Avatar: The Allegory Of The Cave

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The Allegory of the Cave is a representation of Plato's perfect world, or the world of the Forms. The Forms can be defined as an abstract or the essence of an object, like Oddness or Beauty. The allegory depicts a visual of a cave that hold prisoners bound by chains. The prisoners can only see what it is in front of them, shadows that are enlightened by fire. One breaks free of what is considered the physical world (world as we know it) and enters to the ideational world (world of the Forms). When the former prisoner sees this world for the first time, it is rather painful and challenging to get acquainted with its surroundings. A movie that I found to be the best representation of the Allegory of the Cave is Avatar. Avatar fully illustrates the Allegory of the Cave by representing both worlds the political maneuvers used in the movie.

The movie sets on Jake Sully, a paraplegic veteran that is offered to take over his brother's contract in the Avatar program. Despite Jake's impairment, he shows to …show more content…

In the allegory, Plato discusses the dialectic, or the process of philosophizing to understand the Forms. For Jake, this experience was not something he expected; he was goal-oriented, only there for the occupation he was undertaking. Entering Pandora through his avatar was an encounter that changed his life forever. Like the dialectic, learning a thing that it outside of your comfort zone, such as the Na'vi's customs, is rather challenging. The same applies for the prisoner that was unbound by his chains in the cave. Once he saw the world of the Forms, he didn't believe his eyes of the beauty that was beholding him. Like in the reading, when Jake try to tell his human counterparts of his new findings, they didn't believe that a person who was just hired as a gunman for a pilot would open a door of opportunity for both

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