"Last Comments" on David Banach's lecture

There are several things that I do not like in Banach’s lecture. One of the main parts that I disliked is part III, when they said Sisyphus should be happy rolling the rock up the hill over and over again. This idea of “all our activities [leading] to nowhere”, reminds me of nihilism. Nihilism is “an extreme form of skepticism: the denial of all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth”, and “nothingness or nonexistence”. This means that some philosophers believe that we are living our lives, and that whatever actions we make are pointless because they lead to nothing.

Sisyphus leading the boulder up the hill is an example of him leading to nowhere for eternity. I really don’t let this concept of Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill, and how Camus said: “one must imagine him happy”. Rolling a boulder up a hill sounds like a pain in the ass, and he could just walk away from the boulder. I know the Gods apparently made him push the boulder for eternity, but that’s why I don’t believe in myths like that.

On the worksheet I wrote: The existentialist’s view of happiness is that we must find the happiness within ourselves. They connect Sisyphus to people struggling to live their lives, which annoys me. I know living one’s life may be stressful at times, but for Sisyphus, why is it that we must imagine Sisyphus was happy? It sounds like a miserable job to move rocks up a hill for eternity. I don’t really believe in all that God stuff, but I understand the happiness from within thing. Yet people look for happiness through others, through music, through art, drugs.. We are human. We can’t just sit there doing nothing and always being happy. But we can appreciate being alive.

In class, Jace said how school is like a boulder that we are constantly rolling up a hill, and that we do the same routine every day: waking up, going to school, going home, waking up, going to school.. Sometimes I agree with this, that we are going through the same routine every day. I remember at the end of the last school year I felt like I was walking on the exact same patch home every day, and how I felt like I needed to do something different. For the last couple of weeks I would walk down different roads leading to my house, because I felt like I was endlessly walking down the same path.

In class Jacara and I have had a lot of really interesting conversations about the parts of Mr. Banach’s lecture. Again, I don’t really like this section of Banach’s lecture as well. This lecture has been interesting to read; yet it is very frustrating for me to read it. When I was talking with Jacara I responded to where Banach said: “can I choose to be a murderer, a thief, or an exploiter of humanity?” by saying that we are allowed to do what we want to do, within some extent, but that it is wrong for someone to take another’s life away from them without their permission. This reminded me of One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest, the main character was very lively and cocky. In a part of the movie they take him away to where the really crazy people are, and they extract part of his brain; which also took away his personality and made him into a vegetable. I felt really disturbed when we was transformed into this mess, because I felt like they had no right taking out part of his brain without his permission.

I liked the quote: “he makes himself into a character controlled by the very slaves of whom he makes himself an object. The person who uses other people as objects to satisfy his desires makes himself an object.” This quote reminded me of the lyrics from the song “Wrapped Around Your Finger” by the Police, that says: “then you'll find your servant is your master” which I have always found to be an interesting concept.

I usually really like when Banach talks about artists, and how “the artist is free to create; she does not follow any explicit rules.” Yet I did not like that he said: “yet her action is constrained by the requirement that her creation must be coherent.” When I was talking with Jacara she thought that the artwork has to make sense to at least one person, including the artist. Yet I said how artwork does not have to make sense to anyone but the artist, and that if it does not make sense to other people, it’s too bad.

To answer the question “are we free?” I said that we are as free as we can be, within a certain extent. We are free yet we have to follow laws, and how society is. If we act too free people may try to shut us up, or shut us down.