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Essay on Comparative Analysis of Plato's The Allegory of the Cave and The Matrix
Plato's Allegory of the Cave Plato was born 427 BC and died 347 BC He was a pupil under Socrates. During his studies, Plato wrote the Dialogues, which are a collection of Socrates' teachings. One of the parables included in the Dialogues is "The Allegory of the Cave".
"The Allegory..." symbolizes man's struggle to reach understanding and enlightenment.
First of all, Plato believed that one can only learn through dialectic reasoning and open-mindedness. Humans had to travel from the visible realm of image-making and objects of sense to the intelligible or invisible realm of reasoning and understanding. (Sallis, 1999)
"The Allegory of the Cave" symbolizes this trek and how it
would look to those still in a lower realm. Plato is saying that humans are all prisoners and that the tangible world is our cave. The things which we perceive as real are actually just shadows on a wall.
Just as the escaped prisoner ascends into the light of the sun, we amass knowledge and ascend into the light of true reality: ideas in the mind.
Yet, if someone goes into the light of the sun and beholds true reality and then proceeds to tell the other captives of the truth, they laugh at and ridicule the enlightened one, for the only reality they have ever known is a fuzzy shadow on a wall. They could not possibly comprehend another dimension without beholding it themselves, therefore, they label the enlightened man mad. For instance, the exact thing happened to Charles Darwin. (White, 2002)
In 1837,
Darwin was traveling aboard the H.M.S. Beagle in the Eastern Pacific and dropped anchor on the Galapagos Islands. Darwin found a wide array of animals. These differences in animals sparked Darwin on research, which lasted well up to his death, culminating in the publishing of The Origin of Species....
