Week 14 Blog 2: Feminism

Wow.  I mean, wow.  That was probably the most heated our discussions have ever been, and to be honest, I'm not sure it was really helpful to the overall discussion.  A couple people were asked to "push buttons", and I think that might have been a mistake.  The topic of female inequality is something that has been talked about many times before, and has many negative stigmas associated with it.  Feminism, to me, brings forth mental images of women on soapboxes, shouting about how the male has always oppressed them and how women should take independence from men.  If you've ever seen the Nicolas Cage version of "Wicker Man" you'll know what I'm talking about when I say that the schoolhouse from that film is exactly what I imagine Feminism.  A classroom full of only girls discussing the singular problem from America, and a pair of twins say in unison, "Phallic symbol, phallic symbol, phallic symbol."  This kind of attitude is more hatred than anything else, and doesn't lead to equality, but more of what I consider to be a rubber band effect.  With the rubber band effect, imagine holding a rubber band taut between two fingers.  If you slowly let the two fingers come together, you can slowly relieve pressure and the two sides become equal.  However, if you let one slide slip off your finger, you get a rapid and violent reaction where the band overshoots one side and shoots off the other side.  It's the same when dealing with any form of inequality.  If you have both sides working in unison to fix the problem, while it may take longer it will in fact succeed with no violence and no pain on either side.  However, if one side calls for radical reform there is a high chance that there will be pain, and even the chance that the side that was mistreated will then go on to mistreat their opponents.  This then leads to further violence, and the proccess repeats.

Week 13 Blog 2: Bad Faith

I honestly loved this talk.  Both the talk on Sunday, and the talk on Wednesday were eye opening to me in completely different ways.  The most profound came from my talk on Sunday during the after school mock classroom talk.

The idea of Bad Faith to me is a re imagining of a very old concept that I have held in high regard.  To be in a state of balance between to different sides of the same coin is an age old idea, and one that bears repeating to younger generations.  From good versus evil, light versus dark, will versus fear (stemming from my having just watched The Green Lantern for the first time), or this idea of being stuck in the past versus being stuck in the future, they all have the same outcome; balance.  There is no pure good just as there is no pure evil.  Rather there is good in the face of evil, and we have to choose which side to pour our efforts into.  This idea brought from Bad Faith, however, is a little different.  Rather than being a pull between both sides of the problem and having to choose a singular side, the idea of going against Bad Faith requires that we stand between the two ideals, like balancing on a tightrope.  With Bad Faith dealing with being stuck in the past and the facts versus being stuck in the future and never having anything happen, we as humans find that facets of our lives can sometimes fall into one of these two categories, but rarely does it fall right between.

A personal example I have of this has to do with my love life.  While not a great success, I feel I have the ideals and mindset of a person ready and willing to commit to a stable relationship with the right person.  And indeed, I believed I had found the right person, and all was good within the world.  However, I found myself in a state of constant stress as I tried everything to make sure this person was happy, while never having much happiness for myself, and at the same time straining the relationship.  I was in a state of Transcendence, or being too far into the future.  I had begun to see failure before it occured, and in trying to avoid it, caused more failure than I was trying to prevent.  And then, when the relationship failed, I entered into the opposite, Facticity.  Within Facticity, I was conviced that I was the ultimate cause of all the problems in our relationship, and that my failures would keep me from having a stable, meaningful relationship anytime in the future.  And that was when I hit rock bottom.  I spent hours thinking to myself about what had happened and how much of a failure I was.  And at the same time, Thad was preparing to deliver the talk that would change all that.  Because when I heard about this idea of Bad Faith, it all clicked.  I was living in such Bad Faith that I had forgotten my reasons for seeking that stable relationship that I craved.  It was so I could have happiness in my life, and provide happiness for others in that moment.  There was no need to think of the future, nor of the past.  Rather, there was only a need to make sure that I was in the moment, doing my best to make life worth living every day.  And this was mirrored in class on Wednesday.  I found myself reasserted, and I feel that if I hold onto this idea of Bad Faith, I can achieve more than I ever would have thought possible.

Week 12 Day 1: Philosophy and Action

Well this week's first class period got a little heated between myself and another student, and it really made me quite defensive about my position on this subject of philosophy and action.  So, for this week's blog, I'm going to dictate my stance on the question of whether or not philosophy is useful in relation to the actions we take in our day to day lives.

Yes.  Totally and unequivocally yes.

Why?  Because without philosophy, our lives go around based on instinct.  During class, the student I was arguing against said that philosophy was not useful because it did absolutely nothing.  He claimed that sitting around and thinking about things, while nice, was not the way to get things done in a meaningful society.  I believe that is completely false.  Saying that action is the only useful part in a society is like saying that the grocery store is the only useful part in the food chain because it's the place that actually sells you the product.  And that's completely wrong.  To say that the whole chain is unimportant because the last person is the person that acts is to claim that the last person did all the work.  If you think that way, you build a society based on being the person to be the final link in that chain.  Imagine if the cure for cancer was found, and instead of the team of scientists getting the credit for the work, only the man who gave the medicine got any of the credit, even if that man had nothing to do with the creation of said medicine.  Similarly, to claim that the reasons behind action have no usefulness because they do not take the action themselves is equally faulty.  I will not claim that action is not important, some might say that without action, philosophy would indeed be useless to us.  But to say that philosophy is useless even if it precipitates action is both a false statement, and a terrible way of viewing the work of people around you.

Week 12 Day 2: Writing from Beyond Self Relization

Well I feel like this post is going to be a bit lacking in that this really isn't what I would like to talk about right now.  What I would like to talk about is the amazing discussion we had today about Sartre's writings and how they deal with "Bad Faith", but I will limit myself to what I need to talk about from last Wednesday's conversation about Sartre.

So, let's talk about responsibility.  Trying to understand Sartre's meaning of responsibility is very difficult, and I believe a portion of the class got a bit sidetracked into responsibility relating to how your actions reflect on the actions of others (I was a large part of that side track, apologies).  But after a lot of discussion, it boils down to something a lot simpler.  Sartre was simply talking about responsibility relating to inaction.  As was brought up in class, he lived in a prisoner of war camp during World War 2, and all he had were his own thoughts.  And his thought process, at least to me, seems pretty straight forward.  "Hey, I hate how so many people aren't fighting in this war against these assholes.  Seriously, why aren't they?  They need to stand up and fight in order to stop these people.  They are affected just like the rest of us.  They have a responsibility to their country, their families, and to themselves to stop this war!".  And I think every one of us has had a moment where we think, "Why don't people stop bad things from happening?"  If there is so much bad going on in the world, why doesn't everybody step in?  Some people might not think it will affect them, or that it isn't their problem, or that it will hurt them if they try to help, or any number of "cop outs".  But honestly this is all bullshit.  I agree with Sartre that if we see a problem, we have a duty to try and stop it.

Week 11 Day 2: Transposition of the Great Arteries and how it makes you see Death

So, for this post, I will be both talking about the concepts discussed in class, as well as something that is near and dear to my heart.  But first; Da-sein.

This idea of Dasein has changed for me over the course of our discussions during class.  At first I thought it was simply the lens through which we see the world around us, shaped by our interactions and our life experiences.  It would explain why someone who comes from a rich British family who has problems feeling loved by members of their own family would see life differently than someone who lives in the slums of Africa and has to prostitute themselves to make enough money to keep the family they care about alive.  So after this class, I remain a bit confused as to what this idea of Da-sein really and truly is.  So I decided to try and sum it up in a sentence.  Or at the very least, a paragraph.

Da-sein is our understanding of the universe.  At the same time, it is who we are.  Our good qualities, our bad qualities, our loves, our hates.  Everything we are is rolled into one singular idea.  Some call it Da-sein, I prefer to call it a soul.

So what happens when that Da-sein is over?  What happens when it is gone?  That's what Death is.  We narrowed down in class that Death is the end of that Da-sein.  It is not the absence of Da-sein, but the absolute end of it.  So when you die, you can never come back.  So this brings up some interesting questions and arguments.  Can you experience Death without being dead? No, you cannot.  Without being dead immediately following Death, it isn't really Death according to our definition.

So now onto the part of the blog that is near and dear to my heart.  As some of you may have heard, I have a dear friend of mine who has a heart condition called Transposition of the Great Arteries, where her heart valves are swapped.  This has tons of medical implications, and has caused her much suffering over the years.  She was told from a young age that she would not live past puberty, and today she is 24 years old.  She is a medical miracle in my book and in the book of every doctor she's ever been to.  If you want to learn more, check this link: http://www.childrenshospital.org/health-topics/conditions/transposition-of-the-great-arteries-tga  (as you can see, it's on a children's hospital website)  How does this relate to our discussion?  Well, as I mentioned in class, this woman has had Death thrown in her face more than anyone I have ever met.  So therefore, she lives within that class of people who look at life as a mere inch from Death, rather than most people who live their lives thinking they are immortal.  I value her opinion because it brings me back to earth, and she helps me re-evaluate who I am on a daily basis.

Week 11 Day 1: beings into Beings

Boy, do I not want to ever read or write the word Being again.  But, for the sake of further existential exploration, I shall endure it for a little longer.  So, onto the examination.

The idea of an understanding of the overall Being by taking a look at the life of a single being within it was something that I strongly agreed with, and was excited by the idea of.  I brought up during class that I considered the journey to understanding Being to be equated to doing a 1000 piece puzzle without looking at the box to see what it will look like.  You need to take a look at each piece, and see how it interacts with every other piece in order to fully and completely understand what Being really is.  The question then became, how does one do this?  How can someone completely understand what Being is, if  they cannot get a clear understanding of every being that exists within it?

The answer, at least to me, is that it cannot be done.

Well actually I should clarify.  I can't be done in that exact way.  However, I believe, that a mathematical idea could help us to understand how this works.  Consider a set of data points that closely resembles a line graphed out on a chart.  In order to find the slope of this graph, we use an approximation to understand what the graph is close to.  In this way, we can understand something about the line without knowing everything about it.  Another example is in Calculus, where we study the effects of infinity on equations without actually having a complete understanding of what infinity is.  In the same way we understand infinity we might be able to understand Being.  By extrapolating the data from what we can gather from testimonials, historical texts, eye witness accounts, and every other piece of historical true evidence on the planet, as well as as much info from the present as we can surmise, there must be enough data included within that to give us an approximation of what Being is.  We may not have enough information to completely understand it, but we can get as close as humanly possible with what little we actually have.

Week 10 Day 2: Necessary Suffering?

Suffering is part of life, and no singular human being, young or old, can ever claim to have had no suffering in their life. And yes, I mean everyone.  I've noticed recently, more than ever, that people in all walks of life go through suffering. Some may argue that a very wealthy woman's fashion show being rained out not considered true suffering, but I disagree.  Yes, it isn't the same as a young poor girl having to sell her body for money in order to keep herself and her family alive, but that does not mean that they don't feel the same amount of suffering.  When you're life is great and nothing seems to be going wrong, it's truly amazing how the brain seeks out suffering where one might assume there is none.  For example, I am in a great home, with a modicum amount of cash inflow from my mother and father, and my life, on the whole, is great.  Not "I can buy anything I want" kind of great, but great nonetheless.  Yet the other day I felt so terrible about a personal situation with my girlfriend that I felt like my world was in tatters, and that I would never get past that day.  I would call that, on all accounts, suffering.  But I understand that I am not like the rest of the world.  I'm not a young man living in Crimea, called to defend his country.  I am not an old man, living on retirement funds while his family forgets about him.  I do not have what some would call "true" suffering.  But I, as a person, within my own world, have known suffering.  And I guarantee that everyone who reads this post has felt some sort of suffering within their life.   It may not be the worst thing in the world, but it is considered suffering, at least to me.

So what does this lead to?  Well, suffering does eventually end, this we know.  Whether sooner or later, all suffering does end.  But does it always lead to something good?  Most of the time it leads to something better, in my eyes, but I don't feel comfortable saying that suffering always leads to goodness. And is that really a true statement, anyways?  Could it be that anything after suffering looks good in comparison?  Similar to a man dying of thirst seeing a glass of water.  To us, that glass of water is something is always there, and that we never stop to think about.  However, to that man, the water is more than that. It's a life saving drink that is akin to all the money in the world in that singular moment.  So does suffering lead to goodness, or just to what we perceive as goodness?  I think it's impossible for someone to step back to tell, but we as philosophers have to try our best to understand the world around us.

Week 10 Day 1: Passion and Reason

One of my classmates brought up the idea that reason can lead you to passion, and will push you forward towards the meaning of life.  However, I completely disagree.  Passion is the root of all human nature.  We fight with it, we embrace it, we try and throw it away, but always it stays with us.  Passion is with us from birth, and nothing can get rid of it.  And really why should we?  Two brothers started with a dream of sailing with the birds, and that gave us the planes we use as transportation today.  One man with a crazy hairdo wanted to understand how the world worked and gave us some of the fundemental rules of science we have today. And one man decided that he would teach a class the wonders of philosophy, and here we are now.  Acts of passion fuel our reason.  Reason is the understanding of why the world works the way it does, and why we work the way we do.  If I went through life only working on reason, I would never deviate from the path my parents taught me.  I would follow the best path, never changing course to see if anything else might be objectively better.  And that would be a terrible existence.  If I never had the passion to decide for myself that I should become a writer and it was decided by my reason only, how could I gain happiness from that experience?  As for the arguement that reason leads to passion, how can it?  How can I look at a situation, reason what to do from it, and then become passionate about that work?  Instead, I would need some passion in order to reason what to do in any current situation.  Without passion, the world is stale and boring, and I would not like to live in that kind of world.

Week 9 Day 2: True Freedom

Freedom is one of the ideals that us Americans strive for in our daily lives.  Part of this stems from our rebellion against the Britains, another part of it stems from our rebellion against the confines of religion.  And I believe part of it is inherent in human nature.  What does a human desire more than his own freedom?  To decide for himself what he or she should do with their own existence?  To feel that they are more than just a Pinnochio puppet that is tied down with strings and wire.  However, what is real freedom?  Many people brought up during class that true freedom has never been realized.  We work within the confines of our social structure.  It was writer John Locke who examined what life was like before civilized societies, and he posited that we as a people had gone from a state of nature to a state of civilization.  And by doing so, we give up certain civil liberties to protect that civilization.  For example, a puma may kill another puma who is hunting for food if he chooses, and he will not be ostracized by any other puma for doing so.  However, if a man kills another man in modern society, we as a society shun him, punish him, and sometimes kill him ourselves in order to maintain the peace and existence of the society.  So what is true freedom then if we cannot attain it within society?  Can we leave society?   Mr. Locke mentions that we cannot go from a state of civilization to state of nature again, and therefore we are stuck within the bounds society gives to us.  And even if we did break from the laws of society, would we then be free?  No, because our mortal bodies and the restrictions of the universe bind us and keep us here on Earth.  So what if there were no limits?  What if we were in a white space, with no walls or floors or ceiling, and given the power of God himself.  Creation, destruction, transformation.  All the powers of the world were ours to command.  That would be true freedom.  But what would we do?  Again we find ourselves limited by the one thing that we cannot change.  Our imagination.  No matter how hard we try, we cannot invent a new color, or come up with more ideas than that which we are capable of creating.  By being human, we are bound to never be truly free.

But does this mean we should not strive for freedom?  Of course not.  We strive not for true freedom but for relative freedom.  Freedom to do as we wish within our society, and freedom to challenge society if we see it does not fit the duties it was assigned.  We crave freedom to control our destiny and to not have any force, be it fate, God, or supernatural entity decide what we do.  We want the freedom to have chocolate ice cream, to hold the ones we love, and to say what we want and to strive to make that dream come true.  That is freedom.

Week 9 Day 1: Joker and the Cybermen

This idea of an Underground Man really intrigues me.  I can't think of someone who does something without rationally considering his options and choosing what is most advantageous to him.  And if they do choose something disadvantageous to themselves while still retaining enough reason to understand that what they are choosing is wrong and that they do not want to choose to do it, I would call them insane!  However, the fact that they realize they are wrong makes them not insane by definition!  So I really am at a loss for an example of this Underground Man as someone in real life.  Perhaps the only example that could even come close is the Joker from the Batman: The Dark Knight.  That version of the Joker, more than others, really had no reason for doing what he did.  He wasn't in it for money, he wasn't in it for pleasure, he wasn't in it for domination like the Scarecrow.  Though some might say he had a sick kind of pleasure in his terrorist activities, I might go against that by saying that during the scene where Batman is coming at him on his Speeder bike and the Joker is standing there, telling Batman to run him over, there is a moment where you can see that the Joker does not care that he is going to die.  He has an internal instinct to not want to die, and yet he seems to ignore that and goads Batman to kill him.  For what purpose we don't know.  He seems unfazed when Batman fails to kill him, and we know if he wanted to die he could easily kill himself.  So for some reason, he seems to want that which goes against his own self judgement and does not care that it is the wrong thing to do.

Another thing I wanted to talk about is the idea of losing emotions, and giving up emotions entirely.  Some people said during class that acting on emotions was the wrong way to go through life, and that getting rid of those things, along with other faults, and relying solely on reason, was the way to live a productive life.  To me, being a Doctor Who fan, this reminds me of an enemy of the Doctor called the Cybermen.  The idea of the Cybermen is that one man, John Lumic, wanted to cheat death.  He was a genius who was dying of sickness and old age, and to cure both of those he built himself a cybernetic suit of armor.  This would house his brain, keeping him alive.  But, he also believed, like some of the people in class, that emotions were obsolete, and would only hold him back.  So, to counteract this, he built into the suit an Emotional Inhibitor, which would allow him to keep back his pesky emotions.  He considered this achievement the next step in human evolution, and wanted the rest of the world to convert with him.  However, not everyone wanted to become a walking brain in a suit of armor, and resisted.  This is where my point comes in.  Why would people want to refuse?  Because they see their "faults" as strengths, the things that make them human.  Getting rid of those attributes would be getting rid of who they are.  So sometimes, emotions are just as useful as reason, if not moreso.

Week 8 Day 1: Master and Slave Relationship

One of the things that really bothered me during our discussion this week was during the discussion of whether Masters had to think only for themselves, or whether they could think in terms of a group.  To say that a Slave alone thinks of the group as a whole, and it's needs and objectives, to me seems to be the opposite of what society should believe.  In today's society, we praise the self obsessed and the self indulgent.  Shows on television like "Keeping up with the Kardashians", "Honey Boo Boo", and "Housewives of (insert famous American town here)" praise the kind of people who really only think about themselves.  And we pay to watch these people!  People who could care less what goes on outside of their little lives with sportscars, big houses, and relationship drama.  It's one of the reasons I move away from television nowadays.  But there are some reasons that I still watch TV, and these mimic the thoughts of the Slave; the thoughts of the group.  One of my favorite TV shows I watch is Doctor Who, a science fiction adventure featuring a man in a time traveling blue police box who goes around saving the universe.  One of the reasons I like this show is that it shows us both the good and the bad side of humans.  One episode in particular really hit on an interesting point.  In the episode, the gang travels to the Kingdom of Great Britain far in the future, when the entire island of Great Britain is moved off the planet Earth and is flying through the stars looking for a new planet to colonize.  But there is a mystery aboard the ship, namely that it doesn't seem possible that it could move.  There are no engines, no wiring, nothing that would be seen aboard a spaceship.  And the government is keeping the secrets as to what makes the ship fly.  As it turns out, the last of a species known as Starwhales, came from the sky to Britain when the planet was going to explode, and the government captured it and built a spaceship around it.  They were essentially torturing the creature in order to make it fly through space for them.  Then the group was faced with an impossible decision.  Do they let the Starwhale go and kill everyone aboard the ship, or do they destroy the Starwhale's brain, making it feel no pain and save the people on it's back.  It's then up to one of the companions, Amy Pond, to realize that the Starwhale would fly for them even if they didn't torture it and that it had wanted to help them fly all along.  The episode both proposes that there is a conflict between thinking for oneself, and thinking of the many.  But it also shows that if everyone thinks for each other the best outcome may be reached.  And I think that that kind of philosophy is exactly what we as a species need to employ in our daily lives.  Do not think for yourself, but rather for everyone including yourself.

Week 7 Day 1: Choices

This time around, I'll be tackling the idea of choice.  Because in our reading this week, we find that to our author, choice can only be the right choice if the choice is to not follow the herd.  And I for one, find this highly illogical. And to demonstrate this, I will describe to you a game I recently played that is entirely based on choice, called The Stanley Parable.  Honestly, if you want to have some laughs and some serious thought on the nature of free will and the choices we make, go ahead and get this game.  The Stanley Parable focuses on a man named Stanley, who goes to work one day and suddenly realizes that all of his coworkers are gone.  He goes out of his office to try and find out what happened.  In this game, the player is offered many choices, and each of these leads to a different ending.  For example the first choice you are offered is to follow the voice of the Narrator or not.  When Stanley reaches a room with two doors, he is told to take the one on the left.  But you as a player can easily take the one on the right.  Now, say for instance we take the ideals of Nietsche and do not follow the herd, or rather what the Narrator wants.  If we take the path on the right, we lead ourselves to more endings, some good, some bad, and some silly.  And we gain and learn from these endings.  However, if we decide to vehemently follow the Narrator, we find ourselves being led to what the Narrator describes as pure happiness for Stanley: true freedom.  He disables a mind control machine that was making him work tirelessly and never to question his surroundings, and leaves the office into the great wide world.  So, why is this path the wrong one?  In Neitsche's eyes, this path is the path of the herd, the one that everyone follows blindly.  But if someone were to choose that path after examination, what then makes that so bad?  In my eyes, it doesn't.  To me, the point isn't that everyone has taken that path, but rather that I find it is the path worth taking.  And no one can claim that I am wrong in thinking that.

EX Class Week 4 Day 2: Homework in Class

Wednesday's class was nothing short of fast paced.  I felt like the class was whizzing by, and I had to hold on or I was going to be lost in the constant stream of thought.  While this isn't neccessarily a bad thing, it made me feel as others in the room probably felt; I felt like I had more to say.  We started with some of the questions, which really felt like I had to only choose one to talk about, and if no one else talked about that topic, then my notes would be useless.  However, we did end up touching on my topic of choice; innocence.  I felt some connection between the reading for the class and the reading I did for my own presentation.  With the topic of innocence, there are so many questions; but the one posed to us was if at any point in our lives we as a person were innocent.  Looking at it from a strictly rational standpoint, I found myself saying, "Yeah, when we're born we're innocent. There isn't something inherent within us that causes our innocence to be destroyed."  And I yet I forgot that in our reading it talked about the fact that the Original Sin written about in the Bible negates that very innocence, and the fact of our existence and knowledge that is given to us from birth is a sin in the eyes of a church.  And even in masses at churches during part of the prayers the church mentions the fact that they are not worthy of praising god, and they have baptisms to help clean their parishioners of their original sin.  So then should we consider them innocent?  And of course this has implications about what happens in the court room.  Should the jury be made aware that they themselves might be guilty of the same level, if not a higher level, of crime than the man on trial?  Can they be an effective jury with their innocence taken from them?  Would we even want a jury of innocent men?  Furthermore, is innocence even possible?  Should we define innocence based on having our "Original Sin" and have everything we do after that be against our innocence?  So many questions, not enough class time.

EX Class Day 4: To Boldly Go Where No Group Has Gone Before

So Monday was the first group's presentation.  As much as I dislike being the second group to go, I'm even happier that I wasn't in this first group.  Not that they weren't great people or anything, but it was just that I didn't want to go in not knowing what to expect.  So as I entered into class, knowing that my group would be next, I looked at the presentation in 2 ways. In one way, I was a normal student trying to get his opinion into the discussion.  In another, I was a student looking to see how I could improve on their presentation when it came time for my own group to go.  I got a lot from the discussion, including some ideas that I used in my own slides for the second half of the text.  But I also got some interesting ideas on how to format the presentation.  For example, the first group hardly used their slides, so I made sure that we got the slides out of the way first.  They also used a part from the book as a skit, which was fine, but I wanted our group to do something a little different.  So instead of using the book, we expanded upon what the book had already said.  Overall, they did a great job, and I was really surprised at how easy it looked to stand up their and give the presentation.  Of course, I had no idea the prep work was gonna be so difficult.

Ex Class Day 3: Group Meetings

I have to say that I always dread meeting my groups, mostly due to the fact that I always find myself with a mixed bag.  I always get some people who wanna work, some who don't, and others who couldn't care less. I seem to have gotten a pretty good group so far, although we did find it odd that our fifth member showed up for class and yet left as soon as the class broke into groups.  The rest of Group 2 sat down and started discussing how we were going to tackle this skit and presentation.  To be honest, I hadn't finished the section we were presenting on yet, and relied on the others in my group to fill me in.  Having now finished the paper, I can still say that I have no idea what we are going to talk about.  As I said in my last blog, the characters in the book seem very stereotypically French. I find that while I have an easier time reading this book compared to others like Kant.  I really found myself having a hard time caring about the characters in the book, seeing as they didn't really seem to care about the world around them.  And that was the problem for our group.  It really didn't seem philosophical at all.  Most of the book was about a dude getting up, having a smoke, and going to his mother's funeral.  So our group got together and made some notes using the notes we had from the teacher, and made some preliminary conclusions about the book and about our skit.  I felt we did well, but could have done more with all the group members.  I hope that this next week will be more productive and that we can tackle our assignment with a better frame of mind.

EX Class Day 2: Short Days and Boring Protagonists

Wednesday was fairly uneventful.  As I entered class, I had just come from sitting in Coor's Computing Commons for about 2 hours, and I was dying for something to do.  Of course, when I entered class and sat down, I didn't realize that I would be there for only a total of maybe 30 minutes.  We got together in our groups, and my first thought was, "What should these people call me?"  When I looked at the list of people in the class, I noticed that there were at least 4 other people with the name "Benjamin", the same name as mine.  So in a split second decision, I chose to have my fellow classmates call me "Artie".  That means that when they see the name of this blog, they'll instantly link it to me because no one else in the class has the same name as me.  I also have always wanted someone to call me Artie in a real life setting.  So two birds with one stone there.

My group seemed nice enough, and we exchanged nervous pleasantries as we introduced ourselves.  I must admit that even now I have a hard time remembering any of the names of the people in my group.  But of course I only spoke for them for less time than an average bus ride.  So as we shuffled along to stand in line to get our photo taken, I began to try and figure out exactly what I wanted to be for my group.  Was I going to be the joker that gave everyone the energy to push through the tough assignments?  Was I the guy who was going to buckle down and do the work, or was I the guy who was going to sit back and do nothing. Figuring that doing nothing would get me an F in the class, I figured that trying to help the group with whatever needed to be done seemed like the best option.  So that's what I plan to do.

For the reading assigned to our group, I'm starting at the beginning of the book, The Stranger, and I find myself feeling rather annoyed by the main character.  While I have very little idea where he is from and what language he is speaking in the books initial translation, I imagine him as a stereotypical French man.  And I don't want people thinking I believe this stereotype is true, indeed my views are far from it, but I can't help but see him this way.  He seems very disinterested with everything, and I see him standing over his mother's coffin, cigarette in hand, and having a very boring facial expression.  It annoys me that this character can seem so unlikable, and yet we are supposed to care for him.

Overall, Wednesday's class was short, and I got very little from it unfortunatley.  And due to a scheduling error on my part, I had 4 hours to wait around before my next class, leading me to sit at the MU and watch "Days of Our Lives", which suprisingly I got even less from.

Simply,

Ben "Artie" Belisle

Exstitentialism Class Day 1: Opening Thoughts

Most people:

What the actual fuck, how am I going to pass this class?  I hate groups, I hate writing, and the teacher said he wasn't actually going to be teaching the course! Besides, this tall gangley freak sitting next to me is starting to creep me out.  I think I'll drop this one and go for an easier A.

Me (the tall gangley freak) :

Damn this is gonna be fun.

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My name is Ben Belisle, although most people on the internet know me as Artie, hence the name of the blog, "Existential Artie".  I'm a sophmore here at ASU, and this is the first philosophy class I have taken.  Well actually that's not true.  This is the first philosophy class I've taken in college. My other experiences with philosophy come from my days in high school when I went to a school known as Chandler Preparatory Academy (CPA for short).  The school was centered around teaching kids how to be prepared for college by enabling them to have a love of learning and giving them a handle on what was going to be expected of them at the university.  I actually noticed a few others I knew from the school in this class, but that's to be expected when your graduating class is only 69 students.

But back to philosophy.

I've loved philosophy for a few reasons:
1. There are never any clear cut answers, and almost everything has an antithesis associated with it.
2. It allows me to express myself through the writings of others, and gives me a chance to read through the thoughts and memories of another individual who, more than likely, had a much firmer grasp on reality that I do.
3.  I get those awesome moments of "Holy shit, he/she is totally right."

So when I got into this class and I got 4 separate emails from the teacher, I knew that either the class was going to rock because we had a zany teacher, or that the class was going to suck because the teacher was obviously not very bright.  And personally I'm glad we got the former and not the latter.

As for the reading and what we discussed in class, I found myself sticking to a singular idea: existentialism seems to be the "loner's philosophy" according to Solomon.  He talks multiple times about how it's an individual's perspective on a world that doesn't make sense to them.  I've felt this way before, and have written story ideas on the premise of "not fitting in".  But existentialism seems to be much more than that, it's a movement inspired by the ideas of one lone individual.  Like the man sitting in the same row as me today said, "There's an almost neurosis that comes with existentialism.  I don't sit up at night thinking about bills or girlfriend problems or stuff, this is the stuff that keeps me awake at night."  And I agree, there's a sort of crisis that occurs in oneself when confronted with the idea that he may be alone in the world.  The mind begins to tear down any notions of self worth and self definition, and you have to start from scratch and ask yourself, "Who am I?"  Overall, I got a lot of notes from this reading including questions like "If existentialism can never be fully bottled and documented, does that mean that we should then not try to bottle it at all?  Does a painter never paint a river because he knows that the river will not stop while he paints?"

I leave you with an idea that I've been tossing around in my head for a while and really comes to light with this reading.  Say you tear down all self image and self prejudice and go meet someone.  Say you get stuck in an elevator with a pretty girl or a cute guy.  You get to talking.  If you, as a person without any judgments or self predjudices can talk to that person, get to know them, form a bond with them, and have them accept you for who you are, then there is nothing in this world that is beyond your grasp.  It is not the ideals that are imposed upon us, nor the ideals that we impose upon ourselves that push us forward on the path to glory, but rather the acceptance and personal affirmation of who we are that bring us to greatness.

Simply,

Ben "Artie" Belisle