Existentialism @ Rhodes

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2009-12-15T11:39:00.000-08:00

I feel like I should preface this post with an apology. These thoughts came to me while I was in an exhausted and apparently abstract mood. I guess the burnout of finals can produce some weird philosophical thoughts?

Human beings seems to constantly produce major questions and, as a result, are always in search of major answers. Modern science, for example, has produced a wealth of questions and has answered many of them. But do scientific breakthroughs not simply ask at least as many questions as they answer? One might argue that there will always be the same number of questions that humans have of their world. A scientist may have discovered that stars are simply balls of hot gas, but is then left wondering why they came to be, or why we are even able to discover such things? There will always be, in other words, a steady sea of human questions.

It just seems that the ancient Greeks had just as many questions as we do, despite any obvious technological advances. Our questions are without a doubt, different and perhaps more "advanced," but are they any less prolific? Perhaps existence is not as finite as we may think. Our thoughts can never truly be a means to an end because there will always be more to ponder.

Interpreting individuals

2009-12-15T09:23:00.001-08:00

In Arthur Miller’s selection from the Death of a Salesman, a very interesting point is brought up that deals specifically with the interaction of people through an existentialist lens. Throughout the semester, we have focused mostly on the self and rarely addressed interactions of two people, except for when we studied Sartre, specially his claim that the interaction between two freedoms will always result in conflict. In Miller’s literary work, the interaction between Willy and his family occurs before he has died and at his funeral, his family attempts to make sense of his suicide, despite the fact that there is no way to know what was going on his mind right before he killed himself. What’s interesting to note is that while we do acknowledge that the world is absurd and that paradoxes emerge constantly, we seem to ignore that when dealing with other people, and attempt to rationalize them based on their actions. When we don’t understand them or the rationality that we ascribe to them doesn’t make sense to us, we tend to rely on an emotion to deal with those people.
Instead of attempting futilely to understand beings or more common, but even worse, take shortcuts and only analyze a few traits or a few actions, we need to acknowledge that they are freedoms like us and impossible to objectively define. A person is constantly changing. Preferences, thoughts, and actions taken are all fluid and rarely stay constant for more a few seconds, except when consciously forced. Leaving room for this unpredictability that ultimately arises and not attempting to rationalize one’s actions into an interpretation of that person, serves us better than exhausting our brain for an interpretation of events, where their only utility is to serve ourselves. But what I’m asking for is unreasonable.
Finding meaning in anything and everything, no matter how extremely limited and subjective it is, is what people do. It is just as much a way to survive and cope in this world as it is a way to make sense of this world. While we cannot change our way of dealing with other people and their freedom, we must at least acknowledge the way we ascribe meaning to them and how we view them. We must constantly question this rationale and at the very least make it as malleable as possible, since the rationale that may have explained an individual to us at one point may not suffice at a later point, yet we still use it and rarely question its foundation.

On the Conservation of Time

2009-12-14T18:18:00.000-08:00

Where does time go? Where seems an awkward qualifier to use in discussing time, considering that where deals with physical space and time deals with, well, time. The creation of recorded time and dates and the distinction of past, present, and future control our perception of time. One might say time has passed but does time really pass? Perhaps life is like the sand in an hourglass, the top the future, the bottom the past, and the narrow stream in the middle our consciousness of its conversion. Time is therefore the name given to this conversion. And Life in general follows this metaphor, only with more sand. Where does time go? We capture it. We trap it in pictures, paintings, books, films, magazines, stories. We capture it and make it accessible to the present. As technology has developed, we have been able to capture more and more of it. First only through speech. Then writing. Then television. Now the best scientists estimate that we are able to capture around one percent of time as it passes. Even then, they admit, we are only able to capture it temporarily. Where does ninety-nine percent of the time go? Clearly it never happened.

The conservation of time. Our conception of time is nothing more than a conception. Time is not past, present, and future. Time is the instant. Time is the now. It does not pass. It is a focal point through which motion is permitted. The present does not include five minutes ago or five minutes from now. It does not include one second ago or one second from now. It has no range because it is not a duration. Time is conserved because it is continually the same instant. The past does not contain time. In fact, there is really no such thing as the past. This is because nothing exists except in the now. The past is only its effects on the now. The future. How wonderful to think about the future. So mysterious, a loose word to describe the indescribable. The future. What will soon be the now. Of course it is nothing. Nothing more than ideas in your head. It doesn’t exist. All there is is the now, the universe is constantly made new.

Of course this is why we have no perception of time. We live in the instant because there is nothing else. So on reflection of my day. Where did the time go? I had a large Thanksgiving dinner. How long ago that seems now. A number of hours, sure, yet it seems much longer. And my birthday last month? I scarcely remember it. Actually, at this moment, everything I think of seems as if it were hundreds of years ago. A different life even. I am restricted to the now. Everything else is nothing but what I manage to retain.

So there are two things. The instant. And me.

Everything else there is to say about time is fundamentally derived from these two.

Of course, this is just what I think.

Student Film: "Present-at-Hand vs. Ready-to-Hand"

2009-12-14T18:14:00.000-08:00

by Erin, Ben, and Alex.

Roth and Nietzsche

2009-12-13T19:46:00.001-08:00

I really liked reading the human stain, it reflected Nietzsche. It was a very at taking many of the existential ideas Nietzsche had and put it into an example that was easy to understand. Phillip Roth did a good job writing this story, I only wish that I could have read the whole story so I would hae gotten the full context of what was going on.
The idea that you should just keep dancing seems to be a theme from Nietzsche. It wasn’t in anything of Nietzsche that we actually read this semester, however Nietzsche once wrote that any day that is not spent dancing is a day wasted. I thought that this was really funny considering what was said in the human stain. The janitor woman keeps telling the man to keep dancing. She is trying to explain that we need to keep dancing, or we are wasting our lives, slowly but surely. The idea that we should only worry about the now, and create our own values is one that is central to Nietzsche philosophy. The idea of dancing is a perfect example for this story. In hindsight dancing seems like a meaningless activity, why do we dance, we don’t gain anything from it, it doesn’t help out society, its an activity that we do on a whim. Usually when we dance it comes from some small temporary impulse to move around and enjoy the moment. Dancing seems like a temporary joy that we pursue for our own pleasures, not for the pleasures of others. Dancing seems like an activity of the ubermensch. Nietzsche says that we should live a life that we would not mind repeating for eternity. A life spent dancing and celebrating does not seem like a bad life to repeat.
In addition I think this is obvious but the woman in the story is an obvious embodiment of the ubermensch. She does not care about the opinions of others, she makes her own values, and does what makes her happy not what other people tell her she should do. She is not only able to make her own values, and she is able to pull people away from the herd. In the story the janitor and the man she is with both realize their identity as value making beings, and they decide that they are going to live the life they want, not the life their spouse wants, or the life anyone else wants.

Choosing Temperament

2009-12-09T22:57:00.001-08:00

Merleau-Ponty's examination of freedom differs from Sartre's, but I wonder how these different formulations of human freedom affect a diverse group of readers, all with dispositional differences. Sartre saw freedom as absolute or total; however, seeing freedom as something embodied, within a body that shares specific limitations with one's consciousness, seems to be a formulation from felt limitations. As Sartre supposedly never knew despair, anguish, or personal misery, perhaps he could feel the boundless freedom he attributes to consciousness, (269-270). Merleau-Ponty presents freedom as something within a field, for if freedom was absolute, inherently so, within humans, freedom would be both everywhere and nowhere. There would be no instances by which one could differentiate a free action from an unfree action; by recognizing limits such as these on any coherent discussion on human freedom, a human project is given meaning by our choosing it and holding fast to it.

Merleau-Ponty posits one's temperament is a matter of choice, as existing "only for the second order of knowledge that I gain about myself when I see myself as others see me, and in so far as I recognize it, confer value upon it, and in that sense, choose it," (278). He then goes on to explain how motives follow from decisions, as the motives behind a project lose their force once one has abandoned the project. An example would be me waking up at 7:30 this morning to write a post for this class, but I somehow decided in my grogginess not to get out of bed and write the post. Thus my motives behind the specific action of writing a post lost their force in the wake of my decision to continue sleeping. I have a difficult time taking this view of motivation as valid, as I often find myself trying to counteract my temperament in order to act in certain ways. Thus my action may be free, and my decision as well, but my temperament seems to be making a great dent in my ability to stick to a decision early in the morning that happens to be contrary to my temperament.

While Merleau-Ponty's version of describing human freedom differs from Sartre's, I have the same problem with both of their explanations for temperaments or sadness, despair, etc, as being chosen. I suppose the project of being happy would be given meaning by our choosing of this project, and motives will follow closely behind. However, for someone like a writer, who creates meaning for themselves and define their selves through the act of writing, the existential vacuum as described by Viktor Frankl seems to affect some in devastating ways while not others. We notice the particular temperament shining through one’s philosophical works, but we cannot hope to understand it through a clinical lens. Camus offers an anecdotal account of having fallen through the safety nets of philosophical and theological tradition and grappling with despair. By the persistent goal of philosophy to itemize the problems felt through specific human experiences as those of humans in general, we are driven to ask if those not experiencing the existential vacuum are in bad faith simply or simply do not experience these vexing issues. We must ask whether these problems are dispositional, contingent upon a confluence of environment and choice and culminating in the production of a philosophical work. Some writers are going to approach the project of happiness by darker means than other writers, such as between Frankl and Sartre, as Frankl writes of “tragic optimism” in the face of the “tragic triad,” “Optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope. And what is true for hope is also true for the other two components of the triad inasmuch as faith and love cannot be commanded or ordered either,” (358).

Rorty vids

2009-12-08T02:31:00.000-08:00

Seeing as how our last reading mentioned the American philosopher Richard Rorty (and given that at least 3 of us will probably be reading for Shade in Senior Seminar next semester), I thought these two videos would be worth sharing, especially since Rorty orally expresses his ideas reasonably well for a contemporary philosopher.

The first is a short video where Rorty discusses his views on truth.

The 2nd is a long discussion between Analytic philsopher Donald Davidson and Rorty on truth, meaning, and reference. All topics that we've broached this semester to some degree in Existentialism, but coming at them from a different angle. This video is much longer; I think the whole thing is about an hour. It's also A LOT more technical. At this point in the semester, I doubt many people will have the opportunity to look this one over and reflect some on it, but it's probably worth listening when have an hour or so to burn over X-mas break. Be sure to check it out, if your interested.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjWTuF35GtY
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCwbPDnN_yU
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ls8fZZcPKk
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPLShcPd7ao
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGiLoly2_1Y
Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqGhwnydOrQ

Student Film: "Little Freedoms"

2009-12-07T22:56:00.000-08:00

by Manali Kulkarni and Courtney Martin

Student Film: "s-candy-lous".

2009-12-07T20:05:00.000-08:00

a short film by brannen vick & sarah knowles:

"hey..."
"hi."
"you seem like me."
"How do you know?"
"I can feel it."
"okay."
"you know this is it."
"I know."
"We shouldn't wait around for another."
"I know. but what should we do?"
. . .
"Live.
Be here.
Be with me."

Student Film: "Saw XVII"

2009-12-07T16:43:00.000-08:00

Hey Y'all! I was not able to upload my video because the file was too large however, I did post it on to youtube.

The Link for Youtube is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u4ZKGeJToU

Can we ever truly get our point across?

2009-12-07T09:42:00.000-08:00

The other day in class we began talking about Derrida’s idea of difference and differance. In French, difference can be defined as spacing between two things distinguishing them from one another, which is the same in English. Differance can be defined as to differ. These two different words with that vary in their meanings sound the same when pronounced out loud. Therefore, the meaning of the word is derived through the context in which it was said. It is up to the listener or the reader to interpret the message, yet interpretation in conversation and interpretation in reading are comparably different. The ideas of difference and difference exemplify how a listener or reader can misinterpret or create their own meaning of the sentence. This realization made me wonder which way of communicating more accurately expresses your opinion or if one’s ideas can ever truly be understood in the way by which the author wants them to be interpreted.

I’ve often thought writing is the most accurate way of communication. It gives us a chance to clearly develop our ideas and show the direct correlation of our thought process. These ideas can be expressed through our knowledge or experience, which can be explained in writing. Yet, the readers of our material may not have had those similar experiences or knowledge and their interpretation of the work can be skewed. Once the ideas are finalized in paper, the author loses control of someone’s interpretation of that work. It is up to the reader to derive meaning from what is written.

On the other hand, conversation allows people to communicate by responding to what is being said. If there are questions, then they are asked by the listener so a more clear way of expressing the idea can be attempted. Yet, conversation is not always as clear as writing. There is not always the flow from one point to the next, which allows for people to miss points or the exact meaning of the conversation. There is also the chance as we see in difference and differance that a word can sound the same, yet not have the same meaning.

After considering these two forms of communicating which we use daily to express ourselves, it made me wonder if I’m interpreting people the way in which they want me to understand. It also made me wonder if which way of communication would be the best for someone to fully grasp the meaning.

Being John Malkovich - Holy Existential Batman!

2009-12-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

So, one of my favorite movies of all time, Being John Malkovich, is probably one of the most existential movies I've ever seen. Below is the trailer in case you haven't had the pleasure of seeing it. Now I will say, if you haven't seen it, you'll want to, so I apologize in advance for ruining it.

Where to begin? This movie deals with language, everydayness, responsibility, death, meaning-making, and ridiculous amounts more. The film can arguably, perhaps unfairly, broken down like this: conflicting freedoms who resent their present lives, and will do anything to live forever. In this case, living forever means sacrificing your own body to live within another (a vessel, as its termed). This vessel happens to be the fiery John Malkovich. Why? I have no idea. Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) discovers a portal within his 5 foot tall office which leads into John Malkovich's head. Once inside, Craig (and anyone else who enters the portal) can live as Malkovich until eventually taking full control of his body. All that enter Malkovich's head also get a sort of sexual satisfaction (often feeling as though John's encounters are their own, alowing many to commit a form of adultery and many others to simply have sex as John Malkovich). Craig's experience becomes an addiction, which he begins to sell to other 'everyday-ers'. They keep coming back to re-experience the Malkovich ride, exemplifying their own dissatisfaction with their current lives. They fear making bold, free decisions that they can make while inside of another body, deflecting any real personal responsibility onto Malkovich.

Back to the vessel idea. Craig soon discovers that he can fully control Malkovich. He then uses Malkovich's socail standing to become what he's always wanted to be, a famous puppeteer. In doing so, he is forced to completely deletes the Craig Schwartz that used to be. In the end, a struggle for the vessel occurs. In order to illustrate my next point, a few things have to be outlined. So, here goes my best attempt at explaining something I still have trouble grasping. The vessel (John Malkovich) has always existed, from generation to generation. It just so happens that Malkovich is the current vessel. Just after the vessel's 44th (I think it's 44) birthday, any who enter the vessel will live on to the next generation, enabling to live forever. However, those still inside the vessel at the time of the 44th birthday, are trapped within the next vessel forever, having to sit and watch others live their lives within, never being able to escape.

So, Craig is inside the vessel at the time of its birthday, therefore sentencing him to watch from within another for the rest of eternity. This is the most unfree situation I can imagine, but even then, I realize that he is able to speak, but cannot do anything else at all. In the end, Craig sacrificed all the freedom he had in order to be someone other than himself, just to be sentenced to the most unfree existence imaginable. You can see how much is here. You could write forever on the stuff in this movie. There's so much more, and I'm doing this film a terrible injustice by not going the full mile, but it's late, and I'm tired.

Seriously though, watch it. You won't be disappointed.

The Now

2009-12-06T21:53:00.000-08:00

I have always been told to “ live in the now” or to live in the moment. I never understood really what the “now” was and how to feasibly to able to live in it if I never understood what it was. Also, I always wondered why I should live in the now when I always wondered about the future simply because of curiosity. I was always curious to know what my future would be like because of my actions in the present. However, thinking about the future while living in the present was not the “proper” way to live because we should only be concerned with living today as if tomorrow is not guaranteed.

After reading Roth’s story from “ The Human Stain” and his perspective about living in the now as he is concerned with simply” fucking to come” and nothing else. He is simply concerned with what he is doing now and not next or tomorrow. Roth explains his story about a man and women when they are in bed together but simply sleeping together with no other motives behind. When he states that she is teaching him, she says that she is not "teaching" and implies that all she wanting to do is sleep with him without any other purpose but what is happening presently. By leading life as the woman does, Roth seems to claim that it is only being concerned with the present that is fully appreciating the existence of God and his work.

I know that is sounds peculiar that Roth’s except helped me to further understand what the now was but the concept of not wishing you were anywhere else but the present made sense to me in the overall context of “ the now”.

However, many people have told me that living in the now is better way of leading life and appreciating God on a higher level. Not taking tomorrow for granted is the ideal way to lead life as you are not going to be taking life for granted. Through this, you are appreciating God’s creation to the fullest. The paradox that I do not understand from this concept of leading life is that everyone( who believes in God) that lives in the moment is doing it to appreciate God’s creation of today but not in fact to appreciate the actions that are being done.

I am not claiming that there is any religious motives behind the characters in Roth’s story but I still wonder if anyone can really ever live in the moment or the now if there is a religious purpose to appreciate God behind all their motives?

Blog Finale.

2009-12-06T20:43:00.000-08:00

Last week we discussed The Human Stain by Roth. In it, Coleman and the janitor discuss the existence of God. To the janitor, meaning in her life is characterized by not wanting to be someone else somewhere else. In the case of a husband and wife having sex, it could be that one or the other imagines that he or she is with another person to whom they are attracted. This is an example of wanting to be someone else, somewhere else. Rather, we need to live in the "this," or the present moment, in order to place meaning in our lives. I immediately related this back to earlier this semester when we discussed thought as proof of human freedom. We can also think back to the idea of living the "eternal life" and avoiding living in the "this" would cause one great anxiety about his life.

The idea of "eternal life" certainly relates to this reading. We can never fully experience our lives if we constantly wish we could do something else. A potentially lame example of this is a young adult who chooses their career according that what his family expects, instead of following his desires. He would would be in a perpetual state of the "someone else, somewhere else," which would cause him depression and anxiety. To imagine that life over and over would only cause more tragedy. The characters relate the idea of a man and wife having sex (particularly one wanting to be with another during the act of sex) to the existence of God. We discussed in class how this relates to God, in that humans always try to re-invent themselves despite the way they were created. This, to me, is a weak explanation of God's existence. Rather, it applies more to the focal points of existentialism. While it is inconvenient to constantly wish to be someone else somewhere else, it in a way proves us as free beings. When I take my math final on the 16th, I will desperately wish to be another student, one who is travelling home. My capability to imagine myself as another person supports existentialist philosophers' ideas that we are free beings to think what we wish. This contrasts the text, in that our desires to be elsewhere cannot necessarily relate to God. That suggests essence before existence, in that we were created to be a certain way yet we cannot help but to "want what we can't have." To say that we refute our "creation" rids the idea of existentialism entirely.

Philip Roth and Living in the Moment

2009-12-06T19:34:00.000-08:00

It seems that the philosophy expressed in The Human Stain can be more or less summarized by the maxim: “live in the moment.” I think that this might be a notion of Existentialism most applicable to our lives.

When we live in the moment, we have no opportunity to imagine the past or the future, only what we experience in the present. We have no opportunity, as Sartre would say, to live in bad faith, to exist in the mode of not-being. It seems imperative to live without over-thinking the future or the past, because our past and future selves do not exist. By pretending that they do, we are not really living. We pretend that our present reality is false, that we do not exist. This is not to say that some sort of long term goals are wrong or bad, but they should not dictate the way in which we experience the present.
I think this is what Roth is getting at with the story of the couple dancing. The woman urges her partner, “don’t look at me now like I’m good for something other than this. Something more than this. Don’t do that. Stay here with me. Don’t go. Hold on to this.” This is Roth’s notion of an ideal life. It should not be one lived in moments of the past, or attempting to imagine the future. To actually live life, it is necessary to actively make meaning of the world. The couple in this example make the dance a symbol of human existence. They render the event significantly meaningful. They do not allow the past or present to nihilate, so to speak, their present selves.

The dance represents the rarity of modern life in which a person is actually doing what they’re doing. To be more specific, it is like another except from Roth. The woman posits, “You’re a man and you’re with your wife and you’re fucking her, but you’re thinking you want to be fucking the post office janitor. Okay—you know what? You’re with the janitor.” In this case, the man is not actually doing what he is doing. He is somewhere else. In his mind—and therefore in his “true” reality—he is fucking the “janitor.” Although perhaps this seems like a somewhat esoteric example, it actually is quite like the way most of us live our lives. We go to class imagining that we are outside or back in our rooms. We stay in and imagine scenarios in which we decided to go out, of all the fun we could be having. Thus, we rarely do what we are doing.

They actions of the couple are life affirming because they are inherently meaningful. They do not garner a sense of meaning from what might happen in the future, or what has happened in the past. They do not imagine that they are dancing with other people or that they are outside or at dinner. They are living in the moment. Thus, they are genuinely themselves. It seems that by acting in this way as much as possible, we can best apply the tenets of Existentialism. Too often we worry about the past or future and forget to live our lives.

Existialism (or lack thereof) in Roth

2009-12-06T17:42:00.000-08:00

Aaah. At long last, something I know and understand: fiction. But of course, as per usual, a disclaimer: I’ve read other works from Phillip Roth in previous English classes, but by no means does that mean I possess some special insight into the meaning behind his words. I’ve analyzed his texts for their literary merit, not for their existentialist attitudes. But as before, I shall stride forward with accustomed blindness in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, I may stumble upon something spectacular.

In Roth’s “The Human Stain,” he employs the example of a man and woman having sex and states that the woman is neither having sex for the sake of having sex nor to attain physical pleasure, but rather because “it’s the right thing to do” (374). On this point, I’m completely and utterly confused. What qualifies having sex with one’s husband as intrinsically “right”? According to what principles? Does Roth attempt to claim that in any given situation, the expected or natural action that could occur in that situation is undeniably the “right” thing to do (but even on that premise, what distinguishes having sex as more “right” than sleeping or watching TV?), or is Roth simply being misogynistic? Quite honestly, I’m not entirely sure. My inner English major wants to gloss over the whole incident by claiming that Roth simply forgot to include the phrase “you think that” before “it’s the right thing to do” (that extra phrase would align this section of the metaphor with its later counterpart where he purports that if a man imagines in his mind that he’s with another woman, he is, in effect, with that other woman. Hence, one’s thoughts and convictions are what dictate the viability or “rightness” of a situation rather than what one actually does and who one does that action with).

However, the fact of the matter is that he did not include that phrase and though my inner English major may rally and protest, such an omission does raise an interesting and necessary question for this class: what, if anything, can be said to be undoubtedly “right” in existentialism? Throughout the semester, we’ve examined differing perspectives on how to live one’s life as put forth by various philosophers, but we’ve never established any baseline, any constructs that could act as general parameters for the field of existentialism. Even the claim by Jean-Paul Sartre – who’s commonly referred to as the father of existentialism – that “existentialism is a humanism” has been picked apart and argued against by his pupils and colleagues. If that’s the case, then perhaps it can be said that the number one rule in existentialism is that there are no rules, that there are no hard baselines against which to judge the viability of any action or situation. And that’s all well and good, but viewing the aforementioned excerpt from Roth through that premise begs the question: what qualifies Roth’s text as existentialist?

Existentialism (The Ending)

2009-12-06T16:44:00.000-08:00

As it was in the beginning it shall be in the end (I've always wanted to say that and this was the perfect opportunity). When I first started writing on this blog I wrote a bloggraph about what I thought Existentialism was and what little I knew about it. Almost in the blink of an eye, the end of the semester has gotten here and we only have one more class in the semester. However, existentially, we knew the end was coming from the very beginning, because of this, the class participated like every class was the last class (with the exception of myself), like every moment was worth living; which, existentially it is. I can honestly say that before the class I don't ever recall having any existential crisis and, if I did, I just didn't know that's what they were. But after taking the class, the number of existential crisis (how the devil do you pluralize that word) that I had increased dramatically. I soon found myself walking around campus discussing with myself everything that I "think" I wanted to do, but they were really only out of the socially constructed portion of myself that say "these things" are what should be done anyway. For instance, I "think" I know that I want to go to graduate school and eventually work as an administrator in the Higher Education System. However, as I am walking, I then begin to think about what I really want....which is probably, living life to the fullest, to be on a cruise out in the middle of the ocean with the sun shining bright on me. But I know that if everyone lived to do exactly what they wanted then I start to question what would actually be able to get done....what if the captain of the ship that I want to cruise on doesn't want to be a captain...then I can't cruise. I am left to not only understand that my death is only mine, but may be the only thing that I will be able to look forward to. Now that I think about it, everything else that I look forward to, I look forward to it, and then it's over. If I know I am going to die...I might as well look forward to it and know that nothing else comes after. The knowing of the coming of death doesn't really cause too much anxiety. For those people that it does cause anxiety for I feel as if they haven't come to terms with it. I really enjoyed the class though. It was truly and eye opener. I had a many a brain ooozing out of my head moments but that's a good thing because it caused my brain to think, and to try and understand, and forced it to wrap itself around ideas that it had never been exposed to.

Differences

2009-12-06T14:50:00.000-08:00

Last week, I thought our discussion on postmodernism and more specifically, Derrida's concept of words, was interesting. He gives the example of difference and the French word for differ, differance. These two words sound the same, but by their context, you are able to tell the well, difference, between the two. As words, they can always mean something else in another context. In this case, words and their meaning seem to parallel human beings--no two words mean exactly the same, just as no two humans' existences are exactly the same. Each differs in a certain context. One word can mean something entirely different in one sentence than another, and a human can act an entirely different way in one situation than another. If a human is put in a strange situation he/she is not used to, they may feel uncomfortable and act differently than usual--if a word is put into another sentence it is usually not used in, its meaning may change.

Also, this is kind of a silly example, but I actually think it works here-- a few weeks ago Professor Johnson mentioned again “the gaze.” “The gaze” however also sounds like “the gays.” It might have caught me off guard for a second, but I knew that in this context, she was obviously talking about existentialism’s “the gaze.” The point is, though they sound the same, they mean something completely different and one way or the other, changes the meaning and interpretation completely. It is just funny to think about stories told over time and texts, such as the Bible, where the verbal and written context of the same thing may mean completely different things to those who told the stories and those who wrote them; even those who are reading them.

There's no "u" in special

2009-12-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

The existential video with the two dots raises an interesting question about existentialism.

One of the dots is upset because he depends on the internet for his happiness. I think that his use of the internet is very existential. When we create a facebook page, we are creating meaning for our lives. We decide which pictures to take and how they should look and which pictures to use to represent ourselves. We also describe ourselves: we list our jobs then describe them by saying “mindless but it pays,” or list books that we like to prove our intelligence or knowledge of culture. By picking and choosing “what matters” in our lives and what represents us, we are creating meaning and therefore engaged in an existential act.

However, one of the reasons that the dot becomes so dependent on the internet is because he needs to see that there are more things about him on the internet each morning. I take this to mean that other people need to respond or other people need to make reference to his life in order for him to feel fulfilled. It seems that he feels a need for other people to recognize the meaning he has made and if he cannot achieve this then he feels his meaning is not real. The friend dot’s response to the dot’s despondency pales in comparison to the honesty and realness of the dot’s statements and is characterized by the average everydayness of what “they say.” Using phrases like “oh, don’t worry about it” or “its ok” are examples of what “they say” and none of the responses from the friend dot are really comforting.

Also, I think the representation of the person as a tiny dot of color among a screen of color represents the person’s feeling of insignificance. Because the person is just like everyone else in the world he wants something to distinguish himself and wants others to recognize him. Towards the end of the film the dot states he wants to be a more famous version of God, i.e. he wants everyone to know who he is and to recognize the meaning he has made as objectively true. After that, color flashes across the screen, alternately disguises the dot and the friend dot until they both disappear completely in the field of color.

I think that this need for our meaning to be real would also be found in our desires to seek out relationships in which other people affirm our meanings. Therefore, it seems that the dot and humans in general tend to seek out objective meaning. I wanted to pose the question of what the existentialist would say about this. Obviously objective meaning is impossible to the existentialist but should we try to seek it out anyway through societal rules and organized religion? It seems that the existentialist would say that this would be shirking from our responsibility to freedom. Therefore I think that the existentialism would say that our yearning for others to affirm the meanings we make is a sign of weakness and dodging responsibility.

Philosophy Comic

2009-12-02T13:26:00.000-08:00

New Human Existence

2009-12-01T22:06:00.000-08:00

Today in class, we watched a video with two dots speaking to one another about one’s conquest to derive meaning in his life. Through seeing his sightings on the internet, he was able to find happiness. Yet when he did not see anything about himself, he was depressed. He was creating meaning through technology, which signifies the shift in our generation. Many of the philosophers we have read throughout the semester did not have the technological advances that we have made in the past decade. Dr. Johnson pointed out that technology brings about a new crisis of meaning or a new human existence. This new perspective on beings brings about a lot of problems in the existentialist world.

First, we must look at how the internet changes a being. The internet allows us to transcribe exactly who we think we are into a profile. We are able to create, destroy, leave out, or simply be ignorant to characteristics that make us as individuals. A profile may not be a complete lie, but it is our own perception of ourselves and what we want people to see. Alot of people can gain access to the profile or page; through scanning pictures or sighting different interests, people are able to make preconceived ideas of what we are doing or who we are. It allows people to judge others based off the web without even meeting them. That is the first problem. The second problem is for the being itself, which we briefly discussed in class. Through creating meaning on the internet, we have a chance of losing a meaning in the physical world. As a disclaimer, I do not believe that we lose our self by creating a profile or spending time on the web. If it is through those things that we find meaning, then in a sense one has created nothingness within their own lives. (I feel it will be interesting to see the generations below us who have grown up playing Wii instead of playing in the backyard)

There are many issues I feel that could arise with the philosophers if a “being” is communicating and deriving meaning through the internet. The two that stand out to me are Heigel’s master-slave dialectic and Sartre’s “The Gaze.” If two “beings” are not in contact nor know the others true strengths or weaknesses, then how can one gain superiority over the other? In this case, does the internet levels the playing field and acts as an equalizer? On the other hand, without being in contact one cannot be objectified by “the gaze,” yet it seems likely that some form of opinions can be drawn from the internet. Although I have thought about the effects of the internet on the fundamentals of existentialism, but have not yet figured out the way in which the society will deal with the new human existence.

Stupid Sartre!

2009-12-01T11:58:00.000-08:00

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless. "
-Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

A few weeks ago the North American Sartre Society Conference was in town at the University of Memphis. One particular lecture I attended entitled "Laughter and Forgetting," Nicolas de Warren of Wellesley College argues that towards the end of Sartre's life, he began to discover something essential about his existence through his writing on Flaubert in The Family Idiot (1971). Flaubert is known for bringing cyncism to an art form and his most famous novel was Madame Bovary.

The Family Idiot is a psychoanalytic and existential project in which Sartre imagines how Flaubert forged his inner self during his adolesence and later on in his literary career. De Warren argues that Sartre discovers something essential about himself: that he must make himself stupid in order to not be stupid about the stupdity he is renouncing. According to de Warren, The Family Idiot is not simply an attempt to analyze Flaubert's life but also Sartre's own ridiculousness. Through his research, Sartre finds that Flaubert has made himself stupid with the promise of overcoming bad faith - to not be stupid in the mode of being stupid.

De Warren argues that stupidity can be described as reimagined bad faith in that through the dissasociation of truth (transcendence) and evidence (facticity), evidence is nuetralized and an understanding of that situation results in something that can be true despite any evidence or particularity. It was really hard for me to pin down what exactly he was saying here but I think de Warren was getting at ironic bad faith. When we act ironically, we have an understanding that the action we are taking is not actually a reflection of ourselves. The action itself still takes place, but looses it's transcendent meaning as the nature of irony involves a preconception that one's actions are opposed to one's transcendant identity.

De Warren also discussed the tone of stupidity. When we are speaking we give particular sounds meaning (even though the words themselves do not occupy that meaning). The nature of tone "turns materiality into meaning." For example, the phrase "deeply profound" is a nonsensicle one, as depth is implied in profundity. However, the use of the "deeply" makes the phrase more emphatic, changing the statements percieved meaning without changing the statements actual meaning.

In 1964, just before The Family Idiot was published, Sartre was awarded, and subsequently rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature. De Warren argues that it was a ridiculous move to refuse such an honorable prize and Sartre was well aware of that. De Warren compares the rejection of the nobel prize to the act of graffiti. In both cases, the person is enscribing their subjectivity on an object in order to affirm themselves over that object and also deny it. So stupidity, he argues, is a consequence of our freedom over objects.

De Warren described bad faith as a kind of "vaudville comedy of stupid people." For de Warren, stupidity is the way in which conciousness dupes itself. De Warren's argument makes intuitive sense to me. People often make themselves into the subject of ridicule in order to make other realize their own stupidity. Additionally, it is commonly understood that one ought to be able to laugh at one's self, or at least not take things to seriously. So for Sartre, it was only through being stupid that he could elevate himself above stupidity all together.

I think that de Warren provides a way of looking at some of Sartre's basic consepts in a new light. Howver, I wonder if Sartre would consider bad faith an essential consequence of human freedom. According to existentialism, nothing is essentially anything as any meaning in the world is ascribed. But if we are all destined to act in bad faith and there be stupid, then would that be an essential component of human nature?

(Sorry if the arugement seems disjointed. I wish I had the whole paper, because the guy really only spoke for twenty minutes.)

Coleman and the They

2009-12-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

The selection from Philip Roth's The Human Stain shows the capacity of literature to powerfully convey existential themes more effectively than most abstruse philosophical argument. Literature helps us to feel the conflicts that are often stripped of their force through attempts to translate them into a philosophical language fitting an academic form. The refreshingly vulgar and human characters display many of the same sentiments shown by other conversational writers such as Camus (see The Fall). Camus' conqueror in The Myth of Sisyphus echoes the imperatives put forth by Roth's character in stating that in reacting to the absurdity between human life and the universe, man has one luxury, "that of human relations...Taut faces, threatened fraternity, such strong and chaste friendship among men--these are the true riches because they are transitory," (Camus, 88). The emphasis on authentic interpersonal relations is, although appearing somewhat idealistic and pathetic in Roth's character, contiguous with Heidegger's description of an altered hold on everydayness characteristic of authenticity.

Authenticity begins not with placing oneself above or apart from the They but rather knowing specifically against whom one is distinguishing oneself, the particular perspectives being forced upon you. Coleman's female friend recognizes the lack of emphasis on personal, meditative thinking endemic to "all the social ways of thinking" and the leveling down of Dasein caused by these social expectations. All of this analysis may be misguided without knowledge of the actual characters' background stories, as Eric rightly pointed out in his precis. However, despite Coleman's "living a lie," being absorbed into the kind of being of "the others," he seems to be in line with Camus by keeping touch with the gratuitousness of his existence and the absurdity of his life, as displayed by his "proof" (or lack thereof, depending on interpretation) for God's existence.

Even the atrocious film version, with Nicole Kidman as the poorly played janitor, exhibits the influence of the They, as Coleman's wife dies from the shock of his disgraced departure from the university. I cannot agree with Eric's comparison of the janitor with the Uebermensch both as I have only read this excerpt and probably witnessed Hollywood destroy another important book, yet it is obvious how instrumental this new love interest of Coleman's influenced his conception of his own being and his being-toward-death. This merely demonstrates the malleability of the self and the ease with which something like love can influence one's worldview. However, it can only be argued that the janitor is working toward Nietzsche's ideal of the Uebermensch in that she creates her own values, her own meaning to her existence, as something apart from conformity to the herd mentality and the warm comfort and easy consent that comes from being indistinguishable from one's social environment. The Uebermensch arises in Nietzsche's thought from his preoccupation with self-creation and self-perfecting but also was an ideal that neither himself or another has or necessarily will have embodied.

God as an Object

2009-11-30T21:26:00.000-08:00

My post started as a response to Eric’s blog, “[His] Beef With God,” which raises a lot of interesting questions--as you can see. Basically, I tried to think of a way in which God could be an object.

What if God, in some way or another can/could be experienced or quantified? If I can say "tigers exist," without ever seeing one or knowing how to go about seeing one in reality, then I have not really experienced one, and therefore cannot know for sure what a Tiger is or whether it exists all. I also would not know whether or not I have experienced anything like it. But this does not make the existence of the Tiger any less real as an object. There is also still the possibility of finding a way to experience a Tiger, to see one in real life, and for the Tiger to be disclosed in a being.

Just because I have never seen God or experienced him, does not mean that there is no possibility for me to do so. You could say that inherent to the idea of God is infinity, and therefore he could not be experienced or quantified. But also inherent to the idea of God is infinite possibility. Couldn’t God then be made in some way material/quantifiable? From another perspective, when we think of the word perfection, don’t we recognize on some level it’s being? I think we do, and to a further extent than may seem apparent. We have a strong idea of what perfection is, even if it might be wrong. And even if it might be wrong, it also might be right. If our notion of perfection could be right, then why couldn’t our idea of God as some sort of object be right? In this way, God does not seem that different from the example of the Tiger. Both cannot be quantified or determined unequivocally or in themselves. But in one case our idea of something (the Tiger) is in fact correct. Thus, why couldn’t our idea of another thing (God) be correct? This isn’t to say that it is correct, but just that it has the possibility of being correct.

There is always the possibility that we may be right in our perceptions of things, even things that we have yet to come in to contact with or fully know (e.g., the Tiger). This means that God could possible exist as an object in relation to humankind. There does not seem any way to determine the existence of God simply by believing in Him or thinking about Him, but we also do not know a whole lot about exactly what He is. We should check a lot of our assumptions regarding belief and what we know is true or is not true, but also realize the possibility that our assumptions might be right.

I’d appreciate any thoughts on this. I know there are some problematic ideas here.

Shaping the Freedom of Thought

2009-11-29T21:42:00.000-08:00

Thinking back to Merleau- Ponty’s thoughts about freedom in relation to that of Marquez’s, I began to wonder about the limitations that can be placed on our freedom to think or whether such restrictions are possible.
During class discussion we said that Merleau- Ponty’s concept of “ lived experience” leads to explain that freedom has to be in a “field” and there have to be limitations and restrictions for freedom in order to be applicable and exist. Also, according to Merleau- Ponty, freedom is limited in a number of particular possibilities or boundaries. A person is able to only thinking of choices within this so called field of freedom and is not able to think outside of these restrictions; this is in fact the limits of freedom.
In the love story presented by Marquez, a woman’s, Fermina Daza, husband passes away suddenly. Fermina is not seen to follow societal norms; she does not have a typical funeral as Fermina does not have a “ traditional nine- night wake“ for her late husband . At this unorthodox funeral, a past lover of Fermina’s, Florentino Ariza, comes and stays the whole time. At the end, Florentino confesses that he loves her. Femina is offended at the moment but later, when she is alone, is caught thinking about her Florentino and not her recently dead husband.
Therefore, I did not understand if thoughts could ever be limited through any kind of restrictions. Our thoughts are a product of experiences that we have along the way. We know what love is by seeing our family or , on a superficial level, watching movies. We understand pain or suffering through our own experiences in relation to hardships in life. Hence, though other people can not limit what we think, I think that our thoughts are limited only by our sphere of experience.
So in relation to Merleau- Ponty, I wonder if our freedom of thought is limited by a field of experience. The limits and restrictions of experience are what restrict our thoughts. The woman in Marquez’s story can not be physically restrained by society to think a certain way but through her past experiences with her former lover, Florentino, can have thoughts about him rather than of her late husband because of experience not society.

So my main question is can thoughts ever be limited? If so would society be considered “ the field” that restricts and helps to form other people’s thoughts or is "the field" the person’s experience regardless of society through which these thoughts are limited and shaped?

My beef with proving God's existence

2009-11-29T19:28:00.001-08:00

I hate to come back to this again, but I, like Jen, cannot let it go. In class, we had quite the discussion about whether a belief in God implies the existence of God (or whether the first can exist without the second), and although I originally thought that the first could indeed exist without insisting on the second, I have a slightly altered view after a couple weeks of mulling it over. First, I want to distinguish between the idea of God and God himself, at least in terms of existence, to help make my claims clearer (hopefully). Keeping that distinction in mind, I claim that a belief in God not only infers the idea of God but demands it. This concept is somewhat trivial- in order to believe in God, one must have some pre-existing idea of what God is, i.e. what it is that defines God; whether it be that he is the ultimate power and knower or whether he is pure perfection, one must have some idea of what he is in order to believe in him. Scholars of Descartes would argue that this necessitates the existence of God, insofar as we have some concept of perfection in our minds, and while this is an argument for another day, I think in short that it is just as easy for us to have created the word perfection to describe what seems complete to us and for us to be completely mistaken than for us to have an accurate idea of what completeness truly is and for us to term it as such. Anyhow, my main problem with asserting that belief in God necessitates or infers the existence of God is that it seems to assume that we can prove the existence of God as if he is an object. Think about it this way- when we speak of existence, what do we mean? We mean that we have experienced a thing or something similar in a certain state that we term "existing". When I say "I exist," I mean that I continuously experience my own Being disclosed in a being by way of thinking, walking, looking in the mirror, getting bitten by a mosquito, etc. When I say "tigers exist," I mean that if I went to Africa, it would be simple for me to point at a Tiger and say "look, a tiger" or that I saw a tiger in a national geographic film. When I say "God exists," however, how can I supply evidence for my claim? Although Descartes' solution is a clever one, it seems just as simple for me to say that I received the idea of completeness from a drawing of a circle, which even the most simple minded child could produce, even on accident. I cannot say that I have or could readily experience God as I could any other object- he is not a site at which Being is disclosed, but rather he is Being (possibly). At any rate, while I can certainly postulate that God exists in order to make my own experiences more relevant and meaningful to me, I cannot declare God's existence absolutely and outside myself because it would be doing so as if he is an object, which he is most certainly not.

I understand that there are many holes in this, and I invite criticism/comments- I struggled for weeks with these ideas and this is the brief version of my conclusion, although I am still wavering on many fronts. I guess at the root of it all it just seems, to me, both immoral and against all intuition and reason to attempt to claim for all others' existence that God exists.

Revisiting the Conflict between Existentialism and Religion

2009-11-29T18:10:00.000-08:00

I know it was a couple of weeks ago when we discussed the role of God in existentialism, but the idea continues to plague me. We continuously debated whether belief in God is “allowed” if one is an existentialist philosopher. We came to one possible conclusion, in which a belief in God could serve as a “meaning making activity” in our lives. Although this proposes the idea of God and existentialism functioning harmoniously, this still does not seem convincing. If one claims to be an existentialist, he asserts that he is born entirely free make meaning for himself or not. If he adopts a belief in God, he recognizes a higher being in control of his life. This directs him to live according to a certain “plan.” Thus, the person’s existentialist beliefs regress as he accepts God as the All-Powerful Creator. He negates the idea that he is the original source of his freedom. Therefore, I do not believe that a true existentialist can simultaneously believe in God.

Tillich discusses the concept of fear and anxiety in the context of courage. Like we discussed earlier, fear is the unpleasant aversion to an animate object, but anxiety is what underlies that fear. It is as if we are giving control to that object, and we are anxious because we anticipate the harm it might cause. It is the recognition that it could end us. Courage is the feeling in which we take control of our emotions even in knowing that something could kill us or cause the “nonbeing.” Tillich claims that religion is omnipresent, especially in the “threat of nonbeing.” I think that this ties into the “role- of- God- in- existentialism” argument. Religion to some people is the stringent belief in God, in others religion causes skepticism and apathy, in others it is meaningless and causes the denial of all gods. However, in the threat of nonbeing, we are always faced with religion. If one is devout, they understand that their death is God’s responsibility. This would then be sloughing off responsibility, as one allows another Being to control the afterlife. If religion for one causes him to deny or be skeptical of God, they remain unclear of the afterlife. That would make the idea of death even more unbearable. Would this belief, that religion must always be present, allow for this excerpt to be entirely existential? It seems that if it were existential in its purist form, then religion need not be always present.

How Beckett Struck Gold

2009-11-29T03:47:00.000-08:00

I’m going to be perfectly honest: when I first read Samuel Beckett’s "Act Without Words", I was confused. Hella confused. As much as I hate to admit it (especially given that I’m an English major whose focus is creative writing), I’ve never been very good at pure and self-contained symbolism. But after repeated re-readings and Ben’s oh-so-amazing précis, I finally discerned the main points of Beckett’s drama: that even when circumstances prohibit us from doing what we should be able to do (when someone’s thirsty, they should be free to have a drink of water) or what we could do (when someone possesses the means to secure their own sustenance, they should be free to use those means to pursue what they desire to the height of their individual potentiality) we’re still able to practice the option of what we cannot do. That, in Beckett’s view, is our ultimate and unalienable freedom: to not act. Such a perspective may seem completely antithetical to so many of Beckett’s preceding existentialist colleagues – such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Unamuno – who all argue that man’s greatest freedom is to go forth and act with purpose. But when examined closely (which multiple readings allows ample room for), his argument actually strikes at the heart of all existentialist theories: that even when robbed of all opportunities to act, man is still free. And as a quick perusal through my notes reveals, such a notion has famous company, especially in the works of Feodor Dostoevsky.

In "Notes from Underground", Dostoevsky famously declares, “I am a sick man. . . I am a spiteful man. I am unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased” (38). Based on that premise, one automatically thinks of what he could do (see a doctor) or what he should be able to do (pursue any option he wishes for curing himself of his ailment), but instead Dostoevsky’s narrator instead chooses to do nothing at all and simply “let[s] it get even worse” (39). Why? Because he can, because this freedom to pursue even what is seemingly detrimental to himself is what he believes to be the only thing that differentiates himself from an unthinking organ stop.

Of course, it can be argued that in that regard, the theories of Dostoevsky and Beckett are worlds apart: Beckett’s protagonist arrives at this realization through necessity whereas Dostoevsky’s narrator pursues this option out of choice. But regardless of the routes taken, the resulting insight does not tarnish in the slightest. In fact, the final moment of Beckett’s play where the protagonist gazes at his hands could be interpreted as the protagonist’s comprehension of his freedom and capacity to act, even in that moment of not acting. Now, whether that moment should be seen as an instance of hopefulness over still possessing the ability to act even in the absence of suitable means, or a submission to complete and utter despair over being able to act but having nothing to act upon, one cannot be sure. In a literal sense, that would all depend on the manner in which each individual director manipulates the text for the stage. But therein lies the shining kernel of existentialist philosophy: like the possibility for sheer hopefulness or inconsolable despair, we are free to do absolutely anything or utterly nothing. But no matter what, even when our surroundings rob us of absolutely everything, we can still think, we can still decide, we are still free.

Camus vs. Beckett

2009-11-28T14:07:00.000-08:00

I think that Beckett and Camus have two very different attitudes for the same situation. Beckett tries to make the claim in “Act With Out Words” that the absurd is horrible. While we do have a freedom to choose, the situation we are put in is horrible. In the play the Protagonist is unable to leave a desert; He is unable to make anything productive happen. Any time he finds any meaning in the things he sees, those things are taken away from him. Like when he figures out what to do with the boxes the boxes are taken away, when he figures out he can hang himself on the tree, the tree is taken away. At the end of the story the man resigns himself to doing nothing, plugging his ears, and humming. He decides not to play the game, because he knows that every time he attempts to play he will fail. Beckett’s attitude toward the absurd is one that is torturous and cruel.

Sisyphus is in a similar situation; he is resigned by the Gods to pushing a boulder up a hill. In this task he will inevitably fail, however he keeps trying to push the boulder up the hill. Camus says that this would not be a bad life because he gets to spend eternity pursuing the absurd. He can choose to be happy in the task that he is assigned. Camus point is that we do not have to resign ourselves to unhappiness; we can enjoy the absurd task we are given and take joy in our attempts.

Camus and Becket differ, because while the character in Beckett’s story accepts defeat and resigns himself to nothing, Sisyphus continues to take joy in his task. Beckett’s character did not create his own value for the things he was doing. He only valued the end result of his task, not the act of doing them. Both live in the absurd however one is able to enjoy things while the other does not. Sisyphus had it worse; at least Beckett’s character was able to be given different tasks to enjoy. Sisyphus had to do the same thing over and over. Becket’s character should find happiness in the fact that while he can’t enjoy the fruits of his labor at the end of the day, he can still enjoy his freedom to do things. At least Beckett’s character got boxes he can try to create a value for, a far worse hell would be one where a person is stuck in the desert with absolutely nothing to do, or attempt to do.

Student Film: "The Call"

2009-11-26T12:58:00.000-08:00

A Film By: Hugh Barber, Aaron Fitzgerald & Kip Geddes

Samuel Beckett's "Act Without Words"

2009-11-24T08:46:00.000-08:00

Theistic Absurdity and Living Without Appeal

2009-11-24T00:12:00.001-08:00

As there has been some question of the necessity of atheism in existentialism, one should point out that the atheist considers a godless universe and grapples with absurdity, issues of objective meaning, differently than the religious explaining their faith or constructing a specific notion of God. However, a strict atheism is not necessary to find absurdity in life, though it propels the question with a greater force in the absence of absolutes. In a lecture by Robert Solomon (somewhere on the internet, I cannot remember), the problem of evil is discussed as an example of absurdity within the belief in a benevolent God. Thus, a godless universe is not necessary to recognize absurdity, but the problem does not take on the specific dimensions of an atheistic perspective on objective meaning. Shortly, the problem of evil does not question the existence of God but rather the nature of his "plan," as evil exists in the world.

As for the question of freedom in the face of a divine "plan," such predetermination is not the same as being born into a certain facticity. One's facticity influences the choices one makes and allows for freedom only to the point that the specific facts of existence are not designed, that one's transcendence allows a person to choose to engage in a difficult, unusual action, something with a high coefficient of adversity, without corresponding to a preordained purpose for that person's actions. The problem is that our self-creation, our desire for freedom is cheapened, lessened, etc. when the specter of an omnipotent God enters the picture, when all our actions merely fill in the walls set for us by God. The idea of human freedom, in the robust atheistic sense provided by Sartre, Camus, etc., derives its power from the lack of a given nature in humans, the lack of a prepackaged self, the lack of a merely given freedom. As for Camus, the absence of the absolute allows humans a certain "increased availability" of action, able to live without appeal to divine purpose. The sole justification of human action comes from humanity, and self-creation thus takes on a greater importance in freedom for the atheist conception, an increased power and authenticity to oneself and others if that decision is not part of some divine plan but freely arrived at in a transitory body. Of course, this all arises from the human want for a seemingly boundless field of action: one cannot fail at scaling a mountain without freely choosing to attempt the action. In the presence of a plan, the outcome is already decided and known. "Degrees of freedom" are not what Sartre and Camus want: they give human freedom its proper power by attempting to live without appeal. Humans thus justify their own actions without recognizing a conscious giver and guarantor of freedom.

Student Film: "Do Not Walk"

2009-11-23T21:08:00.000-08:00

... by Carol Faulk, Brendan Keegan and Christina Cooke

Dada

2009-11-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

I think that because existentialism, as a philosophy, is presented as more of an attitude than a formal argument, it more easily lends itself to be portrayed in films or other forms of art. In another one of my classes, we have been talking about Dadaism, and I think that this could be a form of existentialist art. Here is a site that has a lot of examples of Dadaist art.

Dadaism was a challenge because it was seemingly so meaningless. Before Dadaism, art was judge based on values such as the skill of the painter (think Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel) or the genius of his or her ideas (like Impressionism’s new interpretation of how we see) or the ability of the art work to appear beautiful to us. Each of these values seems to be intrinsically precious: we do not choose what genius is, we merely find genius in the world and recognize it as intrinsically valuable.

To challenge these ideas, Dadaism created art that anyone could accomplish and the ideas behind them seemed more like random stupidity than genius. They made poems where words were chosen at random to create each line. Duchamp, a Dadaist, created the idea of ready-made art which is when the artist would choose a random object (a bottle rack or a urinal, for example), and then put it on display in a gallery.

Dadaism was largely a reaction to World War I. The artists were creating meaningless art to protest against the meaningless death and destruction that the war brought. Although we have seemingly rational reasoning behind our wars and ideas, so much death and suffering for the sake of keeping treaties and promises seems blatantly ridiculous. Dadaists were creating art that was just as senseless as the war but without rationalizing it and without pretending that there was anything intrinsically good or beautiful about their work. In this way, they reinforced the existentialist idea of human's constantly determining the meaning of things and events.

These acts of creating nonsense poems or ready made sculpture seem meaningless. I think that they are existential acts in that they ask the viewer and society to take them seriously and give them meaning or see the meaning or intention of the artist. We value and view Dadaist works as art despite the fact that they defy the basis upon which we defined and still define art from earlier in history.

Sartre and Lobsters

2009-11-22T13:07:00.001-08:00

Hello!
I found a short article about how Sartre briefly experimented with mescaline, and how the drug caused him to have visions of lobsters. It doesn't have so much to do with anything we've talked about in class, but apparently mescaline was influential to writing his novel Nausea, and crabs/lobsters were incorporated into his play The Condemned of Altona as well.

The couple of quotes that the article has of Sartre talking about his visions are interesting, kind of funny, and a little sad, so I linked it here if anyone wants to read

Existentialist Ideas in South Park?

2009-11-20T18:37:00.000-08:00

Last class we talked some about the relative merits and demerits of using other mediums, particularly the artistic medium of literature, in order to deepen our understanding of particular existentialist ideas and concepts. We all also have the opportunity to create an "existentialist film" for extra credit. Earlier tonight, I caught one of the better known south park episodes titled "Raisins." I don't want to spoil the episode too much, to those who haven't seen it. But it mainly focuses on two storylines: how Stan deals with his g/f Wendy breaking up with him and Butters' imagined relationship with a girl who works at the restaurant "Raisins"--think Hooters for 3rd and 4th graders.

It's really hilarious, and touches on some of the themes we've talked about in class, such as bad faith, the they, authenticity & inauthenticity, meaning i life, pain, suffering, and death--although I'm not quite sure whether or not the episode, in the end, is "existentialist" in it's outlook. Anyway, watch for yourself and be the judge. You can watch the episode online here:

http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/103939

Frankl and Literature for Me

2009-11-20T08:42:00.001-08:00

Ok, so the other day in class we talked about Frankl's Three Stages to readjust to freedom and his tragic triad however, I will just focus on the Three Stages to readjust to freedom. The first he says is shock, which is basically where an individual has forgotten how to be and what it means to be free. The second of which is apathy, which is basically when the individual forgets how to feel and express emotion - their sole purpose is to survive. And the third, which is de personalization/disillusionment, which is when an individual has been scarred. I look at these three stages and the first thing that came to mind for me was when you are learning how to read. When you learn to read as a young child you pick up a book entitled "Harry." The very first line of the book and probably one of only 10 lines in the book is "Harry loves to walk his dog." These books have no protagonist, antagonist, climax, etc, however, we, as young children read them and enjoy them. Once I learned all of the names for the different parts to a novel such as the setting, or the antagonist and the protagonist, "shock" comes into play. My freedom of loving the novel for a novel and the characters for simply characters, and where they live for their house have all been construed. I can only look at the characters and the role they play as good guy or villain, when they say where they grow up the word setting pops into my head and forces me to relate everything they are doing to: time period, location, etc, etc. I have forgotten what it means to read a book for a book. Once apathy sets in, I can no longer enjoy the book at all. Every book that I read after this is simply because I have to, not for enjoyment. And thirdly, I have been scarred because of the simple fact that I no longer want to read books now because I remember what's going to happen anyway. I'm going to pick it up, thinking I want to read it, and ulitimately get lost in the "english" of the book, and put it down never to be read.
This was the first thing I thought about when we were going over Frankl in class....I was sitting in my seat and I said "wow...that's how I feel about books." So I decided to share my example on the blog....

^_^

Student Film: "Excalibur"

2009-11-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

... by Austin Freeman

Tillich and Creativity

2009-11-18T23:12:00.000-08:00

In the excerpt from The Courage To Be, Paul Tillich purports that in his view, the philosophies of Martin Heidegger represent the clearest view of Existentialist philosophy, so much so that Tillich unapologetically declares that Heidegger is the “symbol of present-day Existentialism” (333). From there, Tillich offers his reading of Heidegger’s texts, stating that from Heidegger he concludes that man possesses complete and utter freedom, that “[n]othing is given to him to determine his creativity” (334). On this point, I strongly disagree. Whether the fault lies with Heidegger or merely with Tillich’s interpretation cannot be easily delineated, but as other contemporary philosophers such as Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler have hypothesized and repeatedly argued, mankind receives a myriad of characteristics and expectations from the moment each individual takes their first breath that influences the path of their lives.

From birth, man is given language, given culture, given gender, and even given ethnicity. In the works of Judith Butler, for instance, she avows that people are categorized from birth into two categories that possess drastic ramifications for the opportunities that will be made available to them throughout their lives: the two categories of male and female. Gender, according to Butler, is not biological. Rather, it is assigned, forced upon us from the cradle, and used as the parameters for how one may act and what one may pursue. For instance, if someone is male, they are expected to be brawny, stoic, and professionally successful. If someone is female, on the other hand, they are expected to be sensitive, nurturing, and domestically-minded. As such, any individual who acts outside of those boundaries are seen as strange, queer, or even sub-human. Hence, the constructs of gender restricts one’s supposedly inherent freedom.

But to be fair, it can be argued that all these social structures can be escaped, should one possess the inner fortitude to do so. New languages can be learned, different cultures can be experienced, the boundaries of gender can be traversed, and foreign ethnicities can be inhabited. But regardless of whether man disposes of or adds to the characteristics assigned to him, man does receive an entire gamut of traits upon his arrival into society. Only through a conscious effort can the limitations of these traits be broken down. Hence, man does receive certain expectations that can sway the path of their lives. However, to evoke Freidrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Ubermensch, it is up to the individual as to whether these traits will truly curb their creativity.

meaning and belief in god

2009-11-17T18:37:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about two end of class questions today, regarding how one could believe in god without believing that god actually exists, and whether this belief is pointless like a child’s belief in an imaginary friend. I think atheistic existentialists would very much agree with this comparison, in that they would argue the child’s imaginary friend, just like God, serves a very important function despite the fact that they do not believe either actually exist.

I think that when people are placed in situations where they have trouble accounting for what has happened, for the meaning in life, for their own purpose, as existentialism in a way requires one to do, an easy and comforting fall back is to look for something else to provide meaning. In the case of the child and imaginary friend, although the imaginary friend does not exist, it is a helpful and meaningful belief for the child. The imaginary friend allows for the child to take comfort in having a relation with another being that understands their problems, is a best friend, knows them better than anyone else and provides them with a constant source of strength, especially when they lack other real human relationships. In the same way, regardless of whether or not any god actually does in fact exist or not, the belief in god provides for many people a lot of the same comforts.

Atheistic existentialist would argue that god, like an imaginary friend, can be a source of comfort in a lonely world, allowing people to transform their anxiety into a meaningful suffering.When something bad happens, it is for some immensely comforting to say that there is a god who has a reason for this unfortunate event occurring. When hit by a feeling of anxiety about the possibilities of life, it may be comforting to believe there is a plan that will guide one safely through it. When struggling with questions of whether or not there is any meaning to life at all, it may be more comforting to assert that a god has made an absolute meaning than to believe that there is no meaning at all.

Frankl argues that all humans strive to create or to find meaningful answers to our problems, and that as a result it may be as natural for humans to find meaning and comfort in believing in god as it is for a lonely child to find meaning and comfort in their relationship with an imaginary friend. This is all good as long as every believer recognizes that they create and believe in god in the same way that a child creates and believes in an imaginary friend. According to atheistic existentialist, neither the child or the existential believer should really think that the imaginary friend or god exist in reality, while this does not mean they cannot value their beliefs as meaningful since believing in these things is an expression of their own meaning making potential.

Atheistic existentialists would view this belief as good, though, only insofar as believers do not start attributing meanings and values as existing independently of themselves. Just as parents are scared if a child begins claiming to act on the instruction of their imaginary friend, atheistic existentialists are scared by religion when believers start claiming to act in accordance to the purposes of a god.

Student Film: "The Housewife in Bad Faith"

2009-11-17T10:50:00.001-08:00

... by Alin Florea and Leann Farha

I-Thou, I-It, and Reality TV

2009-11-17T03:08:00.001-08:00

When we discussed Martin Buber’s I and Thou it made me think of reality television. Buber’s text presents two modes through which people interact with the world, the I-It and the I-Thou. The I-It relationship is a quantitative one where the subject is viewed as a definable object in the world that is a sum of its part. The I-Thou involves recognizing the innate humanity in others and viewing them as greater than the sum of their parts. Reality television has taken what seems to be the most obvious interpretation of the I-Thou, Love, and made it into an I-It relationship. Take for instance a show like The Bachelor or, more recently, My Antonio both shows feature a group of women trying to win the hand of an eligible bachelor in hopes of marrying them. The audiences of these shows are expected to believe that the relationships generated constitute Love, or an I-Thou relationship, which is ridiculous given the amount of engineering show producers do to garner good ratings. However in viewing the show the audience participates in an I-It relationship where it quantifies the contestants and in the shows like this where there is also a cash prize at stake the participants treat each other as things amongst things using each other like means to an end. It seems with the popularity of reality television, VH1, and MTV the I-thou will be completely obscured by and confused with the I-It making true caring relationships between people become superseded by relationships based solely on utility.

Mind Your Body

2009-11-16T14:47:00.001-08:00

I’ve fully never understood why people always seem to view the mind with such detachment from the body, the way Decartes put it, “like a pilot in his ship.” I think it may have something to do with the introduction of the idea of a soul; since it is supposedly everlasting, and when compared to the fragile and finite existence of the body it seems as though there must be a disconnect between the two to allow them both to “exist.” Since the exact definition of a “soul” is often vague and poorly understood I see it frequently used nearly interchangeably with “mind” in casual conversation. Many seem to forget that the only way we learn with our minds at all is through interaction by using our five bodily senses, and by using our minds to reflect upon and analyze those very experiences. That being said, I really like the importance Merleau-Ponty puts on understanding the link between the body and mind. Derived from that line of thinking, because all we have to rely on are our own senses, there is no way to externally test the veracity of the ability of those senses to accurately represent the true reality of the world around us. All we have is our own imperfect perceptions based on those sensory experiences. It can be quite disconcerting to always have a doubt deep within oneself as to whether or not the things one perceives is accurate at all. This may be another reason why people like to view the body and mind as detached from each other, so that all of the imperfections we know about the body won’t seep into the minds with which we think about them.
Furthermore, the whole idea of understanding the relationship between the body and mind has been made even more complicated by modern science, as technology has progressed to the level where we can see one fade beyond control while having the means to artificially sustain the other: The mind can fail the body (as seen in coma patients) and in turn the body can fail the mind (in cases such as Locked-In Syndrome). The fact that these types of conditions exist prove that the two are indeed separate and distinct, but I think most of us overemphasize that division, while instead we should be focusing on the synergistic relationship between the two—how they interact, how they communicate, how deficiency or greatness in one affects the other, and so forth. I feel like I think those two previous phrases mean effectively the same thing.

Buber and God

2009-11-15T23:21:00.000-08:00

In the I it relationship, the subject attatches meaning to the object. In other words, the subject sees the objects and "describes it," i.e. gives it certain attributes, which create its meaning as the object. Thus, the object has no intrinsic value, but rather its value is given externally and thus is wholly subjective and in no way absolute. This manner of relating is certainly a reality in our existence- it is the only way in which we can relate to objects which we encounter everyday. Even so, when it comes to interpersonal relating, i.e. subject-to-subject relations, there exists a higher and more abstract manner in which we can relate to each other: the I- Thou relatoinship. According to Buber, in this relationship each subject recognizes the other as wholly free, and as such no external value is deposited on the subject. Instead, the subjects participate in dialogue that relfects each's entire essence. I wonder, though, if we can even accurately describe such an idea as a full and genuine dialogue between two wholly free subjects, and I think buber would agree, insofar as he defines our I-thou relations as derived from our relationship with God. In his view, i.e. that of someone with faith, he has no problem asserting that he has a free and open relationship with God. Thus, he can move from his relationship with God, using it as a model, in order to guide his I-thou relationships with other people.

I wonder, though, if for the athiest existentialist, getting to the point of being able to relate in the I-thou fashion is impossible because the athiest existentialists' relationship with God is non-exisistent. I think Buber would likely respond by saying that the atheist existentialist is not asserting his full reality through the I-though relationships because of this fact, and as such Buber would call for a re-evaluation of one's relationship with God or lack thereof. Any thoughts?

Affirming the Consequence

2009-11-15T22:26:00.001-08:00

I class I noted that Buber’s jump from I-Thou relationships between people to the claim that there is an eternal Thou was affirming the consequence. Affirming the consequence occurs when you say P then Q, Q, therefore P. Buber states that we have I-Thou relationships because there is an eternal Thou and “each individuated Thou is a vision through to it” (329). However, the claim (or fact) that we have I-Thou relationships does not necessitate that these relationships mimic an eternal Thou. This is a logical fallacy. This made me realize that as strange as it seems to me, there is no logical reason to say that because we exist, God (or anything for that matter) created us. The syllogism is as follows:

If God created us, then we exist.

We exist.

Therefore: God created us.

This is affirming the consequence. It would make just as much sense to say “if God didn’t created us, then we exist; we exist therefore God didn’t create us.” It is strange to me, but logically we cannot deduce any causation for our existence because it will always be affirming the consequence. What is very strange to me, logically causation for our existence is not required. It makes perfect sense to simply say: we exist; therefore we exist, and that our existence does not require a cause.

Through science it may be possible to discover the causation of our existence. However, personally I cannot imagine a science providing a satisfactory answer to such a question. The big bang theory coupled with evolution and etc works but I feel like there is more behind it. But like I said, there is no logical reason for me to think that. Religion, or more specifically God, makes sense. However, it is not required logically for existence. Because of this, God must be accepted on faith alone. If we knew there was a God then there would be no point in having faith.

It is funny to me that because we can debate about whether or not God exists, the world would be the same with or without God. One so religiously inclined might say this isn’t true because we can’t perceive of a world without a God. However, an atheist could just as easily reply that this is exactly how a world would look without one. This, of course, works in the reverse as well. So in the end, as always, the question goes unanswered.

2009-11-15T20:56:00.000-08:00

In class we briefly discussed Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex, about women being seen as the “other” sex, coming second to the male norm. This is a concept that has developed throughout the years in all societies, thus a stereotype of woman has been produced. There is the question of how exactly does one “become” a woman. It was explained that women, in society, are understood to act a certain way, to be a certain way, that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Thus, biology does not determine one’s identity, but it is the social construction that is at the core of identity. However, this attaches certain meaning to the word woman, almost objectifying the woman herself. It has become simply a word, a stereotype: she cooks, she cleans, she wears dresses, she takes care of the children, etc. Society has made meaning for being a woman, yet this meaning is generalized and ambiguous—it almost seems as if the “they” is responsible for constructing this image of what a woman should be and how she should act. So what happens when this idealized image of a woman is gone against? What if a woman should “become” someone who does not fulfill this identity? As we discussed, society then has to make sense of this and form again their own meaning—is she accepted? I think society has developed stereotypes as certain guidelines for certain idealizations. Some woman grow up and “become women” based on these guidelines and might follow this structure and the ones who do not still become women, though it might be that society never accepts them as such, based on their meaning when figuring out their place in the world—every experience is different for an individual and even when following society’s stereotype, no two experiences are alike.

To be a courier the way a king would be a courier?

2009-11-15T20:50:00.001-08:00

Last week when we were talking about the kings and couriers scenario, we briefly discussed whether couriers could be couriers the way that kings could be couriers. I think that the couriers are collectively the kings, but can't (as couriers) individually assign themselves the role of a king, just like Heidegger's das Man is both everyone and no one. To be a king, similar to an übermensch, one must take on all the possibilities of the world, creating their own values, outside of the average everydayness. The way I see it, everyone chooses to be a courier because of wanting to dispel some of the anxiety of acknowledging the whole host of possibilities that we have. If we could cope with and live with the complete awareness of these possibilities, then it would be possible to have kings. I do not think that anyone can be a courier the way a king would be a courier, because that would be a person who had complete awareness of their possibilities, but still chose to participate in the self-limiting of these possibilities. The two sides seem contradictory to me, but I'd be interested in what the rest of you think.

Someone mentioned in class that being the king of the couriers is just climbing your way to the top of the herd, which I agree with. To be a courier in the way a king would be a courier as much as possible (as I said above, I do not think that this is completely possible), you might be the most übermench herd-member out there, but you are still part of the herd.

Sisyphus and Regular Life

2009-11-15T20:50:00.000-08:00

I think Camus is right, I can easily see the character Sisyphus as happy. Rolling a Boulder up a hill may seem meaningless to us, however we need to keep in mind that that is our subjective view of the situation. From Sisyphus’ point of view the act may very well have meaning. Some people try to become great lawyers or doctors; however these professions have different value for everyone. An Engineer might not see a philosopher as someone with a meaningful life, however the philosopher will probably have a different opinion. Sisyphus might just like to roll boulders up a hill, who we to tell him that his job is meaningless. Sometimes people are forced to do mundane tasks in life. Some people have jobs that consist of filing papers for a company. The company will always have new papers to file, so no matter what this person does they have they will never be finished.

Some people might say that Sisyphus was forced to this task; however the employee has to do something in order to make a living. They have their own obligations, to fulfill. However we would be wrong to say that the person has, without a doubt, an unhappy and meaningless life. They can still enjoy their life even if it is filled with these tasks.
Some people might say that because Sisyphus will never accomplish his goal, that he is living a horrible and meaningless life, however same can be said about our day to day activities. A philosopher for example will spend their entire life trying to figure out meaning, and find out the answers to all of life’s questions. Despite their effort however I doubt they will ever come up with a concrete answer to all of their questions and problems. Their life will be similar to that of Sisyphus. A person trying to become a great lawyer will face a similar problem, at the end of their life they will never reach the top of their hill, In the end they will always fail, because in the end they will always die, and up until that point there will always be new challenge. There is no time in life where they will be able to look back on the things that they did and say, that they are done. There will always be goals and problems they will have to face. We are all like Sisyphus. Each foot up the Hill Sisyphus tried to roll a rock up is like the goals and problems we set in our regular lives. The only thing we can do is to try to enjoy our own life and the decisions we make.

Do we understand everything we experience?

2009-11-15T20:49:00.000-08:00

Merleau-Ponty claims that freedom only exists in a field. That is absolute freedom does not exist, because if there are no limits or parameters to a freedom, then it according to Merleau-Ponty, it doesn’t exist. However, this logic assumes that in order for something to exist, we must understand it and compare it to something else. While using this logic cannot prove that something we don’t understand must exist or even has a chance of existing, it does put some doubt on Merleau-Ponty’s claims. Why do we need to compare freedom to a limit to legitimize it?
Let’s look at a scenario where a human can do anything he or she wants, because there are no limits. Can we say this person is not a freedom or not even acknowledge the freedom he/she experiences? The person may not understand the freedom since there is nothing to compare it to, there is no limit, nothing that he or she can’t do, so there is just existence. However, given our perspective, where we experience self imposed limits on our freedom, as Sartre suggests, we recognize the person’s absolute freedom.
In a more relatable example, we experience freedom and its limits throughout our lives. However once we become aware of this freedom by experiencing limits, it doesn’t mean that in the past when those limits were recognized and we could in fact do what we actually wanted, freedom didn’t exist or it wasn’t relevant. We just didn’t understand as we do know, nor placed enough emphasis on it to understand how to make choices in a given field with parameters. Now that we do, we can look back at our experiences where freedom may have truly not been limited and understand why and how that happened. We can also look at scenarios where freedom was in fact limited, but we didn’t understand or weren’t aware of the limits, so we ignored them, thus not having something to contrast our freedom to.
Merleau-Ponty’s claim is more based on our conscious understanding of freedom itself. However, we don’t need to acknowledge the existence of freedom for it to exist in the world. Even if freedom doesn’t mean anything for an individual or that individual has never grasped the concept, it doesn’t mean that it is irrelevant for that individual and that he or she doesn’t experience it. After all, do we understand everything we experience?

community

2009-11-15T20:00:00.000-08:00

Other people are indispensible to our own existence. It would seem as though we need other people to help us define ourselves even. If we grew up all alone, we would be merely animals and indistinguishable. Because we have other people to teach us how to live in modern society, we are able to build ourselves upon the foundation that is society. It’s funny how if this is true, one’s quest to set themselves apart from other people almost brings them closer to other people. We use what has been found by the generations before us and elaborate on it to find ourselves. It’s almost as though we pick up where our ancestors left off and add our own discoveries to theirs and so on and so forth. Once we’ve had the interaction with other people and have figured ourselves out, we cannot simply just leave humanity behind either. If we look at Tom Hanks’ character in Cast Away, he still needs, even desperately, the company of another person to keep living. He finds a companion in the volleyball Wilson, without which he could possibly perish. Without other people, we lack a wealth of resources that make our lives livable. I remember being told recently that if babies are coddled they aren’t able to develop certain abilities and relations and may even die. Other people are indispensible to our survival, and although some people believe they only rely on themselves and don’t need anyone else to get by, that is simply not true. Some people don’t allow themselves to build connections with other people or rely on them because those people aren’t going to be there one day, but they fail to realize that people come and go and just because one individual isn’t going to be there for the rest of your life doesn’t mean they should be shut out. The human condition is one of community; sometimes we rely on others and sometimes others rely on us.

Thinking about Justification

2009-11-15T19:33:00.000-08:00

At this point in our course work I am beginning to wonder whether or not the justification for an action is more valuable than the action itself. For Sartre, it seems that who a person is is constituted in their behavior, hence we are who we are in the mode of not being it not in our reflection upon that action. For Sartre, whenever we attempt to become some ideal, we are making an error as we can never truly and wholly fulfill that ideal. With that being the case, I wonder if the justification for an action can take precedence over the action itself in the way we actually live our lives. So if I steal money from my friend and never get caught, there is no need for justification. In that situation I need only justify to myself why I did it, if I choose to do that at all (perhaps I do not feel any moral inclination at all to engage in such a practice). Additionally, if the action is perceived, then I must make a case for what I have done, especially if it is morally reprehensible.

For Simone de Beauvoir, ethics are wrapped up in our conception of freedom. I am responsible for my actions and it seems that in this way the actions themselves become less important than the justification. Of course, there would be no need for justification if we did not act in the first place. However, in a world of other freedoms it seems as if it is not simply the things I do but how I can make a case for those things to others that defines me. We live in a world with other people, rules and prescribed modes of being and because this is the case, it seems to me that I can never be truely free from having to justify my actions.

laws smaws

2009-11-15T19:22:00.000-08:00

So there’s this gate keeper that’s standing in front of this door. He tells the countryman that cannot go through the door when, in fact, you are able to make the decision to walk right on through the door. One problem is however, that if the countryman goes through the door then he will encounter more terrifying gate keepers that will increase in horrification as the countryman progresses through each of the doors. The person standing in the midst of the gate keeper finds himself in a position of whether or not he should proceed through the doors to encounter more horrifying gate keepers. Fighting himself, about whether or not he should enter, the man eventually dies in front of the door. Nietzsche refers to this as weak and lazy because of the simple fact that we would rather just accept things as they are instead of trying to create our own. I don’t fully agree with the idea that we, as humans, like to merely agree with everything instead of creating our own. We, way back when, were the ones and still are today, the ones that created the law in the first place. Kind of like what De Beauvoir states when she says that you become a man or woman by conforming to social construction, we, in a sense, forget that we ourselves created the social construction. We created the things needed for someone to figure out whether or not they will be a man or woman and at the same time, create everything else around us. The force of a law is only how much we allow it to have. To an extent we can do whatever in the world we want to do. The countryman could have gone through the doors, and probably, no matter how scary all of the other gatekeepers would have been, especially if they all just stood there like the first one, would have just done nothing. We, as a population, are reified by the social norms we are created. We become these robots who, though we don’t realize it because “it’s the norm,” follow all these rules and don’t say anything about it. I don’t think we are lazy for following these rules and not wanting to create our own, I think we just don’t realize that we are following the law all the time. Whether these laws are human made or natural, like we wake up when the sun comes up and go to sleep when it goes down, we are ultimately run by them and, if everything runs smoothly, have no reason to change them.

Why Can’t We Be Kings

2009-11-15T16:31:00.001-08:00

Even after a couple weeks of thinking about it, I still disagree with Kafka, and possibly all other Existentialists, that I would choose to be a courier over a King. I can only think about examples from my childhood when I choose to take the lead, or be recognized as the leader during games such as Emperor or Teacher. In all situations when I got chosen to be anything other than the leader, I neglected my duties.
When I look back at it though, as a child I didn’t quite understand the idea of an oath, or allegiance to someone. Playing a game like teacher just enhanced my feelings of resentment for the person chosen to be teacher rather than generate respect. This is definitely a good example of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, in which he says people began to resent those with life-affirming values. Does that mean as a child, before I even became aware of the concept of ‘the herd’ I was a member? If so, then this definitely clarifies Kafka’s position of children naturally wanting to be couriers, as we really have no other choice. So why then, as I grew older, is it that I would prefer to be a King over courier? Is it my natural desire to break away from the herd, even though the herd is simply a self-imposed prison? Or perhaps, Nietzsche got it wrong, and there really isn’t such a thing as a life-affirming person. Essentially that means that man is doomed to fail then. Since eventually we “would like to put an end to this miserable life of [ours] but [we] dare not because of [our] oaths of service”, this quote from Kafka, pretty much sums up why life-affirming individuals have to exist from an atheistic existential viewpoint. If we are all just miserable couriers with no direction, what else do we have to live for?
This also explains why a King, or God, is a necessary construct for us humans to have. God allows us to be his couriers, which in turn, provides our life with meaning. Without a God, our messages are meaningless; therefore, the benefit to do more than grow old and die outweighs all other possibilities to make our jobs as couriers useful. This isn’t the life I want, and I believe that others wouldn’t want to live this way either.

Sartre or Merleau-Ponty: Who has the better conception of freedom?

2009-11-15T15:44:00.000-08:00

For Merleau-Ponty, freedom is a mode in which personal actions and commitments can be chosen within a situation or field of possibility. According to MP, freedom is always within a given field of possibility. Whereas, for Sartre, freedom seems rooted in our power of negation--imagining alternatives and trying to pursue them. To me, it seems like the existential picture Merleau-Ponty provides is deeply at odds with the Sartrean picture, or any other existentialist vision of subjectivity that prioritizes a rational, autonomous individual, who is capable of imposing their choice upon a situation that is entirely external to them (side note: I wonder if Kierkegaard fits this bill too?).

I think MP would argue against Sartre that while it sometimes is an expedient shorthand to distinguish between transcendence and facticity (or Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself), it is a mistake to take them to be distinct metaphysical categories as Sartre does, because these two ideas fundamentally overlap in a way that undermines any absolute difference between the two. If that's right, then consequently Sartre’s vision of absolute freedom in regards to a situation is untenable, because we have to recognize the ways in which the self and world are intertwined--though not intertwined in a way that means that the world can be reduced to us, or us reduced to the world. Thus, MP and Sartre have very different views about our situatedness, for lack of a better term, and how that relates to our freedom. For Sartre, we seem like outsiders to our specific contingent situation, which comes to have meaning out of some original free choice we make: probably something like deciding to make my life a por-soi instead of an en-soi. Whereas, for Merleau-Ponty, I suppose the best characterization is that we freedoms are constantly in a kind of back and forth dialogue with the situations we are thrown, fallen, and cast into, and out of that dialogue certain potential possibilities come to be expressed. Thus, freedom, for MP, is more about sanctioning, rather than negating. I apologize if that is really confusing, I'm not sure I completely get the ins and outs of both of their positions, but I'm going to try and re-state what I just said and hope it comes out somewhat clearer. I think the difference between Sartre and MP ultimately boils down to this: Sartre seems to think freedom creates meaning (and thus is more fundamental), whereas MP seems to think that meaning is more fundamental, since a person has to already be woven into world (or field) of meaning before a personal act of freedom can occur.

Which view of freedom do you all think is more accurate? At this point, I'm leaning toward MP, since it seems like free choice requires situations that allow for different possible aims or activities, though I'm curious to hear other opinions.

alternative epistemology

2009-11-15T13:19:00.000-08:00

In light of Beauvoir and our discussion on his work, I've been thinking a lot about alternatives. People seem to make rules for themselves in life, whether on a personal or ethical level. These could be anything from wiping your feet before coming into the house, to thou shall not kill. We create these rules for ourselves and live by them, more or less. Whether based on nature, reason, or God, we all have these rules and can logically defend them, despite the fact that they can be equally valid, yet completely contradictory. In the back of our heads, however, we know that we are free beings and that we fabricated our own values. In other words, we are responsible for our own rules, we made them and technically we can break them. This presents two questions, the first being just how arbitrary are our values systems and rules? Could they just as easily be completely different, yet still make sense within society? The second, and perhaps more important question is why do we stick to them? If somewhere in our consciousness we are aware that we are free from our own rules because we made them and they really don't limit our freedom as individuals, why do we embrace them and let them dictate our lives? I recall Dr. J's question as to whether or not we do this because of a lack of alternatives. At first this concept made a lot of sense to me; there really don't seem to be too many reasonable alternatives to how we live that don't seem absurd. But after really thinking about it, I realized that the world is literally full of alternative systems of ethics and laws. The Imbonggu people of Papua New Guinea, for example, have a totally alternative set of beliefs and way of living in the world. So the alternatives are out there, but why do we still maintain our ways?

Conflicting Ideas in Buber and Sartre

2009-11-15T12:24:00.000-08:00

After thinking about Satre’s notion of bad faith and Buber’s notion of human reciprocity, I think there is somewhat of a contradiction concerning the individualist aspect of Existentialism. On the one hand, we must be attuned to our own self-interest and personal responsibility—and prevent ourselves from being in bad faith. We thus should not consider ourselves things in-themselves, because we have the ability to choose who we will be. It seems, then, to not be in bad faith, we must be self-interested in the sense of not allowing the influences of the exterior world—the world of “Da-sein,” as Heidiegger would say—to affect us.

However, when we consider Buber’s philosophy, recognizing the importance of the I-Thou relationship, the value of the individual becomes slighted. We are not entirely self-interested in the sense described above, because we garner meaning from the interaction with other freedoms. As Buber writes, “meeting the Thou, I become” (321). Therefore, our very existence rests on an encounter with “the Thou.” How then can we not be in bad faith if we follow Buber’s philosphy? If it takes viewing someone else in the world to understand who we are, then it seems we can never really choose for ourselves. In Sartre’s terms, it seems that if the self depends on the other, the self is not a true self at all. It is a self in bad faith.

How then do we get rid of the apparent discrepancy between the two viewpoints? Certainly Buber’s philosophy coincides with Satre’s, and Existentialism’s, fundamental premise that existence precedes essence. But it seems that according to Buber, the original human essence is not one chosen by the individual, but rather by an interaction with another freedom in the world. According to Satre, it seems, true essence is entirely incumbent upon the individual’s desires, what the individual wants for himself. Maybe the encounter with the Thou is our own personal choice: a choice made by the individual. Perhaps if we can choose how to relate to the Thou and how we wish to understand ourselves through this relationship, we are not in bad faith. This might be congruent with Sartre, but I’m not entirely sure. I’d appreciate any other ideas on this problem. It still seems to me that someone is in bad faith he allows the world of the other to substantially impact who he will be.

Martin Buber vs. NPR

2009-11-14T21:36:00.000-08:00

Martin Buber asserts that the there are two “founding relationships” that humans form. There is the human-to-object relationship, the I-It, as well as the I-Thou, a human’s relationship with another human. The I-thou is more than just humans connecting one another, however; it is the freedom-to-freedom relationship. That is, we have a profound connection with other people when there is a reciprocation of the understanding that each is a free being. Buber, a theologian, states that we are capable of forming such connections because they reflect our experience with God. This is the case for both believers and nonbelievers. When a human encounters the I-It, the person seeks for the object in need. Conversely, the I-Thou relationship is deeply significant because the human with whom we connect enters our lives naturally, creating meaning for both subjects. This is similar to a human’s experience with God. Our views of God develop based on life experiences, rather than constant search for a finite answer of God’s existence.

While Buber suggests that our personal relationships reflect that with God, an NPR broadcast I came across in my Psychology class complicates this. The broadcast, entitled “To the Brain, God is Just Another Guy,” supports that the brain responds to God as if He is another person. Functional MRIs were performed on participants as they were told statements such as “God is with me throughout the day and watches over me,” and “there is no higher purpose.” The statements activated areas of the brain responsible for empathy and understanding others’ thoughts. If we formulate opinions about God, our brain cannot help but to understand God as if He were another finite being. The study also suggests that that religion formed in the brain as result of social interactions (Hamilton, 2009). In other words, our idea of God developed over years of people collectively attempting to understand a higher being and the afterlife. It benefits human evolution, however, because it allows us to form unity, especially in times of turmoil. Essentially, the study claims that we have developed an idea of God because of complex human interactions.

While I do not believe that this experiment directly disproves the I-Thou relationship, I do believe that it complicates Buber’s claim. God is an incredibly infinite Being that the human brain cannot fully fathom. Whether we believe in God or not, we cannot entirely understand God’s purpose or existence. Thus, the study’s findings suggest that we can only expect so much from the I-thou relationship. We are supposed to model our I-thou relationships with the ideal Eternal-Thou. However, if we can only understand God as “another guy”, then the model for such relationships is restricted. It is not degraded into the I-It, as we are not necessarily objectifying God. However, Buber’s idea that humans must strive for the Eternal Thou in our personal relationships is too idealistic.

Citation:
Hamilton, Jon. (2009, March 09). “To the Brain, God is Just Another Guy.” All things Considered. Washington, DC: National Public Radio.

atheistic existentialist and the choice to ignore god

2009-11-14T18:36:00.000-08:00

Considered from the existentialist viewpoint, god is not only a subject of contention, but seems to be an atheistic existentialist’s nightmare. Although the freedom of existentialism may be full of anxiety due to the burden it places upon individuals to create his or her own purpose out of an inherently meaningless life, the opposite, that there is a god that creates our purposes, seems even more troubling according to an atheistic existentialist philosophy.

For example, consider that a meteor falls out of the sky and lands directly upon, and kills, a single person in a large crowd. For existentialist, this example would be an appropriate illustration of the absurdity and meaningless of life. That a person is killed by a meteor that has flown through space for thousands of years which have unfortunately coincided with the thousands of years leading up through the generations of the single person’s family history, with both culminating in a single moment when meteor and person meet is an almost funny event- it forces one to consider the absurdity of life that is so unlikely, so unpredictable, and so impossible to predict that it doesn’t make any sense to attribute meaning to the events that occur within it.

This understanding comes up in the movie No Country for Old Men, with the coin toss. Taken not as an illustration of fate, the random chance of coin toss in one sense drives home the objective lack of meaning in life. Life is just a toss of a coin, which has no meaning other than that which is created for it.

For one who believes in god though, it would be tempting to say that meteor accident happened for a reason, that it is not an illustration of absurdity or coincidence, but of purpose. This consideration seems much more terrifying for existentialist than the absurd. Believing that all things happen for a purpose, for purposes that one will likely never ever know but is trapped in anyways, forces questions such as what the purpose is, and why. Existentialist would argue that adhering to the belief that there is an objective purpose to life reveals all humans to be nothing more than Dostoevsky’s piano keys, limited in how they will live by their order in a set piece that is written and conducted by a god. All of the philosophers we have read run from this illustration of human life. No one wants to be a piano key, and so we are encouraged to rebel by spiting the meaningless of life and to create and live freely instead, to not accept what “they” say is our purpose but to make our own, to break out of the limits ascribed by others, to believe in the freedom and eternity of our own subjective meaning.

As a result, on the side of existentialism is an exhilarating freedom where each individual creates their own limits and is creator of their own purposes and values. Although the anxiety of living with so much possibility may be debilitating for some, for others it provides the room necessary to live a subjectively meaningful life that one may feel joy in living over again and again. Believing that god controls purposes and meaning, though, consigns humans to only ever living one set of events that are out of their control. Good or bad, there is no responsibility for what happens as the pressure and explanation of life is lifted onto god. While this may be a more comfortable existence than existentialism, since existentialist can only ever say that life happens while believers may say that it happens for a reason, atheistic existentialist would abhor this belief in god as ultimately constricting their potential for free meaning making and creativity.

Perhaps in the end neither side can be objectively proven though. Existentialist will only ever feel comfortable believing that we are each free to be totally and individually responsible for our lives, while believers in god will argue that though we live freely it is ultimately in accordance with a plan and under the guidance of god. Atheistic existentialists, though, would force the issue by asking not only on what basis anyone believes in god, but more importantly why anyone would ever want to, even in the case that god actually did exist. Given the troubling questions that come with accepting an objectively meaningful life as guided by god, answers to which all involve taking away responsibility and freedom from the individual while limiting the subjective creative and purposive meaning making processes of life, in the end atheistic existentialists would argue that even if god was objectively proven to exist, that it would be better for everyone to try hard and ignore this evidence, to live their lives believing with conviction that god is dead.

The Fifth Amendment in light of Kafka and Sartre

2009-11-13T21:00:00.000-08:00

“ No man is bond to betray himself,” a quote by John Lambert, is the essence of the Fifth Amendment’s self incrimination clause. The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution protects individuals from self-incrimination. The problem with the Fifth Amendment Self Incrimination Clause is that the individual may refuse to testify against himself. How is the jury supposed to determine the correct verdict for any case without a confession from the defendant?

The self incrimination clause makes it seem as if the defendant is in Sartrean “bad faith” by lying to him or herself about being guilty. The defendant is trying to be not guilty in the mode of being guilty, therefore, is trying to be free from guilt rather than be rightfully guilty. If the individual is guilty then the clause gives him the ability to withhold incriminating parts of his testimony, which is to be in “ bad faith” as to lie to himself.

In “ In Trial,” Kafka presents the story of " a man from country" who wants to be admitted by the Law. When he asks for access to the Law, he is denied by the gatekeeper who is guarding the gates that lead to the Law. In relation to Kafka, the defendant can be seen as the man before the gate, the gatekeeper symbolizes the legal system, specifically the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment helps the defendant to become free from an incriminating confession. Both the man and the defendant strive for different forms of freedom; the man in the story wants a genuine yet paradoxical sense of freedom which is the freedom to be accepted by the law but subconsciously adhere to laws as he waits in front the door all his life. This causes him to deprive himself of freedom regardless the gatekeeper‘s action while trying be accepted by the Law. The man at the gate is not free in the mode of actually being free so he is in a type of “ bad faith” as well. However, the defendant wants freedom from self incrimination, so he takes makes use of the Fifth Amendment. However, complying to the Fifth Amendment’s self incrimination clause causes the defendant to fall into the Sartrean bad faith. Neither the man at the gate nor the defendant are able to attain their own sense of freedom without falling into Sartre’s concept of bad faith.

I am not sure if the defendant is really free if he achieves the illusion of freedom by slipping into bad faith. Is this really being free even though the defendant is withholding incriminating information through means of bad faith? Will Kafka's man at the gate or the defendant be able to attain freedom without a drop of bad faith?

Wishful Thinking

2009-11-08T21:56:00.000-08:00

I think that it is only wishful thinking that can imagine Sisyphus as happy. Imagine pushing the same rock up the same hill again and again and again. Enduring a perpetual punishment and never reaching the goal of a task. The Greeks specifically formulated Sisyphus’ situation to be one of eternal torture. I am a goal-oriented person, and the thought of pushing a rock up a hill for all of eternity only to have it fall back again is tormenting. There is no hope.

I think that there is absurdity and certainly absurd situations in life but I think that there are situations in which meaning and achievement are present. When someone close to us dies unexpectedly and unfairly, we experience what Camus’ describes as the absurd. There is no rule, order or meaning to what happened, and we realize how fragile our world is. The Holocaust would also be an instance of the absurd. However, there are also moments in life where true victory and happiness are achieved. Being with my family has given me experiences that I would never take to be meaningless. Even if I, for some reason, never see them again, I will still cherish the memories and take them as moments of true happiness and victory. There is nothing absurd about my relationship with my little sister, it is entirely good and meaningful. In addition, we as a society have made great social advancements in the past century. Gender and race issues have been brought to the surface and progress has been made on discrimination.

Although Camus is right to point out instances where we encounter the absurd, I think that he neglects the fact that there are also moments in life where things are achieved and goals are completed. Sisyphus is a dejected prisoner destined to a meaningless existence.

We are never a mere Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill for no reason; we instead are taking three steps forward, four steps back, three steps forward, and then one step back. I believe that each of us is working towards some meaning in our lives and that although there is absurdness in our lives, it is not the only thing we experience. Camus might reply by saying that the absurd will break everyone into abandoning all meaning in life. However, I believe if one expects the absurd, one can withstand the arbitrary events that set us back and hurt us.

Failure through Inaction

2009-11-08T19:27:00.000-08:00

Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy, as perhaps Existentialism as a whole, can be reduced to the word possibility. De Beauvoir writes, “Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.” Thus, according to de Beauvoir, there always exists the possibility to win and lose in any given situation—that is, unless we act to deliberately limit them. There exists the possibility of neither winning nor losing, of not playing the game, so to speak. We can pretend that a possibility is not a possibility. Using her example, we can pretend that a door cannot be opened because it could not be opened on the first try. In other words, we can live in a state of inaction in which we rid ourselves of the possibility of failure, but also of the possibility of success. This, of course, is undesirable. In this state, we would not be truly living.

I see this as failure in its worst conception. It seems that to exist happily and meaningful, we must attempt to increase the possibilities of our life. If we do not maximize our possibilities, we in some way limit them—along with our potential successes and failures. Limiting our experiences, the possibilities of life, is the sort of “evil” it seems that de Beauvoir describes in her commentary on the “ethics” of Existentialism. It is evil to accept our life as it is, as if we have no say in its direction and, more importantly, its meaning. This approach to life is largely masochistic. If life has the possibility to be better, then by not attempting to improve it, we resign ourselves to an unhappier state of being, a comparative life of misery. Although some may say that people do not realize their possibilities, this is no excuse. We all in some way or another realize the possibilities available to us. Some of us chose to act on those possibilities while others don’t.

People say that they could never sky dive or climb a mountain, but this is synonymous with pretending as if it is impossible to open the door. One can chose not to climb a mountain or sky dive, but it still remains a possibility. Although this may be an extreme example, people frequently resign themselves to inaction. They are scared of failure of the lesser kind. People will refuse to apply for a job because they tell themselves that they won’t get it. People won’t go to college because they tell themselves that they can’t succeed. By not doing these things, people indeed get rid of the possibility of failure in the sense of not getting the job or not succeeding in college. However, they also prevent themselves from bettering their lives—a greater failure it seems. In any case, it seems that actively attempting to better the quality of one’s life is essential to obtaining any kind of meaning or happiness. We must be active participants in life to succeed on a higher level.

Where is happiness?

2009-11-05T08:32:00.001-08:00

Our class discussion Tuesday and last Thursday got me thinking about the importance of thought and it’s connections to your actions. For Sisyphus, his actions were a revolt against the absurd, and he was happy in his decision to remain rolling the bolder up the mountain to see if fall again. Sisyphus could have been angry with the world or revolted in another way, yet he sustained pleasure in the idea of revolting by doing the monotonous task.

Throughout this class, we have talked so much about our perception of the world shaping our actions or how we feel about our situations, yet I can’t help but think isn’t there a choice in deciding how we feel. We all have the freedom to walk around upset, angry, or mad at the world, but isn’t it more important to have the freedom to chose how we feel. I know some mornings the last thing I want to do is smile, interact, and overcome my exact feelings, yet when I make that decision to continue to do it even though I don’t want to my perception changes. I’m not saying people have to cover their true feelings, but I do think it is important to look at our situations and reassess how we perceive them and how they control our emotions. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in his book The Conquest of Happiness, "Happiness is not, except in very rare cases, something that drops into the mouth like a ripe fruit... Happiness must be, for most men and women, an achievement rather than a gift of the gods, and in this achievement, effort, both inward and outward, must play a great part." Here, Russell is saying that happiness is a choice. It is not something that comes naturally or can found through certain things. It is a conscious decision that we each have to make whether the situation is good or bad.

Although my eyes have been opened to the positive aspects of existentialism, there is still negative ideals that none of us like to face. Merleau-Ponty points out that although we may think we are free, we are never completely free. For Sartre, we try not to act in “bad faith” yet we continue to act in bad faith. I guess what I am getting at is how one can look at these perceptions of life which do parallel our existence and overcome the angst. Where is the happiness? How can it be achieved? I don’t have any great ideas, but I think it is through the acceptance of the now and the appreciation of the life at hand we find happiness.

Individualism

2009-11-03T13:12:00.000-08:00

The other day we were talking about people wanting to follow the commands of another in the example of the couriers as well as the idea that if we were truly free we would leave school and do whatever it was we really wanted to do. I was pondering these ideas and I decided that we don’t have to go to such great lengths to prove our freedom. Why perform an action just to prove you are free? It would be a much better action to consider your options and figure out what is the best route to take in life. I believe that making a good judgment is more important than proving my own freedom. In fact, I don’t have to prove my own freedom to anyone. I know I am free and I am free to choose that which is best for me in my own life. Hell, I don’t even have to choose to do what’s best because I don’t have to prove anything to anyone else. Personally, I don’t need validation from the outside world to tell me what I am doing is good. We are fully capable of making our own morality and not everyone needs outside influences to guide them. It doesn’t take the signing of the honor code to convince me I shouldn’t cheat. This can be for whatever reason, whether it be I think cheating would be contrary to the whole goal of education or because I think cheating is inherently wrong. Frankly, it doesn’t matter much what I think except to myself. Many of us are caught up in thinking about ourselves and proving we are good to other people, but other people don’t care either. Just as we are worried with validating ourselves, they are worried about validating themselves. Our ideas and feelings about things revolve around us and our experience and we aren’t usually trying to figure out whether someone else is a good person. Due to this, performing an action just to prove I am free is not only foolish, but pointless because I would not be proving anything to anyone, just the fact that I have the freedom to make a bad decision. Wouldn’t it be way better to prove I have the freedom to make a good decision? By deciding to stay in school instead of leaving and doing whatever is fun I am showing that I can make a good judgment call, and if anyone wants to doubt my freedom they can go right ahead because they have the freedom to do that, but I have the freedom to ignore them.

Despair or Laughter

2009-11-03T02:02:00.001-08:00

“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger,” (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 6).

“Humility falls between nihilistic detachment and blind self-importance,” (Nagel, The View From Nowhere, 222).

The existentialists describe the human activity of self-creating, self-overcoming, and positing values as an exercise of human freedom and thus our most valuable function and the only method of intuiting anything resembling “truth” or “value” from the world. As a human is, in Heidegger’s terms, a being for whom its Being is a question (and perhaps the only being of this sort), the question of objective value, a priori principles, and the like are necessarily to be butted against subjective valuations of the world, distinctly for Camus as the recognition of only subjective meaning for life in a void of objective meaning. Thus, Camus presents man’s relation to the world as one necessarily shot through with absurdity, this recognition of the relative meaninglessness of human life in the non-rational darkness of the universe. From these assertions, Camus draws three possible conclusions, the religious devotion to the irrational as God (a la Kierkegaard), suicide, or revolt. Camus presents MOS as explicating the relationship of suicide to the absurd, and he portrays Kierkegaard and Chestov as representing the religious response to the absurd, hypostatizing the irrational and impossible as God, as committing "philosophical suicide." But can these three responses possibly exhaust all relationships to the absurd? Camus’ revolt consists of scorning the fate of humans to whom this bleak situation has been forced by a non-rational universe, but this fate is not a punishment as there is no punisher. The dramatic quality of Camus’ writing, that of the “traumatized atheist” as Robert C. Solomon characterizes him (Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life), has been assessed harshly by several contemporary philosophers. Solomon, for example, concludes that Camus’ “literary genius enables him to paint this ghastly scenario in heroic colours; but we must see it for what it is. It is a degrading, spiteful, and hopeless version of the Christian denigration of man – as petty and helpless, virtually crushed by the weight of his guilt and his punishment, virtuously salvaging his last crumb of self-respect through resentment, scorn [and] silent defiance,” (Solomon, 45).

Bob Plant explores the possibility of a hearty Nietzschean laughter as a response to objective meaninglessness of life through his discussion of Nagel’s dispassionate recognition of absurdity, in the essay “Absurdity, Incongruity, and Laughter.” Camus’ resentment of the absurdity of life is possible, according to Nagel, if one presupposes that “the harmonization of subjective and objective viewpoints is, at least in principle, possible,” (Plant, 130). This seems like a mischaracterization of Camus’ worries, as his despair arises from an acknowledgement of the inevitable lack of possible unity between the perspectives, the thought that humanity will always suffer this tension between subjective meaning and the lack of objective meaning. But notice how I describe the absurd here, in Camus’ dramatic terms of suffering and fate. For some, surely, existence primarily resembles suffering, coping with rather than overcoming certain facticities, such as a life-long depression. For those who do not find the lack of external corroboration of the meaningfulness of human life at least troubling perhaps simply do not share a certain roughly defined disposition. The way in which Plant takes laughter for granted in response to absurdity is the way in which Camus takes despair as a normal response to the sudden realization of the absurd. These may simply represent different characterizations of revolt against the absurd, but whether one is better or more convincing than the other is another issue. Plant’s example of an exchange student reading The Stranger and falling immediately into a protracted despair, only to be immediately remedied by recognizing that one’s thoughts are of importance to the thinker, may show a shallow sort of anguish about the absurdity of life, but this is one example of someone who obviously did not seriously ponder the absurd prior to reading such lines as “Nothing matters.” Someone who grapples critically with the problems of faith will recognize a certain despair that, if only momentarily, resembles the feeling of the absurd as Camus illustrates it. While Plant posits that laughter is “the right response to absurdity,” he never spends much effort describing how convincing someone out of despair and toward laughter would occur. Early on in MOS, Camus acknowledges, “It is legitimate to wonder, clearly and without false pathos, whether a conclusion of this importance requires forsaking as rapidly as possible an incomprehensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of men inclined to be in harmony with themselves,” (Camus, 6). Could being continuously conscious of the absurd, the great incongruity between human aspirations and an unfeeling universe, an inevitable tension between striving toward objective meaning but really only creating subjective meaning, resemble more a pathological sort of misery than a Heideggerian authentic existence? Through constant consciousness of the absurd, or for someone like Rorty, the contingency of language, selfhood, and community, one can avoid placing too much emphasis on either an objective lack of meaning, falling into nihilism, or the subjective meaning of life, becoming too self-important. Thus, Nagel presents a manageable tension between inner and outer perspectives (subjective and objective) as humility. However, it can be said that Nagel is merely another voice on this subject, not inherently more correct than Camus’, but rather the description of another response to the absurd.

Offering a fruitful counterpoint to Camus’ revolt in the face of the absurd, Nagel implores us not to lose sight of either the objective or subjective points of view, that there should always be a tension between them. “The pursuit of objectivity with respect to value runs the risk of leaving value behind altogether…if we continue along the path that leads from personal inclination to objective values and ethics, we may fall into nihilism. The problem is to know where and how to stop, and it shows itself in some of the more personally disturbing questions of philosophy,” (Nagel, 209).

Per last class discussion on knowledge of God, here's John Calvin!

2009-11-02T20:09:00.000-08:00

http://austinfreeman.blogspot.com/2009/10/from-john-calvins-institutes-of.html

Basically, this selection talks about what I mentioned in class last time, that knowledge of God is limited to some philosophical concepts, but that we can't relate on a deeper level with God on our own. It takes Him revealing Himself to us for us to have important knowledge (in the Kierkegaardian sense of subjective and important truth) about God.

Sisyphus.

2009-11-01T21:58:00.001-08:00

Camus' interpretation of the Myth of Sisyphus can be applied to human existence and strife. Humans should strive to make the most of an uncomfortable situation. We all push our own rock up the mountain. Some rocks do make it up to the top of the mountain, but most of them roll back down, and then one must start over. There are small struggles humans participate in every day with forces acting against the rock. The happiest one can be is at the top of the mountain, which is why we push the rock up the mountain. It may be that the rock doesn't fall all the way down to the bottom of the mountain, but is a constant difficult struggle.
The only difference is that Sisyphus is immortal, while human struggles are mortal. The struggle is what we make of it; everyone is different. Struggles vary from person to person, but everyone is fighting the same battle. The rock one bears is different from all the other rocks- different weight, shape, etc. There are various inclines which we must climb.
I’m not sure if I would say Sisyphus is happy; it seems to be more of a determination. Sisyphus cannot escape his eternal damnation, so he resolutely resigns himself to sucking it up and carrying it out without whining or complaining. He realizes that this is his life, and continues to push the rock.

The Pusher Man

2009-11-01T20:40:00.000-08:00

In Camus' The Myth of Sisphus, Camus comments on the story of Sisphus having to spend the rest of his life pushing a rock up a hill. Though he seems to be suffering and though having to spend the rest of one's life in such a state would be miserable, he is in the end fact happy. Since the task is so absurd and ridiculous, every time Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill, he is rebelling against the absurd and does not let the absurd get in the way of his life, even if it is a life spent doing such a task.

Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill everyday can be seen from the outside as a sort of torture. Towards the beginning of the semester we talked about how even if you were bound and tortured with your arms tied around your back, not able to move, that you still have a choice of sinking into darkness and sorrow, or still moving on in your mind. No matter how physically impaired you are you still have the ability to think and even feel anxiety about possibilities. You do not have to think how miserable your life is that you are imprisoned--you always have the choice to think of something else and not succumb to sorrow. In East of Eden, to bring this book up again, the character Lee lives by one word: timshel, which means 'thou mayest.' In the story of Sisyphus, this word is applicable in that it says basically that you are allowed, you can chose your own destiny--there are always possibilities, which are left up to you. Sisyphus is happy to be pushing up the rock, to be revolting against the absurd, because he is allowed to; he is free to think and feel what he chooses, and he chooses to keep pushing and never give up.

However, though Sisyphus is going against the absurd task, how does he know he is happy? Could he be merely lying to himself like Sartre's "bad faith?" He could almost be compared to the overzealous waiter in the restaurant: Sisyphus could be simply acting or faking his happiness--maybe he is just "a little too excited" to be pushing the rock up the hill. Could his happiness objectify him, just as "a table is a table" and thus put him in "bad faith?"

To what extent should the indiv. as indiv. be held accountable to the universal, or have its decisions held to some kind of justification standard?

2009-11-01T19:13:00.000-08:00

I recently stumbled across this long interview with American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who is still alive, about his book "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon." As you can probably surmise from the title, Dennett is an atheist/agnostic and is quite critical of religion/faith in general, particularly with regard to how, he says, our belief in religion--he mainly focuses on Christianity and Islam--often has nefarious consequences in politics and other spheres of human action.

Be forewarned, Dennett likes to frequently express his points in very colorful and rhetorical way--he's kind of similar to Nietzsche in this regard --which, on the one hand, is good because it keeps the discussion interesting; on the other hand, it's sometimes bad, because one sort of has to read between the lines of his provocative, offensive sounding statements and interpret that particular colorful point within the context of the rest of his discussion, as opposed to just looking at it in isolation. For that reason, I've posted the whole interview below.

I'm not sure how much I agree with many of Dennett's arguments in the entire interview, especially the ones that seem to rely on his verificationist construction of science as the final, end all be all, word. Nevertheless, I found the interview challenging and thought-provoking. It's definitely worth watching, if you have a spare hour or so to burn, and are in a religious or philosophical mood.

Moving on to my title's question, while Dennett definitely doesn't express himself in existentialist style terms in this interview, one of the things that leaped out to me is Dennett's prescriptive stance toward how our religious faith should impact our decision-making process, when our decisions involve other freedoms. That is, we ought to be very cautious when our individual relationship/experience with an absolute, that we can only truly "know" or experience through faith, encourages us that take actions that affect other human beings/free agents. IOW, one's faith alone shouldn't be sufficient to justify a decision about something like taking a stance on abortion or deciding whether or not to go to war. Or probably, for that matter, Abraham's agonized decision to take his son Isaac up to the top of the mountain and kill him.

To me, this seems like a critique of the individualist orientation of a lot of the existentialist thinkers that we've read. While what Dennett seems to be be saying doesn't have to necessarily be pro-"herd", it does seem like what Dennett is saying is if you break from the herd (or, in some cases, go along with it) you damn well better have some sort of reason or explanation for that choice. Reasons or explanations that admit themselves to a open discourse of justification (i.e. pulling your decision somewhat back into the universal realm). Thus, if we take Unamuno’s principle seriously that should act as if “to survive and become eternal , Dennet seems to say, we need to factor others into this equation in a way that is more significant than the way a table or chair might factor into my decision as an object with a particular coefficient of diversity. IOW, it seems like when considering something like whether or not you would want to make the exact same choices again and again you should also consider whether you would want to justify those choices to other freedoms the same way again and again. What do you think of this type of criticism? Is he simply yelling at the individual & absolute realms from the universal/ethical realm, or does he have a legitimate point?

law

2009-11-01T19:09:00.000-08:00

In our discussion of Kafka the other day, we dissected his work, "Before the Law." I personally found it interesting to view existentialism through a purely fictional lens, as opposed to the finite and seemingly instructional essays of the other philosophers that we've read. In this story, the protagonist is arrested and tried for a crime without ever learning of what exactly he was convicted of. He is sentenced to death and in a very existential fashion, his last words are "like a dog." He was failed by his dependency on the law. He thought that it represented objective truth, the embodiment of justice, and that it would save him, but he ended up dying while waiting for it to reach him. As we discussed, this has higher implications and can be observed through a broader scope and tell us some things about what exactly law is and how it functions. Kafka talks about the "force" of the law, what fuels it, in other words. It is obviously not inherent, law does not exist outside of humanity (with the exception of natural laws, gravity, etc.). It has no foundation in humankind other than that it is a creation. So one must ask, how does law rule our lives without any objective force behind it? Who gives law this power? Kafka says that by simply recognizing and abiding by the law, the individual willingly gives it authority. So it is the citizens (or victims) under the law that empower it. It is safe to say that this logic is reasonable and, at least to some extent, true. Under this logic, however, an argument can be made that the law is powerless if one doesn't recognize or abide by it. This is, of course, flawed logic because one can still fall victim to the punishments of the law, even if they don't believe in it. My lingering question then, is what exactly does this say about Kafka's theory.

An Absurd God

2009-11-01T10:21:00.000-08:00

The other day in class we discussed what life might be like if there was an absurd God that had created everything and, so far as we know, controlled everything as well (besides the supposed human free will of course). During this discussion, I had my own little simple minded thoughts about what the ethical world would be like and, how might my thoughts and everyone else's on the earth be different. After all, if we, supposedly now, have been created and everything is governed by what we think we know as a peaceful and loving God, then we look at this as being normal. But what if everything that we thought was absurd was indeed normal? Then that life would be cool too I guess, at least I think so because more people would be like me and like to do everyday absurd things like: walk in the cold with no jacket on (basically because I'm not cold), think barefoot-ness is cool, and think that sneezing and the hiccups are the two greatest things in the world. However, because I am supposedly still under the reign of the sensisble and reasonable GOD, all of my absurd "fun things" will remain absurd.

Speaking of everyday things, Camus touches on the fact that suicides are commited because we realize that we are indeed operating under habit and confess to ourselves that we can no longer handle it. He states that "Leaving naturally is never easy," which, I compare to an existential crisis. When I, at least, have an existential crisis, it is a moment where everything that I am doing seems redundant and, although for a purpose, more generally it feels as if I am doing it for nothing. Living naturally is hard because it requires us, or at least me, to go about doing those things that are required of me on a daily basis over and over and over again. And, although I can prove my freedom by going against all of these daily activities, I feel compelled to complete them in "loop" fashion from day to day. This results in me not being able to do other things, leading to my existential crisis or for some people, suicide. It's somewhat like Emile Durkheim's Anomic Suicide. Anomie is something a person goes through when they do not have the resources to reach their goals or their goals simply become unattainable. For those of us constantly reaching for something new, "outside of the bubble," outside of "living naturally" and want to go about things in a new way not the boring old normal fashion, suicide is seen as the quick way out.

Finding the Balance

2009-10-26T19:51:00.000-07:00

In Miguel de Unamuno’s “The Tragic Sense of Life,” he asserts that he is a “man of contradiction and quarrel” not because he lacks the ability to grasp one path as his own, but that he realizes that it is within his right as a free being to traverse across multiple paths, to experience more than one way to live his life. Furthermore, Unamuno adds that not only is he - and, by extension, us – capable of maintaining this dichotomy experiences, but that as a conscious being, he considers it his life mandate to take advantage of any and all opportunities made available to him without worrying over whether it undermines the decision or opportunity that came before. This compulsion to act, this drive to act according to his inner impulsion to “create his [own] spiritual world” (158) is what Unamuno deems the utmost charge in his life. And through a rather skillful network of adjoining metaphors, Unamuno successfully reasons for why he believes his perspective should extend beyond the realm of “he” and into the scope of the royal “we.” But through all his discussions, all his illustrations of why the man who acts with personal conviction than from an obligation to simply do what is expected of him, Unamuno never really reconciles his philosophy with his fleeting mention that “[a]ct so that. . . in the judgment of others you may deserve eternity” (159).

In my view, it seems that Unamuno trumpets a mode of being that moves forward without concern about expectations from others, about the rationalizations and generalizations one can easily find themselves stuck in. A life lived with unbridled “passion and even against all reason” (159) is what Unamuno values the most, but how will that affect one’s ability to co-exist in a world with other immortality-seeking beings? On one hand lies the argument that such fervent adherence to one’s own morals is dangerous, wrong, and that in order to fashion a society in which all individuals feel free to pursue their greater purpose, one must relinquish other smaller freedoms for the sake of communal safety. On the other – and this is the stance in which I believe Unamuno bases his argument – is the belief that any and all limitations on one’s freedom violates the very nature of that freedom, that one must act wholly and completely from one’s inner desire without relying on any external dimension. But wouldn’t that extreme sense of freedom conflict with another’s freedom and cause strife and even suffering? It seems, then, that the answer lies somewhere between those two extremes, in some elusive middle ground that has yet to be revealed. For through all our readings from Kierkegaard and Sartre and Heidegger (oh my!), they have expounded in detail on the need for individuality and self-reliance. But how does that self-reliance translate into a functioning nation?

Atheistic and Religious Existentialism

2009-10-25T22:34:00.000-07:00

It seems strange to think that human beings cannot live their lives without thinking to themselves that there must be some sort of eternal retribution at the end. That at some point we are rewarded for our hard work and staying alive as long as we have, granted that we have lived "good," "worthy" or "meaningful" lives. But I can't seem to bring myself to actually believe in an afterlife and furthermore, I do not think I must necessarily frame my action as some sort of evaluable experience that will be judged after the fact. Unamuno points out that there is no truth that is not subjective, that we must all give our lives meaning, and that believing in an afterlife motivates us to make meaning in the world. While I cannot genuinely belive in an afterlife, it seems that my mortality and the finality of my life is what drives it and gives it meaning.

It is only reflectively that one begins to posit a meaning for his/her life, not actively. Thinking about some abstract eternal return may be helpful for some. But my own temporary existence on this earth and knowing that nothing will become of me after death (I will be dead afterall) seems to be an objective truth I cannot deny. And while I do not know for sure what will become of me upon my death, I don't think that an afterlife is going to help make my life anymore meaningful. In this way, Athiest Existentialism seems to make more sense to me than Religious Existentialism as I think it gets at the heart of the problems of human existence, that we are powerful meaning making beings, but that we are one of billions of those beings who are born and die everyday. It is the intersection of my particularity of being situated in the world and my anonymity of being just another being that is meaningful, not some sort of eerie, dream-like relationship to the world in which I must give a reason why I have lived at all when I wake up.

Immortality and Unamuno

2009-10-25T21:49:00.000-07:00

Throughout the semester, we have encountered different modes of anxiety about possibilities and death. However, few of our readings have offered many thoughts on the afterlife itself and the attainment of an afterlife if one does exist, which is why Unamuno's statement "act as if you were to die tomorrow, but only in order to survive and become eternal" (159) along with his notions on truth intrigue me. In order to flush some of these ideas out, let us examine the situation in which someone performs an action, and when asked why they acted as such, the person resonds "becuase I want to go to heaven."

This motive for action has bothered me since I was a child for reasons partially inexplicable, but after reading Kant I think at the core what bothers me about this motive, in particular, is that it forces the actor to become a tool toward a greater end, rather than a free person deserving of respect and possessing of absolute worth and dignity. Personally, I believe that there are two types of immortaliy; immortality in the sense in which people refer to it in general, i.e. heaven, and immortality gained by impacting the world in such a way that one live's on through the consequences of one's actions. Whereas we cannot hope to understand immortality in the non-physical sense, we can at least strive to live in such a way that when we look back at our life we know that we have set something good in motion that will outlast our physical existstence. If it then turns out that there is a heaven, at least one will have lived a good life. When it comes time for judgement, who knows what the requirements to get into heaven are anyway? It seems as if many religions claim different things, but a common theme amongst them may perhaps be to live in such a way that one leaves a positive impact on the world (think the gold rule- love thy neighbor as thyself), so at least one's chances are decent. Regardless, the point is that instead of living a life that limits ones will to simply be a tool to a greater end, why not live in a value creating way which confims one's own existence in the world as we experience?

Returning back to Unamuno, I wonder how he would respond to such a statement of motive as "becuase I want to go to heaven." While my first inclination was to say that he would not have a problem with this, upon further relfection I think that he would say that heaven is an attempt to claim objective truth about the afterlife, namely that there exists some state of eternal happiness called heaven with pearly gates, and so on. However, in fact truths in our own existence (those that matter, anyway) arise from experience and decisions in our own lives which make subjective truth by confirming or asserting notions about given things. In the context of eternal life, Unamuno wants to cling to the fact that one in fact might exist, but he does not offer any sort of description it; we cannot experience the state of being which we term eternal life until we experience it, which obviously we cannot do. However, what we can do is to fervently believe that the possibility of eternal life is a real one, and live in such a way that we deserve it if it proves to be an option.

So, I do not think Unamuno disagrees with using wanting to get into heaven as a motive for the same reasons that I do, but I think that he would be careful describing eternal life as anything but the continuing of existence past that state in which we now exist. Regardless, I enjoyed the fact that he did address the concept of eternal life, since although it is a metaphysically and epistemologically difficult subject to tackle, it is a real possibility in our lives, and as such deserves attention when speaking of existence in general.

Losing the Reality of the Life: Dementia's Influence on Truth

2009-10-25T21:33:00.000-07:00

While discussing the concept of a posteriori and a priori during our discussion about Unamuno’s “The Tragic Sense of Life,” I began thinking about the experience of a patient that has dementia.

As we explained in class, a posteriori is derived from experience and a priori means independent of experience as in universally true. A posteriori are the truths that unify our lives. So I wondered what the effects would be on the truths of a dementia patient. Dementia causes loss of significant amounts of intellectual ability such as memory. Dementia patients also experience loss of judgment and many cognitive skills. Medications can be prescribed to ease anxiety and agitation. As a result of dementia, a person’s behavior can change to be more prone to anger or aggression. The patient changes permanently cause of dementia and is not the same person that he or she was before the disease. Also, dementia is thought to affect people who are usually older, above sixty years old or so. Someone that is around or above sixty years old has had important life experiences that do influence his or her life.

Dementia changes the personality of a person so a patient’s perception of his or her present life and past experiences could be very different from what has been and is the actual truth about his or her life. As a result, dementia would cause a person to become confused about his or her own life. Because of such confusion, I wonder how a patient with dementia could figure out the actual meaning of life- especially the truths that are derived from experiences, which are a posteriori.

Also, in regard to the concept of a priori, dementia would cause all of a patient’s thoughts to be erased and muddled so I was thinking whether or not a patient’s truths that are independent of experience would be changed as well. Truths that are universally true are understood and accepted by the rest of humanity with any necessary experience. So even though a dementia patient loses the experience he or she would not be able to completely relate to the universal ways of societal thinking. Therefore, I am unsure if a patient with dementia would be able to perceive a priori types of truths.

I wonder three things in regards to a dementia patient:

Would the truths that are derived from experience, a posteriori truths, change if some moments in a dementia patient’s life have been erased from memory? Also, does dementia cause the patient to cloud the impression of these truth- creating experiences which causes the patient to form a false truth about his or her own life?
Also, would dementia patients be able to perceive a priori truths if they are not able to perceive or remember the reality of life?

Objective Truth

2009-10-25T21:12:00.001-07:00

Unamuno claims that we make objective claims in order to give ourselves purpose. He says that truth is subjective. He claims that people can justify anything. That this fact allows for things like murder and rape to be thought of as something that can possibly be justified.
What basis does he have to say that truth is subjective? There are objective truths out there that we can prove with reason. Like all bachelors are unmarried males. Why can’t there be on objective truth, and someone is just wrong in interpreting that truth. A moron would have trouble understanding objective truths like 2+2=4, however someone who is a little smarter can see that easily. People might not be smart enough yet to see the objective truths in other areas. If I make the statement that Elvis is dead, I am objectively correct, I don’t care what conspiracy theories or beliefs people have, if they don’t think Elvis is dead, they are just wrong. I can also extend the objective reality to ethics. Maybe murder is objectively wrong but as ignorant animals we can’t understand that yet. Perhaps we are not using reason properly to understand the world. Who know, maybe Kant was right and anything that can’t be universalized is wrong. If we make reason the basis of our morality, it is arguable that we can claim objective truths about ethics and the world. I don’t understand what evidence Unamuno has to try to remove the idea of objective truths. It seems like if we look at plain egoism or utilitarianism you might be able to make this claim.
On a different note, Unamuno says that people should live every day with the knowledge that they will die. He argues against the church for restricting people from living a “meaningful life” and putting restrictions on people’s actions. Shouldn’t people be restricted though? If I thought I was going to die tomorrow, and if I thought that I needed to fulfill all my life long wishes before I die, I would be currently flying to Las Vegas to punch Carrot Top in the face. However, I know that such actions would leave me broke, in jail, and I know it is something that I shouldn’t do. Sometimes people do the craziest things on a whim. Having these restrictions in place by the church prevents people from doing destructive things. At least being brought up not to sin, will make people think about their actions before they act. It will make people at least think twice before doing things like getting revenge, or hurting people on a whim.

2009-10-25T21:09:00.001-07:00

Unamuno believes that no person’s set of beliefs is totally based on rationality. We believe things then we situate them within the logical framework of our beliefs afterwards. I think that some examples of things we believe can help illustrate this.

In general, people believe what their senses tell them. If my senses tell me that I am listening to Dr. Johnson in class, I believe it without question. Even when I am dreaming, I believe what my “senses” are telling me: if I am being chased by something in my dream, I believe it and try to run away. Only afterwards when I wake up do I stop believing.

Reason tells me that it is certainly possible that I am just a “brain in a vat” or in “the matrix” but I honestly do not believe either option at all. One could say that this is because the probability of such advanced scientific progress or computers taking over the world is very small. But, this makes no sense because if I am a “brain in a vat” the actual world is not accessible to me because my senses are faulty. Therefore, I believe my senses before reasoning out and possibly despite reasoning out the reliability of the senses.

Another example has to do with our close relationships. Although it is possible for a mother to perform an elaborate charade to pretend to love her child, I believe that my mother actually does love me. I can never explore my family members’ minds for their actual feelings about me. However, despite this, I never seriously doubt that everyone in my family loves each other. (My family could get angry at each other or be annoyed by each other, but they would never stop loving each other). One could object by saying it is enormously improbable that someone would pretend to love someone for so long. However, it is not that uncommon to have families turn on each other in awful ways that are incompatible with a loving relationship.

I am not really sure what to make of these things Unamuno says I immediately take to be true. I think that one could argue for why they are true, but Unamuno states that I really do not take arguments into consideration when I believe these things. I am concerned about arguments precisely because I already know these things to be true. This seems to suggest that I create truth or maybe create “my own truth.” However, when I believe that my family loves each other, I believe that it actually happens in a real external world. I think that this contradiction creates an uncomfortable tension in Unamuno’s argument that is unacceptable if we really believe something to be externally true.

unamuno and nietzsche

2009-10-25T20:06:00.001-07:00

Reading Unamuno reminded me of Nietzsche’s emphasis that every person live as a life-affirming and meaning making beings, despite the fact that there is no objective meaning to life. One of my favorite examples of the existential skepticism towards objective truth and meaning is in Nietzche’s book The Birth of Tragedy. He writes that we live just like we dream, as “in our dreams we delight in the immediate understanding of figures; all forms speak to us; there is nothing unimportant or superfluous.” Just like in a dream where strange things happen that make perfect sense to the dreamer, life is a strange happening that we somehow are able to comfortably accept. When something odd happens it is often easy, and easiest on us, to expect that there is a reason for it to have happened, similar to our dreams where strange things happen but still make sense. Nietzsche goes on to say, though, “even when this dream reality is most intense, we still have, glimmering through it, the sensation that it is mere appearance...that another, quiet different reality lies beneath it.” The most thorough skeptic, then, must not only doubt objective meaning and truth in our dream lives, but also doubt reality itself. For Nietzsche, this doubt leads the terrifying appreciation that chaos and chance are the abyss over which we walk, that we can be confident of no objective meaning, have no control over any part of our lives, and finally, that there is nothing we can do to change this. Despite the resulting horror of realizing and appreciating this chaos that underlies our falsely comforting and constructed truths, Nietzsche writes that “perhaps many will, like myself, recall how amid the dangers and terrors of dreams they have occasionally said to themselves in self-encouragement, and not without success: “It is a dream! I will dream on!”

This stance towards life and death seems like one of at least three possible ways that Unamuno and Nietzsche assert a person can approach a life that lacks objective meaning and purpose. One is to try and deny death by falsely attributing objective meaning to other objects in life. Believing in an objective God does this by relegating death as less important—instead of death being the primary concern of living, it is overcome by the attributed purposes and power that is given to God. Another approach to live is to not act at all. Recognizing that death is staring one in the face, the horror of the unknown and the magnitude of the oblivion of death might cause a person to lose faith that any of their actions have enough meaning to constitute a life worth living. Instead, that person would be resigned to giving up their life because they believe nothing can overcome an objectively meaningless existence. The third approach is the one advocated by Unamuno and Nietzsche. Instead of approaching death through a life of denial, or being horrified by the prospects of death and rendered incapable of action, both assert that life should be lived bravely and with conviction, because, and in spite of, the recognition that death renders all of one’s actions absolutely meaningless.

In regards to this third approach, I think that Nietzsche’s description of the dreamer and the overwhelming-ness of chaos complement Unamuno’s principle that every person should “act as if you were to die tomorrow, but only in order to survive and become eternal.” Unamuno’s example of the captain whose boat is sinking is similar to Nietzsche’s dreamer. Even with the deck of the boat giving way, the captain asserts with conviction—in the face of his own death—that his actions are purposeful despite his recognition that there is no objective purpose to what he is doing. Even in dying, he chooses to embrace his living and to live on. As a result, the second half of Unamuno’s principle that one should act is if “to survive and become eternal” seems more to mean that one should live as if their actions made death irrelevant, or because one believes their actions to be worthy of having meaning in a meaningless world. It is not the thought of eternal life that motivates a person to act meaningful and live, but rather is the possibility of creating, believing, and living with purpose that makes one want to believe in eternity. As a result, despite the horror, despair, and anxiety of being alive in a life without meaning, the person most worthy to live is that person who Unamuno suggests acts as if their convictions are worthy of acting out forever, and who Nietzsche claims has conviction enough to recognize life as a merely a terrifying and illusory dream, and yet chooses to dream on.

Experiencing Time

2009-10-25T19:32:00.000-07:00

This class has made me look at many things in a new light. One of those things is time. I don't pretend to know anything about the relativity of time so I am not going to bring that up, and to my knowledge it is irrelevent to this particular discussion. My point is that it is interesting how time is objectified and at the same time (yay puns) subjectively experienced. The same objective duration of time can simultaneously "fly" for one and "crawl" for another. In this same regard, although a week has past, I don't feel a week older. I attribute to the fact that I only live in the present and therefore only experience time in the present. Further, because we only experience time in the present, to some extent I would venture to say that the difference between being five and forty is not the actual perception of thirty five years of time, but the what was experienced in those years and is backed up by memory.

It seems to me that we do not directly experience time; that is, we cannot purely perceive it. We experience it objectively with clocks, but this is external to our individual experience of it. It is extremely hard for me to judge the duration of time without some sort of reference. For example, it is impossible to describe how long an hour is. It seems to me our subjective perception of time cannot be based on time, but rather is solely based on what we are doing and its relation to time.

Time is a complex subject, but hopefully this makes some kind of sense.

Problems with the Anti-Rational Truth of Our Heart

2009-10-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

Unamuno believes that the driving force for human existence is an idea in some sort of immortality. Of course, as he acknowledges, this is “anti-rational.” There is no real reason for us to believe it, but we do. We live our lives as if we will continue to develop as human beings, as if we will live forever. Assuming all this is true, I wonder if we may be doing ourselves a disservice by believing in something that likely does not exist according to our sense of reason. If we have the ability to change this outlook on life, by acting purely rationally, perhaps we would be better off by doing so.

Unamuno’s description of the human purpose—to make our lives unworthy of annihilation and seek an eternal sense of happiness—seems ideal, but only if it is possible to reach this sense of happiness. I do not think it is enough, as Unamuno seems to say, to believe that it is possible. The old idiom, “ignorance is bliss,” does seem to be enough to justify the human ideal. If there is no supreme happiness or immortality, then it seems wrong that it would be the basis of our lives.

Of course the alternative is not great. It means that we must actively accept the fact that the course of our lives is pointless, that there is not any real glory in acting to make annihilation an “unjust reward.” This is certainly bleak, but at least we render our lives something based in rational truth, rather than anti-rational truth, a contradiction.

All things considered, I’m not sure if it would ever be possible to change what Unamuno calls the “anti-rational truth of our heart, but it still seems disconcerting to think of our lives as based upon it. Maybe there is not much for us to do but accept its problems as the center of our existence. Or maybe we should rethink our driving purpose if possible, however bleak that may be.

Life and Death

2009-10-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

In Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life, he talks a lot about the paradoxes of life. Unamuno asserts that the ones that yearn immortality the most, deserve it the most and claims that life must be lived with a passion for immortality against all reason and rationality. On the other hand, he acknowledges the paradoxical lives we live and the subjectivity that dooms one man to commit suicide, while reaffirms another’s will to live. He emphasizes this point and beats it across the reader’s head and then to prove his point suggests that we live our lives as if we are going to die tomorrow, but only to survive and become eternal. This is an oxymoron, how can one live life knowing he will die in the near future, with the intent to survive? It is impossible, it defies reason – if you know your death is a certainty, you cannot possibly survive, so the scenario must be placed back in realm of individual subjectivity, with each of us adopting it as our own and making meaning out of it.
He mentions that the objective belief systems that are rampant in our society are all merely used to justify actions and should not be followed as the objective truths, because they aren’t and often times they are shaken to their core and no longer true as they once were believed to be. A personalized combination of many ethics that an individual can adapt and thus regard as true is what should happen and it is all that matters. Thus, this slight mistrust of any moral or ethic as the objective truth causes much despair and anguish.
Maybe we need this constant state of limbo, where no ethic is objectively certain, where there is a lot of unknown, in order to continue living in the bliss that we do now. How would our lives turn out if we knew everything? What if we knew where, how, and when we will die, or (just to appeal back to Unamuno) that we will continue this existence of constant contradiction forever, attaining immortality in the literal sense? Our ignorance in this regard offers a way out and promotes a more proactive life, because it adds the despair of not knowing and the anxiety of possibility to our consciousness.
Unamuno’s paradox of living as if we will soon die in order to survive, makes it harder to postpone our end, because we are thinking of it constantly, but at the same time we know it, or at least believe it to be false, that we have much more to live than just one more day. It also leaves us wondering, not knowing when our death will happen, trying to subjectively accept that it will happen, but also empowers us with choices and that we are in control, until of course we die. Our ignorance makes us think we are immortal and act accordingly.

A Few Thoughts on Morality and the Individuality of Doubt

2009-10-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in class we continued to discuss objective and subjective truths in the context of Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life. It is popular among the existentialist philosophers to suggest that objective truths are not what we really mean when we discuss what is true. This is also incorporated in calculative thought, in which we learn facts such as 2+2=4, accept this as factual, and move on with our lives. In my opinion, this argument undermines the importance of objective truths, because they allow societies to function properly. It is evident that we have objectified morality, because we have established laws that people subconsciously accept and live by. For the most part, we do not even think twice about the cases of murder, rape, etc. because it is engraved in us that these actions are immoral. To take our own subjective views on these actions would be “frowned upon,” and to act contrarily to these social norms could land one in prison.

We discussed the idea of raping babies in class. We collectively agree that raping babies is…wrong. Then we attempted to find reasons when raping babies would be thought of as just, or “called for.” Our inability to think of any legitimate reasons for such an act shows the little influence of subjectivity on aspects of morality. When is it okay to murder someone? When is it okay to steal or cheat? To subjectively conceptualize when these acts are decent is irrelevant, as society has established that they are wrong. Thus, we must abide accordingly. While it may be an entertaining thought exercise, it has no application or relevance.

Let me shift gears a little bit and turn to Unamuno’s irritation with Christianity’s generalized rationalization of its beliefs and requirements. Both Kierkegaard and Unamuno criticize Christianity for attempting to make itself something to which everyone has access. However, to understand God or to have a relationship with such an all-powerful being is individuality at its highest degree. One must undergo an entirely particularized experience to have such a relation with the Absolute.

But that begs the question: Is doubt not a singularized view as well? It seems that in order to fully disbelieve in God, one must recognize the utmost individual experience with the Absolute. Disbelief would then stem from the failure to have such an experience, or to recognize those who claim to “know God” as absurd. However, one could develop doubt of God from an experience that causes him to “lose his religion”, as we mentioned briefly in class. This particular occurrence, in which something tragic or not according to God’s “plan” happens, will cause someone to lose his faith altogether. Something as powerful as this, to break the most particularized relationship, must also be out of the ethical realm entirely.

Jesus and other Role models

2009-10-12T22:40:00.000-07:00

All arguments about God aside, I would like to take a minute and wonder about Sarte's view l on Jesus and other role models in general. Let's assume that Jesus was a good person (as most Christians do), and examine the claim that we should imitate Jesus in who we are so as to be better people. I think, for Sartre, this claim creates a variety of problems. First, when one uses someone or something as a model for one's behaviour, one can rid oneself of responsibility for one's actions by virtue of blaming the model. For example, to follow a model is to make certain, prescribed chioces in a given situation based on the actions of the model in that same situation. Then, the model holds primary responsibility for the action rather than the present actor, which is to hide from freedom altogether, which is inauthentic. Second, and more closely related to our recent readings on bad faith, to use Jesus as a role model (i.e. W.W.J.D?) is to attempt to fit into a mold; just as the waiter in the cafe attempts to be a waiter rather than himself, one who attempts to "do as Jesus does" attempts to define themself as an object, something that is completely defined for the situation and has no transcendent possibilities. Even so, just as the waiter will never be a waiter in the same way in which a table is a table, one who attempts to exemplify someone else, such as Jesus, as a role model will never be that role model in the same way an object is an object; we must not forget that a person's essence does not precede existence, as in the case of an object, but rather that a person exists in the mode of not being, as in the mode of having freedom over how one will define himself, in terms of not yet being what one is. Thus, one simply lies to oneself when one attempts to follow a role model, just as the waiter lies to himself by trying to be waiter in every way. One could say that we simply look to models for advice as to how to act, rather than try to be the model in the way the waiter tries to be a waiter, but I think even then we run into a problem in terms of responsibility- one who looks to a model assigns the reasoning for action to the model, and thus attempts to lack any responsibilty for the making of the chioce.

I would like to believe that Sarte would condemn role models just as he would blaming God or genetic predisposition for the result of man's free will, but I wonder how we come to recognize any sort of notion regarding responsibilty having a point of reference. If we view responsibility for our actions as a function of the consequences of our actions, how do we get a notion of what is a good consequence versus what is a bad consequence? It seems as if we must relate consequences for others back unto our own self, but we inevitably fall into making judgements on consequences which we undoubtedly have no way to relate to, such as a rich white kid thinking about consquences of his actions on the life of a poor black kid. What is good for the poor black kid might be such a culturally and demographically different event than what is good for the rich white kid. How, then, can the rich white kid make any judgement with regard to the consequences of his actions? Similarly, how can he make any judgement upon his own responsibility? I'd love some feedback here- as we read more Sarte I unfortunately find myself questioning things which I previously (thought I) understood.

Bad Faith and Self-Identity

2009-10-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

After reading Sartre’s Patterns of Bad Faith, it seems to me that any attempt to develop a concrete sense of self is ultimately futile. Through living in the world, and participating in society, it seems virtually impossible to not be in some sort of bad faith. Perhaps it is possible to be in bad faith in some actions more so than others, but we are always, on some level, in bad faith. We constantly make ourselves objects based on the ideas of the people and world around us. This is how we understand who we are. Our culture, family, and friends are highly influential; if they are the source, even in part, of who we become, then we can never be entirely sincere, as sincerity is defined by being ourselves, as not acting as objects.

Of course, we can distance ourselves from our family, friends, and culture, but can we say that doing so would not be in some way based on our experiences with our culture, family, and friends? That distancing would be insincere—what Sartre equates with bad faith—it would be a decision not entirely our own. In other words, we would be objectifying ourselves, as the Other, to the rest of society.

Sartre’s example of the waiter helps illustrate this problem of bad faith and self-identity. It seems that one can objectify oneself to a great degree, as does the waiter who actively tries to become the waiter as the world perceives a waiter should be. He does not see himself as an individual human being, but rather as solely an object. This of course is bad faith; he is insincere, and could likely be more “himself,” by not trying to be something else.

However, even if we are not actively pursuing bad faith in the way in which the waiter is, are we not still in some way in bad faith, and thus not ourselves? If we are the patrons of the restaurant, we objectify ourselves to some degree, acting the way we think someone at a restaurant should act. This is again bad faith, but to a lesser degree.

My point is that it does not seem that we can escape bad faith, and ever really be ourselves. We will always, on some level, be playing a role. Perhaps the only way to be completely sincere is to be entirely self-interested, but then again it is difficult to say which interests are truly our own

Can't we just avoid this situation all together?

2009-10-12T15:28:00.000-07:00

If I am simply what I do, then perhaps I ought to act genuinely at all times so that I will remain authentic. But what if authentic action sometimes involves bad faith? What if the only genuine course of action is to refrain from acting? It seems to me that when it comes to relationships, no one ever really knows what is going on. In an attempt to keep "cooooooool" or "in control," we often refrain from telling each other the way we feel about each other. When there is this lack of communication, it become easier to act in bad faith, because sincereity of the situation (see post below) is wrapped up in action, rather than strict communication (the action seems to have become the only source of communication). It seems that when a person is more straight forward, it becomes harder to simply ignore them. Additionally, when there are no open lines of communication, the only perspective I have on the relationship is my own. So when I am feeling like a boy might like me and I am not sure how I feel about him, it seems reasonable to refrain from action until I figure out how I feel. It seems like refraining from action is the only genuine course of action other than tell the guy "hey, I don't know how I feel about you yet." That sort of directness may seem harsh, but isn't it more harmful to both parties to continue to act out of bad faith simply because they have trouble expressing themselves?

Sincerity = Bad Faith?

2009-10-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

During our discussion of Sartre’s “bad faith” last Thursday, I felt there was a lot of criticism towards the woman on the date. The suitor comes on to her and she does nothing except try to view his actions as mere facts. Yet, could that have been the whole situation? Most likely, we have all experienced a situation where we alter our actions to avoid an awkward circumstance or try to downplay our emotions whether they are positive or negative. It’s not that the facts of the situation aren’t recognized and further analyzed. It is the issue of “sincerity,” not in the emotional sense but rather the understanding shared amongst people, which I feel is a large part of ones actions. There is this idea of how we are suppose to socially act towards one another in order to be respectful and keep the situation more at peace.

We briefly discussed Sartre’s perspective of sincerity at the end of class. Correct me if I am wrong, but it was summed up as an issue of bad faith, because “I am what I am in mode of being it, and I can never be that.” I found this very contradictory to our previous discussion of existence preceding essence. If action makes up who we are then why doesn’t being sincere constitute as something other than bad faith. If we act according to our emotions, then there wouldn’t be lying. We would be recognizing the facts of the situation and thinking or reflecting about the it, then acting accordingly.

When focusing on the aspects of bad faith, we recognize that in trying to conceal the truth from others, when you already know the truth you create a dual existence. Yet, if you recognize the truth and act according to the “sincere” facts and the realization of those facts would that still be bad faith? I guess I am having a little trouble grasping the correlation between bad faith and sincerity. In the defense of the woman, she may have recognized that the man was coming on to her, yet decided to act in a way as to avoid awkwardness and simply be “sincere” in societies sense. Maybe this is a way of lying to yourself and could be exactly what Sartre is trying to get across, but I just don’t see how being sincere and being in bad faith are of the same nature.

Is there a Need?

2009-10-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

When I finished reading Sartre’s Patterns of Bad Faith, I began to question whether or not God is necessary and after much thought, here’s the conclusion I came to.

Generally speaking, God is as undefined as Sartre’s ‘good faith’, but, unlike Sartre, we attempt to define the unknown. We do this by adding attributes to God that we think are not of ‘bad faith’, while, also adding some that aren’t so appealing, such as: jealousy, and vanity. Sartre would say that by adding these attributes to God, we are limiting our scope on God. By relying on the past and present to provide ration for a phenomenon that cannot be explained we ignore all other possibilities; therefore, we are in bad faith. But, if this is true, then God makes all humans who choose to believe, people of bad faith. So why do we need a God, especially if you choose to follow Sartre’s logic? The simple answer is that we need God - the same way a child needs a parent, the way students need teachers - God becomes our permanent mentor. Unlike your parents or teachers, God is a being that doesn’t leave your side or die; in fact, the closer you are to your one absolute truth, death, the closer you are to God, as his being exists beyond time and space, like death. The other reason why God is needed is the idea of ‘good faith’. Since humans are animals, our one basic instinct is survival; luckily, we have the ability to reflect, reason, and rationalize all qualities that keep us civil. As such, if the concept of God didn’t exist, where would human thought be? God values certain moral characteristics of people, and therefore people follow them to be a reflection of the great Being. Here’s where ‘good faith’ comes into play, but first I need to clarify that, ‘good faith’ is not one’s passion for God or religion; in fact, it’s far from that. ‘Good faith’, as it relates to God is the personal character traits we attribute to God and aspire to have. For example, the evaluative thinker thinks highly of his being because God also assesses, therefore God becomes the evaluator. So why then is it shameful to judge others, especially if God does it, and the attributes given to him are indeed human? That’s because God becomes the absolute evaluator, this is ‘good faith’. If we attempt to take on the role of the evaluator, we ourselves take on the role of God, putting us in ‘bad faith’. I believe this is where every human lies, as overtime every conceivable quality that a human has, has undoubtedly been passed on to God. I don’t think this is a bad thing; in fact, humans striving to be Godly can achieve many good things. The problem is when negative attributes are transferred to God’s being.

Preceding Camus

2009-10-11T21:52:00.001-07:00

There seems to be some controversy over the role of genetics and external influence in our daily lives, whether or not our specific facticities, viewed through the lens of a geneticist or behaviorist, inhibit the practice of free will. For those born with one or more mental disorders, such as major (or severe) depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder, the feeling of free will is diminished in many cases. Often an overpowering sense of despair crushes the will to action, causing the depressed person to sit inert for any stretch of time. Alcoholism is a different bag. Some people use alcohol as a coping mechanism for the absurdity of life, its lack of external meaning, and the specific hardships faced, such as a splintered family. Sartre defines freedom as “autonomy of choice,” but he describes hardship in strictly physical terms in “Freedom and Facticity: The Situation,” using the example of the crag. He claims that the only limits placed on freedom are those which it imposes on itself, those created by attempting to perform some impracticable feat. However, a mental disorder does not lie without, something optional for a human to encounter. The generation of hardship on someone with life-long, hereditary depression does not require a person to attempt anything other than everyday life; external factors may exacerbate the problem but many times do not produce it. Hence an issue arises when Sartre asks, “Is not this sadness itself a conduct?” (231). At least with depression, it is an effect, not a choice of any sort. It often bubbles to the surface following the slightest mishap and sometimes skips over major tragedies. Perhaps it is also the case that in such an affected state, one recognizes the absurdity of life more often than others; people get caught up in whatever purpose they have created for themselves, be it a job, school, family life, and do not recognize the dark lens through which many others view the world. The need for “a reason to get out of bed” is recognition of the need for constant struggle for meaning, a seemingly simple exercise of free choice with which the depressed person has trouble. For some, merely dealing with the ubiquitous lack of integrity in modern life (i.e. the YellaWood guy, Corey Trotz commercials) is enough to inspire a move to the country, or to another country. I suppose a more direct involvement with the absurdity of life and the question of suicide would be helpful at this point, instead of the skirting I have provided here, but soon we’ll read a selection from Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.

Can freedom truly not have boundaries?

2009-10-11T21:51:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed Sartre’s claim that freedom never encounters limits, but rather imposes them on itself. This claim in itself is very applicable to explaining the why’s in our daily life and instrumental in reassessing how things are defined. It is our freedom through which we define our obstacles, but it is always before things are encountered. That is, we first draw up the freedom field in which we will operate and be limited, then we assess various situations that arise, such as the crag. Depending on our already defined freedom, we can then understand why the crag posses such a daunting obstacle if we are building a stadium, a neutral existence if we are surveying the land, or an aid if we need a good view to take a picture.
To claim that freedom is entirely limitless and that it only imposes limits on itself is somewhat true, but it needs to be qualified. Freedom needs to be defined before anything else occurs. Just like not making a decision is in fact choosing to not make that decision and thus a choice is made, with every choice, freedom is limited. Any subsequent choice limits freedom more or alters the limit on freedom as much as the previous choices will allow. Thus any “crag” that is encountered after that first choice, where freedom is already limited will be in-itself, either “as resistance or as aid.” Thus, it is impossible to first assess the object, and then impose a limit on freedom, so that the “crag” can be defined as aid, rather than as resistance. For this reason, it is irrelevant that a freedom only has boundaries that it imposes on itself, because there is nothing that can be done to change that freedom that was arbitrarily limited before anything else happened.
However, Sartre’s claim does roughly translate into a great analytical tool. It gives us the insight into why something is occurring and provides a tool to confirm or realize that some fundamental belief needs to be changed, within the parameters of the limited freedom. Thus, the limits that freedom imposes on itself are purely coincidental with absolutely no time or any knowledge at all about future encounters that would make the limits easy to work with in the world. For this reason freedom is limited by its own parameters, but because of random chance, which essentially makes freedom always have boundaries and only before existence exists is it really limitless.

Hesse

2009-10-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

I'm going to completely jump off the Sartre ship. I've been reading Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. The "Treatise on the Steppenwolf" (found on page 104 of our book) is amazing; I really encourage reading this to further understand existentialism. Throughout the book Hesse references Nietzsche, whose influence is evident throughout the novel. The main character, Harry Haller, completely distances himself from society, but keeps a close watch and commentary on said 1920s society. "But in the midst of the freedom he had attained Harry suddenly became aware that his freedom was a death and that he stood alone" (108). This is existential to the extreme. Harry mimics Dostoevsky's Underground Man in the way that he is not mentally constrained within society but continues to critique it. The difference between the two is that the Underground Man is angry against the bourgeois society, whereas Harry longs to be a part of it. He longs for the innocence and simplicity of living like the masses. Although he is a lone wolf (a wolf from the Steppes), he wishes to be fully human and experience humanity for all it's stupidity and ignorance.

sartre and others

2009-10-11T21:29:00.001-07:00

In his section on “Bad Faith” Sartre gives the three examples to help explain different facets of his point, the woman on a date, the waiter, and the homosexual. The women on the date shows how the women is in bad faith by believing she can transcend the situation she is in by denying the facts of the situation, and by reducing the man’s actions to mere facticity instead of applying meaning to them as well. The example of the waiter illustrates the bad faith of a waiter who is denying the transcendental qualities about himself by trying to fit an specific conception of the waiter, only concerning himself with his facticity. The example of homosexual shows the problems with sincerity, as choosing to be sincere is in Sartre’s view objectifying oneself as a “real” object or label.

The example of the waiter stuck with more than with the other two, and also has given me an excuse to ramble about my own misunderstandings of Sartre. First, I agree with Professor Johnson that it is very easy to see Sartre’s description of what it means to be in “bad faith” played out in everyday interactions with others and in my own thinking. For example, driving back to campus yesterday I had an experience I thought was exactly like Sartre’s waiter example. As a friend skipped through radio stations, one DJ’s voice stood out very clearly. Talking about musicals and rock operas, just the way he sounded to me made me think that he sounded too much like a stereotypical DJ, that he in particular seemed to fit the expected norms of what I think a DJ sounds like too perfectly. According to Sartre, the DJ was denying transcendent qualities about himself. At the same time, though, in having this thought about the DJ being too much like a DJ, I was reducing him to mere facticity as well.

This dual attack on the waiter’s self made me feel a little unfair. On the one hand the observer sees the other and claims they are being too much like a mere object, that they are denying their transendency. On the other hand, by doing this the observer is embracing their own facticity by arguing that the other person, as an object in the world, is being too much like an object we expect, the ideal of the waiter. Together, I think that this limits the waiters and DJ’s by conceiving of them against a certain stereotype of being, and limit myself by having this conception of what the waiter is trying to be in the first place.

Thinking about this reminded me of Kierkegaard’s analysis of how we limit other beings by our own conceptions. In the case of the waiter, looking at him and saying that because he is “too real” he is being absorbed by facticity and denying the transcendent seems to limit his ability to be anything other than what I see. While the waiter is free to continuously fluxuate between different types of bad faith, I don’t see how an observer can actually say another is in bad faith without being in bad faith themselves. In order to say that the waiter is too much a being-in-itself I must reduce myself to a being-for-itself. The observer necessarily limits both themselves and the other to make this decision, even if they admit that they are both free in the ability to move from one state to the other.

I was wondering about Kierkegaard, though, whether he would look at the individual as limitless every time, refusing to acknowledge either their faciticy or transcendency but instead being completely open to the other as being free absolutely. I don’t know. I know Sartre is not denying possibilities for persons, but I’m having trouble thinking about it as at least to me, in order for me to know of myself, I contrast with others and in doing so limit them to a label, to a state, to something other than me. I guess I’m just tied up in how even when I may be capable of an infinite set of possibilities, it seems like I have to limit everyone else and fight the limitations perceived on of myself in order to be that way. I wasn’t sure if this was an accurate reading of Sartre, or just my confusion, but thinking about bad faith and others makes me feel that in order to be me I naturally limit others to being others, to being things in the world, while this limiting of others is at the same time a limitation on myself.

Sartre and Blade Runner

2009-10-11T20:43:00.000-07:00

When we started discussing Sartre I immediately thought of the movie Blade Runner. The plot of the movie centers on the escape of several replicants, or artificial humans. As the movie progresses the humanity of the protagonist, Rick Deckard, becomes more and more questionable. BY the end of the film it becomes very hard to determine if Deckard is or is not a replicant. The objects of the Blade Runner universe are the replicants which though appearing just as human as actual humans they are denied their humanity and freedom, hunted, and killed because the natural humans do not deem them to actually be people. In fact, the way Blade Runner is presented it is impossible to truly determine who is a natural human and who is a replicant, with even Deckard’s own naturalness being called into question by critics. The characters of this film have embraced their facticity while denying their transcendence. They have become so rooted in and defined by objects that they seem to be nothing more than extensions of the objects. Where humans, those possessing both facticity and transcendence, should define objects, the objects of this world define the humans. Blade Runner goes so far as to make objects into humans so that the definition that the objects are giving is reflected upon themselves; humanity is subverted by inhumanity, objects develop more important roles than humans while humans are placed in a position of unclear meaning. With this in mind is it possible that a replicant could posses both facticity and transcendence since they act like humans, fear like humans, and behave like humans?B

Anguish

2009-10-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

The Origin of Nothingness really got my mind going. When I read the part Sartre wrote about vertigo, it really hit me because that was a sensation that I have experienced countless times and never understood. Just like he said, when I’m on top of a tall building with a low railing, I’m reluctant to get too close to the edge, not because I’m afraid I will fall off, but I’m afraid my body might throw itself off somehow. It was as if I was scared my body would turn on me for some ridiculous reason. But as Sartre explains, it is anguish that we feel at these times because (aren’t we the self centered bunch) we see everything else as a subject to our life. If a bookcase somehow fell on me, I wouldn’t think “damn, if the bookcase had only fell the other way”, instead I would probably think “if only I had been standing a foot away this wouldn’t have hit me”. The possibilities of my life are my possibilities, as Sartre explains. They are singular as in my life. I believe what Sartre postulates, but I can’t help thinking that it makes us look egotistical and self-centered. The world revolves around each one of us in our own minds and we seem to think about everything in relation to us. In this new series I’ve been watching, Bored to Death, one of the characters explains to the other that they are each in their own movies and one sees the other merely as being featured in the life in which the one is the star. I find this analogy to be very true of human nature, we are consumed with ourselves and can’t help but one consider another person inasmuch as what we see of them. You don’t see a vast majority of the life of the people around you, but, for the most part, you only consider the parts that you see. They may go off and be completely different people away from you, and you would have no idea, and they would be one person in your life’s movie and a complete different person in someone else’s life movie. On top of that, that person sees you as just a character in their own movie. Anguish comes from inside and we mainly feel it in relation to ourselves. We feel anguish when we have to make an important decision, but we cannot feel anguish for someone else who is making an important decision, or at least that’s what I understand.

Dealing with Bad Faith

2009-10-11T18:54:00.001-07:00

Let us return to the lovely couple out on their first date. The man makes his advance in the form of taking her hand. Sarte proposes that she acts in bad faith by feigning to notice. However, let us examine this from the prospective of the man. The man took her hand in order to create an immediate reaction and allow him to properly evaluate the situation. While Sarte explains her inaction as bad faith, the man does not have such luxury of understanding. Positive action on her part would tell him she was attracted; negative action would tell him she wasn’t. Either way, the action would at least confirm to him that his action—and intention—was received, and allow him continue according to her given response.

However, no response is uncertainty; it creates anguish. The woman’s apparent ignorance of his advancement baffles the man. Did she really not notice his hand? This is possible, perhaps, but the man thinks it unlikely. As he would have read her action, he now tries to read her inaction. He creates her possibilities: she likes him and she’s playing hard to get; or, she doesn’t like him but at the same time she doesn’t want to be rude, etc. Or, he realizes, these theories are solely the product of his own mind; she in fact did not notice his hand. But he is sure she had to have, so he presses for a more satisfactory explanation.

This is a form of nihilation. The man guesses at the situation by creating various attitudes for the woman, only to realize that these attitudes have no existence outside of his own mind; he has created nothing. It is possible, maybe even likely that he postulated accurately on what the woman was in fact thinking. However, given the gross ambiguity of the situation, it is extremely unlikely that he dwelled on that answer any longer then any of the others anyway. It may have in fact crossed his mind, for example, that she didn’t move her hand because she was pretending not to notice so she could postpone her decision. However, the man immediately realizes how preposterous such an idea is. Chances are, he reasons, she really didn’t notice his hand, and he is overanalyzing the whole situation.

Of course the woman felt his hand. Better yet, she knows exactly the anxiety she has created in the man. She knows her inaction utterly confuses the man because she knows it doesn’t make any sense to him. She knows because it is for this reason she left her hand there in the first place! So the man continues to think.

God and Freewill

2009-10-11T18:30:00.000-07:00

I know that Sartre does not believe in God, I think his reasoning behind this comes from the fact that if God made us then we can only do what God programmed us to do. We would not have free will because we were programmed by some other being. From what I heard in class Sartre would not think robots and AI do not have free will because they were programmed by us. I do not think that created beings would not have free will though. I think that free will and the idea of someone creating us are not mutually exclusive. For example if God did not exist then that would mean that man would have been programmed by nature and the environment. It would mean that nature created man and gave us everything we have; it would have programmed us to follow survival of the fittest. It would mean that nature and the events around us encoded our genes and us to a certain destiny. This would mean that there is no free will. Nature and our environment would therefore be the only thing that governs us.

If this is the case and we were programmed by something else, then we do not have freewill. So either people can have freewill despite being initially programmed by God or nature or whatever, or freewill does not exist at all. Things like A.I. would therefore have freewill. So the super computer in the Terminator movies would be a rational being.

On a slightly different note why do people assume genetics take away peoples freewill? Like people with a genetic disposition to alcoholism do not have the freewill not to be an alcoholic. They make the choice every time they pick up a drink, and at anytime they can put it down if they really wanted too. They can choose not to drink. It seems to me that genetics are merely blueprints to the body, and that it merely guides people to survival. Instincts are merely tools to help people survive. If Sartre is right though and people are a blank slate when they are born, then people shouldn’t be influenced at all by genetics. But it seems true that genetics will greatly influence people’s decisions. Does Sartre take genetic disposition into account, does he think it matters in terms of freewill and how we choose, or are people truly blank slates that can only be influenced through our choices.

Existentialism in East of Eden

2009-10-11T17:59:00.000-07:00

Sartre says that determinism would mean there is nothing special about human life and that it is a cop out, basically saying that you are not free, that you are governed by a certain thing. In class we discussed the idea of saying "oh, it's just in my genes" or my parents did so and so or had some disease or act a certain way, so I'm destined to do the same, which is also a cop out--it is saying that you have no control over your life and that you're just making excuses, and we know what Sartre would say about that--NO EXCUSES!

Anyway, this made me think of Cal in East of Eden. If you haven't read it, Cal is the son of Adam Trask and also has a twin brother Aron. In a nut shell, their birth mother Cathy Ames is the embodiment of evil in the book and extreamely manipulative and parastic became depressed after giving birth and wanted to kill the twins, as she did not want them in the first place and also didn't even want to marry in the first place. So instead, she shot Adam, her husband whom she didn't love (obviously), in the shoulder and and left him and the twins to be "free" and become a prostitute. In addition to killing her parents when she was a child, she also poisons and kills another woman. Overall, she is obsessed with committing sin and again, the embodiment of evil. So, when Adam finds out she is a prostitute he obviously wants to keep her identity concealed from his boys and does not want them to find out. But eventually, Cal, the darker of the twins who has evil tendencies does find out and hates her--however, he is also concerned about being just like his mother too:
'"I hate her because I know why she went away. I know--because I've got her in me." His head was down and his voice was heartbroken."

..Then Lee, their wise lifetime housekeeper and cook says:

"'Listen to me! You wouldn't even be wondering if you didn't have it. Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now--look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do it--not your mother."'

So first of all, Cal is fears he is just like his mother and destined to fail at life and that there's no hope f0r him. But lee then basically reiterates Sartre's ideas about breaking free from the idea of determinism and changes his mind. Go Lee!! Then, a little later, Cal actually goes to visit his mother he said to her: "I was afraid I had you in me," and she says "you have," and then finally he says "No, i haven't. I'm my own. I don't have to be you." This is the perfect example of realizing you are you and no one else and that you don't have to be tied down by determinism. You could either take the easy way out and give in or you can rise above determinism and become your own person.
Also, this brought up another point about Sartre's "Bad Faith." Adam Trask conceals the truth that he knows about the twin's mother to protect them. I know this is bad faith, but i guess it's almost like saying that it is lying, but lying to conceal an ugly truth--like "lying in a good way," if there is such a thing, which according to Sartre, I'm sure there's not, but personally I would not be about to tell my children my wife shot me in the shoulder, didn't really love me, and left them to become a prostitute. Just sayin' I think I would have to go ahead and be in bad faith on this one, Sartre.

Love Is Dead

2009-10-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

Love Is Dead

In contemplation of Sartre's Patterns of Bad Faith in conjunction with the horrific nature of my past relationships, I began to consider the principles applied in Sartre's work in relation to my relations. One qualm that's been plaguing me in my pre-sleep state amidst a plethora of beta waves, when I should be thinking about unicorns, rainbows, and guppies like every other little girl, is the question of love. Love to me has become only a question, and in it, I cannot find any substance, transfer of certain chemicals, intransigence, or truth. I believe that there is a certain feeling that accompanies specific actions, but I can no longer allow myself to subscribe to the heavily processed system of 'love." I think that what people associate with the word love has never existed. The feeling is instead something much less powerful and miraculous. My drive to believe in love and seek it is sadly little more than an instinct to seed a harvest of young baby monster Sams. I believe a lot about relationships and interactions and feeling, but having read Patterns of Bad Faith, I cannot accept 'love." I for those looking for comment boosts...I am not at all saying there are no meaningful relationships....blah blah blah....nor am I saying that drugs are good, and religion is bad.

The love I am referring to in this post is the relationship brand of love, as opposed to the love in which I can really love America, or the Jonas Brothers, or circular silver refrigerator magnets. Just as no one can ever truly achieve good faith, it is just as impossible to achieve love. Personal love (I don't have the time or desire to discuss love in terms of agape, so I'm omitting that until another time) is a strong attachment between two people in which each subject has a locked attachment to the other in a purely volitional sense, such that they are not driven to love as a means for certain wants. I believe that this love can never be achieved just as good faith because it would require intense work in order to achieve such a thing, and in the same vein, it would require an awareness in treating love like an object, attaching to it "a permanence like that of things," so that it may be maintained. Love is like an attempt to find some sort of suspension between choosing between the facticity and the transcendence found in humans, as if we are above making decisions when we are not. Belief in love allows for us to will strongly that the strong attachment felt at a moment, which is almost infinitely enjoyable, will never cease to be, and in doing so, we are in denial.

student

2009-10-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

I was drawn in on thursday by our brief discussion on the student. Within this discussion we defined student both as a noun and a verb. All students (n.) are capable of learning and, ideally if they are good they do just that. But often times what happens (and what I did pretty much all through high school) is the student adapts to the system and, instead of focusing on learning, they focus on studenting (v.). Studenting, as Dr. J put it so well, is basically gaming the system. This can include writing papers right before the deadline (no pun intended seeing as this blog post is a bit down to the wire), creating an easy schedule of classes, or doing just enough for the desired grade and not for the knowledge. Studenting can involve learning if the student is good, but does not inherently include it. I am confident that we are all guilty of both learning and studenting at some point in our academic careers, some of us with more favorable ratios than others. I remember all of the endless and seemingly pointless math worksheets and spanish exercises in high school which I did between classes, during lunch in the cafeteria, or even with one eye on my peer's completed work. I'm not exactly proud of it, but our discussion on thursday suggested that maybe I was merely honing my skills as a student. I was just playing the system that was put before me.

My lingering question, however, is what happened when I got to college? Isn't the idea of college that there is less busy work like the math worksheets, and more genuinely productive work? Does college lend itself more to learning and less to studenting? I certainly agree with this sentiment in that I have much less (if any) work that I view as "pointless." I can see the objective in every assignment that is put before me and as a result, I feel that I am learning much more. But perhaps, as a friend suggested to me, we are just learning to student differently, to con another system.

The “Objectification” of Nothingness

2009-10-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

In “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre begins with explaining that the existence of a being precedes that being’s essence. He sees existence as the possibility of freedom in the world. The fact that humans have freedom makes it possible for beings "to nihilate" certain possibilities. This act of nihilation is used by Sartre to further explain the concept of nothingness in “ The Origin of Nothingness.” He explains that nothingness happens as an act of nihilation. Nothingness is a means of experiencing an absence of something in the world. A being is not his past or future being but simply its present being. A being is not its past being in a sense that it is marked in part by an absence in the past; that being is in the mode of not being himself (in the past) which is in turn nothingness. Along the same lines, a being cannot be its future being as it is not possible to determine what the future being would be if the being is not actually able to be there which is caused by the basis of the nothingness. In order for nothingness to be possible, the absence of a being has to be experienced by another person besides the being himself. Hence, nothingness has to be recognized by others in order for it to be considered the basis of the being's existence.

However, what if there was a person that was very isolated from society all of his life. He may have been seen by people he passed in the street but he was not actually recognized by anyone around in a significant way. He was alone from the beginning of his life without any identifiable parents and had never genuinely been recognized by anyone but himself. Because he is not recognized by anyone, then his being would not have nothingness if no one else realizes his nothingness. If his being’s nothingness is not recognized it would be difficult for him to implement his absence as an act of nihilation; therefore, if he is unable to implement nihilation in turn he is not choosing one possibility over another. Without the ability for possibility to be nihilated, a being cannot have complete freedom which is the basis of our existence. So without having our nothingness recognized by others, we are deprived of our ability to nihilate possibilities which is also eliminating our freedom. Freedom is what distinguishes us from objects which have no possibilities. Without others realizing our absence we loose our distinguishing features of being a being- for- itself that has freedom and possibilities.

If a person is not recognized by others his nothingness is not realized either so if nothingness is the basis of a being’s existence then does the hypothetical being described become a being- in- itself (an object) as opposed to a being- for - itself (being with freedom)?

2009-10-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

Sartre’s entire philosophy is based on the freedom humans have because a human’s existence precedes his or her essence. It seems intuitively true that we are free. When I get up in the morning, I have a choice whether to go to class or skip work or to wear whatever I want, etc.

But there are certain philosophies, i.e. Determinism, that tell us the exact opposite. We are human animals conditioned in such a way as to make decisions based on our genetic make-up and how we were socialized. To jump-off from where Jen left off on her previous post, examine the man with the “alcoholic” gene. The man may have the gene to be an alcoholic but chooses not to drink a sip of alcohol in his life. But why would he do his? One could point to his upbringing. The man was raised by an alcoholic father and saw the awful effects of alcoholism and his mother encouraged him never to have a sip of alcohol.

Sartre might respond to this by saying that this example is completely consistent with freedom because one could imagine another man (Man B) having the same situation as Man A, and making a completely different decision. Man B could have an alcoholic father, the alcoholism gene, and a mother who encouraged him not to drink. And yet, Man B could certainly choose to become an alcoholic. Indeed there are empirical examples of both of these decisions being made.

The determinist could respond by questioning whether Man A and Man B’s situations were absolutely identical. There are subtle differences in the genes and situations of Man A and Man B. Maybe Man A’s mother was more caring and attentive than Man B’s mother. Or perhaps Man A had a passion to become a philosophy professor (due to genetic and social factors, of course), while Man B was awful at school (genetic intelligence factors) and thereby had a low self esteem which contributed to his alcoholism. No matter how specific the situation is, the determinist could argue that there is a factor that we have not accounted for. However, no matter how specific the situation is, the existentialist will argue that a human could have decided differently.

Despite all of the different arguments, determinism merely assumes that causes are there whether we can identify them or not, while Existentialism assumes that causes are not there, which is why we can not identify them.

If determinism is true, however, why do we experience guilt or pride? When a human being accomplishes something great, he or she has an emotional reaction. This is not merely restricted to moral decisions, but also extends to creating great philosophies, making great works of art, and making important scientific discoveries. There was no moral imperative to motivate him/her. Although he/she may say things like “I could have never done this without the support of my family” or “My colleagues were integral in my success,” he/she still has the feeling that “I accomplished this.” In a similar way, the alcoholic, Man B, can feel guilt. It does not matter if he has an alcoholism gene or had an awful childhood. And even if Man B hurts no one else, he still feels disappointed in himself and guilty about his actions. This is because he feels that he could have made the opposite choice, but, instead, he chose to be an alcoholic.

Determinism could say that these feelings of guilt and pride are programmed into us, but I think that they are indications of our self-knowledge of our own free-will. There is no moral imperative to “be great at something” (though you will receive praise if you are) and the alcoholic should be guilt-free if he hurts no one but himself. However, we have these feelings of pride and guilt because they are natural emotions that arise from a free-will.

The Effects of Biological Predispositions on our Self-Created Essence

2009-10-07T23:15:00.000-07:00

Sartre’s philosophy is concerned with personal responsibility. He believes that our ability to think shows that we are entirely free. We are born into the world without any traits, but we develop our persona as a result of the choices we make. For instance, an honest person is not such because he was born that way; rather, he becomes honest after he acts truthfully in a situation where he could lie. Basically we are not born into any particular situation, because we have infinite possibilities on how to mold our lives. However, this seems to bring about too big of a responsibility for humans, according to Sartre. Thus, the huge responsibility causes people to have tremendous anxiety. Sartre believes that we experience anxiety because we suddenly become aware of the possibilities in store for us. We discussed in class that we don’t have to graduate from Rhodes, and go on to some graduate school or the workforce. We feel the need to do so, however, because it gives more purpose to our lives. Thus, the actions make up our essence that we create for ourselves. Because humans are faced with such deterministic responsibilities, we purposefully seek ideas or concepts that will make choices for us.

I find this perspective somewhat problematic. Sartre’s philosophy is not supported by scientific research that proves the existence of biological predispositions for certain habits or personality traits. Sartre believes that humans tend to blame our genes for the way we act. While human’s have (what seems to be) an endless variety of choices to make in order to create our “essence”, there are cases where the possibilities are limited due to our genetic makeup.

Take, for instance, depression. While there are cases where the person may be in mourning or traumatized in some way, depression is a genetically linked ailment. The brain of a depressed person simply cannot produce the proper amount of neurotransmitter. The family members of a depressed individual may be vulnerable to this chemical deficiency as well. These predispositions are then present before birth. Although one may be proactive about their condition and assume responsibility, the depression itself was determined for that person before birth (based on its genetic link), and will affect this person’s behavior throughout its life.

Secondly, alcoholism is another genetically linked dependence that again, is determined before the person is born. For these reasons, I find it difficult to completely agree with Sartre. It is important to understand that inherited disorders can deeply impair a person from having full control over his or her life.

Based on Sartre’s idea that we are born without traits, I wonder how Sartre feels about homosexuality, in terms of it being natural or not. He clearly condemns homosexuality, in the sense that he refers to the "guilt" that homosexuals must feel. But it seems that he assumes homosexuality as something that someone determines for themselves. In contrast, there are a number of scientific studies demonstrating that humans or animals do not consciously “choose” which sex they are attracted to. A study in 2006 on News-medical.net demonstrated that over 1,500 species have demonstrated homosexual or bisexual characteristics, including apes, lions, and dolphins. Thus, it is suggested that homosexuality is determined before birth and occurs naturally. However, it seems that Sartre would see it as a choice made by that person; it is something that that person feels is necessary for his or her “essence.”

While humans take responsibility for themselves for the most part (choosing a job, or education, acting honestly, or kindly, etc.), it is possible that a person has predetermined traits that will affect the creation of his or her essence.