Existentialism

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 ...

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"...