Introduction People are social creatures and their existence is impossible without communication. The success of the latter is significantly determined by people’s abilities to understand others. This ability, in its turn, is closely connected to human desires to establish understanding. The current paper is concerned with the problem of how people can succeed in understanding others. Namely, the main point that we make here is that the way people understand others is determined by how free they feel from the imaginary caves they live in, how correctly they understand the metaphors they live by and how privileged they are in their society. Main body Going by Plato, we assume that all people are prisoners, they all live in the caves where rays seldom appear. As far as the allegory of the cave is concerned, we can suppose that there is a mutual interdependence: the more successfully the prisoners coexist, the better understanding of each other appears, and, vice versa, the better the prisoners understand each other, the happier they feel in the cave. Plato’s work suggests that people in the cave are immobilized by the chains, their heads are forced to gaze in one direction only: the only thing they can see is a wall. Also, in the cave, there is a walkway along which puppets of various things move along and cause shadows in such away. Watching these shadows is the only occupation of the prisoners. When the puppets speak, their voices create echo and prisoners believe that the words come from the shadows. When they hear the words they start to name them as they come by. The sun influences the way the shadows are formed and this also impacts the way the prisoners percept the shadows. The prisoners understand each other only when they define whose skill in quickly naming the shadows is more perfect and whose is not worth attention at all. We believe that the same happens in a real, not imagined Plato, world: people are so much restricted in their views on others’ patterns of behavior and too subjective in their judgments of others. This restriction and absence of impartiality prevent people from getting freedom in the most general sense of the word. William Cronon’s view on qualities of the liberally educated person suggests several hints on how a better understanding of others can be achieved. According to him, liberally educated persons and, we assume, every one striving to understand others, should know how to listen and to hear. Cronon claims that such people know “how to pay attention to people and to the world around them. They work hard to hear what other people are saying. They can follow an argument, track logical reasoning, detect illogic, hear the emotions that lie behind both the logic and the illogic, and ultimately emphasize with the person who is feeling those emotions.” (Cronon) Further, he suggests that liberally educated people know how to talk to others. As we assume that an educated person is more responsible for establishing a better understanding than anyone else is, we take this advice as a rule for those who struggle to understand others. Paraphrasing Cronon we suppose that people have to learn how “to figure out what’s so neat about what the other person does.” (Cronon) To understand others people have to learn how to participate in v