The Midterm

3) Explain the various stages of development that Siddhartha goes through. How effective is Siddhartha's philosophy of detachment as a response to nihilism?

#3 Siddhartha goes through a development of knowing himself. "Your soul is the whole world", was written that man in his sleep, in deep sleep, would meet with his innermost part and would reside in the Atman." He goes through stages between each person who is meaningful in his life. He goes through the mental development by telling his parent he needs more knowledge within."Siddhartha, was not a source of joy for himself, he found no delight in himself". He goes through it physically because he wanted to become one with himself."The ablutions were good, but they were water, they did not wash off the sin, they did not heal the spirits thirst, they did not relieve the fear in his heart". Once he goes finds what makes him content, their he was alone with nothing to make him lose focus. He relates to nihilism because he had to step out of traditional ways and start fresh. He started his own journey alone to find out what steps he must go through as a new era for his generation of wise men to come.

Once Siddhartha can see clearly, he  would now be the person he can feel content with as a whole. His philosophy relates to nihilism because his father and other wisemen teachings were meaningless to him. It did not fulfill the meaning of life for him. His father wanted him to do it in a traditional way that it would give him meaning. But the traditional ways for him did not fully give him the knowledge he was looking for in life. Siddhartha had to do his own path to where he can get fulfillment from expressing himself as a wise man of his time. 

4) Explain the statement, "boredom is nothing other than the dissolution of pain in time", (Jünger p. 13) and its relationship to nihilism

This statement is referring to pain as a feeling you have in different times in your life, When you feel pain it goes a way a little at a time,but you will eventually get over the pain. It takes time for you to go through stages where you are bores because you want to forget about the pain and be in your own state of mind away from it all. This relates to nihilism because the boredom has no meaning or fulfillment from the pain you want to get away from.  Once you have pain in your heart, it may still linger on when you have moments of joy.As time goes on you will get bored with the pain you feel, and you will go on to have times of joy that will help you forget.


When you have something in your life that gives you pain, to get over it you must give it less meaning in your life so it does not cause you hurt anymore. The relationship between Nihilism and the statement want to go on to something with a meaning of your own. You want the pain you are going through to leave so it will have no meaning in your life anymore. Once the meaning of what you felt goes away, that is because you got bored of going though the pain and have moved on mentally with a different view of your feelings.How you feel about what happen that  gave you that void in your heart will go away with time.

Passage:Photography

Junger devotes alot of time to talking about the impact of  photography on increasing our awareness (and hence our control) of the human body:

The photograph stands outside of the zone of sensitivity. It has a telescopic quality; one can tell that the event photographed is seen by insensitive and invulnerable eye. It records the bullet in mid-flight just as easy as it captures a man at the moment an explosion tears him apart. This is our own peculiar way of seeing, and photography is nothing other than an instrument of our own peculiar nature.(p39)

I chose this passage because it relates to all the pieces of art we have seen, it is capturing a moment of their emotions and expressionism as a picture.The passage is saying that when someone takes a picture or creates one, it is from which they see it. When we studied the pieces of art, it was from expressionism that they built their art work from.

Artist create pictures from their own experience from life and how they were effected. They wanted to created something that expressed how they felt when they saw certain events take place in their lives. For example, Dada Ottis painting were of his experience in the war. His paintings were of men at combat and they looked disfigured, while in battle. This made a statement that the men in war were damaged from what they have been through during the war. He was very detailed on the body disfigurement, which was insensitive to the viewers, but that's what his saw through his eyes as a  person.