Module 7 Discussion. Literature & Language Assignment.

Please read the To Do then write the disscusion question. Two question.please answer more specific. Please use the in text citation also from the reading material and book. Least two page.thx.Module 7: Enlightenment
In this module we will explore how the Enlightenment's focus on reason sought to cope with the "irrationality" of sex.
Learning Goals
• Interpret Kant's writings on the purpose of marriage and the meaning of sex
• Study one modern writer's interpretation of Kant
To Do
• Read the online material
• Read Kant (library reserves)
• Read Candace Vogler Sex and Talk g
To Complete
• Complete the Individual Response Paper or post and two responses
Module 7 Discussion
Discussion Title: Discussion #7 Read the following directions:
• Click on Reply to respond to all discussion questions and prompts below.
• Your discussion thread and responses should be thorough, thoughtful and substantive.
• Support your statements with examples, experiences, and/or references where applicable.
• Brief quotes from the readings supporting your answer should be embedded in your response.
• Include page numbers for in-text citations.
• Your first response is due by Thursday @ 11:59 p.m. during the week of this module.
• Respond to two of classmates' responses by Sunday @ 11:59 p.m. during the week of this module.
• A rubric will be used to assess your responses.
Discussion Questions:
1. According to Kant, why do we need marriage? What do you make of his logic?
2. According to Vogler, what is the relationship between sex and talk for women? What do women get from talk that men get from sex? (And vice versa) How would you account for this difference?
Eventually, an owning class grew to the point that it demanded political power to match its economic clout, and members of the titled classes who did not figure out how to turn themselves into capitalists sometimes found themselves holding very little beyond their titles. The first Enlightenment political revolution was of course in the US, where wealthy British landowners found themselves shut out of political power simply by virtue of having been born overseas in the colonies. The slogan "no taxation without representation” was obviously not a call for some kind of communist revolution but rather an attempt by an owning class to insure that its interest were met by the government. The French Revolution soon followed, and, while it mobilized the peasantry, it, too, was largely conducted by a growing middle class (or a titled class in the process of transforming itself: recall that Louis the XVI was removed as king via a vote, and one that many nobles participated in.) Out of these revolutions came a new political unit, the nation-state, which was characterized by the idea that all citizens were created equal and constituted what Benedict Anderson has called a horizontal community.
So if the Enlightenment rejected religion, superstition and monarchies, what would take their place? How might society be held together, other than through allegiance to a greater power like God or the King? Over the course of the Enlightenment, the legal contract becomes increasingly important as a rational response to the problem of adjudicating disputes. In the context of the US, documents like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights hoped to prevent tyrannical exercises of power. We see this recourse to the contract in Kant (and in his book, Michael Warner will remind us that, however we feel about it as an institution, marriage is first and foremost a legal contract.) In the reading on Kant, Candace Vogler shows us how the philosopher turned to the marriage contract to use reason to "solve” the potential problems of love, sex, and marriage.
As we might expect, political change came slowly. In an effort to ward off full-scale political revolution and at the same time improve the lives of their subjects, some absolute monarchs pursued a policy of “Enlightened Despotism,” whereby they adopted certain ideas from the Enlightenment - for example, the idea that science and reason could aid in urban planning and administering. Rather than risk full-scale revolution, some monarchs agreed to constitutions. Keep in mind that, despite appearances to the contrary, Napoleon believed that he was in fact spreading the ideas of the French revolution to the areas he conquered. Although he had himself declared emperor, he also instituted the Napoleonic code, and, once an area had been conquered, he gave its people constitutions - in some cases, for the very first time. He also was largely responsible for developing modern bureaucratic administration, the institutions necessary to the maintenance of the modern nation-state.
The Enlightenment was also characterized by a "return” to classicism in the visual arts and music, a reaction against the Baroque of the late Counter-Reformation, which was thought to be "excessive.” (Baroque church architecture was supposed to produce awe in the worshiper, and so it was often characterized by multicolored marbles and fresco paintings that portrayed souls flying up to heaven.) In sculpture, Antonio Canova's work represented this new classicism. In music, symphonies and sonatas, musical pieces composed according to certain formal requirements - each consisting of four movements, for example - developed, as an antidote to the freer musical style of the Baroque.
In painting, this return to classicism consisted of paintings of subject matter from ancient Greek and Roman mythology, as well as ancient historical events.
While Vogler's essay is dense, it will prepare you for many of the works that will follow, including Freud and Warner in particular (but also to some degree the feminist psychoanalytic critics we will read like Segal and Cowie). Pay careful attention to the way Vogler discusses what sex is, what people want from sex, why they want it, and how Kant attempts to find a way to manage, via the marriage contract, the potential "abuses” of sex.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and the Enlightenment
The Enlightenment is the name we give to a trans-European philosophical movement that argued the value of secular learning. Also called the Age of Reason, The Enlightenment asserted that science and the scientific method could be applied fruitfully to many if not most areas of life - not simply the natural sciences, but also the so-called human and social sciences: history, for example, or economics, or politics. Concurrently, it argued that science should not be swayed or dissuaded by arguments based on religious faith alone; even the existence of God ought to be able to be proven logically. A third idea from the Enlightenment is the belief in progress and the ability of reason to produce, over time, successive and increasingly accurate approximations of the truth.
Some scholars date the beginning of the Enlightenment to between 1650 and 1700. As for when it ends, one argument is that what we call early 19th century Romanticism, with its emphasis on feeling and self-expression and reaction against the Industrial Revolution, signaled a kind of fatigue with the Enlightenment's absolute faith in reason. Others would argue that it is with the carnage of World War 11 and the horrors of the Holocaust and atomic bomb that, in the Western world, faith in reason is profoundly shaken. Still others would suggest that we remain today a product of the Enlightenment and its commitment to scientific method, the readiness with which some people are willing to accept the supposition that knowledge of human culture, produced by human beings, could be "objective” - free of bias, value neutral, disinterested, “factual” - is one measure of the degree to which the Enlightenment still shapes our thinking. And the fact that, at least since World War II, some philosophers have produced powerful critiques of this assumption that knowledge is ever value-neutral is evidence of a certain “crisis” in Enlightenment thinking.
One of the significant differences between the Greek philosophers and those of the Enlightenment is that, as a result of its commitment to using reason to explore what is specific to various aspects of existence, the Enlightenment argued that the search for the good, the true and the beautiful are different endeavors. As a result, they should be assigned to different fields and explored by specialists within those fields (though the initial Enlightenment philosophers often wrote in more than one field. Kant, whom we will read, wrote on both ethics and aesthetics. It was only later, with the increasing professionalization of the intellectual through institutions like the university, that thinkers were discouraged from imaging that they could speak knowledgeably about both, for example, art and politics, and evidence of the critique of the Englihtenment is the fact that we are increasingly being asked in the university to think in interdisciplinary terms.) With its division into various faculties - Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and so forth - the universality is very much a product of the Enlightenment, and although some of its presumptions have been under attack, even some of the Enlightenment's critics - Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, to name only three - saw themselves as working within its traditions. Both Freud and Marx, for example, saw their work as, on some level, scientific.
One way of understanding the Enlightenment is as the philosophy that made it possible for the capitalist class to claim the right to self-rule.
Some of our most basic political beliefs - in the US, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for example and the belief that all men are created equal; the French motto of liberty, equality, fraternity - are products of the Enlightenment. (The fact that “universal” suffrage was granted first to men and not to women is just one indication of some of the contradictions of the Enlightenment.) Obviously, rulers who believed they exercised a "divine right” did not believe that they were equal to those over whom they held power. While capitalism began in the Renaissance, it was restricted by monarchical institutions; divine right, for example, was difficult to reconcile with the demands of the market, and from capitalism's beginnings, tensions existed between the titled and merchant classes. (Some of Boccaccio's stories in the Decameron explore this tension.)