Nihilism

Isolation Makes the Heart Grow Fonder Imagine having plenty of green Earth to roam, but being isolated so much that no place feels like home. A dark looming creature saunters around the green land. He silently lurks and spies on the mead halls he finds at late night hours, because the sunlight burns and the darkness accepts its child. When fate shows the monster to the people of the hall, the monster welcomes their violence instead of his isolation. Dying alone the monster is erased from…

another sees bad. However, perspective is a part of life, and it can impact one’s understanding of literature also. Though Beowulf could be read as an elegy of a failing society, the counterargument that title character whispers against his enemy’s nihilism while in John Gardner’s 1971 novel Grendel is actually an ideology originally implicit in the anonymous Anglo-Saxon epic poem, and this is important to…

Clinical disorders are defined in class as “behavior that leads to distress, disability, or an increased risk of death, pain, or loss of freedom.” In the film Good Will Hunting, both the protagonist, Will Hunting, and his therapist Sean can be characterized as having clinical psychological disorders. Will is a mathematical genius who hides his true emotions throughout most of the film, suffering from a disorder stemming from his upbringing -- and Sean is a character who is has been battling…

Throughout history the discipline of metaphysics is not able to answer the rebuttal of nihilism, but through the lens of Heidegger, the field undertakes a metamorphose into a phoenix by going back to its core. Metaphysics is arguably a failure of a philosophy because it is never answers the question of how does it(existence) stand with being. However, that is not the only goal of metaphysics just pure speculation and observation of it will continue to advance the field. Consequently, metaphysics…

Philosophy plays a significant role on examining religious claims to certainty regarding metaphysical reality because it questions the unquestionable, and challenges ideas that have been in motion for centuries. As stated in the book, Elements of Culture, by Susan Andreatta, “religions support the status quo by keeping people in line through supernatural sanctions, reliving social conflict, and providing explainations for unfortunate events.” Religions provide knowledge of the unknown, or at…

Humans are greedy by nature and this is portrayed in both stories very well. In Grendel, Grendel would basically kill any human that he wanted to for whatever reason he wanted to, but would not kill Wealtheow. “I have not commited the ultimate act of nihilism: I have not killed the queen” (93). Every human would kill Grendel, if they had the chance, but the compassion and selflessness of Wealtheow is what saved her. Grendel saw her as someone who would give of her own life to a perfect stranger…

An ethical issue involves a problem or situation that requires a person or organization to choose between alternatives that must be evaluated as right or wrong. Right meaning ethical and wrong being unethical. A problem or situation always has an outcome; this outcome could determine or define the choices a person makes which could reflect upon the story line of their life. The epics; The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Shakuntala, introduce many issues. The central characters strive toward…

Stories have never existed in a void, where everything exists only as a story begins and ends. As far back as Ancient Greece, characters and settings were understood to continue existing past the events of a written work, within their own fictional “universe.” Greek Gods like Zeus or Hades, and heroes like Heracles and Odysseus would recur in multiple different pieces written by various authors, building upon other authors’ creations to expand the worlds these stories produced when strung…

The counterculture movement known as punk defies definition in any concrete terms. Beginning as a perverse fashion statement in the 1970s, punk quickly became something much more politically charged than many initially anticipated. It was a movement that defined itself through a series of negatives: it was more easily seen as what it wasn’t than what it was. Punk contrasted itself to the 1960s, the hippie movement, and the rock’n’roll scene that had established itself; it was opposed to the…

Japanese Literature Both writers, Dazai and Ibise, describe the war according to their experiences and those of the people around them. Both are very different but they shared same sentiments about what had happened to people however, their view about the outcome of the war and how they reacted to these results was extremely different. People address issues differently and react to situations in diverse ways just as these two writers did. Question 1 According to Dazai, his future and that of…