Passion to Change the World in John Miltons Paradise Lost :: Milton Paradise Lost Essays

Passion to Change the World in ass Miltons paradise baffledThe world I see around me both day is one based on reason, scientific principles, tolerance, freedom, and most of all, a deep-rooted skepticism toward any form of absolute truth. When I mobilize about Paradise Lost, I cannot military service but to ponder what implications Paradise Lost has in this cold post-modern world. The world was a very antithetical place in 1666, and not to say Miltons ideas where meaningful to for all(prenominal)one in the 17th century, but for many people today Paradise Lost is, to put it rather bluntly, little more(prenominal) than a fairy tale. My thoughts take a crap led me to one question can a post-modern society such as ours learn anything from Paradise Lost that we can use to help better our world, or do our vast technological skills and post-modern philosophies provide a sufficient means for us to find joy, happiness and meaning in our lives?The post-modern world is full of com plexity, skepticism, and moral ambiguity. Jean-Francois Lyotard, in Defining the Postmodern, explains that post-contemporaneousness arose from a rejection of modernism and its failed ideologies, ideologies that gave us such memorial events as Auschwitz, and have left us with deeply engrained feelings of skepticism toward our world and ourselves. Lyotard illustrates how mankind, in a post-modern world, is in the hold back of running after the process of accumulating new objects of practice and thought, which to Lyotard is something like a destiny towards a more and more complex condition. Lyotard points out the implications of this ever increasing complexity when he observes that our demands for security, identity, and happinessappear today conflicting in the face of this sort of obligation to complexify, mediate, memorize and synthesize every object, and consequently, the claim for simplicity, in general, appears today that of a barbarian (1612-5).Our world is in every way leadi ng us into, as Lyotard points out, a more and more complex condition (1614). Truth, for example, was once thought of as a single transcendent idea, accessible by a means such as science, religion, or philosophy. However, as citizens of a post-modern world, we have to deal with a more complex definition of truth than ever before. Friedrich Nietzsche, in 1873, said, truths atomic number 18 illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous zero (878).