After the reflection last week there was a request for the notes. I put some together quickly and here they are:
Reflection 1 Feb 2009
Readings: Ecclesiastes 1.1-11
John 11.1-16
Images:
Plato:
- Image of ideal forms
- Metaphor of the cave/shadows
Socrates:
- ‘Unexamined life is not worth living’
- Executed by drinking hemlock for teaching youth means of questioning thoroughly. Dangerous.
Descartes: “Cogito ergo sum”:
- I think, therefore I am
- Mind/body dualism
Hegel:
- Overarching/all encompassing system
- Thesis, antithesis, synthesis
- W/out Hegel, no Marx
Kierkegaard:
- NO to Hegel; the individual before God
- Leap of faith: Abraham
Derrida:
- Father of deconstruction(postmodernism?)
- All texts have within them an idea that undermines their (stated) meaning
- Deferral of meaning: we talk across a divide and communication is (im)possible.
Ecclesiastes:
- Nearly left out of OT because of ideas; only included because of ending?
- Basic premise: all is nothing/wind;thus, seize the day.
Jesus:
- Raising of Lazarus: 7th/final sign in Book of John before moving on to events of the passion. Therefore, as 7th, most important (7 as completion).
- Jesus thus gives life; foreshadows resurrection. Because of Lazarus plot to kill him gains momentum
Kant:
- Limits of human knowledge
- Regular life: same walk, same time, every day ‘suffused with hostility to the particular’ (Alistair McIntyre); living in ethereal realms and thus not as interested in details of history?
Ecclesiastes:
- ‘suffused with weariness to the particular’
Jesus:
- ‘suffused with love for the particular’;why he braved death for his friend Lazarus. that is what gives life, suffused with love for particular; that is what we are called to do; for we are loved in our particularity by God; children of God and created in image of God.
