Post by Kmylove on Apr 9, 2007 13:13:29 GMT -5
Here is a thread dedicated to discussing the philosophy behind the movies, the philosophical refferences.
One of my favorites, and very easy to identify is the allegory of the cave, which was developed by Plato. He originally made this allegory to explain a philosopher's condition in the middle of people who don't know the essence of things.
If you follow the ideas of the theory you will be able to identify analogies to Zion, The Matrix, The One.
This is how the allegory goes: humans are prisoners inside a cave, fastened in chains, with their heads in chains, so that they can only watch one wall of the cave.
Behind them there is a fire, and statues which cast their shadows on the wall that the prisoners can watch. This is the only reality of those people: shadows of images. If one prisoners would be freed and forced to turn and look around into the fire, he would be blinded with light and wouldn't realize the statues would seem to him as real as the shadows he was used to watch. If he would go out of the cave he would be blinded with sunlight, and it would take him time to accomodate with the shapes of things, until, eventually he would be able to see the sun, the cause of all the other things he had seen.
Though the prisoner would be so used to reality that he wouldn't want to go back and free the others, he would be forced to do so. But if the others wouldn't want to be freed, he would have to stay there and learn to get accustomed to the darkness and to the shadows on the wall, but he will never see the shadows the way the other prisoners do, he would see them in a distorted way.
I don't know whether the movie was really intended to refference to this analogy, as I don't recall Plato being mentioned among the sources of inspiration (I recall the producers mentioning Descartes, but I haven't read his works).
One of my favorites, and very easy to identify is the allegory of the cave, which was developed by Plato. He originally made this allegory to explain a philosopher's condition in the middle of people who don't know the essence of things.
If you follow the ideas of the theory you will be able to identify analogies to Zion, The Matrix, The One.
This is how the allegory goes: humans are prisoners inside a cave, fastened in chains, with their heads in chains, so that they can only watch one wall of the cave.
Behind them there is a fire, and statues which cast their shadows on the wall that the prisoners can watch. This is the only reality of those people: shadows of images. If one prisoners would be freed and forced to turn and look around into the fire, he would be blinded with light and wouldn't realize the statues would seem to him as real as the shadows he was used to watch. If he would go out of the cave he would be blinded with sunlight, and it would take him time to accomodate with the shapes of things, until, eventually he would be able to see the sun, the cause of all the other things he had seen.
Though the prisoner would be so used to reality that he wouldn't want to go back and free the others, he would be forced to do so. But if the others wouldn't want to be freed, he would have to stay there and learn to get accustomed to the darkness and to the shadows on the wall, but he will never see the shadows the way the other prisoners do, he would see them in a distorted way.
I don't know whether the movie was really intended to refference to this analogy, as I don't recall Plato being mentioned among the sources of inspiration (I recall the producers mentioning Descartes, but I haven't read his works).