Consider the Lobster
Escape From the Cave
In his article “Consider the Lobster”, David Foster Wallace pointed out that the lobsters would suffer pain if cooked alive on the basis of many scientific materials about the lobster that announced by different organizations, trying to figure out if it is moral to cook the lobsters alive. Although he fell in an ethical dilemma at last, just as most people, struggling between the moral problem and the selfish interest in eating certain kinds of animal, he did not evade querying about the morality of his eating habits. In fact, human are always influenced by familial, social, religious, moral and political factors, which limit their perspectives and trap them in a self’s mind cave; however, they can always do better and finally understand the abstract reality if they gradually move to a higher realm, continually studying and reasoning what they think they 've already known, which in reality are the illusions of the physical world mirrored in their mind. In his book The Republic, Plato recorded the allegory of the cave, which is a fictional dialogue between him and his teacher Socrates, to explain how educations of mind help people achieve enlightenment. This allegory shows an image of benighted humanity, living in an underground cave, having their legs and necks chained and could only gaze at the wall before them, which like a screen that reflected the shadow of the artifacts carried by actors behind them. They believed what they saw is true although those were only the echoes of the artifacts that actors created. A few of them were freed and escaped from the cave; however, the sunlight was so bright that hurt these prisoners’ eyes, and then blinded their eyes. After a long journey of enlightenment, they adapted to the sight of the real world step by step and finally discovered the immutable truths. However, the prisoners in the cave would always refuse to listen to these people who came back from the real world and insisted to believe their
In his article “Consider the Lobster”, David Foster Wallace pointed out that the lobsters would suffer pain if cooked alive on the basis of many scientific materials about the lobster that announced by different organizations, trying to figure out if it is moral to cook the lobsters alive. Although he fell in an ethical dilemma at last, just as most people, struggling between the moral problem and the selfish interest in eating certain kinds of animal, he did not evade querying about the morality of his eating habits. In fact, human are always influenced by familial, social, religious, moral and political factors, which limit their perspectives and trap them in a self’s mind cave; however, they can always do better and finally understand the abstract reality if they gradually move to a higher realm, continually studying and reasoning what they think they 've already known, which in reality are the illusions of the physical world mirrored in their mind. In his book The Republic, Plato recorded the allegory of the cave, which is a fictional dialogue between him and his teacher Socrates, to explain how educations of mind help people achieve enlightenment. This allegory shows an image of benighted humanity, living in an underground cave, having their legs and necks chained and could only gaze at the wall before them, which like a screen that reflected the shadow of the artifacts carried by actors behind them. They believed what they saw is true although those were only the echoes of the artifacts that actors created. A few of them were freed and escaped from the cave; however, the sunlight was so bright that hurt these prisoners’ eyes, and then blinded their eyes. After a long journey of enlightenment, they adapted to the sight of the real world step by step and finally discovered the immutable truths. However, the prisoners in the cave would always refuse to listen to these people who came back from the real world and insisted to believe their
Cited: Wallace, David Foster. Consider the lobster. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. Print.