To start off class, we looked at various enlightenment paintings by Delacroix and De Goya. In Delacroix’s painting, there is a woman holding a French flag standing over dead noblemen. This was during the French Revolution and the woman is a symbol for liberty. This painting also depicts the rise of the middle class, an important aspect of the enlightenment. The first painting we looked at from De Goya was also about the French Revolution. In the painting were French warriors shooting at a group of Spaniards. One of the Spaniards is shown dead on the ground in a pool of blood. The fact that we cannot see the faces of the French warriors shows the belief that they were faceless and did not care about others but themselves. De Goya’s second painting depicted Saturn eating his children. This represents the paranoid autocratic rulers of the time who killed thousands of people to ensure that they would not be overthrown. Then, we looked at the attractive and unattractive sides of China, Japan, India, and Islam. Voltaire, among others, said these places were attractive because they had established rule. Montesquieu argued that these places were unattractive to the west because even though their was an authoritative government, people were not allowed to be free and were still tortured. Finally, we discussed about the concept of a “dual enlightenment”, an attractive one and an unattractive one.
NOTE FROM JESSE: It is valuable to think about what makes one side of the enlightenment “attractive” to us and what makes the other side “unattractive” to us.
