ipl-logo

Elements Of Plato In The Allegory Of The Cave

650 Words3 Pages

How does the story "The Machine Stops" echo the sentiments of Plato in "The Allegory of the Cave"?
"The Machine Stops," The two main characters, Vashti and her son Kuno, live on opposite sides of the world. Vashti is content with her life, which, like most people of that world, she spends producing and endlessly discussing secondhand 'ideas '. Kuno, however, is a sensualist and a rebel. He tells Vashti that he has visited the surface of the Earth without permission, and without the life support apparatus supposedly required to survive in the toxic outer air, and he saw other humans living outside the world of the Machine. However, the Machine recaptured him, and he has been threatened with 'Homelessness ', that is, expulsion from the …show more content…

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, it also suggests an alternate world, a world that isn’t recognizably like, in " Allegory of the Cave “and in "The Machine Stops" they both throughout the story …show more content…

In "The Machine Stops," people have put their entire faith in a machine which eventually lets them down, and Communication is made as a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine called the speaking apparatus, with which people conduct their only activity, they sharing ideas and knowledge. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato distinguishes between people who mistake sensory knowledge for the truth and people who do see the truth, the cave represents people who believe that knowledge comes from what we see and hear in the world empirical evidence. The cave shows that believers of empirical knowledge are trapped in a ‘cave’ of misunderstanding, Although, the prisoner managed to break his bonds and soon discovered that his reality was not what he thought it was and in “The Machine Stops," it’s a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Now they live in isolation below ground in a standard 'cell ', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the

Open Document