In 24 lectures that let you see the world through the eyes of the Enlightenment's greatest writers, follow the origin of new ways of thinking-ideas we today take for granted but are startlingly recent-about the individual and society. You'll discover how these notions emerged in an era of transition from a world dominated by classical thought, institutional religion, and the aristocracy to one that was increasingly secular, scientific, skeptical, and middle class. These lectures are essentially about ideas and about books-how great ideas are alive and powerful in the pages of significant written works. The guiding premise is that the best way to appreciate the thinking of a given period is to explore its literature. You'll note or discuss at length a range of novels, autobiographies, and biographies from the 1670s to the 1790s, including The Pilgrim's Progress, Candide, The London Journal, The Social Contract, Confessions, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience. If you haven't already done so, this is your opportunity to familiarize yourself with this remarkable collection of works. What was, after all, the modern self that the Enlightenment invented? This engaging lecture series suggests that it was a new human insight, one that rejected absolute or easily generalized explanations and embraced the conflict, confusion, and paradox of life. It was a new and dynamic account of human life-one that continues to both benefit and afflict us. And in the company of a master educator, you can finally discover why our everyday lives in the modern world are indebted to the writings of the Enlightenment thinkers.
The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self
01: Changing Ideas of the Self
Why study Enlightenment ideas about the self? This lecture presents an overview of the traditional belief system of 1500 to 1700, and how its coherent picture of psychological life began to break down during the Renaissance and Reformation.
02: 17th-Century Religious Versions of the Self
This lecture examines two great religious writers, the English Protestant John Bunyan and the French Catholic Blaise Pascal. Enlightenment thinkers would insist on the positive value of this world, would make pride a virtue rather than a sin, and would seek fulfillment in social interaction, not in self-disciplining solitude.
03: 17th-Century Secular Versions of the Self
This lecture considers the implications of René Descartes' rationalism and of the empiricism of the British political theorist Thomas Hobbes. Enlightenment thinkers had to reconfigure empiricism to avoid its grimmer aspects—defining competition as constructive and sociability as natural for human beings.
04: Lafayette, “La Princesse de Clèves”, I
The aristocratic court culture in France at the end of the 17th century held a shrewd but narrow world-view. The pioneering novel “La Princesse de Clèves” by Mme. de Lafayette. Today's culture aspires to an ideal of truth-telling authenticity, but most 17th-century writers took for granted that we never can know the truth about our own motives.
05: “La Princesse de Clèves”, II
“La Princesse de Clèves,” for all its greatness, presented a world-view that was unable to envision the possibility of companionate love, of sexual enjoyment that is not a power play, or an evolving personality as opposed to a static character.
06: British Empiricism and the Self, I
The philosophy of empiricism provided a default framework for psychology throughout the 18th century. Empiricism was an empowering ideology of a middle-class culture that needed value in competition and a secure basis for cooperation in the social self. We discuss empiricist psychology in the immensely influential writings of John Locke.
07: British Empiricism and the Self, II
The Scottish philosopher David Hume exposed some crucial questions that Locke had evaded. Hume's radical skepticism dissolved any possibility of knowing what the self is. The lecture concludes with the poet Alexander Pope, who struggled to make sense of inner conflict in the limiting confines of the empiricist framework.
08: Voltaire, “Candide”
Voltaire's career and writings reflect the outwardly directed and pragmatism of the Enlightenment. Voltaire dismissed introspection and directed his inspired propaganda at historical events. In the satiric fable “Candide” he parodies philosophical optimism.
09: Voltaire, Johnson, Gibbon-Some Lives
As an approach to 18th-century ways of understanding behavior, this lecture considers biographies by several major writers to show how hard it was to recognize, let alone to explain, issues that would later become central in biographical explanation.
10: Boswell, “The London Journal”, I
“The London Journal,” a diary kept by the young James Boswell in 1762-1763, gives valuable insight into problems of the self as experienced by an actual person. The problems he raises are important symptoms, exposing issues that the culture as a whole will have to acknowledge and try to deal with.
11: “The London Journal”, II
Boswell strives impressively to reconcile his conflicted feelings. We use a modern perspective to clarify what he has trouble understanding: his role-playing, euphemistic language, attraction to prostitutes, his “melancholy” or bipolar disorder. Empiricist psychology had no way of addressing the psychological suffering that Boswell experienced.
12: Diderot's Dialogues
Diderot played a central role in the public mission of the Enlightenment. He was editor of the “Encyclopédie,” which aspired to promote open inquiry and make technological knowledge available to all.
13: Diderot,” Jacques the Fatalist”, I
In this novel Diderot presents a world in which the narrator can never be trusted to tell a reliable story. “Jacques the Fatalist” refuses to be “realistic” and develops a metafictional perspective on the way we normally try to find “truth” in works of fiction.
14: “Jacques the Fatalist”, II
The fatalism of his title refers to the idea that everything is determined by an unbreakable chain of causes, but as Diderot also acknowledges, human beings cannot help believing in freedom.
15: Rousseau, “Inequality” and “Social Contract”
Empiricism left each individual trapped in a private subjectivity. Rousseau's response to this dilemma was to consider that, perhaps, we do have an authentic self that has been covered over and distorted by a lifetime of social conditioning.
16: Rousseau, “The Confessions”, I
Rousseau began the “Confessions” to assert his personal integrity and to recover the meanings in childhood experiences that haunted his memory. In doing so, he reveals fundamental patterns in his psychic life.
17: “The Confessions”, II
The episodes recounted in “Confessions” implicitly confirm Rousseau's theory of natural man and his deformation by civilization. He presents a critique of the assumptions of empiricism with respect to particularity and generality, the self and memory, and the value of the imagination.
18: Rousseau, “Reveries of the Solitary Walker”
Detaching himself from society, Rousseau invokes nature as his god-term and becomes a major contributor to the current of thought later known as Romanticism, in which human beings receive spiritual sustenance from external phenomena.
19: Franklin, “Autobiography”
In Franklin's “Autobiography” we return to the optimism, practicality, and sociability of the empiricist model that has continued to influence our culture to this day. Franklin embodied the American ideal of being well adjusted and, in his own time, was seen as the quintessential American.
20: Franklin and Adam Smith
This lecture examines the psychological and economic writings of Adam Smith, which advance a powerful theoretical foundation for the values that Franklin exemplified in his life.
21: Laclos, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, I
This lecture introduces the most compelling and thought-provoking novel of the 18th century. Written as a series of letters, it makes the truth about human motives seem unknowable: Most of the characters are so skilled at duplicity; even their attempts at self-knowledge are doomed to failure.
22: “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, II
“Les Liaisons” challenges us to find a moral perspective in a hermetically closed society, where power is the only value, but refuses to give us a place to stand and remains disturbingly ambiguous throughout.
23: Blake, “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”
The final two lectures look back at the Enlightenment from the perspective of the Romantic movement that succeeded it, focusing on William Blake's imaginative works that brilliantly reconceive the central issues of this course.
24: Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
Written in response to the excitement of the French Rev¬olution, Blake's book uses a medley of genres to explore interrelated themes in psychology, politics, and religion. With Blake, we take a retrospective view of what the Enlightenment achieved in understanding the self and of what it left undone.
Overview Course No. 4117
About
Dr. Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, where he has been teaching since 1989. He earned a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. At Harvard, Professor Damrosch was named a Harvard College Professor in recognition of distinguished teaching. He has held National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim research fellowships and has also directed National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminars for college teachers. Dr. Damrosch is the author of several books, including Tocqueville's Discovery of America, Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense, Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth, The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope, Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson, and The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. He also published a biography, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, which was one of five finalists for the 2005 National Book Award in Nonfiction, and won the PEN New England/Winship Award for best work of nonfiction.
