I will now look at a passage focusing on Rene Girard’s ideas from his book Violence and the Sacred. “Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being. If the model, who is apparently already endowed with superior being, desires some object, that object must surely be capable of conferring an even greater plenitude of being. It is not through words, therefore, but by the example of his own desire that the model conveys to the …show more content…
Based on his explanation of the desire on page 146, he appears to believe in an Epicurean idea of natural vs. empty desires, since he tells us that this desire for the object is not a necessity. Here is an excerpt from Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire. “Using his intuitive picture of health and impediment as a guide, Epicurus now divides human desires into two basic groups: the ‘natural’ and the ‘empty.’ The natural are those whose appropriateness is witnesses by their presence in the uncorrupted creature. The empty are products of teaching and acculturation, absent from the uncorrupted condition.” (Nussbaum, pg. 111). We see that Epicurus has created two groups of different types of desires; the natural and empty. He describes the natural desires as being present in the “uncorrupted creature”, or a human being who has not been exposed to corruption. The empty desires, however, are wants that are taught to the individual, most likely from society or culture. These are all the desires that are not present in a uncorrupted human and Girard seems to use these ideas as he describes his explanations. This leads us to ask whether the passion to imitate a model to gain being is a natural or an empty desire because the lines are …show more content…
It is not essential to the function of life. However, you can argue that having a sense of being is essential to our well-being; Girard even says that the desire may come before our basic needs are met. But I believe that this is an empty desire because later in the passage, Rene Girard suggests that the model may not even have a sense of being but it only appears as if he does. You can still survive without being but it definitely gives our existence more meaning. If we were to be completely uncorrupted and alone in nature, I think our ideas of success would be a lot different. In an uncivilized society being could be something as small as having a successful hunting day or creating
Heidegger asks the question of the meaning of Being with respect to a fact which, to his mind, characterizes our times and which he calls "homelessness". This fact is due to "the oblivion of Being", as a result of which Being "has abandoned us". (1)
In the case of a lynching, the violence affects both the lynchman and the lynched. Other times the violence is psychological in nature and it is often indirect. No matter what, it poisons and corrodes everything and everyone, from the environment itself to the very self; the “i” within the environment. And it still does to this day. Jean Toomer’s short story, “Blood Burning Moon” and other works featured in Cane, visualizes depictions of violence through lynching and reveal the innermost madness of the psyche that is the product of racialized violence in the South.
Ours is a violent world where even the most common folk can find themselves faced with unspeakable horror through little or no intention. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the characters find themselves at the mercy of armed men because of a faulty memory and a few wrong turns. In Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow,” a young man winds up shooting his friend in an apparent accident which culminates in a debate between saving that friend or whether it is more important to preserve the self. The stories work together to explore what humans will do when faced with terrible violence.
Loud and dangerous riots are occurring constantly throughout the US taking different forms. In Jon Krakauer 's novel, Into the Wild, Chris McCandless joins the uproar of people disposing their past and an adverse society to head to the vast openness of nature to find peace. In Malcolm Gladwell 's article, Thresholds of Violence, however, students are buying guns or making bombs to dispose of people in their schools and homes; They join a homicidal uprising that began after the mass shooting at Columbine. Militants from both movements are revolting against society, they feel detached and not in need of serious relationships. For example, Chris McCandless and John Ladue both wanted to rid themselves of their parents and Chris refused to allow
How is it that in the year 2016 violence is not only increasing but is also being accepted at a startling rate? Most teenagers in modern days believe “that it was acceptable for a boyfriend to act aggressively towards his partner in certain circumstances.” (Statistics). If teenagers today believe that acting aggressively towards your partner is okay, will they grow to believe that other forms of violence are acceptable as well? Will they create a world where domestic violence, rape, and murder are “no big deal”?
In her book, On Violence, Hannah Arendt studies violence as it relates to war, science, power, aggression, and the like. In this paper, I will speak on the topic of violence as it pertains to aggression. I argue that we, as human beings, possess at least a basic level of aggression that is explainable through animalistic research and characteristics. This argument is one that contradicts the overarching ideas of Arendt’s thoughts on the topic. Through an explicative and then disputatious discourse, I hope to bring validity to my viewpoint.
Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Suzanne Collins, author of Hunger Games, and Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, wrote amazing novels about serious and powerful topics. Each of these books are considered dangerous in their own way, from promoting violence, profanity, sexual themes, anti-religion, to basically any other potentially offensive theme is provided in these novels. It is debatable to which one is the most dangerous and most criticizing to society but I believe Slaughterhouse Five is the most dangerous to society due to the evidence of being against free will, which can result in individuals pursuing negative actions.
One of the aims of Being and Nothingness is to describe consciousness, or human subjectivity. Sartre distinguishes two different modes of consciousness in order to accurately describe human subjectivity. These two modes are being-for-itself and being-for-others. Being-for-itself refers to a transcendent conscious being (Oaklander, 238). Transcendence is the antithesis of facticity. I will describe facticity first, in order to make the concept of transcendence more tractable. Facticity denotes the concrete details of the subject’s being including past decisions, plac...
Violence is an important topic in many medieval narratives, especially those concerning travel. Sir Isumbras, written in the fourteenth century, is a travel narrative about a wealthy man, Sir Isumbras who is travelling to the Holy Land to atone for his sins of pride. Throughout his journey, Sir Isumbras and his family come into contact with many different varieties of violence, ranging from war to kidnapping. While the purpose of the narrative is to atone for sins and make it to the Holy Land, the plot would be nothing if it were not for the violence acts that were splattered across the story. In turn, violence and religion seem to go hand in hand throughout many narratives,
...ess of meaning generated to compensate for the lack of completeness in relationships constructed by language. The excess of meaningless signification, seeking resolution for false desire (such as creating a female mate) drives the Monster to irrational actions as he cannot fathom how language, which he sees as superior to the imaginary, cannot fulfill his requests as he witnessed them fulfilled during his time watching the De Lacys.
Maya Angelou once said, “you may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” Jean Paul Sartre devotes his second chapter in Being and Nothingness on ‘The Body,’ demonstrating his historical knowledge, following an influence embedded in Hegel’s theory. In the film, Cleo From 5 To 7 , director Agnès Varda demonstrates a reflective perspective on freeing oneself from the bias of what others view as the ideal vision of beauty. Sartre shows that the being-for-itself, or the human being starts to become more aware of his or her own moral existence, only when he or she sees themselves being perceived by another being for-itself. Sartre says that we become more aware of ourselves in the hands or comparison
The Stranger written by Albert Camus is an absurdist novel revolving around the protagonist, Meursault. A major motif in the novel is violence. There are various places where violence takes place and they lead to the major violent act, which relates directly to the theme of the book. The major violent act of killing an Arab committed by Meursault leads to the complete metamorphosis of his character and he realizes the absurdity of life.
The collection of stories in The Aleph as a general theme, tend to employ lots of physical violence. Whether that comes in the form of executions, knife-fights, political killings, or revenge, many of these tales are in the lean, machismo, cold-hearted tradition.
"Being, the One, is, and that Becoming, change,it comes either out of being or out of not being. If the former, then it already is-in which case it does not come to be; if the lat...