First-Year Seminar
Quaestio mihi
factus sum: Self and Society in the Liberal Arts
One of the few common denominators in the history
of the arts, humanities, and sciences has been the quest—through creative,
rational, scientific, and spiritual approaches—for understanding the
relationship between the individual and the larger world. Fittingly, the very
root of the word used to describe both the private and public self, identity,
has always entailed a tension between “sameness” (in Latin, idem) and
“difference” (if I am x, then I am not y). Whether through philosophical
inquiry into what constitutes the person, scientific debates about when life
begins, theological disquisitions on the nature of the soul, or the literary
construction of the autobiographical persona, thinkers and artists throughout
history have explored the moral and ethical dimensions of self-representation
while gesturing toward its unsolvable mysteries and productive tensions. In the
words of the theologian Saint Augustine, “mihi quaestio factus sum” (“I have
become a question for myself”; Confessions 10.33.50). The search for the role
and purpose of the human being can serve a powerful epistemological function.
In “becoming a question for ourselves,” we establish a position of wonder and
critical inquiry vis-à-vis the world.
Texts for spring 2010:
Locke,
Second Treatise on Government
Rousseau,
Social Contract
Shelley,
Frankenstein
Marx,
Communist Manifesto
Darwin,
Origin of the Species
Nietzsche,
Genealogy of Morals
Du
Bois, Souls of Black Folk
Freud,
Three Case Histories
Woolf, To the Lighthouse; or Achebe, Things
Fall Apart; or Levi, Periodic Table