The Quest for the Ideal The quest for the ideal is a phenomenon that many people attempt to achieve. As we all know, the quest for the ideal is difficult and complicated by personal experience. The poems, “The Story” by Karen Connelly and the “The Love Song of J.Aflred Prufrock”, by T.S Elliot, as well as the essay “Kant’s Beauty and the Sublime” by Maureen Rousseau explore the peril inherent in the quest for the ideal, which is that in our search for beauty we risk encountering the sublime. The danger of the sublime is that we cannot comprehend the magnitude of the realms of things that are sublime. We ask ourselves why someone would want to risk encountering the sublime. Well, with great risk comes great reward and that is the beauty we seek. In the poem, “The Story” by Karen Connelly, the poet explains the quest for the ideal in one large metaphor. Connelly discusses the notion that we risk failure in the quest because we are not always up for the task. Therefore, success is not always certain. In the poem, she says that what is certain is the fear that we are always going to have in the pursuit for the ideal. Connelly uses the metaphor of swimming in the ocean to illustrate this concept. In the line “the way you never know what’s in deeper water” (4-5), Connelly is acknowledging the inherent peril in the quest for the ideal just as a swimmer cannot see everything below the water. She extends the metaphor further in the next stanza to illustrate the process we go through in the quest for the ideal. First, Connelly wrote “You know you are a fool for having come this far” (10-11). She is comparing this stage of the quest for the ideal to the point in someone`s swim when they realize they have swum farther from the shore than... ... middle of paper ... ...to be” (115) and explains to himself that he is just “an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two” (116-117). In brief, beauty is something that is aside from you. It is something you do not have to worry about. Nevertheless, we must be afraid of the sublime because we cannot understand it and therefore, is dangerous to us. We must at least decide is it poses as a danger to us. Just as Maureen Rousseau restated from Kant’s “Critique of Judgement” about the notion one can fear God without being afraid of him because we cannot resist God. It makes sense what Maureen Rousseau says when she explains that we can be fearful of the sublime but we can also determine if it something be afraid of. Maybe that is why we have the quest for beauty because we have nothing to fear from beauty. Beauty is ultimately something we admire and want.
When individuals face obstacles in life, there is often two ways to respond to those hardships: some people choose to escape from the reality and live in an illusive world. Others choose to fight against the adversities and find a solution to solve the problems. These two ways may lead the individuals to a whole new perception. Those people who decide to escape may find themselves trapped into a worse or even disastrous situation and eventually lose all of their perceptions and hops to the world, and those who choose to fight against the obstacles may find themselves a good solution to the tragic world and turn their hopelessness into hopes. Margaret Laurence in her short story Horses of the Night discusses the idea of how individual’s responses
The late author and philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch once said “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.” The general argument made by Tim O’Brien in his short story “On the Rainy River” is that an individual’s self-perception may skew the line between illusion and reality. More specifically O’Brien argues that the line may be discovered if an individual is able to come to terms with their perception. Illusion and reality are found to be confused throughout the novella “On the Rainy River” as a journey through one’s own mind is taken in order to reach a life-altering decision.
An individual’s meaning or purpose in life cannot truly be realized unless they are faced with a situation in which their course of action directly affects their future. In most cases, humankind is forced to face an extreme circumstance when something comes to an end, whether it be positive or negative, for that ending means that change is inevitable and approaching. Thus, life becomes more meaningful as something ends, for people are forced to realize what is truly important to them as well as the idea that nothing lasts forever. Individuals must choose which of the aspects and goals of their lives are the most significant and should be focused on as they approach a resolution, as can be seen in the Gawain Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Therefore, due to the finality of an ending and the uncertainty of the following events, humankind can reveal what they believe are the
in a trance or sleep state where you at times may not be able to tell
Connelly uses a reflective tone to indicate that one must learn through experience. We learn through confronting what scares us and leaving our comfort zones. While struggling in a situation, the person involved usually realizes “[they] are a fool / come this far” (l. 10-11). Most people will attempt to find an escape, but often to no avail. Therefore, they must confront what they fear in order to move past it. Panicking what some people will resort to as “[their] heart / dissolves like a holy tablet / of salt” (l. 14-16). Swallowing salt water compares to accepting the various defeats everyone experiences on a daily basis. Hyperbole is used in these lines, because sometimes an individual may exaggerate by saying the burdens in their life are “killing” them. The third stanza exerts a calming mood, by describing that the object the swimmer was afraid of was “only a drifting body / of wood. Or a dolphin” (l. 17-19). This symbolizes that the obstacles in life are sometimes nothing to even spend a second worrying about. Depending on the circumstances, sometimes all that needs to be done is to take a step back and obtain a different point of view. In retrospect, fears are sometimes irrational because humans are wired to fear the
There are many ideas about the way things are suppose to be, they guide people in the way humans approach life and how people go about achieving our goals. Unfortunately people do not always accomplish these ideas they have for ourselves but the truth often times is what we really need. In the Shakespearean drama, Macbeth, he writes of a once cherished leader, Macbeth who is approached by supernatural being and acts out erratically to fulfill what prophesies he desires which lead to his eventual demise. Macbeth has difficulty perceiving idealism from the truth, in other words what he thinks should happen and what actually happens. The prophecies are the catalyst for his irrational thinking and from then on Macbeth becomes addicted to knowing what his future could be and taking it to the extreme of needing to create it then and there. Down this path he also has his wife Lady Macbeth who pushes him further to act on these prophecies to achieve the ultimate goal of the crown. She too has an obsession with doing whatever it takes to be Queen and have that authority to her name. These two characters take to the extreme what it means to need truth but desire their idealism and how this leads to their eventual demise.
Beauty is dangerous, especially when you lack it. In the book "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, we witness the effects that beauty brings. Specifically the collapse of Pecola Breedlove, due to her belief that she did not hold beauty. The media in the 1940's as well as today imposes standards in which beauty is measured up to; but in reality beauty dwells within us all whether it's visible or not there's beauty in all; that beauty is unworthy if society brands you with the label of being ugly.
In this essay I will show how the Song of Songs implies the philosophical ideas that the definition of beauty is not dependent upon society’s prejudice or taste; that it is most precious when it is protected and guarded; and that with edenic love comes maximal blessing. The book exists as an ancient poem of inspired literature, where the author paints different interactions between two lovers: a Shulamite woman, and a shepherd who is known as “the beloved” (2:3).
Nevertheless, the sublime does not lead us to despair, but to a higher pleasure than beauty affords
Nowadays everyone is hyper-focused on their appearance. From wearing designer clothes to updating social media, our lives constantly revolve around impressing each other., instead of appreciating each other’s uniqueness. The characteristic of Romanticism I chose is, “Aspiration after the sublime and the wonderful, that which transcends mundane limits.” The author that I thought best represents this characteristic is Nathaniel Hawthorne.
As stated by ‘The Duchess’, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford’s famous quote “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” As a result, beauty can describe as an inspiring view present in everything that can be seen. To begin, beauty can be viewed in a building as large and extravagant as the white house to the small hometown market or even in the sight of a single flower to a field filled with a million flowers. Also, beauty can be seen in the sunrise over the peaks of the mountains and also in the sunset glowing across a calm lake surrounded by the bright colors of the fall trees. Furthermore, people have physical beauty, which can be found in a person’s features, figure, or complexion. In the poem “Beauty & Dress” by Robert Herrick he explains the beauty he sees in his wife. Herrick states,
In this paper, I investigate the overall Enlightenment role that Kant conceived for aesthetic experience, and especially, of the beautiful. (1) I argue for an interpretation of Kant's aesthetics whereby the experience of the beautiful may play the same functional role in the invisible church of natural religion as Scripture does for the visible churches of ecclesiastical religions. Although aesthetic experience, for Kant, is autonomous by virtue of its disinterestedness, seemingly paradoxically, this very autonomy enables the beautiful, potentially, to serve profound moral and Enlightenment aims within his system. For Kant, because we are both rational and animal, we require embodiments of moral ideas, and thus, the experience of the beautiful is necessary in order to f...
...e ability to achieve anything in life. Hopefully, readers would learn from this novel that beauty is not the most important aspect in life. Society today emphasizes the beauty of one's outer facade. The external appearance of a person is the first thing that is noticed. People should look for a person's inner beauty and love the person for the beauty inside. Beauty, a powerful aspect of life, can draw attention but at the same time it can hide things that one does not want disclosed. Beauty can be used in a variety of ways to affect one's status in culture, politics, and society. Beauty most certainly should not be used to excuse punishment for bad deeds. Beauty is associated with goodness, but that it is not always the case. This story describes how the external attractiveness of a person can influence people's behavior and can corrupt their inner beauty.
Edmund Burke was one of the primary Enlightenment figures who wrote on these two topics. In the excerpts from The Sublime and Beautiful, Burke made five descriptions about aspects of the sublime and another eight about the beautiful. His basic point was that beauty is the quality that causes love. This, in turn, makes us need to question what love is. The first distinction that Burke was sure to make was that love is not desire or lust. Desire and lust are “an energy of the mind that hurries us on to the possession of something”. He then proceeds to describe love as “the satisfaction that arises to the mind when you see something beautiful”. Well, based on these two definitions, we have fallen into a sort of circular course of thinking. Beauty equals love, but love comes from seeing something beautiful, then you cycle back to questioning beauty, and so on and so forth. Burke also points out that perfection does not cause beauty. He finally goes on to say that beauty is “some quality in bodies acting on the senses”. As he goes through the rest of the sections that we read through, Burke states and defines some qualities of beauty. He uses words such as smallness, smoothness, and delicacy, as well as explaining the “beautiful” colors and sounds, which are softer colors and sounds without any darkness with them. After taking in all of this from Burke, the final conclusion to be made is that beauty inspires affection and
“In the place where idealism and realism meet, that is where there is the greatest evolutionary tension.” Idealism prioritizes ideals, social reforms and morals, by wanting to benefit not just yourself, but the world around you, believing people are generally good. On the contrary, realism gives priority to national interest and security with emphasis on promoting one’s own power and influence by assuming that people are egocentric by nature. Based on the definitions stated above, idealism and realism are significantly different from each other and their divergence of thought is more apparent when various proponents of each such as Woodrow Wilson, Henry Lodge, Barack Obama and George W. Bush have varied outlooks on comparable issues in politics. Subsequently, an idealist’s reaction to a particular issue would be a lot different than a realist’s response. Therefore, idealism deals with normative ideas and allows for improvements in the progress of not only a single state, but the whole world, however realism solely focuses on the benefits of one’s own nation.