Socrates, Descartes, God Flashcards
Night Sea Journey Summary
Story and theme are one and the same in this interior monologue by a spermatozoan swimming toward an ovum. He announces immediately that “it’s myself I address” and that he has two aims: to “rehearse” the human condition and to disclose his “secret hope.” As he considers his existence (and humankind’s), he evaluates the various ontologies, or theories of being, that philosophers have conjured up; he meditates as well on some common, and uncommon, theodicies, or explanations of why the world is the way it is. He raises first the insoluble metaphysical conundrum represented in versions of epistemological idealism: Because one can know the world only through one’s senses, does the external world really exist? As the swimmer puts it, “Do the night, the sea, exist at all? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream?” His answer is only conditional and raises another question: “And if I am, who am I?” Is he the “Heritage”—both genetic and cultural—that he carries?
He admits to his vacillation. At times he feels drawn toward the religious-humanistic faith that swimmers have a “common Maker” who has created the world with a master plan, but then the existential absurdity of his undertaking strikes him as he witnesses the many who perish as he flails on, and he suspects “that our night-sea journey is without meaning.” At this point he rejects the well-known thesis of Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” that humanity in its plight is like Sisyphus: Just as Sisyphus had to keep pushing the rock up the hill throughout eternity, always to have it roll back, so must humanity struggle against life’s obstacles and find its only values and satisfactions in the struggle itself. The swimmer takes no solace in this vision of life: “Swimming itself I find at best not actively unpleasant, more often tiresome, not infrequently…
Night Sea Journey theme
After this summary of creation theories, the swimmer turns to “the point of my chronicling.” This point turns out to be his tentative belief in a dimly sensed “She” that draws him “Herward,” making the goal “a mysterious being, indescribable except by paradox and vaguest figure: wholly different from us swimmers, yet our complement; the death of us, yet our salvation and resurrection.” He recalls, furthermore, his friend’s speculation that every creation had two kinds of creator: “One of which gives rise to seas and swimmers, the other to the Night-which-contains-the-sea and to What-waits-at-the-journey’s-end.” (These two creators perhaps should be interpreted as Eros and Thanatos, the life urge and the death wish.)
The swimmer explains that the only “purpose” of his journey must be some kind of merging of identities with “Her,” or so his friend had argued. However, if the “issue of the magical union” cannot remember the journey, then there is no satisfying immortality. The whole cyclical process thus becomes pointless, even anguishing eventually. Young swimmers, though, can only swim onward toward the figure that whispers, “I am all love. Come.”
The monologuist, himself by now an older swimmer, feels the attraction “Herward” as strongly as the others do, realizes its source, and appeals passionately to “You who I may be about to become.” What the monologuist begs of his progeny-to-be is nothing less than an end to life by a breaking of the cycle. He realizes that he is too caught up in Life, Desire, Love, Eros, or whatever, and cannot end “this aimless, brutal business” himself. Even as he goes flailing on to his fate, consummation with the ovum, he pleads:Whoever echoes these reflections: be more courageous than their author! An end to night-sea journeys! Make no more! And forswear me when I shall forswear myself, deny myself, plunge into her who summons, singing . . . ’Love! Love! Love!’
Night Sea Journey analysis
John Barth has a reputation for flawlessly written allegories, playful, imaginative, and intricate. He has a superb sense of both structure and texture, and he puts these fictional skills to the service of philosophical reflection and complicated patterns of meaning and imagery. “Night-Sea Journey” enjoys all these standard Barth talents, and it reveals many literary sources that, although never mentioned directly, give the story resonance and offer the reader the pleasure of recognition.
To give examples, the lament that “I have seen the best swimmers of my generation go under” is a clear allusion to Allen Ginsberg’s sensational Beat manifesto, the poem “Howl.” The whole meditation on the virtues and satisfactions in swimming for its own sake derives from Albert Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942; The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955), and behind that essay the myth itself. In another glancing allusion, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem on the Light Brigade is invoked in the assertion, “Ours not to stop and think; ours but to swim and sink.” Neither Charles Darwin nor Friedrich Nietzsche is mentioned by name, but both come to mind in the swimmer’s accounts of the Superman’s philosophy and the creed of the survival of the fittest. Although no particular passages echo lines from Walt Whitman, the discussions of merging identities and immortality through transmission of life all evoke some common Whitman themes. Finally, the desire to end the cycle of life in a peaceful obliteration suggests Hindu doctrines about samadhi and the release attained in Nirvana. The effect of all these covert allusions is a knowing style that, combined with the many explications of theodicies and ontogenies, makes “Night-Sea Journey” a very literary work, more of a playful philosophical tour de force than an ordinary work of fiction.
One more technique should be mentioned: the use of the “friend” as a source of many of the philosophical systems explicated. This device makes the point of view more complex, and thereby enables the swimmer/narrator, and the author, to sustain his exposition with less danger of monotony and loss of interest. Some small bit of narrative tension develops in the attitude of the swimmer to his friend, thus creating additional fictional life in a work that is essentially a lecture on philosophy.
People like Thales are known as presocratic because
they did philosophy differently from Socrates by adding new technology into philosophy (nature of reality), something Socrates was not worried about
What type of questions were Socrates interested in?
ethics = “how to live” “what’s a good life”
What was the fundamental change through Socrates?
culture where beauty is valued by using reason
What does Socrates question?
concepts that a society uses
Athens was the first
democracy and was very participant
Athen was on its way out as a
“world power”
Athen’s democracy chooses to go to war
democracy gets over thrown two times
students overthrow government
people who come from wealthy backgrounds, education
Although Athens had fewer laws, one of the laws was that
anybody can prosecute anybody
piety example would be
prosecuting the father
Athens all have to agree that the pious things
are loved by the gods
What was the question with piety?
Do the gods love pious things because they’re pious or are they pious because the gods love them?
Descartes wanted to put a firm foundation on
knowledge
Descartes was always skeptic
held a belief that you can’t know something
claims are subset of beliefs
knowledge
to make knowledgeable claim =
justified true beliefs
Descartes’s standard of justification =
high
“I think therefore I am.”
Descartes wants to empty himself out
examine principles of justification
“I think therefore I am.”
doubting experience like dreams
“I think therefore I am.”
“I think therefore I am.” The “I” is
just a thought- how the soul is separate from the body
What does Descartes want to think about God?
I know myself; therefore, I know God exists and he’s all powerful and benevolent
