Spheres of Existence

Group 8 is up; my favorite number. This was the best group so far. I actually stopped commenting on this because it was getting repetitive, but they were that good. Thad even stopped class to say that they were a step above the rest. The presentation was good, but the skits made everything come together; they were funny and intelligent which forced you to want to listen. The guy talking like a girl with a mop on his head was pure gold, and had the whole class laughing. Overall another reason why 8 is my favorite number.

Group 8 started off with Kiekegaard’s aesthetic sphere of existence. The main argument that sprung up was if a person living in the aesthetic sphere of existence could they reflect. Thad gave an example of asking the person the meaning of life and their response would be a reflection of getting what you want. But I don’t think that is a true reflection, because they are answering the question based on their current situation. There is no reflection; just an opinion of what they are doing in the moment.

Then there was the ethical sphere. Where people base their actions and way of life on their sense of justice in the world. The best example that the class came up with was Hitler. Hitler while even though is actions are deemed morally wrong, had a strong since of duty towards his country. The big topic that got brought up was whether you could switch in and out of the aesthetic sphere and ethical sphere. Thad said you can not, and I don’t think you can either. While I do think you can change your perspective on life, it is a very hard choice to make. Thad argued that you never really left or went into the ethical sphere if that were the case. The last and most important point made was that the ethical sphere is a place where you fall short from achieving a certain principle.

Truth is Subjectivity

Thad before class said to think about subjective truth as action passionate commitment. Anyway, Group 7 started out by pointing out the differences between objective truth and subjective truth; stating that objective truth is the “what” while subjective truth is the “why”. Objective truth is logical and indifferent, and subjective truth is emotional.

The best part of the class was when a student in the front of class named Andrew said he completely disagreed with the person presenting. Andrew said the logical arguments didn’t make sense and went on to prove his case which made the presenter speechless. Andrew gained a lot of respect from Thad from that moment and got a nice complement. The reason why he was so familiar with the material is because Andrew is part of Group 8 which was assigned to read the second half of Kierkegaard’s readings. The question that Andrew asked the presenter was a little unfair because he used some of the material from the readings of Group 8 which Group 7 was not responsible to be prepared to answer.

Towards the end of class Thad gave his own opinions that I would like to touch on. Thad said the Kierkegaard loved the torment of not knowing. It is within the uncertainty that creates the passion, and even if you are uncertain you must make a choice. It reminds me of the phrase it’s not the destination but the journey. Just knowing or being given the answer takes away from the challenge and the fun.

Religious passion cannot be collectivized into an organized religion. I have to agree with this. Forcing to take into account every detail that a pastor or other religious figure says as fact gets in the way of connecting with God. I listened to a person on the subject of why kosher foods came about in the Bible aka why Jewish people don’t eat pork and shellfish. The reason being was because the cooking techniques used at the time caused the food to still have many diseases which killed many people. Now a days, following a eating program should only be in the best interest of keeping your body healthy. I am pretty sure that God doesn’t care if we eat pork or chicken for dinner. Anyway I have reached my criteria for the amount of words for this blog, but one last note. I think the Bible was just a bunch of the best myths and folk tales from a long time ago. And the Bible was indeed written by men, so you know it’s not perfect

Kierkegaard

Group 6 had to do the reading on Kierkegaard’s Existentialism dialect. Group 6 started out by asking the class if they enjoyed the reading; most people raised their hand. Thad raised his hand when they asked who didn’t enjoy the reading; I couldn’t help but laugh. Anyway they asked us to write down two questions before the presentation which we would answer later. We never got to that point so we waisted five minutes brainstorming questions that we never got to asked which gets me frustrated. This is the first class that I have had where there is a chance that you will not get the chance to voice your opinion because of the massive amount of people that want to talk. That is one reason I love these blogs; I get to rant on about how I would have asked and answered a question.

My favorite question that group 6 asked was, “Is truth your truth, or the amplification of someone else’s  truth?” Its a tough question and I’ll do my best to answer it. I believe that my truth is the amplification of someone’s truth until I can confirm it for myself. Whenever new information is presented, depending on how knowledgeable the presenter is and how much I trust that person determines whether I accept the what they said as fact. I realize that I and probably pretty much everyone was naive as a child and would believe in pretty much everything, even the impossible.

When I was little I was raised as a Christian, I went to several churches and even attended a private Christian school. I loved that school that I attended from when I was three years old until eighth grade. Eventually, I went to a public high school and attended a world history class that focused heavily on the religions of the world. I never realized how little I knew about my own religion by not knowing about the other possibilities. I had been raised to understand Christianity was the truth and I never once questioned it. I have since changed my view on religion, but I am so glad that I experienced gaining my own truth. I wouldn’t classify myself as a Christian anymore, but I still believe there is a God. Now the important part, even if my region did not change, I believe that the amplification of someone else’s truth becomes your own when you finally test your truth.

The Fall Part 2

Camu’s “The Fall” was again discussed today. Group 5 lead the class by a well organized plan; each person in the group was responsible for a certain theme that they found relavent to the reading. The five themes were manipulation, righteousness, shame, pride and “jaumness". Before each theme they performed a skit, which was a metaphor for the theme being presented. 

My favorite skit was on manipulation, where a man helps a blind person across the street but only so that society views that person as a gentlemen. I loved the way they took an innocent situation and made the person a bad guy. The whole point of the manipulation was that after the gentlemen helped the blind person across the street, the gentlemen tipped his hat to the blind person. The tipping of his hat was deemed worthless and only for others to acknowledge that he did a good deed. I think that doing small acts or rituals like that are common and are done regardless of whether the person on the receiving end cares.

When I was in high school, I worked at my look Fry’s grocery store as a courtesy clerk aka the bag boy. As a courtesy clerk  you are supposed to greet the customer, ask whether they want paper or plastic, ask if they need help out, and then give them a friendly goodbye. I said to almost every customer, “Have a nice day”. One day, my mom came through my line and I gave her a hug and a kiss, and after helping her I told to just “Have a nice day”. I felt so bad that I actually said, “No, wait, Have a great day”. I said that line so much that I feel the sentence lost its meaning to the people I truly wished to “Have a nice day”. I wanted my words to actually mean something. I’m sorry that got off topic, but maybe to the gentleman, tipping his hat had become so familiar that it lost its meaning.

The main theme of the class discussion was on how if a person recognizes that they are not innocent that it raises up how good one is. This reminds me of certain people’s opinions where they believe that perfect is impossible to achieve. Then doesn’t it become how close to perfect can we get? Even if nobody is innocent or perfect we should still strive to become as close as possible.

The Fall

Group 4 had to present Camu’s “The Fall” which I’m so happy I did not have to present. I could barely follow the logic in the way the sentences flowed. It reminded me of reading Romeo and Juliet in Highschool; a teacher was needed in order to point out the meaning in the use of the words. Anyway, Group 4 started their teaching of the material by having all the students write down questions that we could answer throughout the lecture. This was a disaster; not only did the questions not come up later in the discussion, but the way the questions were presented was horrible. The members of Group 4 dispersed across the classroom and each one read a question. The questions were way too long and read way to quickly to write down before another was given. There was probably like ten questions in all, but I gave up around the third one. If they ever have to present to a group of people again, they should realize that people need some time to write down information.

Now that is off my chest, let’s talk about the content. The main ideas that came up in the discussion were about judgement and innocence. I thought the best example of judgment came from the teacher, Thad said to think of a time where you judged someone. After giving a little time to think it over, he asked the class, “How many of you thought of a negative judgement?” I kind of felt bad afterwards because I definitely did. There is something about the word judgement that makes me want to think of someone being guilty. One person in the group said the quote, “ Always a reason to kill a man, but not to let a person continue on living”. The quote made me think about how we are so quick to find faults in others to make us feel better about ourselves.

I personally loved the innocence related scenarios. The main point that came across is that all people are selfish, therefore nobody is innocent. I believe that everyone is selfish but I don’t think having wants makes a person not innocent. Even before class, I did share the opinion that every choice that we make is because we wanted to make that choice. No matter what it is, we choose to live our lives the way we want. Even tough choices, one’s that are mistakes, or choices that we perceive for ourselves as wrong are because we want to make that choice. Whether the reason is because of a human instinct, moral righteousness, religion, or a promise ever action is because we ourselves want it. It is because of this that every person is selfish. After class, I asked Thad to give a situation where an action was chosen that we did not want. He the only one that he can think about is an action where we were not conscious of the choice such as accidentally doing something. Being selfish is usually thought of being a negative trait, but what matters more is what is your own reasons for being selfish.

Absurdity Zone

Group 3 started there out hour of teaching with their skit. The skit started out as three students listened to a “teacher” give them a ridiculous amount of work to finish within an unrealistic amount of time. One students said, “I quit”, and dropped out of school. Another student stayed because he felt like he had no choice but to tough it out. The last student was eager to finish the class as it signified they were closer to accomplishing their goal of getting a degree and eventually, a good job. This skit in my opinion was the best so far to represent what the reading was about. The skit was easy to follow and relatable to our current situations.

The main point of the skit was to represent the three choices we have while chasing the meaning of life. The first way of looking at things is the “suicide path”. The suicide path meaning that they have come to the conclusion that there is no meaning of life and no reason to live. The second path is acceptance of absurdity where the they accept the meaning of life is absurd and live with it. The third and final path is the leap of faith where you hope to find meaning of life in the next life. Group 3 thought it best if the class broke into groups and had a debate arguing each side. The debate went terrible, but the discussion went well. Each group presented a good opinion but no real debate happened.

One female student who had the class from last semester brought up the point of big M vs small M. Big M stands for the cosmological meaning of life and the small M stands for each of us finding our own meaning of life. The discussion never fully matured toward that direction though. Thinking about the meaning of life that way makes sense to me. While everyone wants to know the big M, the meaning behind why we are here. The small M is just as important in my opinion. A person needs to find meaning in their own lives regardless. If we were to apply the three paths of life to the small M, we can see how people can go through their lives. The suicide path would be where a person searched for their own meaning of life and never found something that they were passionate about so they gave up. The accepting absurdity path would be those that never  gave up searching for their meaning or they accepted their own meaning of life. Finally the leap of faith would be somebody that believes in an afterlife where they give meaning of life not to this one but the next one.

While I’m not sure if we will ever find the big M, the cosmological meaning of life, I am happy to find my own small M. I’m not too sure what it is but I’ll continue to search for it. Besides what if we found out the big M, and I didn’t like the answer.

The Stranger Part 2

First lets talk about the presentation. In my opinion, Group 2 did not do as good of a job as Group 1. That is not to say they did a bad job, but Group 2 just did not feel natural. Thad said to avoid straight lecture, get the students involved, and just allow the students to be apart of the presentation. The first ten to fifteen minutes felt like they didn’t want to get the students involved, they said to hold all questions till the powerpoint presentation was over. While I didn’t mind too much I would have appreciated being able to discuss some of their views while on the topic. The skit was really cool; coming up with a “what if” in terms of what was going through Meursault’s thoughts as he talked to the preacher was interesting. After the skit, Group 2 just let the discussion take its course which again made me feel great by the amount of participation. I even had my hand up to ask a question, but never got to ask it because of how many others wanted that same opportunity.

The question that I wanted to ask was about how many people were arguing about Meursault’s view on emotions. The thing that irritated me was that people thought that Meursault was living in the present by not allowing the past or the future affect his decisions. Living in the present is a good thing to do, but that was not what Meursault was doing. Meursault either had a mental disease that made him not care, or had Meursault had a traumatic experience that caused him to deeply repress his emotions. Now regardless of which one is afflicting Meursault, that isn’t a good way to live one’s life. When people say it’s good to live in the present; I believe it is because some people are too obsessed and want to cling to the past, or they are too busy worrying about the future that they neglect the present. Meursault did not care about the past or future. Meursault’s mom died and he killed a man, but the story didn’t put hardly any emphasis to show remorse. And when it came time for his execution, Meursault did not believe in God.

The past actions give us reasons for living, and we can share those stories with others. The present is what we can do to change either the past or the future. The future are the goals we wish to accomplish someday. One of my favorite quotes is, “Today is a gift, that is why it’s called present”. Both yesterday was once today, and tomorrow will become today; which makes them all gifts that should be cherished.

The Stranger

The first group, Group 1, had to present their lecture and skit this Monday. It felt like it was the first day of actual class. I felt sorry for group 1, not only were they chosen to be the first presenters, but they also only had 3 people in their group when most groups have 5 people. None of that stopped them; they did a wonderful job. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of quality discussion over Part 1 of the Stranger. The Stranger is a story of Meursault’s life after having his grandmother recently pass away. Group 1 started out leading the discussion for the day by using a powerpoint to examine the main points.

It looked like they had prepared a 10 plus slide powerpoint presentation, but they only got through 2 of the them. It was amazing; the first slide was on the personalities and characters in part 1, and as soon as a character was introduced students where egger to get their opinions out. The class discussion went over so well that the teacher actually had to remind them to stop the discussion in order for them do their skit. That was mostly what happened but lets talk about the main ideas that I thought were interesting that students brought up.

The first thing that I remember the most was that a person pointed out how the heat/weather should have been on the first slide as a character. It was an interesting idea, the heat definitely played had a huge part in the Stranger. Every time Meursault’s character was being challenged, he would complain about how harsh the heat was. Whether the heat was an actually real or just something that Meursault imagined, the heat was a very focused topic.

Our teacher, Thad, brought up an interesting idea that took up a considerable amount of time. Thad asked the question,” Who would like to have Meursault as a friend”. An interesting question that I wasn’t prepared to answer. It’s very hard to answer a question like that, Meursault had a hard time presenting his emotions. When he talked it didn’t sound like he loved is girlfriend Marie, and his neighbor didn’t sound like a true friend. The reason why the question was so difficult was because Meursalt killed a person. But as I thought about the question, I realized that being a murderer wasn’t that important to me to earn friendship. I think how a person treats me is more important than what they do to others.

Second Day

These Existentialism blogs are supposed, “Demonstrate a sincere struggle with the course material.” But so far our class discussions haven’t been that involved. I know it is just the first week, but so far we haven’t done much. Thad talked about how lengthy some of the course readings were going to be, and how certain Existentialist readings will impact each student in a different way. Also, Thad read a few lines from former students’ final papers that he felt showed a sincere struggle with the course material. I got to say the caliber of the writing from those students were phenomenal. I cannot wait to get into the material and have some of the same experiences as those students. 

After thad read Most of Wednesday was spent creating our groups that we will be with for the rest of the semester. The groups were chosen alphabetical which since my last name starts with “S”, I’m towards the bottom. Group 21 out of 24 groups. I can’t complain though, I’m happy that I wasn’t the first group. Being in that first group has got to be tough. They have no idea what the teachers expects from them, and have little time to prepare. 

Each group has five people, my group consists of Roman, Anthony, Pratishtha, Kyle, and myself. Roman can speak Russian. Anthony, if I remember right, was in a military branch. Pratishtha prefers to be called Sonny (or was it Sunny) and she can speak Hindu. I don’t remember too much about Kyle. We actually didn’t spend too much time together, right after we got together and had our picture taken we set up on next Wednesday to meet right outside class to work on getting our project started. Hopefully we can use that time to also get to know each other a lot better.

First Day

My brother told me Tiger Woods once said something like,”The day I don’t feel nervous before a tournament is the day I quit professional golf.” He said that being nervous was a sign that you care about something. The quote sounds so basic and simple which is why I love it. Today is the first day of spring classes at ASU, and I was really nervous. My first class was a CSE class which I knew was going to be easy, but my second class was a philosophy class called Existentialism. I only took the class because it fulfilled a upper division social science requirement. Almost as soon as the teacher started to talk, I knew the class was going to be fun. The teacher is the determining factor in having any fun course, and I have a feeling that  Thad Botham is going to make Existentialism fun.

Thad starts off the class by asking how the introduction was for Solomon’s book Existentialism. I was in the group that answered they had no idea what he was talking about. I kind of understood, but not enough to say that I got it. Somebody asked why did the book switch back and forth between his and her when using an ambiguous person; isn’t his usually the correct form? Thad gave a long answer that the author was trying to be more gender neutral, and then made a joke about it saying it’s the least we can do for women. I asked Thad if he wanted us to call him doctor. His response was a really long one that started off with don’t call me doctor, but I don’t think he ever answered my question. This is the second time that I have said he gave really long answers, but it’s because he isn’t like most teachers I have had before. Instead of just saying the answer he goes on to explain the reasoning and also making a joke about it.

This was also the first time that a teacher swore in the classroom saying fuck multiple times. Every time he swore it was because he was imitating what a student might be saying. For instance, after Thad said that for the majority it would be the students teaching the rest of the students; He said, “Some of you must be thinking, Fuck, I didn’t sign up to teach.” It was funny because I definitely could imagine somebody saying that exact line in their head. Thad ended the class with showing off his definition of Existentialism which was like a paragraph long that looked pretty good according to what I read. But just like the book, Thad didn’t really want to limit Existentialism with a definition, but wanted us to discover it for ourselves. 

This class feels like it is going to take a lot of work with the reading to get that good grade, but I feel like it will be worth it. Because if I can keep up with the material, the class should be really fun. We get assigned to groups on Wednesday, and again I’m nervous, but that just means I care. I hope the people in the group are fun.