A misanthrope is a person who hates or distrusts others. Your great-aunt Edna, who hits anyone who comes close, convinces that she will steal the jewelry she keeps in her purse on her lap? A misanthrope indeed. This misanthrope is more than an honorable gentleman at odds with the world. The island failure is often shown elsewhere by the poet under the difficult light of a misanthropic genius. These sample sentences are automatically selected from various online information sources to reflect the current use of the word “misanthrope.” The views expressed in the examples do not represent the views of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us your feedback. Nglish: Misanthrope translation for Spanish speakers They have some superficial similarities to Richard Morris, the misanthrope at the center of Perforated Heart. The word misanthropic is human from start to finish. One of his relatives is the Greek name anthråpos, meaning “man”.
Its other parent is the Greek verb misein, which means “to hate.” Misein also gave English misogamie (“a hatred of marriage”), misogyny (“hatred of women”), misology (“a hatred of argumentation, argumentation or enlightenment”) and misoneism (“a hatred, fear or intolerance of innovation or change”). Anthråpos also partnered with phil- (a form of connection meaning “to love”) to form the Greek ancestor of philanthropy (“active effort to help others”). We also find Anthråpos when we dive into the basics of the word anthropology. Among the main flaws that misanthropes point out are intellectual errors, moral errors, and aesthetic errors. Intellectual errors such as wishful thinking, dogmatism, stupidity and cognitive bias are what lead to false beliefs about what hinders knowledge or violates the requirements of rationality. Moral faults such as cruelty, indifference to the suffering of others, selfishness and cowardice are often identified with tendencies to promote evil or inappropriate attitudes towards values. Aesthetic defects concern ugliness and include ugly aspects of human life, ugliness caused by human activities, vulgarity and lack of sensitivity to beauty. Proponents of misanthropy often focus on moral errors and provide various examples of their manifestations, such as massacres, factory farming, and pollution.
Opponents respond by pointing out that serious moral deficiencies manifest themselves only in a few mentally ill people or in extreme circumstances, which is denied by the misanthropes. Another important consideration for arguments based on errors is that they highlight only one side of humanity, while evaluative attitudes should consider all sides. Other arguments against misanthropy are not based on whether it adequately reflects the negative value of humanity, but on the cost of adopting a position associated with hatred of the individual and society as a whole. Advocates responded by showing how a misanthropic perspective can lead to different lifestyles. While some of them are based on hatred and can lead to violence, others focus more on fear and removing negative influence. Other alternatives are resignation and activism, fueled by hope for radical transformation. A central aspect of misanthropy is that its negative attitude towards humanity is based on human error. [11] [4] Various misanthropes have presented a long list of flaws, including cruelty, greed, selfishness, waste, dogmatism, self-deception, and insensitivity to beauty. These errors can be classified in several ways. Traditional religious texts tend to focus on spiritual errors such as ungodliness.
But in contemporary academic literature on the subject, the emphasis is more on intellectual errors, moral flaws, and aesthetic errors. [11] [8] Although all of these forms carry some weight to justify a misanthropic perspective, it is often argued that moral errors are the most serious, for example with regard to the humane treatment of animals. [7] [12] [4] The development of Percival from a proud misanthrope to a man and lover is beautifully told. Highsmith, a misanthrope, gave us in his fiction Tom Ripley, the most charming but murderous sociopath in the world. Gustave Flaubert once declared that he would “die of repressed anger against the madness of [his] fellows.” [24] Misanthropy has also been attributed to a number of satirical writers, such as William S. Gilbert (“I hate my fellows”) and William Shakespeare (Timon of Athens). It is generally believed that Jonathan Swift was misanthropic (see A Tale of a Tub and especially Book IV of Gulliver`s Travels). The poet Philip Larkin has been described as a misanthrope.
[25] Find out which words interact and create more natural English with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary app. She eventually becomes anemic and neurasthenic and misanthropic. Misanthrope comes from the Greek misanthråpos “hates humanity” and was probably popularized by The Misanthrope by the French playwright Molière, who is a sharp critic of society who prefers exile to contact with other people. In English, misanthrope (or its anglicized equivalent, misanthrope) has been applied to many crackpots perceived as antisocial, from satirist Jonathan Swift to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to Charles Dickens` character, Ebenezer Scrooge. It is one of many English words that begin with mis- (from the Greek misein “to hate”) and refer to people who despise something or someone. The most well-known example nowadays is misogynistic, used by a person who hates women. Two lesser-known variations on the theme are misandrist “someone who hates men” and misopedist “a person who hates children”. Another problem with arguments based on human error is that they represent only one side of humanity, whereas evaluative attitudes should consider all sides.