So now that I have just invited you into this review through the symbol, really, of architecture, I want to go back through the syllabus and just give you some headlines for what I think we've covered in the modern and the postmodern. And I'll start off with Rousseau and the question, really, that we asked in regard to Rousseau, which was, how is philosophy relevant to modernity? Remember, in s first discourse, the discourse on the arts and sciences, he rejected the easy notion of enlightenment progress. Now some of you, in your posts around Rousseau, complained that Rousseau seemed like a technophobe, he seemed he was cranky, he has some outrageous claims. Absolutely, absolutely, remember, he's writing 200 years ago. But Rousseau is also writing to provoke us, he's writing to wake us up. Not just to convince us of a particular argument. I mean, Rousseau's efforts in the First Discourse, his effort is not to make us throw our books away and get rid of education. His effort is to make us think about what we really are doing when we think we're learning. His effort is to force us to consider the possibility of corruption within an ideology of progress. Rousseau is reminding us of what we might be losing as we think we're polishing ourselves, and getting ourselves smarter and more together. Rousseau wants us to remember that honesty and authenticity may be the price we pay for sophistication. That, it seems to me, is a lesson that is as relevant today as it was in the 18th century. And that sense of challenging progress runs through much of our course, right? Kant says yes, there is progress, dare to know, and if you dare to know there will be progress. But remember, Kant too, he puts constraints around progress, if you will. He puts constraints around knowledge, we talked about that. Remember my [LAUGH]? It's one of the things students of mine remember is the space time glasses. Now look, I have new glasses since, I think, I recorded these lectures, because I lost my other pair. But for Kant, the space time glasses are what allow us to understand the world. We understand the world because we make the world understandable. Within that framework, we can make progress. But he is very concerned about those thinkers who believe we can explode through any framework to get to what I'll call in this course, the really real. Kant thinks that never happens through knowledge, right? That knowledge is always bounded by some constraint. And that notion of bounded, or knowledge, that notion of bounded knowledge will come up again and again. Just a reminder about Wittgenstein, for example, that we always are within a language game, right? We're always within in a language game. For Kant, knowledge is always within the phenomenal. In Rousseau's discourse on inequality, we get a lot more political. We get a lot more political because there Rousseau is trying to underscore the ways in which the ideology of progress, property, and the state contribute to our misfortune. Because all of those thing support the rich at the expense of the poor. And that the ideologies that govern our modern cultures, those ideologies undermine equality and create conditions in which we not only favor the rich. We not only favor the rich, but these are conditions that lead everybody to desire to become like the rich. And that's even worse than supporting the wealthy. What's worse is that we create a culture in which the only thing that matters is coming out at the top of a hierarchy. And in such a culture we lose ourselves, we lose our humanity, we lose our authenticity. That sense of loss through the development of modernity is key for Karl Marx, who we read just after Rousseau. Remember, the early text of Marx that we read dealt with alienation. Of how it is that by, through work, which should be the most human of enterprises, for Marx, through work we find ourselves estranged from who we really are. That was Marx's point. We find ourselves in contradiction with ourselves. That was my point about Marx. And furthermore, for Marx, when we find ourselves in contradiction with ourselves, when we find ourselves in self-contradiction, that means we must change. And here is where Marx's optimistic side came in, right, his progressive side, if you will. That is, he believes that when we are in contradiction that will lead to change. You can't just permanently exist in contradiction, cuz if you did, then the world would make no sense. Now Marx doesn't really entertain the possibility very long that the world doesn't make sense. He instead, following Hegel, says if there's contradiction, that dialectic shows us that contradiction will work itself out at a higher level. And that means, for Marx that we, through our alienated selves, because we are hurting, cuz we're in pain, we will wanna change that. And in our society, at the level of the group, the level of the nation and then even beyond, when there's contradiction between classes, conflict between classes, when there's such a conflict, we must see change. Change comes through history. A history based on conflict. Now for Marx, the alienation from our species being, from who we really are, if you will, the really real of the human, that is something that has to change. And for Marx, the core elements of history, if you will, the really real of history, is that all history of hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Class struggle was the key for Marx in the text we read. As Marx grew older and history grew less, how should I put it, hospitable, he turned away from class struggle as the core element and concentrated more on economic laws as the really real history. After Marx we shifted gears as you'll recall completely, [LAUGH] and went to Madame Bovary and Gustave Flaubert. Now as I say, we shifted gears completely, perhaps I overstated, because after all, Flaubert is very much concerned with contradiction and hypocrisy. You have the contradiction between Emma and her surroundings, between Homais and the enlightenment figure and romanticism. You have the contradiction between art and banality. But, Flaubert doesn't think that these contradictions will work themselves out dialectically, no no no no no. The contradictions become the material for art, art is what matters. For Marx, [LAUGH] class struggle is what mattered. For Rousseau, honesty, the human nature, authenticity is what mattered. For Flaubert, art is what matters. The artist has a responsibility to her art, his art, that's what really matters. And what dooms Anna Bovary, is that she thinks that happiness through desire, through romance, through the acquisition of toys, of luxuries, that that will be what matters. But she's wrong and she pays for that mistake with her life. For Flaubert what matters is art and the pursuit of the ideal through aesthetic focus. And Flaubert, many of you, I think, found Flaubert challenging. And challenging because it was unremittingly critical of modern society, of bourgeois society, middle class society. And where did Flaubert stand in relation to that society? Well he thought he stood above it [LAUGH]. Because he stood on the heights of art. Now after Flaubert and art for art's sake, we again change gears and cross back across the channel and we're looking at Darwin. And some of you said, what's Darwin doing in this class? Darwin's not, is he a philosopher? He's not an artist. And others leapt to Darwin's defense. Because, after all, Darwin created some of the most important work in the 19th century that still affects our lives today. And, now of course, Darwin was very concerned with history. He was very concerned with conflict, but he was not building his intellectual edifice on some core notion of species or of humanity. Nor was he building it on even a core notion of science. Darwin's work is built on painstaking collection, observation, and reflection. And I tried to situate Darwin in the context of the English enlightenment and of romanticism in England. But what Darwin contributes to our course is a real focus on the mechanisms of change. The mechanisms of change, and mechanism of change for Darwin is, of course, natural selection. And from our purposes it was important to see that Darwin, like Marx, and to some extent, like Rousseau and Flaubert, Darwin was a thinker who privileged crisis as the understood change. Crisis is what produces much change in the biological world. And through crisis, some animals, some organisms are able to survive better than others. And that survival, that adaptation to crisis, that adaptation to a changing world, gives them a biological advantage.
