Useful article for your next essay
Hi everyone, I hope your break was fulfilling and fun. I had hoped everyone would post over the break but I see that only a few of you have. Ariella’s focus on the effects of a rapidly shifting culture on young people is insightful and I wonder how you all might experience our own shifts into internet culture which ups the ante even more on sexualizing selves via celebrity worship. Kwame’s suggestion of Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” is a great one for an early take on the scientifically induced desire for perfection, which continues full force these days in all kinds of ways. And the anonymous post on the constraints of consumerism on our freedom (despite its promise of greater freedom) is very much in keeping with this article by Samuel Alexander, which brings these themes together in advocacy of “voluntary simplicity.”
Here is a pdf version for you to download:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1941087
Alexander presents an “attempt to infuse Foucauldian ethics with an emerging post-consumerist philosophy of life,” so it also brings together Foucault’s analysis from History of Sexuality, volume one, and his later works that I have mentioned regarding an aesthetics of existence.
This essay will be useful for you as your write your second essay and plan your creative project. The first sections provide a good review of Foucault’s critique of metaphysical assumptions, especially those that adhere around concepts of universal human nature and Truth. A number of our readings deal with a version of creating oneself as a work of art.
Best, Lee
