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Literature and Philosophy (The Collective (Duty (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann…

- - - - John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
        
        Locke ascribes to an empirical framework of knowledge. He states that at birth all humans are born with a blank slate or "tabula rasa" for a mind and that slate is filled with ideas and morals through experiences filtered through the five senses. Furthermore, the ideas that we have are naturally limited because our senses are only aware of so much and our ideas are natural outgrowths of our senses. Through Locke's view, knowledge is inherently limited. Locke argues that God granted humans the capacity for reason in order to assist us in our quest for what is true. Locke also espouses the right to self-preservation and all the things that that entails, such as private property and the right to own the products of ones own physical labor.
    - - Cogito
        
        Rene Descartes, Meditations
        
        Descartes espouses a foundationalist epistemology. This means that all knowledge rests on a basic principle that is self evident and not inferred by some other claim. Descartes mounts a defense against skeptics who deny the possibility of obtaining certain knowledge. He instead fully embraces and simultaneously doubts everything. He doesn't believe you have to investigate each belief but instead investigate the structures on which whole classes of beliefs rely on. Descartes is famous for his saying "cogito ergo sum" which translates to I am, therefore I exist. Descartes empiricist framework means that he is operating on the basis that knowledge begins from the senses and not from rational appeals to reason.
      - Consciousness
        
        Memory
        
        Involuntary Memory
        
        Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
        
        Perhaps the most obvious crossover between literature in philosophy that we read throughout this course, Proust oscillates between two modes. Philosophizing and storytelling. The nature of time and the power of memory are both prominent focuses throughout the story. The madeleine scene may be the most memorable portion of the story. The effect a single sensory experience can have on Marcel and its ability to virtually teleport him back in time through his memory espouses the intense connection our senses have to our memories and therefore our identities. Proust makes clear that all humans possess the ability to reconstruct the past through their own memory, however, he also warns that merely escaping to the past will never cure what ails someone in the present. Another interesting facet of the story is Proust's view that people are defined not only by their memories, but by the things that surround them, the physical objects in our waking external reality. He says that people must piece their identities back together piece by piece every morning upon waking.
      - Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism
        
        Sartre believes that the essence of a man is a universal concept that is applied indiscriminately. He is a humanist which means that he is interested in the human rather than the divine. He also affirms the human and its progress. This is an inherently optimistic view. Sartre believes that moral values are something that we as humans invent ourselves and are not a priori. Sartre's philosophy is a philosophy of the study of being. He is interested in philosophy as a guide for living. Humans are an outcome of becoming, of the choices that we make. For Sartre, existence is the coexistence of the two tenants, being for itself and being in itself. Being for itself focuses on transcendence, the fluid and dynamic human as well as the non-self identical. Being in itself focuses on facticity or the givens in each persons circumstance, the passive or the inert and the self identical.
        
        Sartre's Key Maxims
        
        1.Existence precedes essence 2.Responsibility is a choice. 3.Men are condemned to be free. 4.Existentialism is a harsh optimism. 5.Each man is responsible for himself and others. 6.The human is nothing but what they make of themselves. 7.Absence of choosing is still a choice.
    - - .
      - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
        
        Nietzsche attempts to tear down and build anew the world of philosophy just as Descarte did in his own time. Nietzsche Rewrote the will to truth as a will to power. Sought to upend the entire tradition of philosophy. Moralities are merely a sign language of the affects. A strong synthesis of the combination of philosophy and literature.
      - How do we know ourselves?
      - Perceptions of Others
- - - - Race
        
        W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
        
        A main theme of the first chapter in DuBois' writing is the veil. This veil is worn by all black Americans. It is called the veil because thier view of the world the opportunities that reside in the economy, politics and socially are vastly separated from those of white people. The veil is a symbolic manifestation of the color line. But importantly, DuBois turns the idea of the veil on its head and views it from the other side when he refers to it as a gift of second sight for black Americans, thus simultaneously characterizing the veil as both a blessing and a curse. Another main theme, and perhaps the one that DuBois is best known for is his idea of "double consciousness." DuBois gives the definition of "double consciousness to be "always looking at one's self through the eyes" of a racist white society, and "measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt".
        
        Jordan Peele, Get out
        
        Jordan Peele's intense meditation on race in modern America is underscored by a horror plot in this breakout hit for Peele. In this film, Peele literalizes the notion first set forth by DuBois of double consciousness. He also dramatizes Mills' problem cases of appearance not lining up with ancestry or culture. By placing both the master and the slave, the white and the black, within the same body, Peele brings an immediacy and a physicality to double consciousness and the idea of the veil that was not there before. Peele seeks, and in my opinion succeeds to confront our own intuitions and internal biases about where or what race really is and if and how it can really be quantified or measured solely through external, outward appearance.
        
        Evolving view of what it means to be black in America
        
        Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing
        
        A documentary of the Imagination that describes the Indonesian genocide that has never been officially recognized or acknowledged and moreover one where the victors won. See the difficulty caused by non-recognition on the level of historical event and national identity. Para-military organizations continued on without any sense in their role as the massacrer’s. Raises the question of whether or not Anwar and his associates qualify to be participants in the banality of evil as postulated by Arendt? Shows what non-acknowledgement can mean for an individual such as in the case of Anwar’s see-sawing between understanding and cognitive dissonance most noticeable in his psychosomatic retching in the final scene of the film.
        
        Charles W. Mills, “But What Are You Really? The Metaphysics of Race”
        
        Charles W. Mills seeks to ask first and foremost the metaphysical question of the ontological status of racial identity. He states that race is constructed yet it is also real. Intersubjective agreement between cultures and individuals that race does matter perpetuates the idea of race. By working through a set of thought experiments that show the flaws and inherent logical fallacies in racial construction, Mills sets up a deeply important philosophical and metaphysical structure on which race can be discussed moving forward.
      - Gender
        
        Performance
        
        Judith Butler,
        Performative Acts and Gender Constitution
        
        In her essay, Judith Butler argues that “gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. Gender is not a priori, rather gender is created by the act of your performance. This performance is informed by what is already historically constituted as gender and is performed by the individual through acts of the body. Society pressures each performer to live up to the heavily codified gendered expectations that exist in the culture for each gender. The difference is, we are not aware of our performance of gender. Butler believes that we as a culture should not relinquish power to expand the cultural field body of gender through subversive performative acts.
        
        Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex
        
        De Beauvoir believes that there is no human essence, no essential quality to the dividing category of gender. There is no "eternal feminine." Beauvoir investigates the relationship between the subject and the other or in her words, "alterity." She is concerned with the question of how is a woman to realize her project of self making if recognition from others doesn't come. De Beauvoir uses “immanence” to describe the historic domain assigned to women: a closed-off realm where women are interior, passive, static, and immersed in themselves. “Transcendence” designates the opposing male lot: active, creative, productive, powerful, extending outward into the external universe.
  - - - The third installment in Sophocles' tragic trilogy. This play focuses on the duty to family and how divine law trumps human law. Interestingly enough, Creon was not seen as an inherently evil character when the play was first shown. Even though to our modern eyes, he reads as being in the wrong, the claim he has to keeping order and serving justice in accordance with the laws of the state was a wide-held belief. Antigone believes that the rites her brother is owed are more important than cow-towing to the will of the king because the Gods will is more important. Divine will comes from a higher source and is a law that reigns over the law of a king. The chorus also plays an important role in that it encourages Antigone to act on her own will by bringing up multiple examples of other women of myth who suffered for what they believed in. Moral worth is located in what the action wrought, not the intentions behind said action.
    - - Gave us an analysis of a Nazi war criminal who was not a monster or particularly exceptional but terrifyingly normal. He saw himself as conforming to the duties of the law abiding citizen. He thought he was applying Kant’s categorical imperative. Arendt thought Eichmann distorted Kant’s imperative. Eichmann identified Kantian law with the law of the land. Similar to Nietzsche’s morality of the herd. Arendt complicated Kant’s notion of intention by asking whether the courts thought Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to convict him of that crime.
    - - Argued that an action is only moral if it is done from duty. Duty is the capacity to follow a moral law that each of us moreover is capable of legislating by virtue of having practical reason. Moral law is the categorical imperative - way that we all could determine if our actions were moral or not. Standard of determining morality, universalizing the maxim and seeing if it could be sustained/not contradictory. Example is making false promises. If everyone made false promises, promises would never mean anything.
        
        Proposed treating all humans as ends in themselves instead of means to an end.
        
        Proposed acting so that through your maxims you could be a legislator of universal human laws.
    - - Mill espoused a form of consequentialism in the principle of utility. Actions are wrong if they produce an absence of happiness and vice versa. Happiness not only of the agent but all people involved. The duty to the collective and the environment that surrounds each individual is very important in Mill's philosophy. It is opposed to Kant's framework in that means and ends are swapped in their importance. Utilitarianism, for Mill, comes from natural human sentiments that are grounded in natural social desires. He also claims that the reason that certain human rights exist is because they are crucially necessary for human happiness.