Themes connecting The Matrix and Plato The Matrix and Platos Republic both deal with the idea of reality.

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Themes connecting The Matrix and Plato

The Matrix and Plato’s Republic both deal with the idea of reality.  The Matrix shares many similarities with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, including the perplexity of what is reality and falsehood.  The Allegory of the Cave describes a scene where a line of prisoners is chained in a cave, so they are all watching the same images on the cave wall.  These prisoners believe that these images are reality just as the citizens in the matrix believe they are living a “real” life.  Both Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and The Matrix focus on three major themes: belief, perception, and knowledge.

The ability to believe often presented itself in both The Matrix and the Allegory of the Cave.  Morpheus throughout the movie encouraged Neo to believe.  Finally at the end of the movie, Neo allowed himself to believe he was “The One” and this belief led him to being able to defeat the agents and find his true self.  In Plato’s Allegory of the cave, light plays a role in inspiring belief. First, the campfire in the cave allows the prisoners to see the images of the wall and believe these images are reality.  Socrates also explains that the sun serves as a path to belief. The sun illuminates the prisoner’s eyes, which permits the prisoners to actually seeing true reality.  A person would “conclude that the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all the things that he used to see” (516b).  When a person is able to see, he more than likely will believe.

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Perception is taking what a person understands to be true by means of his senses.   Socrates explains that “the eyes may be confused in two ways and from two causes, namely, when they’ve come from the light into darkness and when they’ve come from darkness into light” (518a).  The prisoners in the cave assume the shadows are their sole reality because those shadows are the only images their eyes can observe.  These shadows present themselves as the only real existences in the prisoner’s life, so the prisoners believe these shadows to be the extent of reality.  The matrix parallels ...

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