Slaves to Freedom

As Satre notes that human beings are a creation that are both in and for themselves, the mysterious endeavor of creating an identity becomes all the more daunting. Trapped on a planet in a universe with no clear purpose or meaning, humanity must face the uncertain passage of time alone. Even as we live among each other, often in closer proximity than we'd prefer, humans still long for a sense of achievement or progress along the clean slate of free will. In efforts to justify or convince others of our opinions, we create associations among objects and people in an attempt to expand our personal webs of knowledge and understanding. We fear what we don't know and reject what appears contrary to the truth, but in reality, we are all subjects to the surprising nature of existence and must endure limits we may previously deem impossible. As a whole, humanity has experienced the most extreme instances of every conceivable emotion - from agony and despair to joy and euphoria - and these outliers of the collective human experience are what motivate us to live each day as if it's our last. As we are flung through the present into the infinite abyss of time, we craft our tales of existence and try to make sense of them in our universe of constantly changing possibility. Though our efforts may be ultimately futile, the history that has resulted from our brutal endurance of time thus far is the best and only one that we have.

A Stream of Consciousness

Our class's recent coverage of cause and effect versus a flow of constant, concurrent events suggested an interesting branching concept. If every observable event were to possibly just exist alongside another completely irrelevant event, one that we would correlate as a cause or effect of the other, then perhaps every action, emotion, and idea of perception is constantly being occupied by someone or something in a particular nook or cranny of the world. The intense amounts of joy, despair, or anticipation that mark a pivotal point in our individual could belong to a single, global capacity of these respective emotions that we strive to attain or avoid throughout the "present" that our life occupies. In our desperate struggle to elongate, shorten, or just generally control the flow of time, we cannot help but be affected by these forces of the world and attempt to create a system of organization to counter them. Even so, it is only through our personal experience that we may one day accept this fate of expiration and take our best shot to maximize the time remaining in which this perception rings true.

Right Before Your Eyes

With the idea of an external reality being one that exists outside of the realm of human observation, we often ponder the truth of what is laid out before us. To transcend this perspective would require an abandonment of the senses and a willingness to recreate the world according to truth. However, this transcendence is unfortunately only one of speculation and currently remains outside the realm of what is possible for our species. Even so, it is in this impossibility that we thrive on the idea of the abstract and can think critically about the knowledge that may or may not exist beyond our scape of perception. We instead create ideas out of theoretical building blocks, attempting to approach reality from every tangible angle until we've found a something that may resemble truth. This universe shrouds itself in mysteries, each more complicated than the next, but the human drive to understand what is around us - what is real - has led to tremendous strides in putting together many pieces of this massive puzzle. Anything is possible if you start on the right side of infinity.

2/21 Class Synopsis

For this class, we continued to discuss the difficult issue of proving the existence of God and focused primarily on the arguments proposed by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Beginning with the distinction between faith and reason, Aquinas claimed that there was a fundamental difference separating these two categories of knowledge. This major distinction between belief and knowledge is dependent on the ability to observe and draw conclusions from the effect of a cause, sometimes through scientific inquiry or possibly just through innate knowledge, but we can never have knowledge of what actually causes these effects. Using the example of a triangle, we cannot know what a triangle is without also knowing that it is three-sided, just as we cannot know of the existence of God without first accepting that there is a cause behind the many mysteries of the world.

However, Aquinas did not agree with Plato in assuming that knowledge of God was self-evident or intuitive knowledge, nor did he agree with Anselm’s ontological argument of God being something which nothing greater can be thought. Instead, Aquinas gave two kinds of self-evident (analytic) statements that were “In itself but not to us” and “In itself and to us.” His cosmological arguement explained that since we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us but must be demonstrated by effects that are more known to us. The ontological argument stated, like before, that we can only know the subject (God, triangle) through its predicate (existence as a whole, three-sided), and also that the effects are not proportionate to the causes as no perfect knowledge of the cause can ever be obtained. These two kinds of demonstrations of God’s existence are known as A Priori (through the cause itself) and A Posterior (through the effect).

To streamline his argument into five major points, Aquinas created the Five Ways which included: (1) Minfestor Via, or the argument of an Unmoved Mover; (2) Efficient Cause, or that nothing can be the cause of itself without having existed first, making God the only uncaused cause; (3) Contingent and Necessary, which states that in nature there are things which can and cannot be generated and it is impossible for these things to always exist, requiring a source to initiate the entire sequence of being; (4) Gradiation, which uses Degrees of Perfection, Goodness and Truth, and Comparative Judgments to imply that there is an existence of the Absolute through the fact that we have comparative thoughts of perfection; and (5) Design Argument, which states that order and finality are doubtlessly the effects of an initial cause.

Regarding the question of what God actually is, Aquinas said that “Having recognized that a certain thing exists, we shall have to still investigate the way in which it exists, so that we may come to understand what it is that exists.” He said that via negativa, we can understand what God is not, namely that he is not corporeal but instead more than a body, and also that God is not potentiality (cause) but Pure Act (cannot be what is or what is not, but a constant state of being – God cannot be but what he is). Instead, Aquinas believed that God is simple and perfect, not just a composition of substance and form, but a fullness of being through one undivided and eternal act. As further evidence that God is not corporeal, we must confront some of the basic questions that would contradict these assertions such as whether or not he would take up space. What body characteristics would he have? Would his omnipresence physically push us away? Alternatively, Aquinas suggested our idea of God should be more abstract, like the concept of twoness, and rooted in the idea that we compose the very body of the bodiless known as God.

Lose Yourself

As we live our fast paced lives as college students who have worked toward a future, who have paved a road of opportunity for ourselves, remembering to step back and reflect can be a hard task. However, when we do take these opportunities to learn about ourselves, they can be tremendously helpful in discovering who we are or who we may become. Choice after choice, from drugs and drinking to sex and relationships, is thrown at us faster than ever before and we're expected to walk away as mature individuals who can handle the responsibilities of the world. Even as we shape our paths toward success, parts of who we are may very well be left behind in the process.

Compromise, experience, success, failure - all of these play major roles in developing who we are as individuals, but we cannot rely on the flow of time to simply bestow on us the lessons taught by each. Instead, it is our task to take as much from these ups and downs of our lives while retaining what it is that makes us who we are. Perhaps a bit cliche, but these meditations can prove to be invaluable when arriving at a crossroad of what to believe or what you expect from yourself. Take these chapters in stride and learn to never be complacent with your understanding of the world or yourself.

"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” - Oscar Wilde

Harmony

With our class's recent discussions about the sources of knowledge, such as the various arches, I began to reconsider what truly merits an objective perspective toward the world. Are we bound by the restrictions of human observation, making any sort of scientific or religious implications a potential bias? According to the principals of scientific study, our theories and ideas of the world are only built on what we can assume is true through the scientific method. However, even with this very strict foundation, we have still envisioned a universe filled with unexplainable phenomena and enough questions to occupy the rest of human civilization. While we may have accepted that it's impossible to know everything about our existence, we still continue to strive for a greater understanding of the world around us and the forces it uses to operate. The concept of philosophy draws attention to these questions that are, for the most part, unanswerable by scientific means and tries to assess some sort of conclusion from them. This does not mean that science cannot weave itself into these, however, as many new and old philosophies build upon the road of supposed knowledge that science has paved. Issues of faith are often put under fire with scientific interrogation, but even the fundamentals of science itself can be put into the realm of the unanswerable. For example, what initial forces caused the laws of physics to be set into motion? Are these forces observable on a spectrum not contained by light? Combining and harmonizing the different methods of thinking, both scientific and philosophic, can reveal the true vastness of what we do and do not know about the universe surrounding our tiny existences.

In the Name of Nothing

With our class's recent coverage of different philosophies, such as relativism and absolutism, it was an interesting task to try and identify with one more than the others. However, the philosophy of Nihilism stood out as needing a particularly complicated approach, relying on a complete removal of our Self from the equation and perhaps the entire equation itself. Touched on with questions from our class, Nihilism roots itself in the belief (or lack of belief) that the universe has no ultimate purpose. That we're all just specks of dust floating around in the infinite abyss of space.

Despite this seemingly dreary outlook on the world and life itself, I personally take refuge in the idea of a meaningless existence. Instead of expecting compensation for a life of good deeds or a punishment for one filled with wrongdoing, I am held accountable only to myself. Even though this seemingly still attaches 'meaning' to life constructed by my desires and decisions, it exists in parallel to my understanding of the universe. As a human being, I am bound by my choices and consequences, hoping to satisfy the innate wants and needs all people wish for - happiness, love, success. However, as we stare into the depths of space hoping to understand its inner workings, it will always stare back with a relentless tone of indifference. And it couldn't be more beautiful.

The Freedom of Choice

After watching a screening of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange for another class, I found it to be an interesting display of how greatly the concept of choice in relation to ethics can truly be stretched to fit the preexisting notions of our world. One of the primary conflicts it illustrates is how difficult humanity's struggle to find forms of punishment and reconciliation that are both humane and appropriately just for crimes committed against society. Is the eradication of various sources of evil a means to preserve justice?

The movie challenges this idea, showing that humanistic tendencies will likely overcome the suppression of choice, and if unable to do so, will try to destroy themselves. If a seemingly effective method of psychological "cleansing" was ever introduced to the public world as a way of correcting actions we consider inappropriate or unlawful, would we be effectively surrendering our freedom to choose our own ethics and their consequences? Whether or not the absence of evil should intrinsically be considered good is a difficult question, fundamentally defining many philosophies and the ideas that echo from them. Could the possibility of an innate goodness within each person limit the boundaries of human capability and choice as a whole? As with all philosophy, these questions can only be answered with theory, but hopefully the meditation of ideas like these will help prevent a bleak future for humanity.