Although it’s “absorbed” and “absorbing” the correct spelling of the noun is “absorption.”
But note that scientists distinguish between “absorption” as the process of swallowing up or sucking in something and “adsorption” as the process by which something adheres to the surface of something else without being assimilated into it. Even technical writers often confuse these two,.
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Write a minimum of 1200 words about some aspect of Goethe’s Faust.
Design your own topic or choose one of the following, remembering that you will be expected to define your topic further, since most of these are very broad:
Faust and Mephistopheles
Faust and Gretchen
Thought vs. Action
Religion
Humor
Music
Magic
Classical Mythology
Again, if you have trouble choosing or defining a topic, ask for help.)
Remember to refresh your memory by checking your paper against “Helpful Hints for Writing Class Papers.” Especially note that Faust is written in verse, so that you need to use proper form for quoting poetry, as explained in “Helpful Hints,” item 15.
Pullman students turn in your papers at the beginning of class on the due date. On-line students outside of Pullman send your papers to me by the due date using “My DDP.”
Papers submitted on or before the due date may be revised to raise their grade.
This class is part of a sequence of courses in the humanities in Europe which are taught in the Department of English at Washington State University, Pullman, Washington. Humanities 101 covers the ancient world, 302 the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and this course the period from roughly 1750 to 1914. The period since 1914 is covered by the last course in the sequence, Humanities 304.
All are designed to be international and interdisciplinary, focusing on literary works outside of the Anglo-American tradition, on philosophy, and on art, architecture, music and–in the case of 304–film. While it helps to have some general historical knowledge of Europe before 1750, none of the other Humanities courses is a prerequisite for this one.
303 is the only one of these courses to have a descriptive subtitle that does more than indicate a period to be discussed. Obviously a course such as this cannot possibly “cover” such rich and varied material; and it has been designed to concentrate on certain crucial themes. What holds the course together is its focus on revolutionary movements and ideas which have had a lasting impact on western civilization and on the world at large. Much that we think of as “modern” began in the 18th and 19th centuries.
“Reason” refers to the French Enlightenment, that movement to use rationalism as a weapon against the forces of repression embodied in the monarchy and the church. Voltaire was the most popular if not the most influential of all the Enlightenment writers, and his Philosophical Dictionary contains lucid and entertaining presentations of all his major ideas. The rationalist tradition also influences later writers studied in this course, including especially Nietzsche and Marx. The rationalists are often associated with classical era music and neoclassical painting, which we will also explore.
“Romanticism” is the label for a literary-philosophical-artistic-musical-political movement which is often seen primarily as a rebellion against the stifling intellectualism and rigid logic of the Enlightenment, but it is much richer than that. It had a rich, multifaceted effect on Europe, more so than any movement since Christianity first swept over the area in the Middle Ages. Unlike the Enlightenment, which was at first confined principally to a few elites, it changed the way ordinary people viewed themselves, their relationships with each other, and their relationship to the natural world. It still largely shapes the way we think and feel today. It was not a simple revolt against reason in favor of emotion–though this stereotype has some truth in it–instead it was a major shift in values. No other movement in the last three centuries has affected so many different aspects of life, spread so widely, nor lasted so long.
Goethe’s Faust is the perfect work for illustrating the multifaceted, often self-contradictory nature of this movement. Reason and passion struggle together, tragedy blends into comedy, and the bounds of literature itself are stretched as a new form struggles to be born.
Much of the most popular music in the traditional concert repertory is still that which was first written in the romantic style. In some way or other, all succeeding styles either build on or react against romanticism. Neo-romanticism is a powerful force in contemporary music, in composers as different as Witold Lutoslawski and Alan Hovhaness. We also be looking at romantic painting.
Any of the works studied in this course could be described as “revolutionary,” but Zola’s Germinal and Marx’s Communist Manifesto are especially helpful in understanding the background to the great socialist revolutions which swept across much of the world in the first half of the 20th century. In contrast, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground stands as a cry of anguish against socialism, against rationalism, against modernism generally. Dostoyevsky’s powerful case against the notions of progress and utopia still provides major weapons for conservatives and reactionaries today. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring are examples of revolutionary music.
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a sense sums up the entire course. Infused with both rationalism and romanticism, profoundly revolutionary and anti-political at the same time, leaving influences in philosophy, psychology, theater, fiction, art and music in a bewildering variety of directions, Nietzsche’s work continues to be a powerful influence on many thinkers today.
These are some of the movements and creative minds who have made the modern world what it is. They are not buried in history, but alive in the ways we think, feel, and perceive the world around us. By understanding them, we can better understand ourselves.
This is an upper-division class which requires advanced reading and writing skills. To judge whether you can handle the material, try using the online study guide to Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary while you read some of the assigned articles. You may need to reread carefully to extract the meaning from these articles. Students are not expected to be fluent in reading Voltaire at first, but you should be able to figure out his basic points and answer most of the study questions.
If you find the experience intimidating, please note that you are allowed to go back and revise any paper for this class and raise your grade; so even if you have trouble the first time around, you’ll have other chances. The online syllabus
The evidence to support this argument is fairly strong. The socialist governments of various northern European governments in particular managed to create societies in which personal liberty, income equality, low unemployment, strong public welfare systems and a high standard of living all coexisted for a long time.
The problem is that this evidence makes a better case for regulating capitalism than it does for socialism classically understood. The sources of wealth in these countries are still preponderantly capitalist. As international market pressures have drawn these countries into a more competitive mode, almost all of them have been dismantling large parts of their welfare systems and selling off nationalized industries to stimulate their economies.
What belongs to all belongs to no one. In Russia even today hallways and shared spaces are often unkempt and rundown while private apartments are lovingly maintained inside. Travel the Chinese highways and you will see abundant litter scattered along the roadside where it is no one’s particular job to pick it up. Travel American highways and you will find much less litter, and frequent signs boasting that a particular stretch is being maintained by some volunteer civic group out of pure idealism.
A unified culture in which the citizens generally feel benefitted by the system as a whole–say, Japan–can maintain clean and safe public spaces. Diverse cultures with many citizens who feel disenfranchised and alienated, like the U.S., have a much more difficult time doing so. Clearly small projects–a village well, a community garden, even a credit union–can generate loyalty and pride in shared ownership; but no one has demonstrated that such cooperation can be scaled up to a national level and sustained. The evidence is heavily against those who maintain that it can.
Only the most optimistic Marxist can still believe that an entirely controlled economy can work efficiently. Lack of inflation and full employment can be mandated, but a flow of high-quality goods to the public has never been generated by a Communist economy which can match any ordinary Capitalist one. The reasons are not obscure.
1) Nobody knows enough. Large modern economies are too complex for governments to be able to assemble all the information to do rational and effective planning. Stock markets and corporate elites may make irrational and even disastrous decisions, but ultimately their mistakes tend to be self-correcting. These difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that in a planned economy it is not in the interest of most individuals to generate and convey accurate data. The worker lies about how much work has been done, the manager about how many goods are being shipped, and the economist about how successful the latest plan has been. The official statistics quickly become a fiction from which it is impossible to generate any rational plan.
2) People are not motivated to work as hard for the common good in large enterprizes as they are for themselves. This may or may not be “human nature;” but no Communist government has ever been able to inspire its people to work really efficiently except for brief periods, usually through terror. Both the USSR and China had to rescue their disastrous agricultural policies by allowing farmers to develop private plots for their own profit, which typically produced far more than the properly socialist communal farms. Exceptions may be found on small Israeli kibbutzes and other settings where people know each other well, but in large modern states it seems impossible to generate the enthusiasm to work hard except in wartime or similar crises. Toward the end, the Soviet economy was notoriously rife with absenteeism, employee theft, and idleness, expressed in the popular joke “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”
Socialists commonly try to inspire workers with various slogans and visions of the glorious future (say, during the Cuban sugar harvest in the 60s), and these can actually work for a time; but they seem impossible to sustain in the long run. After all, people do not embrace socialism because they want to work harder: they have capitalists to make them do that.
What it makes them more responsive to is market pressures, which don’t always reflect public needs. American aversion to “socialized” medicine is almost matched by American disgust with for-profit doctors and health plans. Private bureaucracies can be as callous and inept as public ones. Sometimes political processes are more effective than the market in creating responsive services.
The important truth in this belief is that in countries with relatively open capitalist economies it is possible for some poor people to work their way up. Most well-off Americans have only to trace back in their families one or two generations to find ancestors of poor or modest means. This is not so true in older countries like Germany and France where workers much less often become owners, and Marxists have elaborate and interesting explanations for this “American exceptionalism.”
However, “opportunity” is a very elusive concept when you come to examine it. Clearly not everyone has the same learning abilities, the same access to borrowed capital, the same familial support, the same influence in government circles–the list of inequities goes on and on. But the belief that just about anyone could become rich by really working hard and taking risks leads many Americans to support policies which guarantee that a tiny minority of citizens will control the vast majority of the national wealth. They may not have won the economic lottery yet, but that’s all the more reason for them not to want to shut the game down.
This has enough truth in it to have persuaded most Americans to accept it almost as a religious dogma. During the latter half of the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, more and better goods have become available to more people in Capitalist economies than in non-competitive Marxist economies. Despite persistent pockets of poverty, most developed capitalist economies had higher average standards of living than controlled Communist ones, and the pressures of the market on capitalists to produce more popular goods at lower prices clearly have a lot to do with this.
But capitalism is not always competitive. The Japanese economy thrived for several decades by strictly controlling competition. Would-be monopolists are always emerging as natural products of capitalism, threatening to do away with competition from capitalist, not socialist motives. If people have been able to raise their standards of living it has been partly because of the work of labor unions and those who have agitated for minimum wage and maximum work day laws, all denounced as harmful to free competition.
Sometimes it is the capitalists who fear the free operation of the market and call for regulation. When employment is high and people are achieving higher wages, the stock market frets about inflation and creates pressures on government regulatory agencies to “cool off” the economy, creating more widespread unemployment and lower wages.
As the Asian “tigers” (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) stumble in their pursuit of regulated capitalism, the free marketers are currently triumphant; but the record of the unregulated market in post-Communist Russia is not inspiring. That unregulated capitalism could produce misery was demonstrated during the industrial revolution, and the demonstration has been often repeated since. No society can long tolerate the entire lack of restraints on business, and never does.