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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
In four pages this paper examines the characterization of Phaedra in Euripides’ play Hippolytus within the context of Enlightenment values to consider whether love and passion are dangerous, if emotions are a sign of weakness or lack of control, or absence of reason in the play, and assesses the cause of this tragedy and whether or not reason is enough to achieve happiness. Three sources are listed in the bibliography.
Page Count:
4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: TG15_TGphaedra.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
and emotions reflected an individuals lack of control and were therefore, according to Enlightenment philosophers like Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant, counterproductive because they impose barriers to logic. In
his Meditations, Descartes referred to cogito, which he described as "a mental action" devoid of all passion (Losonsky 1). Descartes maintained that a person could only acquire true enlightenment
through intellectual clarity and belief in his own power of reasoning (Losonsky 1). According to Descartes, a persons reasoning capabilities could be adversely influenced by listening to another authority
figure (Losonsky 1). In his text Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba, Charles Segal noted that the undoing of female
characters in Greek tragedy was "their susceptibility to the force of desire (eros)" (98). This is certainly true of Euripides classic Greek tragedy, Hippolytus, in which the heroine Phaedra,
wife of King Theseus, has fallen passionately in love with her stepson Hippolytus. Her struggles with the roller coaster of erotic emotions that have overtaken her are the primary
focus of this tragedy. To her nurse/confidante, Phaedra acknowledges, "Pollution stains my mind" (Euripides 48, line 317). While reluctant to divulge what is bothering her, Phaedra seems to
describe the Enlightenment philosophy in her observation: "We understand and recognize what is good, but we do not labor to bring it to fulfillment, some of us out of laziness,
some because we put something else, some pleasure, before virtue--and there are many pleasures in life, long conversations and indolence, that pleasing vice--and a sense of shame. This takes
two forms. One of them is not a bad thing, but the other proves a burden upon the house.... And I shall tell you of the path which my
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