Rachel's Existentialism Crisis

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...

Feodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground was one of my favorite readings since Camus. I was most intrigued by the speaker’s take on free will and how that had to do with him refusing to seek treatment for his illness. There is something in human nature that seems to drive us to self-destruct just because we can. It’s hard to talk about because it’s at times so obviously irrational or selfish that we cannot avoid trying to justify it to ourselves. We tell ourselves we are not going to the doctor because it’s too expensive or we’re too busy or we don’t trust doctors. Sometimes these are in fact our true reasons, but other times we say things like this because it would be ridiculous to explain that we are risking our own lives out of spite. Spite for who? Our doubt? I don’t know if we have free will, though I am inclined to say that we do. But the scariest part of that question for me is not the idea that maybe we don’t have free will, but the fact that there is any doubt ...