Man Thinking

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know about the truth that sometimes we are scared to move away from our comfort zones and leave the things that we got used to and explore new worlds that we might know nothing about. Just like what others may say; “truth hurts”, but to know the truth is to be enlightened.

Just like the prisoner who escaped, my uncle seek for enlightenment and knowledge by going to a culinary school where he learned more about his passion. By having more knowledge and experience about pastry, he is now a teacher at a culinary school, sharing his knowledge to his students or as to what the prisoners in the story referred to as “a master of nature”.

My uncle won competitions around the world along with his team, but what sets him apart from others is his creativity and uniqueness with his work; a man who disregarded books, an original mind that creates its ideas on its own without referring to past knowledge and written books to bring new knowledge and ideas on the table; “Man Thinking” is what Ralph Waldo Emerson called it on his speech “The American Scholar”.

Emerson feels like our culture is greatly influenced by the European culture, he then tries to determine the real American culture and asked his listeners to preserve what is left in our culture that makes us unique. He talked about the qualification and the duties of a true scholar ,and to be a true scholar one must have a great knowledge of nature to increase one’s self awareness. He wants people to find new ways in living life and get rid of the old traditions that can lower the life of society. He feels like books can be harmful, because it is the one that keeps the old ideas and tradition as well as it harms our creativity by making someone scared to go against it and the age old ideas. His idea is to not disregard past knowledge, but instead use it as a guide to flourish new ones.

Emerson wanted to see change, he wants people to think on their own creative ways, to get in touch with the nature, to see the world clearly without the influence of history and tradition, to consider books as a tool that only holds information and not a means to determine one’s thinking, to not limit ourselves from what we believe our limits are. To have this way of life is the full definition of man thinking and our only way to find enlightenment.

Bibliography

Plato: The Allegory of the Cave, from The Republic. Translated by Jowett, B.

Emerson, R.,(1837). The American Scholar