Great Works of Western Tradition: The Treatment of Time and History Essay

Not a few of the greatest works in the westerly tradition tackle the evolution of homosexuality and of civilization through with(predicate)out the ages. The question of the evolution of civilization is e real(prenominal) the more difficult since it seems to be tortuous rather than linear and progressive. As it sh al bingle be seen, thinkers from rattling different cadences consent pictured civilization in different ways, emphasizing either its wondrous mature handst or its blatant im sinlessions. Thomas to a greater ex tennert, Voltaire and Sigmund Freud belong to very different ages of sympathetic civilization and have held very different opinions about history and the evolution or involution of bit.As it sh completely be seen however, the major origin in all of the works under discussion is the evolution of man and nightspot throughout the cartroad of fourth dimension. Moreover, in Utopia, Candide and refining and its Discontents the development of civilization is q uesti stard and the achievements of worldity doubted. Despite the fact that the come from different act points in human history, which had seen a prodigious advance of culture and comprehending of the human race, the three authors argue that the human civilization is very farther well-nigh from its ideal state.Thomas Mores Utopia is an imaginary project of the perfect human society which resembles Platos Re state-supported. As a representative of Renaissance, More is a humanist and a socialist, who criticizes the state of thing in his native England. The work is therefore, in many ways an inverse reverberate of his coetaneous society. More openly addresses the precarious society and the government activity in England and at the same time creates a puff counterpart for these on the island of Utopia. The most salient target of the scholars comment is the specific form of government characteristic for his society feudalism.In his imaginary world, everyone is equal and no one is poor or in need, since everything is distributed justly In Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if cargon is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can lack anything for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity, and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, thaw from anxieties. (More 86) According to More, money and possessions in general are the key of civilization as he saw it.As such, he attacks his contemporaneous society at its very roots, by advocating a society in which everyone would be equal and in which money would hold no importance. As he saw it, the human world was moved and desire by inequalities and disproportion in possessions And who does not see that the frauds, thefts, robberies, quarrels, tumults, contentions, seditions, murders, treacheries, and witchcrafts, which are indeed rather puni shed than liberalizationrained by the severities of law, would all fall off, if money were not any more valued by the world?(More 87) other important aspect that More notes is that, all the crimes and misfortunes arising from the pecuniary problems are punished rather than restrained by law. This aspect of the human society has remained true even today, since money is still a key subdivision in the world and since the law is only designed to help maintain a relative battle array. Thus, More sees the state of civilization during Renaissance as very precarious, since the character of people and their morality is continuously undermined by the inequality regarding the distribution of possessions.Expressing truly revolutionary ideas for his age, More perceives that the nature of the government in his own time is nothing more than a conspiracy of the rich to monopolize the goods and to hold sway over the rest of the population, under the pretense of administering the public affairs T herefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who on pretence of managing the public only lock their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out.(More 157) Mores intuition about the workings of politics and economics in his own society is therefore incredibly accurate. Utopia is merely a complete society, having all the institution of the innovative world, including politics, religion, science, culture and family. More fundamentally remodels the social regularise of his time, designing an ideal community marked by simplicity. For cause, the political system is democratic, in the sense that we understand it today, with all of the members of society participating in the electionsOnce a year every group of xxx households elects an administrator, who use to be known as a syphogrant, but in innovational times has been called a phylarch. Th ere is another administrator in charge of every group of ten syphogrants with their households. He used to be called a tranibor, and is now called a senior phylarch. All the syphograntsthere are two coulomb of themelect the chief executive. ( More 96) The family is an important cell of this society which hints at the principles of brotherhood that should dominate and ordain the world.The society has very few laws, moreover, which emphasizes Mores views of the contemporary justice system. According to him therefore, the human society is inevitably based on complex and marginal laws, which strive to punish delinquency but which do not manage to restrain it. Furthermore, science and the arts are made accessible to the large public and not limited to a privileged category. More obviously points out to another essential attribute of socialism which stipulates the noetic equality of all people.This also pinpoints the fact that, in Mores view, the pecuniary inequality of people is the key factor causing inequality in all other respects. It should be noted that More constructed his utopian world primarily as a badinage for his contemporary society. He did not believe himself in the ideal society he proposed, simply because the project came considerably onward its time and before there would be the necessary conditions to establish it. His main contention therefore is that the human civilization of the Renaissance England was a corrupted and dysfunctional system that revolved around the possessions and interests.All the institutions, the government, the law, the economy, politics and even the arts and sciences suffered from this corruption as they were based on inequality between people. Mores view is all the more revolutionary since the world of Renaissance believed in order and in the mountain chain of things. This scale or hierarchy of things obviously applied to the human society as well, where the king was the highest liaison in the chain, organism set th ere by divine will. In this context, Mores hike of equality is all the more mystifying.As it shall be seen, almost three centuries later, Voltaire published a satire that attacks the myth of human civilization and points out its main weaknesses. As More belongs to the Renaissance, Voltaire belongs to another period of ethnical revolution and advancement, the prudence. More so than the Renaissance that had established the faith in man and in his powers, the Enlightenment brought undreamt evidence of mans reasoning capacities and his ability for controlling nature and the universe and make these work in his own favor.As More before him, Voltaire satirically attacks the very roots of his contemporary society. His Candide can be easily considered one of the most potent philosophical satires of all times, as it is order not to a particular aspect of the world but to the world as a full-length and to the entire human race. What Voltaire mocks is not so much the state in which the wo rld and humanity are in, but the inveterate optimism that characterized the Age of Reason.The values and creeds of the Enlightenment philosophers are demolished one by one in Voltaires work the famous statement maintained by Leibniz and Rousseau that our world is the best of all possible worlds, the belief that the universe is in a state of unshakable harmony that only gives the archetype of chaos, the general optimism that regarded even the dreariest events in the world as good, the faith in the human reason and the free will of man and many other standardised optimist opinions.Voltaire makes the eponymous character of his work, Candide (who is, not by hap and as his name indicates, incredibly naive and simple) experience, through his journeys and adventures, the entire range of human sufferance wars, indwelling catastrophes, maladies, slavery, religious persecution, rape and so on. In his way, Candide experiences all there is to experience and meets with all the evil in the w orld. His gullible nature disposes him to believe the more comfortable theory, which is that of his master Pangloss.Pangloss is thus the prototype of the Enlightenment thinker, the professed optimist who believes in the absolute perfection of the world. Despite of the disasters he meets with and despite of the evil nature of the men he encounters, Pangloss corpse a stubborn optimist, an advocator of the perfect harmony of the universe Master Pangloss taught the metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology. He could prove to grasp that there is no effect without a cause and, that in this best of all possible worlds, the mightinesss castle was the most magnificent of all castles, and my lady the best of all possible baronesses. (Voltaire 27) As More before him, Voltaire ironically notes here the way in which the belief in the perfection of the world is used by roughly to justify their own rights. The eulogy of the baron and baroness, who are obviously far from moral rectitude and noblenes s, is a hint to the way in which people of rank had to be treated as great men despite the fact that in truth they were full of imperfections. Another astringent allusion is the image of war as one of the most absurd evils haunting the human society.This is one of the most terrifying proof that man has not reached yet the state of absolute civilization, and that he is still a savage Never was anything so gallant, so well accoutred, so brilliant, and so finely disposed as the two armies. The trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon made such harmony as never was light upond in inferno itself. The entertainment began by a discharge of cannon, which, in the twinkling of an eye, laid flat about 6,000 men on each side.The musket bullets swept away, out of the best of all possible worlds, nine or ten thousand scoundrels that infested its surface. (Voltaire 9) In organicly light tones, Voltaire describes the carnage and absurdity specific to war, hinting that such a disaster would be sufficient to recognize the world and the state of civilization for what it is. Instead of the ordered, harmonious world that nigh of the greatest philosophers and scientists of the time discerned, Voltaire points to the actual state of humanity as he saw it.Discoveries were indeed being made, but man was far from living in an ideal and balanced universe. There are some obvious similarities between Mores and Voltaires satires therefore. More imagined an ideal society which would be the reverse of his contemporary world and Voltaire imagined a story of a naive character who is confronted with all the ills and evils of humanity and civilization. twain of the authors therefore imply that the human evolution is not as significant as it is believed.The beginning of the ordinal century, with the dawn of modernism saw equally great changes in all the aspects of human existence. Freuds Civilization and its Discontents makes a potent critique of civilization as a web of negative impos itions on the modern man. Freud puts forth that civilization can only become workable through an economical principle similar to that employed by the politics of a state it restrains mans instinctual force in order to concentrate his energy on the exploitation of its intellectual resources.Thus, while the two other authors under investigation proposed that the world was largely primitive at its core, despite the advancement of civilization, Freud points out the opposite. He elaborates on the benefits and incredible progress made by human civilization, all the same criticizing its prospects which have restrained the instinctual nature of man This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.(Freud 33) In Freuds view, as revolutionary for his time as the other two authors perspective during their own, it is the basic compulsion of civilization which h as become pernicious for man. Thus, civilization demands a repression of instinct in man, in favor of intellectual achievement No feature seems better to characterize civilization than its esteem and encouragement of mans higher mental activitieshis intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements-and the leading role that it assigns to ideas in human life.(Freud 41) According to Freud, it is the very nature of civilization which causes man to become more and more frustrated out of his intrinsic freedom and lack of restraint Civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means) of powerful instincts. (Freud 44) The efforts and results of science and technology as they are perceived in modern times are indubitable. Man has strived to protect himself from nature thus becoming more and more modify from it.Civilization is in many ways synonymous with comfort, but, in Freuds view it is and will forever be contrary to mans happiness Is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can take up in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? (Freud 35) As Freud pertinently remarks, people usually think of the good state of civilization in terms of victories over nature, such as the invention of soap for instance Indeed, we are not surprised by the idea of setting up the use of soap as an actual yardstick of civilization. The same is true of order. It, like cleanliness, applies solely to the works of man. But whereas cleanliness is not to be expected in nature, order, on the contrary, has been imitated from her. (Freud 40) Also, people tend to think of the previous ages as uncivilized in terms of cleanliness, order and comfort mainly.In Freuds opinion however, these victories are as many thwarting for the ego, who has definitively lost his liberty. He argues that civilization comes into harsh run afoul with the human ego, since the egos instinctual nature cannot be corrected by culture but only repressed or silenced. As many aspects of human behavior prove it, instincts only lie dormant inside the psyche and can be evoke at any time. Civilization comes with its impositions and claims, attempting to subdue the subconscious and promote only the sublimated characteristics of the mind.Therefore, being denied the proficiency of the pleasure principle, men have to content themselves with exchanging it for the milder reality principle which will only safeguard them from extreme sufferance. While More and Voltaire have endeavored to show that civilization is far from reaching its perfection, Freud points out the essential conflict there will always be between civilization and man in his nat ural state. basically however, all the authors observe the degradation of humanity, despite the efforts of civilization.In modern times, as Freud notes, the primitive forms of violence have been subdued for the greatest part however violence has only changed its form and not its nature. The same applies to the volume of the aspects of civilization today. Therefore, the fundamental ideas of the three authors selected have a common center. While the advancement of civilization seems to be undeniable at each of the turning points in history, Renaissance, Enlightenment and then ultramodernism, civilization seems to have evolved superficially without the possibility of reaching an ideal state.Man builds up an artificial civilization which comes in conflict with the natural world and therefore it is far from being balanced. Thomas More, Voltaire and Sigmund Freud all note that, from various stances, we still do not have the right formula for civilization. ? Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. New York W. W. Norton, 1961. More, Thomas. Utopia. Trans. David Wootton. Indianapolis Hackett Publishing, 1999. Voltaire. Candide. New York Modern Library, 1918.