NIGHT: Chapter 4
Symbolism of 3: Threeness or triad, has always been considered sacred–like oneness, duality, and all numbers–by virtue of its very properties and particular attributes. These properties and attributes are manifested in its threefold nature, which of itself is the inevitable expression of a principle, an archetypal fact, that solidifies in a series, as a representation of ideas and energies that materialize in magical, mysterious fashion while obeying precise, universal laws, which the numerical codes and their geometrical correspondences symbolize.
Homework! Record your thoughts in your reactionary journal......
Chapter 5: Due Monday
"Existentialism” is a term that belongs to intellectual history. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by
Jean-Paul Sartre, and became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s.
Existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one. Sartre's own ideas were and are better known through his fictional works (such as
Nausea and
No Exit), than through his more purely philosophical ones (such as
Being and Nothingness and
Critique of Dialectical Reason). Artists linked under the term: Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka; expatriate Samuel Beckett; even abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock.
How can we define it simply?As a philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts.
ASSIGNMENT:Define existentialism in your own words, then apply it to a piece of Elie Wiesel's novel,
Night.
