Fifth Class

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 parking lot and just took off then that might be an understandable retaliation but if someone just broke up with you and you decided to key their car then I would probably judge you as an unstable individual. There were some other things that simply seemed awful however like harboring thoughts of murdering people and not washing one's hands after using the restroom. Anyways, I am getting a little off track here - my point is that I found it so engaging how the group members evaluated what headspace Clamence was in and then developed an activity that put us in the same headspace - very well done on that. Otherwise, their execution was pretty normal and their discussion questions certainly did the job to keep the thoughts coming and the discussion moving. Group 6 led a discussion about Søren Kierkegaard's On Becoming a Christian in which the most interesting discussion question to me was the one about whether my freedom of speech or freedom of thought was more important to me. At first, my initial reaction was to say freedom of speech because I could see that being actually limited by a government or other people whereas I did not understand how my freedom of thought could ever actually be limited, but then one of the group members brought up how other people could be withholding information from you like in 1984 or in Nazi Germany where they burned books to limit the people's ability to think against the norms the government wanted to instate. That got me thinking about if we are ever truly able to reach complete freedom of thought because if having some or many things restricted from your knowledge like the burning of the books in Nazi Germany is truly a strain on your ability to think freely then isn't it also true that the current government limits our freedom of thought as well? There are government secrets not available to me that are essentially limiting my freedom of thought. Another thing to consider is how will we know if we even have full freedom of thought - if we think we have finally discovered and learned everything how do we know something else isn't just still hidden? Does that mean it doesn't matter how much or how little is hidden from you anyway? Lots of questions but overall a really great class that had me thinking for days after.