Beauty

Beauty. Beauty can be different for every single person. We can think that a person, a thing, a place, a feeling, or any other thing is beautiful, but others can disagree with us. Something can be beautiful for me while the same thing is ugly for someone else. We all have different concepts for "beauty".

In chapter 9 of Savater's book "The Questions of Life", he talks about a pyramid. He says that we can go to egypt and admire the pyramids and say that they are beautiful because they are huge, amazing, etc; it gives us visual pleasure. But he also says that others can think that it is not beautiful because the pyramids represent that there were many people and slaves suffering and working very hard to construct that pyramid.

Everything is unique. If someone wouldn't existed, the things that he created also wouldn't existed. Maybe someone would create something similar, but not exactly the same; similar. Definitely, beauty makes us happy. In some cases, beauty makes us change our minds and see everything in a different, better way.

The Shiver of Beauty

I have to tell you something, I didn't like this chapter. Why? Well, to be honest I think there are hundrerds of other topics Savater should have used to talk about in this chapter. Previously, I have liked some chapters and dislike a few others, but u untl now I always understood why Savater wanted to focus on that specific subject. However I don't believe beauty is something that should be discussed in a philosophy book simply because of the fact that it is not too important. In my opinion, Savater shouldn't have wasted 20 pages of his book on talking about something that is so... vain.

I'm not saying his ideas weren't good, he has some good analisis and points of view, it was nice to read about all these things, nevertheless, all the time, I couldn't help but to think: Ok but, there are many more important things than physical beauty aren't there?. I just think that having just 1 more chapter to go, he should've picked a more impotant and meaningful topic like, I don't know, the importance of a partner, or why having children, something deeper.

However this is just my point of view, feel free to disagree with me.

Beauty. One of the most or even the most important question. What is beauty? We cannot define what is beauty, because what is beauty for you its not beauty for everyone. One example is the one that we discus in class, the pyramids one, for one person it was something wonderful, but for the other men is was something horrible for the background of the pyramids, all the people that die, slavery, how can that be something beautiful for him.

Other thing that we discuss on the class of Friday is what is pleasure. Almost all of the persons when they hear the word pleasure they instantly related it with human pleasure(sex). Pleasure is not only that, pleasure is something that make you feel good. Pleasure could be a good food, a good drink that pleasure, as I said something that make you feel good.

For last other thing that impact me was the video that we saw in class, the one of the mother telling to her daughter thing that will we so impactfull on the girl life. In the video they don’t show who was talking to until the end it appear a little girl of no more than ten years old. Some of the thing that the mother was telling her was that she don’t eat junk food she need to have a balance diet, she tell something about plastic sergury to a girl of ten years that information that could have really bad impact on the girl life.

FREEDOM IN ACTION

The world, what is it compared to human freedom?
Savater responds that "man inhabits the world" which is different from having a determined function that makes up the world, like if we were in a magazine and man was just another product from it. It is not as if we were inside something else, or as if man was the owner of the world, because man isn't, man just inhabits it.

We are in the same place as before, just that in this moment we could assent that the world is that place in the space we live in, eat in, walk in, talk in, and especially we relate in, actually it is the most significative place in the universe where we act.

But it is not just the truth that we are symbolic which separates us from other animals, it is also our undetermination, the real truth that we are open and capable of deciding the course of our actions. The thing I want to make clear is that we can decide what to do or what to think from all the things, living and unliving, which are also part of the world. This is what makes us genuine and in my opinion that is a good argument opposite to the determinism. In my opinion we are free just by the truth that we don't have a particular habitat and we can choose from all habitats in the world, we can choose if we want to live in the world and what to think of it. I think we don't accept this truth oftenly, but it is good to question ourselves that if we can decide where to exist then why wouldn't we be capable of deciding all other subsequent things.

Freedom In Action

In this chapter, I really liked the way Savater focused on the concept of freedom. When I was reading the 3 different types of freedom he comes up with I was like, wow, I had never thought of freedom in such ways, only in the first one. I particularly liked his second way of using the concept of this word. I maybe handicapped, in prison or extremely poor, and maybe because of this I can't do a certain amount of stuff like backpacking across Europe or climbing mount Everest, what do I know? But nobody, and I mean, nobody, can stop me from wanting to do all these things. I am completely free of wanting to go and do all those things. I will never be forced to like or want something I do not like. Yes, I can be forced to do it, to some point, but If I don't like that action, if I don't want to do it, I can always remain hating it. Nobody can change my will. It is all mine, and that, to me, is what is so great about freedom.

Also, on a completely different aproach of the term freedom, I think it is really important for us to realize that freedom and responsability are always linked. I may be free to do whatever I want, but eventually the things I do are going to catch up with me and I will have to take responsability for them. I believe this is very important because we have to know the consecuenses of our actions before we act, so that we can be truly free and live in peace.

The universe

Well, in this chapter i found interseting how Savater argues about the creation of the universe, but I don't agree with him, because he argues that someone had to be the creator of the unvierse, he says that because he also uses the example of any object, when you see and object , you know that someone made it or created it, but after all I don't really think that someone was the creator of the universe, because no person in the world (including god) can ever create a phenomenom so big and large just like the universe is.
In my opinion i think what created the universe was something that happened naturally, for example the big bang theory, I found interseting the concept of the big bang theory because I think is something that happened naturally, beause of the preassure of the molecules, or whatever i don't really know, but no person or thing could ever made an explotion just like that.
The weirdest thing is that the universe is perfect, i mean the planet's orbits, the galaxy, the distances, etc. but the question is how? how is it possible that from an explotion suddenly is all made up? but that's a question that maybe some people had already tried to answer and many people will try, but I think this question will never have enough arguments to prove how this huge thing called "universe" was created.

My order or your order?

Reading the book of Fernando Savater I saw a pair of lines that strongly capted my attention. When I was young, my family, teachers, and people in general kept telling me to put my things in order. They said what objects belonged to what places and so on, admitting that their order was the right and I was expected to follow it. I kept thinking and asking myself why did my parents tell me that my order was wrong, if there was not a book nor law that said how the order in general should be. At last, I agreed with my parents and teacher's order and appeared to accept that order.

There are conditions that affect the ideologies we walk on. Tolerance I think its a very important condition. If my parents or my teachers above all, would have been tolerant to my type of order, my entire life would have been different. I think that people have stereotyped the word order and acceded to the general conception of it.

I learned in this chapter that order " denotes an attemp to introduce unity and articulates relations within a multiplicity of elements". In addition, I noted that we tend to classify everything surrounding us, making me wonder if everything is a casualty or is it ordered in a determined mode we can't recognize. These questions are difficult to answer but with open minded attitudes and a sense of tolerance we could be capable of figuring out that order is relative, different and doubtful.