Newsletter January
F.C. Sophia Newsletter January
Table of contents:
- A word from the board
- Member of the month
- Guest column
- Philosopher of the month
- Upcoming events
A word from the board
Dear Sophians,
We are so curious about you. How did your exams go? Did you all survive the exam period? And, most importantly, are you ready for all the upcoming Sophia activities? In the coming period we will have some great activities, and we cannot wait to see you there! We will have drinks, parties, lunches, GMAs and pub quizzes coming up, and at the time of sending this newsletter, we are at the amazing Sophia Weekend in Brugge! I hope you all are as hyped for all these things as we are! And as far as the newsletter goes, there is even more fun this time, as we have our amazing Commissioner of Internal Affairs Eva Leentjens writing a masterful column. Things are truly on the way up again, the days are getting longer, the horrible freezing weather is over (for now), and our new courses this semester will actually give us some motivation to take university seriously for a week of three! What a time to be alive. Lovely Sophians, we will see each other again, and we cannot wait!
Sincerely,
In name of the XXXVIIth Board of F.C. Sophia
Your Commissioner of Educational Affairs
Sander van der Snel
Member(s) of the Month
This month, we have decided to put Laurens in the spotlight. Not only has he has been a valuable and active member of the Educational committee, and helped organise many educational activities. And not only that, he is also a very well-liked member of our association. Here is a word from Laurens himself:
“Hello everyone, I am Laurens,
I’ve been at Radboud and at Sophia for more than 2,5 years now, and you might know me from the 15th floor, which is my “home base” in this university. I am deeply honoured to be F. C. Sophia’s member of the month this month, because I think Sophia is the best study association in the world! But Sophia is only is good as its members, and it is the (extra-)ordinary members of Sophia (yes, reader, that includes you too!) that make it such an amazing group of people. Therefore I want to thank you all for your company these past years, and that the remaining years may be just as wonderful as the past! May the blessings of Hegel be with you always!”
Do you also want to put someone in the spotlight? You can always send us a DM on Instagram or email us at fcsophia@gmail.com to nominate someone for the next Member of the Month.
Guest Column
Dear committed readers of the F.C. Sophia Newsletter,
My fellow board member Sander has elected me to write a guest column for this newsletter. What an honor! Since Sander has given me no indication of what to write about, I will treat this guest column as a personal diary of sorts. What thoughts are currently occupying my mind?
I will start on a positive note (which will then spiral into something of an existential crisis, as is typical of a philosophy student). I started the ‘Gender and Sexuality’ module of PPS, which interests me greatly. It includes a class by Rae Aumiller (to the older F.C. Sophia veterans this teacher might be unknown, but I can assure you: a very interesting and cool teacher). The class is called ‘Trans-Formations’ and deals with transformations of the body, soul and society in the context of gender.
What I like about this class is that it gives an opportunity to actually philosophize. This might sound a bit silly, but recently I developed some criticism to my program, PPS, which has also been mirrored by Dutch Philosophy students: we are not doing any philosophizing ourselves. We are learning about the history of philosophy and critically analyzing famous philosophers, but we are not developing any philosophical ideas on our own. Of course, you can do this in your free time based on the various readings for class, but the classes themselves have not been pushing me to create any unique ideas (if this is a reflection on my poor philosophizing skills, pretend I have not said anything).
Rae’s class is a bit unconventional, if you may. The class ‘exam’ consists out of weekly assignments where we philosophize and better shape our own ideas of gender. We are pushed to shape our own opinion. We started out with a contemporary reading of desert mysticism, a tradition of philosophers who rejected society and the roles that were prescribed to them. They traveled into the desert, where there are no societal rules and lived a life filled with contemplation. The influence of societal roles was often so extreme, that in the absence of it, those roles became meaningless. One example of such a role is the category of gender. Because what does it mean to be a man or woman if you are isolated in a desert? If there is nobody to perceive you as a man or woman, are you still one?
This relates to a recent F.C. Sophia activity as well. For the ‘Art House Movie Night’, we watched the movie “My Dinner with Andre”. This is a two-hour movie consisting out of nothing except two people, Wally and Andre, having a conversation (a good watch if you feel like your attention span has been lacking lately). The conversation moves from philosophical topics like if electric blankets are a sign of modern alienation from reality, how everyone is living a life in a habitual trance, ear-nibbling in sex and, for me most interestingly, how people are continuously performing roles based on other people’s expectation. Wally and Andre can articulate it better than I can, so I will quote:
“Andre: I mean, we live in a world in which fathers, or single people, or artists are all trying to live up to someone’s fantasy of how a father, or a single person, or an artist should look and behave. They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment and they all seem totally self-confident. Of course, privately people are very mixed up about themselves. They don’t know what they should be doing with their lives. They’re reading all these self-help books.
Wally: Oh, God, and I mean, those books are just so touching, because they show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are really getting on in life, even though, by performing these roles all the time, we’re just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other, I mean, we usually don’t know the things we’d like to know, even about our supposedly closest friends, I mean…I mean, you know, suppose you’re going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things, but we just don’t dare to ask each other.
Andre: No. It would be like asking your friend to drop his role.”
To wrap up this guest column which was only supposed to be a few hundred words, I want to urge you: ask your friends how they’re doing and give an honest answer when they ask the same thing back. Challenge the role that you’re performing every day, whether this is the role of a woman, man, a single person, or a philosophy student. Is there a truth to your role, or is it out of habit? How would you identify if it was just you, all alone in a desert? And please, for the love of god, put down the book “Atomic Habits”. It’s not going to help you.
Sincerely,
Your Commissioner of Internal Affairs
Eva Leentjens
Philosopher of the Month
Because of the sheer length of Eva’s guest column, it may be better to keep this part short. Eva’s piece was superb, a masterpiece in yapping. So how about we dedicate this month’s Philosopher of the Month to someone who is even better at it? He wrote a book of 4225 pages, and did not even live long enough to finish it. For the love of God and my own mental health, may the next guest columnist have not so much to say, and not write the equivalent of the Summa Theologiae. Yes people, that’s right, the Philosopher of the Month is Thomas Aquinas.
Upcoming Activities for February
5th: Monthly drinks @ de Opstand
10th: First-years Pubquiz @ ‘t Haantje
11th: Valentines Card Activity
11th: Monthly Lunch
12th: Half-year GMA
19th: Valentines Party
Poem of the Month
Poem by Thomas Zweig
Excerpt of English translation of the poem ‘Brügge’
Bruges
The peace of evening wafts over the sleepy town,
Into the canals of the sun’s golden blood streams,
And an undirected yearning without words seems to drown
The town under the weight of the gray towers’ dreams
The old bells sing deep and wonderful chants,
Of the days when the land was filled with happiness,
In the streets below bright sun was plentiful, each glance
Fell on joyful flares and pennants making the harbor gleam with richness
The days glowed with radiant wonder shining,
Now, like a child’s first dream, have long departed,
The Angelus silent. Slowly the dying bells are ringing,
The air trembling with the soft harmonies imparted
The last tone is caught by the evening wind,
And lonely echoes are caught in the dead streets,
All silent, wracked by pain’s relentless grind,
A blind child, lost without a hand to greet.
Through the still water stride two wild swans,
And softly murmur, a gentle shiver and sigh
About a lovely girl, who was a queen once,
Now in dark nun’s habit, sorrowful, lonely, her youth passed by