The Greek philosopher Plato, known for being one the most influential figures in western philosophy, wrote a dialogue called The Republic in which is found a very insightful philosophical story describing the nature of reality. This story is widely known, by anyone who has studied philosophy, as The Allegory of the Cave. Plato and his philosophy keep influencing people in the modern era, therefore is not surprising to find books or movies with similar approaches to the nature of reality to the one that Plato proposed. A perfect example of this is The Matrix; movie, in which all of humanity lives on a matrix, created by an artificial intelligence, where all the memories and the environment around them are unreal. When Plato’s Cave and The Matrix
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Plato describes that one of the prisoners is dragged out of the cave, the same way that Morpheus takes Neo out of the matrix. This process of going from ignorance to enlightenment is a harsh one and in both cases is clearly exposed. In the allegory Plato describes that “Whenever any of them was unchained and was forced to stand up suddenly, to turn around, to walk, and to look up toward the light, in each case the person would be able to do this only with pain...” (The Republic VII), while in the movie Neo’s reaction to what is actually real is not very pleasing, he refuses to believe it and wishes that he had taken the blue pill. Interesting enough his name in the matrix is Thomas, making reference to the apostle Thomas, who refused to believe that Jesus had appeared to the other ten apostles.
This leads to another similarity. In the movie and in the story, regardless of the pain and suffering that truth brings, both characters, Neo and the freed prisoner, have to face reality as it is, they cannot escape it no matter how hard they try, nor Neo can’t go back into the matrix (after he took the red pill) nor the prisoner can go into the cave and keep believing that the shadows are real and they have to accept this reality in order to comprehend it and learn how to live within it. By accepting this both become enlightened in their own way, the
Plato describes that one of the prisoners is dragged out of the cave, the same way that Morpheus takes Neo out of the matrix. This process of going from ignorance to enlightenment is a harsh one and in both cases is clearly exposed. In the allegory Plato describes that “Whenever any of them was unchained and was forced to stand up suddenly, to turn around, to walk, and to look up toward the light, in each case the person would be able to do this only with pain...” (The Republic VII), while in the movie Neo’s reaction to what is actually real is not very pleasing, he refuses to believe it and wishes that he had taken the blue pill. Interesting enough his name in the matrix is Thomas, making reference to the apostle Thomas, who refused to believe that Jesus had appeared to the other ten apostles.
This leads to another similarity. In the movie and in the story, regardless of the pain and suffering that truth brings, both characters, Neo and the freed prisoner, have to face reality as it is, they cannot escape it no matter how hard they try, nor Neo can’t go back into the matrix (after he took the red pill) nor the prisoner can go into the cave and keep believing that the shadows are real and they have to accept this reality in order to comprehend it and learn how to live within it. By accepting this both become enlightened in their own way, the