“Whereas our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.”
This is my moral to the story for my paper. Eureka I found it! I have just successfully completed watching The Wizard of Oz. The witch of the North talks about how Dorothy has always had the power and that she needed to learn it for herself. This ties in dramatically with my first blogs regarding the path towards obtaining knowledge or wisdom through experience. When I viewed the film, I did my best to correlate what I heard and what I saw on the screen with symbols discussed in class about Plato’s Cave. It was then where I realized that it was all there in front of me.
The yellow brick road, notice that yellow is a form of light, is the path towards enlightenment. Dorothy ran away from home because she was mentally and spiritually bewildered. It was the path that she needed to take through another reality or illusion that the knowledge of finding who she is and what is important to her in the end. Along her journey through self-evaluation and the search for truth, she is accompanied by none other than the scarecrow, tin-man, and lion. They were all in need of something as well including a brain, heart, and courage. Symbolically, I feel that Dorothy was in need of those exact three objects as well. The characters in the story already had what they were looking for all along. As stated in the bold quote above from the end of Plato’s Cave, the “capacity of learning exists in the soul already.” That is it!
It relates to learning through experience. They just had not realized it or even understood what it meant. A few other symbols that I considered were the Wizard himself, and the flying monkeys. The Wizard reminded me of Socrates for he was full of answers and wise. The flying monkeys were the slaves in the dark, empty, closed minded cave. They did exactly as they were told to do and had no minds of their own. The black and white beginning of the film represented Dorothy’s cloudiness of thought, her lack of experience.
She was at her home in Kansas, her cave, her comfort zone. It was running away from this comfort zone and the willingness to change from the ordinary to grow that ultimately showed her the path towards enlightenment. When she arrived to the Land of Oz, it was all in color, suddenly more clear and she was on the right path towards the truth. I can think of a few specific scenes and quotes from the film, that I will use for my paper to help justify my argument on this moral. I will wait until the paper is complete before I further discuss those topics. I am positive that this film has a crap load of life lessons to be learned, but I find this moral the most meaningful to me as it relates to my previous blogs pertaining to learning through self-evaluation and experience!
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That's cool! I really like your moral, and I have always been a firm believer of the concept of "Attaining wisdom or knowledge through experience." I also see them as making the best decision or action according to the current situation with respect to prior similar situations and their outcomes. Moreover, this is what I personally try to accomplish by acquiring it over time. I remember taking my first computer class in 8th Grade. I recall walking single file to the computer Lab. It was a room that was completely new to my whole class. What did it look like inside? Did we all really get to play on these machines? I had never even typed on a computer before. This was 8th grade, and my computer experience was, well, let's just say lacking, and so learning to use these computers was a great experience for me. I was pretty scared, but I learned how to use programs, and the teacher was very kind and helpful. Computers were a thing of the future, and more and more kids needed to learn how to use them. This was a choice I made to take this class in school. I knew it was time to learn computers, and so I pushed myself to learn. I am just grateful my instructor was really good, and she had also made me realize that computers were not just for adults. I had seen computers before, but had never learned how to use them, because I was always taught to write summaries and reports on paper. Plus, I didn't want my mother to always look at me as an accident waiting to happen when it came to expensive things. Now that I am in college, I must say that I have gained some knowledge in this area.
ReplyDeleteha ha nice Joe. Yeah those were the days with the gigantic floppy discs and for me it was Mavis Beacon and the Oregon Trail
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