FOUR Versions of What we did Today

1. Today we started off the day with the extensive discussion of an article on Nietzsche, bringing in different areas of thought to our discussions. Post-Christian modernity, anti-egalitarian, Hegelian idealism, anti-Semitics, Schopenhauer's views on death being the ultimate solution, suffering, materialism and its branches in different contexts of society, consumerism, history and economy, Marx's views on historical materialism, the current idea of happiness being a flawed concept, exemplified by societies in Scandinavian countries - these were just some of the various ideas and philosophies discussed, all rooted from the same article about Nietzsche. We then ventured into Zia Haider Rahman's novel, 'In the Light of What We Know’, through a review by the New Yorker. Finally, there was the connection between Marx and Shakespeare through the opening lines of Hamlet and Marx's Communist Manifesto.

2. We started off the day with discussing Friedrich Nietzsche who is a German philosopher, an existentialist who diagnoses the most profound cultural fact about modernity, "The Death of God," in THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, which is the leading international weekly for literary culture. We discussed about Kant, Plato and Karl Marx. We had conversed about what Dutch disease is and about Western Philosophers. We had deliberated about Schopenhauer's statements what he had to say about Nietzsche. Later, we had been diverse to one of the British Novelist who is born in Sylhet, Bangladesh and wrote “In the Light of What We Know” and who is no other than Zia Haider Rahman. We had conferred about his biography and read it in "The New Yorker."

3. We started with reading article on Friedrich Nietzsche. From there we got a lot of references including post Christian modernity, Beethoven, anti-egalitarian of Nietzsche, neo-Kantian, Hegelian idealism, syllogism and post hoc rationalizations, Dutch-disease (a concept in macro-economics). From these references we started talking about our ideas of materialism and therefore veneer goods. So me read a bit about the "theory of the leisure class" written by Thorstein Veblen. We also talked about Karl Marx's communist manifesto and how the introduction to the "bourgeois and proletariat" was taken from Hamlet. We further talked about the novel "in the light of what we know" written by the author Zia Haider Rahman. we ended that discussion by reading the article The World as we know it, based on Zia Haider Rahman.

4. Our class today, started off with the introduction of Nietzsche, a German philosopher, whose work radiated two main concepts. Existentialism and illiberalism. Existentialism is the belief or the formation of one idea and the death of another. The idea of belief in god has died or/and is dying and the new idea that as god is dead, what will the truth of our existence. On retrospect, "illiberalism" is the concept of believing that moral equality is not essential in the world, as a sentient being who loves everyone equally does not exist. We also looked at some Shakespearean literature, some Marxist ideas on Materialism and on Zia Haider’s ‘In the Light of What We Know’. We looked at MIT’s Hamlet, and read some parts of the entire play. About Materialism, we read a paragraph on page 14 of The Communist Manifesto and also learnt about materialism through a story about a Bengali Film about two brothers. We also talked about some books on this topic such as ‘Fathers and Sons’ and the ‘Theory of the Leisure Class’. We read a review article on Zia Haider’s book on The New Yorker magazine.