Teaching Voluntary Servitude

In Fall 2015, I'll be teaching PHIL 3330A: Topics in History of Social and Political Philosophy, at Carleton University. The purpose of the course is, loosely speaking, to familiarize students with political thought from the early modern period to the 19th century, while covering some of the big names in political theory, such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Probably J.S. Mill, too, but he didn't make the cut for reasons that may or may not become clear below.

My first impulse was to arrange the readings as a debate about the valences and vagaries of consensus and dissensus, but I opted not to, since that distinction seemed to look backwards at a project I'd just completed. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but I would prefer to teach without knowing the theoretical trajectory of the course in advance.

I chose, then, to use the course as a chance to investigate some of Miguel Abensour's work on what La Boétie calls voluntary servitude. It forms part of a larger project on Abensour's critico-utopian philosophy. If you happen to be familiar with Abensour's only book translated into English, and are somewhat surprised by this, he was involved in bringing a critical edition of Le discours de la servitude volontaire to press in 1976 (reissued by Payot & Rivages in 2002), which includes essays by Abensour and Marcel Gauchet (before they became enemies), Claude Lefort, and Pierre Clastres. He's revisited La Boétie's "contr'un" in more recent work, and that will, in part, guide the readings for the course.

Here's the course description:

According to prominent accounts of the topic, the goal of political philosophy is to elaborate the conditions that make it possible to protect individual liberties and distribute goods fairly. The history that tracks the development of this task of political philosophy leads from John Locke to John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Without necessarily disputing the democratic ideal of this approach, we will study another persistent problem in social and political philosophy: the concern that social institutions emerge not from procedures of consensus and well-reasoned debate, but as forms of voluntary servitude. We will examine this other tradition of philosophical inquiry—which includes La Boétie, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx—in order to consider the following questions:

• What is voluntary servitude?
• Is it significant that democratic institutions might have arisen from institutions originally dedicated to policing society?
• Are there forms of democracy that do not involve voluntary servitude?

And the readings:

• John Locke, Second Treatise of Government. Ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980). ISBN: 978-0-915144-86-0. 
• Etienne de la Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2012). ISBN: 978-1-60384-839-8.
• Miguel Abensour, “Is There a Proper Way To Use the Voluntary Servitude Hypothesis?” Journal of Political Ideologies, 16/3 (2011), 329–348.
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. Revised Student Edition. Ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ISBN: 9780521567978. 
• Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise. Trans. Samuel Shirley. Second Edition (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001). ISBN: 978-0-87220-607-6. 
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses. Ed. Susan Dunn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). ISBN: 9780300091410. 
• G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Preface (pp. 20–23); §182–208; §230–249.
• Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990). ISBN: 9780140445688.

Late Additions: Teaching

More often than not, I receive courses for the Winter semester in December--it's happened enough times that I feel like I've written this post several times before. An early Xmas gift (the course, not the post), if you will. This year one of the professors at the University of Ottawa decided to retire for the new year, and that decision made his section of Great Philosophers available, and I ended up with it.

I tend to teach the course through contrasting the canon of Western philosophy with less traditional figures/critics of the canon. When I run the list past friends and colleagues, there always seems to be at least one name that produces the unconscious that's-not-a-great-philosopher facial tic. My reasoning is that the students don't know that. By including non-traditional figures, I'm staving off the eventual inculcation of biases about what makes a philosopher great or not. I'll admit that, given that I try to spend at least a week on each figure, the list isn't as diverse as it could be--but that's always balanced by the worry that if the student finds the non-traditional figures compelling, that he/she might not read them again in his/her philosophical training.

This year, the picks: 

• The canon includes Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
• Each year, I don't know if Marx belongs in the canon or critics.
• The non-canon includes Schiller, Du Bois, Bergson, and Beauvoir.

I've been emboldened regarding Schiller, having just written an extensive amount about him for Egalitarian Moments. Du Bois has become a fixture when I teach this course, as has Beauvoir. Sartre didn't make the cut this time around because I taught him in a third year course (Topics in European Philosophy) at Carleton this fall, and I've chosen Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity over The Second Sex for the same reason.

The big change for the next semester, then, is the addition of Bergson, who I've never taught and of whom I've admittedly read very little. Given that I've been critical of post-Bergsonian vitalism (via Senghor and Deleuze) I've figured that it's time to catch up on Bergson himself. The impetus, however, was finding his Introduction to Metaphysics in an affordable edition while browsing through Hackett's website. It will be just my luck that, after Descartes, Spinoza, and Schiller, the whole class will end up Bergsonian despite my efforts...

Representing Art Theories

One of the most, maybe the most, time consuming parts to preparing a lecture for the course "Theories of Art" is searching for decent digital reproductions of paintings and sculptures. Even when you can access a resource like ARTstor, I spend a lot of time considering what images are most appropriate (is an image verging on cliche? if less known, is it still formally interesting? etc.). Note that ARTstor is not complete, which leads to the next paragraph:

If you don't have access to these resources via a library, things get tougher. As long as a work is in the public domain (more or less), Wikipedia is fairly reliable, although you often have to switch between languages to find your way to the more extensive galleries (often this requires going to the page in the artist's native language, where there is often the most interest in his or her work). When the work is still under copyright, things get much trickier. I spent the last two days working on a lecture on Max Raphael's Proudhon, Marx, Picasso, on excerpts from the chapter on Marx. Overall the book was a pleasure to read--too bad it's faded into obscurity (I discovered it  while researching Walter Benjamin's sources).

Every lecture starts with an image of the critic if possible. This lead me to MoMA, where I discovered a watercolor by Max Pechstein, Max Raphael, 1910:

But when I wanted to address some of the questions posed by Raphael, and pose them through the interpretation of visual arts, I had some difficulty finding the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Diego Rivera. To save you some time, if you like, and if you would like a source for images for teaching some contemporary work under copyright, here are a few links:

• Diego Rivera's murals from 1931-1932 at MoMA are here.
• Basquiat, at Potomitan, a resource for créole culture.
• And from my research last year, the gallery Latin American Masters. I found the site while looking for José Bedia, whose work figures prominently in Gerardo Mosquera's article "The Marco Polo Syndrome."

The New Semester is Starting

I'll be introducing my first course for the winter semester in under two hours. Here's the reading list for the course:

• Plato, The Republic, Books IV and X
• Aristotle, Politics, Book I
• Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I, and Meditations I, II, IV and (briefly) VI
• Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (selections)
• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (selections)
• Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts ("Alienated Labor" and "Private Property and Communism")
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, chapters 1 and 3
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (as much as we can read in two weeks)

Compared to previous iterations of the course, I've switched from the first few books of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to the Politics, and added Wollstonecraft and Du Bois (who I've previously taught in the course "Fundamental Questions"). In addition, I decided to change things up with Beauvoir. Instead of teaching Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism" followed by the introduction to The Second Sex, we will be sorting out The Ethics of Ambiguity--why absurdity and ambiguity are not the same thing.

Teaching Fundamental Philosophical Questions

I just found out that I will be teaching "Fundamental Philosophical Questions" in the winter semester, along with  my course in the Department of Visual Arts, "Art Theories." Local University of Ottawa lore has it that the philosophy department split what is usually "Introduction to Philosophy" into "Fundamental Questions" and "Great Philosophers" as a concession to the Analytic/Continental divide. I'm using the fundamental questions to add several figures that aren't usually included in the canon (I've done this before with Great Philosophers as well). Here's what I've got after a few hours of work:

This course is an introduction to several of the fundamental questions of philosophy. We will be reading a variety of material dedicated to the search for the ‘good life.’ We will see that what the good life is has its own history, as we analyze texts ranging from Plato’s Republic to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. We will see how such a form of life is thought as an idea of harmony, religious devotion, a rational pursuit, a product of self-exploration and self-realization, and finally, as a mode of social involvement that seeks to appropriate and transform a way of life denied to historically marginalized groups and peoples.

After the usual suspects like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Rousseau (culled from Charles Guignon's anthology The Good Life), we'll spend a significant amount of time working with the themes of existentialism and alienation as a way into Léopold Sédar Senghor's "Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century" and Fanon's "On National Culture." This will be a whole other way to ask what the good life is.

Paulo Freire, Round One

I'm going in to teach chapter two of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed in about twenty minutes. It's a challenge to myself and to the students-- all 170 of them, which is about 150 more than Freire recommends for dialogical problem-posing sessions. 

The basic idea is fairly clear: that the banking concept of knowledge aims to produce a body of knowledge that integrates people into the status quo, and that problem-posing education aims to show that social relations (including knowledge) are transformed through our praxis. It's up to the students, however, to figure out what that means for their lives.

The New Course Description

The new, emboldened doctor has a new course description for his class entitled 'Great Philosophers':

It is a good question, in the year 2010, to ask why we should talk about ‘Great’ philosophers. A title such as this seems to indicate a set of essential qualities of both greatness and what it takes to be a philosopher. To our more skeptical eyes, a decade after the turn of the 21st century, it seems to be an anachronism. Do not the ‘Great’ philosophers overlap with a particular image of society that is overly white, European, bourgeois, and imperial? Have not the very promises of philosophy or even civilization been used to oppress those excluded? Minorities? The colonialized? The poor? Women?

And yet, is there not a promise in some of the ideas that continuously reappear in the history of philosophy that make it worth learning, appropriating, and even worth fighting for? Does not philosophy diagnose our situation with concepts such as modern alienation, or provide arguments for understanding the relationship between the self and society? Does it not affirm, in the face of oppression, the possibilities of subjectivity and political agency, freedom, and liberation?

This class is an investigation into this contradiction at the heart of the history of philosophy: while it has often reinforced the prejudices of the ruling elite, or of society, it has also offered the promise of a better, more egalitarian, world. While we will not resolve this contradiction, in reading the ‘canon,’ –which includes Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Rousseau– along with its critics –including Marx, Engels, de Beauvoir and Césaire– we will discover some of the conceptual tools that will allow us to think critically about what it means to do philosophy.