Are you familiar with the Great Courses recordings (audio, video)? I can recommend Professor Leo Damrosch's "The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self"... (available at audible.com)...
- Leo Damrosch, Ph.D.
I think the greatest novels make you all too conscious of people’s limitations and wounds.
Harvard University Learn More About This Professor
- Course Overview
- Reversed religious notions that human nature and the material world were infected by sin; instead they became beneficial
- Provided a new rationale for the way we obtain and use knowledge
- Coined or redefined words—such as humor, sentiment, and sensibility—to reflect new attitudes about feelings and personality
- Disputed the classical dictum that art should "hold a mirror up to nature" and serve a moral purpose
- Laid the groundwork for theories of the unconscious
- Nurtured the development of the novel, with new ways of understanding psychological and social experience
- Invented the autobiography
- Raised pre-Darwinian ideas about evolution
- Suggested that men and women should be treated as equals.
You are a product of the Enlightenment. In fact, the philosophy behind so much that has created the modern concept of Self—politics, economics, psychology, science and technology, education, art—was invented as recently as the Enlightenment of the 18th century. In The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self, literary scholar Leo Damrosch of Harvard University considers the time when ideas about the self were first considered.
Through the eyes of the Enlightenment's greatest writers, you follow the origin of new ways of thinking—ideas we today take for granted but are startlingly recent—about the individual and society.
You see how these notions emerged in an era of transition from a world dominated by classical thought, institutional religion, and the aristocracy to one that was increasingly secular, scientific, skeptical, and middle class. The 18th century was a crucible for new questions that, among other things:
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