Greek Art and the Pursuit of the Ideal

In both artistic and philosophical endeavors, as well as their daily activities, the ancient Greeks displayed a preoccupation with rational living and the pursuit of ideals. These spirits of rationalism and idealism ingrained in the culture found a natural corollary in Greek humanism, and surviving examples of Greek architecture and sculpture highlight the cultural search to reflect these ideals in a manner accessible to the senses.

The Parthenon, an example of Greek architecture at its pinnacle, shows us how the Athenians of the fifth century BC sought through their temples to bring order to the chaos of space. Their careful attention to symmetry and proportion, which went so far as to cause them to make extensive, yet infinitesimal visual compensations (for example, knowing that perfectly straight columns, when built very large, would appear bowed to the human eye, they designed these columns to bow slightly outward naturally so that to observers they would appear straight) points to their faith in mathematical reason to effect the concretization of their ideal.

In the realm of sculpture we have the Doryphorus. This statue of a young spear-bearer is the work of the sculptor Polykleitos, who is also known to have authored a treatise on aesthetics called his “Kanon.” Breaking down the human body into segments, he gave proportional measurements for each one, which when put together would, he believed, exemplify the ideal human form. As is the case with the Parthenon, the Doryphorus and Polykleitos' other sculptures are based on very definite mathematical proportions which seek to display the subjects in their most ordered forms. Again, this is a concrete instance of human reason seeking the ideal.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Greek attitude towards art is the humanism it displays. To posit the reality of ideals is one thing, an exercise common to many cultures; to say that such ideals can be discerned through the efforts of human reason is another. Such a belief requires them to rank human ability to recognize the aesthetic ideal when presented with it very high. Greek art, as seen in the Parthenon and the Doryphorus, reveals that the Greeks not only believed in a theoretical perfection of things encountered in day-to-day life, but that they firmly believe that this ideal can be reached towards and ultimately recognized by the workings of human reason.



The Parthenon



Doryphorus of Polykleitos

Rome on Sunday

These were pretty much all taken at or around Saint John Lateran.

Let the classes begin!

I'm not sure, having just completed the first day of class, how regularly I'll be able to keep up this blog. I should at least be able to write once a week, but as for more than that, I'm not sure.

The reading assignments are rather heavy, UD-style, but I'm not particularly concerned about the academic side of things by itself. Rather, I'm rather worried that all the mandatory meetings in which people regal us with hours of marvelously boring information that any one of us to keep our ears open over the past few days would know by heart already. I write satirically, as I know there is an unfortunately high rate of people who don't listen at most universities. But such hours of fidgeting make the ability to bilocate particularly appealing.

With that bit of complaining out of the way, I must say without reservation that the three classes we began today promise to be a blast. We have nearly 15 books for English, some of which (collections of Greek plays, for instance) we will not be reading in their entirety. Nonetheless, our English program for the Rome semester should cover quite a lot of material indeed, ranging from Greek to Shakespearean drama and focusing on the genres of tragedy and comedy as lenses through which we can approach a literary study of reality. The Philosophy of Man class is also exciting, partly because it will probably address one of the subjects that has been on my mind recently, namely, the relationship of Plato's and Aristotle's epistemologies. An Art and Architecture course is also required for this semester, and one of the fun things about this class is that a great many of the meetings will be held on site in Rome or in various locations around Italy.

I'm really psyched about getting a deeper understanding of a coherent view of the nature of reality and the meaning of life from this semester. I mean, come on. . .the meaning of life! What could jolly well be cooler?

Exploring Albano

Albano is a town nearby our campus. It's supposed to be about a 30 minute walk, but tonight, as some friends and I went out to explore it a bit, we didn't want to walk. For one thing, the streets - even the famous Via Appia (Via Appia Nuova, that is, a relative newcomer dating back only to 1784) were extraordinarily narrow, and I can assure you that every legend about the marvelous rashness of Italian drivers has been edited and bowdlerized out of respect for the feelings of these fine people. At several points, I saw three cars side by side in a two-lane road. Taking the bus into town, as you may imagine, was interesting in such a setting, but all in all it went off without a hassle and it was certainly more disconcerting for the unexperienced American, adapted to a cautious style of vehicle operation, to find the cars whizzing less than two inches from the sidewalk.

The houses were very tall and squished together and there were random ruins of castles around various corners of the cobblestone streets. We explored the city for a time, and once we began to worry that staying longer might make it impossible for us to both eat and catch the last bus back, we decisively chose one of the last open restaurants that was within our budget. (The restaurants tend to stay open late, but in such a small town there were only a few inexpensive restaurants to choose from, since the pizza shops and bakeries close earlier.)

Our waitress didn't speak English at all, really. You could tell that she genuinely didn't because she had a very difficult time understanding our requests for extra plates (we intended to split up meals). She was very friendly however, and after a few attempts to communicate through a mixture of Italian, English, and Spanish, we all understood each other, and we turned to our meal with a feeling of exaggerated triumph at the successful response to our first study-abroad challenge.

The food was "squisito" - which actually means "delicious" despite its looks. We ordered two pizzas (very thin crusted, one with cheese and tomatoes and one with zucchini) and two dishes of pasta - gnocchi with tomato sauce and fettuccine. It would have been a bit thin for the eight of us who went were it not for the fact that the "Mensa" (cafeteria) ladies had fed us an enormous lunch a few hours earlier.

A couple pictures of the restaurant (one with us in it, obviously):

First day in the city

Today is day two of orientation (and this fascinating exercise in practical education, successful or not, will continue until the weekend). The morning's attraction involved a hundred students sitting in a classroom, listening to various rules about drinking, etc. However, this afternoon, we had our first expedition into the city. It was stunning and overwhelming, though in a vague way due to the fact that we were split into hurried tour groups for a fast tour of some of the city's landmarks. Not exactly an activity calculated to instill grand sentiments of awe. Thus did our introduction to the city function as a advertisement for the rest of the semester – it gave us enough of a taste of the real thing to want to come back, but no time to enjoy it. The pleasure of Rome remains largely anticipatory.

St. Peter's in Vatican City, however, was amazing. We went to Mass there at 5:00, and then had time to wander around and look at things until 6:30. The church as a whole was stunning both in size and beauty; the famous statue of St. Peter with its toes worn down from years of reverent touches was magnificent, and the thought of just how many generations of Catholics have preceded us in this place sends a chill up one's spine.

But the best attraction by far was the Pieta. None of the widely circulated copies of the statue come close to giving one an idea of the actual thing. The marble is pure and smooth and appears almost soft, as though it were alive, but on a different plane than the observer. I can't really describe it beyond that, and I won't post a picture, as it couldn't do it justice.

However, I do have a couple of other pictures, and here they are:



Pantheon from the front



Pantheon from the back




The St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel in Santa Maria Supra Minerva





The tomb of St. Catherine of Siena in Santa Maria Supra Minerva




The Victor Emmanuel Monument, known for resembling an over-sized wedding cake.

I'll have to post more of the pictures separately, because I don't want this post to jam up the wireless here.

Rome

Well, the famous UD Rome semester has begun for me and half my fellow sophomores. We arrived on the lovely campus early yesterday morning and spent the day in a jet-lag induced fog, struggling through orientation events whenever we were not turning to each other in fits of excitement worth about ten energy drinks each and exclaiming that we were actually in Rome.

The campus here is gorgeous, though tiny. It consists of three buildings: a large dormitory with six-person suites; a building which houses two classrooms, the Capp Bar, the library, and the cafeteria; and a villa where the professors and their families live, the professors' offices are located, and where one can find the chapel. A vineyard fills most of the property on the side of campus without buildings, but there is a courtyard of sorts between the buildings and then a soccer field and lots of. . .grass.





Part of the courtyard as seen from our window




An example of how close other houses are to the Rome campus. . .and an example of how crowded Rome is in general, considering that our campus is considered rather secluded.




More window view: this is the professors' villa




Part of the view from our window

Freedom of Choice Act

I know, I know, since when do I post political stuff here? Or at least, political stuff that doesn't focus on the 1700s and general political theory. But the proposed "Freedom of Choice Act" that Mr. Obama has promised to implement is too much to just sit back and watch come to fruition.

Among other things, this rabidly pro-abortion proposition would:

* do away with state laws on parental involvement, on partial birth abortion, and on all other protections.
* compel taxpayer funding of abortions.
* force faith-based hospitals and healthcare facilities to perform abortions.

This isn't just a bill that will hurt the pro-life cause; it's one that will really present a great blow to the whole American idea of Constitutional freedoms (not to mention the now uncommon belief in certain innate freedoms, etc). I'm using a rather shallow distinction consciously in the above sentence, only because it's a fairly common one - I really think the pro-abortion cause itself strikes at the heart of the Constitution; that it's not just an issue of opinion for Americans to decide willy-nilly by majority rule, but I'm not going to address that here. For now I'm going to let the distinction stand and try to phrase the argument in the proponents' own terms to a degree. It just shows you how extreme people can be about this issue when they start undermining some of their own dearest arguments just so that they can get legislation they support pushed through.

Regardless of beliefs about abortion, it should be quite clear that such an act, proposing as it does to compel taxpayer funding of abortions, and to force faith-based hospitals and healthcare facilities to perform abortions (among other proposed measures) strikes at our Constitutional right to real free choice .

To compel taxpayer funding of abortions is to interfere with their innate freedom of conscience, which the clause protecting religious freedom in the First Amendment implicitly upholds. Forcing religious hospitals to offer abortions in opposition to their professed beliefs also erodes the value of this Amendment. What difference will it make in the long run if the act is not passed? The sole risk associated with it, from the point of view of those who support abortion, is that some women, when presented with alternatives to that procedure, could freely choose to keep her baby. And for those who object to abortion, rejection of this act will preserve their freedom to dissent.

We cannot presume to force American citizens to support, both financially and through their actions, a practice to which they have a stong moral and ethical objection. We cannot achieve freedom of choice by denying dissenters the right to disagree on the off chance that a woman may change her mind in response to their arguments. We cannot sacrifice the foundations of American liberty in favor of the dogma that abortion "rights" must be inviolable and their presuppositions about the nature of human life implicitly true.

North vs. South

It's pretty natural, I suppose, being as I am at a college in an unambiguously southern state, that I should be exposed to some fairly strong opinions about the Civil War. Barely any of these, it needs hardly be said, are particularly complementary to the North. I was rather surprised coming down here, actually, to find opinions on the subject still so vehemently held... I mean, the war was nearly 150 years ago, and everyone in the South is now benefiting on equal terms with all the rest of us from the Union of the states. And you just need to look at the history of the 20th century to see how beneficial that union has ended up being to us and to the rest of the world (WWI, WWII, etc).

Be that as it may, my American History class has been quite wonderful in its approach to the era, treating the writings of the period to a rigorous interpretation in light of the country's inheritance from the Founding Fathers. My current understanding of Lincoln's writings leads me to refine my earlier ideas that it is possible to analyze the Civil War from two major perspectives: it was either a war about slavery or a war about states' rights. I do think each of these two aspects was decisive in raising the main issue at stake as an issue divisive enough to split the county, and in the minds of many involved, one or the other was the sole reason for which they were fighting. But there is a more fundamental issue at stake, I think, and it's one that is more intimately connected with the message of the Declaration than either of those two.

I believe that before it was a questions of states' rights explicitly, the dispute at the heart of the war was about how we are to understand rights at all. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that this issue is implied in the states' rights and slavery interpretations. The essential question at the heart of, for example, the Lincoln-Douglass debates, is whether it is accurate to conceive of "liberty" as the capacity to override existing statutory law (here, the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850) just because a majority wishes to do so. Of course, if you're going to go by the principles laid out in the Federalist papers, to legislate purely according to the will of the majority as opposed to precedent and fundamental law "may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny" (Federalist 88).

This becomes a question of greater significance if the fundamental law on which the government is based purports to be a reflection (at least to some degree) of the absolute laws of justice, as we see in the claim of the Declaration to be based on the self-evident truth that "all men are created equal" and that their rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are inalienable. Of course, if the government is such an organic institution, existing in principle from before their actual codification, as Lincoln suggests in his First Inaugural Address (paragraph 13), you really can't throw it off legally (i.e., Constitutionally for Lincoln) unless it itself breaches the fundamental law at its core. The fundamental law moreover is essentially the sum of absolute duties intrinsic to man in virtue of his personhood, not in virtue of majority rule in their favour, while the rights resulting from this fundamental law comprise the freedom to fulfill it. Thus if you reject the government that is trying to uphold the fundamental law, you're rejecting this conception of liberty for excellence in favour of a conception as liberty as the random will of a majority.

Of course, a question that comes up as to whether one could see the South in the Civil War as not intending to reject the fundamental law at the heart of the Constitution at all but to merely change the external form of government that protects it. However, slavery intrinsically violates fundamental law by denying certain people their absolute rights. Looking at the matter chronologically, it is fairly easy to trace the natural progression of thought that would come from support of such an institution. First you have a slave or two, you need to justify the fact that this manifestly contradicts the principles of the Declaration, you naturally enough begin to cry for "states' rights!" "our natural liberties to do what we want with our own property!". Thus you have the concept of states' rights deriving easily from the fact of slavery. Implied in this in the sense that it is necessary to make this view coherent is the redefinition of what it means for Americans to be self-governing.

The idea at the heart of Lincoln's battle for the Union, for the upholding of the American Constitution is that the liberty to which we have a Constitutional right is the freedom to do what is right, not to have equal freedom to do good or evil. If we deny the existence of moral absolutes, civil society disintegrates, Lincoln believes, and it is for this conviction that he came back to politics, debated Stephen Douglass, and finally became president.

The Education of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass’ autobiography follows the development of his earnest conviction of his innate humanity and liberty. This realization has its roots in his early childhood when he entertained “a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold [him] within its foul embrace” (Douglass, 43). The rest of his years as a slave are a continual struggle to retain this inborn sense of humanity in the face of repeated attempts to reduce him to a state of bestial apathy towards his natural liberty. Preservation of his sense of inherent freedom and humanity requires that his embryonic understanding be nourished through education from some trustworthy source which supports, deepens, and sophisticates the vague comprehension with which he is born. This source he discovers by learning to read.

Experience is the first form of education Douglass receives. As a small child he witnesses much brutality in plantation life. Recounting his experience of seeing his aunt brutally beaten by his master, he observes that “it was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and participant” (Douglass, 21). He speaks of the songs and chants of his people, each of which is “a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains,” and traces his “first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery” from his hearing of these songs (Douglass, 27, 28). Despite his horror at the injustices suffered by his people however, he does not “understand the deep meaning” of their sadness well enough to express it in concrete terms (Douglass, 27). He longs vaguely for freedom but has little comprehension of why the opposite is wrong and poor ability to phrase his intuition.

Moreover, though experience reveals to him the ugliness of the institution, in the long run it has the potential to deceive him. Natural sentiment, met with the sights the young Douglass witnesses, initially revolts. However, constant dehumanizing treatment can hardly fail to make some impression on most people, and the Narrative recounts the deadening effect slavery—both the experience of being enslaved and owning slaves—has upon the souls of men, black and white alike. The masters beastialize themselves by denying the humanity of other men, convincing themselves and others that these slaves are incapable of “virtuous freedom” (Douglass, 80). Slavery can prove as injurious” to such tyrants as it does to those from whom they have withheld freedom (Douglass, 49). The slaves in their turn, having no guide to reveal the path from servitude to freedom, begin to swallow the lie that they are not fit for the “privilege” of basic human liberty. Constant mistreatment and attempts to break their natural spirit can only reinforce such a misconception. Experience can degrade more than it enlightens, Douglass shows. Some further teacher is necessary to sustain the germ of liberty within the heart of a slave.

Douglass attains this further education through reading. Ironically enough, his master, Hugh Auld, is responsible for kindling Douglass' enthusiasm for this mode of education by remarking that to teach a slave his letters “would forever unfit him to be a slave” (Douglass, 45). Upon hearing this, Douglass realizes that “the white man's power to enslave the black man” is found in the former's ability to keep the latter illiterate. Books and education in language give “tongue to interesting thoughts of [Douglass'] soul, which had frequently flashed through [his] mind, and died away for lack of utterance (Douglass, 51). By preserving ideas in concrete words, a book helps to immortalize and clarify glimpses of the truth that appear in experience. In Douglass' soul, “freedom now appear[s] to disappear no more” (Douglass, 51).

The experience of slaves in the American South was of being perpetually ground deeper into a “beast-like stupor” that crippled the natural feeling of innate freedom. Insofar as his only education was experience, the indoctrination his brutal treatment imposed could “disgust the slave with freedom” by causing himself to believe himself unfit for it (Douglass, 81). Thus, the strength of the innate notion of human freedom is to some degree a matter of cultural inheritance, due to the influence of the education provided by one's culture. The result of Douglass' reading is that his education is not confined to the indoctrination pressed upon him by his cultural circumstances. His formation in knowledge and understanding “rekindles the few expiring embers of freedom,” and “revives in [him] the sense of [his] own manhood” (Douglass, 78).

Just a note

I'm doing some maintainance on this site just now, which includes deleting some of the links for the blogs I've linked to which seem to have become largely defunct since I posted them. I'm going to work on looking out for any others whose theme would blend well with that of this blog.

On a completely unrelated note, I just got back from the UD English Department Christmas party, and was quite impressed by the deliciousness of the food. Salmon with dill, spinach dip with flat bread, hummus, truffles, and quite a nice variety of desserts. Jolly good.

We also had a reading of an Anglo-Saxon hymn that was set up a dialogue between Mary and Joseph before the birth of Jesus. Joseph was criticizing Mary at first, thinking that she had been unfaithful to him, and Mary replies by defending herself through a sophisticated exposition of the Catholic doctrine of the Virgin birth. It was rather interesting, although I was rather disappointed at the portrayal of St. Joseph, who wouldn't have reacted so judgmentally, I think. It was fascinating to hear the ideas laid out in a language and format that was so reminiscent of Beowulf or some other poem from about that time period

Nietzsche vs Christianity

In one of our recent philosophy colloquiums, Fr. James Lehrberger presented a rather interesting discussion of the 19th century German philosopher, Nietzsche, and his critique of Christianity. I've heard plenty about the guy before, but not his specific argument against the faith.

Basically, Fr. Lehrberger allowed Christian doctrine to provide its own answer to Nietzsche's accusation that it is a religion fueled by an unconscious envy, hatred, and spirit of revenge. This answer is quite useful for what it attempts to disprove (namely that vengeance and hatred are at the heart of Christian doctrine). However, it does not attempt to address the fundamental discord between Nietzsche's philosophy and the tenets of Christianity, the fact that each simultaneously claims to be the only true path to human fulfillment. Nietzsche's assertion that Christianity consciously celebrates weakness and subservience and rejoices in the destruction of the strong was shown by Fr. Lehrberger's argument to be inaccurate: Christianity claims with every bit as much confidence as Nietzsche to the the route to a fuller and more glorious humanity. This nonetheless leaves us, however, with two radically opposed pictures of what it means to be human, each of which alleges that the other will in practice destroy everything dynamic and noble in a man.

For Nietzsche, the ultimate human good is the advantage of the individual. Christian emphasis on a person's duties towards others seems to him no more than an attempt of the weak to depict standards protecting their kind from robbery, murder, tyranny, or other "crimes" as based upon some objective moral standard. Only the weak and vulnerable benefit from commandments and laws forbidding violence or trickery, while those who are strong and intelligent enough to use such means for their gain are penalized. The greatest human good is realized in whatever person is most independent of such effeminate myths, most free to use his natural advantages to his own benefit, and most rich in those advantages which allow him to retain this independence unchallenged.

A very different conception of what it means to be human drives the message of Christianity. Man is not brought to perfection but in fact is dehumanized when he isolates himself from his fellow men and acts in a manner that puts him into constant competition with them. To be human is to be an intrinsically relational being. Whatever actions harm one's fellow men harm oneself as well, and true humanity therefore necessarily excludes whatever actions violate the standards of just interaction between human beings. Conversely, actions which benefit the weak benefit also the actor, as in strengthening one member of the Body of Christ, they bring a more perfect life to all.

Essentially the question that one who examines Nietzsche's critique carefully must ultimately face is whether his proposal or the Church's message promises true human fulfillment. An adequate answer would fill a book at least, but it is true that to some extent, the latter option makes more intuitive sense. As we live our lives, it's hard to make the case that we are most complete as lone individuals seem very convincing at all to ourselves. The principle of rationality really does appear in our daily lives as a concrete reality, and it is from this experiential base that we can be motivated to help defend the Christian view of man's meaning in life.

Blog personality?

Hahaha... so now personality tests have made it into the blogosphere, eh? You know those ridiculous but quite amusing tests you have to take, for example, before being assigned a roommate? Well here's a one for my blog. Apparently they've designed an application to explore the site and analyze things like type of vocabulary, length of sentences, and to some degree, subject matter (kind of an expanded version of what those reading-level analyses on Microsoft Word do). It really is quite amusing.

The analysis indicates that the author of http://sesquipadalianmusings.blogspot.com is of the type:

INTP - The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

The person in the picture looks just a tad schizophrenic. There's no way anyone has that many things going on in their head at once and stays sane.

Try it yourself if you've got a blog. It will make you chuckle... and everyone else is doing it (most novel reason in the world, eh?). http://www.typealyzer.com/

Slavery's Destruction of the Family

This small paper begins to get at some of what I was talking about previously, though it's not in any sense complete. I'm only focusing on the family here, and even my treatment of that is quite restricted due to length limits. It's a good pre-exercise for the real thing, though. The prompt here was "What role does the cabin play as the dominent image in Stowe's argument against slavery?"

Given the title of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic protest against slavery, it is not surprising that Uncle Tom's cabin plays an important symbolic role in her argument. This cabin, as the center of Uncle Tom's family life, represents the most sacred and fundamental unit of human society. However, in a slave-owning society, both Uncle Tom and his home are no more than pieces of property, vulnerable at any moment to separation. According to Stowe, the social and moral ills of slavery are rooted in the destruction of the family, in robbing human beings of the capacity to create a safe and secure home.

Physically present for only a few brief pages towards the beginning of the book, the cabin nevertheless acts as the dominant image of slavery's catastrophic effect on family life, particularly in its later conspicuous absence. First presented as a neat, welcoming sanctuary of family life, with its "neat garden patch" and good food, the position of this "snug territory" is nonetheless insecure (Stowe, 32). Its status as center of life for the small community of relations and friends on the estate is legally subordinate to that of the master's "close adjoining" house (Stowe, 32). The preceding scenes in which the master and trader plan to sell Tom, the spiritual and familial head of this small community, make the reader aware that the most attentive efforts of a slave to create a happy, peaceful household are in vain if the master finds it convenient to break up this state by selling a member of the family. Tom is sold, removed from his home and family in order to satisfy the debts of a relatively decent master. He has no right to defend his home; no liberty to fight for himself and the welfare of those he loves. Not only is his lifestyle insecure, but he has no freedom to secure it.

The motif of the breaking up of familial relationships continues from the time Tom is sold to the end of the narrative. George and Eliza Harris' desperate bid to preserve their family in a free land, Topsy's lack of a good and loving upbringing, and Cassy's bitterness at having been robbed of her daughter and of the chance of a stable family demonstrate how this legal and societal lack of respect for the home of a slave plagues those who live in such a society. Thus, even in the best of circumstances where a kind master and mistress allow the foundation of such a community among the slaves, the home cannot truly flourish. The system of slavery destroys the essential characteristic of security in family life by viewing people as property, liable to be sold to satisfy a good master's debts or a bad master's whims. As another decent slave owner, Augustine St. Clare puts it, the heart of the evil of slavery does not lie in its "abuses": "the thing itself is the essence of all abuse" (Stowe, 262).

During Tom's absence, his cabin is "shut up" (Stowe, 301). He is robbed of it and it is robbed of him. Not until the very end is this break in some sense healed. George Shelby—himself a former honorary member of Uncle Tom's family, though the master's son—frees the slaves and removes this insecurity from them "in case of [his] getting in debt or dying" (Stowe, 509). The cruel fate of Uncle Tom had caused Shelby to resolve "that nobody, through me, should ever run the risk of being parted from home and friends, and dying on a lonely plantation" (Stowe, 509). His final exhortaion to his former servants serves as an exhortation to Stowe's readers as well. "Think of your freedom," he says, "every time you see Uncle Tom's cabin"; this simple house will be a reminder of the evils of slavery that tear apart the family and uproot a loving household (Stowe, 509).

Jolly exciting, all this!

Going back to what I was saying last night:

Essentially, Stowe's argument is that slavery dehumanizes people by treating them like "isolated selves", as though they were individual pawns to be separated from ties of family and friends at the whim of their masters. There is no recognition in law of their personal identity in terms of their family or larger community. You see this in her constant centering of the plot around various types of homes: we start in the "ideal" slave-owning household where the slaves are treated with incredible kindness by their owners. The lack of respect in law for their community however results in Uncle Tom and Eliza (for her son's sake) being torn from this community in order to satisfy his master's debts. The first dozen chapters end with Eliza arriving safely at the idyllic Quaker home in the north. The second dozen follow Uncle Tom south to where we find Eva, a sort of symbol of purity in the midst of the deep south, saddened by the sin of her own home and longing for an eternal one. Finally we have the tragic scene where Uncle Tom is killed yet dies a freer man than any of his murderers because he has held on to the one community - the Christian (real Christian) community that no earthly law can rob him of.

This is all pretty evident from even the most brief summary. The real controversy remains whether this is at all what Douglass and Jacobs are trying to say. (Fortunately we only have to deal in detail with Douglass for the paper - if we had to treat Jacobs too, this really could get to dissertation length.) Just as with Stowe's book, Douglass's argument becomes much more apparent if you start by looking at it from a more architectonic standpoint. Chapter 1 opens with Douglass' regrets that he knows neither his birthday nor his father nor his mother. Chapter 2 centers around his lack of a home and on the slaves' innate attraction to the idea of the "Great House Farm" which will be not just their master's but theirs as well. In chapter 3 we get an account of his inability to live the way he wishes to - not just of his lack of independence to do whatever he feels like, but of his freedom to live well: he speaks of how slavery creates a disjunct between the "thoughts of the heart" and one's moral obligations, and what the slaves must in fact say and do. They are forced to lie, to ignore familial bonds, to keep their own self-interest at the forefront of their minds if they are to survive at all. The introduction of the overseer in the fourth chapter and accounts of killings perpetrated by him and his ilk for which the slaves have no hope of legal redress emphasize the lack of protection in law for their community. (Isn't this cool stuff?) Finally, in chapter five and following, Douglass learns to read. This reintroduces him to a community, gives him a notion of it that in turn gives him the courage to claim his freedom. Once able to read he has "reached the period in [his] life when [he] can give dates"; he receives a new set of "fathers" in the figures of the Founding Fathers and others whose writings educate him in a sense of his humanity; in the language of scripture, he receives a new mother tongue. When he finally has this new sense of community (sense of time, forebears, church), of where he belongs as an individual in relation to other people, he fights to preserve it.

So that's the idea, more or less, from an architectonic point of view. Seven pages will leave plenty of room for explicit quotations and so forth, which will be fun.

Another seven page paper!

Well, I've got another 7-page paper assigned in American Civ. The prompt is even more exciting than the last one. Seriously, you could write a dissertation on the thing. The actual prompt is only a sentence long: "Does Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin betray or convey the slaves' own argument against slavery." Ok. Maybe on first reading it doesn't sound all that enthralling (or maybe it does). But if you've been doing the reading, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, if you know even a bit about the virulent controversy revolving around the question of the proper way to interpret the slave's demand for freedom and the black Americans' demand for civil rights (Martin Luther King vs Malcom X, anyone?), and if you've just been bowled over by the realization that Uncle Tom's Cabin isn't just a silly, sentimental novel but has a valid and well-structured argument at its base, you probably will reconsider.


Add to that the fact that Dr. Hanssen handed out several very cool readings - one from Cicero (De Officiis) on how we can understand man's natural rights in terms of his moral obligations, one from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, an excerpt from John Paul II's "Veritatis Splendor" which discusses intrinsically evil acts, part of an address from Pope Benedict, and a very interesting chapter from a book about women's experiences in slavery by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese - and you can see how this paper has the potential to be very fun indeed. I'm going to argue that Uncle Tom's Cabin, contrary to the ideas of more recent literary criticism ("more recent" being the '60s), does in fact convey the Douglass' and Jacob's main argument against slavery. How does it do that? Well, that's where everything should get so interesting, of course.

I shall post about it tomorrow.