S1314 Portraits of Human Existence in the East and West

Normal 0 14 false false false IT X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Normal 0 14 false false false IT X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is a study of the guiding principles which major East and West figures have presented for living a rich human life.  The variety of approaches sheds light on a large number of human goals which each guide suggests and indicates the most advantageous means to realize the primary goal chosen by each guide.  The first of our images of man is the basic presentation of the Buddhist way of life as found in the Pali Canon.  The Pali Canon provides the Buddha’s basic teachings leading to nirvana or the peace of mind attained when we are free from hatred, greed and other forms of suffering.  The Confucian way of life, portrayed principally in the Analects, reveals the fundamental wisdom of the Chinese traditions.  It is basically a form of humanistic learning and living that strives for a form of goodness that cannot be reduced to or portrayed by special virtues, such as courage or temperance.  Rather it is a wholeness discovered by virtuous living, by a growing sense of community obligations, and by a strong awareness of fuller ways to bring one’s life toward perfection.   Western images of man are portrayed in ways that provide dramatic contrasts to one another and to the portraits provided by Buddhist and Confucian ways of life.  Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, tries to establish the goal of human life as happiness.  He needs, however, to clarify what he means by happiness and distinguish his view from that of the Greek poets and sophists. After arguing his case, he then spends the rest of his work exploring the means available to men to play some role in bringing about happiness in their lives.  The Stoic, Epictetus, represents through his Enchiridion or Handbook the view of man’s life that argues that we cannot often control our surroundings and given fates.  We can, however, train our attitudes to avoid the illusion that we can control what we can’t and learn what is within our control, mainly our attitudes of mind in dealing with things beyond our powers.  This awareness will bring the tranquility or peace of mind our heart desires.  Lucretius, a follower of Epicurus, in his Nature of the Universe, underscores the source of man’s woes – society.  If we want to attain peace, we must not try to scale society’s pinnacles of power; rather we should return to the simple life of nature, drinking water from an unpolluted stream and eating the fruits of the earth.  Pursuing the rat race of the cities is a completely artificial existence.    The Christian, Jewish and Muslim religious views of life and its meaning are strongly represented by voices who had to justify these three portraits of man as they were challenged by the cultures in which they developed.  Generally, these challenges were philosophical challenges.  Augustine, the Christian, had to deal with the competing Stoic view of man; al-Farabi , al-Ghazali and Maimonides had principally to meet the challenges deriving from Aristotle.   All had to try to establish the superiority of their religious views of man’s fulfillment in comparison with these philosophic competitors.   Modern thinkers differed seriously from their philosophical and religious predecessors.  Francis Bacon shifted his appreciation of human life in a far different direction, basically charging his predecessors with shirking their responsibility and of viewing the world as ready-made.  Man must not just accept the world as given; he has the opportunity and responsibility to change it, and thus rid it more and more of human suffering and deprivation.  Thomas Hobbes later argues the case that there is no valid universal goal for human life; each man can pursue what he or she finds most worthwhile. Happiness becomes an individual’s challenge and project.  Problems arise only when two individuals want the same thing that is not shareable.  Their desires are stronger than their reason, so this can only be settled by an outside referee that has a big enough stick to force conformity to his decision. Government laws determine the justice which provides solutions to citizens’ conflicts.  Rousseau will set up a counter thesis to Hobbes’s view of man, of individualist states and natural self-centeredness.  It is the Hobbesian state, in Rousseau’s judgment that has corrupted man’s fundamental nature.  Man, for Rousseau, is naturally cooperative; Hobbesian society has changed his nature to a competitive self-centered existence that is tempered by society’s rules, or as Rousseau portrays it: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”  Nietzsche, the last of our modern philosophers, presents us with a self-creative view of man, that is, man not as having an essence with a pre-ordained plan for fulfillment but man as a creative being, an artist whose aim is to create himself as a masterpiece.  He, in effect, turns over the words Plato put in Socrates’s mouth (“The unexamined life is not worth living”) to form a new anti-philosophical aphorism (“The unlived life is not worth examining”).  Each man must become the creator of himself.  Kierkegaard, especially in Fear and Trembling, provides an alternative existentialist approach to life, appealing once again to religious resources.   In this global-oriented course the students should learn the varied accounts of man’s nature and the expectations each has for man’s fulfillment.  Each student has at least some implicit view of what he or she should achieve in life.  The multiple views offered by these authors and their works should raise questions about the way humans might live that they had not yet formulated for themselves.  We will expect that they would choose one of these options as best representing their own viewpoint or could make explicit their own view of their life and its meaning. The diversity of human portraits should also give them entrance to the intellectual worlds they have not yet entered.  Our expectation for this course is that the arguments presented by the different authors would lead the students to formulate reasons that would justify their own views of the purpose or goal of human life.   Teaching and Evaluation Methods This course will follow a seminar model and will discuss the goals of life and the means to attain them which each author underscores. Before each author is studied the students will have a list of questions to guide them in their search for the author’s messages.  Three ten-page papers will be required throughout the semester and the final examination will be an essay examination that compares and contrasts the views of at least two of the authors studied.  Each paper and the final examination will count for 25% of the final grade. For this course as an introduction there is no required preliminary philosophical knowledge.