Liberation and Enlightenment

Undergraduate / Graduate

The purpose of this course is to explore the relationship between the project of human freedom-the project of liberation-and the idea of enlightenment. The main theme is a question: Is liberation simply a matter of enlightenment? That is, does freedom come from a special kind of profound knowledge? Affirmative answers to this question can be found in many places across the world and history, from Gautama the Buddha and the Stoic Epictetus to Francis Bacon and Immanuel Kant. Others have insisted that enlightenment, while part of liberation, is not reducible to it: liberation is a social, economic, and political process, facilitated by a kind of realization about one's lack of freedom, but not reducible to it. This kind of thought is also ubiquitous: from Marcus Garvey and Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis and Catherine MacKinnon. Still others have been skeptical of enlightenment: most famously, Frankfurt school theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. At stake in this debate is a set of fundamental questions about the human condition and what one is to do with one's life. Why, for example, are we supposedly unfree? After all, many people-including many of you considering enrolling in this class-have relative freedom of bodily movement, the ability to choose when and where to eat your next meal, or whom to love. But all of these thinkers agree that we-all of us, from the college student to the political prisoner to the head of state-are unfree. Why? (A)