Thesis: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Theory of Forms relate in many ways to the psychology of the Matrix.
The 1999 science-fiction film, The Matrix, is about a computer hacker named Neo who is brought into “reality” from a dream world; this “reality” is known as The Matrix. “The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room...It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth,” states Morpheus. The dream world was created by machines so they could control the human population. But in the dream world humans were free to do and be whoever they wanted.
Plato and Socrates wrote a fictional dialogue called Allegory of the Cave,
which was designed to teach, as Plato said, "our nature in its education and want
of education.” The Allegory of the Cave (also known as, Analogy of the Cave/
Parable of the Cave/ Plato’s Cave) describes a group of imprisoned individuals
who live their whole lives in a cave, facing a wall. Their hands and legs are
chained together and their head is adjusted to only stare at the wall. And all they
know of the world and reality are the sounds they hear and shadows they see
cast upon the walls of the cave. Plato and Socrates imagined one of the prisoners
was to be released; how would he act in the real world? If the released prisoner
was shown the objects they have seen upon the wall of the cave, they would not
recognize it because the shadow is what’s real to the prisoner, not the actual
object. The prisoner believes that the cave is reality and reality is a dream world.
“…is graceless and looks quite ridiculous when – with his sight still dim and
before he has gotten sufficiently accustomed to the surrounding darkness” states
Socrates. But the prisoner would recognize the Sun and know what it is and that
it gives everything life and energy.
The Allegory of the Cave and The Matrix relate because Morpheus
emphasized to Neo that the reality he thought he lived in, wasn’t real and the r
released prisoner from the cave was convinced that the outside world wasn’t
reality. Neo subliminally lived in a cave, shielded from the real world, or the
Matrix. And all he saw was what was in front of him. When Neo was released
into the Matrix, he didn’t believe he was in reality because everything is
computer operated and he isn’t used to that.
Allegory of the Cave also has to do with the Theory of Forms, in the sense
that the forms have to do with the world of revolution being presented to us
through sensation, takes the highest and most basic kind of reality.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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