Last week, a well-known philosopher and writer Kang Shin-Ju came to Jeju-NU. Here are some parts from is talk that were significant to me. Why did you come to class today? He started with importance of having your own will for your actions. If you do not act out of your own will you are no better than a slave following orders. Now that we are no longer high school students we should not be doing something just because someone else tells us so. The unwillingness to think can cause “the banality of evil”. The phrase is by Hannah Arendt in an article called Eichrnann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Adolf Eichrnann was an ordinary person who obeyed orders which resulted in his participation of the Holocaust. The article raises the question “Is evil radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, the tendency of people to side with mass opinion without criticism?”


In order to call oneself intellectual one must be able to truly think in others shoes. Having a high level of education does not mean one is intellectual. Thinking about me is very easy. We do it all the time. What I want, how I fell, who would be beneficial to me. Thinking about others, felling the way they would fell, wanting the things they would want is something completely different. One good way to start being intellectual is by being in a romantic relationship. When with a lover one thinks about ‘us’ instead of ‘me’, ‘our’ instead of ‘mine’. Love makes us care more and think in other ways. If you want to motivate someone to protect the environment instead of showing them a picture of the polluted or destroyed area make them love the clean lakes and mountains first. Make them realize the value of something they have lost. When one is intellectual one can work for community, one learns to want something greater than the individual.

I was surprised to hear that Eichrnann was a common person not a ruthless murderer. Jewish Hannah Arendt reported so objectively about Eichrnann I admire her insight as a reporter myself. The lecture reminded me of a quote by Paul Bourget, “One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.”

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