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!”