Socrates & Why?

      The Trials of Socrates really makes you think. The conversations in this book between Socrates and others show us the highly inquisitive mind that Socrates possessed. A highly inquisitive mind that made people talk in circles and reevaluate what they held to be true until it was questioned. This text fits into the community section of the course because Socrates' methods influenced the community at the time and still influence people today. Questioning values, beliefs, and theories,  otherwise known as elenchus, is key throughout the text. Socrates makes people realize what they think they know they actually may not know anything about at all. This allows any reader to reevaluate what they grew up and learned, or self-developed, to be true. Socrates believed that philosophizing was so important to the human race that he rather die for it than ever deny it or give it up. He focused on moral education and reform which led to the questioning of the law, what is just and unjust, pious and unpious, and also led to the questioning of parenting and the knowledge parents give to their children. Socrates also held the belief that all we need in life to be virtuous and happy is knowledge. In his quest for knowledge, Socrates had roundabout discussions with a variety of people including Euthyphro, Crito, and Aristophanes. Socrates and Euthyphro attempt to fully define pious and unpious in relation to living and to pleasing the gods. Euthyphro prosecutes his father for an unjust act (murder) and describes his own definitions of pious and unpious. However, Socrates keeps pushing for proof for why Euthyphro defines things the way he does and evidence to back everything he says up. Socrates keeps a constant “why?” within every conversation to extract the most information. Since Plato wrote this section, we do not know if Socrates meant his use of “friend” and “dear” as sarcasm, or if he often used those terms when he spoke with Euthyphro. I see the use of these “pet names” in the conversation as a persistent reminder that Socrates believes no one really knows anything, that “true” means something different to each person, and that Socrates believes Euthyphro is ridiculous to think he possesses all this knowledge. I agree with Socrates throughout the text because when you actually question everything you know, you feel like you really do not know anything. The thoughts I had when I was reading concerned “truth” and “law.” We are brought up to believe what our parents, teachers and even friends tell us and teach us. But as we experience life and live through different hardships, we begin to define things as they affect us. So althought the law is meant to govern us as a people, the definitions of right and wrong can be polar opposites between individual people. Crito mentions the “majority opinion” as being something that defines right or wrong by whether or not the majority agrees upon it.  Another example would be religion, we grow up learning beliefs our parents pass on to us and through going to Church or other services. However, as we experience life and learn about different religions and cultures around the world, we begin to shape our own beliefs, which can either work towards what our parents have taught us or completely break us away from what we have grown up holding to be true (Aristophanes /son). Socrates can be confusing, and even Crito admits to him, “I can’t answer your question since I don’t understand it” (71), but if we question what we know and question what others know, we can ultimately build up a knowledge that may or may not be true, but has much more theories from which to build the bigger pictures.

The Borderlands of Life

Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza, raises many questions and thoughts in the reader. She discusses her life as being an outcast, as Chicano, a woman, and a lesbian. Anzaldúa combines rascism, sexism, homophobia, and issues concerning illegal immigrants throughout her story. She discusses psychological and spiritual borders alongside the physical borders that separate America from Mexico, the tejas-Mexican border. This is the border where, according to the author, people of all different backgrounds, races, and social classes “shrinks into intimacy.” An obvious connection seen in the beginning of Anzaldúa’s writing is with Las Casas’ An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies. The evidence for such a connection is seen with the author’s fact of how America was colonized and how the land’s first inhabitants were forced out or brutally murdered or lynched. She defines “legitimate inhabitants” as those “in power, the whites” and “the Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority” which led the way for the total control of the land and the “stripping of Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it” (29). Anzaldúa, much like Las Casas, includes numbers of murders to strengthen feelings of horror or concern for the awful treatment of her people.

I also connected this reading with Freud due to the strong feelings of difference between men and women, mainly women being seen as servile to men in Anzaldúa’s culture. There is also the bias present in her writing because she is seeing everything from a women’s viewpoint and from someone who has grown up with an inner resentment towards the cultures and/or people who have been seen as more powerful throughout her life. The bias can be connected with Freud because in Freud’s writing, he is writing from his own viewpoint as well, which could be seen as the absolute opposite perspective compared to Anzaldúa. This reading can fit in with the Self and Others unit because there is the constant comparison between self and others in every crevasse of this book, especially concerning Anzaldúa’s awareness of her own differences. Anzaldúa discusses The Coatlicue State, which “depicts the contradictory,” and which touches on the unconscious and on resistance (another connection with Freud). It describe the constant fear of, yet inevitability of, alienation. It is the wanting to fit in but being aware of the impossibility of the desire. Although Anzaldúa does preach of finding that oneness inside herself, there is too much evidence throughout her writing of a state of instability. One of her poems, entitled, En mi corazón se incuba (166), she speaks in Spanish of sadness invading her, strokes of loneliness that consume her, being immersed in fear, hiding pain, unconfessed dreams, and secret love. In my opinion, after translating the poem, I felt as though Anzaldúa will forever feel a sort of disconnect with her culture. She seems to almost boast of making “the choice to be queer” and the “ultimate rebellion against her native culture is through her sexual behavior,” but she cannot hide her obvious loneliness in her poems. Everyone, including Anzaldúa, seeks that special connection or mutual understanding with another.  I believe homophobia really is the “fear of going home,” not being accepted, being alone, or even being abandoned by a family or a culture that does not approve. I also believe that Anzaldúa wrote her story to allow herself an outlet of emotional struggle that herself and others in the same positions have had to live through and battle with each and every day of his or her life.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot, especially the massive amount of Spanish writing Anzaldúa included. I am a Spanish minor so it was great to read something with so many cultural aspects.  

(Last note: It almost seems unfair that immigrants have gotten such bad treatment, illegal or not, in this country. America is known as the “melting pot” because of the obvious fact that the population is so diverse and each person has ancestry from all over the world. So really, what is an American? I believe it is not easy, if possible, to find an American that traces his or her history back so far as to only be related to people strictly from America. Wouldn’t we all be considered immigrants in such sense, with families and ancestors from various other countries? Therefore, wouldn’t that make Native Americans the only true Americans? ….just some of my rambling thoughts on this topic). 

Freud, Psycho-Analysis, & Sex

      When I read the first portion of Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, I was intrigued by his theories concerning dreams, manifest content, and latent dream thoughts. I thought, "Wow, this guy has really discovered some incredible concepts!" However, as I read on through the next two portions I soon came to realize Freud's first and foremost reason for all neuroses and problems had their root in sex, sexuality, or sexual experiences in childhood. Freud seemed to me to start off with very intellectually stimulating points about wish-fullfillment through dreams and the latent dream content which he uses to try to seek out the real meaning of the dream. However, he later introduces resistance, repression, infantile sexuality, and the oedipus complex, with each topic being contrasted between the sexes. Since Freud is a man, he is only fully able to comprehend the world he is looking into, through a male's eyes. He cannot completely vouch for women, especially since he is mostly only discussing such issues with women who have money which enables them to have an excessive amount of free time, an ideal many domestic housewives did not even have the option of considering. It seems to me that Freud over-emphasizes gender roles and sexual intercourse, especially toward the end of his book. He explains repression, resistance, and censorship, each having to do with trying to forget or hide things that have occurred in the past or even things not deemed acceptable in society. The main and most prevalent problem is stated again and again as being the sexuality or sexual lives of the affected people. A denial of someone's erotic wishes can lead them to frustration that further leads to illness. Or an interest in types of sex or sexual activities deviating from the "norm" can cause people to feel so ashamed and to repress these desires so deeply that this too can lead to illness. Freud uses homosexuality, fetishists, sadists, masochists, and perverts as examples of such incidents. During the time period in which Freud wrote about such radical ideas, sex was rarely, if ever, talked about. It was, "something improper, something ought not to talk about," and in some cases, the "strange and abnormal" cases, "intensified to the point of being abominable" (380). When I thought Freud was going to stop at that, he introduces the sexual life of children. He explains how all children, "have a predisposition to all of them and carry them out to an extent corresponding to their immaturity ... that perverse sexuality is nothing else than a magnified infantile sexuality split up into its separate impulses" (385). In my opinion, this is absolutely ludicrous. Freud would explain that I refuse to believe his theories because of the educational world in which I have been raised. I strongly disagree. Childhood is free, it is a time when children BEGIN to explore the world, with no knowledge of how anything really works. How is it even probable that a child can really see his mother's breast as anything more than needed for food, for survival? It just doesn't seem the least bit sensible that "sensual sucking" exists for any infant. Freud cannot comprehend that children do not have a sexual life before puberty, but it only makes sense that a sexual life develops during puberty, since puberty is the time when a girl or boy is fully developing their sexual organs and maturing in order to be able to reproduce.

      My last point would be the emphasis on the contrast between women and men. Women, according to Freud, have more illness and frustration due to their sexual lives, while men, also according to Freud, desire to stand up to other male figures as if they were standing up to their father. It seems that since Freud does not have an accurate portrayal of women in this research and comes from a male viewpoint, these theories are completely inaccurate. He also discusses how little girls wish they had the penis they seem to "lack," meanwhile little boys cannot fathom life without a penis. In today's society, men and women have come a long way to be equal on every playing field. Therefore, many of Freud's theories would be seriously contradicted. The theory of psychological illnesses and issues stemming from repressed childhood experiences does still have a strong root in psychology. However, the sexual life of children is not something that is constantly included in research studies in our current society. Freud's lectures were radical at the time and even are partially radical today, but have opened doors to many other theories and discussions that have greatly improved psychological research and knowledge. Sex was rarely talked about in the 1950s/60s, and is now almost an obsession, constantly all over various types of media. We have definitely come a long way from rarely discussing a major topic in society to being comfortable advertising contraceptives and shows like "16 and pregnant" which can help dissuade young adults from having unprotected sex or having sex too early. Yet, there are other aspects like masturbation, among other topics, that have yet to move into the comfort zone of conversational matter. There doesn't seem to be a clear future time when we will arrive at a point where every sexually related aspect is appropriate to discuss in schools or the workplace. Nonetheless, Freud, and others like him, have made examples of how one person's radical views, once voiced, can really change our society and impact future research.