Seventh Class

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. I agree with this idea that mankind is always in a state of unrest and that we will always be seeking the next best thing as that is what tends to keep us going in the otherwise mundane usual routine of our lives - the absurd as Camus put it. On top of that point, Dostoevsky also says that we naturally act in a rebellious fashion that, in the end, seems to work against ourselves and others' best interests. I agree with this point to an extent that humans are always looking for something better which will cause them to riot or look for change when they feel as though they have been mistreated but I don't believe this is necessarily a bad thing as every time we act "out of the interest of the whole" we are doing so in the hopes of creating a better world for the individual and every time we do something like that, hopefully, it makes the world a better place to be in. A question from group thirteen that really stuck with me was to think of an action I have done that contradicted with what society taught me or what I personally believed in and why I chose to take that action. I used to do a lot of urban climbing when I was in high school which got me into a good bit of trouble but I think my reasoning for doing it was just to break the mundanity of daily life in school and how it was so structured every day - I needed something risky and adventurous to do in order to keep myself sane. The example I liked most from group fourteen is when we had to evaluate what we had been doing during the quarantine and how it had shifted from majorly outside forces being the reason for why I do things to now internal forces having the most weight in choosing what I do every day. I also saw how what I chose to do became more lazy and self-serving rather than productive for the most part. I think this highlights Dostoevsky's idea that we are majorly self-serving in a modern and creative way.