Seeing is Believing percy and berger
Seeing is believing, or so the old adage would have us believe.While a person cannot be sure of those things which he is told, or thatwhich he reads, seeing - ah, that is the proof of reality. However, thisid not the case for Percy or Berger. These two existential leaning criticschallenge the reader to ask the question "what is reality" and to ponderwhether or not what a person sees is a true identification of reality. In Percy's "The Loss of Creature" the author devotes his effort toquestioning whether or not seeing is really believing. Through anelaborate comparison of many different settings, Percy arrives at anelusive and unfulfilling conclusion. He starts with the example of avisitors' experience of the Grand Canyon. Does the modern tourist have thesame experience as Garcia Lopez de Cardenas who discovered the majesticland form' Percy builds an elaborate argument that the modern tourist,because his perspective may have been performs by travel brochures, or postcards could not possibly have the same experience as the first explorer whostumbled upon the Grand Canyon after traveling through miles and miles ofdesert. Cardenas experience, and therefore the reality of the canyon, is
He seems to be lost in a haze ofJimi Hendricks music, and stuck on the same idea of experiencing realitywhich college students attempted to find via the use of LSD in the late60's. This is neither a realistic goal, nor one whichuniversally affects the experience and knowledge of a person who encountersa particular event. Theyhad never experienced the indigenous tribe before, and the indigenous tribehad never experienced them either. Again in the west on vacation, a tourist couple becomes lost inthe mountains. After hours of traveling a mountain road, they turn into along forgotten valley, and discover a tribe of indigenous peoples in themiddle of a religious ceremony. Percyseems to say that only being able to experience something for the firsttime, without any preconception or bias, is a definition of continuing tolive as a human creature. Percy's definition of the real as experiencing that which has never beenexperienced by anyone before is unobtainable in any society, and thereforeis an invalid definition. Much of our identity isformed through relationships and experiences with other people. Our perception of reality can onlyextend to the boundaries of our own beliefs. Percysuggests, no, insists that because the genuine experience of new events isincreasingly rare to the person, that the personhood of the individual islost. Most significantly, however, I disagree with Percy that experiencingevents differently means that the person and the creature are lost. I had never seen such a beautiful display ofcolor, nature, and the presence of man all purposefully painted into asingle landscape. Thefirst born child is born into a pristine family. As thedawn spread itself over the plains of Nebraska and Kansas, our party wasjust clearing the tree line. My experience would be no less genuine to me,but they would be significantly different, as Percy suggests.
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Acceptance Essays
