In his autobiography, Henry Adams recounts his search for unity within and across the disciplines of history, philosophy, and the natural sciences. In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, written at the same time, he finds this elusive unity in the converging developments of the architecture, art, literature, and philosophy of the High Middle Ages. With a remarkable eye for detail, he traces disparate but analogous features in the transitions from the Romanesque abbey of Mont Saint Michel to the Gothic sculpture and glass of Chartres, from the Chanson de Roland to the high medieval troubadours, from the discursive philosophy of Abelard to the soaring theology of Thomas Aquinas. We read Mont Saint Michel in its entirety, as well as a chapter from The Education of Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” to consider the search for past unity against its contemporary absence. 

Texts:

• Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Penguin, ISBN: 978-0140390544
• An additional handout will be provided.

Jane Eyre is alone in the world, small both literally and when considered within her Victorian society. Her passions and perceptions are as large as they come, though. Seemingly mousy and negligible, she stubbornly insists on being a full human being, believing in her own vast feelings and, against odds both moral and circumstantial, making her electric integrity felt. The novel, with its tinges of the Gothic, has for nearly two centuries drawn in readers to be amazed at Jane’s vividness and attracted to the stony mysteries of her employer, Mr. Rochester. Both the lights and the darks of the world seem stronger after reading this book. It is an emotional plunge.

Text: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. Penguin, ISBN: 978-0141441146

In this seminal sequel to the Origin of Species, Darwin considers sexual selection in various groups of animals as well as the evolution of the human species. We focus on the chapters dealing with human beings. Darwin looks at various, supposedly special aspects of humanity, such as tool use, reason, language, morality, and religiosity, and argues that they all can be explained by his theory of evolution by natural selection. He seeks to find connecting links and our closest relatives among the animals. He uses his theory of sexual selection to investigate the secondary sexual characteristics of men and women and to consider what role it might play in the various races of man.

Text: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man. Penguin, ISBN: 978-0140436310

The Classic of Dao and Virtue is one of the two foundational books of Daoism, and a life-book for millions of people. Its terse, enigmatic, sometimes riddling poems both tell and keep their secrets. They speak to the patient, receptive reader but almost deliberately repel the impatient, analytical, and narrowly egotistical. What is this book? Is it even a book? Its poems could all fit within two pages. What is it “about”? It has been appreciated for its political insights, its lessons for survival, its spiritual via negativa; it teaches us about decline, exhaustion, death. It can be read as a manual on how to die, thereby showing us how to live.

Of the over 300 translations into English, we are selecting two (of which one is hot off the press), but feel free to triangulate between other scholarly translations. Be wary of versions by translators who know no Chinese!

Texts: 

• Laozi, The Daodejing of Laozi (tr. Philip J. Ivanhoe). Hackett, ISBN: 978-0872207011
• Laozi, Daodejing (tr. Brook Ziporyn). Norton, ISBN: 978-1324092476

“A picture held us captive,” Ludwig Wittgenstein declares in one of the most radical works in 20^th-century thought. Rather than building a grand system of truth, he acts as philosophical demolitions expert, tearing down our intellectual perplexities and showing them to be traps set by grammar and words. This class is a high-stakes mission in unlearning. As we work through some of his most explosive challenges, Wittgenstein alters fundamentally how we view logic, language, and our own minds. Ultimately, we reflect on how to navigate cheerfully through the ruins left in his wake.

This seminar is introductory; it does not aim to “cover” this substantial and intricate text. Instead we experiment with a number of the playful mental exercises through which the philosopher blasts open our linguistic prisons.

Text: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: 4^th Edition (tr. G.E.M. Anscombe; ed. Hacker and Schulte). Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN: 978-1405159289

This hardcover edition features the preferred Anscombe German-English parallel text edition. This translation is also available as an out-of-print paperback with ISBN: 978-0631205692.

You may use an edition of your choice, but it is recommended that you use the Anscombe translation edition for ease of reference between participants and tutors.

The Irish poet W.B. Yeats is among the greatest poets in the English language. Fearlessly facing the mysteries of love and loss, death and rebirth, offense and forgiveness, Yeats takes us with him to witness the emergence of the human heart in daunting conditions of political and personal chaos. He shows us how a remote birth and a single person can become a fulcrum for change and renewal.

We read a selection of poems from Yeats's early to late periods, singing of youthful love and hope, living ancient Irish myths, and exquisite lyrics of travel, nature, and art. We add to these profound, passionate poems inspired by living in a country torn by uprisings and war and close with meditations upon old age and death. This is poetry at its most sublime, lines that resonate in the memory for a lifetime.

Text: William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (ed. Richard Finneran). Scribner, ISBN: 978-0684807317 

“’Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.” Thus begins The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, surely one of the three or four greatest plays ever written, the most quoted, the most mysterious. What the play is about, and even what is going on much of the time, remain vital questions whose attempted answers become, inevitably, the present. Participants will take on Hamlet’s burden of being, while not knowing. They will follow, with the prince, ghost-led thoughts beyond the reaches of their souls. Deeds of rightful vengeance they, too, will hold in suspense, as the heart’s cruelty, kindness, and authority are unsealed. Cast in the common plot of mortality, make ready for an interim to subscribe to its original story.

Text: William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Signet, ISBN: 978-0451526922

In this masterpiece of introspective narrative, often listed as one of the best English-language novels of all time, Woolf plunges the reader into the life of the Ramsay family. Every nuance of perception is highlighted. Things that seem to be insignificant take on heightened importance, sometimes over the timeframe of the novel and sometimes from a particular character’s perspective. The focus of the novel is on two gatherings, ten years apart, at the Ramsay’s summer home in Scotland. Their large family is joined by a few friends, including Lily Briscoe, a young aspiring artist. These gatherings make up Parts I and III of the novel, with the aptly titled, “Time Passes,” as Part II in between. Will Mr. Ramsay make it to the lighthouse? Will Lily finish her painting? What does it all mean? We may not answer that last question definitively, but we will surely find excellent conversation in the attempt.

Text: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Harvest Books (Harcourt Brace), ISBN: 978-0156907392

No 20^th-century author asks gnarlier questions in fewer pages than the legendary Argentine short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges. If one were to inhabit a maze simultaneously containing all possible outcomes of all events, what might become of choice, responsibility, or plot? What might it be like to be cursed with perfect memory? If all of space were visible in a single point somewhere in a Buenos Aires cellar, how might such a vision change one’s life? In studying five of Borges’s greatest stories (“Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Funes His Memory,” “The Aleph,” and “The Zahir”), we shall relish the carnival of Borges’s thematic obsessions: infinity, time, memory, identity, fiction, erudition, speculative metaphysics, mysticism. Should Borges’s compressed labyrinthine “ficciones” be read as puzzles demanding solutions? Existential conditions to be inhabited? Diabolically playful critiques of early 20^th-century modernity? Glimpses of a strange new theology?

Text: Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (tr. Andrew Hurley). Penguin, ISBN: 978-0140286809

In 1774, Goethe became an international celebrity when published The Sorrows of Young Werther. An epistolary novel about a young man whose unrequited love for the betrothed Charlotte ultimately leads him to suicide, the story was a major influence on the Romantic movement and led to a number of copycat suicides. Faust, Part One, published thirty years later, concerns a polymath who bargains away his soul—and, with the help of the devil’s representative, Mephistopheles, seduces and impregnates an innocent beauty named Gretchen. In this seminar, we inquire into the hidden similarities between these two wildly different works, exploring themes of betrayal, desperation, yearning, the limits of knowledge, the relation between morality and aesthetics, individual psychosis, demonism, and love. Finally, we question whether Romanticism is a nascent form of despair or a catalyst for individual achievement.

Texts: 

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (tr. David Constantine). Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0199583027

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One (tr. David Luke). Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0199536214

Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) examines the rise of 19^th-century liberal capitalism and the social and political upheavals that followed. Central to his account is the transformation of land, labor, and money into “fictitious commodities”—things treated as commodities although they were not originally produced for sale. He argues that such an economy did not emerge spontaneously from the choices of private individuals, as 19^th-century liberalism maintained, but was deliberately constructed through state action directed by elites. Efforts to subject society to market forces generated protective “countermovements,” which could take democratic or authoritarian forms and could themselves disrupt the functioning of the market system. Sitting at the intersection of economic history and social theory, the book has become a central reference point in debates about capitalism, freedom, and the proper relationship between markets and society. We hope this course will be the first in a series of Classics devoted to key 20^th-century texts in political economy.

Text: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Beacon Press, ISBN: 978-0807056431

Never has the political thought of Hannah Arendt been more urgently relevant. We begin with three famous essays from her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), reading first “Perplexities of the Rights of Man,” which brazenly charges the liberal institution of human rights with complicity in the rise of totalitarianism (of which Nazism is an instance), and then “Total Domination” and “Ideology and Terror,” where Arendt categorizes totalitarianism as an entirely new political modality, distinct even from tyranny and characterized by “radical evil.” We close with the ferociously controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which Arendt reflects upon the moral and legal enigmas that arise in the attempt to judge a war criminal whose form of evil she would now call, notoriously, “banal.”

Texts: 

• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace, ISBN: 978-0156701532
• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin, ISBN: 978-0143039884

In Meditations, first presentation of his metaphysics, Descartes uses skeptical arguments as a tool to guide the reader into the right frame of mind to inquire after metaphysical truths. His metaphysics sought to answer such questions as: How does the human mind acquire knowledge? What is the mark of truth? What is the actual nature of reality? How are our mental experiences related to our bodies and brains? Is there a benevolent God, and if so, how can we reconcile his existence with the facts of illness, error, and immoral actions?

Text: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (tr. John Cottingham). Cambridge University Press, ISBN: 978-1107665736

Our first impressions of Tchekov are not of simplicity but of bewilderment. What is the point of it, and why does he make a story out of this?  –Virginia Woolf

The characters in Chekhov’s stories affect each other in ways that they cannot understand, bear, or express. The stories are replete with details—weather, furniture, gestures— but what do these beautifully rendered particulars have to do with the action? We find ourselves in the middle of that action, wondering where it originated and where it is headed. Disaster, tenderness, and humor rapidly succeed one another. But in just a few pages, we sense a marvelous whole. The coherence is there, to be discovered by the attentive reader. We look forward to working together with care and attention to discover that coherence.

Text: Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). Modern Library, ISBN: 978-0553381009