Analogy of Writing

Philosophy is an impossible class. It is also extremely hard to write a paper on. Such has been the case with the topic of personal identity and immortality. The personal identity part was not the troubling bit, it was two views of whether or not the mind and body are one, and what happens after we die. I set out to look for something that could be set into words, but also had some barring on what the paper was to be about.

Looking at a book seemed to be the best way to calculate whether or not there is life after death. It would stand to reason that since the ideas of the author are in the book, so the feelings that they worked with while writing them would be (somewhat) intact. This is not saying that the mind of the author inhabits a book written by them after they die, but rather that a part of the whole can be seen through their work. Whenever one picks up something to read, whether it is a magazine article, a work of fiction, or a deeply detail piece of literature, some insight is gained on who the writer is or was.

William Shakespeare has been credited for writing the line, "All the world's a stage: And all the men and women merely players" (Shakespeare 2.7, 139-166). The real question here is who writes the lines? Well naturally it would be the writer who has written the lines! This then makes for a very interesting analogy, as the writer, then, would be considered to be a God.
If a writer is God (in the case of fiction), then surely the protagonist could be comparable to Jesus. In the case of essays, the author is both God and Jesus (respectively), as the writing is created from the mind engineering the work. This, then, means that one could gauge how the author views or viewed themselves. Do or did they fancy themselves as someone separate from everyone else, as is the case of author's like Virginia Woolf and H.P. Lovecraft, or were they involved with the crowd? The writing of person who understands what human condition really is against the writing of someone that does not is vast, just as someone who understands philosophy against someone who does not is also vast.

Whatever the case may be, the far reaching questions of philosophy are generally accompanied by some sort of analogy. This does not limit analogies to just philosophy though. This is something that is constant throughout every work that has been written down. We (collectively) always try and get ideas across through means of comparison. Anytime a statement turns into a, "It was like . . ." situation, a comparison is made. A comparison in this case is not at all similar to a comparison in an essay. It is a means to express something that is imperceptible by simplifying the concept to something that everyone has experienced.

The theory that philosophy is a useful tool to understanding might be true, but then again, what is truth? Why bother with understanding metaphysical concepts at all when a simple analogy could fulfill the same purpose?