Analysis of Bacons Essay of Love - 1235 Words

Analysis of Bacon’s essay ‘OF LOVE’ In this essay, â€Å"Of Love† Bacon tries to alter reader’s understanding by pointing out the shortcomings of love by focuses his attention on three points: Love is entertaining only on stage, it is an exaggerated form of expression in literature and wisdom and love wouldn’t coexist. He starts his essay by plunging direct into the crux of his argument which is confined in a short sentence, â€Å"The stage is more beholding of Love, than the real life of man.† He in the next line articulates the Aristotelian classification of stage i.e. tragedy and comedy. He believes that only plays are capable of portraying love that is pure and gives joy while in reality love is digressive, deluding and impish in nature like†¦show more content†¦In his view, this potent sensation is for the private life like religion and can be shared with friends, spouse and with the creatures of God, if it follows enthusiastically in the streets it becomes an emasculating inf luence. It is said that love is a â€Å"fever that comes and goes quite independently at its will.† It is a passion that doesn’t work on calculations, though it gives pain but life is incomplete without this suffering. If we compare Bacon’s notion of love with C.S. Lewis’s â€Å"The Four Loves† we also find some categorization of love but for him this suffering is a pivotal ingredient of life. He says, â€Å"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and irredeemabl e. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all theShow MoreRelatedFrancis Bacon15624 Words   |  63 Pagessaleable morality. He is a moralist-cum-worldly wise man. Bacon appears as a moralist in his essays, for he preaches high moral principles and lays down valuable guidelines for human conduct. Some of his essays show him as a true lover and preacher of high ethical codes and conducts. For instance, in â€Å"Of Envy†, he puts: â€Å"A man that hath no virtue in himself, ever envieth virtue in others.† Then, in his essay â€Å"Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature† he says: â€Å"But in charity there is no excess; neitherRead MoreThe Human Psyche, By Michel De Montaigne And Sir Francis Bacon2294 Words   |  10 Pagesinsatiable curiosity, used the literary form of the essay in an attempt to capture the world in its entirety and its diversity: every thought, every experience, and every inquiry in their work questions the intrinsic value of humanity. The intelligence and imagination of these two essayists becomes a small universe , in which the individual can articulate the way in which humans think about the world and their relation to it. Montaigne s essay, Of Experience (1580-92), and Bacon s Of StudiesRead MoreOf Truth by Francis Bacon and a Short Analysis What Is Truth? Said Jesting Pilate, and Would Not Stay for an Answer. Certainly There Be, That Delight in Giddiness, and Count It a Bondage to Fix a Belief; Affecting1 Free-1965 Words   |  8 PagesOf Truth by Francis Bacon and A Short Analysis What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be, that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting1 free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind2 be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing3 wits, which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them, as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficultyRead MoreEssay on HUMAN BEINGS AND NATURE DURING THE REVOLUTION OF THE MIND3395 Words   |  14 Pageseducated by classical and Christian texts that stressed humility before the divine. In 1637, Descartes made a philosophy of questioning authority with his book, Discourse on Method. In the book, Descartes developed a mathematical counterpart to Bacons empirical challenge of the deductive reasoning method. The first tenet of his philosophy was never to accept anything as true when I did not recognize it clearly to be so... [and to] reject as absolutely false all in which I could conceive the leastRead MoreEssay on A Role for Religion in Public Service3653 Words   |  15 Pagesrecommends including both past- and future-oriented views. In historical terms ideology dates only from the late eighteenth century. But learned awareness of deliberate misinformation preceded the term itself by several centuries, as in Francis Bacons idols of the tribe, cave, market, and theater, Machiavellis distinction between thought of the palace and thought of the public square, and Humes sensitivity to feigning in his History of England.(8) Then the French philosophes used ideology