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"...

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...