Waking Life

But do we really know we are communicating as we think we do? Here we could see Descartes’s method of doubt as he would doubt the words to be real and not a part of his hallucination. I really enjoyed the movie and I would want to watch it again and again to listen to people’s thoughts and gain knowledge from it. The “language lady” doubts the words of our languages because “they are dead”. A person says a word and it has a certain meaning to that person; the other person hears the word and they associate the word with their experience and a perception of this word is different from the other person’s.

There are many people in this movie that have their own outlooks on life and their philosophies about our world. The teacher says, “Your life is yours to create and it is always your decision who you are” and by this, in my opinion, he gives his students a great lesson. The teacher says that even though the philosophy of existentialism tells us that we are abandoned and alone in this world and that the whole concept of universe and human nature is absurd, it gives us great power because we are “condemned to be free”. What if we are really dreaming and hallucinating? We cannot know for sure. many people and he argues that it is not. One thing that we can be sure of is that we exist, our body is real and Descartes says “I think, therefore I am”. He talks about the significance of “freedom of choice” and that we could be whatever we want to be in this life since we have a right for free will. We could doubt everything that surrounds us, everything we hear and see and smell.

The “language lady” was talking about people creating words in order to be able to communicate “spiritually”. He refers to Jean Paul Sartre, a famous existentialist, who once said that he never had a “day of despair in his life”.