WESTERN CULTURAL TRADITION
VII & VIII
(2005-06)
Last semester,
excepting the "voices of dissent" such
as Pascal and Milton, we noted that the "faith" of the age seemed
increasingly to be a faith in human reason's capacity to know and
possibly even to control the natural world; to understand human nature
and our rational capacities; and even to understand supernatural or
metaphysical truths. This semester, that increasing rationalism
will come to a climax in Kant's quint-essentially modern declaration: "Sapere
Aude!" Dare to know! Still, very quickly we
will encounter new voices denying human rationality's self-sufficiency.
By the end of the 19th century, Nietzsche will demand an antirational
"transvaluation of values". Still, neither rationalism nor
rationality disappears. In the early 20th century, Freud will,
without irony, strive to banish irrationality from human experience by
using rational analysis to explain the irrationality of human
behavior.
What comes of all this is, I think, a frightening cultural
crisis. Writers such as Nietzsche and Mann will critically and
artistically explore the possibility that the Western Tradition had
been exhausted. Yet there are new hopes. This sense of
exhaustion, of ending, and the appearance of new, limited hope, has
never been more aptly expressed than in the opening paragraph of D. H.
Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover:
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to
take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the
ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little
hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the
future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to
live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
The hard work of going on "no matter how many skies have fallen" --
without religion? without reason? without social order? without moral
values?
| Jan. 17,
Shelley, Frankenstein. |
Jan.
19, Goethe, Faustus. |
| Jan. 24, Goethe, Faustus, and Don Giovanni. |
Jan. 26,
Jacque-Louis David, Oath of the
Horatii. |
| Jan.. 31, Kant, Fundamental Principles for
the Metaphysics of Morals. |
Feb.
2, Kant, Fundamental
Principles for
the
Metaphysics of Morals. |
Feb.
7, Kant, What is
Enlightenment?
and Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone. |
Feb.
9, Schleiermacher, On
Religion:
Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. |
| Feb. 14, Schleiermacher, On Religion:
Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. |
Feb. 16, Schleiermacher, On Religion:
Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. |
| Feb.
21, The Beautiful and the
Sublime:
Kant and Burke; Constable and Turner. |
Feb.
23:, Caspar David
Friedrich: The Natural Divine. |
| Feb.28, Romantic
Poetry
Wordsworth & Coleridge. |
Mar. 2, Romantic
Poetry:
Wordsworth & Coleridge. |
| Mar. 7,
SPRING BREAK |
Mar. 9,
SPRING BREAK |
| Mar.
14, Conrad, Heart of
Darkness. |
Mar.
16, Conrad, Heart of
Darkness. |
| Mar.
21, Conrad, Heart of
Darkness. |
Mar. 23,
|
| Mar.
28, Nietzsche, from The
Genealogy of Morals. |
Mar.
30, Nietzsche, from The
Genealogy of Morals. |
| Apr.
4, Nietzsche, from Birth
of Tragedy and The Case Against Wagner. |
Apr.
6, Wagner, Tristan
and Isolde. (No, not the recent movie!) |
| Apr.
11, Freud, from Interpretation
of Dreams and Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. |
Apr. 13, EASTER BREAK. |
| Apr.
18, Freud, The
Future of an
Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. |
Apr.
20, Mann, Death in
Venice. |
| Apr. 25,
Mann, Death in Venice. |
Apr.
27, Mann, Death in
Venice. |
| May 3, Virginia
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. |
May
5, Virginia Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway. |
|