Death Unto Life essays

Death Unto Life essays Death Unto Life Is the mind capable of producing a pure thought? I think not. We live in a world influenced by power, prejudice, and greed among other things. It is a world where people inheritably accept the values and morals of their society. As a product of our environment we cannot help to be overcome by the fears, wants, and desires that flow through our world so readily. It is these very things which make us incapable of pure thought. Our thoughts are and always will remain impure as long as our body produces these opinions; the very poison that contaminates our thoughts. In Phaedo, a fictionalized account of Socratese, Plato speaks of the separation of the soul and body. He speaks of pure knowledge and reasoning without the use of the senses, a facet we find so necessary in almost any earthly task. Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears, and in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul when it is associated with it. Will not that man reach such a reality? (Phaedo, 66e). The world as we know it will never theoretically be the world, as we know it, that is, until our body and soul are separated. What our body perceives and what our soul perceives are two separate entities. One goes through life with the precognition that they understand their surroundings. That when we view a beautiful painting we fully understand the essence of beauty and the aspects, which attribute to that painting being beautiful. A beautiful summer day may seem beautiful because it is comparable to that of other summer days. But what truly makes it beautiful? Perhaps it is really ugly ...