Suffering is one of life’s great teachers- Bryant H McGill. More often than not, suffering is seen in a particularly negative light. Not many people can see the possible beneficial factors of suffering, but instead see only self-pity for themselves. On the contrary, suffering can actually be the key factor in understanding the world we live in. Before we can understand the world through suffering, we must understand suffering itself. Suffering can be seen as any mental or physical pain an individual has to bare. No one really needs to suffer, but somehow everyone at some point in their life has. This brings about the question on why we suffer. In the pieces of literature Medea by Euripides and The allegory of the cave by Plato, one …show more content…
Those people are not necessarily wrong. Those people are right in the suffering they describe. The suffering those people believe is not constructive but rather destructive. Suffering defined by them is non educational and can only lead to more pain. The suffering the people describe is not what true suffering is. True suffering can come in many forms. For example, Medea experiences emotional suffering when she finds out her beloved Jason has left her for another woman (Medea, lines 20-40). From this suffering Medea is able understand the situation she has put herself in. From this enlightenment Medea is able to escape the fate of her situation all the while getting the revenger she wanted. The physical sense of suffering is more prevalent in the Allegory of the cave. When first released the cave, the prisoner is burned by the sudden light surrounding him. The physical suffering he experiences eventually subsides and the prisoner begins to see and understand his new surroundings (AotC, 516b). Notice how each character experiences a completely unique type of suffering tailored specifically for their situation. An example of suffering that did not lead to clarity was the character Jason in Medea. Even though Jason lost all he the people he cared about in this world, Jason still insisted he did no wrong in the situation at hand (Medea, Suffering is painful but also durable. If someone …show more content…
What people need to understand is suffering is like bouncing a ball. The ball can only begin its ascent once it has reached its lowest point. The same goes for people. A person can only reach their highest form of understanding if they reach their lowest self. Medea and Allegory of the Cave represent two different spectrums of suffering. Medea faces mental pain or heartbreak when Jason leaves her for another woman. The prisoner who is released from the cave experiences physical pain from the sudden brightness of his new environment. While suffering is all around us, not many people truly understand it. Each individual experiences their own unique form of suffering that would be most beneficial to achieving their personal understanding of the world. A person cannot just rely on suffering alone to reach their enlightenment. The person has to be open to learning from their suffering in order to grow as a person in today’s society. Without suffering, we would be stuck within ourselves. Suffering allows us to break through our concept of reality and understand the world around
suffering hurts man spirit is does more good then constant happiness and power. We have to beat
>>>>>In "The Enormous Radio" and "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas," a question about suffering is raised. When
Despite its prevalence, suffering is always seen an intrusion, a personal attack on its victims. However, without its presence, there would never be anyway to differentiate between happiness and sadness, nor good and evil. It is encoded into the daily lives people lead, and cannot be avoided, much like the prophecies described in Antigone. Upon finding out that he’d murdered his father and married his mother,
The stories characters, Medea and Jason, can be seen as representations of two different responses to life. For hundreds of years, society has judged each others actions and reactions based on just cause. This story, to me, has a type of underlying theme that drags the reader into a moral debate, which forces you to really question your own belief system.
Plato is one of the most familiar and commonly studied philosophers. His work is of the highest intelligence and full of thought-provoking attributes. Plato’s “Allegory Of The Cave” is perhaps one of the works most easily related to life. This allegory creates a sense of advancing into the “light” of understanding and knowledge.
The tragic play Medea is a struggle between reason and violence. Medea is deliberately portrayed as not a ‘normal woman’, but excessive in her passions. Medea is a torment to herself and to others; that is why Euripides shows her blazing her way through life leaving wreckage behind her. Euripides has presented Medea as a figure previously thought of exclusively as a male- hero. Her balance of character is a combination of the outstanding qualities of Achilles and Odysseus.
Suffering is apart of life, just like joy and love is. We can never choose how life treats us but we can always choose how we react and get back up again. Through Fever 1793 we see up close and personal how suffering can affect us, and how sometimes it can affect us in positive ways. How suffering can help turn the page to the next chapter in our lives. How suffering doesn’t always mean losing but also gaining.
Pain and suffering is something that we all would like to never experience in life, but is something that is inevitable. “Why is there pain and suffering in the world?” is a question that haunts humanity. Mother Teresa once said that, “Suffering is a gift of God.” Nevertheless, we would all like to go without it. In the clinical setting, pain and suffering are two words that are used in conjunction.
In Iyer’s article he comments on how suffering is handled in different situations and he goes into different explanations on how suffering could be interpreted. One example he gave was using a Buddhist interpretation, “Wise men in every tradition tell us that suffering brings clarity, illumination; for the Buddha, suffering is the first rule of life, and insofar as some of it
Euripides shows his views on female power through Medea. As a writer of the marginalized in society, Medea is the prime example of minorities of the age. She is a single mother, with 2 illegitimate children, in a foreign place. Despite all these disadvantages, Medea is the cleverest character in the story. Medea is a warning to the consequences that follow when society underestimates the
The concept of suffering plays an important role in Christianity, regarding such matters as moral conduct, spiritual advancement and ultimate destiny. Indeed an emphasis on suffering pervades the Gospel of Mark where, it can be argued, we are shown how to "journey through suffering" (Ditzel 2001) in the image of the "Suffering Son of Man" (Mark 8:32), Jesus Christ. Although theologians have suggested that Mark was written to strengthen the resolve of the early Christian community (Halpern 2002, Mayerfeld 2005), the underlying moral is not lost on a modern reader grappling with multifarious challenges regarding faith in the face of suffering. In his article "A Christian Response to Suffering", William Marravee (1987) describes suffering as an "experience over which we men and women continue to stumble and fall". The way we view God is crucial to the way we view suffering according to Marravee, who delineates the disparity between a view of God as an ‘outsider’ and the biblical image of God – where God is an ‘insider’ who suffers with us in our struggle. This essay seeks to explain the Christian view of suffering and the purpose suffering can have in our lives.
Nobody wants pain or suffering. How can we know joy without suffering? When everything is going well, individuals have very little reason to question their philosophy of life. That is why when suffering occurs, it compels people to ask “how can i can make sense out of this? What am i missing?
As previously, stated God uses difficult situations as a way to improve the relationship we have with Him. Why suffering though? Frederick Sontag wrote in his book that evil or suffering are the best circumstances in which to find a God, unlike times where everything goes well
According to Brooks (2014), people seek happiness but indirectly obtain several tests that affects their emotions in many ways. Indeed, when people are is questioned about their past, memories coming back to her mind are often the most important positively as negatively. A positive event can be the birth of a child, success. In contrast, a negative event is often links to death, failure, a dismissal, and so on. Suffering or pain also gives us an outside perspective. Without a doubt, suffering makes us human we like it or not. For example, when a friend tells that she has failed an exam and we realize that we could get it easily, it is hard to understand exactly her emotion because we have never been in the situation. But when the same situation arises and you become the concerned, you understand the effect that this failure may have on you emotionally. In this sense, we understand that suffering makes people human because it helps them to be connected to a situation already happened before or which could happen in the future.
Medea is a tragedy of a woman who feels that her husband has betrayed her with another woman and the jealousy that consumes her. She is the protagonist who arouses sympathy and admiration because of how her desperate situation is. I thought I was going to feel sorry for Medea, but that quickly changed as soon as I saw her true colors. I understand that her emotions were all over the place. First, she was angry, then cold and conniving. The lower she sinks the more terrible revenge she wants to reap on Jason.