Wiesel's Night By Jean Paul Sartre

What does it mean to own something and how can it impact our sense of self? Many philosophers have has opposing views about this. However, Jean-Paul Sartre has the most accurate representation about the meaning of owning something. Ownership expands beyond physical objects, which means that it includes intangible things. This includes learning a skill or knowing a subject extremely well. Also, ownership doesn’t always impact character negatively, the same way it doesn’t impact it positively all the time. You can see examples of this all throughout everyday life, literature, and movies. People own things that they have bought or made themselves. These objects are your own because you’ve put work in obtaining them. For example, when B.F. Skinner created the Skinner Box in order to conduct experiments on operant conditioning, the box was his to own. His Skinner Box helped expand his knowledge, which also increased the amount of intangible things that he owns. Since Skinner was the first person to understand operant conditioning from his experiment, he owns the idea that operant conditioning is determined by the reward or consequence that you get following a certain action. Ownership isn’t more detrimental or more
In Eli Wiesel’s Night, Eli loses faith in his religion while he is in the concentration camps, which in result causes him to become bitter and hopeless. This shows that his ownership of his faith helped developed his character, because once it was gone he diminished as a person. However, when you look at a different situation, such as the one presented in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye the protagonist, Holden, took ownership over the idea that the world is out to get him in the beginning of the book which resulted in him not caring about what he does or what he says. These two different situations show that, even though ownership does have an impact on character it isn’t always good or