Calling to a Truer Self is a Sham
NEEDED READING FOR QUOTES
Nostra Aetate
The Apology of Socrates
Allegory of The Cave
-Hebrew Bible
The Story of Abraham
The Story of Joseph
The Gospel According to Luke 1-9
Journey of Transformation -‐ CORE 1101
Paper #1
The first paper corresponds to the readings from the first section of the course. In a paper of 900-‐1200 words ( 4 pages long), please respond to the following:
At the beginning of this class we encountered a quote from Thomas Merton in the Epigraph of the Journey reader. In it, he asserts that the goal of education (and, implicitly, life itself) is to aid a person in finding her or his own true self, and to avoid what Merton calls “distractions” in order to save one’s self (and one’s society) from a meaningless, superficial existence. In an interviewwith Esquire magazine, filmmaker Woody Allen asserts something quite different:
It’s just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don’t have to really face up to the fact that, you know, we’re just temporary people with a very short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. And everything that you value, whether it’s Shakespeare, Beethoven, da Vinci, or whatever will be gone. The earth will be gone. The sun will be gone. There’ll be nothing. The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.
For Allen, in life, there is nothing beyond distraction, so, by all means, distract yourself. Using one work from Plato and one work from Hebrew Scripture or The Gospel of Luke, respond to these two arguments. That is, use these works to either (A) support the claim of Merton that we really are called beyond distractions to discover some truer self, or (B) support the claim of Allen that the “calling” to a truer self is a sham, and the best we can hope for is to be distracted along the way.
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