For my Introduction to Philosophy course, the final question on the final exam was:
In your judgment, what is the most dangerous book we read this semester? Present the book’s most important themes and explain why you think it is dangerous.
We read five major authors in the course: Plato’s Apology and Crito, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Descartes’ Meditations, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
The fifteen students in the course responded this way:
None chose Socrates as the most dangerous.
One student voted Descartes’ Meditations as most dangerous, on the grounds that his radical doubt could be too unsettling to an unprepared mind, especially for those raised in conventional religious families.
Four students voted for Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents as the most dangerous book. Three cited his insulting dismissal of religion and one focused on his gloomy assessment of the human condition and his recommendation that we not aim for happiness in life but rather lower our sights.
Lewis’s Mere Christianity got four votes as most dangerous book. Three of the four students objected to Lewis’s relentlessly negative view of human nature, and the fourth added that he/she felt like Lewis was too bossily trying to impose his religious views on the rest of us.
Finally, Rand’s The Fountainhead was voted most dangerous by six students, for three different reasons. Three argued that the bad characters were presented so realistically that it would be too easy for readers to take the book the wrong way, i.e., as commending Keating’s or Wynand’s or Toohey’s paths as being the way of the world and so one might as well go along with it. Two argued that Rand’s insistence on independence, taken consistently, conflicts with religion. And one made a very brief argument that I didn’t understand and so don’t know how to state coherently here.
So I hereby declare The Fountainhead to be the Most Dangerous Book in Introduction to Philosophy, Rockford College, Fall Semester 2009.
Posted 2 months, 4 weeks ago at 3:06 pm. 2 comments
In my Introduction to Philosophy course we are reading Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. In Chapter 5, Freud makes the following strong claim about human nature:
“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]” (68).
Aggression, slavery, rape, theft, sadism, and murder as the center of human nature.
Freud is not making the innocuous claim that we can experience aggressive and anti-social urges. He is making the strong claim that such anti-social urges are inborn and dominant in us.
By contrast, Freud believes, our rational and cooperative capacities are much weaker: “instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests.” Consequently, mankind’s history is dominated by crime, war, and atrocity, and “civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration” (69). The modest successes of civilization are a tenuously fragile veneer over a mutually predatory intra-species conflict. “Who,” Freud asks, “in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
I do; and there are lots of issues worth following up there, but in this post I want to make one sideways connection to another book we read in the course, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
Freud is an atheist who disparages the Christian tradition and Lewis is a theist who defends the Christian tradition, but they are in marked agreement in their assessment of human nature.
Go back to the Garden of Eden in the story of Genesis. God has created a place of ease and loveliness and left Adam and Eve free to enjoy it. In their first independent act, they steal from the Tree of Knowledge. In the next generation, Cain envies Abel and murders him. The book of Genesis carries on through several generations until the time of Noah, when “the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).
God is so disgusted with what his creatures have wrought that he wipes them out (even the children) and starts over with Noah. But the humans pick right up where they left off and continue their wicked ways — more theft and murder and deceit and war and every form of nastiness. That is Original Sin: the innate badness in man dominates his existence.
Freud has a secular version of the same view of human nature.
As Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity in commenting directly on Freud’s views, “But psychoanalysis itself … is not in the least contradictory to Christianity” (p. 88). Lewis notes there are metaphysical differences between the Christians and the Freudians — the Christians add a God and a rather ineffectual immortal soul to their ontology — but their view of human nature in action is the same.
On this issue, the key divide is not between dualists and physicalists but between the pessimists (e.g., Freud, the Christians) and the optimists (e.g., Socrates, Rand) about the raw material of human nature.
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 3:22 pm. 1 comment
This semester’s major authors and texts will be Plato’s Apology and Crito, Descartes’s Meditations, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and Rand’s The Fountainhead.
We will be covering those authors and their views in their own right and using them as launching points for discussion of issues such as the existence of God, free will and determinism, the mind-body problem, and the meaning of life.
We will also use a number of shorter pieces from Daniel Dennett, Martin Luther, John Steinbeck, Rupert Brooke, and others as supplements.
Here are PDF files of the three-page syllabus and schedule and the seventy-three-page supplemental Readings in Philosophy booklet I put together.
Posted 7 months ago at 8:49 am. Add a comment
One of the books I use in my Introduction to Philosophy course is Lewis’s Mere Christianity. It’s very clear and accessible and covers a wide range of traditional religious philosophical themes. I’m reviewing it now in preparation for the new semester which begins (yikes) in two weeks.
I find Lewis’s chummy, let’s-pop-round-to-the pub-for-a-quick-one writing style a bit much — and especially irritating when combined with breathtakingly anti-human statements.
For example, in a chapter (Book 3, Chapter VIII) lambasting pride as “The Great Sin” and as the “complete anti-God state of mind,” Lewis contrasts it to humility. Humility is based upon a full realization of your original sinfulness and helplessness. When that realization happens and you accept it, Lewis states, you feel “the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity.” Humility enables us to “take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have all got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are.”
All of that set us up for a right relationship with God: “The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.”
Wow. Tell us what you really think, Clive.
If philosophy is autobiography, that’s quite a statement.
It’s quite a statement even if it isn’t: the generalization about human nature is audacious.
Posted 7 months, 1 week ago at 12:20 pm. 7 comments
