Plan for First Lecture

So, one huge question that most people will sympathize with is this: why is it important to study philosophy? What good does it *really* do for anyone, at the end of the day? To begin to answer this, a provocation, I feel, is necessary.

My idea was to show slides of the Lascaux cave paintings, and to ask the students what they were. What could these possibly mean? Who made them? Why were they made? What was the purpose behind making them?

The agreed upon answers in anthropology tend to fall into the "hunting magic" camp. The idea being that these primitive peoples, who existed prior to the written word (and almost certainly speech, at least as we know it), were doing a number of things. The first one was to represent what was most pressing on their minds -- magnificent beasts whose proximity and presence they could not directly control. Obviously, these creatures inspired something akin to awe or wonder in our primitive peoples -- but not only that. The beasts were also thematically large in most cases, and rendered so. From this we can infer that killing even one of them would be a massive boon for a tribal, cave-frequenting community. It would be a cause for immense celebration. There was a salvation of sorts that these people were attempting to procure, much in the same way an athlete visualizes successful completion of an event, a critical movement or the winning of a game. In the absence of the beast, they attempted to contain and capture their spirits with a depiction, the rendering of an image. Lastly, worship. Obviously, these tremendous creatures were not only things that our people would have happily eaten -- they loved and revered these beasts in some intense and powerful way.

What bearing, it might be wondered, would any of this have on philosophy? It's quite simple when we note the way in which human beings are unique in the animal kingdom for making such artistic renderings. We attempt to tame reality through representation; furthermore, representation tames the animal in us, so much as we accede to and participate in it, symbolically. Another way of looking at the cave paintings is through the lens of "epistemic criteriology" or even a kind of anamnesis. We know their meaning because its necessity has been sublated in us and is contained; and yet, their meaning is indescribably foreign, because in the process of our becoming ever more human, our interpellation in the symbolic realm has tamed the vivacious and immediate appeal and understanding that these images might have otherwise had for us. We only know their rough sense, in so many words, because that rough sense is still a part of us, driven and hungry creatures that we are; but it is only a rough sense, insofar as it is excluded from what normally passes as (human) meaning, and thus remains for us something raw and alien.

Even more telling: these things are products of humanity. We are humans. We look upon them with terrible and haunting questions. We become a question to ourselves -- or rather, the moment at which our consciousness qua human consciousness sparks becomes a question. From this, the question of where we came from and where we're going naturally alights.

From the second creatures began to communicate their hopes, dreams, fears, longings, hungers, needs and drives through representative means . . . that was the moment that the germ seed of philosophy came into being. Because however superstitious and ritualistic an attempt to control a massive, autonomous living creature by making a large painting of it may have been, the act itself was an attempt at wisdom, like all the mythic and religious narrative explanations of reality that came after it.

Man you're already anticipating my curriculum, amazing how that works.

Aristeuein, i.e, the native view of justice or the good of men as portrayed in the Iliad, justice as besting one's rivals in all things, is a topic I definitely want to touch on. Thrasymachus' dramatic hyperbole against Socrates in The Republic is such a good literary example of this, and the extremely gentle way in which Socrates starts to get him beyond it is so telling.

The overall vision I have is basically this:

Human beings are obviously animals endowed with the capacity to represent meaning in images and symbols. Through time, the need to vent our unique form of consciousness in commingled acts of worship, ritual and sacrifice, which were the earliest ways in which things like justice and law were established, evolved into ever more and more fair, just, rational and mediated ways of representing and doing things. Somehow, however, the regressive tendency towards evil or more primitive ways of negotiating conflict keeps rearing its head. What of this remainder? How do we deal with it?

Also, in re: Kafka. Can you elaborate? I would love to hear your commentary on a short that might be accessible for my students to start to grasp this overall problematic, i.e., that of "winning" and "losing" as you put it. I've read the metamorphosis very long ago, but beyond that, I am unversed. I definitely want to interweave existential problems into the course -- one of the things I want to touch on, very desperately, is the question of why it is at all worthwhile to study philosophy and/or to learn to think philosophically, in face of the often questionable worth of life itself.

Anyhow, I'll try and use this thread to keep developing the thoughts -- maybe even flesh out talking points for lectures in advance. Thanks for the comments! Helpful for certain, and feel free to elaborate on your own ideas there.