The Matrix” illustrates Plato’s allegory of the cave
1. Rent and watch the movie The Matrix.
2. Read John Partridge’s “Plato’s Cave and the Matrix” attached to this unit.
3. Read Christopher Grau’s “Bad Dreams, Evil Demons, and The Experience Machine” attached to this unit.
4. Discussion 8: Using both your own knowledge and the Grau and Partridge articles, discuss in detail how the film “The Matrix” illustrates Plato’s allegory of the cave. What does the film suggest about how we know things? Does Plato agree? Do you?
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Sample Solution
The 1999 film The Matrix by the Wachowskis is largely Platonic and Cartesian; the film explores the journey of one man from the Matrix, a simulation ruled by deceitful robots, into the enlightenment of the ‘real world.’ While Plato and Descartes’ skepticism of the existence of the external world seems to be at the forefront of the film, The Matrix also argues the anti-Platonic possibility that perhaps the Matrix isn’t any less real than the ‘real world’. The Matrix, in large part, is an embodiment of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” Plato’s allegory is reflected through a dialogue between fictional versions of Glaucon, Plato’s brother, and Socrates. Plato, speaking through Socrates, explains the allegory: In a cave, there are prisoners chained so that all they have ever known is a wall in front of them onto which shadows of objects moving in front of a fire behind them are cast. Socrates says, “For them…the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of images.”
