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.