Rachel's Existentialism Crisis

As the sappiest person in the entire world, I’m really sorry that this reflection is going to be way unnecessarily touchy-feely for a class discussion post. Let’s talk about bad faith. Reading the material, I was struggling to really put my finger on what made bad faith bad. The example from class where I really felt like the nuance clicked for me was the example that involved doing something for your family but convincing yourself it’s because you want to versus doing something for your family because you realize family is important to you and you’d rather do something you’re not entirely happy with to please them. The difference is subtle but powerful. The results are the same, but the intent matters. Existentialism is intentional. Being in this class has allowed me to hear so many perspectives that I would not have heard otherwise. The readings often opened my eyes, confused me, frustrated me. The other students constantly allowed me to evolve in my understanding of the ma...

From this reading, the main point that has continued to eat at me, and, from the discussion, seemed to be eating at other students, is this question of our emotions. Can we control them? Must we take responsibility for our emotions? Intuitively, I notice the reactionary nature of many emotions. Many emotions occur in reaction to something. It’s this feeling in my gut that feels as natural as breathing. Because of this, I do not think I can comfortably say that I have full choice over all my emotions. It seems that many of my feelings just happen. Now, does that mean I’m not responsible for how I act in the wake of these gut feelings? No. Does that mean I can’t be proactive about my emotions to try to control them beforehand? No. I don’t think we are slaves to our emotions, but that doesn’t mean we choose them. There are two very different examples from my personal life that I think illustrate some of this difference for me. In the first instance, I did exert a lot of control...

Early Childhood Explorations of Da-sein When I was a little kid, I asked my mom if fish went to school. My mom inferred that I had heard the phrase “school of fish” on one of my PBS educational programs, and explained to me that the word school meant different things in these contexts, and that, no, fish do not go to school. But this was not the question I was asking her. Even as kid I knew that fish did not go to school. What I was really asking, without fully realizing, was why fish (an all other non-human animals) didn’t go to school, and why humans did. What was it that drove humans to seek knowledge and education? Why weren’t we satisfied with an understanding of the world that allowed us to survive and not much else? There seems to be something uniquely human about being concerned with questions like why we exist and what our purpose is and what’s going to happen when we die. Heidegger’s ability to give terminology to our existential dread was extremely confusing but onc...