Weil

We're in the third unit!  Here's our excerpt from Simone Weil (pronounced: "Vay"), for next week:

Simone Weil, "The Needs of the Soul" in The Need for Roots

How Should We Respond to Our Circumstances of Existence while searching for meaning?

How Should We Respond to Our Circumstances of Existence while searching for meaning?

Victor E. Frankl provides probably one of the most horrific examples of how circumstances affect an individuals search for meaning. Frankl, being a Holocaust survivor, provides insight on the decision the Holocaust survivors did have. Individual choice that is, the internal struggle someone faces when the circumstances have completely stripped human value away from you. Just because your circumstances have stripped away your rights, are you automatically left in defeat, or can you continue searching for your individual meaning? Just because society says you have no values, do you give into defeat and abandon those values? Do you give up on your hopes, when the hope in your future has been stripped with an uncertain length in imprisonment? According to Frankl, you can continue your individual search for meaning, hold on to your values, and hold on to your future, regardless of the circumstances. The circumstance is an influence that you have to over come for yourself, for what you hope to stand for.

During your existence, you individually search for your meaning. What is your importance? What have you done? What have you over come? The Holocaust is a perfect example of historical occurrences when this internal growth and development was literally stopped for a lot of those who lived through it.  The Holocaust, to Frankl, was an influence, not what actually took his individual search for meaning. He didn’t mean anything to the Nazi’s, that’s for sure, but he still found ambition in the camp regardless. He had invested himself into “… [his] only countryman, who was almost dying, and whose life it had been [his] ambition to save in spite of his condition” (page 68). Frankl knew the circumstances, and knew the odds weren’t in his favor. Still, you have to search for your own hope. You have to find something to find meaning in, because that the circumstances can’t stop.

When it comes to dry cut circumstances of survival, is there room for your values? You still have that much control. You can still make decisions that aren’t reflective of your environment, you can still make decisions that you can live with and be proud of. You aren’t bound to act a certain way based on the things that surround you, because you can still put yourself first even when everything around you doesn’t. Essentially, just because you physically bound to imprisonment, and you are constantly being influenced against your own mental will “man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress” (page 74).  Your spirit is something uncontrollable, yet it can be influenced. The Holocaust influenced people to give up on their values because they believed their spirit too was imprisoned. That’s an individual’s attitude succumbing to the circumstance, not any actual dominance over an individual’s spirit.

If your attitude, and your spirit, is the only thing left, in a circumstance like the Holocaust, that an individual controls, wouldn’t people hold tightly to this control? Wouldn’t all of the survivors have triumphant stories of how the Nazi couldn’t dominate their mental independence? It’s part of the influence the circumstances had on the individuals. Being a prisoner in this circumstance was “…the most depressing influence of all that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be” (page 78). The prisoner’s inability to accept fate, or to let fate take its course, let his last freedom succumb to his circumstance. It’s nothing that the Nazi’s did to those whom lost their spirit in the Holocaust, but more what went on inside the individual’s soul that let the Nazi win. Their spirits were broken, and that’s what gave the Nazi’s mental control over those who endured the Holocaust.

The countless, horrific, factors that influenced Frankl’s circumstances are drastic but efficient. It’s an example that leaves nothing more than the internal struggle to uphold your spirit, mind, and value, when life is at stake all day everyday. Regardless if your values weren’t upheld, and your spirits broken its important to remember: “no man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same” (page 58). On the matter of the individual journey of finding meaning, it is a personal experience, heavily influenced by your circumstance, but most importantly a personal experience.

Frankl

Don't forget!  Proposals are due by Sunday, October 26, at 11:59 PM.

Here is the link for the Victor Frankl reading.

Please also watch this video of Frankl speaking.

How Should We Respond to Our Circumstances of Existence in Power?

How Should We Respond to Our Circumstances of Existence in Power?

            Overall an unedited piece by Nietzsche, “The Portable” presents an individuals position in power, over three different main points: self-overcoming, those who are sublime, and redemption. All of these things all of each individuals existence in power; power thus being each individuals will to life. Since we all have and seek some form of power: do we have control over good and bad things? If we deem what is good and bad, then do we have control over the bad? If power is part of nature, how do levels in power rise in society?

            Power is part of our existence. Individual’s should account for and prosper in what they have control over. Label what is good, and let the good naturally struggle with its counterpart. This natural struggle will develop and grow your values, as you want to create the world around you. There will always be someone of more power, but it is not because they have a greater will, but because they naturally have more strength. Your will, in itself, will continue to seek and earn more power on its own, regardless of the fact that you are obeying someone else. Obeying automatically comes with living, and those whom you obey carry your burden on top of their own, and that is why their strength is deemed so important in levels of power. This all, of course according to Nietzsche.

Freud

Freud reading is here.  These are excerpts from Freud's Civilization and its Discontents.  

(We're borrowing this PDF from Middlebury College.  Thanks, Middlebury!)

Pay special attention to: the pleasure principle, eros/thanatos, aggression instinct.

Nietzsche reading is here.  Most of this PDF is what we call "front matter"--introductory material about Nietzsche and about his work that you are reading excerpts from, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  Then there are two excerpts, "On Self-Overcoming" and "On Redemption" from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

As ever, please let me know if you can't view this.

What is your will-to-live?

 

summary:

Shopenhauer’s will-to-live and Representation is about what gives people that will or drive to keep going on with their lives. Everyone is different with what their drive is as Shopenhauer states it is the troubles and desires that give people the push they need or want to move on. He also mentiones about purpose and how just like desires and troubles everyone lives differently for something or someone else. I use this example in my paper from the reading Mother Nature’s purpose is to maintain all living organisms, and humans all have a different purpose. Mothers care for their young, as do animals. What separates us from animals is that we as humans have a consciousness, and with this consciousness we have the ability to think, express, feel and where we feel we are aware of the fact some fear things like death. Whether that fear of death is rational or not it is something most experience. Shopenhauer believes it is better to feel the hurt and pain over the happiness and joy because he feels the bad outlasts the good, where the good comes and goes, but the bad tends to stay with us.

paper:Julianne Ferguson

                                                What is your will to live?

     “The World As Will And Representation” by Arthur Shopenhauer is about the will- to- live and what the aim and purpose of that will is, which differs from each individual and living thing. Every living organism has some drive, some point to doing something. In nature the driven force is mother- nature; her purpose is to maintain all living species. The aim or drive for humans isn’t to constantly do the same tasks over and over again, with in some retrospect doesn’t guarantee anything in return, no reward, “here too life by no means presents itself as a gift to be enjoyed, but as a task, a drudgery, to be worked through” (351). Shopenheauer declares we as people go through life doing the same routine over and over again, for what? Nothing, just to redo it all again tom? People need some drive to keep going, to move forward he explains “only apparently are people drawn from in front; in reality they are pushed from behind, it is not life that entices them on, but want and trouble that drive them forward” (pg. 360). No matter what life has in store, it comes down to the wants and troubles, or pain that gives people that ambition to keep going.

     One philosopher from the reading “confirms and establishes that the will-to-live/ everything presses and pushes towards existence” (pg.350). Shopenhauer gives one example in regards to animals in nature, “it then becomes obvious that the will-to-live is the keynote of its being…”(pg.350). Animal existence relies on the ability to not be changed and have endless limits as to what it can be or do such as always evolving and “seizing every opportunity, greedily grasping for itself every material capable of life…”(pg. 350), whereas with individuals whose lives will eventually come to an end, we have a consciousness. With this consciousness we feel pain, wants, desires and some fear the unknown. Some fear death, others nonchalant, while there are few who embrace it. 

     In Plato’s Apology his character Socrates did not fear death as some might, especially if they were in his situation. Socrates was condemned for teaching his young students about the curiosities of the world. Before being sentenced he was given a chance to defend himself in a defense speech. In his speech he did not simply state whether he was guilty or not guilty, instead he proved his innocent until the very end of his life. He was brave and courageous and took death in strive “there is good hope that death is a blessing, for it is one of two things: either the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything, or it is as we are told, a change and a relocating for the soul from here to another place” (pg.35). Death isn’t to be feared it is but a natural course of events as is life itself, we either become nothing, or our souls have another place to live on, either way it isn’t something to be afraid of.  

     Another reading in comparison to Shopenhauer’s belief death is natural and should not be feared is Marcus Aurelius from Meditations. In the reading in book 2 On The River Gran, Among The Quadi number 11, “if there were anything harmful on the other side of death, they would have made sure that the ability to avoid it was within you” (pg.3-4). Meaning as stated if death were so bad, then the Gods would have provided the people the means/ability to avoid it at all costs, also on part 16. The Human soul degrades itself: number 17. On human life, as we as people learn we must learn to “accept what happens and what it is dealt as coming from the same place it came from”/ “and above all, that it accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed”(pg. 6). As previously mentioned death is but a natural course of events, where there is life there is death.

    Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics agrees with Shopenhauer that all good things come to an end, Aristotle states as followed “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does  not make a man blessed and happy” (pg. 567). As happiness comes and goes, it does not last forever, and leaves people wanting more. Shopenhauer believes that its better to feel the hurt, sadness, and pain over the happiness and joy because the pain, and the feeling a person receives from that pain, outlasts the feeling a person receives from experiencing happiness. The good comes and goes, but the bad lingers in our mind and hearts for a lifetime. As quoted by Shopenhauer “Accordingly, happiness lies always in the future, or else the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow”(pg. 573). The past is lost, the future unknown, and the present always not meeting our standards the way we hoped or dreamed.

      In agreement with Shopenhauer that yes all good things do come to an end, and yes we as people do crave that longing to wanting longer lasting happiness. It is sadly true that all negativity does tend to weigh heavier than the good because of that feeling we cannot seem to shake when something bad happens. Whether that bad is an accident, or an emotion we feel from something we cannot seem to forget it, but the joys we lose in an instant because they happen somewhat frequently. In disagreement with him, I disagree that it is far better to feel the pain and hurt, than the joy and happiness because though short lived I would far rather experience the happy than the sad any day. A quote that I liked in terms of what we remember

 “A thousand pleasures do not compensate for one pain”- Petrarch (pg. 576).