To continue with another somewhat general topic, let us migrate towards the discussion of hope. In specific, your reaction(s) to the following quote, and also how it differs from your idea of what hope is.
"Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it."
Personally, I took this quote to mean that when you have hope, you are blinding yourself to reality. In connection to the Allegory of the Cave, I saw the light as not reality, but as hope. It lights the darkness, but leaves shadows in its wake, and those shadows are what we fear, because they are the unknown. The darkness is reality, and the only way to face reality is to look away from the light. Thus, they are no more shadows, they are a part of the darkness. The quote goes on, latter, to say that we need to take the carrot away and walk with our eyes open. Hope is not going to save us, hope will do nothing, and if we follow the carrot, we'll be following it until we realize how we've wasted away.
That's how I took the quote in a nutshell. What do you think?
~Kari~
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12 comments:
Well, I think that hope is good, to a point.
Following the carrot analogy, keeping the carrot in front helps one feel "better," but eventually it reaches the point where it would be pointless...
For example, there was a race.
Having the carrot in front of the horse, may encourage it to strive harder, and win.
But leaving the carrot on after the race would be redundant.
So, my by beliefs, a slight bit of hope in a time of need is nice, but a lot of hope clouds the mind of what actually occurs.
This is a very interesting use of language. The quoted is describing hope as being unobtainable, though many times things that have been hoped for have been received. Perhaps this is a delusion on my part, but I thought many people hoped for womens suffrage, and it was received.
I agree with mr. pseudonym. I think we're judging the concept of hope a little too harshly. Does it only occur when we want something improbable to occur or can we hope for something likely to occur, too? Theoretically, if you were mostly sure that something you wanted to happen would happen, then you wouldn't have to hope for it. However, people still experience hope in these cases becuase hope is an emotion and emotions aren't based on logic, they're uncontrolable. Another thing: if we abandon hope, then what else do we have to live for?
I agree with Lucas (I'm hoping that's the right person), I think we do need hope sometimes, but after we've obtained our goal it's pointless to leave the carrot up rather than eating it as a reward. Though, following the analogy, the carrot is indeed unraw, because it is being cooked by society. We have a long theory on this. But anyway. In some cases hope won't help us at all, because what we are striving for is unattainable. Hope can be very blinding if you let it take control, but if you control it it can be a good thing.
I disagree that emotions are uncontrollable. They are very controllable. And I can prove it.
What else do we have to live for? Curiosity. What will happen if we keep going, with or without hope? Will the end result be any different?
In response to katrina337, I stand by what I said that emotions are uncontrolable. We can, however, control how we deal with emotions. For example, if we feel fear there's no way we can stop that impulse of fear from hitting us. What we can do, is supress that fear with other things, like logic. You mentioned that curiosity is something to live for besides hope. Technically, curiosity is based on hope.It's "a state in which you want to learn more about something". For a person to feel curiosity, he first must have the hope that there is something new for him to learn.
I still disagree. At one point in time, I completely turned myself off to anger; I couldn't feel it. I've done the same with fear, regret, and happiness. I could have brought myself to a point where I could feel no emotions, but I chose not to. It wasn't merely dealing with my emotions, I didn't even let them exist. I essentially numbed myself, so you can't really say the emotion was their if I wasn't feeling it, because that's all emotion is; feeling.
And is it a hope that there's something else to learn, or a knowledge? If I say I know there are more things to learn about biology, it's not that I'm hoping that there are more things to learn, I'm even partially dreading it, but at the same time I'm curious as to what I will find. There's no hope read into that, it's merely curiousity and dread.
I see your point about the curiosity thing. It's human nature to crave the unknown with or without hope. However, even though you have the ability to turn off your emotions, can that be said for the rest of the human race?
Yes, actually.
I shall attempt to re-count what a psychotherapist once explained to me in an understandable manner.
Basically, you have 3 parts of your brain. The first part is your conscious part, the second part is your subconscious part, and the third part is basically only used when you perceive danger of some sort, it's basically your basic survival instinct, and it has 3 decisions it can make. The first is to fight that which it perceives danger (or some sort of struggle) from. The second is flight, to run. And the third is to freeze, both physically and mentally. Basically, physically it takes all of the adrenaline out of your body and replaces it with something of the sort of novacaine or some other numbing substance. It can do the same with your emotions and things.
Does that make any sort of sense?
Doesn't there have to be some sort of trigger for this phenomon to occur? Is this trigger emotion, or something else? It seems like something has to happen to you for this to happen or else our emotions would be freezing randomly on a regular basis.
Well, it has to deduce that the other two won't work. In most cases fight or flight suffices, which is why they are the most commonly heard of. I think on my part it was a half-conscious decision, because my conscious observations helped decipher that that was the only one that would actually be...helpful, in some way. So I guess...that one's rather a last-resort type of thing, which doesn't happen terribly often.
This has been interesting, but I feel obligated to bring the discussion back to hope, as that's what the post is about. I still think that hope is something that can't be controlled becuase it is an involuntary human instinct. However, there may some cases (freeze situation) in which people can't feel anything. I don't know a lot about psychology, but my guess would be a person doesn't have to much control over themselves in that situation either.
"Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it." The horse plods along in hope of reaching the carrot. I think its a bit harsh to say he is denying reality. He doesn't actually know he won't get the carrot. When I hope for something, I don't think I'm denying reality. I usually hope for something I have some chance of achieving and therefore am not totally making a blind reach for something that will never happen. If the carrot were to be removed, would I plod along? Hope also, for me, encompasses motivation. Hope, inspired by the goal, motivates me to move through life and greet reality face on.
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