English 101

In her essay “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard writes: “…I swiveled around-and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking at a weasel, who was looking up at me.” Plato in “Allegory of the Cave” writes of the need to “turn the body.”

Why must human beings “turn the body?”

When have you had to “turn your body?”

Compare and/or contrast the theme of the two essays. Your thesis statement must be arguable and specific.

You must cite a third source as well as the two assigned essays.

You must cite your research.

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ANSWER

The Purpose of Life in Living Like Weasels and Allegory of the Cave

Philosophers have tried to explain the purpose of life in different ways in the cause of life. While a philosopher like Plato thought of life’s purpose as attaining a higher calling and serving humanity through exploration and discovery of nature, Annie Dillard thought of the purpose of life as simplicity and living out of pure necessity (Dillard 1982). This essay compares and contrasts the two views in an attempt to establish the purpose of life to establish that life cannot be as simple as living for individual needs alone but must go further to try and solve problems in nature and in human societies.

Plato talks about ‘turn the body’ in the Allegory of the Cave. This is an inference to making more effort by human beings to discover their nature and their purpose as what the one prisoner does when he escapes the cave discovers a whole world he was unaware of and makes it his purpose to come to inform the rest of the prisoners about the lie they had been living (Ferguson 1922). Should the same allegory been applied to Dillard’s view of life, the escaped prisoner would have no need to preach the truth to the naysayer prisoners left in the cave. The liberated prisoner would have simply lived out his life with his discoveries alone and never develop the need to disseminate knowledge, just like a weasel.

Life cannot be taken as easy as living to solve needs; otherwise, human societies would never improve, and knowledge would never go beyond the basic (Fluke 2009). In such a situation, humans would not be different from less intelligent animals.

Works Cited

Dillard, Annie. “Living like weasels.” One Hundred Great Essays (1982).

Ferguson, A. S. “Plato’s Simile of Light. Part II. The Allegory of the Cave (Continued).” The Classical Quarterly 16.1 (1922): 15-28.

Fluke, J. (2009). Allegory of the cave: On the theme of substantiation. Child maltreatment, 14(1), 69-72.