Existentialism

In this class, we went over some Sarte and Simone de Beauvoir. The questions that majorly stuck with me were from the Simone de Beauvoir section so that is what I will be covering for this particular blog post today. The first of these questions that piqued my curiosity was one about common ways we find ourselves not willing to be free. I think that this is something I actually find myself thinking about quite a lot but I never had it put into a question like this. I think that in the current state of the world - with the coronavirus going around - there are obvious reasons for our freedoms to be limited in the short-term as a precaution for everyone's safety. However, a sentiment I and my friends have shared is that, even though we now have less freedom to go places and do things, we are still doing essentially what we would have done anyway. We stay inside, play videogames, and study. I think the reason behind this comes from simply relying on what we know and what is easy. Sure

During this class session, the first group talked about Heidegger and death. The first question was about if one can understand the totality of one's own life or if that is something that alludes us even if we can see a corpse right in front of us. I believe that we can never truly grasp the totality of our lives and the fact that we will actually meet our end until we are literally dying at that very second. When you are at a funeral you may think of how you will live a total life and die one day but it is only in hypotheticals as you won't have to actually face that until you are much older or you are dying sometime in the nearer future. Understanding the totality of life requires one to totally live their life up to their death in my opinion. The next question that caught my attention was whether or not we comfort ourselves when we comfort others that are nearing death. I think it depends on how we choose to comfort the person in question. If we choose to tell them that ever

In today's class, we talked about some of the prominent ideas of Dostoevsky. I find he was a pretty strange man and his life would definitely lead one to many questions of the purpose of being and many existential crises. The most prominent moment I recall from his life that struck me as interesting was the mock shooting. Dostoevsky was put on death row at one point and sent in front of a firing squad. However, instead of shooting him they just let him go with the guilt of knowing that he should be dead which lead him to make a lot of existentialist literature. One of the key beliefs in Dostoevsky's philosophy is that mankind is particularly ungrateful and petulant by nature. We always want more than what we have now and will never truly be satisfied until we die. In fact, Dostoevsky goes so far as to say that even in a situation where there could be no upset or conflict created, man would find a way to make it happen regardless simply because that is how we are wired as beings

Hello, current reader, I am back once again to talk about how my most recent existentialism class went. There was some really great discussion as we have seen in many of the previous classes. We started this particular session with Kierkegaard who is an older philosopher which leads to many of his ideas being centered around religion, god, and faith as well as what it means to be truly faithful or to have faith I should say. Kierkegaard seems to think that reflecting on whether there are things about religion worth questioning or thinking twice about is self-evident of a person with little true faith. Essentially, if one needs evidence to truly believe in something like a god then they do not count as a true believer. The only way one could be considered a true believer would be to practice their religion vigorously and, for lack of a better world, religiously without needing solid evidence or proof that the religion they are practicing is the correct one or not. To Kierkegaard, a pers

This last class was very interesting and I would say it had arguably one of the best activities thus far. Said activity was organized by group five which was covering the last pages of The Fall by Albert Camus that our group did not touch on. Throughout the novella, we see the character of Jean-Baptiste Clamence constantly judging everyone including himself to a scrutinous degree. In order to get us into the mindset of Clamence, group five conducted said activity wherein we were to write down a secret/event/memory that could either be real or fictional, put it into one of three bags, and when the papers were redistributed back out to other students to ask ourselves whether we would judge the person whose paper we were reading for what they did. Mine said that the person had keyed a car and if this was true I would need more context before I would fully judge the person because there may be some scenarios where I would understand keying someone's car like if they hit your car in a p

Our fourth class was very interesting as it was the day that we were going to teach the second half of the class. To be completely honest this day was really hard for me for many reasons both extraneous and personal to me but I was able to pull it together for the class and get the presentation done. The first group went before us and their presentation on the myth of Sisyphus was wonderful. I really loved the skit that they did which showed two girls running through the daily monotony of modern life and eventually getting fed up with it - asking why we do the same thing every day with no particular objective other than to continue taking up space. The discussion led us to some interesting places about what meaning or purpose means and I proposed the idea that you can find your purpose in rather shallow things such as watching cartoons or playing videogames and that is only wrong because, through the lens of society, it isn't productive or conducive to a "life well lived"