week 14 blog 1

The discussion of the other was an interesting topic.  It was a fun idea to entertain and it made a lot of sense.  The idea being that, a part of ourselves comes from how other people view us.  This was one of those things that I don’t often think about.  I don’t mean to say that I don’t think of what other people think of me, but the idea that how these others view me is just as much a part of me as how I view myself.  In my own life I’ve noticed that what other people think of me is highly important to me.  But I think that this comes from my desire to make people happy.  When someone views me negatively, I notice that I tend to focus on the single negative opinion rather than those which are positive.  I think I am living in bad faith because of this.  My understanding of bad faith in this context is that we are in bad faith when we only see ourselves through others, or we only see ourselves through us.  What I think is the major point of this, is that when we only look through one lens, we are deceiving ourselves.  This self-deception causes a lot of problems.  Letting ourselves fall into this deception prevents us from seeing the whole picture.  What I’ve really got from Sartre so far is that there is more to people than what lies on the surface.  That humans are complex, and that who we are, what our meaning in life is, is a combination of many different aspects of our lives.  The other thing that I’ve gotten from Sartre is that people often let one aspect of who they are overshadow the other aspects, and that we should strive to maintain a balance between these aspects in order to live life to the fullest.  

week 13 blog 2

The Idea of bad faith really got me thinking.  Thinking of bad faith as not having a balance between one’s facticity, the things about you that are, and transcendence, the more subjective and future sighted, it’s hard not to be in bad faith at least one point in your life.  I know that I have definitely been in bad faith quite a few times throughout my life.  And I don’t doubt that I will be in bad faith several more times in the span of my life.  But being in bad faith doesn’t mean that we are doomed to live a life without meaning.  It’s more of an indication that we need to change the way we view the world and live our lives in a better way.  Being in bad faith, as I have come to understand it, is an overemphasis of either facticity or transcendence, in which some form of deliberate self-deception happens.  Like in the skit, the student looked at the world with an emphasis on his transcendence.  Because of his self-deception, he wasn’t able to see that he would not reach his goals.  This makes me think about how lost we can get in either thinking of what we would like to do in the future or things we’ve done in the past.  Because if we let ourselves get lost in the possible futures in our heads, we can miss out on the opportunities to make the future a reality.  But if we get lost in the past we miss out on the present.  I think what Sartre was getting at is that we should strive to live our lives in way that allows us to enjoy the present as well as hope for the future and not forget our past.  I think I have somewhat of an understanding of was meant by I am what I am not, I am not what I am.  

week 13 blog 1

I find Sartre’s ideas interesting.  The idea that we control our emotions really made me think about how I’ve lived my life so far.  For the past several years I’ve been dealing with a lot of emotion stress.  From loved ones dying to realizing that my best “friend” wasn’t even my friend.  But after really thinking about the idea that we control our emotions I think I’m starting to come to terms with my emotions.  If we really do control our emotions why do we feel those that are negative?  Why have I been depressed and angry?  If I can control these emotions why would I chose to feel negative emotions as well as positive?  But after some pondering I think I may have a better understanding.   First off, if we didn’t feel negative emotions, positive emotions wouldn’t mean anything.  They must coexist within us in order for us to feel them at all.  You can’t have one without the other.  But why would people chose to dwell in a state of mind in which only negative emotions are felt?  I think that what Sartre may have been getting at is that, rather than sitting down and weighing the options of what emotion should I feel right, that we choose in an instant.  We choose subconsciously.  I think that we can choose whether or not to be happy or sad or angry.  But it’s not a conscious choice.  Our body chooses how we react to stimulus.  So in a way we do choose our emotions.  But I don’t think this is the main point Sartre was getting at.  There’s something deeper than just choosing our emotions.  I think that he might be trying to say that, what’s important about our emotions is to take responsibility for them. This idea of being responsible for our choices is another one of Sartre’s points.  My interpretation of this idea was that we are free to make whatever choices we want, but we are responsible for them.  

week 12 blog 2

Sartre’s ideas are kind of profound to me.  Although, I do have to say I like them.  Especially the idea of essence vs existence.  It’s fun to think about how things are made with a purpose in mind.  Like the keyboard I’m using to type this.  It was created for a specific reason.  To send little signals to my computer which then get processed and within milliseconds my thoughts are put before me.   But I could on and on about things that were designed with a purpose, because everything humans created was created with some purpose for it being there.  Whether that purpose is to look pretty, or to make electrons travel at the speed of light.  But after looking at all these things, it makes me wonder.  What is my purpose for existing?  I know for a fact I have an existence.  But what about my essence?  I’ve had many sleepless nights wondering this.  What is the point of living?  More specifically, what is the point of my life? But I’ve been wondering this for years.  And people have been wondering this since farther back than we care to think about.  Maybe we have no essence.  Maybe there isn’t a reason for our existence.  But after contemplating this for a bit, maybe that’s a good thing.  Because if we don’t have a set purpose, we are free to do what we want.  There’s nothing that forces me to me to live my life in a certain way.  Hell, if I really wanted to, I could just up and leave.  I could move into the woods and live off the land.  If I don’t have a set purpose, what will stop me? Nothing, other than the fact that I don’t really want to.  So maybe it isn’t too bad to not have a purpose.  

week 12 blog 1

The topic of philosophizing is a very abstract one. Many seemingly unanswerable question are asked in the process of philosophizing.  Why am I here?  Is there a right way to live? Is there a wrong way to live? Why do things exist?  These are the questions people have been asking for thousands of years.  Not a single person has found the objective meaning of life.  We still don’t know why we are here after all these years of asking.  But we must ask ourselves this.  If there really is an objective meaning, would we truly want to know it? Because in knowing what the true meaning of it all is, we lose the ability to define our own meaning in life.  And honestly being able to find one’s own meaning in life is one the best things about life.  We get to choose what our lives’ mean.  Whether it’s to help the starving children in Africa, or attempting to become one of the richest people in the world, you get to choose your owning meaning. The other interesting topic we discussed was the idea of philosophy.  The idea that philosophy can’t do anything was a very strange concept to me.  I had always thought of philosophy as a guide to living a better life.  But by itself, it means absolutely nothing.  It’s useless.  The true potential of philosophy comes from allowing it to impact you.  Letting it work its magic per say.  I think that the way to do this is simply think.  Think about what life means to you.  Why do you think you are here? Why are you important? How do you think should live your life?  These are the questions that allow philosophy to impact you.  And once you let this happen, you can “benefit” from philosophy. 

week 11 blog 2

After looking mostly at life and how it should be lived for most of the semester, the topic of death was an interesting change of pace.  Death is one of those things that a lot of people don’t want to think about.  They usually just say it’ll happen someday but it’s a far off thing so it isn’t anything to worry about now.  But is this way of thinking really a good way to think about death?  When I really thought about it I realized something.  Our lives are made meaningful by the fact that we die.  If everyone lived forever than what would be the point?  The fact that our lives come to an end, means that we only have so long to live, there’s only so much time that we have to do the things we want to do.  Death could be lurking around every corner.  We don’t know when we will die but it will happen.  Like it was said in class, you could get hit by a bus right after class.  Just think about it.  You could die at any moment.  But how does this knowledge effect the way we live our lives?  For the people who tell themselves that death is far off, it doesn’t do anything.  But for those who truly come to understand, it can make life that much sweeter.  When I think about it, if I could die at any moment why would I not want to live my life to the fullest?  When my death comes, whether it comes 60 years from now or tomorrow, I don’t want to have my last thoughts be of all the things I wasn’t able to do.  I want to be able to think that my life was worth living, and that it meant something. 

week 11 blog 1

              The concept of Da-Sien was kind of hard to grasp for me.  It may have just been because of the translation issues, but the concept itself seems kind of elusive.  It’s hard to really come up with a concrete explanation or definition of such an abstract idea.  What is a being?  It seems like there’s no real right or correct or definitive answer.  I found the approach to understanding what a being is interesting.  That we have to look at our world as a whole to understand the little parts.  It makes some sense but, there’s something about it that just doesn’t fully compute.  Another thing that gets me is that in his definition of being, in order to be a being, one must contemplate the idea being.  But this doesn’t translate to other things that people may consider a being.  For example, children.  I can’t really think of a five year old that contemplates what it means to be a being.  So does this mean that the child isn’t a being? That it is something else, something that has yet to become a being?  We treat children as beings right?  Children think. They have a seemingly infinite imagination, but if Heidegger is right then they aren’t really a being.  If they aren’t beings then what are they?  This quest for understanding, if you will, seems to be a futile one.  I don’t think Heidegger’s answer to what constitutes a being is wholly correct.  I think he took a good stab at the question, but his answer lacks something.  I don’t really know what it lacks, but it feels incomplete.  Maybe it’s just not possible for us to really understand what makes a being a being.  

week 10 blog 2

              The discussion in class yesterday really hit a nerve for me.  The topic of existential frustration hit hard for me because I feel like I am experiencing it firsthand right now.  For a long time now, I haven’t really been able to figure out what makes my life meaningful.  I don’t have a really well defined sense of who I am, and the more I try to figure it out, the more lost I become.   It’s a struggle I face every day.  Who am i?  Why am I here?  What is my life’s meaning?  What if I never find it? What then? Will I just fade away into nothingness and a deep depression?  I’m honestly scared of what happens after college.  I feel like I’m stuck in the existential vacuum.  For a while I was really passionate about music, but that door shut right as I was getting rolling on making it my life.  Ever since then, I feel like life is pointless and hopeless.  I lack a true, driving passion that makes life worthwhile.  And in the absence of this passion, I find only depression and dark thoughts.  And these thoughts scare me.  One of the quotes form Frankl that the group used really hit me like a ton of bricks.  “No instinct tells him what he has to do, and tradition what he ought to do, sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do.”  This quote really reflected what I’ve been going through for a while, and after I read it I had trouble holding back the depression that I carry with me.  But, the idea that it is able to be overcome, keeps me pushing onward.  I am determined, now, to search and find my meaning in life, whether or not it comes to me soon, I know that it’s out there.  

week 10 blog 1

Unamuno had some very interesting ideas.  One that really got me thinking, was the idea of living without morals.  Living a life without morals seems like a very strange idea, especially in our society today.  We tend to hold the notion that without definitive and precise morals we would all be horrible people.  But Unamuno had a different opinion on that subject.  My interpretation of his thinking is that even without morals, we are still good at heart, that people are inherently good.  We don’t need to have morals that written in stone to live a good life.  One of the other points I liked was the idea that we should do what we want, that breaking your morals every now and then isn’t all that bad because it’s what our heart desires.  I think this conclusion come from the early point that people are inherently good natured, because if we good at heart, our hearts will be a pretty good guide.  But a pretty point was brought up.  What if the heart desires something that isn’t considered “good” or “correct behavior?” Something like cheating on a significant other.  Is it ok because it’s what our heart desired?  I honestly think this is one of the many gray areas that pop up in world views.  The way I see it is, if you truly desire to do something that breaks your morals, its most likely time to rethink how important your morals are, and to really exam why you hold onto it as a moral.  I’m probably making very little sense but put simply, if you constantly break your morals you should think about why you have morals, and what those morals mean to you.  I like the idea, but I really question if people are truly as good natured as Unamuno made them out to be.  I wish it were true, bad I see so many counter examples daily that I don’t think I can truly get behind this idea.

week 9 blog 1

The underground man really got me thinking.  Especially the table, or “the irrefutable formula for human behavior.”  What if this crazy formula or table was somehow discovered tomorrow?  How would it change the way we live our lives?  If there was a way to predict every action I take, what would that mean?  Would my life simply become irrelevant because I know exactly what would happen to me?  I say no.  In my eyes, having this table doesn’t mean a motherfucking thing.  So what if you can predict my every action from here on out and turn it into some kind of a mathematical formula or equation?  Just because someone can predict everything you are going to do, doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to do it.  I don’t think it means that I somehow lack free will now.  I still get to choose what I do.  You can predict that someone is going to murder someone else.  That doesn’t change the fact that someone murdered someone else.  Being able to tell people what they are going to do can’t really accomplish anything.  If the table truly can predict everything, then it doesn’t matter because it’s going to happen whether or not you can say it’s going to happen.  Being able to say the earth will explode tomorrow doesn’t mean shit.  But thinking about this in the way that I do, does that make me the underground man?  I don’t think so because I’m not saying the table is wrong.  But I don’t think I’m the gentleman or scientist either.  I see this table as a novelty.  Just something that can make you say “oh, ok, that’s cool I guess.” If the table is as it was made out to be, then its existence is kind of pointless, because whether or not you can predict something will happen won’t change that it will happen.  

week 8 blog 2

Talked about eternal recurrence today.  Really got me thinking about how we go through our lives.  How differently would we act if this concept is true?  If we really are stuck in a never-ending cycle, of living our life over and over again, how would we act?  Would we sit around and mope all day because life sucks and we’re doomed to redo it over and over again?  Or would stop and think, “You know what, if I get to do this an infinite number of times, why don’t I just try to have some fun with it?”  Because that’s how I view it.  If I have to do this over and over and over again, why not get out and see the world, experience everything I can, do things that make me happy to be alive?  If we are really stuck in this never-ending, godforsaken loop, why not try to live to the fullest?  I mean if you have to do it for an infinite number of times, use this life as a break from the mundane cycle of infinite lives.  But if you really get down into what Nietzsche is saying, even if it’s not actually that way, why shouldn’t we live like we have an infinite number of lives?  I’ll use video games for example.  Say you were playing Call of Duty, or some game like it.  There’s a few different modes you can play on, some let you do more things than others.  But there are two specific ones I want you to think about.  In one, you have one life.  That’s it. That is all you have.  You die you’re out till the next round.  But there is also a mode where you have infinite lives.  Think about how you would play each mode.  In the mode with one life, you’re obviously going to try and not die as long as possible, you’re going to sneak around focus on NOT DYING.  But in the other mode, you’re more likely going to try and gets kills, as that’s the point of the game.  But compare this to how we would live our lives.  If life was a giant multiplayer online game, where you have infinite lives, we would all just go around trying to have a good time, knowing that if we fuck up, theres always the next life.  I think this is where Nietzsche was going.  If we try to think of life as a never-ending loop with unlimited replays, we can enjoy this life a lot more because we can worry less about the hardships we have in this life.  

week 8 blog 1

Did Nietzsche’s the immoralist on Monday.  There were some interesting concepts.  I really liked the master/slave concept.  It made me think a lot, and evaluate myself.  Am I a slave or a master?  Naturally I want to be the master, but am I?  Is it possible for us know if we are on or the other?  The master seeks power.  But how do we define power?  Is it literal?  Or is it this power something that is inside us, like some kind of hidden social ability? Maybe the power is simply power of influence.  Being able to get what you want, do what you want and go where you want.  If that is what power is, then I see myself as more on the side of the master.  I want to be loved by lots of people.  I want them to think highly of me, to say “Oh look, there’s AJ, he’s a good guy.”  If that is power, and the master strives for power then am I the master?  Or am a slave to an ideal created by the masters to keep me occupied while they gain more power?  Ok that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but if power is only a “bow down before me nave” kind of power then is there really any masters?  Could we say the Queen of England is a master then?  I think so.  I think that leaders of countries, CEOs of Wall Street, and religious or cult leaders are all masters.  They could be compared to shepherds leading the flock.  Being a master is about having the mindset of a master.  No pity for the slave, just the pursuit of power. When I think of the master I imagine Leonardo DiCaprio's character in The Wolf of Wall Street.  To him money is power, and you can never have too much of it.  

week 7 blog 1

Nietzsche was a truly interesting philosopher.  The madman was so fascinating. I love the God is Dead concept.  It makes me wonder about world around us.  It gets way deeper because rather than saying god never existed, he made the claim that we killed him.  Acknowledging that he was here makes it so much more meaningful.  God was here for long time but the need for god is dying.  People are starting to realize that they don’t need god.  They just need faith in themselves and passion.  With these two things people can overcome the absurdity of life.  The need for religion is fading away, and being replaced.  But what with? Without religion how will people know right from wrong? All religions teach people a few basic concepts, don’t be an asshole, and just do you.  And without religion, these principles will still exist.  They won’t just vanish.  There’s lots of people out there who aren’t religious, that are still good people.   People spend a lot of time on religious activities.  Imagine what could be accomplished if that time spent on religious practice, was spent on advancing society.  Inventing things, discovering cures for the worst diseases, and going even farther into space.  With god dead, we could change the world around us, we could be our own gods.  But with the herd mentality still raging through society, people still spend their time worshiping god, even if they don’t really believe what they believe.  If people could stop and look into their consciousness, and break free from the mental slavery that is the herd mentality, they could truly find themselves.  I really think I’m starting understand what existentialism is all about.  It’s about recognizing that life is absurd, meaningless and pointless, but we need to bring meaning into our lives through our passions and only then will our lives not be completely in vain.

week 6 blog 2

Kierkegaard had some profound ideas.  The idea of the three spheres kind of interested me.  I thought the discussion on it was very intriguing.  The aesthetic sphere seems to be the hardest to live in.  A life without self-reflection.  Kierkegaard’s aesthetic existence is about momentary and immediate satisfaction.  So what if self-reflection is satisfying?  Does that person leave the aesthetic and go into the ethical, just because they self-reflected? If the self-reflection causes feelings of guilt then it would be fine to say yes.  But what if there wasn’t any guilt?  What if there is but the person decides to ignore it? Are they still the aesthete? Or are they the ethical?  Another thing that comes to my mind is moving between the spheres.  Can a person freely move between the spheres? Or is there only a linear path?  And how does one know what sphere they exist in, especially the aesthetic.    Another interesting thing that came up, was that Kierkegaard pretty much said that it doesn’t matter which sphere you exist in, as long as you have passion.  But what does this mean?  It would seem to me that each sphere would have a different understanding of passion or subjective truth.  Would the Aesthetic see passion as whatever they can do to make themselves’ happy? Or would it be fighting the despair of our pointless lives?  What about the Ethical?  Would the Ethical’s passion be trying to make the world a better place?  Maybe they would just passionate about sticking to their morals.  And then there’s the religious.  Passion for the religious would be following their religion.  Believing just for the sake of believing.  It kind of seems to me, that Kierkegaard is saying something along the lines of, as long as you have passion, life isn’t completely pointless.  

week 6 blog 1

Today’s discussions were very interesting.  Subjectivity in a very fun topic to contemplate. I really like how Kierkegaard approaches faith.  Faith is passion.  Passion towards gaining an understanding of objective truth.  But objective truth will always be just out of reach.  Passion is what drives our lives.  We go on through life trying to understand why we are here, even though we will never truly understand our existence.  I believe that life is pointless, but we should live our lives to the fullest because it doesn’t inherently mean anything.  My passion towards this is my subjective truth.  And I live abiding buy it.  There is no correct or incorrect subjectivity, everyone comes to their own subjectivity, and everyone is passionate about something.  And no one can say that someone else’s passion is wrong.  Subjectivity cannot be fully understood buy any outside party.  Passion and faith are individual and are constantly in a state of flux.  Passion exists momentarily, so it must be renewed often.  Because we can’t ever reach an objective understanding, we must take a leap of faith and decide what you are going to do about it.  We can waste our lives trying to come up with an objective understanding.  But doing this wastes the time you have in this world.  I think what Kierkegaard was getting was that, rather than try to prove that our subjective truth is right, we should just accept that we can never truly understand the truth through an objective lens.  I think he meant that we should just live by our passions, our subjective lens, believing in them and accepting them, whether or not other people believe us.  His lasts days were spent laughing at the people who entered the church. And I think it’s because he saw them as sheep who blindly followed whatever the pastor said, and accepted it as an objective truth. 

week 5 blog 2

Kierkegaard is an interesting philosopher.  The discussions today were good. I liked the group truth bit.  Really made me think about what truth really means.  Is truth just something we accept because someone said so?  It made me think about how I know what I know.  Most of the things we know, we know because other people said it was so. So I believed them.  I let them tell me how things work.  But I know I think back and realize that I should question my beliefs more.  That I should ask myself if I really believe in what I believe.  I used to be a good little Christian kid, who believed in god, Santa and the Easter bunny.  But I learned that Santa and the Easter bunny don’t actually exist, and I did it on my own.  And a while after I stopped believing in them, I realized something.  I've come to realize that most religions are simply ways of explaining the seemingly explainable.  As I went through school I learned about things like evolution.  After learning and accepting it I stopped and thought.  If this is true then the bible is wrong.  People didn't just appear, our species evolved from some ancient primate.  This was very conflicting for me.  If the bible is wrong about that, what else in it was wrong?  And then after a while, the conflict in my head ceased.  What I knew as the truth, wasn't true to me anymore.  I realized that there are a lot of things people just accept without a valid reason.  There’s no proof god exists.  But does that mean he doesn't?  Nothing can be confirmed without proof, and in the thousands of years people have been on this planet there hasn't been any real proof.  So, until I see proof, my individual truth will differ from the group truth I was brought up believing.  

week 5 blog 1

We did the fall part two on Monday.  Interesting discussions. Lot of interesting ideas were brought up.  I liked the discussion about mental slavery.  Are we mentally slaves to one another?  Do our relationships with other people make us slaves?  Now this really made me think.  What makes someone a slave?  Is it physical ownership? Or can one be a slave in a more emotional or mental way?  We go through life making friends and forming relationships.  And we do things for our friends and our loved ones, because that’s what friends are for right? We help each other even if don’t want to.  But does the fact that we do these things for them make us slaves to them?  No.  It makes us friends.  Just because we help our friends doesn’t make us slaves to them.  They don’t own us and we don’t own them.  A slave is a person who is owned by another person.  However, we are slaves to our minds.  They own us, and tell us what to do.  The mind is an interesting concept it’s so bizarre.  But it’s bizarre because it said it was bizarre… It tells us everything.  It tells us things like “she’s a bitch,” and “that guy is a total asshole.”  It makes us think that we are the most important person in the whole damn universe.  But should i trust it?  Am I really the most important?  Or am I just thinking that because I can’t be in the mind of other people?  And What Factors determine superiority?  Looks? Job? Personality?  But none of it really matters.  Because in my mind I am the most important being in all of the universe.  I am the “chosen one” in my mind.  My mind is the master of my own little universe.

week 4 blog 1

The Myth of Sisyphus brought up an interesting discussion on Monday.  The idea that we should picture him as happy is a very foreign concept.  A man forced to push a boulder up a mountain every day in a futile attempt to leave hades.  How can he be viewed as happy? Although, if you translate it to life, it makes more sense.  We go through life dealing with so many hardships just to die at the end.  It’s as if everything we do is done in vain.  Yet, we do it anyway.  The hard drive example really stuck out to me.  You write a paper just to have your hard drive crash right when you finish.  And so you write it again and again just to have the hard drive crash every single time.   But you keep on writing.  Why?  If you think of the paper as life, and the hard drive crashing as death, why keep writing? Why not just give up?  Why not kill yourself? It could save you the pain of having to experience the crash just when everything seems to be all good.  But, that’s a coward’s way out.  You shouldn’t kill yourself to save yourself from the pain of writing the paper that is your life.  No. you should write the best paper you can.  Just to spite the fact that your hard drive is going to crash.  Life is more about the writing of the paper than the finished product.  We live in an absurd world yes, but use that as motivation to carry on.  Just say “fuck you universe, I‘m not going to give in, I’m going to live the best life I can just to spite the fact that you don’t give a damn about me!”

week 3 blog 2

Did the stranger part 2 today.  Really interesting discussions. One thing that got me was the idea that Meursault wasn't actually emotionless, and that he just decided to bottle up his emotion.  This was an interesting idea, because it changes the whole story.  It goes from a tale about an emotionless man to one fighting emotions.  This internal battle would be an extremely painful and difficult one.  As a person who tends to bottle up a lot of emotions I can understand the struggle, but I can only imagine the intense struggle that Meursault would have felt.  He seemed to have a changed a little while in prison too.  Like it was somehow easier to express emotion after he gets put in prison.  I can imagine that it would have felt good to release a lot of that built up emotional tension, but with person such as Meursault, one can’t truly tell.  I also found the idea of the world being indifferent towards him a little mind bending.  To think that we don’t matter except to ourselves is a very heavy thought.  Because we all think we matter, even if just a little bit.  The idea is kind of hard to swallow, yet upon really thinking about it, it doesn't seem like we would matter in the grand scheme of things.  I mean there are millions upon billions upon trillions of stars.  And each one likely has planets.  And there it’s highly likely that there are others out there. Who’s to say we are more important than them?  Why do we matter more than them? It makes me think about all of humanities religions, and how crazy they would seem to other sentient beings out there.  It makes me think that none of the religious beliefs people have mean anything. Like nothing at all means anything.  whoa

week 3 blog1

Today we went over part one of Camus’ The Stranger.  Meursault is a very interesting person.  Seems to lack a lot emotion.  He comes off as detached from the real world and lives in his own reality.  It makes me wonder how a person can do that.  To not care about the future or the past just the present.  To be free of emotion where others find it mandatory.  His own mother’s death doesn't even seem to faze him.  It makes me wonder if he was always like that.  Maybe the loss of his mother caused him to go into this state of shock where his emotions, and feelings and cares just, vanished.  Losing someone can be a traumatic experience, and everyone handles it differently.  Some develop depression, others turn to drink.  Maybe this state of detachment is his coping method.  But then again maybe he’s always been that way.  I feel as if life would be very depressing if you had an outlook such as Meursault’s.  No emotional attachment to anyone or anything.  Everyone and everything just being objects that don’t mean anything.  Seems kind of nihilistic.  Believing in nothing.  Thinking you have no responsibility for your actions.  You’re born, you live, you die and nothing more.  Meursault doesn't come off as a good person.  He seems selfish and irrational, maybe even a bit psychopathic. Blaming the heat for shooting the Arab.  A normal, sane, rational person doesn’t shoot someone because it’s hot.  The first shot may have been somewhat of a self-defense move, but the rest of the shots?   Only a person with psychopathic tendencies would do that.  But maybe he actually felt emotion when pulled the trigger.  The man did stab his friend.  Maybe he feels emotion he just can’t display it.  His mind could be rejecting emotion so much that it processes the intense emotion only through the physiological changes, like the heat.  

week 1 monday

First day of class left me very intrigued with the subject.  There’s something about existentialism that just seems so mysterious and far off. It comes off as a very foreign concept, yet it seems so familiar at the same time. If that makes any sense. Anyway, I am really looking forward to this class. I like the idea of students being the teachers.  It excites me and makes me feel like this is going to be a semester. It makes me feel like I'm going to be important, and not just a student who is there to receive a grade and move on.  This is my first philosophy class so I’m a bit nervous but I think I’m up to the challenge.  Although I am also a little worried about what I might find out about myself.  Right now I feel like I don't have a super clear idea of who I really am, or if there is even any purpose to my existence.   Maybe by the end of the class I'll know, or at least think I know.  Maybe I’ll just end up with even more doubt about who I am and if there is a reason for my existence.  Maybe I’ll never know.  Maybe that’s what existentialism is really about.  Trying to make sense of things that are truly impossible to make sense of.  Seems kind of crazy yet it makes some sense.  And maybe it tries to answer the question of why we exist, the never ending debate between essence and existence.  Maybe we don’t have a reason to exist, we just do.   Hell for all I know this could just be my imagination, maybe I don’t exist at all.  But then again, who cares. I’ll just keep on existing whether there’s a reason to or not.