Synthesis Essay
"One person's craziness is another person's reality"(Tim Burton). In this quote, Tim Burton is pointing out that people have our own reality. Philosophically, reality is whatever we think or perceive. There is no true or real perspective. Our perspective depends on our morals and beliefs. All our life, we perceive knowledge and information through different forms of language. Hence, our perspective is also limited by the language. Language is one of the unique things that people have. Language puts limits on our thoughts.
For example, when someone says dog, we all picture a different dog, therefore we perceive the information differently. Similarly, religious books influence the way of our thinking through the words or language in the book. Those words are ideas of someone else but we get so influenced by those words that we base our morals on it. Words are part of language which fixes an image in our minds. When we say dog, we picture a dog, not a lion or fish, because we are imprisoned by the language that we ourselves created.
Those words in the biblical texts are from a perspective of a different person but we believe in his/her words, borrow the idea and we make our own beliefs which is still inspired by someone's perspective. Those beliefs define the world around us. Thus, through language we create our own limited world and imprison ourselves. Likewise, in the excerpt Cosmic Prison from the book The Invisible Prison by Loren Eiseley, the author argues, that human perspective is limited by language, culture and origin. In the Cosmic Prison, the author, Eiseley attempts to point out that perspective is limited and bounded by language.
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Language limits our thoughts and imagination: “Language implies boundaries” (Eiseley 31). Whenever we name a thing, we put limits in our imagination. According to Eiseley, man creates an “unnatural world of his own, which he calls the cultural world and in which he feels at home”(Eiseley 31). We are comfortable with our cultural world that we created ourselves but at the same time we feel imprisoned and long to escape. Eiseley develops an interesting analogy between man in his prison and white blood cells imprisoned within a living body.
Both man and white blood cells a self contained and they don't seem to understand the world outside of them. Their perspective is limited by the boundaries of their realm. A cell may not know that it might be living inside another body. They don't see outside of their world. Similarly, people have their own perspective and they might think that the action done by another person is wrong whereas according to that person, his actions are right. People tend not to go outside of their perspective to walk the world through different shoes.
We believe and trust our own perspective which is influenced by human knowledge obtained through language. Our perspective might be influence by someone's words or actions like media uses persuasive language and repetition to make us believe in something. For example, media showed most Muslims as terrorists only, thus making us believe that Muslims are terrorists. It changed our perspective on Muslims and limited our knowledge. Therefore, language creates boundaries and restricts our perspective. Furthermore, culture and our values limits our perspective too. In the article
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