Icarus was the son of Daedalus,the man who built the Labyrinth for the Minotaur in ancient Greek Mythology. They were imprisoned inside the Labyrinth and sought to escape from the King who trapped them there. Daedalus made two pairs of wings by adhering feathers to a frame with wax. Giving one pair to his son, he cautioned him that flying too near the sun would cause the wax to melt. However, Icarus, drunk with freedom and exhilaration of flight, wanted to touch the fiery light above him. He flew too close to the sun and the wax melted off his wings, leaving him to fall to his death in the ocean hundreds of feet below him. Icarus’ fate could have been avoided if he had only focused on escape, on his father’s warning, and on the wax that melted away rather than flying and sparing Daedalus a lifetime of guilt. When people try to surpass their pain with impulsive decisions such as trying to touch the sun, it leads to very bad situations (sometimes even death). However, this can be evaded. Metaphysics helps us cope with suffering, understand ourselves better and even understand each other better
Having a grasp of mental transcendence can aid all people to survive great personal grievances. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Dr. Frankl discovers that this method of coping with the pain and horror of the Holocaust is the only way to survive such a traumatic event. One scene has Dr. Frankl trying to sleep in his bunk with the other prisoners when a man next to him started to scream in his sleep. Frankl is about to wake him up from the nightmare but, at the last second, does not. This is because he realizes that no dream or nightmare can be worse than their current reality. As awful as that sounds, Frankl is correct in thinking that anything co...
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... bad thing to control your emotions rather than them control you. It is hard to care about everyone and everything; most feel as though they don’t have the mental capacity to do this but caring about everything can result in completely grasping a perfect human state. Metaphysics has helped many try to strive to create a more empathic world to combat this phenomenon of socially accepted apathy.
Using your mental strength to combat all physical evils and understand is just a necessary component to human experience. It can help escape a painful situation, care for everyone and everything and figure out what we want to do with the time we are given. Furthermore, metaphysics is so incredibly important because no matter what happens in reality, we will always have ourselves and we can transcend anything that life throws at us if our hearts and minds are strong enough.
Viktor Frankl, the author of the novel Man’s Search For Meaning, a holocaust survivor and also known for his theory of locotherapy, explains the hardships that the holocaust brings while living in a concentration camp. Throughout his experience, he confesses that it is hard to have hope and faith in order to live. He gave strongly worded advice to other inmates and was also a doctor to the victims. He is seen as a powerful, bold, and courageous character towards everyone he meets. His stories and incidents that occur throughout the novel portray locotherapy, which is described as the search for meaning in life. By setting goals and looking toward the future can help to push through hardships such as the holocaust.
It is not about controlling the emotion or an action, but controlling how the mind views it. As Brooks is elaborating on his view, he mentions something William James stated, “[T]he whole drama of voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas might receive… Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of the will” (131). Notice, James strong beliefs are focused on how much attention a person gives to his/her thoughts. If a person is angry, focusing only on the anger, the person is much more likely to punch a wall or maybe even punch a person, than if the person who focused on his/her breathing pattern to calm down. Brooks uses James’ thoughts to remind readers that self-control isn’t just about controlling an emotion or a certain behavior. It is about rewiring how the mind thinks and processes information. This ability to be able shift one’s thought to something else is a direct reflection on the determination one has. In summary, Brooks believes, although contrary to popular views, that self-control is about redirecting the attention of the brain to accomplish or avoid certain
In the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the author displays the transformation and the evolution of the average human being, through a horrible experience that he personally went through. When he is transported from one place to another, forced to leave everything behind, to go live in the ghettos, then in a horrible concentration camp. In the concentration camp, Elie experiences numerous events that challenge his physical and mental limits. Some of these events made him question his faith, and whether there is such a thing as God, turning him from a conservative Jew to a reform Jew. Elie doesn’t love the concentration camps, yet he doesn’t hate it, in fact he does not care anymore.
All humans are supposed to have emotion, but when people don’t have anything to hold on to positive emotions can become dormant. The memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, is Wiesel’s story from surviving the Holocaust with the help of his father and fighting to stay alive day by day. Wiesel suffered from brutal conditions in labor camps and managed to survive through the agony while watching others perished every day. The unnatural behavior by the S.S. led to dehumanization that shattered the faith of Elie Wiesel and many other prisoners.
In the memoir Night by elie Wiesel, humans can’t maintain a moral mentality when under great suffering as portrayed through Elie and fellow inmates. Because of all the distress and mentally and physically straining things the inmates had to go through, they became brutal savages. People started to not care about what they did, they just cared about how they were
The Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg has said, “ There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.” The Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in the history of mankind, consisting of the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally handicapped and many others during World War II. Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, and his army of Nazis and SS troops carried out the terrible proceedings of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, and suffers a relentless “night” of terror and torture in which humans were treated as animals. Wiesel discovers the “Kingdom of Night” (118), in which the history of the Jewish people is altered. This is Wiesel’s “dark time of life” and through his journey into night he can’t see the “light” at the end of the tunnel, only continuous dread and darkness. Night is a memoir that is written in the style of a bildungsroman, a loss of innocence and a sad coming of age. This memoir reveals how Eliezer (Elie Wiesel) gradually loses his faith and his relationships with both his father (dad), and his Father (God). Sickened by the torment he must endure, Wiesel questions if God really exists, “Why, but why should I bless him? Because he in his great might, had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? (67). Throughout the Holocaust, Wiesel’s faith is not permanently shattered. Although after his father dies, his faith in god and religion is shaken to the core, and arguably gone. Wiesel, along with most prisoners, lose their faith in God. Wiesel’s loss of religion becomes the loss of identity, humanity, selfishness, and decency.
In the memoir Night, the narrator Wiesel recounts a moment when he witnesses the most horrific actions done by men,”I pinched myself : Was I still alive ? Was I awake ? How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent “ (Wiesel 32). Wiesel was thinking and questioning about his existence. While also caring for his father because that's all he has left. It's even more important because, what Wiesel experiences in camps has been near death and fight for survival. Two significant themes related to inhumanity discussed in the book Night by Wiesel are, loss in religious faith and father and son bonding.
As humanity crumbles around you, do you accept the new reality or hold on to an unrealistic dream? When you awake from the illusion of safety, how do you subsist in a harsh and treacherous reality? How does your outlook on the world and your beliefs change when you are ripped from your comfortable existence into a savage murderous surrounding? These are some of the main questions explored throughout Night by Elie Wisel. The story reflects on the author’s life and mindset during and after the atrocious genocide known as the Holocaust.
Authors sometimes refer to their past experiences to help cope with the exposure to these traumatic events. In his novel Night, Elie Wiesel recalls the devastating and horrendous events of the Holocaust, one of the world’s highest points for man’s inhumanity towards man, brutality, and cruel treatment, specifically towards the Jewish Religion. His account takes place from 1944-1945 in Germany while beginning at the height of the Holocaust and ending with the last years of World War II. The reader will discover through this novel that cruelty is exemplified all throughout Wiesel's, along with the other nine million Jews’, experiences in the inhumane concentration camps that are sometimes referred to as “death factories.”
Eliezer Wiesel loses his faith in god, family and humanity through the experiences he has from the Nazi concentration camp.
As humans, we require basic necessities, such as food, water, and shelter to survive. But we also need a reason to live. The reason could be the thought of a person, achieving some goal, or a connection with a higher being. Humans need something that drives them to stay alive. This becomes more evident when people are placed in horrific situations. In Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, he reminisces about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. There the men witness horrific scenes of violence and death. As time goes on they begin to lose hope in the very things that keep them alive: their faith in God, each other, and above all, themselves.
In Viktor Frankl’s essay “Man’s Search For Meaning,” he recounts his experiences surviving the holocaust. Frankl shows how traumatic experiences shape people and force them to change in accordance with what is happening to them. Furthermore, he argues that adaptation was the only way he could survive. To prove this, he describes how he learned to shut himself off from certain aspects of his life and pay more attention to aspects of life that gave him hope, such as nature. Similarly, adaptation is also an important concern of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In Beloved, Morrison explores Frankl’s idea about how people adapt differently to trauma, some love more than they previously had because they are finally free to do so, some try to find a shaky balance between independence and love and others rely too heavily on the love of a few.
Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worse attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point were they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous example used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were. After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others.
Summary: Man’s searching for meaning is a detailed description of the life of psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl, when forced into german death camps during World War 2. Through various experiences within the brutality that he faced, Frankl explains phenomena for survival and love. In order to survive, Victor found that it was essential for people to find meaning and control even in the worst situations. As Victor saw those lose this hope and control, he saw the suffering consume people towards death. Another phenomenon expressed by Frankl in the first part of the novel is the 3 stages of adjustment. The first stage that all prisoners face is initial shock. In this phase prisoners lose their former identity and self image, they are left without clothes, belongings or even family members, they were just left with their bare body. After this initial stage of shock prisoners faced an “emotional death,” in which this horror and shock came to an end, it was instead replaced
Mayer and Salovey (2001) maintained that emotions help prioritise, decide, anticipate and plan one’s actions. In order to effectively manage one’s emotions, one must first learn to identify and recognise them accurately. They should not neglect their emotions as this will reflect lack of self-awareness. For example, when someone lost their loved ones, they choose to be in a state of denial allowing themselves to be drowned in depression and sickness. They refused to get away from feeling negative and find solutions to overcome their emotions. These group of people face difficulties in recognising, identifying and managing their emotions.