Humanities 11
Your Life On Earth Personal Philosophy Project
Project Description:
For this project, we studied various philosophies in order to gain a better understanding of our own personal philosophy. During this time we let our journal entries and various philosophies flow through our minds while learning more about our personal beliefs. This continued until we had a better understanding of ourselves and could create something to express those philosophical understandings. The project itself was very broad in the sense that it was also very individualized. We could create just about anything to express our personal philosophy while letting the essential questions guide our process. My project mainly revolved around the bigger question: “What is the ‘meaning of life’?” My life has many different components in it that make up my ideology and my own philosophical beliefs. For my project, I chose to create a collage that portrayed aspects of my life through moments/people dear to me that have contributed to my life feeling meaningful.
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For more information on my project specifically, you can read my philosophy and artist statement displayed below. There is also a full photo of what I ended up creating, along with some close up's of some photos. If you click on a photo it will open a pop-up in order to read quotes easier.
Final Project
Philosophy Statment & Artist Statment
Project Reflection:
New Insights:
An interesting insight I thought about more after an assignment was that happiness is about the present, while meaning is about the past. While this is generally true there are some exceptions to this statement. Because meaningful experiences could have happened in the past however they could have also given you happiness. And vice versa, it just depends on how you look at it and what experience you’re talking about. Another interesting insight was one of the 4 pillars of meaning, particularly storytelling. I resonate a lot with storytelling being the main contributor to meaning in one's life. I love writing in a lyrical story tone as well as verbal storytelling because when you tell a story it can often feel very connective. You may feel the emotion the writer is trying to get across or maybe you see yourself in the story feeling that personal connection to it. Those feelings differ greatly from just stating what happened without any detail or emotion. It can often feel bland, however, for some things, it's more necessary to write or tell in a purely informational way.
I also enjoyed being able to ponder transience and entropy, because a person can consist of both simultaneously or bounce between the two in a matter of seconds. For me personally, I love the people around me hard, and that state of transience can be short-lived turning into an entropic decline when someone close hurts you. I’ve experienced both the transient haze of loving someone while also feeling that decline into entropy when that love isn’t reciprocated. However, I think both states are needed to keep someone’s life balanced even if one may feel more negative than the other.
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Further Questions and Intellectual Work Left to Do:
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If some people believe humans were placed here to take care of one another then why are we treating each other so unkindly; why are we still killing each other?
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What would need to happen for humanity to become more compassionate, more grateful, more accepting of our differences?
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How does one know they truly lived a meaningful life, is that something that can even be measured when life consists of so many different things?
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How can someone work on their optimistic views while struggling to find happiness in their life?
Rhetoric And Ideology Project
Project Reflection:
Project Description:
For this project, I chose to write about the important roles Planned Parenthood plays in giving women easy access to reproductive healthcare. My project would take the form of an op-ed/open-letter, in hopes of sharing some new perspectives on reproductive care. My intended audience being christians wanting to defund Planned Parenthood. In the beginning, I knew it would be challenging to write towards an audience that I can’t relate to. I’m not a particularly religious person. I was simply never raised as one. Because of this trying to show my perspectives on the issue without pushing it onto my highly religious audience proved to be extremely difficult.
My original thought in exhibiting my work was to share the piece through some source of media. However in the end I only shared it with a few people. As well as exhibiting it on my digital portfolio, sense all of the school work I do is uploaded there for anyone who wants to ready it.
Now that you have looked at the political spectrum more deeply, how and why has your perspective shifted? Or maybe one or both of the following...
What have you discovered about your own emerging ideology as a young American?
Going into this project I already felt like I had a good understanding of my own ideologies and where they come from. Because of this, my views of the political spectrum haven't really changed. Before we took the political compass assessment I had an idea of where I’d end up and sure enough that's pretty much where I did. I think that I didn’t discover new things about my own ideologies because I have already taken a lot of time in the past to look at what things I value in society. Even though I don’t feel that I discovered anything new I’m sure many of my classmates did and that's still cool to think about.
What do you understand about the ideology of others that you didn’t before?
I can kind of see why some people would believe some of the things that they do especially if they were raised as christans or just religiously. This is purely due to the fact that that's how they were raised. Our ideologies normally revolve around what we were exposed to or what we were taught. My new understanding of different ideologies, even ones I disagree with, is interesting to think about where they all came from. It just makes me wonder if you tried to trace them all back to one point would they all overlap at some time? Or are some so opposite that even at their cores it's like two parallel lines that will never intersect?
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What have you learned about rhetoric, ideology, and the “democratic experiment”?
Throughout this semester I gained a deeper understanding of how our country uses rhetoric for its own games. In the media and in the white house especially before the election, rhetoric was used with this underlying fear tone, as a weapon to manipulate its listeners. This is interesting to think about sense after reading 1984 it was clearer that our country is not far off from what Winston experiences. Our government wants to control what we know as much as possible, not quite as open in terms of big brother however we know that it still exists. Government speeches are formatted in a way that controls what thoughts run through the listener's brains while also giving just enough information to let them believe that they know more than they really do. It's a rather scary thing to realize that your government likes to control what you think you believe.
The two major political parties Democratic and Conservative are known to have extremely opposing ideologies. However, at their cores some things do overlap. It's just that in this time in history the media is flooded with extremist versions of both, not taking into account that most people are more complicated than the media portrays. This influences our democracy, or what we like to call a democracy. When the government is tilted we no longer accurately represent what democracy should look like. This push-pull of what democracy should be bur rarely happens anymore, once the white house is titled to one side or the other that's it. For however many years we slide further and further away from democratic tendencies landing more towards authoritarian ones. Until the government is tilted back and so on.
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What role could Rogerian rhetoric and/or a “willingness to be disturbed” play in a democratic society?
If our government was more democratic then having a willingness to be disturbed would increase our society's overall outlooks on others. For instance, more democracy in the white house, would allow for disagreement but not forcing our own ideologies on one another. Our government would be more productive in running our nation if they took other perspectives and ideologies into account before passing huge laws. This could allow for a less divided, more educated country. Possibly lessening various injustices.
Final Project Op-Ed: