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December 10, 2005
Intellectual orgasms
Patrick Ruffini (Penn '00, eCampaign Director at the Republican National Committee) found a picture at whitehouse.gov of one of our favorite professors recieving the National Humanities Medal from the President.
Dr. Alan Charles Kors is one of the few great conservatives in academia. His classes focus on 17th and 18th century European intellectual history, including such revolutionaries as Voltaire and Hobbes. Although most of the discussion went way over my head, I came to expect that by the end of the lecture, there would be something of an intellectual orgasm: a sense that after a lot of work, we had proven a major idea that revolutionized humanity. It was oddly satisfying, as opposed to business classes where we prove that Paramount in 1994 was worth $58.50 a share, not the $59.57 offered by some bidder.
Kors's class is one of few where I keep all the books and refer back to them regularly. We studied the 18th century, when Europe's classic liberal philosophers rejected Hobbes's assertion that life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbe's pessimism was replaced by an optimism that culminated in Jefferson's declaration that man has a right to the "pursuit of happiness." Jefferson's declaration was quite radical for its time, as Europe was emerging from a Dark Ages when the Christian church asserted that pleasure was sinful. There are still many churches that believe something similar, a philosophy that roughly says happiness is only possible through a personal relationship with Jesus or God.
Nonetheless, the Enlightment was fun because it was a time of exploration:
A man is not planted in one place, as a tree, to stay there his entire life. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile)
Consider Voltaire's Candide, who travels the world in search of his love Cunegonde and constantly expects to find happiness at the next turn, yet instead finds only wretched people. They include a Christian monk who spends his money womanizing and a one-legged slave who declares that "dogs, monkeys, and parrots are a thousand times less miserable than we." Candide finally finds and marries his love, though by this time, she is horribly ugly and shrewish. Candide never finds happiness until he asks his philosopher companions to "work without theorizing" and to "let us tend our garden."
The 18th century also saw the rise of the practical. Denis Diderot writes a shocking conversation between a doctor and Mdmse de L'Espinasse where the doctor recommends depressed young girls engage in auto-erotic acts, declaring chastity "the greatest of crimes" against nature. The doctor goes on to endorse homosexual and premarital sex, a rarety for the 18th century:
Take two acts, both of which can only give pleasure without usefulness, but one of which only gives pleasure to the person performing it while the other shares pleasure with a fellow creature, male or female (for in this matter the sex makes no difference, nor even who does what with what), and tell me what the verdict of common sense will prevail between the two.
As if this weren't shocking enough, Voltaire also explains why it is good to have people of many religions in one's society:
Go into the London Stock Exchange - a more respectable place than many a court - and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist [predecessor to the Amish], and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son's foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn't understand mumbled over the child, others go to their church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other's throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.
The 18th century was such a rich time for intellectuals that perhaps the biggest disappointment from leaving Kors's class every day was returing to the real world 300 years later where people still debate many of the principles so persuasively put to paper by the Enlightenment philosophers.
Posted by adrianjo at December 10, 2005 11:02 PM