Analysis Of Rene Descartes's Allegory Of The Cave And The Matrix

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True Reality or Is It
While the similar themes of a controlled reality, educating those who are naïve around the controlled true reality and reactions to that given knowledge, exist between The Matrix, the excerpt from Allegory of the Cave by Plato and Meditation I of the Things of Which We May Doubt by Rene Descartes; however, there is a subtle difference in regards to seeking the truth about reality as a human God given obligation verses someone else informing others of what is true.
Who Is In Control of Reality
The speculation of someone else controlling human reality has been around since 380 BC based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s story, Socrates and Glaucon are conversing about the prisoners who are restrained and can only look in the forward with nowhere else. Puppeteers are restricting the prisoner’s view to only the shadows from the fire which, reduces the mental input normally gathered from surroundings …show more content…

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Socrates asks, how do you think the prisoners would react if suddenly they were set free and were informed that what they knew and understood was clever deception. Socrates and Glaucon decide it would be beneficial for the escaped prisoner to know the truth (Plato, 514-520a). Likewise, with Rene Descartes’s excerpt Meditation I of the Things Which We May Doubt as it is explained, “...and just as the captive who, perchance, was enjoying in his dreams an imaginary liberty, when he beings to suspect that it is but a vision...” (Descartes, 1641). This person comes to the realization that something is untrue and altogether unreal. In like manner, The Matrix synopsis tells of how Morpheus aided in Neo’s enlightenment of the true reality and offered Neo an explanation for his unease that Neo could not be defined. Morpheus gives Neo details and the reasoning behind this revelation of reality (Wachowski & Wachowski,

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