Hang Up, Terry Castle Recommends That We

¶ … Hang Up," Terry Castle recommends that we need to engage in a kind of "symbolic self-orphaning" in order to live meaningfully today.

What does she mean? What kind of goods does she think we get from this figurative self-orphaning? How is her view related to Kant's views about "enlightenment"? Once you have explained Castle's idea about self-orphaning, consider how she might view the dispute between Nicholas Carr in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" And Jamais Cascio in "Get Smarter." Would she side with one or the other on particular issues? Explain your answer and say something about how you yourself view the dispute between Carr and Cascio.

Castle, Kant, Carr, and Cascio in the context of finding oneself and working from there Terry Castle's essay is meant to emphasize the fact that people have the tendency to develop a form of attachment to their parents and to important persons in their lives in general to the point where they feel that it would be impossible for them to succeed in their endeavors without being assisted.

Many tutors play a negative role in the lives of people they love by going from being supportive to being authoritarian and to imposing their points-of-view on their children. Children are eventually left with the feeling that it would be perfectly normal for them to cooperate with their parents in achieving goals that have little to do with how they think. Castle wants her readers to see the bigger picture and to understand that being less attached to one's parents is not necessarily a bad thing.

Doing so would allow them to get actively involved in fighting for their interests and in actually shaping their plans in order to be in accordance with how they feel instead of being in agreement with how their parents feel. Self-orphaning can have a positive effect on one's life, as it can teach the respective individual to channel his or her powers toward being independent.

Even with the fact that it is important to acknowledge assistance received by parents throughout one's life, he or she also needs to be able to understand that renouncing authority can sometimes be good for one's self-development. By being provided with constant care, an individual is likely to gradually lose touch with his or her own powers and is eventually more susceptible to failing, taking into account that tutors cannot stay with him or her forever. As Castle points out, the idea of self-orphaning is not new at all.

It is actually an essential part of society and it has been present in a series of stories throughout time. The idea of Adam and Eve being able to succeed in spite of their initial failure and the idea of numerous heroes and heroines discovering their abilities only after experiencing a form of orphaning are essential in making it possible for the general public to understand that receiving constant support is not really the best thing in the world.

"Yet for English speakers, it's in classic Anglo-American fiction -- in the novel, say, from Daniel Defoe, Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding to Dickens, Eliot, Twain, James, Woolf, Hemingway, and the rest -- that the orphaned, or semi-orphaned, hero or heroine becomes a central, if not inescapable, fixture." (Castle) Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?" somewhat supports Castle's thinking. The Prussian philosopher underlined the idea that intellect was not as valuable as it seemed in a world where people were taught what and how to think.

He wanted people to be able to realize that it was essential for them to leave behind many ideas that had been introduced by their parents and by society as a whole. Both Castle and Kant intended to have the masses understand that it was in their interest to look further than others and to get actively involved in addressing their ideas before trying to act in accordance with what the world expected from them.

Enlightenment is, to a certain degree, similar to self-orphaning, and even with the fact that the two writers addressed different matters, their type of thinking is very similar and it would be safe to say that they ultimately had the same goal -- to enable people to see that sometimes it is important to change one's perspective on life in general. Nicholas Carr's essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" And Jamais Cascio's essay "Get Smarter" are especially intriguing when put side by side.

Discussing the topic in the context of Castle's essay is even more interesting, considering that it almost influences readers to acknowledge that they're more confused than before. While Carr's message is loud and clear when taken on its own, it is more difficult to discuss it with regard to these two essays. She is obviously concerned about how technology has come to be one of the most important factors in the contemporary society.

When taking Carr's general idea into account, it seems that she would side with Carr in thinking that technology plays the negative role in the contemporary society. She doesn't necessarily want to criticize progress, but she fears that the idea of wanting to achieve progress might prove too much for some people. In their struggle to achieve greatness they might be unable to realize that they're wasting their lives or that they fighting for a goal that they know very little about.

This is why Carr wants to open people's eyes and to have them realize that it would be better for them to do some things in moderation. Planning one's schedule by trying to exploit every minute and second can prove to be destructive for some people, as they are so obsessed with achieving success that they are even willing to renounce things that actually matter in life, such as sleeping enough to revitalize the body's energy.

Although Castle's position in the Carr-Cascio debate is certainly laudable, I believe that such thinking might be too extreme. By learning how to balance technology with being enlightened, self-orphaned, and, as Carr would say, not being stupid, one can effectively address some of the most serious issues in the modern world. Technology has recently come to be equivalent to an increase in profits and this.