The And Of The Cave - 1314 Words

Reason is specifically a human trait. Using it is authorizing yourself to observe and to act accordingly to your own reflection, thus overcoming your own servitude. All men are gifted with this capacity to reason thus enabling them to be free. Indeed, this unique human logical process allows people to become autonomous, therefore permitting them to emancipate from certain constraints – by reasoning individuals can set their own rules and they can refuse a blind submission to ignorance. Plato illustrates this point with his cave allegory explained in Lecture I: Plato (Lecture I: Plato, 2015, Dr. Jung-Yeup Kim). Human beings live in a cave in which they are prisoners. In order to be set free and to leave this cave, it is primordial for them†¦show more content†¦However, although in both stories the prisoner manages to get out of the illusion, and more even if in both cases the man becomes aware of his past mistake, what permitted the escape does not borrow the same ethi cal paths: In Plato s, the attempt of helping the remaining prisoners exists, however it is doomed to failure. Among those servitudes, man is mostly familiar with appetite - the animal instinct present in human beings - then passion, which can be described as extreme feelings. As stated in Lecture 3: Daoism (Lecture 3: Daoism, 2015, Dr. Jung-Yeup Kim) Human kind is essentially an animal. However, this living being is endowed with the gift of reason. He possesses the capability to have instincts and reflexes that his reason does not always control. These unmanageable reactions are mainly performed as a survival response along to eating, sleeping and reproducing (Lecture 3: Daoism, 2015, Dr. Jung-Yeup Kim). These are the only things sought by animals. Humans are able to go beyond these basic needs and they open up to other activities including intellectual actions. Therefore, reason gives individuals the capability to act upon the natural laws that governs the world in which they live and to which individuals are not entirely subject. For example, the discovery and the use of medicine have allo wed humans to live their lives without making their survival, their biological goal, and their main one. Consequently, natural