Free Essays on Inez’s Manifestation Of Self-Deception

Inez’s Manifestation of Self-Deception The essay on Self-Deception and his play â€Å"No Exit† show Jean-Paul Sartre as a great thinker and an able writer. His essay outlines his thesis on self-deception while his play brings it to life. The character Inez is the pivotal character in the play. Her actions can be directly correlated with Sartre’s texts. As we will see, Inez’s behavior stems from her cynicism towards others as well as her loss of identity and her conscious drive towards suffering. Sartre strikingly points out that companionship is both a blessing and a curse. Sartre defines consciousness as â€Å"a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being†(K 299) . This implies that our nature is to realize that our consciousness is nothing, that we are nothing. This is not to say that everything is nothing. On the contrary, the very idea of humans having a consciousness leads one to believe that consciousness is the very thing that saves us from damnation, that a higher being would not endow the human race with consciousness if it were not ultimately destined to transcend its own nature and fully employ all the realms of his own consciousness outside of the human body. I interpret Sartre’s definition of consciousness as nothingness of the ego. The ego is what blocks one from identifying their consciousness as nothingness. This said, humans must decondition themselves from the lies and untruth that plague this world. If we are to deny our conditioning; that is, deny what we are or what we perceive o urselves to be (i.e. a chef, a baseball player, a man/woman) we are deceiving what we were. To fully transcend, we must deny those impulses and states of being which naturally define us as human. In this process towards transcendence, we come across two obstacles: self-deception and sincerity. Sartre says, â€Å"the one who practices self-deception is hiding a displeasing truth or presenti... Free Essays on Inez’s Manifestation Of Self-Deception Free Essays on Inez’s Manifestation Of Self-Deception Inez’s Manifestation of Self-Deception The essay on Self-Deception and his play â€Å"No Exit† show Jean-Paul Sartre as a great thinker and an able writer. His essay outlines his thesis on self-deception while his play brings it to life. The character Inez is the pivotal character in the play. Her actions can be directly correlated with Sartre’s texts. As we will see, Inez’s behavior stems from her cynicism towards others as well as her loss of identity and her conscious drive towards suffering. Sartre strikingly points out that companionship is both a blessing and a curse. Sartre defines consciousness as â€Å"a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being†(K 299) . This implies that our nature is to realize that our consciousness is nothing, that we are nothing. This is not to say that everything is nothing. On the contrary, the very idea of humans having a consciousness leads one to believe that consciousness is the very thing that saves us from damnation, that a higher being would not endow the human race with consciousness if it were not ultimately destined to transcend its own nature and fully employ all the realms of his own consciousness outside of the human body. I interpret Sartre’s definition of consciousness as nothingness of the ego. The ego is what blocks one from identifying their consciousness as nothingness. This said, humans must decondition themselves from the lies and untruth that plague this world. If we are to deny our conditioning; that is, deny what we are or what we perceive o urselves to be (i.e. a chef, a baseball player, a man/woman) we are deceiving what we were. To fully transcend, we must deny those impulses and states of being which naturally define us as human. In this process towards transcendence, we come across two obstacles: self-deception and sincerity. Sartre says, â€Å"the one who practices self-deception is hiding a displeasing truth or presenti...

Eunotosaurus - Facts and Figures

Eunotosaurus - Facts and Figures Name: Eunotosaurus (Greek for original noded lizard); pronounced you-NO-toe-SORE-us Habitat: Swamps of southern Africa Historical Period: Late Permian (260-255 million years ago) Size and Weight: About one foot long and a few pounds Diet: Unknown; possibly omnivorous Distinguishing Characteristics: Small size; wide, shell-like ribs About Eunotosaurus The ultimate origin of turtles and tortoises is still shrouded in mystery, but many paleontologists believe that these shelled reptiles can trace their ancestry all the way back to the late Permian Eunotosaurus. The striking thing about this prehistoric reptile is that it possessed wide, elongated ribs that curved around its back, a kind of proto-shell that one can easily imagine evolving (over the course of tens of millions of years) into the giant carapaces of Protostega and Meiolania. As to what kind of animal Eunotosaurus itself was, thats a matter of debate; some experts think it was a pareiasaur, a family of ancient reptiles best represented by Scutosaurus. Recently, researchers at Yale University made a major discovery that cements Eunotosaurus at the root of the testudine family tree. Technically, modern turtles and tortoises are anapsid reptiles, meaning they lack characteristic structural holes on the sides of their skulls. Investigating the fossilized skull of a juvenile Eunotosaurus, the Yale scientists identified small openings characteristic of diapsid reptiles (the vast family that includes crocodiles, dinosaurs and modern birds) that closed up later in life. What this means is that anapsid testudines almost certainly evolved from diapsid reptiles some time during the Permian period, which would rule out the proposed pareiasaur origin mentioned above. Given the hypothesis that Eunotosaurus was ancestral to modern turtles, what was the reason for this reptiles elongated ribs? The most likely explanation is that its slightly rounded and expanded ribcage would have made Eunotosaurus harder to bite through and swallow; otherwise, this foot-long reptile would have been easy pickings for the large, predatory therapsids of ifs southern African ecosystem. If this anatomical bulge gave Eunotosaurus even a slight edge in survival, it makes sense that future turtles and tortoises would improve on this body planto the extent that the giant turtles of the later Mesozoic Era were virtually immune to predation as adults (though hatchlings, of course, could easily be gobbled up as they emerged from their eggs).