I selected this allusion because it is something I can relate to and use daily. I have…
Write a story about an experience that affected you deeply and ought to be known by others. The story can be written in prose, can be a poem, can be a short story, can be a song, or…
The professor Philip Hallie’s ‘From Cruelty to Goodness’ radiates unwavering genuine philanthropy which by its nature oppose the cruelty and imbalance of power he talks about. The understanding of how cruelty works goes through the understanding what cruelty is and what morality has to say about that. Professor Hallie recognizes two types of ethics- negative and positive- that illuminate the path of good-making. The negative is the ban for actions associated with deliberate harm-making and pain-inflicting on other human beings. The most significant negative ethical rules are the Ten Commandments, says the professor. As reverse, the positive rules enjoin actions that preserve human’s welfare. The positive ethics commands activity; demands courage, and takes sacrifice. The positive ethical rules are for the brave. In close association with the ethical rules, whether negative or positive, comes the question what cruelty is? Had we looked at the institutionalized type of cruelty from the near past to nowadays as the slavery, the Holocaust, the political prisons and the prisoner-of-war camps we would see the cruelty is not mere bloodshed, cut-off limbs, beatings and other atrocities which all are included though. The cruelty goes beyond that- it affects the self-respect, self-esteem, all of that which makes person a person and destroys it. So the cruelty not only (often) kills the body, it first kills the spirit, the soul, the life inside. As professor Hallie uncovers the cruelty derives from something so frequently seen as the imbalanced power in the relationship. The relationship could be both personal (private) or institutionalized. The imbalance is being born when the power between the two parties is unequally distributed, often leaving one of the parties with negligible or no power. Respectively, the strong party gains not only the power to decide for herself but to rule over the destiny of the powerless side. The imbalance of power resides in families, business…
Friedrich Nietzsche is a German Philosopher, who studied and written several critical texts. The type of texts he wrote were along the lines of philosophy, religion, contemporary culture, and science. Nietzsche is known for a lot of his work, but master-slave morality is highly valued. Master-slave morality was the first subject in Nietzsche’s book, On the Genealogy of Morality. In this book Nietzsche defines the difference between Slave morality and Master morality. When Nietzsche compares between the two types of morality he distinguish strength versus weakness, the difference is primarily one of power and also love independence. The master knows he has power and abilities to aspire to excellence, also he…
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a novel about the impact war has on innocent people's lives. The struggles of people with disabilities in a time where people weren’t very kind to each other was mentioned often in the story. Doerr writes often about people who coped with and tried to cure blindness through curses, roadblocks, treasure hunts and terrible allies. It seemed that the search for answers and finding hope was the main theme of the story. But it was very sad and dark often, it was depressing in some parts.…
For the vast majority morals are sets of guidelines that we should comply, they let us know what is correct or off-base. Moral philosophers need to find how these guidelines are legitimized, and at the consistent outcomes of moral or moral convictions. The time of enlightenment saw a questioning of religious and customary qualities. Philosophers expected to construct moral framework in light of reasonable grounds. Kant's moral framework depends on levelheadedness. It endeavors to indicate how any objective being would consent to widespread moral laws. Its impact has been colossal and current philosophers still utilize Kant's thoughts as a beginning stage for exchanges on morality. The other incredible moral arrangement of the post-enlightenment time is…
“The Lamb” comes from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, so readers are aware that the poem will be symbolic of an innocent time. This innocence is seen throughout the poem; the speaker seems to be a child as he continually asks, “Little Lamb, who made thee?” (1). The lamb is a symbol of the innocence of childhood; the speaker wants it to know how precious it is, so words such as delight, wooly bright, and rejoice are used. Blake also makes the poem more childlike by making its form similar to that of a nursery rhyme. “The Lamb” becomes even more simple and innocent with this…
The document, Steel of Storm, by Ernst Junger, an English lieutenant in the Great War- or WWI- tells the story of a young soldier in charge of leading other Englishmen to their potential deaths, all united by the goal of defeating the German soldiers and restoring peace to their European home. This piece explains why Junger believed his experience of fighting as an English soldier to be a positive one, what the average experience of a soldier in the trenches was like, as well as how the Great War affected everyone caught in its crossfire.…
"Literature opens a dark window on the soul, revealing more about what is bad in human nature than what is good." This quote means that literature will show all sides to a person not just their good side. It will show how evil a person maybe even though they may seem nice. I would have to agree with this quote because in the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Macbeth was once a noble man but the powers of greed made his true side come out. In Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, Willie the main character may look like a nice guy but deep down inside he is a very troubled man.…
Pathos- this is effectively used frequently through out the text so that the speaker gets the audience to be emotional. An example of this is when he says “ to be abandoned by god is worse than to be punished by him” (444). By saying this, the speaker get the audience to empathize with the victim, put themselves in the victims shoes, which gets the emotions and feeling across to all the members of the audience and get then engaged. He uses human emotion as a way to speak out against the holocaust and then speaks of the horrors of it to trigger emotion from the audience “Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner” as they called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were—strangers to their surroundings...” (444). This creates a feeling of horror and helps the…
On the Genealogy of Morality the word ‘ressentiment’ is possibly one of the key concepts in Nietzsche’s ideas about the psychology of ‘slave-morality’, the birth of morality, and the way it reassigned morality as we know it today. The word meaning itself is very close to the word resentment in English but is slightly different. The context in which Nietzsche uses the word ‘ressentiment’ is a psychological state of people that are conscious of their own inferiority and turn it to hatred towards external anger. It is a feeling that arises from the incapability of one’s success and hence finding external factors to blame for this incapability. Nietzsche aligns this concept with the weak people or slaves which are inferior to the noble, strong…
An issue in today’s society is discrimination. For consistency I will define discrimination as anything that denies a group of people from any universal privileges. A few examples of this would be racism, LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transgender) rights, and sexism. These issue have been present through all points in American and World History, normally putting the white adult heterosexual male as the most privileged and discriminations putting everyone else below him. In the twenty-first century measures have recently been taken to correct for the unjust treatment of those other than white males for factors out of their control. These factors of course include skin color, sex, and sexual orientation. I feel Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality…
Everyone will face a time in their lives when they start to question themselves or beliefs. It forces them to reflect on their decisions and their moral code. Elie went through a very traumatic event, in which no one should have to endure, let alone a child. The Holocaust changed him, as it would anyone. Elie questioned his faith many times in God and humanity. Throughout the novel you can see specific times where his faith waivers and changes.…
Throughout the novel the theme was “At the core, all humans have a strong instinct to survive.” At the camps, the Jew’s main purpose was to survive and Mr. Wiesel was doing just that with his father by his side. As Mr. Wiesel explains through all this pain and suffering that he is still strong, “I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong” (65). When running through the icy winds and snowy weather Mr. Wiesel had become strong minded because his foot was still healing and if he were to stop he would get shot by a SS officer. Wiesel explains, “These thoughts had taken up a brief space of time, during which I had gone on running without feeling my throbbing foot…” (82). When SS officer’s decided to take a break…
Empires can be created, revolutions can begin, all because of a string of hope. Without this emotion, many historical events would not have occurred, such as the Holocaust, one of the most infamous genocides in history. In the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, he writes about the Holocaust and his time in several concentration camps with his father. Hope plays an important part in this story; it became the catalyst of the Holocaust, protected Jewish victims of genocide, and eventually caused the end of WWII.…