After reading a number of responses to the French Revolution that critiqued many aspects of the changes made to French society founded on an ‘Enlightened’ world view, consider what Shelley sees as Poetry’s task. How does Shelley see Poetry entering this debate about how a new, post-Revolution society should look? Please use direct, textual evidence. 300 words minimum.
The existence of monsters throws doubt on life’s ability to teach us order. This doubt is immediate, no matter for how long a time we have had confidence, no matter how accustomed we have been to see honeysuckle grow on honeysuckle vines, tadpoles become frogs, mares suckle colts, and in general to see like engender like. It is sufficient that this confidence be shaken once by a morphological variation, by a single equivocal appearance, for a radical fear to possess us. Perhaps, fear, you will say; but why radical? Because we are living beings, real effects of the laws of life, and in our turn future causes of life. A failure on the part of life concerns us doubly: a failure could affect us, and we could cause a failure. It is only because we men are living beings that a morphological failure is, in our eyes, a monster. Suppose we were pure reason, a pure intellectual machine for observing, calculating, and accounting-inert, and indifferent to the objects that give rise t0 thought: in that case the monster would simply be that which was different from the ordinary, of an order other than the most probable order.
Georges Canguilhem, “Monstrosity and the Monstrous”
Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” (1490)
from an illustrated edition of Vitruvius’ De architectura (~0) by Cesare Cesariano (1521)
Contemporary thought has been struggling to comprehend and proffer an understanding of the underlying logic of community in our globalized world. What does it mean to belong in a world that is so interconnected, where information, people and goods have been able to travel relatively freely, depending on one’s origins? What reasons or properties do we cite when considering belonging to a community? Since this course roughly begins with the period of Enlightenment in the Western world and the aftermath of the French Revolution, we will explore this question of Community as it relates to the capacity of Reason lauded by Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes and Kant. We will examine the role that the irrational, the unreasonable, the mad, the monstrous, and the spiritual plays in our shared and particular histories, especially as it struggles against the forces of so-called Reason when we try to comprehend a concept of Community. We will ask ourselves: how and when do spirits and monsters enter into our logic and what might they represent? When do we exclude the irrational, the unreasonable, and what is left behind? How and when does the rational turn on us and become irrational and unreasonable? Who decides what is normal and what reasons do they give? What are the consequences of our rationalistic and scientific ways of being in the world? And what is shut out, what are we missing, and what drama does this create? As we’ll see, these questions are consequential to concrete historical events, both past and current, and will inevitably touch upon such issues as race, colonialism, ideology-formation, political movements, mechanized warfare, the Shoah, the absurdity of Mutually Assured Destruction, and the current religious fanaticism taking hold on multiple continents. The goal of this course is to mine and to contextualize our current ways of thinking and to ask if what we take to be enlightened thinking is truly in our best interest. More importantly, we will ask what kind of society or community such thinking might create. We will end by examining the limits of Reason when it confronts Nihilism and examine the way in which the imaginative world of poetry, art and dreams offer a new way of thinking about the world we live in and our relationship to others.
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