Saturday, November 15, 2008
Then try to determine why the historians or Spielberg believe what they believe. Are the historians right? How can anyone determine? Check the footnotes. See what basis they have for their claims. Interrogate them.
If truth cannot be established, then both the historians and Spielberg need to justify their claims. Why do each present history as they do? Explore the reasons, or possible reasons. What agenda might be in play?
Finally, you have to step in and tell me what you would have done. How should history be presented? Should history have a social or political agenda? Can it avoid one? Should it stick to "just the facts"? Who is right? SHow that you understand both sides of this debate before explaining your own position.
In this part, you have to present both sides of the debate, the argument for history as truth and fact, and the argument for history as a socially constructed story with an agenda.
You have to put yourself in these writers’ shows and explain how you would have handled this material and why. And then you have to defend your choice.
In your defense of your choice, you here have to include an analysis of your own subjectivity. Through what lens do you see the world? And how do those lens shape your perception and decision? I am, ultimately, looking for evidence of your wrestling with the dilemma of subjectivity in history, not to dismiss either side of this debate as naive, for both have good points, but to show you have a grasp of the debate and some sort of an informed stance of your own.
As with any paper, in the end, tie in your conclusion to the opening specific scene you started with.
Have Fun. More cyber data will be forth coming.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Class,
Here we go.
This blog is for English 302-s15, the upper level composition course for History majors at George Mason University. The blogs here serve both a personal and academic purpose. They will not be corrected or graded. Students are free to write whatever they feel like writing. But they will be read. I am looking for at elast one entry per week. Is that so hard?
You have your assignments by way of the listserv. This will be for more general messages and for links to the other students' blogs. I will be checking in on occasion to follow your progress. Do note the little comment link at the bottom of each post. If the 0 has turned into a number, your fans are trying to reach you. Click and read.
Try to be grammatical and clear, and do have fun!
-Dr Dave
Labels: intro
Thursday, March 27, 2008
"Reality is nothing but a meaning, and so can be changed
to meet the needs of history, when history demands the subversion
of the foundations of civilization as we know it" .
-- Roland Barthes "Historical Discourses," in Social Sciences Information 6, 4, August, 1967.
What do you think?
Is history only a "meaning" and thus open to manipulation?
Or does some truth exist "out there" that can be known?
Do any of our disciplines have access to some universal reality,
or is each one merely an interest group pushing the tribal interests of the individuals in control?
Even if all this is true, and everyone is corrupt, need we resign to that inevitability? Or can we break out of the Matrix? Just how much of a fool, or a hero, is Neo, anyhow?
Food for thought................
The Subjective School: a quick look
(author uncertain)This includes such great thinkers as Luther, Pascal, Lessing, Kierkegaard, Brunner, and Barth. They usually express doubt that the unbeliever can be "argued into belief." They stress instead the unique personal experience of grace, the inward, subjective encounter with God. Such thinkers seldom stand in awe of human wisdom, but on the contrary usually reject traditional philosophy and classical logic, stressing the transrational and the paradoxical. They have little use for natural theology and theistic proofs, primarily because they feel that sin has blinded the eyes of man so that his reason cannot function properly. In Luther's famous metaphor, reason is a whore.
Thinkers of the subjective school have a keen appreciation of the problem of verification. Lessing spoke for most of them when he pointed out that "accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason." The problem of going from contingent (i.e., possibly false) facts of history to deep, inward, religious certainty has been called "Lessing's ditch."
Kierkegaard complained that historical truth is incommensurable with an eternal, passionate decision. The passage from history to religious certainty is a "leap" from one dimension to another kind of reality. He said that all apologetics has the intent of merely making Christianity plausible. But such proofs are vain because "to defend anything is always to discredit it."
Yet, for all his anti-intellectualism, Kierkegaard still had a kind of apologetic for Christianity, a defense developed strangely out of the very absurdity of the Christian affirmation. The very fact that some people have believed that God appeared on earth in the humble figure of a man is so astounding that it provides an occasion for others to share the faith. No other movement has ever suggested we base the eternal happiness of human beings on their relationship to an event occurring in history. Kierkegaard therefore feels that such an idea "did not arise in the heart of any man."
Even Pascal, who discounted the metaphysical proofs for God and preferred the "reasons of the heart," eventually came around with an interesting defense of the Christian faith. In his Pensees he recommended the biblical religion because it had a profound view of man's nature. Most religions and philosophies either ratify man's foolish pride or condemn him to despair. Only Christianity establishes man's true greatness with the doctrine of the image of God, while at the same time accounting for his present evil tendencies with the doctrine of the fall.
And we are told that, in spite of his energetic Nein! there is an apologetic slumbering beneath the millions of words in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
The Subjective School
(author uncertain)This includes such great thinkers as Luther, Pascal, Lessing, Kierkegaard, Brunner, and Barth. They usually express doubt that the unbeliever can be "argued into belief." They stress instead the unique personal experience of grace, the inward, subjective encounter with God. Such thinkers seldom stand in awe of human wisdom, but on the contrary usually reject traditional philosophy and classical logic, stressing the transrational and the paradoxical. They have little use for natural theology and theistic proofs, primarily because they feel that sin has blinded the eyes of man so that his reason cannot function properly. In Luther's famous metaphor, reason is a whore.
Thinkers of the subjective school have a keen appreciation of the problem of verification. Lessing spoke for most of them when he pointed out that "accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason." The problem of going from contingent (i.e., possibly false) facts of history to deep, inward, religious certainty has been called "Lessing's ditch."
Kierkegaard complained that historical truth is incommensurable with an eternal, passionate decision. The passage from history to religious certainty is a "leap" from one dimension to another kind of reality. He said that all apologetics has the intent of merely making Christianity plausible. But such proofs are vain because "to defend anything is always to discredit it."
Yet, for all his anti-intellectualism, Kierkegaard still had a kind of apologetic for Christianity, a defense developed strangely out of the very absurdity of the Christian affirmation. The very fact that some people have believed that God appeared on earth in the humble figure of a man is so astounding that it provides an occasion for others to share the faith. No other movement has ever suggested we base the eternal happiness of human beings on their relationship to an event occurring in history. Kierkegaard therefore feels that such an idea "did not arise in the heart of any man."
Even Pascal, who discounted the metaphysical proofs for God and preferred the "reasons of the heart," eventually came around with an interesting defense of the Christian faith. In his Pensees he recommended the biblical religion because it had a profound view of man's nature. Most religions and philosophies either ratify man's foolish pride or condemn him to despair. Only Christianity establishes man's true greatness with the doctrine of the image of God, while at the same time accounting for his present evil tendencies with the doctrine of the fall.
And we are told that, in spite of his energetic Nein! there is an apologetic slumbering beneath the millions of words in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Thoughts on history and "theory":
from
Objectivity is Not Neutrality - Thomas Haskell
When historians indulge their aversion to theory they have no choice but
to fall back on common sense. In doing so, they risk introducing a fatal anachronism into their work~- because the common sense they unreflectively rely on will almost certainly be that of their own times. One elementary prerequisite of historical understanding is an appreciation of the meaning events had for the actors of the past, and this entails imagination and a readiness on the part of the historian to suspend or bracket the common sense of his or her own era. The meaning historical actors attached to their acts and decisions will not always, or even usually, be the same as the meanings we formulate in retrospect from our own moment in time, but we cannot begin to understand. who they were and why they acted as they did until we have acknowledged differences between the presuppositions that prevailed in their time and the ones that prevail in ours.
To acknowledge this is not only to confess the historicity of common sense but also to admit the necessity of "theory,"- by which term I mean nothing more than a freewheeling recognition that events are interrelated in more ways than are .immediately apparent or carry the sanction of common usage. The theory wars that have laid waste to some fields of literary criticism these past two decades are something I would not wish on my worst enemies. But when historians disdain theory in the modest sense that I am recommending I believe they betray their calling as intellectuals. History need not be a flatfooted report from the archives that smugly prides itself on factual completeness and accuracy while remaining conceptually thin and unimaginative. The best history has always been that which combines empirical rigor with deep and adventurous thinking about the best way to conceptualize and frame the events being related. (p. 6)
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On the other hand, the moderate historicism that I admire (and that I think promises a safe haven for rights talk) must also be sharply distinguished from the more radical varieties of historicism that are commonly identified as Nietzchean. We historians can hardly help being attracted to the historicist end of the spectrum in this debate, but that need not prevent us from recognizing that historicism harbors within itself radical possibilities that are deeply antagonistic not only to ideas of natural rights but also to all hopes of expanding the sway of reason and moral order in the world. Friedrich Nietzsche saw with uncanny clarity just where the most extreme forms of historicism lead - not just away from Plato's universal Truth and timeless forms, which we can all do without, but beyond the very ideas of truth and falsehood, or good and evil, toward a heroic but brutal world in which nothing counts but will and the power to carry it out. Committed though I am to a moderate historicism, if forced to make a painful choice between the extremes of Nietzsche and Plato, it is Plato I would unhesitatingly choose. (p. 117)
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To say, as historicism does, that all our efforts to grapple mentally with the
world are shaped by a frame of reference, and that we do not have any rational basis for choosing between frames of reference, is to suggest that reason is indeed enslaved by (or at least confined within) the particular social and historical context in which it finds itself. And if that is the case, it is difficult to see how rights and the other insights proclaimed by reason can be anything more than mutable social conventions. They evidently cannot be natural or possess any other sort of ultimate foundation. They become, at best, merely agreed upon fictions and their value; if any, becomes merely instrumental, open to negotiation, subject to change. Under, a historicist dispensation, rights cannot be understood to possess the deep and certain epistemological basis that Strauss thought they needed if democracy was to thrive. (p. 121)
