Pope's
The Paradoxical Nature Of Man As A Paradox In The Clash Of Philosophical Trends.The "Essay" consists of epistles, addressed to Lord Bolingbroke, and derived, to some extent, from some of Bolingbroke's own fragmentary Philosophical writings, as well as from ideas expressed by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftsbury. Pope sets out to describe and explain that no matter how incomplete, complicated, impenetrable, and disturbingly full of evil the Universe may appear to be, it does function in a rational fashion, according to natural laws; and is, in fact, considered as a divinely ordered plan of God. It appears imperfect and incomplete to us only because our perceptions are limited by our infirm moral and intellectual capacity. At the time when the clash of philosophical trends began, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftsbury influenced Alexander Pope the most. Thomas Hobbes as a supporter of materialism stands for the truth: "The Universe is distinct from the spiritual; all that is real is material and what is not material is not real". Perhaps he meant that as far as he cannot touch God or cannot see an evidence of God's interfer
"Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man;A mighty maze! But not without a plan;"On the one hand he speaks with the voice of the materialist, with the voice doubting the divine intervention in the scene of Man. I believe that the philosopher caused greater effect on Alexander Pope is Rene Descartes. And why is that? Descartes say "Indeed, it may be said that my perception of God's existence is presupposed in my perception of myself, for how could I know myself as a limited, imperfect, doubting being unless I previously had the idea of a being more perfect than myself". Descartes expressed this conclusion in the famous words "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I exist"). " He therefore was determined to hold nothing true until he could be absolutely certain of it. He sees the Man, as a part of the Great Chain of Being, where everything in the universe has its place in a hierarchical system stretching upward from inanimate substance to things that have life, but do not reason, to that Man, called by the author "a creature in a middle state", and reaching the highest level of this hierarchy, the angels and God. He is torn between two bi-polar extremities, between the divine and the mortal /In doubt to deem himself a God or beast/, between the materialism and the spirit /In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer/, between the perfection and imperfection /Born but to die, and reasoning but to err/. From the principle that thinking proved his own existence, he argued that his essential characteristic was thinking. That is Pope's Man, an earthly creature in a divine arena. He is wandering about in the middle of the Philosophical trends, whether to accept the materialistic "A wild, where weeds and flow'rs promiscuous shoot" or to risk with a "Garden tempting with forbidden fruit". 4But as far as Saint Thomas Aquinas doubts the existence of God, in order to understand its existence and to strengthen his own beliefs in God, the Pope's whole system of doubting shows his insecurity and instability in the Man's real and unique abilities. But the word, God, means something that is infinitely good. "A mighty maze" - expressing the Pope's liability to Hobbes's philosophy, that whenever you cannot see what Lord has done, you would not believe in him, but on the other hand the author shows immediately his ambiguous and doubting nature with the sentence "But not without a plan", implying that everything has its place in the God's divine and distinct from the ordinary people and their minds plan. One kind was thinking substance, or minds, entities such as himself whose essential characteristic was thinking, and the other was extended substance, or bodies, for example, rocks or trees or his own body, whose essential characteristic was being extended over a certain amount of physical space.
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