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.