THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

Both Plato and Sartre use conversations to describe the complex theme of how people go from ignorance to understanding.  Plato's conversations involve onlookers of the situation, while Sartre uses the observations and actions of people directly involved with illustrating the theme.  To best describe the limitations of our thinking both of the authors use stories.  In Plato's allegory, the characters, or the prisoners in the cave travel from a place of limited thinking to a place of enlightenment.  The same occurs in Sartre's "No Exit," except that the characters undergo mental traveling from ignorance to enlightenment, rather than physical traveling.  Lastly, the solutions to obtain knowledge from ignorance differ between the two authors.  In Plato's allegory, a person's enlightenment is only obtained by their own devices, no matter how much others try to explain things to them.  In Sartre's play, however, the character's become enlightened to how they are going to be tortured by interacting with the people around them.  Basically, Plato claims that knowledge and enlightenment is obtained internally, while Sartre claims that it is facilitated externally.

"NO EXIT"

"No Exit" by Jean Paul Sartre Reading Notes and Answers to Embedded Questions in This Text.

• Estelle, Garcin, and Inez in a room; they discover its the afterlife; can't figure out how they are supposed to be tortured.
• Garcin doesn't care about the girls, Estelle cares about herself, and Inez cares about Estelle.
• No mirrors in the room - characters are left to only themselves through others' perceptions of them (taken literally when Estelle sees her appearance through Inez's eyes as the mirror)
• Garcin deserted the army and was shot twelve times before heading to Mexico.
• Inez's lover had a husband.  The husband was run over by a tram.  The lover turned on the gas at night and killed both her and Inez.
• Estelle drowned her baby after having it with a man besides her husband.  That man killed himself.  She died of pneumonia.
• They are all unhappy about the imprint or lack of imprint of them left on Earth: Garcin is called a coward, Estelle's best friend flirts with a boy who admired Estelle, and Inez's room is let out and moved into by a couple.  
• Tone: darkly humorous
• Irony: In the beginning, the characters explain to one another why they aren't the torturer, but in the end, it is revealed that they are actually all each other's torturers.
• Inez tortured by Estelle and Garcin's relationship, but tortures Garcin with the power of declaring or not declaring that he is a coward.
• Garcin tortured by Inez stating or refusing to state his cowardice, but tortures Inez by being with Estelle.
• Estelle tortured by Garcin not loving on her, but tortures Inez by being with Garcin.

Answers:

1.  The place I have chosen as my hell is ordinary-looking similar to that described of Sartre’s drawing room.  The mind can be in hell in a beautiful place because according to Sartre it is the people that make the place either hell or a blissful escape.  Also, what some people may consider beautiful others may consider hell; it depends upon the perspective.  However, I don’t believe there is a way to find peace in a hellish physical environment without numbing your senses to eliminate sounds, smells, and sights allowing you to have peace of mind.  Living in Sartre’s space endlessly, night and day, would likely be torture.  I may have started out okay, but I fear that I would soon get claustrophobic by my unchanging, constrained surroundings and turn insane, like astronauts are tested for their cabin fever.

2.  I am a supporter of the quote “everything in moderation.”  Too much cheesecake would ruin your health, and diminish the satisfaction each additional time you eat cheesecake.  In economics, it is called the law of diminishing marginal utility.  Every additional time you interact with something that you have interacted with before, you receive less pleasure from the situation because you have already experienced it so the novelty has worn off.

3.  Sartre creates a sense of the setting through dialogue by using the characters to ask questions about the setting that are answered by another character, slowly forming a picture of the setting in the minds of the audience.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to stay awake all the time with the lights on with no hope of leaving a specific place.  I think eventually I would go mindless and become numb to my surroundings.  At least, I hope that I would.  Garcin reacts to this type of hell as one of the torturing aspects of the hell he has heard about.  I could make my daily activities a daily routine with no change whatsoever.  Every day, I would do everything exactly the same, with no variations.  This is a circumstance that reinforces the experience of hell, being stuck in a state of preservation.

ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE SONNET

The wall of the cave is all that they see,
Left in darkness through body and mind,
With only shadows to watch of those who could be
In the world of the enlightened outside.

Then imagine one is freed of his own accord,
And transcends above to the light,
How confusing and painful, like the wound of a sword,
Would this strange place be to his sight.

After some time he would have changed,
Deciding to return to tell those that remained,
But his shadow and echo to them was estranged,
And they couldn't understand no matter how he explained.

A teacher can only help and guide;
It is the student who must look inside.

-Allyson Brown

BRAIN WITH 6 LEGS

My literature circle group is reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.  The version from the school library is 412 pages.  When we divided those pages evenly among the ten days we have to read the novel, we decided on 41 pages per day with an extra 2 pages on the last day.  We are going to communicate through group messages on Facebook, and we each chose a role in the group, but we all agreed to help each other with anything we thought they might want to include in their work on the novel.  I am the member who identifies and explains literary techniques used in the book.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

See Questions Here.

1.  According to Socrates, the Allegory of the Cave represents the enlightenment and unenlightenment present in human nature.

2.  The prisoners in the cave can only see the shadows on the wall in front of them.  There is a fire which fuels their ignorance of the real world by helping to create the shadows, the only world the prisoners know.

The setting of a cave represents confinement; it could be paralleled to confinement to a certain set of beliefs or the limitations to one's knowledge.

3.  The allegory suggests that education is the process of enlightening an individual to what they didn't know they didn't know.  The allegory suggests that metaphorically, education is the process of bringing a person out of a dark cave, where they were prisoner to their own ignorance, and showing them the rest of the world that they never knew existed or that they thought existed in a different form.

4.  I accidentally answered this in the second half of number two.  The "shackles" and the "cave" represent the limited and confined knowledge of the prisoners; with the cave, the allegory portrays the prisoners as literally "in the dark" about reality and what life is like outside of their field of vision.

5.  Television is the main thing that shackles the minds of my generation.  Most television shows are purely for entertainment, and watching them keeps us from time when we could be expanding our knowledge.  It is like the dancing on the walls in front of the prisoners; to them, it is entertaining, but it isn't allowing them to learn any additional truths about life.

6.  The freed prisoner's perspective is that the world which he has know seen is the real world, and he pities those prisoners that are still stuck in darkness about life is really like and how their world, in the freed prisoner's new world, consists only of shadows on a wall.  To the prisoners, however, who have never known the difference between a shadow and the object it outlines, they don't know what the freed prisoner's "real world" is.

7.  Intellectual confusion in the allegory occurs when the freed prisoner is thrown into the light outside the cave, and sees everything in a new light, and it is when that same freed prisoner returns to the cave to share what he's learned, but his eyes take a long time to adjust to the dark; he has to become accustomed to being "in the dark" about the world, now that he has experienced what is beyond the cave.

8.  Cave prisoners are freed through either self-enlightenment, thinking that there is something more to what they can see in front of them, or through a freed prisoner, a teacher, returning from outside the cave to explain to them that there's more, or help them escape their bonds.  This suggests that intellectual freedom can occur in two ways: you can have an epiphany yourself about how your perspective of the world may not be the truth, or you can be enlightened to this concept by a teacher who already has this knowledge, like Socrates was to Glaucon.

9.  Yes, I agree that their is a distinction between appearances and reality.  The appearance of the shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners, wasn't reality because they hadn't seen the whole world.  Often we will interpret situations uniquely because of our unique backgrounds so how a situation appears to me may not be the reality.  No human will ever be able to see a situation and observe it completely objectively; we will all have our own versions of it because we all have our own minds and lives.

10.  If we assume Socrates distinction between appearances and reality is incorrect, it is because the appearance of a situation to each person is their own reality.  It is the only way they can perceive that situation.  Appearances meld with realities in respect to individual people.  In respect to the world, their is most likely a reality that no one can understand because it will always be a unique mixture of how it appears to others.

WE HANG TOGETHER

SONNET ANALYSIS #1

Today's sonnet lecture notes:

A POETIC INQUIRY

Initially, I was going to alter my big question to how is our perspectives of others a reflection on our perspective of ourselves?  Sonnets, however, usually contain a subject pertaining to beauty, love, or admiration, so I knew that the closest concept to my original big question would be a sonnet about vanity.  With this in mind, I found this sonnet.

Could it be you admire your comely curves 
While in your room you gaze into your mirror? You know your figure must unravel nerves, So you value it, to you nothing is dearer; For hours you primp in timid preparation Of what might come to greet you for the night, But having done your hair and put your face on, No one there admires your enviable sight. The sight of you... and in the neighborhood You walk, and garner compliments from all; They say you bear yourself as all girls should, You being graceful, featured soft, so tall: But know you'd never have managed thus to rout me Had I been born with decent wits about me.


- Tom Rook

It mentions the vanity of a girl who prepares herself for a long time in front of a mirror, an object mentioned in my original big question.


This author has many more sonnets on this website.

HAMLET REMIX

My visual remix of the topics addressed in my Hamlet essay: 

To Speak Or Not To Speak

     Throughout the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the main character, Hamlet, delivers many soliloquies and asides to himself.  Their effect on the plot and the development of the characters in the play turn Hamlet's words themselves into actions, and my own self-overhearing is similar to Hamlet's in the way I use it to talk myself through making decisions and understanding a present situation.
     Hamlet's lengthy soliloquies complement Hamlet's actions by illustrating the progression of his thoughts and allowing him to think through the many conflicts he encounters, both internal and external, by talking himself through the situation.  For example, Hamlet's famous speech "To Be Or Not To Be" is his outlet for contemplating suicide and his existence while addressing the reasons against it.  This is evident through his concerns for the afterlife in the quote, "For who would fardels bear/To grunt and sweat under a weary life/But that the dread of something after death/The undiscovered country from whose born/No traveler returns, puzzles the will/And makes us rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of?"  Later in the play, Hamlet talks himself through another internal conflict when he sees King Claudius, his uncle and suspected murderer of Hamlet's father, praying and he thinks out loud whether or not to kill him then.
     The content of that contemplative speech shows Hamlet's dynamic character as the audience is able to identify the evolution of his choices and personality in the play.  In the "To Be Or Not To Be" speech, Hamlet is uncertain what lies for him after death, and this is the main reason he chooses not to kill himself.  In the speech when Hamlet is contemplating murdering Claudius, however, he chooses not to kill Claudius while he is praying because he is worried that Claudius would go to heaven, not to hell.  Before, Hamlet's uncertainty about life after death prevented him from killing, but in that speech later in the play, Hamlet's certainty about where Claudius would go to after death prevents him from killing.
     My own self-overhearing talks myself through situations and usually leads to a better comprehension of the subject of my utterances.  For example, the "To Be Or Not To Be" speech isn't written in the common vernacular of today, and the first couple of times I read it, I didn't understand it.  As I was memorizing it, however, I started to comprehend Hamlet's meaning of each sentence because in my process of memorization of the speech, I divided it into small segments and repeated each segment many times, memorizing it alone and then combining it with the one before, slowly building the entire speech in my head.  Through this repetition and through hearing myself out loud, I developed a better understanding of the internal conflict Hamlet describes throughout the soliloquy about whether or not he should kill himself and how thinking about its consequences convinces him not to.
     In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Hamlet delivers many soliloquies that talk himself through difficult situations.  During these soliloquies, we see the progression of the thoughts and motives of Hamlet, Shakespeare's technique for creating a character who the audience can sympathize with because they understand his reasoning.  In addition to character development, Hamlet's speeches serve as Hamlet's outlet for working out all of the complications within his family and his own self-deprecation.  The only similarity between Hamlet's self-overhearing and my own is that I also use it to occasionally comprehend my surroundings.

VOCAB #9

aficionado: an ardent devotee; a fan; an enthusiast
The football aficionado new every team's players and how many games they had won or lost.

browbeat: intimidate by overbearing looks or words; bully
His brother browbeat him into agreeing to do a prank on a neighbor.

commensurate: having the same measure; equal extent or duration; proportionate; corresponding in amount
The price you pay for something should commensurate with the happiness or use you will get from it.

diaphanous: very sheer and light; almost transparent or translucent; delicately hazy
The diaphanous wrap over her dress didn't keep her very warm in the winter weather.

emolument: profit; salary; fees from office or employment
People aren't likely to work without an emolument for their services as a motivation.

foray: a quick raid; a sudden attack; pillage; an initial venture
The foray on the base camp resulted in many fatalities during the war.

genre: a class or category of artistic endeavor; of a distinctive literary type
His favorite genre of music is alternative rock.

homily: a sermon; a moralized discourse; an inspirational saying
Her grandmother told her a homily that encouraged her to live her life to its fullest.

immure: to shut in; confine; imprison
The criminal was immured in the state prison with maximum security.

insouciant: free from concern, worry, or anxiety; nonchalant
His insouciant personality about college applications worried his parents.

matrix: something from which something else originates or develops;
Latin provided the matrix for the romance languages.

obsequies: a funeral rite or ceremony
With the funeral came certain obsequies that the family felt they must follow.

panache: flamboyant manner; style; flair;
This certain panache he had drew many people to him.

persona: a character in a literary work; a person's evident or perceived personality
He had developed the persona of being the town drunk.

philippic: speech or discourse of bitter denunciation
She was so mad that she needed a moment to come up with a well thought out philippic against him.

prurient: characterized by lustful thoughts or desires; causing lust; having a restless desire or longing
The romantic movie was full of prurient moments between the two main characters.

sacrosanct: extremely sacred; not to be entered or trespassed upon
She considered her home sacrosanct and rarely invited anyone into it.

systemic: of or pertaining to a system
The systemic corruption of the organization led to its shutdown because so many employees were involved.

tendentious: having or showing definite tendency, bias, or purpose
No one dared to stop the tendentious lady as she briskly walked down the street.

vicissitude: a change or variation in the course of something; alternating or changing phases or conditions
The vicissitudes of his life kept it interesting.