Wednesday Wisdom

“Don’t sleepwalk through life” is a quote from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and he is more commonly known as “Seneca the Younger” to distinguish him from his father, Seneca the Elder, who was a writer and teacher of rhetoric. Seneca the Younger lived from about 4 BCE to 65 CE and was a Stoic philosopher, a playwright, a statesman, and an advisor to the ultimately incompetent Emperor Nero.

Seneca wrote On the Shortness of Life (De Brevitate Vitae) which is one of his most famous Stoic essays. Its central argument is that life is not truly short, but people waste much of it on distraction, ambition, vanity, and mindless busyness instead of living deliberately and purposely. One of the best-known lines from the essay is “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” Seneca believed in savoring the present, stepping outside social expectations, and consciously experiencing life rather than mechanically enduring it. Seneca’s recurring theme is that people rush through life distracted, anxious, and absorbed in routine without truly living.

A Comedic approach to Stoicism

Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a 1986 coming of age comedy film written and directed by John Hughes, one of the defining director’s of 1980s teen films. John Hughes reportedly wrote much of the screenplay in less than a week. Like many of his films, it focused on suburban Chicago teenagers, mixing comedy with deeper themes about anxiety, pressure, and growing up. The movie stars Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller, Alan Ruck as Cameron Frye, and Mia Sara as Sloane Peterson. Ferris Bueller is a charismatic high school senior who fakes illness to skip school for one perfect spring day in Chicago. He convinces his anxious best friend Cameron and girlfriend Sloane to join him. The story line addresses the fear of adulthood, rebellion against conformity, friendship, and learning how to actually live rather than merely follow expectations Ferris convinces his friends to skip school an enjoy the spring day saying, “How can I be expected to handle school on a day like this?” Ferris addresses the audience to both justify his absence but also mock the institutions by saying “I do have a test today. That wasn’t bullshit. It’s on European socialism. I mean, really, what’s the point? I’m not European. I don’t plan on being European”

To start the adventure, he goes on to say, “The question isn’t ‘What are we going to do?’ The question is ‘What aren’t we going to do?’ The hilarious adventure starts with taking Camerons fathers Ferrari to lunch at an impressive restaurant, taking in a Cubs afternoon game, an intellectual perusal through an art museum and eventually Ferris hijacking a float in a parade in downtown Chicago. The ensuing end is a race home to not get caught for skipping school, yet a day so filled with fun, an Odessey and adventure to make a memory last a lifetime.

Is it a comedy or a deep philosophical movie?

In a Ferris Bueller’s monologue, he says “A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.” In a single sentence he takes on political systems, rigid philosophies, social conformity, institutional thinking, and the tendency of people to define themselves by categories instead of individuality. His day of skipping school and exploring the world is a direct attack on the school as mechanical, authority as often absurd, and modern life as something people sleepwalk through.

As he smiles into the camera, Ferris Beuller delivers the line “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it “

Twist and Shout, Dankeschön

Seneca would love this movie…………………

And now you know...

Philosophy is the art of thinking, the building block of progress that shapes critical thinking across economics, ethics, religion, and science.

METAPHYSICS: Literally, the term metaphysics means ‘beyond the physical.’ Typically, this is the branch that most people think of when they picture philosophy. In metaphysics, the goal is to answer the what and how questions in life. Who are we, and what are time and space?

LOGIC: The study of reasoning. Much like metaphysics, understanding logic helps to understand and appreciate how we perceive the rest of our world. More than that, it provides a foundation for which to build and interpret arguments and analyses.

ETHICS: The study of morality, right and wrong, good and evil. Ethics tackles difficult conversations by adding weight to actions and decisions. Politics takes ethics to a larger scale, applying it to a group (or groups) of people. Political philosophers study political governments, laws, justice, authority, rights, liberty, ethics, and much more.

AESTHETICS: What is beautiful? Philosophers try to understand, qualify, and quantify what makes art what it is. Aesthetics also takes a deeper look at the artwork itself, trying to understand the meaning behind it, both art as a whole and art on an individual level. A question an aesthetics philosopher would seek to address is whether or not beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

EPISTEMOLOGY: This is the study and understanding of knowledge. The main question is how do we know? We can question the limitations of logic, how comprehension works, and the ability (or perception) to be certain.