Author: SHEIKH AHMED

Montaigne presents vagueness while distinguishing imagination from reality in this essay. By practical and fantastical examples, Montaigne proves the power of imagination to interfere with reality. He narrates a tale of somebody who implements himself by the power of imagination in the belief of the executioner’s blow. He argues extreme visionary thinking likely to causes unanticipated events. In another example, Montaigne explains how a man catches impotence from his imagination out of fear of performing poorly. In confusing the difference between reality and imagination by mixing plain views with actual results, Montaigne urges the reader to review the relationship of fiction with imagination, and non-fiction with reality. The presentation of the interchangeability of these ideas plants a seed of doubt in the readers’ minds about the ability to control their actions. Possibly the presentation of these stories reflects Montaigne’s own insecurities because he claims that he borrows stories yet “the inferences are my own”. Each account of Montaigne’s is clearly meant at explaining the power of imagination as apparent from the title of this essay.

Pizan points out that most of the male authors who depicted women as weakly, vulnerable, and accused women as evil is actually biased of their judgemental acts, personal failure, and fallacies that led them to generalize all women as inferior and harmful parts of the society. She particularly mentions the references like pagan and Christianity, they made in their work to depict women negatively and wrongfully. She asked readers to check the claims male authors made to figure out their biases about the nature of women, she mentions many brave and intelligent women as examples to highlight the true essence of women and to prove that how male authors have been falsifying the true nature of women in their work and she believes when readers can incorporate the real nature of women in their perception, they would be able to analyze many vague claims and demonstration of women have been made by the male authors.

Socrates and Phaedrus describe various kinds of lovers’ behaviors based on Lysias’s speech which argues about the nature and form of a pederastic relationship between a boy and an old man. While they both agrees to Lysias’s idea of two kinds of lover: a lover and a non-lover, they hold opposite perceptions to define the behaviors of lovers in such relation. Phaedrus’s beliefs deeply based on self-interest which suggest that a young man should choose a relationship of other man who is non-lover over lover because as young men protect self-interest, they should also know that a lover faces troubled decision-making and often acts irrational. A lover, for example, is more probable to grow a physical passion and later may dislikes that about other person, while an affair based on friendship is likely to endure once passion is used up. Lovers also tend to become upset over meaningless things and to praise things about their lover that don’t deserve praise. In other words, presence of love and being out of one’s senses is habitually dangerous that complicates the truth and compromises a young man’s future. Although Socrates at first retorts Lysias’s speech with his own speech praising sense and sanity over love and madness, he argues that it’s preferable for a man to have a relationship with one who’s in love with him. If he doesn’t deal with the madness that springs from love, he wouldn’t be gaining the pleasures of philosophy and the eventual vision of true beauty. In contrast, if one holds the superficial virtuous sense of a relationship with someone who’s not in love with him, he would only gain miserable benefits of a mortal kind, causing him to trip mindlessly around the earth instead of expecting eternal truth and beauty.

The symbolic featuring of justice in the entire trilogy, specially in the third one is to highlight the transition of ancient self-help justice by individual revenge or battles to the administration of justice by trial sanctioned by the gods. Precisely, the term justice is used to signifies the passage from a primitive Greek society governed by instincts to a modern democratic society governed by reason. In the plays, the Erinyes represent the ancient, primitive laws which demand blood vengeance. In contrast, Apollo, and particularly Athena, represent the new order of reason and civilization and the role of justice thru the trilogy is to represent that transition in the ancient Greek society which was moving towards a modern democratic society.