It is impossible, the philosopher Martin Heidegger once declared, for any human being ever to be truly alone; to exist as a human at all, he argued, is always already to be acting and thinking and feeling in relation to other humans, to be interpreting our own being in relation to those who likewise, and reciprocally, must interpret their being in relation to ours. In this class, we shall examine the ways in which various philosophers and theorists have conceived this mutually entangled condition of togetherness, this existential condition of Being-With. We shall inquire, for example, into the ways this condition of shared being has been interpreted politically (in terms of entities such as city-state and nation-state), sociologically (through notions such as community and society), economically (through concepts such as markets and labor), and anthropologically (through the concepts of kinship group, family, and tribe). What shall distinguish this class from those to be found in any number of social science departments, however, is the close attention we shall be paying to the crucial role of culture, the role of literature in particular, in the making (and unmaking, and remaking) of all these ways of relating ourselves to one another. To put it somewhat more pithily (and alliteratively): how exactly do poetics relate to politics, and politics to poetics, in the shaping of our shared human existence? This course shall survey some of the most important ways of answering this question in the modern era, and then apply these modern theories to the translation and interpretation of select Ancient Greek texts that also attempt to deal with the question of community: the works of Greek tragedians and comedians, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and philosophers such as Heraclitus, Democritus, Aristotle and Plato.
This course will be taught in conjunction with CSLC 203, with an extra weekly session devoted to the study of Ancient Greek texts. Beyond the examination of ancient texts in the original, therefore, students will also be expected to study a wide array of social and cultural theorists from the 17th century to today, including (but not limited to) figures such as Hobbes and Vico, Rousseau, and Smith; Hegel and Marx, Malthus and Mill; Durkheim and Weber, de Beauvoir and Adorno; Fanon and Bourdieu, Turner and Geertz: Habermas and Rorty, Nussbaum and Butler; Nancy and Agamben, Appiah and al-Gharbi.
Students completing the final paper in this course with a grade of C or higher can use this work to satisfy the Second Stage Writing requirement.