Monday, September 23, 2013

Species Being and Camera Obscura (Blog 2)

When Marx talks about species being he has a really good excerpt that I thought was really interesting. "The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. The animal is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself into an object of his will and of his consciousness. He has a conscious life activity."

In this excerpt I think Marx makes a good analogy. The animal has one goal in life, to survive. It is all that the animal knows, its instincts tell it to hunt, mate and protect itself from predators. That is all that the animal knows to do and it really has no free will like us humans do. We as humans eat, mate and protect ourselves but under our own free will. We can choose to do these things and choose how we do these things. We have the free will to do literally anything we want and I believe that is what Marx is referring to with his talks about species being.

The other aspect that Marx talks about is camera obscura. I really liked the analogy of the movie A Bug's Life that was shown to us in class. The reality is that the ants don't have to listen to the grasshoppers and they can live on their own. The lense and ideologies are the grasshoppers telling the ants that they need to bring them food and that they need to obey the grasshoppers. The mutated reality is the ants think they have to live like that and they end up obeying the grasshoppers and harvesting food for them.  I think this is a really good analogy for our society today and how ideologies can mutate our reality.

I chose this video of a cheetah killing a zebra to go along with Marx's analogy of species being. The cheetah hunts the zebra because he has to and thats all he knows. Whereas us humans can choose to get food in whatever way we want, we have the free will to do anything.
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousSeptember 23, 2013 at 3:28 PM

    I never thought of that before but it is true. Animals do what they do because it's instinct while us on the other can have an instinct and the choice to act or not. I think we forget that our goal is also to survive but we continue to put ourselves in dangerous situations and create other goals that seem more important than survival. Good comparisons.

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  2. UnknownSeptember 23, 2013 at 7:41 PM

    I do agree with your post here. Sadly I did think that we as humans should learn from animal instincts. We need to be less selfish and have a goal to survive, but to survive in the most effective way. We should work hard to survive and many of us cheat and look for the easy way to make a living, unlike animals where they work hard for their food. I think maybe you could have talked about how species being could relate to your life a little more in your post, but other then that good example of species being.

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  3. UnknownSeptember 24, 2013 at 10:54 AM

    I really like how you incorporate Marx's idea with animals. It just goes to show that his ideas can work on so many levels.

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