Got the grades.

[icarus]

The grades just came in today.

I nailed the Geology class. Which was expected -- hooray, extra credit.

Unbelievably I got 3.8 for Logic. I must have aced the final. Given that the score was based on only two exams and three assignments - one of which I only got 50% (the evil dreaded conditional proofs) - I must have had a perfect or near perfect score on the final.

Now time for the sigh of disappointment: 3.6 in the Religions class. Ouch, that's a shock. I'd nailed all most of the weekly assignments and the two exams, so I must have really blown the final exam.

Okay, yeah, it was a really tough class, but I think I've just learned a lesson in "balance" and "overkill."

Guess I worried about the wrong test.

Hunh.

Fourteen years as a monastic and my lowest score for the quarter is in Religions. There's a certain irony in that.

Comments

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should be getting my exam back shortly. The teachers here have us give them a SASE if we want our exams and papers back after the quarter.

But I would not have associated the second view with Marx, only the first. He actually doesn't attribute much agency at all to individuals, but only to large groups. And even groups are subject to his "historical laws" in terms of the possible outcomes.

Yep, that's where I extrapolated too far. The piece we were given was too short to be clear (about half a page in fact, the part with his famous "opium of the people" quote). I complained that given Marx's impact on the world it wasn't enough and the clarification I asked for in class (from both the teacher and the two Marxists), well, it looks like there was too much of an attempt to search a common ground between Marxism and Buddhism.

So Marxism and Buddhism are the reverse in that sense. Marx says the causes are entirely external conditions, that individuals are more like drops in an ocean of history. From a historical perspective it certainly looks that way.

But wouldn't that be a contradiction? If individuals can rise up and lose their chains -- that would indicate that they must have some power and will to act.

There's also empirical evidence of individual will -- if you drop apples in front of two people, one will bend down to pick one up and the other won't. This implies choice. Then there's the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle: the more you can fix an atom's place in the present particular moment, the less you can predict it. The more you know about an individual in a particular moment, the less you can predict them.

It seems to me that Marxism is based upon a vast amount of 20/20 hindsight.

The Chittamatra school of Buddhism may say something similar, that there is nothing but the external conditions, yet the power always lies with the individual: once you have the illusion of self you have to work from where you are.

Icarus