Existential!Sarah
2003-08-14 @ 12:00 p.m.


Oy, I just totally FUBARed my quiz. I completely misread it or had a dyslexic moment in which I exchanged two words, thus proving the opposite of what I was supposed to be proving. The awful thing is that it was on Existentialism, which I really understand very well. Mea culpa, of course. Yep, that's me: anguished, forlorn, and despairing, at least in the Sartre-ian (-esque?) sense. Thankfully, Brett's a push over and is dropping our lowest quiz grade.

I like existentialism. There's something ennobling about being made to take full responsibility for all of your choices, the possibility of making you into yourself. It's the ulitimate "Shut up and stop whinning" philosophy.

It's nice to read a philosopher that I actually agree with on most points. I like Kant, but I disagree with nearly all of his basic tenents. I think that it's nice that he's so optimistic about the fate of humanity, it's just that I also think he's completely wrong. I have major problems with teleology, basically because, depending on how you present the facts, you can use history to prove that we're going anywhere. For example, I could do a study of print media in the United States over the last 200 years. Using that data (story length, complexity of style, types of articles, etc.) I could argue that either a) print media has become more democratic and accessible to the public at large and it will continue thus until all citizen will be well informed, or b) we're all becoming blathering idiots with 4th grade reading comprehension and the attention span of a monkey on crack. Sorry for the rant. It's just that teleology is stupid and useless. But I still like Kant. Someone has to optimistic around here.

Thought of the Day:

Abstract historical theory is FUN, kids!

before ~ after

Failing Miserably - 2004-10-08
So Not Dead/Catching Up - 2004-09-20
Murphy's Law - 2,629,163,298, Sarah - 2 - 2004-08-23
Listmainia! continues - 2004-08-04
Continuing the list - 2004-08-02