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.
Required Text:
- The Norton Anthology of World Literature. D, E, F (Package 2). Third Edition. ISBN: 978-0393933666 / Available in the Baruch Bookstore.
- Marjane Satrapi – The Complete Persepolis (Pantheon, 2007). ISBN: 978-0375714832 / Available on Amazon and Baruch Bookstore.
MINJI KIM
IMMANUEL KANT-What Is Enlightenment?
According to the article, he argues about Enlightenment. He says humans need to have courage to use their own knowledge so as to struggle with a society and a hierarchical society and for enlightenment. And then he criticizes religion’s interference that many things like free are limited by religious matters.
I have a same idea with Kant for men need to have courage to use their own knowledge. You nowadays prefer staying safe than challenging to new things as you are used to stay safe by a society. Some parents and teachers at schools in some countries in the world even discourage their kids from trying to new things that have possibility to lead chaotic in the society. You are educated to make a better society. If you accept a given regulation and norm made by authorized organizations and states without your free will, then you do not need to have an education and you are just a stuffed pig because the stuffed pig has no ideas after being fed by its owner or its guardian and it just stays in one location until being fed by its owner or guardian again. In this point, if you just accept a given society made by authorized powers, then your power will be limited to complain something in a society to governments. However, if you attempt to change the given one to a new one, then you will have a power that is possible to change the society although there will be many trials and errors in a process. By many trials and errors, you can be a real human. A human is a thinking and practical animal, not the stuffed pig.