Professor: Hi everyone. Welcome. It looks like a few people are yet to filter in but we’ve got a lot to cover today so let’s go ahead and get started. I hope you all saw my email where I clarified that, yes, your critical reading responses are due next class. While I know there is a lot of reading to cover in a short amount of time, I want you to focus on concision and on producing original ideas. I think this class will be a useful time to pinpoint moments in these texts where you feel you can pushback and perhaps present an equally compelling, contradictory idea. Most importantly, I want you all to remember to bring in examples to ground your argument. So who wants to start us off? 

A Student, Canada Goose draped over his wooden chair, Pret a Manger latte and breakfast sandwich on the table in front of him, Beats resting around his neck: Reading Kant’s outline of the categorical imperative made me think of my favorite presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders. And I guess well…I know a lot of people say that Deontology is really at odds with Utilitarianism, which I have read a lot about in high school. And I think the thing is, those people just don’t understand how someone like, well, someone like Bernie could, like, synergize both of those ideas in the socialist movement. 

Professor: That’s a really great example of something concrete—I’d love to hear that argument fleshed out in a paper.

Another Student, reading “The Skim” daily news update on his email as he speaks: Building off of…(gesturing to the other side of the room) his…idea about politicians and ethical systems, I guess it makes me wonder, like, what type of systems of ethical logic most speak to voters. Like I guess, one thing about Deontology is that, it takes a pretty high level of intellect to really understand its nuances, and that just seems like something voters aren’t willing to invest in today. So then it’s like, do we just settle for another system? For Chaos? 

Another Student, with 3 Glossier Stickers on her MacBook Pro: I actually explored this sort question in my political theory class. Like, what do we do, as lovers of democracy, when most people just can’t really understand what’s best for them, or more broadly, what’s best for society? I’m thinking of writing about voting, actually, and how maybe votes could be weighted on education about candidates and policy. I just think education is so important, and like, it would be best for everyone in the end. It seems like the best way to put a clearly superior candidate like Sanders or Yang or Warren in power.

Canada Goose boy: I mean, not to get too personal, but this is really what motivates me to get up in the morning. I really think, like, we need to be the change we want to see in society. And it can be super hard but I think, like, the thing that’s cool about socialism is it’s like, everyone is at a similar starting point and then…it’s like, you can have better dialogue. Like in an ideal society, we could all be reading the greats, you know, and like, it wouldn’t be a matter of us as leaders having to like, simplify these really nuanced important ideas into terms that an uneducated populace can understand. We wouldn’t be held back from intellectual progress by trying to catch everyone in our Democracy up. 

Process Notes

I struggled not to write a lot more with this assignment. I have so much experience in a discussion setting, especially one based around ideas—one that sometimes feels very insular and echo-chamer-y—that it felt like I could go on magnifying points of irony for a long time. Ideally, in the future, I’d like to write more in this setting, and then cut down to the parts that most emphasize the different ideas I want to present. Sabrina’s primary use of dialogue (outside of illustrations) to drive the narrative inspired my primary reliance on dialogue in this narrative. I think I could have done a better job to display the type of abstraction and assertion of half-baked ideas that often overlooks the everyday lives and opinions implicated in that discussion. I got sort of caught on displaying this indulgence in a feeling of intellectual superiority that often comes hand in hand with a veneration of intellect at a place like UChicago.