Still Dreaming - A Forever Knight Podcast

A re-recording of episode 2 with better audio!

Our existential wandering through Forever Knight continues with part two of the 1992 pilot.

Camus writes, "hope is disastrous for humans inasmuch as it leads them to minimize the value of this life except as preparation for a life beyond."  Nick Knight's hope for salvation is precisely what damns him.  His current quest for mortality is deference, a way of not negotiating the present, not accepting his current state.  He pushes his Sisyphean rock up the hill angrily, already hating it for falling down the other side.

Can Nick overcome his existential dilemma?  Can Schanke figure out anything?  What is going on with LaCroix's haircut?

Tune in, gentle listeners, as we explore these eternal questions in our Forever Knight.

A re-recording of episode 1 with better audio quality!

There's a series of murders in Toronto, and Nick Knight is a detective on the case, but his colleagues don't know that he's actually an 800-year-old vampire.  Nick laments his status an immortal bloodsucker and hopes to someday reclaim his humanity.  But can he, if he continues to be shackled to the past?  Can understanding Nick's plight through the lens of the existentialist idea of the absurd (as written about by Alber Camus) help us unravel both his struggle and our own quest for meaning?  Tune in, dear listener...

References:

Camus Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

_____. Nuptials. (1938)

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, (1940)

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Nick is on the radio!  He's searching for a serial killer before he can strike again!  But first he's got to....throw cards in the air and brood on the floor in robe?  Huh?  I experience existential befuddlement as we ask about the nature of being as it relates to responsibility to others and our own choices of morality...or something like that.  

Sources:  Sartre, Being and Nothingness.  De Beauvior, The Ethics of Ambiguity.  Camus, The Rebel.  And, The Myth of Sisyphus.  

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Natalie's brother is dying, is Nick the only one who can save him?  At what cost?  

What is the Existentialist basis for Ethical living?  If "absurdity challenges ethics"  how do we reconcile the need to live in the world with others with the subjective nature of freedom?  

Sources this week include:  

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947.  Beauvoir, Pyrrhus and Cineas, 1944.  Sartre, "Existentialism is a Humanism," 1946.  

Forget it, Nick, it's Chinatown.

What is the nature of the self in Daoism?  How can the Dao help us understand Existentialism?   What can Simone de Beauvoir tell us about the nature vengeance?  Why is Schanke such an asshole?  Do all Toronto gang members know Kung Fu?  Tune in gentle listener...

不經一事，不長一智

(Wisdom comes with experience.)

Chinese idiom.  

Sources:

Confucius.  Analects. 2014. Berkeley: Counterpoint

Nivison, David. (1973). Moral Decision in Wang Yang-ming: The Problem of Chinese "Existentialism". Philosophy East and West,23(1/2), 121-137. doi:10.2307/1398068

Wang, Yang-ming. (1963). Instructions for practical living, and other Neo-Confucian writings. Retrieved from https://hdl-handle-net.kean.idm.oclc.org/2027/heb.06056.

Laozi, Zhuangzi, Confucius, & Mencius. (2013). The four chinese classics : tao te ching, chuang tzu, analects, mencius. (D. Hinton, Trans.).

Wang, Qinjie James.  "It-self-so-ing" and "other-ing" in Laozi's concept of Ziran. 2003.  (http://www.confuchina.com/05%20zongjiao/Lao%20Zi's%20Concept%20of%20Zi%20Ran.htm)

O'Flynn, Pauline.  "A Question of Vengeance" Philosophy Now.  Issue 69.  2008.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity," 1947.  

Ho, David Y. F., "Selfhood and Identity in Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism: Contrasts with the West," Journal for the Theory of Social behavior.  25:2.  1995. 

Will Nick Perjure himself to convict a murderer?  Can he ever find a place to really belong?  What the is the nature of Truth?  How do we determine value and ethics?  What the hell is wrong with Schanke?  Is the Canadian legal system really this horrifically broken?  

Sources include:  Sartre, Being and Nothingness.  Nietzsche, The Gay Science.   Heidegger, Being and Time.  Charles Guignon, ed. The Existentialists.  (Especially the chapters within by Guignon, Nehams, and Solomon).  Dale Cannon, "An Existential Theory of Truth," The Personalist.  Vol. 12.  No. 2 (Fall 1996): 135-146.