Reading about existentialism on the web, I felt as though I had come to the limits of my intellectual potential. Nonetheless I was able to figure out that existentialism was about defining the human individual as the starting point for a philosophy that describes conditions of thinking, acting, feeling and living. A person is their actions and it lays out a basis for their responsibility. Existentialism writings often feature cases involving “the Other and the look” about intersubjectivity and objectivity which is best described by Sartre: “a man is peeping at someone through a keyhole. At first, this man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. This is an example of the existentialist concept of facticity, where an individual decides to remain true to his past thus being defined by it or employ the existentialist concept of freedom and become inauthentic to one’s past, choosing to become something else.
Existentialism posits that existence precedes essence and presents arguments that originate with the human individual as the basis for describing the universe in which we find ourselves. I found trying to figure out the meaning of this philosophy to be a very entertaining way to spend my time and very helpful in trying to figure out what is meaningful to me and how I am defined by the nature of my thoughts, but what I learned most was the only meaning life has is what I choose to give it.
To touch on that last point, a perfect example of giving meaning to our lives was Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, not just the way they wrote about existentialism, but also through their personal lives. Jean-Paul Sartre in his book Critique of Dialectical Reason sought to reconcile existentialism and marxism, he took part in the student revolution strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested for civil disobedience- Simone de Beauvoir wrote about existentialism and feminism, they were the living embodiment of the principles of existentialism where the person is defined by their actions and it is through these actions that give our lives meaning; for Sartre it was Marxism; for Beauvoir it was feminism.
Since man has started congregating in mud huts our earliest civilizations sought to define the nature of man. First through ethics by classifying what we are not to do through sin. With the arrival of the philosophy of existentialism we can now complete the process that ethics has started: not by telling ourselves what we are not to do, but by telling ourselves what we should be doing. Existentialism is the embodiment of the French expression “joie de vivre” and can best be understood by this sentence from Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road - "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Having a Bad Day (metaphysical)
Having a bad day in its metaphysical context can only allude to thoughts that can be disruptive and negative. Such a state may take the form of hysteria, depression and aggression. Having a bad day can be of great concern to Christians for to us thought life is so important, because it is the reason for our salvation John 3:16, saved through faith means we are saved by the thought of Jesus Christ. Early examples of schizophrenia in the bible were described as demon possession, so Christianity bears a close relationship with the medical specialty of psychiatry. In fact the relationship of Christianity and psychiatry are so close that the proponents of intelligent design would be better served if they reformulated their theories to conform with the medical specialty of psychiatry rather than the branch of the natural sciences known as biology.
The subconscious mind is the source of our dreams when we sleep. Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". The unconscious was defined by Freud to contain three parts the ego, the super-ego and the id. It is this subconscious that can be the cause of your bad day and the main reason for having a bad day is repression. Repression is the burying (without our knowing it) of painful memories and traumatic experiences. Freud also believed that the underlying cause for many disorders was sexual which gave rise to the complaint that Freud was too obsessed with sex. Hence the back and forth when Sigmund Freud was asked whether his cigar habit was evidence he was repressing certain sexual desires which he quipped “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Stream of Consciousness
My Personal Experience With Stream of Consciousness
I’d like to start of by saying that stream of consciousness was a writing technique taught in my high school writing course. The stream of consciousness was used in the first step of a 3 part process. First you wrote furiously whatever came into your mind without worrying about periods and then in the second and third steps you would employ an editing and re-writing process, much like a sculptor chipping away at a block of stone that will eventually result in the finished product.
What is Stream of Consciousness?
Stream of consciousness is when the narrative takes the form of an interior monologue about the characters thoughts. It also disregards syntax and punctuation. It is spontaneous and informal, but how spontaneous and supposedly unintentional it may actually be is subject to debate, in other words the complaint about it is it usually ends up that this style writers may strive to achieve intentionally, with purpose and then made to look like it is off the cuff.
My Favourite Author Jack Kerouac
List of Jack Kerouac’s books containing elements of stream of consciousness: On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans.
Jack Kerouac was called the Father of the Beat Generation, this was the generation that preceded the hippie generation of the 60’s. The Beat Generation was defined by listening to Jazz and Bebop music. Jack Kerouac’s writing method used the breathing technique of Jazz musicians where words were improvised in a long monologue without using the period but separated by the dash where the phrases between the dashes resembled improvisational jazz licks and took on a rhythm that was all their own. Here is Jack Kerouac from the beginning of Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan as an example- http://tiny.cc/RU7OL. As a bit of trivia, Woody Allen is a big Jazz fan and plays clarinet in a New Orleans style jazz band, tickets can be bought under the name of Woody Allen And His New Orleans Jazz Band.
Authors Inspired by Kerouac: Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami also an author who has a style similar to Jack Kerouac is David Sedaris.
An example of Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness style: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
—from On the Road
Jack Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose Method: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose a List of Thirty Essentials
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
I’d like to start of by saying that stream of consciousness was a writing technique taught in my high school writing course. The stream of consciousness was used in the first step of a 3 part process. First you wrote furiously whatever came into your mind without worrying about periods and then in the second and third steps you would employ an editing and re-writing process, much like a sculptor chipping away at a block of stone that will eventually result in the finished product.
What is Stream of Consciousness?
Stream of consciousness is when the narrative takes the form of an interior monologue about the characters thoughts. It also disregards syntax and punctuation. It is spontaneous and informal, but how spontaneous and supposedly unintentional it may actually be is subject to debate, in other words the complaint about it is it usually ends up that this style writers may strive to achieve intentionally, with purpose and then made to look like it is off the cuff.
My Favourite Author Jack Kerouac
List of Jack Kerouac’s books containing elements of stream of consciousness: On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans.
Jack Kerouac was called the Father of the Beat Generation, this was the generation that preceded the hippie generation of the 60’s. The Beat Generation was defined by listening to Jazz and Bebop music. Jack Kerouac’s writing method used the breathing technique of Jazz musicians where words were improvised in a long monologue without using the period but separated by the dash where the phrases between the dashes resembled improvisational jazz licks and took on a rhythm that was all their own. Here is Jack Kerouac from the beginning of Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan as an example- http://tiny.cc/RU7OL. As a bit of trivia, Woody Allen is a big Jazz fan and plays clarinet in a New Orleans style jazz band, tickets can be bought under the name of Woody Allen And His New Orleans Jazz Band.
Authors Inspired by Kerouac: Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami also an author who has a style similar to Jack Kerouac is David Sedaris.
An example of Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness style: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
—from On the Road
Jack Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose Method: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose a List of Thirty Essentials
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
Sunday, March 15, 2009
My Opinion of the Left
My political opinions have always skewed to the right, largely media driven they reflect the political American landscape. They mirror American values of devotion to the family where politics are learned at home and then later influenced by the media. The left controls the media and universities and uses this position to do its proselytizing. I feel that political opinions are influenced by their method of recruitment, for example because the right is pro family they enact policies that benefit the family such as low taxation, favouring a small government and a huge military making the military the de facto government. While the left favours higher taxation, promotes homosexual rights, helps the poor and immigrants, with a large government and a huge military (which usually results in the purge of the population, abolishment of religion and the forfeiture of liberty).
A deeper view of my opinion of the left can be found in how the left feels about religion. A microcosm of left leaning liberal thinking can be found in Hollywood. Hollywood is also home to a new religion called Scientology. I just happen to know of one case where Scientology has resulted in the death of one person, whereas if all the victims of communism were buried in Mt. Pleasant cemetery the cemetery would be a mile higher. At the recent Academy awards an obvious jab against Scientology was delivered by presenters Steve Martin and Tina Fey. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtW6ZooB9cI&feature=related The jab I’m referring to was “And every tiny seed on Earth was placed here by the alien King Rondole, to foster our titrates and fuel our positive transfers.” Then Tina Fey makes the crack about no on wants to hear about a religion that we made up (Scientology is a made up religion by L. Ron Hubbard). This for me represented the first shot across the bow in a conceivable war on Scientology by the left. For years we have witnessed Scientology make inroads into Hollywood’s billion dollar entertainment industry. We have seen many of the stars we knew growing up convert to a new, strange and mysterious religion. For the most part we thought nothing of it and Scientology’s growth and prosperity went unnoticed…, at least by most of us, however the left on the other hand, to them, this prosperity was an entirely different matter. The growth of Scientology was becoming a threat to the left’s control of the liberal media. This threat that is once again threatening to topple one of the left’s bastions of left thinking, their pillar of support and safe haven. If the left were to lose the media, what could this mean?
Enter Anonymous, as mysterious as the religion it seeks to oppose it appeared out of nowhere announcing its existence with this slick ad on You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ It was a battle cry, a narrator declares a detailed battle plan over a catchy beat that threatened to finish Scientology once and for all. A faceless organization unless of course you happen to be me and I say the face of Anonymous is communism. The ad has all the characteristic hallmarks of communism’s view of religion as something that is totalitarian, immoral and that must be stopped. The reality is the exact opposite, Scientology merely seeks to provide a moral standard that is pro family, it just happens to threaten the iron grip by the left over the liberal media providing a new voice and a breath of fresh air from the oppression of political correctness. Scientology promotes an alternative form of ethics from that of the left, jeopardizing the left’s ability to create guilt trips and point the finger of blame at perceived enemies. Here is Tom Cruise giving a speech on ethics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFBZ_uAbxS0 The encroachment by Scientology on the left’s territory creates a spectacle that can only be looked upon with a great sense of humour. Watching the left trying to hold onto its power exposes them for who they really are and I hope to find out more about them as this battle wages on. I will support Scientology in this endeavour and hope to see them victorious. The values of the right are pro family, pro freedom of religion and if the right is successful hopefully we’ll see Hollywood restored to its heyday of the 40’s and 50’s when it was last ruled by right wingers.
A deeper view of my opinion of the left can be found in how the left feels about religion. A microcosm of left leaning liberal thinking can be found in Hollywood. Hollywood is also home to a new religion called Scientology. I just happen to know of one case where Scientology has resulted in the death of one person, whereas if all the victims of communism were buried in Mt. Pleasant cemetery the cemetery would be a mile higher. At the recent Academy awards an obvious jab against Scientology was delivered by presenters Steve Martin and Tina Fey. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtW6ZooB9cI&feature=related The jab I’m referring to was “And every tiny seed on Earth was placed here by the alien King Rondole, to foster our titrates and fuel our positive transfers.” Then Tina Fey makes the crack about no on wants to hear about a religion that we made up (Scientology is a made up religion by L. Ron Hubbard). This for me represented the first shot across the bow in a conceivable war on Scientology by the left. For years we have witnessed Scientology make inroads into Hollywood’s billion dollar entertainment industry. We have seen many of the stars we knew growing up convert to a new, strange and mysterious religion. For the most part we thought nothing of it and Scientology’s growth and prosperity went unnoticed…, at least by most of us, however the left on the other hand, to them, this prosperity was an entirely different matter. The growth of Scientology was becoming a threat to the left’s control of the liberal media. This threat that is once again threatening to topple one of the left’s bastions of left thinking, their pillar of support and safe haven. If the left were to lose the media, what could this mean?
Enter Anonymous, as mysterious as the religion it seeks to oppose it appeared out of nowhere announcing its existence with this slick ad on You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ It was a battle cry, a narrator declares a detailed battle plan over a catchy beat that threatened to finish Scientology once and for all. A faceless organization unless of course you happen to be me and I say the face of Anonymous is communism. The ad has all the characteristic hallmarks of communism’s view of religion as something that is totalitarian, immoral and that must be stopped. The reality is the exact opposite, Scientology merely seeks to provide a moral standard that is pro family, it just happens to threaten the iron grip by the left over the liberal media providing a new voice and a breath of fresh air from the oppression of political correctness. Scientology promotes an alternative form of ethics from that of the left, jeopardizing the left’s ability to create guilt trips and point the finger of blame at perceived enemies. Here is Tom Cruise giving a speech on ethics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFBZ_uAbxS0 The encroachment by Scientology on the left’s territory creates a spectacle that can only be looked upon with a great sense of humour. Watching the left trying to hold onto its power exposes them for who they really are and I hope to find out more about them as this battle wages on. I will support Scientology in this endeavour and hope to see them victorious. The values of the right are pro family, pro freedom of religion and if the right is successful hopefully we’ll see Hollywood restored to its heyday of the 40’s and 50’s when it was last ruled by right wingers.
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