“MAN IS NOTHING ELSE BUT WHAT HE MAKES OF HIMSELF”
This phrase can be thought out Beauvoirs’work. As one read their paper, I started to think a lot about what she said. Most of all about the indetermination of good and evil and how everything is actually stated by the lesson and not by someone or something else. Personally, I do believe that good and evil are determined, although sometimes it is difficult for people to see it due to our stupidity. Do not take stupidity as an insult, I mean that man are not capable of knowing everything, in that sense. I will not explain this position much because in order to do so, I should start talking about “iusnaturalism” and “positivism”, things that I have studied in my career but believe me, they will bother you a lot! To sum up, I don’t really like relativeness much, I find it as an easy way to answer something, its actually harder to sustain an opinion with fundaments.
On the other hand, what I want to focus in this brief work of mine, is in the fact of determination and being conditioned. First of all be have to bear in mind that being determined means that one has everything in their life planned and there is no chance of changing it. To have a more clear explanation it is easier to remember the greek tragedies plays, where the characters were destined to die in a way, and even if they tried to scape that it was worthless because everything was already written, and that effort that they did to avoid death took them to their death penalty.
In relation to being conditioned we can say that first of all we are not determined, so we have the opportunity to change our future, nothing is written and we have the power and the responsibility to make decisions, as a result our future changes. At the same time, we are conditioned by a lot of factors such as: religion, family, education, atmosphere, country, culture; in other words by everything. So we are a result of these different factors that make us who we are. For instance, imagine yourself being born in another continent or under another religion, I guess that we will all end up saying that we wouldn’t be the same as we are today, this because the choices we make are always related directly to the way that we are, and the way that we are is based on the diverse factors.
I could continue indeterminably this paper, but what I wish to say in this work is that men are not what he makes if himself, but is what the factors make of him.
Hi Lucia,
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I found this information closely related to the paradigms of political and social psychology as those studies conducted by B.F. Skinner and mind control experiments conducted by various intelligence agencies (not only the CIA) in the United States during the Cold War. If you can forgive my bias of being an enthusiast when it comes to conspiracy theories, Rousseau's inclinations towards positivism bothers me as well in the sense that how morality is not natural for Rousseau and how goodness by birth does not necessarily imply moral goodness. Although Rousseau was mainly concerned with legal positivism instead of natural law, as it were, there were still similarities that coincided with both types of legal realities. In your paper, I think it would be ambitious to reconcile natural law from Rousseau's point of view and how social conditioning is related to the nature of legal positivism in your proposed context. I'm not saying it would be logically impossible, just that the amount of examples from both Beauvoir and Rousseau's works combined would take considerable amount of time in order to find the appropriate connections between legal positivism in Rousseau's point of view and social conditioning in the contractual sense.