Author Archives: DAVID RICHMAN

Art, Subjectivity, and the Limits of Reason

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I personally agreed most with the Romantic movement. Their focus on Beauty and Art, as well their insistence on the primordiality of subjective experience resonated more than the cold and dry Enlightenment principles. Furthermore, I think that Romanticism sprung up precisely because of a distrust of Reason, a distrust with which I am sympathetic. Modern science and analytic philosophy are the progeny of the Enlightenment–fully realized versions of what were new and young principles in the time period we were reading. Contemporary society thus has the pitfalls of the Enlightenment to the extreme as a consequence of this–and Goethe and Schiller’s critiques seem all the more relevant.

Learning about the Enlightenment and Romanticism I feel has given me an even clearer view of today’s society. As I argued above, because I think that today’s society is in many ways approaching the logical extreme of the Enlightenment (and in some ways perhaps not), I think that reading thinkers from both movements helps understand our current situation in a deeper manner–the positives, negatives, problems, solutions, values, etc.

I think that the most important takeaway from this class is the idea that art and science are not mutually exclusive. It is often times an assumption that science walks a path that is both methodologically and analytically distinct from art. I think that Professor Watkins has done a good job at arguing that this is an irrational position (i.e. by citing studies indicating that doctors who look at artwork tend to treat patients more accurately and better). Decreased attention to the Humanities (in particular, philosophy, art, and literature) is to our peril. And while the Enlightenment provides us with many important tools, the importance of recognizing its limitations and its negative consequences were relayed very effectively in this course.

The picture, “A Moonlight with a Lighthouse, Coast of Tuscany” painted by Joseph Wright, is meant to capture the Romantic skepticism of the Enlightenment’s Reason.

Infinitude and the Rose Window

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The Rose Window is a commentary on on Infinity. All of the pictures are in multiples of eights: eight sideways is the symbol for infinity and the eighth day is meant to allude to “the day after” the seven days of Creation, which signifies eternity. The Rose Window feels like it is infinitely complex: its colors, shapes, organization. One cannot help but be in awe when one sees the detail and brilliance of the whole window. It is almost too much to take in all at once.

The Rose Window calls us to set our minds on the infinitude of human nature. While bounded by limitation, and so finitude, the human spirit is always has a tension of both finitude and infinitude. Beauty calls us to the latter, beckoning us to walk uprightly before God, and to understand and grapple with the possibilities we are capable of achieving. The moral law is also complex, yet it elicits the same awe that does Beauty, and it is beautiful in a way as well.

Intellectual Diversity in America

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The markers here represent diversity–specifically intellectual diversity, but also racial, religious, and ethnic diversity. One of the most powerful points reverberating throughout the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is that of the inherent dignity and equality of each every person regardless of their individual, particular characteristics (one might say our “being made in the image of God”). While it took some time for the US to progress to dispense with, as regards legality, race, sex, etc. for consideration, I nonetheless think the universality is contained within the two founding documents–and many of the Founding Fathers themselves expressed as much in their private writings, contrary to what perhaps they had to show in public. In specific, the idea that this equality is a “self-evident” truth, that we all have “unalienable Rights,” embodied not only in the main articles of the Constitution, but also in the Bill of Rights (the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, and so forth)–these are all extremely powerful and fundamentally unique ideas, ones not exemplified in other countries’ constitutions (i.e. no other country has an unequivocal right to free speech). We often take it for granted that we have major liberty with respect to our being the architects of our own lives, and so long as we abide by relatively minimal rules of non-interference and such, we are treated as individuals with rights, rights not to be taken away. To what extent do you think these ideas and actual textual mechanisms have contributed to the intellectual diversity within America? To its being, by far, the world leader in medical innovation, entrepreneurship, technological advancement, and so forth? Also, what about racial, ethnic, and religious diversity? The US, while having a core of central values, is also the biggest amalgamation of different cultures and peoples–how have these eternal values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution contributed to the unparalleled diversity we witness in the US?

Duty, Motive, and Social Media

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Kant argues that to act rightly is to act from duty. One’s maxim of action ought to be none other than one’s adherence to the “law,” namely the law of morality and what it prescribes, which is good in and of itself. Actions are therefore not analyzed or evaluated with regards to their consequences, but instead with regards to whether or not they are performed out of a sense of duty. Kant’s deontology is strictly concerned with the intentions and motivations for actions, and so it dismisses that the outcomes effectuated by those actions are of any import in moral evaluation. To help better bring out the intuition, consider three cases:

  1. In acting out of a sense of duty, I donate food to charity. One unfortunate homeless man who received my food ended up choking while eating it and he died as a result.
  2. I am walking along a crowded street, and there is a child on the side of the road who is in need of help. With the intention of gaining applause from the crowd, I help the child. Absent the crowd, I may have hesitated helping the child or even not helped her at all.
  3. A rich businessman donates one million dollars to charity, barely noticing the hit in his bank account. A poor man donates one quarter to charity, causing him to take severe precautions in his spending for the rest of the month.

Each one of these cases is meant to bring out the moral sense of actions in deontological terms. In the first case, while my donating food to charity ended up causing the death of the homeless individual who ate that food, I still acted from a sense of duty–out of respect for the moral law–and so performed morally. Even though there ended up being bad consequences, my action was still good. In the second case, it seems as if my action was bad (or at the very least, problematic), even though there were good consequences as a result. Think of whether or not you would feel treated as a proper human being if someone saved you simply because they thought it would afford them fame or money–it seems like one may be justly offended by such a notion, even though the action resulted in good consequences. In the last example, it seems that it would be morally objectionable to say the businessman did something “more morally” simply on account of his having more money–one’s financial standing is trivial with respect to one’s capacity to act morally.

With this in mind, to what extent do you think social media causes actions that are counter to deontological morality? We see people often posting about their “passion” for certain activist causes, celebrity deaths, and so forth, yet, is it reasonable to assume they all do so out of a sense of duty? Furthermore, with a system that has algorithms garnered towards getting more likes, comments, shares, or whatever (depending on the platform), might we be suspicious of not only the maxims of other peoples’ actions (via their posts), but even our own? Given the uncertainty of knowing pure motives when there are all of these confounding and external variables, do you think social media can still be a platform that encourages moral behavior (within a Kantian deontological framework)?