GERST 1190 - [FWS: Evil, God, and Modern Thought: Exploring the Enlightenment]

Fall or Spring. Next Offered: 2020-2021. 3 credits. Student option grading.

First-Year Writing Seminar. No knowledge of German is expected.

Staff.

How could a just God create a world full of incomprehensible suffering? Finding solutions to this persistent question seriously preoccupied enlightenment thinkers who promised to make the world more coherent. This seminar explores a number of “modern” attempts to justify the existence of “evil” both in the world and in us. As we read and discuss novellas (Kleist, Voltaire), poems (Milton, Goethe, Blake), essays (Leibniz, Rousseau), letters (Shaftesbury), manifestos (Lessing), and philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Marx,), we will discover how culture appropriates religious authority in its quest to vindicate God from the charge of having catastrophically failed humanity. To understand the significance of this development we will critically engage with and write about a number of diverse texts that challenge assumed boundaries between religion and culture.