Our Story so Far

Update: Engl-314 students are encouraged to use this post as a "suggestion box" for comments -- anonoymous or otherwise -- on how the course may be improved as it goes on. (20/01/06)


So, after the opening week we have an effective broad outline of a dialectic through the British seventeenth century between positions represented by Thomas Hobbes on the one side and the Metaphysicals on the other -- with John Milton kept as an "excluded middle" for the time being. The nature of the dialectic, as I am describing it, is between Power, on the Hobbes side, and Love, on the Metaphysicals'.

For Hobbes & Power-with-a-capital-P, read, for example Ch. X of Leviathan. But let us just say this: compared to Hobbes' attitude toward power, Tom Cruise mildly approves of scientology; theatre actors don't really mind audience approval; Rick Mercer somewhat leans toward self-promotion; Ted Kennedy would, on the whole, perhaps care for another cocktail; and Paul Martin is comme ci, comme ca about re-election. And as for the Metaphysicals and Love? Well, let George Herbert be exemplar with his triptych Love. (Of the three, I specially prefer the third.)

Of the dialectical opposition, we saw John Donne, in the poem, Satyre III, studied in seminar, declare this attitude to power:

That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know;
Those past, her nature and name is chang'd; to be
Then humble to her is idolatry.
As streams are, power is; those blest flowers that dwell
At the rough stream's calm head, thrive and do well,
But having left their roots, and themselves given
To the stream's tyrannous rage, alas, are driven
Through mills, and rocks, and woods, and at last, almost
Consum'd in going, in the sea are lost.

"That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know." A more counter-Hobbesean position on Power could not possibly be taken.

As for the nature of the two sides of the dialectic, Power is to be explained as the advancement of Self; where Love is the advancement of another. Power considers Self first, where Love considers Others above one's own wants & desires. The Metaphysicals drew this, of course, from the Golden Rule.