Existentialism : Flipped Learning 

 Hello everyone, I'm a student of the Department of English,M.K.B.U. This blog is a part of thinking activity and it is assigned by Dr.Dilip Barad. This blog is based on Existentialism . It is connected with Sumiel Bucket's one famous work 'Waiting For Godot'. 

What is Flipped Learning? :-

Flipped learning is a pedagogical approach, and a form of blended learning, that “flips” the common or traditional instructional approach of classroom-based lectures and instruction, to integrate online interactive lessons that can be accessed prior to the class and in a student’s own time, into the overall approach.

Using technology, learners are introduced to content materials, including the lecture and other instructional resources before class (asynchronously), allowing the classroom time to:

Out comes of Flipped Learning :-

• Inquire about lecture content

• Work through problems, activities, and advanced concepts

• Test skills in applying knowledge

• Engage in collaborative learning

The classroom learning happens in real-time, with both the teacher and student(s) in the same place and at the same time .

It is argued that the flipped learning approach fosters in-depth and active learning as learners are taking an active role in the knowledge internalisation process, relating new knowledge to prior knowledge rather than passively receiving information .

This approach challenges educators to shift the emphasis from a teacher-centred approach of providing content to a student-centred approach of designing active learning experiences, facilitating in-class activities, and scaffolding out-of-class preparation .

Meanings of some words which I got from Chatgpt.

• What is Existentialism :-

Existentialism is a philosophical and cultural movement that emphasised individual freedom and choice, and the inherent meaninglessness of life. It emphasises that individuals create their own meaning and purpose in life, rather than finding it through external sources such as religion or societal norms. Key figures in existentialism include Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. It has also influenced literature, psychology, and other fields.

• What is phylosophycal suicide :-

Philosophical suicide, also known as "existential suicide," refers to the idea that individuals can choose to end their own lives because they find their existence meaningless or without purpose. This concept is often associated with existentialism, which emphasises the individual's freedom and responsibility to create their own meaning in life. Philosophical suicide is not to be confused with regular suicide, which is a severe mental health issue that requires professional help. Philosophical suicide is a theoretical concept, not a call to action or a justification for suicide.

• What is absurdity :-

The concept of absurdity refers to the idea that human existence is fundamentally meaningless or irrational. It is often associated with existentialism, which asserts that life has no inherent meaning and that individuals must create their own purpose. The idea of the absurdity of human existence is often depicted as a confrontation with the meaningless and irrational nature of the world, and the human condition. This can lead to feelings of despair and disorientation, but can also lead to a sense of freedom and the possibility of creating one's own meaning. The concept of absurdity is closely linked to the idea of existential anxiety, the dread, and the fear of the human condition.

In philosophy, "the Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human desire to find meaning in life and the inherent meaninglessness of the universe. The Absurd is often associated with existentialism, which emphasises the individual's search for meaning in a meaningless world. The Absurd can manifest in different ways, such as the feeling of alienation from the world, the sense that life is meaningless, or the feeling that one's actions are futile. The Absurd is not an objective property of the world, but a subjective experience that arises from the human desire for meaning in a world that may not provide it.

Key figures in existentialism and Absurdism are Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger.

• A Leap :-

A leap can refer to a sudden, large jump or bound, often physically. It can also refer to a sudden change or advancement, such as a leap in technology or a leap in understanding. In the context of existentialism and the Absurd, a "leap" can refer to the decision to embrace the Absurd and find meaning in life despite its inherent meaninglessness. This idea is associated with the philosopher Albert Camus, who wrote about the "leap of faith" that individuals must make in order to find meaning in a meaningless world. He called it a "revolt" against the Absurd by embracing it and affirming life in the face of its apparent lack of purpose.

In some religious traditions, a leap of faith is often emphasised as a key component of religious belief, where one must trust in certain doctrine or dogmas without concrete evidence. This concept is often associated with the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote about the "leap of faith" as a decisive step that one must take in order to truly embrace religious belief. He argued that true faith cannot be attained through reason or evidence alone and that one must make a leap of faith to truly believe in something.

• What is Dadaism :-

Dadaism is an art and literary movement that emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction to the devastation and disillusionment caused by World War I. Dada artists and writers rejected traditional forms and values, and instead embraced irrationality, chance, and absurdity as a way to challenge the status quo and question the very foundations of art and society. Dadaism was marked by a rejection of traditional aesthetics and an embrace of collage, montage, and found objects in art, as well as the use of nonsense and wordplay in literature.

Some of the key figures in Dadaism include the artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, and the poets Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball. The movement had a strong influence on Surrealism, and its emphasis on the irrational and the absurd has had a lasting impact on avant-garde art and culture.

Dadaism can be seen as a reaction to the existential crisis caused by World War I, the disillusionment with society and traditional values, and a desire to question the very foundations of art and culture.

• What is Nihilism :-

Nihilism is a philosophical belief that life lacks meaning or purpose. This can manifest in the rejection of religious or moral principles, the rejection of certain aspects of society or culture, or the belief that knowledge and concepts are inherently flawed or meaningless. Nihilism can also refer to a general sense of despair or hopelessness in regards to the human condition.

• What is Holism :-

Holism is a philosophical and/or scientific approach that suggests that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by its individual components alone, but rather by the relationships and interactions between those components.

Holism can be applied to various fields, such as biology, where the organism is seen as a whole that cannot be reduced to its individual parts, or to the study of culture, where the society is seen as a whole that cannot be reduced to individuals. In psychology, it refers to the understanding of a person as a whole, taking into account their psychological, social, and biological aspects.

Holism is often contrasted with reductionism, which is the idea that complex systems can be fully understood by breaking them down into their individual components.

Videos based on Existentialism :-

• Video :- 1

• What is Existentialism :-

• This Video is based on Existentialism. In this video we also find names of the writers who are considered as the Existentialists.

• Existentialism starts with Søren Kierkegaard .

• Key figures of Existentialism include Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger and Albert Camus, Kafka, Shestov, Dosto Yevsky, Herman Hesse,  Semen Beauvoir.

• Their Views differ from one and other in somewhat personal ways. For all of them philosophical think in an existence begin with it thinks in subject namely the individual. 

• Video :- 2

• The myth of Sisyphus : The absurd Reasoning :-

• individual This video is bringing our attention towards phylosophycal suicide.

• There is the truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Many people die because they judge their life and search for meaning in their life.

• According to Albert Camus , "an absurdity in your life is a suicide".

• There are two ways for thinking of absurdity that are hope and suicide.

• Video :- 3

• The myth of Sisyphus : The notion of philosophical suicide :-

• This video is based on, what is absurdity and how it occurs.

• The absurdity is nighter in the world and nor in the man it only occurs in their present together, you could say that all this is rational.

• According to Albert Camus,'Such behaviours towards absurdity is a Leap'.  

• Sometimes absurdity leads mam towards God and sometimes at suicide. 

• 'Like suicide,God changes with a man. There are many ways of leaping,the essential being to Leap'.

• Video :- 4

• Dadaism, Existentialism and Nihilism :-

• Dadaism is the movement of the 20th Century,it was developed in 1916. The Dada movement rose up against world war First and it is  associated with Nihilism.

• Artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, and the poets Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball  and many others who were disgusted by the war moved to Zurich and founded the movement because they thought what had made the war happen were the old values.

• Dadaism mostly tries to question every value rather than creation. Creation isn't the primary goal of Dadaism .

• Dadaism is a way of becoming free of everything.

• Video :- 5

• Existentialism - a gloomy philosophy :-

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• This video is based on human philosophy. 

• Notions such as Anxiety, Despair, Absurdity. It never seems to leave the arena of arguments but all of these so cold negative subjects are only brought into the discussion.

• Video :- 6

• Existentialism and Nihilism : is it one and the same ?

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• According to Søren Kierkegaard  Nihilism means 'The loss of individuality'.

• According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Nihilism means 'The highest values devalue themselves '.

• Video :- 7

• Introduction to Existentialism :-
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• Existentialism is a movement that arose in 19th Century Europe.

• Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche  are often characterised as the founding fathers of the movement.

• Existentialism became especially prominent in the mid 20th Century after the second world war.

• According to Robert Soloman, "Existentialism is an attitude that recognizes the unresolvable confusion of the human world, yet resists the all-too-human temptation to resolve the confusion by grasping toward whatever appears or can be made to appear firm or familiar... The existential attitude begins with a disoriented individual facing a confused world that he cannot accept."

• Video :- 8 

• like I'm Five: Existentialism and Nietzsche :-

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• This is another video based on Existentialism.

• Video :- 9

• Why I like Existentialism ? Eric Dodson :-

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• There are two sides of Existentialism . Existentialism makes an appeal to our mind to understand life more deeply but it also makes an appeal to our heart and soul,and towards the experience of life.

• Video :- 1

• Existentialism : Crash course philosophy :-

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• A sense of meaning is something that we all crave- maybe even need.

• As per philosophy of religion,we should spend some time talking about how we understand our life being meaningful. Maybe you find it through religion or by fighting for social justice or educating others or seeking beauty in artistic expression.

• Existentialism refutes the notion that God made the Universe,or our world or us,with any particular purpose in mind.

• Since there is no teleology,the world wasn't created for a reason and it doesn't exist for a reason.

• If there is no reason for any of this,then there are also no absolutes to abide by : There's no cosmic justice,no fairness,no order, no rules.

• If there are no Guidelines for our actions,then each of us is forced to design our own moral code,to invent a mortality to live by.





So, this is the concept of Existentialism and there are many existentialists who brought this movement into Existentialism . Existentialism is all about our being not about becoming. 





World Count :- 1942

Videos :- 11

Images  :- 1

'Tradition and Individual Talent ' by T.S.Eliot

 Tradition and Individual Talent

-T.S.Eliot 

Hello Everyone, I'm a Student of The Department of English,M.K.B.U. This blog is assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad as a Bridge Course. This blog is based on T.S. Eliot's one famous essay 'Tradition and Individual Talent '(1919).

Points to Ponder :-

• Introduction

• About T.S. Eliot

• About the Essay

• Questions based on this essay

• Conclusion

Introduction :-

"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published in The Egoist (1919) and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, "The Sacred Wood" (1920). The essay is also available in Eliot's "Selected Prose" and "Selected Essays".

While Eliot is most often known for his poetry, he also contributed to the field of literary criticism. In this dual role, he acted as a cultural critic, comparable to Sir Philip Sidney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is one of the more well known works that Eliot produced in his critical capacity. It formulates Eliot's influential conception of the relationship between the poet and preceding literary traditions.

About T.S. Eliot :-

T.S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot) was born September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. He was educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis (1898–1905); Milton Academy in Massachusetts (1905–1906); Harvard University,University of Paris-Sorbonne and Merton College, Oxford University . He devoted a further year (1915–1916) to a doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley, eventually published in 1964.

In 1927, T.S. Eliot became a British citizen. In 1915, he married his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Vivienne Eliot). The marriage was thought to have influenced Eliot’s bleak masterpiece 'The Waste Land' .In 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher (Valerie Eliot), his secretary at Faber & Faber since 1950—she was almost 40 years his junior.

The 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot is highly distinguished as a poet, a literary critic, a dramatist, an editor, and a publisher. In 1910 and 1911, while still a college student, he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published in Poetry magazine, and other poems that are landmarks in the history of modern literature. Eliot’s most notable works include The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1943), and the play Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Eliot’s awards and honours include the British Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His play 'The Cocktail Party' won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. In 1964, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was famously adapted in 1981 into 'the musical Cats', which won seven Tony Awards. Despite his enduring popularity, Eliot and his work have been criticised as having prejudiced views, particularly anti-Semitism.

Eliot was almost as renowned a literary critic as he was a poet. From 1916 through 1921, he contributed approximately 100 reviews and articles to various periodicals. He also made significant contributions as an editor and a publisher. From 1922 to 1939, Eliot edited a major journal, 'The Criterion', and from 1925 to 1965, he was an editor and a director in the publishing house of Faber & Faber.

Eliot’s career as a poet can be reasonably organised into three periods—the first coincided with his studies in Boston and Paris, culminating in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock '' in 1911. The second coincided with World War I and the financial and marital stress of his early years in London, culminating in 'The WasteLand' in 1922. The third coincided with Eliot’s angst at the economic depression and the rise of Nazism, culminating in the wartime Four Quartets in 1943. The poems of the first period were preceded by only a few exercises published in school magazines, but in 1910 and 1911, he wrote four poems that introduced themes to which, with variation and development, he returned time and again: “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”T.S. Eliot died in 1965.

 About the Essay :-

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was first published in 1919 in the literary magazine The Egoist. It was published in two parts, in the September and December issues. The essay was written by a young American poet named T. S. Eliot (1888-1965).

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) sees Eliot defending the role of tradition in helping new writers to be modern. This is one of the central paradoxes of Eliot’s writing – indeed, of much modernism – that in order to move forward it often looks to the past, even more directly and more pointedly than previous poets had.

This theory of tradition also highlights Eliot’s anti-Romanticism. Unlike the Romantics’ idea of original creation and inspiration, Eliot’s concept of tradition foregrounds how important older writers are to contemporary writers: Homer and Dante are Eliot’s contemporaries because they inform his work as much as those alive in the twentieth century do.

Video based on this :-

Questions based on this essay :-

1). How would you like to explain Eliot's concept of Tradition? Do you agree with it?

The concept of 'Tradition' begins with the dictionary meaning of the word 'Tradition'.

 

Dictionary meaning of Tradition :-At a particular place,over a period of time people live a life believing in surtain principal beliefs and carry out a way of life. One can see certain aspects of being negative and certain aspects of being positive.

According to T.S.Eliot 'Tradition' is not just following and imitating the dogmas or the customs  of a given culture and tradition,it is much more than that'. Tradition is a larger term for him. He does not believe in slavish imitation of the tradition. He also describes modern critics point of views and says that according to them tradition means traditional. 

For Eliot, Tradition has a three-fold significance. Firstly, tradition cannot be inherited and involves a great deal of labour and erudition. Secondly, it involves the historical sense which involves apperception not only of the pastness of the past, but also of its presence. Thirdly, the historical sense enables a writer to write not only with his own generation in mind, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature from Homer down to the literature of his own country forms a continuous literary tradition. He takes tradition in a very positive way and that we can find in his works. 

"Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour". 

Eliot  compares different traditions with The country Europe , he says that Europe is divided into two or three parts after the world war and he says each nation has a history of their own generation, the same as traditions of different religions and cultures are differentiated from each other because traditions also change with the time . 

I agree with Eliot's concept of tradition because he takes tradition in a very positive way, each and every person follows tradition in their life. Like language we got the tradition from our parents and family , so we have a deep affection towards our traditions and sometimes we follow tradition by forces of our religion and culture . I also believe that tradition is good in certain things but we should not follow it blindly. 

2. What do you understand by Historical Sense? (Use these quotes to explain your understanding)

• "The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence"
• "This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional."

According to Eliot, all writers must have all the Literature's knowledge they want to write. The writer should write with the history in his bones.

He says that historical sence or knowledge is most important for the writers because they are going to write a literature and if they have the historical knowledge they can write better one. They can clear the mistakes in the earlier works and produce new works .

History sense or knowledge is most important not only for the writers but each and every person because, if they have the knowledge of their past then they can introduce the situations and also get the ideas how to live a life and what are the mistakes they should not do in their life. If they have knowledge about the past they can clear the mistakes and live their life happily.

• "The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence"

This quote suggests how historical sense helps us to live life . The word pastness means tradition lives in the present. Through this quote the writer says that our tradition always lives with us,it is not our past but it is our present.

For Example :-

'Mahabharata' is one of our holy books, it is based on the 'Kauravas and Pandavas' story. This story tells our religious history. On the other hand it is the story of our past but in our contemporary time we also find characters similar to this book. So, we can say that historical sence or knowledge is all about the past but it is our present also and if we have the knowledge about that then we can easily survive in these situations.

• "This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional."

In this quote Eliot describes how history is connected with our present. How history is repeatedly repits in our life. The word 'temporal',means does not have any past, and 'Temporal' means it exists even today.

As history does not describe the exact time but through the story it can be described. As per our history or the story of our holy books we can get the idea how that story lives in our day-to-day life. So, we can find the same history of our life as well as in our history. 

3. Explain: " Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. 

Through this quote writers suggest that in poetry or other writings personality of a writer is not that important as much as poetry. Mostly writers write their work to escape from reality and to go into their imaginative world. In their writings writers try to express their feelings and emotions towards the society. In the writings poets or writers are not a part of this but their writings are most important. Writers write their works to escape from life and live in their imaginative world. 

For Example :-

S. T. Coleridge (a romantic poet), writes his poems just because he wants to escape from their family and he wants to express his feelings and emotions toward the world. 

 

Conclusion :-

Finally Eliot ends his essay with, Very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead,but al vist is already long.

World Count :- 2000

Images :-02

Videos :- 01