Existentialism

The third class of existentialism was amazing! In the beginning, our teacher didn't even give an introduction to the new students necessarily it was just them starting with their PowerPoint. They began with a skit discussing how a normal person might react to emotional stimuli and how the main character from the stranger would respond which demonstrated just how emotionally detached he was throughout. We got into some great discussion concerning this character as to why we - and the characters in the book around him - find him so strange. Many of us tried to prescribe different mental conditions to him like psychopathy or autism but the one idea I heard that I really enjoyed was that he was essentially just a caricature of a man created by Camus that simply does not fit into our emotional society as a way to show us how strange that person would be to us and I think to make us question why we care so much about people having emotions and feeling remorse. Later on in the story, Mers

In my second class of existentialism, we talked a lot about what we considered to be a crushing event for us in our lives and what the consequences or repercussions of that event are in our lives. It essentially moved towards how do we deal with a crushing event and how do we heal or come back from something like that if we even can. My response to myself was that a crushing event is something that breaks down everything you were living for or that pulls the rug out from under you. A crushing event truly makes you feel lost and without purpose in the world. Without something guiding you in life you become like a husk of your former self and it can be utterly debilitating for people when they were living their life for one particular thing and then all of a sudden it is completely gone. The discussion led us to the idea that a traumatic event can essentially shape one's character. A crushing event like this could either break a person for the rest of their life and never let them mo

My first class of existentialism was unlike any class I've ever entered before it. Sure, there were the usual seats, people milling about, and music that I had grown accustomed to this particular instructor playing before class began as per his m.o. in the last class of his I took - introduction to philosophy. Where the strangeness reared its head was when he began to speak on what this class was going to be like. There was no PowerPoint prepared, no clear destination that our professor needed us to reach for comprehension or correct learning, and it was strangely liberating. We discussed whether or not, if presented with a fortune-teller who was accurate the majority of the time, we would ask about what would happen to us in the future. I talked with my groupmates about it and they agreed that finding out what will happen to you would rob you of the surprise of life. The statement that stuck with me was one of my groupmates saying that they valued the journey more than the end goa