 2016 - 2017 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 1031-3961-01 | Y Politics? Death, Freedom and the Pursuit of Meaning | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 4.0
Course description
Once leading our quest for wisdom, such questions are rarely asked in contemporary academia. This course seeks to bring existentialism back to the fore, and examines how it resonates with modern politics. Our challenge is twofold. First, we aim to grasp existentialism, an age-old movement that probes the mortal human’s search for meaning in a meaningless universe. The course seeks to hone the lens of existentialism into a microscope to examine individual life, a telescope to observe social dynamics and a kaleidoscope to enrich our innermost insights. Second, we aim to probe the relevance of existentialism to politics, focusing on the interplay of nationalism and violence, mortality and morality. While existentialism figures very little in political science, the concerns of existentialism are also its key assets in the study of politics. Attentive to changes in our socio-political world, existentialism reveals human as mortal and moral agents, free to choose their political path. That existentialism writ-large became the common ground for such a diverse group of thinkers as Arendt, Buber, Camus, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre, both attests to its vitality and to its potential relevance to many, perhaps most, people and their politics. Unlike many contemporary philosophies, it is not necessarily western or liberal. It can speak to both Greenpeace supporters and ISIS activists. Finally, existentialist art, especially literature, makes it more accessible to social actors beyond the confines of seminars in philosophy. It directly addresses—and challenges—this world.