Nearly four hundred years before the birth of Christ, Greek philosopher Plato formulated a startling theory about reality. The physical realm, Plato taught, is neither real nor the source of any genuine wisdom or enlightenment. The things in this earthly world are merely illusory, impermanent reproductions of the perfect, unchanging, true essences of objects and ideas. To achieve wisdom, Plato argued, a philosopher must first awaken to the unreality of the visible world, and then undertake the arduous process of learning to contemplate the reality beyond. To illustrate this theory, Plato created the Allegory of the Cave, his tale of one man's liberation from a cave of shadow and illusion into the real world beyond. More than two thousand years later, filmmakers Larry and Andy Wachowski proved the continued relevance of the Allegory of the Cave by repackaging it as The Matrix, a blockbuster science fiction movie about sentient artificial intelligence, computer-generated virtual reality, and one man's liberation from his virtual-reality bondage.
Startling parallels between The Matrix and Plato's Allegory of the Cave abound. In The Matrix, human beings are imprisoned in a virtual-reality dream world so complete and convincing to the senses that the prisoners do not even realize they are prisoners. The sights, sounds, smells, textures, and even tastes of this virtual-reality world are only illusory reproductions of reality, much like the shadows of the “artifacts, statues of men, [and] reproductions of other animals in stone or wood fashioned in all sorts of ways”* cast before the eyes of the prisoners in Plato's cave. Both the prisoners of The Matrix and of Plato's cave know no other reality. The prisoners of The Matrix were born into unconscious bondage, while the prisoners of the cave “have been there from childhood, with their neck and legs in fetters.”
Neither the prisoners of The Matrix nor the prisoners of the cave remember any life outside of their prisons, nor any reality different from what they see. This ignorance leads them to believe that “these shadows [are] the real things.” They “believe the truth to be nothing else than the shadows of the artifacts.” Enlightenment is difficult. When Neo, the hero of The Matrix, breaks out of his computer-generated dream into reality, he awakens weak and helpless, his muscles atrophied from bondage, his eyes painfully blinded by the light, for he has never used his eyes before. Similarly, when the prisoner of Plato's cave is first liberated, “when he came into the light, with the sunlight filling his eyes, he would not be able to see a single one of the things which are now said to be true.” And the prisoner of the cave, like Neo, needs “time to get adjusted before he could see things in the world above.”
After this period of adjustment, however, the prisoner of Plato's cave comes to “reckon himself happy for [his enlightenment], and pity” the other men still imprisoned in the cave of illusions. Neo grows determined to free his fellow human beings from their virtual-reality imprisonment.
Unfortunately, however, humanity does not always respond well to being told that what it believes true is, in fact, false. Were the prisoner of Plato's cave to attempt to enlighten the other prisoners, the prisoners would say “that he had returned from his upward journey with his eyesight spoiled, and...it was not worthwhile even to attempt to travel upward”: they would prefer to remain in the world of illusion with which they had grown comfortable, and, in fact, “if they could somehow lay their hands on [the man who tried to free them] and kill him, they would do so.” To avoid this very threat, Neo must act in secrecy within the virtual-reality world he hopes to destroy, for, as his mentor Morpheus tells him, all those who are not one of the enlightened must be seen as his enemies. Despite these difficulties, however, the wisdom which Neo and Plato's prisoner achieve is worth the struggle. Freed of the illusions which once imprisoned them, they can know reality, and may come, in time, to free others by turning their souls “from the world of [illusion] until [they] can endure to contemplate reality, and the brightest of realities, which we say is the Good.” This turning of others' souls towards the Good is, in Plato's theory, of great benefit to humanity.
So many years after Plato first wrote the Allegory of the Cave, however, those benefits still have yet to be fully enjoyed. Many people still live in the “shadowy world of illusion.” In our media-saturated age, we are more clearly imprisoned among illusions than ever. What is television, for instance, but the shadows, reflections, and distortions of reality, chosen and presented for our enjoyment? We even have a genre of television programming specifically designed to simulate reality: “reality TV.” We hide inside and surf the Internet in between hours of watching TV. More than ever, we live in a world of unreality.
What is encouraging, however, is that The Matrix, and by extension Plato's Allegory of the Cave, resonates so strongly with audiences. We, as a civilization, are aware of our imprisonment. We do sense that what we are shown is not real, and we do desire to break free of the unrealities we see into a truer existence. To do so, what we must do is what the prisoner in the cave and Neo in The Matrix did: reject our world of unrealities and contemplate, not just truth, but the simple fact that there is a truth beyond what we see. And once we do so, we will surely feel, as both the prisoner and Neo felt, that our enlightenment is worth the suffering.
*Footnotes removed because Blogger doesn't support them. All quotations come from John Chaffee's The Philosopher's Way.
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