Week 8 -- de Unamuno and Heidegger


Do people create philosophies to justify actions, or create actions to justify philosophy?
I personally (although starting only some months ago) wrote up a guiding series of principles for myself. These principles represent what I believe I ought to be, and when I find myself in a tough decision I tend to consult the principles to (hopefully) go through the situation in a way that will represent me the best.

Now, that all being said, I understand that the wide majority of people do not do this, and that it took me roughly 20 years to do it myself. So with this in mind I lean towards people  justifying their actions on the fly, but I don’t think its impossible to do the opposite.

Learned Christian Values
I can understand our values originating from Christianity, but I have a hard time believing that they are inherently Christian values. When you have enough cultures competing combined with enough history, structures will change based on the times. The Christianity of today is not the same Christianity of the Roman era – the Christianity of Lutherans is not the same Christianity of Puritans – the Christianity of the United States is not the same as the Christianity of Sweden. It’s all too hard to tell to make a conclusion.

Influences on morality
With that all in mind, I still think a person’s religion weighs heavily on their morality. I also think things like family, friends, government, and media can as well; all classical influencers of a person. Looking at this, it almost seems that morality is, in a way, relative. Huh, interesting.

Would you act differently if death never existed?
I think the knowledge of death effects a lot of how we think of the world and how we act in it, so it would make sense if no one knew what death was that we would act differently. How we would act differently, however, is not something I think we can understand. Would we all be lazy, or would our work ethic be the same? In addition, what about reproduction – does this relate a population curve that ends up becoming radically unstable?

Authenticity vs. Inauthenticity
Falling to average certainly makes you look better to society, but I don’t think that you can keep internal happiness by going with the status quo. I believe that the self-actualization of a person in their hierarchy of needs is defined specifically by the connection of their inner self to their outer self. When you create a dichotomy between the two by shaping the outer self to society, that can hurt a person in relation to this hierarchy.

Positives and Negatives of being concerned with Being
One of my principles (as I mentioned in the first topic) is that too much of anything is going to be bad. And so I agree that being too concerned with your being can cause overloads of anxiety that will hurt you in the long run. Still, it is important to look at things in an outer picture sometimes and wonder why you really do what you do.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 6 -- Nietzsche Continued

Will to Power I don’t believe its true that the sole goal of all human beings is to gain power. I can think of a number of people who would not have any sort of happiness with a large amount of power, and would rather leave the control to someone else. Intrinsic Goodness I don’t think there is intrinsic goodness, much like I don’t think there is intrinsic evil. All actions can be seen as being a percentage of good and evil, at least to make things simpler. So we could say that an action is 60% good and 40% bad, or vice versa. A Necessary Power I can understand the concept of necessary power – of a necessary relationship between master and slave. But I am not sure what the real-life example of it should be. Certainly, it would make sense that it would be something within economics, as our world has only so many natural resources. The system of capitalism always requires someone to be on the bottom, and so this might be relevant. Slavery as a choice Didn’t know we...
Read more

Week 4 -- Kierkegaard Continued

Truth is Faith In a sense I can agree that a belief in truth ties directly into faith; not religious faith, but rather the faith that what you believe is true is actually true. We cannot certify that anything is 100% certain, we can only increase the probability of it being certain by lowering the amount of assumptions we make about it. The remaining piece of this, however, has to be ascertained with the faith of believing that, based on probability (or perhaps something else, depending on the person), it is in fact certain. How much does being right matter? It depends, both on what you’re being right about as well as what actually matters. Since my background is in Finance, I’ll give a related example: say you’re buying a big bet on a stock going up. You’d want to be right on this simply based on the fact that, if you are right, you make a ton of money, and if you are wrong, you lose a ton of money. However, money and trading isn’t everything to everyone, and in this cas...
Read more

Week 12 - The Final Week

The idea of self/existing with the self The reason that I chose the self was because I believe at the end there really is only the self. All other things – work, family, money, partners, logic, god – all these things are purely temporary in the end. The one thing that you’re stuck with, day-in day-out, is yourself. Your mind, your thoughts, and your philosophy; and thus the goal of life should be to train the self to be as healthy and high-performing as possible. Freeing yourself from the influence of others (environment vs. true self) I don’t believe that there is really a way to completely free yourself from the influence of society. Like I mentioned previously, the essence of society itself comes before your existence, and due to the age of society and its grasp upon the world, it will always in at least some way circumvent you from acting completely independently. But I think that that’s alright, since there is no real reason to act completely independently; just take the...
Read more