That AMC is a “liberal arts” school may only mean for you that there are courses which students are forced to “choose”. Why is that? One answer: employers report that well-rounded students handle the range of demands that jobs require, such as critical thinking, moral leadership, and cultural awareness. In addition to this concern to make you marketable and successful, there is another reason that you have been exposed to skills in interpretation and the expression of ideas, to psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, art and literature. It is because job success is a crucial but insufficient determinant of what we will be calling a “meaningful” life.
At the end of the day, when your college degree is in hand and you’ve earned the job, the salary, and the independence you’ve dreamed of and persevered for, how can you know that you will not just be “happy”, i.e., pleased or satisfied with what you’ve accomplished, but that you have excelled in the art of living? In any case, how do we measure and define such things? Whose measurements and definitions will we name as our own? Does our society provide adequate conditions for living life in meaningful ways, or are the burdens of “just getting by” too great to afford us the luxury of such concerns? How have definitions of what has “meaning” changed through time? How are meanings made? Do individuals make their own meanings? Do societies make meanings for them? Is it some combination of the two? Can life be lived irrespective of a concern about its meaning? Is “meaningful existence” a social privilege, the luxury of an intellectual or leisure class? How can the question of “meaning” be extended as the basis for equitable social relations? How do our ideas of “the meaningful life” also imply determinations about which lives, or perhaps which deaths, tragedies, sufferings, and so forth, are meaningful to us?
As you can see, the question of meaning lends itself to a great diversity of moral, ethical and existential investigations. It is our hope that you have been provided with the training and resources you need to achieve all of the goals you have set for yourself. But in addition to this, we have not done our job unless you have also examined and developed your own responses to the questions that will shape the way you assess not just the achievements but the character, “ethos”, or attitude of your life. If the question that has preoccupied your college experience until now has been ‘what will I do?’, we now want you to ask an entirely different question: ‘what kind of person will I become?’. If we have done our job, in this class you will be able to see that your college degree has not only equipped you with the disciplinary and technical knowledge that enables you to perform a professional task. It has also equipped you with skills in critical thinking, the awareness of history, and the recognition of other experiences and points of view that will assist you in reflecting on the meaning of your life, the relation of an individual existence to the existences of others, and how one pursues meaning within the particular social, cultural, and historical situations that one inhabits.
Let’s be open about it – these are huge questions, and they have the potential to lead us into despair rather than contentment. Wouldn’t it be easier to focus on the matters at hand: get a degree, get a job, make money, be good, and be happy? One of the foundational assertions with which we begin this course comes from Socrates, who, as you will see, asked a very tough question. Is happiness the greatest goal for one’s life? In fact, Socrates’ life and words suggest otherwise, because he committed himself to what was often a painstaking activity: self-examination. Today, when we speak of the “good life” we usually mean the comfortable life, where we can afford the things that make our lives easier and more enjoyable. Sears Roebuck has made ‘the good life’ its marketing campaign slogan, and House and Garden magazine is sub-titled ‘Design for the Well-Lived Life’. Does this suggest that, in our world, the ability to consume dishwashers and skill saws, to have a finely decorated den or grow lavender in the back yard, leads to contentment? This may be so, if by ‘the good life’ we mean one in which all of our needs and most of our wants are satisfied. Although he is for this reason not only unfashionable but, by some definitions, un-American, Socrates modeled a form of the good life that cannot be achieved through consumption. Instead, the good or well-lived life meant one in which life’s purpose was not only to pursue gain or prestige but to pursue truth, justice, and the good. Socrates suggested that a meaningful existence is achieved by becoming a critic of one’s own life and one’s own city.
You may not like what you’ll learn about the result of Socrates’ pursuit of the meaningful life. The model we get from him is one that places principles above profit, and standards above self-interest, even when the cost is great. It also insists that philosophical self-reflection of oneself and one’s community is indispensable to the project of meaningful human existence. So, that is the task set before you now. This course asks you to draw upon the skills and insights that you have developed in order to fashion a critical, well-reasoned response to the question of what it means to be a self, and to fashion meaning for yourself. We provide an open and non-judgmental space, with attentive dialogue partners and provocative, compelling texts, to make it possible for you to do this. We have structured the course with this in mind: it is a seminar, and you are asked to listen, think, and respond in thoughtful and respectful ways. Occasions to express your ideas and reactions will take place in class in the form of discussions and short presentations, and in writing through a number of assignments. In one of the readings for this course Cornell West will say that ‘dialogue is the life-blood of democracy’; the design of the course affirms this conviction by facilitating opportunities for listening and responding to one another.
Course Rationale
What is a self? However mundane or abstract the question may be, it has taken center stage in historical struggles to confront the conditions of possibility for meaningful, self-determined life. What do you do if, like Neo in The Matrix, you realize one day that you are not who you think you are, or that who you think you are, i.e., your experiences, identity, opinions, tastes, attitudes, self-esteem, and so on, are shaped by external things? Maybe you realize at some point that you react to certain situations in exactly the same way your parents did, so that even though your response feels completely private and personal, you become aware that those private sensations or viewpoints were to some extent conditioned. If we were to press the point, we might even say that every aspect of subjectivity, even the feeling that there is a ‘real me’, a ‘true self’ distinct from other people and forces around me, turns out to be shaped through interactions with those people and forces. If the ‘I’ that is typically assumed to exist prior to all of my experiences, giving them their uniqueness and sense of radical individuality, is more imaginary than real, how do ‘I’ come to terms with my newfound status as a fiction? Am I obliterated by the knowledge that I am engendered by processes of recognition and representation, rather than existing as the sure source of those processes?
This course takes the question of the ‘I’ in its fictional state as an opportunity rather than a foreclosure. If ‘I’ emerge as a subject only when I am recognized as a subject, this means that my existence depends crucially on the existence of something other than me which can recognize me. And if this ‘other’ needs to recognize me, it would appear to be another subject, another consciousness. ‘I’ cannot come into being apart from the existence and the returned look or gaze of this other. In addition to the indispensability of my relation to another, what does it mean to be recognized or acknowledged? In what ways can I been ‘seen’, and thus, by virtue of being seen, see myself as a seen thing? Recognition takes places in many ways in society, not just when we nod our heads or wave to people on the street, but when we acknowledge the humanity of others, regard them as having worth, attribute to collectives of people the same rights (a form of political recognition) that we attribute to ourselves, and so on. That is, recognition is indispensable to the self existentially as well as politically; in fact, it may prove rather difficult to separate the two. If, then, to be a self is to be recognized, and to be recognized entails existential and social conditions of acknowledgement, then the task of achieving a meaningful existence must attend very carefully to this reciprocal, or dialectical quality intrinsic to the formations of selves.
That these parameters for imagining meaningful existence, both as an individual and as a social being, are supported by our culture is not, on the other hand, guaranteed. Indeed, through an examination of the structures of modern liberalism we may find that modern selves are compelled to view themselves as far more autonomous and self-reliant than the picture just painted for you above. What does it mean for us as subjects of liberalism? This is the preliminary question taken up by the course. Moreover, we shall examine how dynamics of recognition orchestrated historical struggles for meaning and self-determination in our own society. Even if one cannot identify in a direct way with the specific struggles for recognition of women, black Americans, Latina and Latino Americans, or gay and lesbian subjects, through an examination of the way these struggles were theorized and negotiated we gain concrete perspectives on the conditions in which every self, in one form or another, is fashioned. Fashion yourself, reflecting on the drama, insecurity and suffering that self-fashioning requires of us. That is your task here.
