But what he sees now is the reality and then somebody drags this prisoner to see the outside world and hold him in the presence of the Sun. Wouldn’t all this hurt and confuse him, if someone were to tell him that the shadows he saw earlier were all an illusion. Socrates further says, what if a prisoner is released, by someone and is forced to suddenly stand, move his neck and made to look towards the fire and the objects whose shadows he had seen before. They start naming each and every object, and amongst themselves declare the quickest one to observe the passing shadows and point out which followed after or before or were together as the winner, with intellectual knowledge and ability. Hence, the only way for the prisoners to get acquainted with their surroundings is to decipher or interpret the shadows and consider them to be a part of the real world. Thus providing the sole view for the prisoners, and say there was an echo/voices that came from the wall because of the puppeteer, the prisoners would perceive it to be the voices of those passing shadows. The shadows of all sorts of objects (animal, jar or tree), as shown in the image, fall directly on the wall. There is an enormous fire blazing at a distance, above and behind the prisoners, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised walkway meant for objects to pass. This restricted movement limits their visibility only to the wall, thus circumscribing the scope of any encounter beyond it.
While describing the story, Socrates asks Glaucon to envision an underground cave inhabited by prisoners, who have been in the cave from their childhood with their legs and necks shackled by chains, so that the movement of their face is restricted, and they can see nothing but the wall in front of them.
#Plato and the cave free
It covers both the fallen and risen state of mankind, from the phase where the man is in search of truth and once he is made aware, all he wants to do is share it with others and free them from the bondage of ignorance. The conversation basically deals with the ignorance of humanity trapped in the conventional ethics formed by society. The Allegory of the Cave is a hypothetical scenario, described by Plato, in the form of an enlightening conversation between Socrates and his brother, Glaucon. In his book – The Republic, Plato covers and explains the effect of many interesting aspects like libertarianism, afterlife, truth, justice, etc., on society from the perspective of a philosopher. His classical philosophies on human nature reveal the basic truth as well as flaws in the psychological evolution of mankind. Plato was a Greek philosopher and mathematician who is said to have laid the basic foundation of Western philosophy and science. From the cave that represents the matrix that humans are trapped and imprisoned in, to the machines who controlled what humans saw or heard as the puppeteers who cast the shadows of objects on the wall.
… that the Hollywood hit, “The Matrix” mirrors Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in a number of ways.
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