If we ignore the first quote, we will get the second. History may be defined as what a culture considers worthy of recollection. Of course the operative word is WORTHY!! How do we define what is worthy?

Traditionally, what is worthy may be viewed from at least four perspectives:

1--THEOCENTRIC--Hamlet tells us "There is a Divinity that shapes our ends..."
We may not always know the plan, but it does exist.

2--HUMANISTIC--Protagoras noted that "Man is the measure of all things." We chart our own destiny.

3--NATURALISTIC--Rousseau said in the Emile that a natural education, that is one shaped by the proper environment, will produce moral individuals.

4--ECONOMIC--We may argue with Marx that the great revolutions of history are products of class struggle in which the 'have-nots' struggle to dispossess the 'haves' who naturally will fight to keep what they own.

Which is correct? All? None? Some synthesis? Who determines? In the words of Martha Nussbaum,

The central task of education...is to confront the passivity of the pupil, challenging the mind to take charge of its own thought. All too often, people's choices and statements are not their own...Words come out of their mouths, and actions are performed by their bodies, but what those words and actions express may be the voice of tradition or convention the voice of the parent, of friend, of fashion. This is so because these people have never stopped to ask themselves what they really stand for, what they are willing to defend as themselves and their own...They are like instruments on which fashion and habit play their tunes, or like stage masks through which an actor's voice speaks.

from: Martha Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. pp. 28-29.

I hope in this course to apply Nussbaum's perspective to the study of literature, history, philosophy and... (Can the list ever end?)

• Why does Plato have his persona Socrates use verbs of passion to express the most sublimely cognitive thoughts?. See: (Republic 490b.). Note that the classical concept of harmony and balance must work for all three elements; not just the top one. The macrocosmic correspondence likewise applies.

B. ASSIGNMENT: construct a definition of human nature from the classical perspective that has a gothic potential.

See Abrams, M.A. The Mirror and the Lamp. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971.

II. THE RENAISSANCE / THE PRAGMATIC THEORY became popular in England in the literary criticism of the Renaissance. Read the following excerpts from Sidney's Defense of Poetry and note the debt to, and modification of Aristotle: Click here.

• What Sidney adds has important implications for the gothic temperament in its Romantic period context. Who judges whom and what?

III. THE ROMANTIC PERIOD / THE EXPRESSIVE THEORY:

• The expressive theory defines the Romantic temperament. Rooted in paradox and the simultaneous rejection and acceptance of dialectical opposites., the romantics defined themselves by accepting no definitions at all. Confusing as that sounds, one must approach the romantic and gothic spirit by accepting all contradictions.
• In THE PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND, Richard Tarnas offers several very astute observations that suggest a gothic perspective:

  1. Speaking of the rise of modern psychological theories of human cognition, Tarnas speaks of psychoanalysis as revealing, "...the mechanisms of resistance, repression, and projection, and bring [ing] forth a host of other insights laying open the mind's character and internal dynamics. Freud thereby represented a brilliant culmination of the Enlightenment project, bringing even the human unconscious under the light of rational investigation." ("The Changing Image of the Human from Copernicus through Freud, p. 328)

  2, In the Chapter entitled, "Romanticism and its Fate," (p. 368) Tarnas continues: "...the Romantics' interest in human consciousness was fueled by a newly intense sense of self-awareness and a focus on the complex nature of the human self, and was comparatively unconstrained by the limits of the scientific perspective. Emotion and imagination, rather than reason and perception, were of prime importance. New concern arose not only with the exalted and noble but with the contraries and darkness in the human soul, with evil, death, the demonic, and the irrational. Generally ignored in the optimistic, clarified light of rational science, these themes now inspired the works of Blake and Novalis, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, Hawthorne and Melville, Poe and Baudelaire, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. With Romanticism, the modern eye was turned ever more inward to discern the shadows of existence. To explore the mysteries of interiority, of moods and motives, love and desire, fear and angst, inner conflicts and contradictions, memories and dreams, to experience extreme and incommunicable states of consciousness, to be inwardly grasped in epiphanic ecstasy, to plumb the depths of the human soul, to bring the unconscious into consciousness, to know the infinite--such were the imperatives of Romantic introspection.

The various Romantic writers have thus expressed paradoxes:

1. Rousseau: "Man is born free, but exists everywhere in chains, "(The Social Contract), but: "Put the child in his place and keep him there." (The Emile). One might also recall what Rousseau did with his own (illegitimate) children (see The Confessions)
2. Keats: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." (Ode on A Grecian Urn.)
3. Byron: "I have prayed / For madness as a blessing--'tis denied me." (from Manfred