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The Matrix: Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

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What is the nature of reality? This has been the question on the minds of many philosophers and this mystery dates all the way back to the very first human being who studied the nature of one’s own existence. For centuries philosophers have offered their own theories about the nature of reality and died for their beliefs. The movie, The Matrix represents one of the most recent successful attempts by anyone to bring these philosophical questions to the public. The Matrix did a wonderful job of presenting a story that was both entertaining and also full of hidden allusions and secret messages. In the movie there were several scenes that made direct but subtle allusions to the claims and ideas of famous philosophers concerning the nature of reality and the human condition. One of these claims that is referenced is that of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave which is in one of his famous writings, The Republic. In the …show more content…

This is when he sees the real world for the first time and struggles to see because he has never used his eyes before. He learns that everything he thought was real inside the Matrix was really only an illusion created by the Artificial Intelligence. This is very similar to the shadows on the cave walls and the statues that made the shadows, creating copies of things in the real world. In the Allegory of the cave, Plato believed that those who could free themselves and come to identify reality had a duty to return and teach everyone else, and we see this in the Matrix as well. Tom Anderson becomes Neo and decides to save humanity from ignorance and any acceptance of the fake reality they live in. Neo 's eventual awakening is a symbol of the universal philosophic experience of questioning one 's beliefs about the world we live in, and the attempt to discover what exists behind our preconceived

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