Here is a paper that I wrote in comparison of Plato with an excerpt from "The Matrix."
Analogy of "The Matrix" and "Plato's Allegory of the Cave"
In the excerpt of "The Matrix" that we watched, Neo was compared to Alice in Wonderland tumbling down the rabbit hole, much like the escapee from "Plato's Allegory of the Cave," he was going through the process of leaving the darkness and entering the light. Tumbling down the rabbit hole was compared to fate because Neo did not have control of his life. Yet as Socrates, he wanted to have "objectively valid definitions (universals)" or "ideas which are true whether people believed him or not."
When Morpheus described the Matrix to Neo, it was like explaining to the prisoners in the cave that what they were experiencing was not real. To do this you had to go beyond the senses to reach the real, the immaterial world, the mind. The real was not made up of the shadows. The escapee had searched for the truth and by discovering the door (the light) he had discovered the truth. But, it did not end there as Socrates said, "Life is a search for the truth." The cave was but a shadow image of the truth, the mind. The cave offered the prisoners knowledge through the senses, in that the shadows made by the puppets placed in front of the fire in the back of the cave were the only real things they knew.
Neo had a choice to take the red pill or the blue pill. It was like giving the prisoners a chance to see for themselves what was outside the cave, or to give Neo the opportunity to step out of the Matrix. According to Socrates, the red pill would have represented looking outwardly towards the universals while taking the blue pill would have represented staying in the cave using the senses or an inward way of perceiving things in what he called the material world. The red pill would also, according to Plato (Socrates), represent Form, the ultimate reality.
Neo exercised his reason of the self, which is contained in the three parts of virtue: wisdom, courage, and temperance. To aspire to be happy and to be a well-rounded person by experiencing life outside of the Matrix, he took the red pill to seek the "light." Right before his transition, he was compared to Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz." Life "would not look like Kansas anymore" and to buckle up for a whirlwind of a ride. In other words, once he experienced life outside of the Matrix and had knowledge of this existence, he would never be able to return not remembering this experience and it having a lasting effect on him. He then entered the world outside of the Matrix. He was basically rebirthed and then lifted out of the "cave/Matrix" through a door that exposed him to the real world and as Plato said, "looking into the light hurts your eyes."
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Hey, do you think there's any "red pills" around to give to those still in the borg?
TuningFork
ically ADVERBWORD HISTORY:Plato did not invent the term or the concept that bears his name, but he did see sexual desire as the germ for higher loves. Marsilio Ficino, a Renaissance follower of Plato, used the terms amor socraticus and amor platonicus interchangeably for a love between two humans that was preparatory for the love of God. From Ficino's usage, Platonic (already present in English as an adjective to describe what related to Plato and first recorded in 1533) came to be used for a spiritual love between persons of opposite sexes. In our own century Platonic has been used of relationships between members of the same sex. Though the concept is an elevated one, the term has perhaps more often been applied in ways that led Samuel Richardson to have one of his characters in Pamela say, I am convinced, and always was, that Platonic love is Platonic nonsense.