4/23/12

When talking about conforming, there are many different aspects to acting independently from everyone else. There is a difference between wanting to do something that everyone else is doing and mindlessly make a decision because of what everyone else is doing. For example stay at home mothers were often ridiculed by feminist for not wanting to be independent, but this isn't right because if you truly want to stay home with the kids there is nothing wrong with that, but if you are staying home because that is what you have been taught to think then are you not being radically free. Law sometimes make the decisions for us, not because of if they are right or wrong but because we don't want to go to jail. We are responsible for the decisions we make, but to judge someone based on their morals is impossible. No one can tell you that your morals are wrong if they are what you believe.  

4/20/12

How can we classify our nature? Marx would say human nature is classified as how we meet our basic needs. But what about biological nature? An example would be alcoholism, there is a level of choice that we have and we don't have. It is your choice to drink in the first place, but there is a line where it is no longer your choice, is that classified then as your human nature. We change based on the things that we need and how we meet those needs. Some of those things are a biological given, like taking care of your children. As a parent you change to provide and do whatever it takes for your children and that is just in your nature, we want to do what's best for our kids. I feel that there are some aspects of our nature that we can chose but then there are choices that we make that can change our nature into habits that we can not control and because of those choices we change our nature completely.

4/19/12

In our reading we are suppose to be answering the question what is means for us as humans to be "radically free". In Platos beliefs we are rational creatures that submit into our emotional feelings and when we do that we are acting more like animals. But the difference between us as conscious beings and objects is that we have intentions within our actions, objects don't. We are aware that there are things other than ourselves in the world, but most adolescences don't see it that way. When we are  younger we tend to have an egocentric predicament, meaning that we think that we are the center of the universe and that we are not intertwined in the world. When we get older we learn that we are embedded into the world and that we are very dependent on our surroundings. To be a conscious being you need to have the realization that there are things outside yourself that you didn't create. 

4/18/12

One of the biggest concepts that I got out of the reading about Sartre is the distinction between consciousness or "human reality" and the inanimate, non conscious reality. What he is distinguishing are not two substances but two modes of being. He is talking about the differences between the way the conscious being exists and the way that inanimate things exist. Sartre also distinguishes between reflective and prereflective consciousness. For example when you are counting something, you are conscious that you are counting them, but you are not reflectively conscious that you are counting them until someone asks you what you are doing. He is going into the concept that we do things without consciously thinking about them and we only come to the realization that we are doing something when it is pointed out to us by an outside realization.

4/17/12

This week in the book we are talking about Sartre and his central assertion being human freedom. Sartre didn't believe in God and claimed that we all fundamentally desire to be God in the sense that we want to "be our own foundation". By wanting this he is stating that we would all like to be perfectly complete and self-justifying. He also talks about an negative way that we all tend to think of, we recognize want is not the case. We can conceive something otherwise than it is, and it will be otherwise. He also brings up the thinking that emotions are outside the control of will, but Sartre that you are sad only because you make yourself sad. He claims that emotions are not just moods that "come over us". For example anger with someone involves belief that someone has done something wrong, but if you don't think that action is wrong anymore, you are no longer angry.

4/12/12

When in school, we change classes because we hear a bell. And then when we get to that class we sit in rows, usually in order of our last names. Even in college when we don't need to sit in the same seat every day we do because that is what we have be conditioned to do. This is very much like an assembly line, workers are grouped together on a line to make a product and have no control over the workplace. Bosses hate labor units because we are so expensive. Think about it, the people that work on the assembly lines for Apple making iPads don't get an iPad at the end of the day. Most of the time we don't get to reap the benefits of what we make or in better words what we labor on. That is a form of alienation. We are being alienated from the process and the product. We exploit resources and by doing that we are alienating ourselves from nature and by not caring about what we do the the planet or the other animals on it.

4/11/12

What do we consider property? Is it land, or maybe a car, or even your children? When we first discovered America, we claimed this land as our property because we were here first. By claiming ownership, you are claiming something is yours, usually by the labor that you put in to get it. That's why when your mother or father says "that's my child" technically they have every right to say that because they put in the work to make you, cloth you, and put a roof over your head. Money is a main exchange of ownership, you work for the money and for the exchange of that hard work you can get something of equal value, seams fair right? You labored for the money, making it yours, now if you see something you want then you can exchange that hard work for anything you want that is to equal value. We used work to survive, but now we work to get nice things and to keep up with always changing trends.