All At Once
This is my first time, both to blogging in general and to blogging for this class. I hate the word blog. And blogging. Bad news bears.
Q1: The thing I hate most about my home is . . . hard to pinpoint. I love my home, it's beautiful, well situated between city, mountains, and beach, the people are nice, and most are progressive thinkers. I don't like the near constant fog and rain of winter (which is not the case this year, I do honestly think it's because of global warming . . .). I despise the yuppie-ville feel that excessive wealth of my fellow inhabitants creates. I also abhor the unnecessary tendency of my peers to get fucked up. And not just fucked up, in my home town one doesn't smoke three bowls, take ten shots, and say "I'm FUCKED up, man." No, no. They take two mescaline and some X, maybe a 1/4 of shrooms and some acid too. Then they smoke and drink. I'm exaggerating, sorry. They're not that intense, but they are intense and I don't like it. I can feel the gaping holes they're burning in their brains and it hurts me.
Q2: What problem faces me? I've spent a lot of time on this one. A lot of problems face me, and I'm not talking about personal problems, those are not as important to me as the problems that face the world. Whoa, I that was a lie. Of course my personal problems are more important, that's why I buy clothes made in China. I mean to say that for this project what is more interesting to adress are world problems. And a lot of the issues that face the world (and me, in smaller ways) come, I think, from greed. So my problem is greed. Whether innate or created, big or small, I want to know where it comes from, what it does, how it does it, why it does it, and maybe, just maybe, how to stop it.
Q3: I think Mary Shelley's Frankenstein confirms Rousseau's state of nature if you consider her monster to be a man, which, for the sake of this blog, we will (which does not mean that I think he is a man). In part one of the Second Discourse Rousseau describes natural man's development from a savage who's actions and thoughts are little different from an animal to the more developed actions of social man, actions that require forethought and knowledge. Shelley's monster goes through the stages described by Rousseau, just at a much more rapid pace. The "wretch" is a timid, peaceful sort in the beginning. However, when the monster kills Frankenstein's brother he is no longer in accordance with Rousseau's state of nature. Rousseau believed that man in his natural state would be "without any desire of hurting [his fellows]" (pg.110-111). Rousseau thinks that property and inequality are needed to arouse enough anger to incite wo/man to violence. The monster has no property when he kills the boy. So I think that this sudden violence is more in line with Hobbes' state of war. It was not, however, self preservation that caused the monster to kill. Indeed it was simply for comfort (to stop the boy's yelling) that he murdered. This is in accordance with Rousseau's view of Hobbes' state of war: that Hobbes took social/sophisticated man and put him in a world without government, without social conventions and that this is what caused their brutality. Natural man does not understand comforts, nor language. His first reaction to discomfort would be to flee. But the monster doesn't flee, he talks to the boy (language is a trapping of social man), and then attacks the boy to create a situation that he finds more desirable: silence. This is what a Rousseau's idea of a sophisticated man would do in Hobbes state of war.
So both the idea's fit, but Rousseau's is the one that is vindicated to a fuller extent. Ha.
Q1: The thing I hate most about my home is . . . hard to pinpoint. I love my home, it's beautiful, well situated between city, mountains, and beach, the people are nice, and most are progressive thinkers. I don't like the near constant fog and rain of winter (which is not the case this year, I do honestly think it's because of global warming . . .). I despise the yuppie-ville feel that excessive wealth of my fellow inhabitants creates. I also abhor the unnecessary tendency of my peers to get fucked up. And not just fucked up, in my home town one doesn't smoke three bowls, take ten shots, and say "I'm FUCKED up, man." No, no. They take two mescaline and some X, maybe a 1/4 of shrooms and some acid too. Then they smoke and drink. I'm exaggerating, sorry. They're not that intense, but they are intense and I don't like it. I can feel the gaping holes they're burning in their brains and it hurts me.
Q2: What problem faces me? I've spent a lot of time on this one. A lot of problems face me, and I'm not talking about personal problems, those are not as important to me as the problems that face the world. Whoa, I that was a lie. Of course my personal problems are more important, that's why I buy clothes made in China. I mean to say that for this project what is more interesting to adress are world problems. And a lot of the issues that face the world (and me, in smaller ways) come, I think, from greed. So my problem is greed. Whether innate or created, big or small, I want to know where it comes from, what it does, how it does it, why it does it, and maybe, just maybe, how to stop it.
Q3: I think Mary Shelley's Frankenstein confirms Rousseau's state of nature if you consider her monster to be a man, which, for the sake of this blog, we will (which does not mean that I think he is a man). In part one of the Second Discourse Rousseau describes natural man's development from a savage who's actions and thoughts are little different from an animal to the more developed actions of social man, actions that require forethought and knowledge. Shelley's monster goes through the stages described by Rousseau, just at a much more rapid pace. The "wretch" is a timid, peaceful sort in the beginning. However, when the monster kills Frankenstein's brother he is no longer in accordance with Rousseau's state of nature. Rousseau believed that man in his natural state would be "without any desire of hurting [his fellows]" (pg.110-111). Rousseau thinks that property and inequality are needed to arouse enough anger to incite wo/man to violence. The monster has no property when he kills the boy. So I think that this sudden violence is more in line with Hobbes' state of war. It was not, however, self preservation that caused the monster to kill. Indeed it was simply for comfort (to stop the boy's yelling) that he murdered. This is in accordance with Rousseau's view of Hobbes' state of war: that Hobbes took social/sophisticated man and put him in a world without government, without social conventions and that this is what caused their brutality. Natural man does not understand comforts, nor language. His first reaction to discomfort would be to flee. But the monster doesn't flee, he talks to the boy (language is a trapping of social man), and then attacks the boy to create a situation that he finds more desirable: silence. This is what a Rousseau's idea of a sophisticated man would do in Hobbes state of war.
So both the idea's fit, but Rousseau's is the one that is vindicated to a fuller extent. Ha.
posted by Jenny at 10:44 AM
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