We realize that throughout the reading, we have trouble defining women as a whole. This issue comes up because you cannot define someone as a woman without the definition of a man existing. “Hence woman makes no claim for herself as subject because she lacks the concrete means, because she senses the necessary link connecting her to man without positing its reciprocity, and because she often derives satisfaction from her role as the Other” in the whole relation to men (p. 10). Just like you yourself cannot say that you are you without looking at someone else. This kind of comparison has been a topic of controversy for years, the differences between the sexes, and how we see each sex. DB has seen women value themselves as an accessory to men for years, valuing themselves more depending on how good they are at being by a man’s side. Sometimes it’s more about how men feel about you rather than being married or being under a man in a loose sense of the meaning. Women have not tried to uplift each other all the time, and often this mix of valuing themselves beneath man and competing for his gaze sets them apart from each other. This separation makes it harder for women to escape being the Other.

Women see themselves as the Other in comparison to men, needing them in order to put value on themselves as people. The need for someone else to be compared to not only separates the Other from man, but the Other from yourself. You become used to how you operate, but when someone else, or the Other, has their eyes on you, suddenly you are given another perspective on who you are. The perspective on who you are is made up by how the other looks at you, and if you feel that their opinion of you has some or even a little truth to it. You can separate yourself from the Other, but the Other brings to your attention what you feel should be ashamed of.

The Other becomes a mediator for knowing who you are, and who the other is. The only reason someone knows that they are an individual is that they see someone else. They can observe that though this person may look like me, or sound like me, that is not me. The Other puts into perspective how you are, how you speak or carry yourself. You form opinions about yourself according to how other people describe you, and when you like what they are telling you. When you do not like what they’re saying, you see it as a negative trait or as false altogether. As for me, when people tell me that I talk a lot, I know that in relation to other people, they are one hundred percent correct, I do talk a lot. Now when someone tells me that I am bad at something enough times, I start to believe them, and it feels pretty bad. I’m bad at enunciating sometimes, so my words can get very mixed up and quite weird sounding, and I get very embarrassed about it. This brings us into our own roles in shame.

When you think about it, school has shamed you all of your life, telling you to either fit this mold or you’re worth nothing to the rest of the world and goodbye. People may encourage you to be yourself, but there will always be an opposition to either your happiness or your self as you portray it in life. We become ashamed when under the eyes of another. When we feel like we are being judged, we get embarrassed and decide to never do what we just did in front of this other person ever again. This generally makes us feel bad about ourselves. Scrutiny from others is a driving force in the human life, shame created both laws and morals, one more designed for safety reasons whereas the other tells us exactly what to be ashamed about in your own life. Even this weekend I got shamed for looking around the Pottery Barn Kids at the Roseville Galleria. My younger sister and I were quietly looking around the place, looking at the cute bed sets we didn’t get as kids, and just looking at how cute everything was. On our way out, the middle aged white woman started following me out the store. I knew she worked there because she was right at the desk before we walked in, and she didn’t say much, just eyeballed us for a while. I asked my younger sister quietly if she was following us, and my younger sister did this dramatic turn and they stared into each other’s eyes all the way out,and she watched us leave. First I let it go, because hell, why would a 19 year old and 16 year old be shopping at Pottery Barn for Kids? I later remembered that you aren’t obligated to really buy anything when you go out shopping, not for any store. This woman I’ve never met and know nothing about made me feel like for some reason, I didn’t belong in her store, whether it be because of my age or my race, maybe how I was dressed, I’m still not sure why she wanted me out of the store so bad, and didn’t talk to me about it. In my own case, the other reminded me that it isn’t appreciated when someone like me wants to look around, sending the message to me that I’m not welcome there, and it made me feel out of place, a little disgusted too. usually the other can help up in society and how we differentiate between good and bad behavior. Without the Other to tell us what is good and bad, then treating the other as an equal is a shaky platform depending on if you are the Other.

Word Count: 987

Based on the demon talk from the lecture.

If a demon were to appear before you and tell you to relive the same life over and over again for all of eternity, would you say yes? Is reliving the same life over and over again painful?

Thinking over the question, multiple thoughts and meditations come to mind. One of the first is the fact that this may or may not be the first time that you are being encountered by the demon. You may think that you have the choice in deciding whether or not to accept this offer, when you may not have the choice in the first place. Whether or not life becomes a painful chore is up to the demon more than it is up to us for various reasons, even in discussion there were many points about what this reliving held in store for people and whether or not it would be bearable.

Reliving life may even be what’s going on now, just without recollection of the first however many times. You could consider each day a new life lived, as routine becomes life and then repeats with each day you keep it up, like sleeping in waking are turned into death and rebirth. The idea of even living is taken into question by this demon’s presence and your own thoughts on life before his visit. There is no point, however, to how much you know about the last lifecycle you lived or how much knowledge you would carry over to the next life. Despite the amount I know, my first instinct was to say yes, after reading the in class paragraph.

I said that I would relive this life because I would not know what to do without the life given to me, and that through the bad experiences, I would take it all over again to live out the happy moments I have had in the past. If I had to relive life knowing everything from my past life, it becomes a vicious cycle of knowing pain is coming with no way to stop it. Looking back to the worst moments of my life, having been pushed around in high school, if I knew what was going to happen and did nothing, part of me would die with each day in the life cycle that this happened over and over again. If I had more choice in stopping it, I might choose to free myself from so much pain, or to help people I didn’t realize needed it before. Though again, the demon and Nietzsche do not specify the limits to our repeated lives. Life should be what you make of it, but when a demon has made it for you to repeat, it no longer feels or is your life anymore in this sense.

Although, I believe that from this point on, life is not just the same determined outcomes as you once thought. Determinism usually gives you the idea that no matter what, whatever is happening was bound to happen, whether you like it or not. In this case, it doesn’t matter what you end up choosing, because your actions from then on will be determined by the next actions or lack thereof. Whether or not this applies to the demon is up to debate.

For me, I believe that the demon may have been pulling the strings, but said demon cannot control the world from above and be down inside of it without taking his eyes off of it. The demon puts down their reigns, and gives you a sliver of time to determine something without his weight on your shoulders. From there, something undetermined may happen, making the rest of your life something with more of your choice because of the seconds he gave you to answer to him. Whether you answered yes or know to him, it brings the question the quality of your own life and your values as a living person.

Word Count: 666

In the writing “On Truth and Lies” by Nietzsche, we are introduced to an arguement that not everyone gets to think about often. Of course, this is because changing this issue would be far too hard, but realizing it is an issue to be discussed throws the reader into a new set of thoughts, and then thoughts of how the words we use are affecting us. Nietzsche argues that there is no truth in the world, and that we cannot ever find the truth, because of how language was created by humans, for humans.

Nietzsche brings the argument up that language is falsifying the world, and giving us the false comfort that we know things. Language is not spoken fact, but a tool that we use in order to express how we feel, to communicate with one another in order to get what we desire from them, or to share an idea. As Nietzche states, “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out,” thus fooling society into believing that these sounds we use are not in fact facts at all. What we say is almost the opposite.

All humans made up language, using definitions to describe what they’re talking about, or to assign an attribute to an item. With all words being made up, there is no one true thing on this earth that we know has a real name or meaning, as we are the ones who game them life and meaning. You can call a chalkboard a whiteboard easily, if you change the definition of chalk or of a whiteboard, you could even go as far as calling it a whole desk, and you could possibly be right. My family and I do this every day. Sometimes we have word slips, or more Filipino family that we listen to say things like “close the light,” or “turn on the window.” We have accidentally and playfully redesigned language in our house, and know what it means when someone says that to us, and technically in our house, that’s correct terminology. Whether it is an official definition or not makes no difference in the fact that those are words with some kind of meaning that we recognize in commands. Calling language a metaphor puts into perspective how little we really do know about the world around us, and how we have made up what we think we know.

As we know “so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors.” With this in mind, it gives us something to come to terms with. Our truth right now can remain as is, but the question of whether or not we know anything at all is knowledge. It is impossible it seems to know something, so we must accept the fact that this is how we have to work around knowing and not knowing something.

Nietzsche continues about how the artist can escape this. He says that you can create your own world in which everything is organic, if you are able to aesthetically recreate the entire world for yourself. I understand that this can be a nice way to have a new view on things, but I do not think that this brings you any closer to a truth, if one existed in the first place. A big limit I can think of for artistic freedom is that you would have to be born with no one around to teach you about any of society and our normatives. I think that surviving like that at all would be a struggle, and then starting a new world for yourself only brings us back to the question before we released this child into the wild. Even if you make a whole new aesthetically organic world is that we continue to have the problem that nothing in that world can be truth either.

Word Count: 666

Based from the group discussion after watching the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, our group looked over:

6. What is the point of saying that “we want our minds to be a window on the world, not a prison?” (122) . How would memory removal be a metaphysical prison?

By saying that we want our mind to be a window rather than a prison, we mean that we want a clear view of the world rather than a small, closed off opinion of it. A window is usually much clearer and more open than a prison window is. A prison window is purposefully limited, cutting off your view of the world except for the narrow space you can see out of. If you want to learn and be able to survive in the world, you need to be fully aware of it, with a wider view and capacity for what life can and will throw at you. A wider, clearer window is easier to see you of than one in prison. In relation to the memory, by only remembering what you want to, you actually take away what you learned from your experiences, making you vulnerable to making the same mistakes time after time.

7. How can what you don’t know hurt you, according to Grau?

Like Grau said, what you don’t know can definitely hurt you. You don’t have to be aware of a pain or hurt for something to be negatively affecting you. In the literal, physical sense, when I was young, I didn’t know that hot wax would burn me, so one day I decided to stick my hand into it to see what would happen. I learned very quickly that it hurt like hell and I’ve never done it since. Even though I had no idea that hot wax burns, it still physically was able to hurt me. What Grau uses as an example is based from the characters in ES, characters that were self-destructive or easily manipulated. Although these seem like characters flaws or downs on sight, the reality is that these traits can hurt you. Even if you are unaware that you are making self-destructive choices, it does not change the fact that you are being hurt by your actions anyways. By being able to forget in this movie, you see that the characters keep engaging in the same, unhealthy relationship, without knowing each time how bad it will be for either of them. With the memory, it does not matter if you don’t remember something, the fact that it can hurt you does not change. The facts stay the same, and so does history, it will not change just because you choose to ignore it.

8. What is the difference between harms that would and harms that deprive? (123)

Harms that wound you are the things that somehow hurt you, either physically or mentally. if you get knocked out in a physical fight, you’re going to get bruised or get a few cuts, wounds that hurt you. If you get dumped by someone you’ve really liked then it stings, when you think about it and in the moment, it hurts you. You can learn from these mistakes and grow from them, so you don’t make the same mistakes or so that you aren’t as hurt when it happens to you again. This differs from wounds that deprive. Wounds that deprive avoid the experience all together, making it so that you never meet or learn from the situation. In short, a wound that never lets you learn and hides truth from you, neglectful. Wounds that deprive almost lie to you, and hide you from the truth of the matter or the truth of the world. Memory removal would deprive you, keep you under the impression that you are in control and you are safe, when in reality, how can you be safe when you have a new opportunity to let yourself get hurt again? When you do deprive yourself of these memories, you open yourself up to dangers and are more vulnerable to them.

14. Do you agree that Mary’s goal (of returning files to memory removal clients) is a worthy one? 128

To me, Mary’s goal is not a worthy one. Mary’s whole goal of returning the memory files is based from her own pain, and to comfort her own conscience. Although it may seem that she is doing a good thing, its for her own comfort and peace of mind that she’s giving everyone back their memories. Giving back the memories of those who had them erased may not even be the thing to do, considering the negative outcomes that may come from them, only giving people more questions. The direction of the movie made it seem like the ones with an erased memory ended up making the same mistake or reliving what they had chosen to erase. Even if it is a good thing that everyone has their memories back, it does not make Mary a good person. Mary was so upset at the doctor that she lashed out at him by ruining his business, and did it to satisfy her own want for revenge on the doctor.

Word Court: 863

• Is there a necessary connection between destruction and creativity, as Nietzsche suggests? Does great art require suffering?
• What does Zarathustra mean when he says that “The overman is the meaning of the earth? What are the ways you see people “blaspheme against the earth?”

Zarathustra is a character made to play as the counterpart of Christ or Socrates, coming down with great wisdom that no one wants to take part in. No one is listening to his Dionysian way of thinking, and prefer to stick to the Apollisean way that they are used to. He thinks to himself often that he is “not the mouth for [their] ears,” as nothing he brings up can be accepted by the majority of people in the square.

He goes on about mainly how God, or any God, is dead, and that is is our responsibility to save ourselves rather than to wait for him to save us in death. This is an inflammatory statement and idea to say the least, as the common people are not used to anyone not believing in a god or that we must be saved for the afterlife. Zarathustra argues that we (his readers and the audience in the story) should be the new meaning of the earth, or the ubermensch. The Ubermensche, loosely translated as the Overman, is a would be God who is true to the physical earth, as he sets his own rules for how he lives so long as no one is purposely hurt. Sadly, though this thought of anyone being godlike appeals to people, it is not something that the ‘normal people’ are happy or willing to hear.

Going off of his Dionysian thinking, I can say that creation and destruction are hand in hand. You cannot create something without breaking it in, or making it out of multiple things you take from the earth. Dionysian ways of thinking involves an awareness of the darker side of life, and focuses on the darkness as vital to truly living. It sounds depressing, like you’d only be sad all the time, or like you focus on things that make you unhappy. When you take this into account with the fact that life is half and half good and bad, ignoring half of it seems like a delusion. It makes it out to be less focused on half of life that matters just as much as the happy half.

With creativity, I do believe that good art makes you feel something deep within, and that sad art has an amazing way of making evoking emotions from you by just existing as art. Good art can evoke the same emotions, but the more powerful ones come from the sadder art. Great art is enhanced by suffering inside of it, or being a product of suffering, but not all great art is great because of the sadness it carries.

When Zarathustra saws that “the overman is the meaning of the earth,” he means it in the sense that god is gone and has passed the earth down to us. We now need to take the responsibility of the earth and the physical world. I see that people blaspheme the earth by acting like nothing they do can hurt the earth, as if we don’t live on earth and directly affect it. No one else is here but us to care for it, but the way we decide against caring for it speaks volumes about how disconnected we are from where we live.

Word Count: 586

In the film Double Indemnity, “an insurance representative lets himself be talked into a murder/insurance fraud scheme that arouses the suspicion of an insurance investigator” (IMDb). Throughout the film, we can see an artistic interpretation of fate or a lack of free will to an extent. Walter, being the insurance agent, finds himself so drawn to Phyllis, that he cannot escape murder. The whole movie, the audience listens to him talk about how he can’t stop himself, no matter what he does, making for an almost perfect murder “straight down the line.”

We can see in the film that both Phyllis and Walter are not satisfied with their lives. We find early on that Phyllis is dissatisfied with her husband, and how he was away all the time and paid her little to no attention. When he would give her attention, it was usually negative. Along those problems, her step daughter would get the attention from her husband that she craved and envied. This looks at first like her main drive for the murder of her husband.

Walter is an insurance salesman, going out and convincing people to buy his insurance for his company. The only reason I can see from him to be satisfied is the fact that he has his eyes set on Phyllis.

Phyllis has had her eyes on murder prior to meeting Walter, killing her now husband’s first wife in order to get money and what she wanted. Money has been a motivator for the both of her murders, and she is very aware that she is “rotten to the heart” before her death. Without Walter, Lola would be the one to get the money if Mr. Dietrichson had ever died instead of herself.

Walter has a big ego, with an even bigger desire for showing it off and finding what he wants in drinking and women. Since he already had beer, he wanted Phyllis next, telling her she’d help kill her husband once she had come to his apartment, since it would mean that he’d have her instead of Mr. Dietrichson.

The fate is played out when we can hear Walter attempting to push away Phyllis once she brought up murder saying that he, let her have it, straight between the eyes. She didn’t fool [him] for a minute, not this time. [He] knew [he] had ahold of a red hot poker, and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off. [He] was all twisted up inside and [he] was still holding on to that red-hot poker.” Why didn’t he drop it then, get away from Phyllis while he could? “And right then it came over me that I hadn’t walked out on anything at all, that the hope was too strong, that this wasn’t the end between her and me. It was only the beginning.” He knew their lives had been leading up to them meeting, and there was no way for his to escape, no matter how hard he tried to pull away. He and Phyllis went through with a fated murder “straight down the line.”

Word Count: 525

Sisyphus was an incredibly cunning man, notorious for his eternal punishment in the afterlife of pushing a giant boulder up and down a mountain ceaselessly. Would “unlife” be a better word for that?

Camus recalls this story in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” and has come to the conclusion that in Sisyphus’ consciousness, in his brief hour of rest, that Sisyphus is actually happy with his punishment. “That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.” Who would be happy if they were condemned to an afterlife full of never ending suffering for the sins of the life you once had? I’d be mad for all of eternity just screaming at the gods who condemned me to such, but Sisyphus actually overcome this punishment.

Sisyphus knew why he was punished, he tricked the gods, and they wanted him to suffer. “Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent,” but that is what made him happy (Camus). The punishment came from his wrongdoings in the living world, but to remember the cause of his punishment fills him with this odd happiness that we call lucidity. Despite the pain of rolling the rock, he knows that he’s here for a reason, for his contributions to the world, but this is what he takes pride in. It was another way to rebel against the gods, to accept a punishment they thought would ruin him, and smile on his way to do it all over again

Camus believed that Sisyphus was an absurd hero for this. In the hour of consciousness Camus mentions that when Sisyphus “contemplates his torment, [he] silences all the idols” in that hour (Camus). The pain is not what makes Sisyphus happy, nor is the fact that he can never stop pushing. He is happy because he has closure, that he understands what is going on, and he continues to do as he must while looking back at why he’s pushing this rock. His “why” for pushing this rock is what keeps him going, and why Camus believes that he is absurd for being happy in his descent. Sisyphus has overcome the gods because sisyphus can no longer see this as a punishment, if he believes it was all worth it from his life with the living.

When I think about Sisyphus’ happiness even during pain, I see a sort of grim relationship to myself. As in, when I look back at my life and wonder why I committed to school, I have to realize that like my own parents, I want to be able to take care of them, and whatever family I have or make in the later future. It’s like if Sisyphus was looking to his future as he pushed, instead of looking backwards at what he did, I too find happiness even as I struggle to start building something for myself.

Camus also thought that the same absurdity that laid in Sisyphus disturbs many people, to the point that they ask if life is worth living, or go and off themselves because they believed that it has no worth, or that they have no worth. Is life worth living? “Camus sees this question of suicide as a natural response to an underlying premise, namely that life is absurd in a variety of ways” though, are many reasons for suicide, and life has never changed (Aronson). Camus, to my reading and understanding believes that life is filled with things that are absurd, but why should they be absurd? Despite the fact that humans may not understand everything in the world around us right now, does not mean that we need to freak out and kill ourselves over it right now. If we continue to work, we will find the answers with time. Why alienate yourself from a world you live in? Not thinking life is worth living comes from not having a purpose, but it takes a long, long time to begin to know what your role is, you can’t rush that, and I don’t by any means believe that death brings anyone closer to finding that truth. In Camus and his thoughts on whether life is worth living, in Sisyphus’ case he has no choice, but if he did have a choice, I’m sure Sisyphus would try and live forever to continuously spite the gods, just as he is doing now in the underworld.

In the first case made by Camus, I do agree with Camus that Sisyphus is happy despite his undying task. I believe that you can find a certain closure from a pain, not an acceptance or a happiness, but that it helps to bring you to terms with it. Sisyphus just took it a few steps forward. Now on Camus’ topic of suicide, I never believe that life is not worth living, I might as well try and do something with the life I happen to have, however I came to be as a lifeform.

Word Count: 916