Our Stranger Meaning

In class we are reading a book called the Stranger. The main character is a man named Mersault. He does not seem to care about much that goes on life. For example, at the beginning of the book his mother dies and he doesn't even know how old she is. He doesn't even cry at her funeral. He is a very strange man to say the least. However does he represent our stranger meaning? Is Mersault actually normal while we are the ones who are weird? Being normal is not something that can be defined. Everybody is normal and yet nobody is normal. We all have our own little quirks that make us just as weird as anybody else. So is what Mersault does normal? I think that it is. For him it is normal. Normality is just something that is perceived and it is different for everyone. So in a way this is our stranger meaning. We all have a little weirdness in us and we will all make questionable choices. I think Mersault represents our stranger meaning.

Candide's Punishments, Do They Fit the Crime?

Candide was naive and innocent but these are the only things he was truly guilty of in the beginning. He was taught the world he lived in was the best of possible worlds only to be nearly destroyed by it. Why? Pangloss, the man who was supposed to teach and inform Candide to the best of his ability, taught him an act considered an unforgivable crime, something that only led to his banishment and the beginning of his suffering,.  After his banishment, he nearly had his skin flayed from his body for "deserting" the army of another nation.

Candide, like his namesake, is innocent. He is like a child really. Children don't understand the cruelty, suffering and corruption of the world. This can cause them to be manipulated, abused, and suffer in an unforgiving and challenging world. If a child imitated what he saw his teacher do or followed the teachings of those more experienced, should he be banished? It's pretty extreme right? This also applies to when Candide was forced to run the gauntlet, a punishement where a line of men strike him with weapons. He simply went for a walk and it was declared desertion. Desertion is punishable by either execution or the gauntlet.

The people in the world Candide lives in practice their beliefs to the most extreme. Instead of simply accepting that maybe everyone may not have the same ideas and beliefs they do or even know of them, they punish them with the most harsh or extreme sentences imaginable.

How Do I Know What I Know?

How do I know what I know? Rene Descartes altered the course of philosophy by raising this question. Descartes’ method of doubt questioned beliefs, both scientific and religious, that could be known with utter certainty. Descartes was able to show most of our, scientific, mathematical, religious, and everyday beliefs really cannot stand up to that kind of assessment.  

This systematic doubt brought an issue that philosopher would debate upon for decades to come. Do we learn about the nature of things, through our physical senses or by logic or reasoning? A great philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant tried to resolve this issue. He argued that we in fact never have understanding of reality but only of things as they appear to us, and that the mind itself supplies the form in which we know appearances.

What do I think of all this? Even before I took this class, I often wondered about my and others’ perceptions of reality. I used to think what if my entire life was a dream or a hallucination? How do I know if the things around me even exist and do they exist to others? It’s really terrifying to think about and I believe that the phrase ignorance is bliss truly sums up what I think about it. Would you want to know if you were a brain in a jar or would you rather continue believing that you are an organism who actually interacts with his environment?  We would say a scenario like that is highly improbable but how do we know?