EXAMINATION- 2005
Basically, psychoses and neuroses represent man’s inability to maintain a balanced or equated polarity in conducting his life. The ego becomes exclusively or decidedly one sided. In psychoses there is a complete collapse of the ego back into the inner recesses of the personal and collective unconsciouses. When he is repressed toward fulfilling some life goal and where he is further unable to sublimate himself toward another goal, man regresses into goal structures not actually acceptable to himself or to the society. Strong emotional sickness of the psychotic type is like having the shadow run wild. The entire psyche regresses to archaic, animal forms of behaviors. In less severe forms of emotional sickness there may be an accentuated and overpowering use of one of the four mental functions at the expense of the other three. Either thinking, feeling, intuiting or seeing may assume such a superior role as to render the other three inoperative. The persona may become so dominant as to create a totally one-sided ego, as in some forms of neurotic behavior. All in all, whatever the type of severity of the emotional disorder, it can be taken as a failure of the psyche to maintain a proper balance between the polarities of life. Essentially, psychoses and neuroses are an alienation of the self from its true goal of self actualization. In this sense the culture is of no consequence. Emotional disorder is not a question of being out of tune with one’s culture so much as it is of being out of tune with one’s self. Consequently, neurosis is more than bizarre behavior, especially as it may be interpreted by contemporaries in the culture. This interpretation avoids the sociological question of what is a mental disorder, since form of behavior which is acceptable in one culture may be considered neurotic in other culture. To Jung, the deviation from cultural norms is not the point. The inability to balance out personal polarities is.
EXAMINATION- 2006
It was not so in Greece, where philosophers professed less, and undertook more. Parmenides pondered nebulously over the mystery of knowledge; but the pre-Socratics kept their eyes with fair consistency upon the firm earth, and sought to ferret out its secrets by observation and experience, rather than to create it by exuding dialectic; there were not many introverts among the Greeks. Picture Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher; would he not be perilous company for the dessicated scholastics who have made the disputes about the reality of the external world take the place of medieval discourses on the number of angles that could sit on the point of a pin? Picture Thales, who met the challenge that philosophers were numskulls by “cornering the market” and making a fortune in a year. Picture Anaxagoras, who did the work of Darwin for the Greeks and turned Pericles form a wire-pulling politician into a thinker and a statesman, Picture old Socrates, unafraid of the sun or the stars, gaily corrupting young men and overturning governments; what would he have done to these bespectacled seedless philosophasters who now litter the court of the once great Queen? To Plato, as to these virile predecessors, epistemology was but the vestibule of philosophy, akin to the preliminaries of love; it was pleasant enough for a while, but it was far from the creative consummation that drew wisdom’s lover on. Here and there in the shorter dialogues, the Master dallied amorously with the problems of perception, thought, and knowledge; but in his more spacious moments he spread his vision over larger fields, built himself ideal states and brooded over the nature and destiny of man. And finally in Aristotle philosophy was honoured in all her boundless scope and majesty; all her mansions were explored and made beautiful with order; here every problem found a place and every science brought its toll to wisdom. These men knew that the function of philosophy was not to bury herself in the obscure retreats of epistemology, but to come forth bravely into every realm of inquiry, and gather up all knowledge for the coordination and illumination of human character and human life.
EXAMINATION- 2007
The author of a work of imagination is trying to effect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not. I suppose that everything we eat has some effect upon us than merely the pleasure of taste and mastication; it affects us during the process of assimilation and digestion; and I believe that exactly the same is true of any thing we read.
The fact that what we read does not concern merely something called our literary taste, but that it affects directly, though only amongst many other influences , the whole of what we are, is best elicited , I think, by a conscientious examination of the history of our individual literary education. Consider the adolescent reading of any person with some literary sensibility. Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet. Very likely he was carried away by several poets, one after the other. The reason for this passing infatuation is not merely that our sensibility to poetry is keener in adolescence than in maturity. What happens is a kind of inundation, or invasion of the undeveloped personality, the empty (swept and garnished) room, by the stronger personality of the poet. The same thing may happen at a later age to persons who have not done much reading. One author takes complete possession of us for a time; then another, and finally they begin to affect each other in our mind. We weigh one against another; we see that each has qualities absent from others, and qualities incompatible with the qualities of others: we begin to be, in fact, critical: and it is our growing critical power which protects us from excessive possession by anyone literary personality. The good critic- and we should all try to critics, and not leave criticism to the fellows who write reviews in the papers- is the man who, to a keen and abiding sensibility, joins wide and increasingly discriminating. Wide reading is not valuable as a kind of hoarding, and the accumulation of knowledge or what sometimes is meant by the term ‘a well-stocked mind.’ It is valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by anyone, or by any small number. The very different views of life, cohabiting in our minds, affect each other, and our own personality asserts itself and gives each a place in some arrangement peculiar to our self.
EXAMINATION- 2008
Objectives pursued by, organizations should be directed to the satisfaction of demands resulting from the wants of mankind. Therefore, the determination of appropriate objectives for organized activity must be preceded by an effort to determine precisely what their wants are. Industrial organizations conduct market studies to learn what consumer goods should be produced. City Commissions make surveys to ascertain what civic projects would be of most benefit. Highway Commissions conduct traffic counts to learn what constructive programmes should be undertaken. Organizations come into being as a means for creating and exchanging utility. Their success is dependent upon the appropriateness of the series of acts contributed to the system. The majority of these acts is purposeful, that is, they are directed to the accomplishment of some objectives. These acts are physical in nature and find purposeful employment in the alteration of the physical environment. As a result utility is created, which, through the process of distribution, makes it possible for the cooperative system to endure.
Before the Industrial Revolution most cooperative activity was accomplished in small owner managed enterprises, usually with a single decision maker and simple organizational objectives. Increased technology and the growth of industrial organization made necessary the establishment of a hierarchy of objectives. This is turn, required a division of the management function until today a hierarchy of decision makers exists in most organizations.
The effective pursuit of appropriate objectives contributes directly to organizational efficiency. As used here, efficiency is a measure of the want satisfying power of the cooperative system as a whole. Thus efficiency is the summation of utilities received from the organization divided by the utilities given to the organization, as subjectively evaluated by each contributor.
The functions of the management process is the delineation of organizational objectives and the coordination of activity towards the accomplishment of these objectives. The system of coordinated activities must be maintained so that each contributor, including the manager, gains more than he contributes.
EXAMINATION- 2009
From Plato to Tolstoi art has been accused of exciting our emotions and thus of disturbing the order and harmony of our moral life.” Poetical imagination, according to Plato, waters our experience of lust and anger, of desire and pain, and makes them grow when they ought to starve with drought. “Tolstoi sees in art a source of infection. “Not only in infection,” he says, “a sign of art , but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.” But the flaw in this theory is obvious. Tolstoi suppresses a fundamental moment of art, the moment of form. The aesthetic experience – the experience of contemplation- is a different state of mind from the coolness of our theoretical and the sobriety of our moral judgment. It is filled with the liveliest energies of passion, but passion itself is here transformed both in its nature and in its meaning. Wordsworth defines poetry as “ emotion recollected in tranquility’. But the tranquility we feel in great poetry is not that of recollection. The emotions aroused by the poet do not belong to a remote past. They are “ here”- alive and immediate. We are aware of their full strength, but this strength tends in a new direction. It is rather seen than immediately felt. Our passions are no longer dark and impenetrable powers; they become, as it were, transparent. Shakespeare never gives us an aesthetic theory. He does not speculate about the nature of art. Yet in the only passage in which he speaks of the character and functions of dramatic art the whole stress is laid upon this point. “ The purpose of playing,” as Hamlet explains, “ both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as, twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.” But the image of the passion is not the passion itself. The poet who represents a passion doest not infected us with this passion. At a Shakespeare play we are not infected with the ambition of Macbeth, with the cruelty of Richard III or with the jealously of Othello. We are not at the mercy of these emotions; we look through them; we seem to penetrate into their very nature and essence. In this respect Shakespeare’s theory of dramatic art, if he had such a theory, is in complete agreement with the conception of the fine arts of the great painters and sculptors.
EXAMINATION- 2010
Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature envy is the most unfortunate; not only does the envious person wish to inflict misfortune and do so whenever he can with impunity, but he is also himself rendered unhappy by envy. Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, he derives pain from what others have. If he can, he deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as it would be to secure the same advantages himself. If this passion is allowed to run riot it becomes fatal to all excellence, and even the most useful exercise of exceptional skill. Why should a medical man go to see his patients in a car when the labourer has to walk to his work? Why should the scientific investigator be allowed to spend his time in a warm room when others have to face the inclemency of the elements? Why should a man who possesses some rare talent of great importance to the world be saved from he drudgery of his own housework? To such questions envy finds no answer. Fortunately, however, there is in human nature a compensating passion, namely that of admiration. Whosoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and to diminish envy. What cure is there for envy? For the saint there is the cure of selflessness, though even in the case of saint’s envy of other saints is by no means impossible. But, leaving saints out of account, the only cure of envy in the case of ordinary men and women is happiness, and the difficulty is that envy is itself a terrible obstacle to happiness. But the envious man may say: 'what is the good of telling me that the cure of envy is happiness? I cannot find happiness while I continue to feel envy, and you tell me that I cannot cease to be envious until I find happiness.' but real life is never so logical as this. Merely to realize the cause of one's own envious feeling is to take a long step towards curing them.
EXAMINATION- 2011
The Psychological causes of unhappiness, it is clear, are many and various. But all have something in common. The typical unhappy man is one who having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction, has come to value this one kind of satisfaction more than any other, and has, therefore, given to his life a one-sided direction, together with a quite undue emphasis upon the achievement as opposed to the activities connected with it. There is, however, a further development which is very common in the present day. A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of “Pleasure”. That is to say, he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide; the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness. The narcissist and the megalomaniac believe that happiness is possible, though they may adopt mistaken means of achieving it; but the man who seeks intoxication, in whatever form, has given up hope except in oblivion. In his case the first thing to be done is to persuade him that happiness is desirable. Men, who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact. Perhaps their pride is like that of the fox who had lost his tail; if so, the way to cure it is to point out to them how they can grow a new tail. Very few men, I believe, will deliberately choose unhappiness if they see a way of being happy. I do not deny that such men exist, but they are not sufficiently numerous to be important. It is common in our day, as it has been in many other periods of the world’s history, to suppose that those among us who are wise have seen through all the enthusiasms of earlier times and have become aware that there is nothing left to live for. The man who hold this view are genuinely unhappy, but they are proud of their unhappiness, which they attribute to the nature of the universe and consider to be the only rational attitude for an enlightened man. Their pride in their unhappiness makes less sophisticated people suspicious of its genuineness; they think that the man who enjoys being miserable is not miserable.
EXAMINATION- 2012
One of the most ominous and discreditable symptoms of the want of candour in present-day sociology is the deliberate neglect of the population question. It is or should be transparently clear that if the State is resolved, on humanitarian grounds, to inhibit the operation of natural selection, some rational regulation of population, both as regards quantity and quality, is imperatively necessary. There is no self-acting adjustment, apart from starvation, of numbers to the means of subsistence. If all natural checks are removed, a population in advance of the optimum number will be produced, and maintained at the cost of a reduction in the standard of living. When this pressure begins to be felt, that section of the population which is capable of reflection, and which has a standard of living which may be lost, will voluntarily restrict its numbers, even to the point of failing to replace deaths by an equivalent number of new births; while the underworld, which always exists in every civilised society the failures and misfits and derelicts, moral and physical will exercise no restraint, and will be a constantly increasing drain upon the national resources. The population will thus be recruited, in a very undue proportion, by those strata of society which do not possess the qualities of useful citizens.
The importance of the problem would seem to be sufficiently obvious. But politicians know that the subject is unpopular. The unborn have no votes. Employers like a surplus of labour, which can be drawn upon when trade is good. Militarists want as much food for powder as they can get. Revolutionists instinctively oppose any real remedy for social evils; they know that every unwanted child is a potential insurgent. All three can appeal to a quasi-religious prejudice, resting apparently on the ancient theory of natural rights, which were supposed to include the right of unlimited procreation. This objection is now chiefly urged by celibate or childless priests; but it is held with such fanatical vehemence that the fear of losing the votes which they control is a welcome excuse for the baser sort of politician to shelve the subject as inopportune. The Socialist calculation is probably erroneous; for experience has shown that it is aspiration, not desperation, that makes revolutions.
EXAMINATION- 2013
Culture, in human societies, has two main aspects; an external, formal aspect and an inner, ideological aspect. The external forms of culture, social or artistic, are merely an organized expression of its inner ideological aspect, and both are an inherent component of a given social structure. They are changed or modified when this structure. They are changed and modified when this structure is changed or modified and because of this organic link they also help and influence such changes in their parent organism. Cultural Problems, therefore, cannot be studied or understood or solved in isolation from social problems, i.e. problems of political and economic relationships. The cultural problems of the underdeveloped countries, therefore, have to be understood and solved in the light of larger perspective, in the context of underlying social problems. Very broadly speaking, these problems are primarily the problems of arrested growth; they originate primarily from long years of imperialist-Colonialist domination and the remnants of a backward outmoded social structure. This should not require much elaboration European Imperialism caught up with the countries of Asia, Africa or Latin America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some of them were fairly developed feudal societies with ancient traditions of advanced feudal culture. Others had yet to progress beyond primitive pastoral tribalism. Social and cultural development of them all was frozen at the point of their political subjugation and remained frozen until the coming of political independence. The culture of these ancient feudal societies, in spite of much technical and intellectual excellence, was restricted to a small privileged class and rarely intermingled with the parallel unsophisticated folk culture of the general masses. Primitive tribal culture, in spite of its child like beauty, had little intellectual content. Both feudal and tribal societies living contagiously in the same homelands were constantly engaged in tribal, racial and religious or other feuds with their tribal and feudal rivals. Colonialist – imperialist domination accentuated this dual fragmentation, the vertical division among different tribal and national groups, the horizontal division among different classes within the same tribal or national groups. This is the basic ground structure, social and cultural, bequeathed to the newly liberated countries by their former over lords.
EXAMINATION- 2014
Probably the only protection for contemporary man is to discover how to use his intelligence in the service of love and kindness. The training of human intelligence must include the simultaneous development of the empathic capacity. Only in this way can intelligence be made an instrument of social morality and responsibility — and thereby increase the chances of survival.
The need to produce human beings with trained morally sensitive intelligence is essentially a challenge to educators and educational institutions. Traditionally, the realm of social morality was left to religion and the churches as guardians or custodians. But their failure to fulfill this responsibility and their yielding to the seductive lures of the men of wealth and! pomp and power and documented by the history of the last two thousand years and have now resulted in the irrelevant “God Is Dead” theological rhetoric The more pragmatic men of power have had no time or inclination to deal with the fundamental problems of social morality. For them simplistic Machiavellianism must remain the guiding principle of their decisions-power is morality, morality is power. This oversimplification increases the chances of nuclear devastation. We must therefore hope that educators and educational institutions have the capacity, the commitment and the time to instill moral sensitivity as an integral part of the complex pattern of function human intelligence. Some way must be found in the training of human beings to give them the assurance to love, the security to be kind. and the integrity required for a functional empathy.
EXAMINATION- 2015
In studding the breakdowns of civilizations, the writer has subscribed to the conclusion – no new discovery! – that war has proved to have been the proximate cause of the breakdown of every civilization which is known for certain to have broken down, in so far as it has been possible to analyze the nature of these breakdowns and to account for their occurrence. Like other evils war has no insidious way of appearing not intolerable until it has secured such a stranglehold upon the lives of its addicts that they no longer have the power to escape from its grip when its deadlines has become manifest. In the early stages of civilization’s growth, the cost of wars in suffering and destruction might seem to be exceeded by the benefits occurring from the wining of wealth and power and the cultivation of the “military virtues” ; and, in this phase of history, states have often found themselves able to indulge in war with one another with something like impunity even for the defeated party. War does not begin to reveal its malignity till the war making society has begun to increase its economic ability to exploit physical nature and its political ability to organize manpower; but, as soon as this happens, the god of war to which the growing society has long since been dedicated proves himself a Moloch by devouring an ever larger share of the increasing fruits of man’s industry and intelligence in the process of taking an ever larger toll of life and happiness; and, when the society’s growth in efficiency reaches a point at which it becomes capable of mobilizing a lethal quantum of its energies and resources for military use then war reveals itself as being a cancer which is bound to prove fatal to its victim unless he can cut it out and cast it from him, since its malignant tissues have now learnt to grow faster that the healthy tissues on which they feed.
In the past when this danger-point in the history of the relations between war and civilization has been reached and recognized, serious efforts have sometimes been made to get rid of war in time to save society, and these endeavours have been apt to take one or other of two alternative directions. Salvation cannot, of course, be sought anywhere except in the working of the consciences of individual human beings; but individuals have a choice between trying to achieve their aims through direct action as private citizens and trying to achieve then through indirect action as citizen of states. Personal refusal to lend himself in any way to any war waged by his state for any purpose and in any circumstances is a line of attack against the institution of war that is likely to appeal to an ardent and self-sacrificing nature; by comparison, the alternative peace strategy of seeking to persuade and accustom governments to combine in jointly resisting aggression when it comes and in trying to remove its stimuli before hand may seem a circuitous and unheroic line of attack on the problem. Yet experience up to date indicates unmistakably, in the present writer’s opinion, that the second of these two hard roads is by far the more promising.
Basically, psychoses and neuroses represent man’s inability to maintain a balanced or equated polarity in conducting his life. The ego becomes exclusively or decidedly one sided. In psychoses there is a complete collapse of the ego back into the inner recesses of the personal and collective unconsciouses. When he is repressed toward fulfilling some life goal and where he is further unable to sublimate himself toward another goal, man regresses into goal structures not actually acceptable to himself or to the society. Strong emotional sickness of the psychotic type is like having the shadow run wild. The entire psyche regresses to archaic, animal forms of behaviors. In less severe forms of emotional sickness there may be an accentuated and overpowering use of one of the four mental functions at the expense of the other three. Either thinking, feeling, intuiting or seeing may assume such a superior role as to render the other three inoperative. The persona may become so dominant as to create a totally one-sided ego, as in some forms of neurotic behavior. All in all, whatever the type of severity of the emotional disorder, it can be taken as a failure of the psyche to maintain a proper balance between the polarities of life. Essentially, psychoses and neuroses are an alienation of the self from its true goal of self actualization. In this sense the culture is of no consequence. Emotional disorder is not a question of being out of tune with one’s culture so much as it is of being out of tune with one’s self. Consequently, neurosis is more than bizarre behavior, especially as it may be interpreted by contemporaries in the culture. This interpretation avoids the sociological question of what is a mental disorder, since form of behavior which is acceptable in one culture may be considered neurotic in other culture. To Jung, the deviation from cultural norms is not the point. The inability to balance out personal polarities is.
EXAMINATION- 2006
It was not so in Greece, where philosophers professed less, and undertook more. Parmenides pondered nebulously over the mystery of knowledge; but the pre-Socratics kept their eyes with fair consistency upon the firm earth, and sought to ferret out its secrets by observation and experience, rather than to create it by exuding dialectic; there were not many introverts among the Greeks. Picture Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher; would he not be perilous company for the dessicated scholastics who have made the disputes about the reality of the external world take the place of medieval discourses on the number of angles that could sit on the point of a pin? Picture Thales, who met the challenge that philosophers were numskulls by “cornering the market” and making a fortune in a year. Picture Anaxagoras, who did the work of Darwin for the Greeks and turned Pericles form a wire-pulling politician into a thinker and a statesman, Picture old Socrates, unafraid of the sun or the stars, gaily corrupting young men and overturning governments; what would he have done to these bespectacled seedless philosophasters who now litter the court of the once great Queen? To Plato, as to these virile predecessors, epistemology was but the vestibule of philosophy, akin to the preliminaries of love; it was pleasant enough for a while, but it was far from the creative consummation that drew wisdom’s lover on. Here and there in the shorter dialogues, the Master dallied amorously with the problems of perception, thought, and knowledge; but in his more spacious moments he spread his vision over larger fields, built himself ideal states and brooded over the nature and destiny of man. And finally in Aristotle philosophy was honoured in all her boundless scope and majesty; all her mansions were explored and made beautiful with order; here every problem found a place and every science brought its toll to wisdom. These men knew that the function of philosophy was not to bury herself in the obscure retreats of epistemology, but to come forth bravely into every realm of inquiry, and gather up all knowledge for the coordination and illumination of human character and human life.
EXAMINATION- 2007
The author of a work of imagination is trying to effect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not. I suppose that everything we eat has some effect upon us than merely the pleasure of taste and mastication; it affects us during the process of assimilation and digestion; and I believe that exactly the same is true of any thing we read.
The fact that what we read does not concern merely something called our literary taste, but that it affects directly, though only amongst many other influences , the whole of what we are, is best elicited , I think, by a conscientious examination of the history of our individual literary education. Consider the adolescent reading of any person with some literary sensibility. Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet. Very likely he was carried away by several poets, one after the other. The reason for this passing infatuation is not merely that our sensibility to poetry is keener in adolescence than in maturity. What happens is a kind of inundation, or invasion of the undeveloped personality, the empty (swept and garnished) room, by the stronger personality of the poet. The same thing may happen at a later age to persons who have not done much reading. One author takes complete possession of us for a time; then another, and finally they begin to affect each other in our mind. We weigh one against another; we see that each has qualities absent from others, and qualities incompatible with the qualities of others: we begin to be, in fact, critical: and it is our growing critical power which protects us from excessive possession by anyone literary personality. The good critic- and we should all try to critics, and not leave criticism to the fellows who write reviews in the papers- is the man who, to a keen and abiding sensibility, joins wide and increasingly discriminating. Wide reading is not valuable as a kind of hoarding, and the accumulation of knowledge or what sometimes is meant by the term ‘a well-stocked mind.’ It is valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by anyone, or by any small number. The very different views of life, cohabiting in our minds, affect each other, and our own personality asserts itself and gives each a place in some arrangement peculiar to our self.
EXAMINATION- 2008
Objectives pursued by, organizations should be directed to the satisfaction of demands resulting from the wants of mankind. Therefore, the determination of appropriate objectives for organized activity must be preceded by an effort to determine precisely what their wants are. Industrial organizations conduct market studies to learn what consumer goods should be produced. City Commissions make surveys to ascertain what civic projects would be of most benefit. Highway Commissions conduct traffic counts to learn what constructive programmes should be undertaken. Organizations come into being as a means for creating and exchanging utility. Their success is dependent upon the appropriateness of the series of acts contributed to the system. The majority of these acts is purposeful, that is, they are directed to the accomplishment of some objectives. These acts are physical in nature and find purposeful employment in the alteration of the physical environment. As a result utility is created, which, through the process of distribution, makes it possible for the cooperative system to endure.
Before the Industrial Revolution most cooperative activity was accomplished in small owner managed enterprises, usually with a single decision maker and simple organizational objectives. Increased technology and the growth of industrial organization made necessary the establishment of a hierarchy of objectives. This is turn, required a division of the management function until today a hierarchy of decision makers exists in most organizations.
The effective pursuit of appropriate objectives contributes directly to organizational efficiency. As used here, efficiency is a measure of the want satisfying power of the cooperative system as a whole. Thus efficiency is the summation of utilities received from the organization divided by the utilities given to the organization, as subjectively evaluated by each contributor.
The functions of the management process is the delineation of organizational objectives and the coordination of activity towards the accomplishment of these objectives. The system of coordinated activities must be maintained so that each contributor, including the manager, gains more than he contributes.
EXAMINATION- 2009
From Plato to Tolstoi art has been accused of exciting our emotions and thus of disturbing the order and harmony of our moral life.” Poetical imagination, according to Plato, waters our experience of lust and anger, of desire and pain, and makes them grow when they ought to starve with drought. “Tolstoi sees in art a source of infection. “Not only in infection,” he says, “a sign of art , but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.” But the flaw in this theory is obvious. Tolstoi suppresses a fundamental moment of art, the moment of form. The aesthetic experience – the experience of contemplation- is a different state of mind from the coolness of our theoretical and the sobriety of our moral judgment. It is filled with the liveliest energies of passion, but passion itself is here transformed both in its nature and in its meaning. Wordsworth defines poetry as “ emotion recollected in tranquility’. But the tranquility we feel in great poetry is not that of recollection. The emotions aroused by the poet do not belong to a remote past. They are “ here”- alive and immediate. We are aware of their full strength, but this strength tends in a new direction. It is rather seen than immediately felt. Our passions are no longer dark and impenetrable powers; they become, as it were, transparent. Shakespeare never gives us an aesthetic theory. He does not speculate about the nature of art. Yet in the only passage in which he speaks of the character and functions of dramatic art the whole stress is laid upon this point. “ The purpose of playing,” as Hamlet explains, “ both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as, twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.” But the image of the passion is not the passion itself. The poet who represents a passion doest not infected us with this passion. At a Shakespeare play we are not infected with the ambition of Macbeth, with the cruelty of Richard III or with the jealously of Othello. We are not at the mercy of these emotions; we look through them; we seem to penetrate into their very nature and essence. In this respect Shakespeare’s theory of dramatic art, if he had such a theory, is in complete agreement with the conception of the fine arts of the great painters and sculptors.
EXAMINATION- 2010
Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature envy is the most unfortunate; not only does the envious person wish to inflict misfortune and do so whenever he can with impunity, but he is also himself rendered unhappy by envy. Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, he derives pain from what others have. If he can, he deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as it would be to secure the same advantages himself. If this passion is allowed to run riot it becomes fatal to all excellence, and even the most useful exercise of exceptional skill. Why should a medical man go to see his patients in a car when the labourer has to walk to his work? Why should the scientific investigator be allowed to spend his time in a warm room when others have to face the inclemency of the elements? Why should a man who possesses some rare talent of great importance to the world be saved from he drudgery of his own housework? To such questions envy finds no answer. Fortunately, however, there is in human nature a compensating passion, namely that of admiration. Whosoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and to diminish envy. What cure is there for envy? For the saint there is the cure of selflessness, though even in the case of saint’s envy of other saints is by no means impossible. But, leaving saints out of account, the only cure of envy in the case of ordinary men and women is happiness, and the difficulty is that envy is itself a terrible obstacle to happiness. But the envious man may say: 'what is the good of telling me that the cure of envy is happiness? I cannot find happiness while I continue to feel envy, and you tell me that I cannot cease to be envious until I find happiness.' but real life is never so logical as this. Merely to realize the cause of one's own envious feeling is to take a long step towards curing them.
EXAMINATION- 2011
The Psychological causes of unhappiness, it is clear, are many and various. But all have something in common. The typical unhappy man is one who having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction, has come to value this one kind of satisfaction more than any other, and has, therefore, given to his life a one-sided direction, together with a quite undue emphasis upon the achievement as opposed to the activities connected with it. There is, however, a further development which is very common in the present day. A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of “Pleasure”. That is to say, he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide; the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness. The narcissist and the megalomaniac believe that happiness is possible, though they may adopt mistaken means of achieving it; but the man who seeks intoxication, in whatever form, has given up hope except in oblivion. In his case the first thing to be done is to persuade him that happiness is desirable. Men, who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact. Perhaps their pride is like that of the fox who had lost his tail; if so, the way to cure it is to point out to them how they can grow a new tail. Very few men, I believe, will deliberately choose unhappiness if they see a way of being happy. I do not deny that such men exist, but they are not sufficiently numerous to be important. It is common in our day, as it has been in many other periods of the world’s history, to suppose that those among us who are wise have seen through all the enthusiasms of earlier times and have become aware that there is nothing left to live for. The man who hold this view are genuinely unhappy, but they are proud of their unhappiness, which they attribute to the nature of the universe and consider to be the only rational attitude for an enlightened man. Their pride in their unhappiness makes less sophisticated people suspicious of its genuineness; they think that the man who enjoys being miserable is not miserable.
EXAMINATION- 2012
One of the most ominous and discreditable symptoms of the want of candour in present-day sociology is the deliberate neglect of the population question. It is or should be transparently clear that if the State is resolved, on humanitarian grounds, to inhibit the operation of natural selection, some rational regulation of population, both as regards quantity and quality, is imperatively necessary. There is no self-acting adjustment, apart from starvation, of numbers to the means of subsistence. If all natural checks are removed, a population in advance of the optimum number will be produced, and maintained at the cost of a reduction in the standard of living. When this pressure begins to be felt, that section of the population which is capable of reflection, and which has a standard of living which may be lost, will voluntarily restrict its numbers, even to the point of failing to replace deaths by an equivalent number of new births; while the underworld, which always exists in every civilised society the failures and misfits and derelicts, moral and physical will exercise no restraint, and will be a constantly increasing drain upon the national resources. The population will thus be recruited, in a very undue proportion, by those strata of society which do not possess the qualities of useful citizens.
The importance of the problem would seem to be sufficiently obvious. But politicians know that the subject is unpopular. The unborn have no votes. Employers like a surplus of labour, which can be drawn upon when trade is good. Militarists want as much food for powder as they can get. Revolutionists instinctively oppose any real remedy for social evils; they know that every unwanted child is a potential insurgent. All three can appeal to a quasi-religious prejudice, resting apparently on the ancient theory of natural rights, which were supposed to include the right of unlimited procreation. This objection is now chiefly urged by celibate or childless priests; but it is held with such fanatical vehemence that the fear of losing the votes which they control is a welcome excuse for the baser sort of politician to shelve the subject as inopportune. The Socialist calculation is probably erroneous; for experience has shown that it is aspiration, not desperation, that makes revolutions.
EXAMINATION- 2013
Culture, in human societies, has two main aspects; an external, formal aspect and an inner, ideological aspect. The external forms of culture, social or artistic, are merely an organized expression of its inner ideological aspect, and both are an inherent component of a given social structure. They are changed or modified when this structure. They are changed and modified when this structure is changed or modified and because of this organic link they also help and influence such changes in their parent organism. Cultural Problems, therefore, cannot be studied or understood or solved in isolation from social problems, i.e. problems of political and economic relationships. The cultural problems of the underdeveloped countries, therefore, have to be understood and solved in the light of larger perspective, in the context of underlying social problems. Very broadly speaking, these problems are primarily the problems of arrested growth; they originate primarily from long years of imperialist-Colonialist domination and the remnants of a backward outmoded social structure. This should not require much elaboration European Imperialism caught up with the countries of Asia, Africa or Latin America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some of them were fairly developed feudal societies with ancient traditions of advanced feudal culture. Others had yet to progress beyond primitive pastoral tribalism. Social and cultural development of them all was frozen at the point of their political subjugation and remained frozen until the coming of political independence. The culture of these ancient feudal societies, in spite of much technical and intellectual excellence, was restricted to a small privileged class and rarely intermingled with the parallel unsophisticated folk culture of the general masses. Primitive tribal culture, in spite of its child like beauty, had little intellectual content. Both feudal and tribal societies living contagiously in the same homelands were constantly engaged in tribal, racial and religious or other feuds with their tribal and feudal rivals. Colonialist – imperialist domination accentuated this dual fragmentation, the vertical division among different tribal and national groups, the horizontal division among different classes within the same tribal or national groups. This is the basic ground structure, social and cultural, bequeathed to the newly liberated countries by their former over lords.
EXAMINATION- 2014
Probably the only protection for contemporary man is to discover how to use his intelligence in the service of love and kindness. The training of human intelligence must include the simultaneous development of the empathic capacity. Only in this way can intelligence be made an instrument of social morality and responsibility — and thereby increase the chances of survival.
The need to produce human beings with trained morally sensitive intelligence is essentially a challenge to educators and educational institutions. Traditionally, the realm of social morality was left to religion and the churches as guardians or custodians. But their failure to fulfill this responsibility and their yielding to the seductive lures of the men of wealth and! pomp and power and documented by the history of the last two thousand years and have now resulted in the irrelevant “God Is Dead” theological rhetoric The more pragmatic men of power have had no time or inclination to deal with the fundamental problems of social morality. For them simplistic Machiavellianism must remain the guiding principle of their decisions-power is morality, morality is power. This oversimplification increases the chances of nuclear devastation. We must therefore hope that educators and educational institutions have the capacity, the commitment and the time to instill moral sensitivity as an integral part of the complex pattern of function human intelligence. Some way must be found in the training of human beings to give them the assurance to love, the security to be kind. and the integrity required for a functional empathy.
EXAMINATION- 2015
In studding the breakdowns of civilizations, the writer has subscribed to the conclusion – no new discovery! – that war has proved to have been the proximate cause of the breakdown of every civilization which is known for certain to have broken down, in so far as it has been possible to analyze the nature of these breakdowns and to account for their occurrence. Like other evils war has no insidious way of appearing not intolerable until it has secured such a stranglehold upon the lives of its addicts that they no longer have the power to escape from its grip when its deadlines has become manifest. In the early stages of civilization’s growth, the cost of wars in suffering and destruction might seem to be exceeded by the benefits occurring from the wining of wealth and power and the cultivation of the “military virtues” ; and, in this phase of history, states have often found themselves able to indulge in war with one another with something like impunity even for the defeated party. War does not begin to reveal its malignity till the war making society has begun to increase its economic ability to exploit physical nature and its political ability to organize manpower; but, as soon as this happens, the god of war to which the growing society has long since been dedicated proves himself a Moloch by devouring an ever larger share of the increasing fruits of man’s industry and intelligence in the process of taking an ever larger toll of life and happiness; and, when the society’s growth in efficiency reaches a point at which it becomes capable of mobilizing a lethal quantum of its energies and resources for military use then war reveals itself as being a cancer which is bound to prove fatal to its victim unless he can cut it out and cast it from him, since its malignant tissues have now learnt to grow faster that the healthy tissues on which they feed.
In the past when this danger-point in the history of the relations between war and civilization has been reached and recognized, serious efforts have sometimes been made to get rid of war in time to save society, and these endeavours have been apt to take one or other of two alternative directions. Salvation cannot, of course, be sought anywhere except in the working of the consciences of individual human beings; but individuals have a choice between trying to achieve their aims through direct action as private citizens and trying to achieve then through indirect action as citizen of states. Personal refusal to lend himself in any way to any war waged by his state for any purpose and in any circumstances is a line of attack against the institution of war that is likely to appeal to an ardent and self-sacrificing nature; by comparison, the alternative peace strategy of seeking to persuade and accustom governments to combine in jointly resisting aggression when it comes and in trying to remove its stimuli before hand may seem a circuitous and unheroic line of attack on the problem. Yet experience up to date indicates unmistakably, in the present writer’s opinion, that the second of these two hard roads is by far the more promising.
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