Part of this final I’m working on is an essay, and it’s supposed to be about French existentialism in some way, shape or form. Mine is, but starting to in just a minor degree. Yesterday I decided to write about neurobiological determinism and how it may refute the existentialist idea that existence precedes essence. It’s quite elaborate, but in short, it’s about how psychopathic serial killers developed a certain defect in their brains during fetal development in the womb, which made them more likely to become psychopathic serial killers because of what the defect did to their ideas of morality, their levels of aggression and their lack of inhibition. And existentialists say that existence precedes essence, in other words, that humans exist first and then define themselves by the choices they make. So there is no such thing as human nature, we are all free to do whatever we want at any time. Right? Yeah. No. Those psychopathic serial killers were in some ways always going to make the choices they made, because for them they aren’t really choices. They’re inevitabilities. Their brains, our brains control us in such ways that our freedom, our essence, isn’t as wide open and optional as existentialists like to think. Even for normal people, that is to say, people with brains that don’t have major anomalies.
Anyway, that’s what I’m writing about. And it has to be done in 1 freaking day (today). Plus I haven’t finished answering all of the reading questions yet. The funny thing is, though, this is supposed to be a philosophy paper, yet after I finished my exhilarating research on neurobiological anomalies and started reading about Sartre’s idea of freedom, I became very bored and easily distracted. Maybe I’m studying the wrong thing. Or maybe existentialism just sucks.
