I audited the course by Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan, on the development of the “The Modern and the Post-Modern” on Coursera.  (Audited here means watched the lectures but did not register or do the assignments.)  Roth discusses the development of the central themes of the world as it moved away from classicism or should I say neo-classicism of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  The romantic era of Rousseau and Marx and Hegel leads to an anti-establishment post-modern world of Nietzsche and a more self-reflective realism of painters like Delacroix and Manet. Ushering in the Modern is the search for intensity and the rejection of social norms of Baudelaire (he shoots a clock during a street protest).  Nietzsche rejects even conventional morality as a notion of self-imposed restraint of personal power and he rejects the idea  of God as a mere figure of shame the people use to impose a false and inhibiting morality.  Dr. Roth concentrates on Europe, but clearly the same development can be seen in America.  There was Jefferson, the Enlightenment paragon breaking from classical thought and religion and embracing science and empiricism.  On the continent, Darwin looks closely at natural processes and describes the fundamentals of biology, while in America Twain and Crane and John Singer Sargent are depicting a realistic world of the life as natural as we come.  Roth’s final lectures are on the art world.  The romantic Delacroix depicts life and revolution as glorious and emotional, depicting the mid-19^th century turmoil in France that Marx called “The Beautiful Revolution.”  Courbet turned to realism, pushing back against both classicism and romanticism.  He paints with the influence of the new art of photography.  He wanted to show the real, quotidian life of ordinary people and, famously rather outrageously, paints highly sexualized nudes and the banned girly-parts close up “The Origin of the World.”  Edouard Manet ushered in the Impressionism movement depicting the impression of light of the picture and the observer.  People interacting with the modern world of the railroad.  In Manet’s Olympia the unashamed courtesan stares directly at you, the observer, while in his “Bar at the Folie-Bergere he shows the barmaid staring away from the patron. While she serves a patron, she stands at the bar among all the objects for sale, which include herself and perhaps all of us watching.

Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan, teaches the course “The Modern and the Post-Modern.”  Roth says that while Rousseau claimed that the state protected inequality and uses the poor to protect the status of the rich, Alexis Tocqueville saw something else in America.  Tocqueville agreed with the problem of inequality but the state should be a vehicle to provide and protect the equality of persons.  Roth says about Rousseau that his legacy is long.  “He institutes a mode of thinking, that challenges his contemporary society, by saying that the dynamics that we see in what looks like progress, are really corruption…. we see greater inequality protected by the state, that vanity and hypocrisy keep us from knowing what human beings are really like.”

Michael Sandel, in his iTunes U course on Justice, lesson 9, mentions the problem of Aristotle’s acceptance of slavery in Nichomachean Ethics but also give a brilliant lecture of the use of teleological reasoning in defense of affirmative action in college admissions.  What is a college for?  He goes on the quote Winnie the Pooh! Winnie hears a buzzing noise in a tree, what is it for?  It means a bee, and what is a bee for? To make honey.  And what is honey for? For me to eat!

Well, Socrates claimed he knew nothing.  That was his only wisdom.  Of course, all that was Socratic irony, Socrates knew better.  On the other hand, there was Metrodorus of Chios.  I kind of like the fellow.  He said “None of us knows anything, not even this, whether we know or we do not know; nor do we know what ‘to not know’ or ‘to know’ are, nor on the whole, whether anything is or is not.”  from Cicero, see the SEP, on “Ancient Skepticism.”