Synthesis Essay

"One person's craziness is another person's reality"(Tim Burton). In this quote, Tim Burton is pointing out that people have our own reality. Philosophically, reality is whatever we think or perceive. There is no true or real perspective. Our perspective depends on our morals and beliefs. All our life, we perceive knowledge and information through different forms of language. Hence, our perspective is also limited by the language. Language is one of the unique things that people have. Language puts limits on our thoughts. For example, when someone says dog, we all picture a different dog, therefore we perceive the information differently. Similarly, religious books influence the way of our thinking through the words or language in the book. Those words are ideas of someone else but we get so influenced by those words that we base our morals on it. Words are part of language which fixes an image in our minds. When we say dog, we picture a dog, not a lion or fish, because we are imprisoned by the language that we ourselves created. Those words in the biblical texts are from a perspective of a different person but we believe in his/her words, borrow the idea and we make our own beliefs which is still inspired by someone's perspective. Those beliefs define the world around us. Thus, through language we create our own limited world and imprison ourselves. Likewise, in the excerpt Cosmic Prison from the book The Invisible Prison by Loren Eiseley, the author argues, that human perspective is limited by language, culture and origin. In the Cosmic Prison, the author, Eiseley attempts to point out that perspective is limited and bounded by language. Language limits our thoughts and imagination: “Language implies boundaries” (Eiseley 31). Whenever we name a thing, we put limits in our imagination. According to Eiseley, man creates an “unnatural world of his own, which he calls the cultural world and in which he feels at home”(Eiseley 31). We are comfortable with our