B. Ricardo Brown, PhD. Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud: Introduction to the Course.
Channel: B. Ricardo Brown, PhD
Date: 2021-01-25

Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud: Session I.  Introduction to the Course.
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Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud
SS.290

 
B. Ricardo Brown, PhD
Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies

School of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies
Pratt Institute


Canvas Course Site:  https://pratt.instructure.com/courses/7863

https://www.pratt.edu/faculty_and_staff/bio/?id=bbrow993
https://twitter.com/UntilDarwin/

In this course we will examine our concepts of society, power, value, and desire through reading selected works by Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. The goal is to understand their ideas and the social context that shaped them through a close examination of their works not to attempt to prove or disprove their many arguments. The emphasis of the course will be on engaging the original texts and attention will be paid to how each writer went about their critiques as well as the revolutionary consequences that followed --- including those that were antithetical to their own views and work.

Detailed description

In this course we will examine the knowledge of social life and its relation to our concepts of society, power, value, and desire through reading selected works of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud. You might begin thinking about the course in this way: Darwin placed us in the natural world and showed that we share a common genealogical origin in nature. Marx shows us how we have changed that nature and at the same time changed ourselves. Nietzsche raised the problem of what those changes have cost us: what have we had to give up in order to have society? Finally, Freud sought to understand how we might deal the consequences of civilization/culture (he used the German kulture, which in English can mean either culture or civilization).

It is important to keep in mind that this course is only a single semester and so it can only serve as an introduction to some aspects of what are extensive and varied bodies of work. Many students do not have the opportunity to read any of these authors except for brief excerpts or secondary accounts. So the primary purpose here is to allow you to begin an engagement that, for the fortunate, lasts a lifetime.

So, we will examine the production of nature, society, power, and desire through the works of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud. And we examine them not because they are canonical “great works” but because they mark how works become canonical; not because we are concerned with “Great Men” or “Great Figures In Thought” but because these authors/works mark changes in knowledge and the limits to truth in their time by raising fundamental problems that the sciences of life and society seek to address address. The readings for this course will cover both their well known as well as more obscure, but often more important, works of social critique.