10 posts tagged “existentialism”
I bought four more books.
From Amazon.com:
Though love is a perennial topic for writers of all kinds, much of what is written about love is simplistic and unsatisfying. In Conscious Love, Richard Smoley—an expert on the esoteric traditions of mystical Christianity—incorporates insights and wisdom about love from noted thinkers in literature, art, philosophy, sociology, cultural criticism, and even neurology. This remarkable book offers a blueprint for infusing conscious love into human relationships.
This book, What is Called Thinking? is supposedly one of his later books that sort of attempts to revist a lot of the material he wrote in the beginning of his philosophical career, mainly Being and Time. It seemed like a good place to start, because thought I really want to own a copy of Being and Time and I want to read it....it's a little intimidating to be honest.
From an Amazon.com review:
The question is this: Can quantum mechanics tell us anything useful about the nature of reality in the observable day-to-day world? .... how do Einstein's theories of Relativity tie in with our day-to-day experiences and with quantum theory?
He proposes that three fundamental problems are all related: first, the problem of measurement in quantum mechanics; second the problem of time in quantum cosmology and third the so-called "hard problem" in brain science that tries to explain how consciousness can arise form apparently inanimate matter.
....
He comes to the conclusion, rightly, I believe, that consciousness does not emerge from the brain but is conditioned by it. Furthermore, that the entire Universe of mind and matter arises from a fundamental non-dual reality.
From Amazon.com:
"Working from existing translations, Thomas Merton composed a series of personal versions from his favorites among the classic sayings of Chuang Tzu, the most spiritual of the Chinese philosophers. Chuang Tzu, who wrote in the fourth and third centuries B.C., is the chief authentic historical spokesman for Taoism and its founder Lao Tzu (a legendary character known largely through Chuang Tzu's writings). Indeed it was because of Chuang Tzu and the other Taoist sages that Indian Buddhism was transformed, in China, into the unique vehicle we now call by its Japanese name — Zen. The Chinese sage abounds in wit, paradox, satire, and shattering insight into the true ground of being. Father Merton, no stranger to Asian thought, brings a vivid, modern idiom to the timeless wisdom of Tao. Illustrated with early Chinese drawings."
I wrote this a year and a half ago for one of my last courses in college. I'm posting it here so I don't lose track of it. I was really proud of it when I wrote it. It's funny because as much depth as I've gained since then, I'm still spouting off the same things. :)
Faith and Hope:
Paralleling the World of Science with the World of Personal Experience
Chaos Theory and Metamathematics:
An Engineering Perspective on Religion
June 12, 2006
“Hope consists in asserting that there is
At the heart of being,
Beyond all data,
Beyond all inventories and calculations,
A mysterious principle which is in
Connivance with me,
Which cannot but will that which I will,
If what I will deserves to be willed
And is, in fact, willed
By the whole of my being.”
- Gabriel Marcel, The Ontological Mystery
Throughout our recent history, there has been a serious disconnect between science and religion. It was often felt that science would eventually explain everything, and that religion might fall by the wayside. But is there something about our existence that eludes even science? Can science explain, or at least exist in harmony with, not just religion but the human personal experience? How can we as individuals deal with all of the pain and suffering in the world? Does science help us or hinder us in this goal? Or is there some aspect of life that makes its mysteries completely unintelligible? Is there any reason to have hope in a seemingly meaningless world such as ours?
Most people think of faith as assenting to certain propositions, regardless of the fact that there is no available proof. If you hold something axiomatically, you hold it on faith. But this is not the only way to think about faith. William Lynch has a much different opinion. We all have a deep, primal urge to trust in something other than ourselves. Faith is exactly that movement of trust. In fact, the word “believe” actually comes from the root “to belove.” Faith is a way of imagining the world through the lens of what you have chosen to give your life to. It is a way of seeing, a paradigm. Just as science has paradigms, faith does too. Our lives are greatly shaped by how we view the world.
“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” [1]
Annie Dillard describes it as the “artificial obvious,” which is what we construct that allows us to see better certain aspects of the reality which exists. A geologist sees things in rocks at a glance that we wouldn’t even give a second look to. Someone who loves cars can diagnose a problem just by listening to the engine. We see what we know and what we expect, and what we expect depends on the artificial obvious that we have composed for ourselves.
Furthermore, because both faith and science are made up of different paradigms, we can come to a conclusive definition of mystery, given to us by Gabriel Marcel:
“A mystery is a problem which encroaches on its own data, invading them, as it were, and thereby transcending itself as a simple problem.” [2]
A mystery is something that we cannot figure out from inside our paradigm. It is because a paradigm is so subjective that these mysteries exist. They encroach on their own data, meaning that he problem cannot be approached from the standpoint of an objective observer. The observer is part of the problem, he is inseparable from it, and he cannot get out of it in order to solve it. So it is with paradigms, both scientific and faithful or personal.
One of the most important features of an imagination of faith, according to Lynch, is that it is ironic:
“It is an ironic paradigm. This is so important that I have chosen irony, the ironic imagination, the irony of faith, the irony of Christ, as the real subject for this book [3]
He goes on to show how deeply ironic the Christian view of the world really is. He even argues that any faith in the world is necessarily ironic because of the fact that it must reconcile pain with meaning. This will become very important in our discussion on what science and faith have in common later on.
Science and math used to be considered absolute disciplines. That is, there was nothing that they chouldn’t find out given the right amount of time and resources. There was always a certain amount of control and predictability that could be counted on in scientific experiments. If you cannot repeat your findings, how can they be valid? Both scientists and mathematicians alike were able (or at least thought that they would be able) to take the world in all of its complexity and label it. They wanted to section it off and put it into nice neat little boxes, each separated from the other. Or, even better, find one theory that could explain the entirety of our existence, tying together everything that we know and experience scientifically.
This sort of view we will hereby refer to as “kitsch.” Kitsch is that sort of naïve optimism that we see running rampant in our culture. From the sappy fairytale endings in many of our movies, to many people’s daily outlook on life. It is the idea that we can expect things to turn out for the better. It gives us the sense that we have control over out own lives. Most of us need it in order to function without being overwhelmed by all of the pain in the world. It is a world that leaves absolutely no room for mystery. Every instance of evil of darkness in life becomes a problem that we must find a way to solve. Unfortunately, many people still think of science this way even today.
However, the more science has reached for this sort of ideal, the more it has discovered knowledge that undermines it. In 1931, while trying to prove logical completeness within a formal system, Kurt Gödel was forced to come to the opposite conclusion. Gödel proved that within a system, there will always be propositions that cannot be classified as true or false without an outside perspective. These “unprovable propositions” are exactly mysteries in Marcel’s sense. Unprovable propositions are problems that encroach on their own data. It is precisely the fact that you are within a system that prevents you from figuring out the validity of a proposition.
As a consequence of Gödel’s proof, math and science became worlds where absolute knowledge will never be possible. This proof was solidified when Chaos Theory came into existence. Because chaotic systems require infinite precision to reproduce exact results, we as finite beings can never be certain what results we will obtain from a particular experiment. It removes the elements of control and predictability that were so present in scientific minds before.
If we put those two together, we find that science now leaves considerable room for mystery. We have had to acknowledge that we cannot figure everything out, and that we may not have as much control as we originally though we did. Our kitschy view of what we can know and figure out has been removed. That is why many scientists had such a problem accepting Gödel’s proof. They could no longer live in a nice, safe, controllable, and predictable little world.
With the advent of modern physics, we have also been forced to realize that it may not be impossible for two opposing attributes to exist within the same object. Didn’t Lynch say that faith was an ironic paradigm?
“The common division of the world into subject and object, inner and outer world, body and soul, is no longer adequate.” [4]
Faith, and now science, have the ability to hold together two contradictory things. Light, and in fact all matter, have been found to behave as both a wave and a particle, depending on the circumstances. Quantum particles have both spin-up and spin-down, even though only one will appear when measured. Chaos seems to posit that we may be able to hold freedom and determinism together.
If we can keep all these things together, then it wouldn’t be too hard to see how God’s love and the evil in the world could fit together. There must be a way to figure it out. If God really loves us, then he must do so allowing us to freely love him back, or not. He must allow us to becomes whoever we want to be and to do whatever we deem necessary. He must give us free will. And, of course, with free will comes bad decisions, and with bad decisions comes evil. Evil exists in the world precisely because God loves us so much. If that isn’t the ironic imagination that Lynch describes, then what is?
This discussion also brings us to a definition of beauty that does not conform to kitsch. If beauty is only the good things in life, then we hold ourselves to a purely aesthetic view of beauty. We imagine it as something that can be judged and looked at as an observer. But doesn’t real beauty mean so much more to us? It takes more than simple prettiness to really ignite us. Annie Dillard wrote about just that in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
“One late afternoon at a low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six- or eight-foot-long bodies of twisting sharks. … The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence.”[5]
A sight like this seems to touch us in a much deeper way than a cute little bird signing a song ever could. It seems more real somehow. It inspires awe, a mixture of fear and respect.
So, now we have found a way to make the pieces of life fit together very nicely. The worlds of science and philosophy merge and are inseparable. But now we must proceed with caution. If we are not careful, we risk falling into a new sort of not-quite-so-naïve optimism. It will be the mystery itself that becomes kitsch. Ernest Becker writes of this in Denial of Death:
“It need not be overtly a god or openly stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to the game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center.”[6]
In face, even Dillard herself was wary of this fact. Years after writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard found herself in a slump. She didn’t like what she was writing, and so she went back to Tinker Creek to try to recapture the experience that drove her to write her prize-winning novel. It was there that she realized how she had been fooled. She had been dealing only with the world of nature. A world that was outside of herself. How can we really talk about violence and suffering if we don’t talk about the human aspect of it? And so she set upon writing another novel, Holy the Firm, which would better describe how we deal with our own personal suffering.
But didn’t we just do what Dillard did in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Didn’t we let the mystery become our new kitsch? If we don’t consider our own human pain, then we are just drawing on
“…an experience which is not drawn from the most intimate and living part of himself, but, on the contrary, is considered from a sufficient distance to allow certain contradictions to become alternated or fused into a general harmony.”[7]
It seems that earlier we were somehow able to logic away the pain that comes from evil. We put ourselves at a distance and talked about suffering as a global term.
“…evil which is only stated or observed is no longer evil which is suffered; in fact, it ceases to be evil.” [8]
Without our own pain, can we really call life a mystery? Doesn’t this element of our own suffering make the problem encroach on its data in a whole new way?
It’s one thing to talk about suffering on a global scale, where you are a passive observer of it. However, things become completely different when you are the one in pain. I don’t just mean physical pain, although that has its problems as well. What I am talking about is existential pain. The pain you feel when your deepest love and trust have been betrayed. It’s not hard to come up with an example of this type of anguish. Most have experienced it before. When you are really, truly suffering in this way, the explanation we gave before that our pain is a consequence of God’s love just doesn’t seem to satisfy you. Not only that, but it almost infuriates you. When you are really hurting, anything with a hint of kitsch reminds you of the love you lost. You get mad because you know how futile it was to believe in such a greater harmony. You yourself had believed it until it was violently ripped away from you. You look at everyone’s life and feel like you know something they don’t. Like they are just going about their stupid, superficial lives but you know better. You know that whenever you put your trust in something or someone, that trust will ultimately be betrayed.
How can God let us hurt so badly when he has the power to stop it? It doesn’t make sense. There is no logical reason for it. It sucks. It hurts. There’s no way to prevent evil from causing pain. But that does not mean that something good can never come from it. Violence and suffering have a way of causing paradigm shifts. Flannery O’Connor, a Catholic fiction writer, articulates this very well:
“…in my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned to at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader…” [9]
We convince ourselves that we have control over our lives. That kitsch isn’t so bad. We get so stuck in our ways of thinking that almost nothing else but violence will do the job of waking us up. Peter Godfrey-Smith also has something to say about paradigms and what can change them:
“In this way, a paradigm is like a well-shielded and well-designed bomb. A bomb is supped to blow up; that is its function.” However, “A well-designed bomb will be shielded from minor buffets. Only a very specific stimulus will trigger the explosion.” [10]
Violence and pain are often the specific stimuli that we need to make our paradigms blow up. But let’s not forget that this process of blowing our old world view to shreds is not easy. It hurts. We spend so much time and effort trying to gain a sense of mastery over our world that when it is ripped away, we feel completely and utterly betrayed.
But even here, there are two levels of suffering. There is a difference between an accident, where the pain comes from without, and what Jerome Miller calls a “tragic reversal.” We usually construct our lives in such a way as to avoid something. What the thing is depends on the particular person and their history. A tragic reversal happens when these very avoidances set you up to invite the exact type of pain that you were trying to run from. It is the realization that:
“I have set in motion my own disintegration insofar as I am responsible for grounding the whole structure of my life on avoidances which the very realities that I excluded from my life are now undermining. … Such an experience upsets the ego in a profoundly intimate and humiliating way.” [11]
With an accident, you can always blame some external force. However, with a tragic reversal, most of the blame lies in you. It is so upsetting because you caused your own pain. You set yourself up for this. Everything you had thought was true and safe and good was a lie.
Miller himself has a very illuminating example of a tragic reversal. It is the story of a man who loves to welcome people into his home. He feels he has built a good atmosphere in his house, based on his wonderful relationship with his wife and son. When people go over to his house, they feel at home because of how loving and perfect the household is. But it is precisely this striving for perfection that causes his son to feel that he has to hide his homosexuality. The son imagines that the father would be perfectly fine with some stranger being gay, but how can his son be gay? How could they have lived all this time together and keep such huge secrets from each other? He does not want to shatter his dad’s image of the perfect home, and so he starts to feel like the one stranger who cannot be welcome in the house. The haven becomes a prison. One day, his father finds him hung from the ceiling in an act of suicidal despair. To the father, it will seem that his son’s death came from out of nowhere. But if he really thinks about it, he cannot help but realize his part in all of this, as inadvertent as it was. It was by his very generosity that he unwittingly set up a dynamic that led to his son’s suicide. Acknowledging this fact would probably be the most painful and horrible act of the father’s life. It would shatter his world even more entirely that the death of his son on its own ever could have. How can you live in a world of kitsch after that? The father’s imagination has been completely destroyed.
But even the pain won’t necessarily change a person’s imagination. Whenever pain is involved, there is a huge temptation to just gloss over it and to convince yourself that you had nothing to do with it. But in order to get past your defenses and shift your paradigm, you need to enter into crisis. Allow the bomb to really blow up and deeply hurt you. Otherwise, you go back to your normal life with your normal kitsch and never fully awaken yourself to the terrible, uncontrollable thing that is your life.
At this point, many get lost in the depths of despair. What good is a paradigm shift if it is a shift into darkness and nihilism? However, it absolutely crucial that we rid ourselves of our kitschy preconceived notions in order for us to be able to see clearly what true hope is. You can only really see the light if you are in darkness.
“Hope is situated within the framework of the trial, not only corresponding to it, but constituting our being’s veritable response.” - Marcel [12]
There comes a moment, not as quickly for everyone, where somehow it is through the pain that we come to see something deeper. Something that touches the most genuine parts of ourselves. All of a sudden we see how complex and terrible and beautiful our lives really are, and we are filled with awe. With wonder. But we cannot force this moment. It is not something we alone can cause:
“…hope is always associated with a communion, no matter how interior it may be. This is actually so true that one wonders if despair and solitude are not at bottom necessarily identical.” - Marcel [13]
It is through our ties to other people that we will find hope. Not just in what others can do for us but in the very obligations that our relationships demand of us. It’s not someone else’s love that will bring us through; it is our love for others. It is the acknowledgement of all of the shit in the world and the fact that there is not easy way out of it. However, at the very same time we must recognize how much love there is in the world and how it all ties together, the good and the evil, to make a horrible, beautiful picture. But again, it is not something we can just will to happen. It is something which requires a certain relaxation. A willingness to go wherever life takes us. But when it finds us, the only reaction possible will be that of complete and utter awe.
And then, after this experience of hope, we inevitably construct new walls and defenses around ourselves. We create new kitsch, and we begin to fool ourselves again. And we will never know that we are doing it until the moment that it betrays us. However, Marcel says it best when he writes:
“…it is never a simple return to the status quo, a simple return to our being, it is that and much more, and even the contrary of that, an undreamed of promotion, a transfiguration.”[14]
Even though we are endlessly repeating this cycle of avoidance, pain, and hope, the repetitions are not meaningless. Each time we reach the hope it fundamentally changes us and how we view the world.
Now that we have more clearly defined the mystery, can science or mathematics really have anything to say? I’m not convinced that it can. It is no fault of scientists or mathematicians; it is just a difference in subject. Math can never really focus on such a personal, data-encroaching pain because
“The business of a science is to concentrate on similarities, not differences, to be general, to omit whatever is not relevant to answering the severely delimited questions it sets itself to ask”[15]
Scientists have a certain amount of control over the objects of their study, and we have come to the conclusion that there is no such sort of control in the personal and religious spheres of life. In addition, even though science and math have been proven not to be completely objective, they still tend to require the scientist to be in the mindset of an observer, not a participant.
So maybe science doesn’t hold all the answers, but I seriously doubt that anything or anyone actually does. Perhaps we all have parts of the answers to varying degrees. But whatever we do, we can never think we’ve got it all figured out. That is precisely when we fall into the worst kind of kitsch. We even have to be careful that, even allowing for mystery, we don’t let that mystery become kitsch as well. Go where life takes you; be willing and relaxed. And when darkness comes, invite it in. It will hurt, and it will tear you apart. You will tear yourself apart. Life will not be merciful, and it does not take requests. But somehow, find a way to trust in the world, and to fully invest yourself in it. Marvel at the complexity and the interconnection all around you, and believe that there exists in the world, at the very heart of being, a mysterious power that cannot but will with you whenever what you will deserves to be willed, and is in fact willed by your entire being.
*****
[1] Werner Heisenberg
[2] Gabriel Marcel, The Ontological Mystery
[3] William F. Lynch, Images of Faith
[4] Werner Heisenberg
[5] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
[6] Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
[7] Gabriel Marcel, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope”
[8] Gabriel Marcel, The Ontological Mystery
[9] Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work”
[10] Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality
[11] Jerome Miller, The Way of Suffering: A Geography of Crisis
[12] Gabriel Marcel, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope”
[13] Gabriel Marcel, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope”
[14] Gabriel Marcel, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope”
[15] Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History”
Not too many people voted, but it's all good. Not too many people participate either, but it doesn't matter. I'd rather have quality than quantity, and boy do we have it. :)
Here's the book for this round:
"As the novel follows the protagonist, Patrice Mersault, to his victim's
house -- and then, fleeing, in a journey that takes him through stages
of exile, hedonism, privation, and death -it gives us a glimpse into
the imagination of one of the great writers of the twentieth century.
For here is the young Camus himself, in love with the sea and sun,
enraptured by women yet disdainful of romantic love, and already
formulating the philosophy of action and moral responsibility that
would make him central to the thought of our time."
Happy reading/watching! ;)
I picked this one because I was talking about it on a message board. Here you go:
I know it's been a while, but I like to wait until at least more than one of us have finished before we move on. That said, it is now time to vote for the next book/movie! As always, if you don't like the suggestions I put here (they're really more like idea starters) feel free to let me know what you *want* to read! :)
Book Suggestions:
"Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality."
Camus is one of the most famous existentialists...although he distanced himself from the movement at the time.
A Happy Death - Albert Camus
"As the novel follows the protagonist, Patrice Mersault, to his victim's house -- and then, fleeing, in a journey that takes him through stages of exile, hedonism, privation, and death -it gives us a glimpse into the imagination of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. For here is the young Camus himself, in love with the sea and sun, enraptured by women yet disdainful of romantic love, and already formulating the philosophy of action and moral responsibility that would make him central to the thought of our time."
The Children of Men - P.D. James
"Near the end of the 20th century, for reasons beyond the grasp of modern science, human sperm count went to zero. The last birth occurred in 1995, and in the space of a generation humanity has lost its future. In England, under the rule of an increasingly despotic Warden, the infirm are encouraged to commit group suicide, criminals are exiled and abandoned and immigrants are subjected to semi-legalized slavery. Divorced, middle-aged Oxford history professor Theo Faron, an emotionally constrained man of means and intelligence who is the Warden's cousin, plods through an ordered, bleak existence. But a chance involvement with a group of dissidents moves him onto unexpected paths, leading him, in the novel's compelling second half, toward risk, commitment and the joys and anguish of love. In this convincingly detailed world--where kittens are (illegally) christened, sex has lost its allure and the arts have been abandoned--James concretely explores an unthinkable prospect."
Movie Suggestions:
Children of Men
To go with the book, if we choose it.
Tsotsi
"Captivating audiences worldwide, this compelling story of crime and redemption has earned countless awards around the globe. On the edges of Johannesburg, Tsotsi's life has no meaning beyond survival. One night, in desperation, Tsotsi steals a woman's car. But as he is driving off, he makes a shocking discovery in the backseat. In one moment his life takes a sharp turn and leads him down an unexpected path to redemption ... giving him hope for a future he never could have imagined."
Magnolia
"An intriguing and entertaining study in characters going through varying levels of crisis and introspection. This psychological drama leads you in several different directions, weaving and intersecting various subplots and characters, from a brilliant Tom Cruise, as a self-proclaimed pied-piper, to a child forced to go on a TV game show and the pressures he faces from a ruthless father."
Oh, and as an FYI, I haven't read or watched any of the above books/films other than the movie version of Children of Men. :)
Happy Voting!
Time to vote for the next book/movie!
I haven't heard back from anyone still reading Vonnegut, so I figured we'd start the voting for the next cycle. It will probably take us a week to decide the next book/movie, so if there is anyone out there still reading, you still have some time. :)
So here we go! If you're not part of the discussion group, now is the perfect time to join!
Here are my suggestions. Feel free to either vote on these or suggest a completely different book or movie!
If we pick this book, I would suggest one or both of these movies, as I think they go really well together.
I'm not sure which movies would go well with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm (since we really have to read both, and they're both relatively short). So I'll just put a couple random ones I haven't seen. Suggestions welcome.
So, there you go. Remember, you don't have to stay within the lines. Suggest your own if you want! And feel free to click through the books/movies to see their descriptions. If you have any questions, ask. :)
Happy voting!
I read a bit of Marcel back in college (yeah all the way back in 2006, whew), and I really liked him. So I looked up what I could find on him. I found a great link from the Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia, and I'm starting to read it.
Here's the link for those interested.
And an excerpt that might get you interested:
“I should like to start,” Marcel says, “with a sort of global and intuitive characterization of the man in whom the sense of the ontological — the sense of being, is lacking, or, to speak more correctly, the man who has lost awareness of this sense” (Marcel 1995, p. 9). This person, the one who has lost awareness of the sense of the ontological, the one who's capacity to wonder has atrophied to the extent of becoming a vestigial trait, is an example of the influence of the misapplication of the idea of function. Marcel uses the example of a subway token distributor. This person has a job that is mindless, repetitive, and monotonous. The same function can be, and often is, completed by automated machines. All day this person takes bills from commuters and returns a token and some change, repeating the same process with the same denominations of currency, over and over. The other people with whom she interacts engage her in only the most superficial and distant manner. In most cases, they do not speak to her and they do not make eye contact. In fact, the only distinction the commuters make between such a person and the automatic, mechanical token dispenser down the hall is to note which “machine” has the shorter line. The way in which these commuters interact with this subway employee is clearly superficial and less than desirable. However, Marcel's point is more subtle.
What can the inner reality of such a person be like? What began as tedious work slowly becomes infuriating in its monotony, but eventually passes into a necessity that is accepted with indifference, until even the sense of dissatisfaction with the pure functionalism of the task is lost. The unfortunate truth is that such a person may come to see herself, at first unconsciously, as merely an amalgamation of the functions she performs. There is the function of dispensing tokens at work, the function of spouse and parent at home, the function of voting as a citizen of a given country, etc. Her life operates on a series of “time-tables” that indicate when certain functions — such as the yearly maintenance trip to the doctor, or the yearly vacation to rest and recuperate — are to be exercised. In this person the sense of wonder and the exigence for the transcendent may slowly begin to wither and die. In the most extreme cases, a person who has come to identify herself with her functions ceases to even have any intuition that the world is broken.
Edit: Wow, we actually learned most if not all of this in that class. Of course, I took the class twice (and it was different both times), so maybe it was the combination of them that got at it all. Very cool though.
The next book and movie that we'll be reading/watching over at The Analogical Imagination is...(drum-roll)... Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Match Point by Woody Allen!
As always, you'll have a couple weeks to acquire the book before we start reading it. This is a relatively short book (especially compared to Brothers Karamazov), so we shouldn't need more than a month to read it. Two weeks to get it, a month to read it. If things go faster or slower though, we'll gladly adjust.
Also, special thanks to Charmedbuttercup, who pointed us over to The Vonnegut Library, where you can read any of his books for free online. So now you don't even have to spend money! Unless you're me and you bought the book a month ago. ;)
In the meantime, see if you can get a hold of the movie. Remember, as soon as you've seen it, you're welcome to comment on it. No need to wait for me, feel free to make your own post and add it to the group! Even if you just want to let us know if you liked it or not, post away!
Here's a little more about the choices:
To the best of my knowledge, there really is no other writer quite like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Mother Night appears to be a rather straightforward, albeit quirky, novel at first glance, but as one delves down into the heart of Vonnegut's prose one finds grounds for contemplation of some of life's most serious issues. This novel is the first-hand account of Howard Campbell, Jr., a most remarkable character. Campbell is an American-born citizen who moved to Germany as a child and became the English-speaking radio mouthpiece for Nazi Germany during World War II. In the fifteen years since the end of the war, he has been living an almost invisible life in a New York City attic apartment. He misses his German wife Helga who died in the war, sometimes thinks about his pre-war life as a successful writer of plays and poems, and perhaps just waits for history to find him once again. As we begin the novel, he has been found and is writing this account from a jail cell in Israel, awaiting trial for his crimes against humanity. While he is reviled by almost everyone on earth as an American Nazi traitor, the truth is that he was actually an agent working for the American government during the war; this is a truth he cannot prove, though.
Thus, in this 1961 novel, the hero is ostensibly a Nazi war criminal. The primary moral of Mother Night, Vonnegut tells us in his introduction, is that "we are what we pretend to be" and should thus be pretty darned careful about what we are pretending to be (a secondary moral being the less enlightening statement "when you're dead, you're dead"). In the eyes of the entire world, Campbell is exactly what he pretended to be during the war, a traitorous Nazi purveyor of propaganda who mocked and demoralized allied troops as well as regular citizens. Internally, Campbell hardly knows what he is anymore; he claims no country, no political values, wanting only to live in a "nation of two" with his beloved wife Helga once again. A series of significant events forces Campbell out of the cocoon of his past fifteen years, and his thoughts and actions along the way provide big juicy morsels of food for thought: taking personal responsibility for one's actions, the harsh truths of war and peace, the sometimes vast differences between truth and fact, individual redemption before self and society, finding direction and a purpose in a world gone mad, etc. Vonnegut's scythe-like dark humor cuts deeper than mere satire, aiming directly at some of the darker sections of the human heart, areas which most individuals too often ignore or refuse to acknowledge. The gallows humor can be quite funny on the surface, but it is in actuality a scalpel which Vonnegut wields to open up the heart and soul of the reader for self-examination. Mother's Night, the title of which is taken from Goethe's Faust, is a relatively short but very powerful novel.
Match Point is "a winning combination of sex, mystery, brilliant writing and first-rate acting that all adds up to one of the most erotic and exhilarating movies in years." (Maxim). Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is being torn apart by his desire for two very different women. Marrying Chloe (Emily Mortimer) will bring him a life of wealth and success, but his true passion lies with his brother-in-law's fiancee, the stunningly sensuous but unpredictable Nola (Scarlett Johansson). Pulsing with tension, Match Point rides the dangerous line between ambition and obsession to an ending as surprising as it is chilling.
My note: Trust me, there are some great philosophical moments and implications to this movie. Watch it, and you'll see that it's about much more than sex.
It's that time again! Time for us to vote on what we want to read/watch next!
I was thinking that since Vonnegut just died, we should read one of his books. These books were in the book section already, but if you would like to suggest a different Vonnegut book, or heck, a different book altogether, please do.
As for movies, how about one of these?
If not, suggest, suggest away!
Hopefully we can pick a new book/movie combo by next week. In the meantime, don't worry if you're not done with Brothers Karamazov. I *just* finished it and will probably be posting about it within the next couple days. I'll also go and update the discussion links page, so it will be easy to find the discussions at any time by clicking the link in the group description.
Happy Voting!
 | You scored as Soren Kierkegaard. You are Soren Kierkegaard. You are one of the few theistic existentialists, and therefore you believe in truth that you can live, but you are grounded by the Absolute, God. You are an original thinker that likes cigars and is sweet.
|
Which Existentialist Philosopher Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com
You know it's funny, I answered strongly agree to sooo many of the questions.
I'm such an existentialist.
