Essay 3

Due Tuesday, December 16 (any time): please submit as a Google Docs document and upload here.

Formatting instructions

• Your essay should be approximately 1000 words in length.
• Your essay should be double-spaced with 1″ margins.
• Please include a title at the start of the essay.
• Please insert page numbers.

Topics

Write an essay on one of the following three topics. Your essay should make good use of the texts we have studied so far this semester by providing clear citations when you present or summarize the ideas of an author. Please use standardized citations whenever you quote or refer to a text (e.g., “Zhuangzi 2 /19″ or “Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.1″) and review the advice in the handout “Presenting and Assessing the Views of Others.”

Topic 1:

When conducted in the present day, reflection on how one should live naturally requires attending to matters of sociopolitical concern, such as healthcare inequities, wealth disparities, environmental degradation, or the carceral state. A number of the ways of life we have studied this semester likewise connect the pursuit of personal well-being with the pursuit of social well-being. To what extent should these two pursuits go hand in hand, in your view? In answering this question, draw on an approach to the good life that you find in Daoism or Existentialism. You can confine yourself to one of these schools or their comparison, or you can contrast one of them with one of the other ways of life we have studied this semester, as you wish. How does their approach to the good life encourage us (or not!) to promote the good of others? Is this an advantage or a disadvantage of their view?

Topic 2:

How has studying Daoism and/or Existentialism and trying out their methods contributed to your efforts to live a good life as a college student in a world wracked by national and international crises? You can focus on one school or you can compare your experiences. Please be sure to defend an explicit thesis — something like: engaging in practices inspired by the views of X left me disconnected from the real challenges I was facing, leading me to question the value of X’s view; or: engaging in practices inspired by the views of X clearly improved my ability to deal with the day-to-day challenges I faced, leading me to conclude that these views are indeed a path toward a better life.

Topic 3:

Unlike most classes, “Living a Good Life” has put a great deal of emphasis upon doing reflective exercises, beginning with the desire maps that you constructed for yourself at the start of the course and continuing through the exercises related to the four ways of life from the ancient world that we’ve studied. The real value of these exercises, however, lies not so much in what you got out of doing them on the days you did them, but on what insights and resources they provided for you to make use of going forward – indeed, adding to your toolkit for trying to live a good life. For this paper, reflect on what you learned this semester that was useful for you, what you think you could benefit from exploring further in the next month or next semester, and draw up a kind of “exercise routine” for yourself involving daily, weekly, or long-term intentional reflection and practices. Ideally, this should be something you can really implement and try out over the coming weeks to see if a longer-term intentional practice can make a positive difference. Your paper should explain: (i) what it is you want to work on and why it matters to you; (ii) the practices you plan to try out in working on it; (iii) the “regimen” you might follow (e.g, “I’ll do this every morning and journal at the end of the week”); and (iv) when and how you will assess the results.

Topic 4:

Throughout the semester, we discussed the philosophical density of images, narratives, and aesthetic experiences as well as of traditional argumentative texts. For this final paper, select one of the two films watched this semester (A Confucian Confusion or Jeanne Dielman) and one of the philosophical texts discussed this semester. That text does not have to be the obvious correlate to the film; you could place a Stoic text alongside Jeanne Dielman, or Frantz Fanon alongside A Confucian Confusion. The goal is to use the theory of the good life proposed in the philosophical text to analyze the film. Specifically, you will argue which of the film’s characters, according to that particular theory, are living good lives or bad lives. You don’t have to and shouldn’t try to talk about every character. Instead, select 1-3. Build your argument out of a) analysis of the philosophical text, b) analysis of the film’s visual, narrative, and otherwise artistic features, and c) analysis of the film’s characters in the lights of both (a) and (b).

Topic 5:

At least two of the philosophical movements we have studied – Confucianism and Stoicism – recommended particular ways of living. This is not to say that they would have recommended that everyone live exactly alike – they were flexible enough that both an emperor and a laborer could follow their respective ways. But each had its own distinctive principles and practices, and very likely the astute observer could tell whether an individual was a Stoic or Epicurean (another Greco-Roman school), a Confucian or a Daoist. Indeed, both of these philosophies had ideals of “Sagehood” which represented what a person would be like who fully lived out that path. By contrast, Daoism and Existentialism seem to reject both the idea that there is a unique human essence that could determine a single path that is best for all of us, and ways of living that follow a set prescription. Some of the Daoist passages we have read seem to imply criticism of Confucian inflexibility, and the Existentialists reject the idea of an essential human nature. We have not seen Existentialist critiques of philosophical ways of life, but we might suspect that trying to live according to an external ideal and re-shaping one’s nature accordingly would arouse concerns accordingly – that living as “The Confucian Sage” or “The Stoic Sage” might be forms of inauthenticity or bad faith. Your task is to adopt the standpoint of either a Daoist or an Existentialist and assess the kind of life that a person would lead as either a serious Confucian practitioner or a serious Stoic practitioner. (E.g., you might take the standpoint of an Existentialist and ask whether a person could live an authentic life as a Confucian, or whether something about that life would necessarily fall into one of the pitfalls identified by Existentialism.)