History of Ideas

Prof. Bruce Harvey

Fall 2006

KEY IDEAS FOR WATSON'S IDEAS: FROM FIRE TO FREUD

Below, for each of the chapters or partial chapters you are responsible for, I've indicated the key ideas/authors/cultural trends and the approximate correlating pages when appropriate. 

However, you can't just mechanically read the emphasized pages.  You still need to read all the chapters/partial chapters on the syllabus to understand the most pertinent material in its context. Below is an aid, only, to help you focus and to select, for our class's purposes, the essential info. from background info. 

Watson sometimes meanders around in anecdote or excessive detail, but his narrative approach is a lot more intellectual fun than your standard textbook approach to the same material.  Watson's book requires that you be a non-passive learner: If you have not underlined/highlighted (or taken side notes) of this volume, you are not doing your job as a diligent student! 

Chapter 23 pgs 474-89

--the particulars of this chapter are less important than the overall drift of the "scientific revolution," the replacement of the anthropomorphic, human-centered/hierarchical (earth below/heavens above) view of the cosmos, with a materialist, rationalist, causal one, most directly exemplified by Newton and his innovative understanding of physics.

--"chief effects of the scientific revolution ... was that the heavens do not rule the earth (476)

--read about the Aristotelian theory of ballistics (bottom 478-top 479): this is the sort of detail that really makes intellectual history palpable

--"in Principia the universe is, intellectual speaking, systematized, stabilized and demystified...." (482)

--"despite all the innovations he had made, [Newton's] view of the universe and the atoms within it did not include the concept of change or evolution...." (484)

Chapter 25 pgs 512-13 & 520-26

--the Protestant Revolution led to skepticism  because the point was to return to what the Bible actually said versus what the Catholic church dogmatically asserted in terms of ritual and belief.  Protestantism thus, although a form of piety, leads to intellectual skepticism and fuels Enlightenment rationalism.  Insofar as Protestantism also shuns church ritualism for a primary relation to the Bible/God, it also leads to the interiority of the Romantic Rebellion

--read 520-26 for examples of Deism and the turning-away from received dogma (ignore Watson's points about ethical monotheism) to get a general idea of what Deism is.  (the Thomas Paine e-text very nicely exemplifies Deism)

Chapter 26 pgs 527-9, 532-35, & 540-44

--the rationalist search for the laws of human nature and government went against the belief in the divine right of kings and aristocratic privilege.

--Diderot's Encyclopedia (529) exemplifies the Enlightenment effort to systematize understanding

--Locke's Essay Concerning Understanding (533) looked at human cognition/development scientifically/psychologically rather theologically

--Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations studied economics from a rational standpoint (541-2), and promoted modern capitalistic notions of commerce

Chapter 22 pgs 458-60

--read the main ideas about Luther's rejection of inherited dogma for "pure" piety

Chapter 24 pgs 500-11

--you need to understand the similarities and differences between Hobbes and Locke (501-504)

--read about the democratizing effect of newspapers/coffee houses (510)

Chapter 30 pgs 606-19

--frankly, I found this a most unsatisfactory, meandering, and confusing chapter.  Read it and get the general sense of Romantic emphasis on interiority, rebellion, nature-as-a-source-of-value, self/emotional expression, subjectivity, and so on.

--for particular Romantic figures, read about Berlioz, 617-18

Chapter 31

--this entire chapter is important to understand the shift into a deep-time/pre-human-history sense of time is important, although you do not need to know particular contributing ideas/authors, except for:

--German linguistic studies that put into question Scripture consistency (627)

--development of archeology (628)

--geology: "Slowly, then, a view was forming that the earth itself had changed over time" (631 top).

--geology: "[Geological discovery] reinforced the notion that there had been separate and numerous creations and extinctions, quite at variance with what is said in the Bible" (633).

--section on Darwin (640-44), concluding with "Darwinism forced people to a new view of history, that it occurred by accident, and that there was no goal, no ultimate end-point" (644).

Chapter 27

--the specifics about particular inventions or industrial/scientific developments need to be read about to understand the ferment of new knowledge and its application in the late 18th and early 19th-centuries, but you don't need to memorize the details

--key ideas pertain to the reduction of workers to cogs in the industrial mechanism and the increasing disparity (and recognition and bitterness over the disparity) between the owner class and the worker class

--Weber's notion of the Protestant work-ethic (561) by which we (or some of us) become obsessed with thinking being a work-a-holic is morally virtuous is very important

--Malthus's response (562-3) to the plight of the urban worker is important

--Owen's attempt to, in a utopia-fashion, to ameliorate the conditions of the working poor is important (563-64)

--subsequent pages (564-68) provide a background to Karl Marx

Chapter 32 pgs 650-59

-- read the specifics/examples of these pages to get a sense of the rise of "Sociology" as a discipline, a 'science' of groups that is not reducible to individual psychology or the form of particular national-states (i.e., democracy, monarchy, totalitarianism, communism, etc.).  Sociology is connected to the rise of statistics, as well, so that we can understand, for example, disease and its relation to health policy (see top of page 657)

--you do not need to remember the name, but you should by now be familiar with Weber's point middle of page 654 that (these are Watson's words) "Modernity" means "rationality, the organization of affairs based on the trinity of efficiency, order and material satisfaction.  This for him was achieved by means of legal, commercial and bureaucratic institutions that increasingly govern our relations with one another.  The problem, as he saw it, was that commercial and industrial society, whatever freedoms and other benefits it has, brings disenchantment into our lives, eliminates any 'spiritual purpose' for mankind."  I've emphasized this several times by pointing out that, although we are free, we're also subjected to all sorts of bureaucratic niches and controls.
 

Chapter 36 pgs 722-28

--get the overall drift of Watson's complaint against Freud--that Freud's theories are insufficiently grounded in testable scientific hypothesis.  Ask yourself: just because it cannot be proven that we have a complex "unconscious," should we dismiss, then, all the psychological trauma and ambivalence and mystery (the strange and marvelous pathways of desire) that the unconscious, if it is there, produces?

Chapter 37 (Conclusion)

--again, it is not important that you memorize specifics.  But you should get a sense of the early 20th-century as an intense period of discovery in respect to physics of the atom

--read, but realize the rest of Watson's stuff in this concluding chapter is very speculative and biased: i.e., why "the West" has "succeeded":

--the achievements of science and yet the frustration that "man's understanding of himself, of his inner life--has proved the most disappointing" (page 743 middle)

--and the even more disturbing formulation of the latter: "despite the probability that the 'hard' sciences still offer the most likely way forward, the self remains as elusive as ever... Given the Aristotelian successes of both the remote and the immediate past, is it not time to face the possibility--even the probability--that the essential Platonic notion of the 'inner self' is misconceived?  There is no inner self.  Looking 'in', we have found nothing--nothing stable anyway... because there is nothing to find.  We human beings are part of nature and therefore we are more likely to find about our 'inner' nature, to understand ourselves, by looking outside ourselves, at our role and place as animals...." page 746, bottom.