Teller Part 2

1. No Quiz (Yay!) Collect Homework (Boo!)

2. I introduced existentialism with the opening of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus.  He begins: 

There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. [...] I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.

The children in Teller's Nothing build a pile of things as a response to whether life has meaning. 
(a) Refugee Interview (to 3:24) What could a refugee or a concentration camp prisoner put in a pile? If nothing, how do you explain why they don't/didn't commit suicide? 
(b) What is the underlying assumption in how the children go about proving that life has meaning?
(c) Do you think this assumption is true?

3. Events that transpired this weekend are a powerful example of what Kierkegaard calls "the law of indifference" or what Camus refers to as "the absurd". Watch some of the following videos. 
Concert
Syrian Refugees in Turkey 
Beirut 
Kenya

(a) Think about some of the responses to the inhumanity of the world you've seen on social media, in your family, and among friends, and within yourself. Is there a way to respond that can make life meaningful or at least worth living?
French response
(b) In the second half of the story the meaning starts to evaporate. (i) Why? (Hint: Read top of p. 183) (ii) Is there any lesson we can learn from this in terms of how to respond to a world with no intrinsic meaning?
(c) Read the last paragraph of p. 154 and the first paragraph of p. 155. What do you think the light in Sophie's eye's represents? 

4. Read Camus p. 479 or p. 480 2nd paragraph. What does it mean?

That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it. The sight of human pride is unequalled. No disparagement is of any use. That discipline that the mind imposes on itself, that will conjured up out of nothing, that face-to-face struggle have something exceptional about them. To impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitutes man's majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself. I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone. At this juncture, I cannot conceive that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of renunciation. 

(a) Read the top of p. 217. Suppose Pierre Anthon is a metaphor for something else. What is he a metaphor for? In light of this metaphor, how can we interpret the passage on p. 217 and Camus above? 
(b) Why might these be examples of revolt against an indifferent world: (i) Holly Holm, (ii) the first people to summit Everest, (iii) First people to reach the north/south pole. Add your own example.
(c) Think of an example when 'revolt against the absurd' gave your life meaning. 



5. On Teller p. 100-101, Hussein loses his prayer mat and both he and his father are upset. Later, Holy Karl is devastated by the idea of putting the statue of Jesus on the pile. Read the passage below by Kierkegaard. 
(a) What does it mean? 
(b) What would Kierkegaard think about Hussein and Hussein's father's reaction. 
(c) What would Kierkegaard think about the Jesus statue? 

Kierkegaard: 

There is a knowledge which would presumptuously introduce into the world of spirit the same law of indifference under which the external world sighs. It counts it enough to think the great--other work is not necessary. But therefore it doesn't get the bread, it perishes in hunger, while everything is transformed into gold. And what does it really know? there were many thousands of Greek contemporaries, and countless numbers in subsequent generations, who knew all the triumphs of Miltiades, but only one was made sleepless by them. There were countless generations which knew by rote, word for word, the story of Abraham--how many were made sleepless by it?

6. Read the last paragraph p. 144.  
(a) What does the narrator mean? 
(b) How can we be many people yet still be the same person?
(c) Is this true?
(d) What makes you "you".
(e) Sartre on identity. 

7. On p. 148 and elsewhere throughout the story, it's implied that suffering is required for something to have meaning. 
"And if it didn't hurt," Anna-Li added quietly, "there wouldn't be any meaning in it."
(a) Is this true?
(b) Can you think of a counter-example?
(c) Sunday at the park