Author Archives: Editor

How to Make a Barbarian in Three Steps

South African road sign (1956). Image via Hulton Archive, Getty Images.

The election of a man with no political experience that won the hearts and minds of many in America by loudly proclaiming what for years the political Right has been saying has been denied them by PC culture: the ability to say out loud that religious minorities, blacks, women, gays and transgender folk, non-white immigrants, non-white citizens, feminists, fatties, and uglies have gotten too uppity and comfortable and need to be reminded of their place; that we represent the limit to the America dream (and not the forms of economic dispossession that enable the .1% to hold onto obscene amounts of wealth and resources). There is a firm belief that the ills of society are caused by the barbarians that have infected America from within and the barbarians that remain at the gate waiting to take from us what ours. In this configuration, I have been rendered the barbarian (though I have been before, as many of us have): I am a Muslim-born, middle eastern immigrant, a divorced childless middle-aged feminist with a doctorate in the Humanities. I am now the intersection of the axes of the new barbarian explicitly articulated by the Trump campaign.

In this moment of wild political uncertainty in the United States and as a barbarian myself, I am immensely grateful to be able to teach Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a text written in apartheid South Africa. Coetzee was eight years old when apartheid was formally instituted in 1948, and witnessed the emergence of the 1950 Population Registration Act, which registered and classified all South Africans racially into one of three categories, “white”, “black”, or “colored”, the latter which included mix-raced as well as Indian and Asian individuals. It should be noted that these distinctions were based on appearance, often dividing members of the same biological family into different racial categories. Thus, Coetzee’s ability to describe and deconstruct patterns of institutional separation and quotidian and routinized cruelties against an “other” is informed in no small part by having lived the dystopian reality of apartheid South Africa, the institutional organizational of which was largely influenced by a real-life white fraternal conspiracy called the Broederbond. It is not insignificant that Coetzee was born to Afrikaner parents and, while he openly resisted Apartheid, nonetheless was a privileged member of South African society: In this book, he beautifully relays the subtle truths about privilege and its many losses.

* * *

South African apartheid-era sign (date unknown). Image via the BBC.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a mapping of colonial relationships, a philosophical challenge to the cruelties of civilization hidden behind paranoid invocations of the “other”, and a cautionary tale of privilege as itself a momentous loss.

The text is an exquisite breakdown of how the other, in this case the barbarian, is a construction informed largely by paranoia and projection. Early on in the narrative, we learn that Colonel Joll’s soldiers capture a dozen local fisherman for no other reason than they were hiding, a fact that the Magistrate characterizes as “[t]he reasoning of the policeman” (18). This reasoning to which he points is, of course, circular: The distrust of the policeman for the “other” renders any act by this “other” ipso facto suspicious. By definition, there is no benefit of the doubt for the barbarian, the truth of which justifies the expansion of the security apparatus of the empire at every turn.

Overcrowding in American Federal prisons, Image via Criminal Justice Information.

Moreover, the conditions which produce “the barbarian” are the conditions mandated by the empire itself. These nomads, now prisoners, are forced into a small space in the yard, using a corner as a latrine, entirely limited in their movement to the enclosed area and fully dependent on the care of those who imprison them. Then — and here’s the kicker — the locals begin to complain about these “barbarians” because they are intrusive: “[t]he filth, the smell, the noise of quarrelling and coughing become too much….A rumour begins to go the rounds that they are diseased, that they will bring an epidemic to the town….the kitchen staff refuse them utensils and begin to toss them their food from the doorway as if they were indeed animals” (20). The other as lazy, as violent, as uncouth is a fact made of the institutions of power, not merely adjudicated by them.

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area at Camp X-Ray of Naval Base Guantanamo Bay (January 11, 2002). Image via Reuters File.

Thus what this scene does is reveal to the reader the patterns of subjugation, and it seems to take a mere three steps: (1) Those invested with power are taught to distrust them and imprison them because they are others/“barbarians.” (2) They impose conditions which are vile and inhuman, and limit their scope of life to satiation of immediate biological needs, and thereafter (3) justify their prejudices and the exclusion of the barbarian/other with reference to the filth and their “animal behaviors” of the other as proof of natural differences. Thus, in this scene we see the use paranoia and fear as a justification for dispossession, and dispossession as key to the maintenance of institutions of power and control. Of course, in case we missed this lesson the first time in the text, this process is repeated when the Magistrate is imprisoned (e.g., 80, 84) showing how the process of dehumanization is the one stable in the functioning of power, and where we can most clearly apprehend the vicissitudes of privilege.

The book reveals that privilege blinds one to the obvious, a sentiment eloquently expressed by a thought attributed to the Magistrate: “There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it” (155). When he is imprisoned and denigrated, the magistrate is surprised, taken unawares, even as he has watched so many suffer before him: “’Why me?’ Never has there been anyone so confused and innocent of the world as I. A veritable baby!” (94). He continues a few lines later:

Deliberately I bring to mind images of innocents I have known: the boy lying naked in the lamplight with his hands pressed to his groins, the barbarian prisoners squatting in the dust, shading their eyes, waiting for whatever is to come next. Why should it be inconceivable that the behemoth that trampled them will trample me too? (94)

Operations in the Warsaw Ghetto in April and May of 1943 to empty the Ghetto and deport its remaining holdouts — men, women and children. Image via the New York Times.

This perfectly encompasses the main lesson of the novel: If routine forms of cruelty can be used against “others”, you cannot be surprised when that same law and order comes to oppress you as its other. Moreover, just as you once believed the law was just even in its violence, you cannot be surprised to find yourself alone when you desperately need the protection of others (as they needed yours). And yet, we will be surprised. The truth of privilege is both that one is blind to the injustices hiding behind the letter of the law, and caught alone the moment when the law reveals its irrationality.

The final lesson is that we need the protection of others. In his own process of being othered — through denial in prison, through torture, through ritualized humiliations that conscript the townsfolk into the process of punishment and dehumanization — the Magistrate finds himself alone, wishing he had come to know his townsfolk better and to know if they, like he, detested the things unfolding around them since the arrival of the men of the capital. Observing the cruelty he fantasizes about the kinds of people that may surround him but which he does not know, people who are as bothered by the sound of the suffering inflicted on others around them: “If comrades like these exist, what a pity I do not know them” (104). Solidarity is a cornerstone of political protection, the Magistrate comes to realize at the moment when he is already taboo. Privilege will always be a loss at the moment in which the law turns from its false promise of protection to a mechanism of cruelty, punishment, and dispossession.

* * *

Japanese-American child with family belongings en route to California internment camp (Spring 1942). Image via U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

What the book does not let us forget is that the force of law, while real, and routinely exercised to dispossess the already vulnerable, is nonetheless localized, limited, and ultimately, fragmentary. In a political world where racism is proclaimed openly, where acts of violence are following the new empowerment of hate in America, where it is unclear what laws will be enforced and against whom in the months and years to come (not to mention the laws to passed and undone), we must remember once and repeat to ourselves daily what our own UC Irvine Comparative Literature Professor Etienne Balibar says in Politics and the Other Scene: “[t]here is autonomy of politics only to the extent that subjects are the source and ultimate reference of emancipation for each other” (10). Let us take this seriously and remember that we are the source of support and liberation for one another. We can no longer assume a caring state will help the dispossessed, that the law answers the distress of the victim of hate and violence, that the person terrorized in front of you will be saved by someone else, that calling the police will end in what you would call justice. The fact we did for so long in the face of testimony by those subjected to the cruelty of the state betrays the extent that we are also under the spell of disavowal that marks the existence of the Magistrate until he becomes “othered” (see for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Works Cited

Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson and Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002).

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin Books, 1980).

Sharareh Frouzesh is a seminar leader in the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine, where she received her PhD in Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on identity formation and the privileging of particular identities through an exploration of the concept of guilt. Her interdisciplinary work engages with 20th and 21st century Iranian and Iranian-American Literature, postcolonial Anglophone and World Literatures, as well as literary theory, political philosophy, and postcolonial, critical, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories.

Rousseau and the Nature of Human Freedom

Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Portrait of Jean Jacques Rousseau (replica of 1753 portrait, image dates to the last third of the 18th century). Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Rousseau’s thought experiment on the state of nature[1] produces some interesting insights into our moral psychology and the social mediation of identity, as well as offering some provocative claims about the nature of human culture. And Rousseau’s influence on subsequent political theory has been substantial, in directions that might seem surprising, given the focus in the First and Second Discourses on the individual and the value of independence. As one of the editors of our edition points out, some accuse Rousseau of being “the author of a totalitarian political theory.”[2] This is precisely Bertrand Russell’s view, asserting that “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau.”[3] Such an assessment clearly points to the arguments presented in Rousseau’s essay On the Social Contract, published in 1762, principally the view presented there that the citizen of a polity must identify absolutely with the infallible general will of the state, and that whoever refuses to obey the general will must be “forced to be free.”[4] How does Rousseau get from his utter rejection of human society in the first two discourses to an enthusiastic, absolute affirmation of the state? The answer must lie in Rousseau’s account of the crucial transition from the state of nature to civil society.

Frontispiece to Continental European edition of Rousseau’s The Social Contrast (1762)

But on this point there is also significant ambivalence in Rousseau. Despite his insistent privileging of the state of nature as the site of natural virtue, and his characterization of human society as depravity in essence, Rousseau ultimately asserts that early life in society “must have been the happiest and most durable epoch” in human history.[5] In The Social Contract, one finds this thought even more profoundly and emphatically stated, where Rousseau argues that entrance into the civil state results in the transformation of the human being “from a stupid, limited animal into an intelligent being and a man.”[6] Although in both passages he still considers the potential for abuse and corruption to be a significant concern, the exit from the state of nature also eventuates in the development of the human faculties and the acquisition of moral liberty, “which alone makes man truly master of himself. For to be driven by appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is liberty.”[7]

Bracketing the possible inconsistencies of Rousseau’s account here, what I find most problematic about this conjectural picture of the entrance of human beings into society are the conditions on which the social compact depends. Rousseau defines human beings as distinct from other sentient beings by virtue of two essential characteristics, which are already present in the state of nature: 1) human freedom, and 2) perfectibility.[8] But just what are the features of human freedom in the state of nature, and how can a human possess a faculty of perfectibility without possessing the category of the moral? Remember that the moral conception is one of the products of the social world in Rousseau’s account, and that solitary human beings would have no sense of moral duty, just as they would lack all other categories of judgment.

Bertrand Russell in 1965. Photo from Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

To put it plainly, the quality of freedom that Rousseau attributes to human beings in the state of nature does not sound like freedom worth having. More importantly, it does not seem to offer a basis for the radical reconfiguration of the world effected by entrance into this contract with other consenting human beings. Other than the impulsive aversion to suffering, which Rousseau terms the natural virtue of pity, and from which all other social virtues derive, it is hard to see just what freedom a human being is supposed to possess. Indeed, as quoted above, Rousseau ultimately suggests that true freedom is only a result of the binding together of individuals into society, but freedom is also a necessary precondition of the founding of society. What is called for is a robust account of human freedom divested of the circularity that I have tried to describe in Rousseau. True human freedom would have to be self-legitimating, self-authorizing, in order to offer sufficient ground for the developmental account that Rousseau wants to offer: the liberty that Rousseau describes as “obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself.” This is a thought that German Idealism (e.g., Fichte, Kant, Hegel) will take to be the central problem of modern philosophy—it is also this line of thinking that results for Russell[9] in the terrific destruction of the Second World War, at the hands of totalitarian empires.[10]

Notes

[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, ed. David Cress (Cambridge: Hackett, 2011), p. 40. Rousseau repeatedly admits that his speculations about natural man are pure conjecture, thus a thought experiment, and this thought-experimental framework had been used many times before him (e.g., Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu) and after him (e.g., Rawls, Nozick). More generally, thought experiments have become a conventional genre is the practice of philosophy, although there is some dispute as to just what these contrived, fantastic narratives are actually capable of establishing. For an example of resistance to this type of theorizing, see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1985).

[2] David Wooton, “Introduction” to Rousseau’s Basic Political Writings, ed. David Cress (Cambridge: Hackett, 2011), p. x.

[3] Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 685.

[4] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 167. The point is also made very emphatically in the “Discourse on Political Economy,” where he suggests that ideally citizens would be educated from birth to accept total identification with the state, “never to consider their own persons except in terms of being related to the body of the state, and […] not to perceive their own existence except as part of the state’s existence” (137).

[5] Rousseau, p. 74.

[6] Rousseau, p. 167.

[7] ibid.

[8] Rousseau, p. 53.

[9] Russell wrote his monumental, Nobel Prize-winning History of Western Philosophy in the midst of that war, with no certainty as to the outcome.

[10] Hitler’s “Third Reich” [Drittes Reich] literally means the Third Empire.

Kurt Buhanan earned his PhD at UC Irvine, and has published on German literature and film, visual culture, and critical theory. He has articles on the poet Paul Celan and the contemporary filmmaker Christian Petzold forthcoming in the journals Semiotica and The German Quarterly, respectively. Unlike Bertrand Russell, he does not hold Rousseau responsible for the rise of Hitler, but he would be happy to discuss the point.

Empire and the Nation-State Before the 18th Century

“What is my nation? Who talks of my nation?”
Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 3, Scene 2

What separates an empire from a nation?

Hans Ulrich Franck, Der Geharnischte Reiter [Knight in Armor] (1603-75). Etching.

When I asked my students this question during our first seminar, they offered two very apt responses. First, they suggested, empires are relics of the past, and now we only talk seriously of nations. Second, if and when we do use the word “empire” today, they observed, it’s almost always negative: a label you attach to political or cultural entities that you consider corrupt or undesirable (e.g. when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” during the Cold War); whereas “nation” evokes positive feelings of belonging and encourages pride in your ethnic or cultural heritage.

Both observations accurately capture our contemporary attitudes and assumptions, and they reveal the great extent to which the nation-state – “an area where the cultural boundaries match up with the political boundaries” – is now regarded as the most natural and efficient form of political organization possible. But as should be apparent from our lectures in HumCore thus far, this has not always been the case. In fact, the concept of the nation-state itself did not even come into being until the 17^th century, and its elevation to the preferred form of political community didn’t happen overnight but instead progressed slowly over the course of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. So, as we transition from Professor Zissos’s lectures on the Roman Empire to Professor Steintrager’s on the European Enlightenment, it will be helpful to think about how this thing we call the nation-state came into being and how it conditioned European attitudes toward empire that would ultimately influence our own. In doing this, we will be following a scholarly method pioneered by the preeminent French philosopher Michael Foucault called genealogy, which is an attempt to discover the origins, and explain the historical evolutions, of our contemporary concepts, social behaviors, and values.

Population loss in Germany during the Thirty Years War

As it happens, the origin of the nation-state was a topic covered in the last cycle of Humanities Core, which centered on the theme of “War.” In that cycle, Professors Jane Newman and John Smith, both from UCI’s Department of European Languages and Studies, gave a series of lectures on the legacy of the Thirty Year’s War (1618 – 1648), a devastating conflict that ravaged central Europe (mostly in the area of present day Germany) and killed almost a third of the continent’s population before hostilities ceased. (NB: all the previous cycles of HumCore are archived on the program’s website, so you can find the materials for these lectures here if you’d like to explore the subject further.) And as Professors Newman and Smith explained, the extremity of the Thirty Year’s War arose from a number of factors.

First, it was a war based on religious identity, where Protestants and Catholics both refused to recognize each other’s right to rule their own lands and assumed a kind of divine sanction for invading the other’s territories. Though both forms of Christianity, Protestants and Catholics saw each other in antagonistic and apocalyptic terms during the 16^th and 17^th centuries, with each defending their own doctrines as absolute truth while attacking their opponents as sinfully corrupt, almost demonic. In the context of England, which is my area of research, this extreme religious prejudice can be seen in the title page of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), a history published under Queen Elizabeth I that chronicled Catholic persecutions of Protestants.

John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1563). Houghton Library Collection at Harvard University.

Starting at the bottom of the image (right), we can see how the two forms of Christian practice (Protestant on the left, Catholic on the right) are contrasted. Moving up the page, the Protestants on the left undergo holy martyrdoms celebrated by a trumpeting chorus of saints and angels. On the right, the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist is literally figured as devil worship, by its positioning beneath a cloud of jeering demons. Christ himself sits in judgement, blessing the Protestant side with his raised hand, while condemning the Catholic with a lowered one. Within the pages of the Acts itself, Foxe, like many other Protestant propagandists of the age, equated the papacy with the biblical figure of Antichrist, claiming that the Catholic Church had falsely usurped the ancient authority of the Roman empire and had used it to unlawfully tyrannize over the whole of Christian Europe. As Foxe writes in Book 1 of the 1576 edition of the Acts:

Insomuch that they [the Popes] have translated the empire, they have deposed Emperors, Kings, Princes and rulers and Senators of Rome, and set up other, or the same again at their pleasure; they have proclaimed wars and have warred themselves. And where as Emperors in ancient time have dignified them [popes] in titles, have enlarged them with donations, and they receiving their confirmation by the Emperors, have like ungrateful clients to such benefactors, afterward stamped upon their necks, have made them to hold their stirrup, some to hold the bridle of their horse, have caused them to seek their confirmation at their hand, yea have been Emperors themselves. (29, original spelling and diction modernized)

To call this an attitude leaving little room for compromise or diplomacy would be an understatement.

Second, the Thirty Years War was fought mostly by mercenary forces in the pay of various European noblemen, rather than by the kinds of well-disciplined and publicly funded armies that characterize modern nation-state militaries. As a result, soldiers were given to unrestrained rape and pillage of the civilian population, taking food and other resources that they needed to sustain their campaigns from local farms and towns. In short, it was the kind of total, chaotic war comparable to the conflicts involving Syria and ISIS happening today.

The Treaty of Westphalia (1648)

But the lasting significance of the Thirty Year’s War, as Professors Newman and Smith argued, came from how it ended. Weary of the prolonged carnage, the various sides finally came together to negotiate the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. With 109 signatories, the treaty settled a number of key issues for international relations in Europe. First, it defined (and thus ended disputes over) a number of contested borders, producing an exact map of European national territories for the first time. Second, it upheld the principle that each country had the right to abide by whatever religious identity its ruler chose, a principle encapsulated in the Latin phrase cuius regio, eius religio (“whosever realm, his religion”). Finally, it acknowledged that each nation had sovereignty over its own domestic affairs, which should not be subject to interference by any outside power. And thus, the nation-state was born: the “nation” part coming from the common identity produced by the relatively homogenous cultures and religious affiliations contained within the borders of each country; and the “state” part coming from this inchoate principle of sovereign self-determination.

The Treaty of Westphalia also signaled the weakening of religion’s hold over the political, moral, and intellectual outlook of European society – a trend that would reach full expression in the Enlightenment a century later. Take, for example, the concept of sovereignty that Westphalia established. In some ways it is similar to Roman imperium, as both denote a kind of absolute authority to command and order society it rules over, but importantly sovereignty claims neither to be universal (i.e. it applies only within the recognized borders of an individual nation) nor divinely sanctioned. Moreover, it was during the period of the Thirty Year’s War that the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes developed his influential theory of government and politics, a theory that based political authority, which Hobbes calls sovereignty, on materialist reasoning rather than religious belief.

Abraham Bosse, Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. London (1651). Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

According to Hobbes’s account, humans form governments in order to escape the “state of nature” – a condition in which there are no laws and individuals are in a constant state of war with each other for resources and dominance. In his most important work Levithan (1651), Hobbes offers the following description of what life in this state of nature would have been like:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (Book I, Chapter XIII)

Thus Hobbes argues that, In order to escape the miseries of the state of nature, individuals come together to form a “social contract,” an agreement whereby they give up their liberty to do whatever they want and place themselves under a common power (i.e. sovereign), who will keep the peace, enforce laws, and maintain order. In Leviathan’s striking title page (right), or frontispiece (which has been an endless source of scholarly interpretation itself), we can see the basic principles of Hobbes’s new philosophy rendered visually, as the sovereign’s body is allegorically composed of all the individual subjects that have legitimized his power through the social contract.

Moreover, by looking at the iconography of Hobbes’s earlier work, we can appreciate the extent to which Hobbes consciously intended for his philosophy to pry European ideas about government from the religious foundations upon which they had previously rested.

Jean Matheus, frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (Paris,1642). Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Consider, as evidence for this intention, the frontispiece to his work De Cive (“On the Citizen”) (left), which was published a few years before Leviathan and is where Hobbes’s most important concepts, like the state of nature and social contract, were first articulated. Note how the work’s title page includes a Christ in judgement at the very top, similar to the religious iconography that animated Foxe’s title page we saw earlier. But here a horizontal division is created in addition to the vertical one, whereby the lower half of the image offers Hobbes’s conceptual replacements for the apocalyptic dualism above. On the left, the figure of Imperium – representing government, order, and civilization – stands with sword and scales before a background of cultivated fields and industrious production. On the right, Libertas, figured as a Native American with bow and spear, represents the state of nature, before a background depicting scenes of war and competition. Thus, Hobbes visually replaces the theological categories of salvation (i.e. an eternal reward for correct religious belief and practice) and damnation (i.e. the eternal punishment for failing to believe and practice correctly) with the secular categories of civil society and the state of nature, and what he’s essentially saying to his European readers is that state authority, and each individual’s loyalty to it, should be determined by its observable ability to prevent worldly disorder, rather than its uncertain relationship to religious truth.

So, now that we’ve sketched a brief genealogy of the nation-state, how might we use it to enrich our understanding of the material that we will be encountering during Professor Steintrager’s series of lectures?

One way is to ask ourselves how the legacy of Westphalia and the Hobbesian emphasis on natural origins were taken up and re-interpreted by our assigned Enlightenment writers. For example, consider Kant’s definition of enlightenment as “the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority,” which is in many respects a translation Westphalian sovereignty to the level of the individual. Rousseau, on the other hand, offers a mixed set of attitudes toward the legacy of 17^th century thought. He would himself take up the question of social contract, but unlike Hobbes, who considered human life in the state of nature to be wretched, Rousseau elevates nature to such an extent that he perceives greater virtue in those untouched by civilization.

Second, as we move into the topic of the British empire, it’s important to remember that it was an empire that developed after the invention of the nation-state, meaning that its organization, administration, and ideology should offer interesting distinctions from the kind of empire practiced by the Romans. What does it mean to have an empire with a nation-state at its center? Does the nation-state produce an empire that is more colonial in nature than the empires that existed before the nation-state? How did the sovereignty of the British monarchy operate differently within the borders of the United Kingdom than it did in the greater territories of the empire?

Or perhaps, even after producing our historical genealogy of the nation-state, might we still consider that nation and empire may not be that different after all?

Works Cited

Kant, Immanuel. “What is Enlightenment?” Political Writings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 56-60. Print.

Robin S. Stewart received his Ph.D. in English from UC Irvine in 2013, specializing in early modern British literature and Shakespeare. In its various forms, his research focuses on how pre-modern and early modern texts can offer productive opportunities for rethinking the origins of, as well as supplying alternatives to, our contemporary cultural assumptions and values. His most recent publications are “Last Judgment to Leviathan: The Semiotics of Collective Temporality in Early Modern England” in Temporality, Genre, and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare: Forms of Time, Ed. Lauren Shohet (Arden Shakespeare, Forthcoming 2017) and “Early Modern Drama & Emerging Markets,” in Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics, Ed. Michelle Chihara & Matthew Seybold (Routledge, Forthcoming 2018). In addition to teaching in the Humanities Core Program since 2014, he teaches upper-division courses on Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, as well as writing courses in UCI’s Program for Academic English/ESL. He spent this past summer giving a talk on Chinese adaptations of Shakespeare in Hong Kong, seeing a lot of local theater, and preparing for the birth of his first child, due this December.

What is Enlightenment?

Last Friday, Humanities Core hosted the first Friday Forum of our new cycle: a presentation and conversation entitled “What is Enlightenment?” by two of our resident philosophers and seminar leaders, Valentina Ricci and Daniel Siakel. As many students in the Tuesday/Thursday seminars were unable to attend the event and the discussion time was limited, Dr. Siakel has graciously provided a quick redux of the event and posed some questions in hopes of continuing the conversation here in the comment section. The Powerpoint slides for the presentation are available here.

The Friday Forum concerning Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” consists of three phases, each of which means to model one mode of philosophical methodology:

(1) understanding another person’s position;
(2) critiquing that position; and
(3) dialoguing about questions that arise in relation to the position or relevant critiques.

The audiences’ questions and comments raise crucial clarifications and complications.

One of these is that, while philosophers aim to understand, this is consistent with there being circumstances in which acting, rather than inquiring, is paramount—in response to racist or sexist discourses, for example.

Another is that, when charitably interpreted, one can employ Kant’s conception of enlightenment to critique Kant (the man) himself and thereby underscore the explanatory power of Kant’s conception, despite Kant’s racism and sexism. If becoming enlightened involves liberating oneself from superstition and prejudice, then Kant himself was not enlightened, according the standards of the position he introduces; for his articulations are rife with extreme prejudice against women and persons of color.

Let’s continue the conversation.

What questions arose as you read through Kant’s text and watched my and Valentina’s lecture? Do you find’s Kant’s conception of enlightenment compelling? Does an alternative view seem preferable? Why or why not?
Do you see traces of Kant’s conception in contemporary discourse(s)? Is ours an enlightened age, an age of enlightenment, or neither? Why?
What strikes you as being distinctive about Kant’s writing? What strikes you as being distinctive about philosophical methodology? What is your sense of how the disciplinary approach of philosophy compares with others?

We welcome all questions, comments, and criticisms that may arise.

Valentina Ricci received a M.A. and a PhD from the University of Padua (Italy), where she focused on German idealism and specifically on the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. She published articles on Hegel’s psychology and on the Phenomenology of Spirit, and co-edited a volume on the notion of recollection in Hegel’s philosophy. After moving to UC Irvine for her second Ph.D., she started working on social and political philosophy as well, and wrote her second dissertation on the ontology and ethics of violence. Valentina has strong interests in feminist philosophy and critical race theory, hence her emphasis on the themes of gender and race in this lecture.

Dan Siakel received his bachelor’s degree (with honors) and first Master’s degree from the University of Chicago, then a Master’s degree and Ph.D. from UCI, all in the discipline of philosophy. His research focuses on issues in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, early modern philosophy, the history of 20th-century philosophy, and, more recently, Shambhala Buddhism and Meditation. Dan’s pedagogical interests have found expression in his capacities as a Senior Pedagogical Fellow for UCI’s Center for Engaged instruction and more recently as a Pedagogical Fellow for the Andrew W. Mellon Teaching Institute.

Humanities Core Research Blog

A Curated Group Forum on Research and Writing in the Humanities at UC Irvine

Author Archives: Editor

How to Make a Barbarian in Three Steps

Rousseau and the Nature of Human Freedom

Empire and the Nation-State Before the 18th Century

What is Enlightenment?