Intro to Humanities II Feb 25

The task today was to delve into formalism, sociological theory, and Marxism, to see how those theories would effect our view of art. The art to be the topic of our analysis was late Renaissance. Of the art the only piece we looked at was Primavera and we did not do much with that. Instead we spent most of the time talking about the Socially Constructed Reality and implications of the theory. A major part of this concerned the limits of social construction and trying to figure out what those might be. I mentioned Wilson and Daly's book "Homicide" as the book that started the Evolutionary Psychology point of view which is often contrasted with those that take the Social Construction of Reality too liberally. The contrary view is that Evolutionary Psychology is just the old status quo in a new disguise.
On Marx I discovered the class was basically unfamiliar with Marx and Marxism so the remaining portion of the class was a review of who Marx was and the essential nature of his philosophy as a revolt against Hegelianism. As usual, I touched on Kierkegaard to contrast how two students of Frederich Schelling both sought to discredit Hegel's philosophy but from contrasting points of view. Soren K took the view that the individual is isolated and must create meaning for themselves. Marx took the view that the individual is a myth and all "individuals" are as the culture creates them. And how the culture does that is not top down as Hegel thought but bottom up. The economy, or means of production, is the source of culture and the nature of the individual from one community to the next.