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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: November 19, 2001
Latest Update: November 19, 2001
E-Mail jeannecurran@habermas.org
E-Mail takata@uwp.edu
E-Mail Olivier Urbain, Soka University

Moral Discipline and the Dominant Discourse

Teaching and Review Essay by Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata: November 2001.
and Individual Authors. "Fair Use" encouraged.

This essay is based on material from Nietzsche, Gide, and the Islamist Movement. It is from a lecture in Transforming Discourse on Thursday, November 15, 2001. These notes are just from recollection for those of you who wanted to return to these issues. Will provide links later. jeanne. Tuesday, November 20, 2001.

Nietzsche spoke to the creativity, the quest for freedom, the need to be all you can be. The dominant discourse of his time (19th Century) he called the "bourgeois society," and he despised it as distorting the human qualities of joy in life:

"The vapid, narrow, and sterile liffe of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, against which Nietzsche rebelled, was then the contemporary expression of centuries of repression. Max Weber's 'iron cage' of bureaucratic rationality,which speaks to the parcelling out of the human spirit, parallels Nietzsche's thesis, as does Michel Foucault's later treatment of the human sciences as disciplinary agents of social control.

"Nietzsche saw in th transition from Greek aristocratic morality to Christianity a fundamental change to slave morality. The Christian doctrine of altruism, humility, and suffering was designed to humble and restrain the willful and sensual."

James Farganis, at. p. 92. Readings in Social Theory.

Read The Journey of a 15-Year-Old From Mali Who Sold Himself Into Bondage By Michael Finkel. New York Times Magazine. With slide show. November 18, 2001. This story relates to the Ivory Coast and exploitation to force indigenous people to harvest cocoa beans for chocolate.

Consider whether the young boy, Yousef, described in the story, would have been attracted by Nietzsche's admonition to follow Zarathustra.

More soon. . . .

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