At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, I teach a variety of classes in Philosophy and Religious Studies, but I also teach a core (or "foundational") course in the humanities. It’s called "In Dialogue with Humanity," naturally enough, and was first designed and implemented at our “parent” campus in Hong Kong.
In Dialogue with Humanity is primarily a seminar-style course. Most of the time spent in the class is in discussion sections (or "tutorials") in which close reading of global core texts is the main activity. Thus, the overall aim of the course is to acquaint students with a variety of important texts from different cultures, religions, and historical periods and to challenge students to develop the skills to approach and critically engage with difficult texts. Readings include Plato's Symposium, the Analects, the Zhuangzi, excerpts from the Bible and Qur'an, the Heart Sutra, Huang Zongxi's "Waiting for the Dawn," Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. To this, I also add excerpts from the Bhagavad-Gita and Elie Wiesel's Night. The faculty teaching this course give short lectures each week to help frame the texts so that students know better how to approach them in an informed way, but again, the main focus of the course is digging into passages and forming reasonable interpretations or applications of the ideas contained within.
While I'm fascinated by these texts generally, I am particularly fond of the Warring States era Chinese philosophical text, The Zhuangzi (and especially in the context of this course). I first read from this book as an undergraduate at Occidental College, and I have long found its combination of humor and absurdity along with philosophical reflection to be delightful and confounding. The freedom that one finds in the pages of The Zhuangzi is freedom from the commitments and views of particular ways or “courses” (to follow along with Brook Ziporyn’s translation of dao (道). The freedom or spontaneity (ziran 自然) advanced in that book has, I think, the value of not judging or limiting a thing by standards that apply naturally to some other thing. This seems an important consideration to keep in mind when encountering texts important to distant times and places or for students to remember when reading texts rather distant from their major fields. I find this practical sense of freedom very attractive if also elusive and challenging to put into practice.
As students work through these varied texts, there's another sort of freedom that emerges from their studies. The freedom I have in mind is freedom of thought, which one develops through developing the capacities to think critically for oneself. There’s no one course that teaches this, or that could teach it, but different General Education courses collectively teach approaches to critical thinking rooted in particular fields and topics in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Of course, one never really completes the process of learning how to think critically, freely. While I am in the role of teacher for courses like these in the General Education program, I also learn a great deal from my students in these courses as well as from rereading course material with the different experiences of a given year of my life before me. Hopefully, students will develop their own sense of appreciation for the values and skills of critical thinking (broadly construed) and they will continue to think and read about those areas, e.g., Philosophy or History, long after they have graduated.
In Dialogue with Humanity is just one course but it is a very important one at the university, challenging students to encounter a dramatically diverse set of views on big questions about life, meaning, the self, and society. The course offers students provocation to think for themselves and to become acquainted with texts that have been prized, even held as sacred (by some), across long histories and varied cultures. I love teaching the course and learn new insights into these texts and their ongoing relevance to critical thought every time I teach it.
