- “Philosophy involves seeing the absolute oddity of what is familiar and trying to formulate really probing questions about it.”
Iris Murdoch - They say about me that I am the strangest person, always making people confused.”
-Socrates
Imagine a dark, subterranean prison in which humans are bound by their necks to a single place from infancy. Elaborate steps are taken by unseen forces to supply and manipulate the content of the prisoner’s visual experience. This is so effective that the prisoners do not recognize their imprisonment and are satisfied to live their lives in this way. Moreover, the cumulative effects of this imprisonment are so thorough that if freed, the prisoners would be virtually helpless. They could not stand up on their own, their eyes would be overloaded initially with sensory information, and even their minds would refuse to accept what the senses eventually presented them. It is not unreasonable to expect that some prisoners would wish to remain imprisoned even after their minds grasped the horror of their condition. But if a prisoner was dragged out and compelled to understand the relationship between the prison and outside, matters would be different. In time the prisoner would come to have genuine knowledge superior to the succession of representations that made up the whole of experience before. This freed prisoner would understand those representations as imperfect like pale copies of the full reality now grasped in the mind. Yet if returned to the prison, the freed prisoner would be the object of ridicule, disbelief, and hostility.
Viewers of The Matrix remember the moment in the film when Neo is released from his prison and made to grasp the truth of his life and the world. The account above roughly captures that turning point in the 1999 film, and yet it is drawn from an image crafted almost twenty-four hundred years ago by the Greek philosopher, Plato (427-347 B.C.E.). Today the Republic is the most influential work by Plato, and the allegory of the Cave the most famous part of the Republic. If you know that Socrates was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock, or that Socrates thought that the unexamined life is not worth living, you may also know that Socrates in the Republic likened the human condition to the state of prisoners bound in a cave seeing only shadows projected on the wall in front of them. Transcending this state is the aim of genuine education, conceived as a release from imprisonment, a turning or reorientation of one’s whole life, an upward journey from darkness into light:
- The release from the bonds, the turning around from shadows to statues and the light of the fire and, then, the way up out of the cave to the sunlight: [education] has the power to awaken the best part of the soul and lead it upward to the study of the best among the things that are.
The allegory of the Cave gives literary shape to Socrates’ most fundamental concern, namely that our souls be in the best condition possible (Plato, Apology 30a7-b4). Socrates also believed he was commanded by the god Apollo to practice philosophy; it both animated and cost him his life. Yet it is not obvious how philosophical investigation improves the condition of the soul still less how the Socratic method in particular does so, consisting as it does in testing the consistency of a person’s beliefs through a series of questions Socrates asks.
I believe, and will show here, that the allegory of the Cave is part of Plato’s effort to make philosophical sense of Socrates’ philosophical life, to link Socrates’ persistent questioning to his unwavering aim at what he called the “care of the soul.” On this theme of care of the soul, there is a deep resonance between The Matrix and Plato’s thought in the Republic. Like the allegory of the Cave, The Matrix dramatically conveys the view that ordinary appearances do not depict true reality and that gaining the truth changes one’s life. Neo’s movements toward greater understanding nicely parallel the movements of the prisoner in the cave whose bonds are loosened. The surface similarities between the film and the allegory can run to a long catalog. The first paragraph of this essay reveals some of these connections. But there remains a deeper affinity between the two that I shall draw out here, especially in Part IV, having to do with Socrates’ notion of the care of the soul.
To see what I am calling a deeper connection between the film and the allegory of the Cave, I begin in Part II by recounting the context in which the Cave appears and the philosophical positions it figuratively depicts.4 In Part III I compare and contrast the film and the allegory, focusing attention on the difficulty in sorting out deceptive sensory information. Finally, in Part IV I examine the warnings and concessions Plato places in the dramatic spaces of Republic. The allegory of the Cave is a strange image, as one of Socrates’ friends says (515a4), while Socrates himself confesses that the Cave is not exact (504b5; cf. 435c9-d2).5 Rereading the Cave after a recent viewing of the film shows that these are not throwaway remarks. The Matrix likewise privileges the work that strangeness and calculated vagueness do; Morpheus, after all, cannot show Neo what he most needs to see, but must get him to see for himself something that is difficult to recognize. In this way, The Matrix and Plato’s Cave are faithful to a central tenet in Socrates’ philosophical examinations: that proper teaching only occurs when students are prepared to make discoveries for themselves. Furthermore, the discovery that is most crucial is the discovery of oneself. Readiness for self-examination is, after all, what makes “care of the soul” possible.