Authors and Titles for CHOW 2 FINAL

Charles Darwin

The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man

• evolution by natural selection

• uses a cautious tone

• language of natural theology

• and narrative of progress leading to perfection

The Origin of Species

• Consistent with Hobbes' state of nature as a state of war 

• Uses the book of God’s works to revise the book of God’s word (different understanding of scripture/genesis)  

• Nature as anthropomorphic (nature as an actor/being) 

Descent of Man 

• Instead of being committed to image bearingness he praises heroism/virtue (monkeys as the heroes and savages as destructive) 

• Natural selection working for your good and leading toward progress 

• Natural selection just about adaptive change to the environment 

• Tangled bank passage: have been and are being evolved (natural selection as past and present), breathed by the creator into a few forms or into 1 (cautious tone), that being of which non greater can be conceived (natural theology) 

• Took paradise lost and works of Milton on a trip, way that he talks about nature kind of connects with Milton's idea of the garden of eden 

• Mankind as unexceptional (can make animals greater than human) humanity’s inherent value seems irrelevant 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In Memoriam, A.H.H.

poem of consolation (taking narrative of progress and trying to find it consoling) looks to nature for consolation and is not satisfied.

memorializes his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, in a poem

Theme: mutability

• nature and progress as a model

• earlier than orgin of species but evolution shows up: types= species

• nature looks wasteful; therefore God looks wasteful

• “Dragons of the prime” = dinosaur

• nature is violent “red in tooth and claw”

• How is it working to my good? I just lost my best friend

Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach

Context

on his honeymoon at Dover Beach, England richest, most influential, most progressive Life as a naturalistic world all on its own Form:strikingly similar to Whitman’s “Out of a Cradle, Endlessly Rocking”

Content

A grim lament for transcendent meaning, tragic loss of faith and meaning in 19th century. Life as chaos, an eternal sadness.The only consolation is that the romantic relationship provides meaning/comfort. All that can be depended upon to console one another is one another. No extension to the supernatural.

Reference for fate

There is a reference to Oedipus Rex (sound of ocean tides brought the flow of human misery. Man is totally at the hands of the fates, of harsh reality. Arnold feels crushed by a loss of spiricual direction and religious faith

Different conclusion from the Romantic poets

a. Total hopelessness for the individual

b. Pessimism or fear that is absent in the Romantics

c. Nature now means less than it did for the Romantics (Nature post Darwin becomes merely forces at play, biological necessity

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach

Hegel

Reason in History

Hegel proposes a philosophical view of history: he argues history is a rational, teleological, and metaphysical process of ideological conflict, which proceeds by thesis–antithesis–synthesis.

Hegel's logic of history: thesis+antithesis=synthesis→new thesis+antithesis=syntheis—----> to the end of history (telos, purpose/goal) Ex. monarchy(conflict)+right of individual citizen(excluded truth)=new system (synthesis)

Some kind of conflict+truth that we don’t know yet (thesis +antithesis)

The world is governed by a spirit and is realizing itself in time. Over time more and more spirit will be expressed around us (history is the result of the spirit being expressed)

Borrows ideas from christianity but christianity is just another means of ideology (not total expression of truth) there will be a more developed, higher view of religion at the end of history

End of history=no excluded truth from the thesis

19th century idea of productive conflict as progression (progress to perfection)

The divine nature of the state

Development of the state (less concerned with the individual and more concerned with the state)

The individual is granted significance because of the state context

“Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not

through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the

fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been simply placed there,

may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.

Page 364: “When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal

descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the

The Cambrian system was deposed, they seem to me to become ennobled.”

Darwin: Descent of Man

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

Darwin: Origin of Species Tangled Bank Passage

have been and are being evolved (natural selection as past and present), breathed by the creator into a few forms or into 1 (cautious tone), that being of which non greater can be conceived (natural theology)

“So careful of the type?” but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, “A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

“Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.” And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law—

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?

Alfred Lord Tennyson: In Memorium

“The laws of morality are not accidental, but are essentially rational. It is the very object of the State that what is essential in the practical activity of men, and in their dispositions, should be duly recognized that it should have a manifest existence, and maintain its position. [….] It must further be understood that all the value which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. [….] Thus only is he fully conscious; thus only is he a partaker of morality, of a just and moral social and political life. For Truth is the unity of the universal and subjective will; and the universal is to be found in the State; in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The state is the divine Idea as it exists on earth.” (PAGE 345)

Morality is rational.

Rational morality must be embodied in institutions.

The State is the institution that embodies universal ethical principles.

Individuals realize their freedom and moral agency only within such a rational community.

Therefore, the State is the highest expression of ethical reason—“the divine Idea on earth.”

Hegel: Reason In History

“The sole thought which philosophy brings to the observation of history, is the simple idea of Reason: that Reason is the sovereign of the world; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.” (PAGE 340)

“It is a conclusion drawn from the history of the world, that its development has been a rational process; that it represents the rational and necessary course of the World-Spirit—that Spirit whose nature is always one and the same, but which unfolds its nature in the phenomena of the world’s existence. This must, as before stated, be the result of history.” (PAGE 341)

“World history in general is therefore the development of Spirit in time, as nature is the development of the Idea in space.” (PAGE 348)

Hegel: Reason in History

Neitzsche

The Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche contends that contemporary Europe is in a “true predicament” resulting from a loss of the love of man. Tracing the development of Western morality to its origin in ancient Israel, he advocates a return to the master morality, a kind of valuation based on strength, beauty, power, and action. 

• Sees the west as moving toward a dead end 

• All existence is matter in motion not a place governed by truth and fixity (existence is about flux and change) 

• Sophistry (doxa or belief, opinion) vs. philosophy (true knowledge, ultimately transcendent) 

• Nietzsche: deeply romantic worldview (intuitive, flux & change, energy and movement, individualism) 

• Life as an interplay of forces (no transcendent fixity) 

• Morality not transcendent has history/genealogy (had a beginning)

• Ancient jew can’t defeat enemies by fighting them so they just inverted the value system (ideological conflict) (powerful/violent=bad, humble/poor/weak=good) 

• Finds Christianity very vexing 

• Ideology that’s health and vitality inducing (energy and strength) 

• Europe’s greatest predicament: no one is aspiring to grow greater, we’re all about coziness and life denyingness 

Master vs slave mentality Master Morality (Good vs. Bad)

1. Epitomized by the Classical World

2. Represented by warrior caste

3. Noble Man: Chivalrous,

aristocratic values connected to combat, adventure, the chase, the dance, war games

4. Noble Man respects his enemy

5. Associated with...the few, the aristocrats and nobles…with action, which is happiness…with confidence, frankness

Slave Morality (Good vs. Evil)

1. Epitomized by Ancient Israel

2. Represented by priest caste

3. Resentful Man: inverts aristocratic values so only the “poor, powerless, suffering, sick, ugly” are blessed

4. Resentful Man makes an enemy out of his opposite

5. Associated with …commoners, the mob …with reaction and repression; full of bottled up aggression; happiness is drugged tranquility, Sabbath, “emotional slackness” …with neither truthful nor ingenuous, nor forthrightness; the slave morality is self- deprecating, self-humiliating

• might=right 

The leveling and diminution of European man is our greatest danger; because thesight of him makes us despond…. We no longer see anything these days that aspires to grow greater; instead, we have a suspicion that things will continue to go downhill, becoming ever thinner, more placid, smarter, cosier, more ordinary, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian—without doubt man is getting ‘better’ all the time…. This is Europe’s true predicament: together with the fear of man we have also lost the love of man, reverence for man, confidence in man, indeed the will to man. Now the sight of man makes us despond. What is nihilism today if not that?

“TWO SETS OF VALUATIONS” (PAGE 456-7)

Let us conclude. The two sets of valuations, good/bad and good/evil, have

waged a terrible battle on this earth, lasting many millennia; and just as surely as the second set has for a long time now been in the ascendant, so surely there are still places where the battle goes on and the issue remains in suspension. [….] The watchwords of the battle, written in characters which have remained legible throughout human history, read: ‘Rome vs. Israel, Israel vs. Rome.’ No battlemhas ever been more momentous than this one. Rome viewed Israel as a monstrosity; the Romans regarded the Jews as convicted of hatred against the whole of mankind—and rightly so if one is justified in associating the welfare of the human species with absolute supremacy of aristocratic values. [….] The Romans were the strongest and most noble people who ever lived. Every vestige of them, every least inscription, is a sheer delight, provided we are able to read the spirit behind the writing. The Jews on the Contrary, were the priestly, rancorous nation par excellence, though possessed of an unequaled ethical genius […].

“A BAD SMELL”

Here I want to give vent to a sigh and a last hope. Exactly what is it that I, especially, find intolerable; that I am unable to cope with; that asphyxiates me? A bad smell. The smell of failure, of a soul that has gone stale.

“LAMBS AND BIRDS OF PREY”

There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, ‘These birds of prey are evil, and does not this give us a right to say that whatever is the opposite of a bird of prey must be good?’ there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument—though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, ‘We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lambs.’—To expect that strength will not manifest itself as strength, as the desire to overcome, to appropriate, to have enemies, obstacles, and triumphs, is every bit as absurd as to expect that weakness will manifest itself as strength.

Nietzche: The Genealogy of Morals

Sigmund Freud

Why War?

• War is rooted in human nature.

• Civilization can restrain it but not abolish it.

• Peace depends on strengthening law, institutions, and human solidarity.

• But the destructive instinct will always remain.

Violence is inevitable

Freud’s theory of human instincts (opposing impulses of love and hate)

Why some favor pacifism

Hermeneutic of suspicion (freud, marx, nietzsche) a commitment to draw out less visible and less flattering truth, sees the world at its lowest common denominator

gov/police exists on a societal level to repress human instinct (violence)

Naturalistic worldview (no love just love plus civility)

Just expression of desire that society deems appropriate

WAR AS “NATURAL”

Why do you and I and so many other people rebel so violently against war? Why do we not accept it as another of the many painful calamities of life? After all, it seems quite a natural thing, no doubt it has a good biological basis and in practice it is scarcely avoidable.” (PAGE 557)

MIGHT MAKES RIGHT:

VIOLENCE AS “NATURAL” TO HUMAN CULTURE

“Thus we see that right is the might of a community. It is still violence, ready to be directed against any individual who resists it, it works by the same methods and follows the same purposes. The only real difference lies in the fact that what prevails is no longer the violence of an individual but that of a community. [….] The community must be maintained permanently, must be organized must draw up regulations to anticipate the risk of rebellion and must institute authorities to see that those regulations—the laws—are respected and to superintend the execution of legal acts of violence. The recognition of a community of interests such as these leads to the growth of emotional ties between the members of a united group of people—feelings of unity which are the true source of its strength.” (550)

EROS & VIOLENCE, LOVE & HATE:

FREUD’S THEORY OF HUMAN INSTINCTS

“According to our hypothesis human instincts are of only two kinds: those which seek to preserve and unite—which we call ‘erotic,’ exactly in the sense in which Plato uses the word ‘Eros’ in his Symposium, or ‘sexual,’ with a deliberate extension of the popular conception of ‘sexuality’—and those which seek to destroy and kill and which we class together as the aggressive or destructive instinct. As you see, this is in fact not more than a theoretical clarification of the universally familiar opposition between Love and Hate which may perhaps have some fundamental relation to the polarity of attraction and repulsion that plays a part in your own field of knowledge. We must not be too hasty in introducing ethical judgments of good and evil. Neither of these instincts is any less essential than the other; the phenomena of life arise from the operation of both together, whether acting in concert or in opposition.” (PAGE 554)

Freud: Why War?

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The Communist Manifesto

Adapting Hegel’s theory of history, Marx and Engels argue that a strictly material dialectic determines the move of history, that the economy determines the structure of society, and that history is an ongoing class struggle.

• Strictly material dialectic determines the move of history

• Trajectory of history (next move after capitalism is communism) 

• Economy determines the structure of society 

• Economic philosophy of conscience raising 

• Workers of the world unite (get people to realize that the system is invested in oppression

• History is an ongoing class struggle 

• Existence is only material

DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM: A focus on “Material Existence”

“Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and

conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness changes with every change

in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his

social life?” (PAGE 386)

DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM: A focus on “Class Struggle”

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf,

guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in

constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden,

now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary

reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending

classes.” (PAGE 369)

… Especially between the “Bourgeoisie and Proletariat”

“Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this

distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a

whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two

great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”

(PAGES 369-70)

“UNDER OUR VERY EYES…”

“They [the theoretical conclusions of the Communists] are in no way based

on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that

would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual

relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical

movement going on under our very eyes.” (PAGE 381)

Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto

Jean Paul Satre

Existentialism

Context: 20th cent.

Existentialism based on

Anguish: total and deep responsibility

Forlornness: the consequence of God’s non existence

Despair: deciding based on —- not certainty of outcome

• Since God does not exist, existence precedes essence and we are condemned to be free

Therefore, we are before we discover who we are. We are merely forms in flux defined by our choices. 

• There is no explaining things away in reference to a fixed and given human nature

• If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.

• There is no determinsim

• Man is condemned (he did not create himself) and free (responsible for all he does) 

• The Anguish of Abraham ex.: choose and act with imperfect knowledge: this is essential to human existence (was it really the angel who ordered me? Am I really Abraham?, says yes and is condemned)

• Not to act is to act, but advocated for personal responsibility divorced from providence.

EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE (PAGE 619)

“What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means

that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only

afterward, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is

indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be

something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no

human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what

he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be

after this thrust toward existence.”

THEREFORE, WE ARE CONDEMNED TO BE FREE (623)

“If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away

by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no

determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does

not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our

conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor

justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses.

That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to

be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other

respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for

everything he does.”

THE ANGUISH OF ABRAHAM (621)

“Anguish is evident even when it conceals itself. This is the anguish that

Kierkegaard called the anguish of Abraham. You know the story: an angel

has ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son; if it really were an angel who has

come and said, "You are Abraham, you shall sacrifice your son," everything

would be all right. But everyone might first wonder, "Is it really an angel,

and am I really Abraham? What proof do I have?"

Jean-Paul Sarte: Existentialism

Wilfred Owen

Dulce Et Decorum Est

• Rejects “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

• Anti propaganda poem

• Everything about heroism in classics is irrelevant in the modern battlefield. No skill of battle or masculinity, only survival 

• A representation of PTSD

“In all my dreams…guttering, choking, drowning” summon the present experience as past horror

• Poetry to communicate the horror of war and scars of a soldier, gives reader ptsd
  

T.S. Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Profrock

Offers a psychological and emotional response to the modern world in a poem featuring a speaker's ancient thoughts and feelings. The poem undercuts the reader’s expectations using its title, epigraph, opening simile, and illusions.

Offers a psychological and emotional response to the modern world in a poem featuring a speaker's ancient thoughts and feelings. The poem undercuts the reader’s expectations using its title, epigraph, opening simile, and illusions. 

Title 

• J. Alfred Profrock = not very romantic 

• Fragmented chaotic consciousness- only the sense of questioning, not the questions themselves, matter

• Starts as a love song but then isn’t “let us go then, you and I, when evening is spread out against the sky” followed by a patient simile 

Opening simile 

• “Like a patient etherized upon a table”  = yearning for a connection that never happened

• carves people into parts, incapable of knowing the whole person

• “Pair of claws” not even a whole crab

Illusions— Epigraph 

• Looks to ancient story- Hamlet- to explain circumstance. Identifies with Poloinious, minor side character rather than Hamlet 

• Intro: Italian lines: an epigraph from Dante’s inferno- addressed by one in hell as one also in hell, one not alive. J. Alfred Prufrock guides us rather than Virgil 

In a world of Fruedian Psychology—--Meta-narrative failure

• Weakness, paralysis, and inhibility to love

• Entertainment, relationships, and enducation fail to bring purpose

• Hamlet should have been suspicious of pagan story of vengeance

• Wilfred owne rejects Dulce et Decorem Est “it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country”