HOMEWORK #4: Comment 2

Binta,

I liked how you directly argue with Banach's ideas about people being absolute individuals and I definitely agree with you...I don't think there's any way we could possibly avoid being impacted or influenced by other people!

Despite whether "existence precedes essence" or not, how can you not be affected by how you were raised or what you experience as a kid? As a baby, or even as say an 6-year-old, do you really have the ability to 'choose' who you are, what to believe, and how to interpret your surroundings? A traumatic occurrence as a baby can subconsciously follow someone for the rest of their life, and of course who we are raised by has a huge effect on us.

Like you said, even if we decide to go against what we learn as children we still have to had been influenced by some other external thing to have made that decision. If you never had the opportunity to see that another view even existed, how would it be possible to rebel?

I thought your talking about about the "first human being" was really interesting. If religion is taken out of the picture, the first human must have had parents. But how can the 'first' anything have parents? wouldn't the parents have had to be there first? Anyway, I guess that's kind of an unrelated topic but what I'm getting at is that it's hard to imagine anyone being completely individual. If you kept someone in an isolated room from the time they were born and kept them fed and healthy somehow without any direct connection with another creature, what kind of thoughts would they have?

To sum up, I really enjoyed your post -- it really got me thinking further. :)