<p>Grammatical errors and awkward sentence structure remains, of course.</p>
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<p>Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below:</p>
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The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes. When reason is overvalued, the individual suffers a loss. Relying more on facts and rationality than on imagination and theory detracts from the quality of a person's intellectual life.</p>
<p>Adapted from Carl Jung.
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<p>Assignment: Is knowing facts as important as understanding ideas and concepts? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.</p>
<p>Essay:</p>
<p>Famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung posited that as critical reason dominates intellectual thought, the more impoverished life becomes. In a general sense Jung is correct; exclusive reliance on facts and rationality detracts from the quality of intellectual life. However, it is important to be cognizant of the pitfalls of ignoring rationality altogether facts are co-productive with theory. A purely imaginative perspective of the world at the expense of a positivist evaluation of it processes is politically unproductive.</p>
<p>Multiple literary and historical examples support Jungs thesis one that immediately comes to mind is Dr. Frankenstein, the eponymous character of Mary Shelleys seminal novel Frankenstein. A brilliant young physician, the quest for pure scientific rationality consumed Frankenstein. His drive manifested in an attempt to dominate the most pervasive and elusive domain of human existence life and death. He toiled many months in his laboratory, and finally achieved what no man had done before: the creation of life through technological means. His achievement was not a success, however. The body he had brought into existence was a hideous amalgamation of disparate limbs, ligaments, and digits. His exclusively rationalistic approach caused him to ignore that which makes life important the creative element. Frankensteins monster was no human, it was a speaking, moving doll; a frightening thug with little regard for morality or emotional attachment, those elements which make us essentially human.</p>
<p>J. Robert Oppenheimer, the mastermind behind the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, was as brilliant an academic as the fictional Frankenstein. In many ways, he can be seen to represent the very culmination of Jungs fears technological and scientific rationality diverted toward the destruction and eradication of human life. Oppenheimer, however, serves an important role in our understanding of the relationship between understanding ideas and their uncritical deployment. After the Trinity nuclear test that conclusively verified the deployability of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer famously declared, quoting the Hindu social and religious text, the Bhagavad Gita: I am become death, destroyer of worlds. He decried the project and its potential ethical consequences. He resolved to spread his word to the scientific community, and advocate an end to the atomic project. Oppenheimer had a clear perspective of the social and ethical ramifications of science and dedicated his life to ensuring that those principles remained prior, including making them the focus of his memoirs.</p>
<p>Oppenheimer represents the critical balance that resolves Jungs dilemma his critical intellectual perspective is important in checking the potential dangers of scientific rationality.</p>
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<p>Thanks!</p>