Sartre and Suicide

Sophie’s World Reaction:

I suspect after reading the very hectic and absurd “The Garden Party,” most everyone’s blog will encompass its surreal events. For the sake of being mildly unexpected, I will instead center this blog on “Our Own Time.” Out of the two philosophers mentioned in this chapter, Jean Paul-Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche, I want to focus my attention on Sartre. Sartre said some pretty interesting things in the book that I was surprised to learn of. For starters, many philosophers we’ve read of so far and tried to give their own view of the meaning of life and what man’s part in this whole ordeal is. One thing that Nietzsche proposed that the others didn’t was the entirely new concept of the possibility of there not being a meaning at all and man’s thought process on that. We have heard the proposition of maybe everything just happened coincidentally and there isn’t any rhyme or reason but we haven’t touched base on where this puts people and how people should and would react to this theory. Sartre emphasized that man has the earning to live for a reason and if man can’t find a reason to live or why they live they are left with three options. One of those options is to commit suicide. Sartre even said “the absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusion… and without resignation of either.” I was thrown aback when reading this and reminded of a quote that said “to be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.” This quote correlated perfectly to what Sartre states and makes me question who are the absurd and who isn’t.

Real World Connection:

Sartre talking about the absurd man and committing suicide brought back memories of taking psychology. I remembered the same quote I mentioned earlier about being ill adjusted to a deranged world in psychology and for a while had been readjusting my thoughts on suicide. I know suicide is something that in my opinion should not be encouraged but should not be deemed as horrible and immoral either. I had grown up in a family that believed so strongly that suicide was a sin and it almost made it seem like people who commit suicide have in turn committed a crime against humanity. I started feeling that it wasn’t right to be criticizing someone who committed suicide. I feel that someone doesn’t just commit suicide for no reason, something pushes them to their limit and they feel as though the only way to feel relief is to let go entirely. To me, people who are pushed to the brink to commit suicide went through enough already and it isn’t right for others to judge and put something else on their plate by saying they wronged everyone else. They went through so much and I feel that to blame them and push them down even further even after they are gone is the worst thing someone can do. For that reason I see where Sartre is coming from and I don’t think it is absurd for someone to believe there is no meaning and feel an emptiness inside. Sometimes I even feel like I am too dumb to really grasp the plausible reality of an empty world and meaningless life and that’s why I don’t feel the temptation of committing suicide. 

Rebel Hilde and Romanticism

Sophie’s World Reaction:

I’m just so confused on what to think and what to believe while reading this book. I’m so inclined to believe that Sophie and Alberto and everyone in the book are just characters and every single thing they say is completely and undoubtedly what Knag intentionally writes for them to say. Having said so, I in turn think everything Alberto and Sophie said towards Hilde directly was known by Knag. Knag knew what he was typing, even if he could have been typing while very drowsy. Alberto said that he thought Knag was falling asleep while writing a part in the book and so they took the opportunity to warn Hilde and try to turn her against her father. I don’t think that’s possible though. For characters that were written in a book and created by an author to start having a mind of their own to me is impossible. We might envision Sophie and Alberto as people and we may think we know how they look and sound and live but in reality they are made of ink and paper, not flesh and bone. Thoughts turned into ink and paper can’t talk or walk or think, never mind rebel against their author. I see this correlating strongly with how I don’t think it’s possible for us to also be someone’s creation or a hologram in a video game etc. I want to say that Knag knew how his daughter would think and knew how she would react and wanted her to believe Sophie and Alberto exits somewhere in Hilde’s world.

Real World Connection:

I absolutely loved reading about the Romantics and their passions. I felt as if the definition of myself was written in those pages. The characteristics that Romantics held, the love for twilight, the night, bygone eras, their emphasis on love, the supernatural, and fairytales are all things I love so much I feel like they make up every bit of who I am. I was surprised to read of how they loved ancient things and the paranormal and supernatural because not a lot of people like them now. I’ve always been the outsider from my friends with my love for ancient religions and cultures and history, as well as ghost and vamps and folklore. I even read the passage that told about the interest Romantics held, to a few who are close to me and they agreed whole heartedly it was as if it were a definition of myself. I can see today how much Romantic concepts have prevailed and continued, especially in adolescent teen girls. Even though Twilight can barely be called a good supernatural book (in my opinion), it held many qualities that Romantics would love that many girls did. Aside from Twilight, I can see how people went crazy for Harry Potter and the hunger games and Divergent, all movies I would consider Romantic. However, even in people my age, I see the passion people have or had for romanticism dwindling. I hope the passion revives itself because I would hate to live in a world that no longer yearned with deep emotions as the Romantics did. 

Berkeley and I Origins

Sophie’s World Reaction: 

This far into the reading I really started to question everyone’s sanity; Sophie’s for allowing herself to be swept away by an elderly man she really knows nothing about, Alberto for his suspicious slip-ups and acceptance of strange circumstances, and even myself for getting tangled in this mess alongside with the characters and truthfully caring too much about the story. The chapter on Berkeley confused me so much I was borderline annoyed. I’d like to say I’ve reached a point where I now expect the unexpected but I’d be lying. I’ve gone past that point of expecting the unexpected and have now moved onto not expecting anything at all. That’s not to say I don’t think the book will go anywhere anymore, I know the book will take serious dives and sharp turns here and there, I just stopped trying to guess what will happen next. This way I won’t stress myself out when I guess something wrong or completely out of line thought most of the time I feel like it’s not me who’s out of line but the book. Soon after seeing the message ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HILDE!’ on the banner flown around by the plane, Alberto almost unwillingly explained to Sophie his growing suspicion that Hilde’s father is a “‘will or spirit’ that is the ‘cause of everything in everything’”, in not so many words; God. It irked me that Alberto seemed to know almost nothing of Hilde’s father at that moment when I was lead onto believe that Alberto knew many things about Hilde’s father. Here I was reading this book thinking that my mind was being framed to doubt everything and not to jump to conclusions yet Alberto throws theories my way of Gods and Angels in the form of Hilde and her father. I know it never said in the book word for word to think of Hilde and her father as just mortal beings very similar to myself, but I felt as though I was almost guided away from thinking of them as angels and Gods. Alberto always acted as though he knew more than Sophie did about Hilde’s father, as though Hilde’s father wasn’t all that special and so I too believed Alberto. I was thrown aback when Alberto told Sophie that he ‘knew along’ that her name wasn’t really Sophie, that it was Hilde, and much like Sophie I was (not for the first time) beginning to question Alberto’s sanity and wondering if all this time Sophie was taking lessons from a delusional. Again when Hermes seemed to speak to her as she was leaving the apartment and Sophie randomly finding her mom on the street while an ominous storm was berating down from the clouds, I was left speechless and utterly lost. 

Real Life Connection:

Spinoza was a confusing chapter for me to get through. I’m still not sure I understand it completely. One of the concepts that was brought up was the ‘perspective of eternity.’ I’m not sure I completely understand what this whole perspective is just yet. A sentence that stood out to me was Alberto’s question to Sophie: “Can you perceive all of nature at one time-the whole universe, in fact-at a single glance?” Sophie replied with a much more confident answer, “I doubt it,” she said when I would have replied “hell to-the-know, I don’t even know what you’re asking me.” Something wouldn’t let me move on from that sentence, something that I was just on the edge of remembering but couldn’t quiet grasp yet. That’s when a quote from a movie I had watched just a few days prior hit me. The movie was called I Origins, a dramatic science fiction film that followed a scientist whose beliefs were turned upside down when his lover dies and possible signs of rebirth began to reveal themselves. When he first met his lover she asked him: “Do you know the story of the Phasianidae? It’s a bird that experiences all of time in one instant. And this bird, when she meets the love of her life, is both happy and sad. Happy because she sees that, for him, it is the beginning, and sad because she knows it is already over.” I’m not sure how well this quote ties into Spinoza’s perspective of eternity but I’m hoping it can give me a small sense of what Spinoza was talking about. Spinoza tried to present the idea that everything and everyone is a part of something much larger than ourselves and that we can only create small ripple effects if anything. If I take the idea of the Phasianidae and associate the bird with God, I can start to get the sense that to her, nothing humans can do or experience may be infinite. Only to her can the true perspective of eternity be felt and understood. 

Young Scientists and Theism/Atheism

Sophie's World Reaction:

I'm constantly amazed by the quite genius and frighteningly accurate theories the scientists mentioned in this book spew out just from observation. The respect I have for them I feel will never truly match up to the amount they deserve. I respect them for having the courage to stand up and challenge a prevalent belief that predated them greatly. For Kepler to revise Copernicus' nearly correct theory of planets having a circular orbit around the sun and instead claiming they orbit elliptically is extraordinary. His proposition that planets speed up when near the Sun and slow when passing is something that was so easily overlooked. Learning of Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation was nothing new to me but I imagined being him and sitting under a tree, watching an apple fall from a tree. Unlike Newton I never would have stopped to ponder as to how or why the apple fell, much less compare that situation with the relationship between the Earth and Sun. Galileo’s Law of Inertia blows my mind the most. To have the thought that an object in motion or rest will stay in that state of motion or rest when no other force acts upon it is something I still can’t wrap my head around. Especially knowing Galileo was surrounded by forces on Earth that could have and should have stopped him from realizing what he did is phenomenal. These early philosophers have helped me come to terms with me never proposing a theory as grand or as accurate as theirs. It's safe to say my self-esteem has plummeted in that respect, but at least I have the audacity to admire and not envy; though at this point there seems to be a very thin line between the two.

Real Life Connection: 

Reading the five arguments between Theism and Atheism forced me to reflect on my personal beliefs and recognize areas where I swayed and areas where I stood firm in my assumptions. I am the type of person who listens to arguments others present and at the end of the day I commonly find myself taking the opposing view into consideration and really allowing myself to see to which side I am tugged to more, or if in the end I float in limbo between them both. Nevertheless I found myself drifting towards the Atheist’ objections much more frequently than that of the Theist’ ideas. The class discussion after reviewing the arguments kept me on my toes. The question thrown at my teacher of why he changed from Atheist to Agnostic threw me out of balance. His response was that at some point in his life there were too many coincidences that kept coming his way and he felt that some force could be behind them. This got me thinking, I never felt as if there were coincidences that were too perfect to be anything but coincidental, but I do believe there are forces that cannot be explained in this world. I don’t think the force(s) I’m talking about has any major role in the world we live in, in fact I feel as though they have minor roles and they are not orchestrated by any person or being of any sort. I don’t think there is any chance of someone planting ideas or tweaking with our lives but I do think things like reincarnation and soft determinism do exist. I do believe in my own version of reincarnation though I don’t think it’s ‘purpose’ is what is generally thought. I don’t believe at all that someone like God can or could exist but I do know that I believe there are unconscious forces in this world that aren’t controlled by any. In the end I’m not sure if to be Agnostic one has to be on the fence with the existence of God or if one can be considered Agnostic while believing there are only the existence of forces. For this reason I honestly still don’t know where I fit in. 

Hellenism/ Indo-European Culture

Sophie's World Reaction: 

Even though it was a lot to take in all at once, reading "Hellenism" over break was my favorite part of the reading. This part of the reading was by far not the most exciting or mysterious of them all, but noticing all the different Hellenistic views on life, how one should live, and beliefs was really interesting. I read each religion and loved connecting each one to myself and finding views I agree with as well as views I don’t agree with.

Cynics:  I would love to follow the lifestyle of the Cynics, to live with no material connections and find “true happiness” elsewhere but that kind of lifestyle just isn’t possible for me and I’m not even sure if I want it to be possible for me. I know material possessions are unnecessary but I am much too attached to let go now or want to.  

Stoicism: I agree with following stoicism in the aspect of dealing with pain I feel that once you have come across something painful there’s no use in complaining about it, all I need to do know is find a way to get over it. I realized I apply this thought to myself but not to others. If someone else complains to me I do my utmost to help because I love helping others though I rarely ask others in return. I didn’t want to believe in fate and honestly I still don’t want to but I feel as though there is such a thing as fate but there are many different paths that lead to many different conclusions and it is very possible to change your fate.

Epicureans:  To me it’s not a bad thing to think about the future, especially when it involves yourself. I also feel it’s not “right”, to be honest, to seclude yourself from the world around you and live a life with “no worries.” Just because you may not have any problems, that doesn’t mean that others don’t. Nothing will improve if everyone simply ignored each other.  

Skepticism: When it comes to large scales or “huge” decisions I think it is important to weigh all your options. Deciding on where to live, one country compared to another makes a huge difference especially if those countries are opposites or parts of different continents. In order to guess if options really do balance each other out or if they may create other outcomes it is important to weigh them out. 

Real World Connection:

I was really surprised to notice how similar Indo-European Culture is to Buddhism and Hinduism. I never knew the Greeks and Romans had such common beliefs, morals, and ways to live by. Born into a Buddhist family, I knew a lot of things mentioned/ read about the Indo-European culture. Even after reading of the different Hellenistic lifestyles, my belief that most religions hold the same core values was supported. I believe that most religions say the same things or many of the same things only with fluff and stories that differ. This belief is the reason why I don’t follow any religion. Learning of the Indo-European culture made me believe it ever more. I realized that Buddhism and Indo-European culture are virtually the same, just the people involved and stories surrounding that person differ. An argument I used against my mom when first rebelling against religion was that when I did considered myself a Buddhist, I agreed with the morals it suggested and some parts of the lifestyle it presented but I didn’t believe in the stories that were told about the Buddha(s) and gods. Because of this, I realized the things I did take out of Buddhism was found in other religions as well such as Hinduism. Just as I had done for Buddhism I could have done towards Hinduism, I took the core values and left out all the rest and decided that if more than one religion reiterated the same beliefs, then it made no sense for me to say I belonged to solely one religion and not the other.