spirituality

Confronting Anxiety As A Law Student: An Existential Approach

/ Staniel Brutis / Leave a comment

I. INTRODUCTION

As a law student, I am confident that we are all familiar with anxiety, an invisible entity that has psychological and physiological effects upon the individual in whom it arises. It causes us to experience fear and trembling in moments where opportunity and possibility are the ripest. Chronic or severe anxiety can manifest in the form of emotional distress, obsessive thinking, compulsive behaviors, relational struggles, and general restlessness. Anxiety often carries a negative connotation due to these effects. However, in this essay, I’d like to offer a different perspective on anxiety, a perspective that diminishes anxiety to a mere nothing while simultaneously promoting it as the most transformative feeling an individual can experience. An absurd paradox.  

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‘Being’ a Law Student & the Movement Away from Bad Faith

/ Staniel Brutis / Leave a comment

I. INTRODUCTION 

We established in “’Being’ a Law Student and the Freedom of Choice” that human reality is inherently and radically free, meaning that freedom is an unavoidable aspect of our existence. In other words, we have no choice but to be free. Because freedom emerges from the very structure of human reality, we are not simply what we are; rather, we must actively become what we are. This process is continuous, unfolding in every moment. The act of being, and simultaneously negating being, occurs instantaneously and perpetually. 

Unlike determinism, which asserts that every action results from a preceding cause, human motivation is not dictated by past events but by future possibilities and the desire to bring oneself into being. However, the anguish that accompanies this radical freedom often leads us to negate it. Faced with the burden of being able to become our greatest potential or our worst failure, we attempt to escape this responsibility by resigning ourselves to the in-itself, ignoring choice and possibility.

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre defines bad faith as follows:

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