to be or not to be philosophie

to be or not to be philosophie

Thought over the act of self-killing has persisted for millennia alongside entrenched religious anathema against it, as well as certain religions which require it on occasion, for example, in the immolation of widowed Hindus. This site uses cookies to recognize users and allow us to analyse site usage. It is in us as a result of aeons of evolution. Without testing capabilities at such junctures, the answer to ‘To Be or Not To Be?’ would appear to lie within the moral compass of the beholder. Therein, dear Hamlet, lies our true identity, and our strength to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Are there things that don't exist? I would never question it just because someone suggested that life seems absurd. I had a significant problem, though: Nancy is an atheist, who thinks that life has no objective meaning. – Wittgenstein). In his Myth of Sisyphus, Camus calls this leap to belief in an afterlife a hope that transcends human understanding, an escape from reality that is akin to philosophical (that is, intellectual) suicide. Is that the one real philosophical question – whether to live? In The Tragedy of Hamlet, the protagonist falls short of being a hero by virtue of his character, or lack thereof. If I could have improved my childhood and youth, I would not have committed murder. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. Whoever Shakespeare was, he had a great mind, his skills with the written word far surpassing my own; he wouldn’t have made such a mistake. "Un être humain n'est pas capable de produire en moins d'un quart d'heure (15 h 18 - 15 h 32) une telle logorrhée, aussi vide de sens et morphologiquement According to the gravedigger’s reckoning (Act 5: Scene 1), Hamlet was thirty years old when he fell into his pit of despair. I'm not saying that the force of will is enough to always determine an outcome, or that some things we wish for won't be difficult to achieve. While walking my dog one afternoon, I noticed a cherry blossom tree in full bloom. To be, or not to be. I told Nancy (not her name) that she needed to stay in the world, that her presence, no matter how miserable for her, was nevertheless good and significant. It is manifest in the clinging to life of the old and infirm whose time is short; and in the same clinging to life of the young and infirm whose time to suffer is long. Aye, there’s the rub! I may also kill my unreasonable and unjustified self. By ending our lives, it may, strangely, seem that we are taking control over matters and deciding how to live (to not). "To be or not to be, that is the question Wether it is nobler in the mind To suffer the slings and harrows Of an outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of trubles And by opposing end them ? This does not render them pointless. As humans we tend to set our visions far into the future and even, perhaps, set them in stone: summed up best in the very concept of heaven. help Reddit App Reddit coins Reddit premium Reddit gifts. But are such tests able to reveal a difference between a soldier laying her life down for her county and a suicide bomber at the end of her life? Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. X. Yes, life is worth it if lived with lucidity, conscious of life’s absurdities, but rebelling against them. I had gotten through to her mother, who lived locally and she rushed to Nancy’s apartment. Who got the guts? And what can a king stand for if he can’t stand up for himself? The human heart recognizes heroes by the choices they make when they are faced with adversity or responsibility. To be or not to be? I gave her links to articles that might awaken her desire to live. Hamlet’s trouble in asking his question is also an admission of having missed a particular life-purpose. Perhaps best summed up in the words of Hamlet, as written by William Shakespeare: to be, or not to be: that is the question: As I sat here typing that very quote, the smallest of things caught my eye. However, the threat of extraneous factors affecting the decision always remains. They speak to an intrinsic part of nature, the need to look at both (all) sides to understand and balance the whole. If you no longer exist then there is a complete absence of pain, which is a good, but also an absence of pleasure. Even if it were proved to be so, we still are driven to live, and so we will. But will we still experience a sense of life after death – especially since our sense organs will no longer have the capacity to work as we anthropocentrically perceive them to? … Until then, the only significance any of us can give to these primeval yearnings for absolute identity are personal morality tales of ideology and imagination. He is surely right to say that life is full of tribulations – “the thousand natural shocks” – and that we are often unable to avoid them. I see the essence of life as growth: where the sum of the parts becomes more than the whole: as regeneration and re-use, and of co-operation to bring build and bring harmony to the chaos: of unity overcoming division; and of balance. If one correlates these alternatives with the alternatives proposed in the opening lines of the soliloquy—“To be, or not to be”—then “to be” is related to suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the mind, and “not to be” is related to taking arms against a sea of troubles. Comments. my philosophy of life. However, although many may hate their lives sometimes, few actually take their lives. Understanding our human condition goes some way to inuring us against its absurdities. Our philosophical discussion about God and meaning didn’t get too far during those visits. « To be or not be » ? I was later to find out that these blossoms are very short-lived. None of us ever knows for sure what we are made of until we are tested. She was not doing well and threatened to end her life. “to be or not to be”, perhaps doesn’t tell the whole story…. Social media invites us to create a kind of living autobiography that is not necessarily about the person we are. So Hamlet seems not to understand what he is asking. To be, or not to be. It is estimated that 80% to 90% of suicides occur in people with mental disorders. Ever since I became aware of the cherry blossom tree’s evanescent nature, I have felt a deep affection towards it. Plants and trees and many animals don’t worry about the future or the past, they are ‘simply’ what they are, they live in the moment, they accept life and what it throws at them, they survive and grow and eventually they die nurturing new life along the way. Back to the quote, which in my view sums things up so well; it could be reduced yet further simply “to be” — in the knowledge that this addresses both states — yet perhaps this would lose something in the translation. On Maxwell’s Demon and the Importance of Intelligence, Existential Choice in the Time of Trump: Conscience and Human Judgment, Law of Life: The Fallacy of your Insignificance. Consider Camus’ telling of the myth of Sisyphus: Sisyphus adheres to his pointless labour in Hades despite the endlessness and ignominy of it, deriving some nobility from his absurd condition. His father, the old King of Denmark, had been dead only a month when his mother’s scandalous marriage turned his world upside down. In the developed world it is a leading cause of death in the unreasonable young. And one of science’s most secure maxims is that energy can never disappear, it merely changes form. Yet we all desire good: the will is naturally drawn to the good, and recoils from harm. Philosophers. In his book, The Gospel in Brief, Tolstoy concludes that our true identity comes down to one thing: our choices. Poor Hamlet! Philosophy (from Greek: φιλοσοφία, philosophia, 'love of wisdom') is the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about reason, existence, knowledge, values, mind, and language. So, he turns to philosophy: “I have studied life. The old, and sometimes wiser, having still a little reason, eschew it, for reason cannot drive us to suicide. There still sometimes occurs the feeling that life is unbearable, that the sum total of good experiences surely cannot outweigh the bad ones. So what keeps you alive, and why? Please give and justify your predictions in fewer than 400 words. He, like everyone else, cannot proceed to properly answer ‘To be or not to be?’ without having performed the necessary first step of making a positive identification of, and commitment to, why he is here. We feel like a Kafka character, who has been summoned to this world without a reason but living in hope that one day, before death, it will all become clear. The possible implications of quantum entanglement, universal sentience, parallel worlds, and a myriad other rabbits, beg to be chased. Hume thought that the our natural fear of death ensured that the person who chooses to commit suicide would only do so after substantial deliberation. Individuals with OCD are seen as people who either wash their hands too frequently, or who are super-organized and … What is not good is evil, meaning that evil is the privation of good. A week or so passed, and I headed out on the same route: only this time, the tree stood bare. Thanks. “Abyssus abyssum invocat” (abyss calleth unto the abyss): This is a quote from Psalm 42 and the title of a music album by the Polish extreme metal band Behemoth.A bit of silence, rather than rock music, is what is needed though, and perhaps Faust can come back to his senses by pausing for a moment. And by opposing end them. Growth that spirals in constant forward motion as light and time itself, not stuck in a moment, in a never ending circle in time. I am a philosopher, not a counsellor, so I was not trained for this. As I departed, I said, “Love is real, please stay.”, Dr Douglas Groothuis, Littleton, Colorado. Conscious thoughts are due to complex electrochemical reactions in the brain, which, when deconstructed, are essentially interactions of matter and energy. by Fred Penzel, PhD. To decide whether life is or is not worth living.” So opined Albert Camus, and he proffered an answer too. These are goods which we especially recognize when they’re missing, in the bitter cold, or loneliness, or heartbreak. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is best known as the greatest writer in the English language, but he was also a philosopher of note. The Ethics of Education in the Secular State. The Big Idea. Growth that spirals in constant forward motion as light and time itself, not stuck in a moment, in a never ending circle in time. The brain – that highly irrational organ – that struggles to convert sensation into something bearable, has given up trying for a moment. To be is a good. This is the philosophical stance of Pessimism. Our true identity does not reside in the dry dusty bones of our family trees, but rather in the sum total of our own individual actions. To Be or Not to Be? To be what you are, who you are, when you are; to be you at each and every moment, to do your best, to learn and move on — ‘to boldly go where’ you ‘have not gone before’. In fact, there is no ‘answer’ available to us, only a choice; and this choice is contingent on whether the ‘to be’ can attain (realise, etc) its purpose – whether understood as that revealed in scripture, as the final cause in Aristotle’s sense, as some personal construction, or the ideal of a thinking subject, and so on. The empirical evidence is clear. I don’t subscribe to the normal world-view of time: of clocks and calendars, that tell the time of the past, the present and the future. Yet to become or not to become what we are meant to be is for us to decide. Instead, it provides the beauty and significance that makes them worthwhile. In this essay, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a … Not an identical situation. And if we need meaning in our lives, somehow, almost all of us will find it. As many in the past have reached this conclusion more or less, it all comes down to the most simple of questions. And in that moment – and it only takes a moment, it does not take thought – we do the non-undoable. Beyond the utility of a philosophy major in terms of skill acquisition and job opportunities, David Jennings said philosophy has intrinsic value as an area of inquiry. We all participate in goodness, which can be perfect only in God. Such things are only important in terms of reference points along the way. Furthermore, there is perhaps a certain dignity gained by living through personal adversity. And when people do march off to war, they do so not to give their lives for their country, but, as General Patton said, to make “the other poor dumb bastard die for his.”. “There is only one philosophical problem which is really serious: suicide. That is, Hamlet is without an answer to the primary pair of questions: ‘What is man and why are we here?’ (Cassirer). It is not the same thing. Camus should have consulted Mother Nature. I consider myself a Cloud specialist, not a DevOps specialist. Some live good lives even though they know that life is ultimately pointless. Carry on Sisyphus! To Be Or Not To Be, That Is The Obsession: Existential and Philosophical OCD. I mean, it is difficult to imagine the ‘What am I?’ before knowing the ‘Why am I?’ This alone can inform us about ‘Who am I?’; and only from answering that can one have any idea about how to answer ‘What should I do?’. We may, for example, be oppressed minorities living under a dictatorship; or, like Ophelia, we may be scorned in love. In one sense, we will always be a part of this great flux of matter-and-energy existence; but the conscious decision to give place to being and/or non-being is one of preference not of certitude, for we cannot experience death amidst living awareness. I will continue this relentless run to touch the horizon of human knowledge until I am enlightened by hidden variables, by inevitable natural death, or never, by nothing. I think this is a noble thought but one that carries great risk, especially if you put off the most important things in life to tackle tomorrow or even the ‘after-life’; when in the end, tomorrow (may) never comes. Created May 2, 2012. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Nancy did not try to die that night. Well, this isn’t strictly philosophy. Sadly, Nancy did attempt to take her own life twice not long after. But through an instant message I checked in with a young friend, who I knew outside of Facebook. Why should I continue to live? Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, 256 pp. Philosophy Department • UNC Chapel Hill • Caldwell Hall • CB# 3125 • 240 East Cameron Ave. • Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125 phone: (919) 962-7291 • fax: (919) 843-3929 • email: philosophy@unc.edu The “discovery” of magnetic monopole in the spin-ice system did not turn elementary particle physics and ElectroMagnetism upside down, because while these “monopoles” have the same characteristics as the bare monopoles, they are only analogous to them. The punctuation, that simple “,”. Submission is permission to reproduce your answer physically and electronically. I believe that while the colour of the petals is pleasing on the eye, it is their transience that provides the special aesthetic quality. In the words of Peter Pan, death is “an awfully big adventure.”. A choice, a process, a paradigm, a trajectory. Nature answered that question for us. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is best known as the greatest writer in the English language, but he was also a philosopher of note. If new life is to be created, then we must take care that it is not a curse, by accepting the challenge of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism. Doubt, that most valuable of commodities for an open mind: fear; that recognition that we are ill-equipped for the challenge faced; that trickster of the mind that can send us into flight without learning the will to learn how to fight; or, into fight without learning that the smart course of action was to retreat and live and learn how to fight harder and smarter another day. The beloved Russian author Leo Tolstoy believed that untangling who we are from what we are is one of life’s greatest pursuits. Are you the king of the philosophical hill, are you the master of agora, the Plato in disguise, the Witt of Wittgenstein? Facebook is a strange place to try to talk someone out of suicide. It will be neither justified nor condemned by reason. Scorn its arbitrariness and commit to being happy. He knew full well who he was, but what he was, he hadn’t a clue. Have the intelligence to know you’re stupid. Yet surely many things do make life worth living: the beauties of nature, art, science, the capacity for reason and self-awareness which allows us to appreciate these things. Yet we’ve all also experienced evil at some point, because we all exist. As for Hamlet, he was all words, words, words, and he was driven to murder and suicide because he had seen a ghost. And how do you exist authentically with the pressures of modern life, which tend to bear us along on a tide of preoccupations? Bad seems to outweigh the good when you compare the latter with the former, so that if we had the choice whether to come into being in the first place, we might well answer, no thanks. That is the question that arises when one faces up to the feelings of anguish, despair, and insignificance that can overcome us during times of deep reflection. To be, or not to be. We are apes, and if we kill ourselves it is not because reason has shown us the way, but because we have become temporarily wonky. His plays give us a glimpse of his views about human nature and the world in general. Yet the latter is not in itself bad, because there isn’t a person who is being deprived. It is to be. The perpetual now; where life is lived, the moment “to be”: the moment we; express who we are, can act to change course, can hope and dream. If I could have improved my childhood and youth, I would not have committed murder. I think few would argue that the evil was required in order to gain these goods. But perhaps all that is needed to revive hope is a change in perspective; to have a little more courage, a little more strength, and the grace to bear that which is passing, for this earthly life is indeed passing, lasting but a moment, while eternity is forever. War might be the chief evidence to the contrary. For Schopenhauer, all organisms are all driven by a Will to survive that often drives them into conflict, meaning that life is essentially suffering. How Stoicism Soothed Anxiety About My Newborn Son Dying Suddenly. It clearly contributes to the survival of one’s species. According to a recent Forbes magazine article, tech companies throughout the U.S. have discovered something universities have known since they began: Liberal arts thinking makes employees stronger. Let Schopenhauer’s Pessimism then be taken as a challenge and a reminder to us: a challenge to build a better world for future generations to inhabit, and a reminder that children do not choose their existences. However, a person embroiled in dreadful circumstances may not be in the optimal frame of mind to make the choice. Short Quiz on Philosophy. I personally do not hold my breath. 58.9k. Either to feed the ego and move to/search/investigate the complementary non-ego, or to dissolve the “me-not me” dualism and accept to be the potential substance of everything, of anytime, of everywhere. Like the blossoming of a ‘Sakura’ tree, our lives are unenduring. So I look again at the meaning of the comma and see it can be the “separation of two complete sentences: We went to the movies, and then we went out to lunch”. This means that nothing is absolved from this immortality, because everything has energy-identity. Therefore, ‘to be’ is the only answer. Et c'est déjà suffisant ! Author of Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays, Colin Emerson says in The Poet, “Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently.”.

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