Lecture 5

The Philosopher’s Stone

“Proof by contradiction”: this shows how bad a non-enlightenment leader can be.

• Mark doesn’t want to work for power.
• He’s after wealth (via the philosopher’s stone), not knowledge.
• The philosopher’s stone is an end goal, not a process, like the enlightenment.

The Fairy Tale

Written during the Enlightenment, at a time when France was invading Germany.

• People need to be educated on how to live in an enlightened society.
• Art is useful! The distance of allegory makes people detatched enough to talk about it without being personally attached.
• Rhein river is the demarkation between France and Germany.
• The text doesn’t tell us what to do, it’s a weird and hard-to-decipher story that makes you think/discuss with people?