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Plato And Brave New World Comparative Essay

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Plato’s political philosophy, The Republic, focuses on the ideal city-state, which contains a standard of justice, education, eugenics, and the idea of a cave allegory. Huxley’s novel Brave New World focuses on a dystopian state similar to Plato’s ideal city-state. Although Huxley dramatically differs from Plato’s ideal city-state with his class system, eugenics, justice, the status of men and women in high positions, and education in The Republic, the similarities in Huxley’s usage of Plato’s education, the cave allegory communal wives’ system, lead to a precise determination of Huxley’s inspiration. To begin with, Huxley has a substantial standard of hierarchy within the hierarchy of the class system within the state compared to Plato in his political philosophical …show more content…

Ultimately, this difference leads to a less educated society in Huxley’s state compared to Plato’s ideal city-state. While Huxley and Plato differ on several particular cases of the state’s actions, there are similarities in those differences, including in education. To explain, in Plato’s Republic, attending school is mandatory, as found in Huxley’s novel. The notion of both Plato and Huxley mandating an education system for different objectives leads to a connection between the ideal city-state where the population obtains an education and the dystopian society within Huxley’s novel. Moving forward, Huxley’s and Plato’s societies also agree on the analogy of the cave allegory. To illustrate, Plato explains the cave allegory as a society bound into a chain of ignorance. When someone gets free from these chains and sees the truth about society, they want to return to the narrative they were trained in. Similarly, in Huxley’s novel, the controller in chapter 17 explains that he would seek scientific discovery in his younger

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For Plato, education is a “turning around” of the soul (Plato, 248). The Truman Show is a modern movie with a similar plot directed and written by Peter Weir. In these stories, humans are visible in an alternate reality that is displayed to them unwillingly. There are countless philosophical concepts and arguments that take place in The Truman Show and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The Truman Show and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave differs with visual images, plot elements, storyline, and dialogue and

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Essential question: What does Plato’s Allegory of the Cave reveal about his and Socrates’ ideas regarding knowledge in society? What do these ideas reveal about Plato’s and Socrates’ attitudes towards themselves and others? Plato’s Allegory of the Cave appears in the author’s extended work, Republic. The brief Book VII discusses three shackled prisoners who represent the condition into which Plato and Socrates believe all humans are born, and the escapee personifies those curious and bold philosophers who dare to look at the world in new ways.

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However, the prisoners who don’t seek past empirical evidence live in bliss because they don’t desire to seek the truth. It is clear how the allegory of the cave fits into the Republic, because Plato’s idea of the education system is not where students passively receive knowledge from a teacher. Plato believes that education and learning is a transformative experience that doesn’t just change ideas and thought but it transforms the soul of a student. He suggests that the students need to desire and seek knowledge and though it is difficult, once the student see’s the world differently they cannot go back. If students don’t question their beliefs and ideas, they will never discover the truth, which is why critical thinking is vital in education.

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