Social Media: Proof of a Beautiful Life or the End of Morality?

This course begins with Friedrich Schiller's Aesthetic Letters and the idea that aesthetic experience is essential to moral development. From there, we explore the present: what happens to morality, depth, and imagination when life is lived as performance and curated for the feed? And—here is the provocation—could Instagram, with its beautifully lit dinner plates and golden retriever reels, actually be educating humanity aesthetically? Or is it quietly dismantling the very conditions such an education would require? We then engage with Immanuel Kant's thinking on judgment and autonomy; Friedrich Nietzsche's exploration of the Dionysian and Apollonian forces in culture; Walter Benjamin's reflections on aura, reproducibility, and mass experience; Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulation; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work on desire, affect, rhizomatic structures, and politics. Social media is treated not merely as a technological system, but as a semiotic environment. This course speaks to students interested in aesthetics, ethics, subject formation, and the philosophical implications of contemporary media.