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Importance of critical thinking in daily life
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Critical Reflection In Practice
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The Necessity of Thinking to a Profound Existence
While pondering upon his existence, the French philosopher, Rene Descartes famously declared, “I think, therefore, I am.” Descartes’s claim has become one of the most reliable pillars of philosophy, open to the criticism and admiration of numerous thinkers. Ray Bradbury’s dystopic novel Fahrenheit 451 conjures a book-burning society where firemen exist to burn free thought. Through their lack of emotions, opinions, and their disregard for life, the shallow people of the society in Fahrenheit 451 validate Descartes’s claim about the necessity of thinking to experience a profound existence.
Most of the people in the novel’s society do not experience emotions because of their inability to think
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for long periods of time. Individuals cannot retain deep emotions or memories because they depend on the distractions of constant entertainment. Among this population is Mildred Montag, who relies primarily on the entertainment of her TV parlor and her association with simple-minded individuals. These thoughtless interactions are the cause of emptiness in her marriage with fireman and protagonist, Guy Montag. As he begins to query their society, Montag questions their relationship asking Mildred, “‘When did we meet? And where?”’. To which she replies flippantly, “‘I don’t know. . . Funny, how funny, not to remember where or when you met your husband’s wife”’. After a short consideration, she gives up, declaring, “‘It doesn’t matter” (43). With the aid of her electronics, Mildred lives in a numbing state of immediate pleasure and entertainment. She experiences rapid bursts of emotions but dismisses them for the safety and uncomplicated presence of accessible electronics and superficial explanations. Her husband’s questions mean nothing to her, and she incorrectly interprets the emotion of loss as entertaining. When it is clear that Mildred cannot find an answer in a short period of time, she reaches for the quickest answer: willful ignorance. People like Mildred in Fahrenheit 451 aren’t aware of their emotional states choose to ignore their feelings. Because they refuse to take the time to think, they cannot reflect on their emotions, causing them to live in a state of emptiness and shallowness. The distractions of the dystopian society encourage citizens to reach for shortcuts, and the diversions desensitizes emotions and undermines true happiness, the key to living. The deliberate ignorance of Fahrenheit 451’s citizens to a variety of information disables their abilities to process thoughts and form opinions. In this dystopic society, firemen burn books. Fireman chief Captain Beatty, strongly supports the institution’s purpose of eradicating differing opinions. When the protagonist Guy Montag, begins to doubt book-burning, Beatty passionately bursts, “‘We can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. . . People want to be happy. . . Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. . . Eliminate it” (59). Beatty embodies the beliefs of most people in Fahrenheit 451’s society and regards the contents of books as dangerous because of the different viewpoints they encourage. The dystopia believes in the options of one viewpoint and none to appease all. By preventing the diffusion of individual ideas and opinions and eradicating the information from differing viewpoints and expert opinions, the dystopia inhibits the people’s individuality by preventing the formation of opinions. The uninformed position of the individuals in Fahrenheit 451 disable their thought processes to form opinions from ideas and reasons. The equality of all thoughts prevent the people of Fahrenheit 451 from living complete, individual lives. Therefore, the people of Fahrenheit 451 do not live, but merely exist as vessels for the dystopia’s thoughts and opinions. The people of Fahrenheit 451’s disregard for all life causes the illusion they live in.
Descartes’s claim obliterated doubt towards human existence by proving that humans lived because they could reflect on themselves. However, in Fahrenheit 451, life has no meaning. Near the middle of the novel during Beatty’s address to Montag’s doubt, Beatty mentions society’s procedural approach to death. He rants, “‘Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man is a speck of black dust”’ (60). Life is swept away within minutes without emotions or considerations, and perhaps rightly so. Without individuality, opinions, and emotions, the lives of the dystopian individuals are indeed worthless. This situation is seen within Mildred Montag, a character focused solely on the distractions of entertainment. She lives half-asleep, leaving her trail bare of footprints and memories. At the beginning of the novel, her husband comments on her presence, thinking, “The room was not empty [and then] the room was indeed empty,” (11,12) representing Mildred’s fleeting existence. Like most of the people, her life means nothing because she is formless. She’s an empty character that lacks opinions, individual thought, and livelihood. Mildred recognizes the state her unhappiness. Towards the beginning of the book, she attempts suicide through an overdose of sleeping pills. Montag finds her and observes his wife further dead in her slumber, noting, “the breath going in and out of her nostrils, and her not caring whether it came or went, went or came” (13). She is not the only one among her society wanting to discontinue the false façade that she lives under. Suicide attempts are common and the operators who treat it claim, “‘We get these cases nine or ten a night”’ (15), indicating the subconscious unhappiness of the people. Without opportunities to think and reflect, the people of
Fahrenheit 451 acquiesce to the numbing society’s influence and distractions. Their inability to think and create their own characters prevent them from having a profound existence on other people and true life. The facile people of Fahrenheit 451 lack emotions, opinions, and disregard the value of life; validating Descartes’s claim that it is necessary to think to live profoundly. The dystopia’s citizens are willfully ignorant of painful emotions and cannot experience happiness because of pain’s non-existent state. Their limited access to different ideas disable them from forming opinions, causing them to exist through one widespread viewpoint and leaving them unable to form their individual identities. Their disregard for life creates the illusion of happiness that they live meaninglessly in. The people of Bradbury’s dystopia prove the necessity of thinking in order to exist profoundly as humans. Without the fundamental emotions, opinions, and living brought on through thinking, humans would be relegated to the position of plants; their purposes being to exist as provisions for higher beings.
The novel "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury correlates with the 2002 film "Minority Report" because of the similarities between characters, setting and imagery, and thematic detail.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Mildred Montag’s life represents a body in a tomb, basically a “tomb world.” Mildred cuts herself off from the outside. This idea applies to Mildred who lets herself live in a world where she is almost gone, holding onto whatever the world gives to her. She is described as someone who just talks to talk, “He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, […] (39). There is a quote by Oscar Wilde that is very true to this book, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.” Mildred doesn’t have any substance to her, she lives in a world
Are you really happy? Or are you sad about something? Sad about life or money, or your job? Any of these things you can be sad of. Most likely you feel discontentment a few times a day and you still call yourself happy. These are the questions that Guy Montag asks himself in the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In this book people are thinking they are happy with their lives. This is only because life is going so fast that they think they are but really there is things to be sad about. Montag has finally met Clarisse, the one person in his society that stops to smell the roses still. She is the one that gets him thinking about how his life really is sad and he was just moving too fast to see it. He realizes that he is sad about pretty much everything in his life and that the government tries to trick the people by listening to the parlor and the seashells. This is just to distract people from actual emotions. People are always in a hurry. They have 200 foot billboards for people driving because they are driving so fast that they need more time to see the advertisement. Now I am going to show you who are happy and not happy in the book and how our society today is also unhappy.
“Remember when we had to actually do things back in 2015, when people barely had technology and everyday life was so difficult and different? When people read and thought and had passions, dreams, loves, and happiness?” This is what the people of the book Fahrenheit 451 were thinking, well that is if they thought at all or even remembered what life used to be like before society was changed.
“Revealing the truth is like lighting a match. It can bring light or it can set your world on fire” (Sydney Rogers). In other words revealing the truth hurts and it can either solve things or it can make them much worse. This quote relates to Fahrenheit 451 because Montag was hiding a huge book stash, and once he revealed it to his wife, Mildred everything went downhill. Our relationships are complete opposites. There are many differences between Fahrenheit 451 and our society, they just have a different way of seeing life.
It is once in a while in the history of one's literary experience that a book comes a long which is so poignant in its message, so "frightening in its implications" [New York Times], and so ironically simplistic in its word choice. One of these treasures of 20th century literature sits on my desk in front of me as I type-Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, the novel devoted to denouncing the adage, "Ignorance is bliss". This novel provides a glance into a bleak world similar to our own (almost too similar) where war is common, feelings are shunned, family is non-existent, and thought is no longer an individual's query. To facilitate this last criterion of Mr. Bradbury's world, books have been banned, condemned to be burned on sight along with their possessors. (Incidentally, I am sure that Mr. Bradbury was aware of the high irony of writing this down in a book when he conceived of the idea.) And who should be the policemen of this world of ignorance? The "firemen." Not unlike the firemen in our world today, they dress alike, drive big trucks, and wail their loud sirens. There is one fundamental difference, however-these firemen start fires; they cleanse the evil books of their sin. And who should personify the heartless, unfeeling, cold-warm fireman but Guy Montag. His father was a fireman, and his father in turn, so what other job could there be for a man like him? Well, as you, the reader, will see, Montag will soon have trouble answering that question himself.
The people in Fahrenheit 451 treat death like it’s nothing because there are no books, so therefore there is no independence. The message that Ray Bradbury is trying to tell us is don’t take advantage of your independence or else you won’t realize how important it is. Knowledge is in our books. Without books, what do we know? Every human life has a purpose, but without books and independence, what matters? Ray Bradbury wrote this book to make you think about your life and how we take advantage of things like freedom and
In Fahrenheit 451, the regime seeks many ways to deal with factions and factional discord. The regime uses censorship on books and learning. In the novel, the society has banned all books and if one is caught with them or attempts to read it they will then be killed and the books will be burned. Knowledge is frowned upon and most don’t feel it is good to read. Television and technology is looked more upon in Fahrenheit 451. It is there to replace literalism, intelligence, and feelings. Emotion was something in society that was not made conscious. The only individual who evoked emotion and ...
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury uses the life of Guy Montag, a fireman in a near future dystopia, to make an argument against mindless conformity and blissful ignorance. In Bradbury’s world, the firemen that Montag is a part of create fires to burn books instead of putting out fires. By burning books, the firemen eliminate anything that might be controversial and make people think, thus creating a conforming population that never live a full life. Montag is part of this population for nearly 30 years of his life, until he meets a young girl, Clarisse, who makes him think. And the more he thinks, the more he realizes how no one thinks. Upon making this realization, Montag does the opposite of what he is supposed to; he begins to read. The more he reads and the more he thinks, the more he sees how the utopia he thought he lived in, is anything but. Montag then makes an escape from this society that has banished him because he has tried to gain true happiness through knowledge. This is the main point that Bradbury is trying to make through the book; the only solution to conformity and ignorance is knowledge because it provides things that the society can not offer: perspective on life, the difference between good and evil, and how the world works.
To start, the novel Fahrenheit 451 describes the fictional futuristic world in which our main protagonist Guy Montag resides. Montag is a fireman, but not your typical fireman. In fact, firemen we see in our society are the ones, who risk their lives trying to extinguish fires; however, in the novel firemen are not such individuals, what our society think of firemen is unheard of by the citizens of this futuristic American country. Instead firemen burn books. They erase knowledge. They obliterate the books of thinkers, dreamers, and storytellers. They destroy books that often describe the deepest thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Great works such as Shakespeare and Plato, for example, are illegal and firemen work to eradicate them. In the society where Guy Montag lives, knowledge is erased and replaced with ignorance. This society also resembles our world, a world where ignorance is promoted, and should not be replacing knowledge. This novel was written by Ray Bradbury, He wrote other novels such as the Martian chronicles, the illustrated man, Dandelion wine, and something wicked this way comes, as well as hundreds of short stories, he also wrote for the theater, cinema, and TV. In this essay three arguments will be made to prove this point. First the government use firemen to get rid of books because they are afraid people will rebel, they use preventative measures like censorship to hide from the public the truth, the government promotes ignorance to make it easier for them to control their citizens. Because the government makes books illegal, they make people suppress feelings and also makes them miserable without them knowing.
In Dystopian societies, conformity overrules curiosity, but occasionally people stand and rebel. In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Clarisse and Mildred represent these two classes of people. they stand on opposite sides of the overall theme to think for yourself. The curiosity of Clarissa and the conformity of Mildred define the opposing sides of Juan Ramon Jimenez's quote, “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way,” by showing both effects in Montag and the rest of society.
In Fahrenheit 451, Montag’s society is based on a dystopian idea. In his society he is married to Mildred, they both don’t remember where they met because the loss of connection. Later on in the book, Mildred overdose on medicine because she thinks her life is meaningless. Then Montag realizes that his society is a dystopia. Bradbury says, “There are billions of us and that’s too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood.” (14). Bradburys uses this to describe how the society is filled with unknown strangers that are dehumanized. The people in the society are dehumanized by depriving the human qualities, personality, or spirit. Montag said: “Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can’t believe it!” (94). When Montag calls Mildred’s friends “monsters”; they didn’t care what was around them even if there was a war going on, they kept talking about their children and husbands.
People nowadays have lost interest in books because they see it as a waste of time and useless effort, and they are losing their critical thinking, understanding of things around them, and knowledge. Brown says that Bradbury suggests that a world without books is a world without imagination and its ability to find happiness. The people in Fahrenheit 451 are afraid to read books because of the emotions that they will receive by reading them and claim them as dangerous. Bradbury hopes to reinstate the importance of books to the people so that they can regain their “vital organ of thinking.” In Fahrenheit 451, Montag steals a book when his hands act of their own accord in the burning house, regaining his ability to read and think on his own (Bradbury 34-35; Brown 2-4; Lee 3; Patai 1, 3).
In today’s world, there is an abundance of social problems relating to those from the novel Fahrenheit 451. In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the protagonist Montag exhibits drastic character development throughout the course of the novel. Montag lives in a world where books are banned from society and no one is able to read them. Furthermore, Montag has to find a way to survive and not be like the rest of society. This society that Montag lives has became so use to how they live that it has affected them in many ways. Bradbury’s purpose of Fahrenheit 451 was to leave a powerful message for readers today to see how our world and the novel’s world connect through texting while driving, censorship and addiction.
Fahrenheit 451 is a best-selling American novel written by Ray Bradbury. The novel is about firemen Guy Montag and his journey on discovering the importance of knowledge in an ignorant society. There are many important themes present throughout the novel. One of the most distinct and reoccurring themes is ignorance vs knowledge. Bradbury subtly reveals the advantage and disadvantages of knowledge and ignorance by the contrasting characters Montag and his wife Mildred. Montag symbolizes knowledge while Mildred on the other hand symbolizes ignorance.