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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Johann Gottfried Herder

Being yourself in the medieval era

07 Sunday May 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Politics, Self, Western Thought

≈ 20 Comments

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Charles Taylor, Epicurus, expressive individualism, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, John Duns Scotus, Michael Allen Gillespie, modernity, Petrarch

Along with rethinking the term for expressive individualism, I’ve also lately been rethinking the history of the phenomenon. The idea that one should be one’s own true self is part of the air we moderns breathe: we don’t think about it because we assume it. (Some of the deeper thought on the matter comes from Christian conservatives, because they need to think about expressive individualism in order to oppose it.) Very few expressive individualists do the work that they should to defend the ideal philosophically. More attention has been paid to the idea’s history – but this, too, is something that I think we often get wrong.

The big question I want to revisit today is: when does expressive individualism begin? When do people first start thinking that every person has her own unique purpose in her individuality, and that following that purpose is a proper ethical ideal? I’ve argued there are metaphysical precedents for the idea in John Duns Scotus‘s distinction between whatness and thatness, but I don’t think there’s any inkling of individualist ethics in the pious thirteenth-century monk Scotus. Expressive individualism comes later – but how much later?

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History and the love of literature

14 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Politics, Reading and Recitation

≈ 2 Comments

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academia, Ashley Barnes, Benedict Anderson, Benjamin C. Kinney, Bryan Van Norden, COVID-19, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Johann Gottfried Herder, Jon Baskin, Matt Wilkens, Sumana Roy, William Shakespeare

Many years ago, as a master’s student in development sociology, I took a course on nationalism with the late Benedict Anderson, renowned for his idea that the nation is an imagined community. The topic and the professor attracted a cross-disciplinary audience; about half of us students were in programs of sociology and political science, the other half in programs of literature. The distinction between the two, as I recall, became apparent when, from theorists and philosophers of nationalism, our reading turned to a work of literature, the sentimental anti-slavery novel Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. We wrote brief papers articulating our reactions to and thoughts about the work. The social scientists were moved by it; one fellow sociologist said she cried while reading it. But the literary theorists, as I remember, all thought it was (in Anderson’s words) a “dreadful” novel, worthy of study merely as something symptomatic of its historical period, at best. I had taken other classes with several of them, and become friends with some, and it occurred to me that I had never heard one of these literature students express love for any work of literature, with the sole exception of Joyce’s Ulysses.

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The birth of qualitative individualism

11 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Politics, Self

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Charles Taylor, expressive individualism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, modernity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romanticism, Wilhelm von Humboldt

What is remarkable about the ideal of qualitative individualism is that it is so pervasive yet so rarely thought about in depth. To get a bit more of that depth, I would like to examine next the question of where it comes from.

The idea is modern, I think, though like so many modern ideas it has premodern antecedents. A while ago I breezed a little too easily over the differences between qualitative individualism and Aristotle. I said:

Aristotle – not exactly a great friend of modern liberal freedom – thinks of the best politics in terms of allowing each person to fulfill a highest end or telos, all being the best they can be. Some thinkers would consider this teleology a higher and truer kind of freedom than choice alone. But it seems to me that the freedom of choice is a vital part of the freedom to be what you are. Who would know what you’re meant to be better than you yourself?

I missed something there. If it’s so clear that you’re the person who knows best what you’re meant to be, then why would Aristotle have been “not exactly a great friend” of the political freedom of choice lionized by qualitative individualists today? Continue reading →

Lessons from a favourite teacher

04 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, Place, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Canada, democracy, European Union, Johann Gottfried Herder, McGill University, obituary, Paulo Freire, pedagogy, Romanticism, Warwick Armstrong

This semester I’m teaching Indian philosophy and spent a lot of time thinking about pedagogy. It’s hard for me to do that for very long without thinking about the best teacher I ever had, Warwick Armstrong, who taught me as a McGill undergrad over twenty years ago. I tried to contact him recently to let him know what a difference he had made, and found that that would not be possible: Warwick Armstrong is no longer with us.

I missed my chance to tell Warwick how great he was. But I can at least let the world know. Continue reading →

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