Many philosophers have created ideas that the real world is an illusion, and the Matrix trilogy contains references to the people who have attacked this concept from many different angles. Although the films are meant to stand on their own and create their own set of philosophical questions, the directors took some advice from a variety of different works from real philosophers. Four philosophical references that can be compared to the Matrix trilogy are Platos Allegory of the Cave, Herman & Chomskys Manufacturing Consent, John de Graafs Affluenza, and Emmanuel Kants What is Enlightenment? The films slightly refer to and compare the ideas established in the work of these philosophers throughout the series, and I will discuss throughout this paper the similarities and differences with how these different philosophers view freedom.
Plato, a greek philosopher from over 2,000 years ago, explored the idea that the real world is an illusion in the Allegory of the Cave. This thought experiment is a theory concerning the human perception of reality and what is fake. Plato claimed that what we learned through our senses is no more than opinion and that, in order to have a true understanding of reality, we must gain it through philosophical reasoning. A brief overview of the story is that Plato imagines a cave in which several people have been kept prisoners their entire lives. These people are bound by chai
ns in such a way that they can look only straight ahead and cannot move their necks at all. They can only see a few shapes as the shadows cast in front of them, but this is all that they have ever known so they dont view it as abnormal. Therefore, because these images are all theyve ever seen, they believe these images constitute reality. One day, a prisoner escapes the bonds and looks behind him to see what he thought was the real world, but it was actually an elaborate set of shadows. He is freed from the cave altogether, sees the world for the first time, and has a hard time adapting to this newfound knowledge of reality. Now fully aware of true reality, he returned to the cave to try to teach others what he found out, but the other prisoners reaction represented that people are scared of knowing philosophical truths and have a difficult time trusting philosophers. In the matrix, this metaphor is too close to perfect when he sees the real world for the first time with the help of the red pill. Everything that Neo thought was real was only an illusion created by the machinesmuch like the shadows on the cave walls that were cast by the fire. Plato insists that those who free themselves and come to perceive reality has a duty to return and teach others, and this holds true in the Matrix films as well, as Neo takes it upon himself to save humanity from the tyranny of the machines who control them.