Ideas and Experience: 1750 - 1950

In which I attempted to teach a course in big ideas

Our honors college put out feelers to the campus for any faculty wishing to teach one of their two undergraduate courses (not required, but which satisfy some general education requirements) on “Ideas and Experience”; one from antiquity to the mid-eighteenth century, the other going forward to the mid-twentieth century. Since the book I had just finished touched on some of the ideas from the second course, I thought I would have a go. The calendar listed “authors could include …” but we had a fair bit of scope (I included about two-thirds of the “could include”).

The course came to its conclusion last week, where my students (there were thirteen) presented essays on which piece they read either from the syllabus, or that the syllabus lead them to, which most brought them to reconsider what they had previously thought. I was really pleased with the results.

And so, for the record, this is what I went with, over fourteen weeks:

The Standard of Taste 

David Hume “Of the Standard of Taste”. 

Immanuel Kant Critique of Judgement, First Book, First and Second Moment, § 1 – 9. 

Romanticism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, “Fifth Walk”,  

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Poems and Ballads, “Preface”, and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”,  

John Constable, “The Hay Wain” 

Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique 

Conservatism  

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution (excerpts), and “Speech to the Electors of Bristol” 

Utilitarianism 

Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chapter 1, “Of the Principle of Utility”.  

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, chapters 1 – 4,  

Charles Dickens, Hard Times (excerpt) 

Reconciliation 

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, chapters 4 – 7. 

William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” 

Liberty 

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty  

Immanuel Kant, “On the Relationship between Theory and Practice in Political Right” 

The Rights of Women 

John Stuart Mill, The Subjugation of Women 

Representation 

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 

 Tradition  

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (excerpt) 

T.S. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent”,  

Michael Oakeshott, “On the Idea of a University” 

Perfectionism 

Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as Educator”, part 6 

Clive Bell, Civilization (excerpt) 

Art and Morals 

Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (excerpts) 

George Orwell, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”  

Roger Fry, “An Essay in Aesthetics” 

Modernism 

“Manet and the Post-Impressionists", Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries (1910), program 

Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse, selected works from the 1910 exhibition 

Roger Fry, “The French Post-Impressionists" 

Clive Bell, Art, “The Debt to Cezanne” 

Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” 

Intrinsic Goods 

G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (excerpts) 

John Maynard Keynes, “My Early Beliefs” and “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” 

Reflections: this was a lot, yet you can imagine how much I had to leave out (no Marx, Darwin, Freud, and many, many others). Heavy on Mill, I know. Students really liked Hume: the question of whether we could say with any authority that someone has bad taste in music generated really good discussion. Likewise the question of whether we could judge the value of art by its implied moral content. That contemporary politics floats in a set of ideas buffeted by utilitarianism, liberalism, and conservatism, often in the same person, led to interesting reflections. Moore’s intrinsic good of deep personal relationships as something of value quite independent of any Benthamite utility was likewise a fruitful discussion for young people trying to work things out.

I wrote a couple of hundred pages of notes, just to be sure of myself: never in my life have I taught about poetry or painting, and I made clear to the class that I was a student as well as instructor. It was worth every minute.