English 233:  Introduction to Western Humanities-- Baroque and Enlightenment

(L. Baker's sections)

Goals and methods of the course

The humanities embrace literature (including theology, philosophy and history, as well as fiction in prose, verse or the theater), the visual arts (painting, sculpture and architecture) and music (which, alas, we shall only marginally address).  Our course, the third part of the Introduction to Western Humanities sequence at Kansas State, will explore central developments and masterpieces that emerged during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries in Europe (an era often labeled the "Early Modern Period").  

Specifically, we will focus on the period between 1517 (when Luther precipitated debate that culminated in the Protestant Reformation) to 1789 (the outbreak of the French Revolution).  From time to time, however, we will have to reach back into the middle ages and even into the eras of the Greeks and Romans and into Biblical times, in order to understand what the people whose works we are examining were reacting against or re-appropriating for their own purposes.

• This is an era in which tumultuous changes altered the way Europeans (and with them, eventually, the modern world) thought of the place of human beings within the cosmos as a whole. These changes were connected in complex ways with new ideas about the mankind's relationship to God, and with wrenching changes in social relationships - new ways of organizing economic and political life.  In fact the central theme of our course can be described as CHALLENGES TO TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY.  Bitter contests arise over those most fundamental questions:  How should a person decide what to believe and to do?  Can we distinguish True Religion from Superstition?  Are there Authorities whose Word is to be taken on Faith?  Is there a criterion or procedure for responsible decision available to individuals on the basis of their natural endowments ­ Reason, or personal observation through the Senses?

(See, eventually, the more specific description of the way in which our theme is articulated in the Organizational Framework of the Course.)

But we are here interested in more than this theme in itself. An essential reason-for-being of this course is to induct students into the kinds of thinking that people must be able to carry out in order to make sense of our cultural past.

• This means, first of all, that we will be spending serious time and attention on GOING THROUGH THE PROCESS of making sense of a wide variety of artifacts. We will learn to "unpack" the Biblical story of the creation and fall of mankind through the eyes of traditional Christian theologians.  We will sample polemical tracts and systematic expositions of religious doctrines about achieving salvation in the afterlife, and organizing social life in this one. We will "decode" some baroque works of art in terms of the assumptions and purposes that governed their making.  We will work through a philosophical "essay" in the form of a series of apothegms (separate pithy statements), and another in the form of a "meditation."  We'll read a classical French court comedy, and a couple of philosophical tales.  Our goal in doing this will be not to get a canned presentation of what these supposedly mean ­ a summary of what some expert (me) tells the illiterate (you) is the "theme" they "contain."  Rather it will be to get you (as apprentices) to follow my thinking (supposedly an appropriate sort) as I go through the process of inquiring my way through this or that kind of work, figuring out what it is up to, what it wants to do to and for the reader, and why. 

Your job here is to "pick up my moves," to "get the hang of" the various activities the works we address call for on the part of their original audience, and on the part of an audience of our time.  What questions do these different critters prompt us to ask?  How are so they constructed as to provide materials for answers?  And what do we need to do to convert these materials-for-answers into answers?  

• All along, we will be practicing two additional kinds of thinking as well.  Rather than "transmitting an account" of what happened in cultural history, I'll be expecting you to accompany me in CARRYING OUT THE PROCESSES of using what they show us to construct a coherent picture of conflicts in the past and of bringing such a picture to bear on the present.

• We will not, in other words, be taking up the works we read in isolation from each other.  Always we will be trying to integrate them into a larger picture.

• This does not, however, mean that we will be trying to reconcile them with each other, for they definitely do not speak with one voice.

• So we will not be looking for any single "plot" behind this history, as if what has happened were a story crafted by an author pursuing a definite theme ("the discovery of the individual," "the emergence of freedom as a cultural idea," "the birth of the modern democratic ideal").  Nor will we be focusing, in the works we take up, on their lowest common denominator with some conception of what we take ourselves to have become in the present.
• Of course we will discover some important continuities: Voltaire, for example, sees himself in important ways as an apostle of Francis Bacon a century earlier; and Swift will inherit from Donne both his hostility to the "New Science" and his pessimism about the prospect of human improvement, at the same time he shares with Erasmus (two centuries before) an admiration for the wisdom of the ancients and the New Testament.
• But often our integration will consist of seeing how different minds take divergent positions on the same issues, and of seeing how different issues connect up with each other.  
• These conflicts are often actively with us today.  It is, in other words, an illusion to believe that there is such a thing as "the" Western World, or that there is any "essence" or what Aristotle would have called an "entelechy" working itself out in the course of time.  Our past bequeaths the conditions and the materials out of which become what we do.  But what we become is always in important ways up for grabs.  The "end of history" is not yet come.

• In other words, we will be continually engaged in complicated comparison and contrasts between systems of ideas and attitudes.  This will enable us to construct a picture of some important intellectual traditions, of how these change, of how they come into conflict with each other, of how they relate to the social and political worlds within which they emerged, and of how they bear upon issues that are on the table for us today.

To sum up:  There are several misconceptions that students sometimes bring to a course such as ours.  It is important to get these cleared up as soon as possible.  One is the assumption that our business here is simply to master certain facts -- about the meaning of certain works, about trends in history, about the lives and views of important people.  Of course we won't get far if we aren't ambitious to know these things.  But we cannot rationally and passionately care about these matters unless we are even more curious about their various dimensions of significance -- and this is to say, avid to pursue their interrelationships.  And this we cannot do by just memorizing another "body of facts" (the second- and third- and n-order facts about their interrelationships).  No, it means we have to get competent and turned on in the business of thinking about them.  Indeed, we have to get engaged in the activity of thinking our way through paintings, fictions, different sorts of philosophical works in the first place.  How do we make sense of these?  And what do we "do with" the sense that we have made?  More fundamentally, how does one learn to think (as opposed to memorize things read in textbooks or said by instructors)?  

You may also want to reflect on the role of Reason and Objectivity in Interpretation, which explores what it does (and does not) mean to say that interpretation of works of art (paintings, plays, and poems, for example) is "necessarily subjective."  If you have questions on the issues raised here or on the positions I adopt upon them, by all means raise your questions to class.  Or you can e-mail your puzzlements to me at lyman@ksu.edu and I will try to satisfy your curiosity.  

An important link available from the document just cited is a short essay More on "being able", which addresses various damaging confusions many students have about the nature of "intellectual talent," the business of a university education, and the role in such an education of courses like ours.  As you will see, the kind of expectations students put upon themselves in their general elective courses has serious political consequences for the future of whatever country they happen to be citizens of.  

  Go to the Home Page of the course.

  Suggestions, comments and questions are welcome.  Please send them to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 2001 by Lyman A. Baker. 

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

      This page last updated 20 August 2001.