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Determinism and free will
Determinism and free will
Philosophy free will vs determinism
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“What’s it going to be then, eh?” is the signature question in Anthony Burgess’s novel, A Clockwork Novel that not only resonates with the moral identity of the anti-heroic protagonist, Alex, but also signifies the essential choice between free will that perpetrates evil and deterministic goodness that is forced and unreal. The prison chaplain and the writer F. Alexander voice the most controversial idea in the novel: man becomes ‘a clockwork orange’ when robbed of free will and tuned into a deterministic mechanism.
Burgess points out the necessity of free will to maintain humanity at both the communal and individual level. The novel represents a futuristic dystopian society through its anti-hero Alex and charts the protagonist’s journey from a perpetrator of violence to a partially reformed and matured man in the end. The paper argues both the concept of free will and deterministic goodness from the character analysis of Alex and the society, as reflected in the conduct of government against prisoners and gives an unbiased conclusion in favour of one of the concepts.
From the beginning, the novel depicts a struggle between violent free will and a safe but regulated environment. Alex and his friends, the droogs, violent free will as they disassociate themselves from the government’s clutches. They display the cold-hearted aspect of free will through their actions such as stealing, attacking innocent people and raping women as their free will dictates. Burgess seems to argue that in a society that depends much on safe and predictable behaviour, the action of Alex and the gang is a reaction or a way of expressing themselves against the expected behaviour. Their display of violence is an assertion, a force against individuals...
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...ocess signifying that the choice of goodness and badness cannot be forced on any individual.
The argument presented here has its allegiance towards free will than forced conformation to goodness. Leading life as a ‘clockwork orange’ is as derogatory as committing heinous acts under the pretext of free will. Ethical goodness is necessary to live life in a civilized society as much a control on evil is necessary to keep the same society free of crime but in both contexts, neither can be achieved through force. As mentioned in the beginning, every individual has an inherent nature, either good or bad. An evil person cannot be reformed forcefully. Only when the individual realizes his erroneous ways and wills to reform, a change can happen. If free will can lead to evil, the same free will can propel goodness, without any necessity for forceful interference.
There have been many books published solely on philosophy, and many more than that solely written about human nature, but very infrequently will a book be published that weaves these fields together as well as A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. In this Book Burgess speculated on the fact “the significance of maturing by choice is to gain moral values and freedoms.” He achieved this task by pushing his angsty teenaged character, Alex, through situations that challenge the moral values of himself and his friends. In the novel, A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, Alex himself, must choose good over evil in order to gain moral values which will allow him to mature into a “man” in the latter of his two transformations.
chosen to undergo a new “treatment” that the State has developed to “reform” criminals. After the State strips him of his choice to choose between good and evil, Alex can only do good now and even thinking of doing something bad makes him violently ill. Then, Alex is “rehabilitated” considered “rehabilitated”. Afterwards Alex is released where he encounters an “ex-droog” and one of his enemies, they beat him to a pulp and leave him out in the middle of nowhere. After coming to his senses, Alex makes his way to a house and in that house, right before Alex went to prison, h...
1. As I was reading the book Clockwork Orange, I felt like it deserved a 8 out of 10. I enjoyed the book because while I was reading it, I did not have such a clear image of all the rape, sex, and violence. Talking from personal experiences, I did not want to picture those images in my head. Finding out there was a movie of Clockwork Orange kind of scared me but also gave me excitement because I wanted to see how different the the book was from the movie. After viewing Clockwork Orange, I would rate it a 7 out of 10. I rated it a 7 out of 10 because the rape and violence was overused. In the beginning of the movie, there were non-stop sex and rape scenes. For example, when Alex and his goons fake their way into an emergency just so they could attack a older man and rape his wife, who later dies because of this accident. Toward the end of the movie, there was a lot of
Many people have different views on the moral subject of good and evil or human nature. It is the contention of this paper that humans are born neutral, and if we are raised to be good, we will mature into good human beings. Once the element of evil is introduced into our minds, through socialization and the media, we then have the potential to do bad things. As a person grows up, they are ideally taught to be good and to do good things, but it is possible that the concept of evil can be presented to us. When this happens, we subconsciously choose whether or not to accept this evil. This where the theories of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke become interesting as both men differed in the way they believed human nature to be. Hobbes and Locke both picture a different scene when they express human nature.
As Madeleine L’Engle aptly said, “because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person,” taking away freedom of choice is equivalent to stripping off humanity. Mankind has evolved to have the ability to use the mind for reason and understanding, which separates humans from beasts and machines. It is this ability that allows man to analyze and formulate different choices, and have the freedom over them. Despite the knowledge that freedom of choice is fundamental in making humans human, social control has always been one of the leading reasons to justify the removal of that freedom. Through showing the need for the loss of freedom for social stability and the resulting problems, both The Unincorporated Man and A Clockwork Orange highlight the conflict between control and freedom.
It concerns violence in the society as an essential social concept in the story that needed to be observed. The man and his boy, however, decide not harm others unless violence is required for their survival. There are many elements to this novel that mean a lot more than it appears to. As it exhibited by the author in the story, the father consciously formed his character and his response to the conflict between self and society when he talks to his son and says, “You,” he reminds the kid, “are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not?” (Robinson 89). His brave is measured by different social facts such as honesty, tolerance, and optimism to express a personal value and follow an individual goal instead of the opposing with the
All Alex knew was to be violent due to the failure and lack of family structure, the school system and the law. The lack of these assertive institutions Alex couldn’t properly generate proper moral values and social norms. According to Mead he analyzed that a child gets some sort of understanding of how to act properly by how others act toward the child. Later on in the child’s development he/she learns and understands “the generalized other”, values and cultural rules (textbook). Alex was never pressured into going to school, there is one scene where his mother wakes him and tells him to get ready for school and Alex tells her “he doesn’t feel like going today” and that was the end of it. With Alex missing out on school he never really self-aware and knowledgeable. His family is absent also. Again with Alex telling his mother he doesn’t feel like going to school and his mother just lets it go shows the carelessness of his parents. Alex can pretty much do whatever he wants when he wants. With their lack of parenting he never truly gained proper values and morals and instead he created his own by the morals and values his “droogs” know. He had many run in’s with the police even before he was
Many of us like to think that humanity as a whole is progressing to a better future where we will live united and in peace with one another, a time of a more enlightened society. But there are those among us that do not share these beliefs. In A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, the futuristic world is displayed as a world turned upside down and in shambles. This 1962 classic is a frightful depiction of what our society could become and possibly what it already is. Drugs almost seem to be legal and unregulated and subsequently are widely used. The prison system is overcrowded with young punk criminals who are inherently evil with no regard for humanity, or any part of society for that matter. The youth takes over the streets at night and beat anyone they encounter. The elderly sit around in bars and drink the remainder of their lives away. The people have become desensitized to violence, because it is so prevalent in their lives. A Clockwork Orange is a very intriguing story that deals with many social problems, not offering a solution, but pointing out obstacles in the way of the creation of a more perfect society.
"John (Anthony) Burgess Wilson." DISCovering Authors. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resources in Context. Web. 11 Mar. 2012.
Timshel; meaning “thou mayest”, holds a significant role in East of Eden. It shows that anyone can desire to surmount vile in their hearts and create morality within them self. In the novel, Steinbeck portrays the significance of timshel through the introduction of free will, the internal conflict of Caleb, and the blessing of Adam.
With the intention to install order and justice to protect human rights, society contrarily threatens human life by its own adverse imposition. This satire of society portrays the author’s opposition to the prominent behaviorism movement, led by B.F. Skinner. Ironically, Clockwork seems to ridicule the utopian society depicted in Skinner’s Walden Two (Aggeler 70). Proponents of behaviorism advocated the human conditioning described in Skinner’s work. Burgess’s imaginatively fabricated language found in Clockwork, known as Nadsat, carries this theme to the reader. At first reading, this fabricated jargon seems preposterous and difficult to understand, but by the end, the onomatopoeic wording flows naturally and thus "the effect of Nadsat on the reader functions as an ironic comment on the novel itself" (Foote, 87). Burgess conditions the readers themselves to comprehend Nadsat, yet they are fully unaware of this imposition. The language itself enthrall...
Freedom and liberalism are catchwords that appear frequently in both philosophical and political rhetoric. A free man is able to choose his actions and his value system, to express his views and to develop his most authentic character. What this kind of idealistic liberalism seems to forget, however, is that liberty does not mean a better society, better life or humanistic values such as equality and justice. In his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), Anthony Burgess portrays an ultimately free individual and shows how a society cannot cope with the freedom which it in rhetoric so eagerly seeks to promote.
Anthony Burgess integrates many social issues today between the Government and People into Clockwork Orange. Many of the issues that Alex faces along with the government are relatable in today’s society. Within the story Anthony Burgess teaches us how people act and how the government works in a more brutal way, The Clockwork Orange expresses this through free-will, maturity and karma, and treatment of people.
As teenagers deviate from the constraining grasp of their parents, they begin to establish their own identity through decisions; however, their development of self-identification is frequently hindered by manipulation of societal institutions such as: justice system, religion, and media. Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, establishes the idea of freewill and how it is suppressed when Alex, the main protagonist, undergoes the manipulative Ludovico's technique, religious lectures, and social norms influenced by media- used to instill pain when Alex's desires violence/music and finding salvation, which is similar to the treatment of criminals in our society; ultimately utilized to mitigate crime, but also suppresses freewill through repercussions, fear, police officials, indelible ads, and the law. Therefore, American citizens are not privileged with the power of choice because the hindering paradox that exists in society: possessing the ability to consciously establish identity is entwined with manipulation, subliminally.
In the novel A Clockwork Orange, the author Anthony Burgess tells a story about a young man name Alex and his friends, every night they go around and start committing violent acts. In the novel Alex expresses his freedom of choice between good and evil. The freedom of choice is a decision that every person must make throughout his life in order to guide his actions and to take control of his own future. This Freedom of Choice, no matter what the outcome is, displays person power as an individual, and any efforts to control or influence this choice between good and evil will take way the person free will and enslave him. In this novel the author uses this symbolism through imagery. He shows that through the character of Alex, and the first person narrative point of view to prove that without the ability to choose between good and evil person becomes a slave.