Session 1: Thought experiment: admiration and immorality
Think of a person who has some immoral quality (or qualities), but who you nevertheless admire… and (worse!) whose immoral qualitiesare precisely the source of what you admire/respect about the person, even this does not match up with your own personal ethical beliefs. Why do you admire and respect this person? What is the quality (or qualities), the value (or values), that makes you admire this person, despite your moral judgment of this person? Why isn’t this quality/value an ethical value? Would you want everyone to have this value?
Session 2: Activity: Convert an Objective Truth to a Subjective Truth
Examples:
2 + 2 = 4 (not possible? silly?)
I am happy (already subjective!)
I am biking to work (just zen mindfulness stuff?)
I am a [teacher, etc.]
I am a citizen [of the USA, etc.]
I am [xx] years old
I am a [mother/father, daughter/son, sister/brother, wife/husband, etc.]
Session 3: Genealogy of (one of your) morals
Pick a moral value that you endorse....
a. Imagine/make up what its predecessors were
b. Did it become a value for reasons of social utility?
c. If not... why not?
d. Does it change the value (for you) to see it in this light?
Session 4: Your life is a work of art
(a) Think of 2 things you most want to change about yourself – morally – and 2 things you are glad of, in your moral character. Put this away! These are not relevant to the exercise!
(b) At the end of a day, examine the day from the perspective of the eternal return – if you had to relive the day over and over again, what 2 things seem the least like a beautiful life? what 2 things seem the most like a beautiful life? Try to pick these things without regard for their morality – are they beautiful things? What constitutes their beauty?
(c) Can you foresee advantages/problems of trying to do more of these things, or only things like this? How does this fit in with Nietzsche’s idea that we must learn to see things as beautiful? “How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not?” (Nietzsche, Gay Science, Aph. 299)
Session 5: No homework!
Session 6: Absurdity Goggles
(1) Find three non-human things/phenomena that you can look at in such a way as to strip away their meaning, and try to see them as having no inherent meaning. What are the things you picked? What are the meanings that you had to strip away? What’s left?
(2)
“Men, too, secrete the inhuman” (p. 450). Take three examples of human behavior that you can “see” as absurd. How are these different than the things you identified in (1)?
Session 7: Condemned to Freedom
(1) Sartre thinks we are “condemned“ to our freedom. Think concretely about your own sense of freedom. When do you most “feel“ free?
(2) Think now about the feeling of weight about making an important decision. What causes that weight? Does it correspond to Sartre’s vision of what causes this feeling of being condemned?
(3) Try intensifying some not-particularly-important decisions - can you intentionally feel anguish about them? Can you ratchet up the feeling that you are condemned to be free to choose? What do you do to “ratchet up“ that feeling - what do you have to think about? Is it useful to do so?
Session 8: (Hell is) Other People
(1) Garcin, Inez, and Estelle are to some extent trapped by their need to be defined, or redefined, by the other two. In your life, who do you need in order to continue being who you are? How much does this need depend on them acting a certain way?
(2) Sartre thinks that, as part of our continual bad faith, we need other people not only to blame our faults on, but also to take credit for our virtues. Pick two things you really like about yourself - now force yourself to identify this virtue as totally stemming from someone else - who is this Other? Does this virtue stem from this Other because you got it from them, like an inheritance? Or do you need this Other in order for the virtue to be implemented, like a dance partner?