Drive, Instinct, and Will in Philosophy and Literature

Catalog description

What drives us? Why do we do what we do, or want what we want? This seminar offers an introduction to the history of a powerful idea: namely, that humans are driven not only by rational thought and conscious intention, but also by unconscious, instinctual forces. Across a wide historical range but with emphasis on the German tradition, we will examine how philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis have conceived of such forces and the many names they have invented for them. As part of our exploration, we will encounter and call into question a series of familiar oppositions - between the somatic and the mental, between the mechanical and the organic, and between scientific and imaginative modes of writing. Readings may be drawn from authors such as: Plato, Augustine, Leibniz, Georg Buchner, Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud.