Essential Books for Liberal Education
Kurt Godden
that thread after buying Britannica's Great Books of the Western World
(for $27). The thesis of the series is that the several dozen works
therein constitute what the editors regard as those works that are
indispensible to a liberal education. To give you an idea of what's
included, here's a small subset: Literature: Shakespeare, Homer, all the
Greek tragedians + Aristophones, Dostoyevsky (Brothers K), Goethe's
Faust; Science: Euclid's Elements, Newton's Principia Mathematica,
Ptolemy, Copernicus; Philosophy/Religion: Hegel, Aristotle, St.
Augustine; Biography: Plutarch; Psychology: Freud; etc. etc. etc.
So the topic of this thread is: What do *you* consider to be the works
that are absolutely *indispensible* to a liberal education? Feel free to
include non-Western works.
-Kurt Godden
Richard Caley
Obviously, a reasonable basic education would include newtonian
mechanics. And, from another point of view, the Principia is certainly
an important book and one should know what it is and where and when it
was written.
However, _reading_ it, while more or less fun depending on personal
taste, isn't going to contribute very much to someone's education. If
reading such original sources is suddenly deemed essential then I for
one bow out of any pretense of education since I am _not_ going to try
and wade through `Kapital' :-).
(Of course, the publishers are just in the business of shifting ink and
wood pulp, so they probably picked it based on weight and having a well
known author and impressive title).
--
r...@cogsci.ed.ac.uk _O_
|<
Thomas S Listmann
One point to keep in mind whilst pondering Kurt's question is that the
Great Books ended with Freud for a reason. The list was put together
in the late 1940s and the editors felt a little distance in time was
needed to determine which works were truly influential. I think Freud
was the only 20th century person; remember, the jury was still out on
Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Auden, Joyce, Thomas Mann, etc. And of course
Beckett was unknown. I saw Mortimer Adler, one of the editors, on
William F. Buckley's show; he said something about wanting to avoid
controversy by not even getting into the 20th century.
Adler also said that, in retrospect, they might leave out Thomas
Aquinas' Summa Theologica if they had it to do all over again.
My memory may be a little hazy on this, though.
A few of my own nominations for the Great Books would be the works
of Beckett, Martin Luther King, Jr., T.S. Eliot and, uh, boy I don't
know--there are so many writers one could think of. Which women
writers--Virginia Woolf? Latin-American authors--Garcia Marquez?
Japanese--Mishima? Social scientists: Margaret Mead? Gregory Bateson?
Critics: Norman O Brown? How about Joseph Campbell?
I seem to have raised more questions, rather than answers...
Tom
Sanjiva Prasad
(minus a handful) for $27. (I have no way of estimating what the first
editions etc. that others wrote of are worth). I recall once quibbling over
the inclusion of St Augustine (and not Erasmus, I think) -- and was told
by the old man (who contributes to the Britannica year book) that the
selection was Hutchins's, and that he was a rather opinionated man (wonder
if the aged parent ever met Hutchins).
As for 20th century people, the original Great Books had William James
(vol. 53, I think --- someone borrowed our copy in the late 60's and
returned it over a decade later, the book having travelled over 3 continents!)
The last time I spoke with an Encyclopaedia saleswoman, I was told
they've dropped two of the original 54, and included 4 volumes of 20th
century writing. Any idea which two are out, and what's now in?
---
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European Computer Industry Research Centre Off: +49 89 92 69 91 58
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BROADWELL GEORGE AARON
do not say this from religious conviction, but because I think that
a person must be familiar with the Bible
to understand vast portions of Western history, law, and literature
SCIENTISTS - Brian Dorland
>
>As for 20th century people, the original Great Books had William James
>(vol. 53, I think --- someone borrowed our copy in the late 60's and
>returned it over a decade later, the book having travelled over 3 continents!)
Freud is volume 54. I left my copy over at a Neurologists house and
when I went to claim it, he told me he had never seen it. Figure that
one out...
>
>The last time I spoke with an Encyclopaedia saleswoman, I was told
>they've dropped two of the original 54, and included 4 volumes of 20th
>century writing. Any idea which two are out, and what's now in?
>
I believe that Apollonius of Perga (The Conic Sections) has been removed
and that some collected works of twentieth century philosophy
(wittgenstein et al) and science (einstein et al) have been included.
One of the members of the selection commitee for the new set was a
professor of mine (Douglas Allenbrook) and we gave him hell over taking
out the Appollonius. He said the commitee was convinced that Appolonius
was too obscure for most of the readers of the set (clearly the works
are not getting harder, the implication must be that the readers are
getting dumber).
Mortimer Adler visited, and we gave him hell, too, over the appollonius.
When we questioned him about 20th century authors, he said that the only
one he would cite with certainty is einstein. He said its still too
early to tell what will become (retrospectively, I guess) a great book.
Bryan
Kurt Godden
In vol. 1 of The Great Books series, the editors mention that they
deliberately omitted the Bible simply because it was so widely owned.
They didn't feel people needed a duplicate copy. On the other hand, not
too many people already own St. Augustine.
I might also add that they both lament and discuss at some length the
fact that the great books have been dropped almost universally from the
curricula of American schools and universities. They also hope/predict
that this will prove to be a 20th century aberration. A colleague of
mine at work informs me, however, that at St. Johns University in
Annapolis students still receive a true Liberal Education, even to the
extent that they begin by learning Latin and Greek in order to read those
works in the original languages.
Last night I was perusing my <1 year old copy of Adler's "The Great
Ideas" to see how it might differ from its original publication as the 2
vol. "Syntopicon" in the Great Books series. He mentions in his Preface
that Britannica published a 2nd edition of the series in 1990 and added 6
additional volumes (nos. 55-60) containing works from early 20th century
authors that the editorial board was predicting would eventually be held
up as classics. Unfortunately, he didn't list those authors or works.
If anyone happens to know, I'd love to hear the list.
-Kurt Godden
Kurt Godden
>editions etc. that others wrote of are worth). I recall once quibbling
over
>the inclusion of St Augustine (and not Erasmus, I think) -- and was told
>by the old man (who contributes to the Britannica year book) that the
>selection was Hutchins's, and that he was a rather opinionated man
(wonder
>if the aged parent ever met Hutchins).
I must relate the following here. This summer I had the opportunity to,
let us say, be exposed to a person who used to be on the editorial board
of Britannica. This woman shall remain nameless for reasons that will be
clear in a moment. She describes the Britannica organization as
consisting of two parts, "The editorial staff which is like a pristine
nunnery; and the sales staff which is like a whorehouse."
:-) Her words verbatim. She is now a faculty member at a prestigious
university.
-Kurt Godden
Al Finger
>So the topic of this thread is: What do *you* consider to be the works
>that are absolutely *indispensible* to a liberal education? Feel free to
>include non-Western works.
>
Some of the books that were essential to *my* "liberal" education were:
_The Autobiography of Malcolm X_
_Black Like Me_
_Summerhill_
_36 Children_
_The Way Things Spozed To Be_
_The Selling of the President_
_Teaching as a Subversive Activity_
_To Kill a Mockingbird_
and a host of others I can't even remember anymore.
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Jack Campin
[ on the Great Books guys ]
> I might also add that they both lament and discuss at some length the
> fact that the great books have been dropped almost universally from the
> curricula of American schools and universities. They also hope/predict
> that this will prove to be a 20th century aberration.
Is it? Just when has anything remotely resembling their selection ever
formed the curriculum of any institution anywhere except mid-20th-century
Middle America?
--
-- Jack Campin -- Room 1.36, Department of Computing & Electrical Engineering,
Mountbatten Building, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh EH14 4AS
TEL: 031 449 5111 ext 4192 FAX: 031 451 3431 INTERNET: ja...@cee.hw.ac.uk
JANET: possibly backwards BITNET: via UKACRL BANG!net: via mcsun & uknet
SCIENTISTS - Brian Dorland
>A colleague of
>mine at work informs me, however, that at St. Johns University in
>Annapolis students still receive a true Liberal Education, even to the
>extent that they begin by learning Latin and Greek in order to read those
>works in the original languages.
That's St. John's COLLEGE with two campuses, one in Annapolis and one in
Santa Fe NM.
Bryan
Kurt Godden
ja...@cee.hw.ac.uk writes:
>Kurt Godden <god...@predator.cs.gmr.com> wrote:
>[ on the Great Books guys ]
>> I might also add that they both lament and discuss at some length the
>> fact that the great books have been dropped almost universally from the
>> curricula of American schools and universities. They also hope/predict
>> that this will prove to be a 20th century aberration.
>Is it? Just when has anything remotely resembling their selection ever
>formed the curriculum of any institution anywhere except mid-20th-century
>Middle America?
Methinks there is a misunderstanding here.(?) Since you are posting from
the UK, I'm guessing that one answer to your question is both Cambridge
and Oxford a century ago (and perhaps even today, I'm not familiar with
their curricula).
Since I was born in mid-century and was raised in 'Middle America' (both
geographically and socioeconomically (ugly term!)), I feel rather
confident in claiming that in the universities (not to mention the
primary and secondary schools) in the American midwest nothing 'remotely
resembling' the Great Books formed the basis for a core liberal
education. To be sure, Shakespeare is even now much studied, and the
same may be said for some of the other great writers. But they form a
small subset of both the authors as well as the works represented in the
Great Books series referred to. Keep in mind that literature is only one
of the many fields represented. How many mathematicians have actually
read Euclid's "Elements"? And the editors of the series expect/wish that
the general liberal arts major not only could but *should* read it.
Incidentally, reading 10 pages from a Norton anthology does not count as
studying one of the great books of the hemisphere.
-Kurt Godden
SCIENTISTS - Brian Dorland
>Kurt Godden <god...@predator.cs.gmr.com> wrote:
>[ on the Great Books guys ]
>> I might also add that they both lament and discuss at some length the
>> fact that the great books have been dropped almost universally from the
>> curricula of American schools and universities. They also hope/predict
>> that this will prove to be a 20th century aberration.
>
>Is it? Just when has anything remotely resembling their selection ever
>formed the curriculum of any institution anywhere except mid-20th-century
>Middle America?
>
century?
Bryan
Mike Morris
Kurt Godden wrote regarding Adler and Hutchins:
I might also add that they both lament and discuss at some length the
fact that the great books have been dropped almost universally from the
curricula of American schools and universities. They also hope/predict
that this will prove to be a 20th century aberration.
Jack Campin responds:
Is it? Just when has anything remotely resembling their selection ever
formed the curriculum of any institution anywhere except mid-20th-century
Middle America?
I think this response is a little extreme, Jack, given that the
set purports to be neither timeless (i.e. equal to that set of great
books an 18th century liberally-educated person would know) nor
universal (i.e. that set of books a 20th-century liberally-educated
Chinese would know). The selection is, on the face of it, americocentric,
aimed at Americans within the setting of their 20th century democracy.
That said, I think one can look at past periods of western history, and
look in particular at educated persons in those periods, and I think
one can see that *some set of books very like these ones* would
have been known among the liberally educated persons. I've spent since
1986 (roughly) reading in this set, mainly the Bible (considered as the
zeroth volume) and the Greeks, with now a little of the Roman stuff (i.e.
I'm reading much more than just the books in the Great Books set, but the set
remains a kind of a syllabus or broad guide). It's quite clear to me that
all classical authors read Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, and the
Attic playwrights. Similarly, if one reads 19th century English novels,
it becomes pretty clear pretty fast the novelists all read and knew their
Milton, the Bible, classical myths, a little Shakespeare, and _Pilgrim's
Progress_. Or Jefferson, say, read Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and
Anglo-Saxon, familiarity with Thucydides and Polybius as well as Roman
and English law and the Bible and Locke and Voltaire and Montesquieu going
into the constitutionalism he and the other Founders promoted. Heck,
I consistently find I come up against my own ignorance around
here in discussions which conjure up Rousseau or Hegel or Kant.
That is, the Hutchins/Adler metaphor of it all as The Great Conversation
seems accurate to me. If one wants to participate in the discussion
at a certain level, there seem to be specific books it is relevant to
know. Shankara and Lao Tzu are simply less relevant to that enfranchisement.
I.e. institutions or no, I think the idea of a core set of Great Books
has been more or less a constant of liberal education in the West.
I suspect that much the same can be said of Islam,
of China, of India, and of Japan, to take examples of more
or less independent ``great'' cultural spheres. To become
educated has meant and means (in part at least) to study the
classics.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Jim Hartley
>[ on the Great Books guys ]
>> I might also add that they both lament and discuss at some length the
>> fact that the great books have been dropped almost universally from the
>> curricula of American schools and universities. They also hope/predict
>> that this will prove to be a 20th century aberration.
>Jack Campin retorts:
>Is it? Just when has anything remotely resembling their selection ever
>formed the curriculum of any institution anywhere except mid-20th-century
>Middle America?
Actually, one of the more famous lists of Great Books is the
required reading list from Columbia (hardly in "Middle America") circa
1920.
For anyone interested, that list is reproduced, among other places,
on pp 105-106 in Charles Sykes' _The Hollow Men_.
--
Jim Hartley
jeha...@ucdavis.edu
"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably
not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." H.L. Mencken
george m jacobs
The World's 500 Greatest Books= (New York: Stein and Day, 1992. ISBN:
0-8128-2938-7). The book is organized into 50 chapters (@ = 1 year) of ca.
10 books/authors
each. The selection is quite eclectic, including books from many
linguistic and cultural traditions. "Year 1", for example, includes: Lewis
Carroll, =The Complete Works=; Plato, =Apology, Crito, Phaedo=; =The Old
Testament=; Vaclav Havel, =Zahradni Slavnost= (tr. =The Garden Party=),
=Vyrozumeni= (tr. The Memorandum=); =The Epic of Gilgamesh=; Tacitus,
=Annales=, =Historiae=; Ondra Lysohorsky, =Selected Poems=; Ernst Hans
Gombrich, =The Story of Art=; George Steiner, ed., =Poem into Poem: World
Poetry in Modern Verse Translation=; and Abelard and Heloise, =Letters=.
I use Ward more as a reference work than as a reading guide, but sometimes
when I'm at a loss for something different, I do use him for inspiration.
--
Mike Jacobs * Arizona State Museum * The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 * tel: 602-621-6312 * email: jac...@gas.uug.arizona.edu
Janet M. Lafler
The insistence on particular "Great Books" as the foundation for a "liberal
education" appears to me to be essentially totalitarian. (I'm speaking
here of the attitude of Mortimer Adler and his cronies, not necessarily
anyone posting here.)
I take the point about the "great discussion," but what disturbs me is the
idea that there is only one "great discussion" in Western Culture; or
rather that this "great discussion" _is_ Western Culture, _is_ liberal
education. Are there "Great Books" from Western Culture which don't
derive from this central tradition? If so, than how do we recognize them?
If not, then the definition of "great" seems to me to be circular. Is
there nothing to be said for naivete, freshness, an outsider's per-
spective? Does the "great discussion" contain all wisdom, or are there
questions, topics, dilemmas that it cannot address? If the importance
of the tradition is that it is a discussion of great and essential ques-
tions over a long period of time (and thus it is only possible to par-
ticipate in the discussion if one is educated in it), then what of people
-- or classes of people -- who have been excluded from this discussion
because of a lack of access to education? Can we really expect such people,
even if offered the chance to study this "great discussion," to be much
interested in it?
What people who have been revising the curriculum have been doing is not
so much cutting out the "Great Books" as expanding the curriculum to
include works which have not been traditionally defined as "Great Books."
This is a political decision, but it's not simply a matter of tokenism,
of including womenandminorities. It's a matter of questioning the cen-
trality of these texts; of asking whether there aren't other texts that
equally deserve to be taught; of questioning the motives of those who have
declared these texts to be "great;" of wondering how they can be the well-
spring of our culture when they have traditionally been known only to a
tiny minority of people; of questioning -- rather than assuming -- their
universality.
I'm not denying the value of studying these texts, only the value of
holding them up as the essential core of education for all.
/Janet
--
Send mail to: ja...@netcom.com
"The semi-colons in _Mrs. Dalloway_ made me insane." --R. Lafler
Jack Campin
> ja...@cee.hw.ac.uk writes:
> >Kurt Godden <god...@predator.cs.gmr.com> wrote:
>> [ on the Great Books guys ]
>>> I might also add that they both lament and discuss at some length the
>>> fact that the great books have been dropped almost universally from the
>>> curricula of American schools and universities. They also hope/predict
>>> that this will prove to be a 20th century aberration.
>> Is it? Just when has anything remotely resembling their selection ever
>> formed the curriculum of any institution anywhere except mid-20th-century
>> Middle America?
> Methinks there is a misunderstanding here.(?) Since you are posting from
> the UK, I'm guessing that one answer to your question is both Cambridge
> and Oxford a century ago (and perhaps even today, I'm not familiar with
> their curricula).
I should maybe leave it up to Francis and Andrew to deal with this, but
Oxbridge was exactly the sort of institution I had in mind. What they have
always done is have their students study a *much* smaller range of material
in *much* greater depth; and I don't think they have ever offered a course
that tried to cover classical Greek mathematics, mediaeval theology,
Enlightenment political theory and 19th-century psychology. The Scottish
tradition was broader (see George Davie's "The Democratic Intellect") but
would also never have let a student think they were getting an education
by virtue of having read major primary works alone, with no cultural
background or commentary. Whenever there *has* been a core of texts
enforced by educational institutions in the past, it's always been much
smaller than the Great Books set and much more critically analyzed. (For
an example outside the Western tradition, Roy Mottahadeh's "The Mantle of
the Prophet" gives a nice description of what Khomeini's education - the
best you could get in Shiite Islam - was like, and it was in no way an
Islamic parallel of the Great Books). So the present situation, where
there undoubtedly _is_ some sort of canon but where no one person knows
more than a fraction of it and no educational institution is capable of
inculcating the whole shebang systematically, is the historical norm.
One way to look at this would be by analyzing what people had in their
personal book collections at various times in the past, so we could work
out empirically what the "canon" really was in, say, Goethe's Germany.
(How many people then would have owned remotely as many books as there are
in the Great Books set?) This should be doable by looking at inventories
of estates or commonplace books. Has it ever been done?
> Incidentally, reading 10 pages from a Norton anthology does not count as
> studying one of the great books of the hemisphere.
Yep, these things (almost exclusively an American phenomenon, though the
Open University does some stuff in the same spirit) are depressing, but
they're the logical result of the Great Books programme colliding with
reality. It's only a small step from thinking that you've done your bit by
a complex and ambiguous ancient text by reading one English translation of
it, to thinking that really a few pages will give you what you need. And
when you've got to fit in the reactions of cytochrome oxidase or the case
law of torts as well as the Great Books, something has to go.
- Jack, who's never read a word of Montaigne, Erasmus,
Montesquieu or Tocqueville and is never likely to -
Jack Campin
No cigar. I forget exactly what's in the Great Books selection once it
gets past the Middle Ages, but it does include Shakespeare, no? - he wasn't
considered as a subject for academic study until late in the century. And
aristocrats, in England at any rate, did not study theology, Aquinas' or
anybody else's: you went to church and any inquisitiveness beyond that was
a worrying sign of eccentricity (more would have been expected in Scotland
and Protestant Continental Europe, but still not real scholarship). Nor
would they have bothered with English translations of anything except the
Bible; if you didn't know Greek you wouldn't study Greek literature. None
of those French Enlightenment guys have ever featured on the curriculum for
the children of the British ruling class, right up to now (though they've
been on the menu as a minor option in Scotland, about as popular as
geology). A nineteenth century European aristo would have been more likely
to study Hafiz in the original Persian than read the Federalist Papers.
And so on; when you look at the specifics not much fits when you get past
the Greek and Roman classics.
Kurt Godden
writes:
>The insistence on particular "Great Books" as the foundation for a
"liberal
>education" appears to me to be essentially totalitarian.
>
the
>idea that there is only one "great discussion" in Western Culture; or
>rather that this "great discussion" _is_ Western Culture, _is_ liberal
>education. Are there "Great Books" from Western Culture which don't
>derive from this central tradition? If so, than how do we recognize
them?
Fair questions. I'll make my feeble attempt at representing what I
understand to be the position of Hutchins and Adler. Note that my
representation is based solely on reading only half of Volume 1 of the GB
series, which is a manifesto for Liberal Education written by Hutchins,
ed. in chief of the series. The copyright date is 1952.
Perhaps at least some of your objections would disappear if you were to
read Hutchins. First, the scope of the Great Conversation (GC). The GC
encompasses many important threads. In fact, vols. 2 and 3 of the series
"The Syntopicon", written by Adler, are essays on 102 of these threads.
(This was re-written and republished under separate cover last year by
Adler under the title "The Great Ideas.") I don't believe that Hutchins,
Adler or any of their "cronies" would suggest that these are the ONLY
valid threads. And they also admit that the actual books chosen for the
series are open to debate. Neither do they *define* Western culture as
consisting of these works (although they come close).
>If not, then the definition of "great" seems to me to be circular. Is
>there nothing to be said for naivete, freshness, an outsider's per-
>spective?
It seems to me that many of the writers represented *are* (or rather
were) outsiders--Copernicus, Freud, e.g. So I'd say that yes, there is a
lot to be said for outsiders.
>Does the "great discussion" contain all wisdom, or are there
>questions, topics, dilemmas that it cannot address?
I don't personally believe in the dichotomy that you postulate. That is,
I think it is perfectly reasonable to state that the GC both does not
contain all wisdom, but that it *can* address that wisdom not contained.
In fact, it seems to me that that is the essence of the GC.
>If the importance
>of the tradition is that it is a discussion of great and essential ques-
>tions over a long period of time (and thus it is only possible to par-
>ticipate in the discussion if one is educated in it), then what of
people
>-- or classes of people -- who have been excluded from this discussion
>because of a lack of access to education? Can we really expect such
people,
>even if offered the chance to study this "great discussion," to be much
>interested in it?
Now Hutchins addresses these points of yours specifically in vol. 1. He
says that, yes, it is only possible to participate if one is educated in
the tradition (the raison d'etre for the Great Books). He claims that a
democracy must be and can only be sustained by universal education in the
liberal arts. So his context is that of the democracy. And keep in mind
my earlier post that a liberal education has all but disappeared from
contemporary education. Huthins advocates a return to the liberal
education *for all*. He wants to *include* those who have been excluded
in the past (for whatever reason). He mentions several times that in the
past, the liberal education has been reserved for the aristocracy, noting
that they were the group who had both the political power and the leisure
to pursue this education. Given that in a democracy, pretty much
everyone now has access to pol. power and leisure, he argues that the
people can and should pursue liberal education. As for interesting them
in it, he spends some time discussing the misapplication of John Dewey's
educational philosphies in the US (which also were an attempt at
interesting students in education, but through what is basically
vocational training). Hutchins pretty much lambastes educators for being
lazy, and themselves destroying the teaching of the great books. He
claims that the purpose of the educator is to (1) convince the students
that they *ought* to be interested in the great books, and (2) find
effective methods for the teaching of those books. Both are essential
elements of the task of teaching.
>
>What people who have been revising the curriculum have been doing is not
>so much cutting out the "Great Books" as expanding the curriculum to
>include works which have not been traditionally defined as "Great
Books."
>This is a political decision, but it's not simply a matter of tokenism,
>of including womenandminorities. It's a matter of questioning the cen-
>trality of these texts; of asking whether there aren't other texts that
>equally deserve to be taught; of questioning the motives of those who
have
>declared these texts to be "great;" of wondering how they can be the
well-
>spring of our culture when they have traditionally been known only to a
>tiny minority of people; of questioning -- rather than assuming -- their
>universality.
Of course, it is always valuable to question motives and dogma.
Ironically, that is exactly what Hutchins is doing in vol. 1 because the
current dogma of mid-century (and today) is that the great books should
be and have been replaced by others in education. So Hutchins is the
outsider here who is questioning the dogma that reigns. (See also
Bloom's book regarding education that was discussed ad nauseam in
rec.arts.books some time ago.) I doubt that Hutchins would deny the
worth of many/most of the books currently taught. It's just that we
don't yet have the historical perspective to judge their greatness yet.
Since we *do* have that perspective to judge the greatness of Aristotle,
Darwin, et. al., *those* are the books that they choose as great.
>
>I'm not denying the value of studying these texts, only the value of
>holding them up as the essential core of education for all.
Point taken. Please also note that I am neither Hutchins nor Adler. I
am trying to represent what I perceive their position to be, but may have
inadvertently misrepresented them. Further, I do not (necessarily) agree
with everything they say.
-Kurt Godden
Francis Muir
One way to look at this would be by analyzing what people
had in their personal book collections at various times in
the past, so we could work out empirically what the "canon"
really was in, say, Goethe's Germany. (How many people then
would have owned remotely as many books as there are in
the Great Books set?) This should be doable by looking at
inventories of estates or commonplace books. Has it ever
been done?
I imagine there are many Reading Lists and Library Lists for people
worth looking at. I have several such, and I'd like to share some
of Claire Clairmont's reading list with the rabble. It would take me
a month of sundays to type it out, but I'll give you the first item
from every letter of the alfalfabet to impose some randomness.
Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound, in Greek and English.
Bacon, Francis: De argumentis scientiarum,1623. The Essayes
or Counsels, Civill and Morall, 1625.
Calderon de la Barca, Pedro: La Cisma de Ingalaterra; Los
Caballos de Absalon; Guardate del agua mansa; La Virgen
del Sagrario.
Dante Alighieri: Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso.
Edgeworth, Maria: Comic Dramas, in Three Acts; The Parent's
Assistant, or Stories for Children; Rosamond: A Sequel to
Early Lessons.
Fantin des Odoards, Antoine Etienne Nicolas: Histoire philosophique
de la revolution de France.
Galignani's Messenger.
Hafiz, Shirazi: Divan.
Indicator, The. (Leigh Hunt)
James I: The King's Quair.
Keats, John: Endymion; Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes
and Other Poems; Hyperion.
La Boetie, Etienne de: Discours de la servitude volontaire.
Machiavelli, Niccolo: Belfagor, first published as Novella
piacevolissima.
Nicholson, William: An Introduction to natural Philosophy.
O'Connor, Arthur, T A Emmett, W J McNevin: memoir on the
Objects of the Societies of United Irishmen.
Paine, Thomas: The Age of Reason; The American Crisis;
Common Sense; A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal on
the Affairs of North America; Rights of Man;
Quarterly Review.
Racine, Jean: Esther.
St. Augustine: Confessions.
Tacitus, Cornelius: various works.
Vallancey, Charles: A Grammar of the Iberno-Celtic, or
Irish language.
Walpole, Horace: The castle of Otranto.
Phew! Just shews you what the intelligent young lady did before TV
(and after Byron...).
Fido
Alan Hunter
>
>One way to look at this would be by analyzing what people had in their
>personal book collections at various times in the past, so we could work
>out empirically what the "canon" really was in, say, Goethe's Germany.
>(How many people then would have owned remotely as many books as there are
>in the Great Books set?) This should be doable by looking at inventories
>of estates or commonplace books. Has it ever been done?
Here's a catalogue of books left by Daniel Campbell, MP for Lanarkshire,
at Islay House in November 1776. This is his "country abode" and I suppose
would therefore include holiday reading, as well as country books. Cambell
owned Islay and was a progressive, inproving laird. This is written from
the transciption. Those books marked X are to be returned to Woodhall, his
house in Holytown, near Glasgow.
Vollums
3 Haughton's Husbandry
1 ffarmer Letters
1 Practical Husbandman
1 Dockson's Agriculture 2d vol. only
2 Mill's Husbandry 2d & 3d do. do.
2 Ellis's Husbandry
2 Siecle de Louis 14th
1 Juvenalli Delphinii
1 Stirling's Virgil
2 Mistakes of the Heart 1st & 3d vol. only
4 Retz's Memoirs
1 Virgilli Opera
X 1 A view of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion
3 Origin of Laws
1 Buchanan's History - ffolio
2 Sketches of the History of Man - do.
1 Boutcher on fforst Trees
1 Valuable Old Manusscripts
2 An inquiry into the natures and Causes of the wealth of nations
3 Bryant's Methodology
3 Dr Henry Exposition of the Book of Job - ffolio
X 1 another copy of Boutcher on fforest Trees
X 1 Dr Beattie's Essays
1 Essays on Agriculture
1 Guthrie's Geographical Gramer
1 Buchanan's Salms
X 6 Langhorn's Plutarch
X 1 Horatii Opera
1 Penal Statutes
2 ffowls Tasso
1 Description of the Western Isles
1 Milton's Paradise Lost
1 Large Map Book
1 The Map Book of Islay
1 Taylor & Skinners map of the Roads in Scotland
X 1 Mason's Poems
X 1 C Offices (the first word is blotted)
X 5 Histoire des Indes - the 2d vol: missing
1 Speech of Edmond Bourk
1 The Edinbr Mag: & Review
1 L'Evangile Di Jour
Spelling and punctuation and capitalisation are from the original, as
are fforst and fforest.
Alan
Mike Morris
Janet Lafler writes:
The insistence on particular "Great Books" as the foundation for a "liberal
education" appears to me to be essentially totalitarian.
Oh dear.
(I'm speaking
here of the attitude of Mortimer Adler and his cronies, not necessarily
anyone posting here.)
Adler totalitarian? I would agree that he tends to be dogmatic.
On the plus side, though, his dogmatism is pretty common-sensical
stuff, and he's very clear about presenting it.
Janet:
I take the point about the "great discussion," but what disturbs me is the
idea that there is only one "great discussion" in Western Culture; or
rather that this "great discussion" _is_ Western Culture, _is_ liberal
education.
Well, presumably Western Culture is much more than one philosophical
discussion thread. I.e. it might include paintings and music and
other things, too.
Are there "Great Books" from Western Culture which don't
derive from this central tradition?
In the sense that there are 17-time-readable books, yes, there
clearly are great books from Western Culture which do not participate
centrally in the Adler/Hutchins metaphor of The Great Conversation.
The books in their selection have specifically been chosen with regard
to this measure of centrality.
If so, than how do we recognize them?
In _How to Read a Book_ by Adler and Charles Van Doren, the definition
of a great book is ``a book from which you can still grow on the 17th read''.
Thus, we recognize them by getting 17 good reads out of them. Short of
that, we try to find them by listening to the recommendations of other
readers.
A Great Books on the other hand [a member of the Britannica set] refers to a
particular selection of such books, chosen for reasons relating to the
Great Conversation metaphor, as well as for considerations of space (thus
no Voltaire, since Voltaire's significance would be spread over
many volumes).
If not, then the definition of "great" seems to me to be circular.
No, even if not then I think one could define great books with respect
to a culturally central debate.
Is
there nothing to be said for naivete, freshness, an outsider's per-
spective?
Of course there's something to be said for it. On the other hand,
the definition of ``greatness'' given above (17-time-readability)
is *intrinsically* conservative. It requires long judgment by
many readers over slow time for recommendations to build up. I.e.
``greatness'' weighs the past more highly than the present,
however sexist, racist, misguided, etc. the societal environment of
those past writers may have been.
Also, it is hard for me to understand how valuable naivete or freshness
or an outsider's perspective can be unless one first has taken a
measure of what it means to be sophisticated or studied or to be
a cultural insider.
Does the "great discussion" contain all wisdom, or are there
questions, topics, dilemmas that it cannot address?
There are questions, topics, dilemmas that it does not address.
On the other hand, you might consider Whitehead's characterization
of all philosophy as being commentary to Plato. That is, there isn't
much in the way of questions, topics, or dilemmas that you can't
already find in Plato.
If the importance
of the tradition is that it is a discussion of great and essential ques-
tions over a long period of time (and thus it is only possible to par-
ticipate in the discussion if one is educated in it), then what of people
-- or classes of people -- who have been excluded from this discussion
because of a lack of access to education?
What of these people? Are you suggesting that the only alternative
is to change the discussion so that one doesn't need access to good
education to participate in it? Wouldn't the better goal be to try
and educate these people who have been excluded from education in
the past?
Can we really expect such people,
even if offered the chance to study this "great discussion," to be much
interested in it?
I can. If this Conversation concerns matters deeply human, and *not*
matters merely white or male or aristocratic or whatever, then I would
count it a great inhumanity on these people's part to be deliberately
uninterested in this Conversation merely because of their identification
with a group that had been excluded from the Conversation in the past.
Of course, I do believe this Conversation to be about matters deeply
human, and *not* merely about matters white or male or aristocratic or
whatever.
What people who have been revising the curriculum have been doing is not
so much cutting out the "Great Books" as expanding the curriculum to
include works which have not been traditionally defined as "Great Books."
If this had been all that anti-canonists have been doing, I'd have no
quarrel with it, since as far as I am concerned, the Great Conversation
has been doing precisely this for ages. Equality of educational
opportunity, for example, is something which is based on philosophical
arguments to be found in the Great Conversation of Western Culture (not
to mention the fact that this equality is based on the material
benificence of Western science and industry and medical science---
women in North America do not now usually die of childbirth, nor
do a significant fraction of their babies die of childhood disease).
Women and minority authors are certainly (already have been) in the process
of canonization without any need for barricade-rhetoric.
On the other hand, the high school English teachers in Milwaukee
3-4 years ago consistently would show the video of any story
assigned to their English classes. This is because they couldn't
trust most of the students to read any assigned material, and so,
in order to discuss any literature at all, they rented movie versions.
That is, the pedagogical environment one is stepping into with one's
call for ``more representation of literature by minorities/women in
the curriculum'' is one in which zero great books are being taught
in the first place, in which at most students take one or two
remedial courses in Western Civ at the college level. I.e. the pedagogical
environment means that if you insist on teaching Juan Rulfo,
even in translation, there went the last Shakespeare play students
were even exposed to.
This is a political decision, but it's not simply a matter of tokenism,
of including womenandminorities.
Since the argument which is usually advanced *is* tokenistic---since
it *assumes* that womenandminorities will have an intrinsically different
perspective and that that difference will amount to a hill of beans (I
think it plainly will not)---, I think it often is simply a matter of tokenism.
It's a matter of questioning the cen-
trality of these texts;
But questioning is a different matter than simply declaring these
texts to be non-central. Questioning involves openness to the possibility
that these texts are central, even if they were written by a minority.
of asking whether there aren't other texts that
equally deserve to be taught;
This makes it sound like we are rewarding self-esteem points to those
races from which authors have written books that have ``made it''.
This is bizarre to me, since I certainly don't feel that I gain
any more points by having it confirmed to me that Plato was a great thinker
than being told that Sundiata Keita was a great king.
of questioning the motives of those who have
declared these texts to be "great;"
There certainly is a lot of this kind of ``questioning'' going on,
though to me it looks more like bald assertion from out of
ugly political bias than anything else.
of wondering how they can be the well-
spring of our culture when they have traditionally been known only to a
tiny minority of people;
Simple, they are the wellspring of ``a liberal education'', i.e. the
highest part of our culture, which has traditionally been accessible
to only a tiny minority of people. It is an open question whether
this highest part of our culture can even ever be made accessible to
more than a tiny minority of persons. Adler, for example, is strongly
committed to the very democratic, very modern proposition that all
children are educable, that all children are capable of at least some
access to the great books. Leo Strauss, on the other hand, seems skeptical
that any but the very highest of minds (and thus the most materially free
of persons) could ever take part in the Conversation. Again, this
is an open question---whether *real* liberal democracy, with widespread
enfranchisement, and widespread educative responsibility among the citizenry,
can ever work. My own wishes are with Adler on this, though I recognize
that Strauss has a point.
Anyway, why it should bother anyone that, if there is a human best, it
will be representative of a minority of human beings, is beyond me.
of questioning -- rather than assuming -- their
universality.
Again, those books for which Adler makes the claim of ``greatness''
are precisely those books for which the empirical test for
universality has already been run. In contrast, the greater
majority of those books which people advance as being by
women and minorities and in need of inclusion in any list
of ``great books'' are (for rather obvious historical
reasons of sexist and racist oppression) 20th-Century Works.
I.e. they are the works whose universality is called the most
into question. They are works we can soberly suspect of doing
nothing more than giving us back ourselves---our own petty and
ephemeral political squabbles in rehash.
I'm not denying the value of studying these texts, only the value of
holding them up as the essential core of education for all.
``All'' is a big word. I would suggest we consider only all
American schoolchildren. Then the question is: Do Americans
need to know something about the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration,
and the reasons the Founders gave to the world for setting up
the institutions we have? Do Americans not need to know if there
are better institutions? Do Americans not need to have some *reasons*
for preferring liberal democracy to other forms of government? For
meddling in the affairs of other countries around the world ostensibly
to encourage the growth of liberal democracy in the world? If you
agree with me that Americans do need have reasons for republican
democracy, that Americans need to know what the alternatives are
and why those alternatives are not preferable, then I would suggest
you have already admitted that all American schoolchildren need
education in at least about half of the Britannica set as an essential
core to their education.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
lewis.h.mammel..jr
> One way to look at this would be by analyzing what people had in their
> personal book collections at various times in the past, so we could work
> out empirically what the "canon" really was in, say, Goethe's Germany.
Well, there's this verse from the Schubert song,
Das Lied Im Gruenen ( poem by Friedrich Reil ):
O gerne im Gruenen,
bin ich schon als Knabe und Juengling gewesen
und habe gelernt und geschrieben, gelesen
im Horaz und Plato, dann Wieland und Kant,
und gluehenden Herzens mich selig genannt,
im Gruenen.
In the greenery I loved
to be as a boy and a youth,
and I learned and wrote, and read
Horace and Plato, later Wieland and Kant,
and, heart aglow, counted myself blessed
in the greenery.
This is from the album notes of
DIETRICH FISCHER-DIESKAU
sings
Schubert Lieder
on Angel records. Das Lied im Gruenen was always one of
my favorites.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Barry Fernelius
> I think that the Bible would have to go on the list of essential books. I
> do not say this from religious conviction, but because I think that
> a person must be familiar with the Bible
> to understand vast portions of Western history, law, and literature
>
I believe that Adler did consider the Bible to be one of the essential books.
The Bible is not included in the Great Books because it is considered to be
commonly available.
Barry R. Fernelius
barry@hpfiqa
Janet M. Lafler
Janet M. Lafler (ja...@netcom.com) lays down the gantlet:
>>The insistence on particular "Great Books" as the foundation for a
>>"liberal education" appears to me to be essentially totalitarian.
posts or you're just a dilletante in this thread.
Kurt Godden (god...@predator.cs.gmr.com) responds like a gentleman:
>Fair questions. I'll make my feeble attempt at representing what I
>understand to be the position of Hutchins and Adler. Note that my
>representation is based solely on reading only half of Volume 1 of the GB
>series, which is a manifesto for Liberal Education written by Hutchins,
>ed. in chief of the series. The copyright date is 1952.
Hokay.
>Perhaps at least some of your objections would disappear if you were to
>read Hutchins.
Perhaps, though it's hard for me to look past my own experiences with
the politics surrounding the whole "Western Culture" curriculum debate.
Not to mention my own abysmal experience with Dr. Adler. (See my reply
to Mike Morris in this thread.)
>>...the definition of "great" seems to me to be circular. Is
>>there nothing to be said for naivete, freshness, an outsider's per-
>>spective?
>
>It seems to me that many of the writers represented *are* (or rather
>were) outsiders--Copernicus, Freud, e.g. So I'd say that yes, there is a
>lot to be said for outsiders.
Here we get into a tricky question: What constitutes an outsider?
Most literary and/or philosophical movements see themselves as challenging,
in some way, what has come before, sometimes to the point of revolution;
yet in reacting against what has come before they are still drawing on
that tradition, and somehow flowing out of it. What may be a radical
break at the time may not seem particularly drastic after the passage of
a hundred years. Freud was a radical thinker; yet he was also quite clearly
a product of his era and the critical debates of his day.
>>Does the "great discussion" contain all wisdom, or are there
>>questions, topics, dilemmas that it cannot address?
>
>I don't personally believe in the dichotomy that you postulate. That is,
>I think it is perfectly reasonable to state that the GC both does not
>contain all wisdom, but that it *can* address that wisdom not contained.
>In fact, it seems to me that that is the essence of the GC.
You're right. I should have said "does not" instead of "cannot." I agree
that the GC proports to be able to address any question, but I think that's
one of the claims that's quite simply not possible. Any conversation must
have defined parameters in order to be coherent; and these definitions are
going to create structures of thought which exclude certain ideas, thoughts,
modes of expression.
>>If the importance
>>of the tradition is that it is a discussion of great and essential ques-
>>tions over a long period of time (and thus it is only possible to par-
>>ticipate in the discussion if one is educated in it), then what of
>>people -- or classes of people -- who have been excluded from this dis-
>>cussion because of a lack of access to education? Can we really expect
>>such people, even if offered the chance to study this "great discussion,"
>>to be much interested in it?
>
>Now Hutchins addresses these points of yours specifically in vol. 1. He
>says that, yes, it is only possible to participate if one is educated in
>the tradition (the raison d'etre for the Great Books). He claims that a
>democracy must be and can only be sustained by universal education in the
>liberal arts. So his context is that of the democracy....
>....Hutchins pretty much lambastes educators for being
>lazy, and themselves destroying the teaching of the great books. He
>claims that the purpose of the educator is to (1) convince the students
>that they *ought* to be interested in the great books, and (2) find
>effective methods for the teaching of those books. Both are essential
>elements of the task of teaching.
I think that these two pedagogical questions are inextricably linked.
Much of the problem with teaching these books derives from the dilemma
of getting kids to see any connection between, say, Aristotle and their
own lives; and my personal opinion is that such a connection is rarely
there to be found. (I've never yet discovered any relevance to mine, and
I'm a lot more susceptible to pure philosophy than most people, coming
from an intellectual family and general environment.) I know that it's
apostasy, but I don't think that the brilliance, importance and beauty
of many of the "Great Books" is naturally obvious. In some cases, I
doubt that it's there at all; in others, I think it's only there for
someone who is already motivated to do intensive study of the subject.
What's necessary is to get kids to see some value in pure intellectual
activity. As someone who grew up with an assumption that books,
reading, and thinking provide one of the chief pleasures of life, it's
hard for me to imagine what might be needed to stimulate such a passion
in someone who has lacked it. One thing I'm sure of is that it's nec-
essary, if we want people to develop a passion for intellectual pursuits,
to let them find their own ways. The surest way to kill a kid's enthu-
siasm is to tell her or him "This is a Great Book, and you will find
it Extraordinary and Illuminating, and if you don't appreciate it,
something is Wrong With You." And I think that, when the "Great Books"
are taught, that is all too often the attitude. I'm not against "Great
Books" (well, maybe some of them), I'm against force-feeding them to
students, and against a rigid definition of what a "Great Book" is.
Janet M. Lafler
>>The insistence on particular "Great Books" as the foundation for a "liberal
>>education" appears to me to be essentially totalitarian.
Mike Morris laments:
>Oh dear.
I know what a trial I must be to you. Try to bear it.
>> (I'm speaking
>>here of the attitude of Mortimer Adler and his cronies, not necessarily
>>anyone posting here.)
>Adler totalitarian? I would agree that he tends to be dogmatic.
I think that totalitarian is exactly the right word for his philosophy. I
had the experience of participating in one of his week-long seminars for
"gifted" students when I was in high school, along about 1980. I remember
it pretty well. We read a Socratic dialogue (I believe it was the one
on piety), a bit of Aristotle, Machiavelli's _The Prince_, The Declaration
of Independence, parts of Rousseau's _The Social Contract_, and _The
Communist Manifesto_. (It was in the course of reading _The Social Contract_
that I discovered that I'm unable to read something of weight and listen
to music at the same time.)
I can summarize Adler's pedagogical style thus: 1) have students read
Great Books; 2) tell them what to think about them (e.g. Marx was wrong);
3) if a student voices disagreement, browbeat her or him until s/he either
agrees with you or shuts up; 4) allow a severely limited discussion, con-
trolling all of the parameters of said discussion as much as possible;
5) if a student questions the parameters of the discussion, ignore him
or her.
I was not one of the students to whom rule number 3 was applied, but I
did have rule number 5 applied to me on several occasions during the week.
(At one point, when we were discussing _The Prince_, Adler told us that
we had two philosophical positions to choose from, namely that a) people
-- excuse me, men -- are naturally good, or b) men are naturally evil.
When I suggested that there might be other possibilities -- for instance,
that people aren't naturally either good or evil -- and asked why he chose
to limit the discussion to just two choices, he just ignored me.)
I came away from the week with the conviction that Adler was not only a
totalitarian, but also not particularly bright.
>> Are there "Great Books" from Western Culture which don't
>>derive from this central tradition? If so, than how do we recognize them?
>In _How to Read a Book_ by Adler and Charles Van Doren, the definition
>of a great book is ``a book from which you can still grow on the 17th read''.
>Thus, we recognize them by getting 17 good reads out of them. Short of
>that, we try to find them by listening to the recommendations of other
>readers.
What do you make of the fact that some readers do not even get one good
read out of some of the "Great Books?" Is it the fault of the reader,
the fault of the teacher? How many readers does it take for the book
itself to be suspected? Does it matter who the reader is?
>On the other hand, you might consider Whitehead's characterization
>of all philosophy as being commentary to Plato. That is, there isn't
>much in the way of questions, topics, or dilemmas that you can't
>already find in Plato.
This sounds very self-fulfilling. It sounds not as though Plato came up
with all the good stuff, but as though Whitehead is willing to let Plato
define (forever and ever, apparently) the parameters of what "philosophy"
is.
>> If the importance
>>of the tradition is that it is a discussion of great and essential ques-
>>tions over a long period of time (and thus it is only possible to par-
>>ticipate in the discussion if one is educated in it), then what of people
>>-- or classes of people -- who have been excluded from this discussion
>>because of a lack of access to education?
>What of these people? Are you suggesting that the only alternative
>is to change the discussion so that one doesn't need access to good
>education to participate in it? Wouldn't the better goal be to try
>and educate these people who have been excluded from education in
>the past?
>> Can we really expect such people,
>>even if offered the chance to study this "great discussion," to be much
>>interested in it?
>I can. If this Conversation concerns matters deeply human, and *not*
>matters merely white or male or aristocratic or whatever, then I would
>count it a great inhumanity on these people's part to be deliberately
>uninterested in this Conversation merely because of their identification
>with a group that had been excluded from the Conversation in the past.
>Of course, I do believe this Conversation to be about matters deeply
>human, and *not* merely about matters white or male or aristocratic or
>whatever.
I believe that some works within the tradition may aspire to universal
appeal, and others not. And I think that it's quite easily demonstrated
that many "Great Books" do not naturally appeal to anyone who happens to
pick them up. (See also my reply to Kurt in this thread.)
The problem with asking people to look beyond the sexist or racist aspects
of "Great Books" to the human, universal stuff that lies beneath them
(promises, promises) is that those aspects may poison the reading experience,
especially if the reader feels that the work is being forced on her or him.
Aristotle's sexism is not reason for tossing all of Aristotle out the window,
but it has certainly stood in the way of my feeling that Aristotle has any-
thing to say to me. Aristotle wouldn't even _want_ me to be reading his
works.
>>What people who have been revising the curriculum have been doing is not
>>so much cutting out the "Great Books" as expanding the curriculum to
>>include works which have not been traditionally defined as "Great Books."
>If this had been all that anti-canonists have been doing, I'd have no
>quarrel with it, since as far as I am concerned, the Great Conversation
>has been doing precisely this for ages....
>On the other hand, the high school English teachers in Milwaukee
>3-4 years ago consistently would show the video of any story
>assigned to their English classes. This is because they couldn't
>trust most of the students to read any assigned material, and so,
>in order to discuss any literature at all, they rented movie versions.
Well, this is as serious problem, but it's not the fault of the "anti-
canonists." It's the fault of serious, deep problems in our educational
system; and I don't think that a return the the canon is going to correct
any of those problems.
>>This is a political decision, but it's not simply a matter of tokenism,
>>of including womenandminorities.
>Since the argument which is usually advanced *is* tokenistic---since
>it *assumes* that womenandminorities will have an intrinsically different
>perspective and that that difference will amount to a hill of beans (I
>think it plainly will not)---, I think it often is simply a matter of
>tokenism.
It is not, however, the argument that I advance. Much of the rest of
your post is based on responding to this argument, so I don't feel
obliged to comment on it.
Jim Hartley
Janet Lafler writes:
>I know that it's
>apostasy, but I don't think that the brilliance, importance and beauty
>of many of the "Great Books" is naturally obvious. In some cases, I
>doubt that it's there at all; in others, I think it's only there for
>someone who is already motivated to do intensive study of the subject.
And later, she adds:
>I'm not against "Great
>Books" (well, maybe some of them), I'm against force-feeding them to
>students, and against a rigid definition of what a "Great Book" is.
Could you give a few examples of the books you are thinking about
here, i.e., could you list a few of the books in the "well, maybe
some of them" category?
And, do you think any of the "Great Books" are truly Great? In other
words, do you deny that it is possible to construct a list of "Great
Books" or do you simply think that the lists which have been constructed
are poor lists? What I am wondering here is whether you would agree
that a list that consisted of, say, The Bible, any work of Shakespeare,
and maybe two or three other books (you choose which) is acceptable.
Mike Morris
Janet Lafler declared:
The insistence on particular "Great Books" as the foundation for a "liberal
education" appears to me to be essentially totalitarian.
I lamented:
Oh dear.
Janet responds:
I know what a trial I must be to you. Try to bear it.
It's really that word ``totalitarian'' I was objecting to (and still
object to). To me it adumbrates Godwin's Rule. I delete your story
of your experience in one of Adler's seminars, which illustrates
what I meant by saying that he is dogmatic---i.e. by a number of accounts
a bad teacher, especially in a maieutic setting. Your representation
of his inflexibility sounds consistent with the manner he projects
in his books. It also reminds me of a eulogy I read once in _The
American Scholar_ of Robert Maynard Hutchins, by a guy who loved
Hutchins but detested Adler, saying that Adler's personality did
much to undermine Hutchins' whole program. One characterization I
remember was that Adler lecturing was about as pleasant to listen to as
a machine gun.
In any event, ``totalitarian'' means to me they hold a gun to your
head. ``Dogmatic'' means inflexible of thought.
Janet wrote:
Are there "Great Books" from Western Culture which don't
derive from this central tradition? If so, than how do we recognize them?
I responded:
In _How to Read a Book_ by Adler and Charles Van Doren, the definition
of a great book is ``a book from which you can still grow on the 17th read''.
Thus, we recognize them by getting 17 good reads out of them. Short of
that, we try to find them by listening to the recommendations of other
readers.
Janet writes:
What do you make of the fact that some readers do not even get one good
read out of some of the "Great Books?" Is it the fault of the reader,
the fault of the teacher? How many readers does it take for the book
itself to be suspected? Does it matter who the reader is?
I think it does matter who the reader is, to some small extent.
But, if I take Homer or Shakespeare or Aristotle or Plato, I
believe these books are rather above our dislikes, and that, if
I haven't grown by reading them, the fault is mine (or, granted
the pedagogical method which introduced them to me). That is
*my* experience of these books---that one can always look at
them anew and grow thereby, learn something new, see something
new. It is also *my* experience that most books aren't like that.
Most books are either 0-time readables (i.e. a waste of time) or
are 1-time readables (you read them once, you learn something,
or are entertained, and you are then beyond them).
Now, I frankly find it hard to believe that you, or indeed any
literate person would be all that different in this regard. That
is, I go about on this planet with the perspiration theory of
intelligence---there ain't no genetic exclusion from the
things of the intellect, except in certain extreme and clinical
cases. I.e. if I read Aristotle or Shakespeare a couple of times over
and realize that it is rich and tight enough that I'll be still
learning stuff on the 17th read, then I figure that you will
not have plumbed the depths of it in 1 read. I.e. I think that
17-time readability is quite an objective quality of the book
itself. It is the distinction between 0-timers and 1-timers I think
that is much more subjective.
I wrote:
On the other hand, you might consider Whitehead's characterization
of all philosophy as being commentary to Plato. That is, there isn't
much in the way of questions, topics, or dilemmas that you can't
already find in Plato.
Janet writes:
This sounds very self-fulfilling. It sounds not as though Plato came up
with all the good stuff, but as though Whitehead is willing to let Plato
define (forever and ever, apparently) the parameters of what "philosophy"
is.
Sorry, but there simply *is* a lot there.
Now, I've explained that I consider a good bit of my own reading
to be remedial---i.e. that school taught me nothing. I tend to read
a lot of different books therefore (though certainly not as many
or as widely as some around here). On the other hand, there's
a real question which has been raising its head with me in this regard
lately. That question is whether it is wise to spend time trying
to read broadly---read alot of books, perhaps, trying to fit in
both ancient Greek literature and modern Japanese fiction---or
rather wouldn't it be better to spend more of my time with Aristotle,
or Homer, or Shakespeare, admitting that I'm not going to do it all
and that perhaps it'd be better to concentrate on doing the best
of it well.
Janet wrote:
If the importance
of the tradition is that it is a discussion of great and essential ques-
tions over a long period of time (and thus it is only possible to par-
ticipate in the discussion if one is educated in it), then what of people
-- or classes of people -- who have been excluded from this discussion
because of a lack of access to education?
Me:
What of these people? Are you suggesting that the only alternative
is to change the discussion so that one doesn't need access to good
education to participate in it? Wouldn't the better goal be to try
and educate these people who have been excluded from education in
the past?
And Janet wrote:
Can we really expect such people,
even if offered the chance to study this "great discussion," to be much
interested in it?
Me:
I can. If this Conversation concerns matters deeply human, and *not*
matters merely white or male or aristocratic or whatever, then I would
count it a great inhumanity on these people's part to be deliberately
uninterested in this Conversation merely because of their identification
with a group that had been excluded from the Conversation in the past.
Of course, I do believe this Conversation to be about matters deeply
human, and *not* merely about matters white or male or aristocratic or
whatever.
Janet responds:
I believe that some works within the tradition may aspire to universal
appeal, and others not. And I think that it's quite easily demonstrated
that many "Great Books" do not naturally appeal to anyone who happens to
pick them up. (See also my reply to Kurt in this thread.)
You have immediately lost me with your word ``appeal'', since we get
into what I was discussing with Heather before. ``Appeal'' doesn't seem
to me to have a whole lot to do with it. Let me make an analogy: If
you want to learn calculus, so that you may take a beginning course
mechanics and electromagnetism and be given a beautiful scientific
insight into half the phenomena in our universe, you are
first going to have to learn trig, which means first algebra,
which means eventually first that you have to learn multiplication
tables. OK, no one finds doing multiplication tables appealing,
or even necessarily intrinsically beautiful when in the 5th grade.
They are work to do. But, if you want to get to the beautiful
stuff, which as a human being endowed with rational soul you are
capable of getting to, you have to do the multiplication tables.
I would suggest that Aristotle is much like multiplication tables.
It is work to read him. But, because some people don't find that
work appealing, or let certain prejudices stand in the way of
reading him, doesn't convince me that the beauties aren't there,
or aren't accessible to any student who tries.
Janet:
The problem with asking people to look beyond the sexist or racist aspects
of "Great Books" to the human, universal stuff that lies beneath them
(promises, promises) is that those aspects may poison the reading experience,
especially if the reader feels that the work is being forced on her or him.
Aristotle's sexism is not reason for tossing all of Aristotle out the window,
but it has certainly stood in the way of my feeling that Aristotle has any-
thing to say to me. Aristotle wouldn't even _want_ me to be reading his
works.
This is exactly what I call tokenism.
I think it is an irresponsible and dogmatic way to read. It reminds
of those people who take ``All men are created equal'' and claim
to have discovered a refutation by pointing out that the man who
wrote that owned slaves, or didn't treat women as equals. The point is,
if it's true it's true for a reason, and that reason means that
one cannot continue to believe in the Declaration and believe in
slavery, or in the political inequality of women. One or the other
of the Declaration and the inequality had to go. I.e. one can't throw
out Jefferson's argument if one believes in political equality for
women and for blacks.
Look, I just don't understand why you feel it necessary to identify
yourself as a woman in Aristotle's time, or why you think that
identification should have any relevance to reading his books now.
To me that's like transporting today's politics back to a time
and place where it is irrelevant, it's failing to make the multicultural
trip. If I transport myself back in time, the simple fact of it is,
even if I get to keep the same gender, I'm more than likely to end up
a slave, illiterate, or dead of some malarial fever in childhood.
Janet wrote:
What people who have been revising the curriculum have been doing is not
so much cutting out the "Great Books" as expanding the curriculum to
include works which have not been traditionally defined as "Great Books."
I wrote:
If this had been all that anti-canonists have been doing, I'd have no
quarrel with it, since as far as I am concerned, the Great Conversation
has been doing precisely this for ages....
On the other hand, the high school English teachers in Milwaukee
3-4 years ago consistently would show the video of any story
assigned to their English classes. This is because they couldn't
trust most of the students to read any assigned material, and so,
in order to discuss any literature at all, they rented movie versions.
Janet writes:
Well, this is as serious problem, but it's not the fault of the "anti-
canonists." It's the fault of serious, deep problems in our educational
system; and I don't think that a return the the canon is going to correct
any of those problems.
But, the ``anti-canonists'' are stepping precisely in the direction
of making the problem worse. Insofar as the debate is an argument between
me and my list of books that I like versus you and your list of books
that you like, the debate is pretty academic. But when we are talking
of educating children, the fact is we are doing a pretty poor job of
giving even the most basic of schooling to kids.
Martha and I intend to homeschool our kids. As part of that, we figure
on the whole family learning Spanish, for twelve whole years and
actually reading literature in Spanish and writing in it by the time
we are done. I.e. I have no quarrel with learning multicultural stuff.
It would only get to a problem for me if the Spanish came at the
expense of learning English and reading literature in English. In
the case of the public schools, that I think is my real quarrel
with multiculturalism, that the newly included works are being
introduced at the expense of a canon *which mostly isn't being taught
already*. I.e., if we can do both, fine (personally, I believe there
is no reason we can't), but if we can do only one or the other,
do the canon first, worry about broadening it second.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Kurt Godden
>>>The insistence on particular "Great Books" as the foundation for a
>>>"liberal education" appears to me to be essentially totalitarian.
>Kurt Godden (god...@predator.cs.gmr.com) responds like a gentleman:
<gentlemanly discussion deleted>
Thank you very much. For the new reader of this thread, "GC" refers to
the Great Conversation--the metaphor for the multiple threads running
through the so-called Great Books of the past 2.5 thousand years.
Janet continues in her own ladylike manner:
>You're right. I should have said "does not" instead of "cannot." I
agree
>that the GC proports to be able to address any question, but I think
that's
>one of the claims that's quite simply not possible. Any conversation
must
>have defined parameters in order to be coherent; and these definitions
are
>going to create structures of thought which exclude certain ideas,
thoughts,
>modes of expression.
I disagree slightly in that I believe that whatever great and crucial
questions have not yet been discussed in the GC still could and can be by
future authors. That is, the GC expands appropriately to include
whatever humans regard as the great issues, in much the same way that a
personal conversation may follow tangents and flow according to the
desires of the participants. (Surely there is a pun lurking here
somewhere on the term "GC" and the garbage that is created during the
course of any conversation.)
>
>I think that these two pedagogical questions are inextricably linked.
>Much of the problem with teaching these books derives from the dilemma
>of getting kids to see any connection between, say, Aristotle and their
>own lives; and my personal opinion is that such a connection is rarely
>there to be found.
Hutchins' response to this is that surely the great questions and issues
that are weaved into the GC are the same as those that are pondered by
every individual (at *least* during adolescence!): Who am I? What is
the meaning of life? Does Truth exist? Is there a God? (Does God
prefer Chinese over, say, Vietnamese food?)
>I know that it's
>apostasy, but I don't think that the brilliance, importance and beauty
>of many of the "Great Books" is naturally obvious. In some cases, I
>doubt that it's there at all; in others, I think it's only there for
>someone who is already motivated to do intensive study of the subject.
He also responds directly to this issue. He says that many of the Great
Books do certainly require laborious effort to read, but that the effort
is worth it (else they would not be generally regarded as great books).
I think that this claim has received empirical justification (in a sense)
from the r.a.b.ble who often have stated the same thing (frequently in
condescending tones) regarding the reading of such books as Finnegan's
Wake, Gravity's Rainbow and the like. While there may certainly be
disagreement as to which books constitute the Great Ones, the payoff for
expending the effort in reading them is viewed as the same.
>
>What's necessary is to get kids to see some value in pure intellectual
>activity.
Indeed. But when I see the Youth of America (tm) spending more time
watching "The Simpsons" or "Beavis and Butthead" than they do on any
intellectual activity, I despair. Perhaps I'm just turning into my
parents, though.
>One thing I'm sure of is that it's nec-
>essary, if we want people to develop a passion for intellectual pursuits,
>to let them find their own ways.
Agreed.
>The surest way to kill a kid's enthu-
>siasm is to tell her or him "This is a Great Book, and you will find
>it Extraordinary and Illuminating, and if you don't appreciate it,
>something is Wrong With You."
>And I think that, when the "Great Books"
>are taught, that is all too often the attitude.
I'll be the judge of that, thank you. :-)
-Kurt Godden
Matt Austern
> I disagree slightly in that I believe that whatever great and crucial
> questions have not yet been discussed in the GC still could and can be by
> future authors. That is, the GC expands appropriately to include
> whatever humans regard as the great issues, in much the same way that a
> personal conversation may follow tangents and flow according to the
> desires of the participants.
At this point, I think, I might question the usefulness of the
metaphor. If the Great Conversation includes all books that could be
described as great, and if it includes all issues that anybody now
regards (or once regarded) as compelling, then is it really sensible
to call it a unitary thing? That is: if we can't decide which books
are part of this Conversation, and if it encompasses every subject,
then does it make sense to talk about it at all?
A better metaphor, perhaps, might be an indeterminate (and changing)
number of different conversations, some of which refer to each other
and some of which don't.
It sounds to me as if we might be committing the error of reification:
acting as if an entity exists just because we can come up with a name
for it.
--
Matthew Austern Maybe we can eventually make language a
ma...@physics.berkeley.edu complete impediment to understanding.
Matt Austern
> And, do you think any of the "Great Books" are truly Great? In other
> words, do you deny that it is possible to construct a list of "Great
> Books" or do you simply think that the lists which have been constructed
> are poor lists? What I am wondering here is whether you would agree
> that a list that consisted of, say, The Bible, any work of Shakespeare,
> and maybe two or three other books (you choose which) is acceptable.
The problem I have with a Great Books list isn't that great books
don't exist; it's just that singling out a book as worth of inclusion
on that list suggests not just that it's great, but that it is greater
than the books that don't get on the list. That is, it limits the
concept of greatness.
I would feel better about such lists if there was always a prominant
consumer's warning label printed at the top of them: something like
"Here is a list of three or four books that are widely regarded as
great. They have been selected, more or less arbitrarily, from
thousands of other books that are also widely regarded as great."
Oh, and incidentally: I don't think that every Shakespeare play is
great, and I don't think that all of the Bible (pretty much an
anthology, after all) is, either.
Joann Zimmerman
(Mike Morris) wrote:
> You have immediately lost me with your word ``appeal'', since we get
> into what I was discussing with Heather before. ``Appeal'' doesn't seem
> to me to have a whole lot to do with it. Let me make an analogy: If
> you want to learn calculus, so that you may take a beginning course
> mechanics and electromagnetism and be given a beautiful scientific
> insight into half the phenomena in our universe, you are
> first going to have to learn trig, which means first algebra,
> which means eventually first that you have to learn multiplication
> tables. OK, no one finds doing multiplication tables appealing,
> or even necessarily intrinsically beautiful when in the 5th grade.
> They are work to do. But, if you want to get to the beautiful
> stuff, which as a human being endowed with rational soul you are
> capable of getting to, you have to do the multiplication tables.
> I would suggest that Aristotle is much like multiplication tables.
> It is work to read him. But, because some people don't find that
> work appealing, or let certain prejudices stand in the way of
> reading him, doesn't convince me that the beauties aren't there,
> or aren't accessible to any student who tries.
Poor analogy, Mike. Perhaps I am/was perverted, but I found myself enjoying
the multiplication tables--when I encountered them in the second grade.
Given that for the next three years I learned no new mathematics with the
exception of long division, which I also found to be fun, this was a rather
sensible reaction on my part. The use of the multiplication tables was an
excellent standin for a lack of ritual in my early religious life: learning
them and repeating them wholesale was roughly equivalent to the repetition
of Hail Marys and Apostles' Creeds; answering random questions on them in
class ("Joann! What's 8 times 7?") functioned as the equivalent to reciting
random portions of the Catechism. The eminently *logical* arrangement of
the multiplication tables seemed to me to be some sort of formal art.
Now, if you wished to use integral calculus as your example, you'd find
little argument from me ...
--
Joann Zimmerman, who is [still] changing newsreaders and seems to have
misplaced her .sig for the foreseeable nonce
[She's also threatening to change her email address, but that's another and
later story]
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
directly responding to any of the interlocutors, I would add my voice to the
general tumult. My perspective, I think it safe to say, is somewhat different
than any so far offered--but not for that do I think it will please Mr. Morris.
Quite a number of questions and problems have to be addressed in a debate such
as this one, even if inadequately. One might be how a polity finds itself an
educational system. A reiterated gripe here seems to run as follows: that in
abandoning a Great Books Liberal Education the U. S. has done itself and its
children a grave disservice. But, for better or worse, the U. S., a
materialist, pragmatic, business-oriented society, cannot--at least most of its
constituents have come to believe--subsist on an essentially contemplative
education. The U. S., no less a cave than any other "culture," has found for
itself the most expedient, democratic education: all our complainings are not
likely to change this a whit. When a great conservative educator of the likes
of Irving Babbitt or Allan Bloom comes along, they can be said to perform the
valuable service of propagating a "rhetoric of discontent" that challenges
complacency in the cave, at least locally and momentarily. But to pretend that
the cave can be excavated by a liberal education and exposed to the radiance
of sunlight is the purest idealism. Does anyone here seriously believe that a
smattering (or even heavy heaps) of Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, et al. would
seriously improve our situation, in either social or educational terms, when
our students will be the same disaffected students and our teachers mostly,
as they must be in so large an educational system, incompetent?
The thrill of discovering a great philosopher or great poet almost invariably
comes on one's own (or through the facilitation of the rarest of teachers,
rare, too, perhaps, for you and not necessarily others). There is something
irreduciably subjective about this process--even if the lamps unearthed are
not themselves merely our phantasmal reconstructions. This subjective element
*must*, by its nature, elude our pedagogical schemes. (An old adage involving
a horse and water comes to mind.)
If we examine this subjective feature further, perhaps we might see, too, that
the books one most profits by and learns best to live with are not necessarily
of what, in Mr. Morris' terms, or the terms of The Five Foot Shelf, are the
greatest. This is not necessarily to be lamented. We each do what we can, and
the goal of a liberal arts education might be to assist the individual in
arriving, not through an uncomplicated process, at fulfillment (whatever *that*
may signify). Certainly an educated student must know the history of things,
peoples, languages, cultures: do we all agree on this? (There doesn't appear
to be a viable alternative, or at least I have not been exposed to one.)
In learning to know such things, the student inevitably must encounter the
authors regarded as greatest, must have some knowledge of the thought and
accomplishments of Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, Goethe, and many, many more. But
firsthand knowledge, at least for the most, will inevitably be confined to one
look at a translated text. To *know* Aristotle or Kant means to know their
language, the history of their times, and the entire system of their thought.
The professor of philosophy has his place in our world, but his task is that of
a lifetime--and is still inevitably specialized. The person who has
assimilated both Plato and Hegel in the most profound terms probably remains
yet to be born, or perhaps, like Heidegger, became another of the great
philosophers whose unceasing work remains forever beyond our grasp. Genius
does not wait for us to catch up.
(And I must insist, as a footnote to this last paragraph, that to know a
writer, any writer, one must know that writer in the original language. In
the greatest works, sound and sense converge to a largely unsuspected degree.
The great writers have almost invariably corroborated this proposition by
their own comments. Heidegger felt his philosophy could only be conducted in
German or Greek. James and Joyce both felt their works were untranslatable.
Anyone who has studied poetic form and meter knows how inseparable such things
are from their immediate medium. Hegel, in response to a naive Frenchman
who asked why his works were so complicated, replied that some things
can not be stated simply--or in French. To really read the Great Books, one
must first know the languages in which they are written. By such a standard
I have only known one educated person in my life. Perhaps this is true:
perhaps he is the only educated person I have ever met; but what significance
does this have for those who will never, whether by circumstance or lack of
ability or application, learn to read with facility and creative brilliance
in English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek? Irving Babbitt, BTW,
read in all these and Sanskrit and Pali, too. He claimed that it would be
as difficult to make a scholar (in his rigourous terms) out of the typical
Harvard undergrad of 1904 as to make a lancehead out of putty. What does that
say for those of us in 1993 at or with degrees from far less elite and
demanding institutions?)
Part of my point here is that not all of us were "cut out" to read, or even
understand, at a low level, the Great Books. Certainly I believe, in
contradistinction to one of Mr. Morris' opponents, that the influence of the
Greak Books circulates freely all around us. We live on and take for
actualities tropes designed by minds whose powers we can barely conceive.
Learning to recognize this is surely part of education. But learning to live
in the world as it is, or appears to be, without lapsing into being "sicklied
o'er with the pale cast of thought" will be the lot of most.
So what "solutions" do I offer to these conundrums (setting aside for the
moment whether I have merely invented them--other will decide for themselves).
First, perhaps we must acknowledge that all "solutions" are provisional.
Teaching in the liberal arts today is rather like working in a MASH unit: you
provide what patchwork you can and then send students back to the frontlines
of life. We can hardly expect that the average student will have much interest
in scholarly and philosophical questions. Perhaps it is even arrogant of us
to expect that they should be interested. Only in a democracy has anyone
imagined that everyone was educable to a level where they would be fascinated
by the least problems presented by peripatetic philosophy or a Joycean text.
This is, and always no doubt will be, the stuff of a specialized clerisy that
could do worse than recognize its own interests, no matter how high the
subjective payoff, are not those of the Heraclitean world at large. If this
suggests an image of the ivory tower, then it should only do so so long as the
tower is itself overshadowed by surrounding skyscrapers.
In the end, I might agree with a position similar to that adopted by the
distinguished English critic F. R. Leavis, who was quite critical of the Great
Books enterprise and suggested as a viable alternative a "training" in one's
own literature. Certainly a whole world, larger by far than one's own
limited horizon opens up if we seriously confront any tradition of writing.
To learn from reading Dickens, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad or to learn
from Hawthorne, Melville, and James, or from Emerson, Thoreau, William James,
and Santayana: this one can do. To do it successfully one must certainly
know "about" the Greeks, about Shakespeare, about a million million things,
each of which contributes more or less to a grasping, crescive self. Not
all edification, I would certainly say, is equal: certainly not if the choice
is Plato or MTV. But the application of one's limited powers of understanding
to any great body of texts--particularly those books that edify one most--
this, it seems to me, is liberal education, not dogmatic devotion to a list
of books only the greatest of polymaths could ever hope to understand or
see the "true" value of. I am not defending complacency--far from it!--but
only attempting to state a more "realistic" position, one that recognizes the
limitations of institutions, teachers, and students. I believe it is better to
know, deeply, something worth knowing (and by definition, I think, this must
remain open, but yet exclusive), than to be merely an autodidactic dilettante
who thinks one must know what one never can. As students, then, we might be
active, restless, "open" (but not merely relativistic), and as teachers we
might then impart at least an enthusiasm for knowing and for life.
Obviously all of this is inadeqate. I post it merely to stimulate thought
and, perhaps, further discussion.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
Thomas S Listmann
This has been the most interesting and worthwhile conversation
I've encountered on the Internet, made all the more enjoyable
by the lack of rudeness and bad-mouthing so charactoristic of
newsgroups.
A few quick thoughts, before my Friday vodka martini:
1. Janet believes the GB and/or GC to be exclusive of those
outside the academy (that is, the traditionalWestern educational
or cultural "structure"): I thought the whole point of the GB
series was "lifelong learning" accessable, via purchase or the
library,to building managers like myself. That is certainly why
I bought the GBs.
2. All this talk about "17th reading" and "finding meaning" and
relevance sounds like "Me Generation" cliches. And perhaps that's
why many of us have troble with the attitudes of Hutchins and Adler:
we look for what is important to us personally in art or philosophy.
Hutchins/Adler came/come from another generation and educational
tradition, one that is more static or defined or whatever you want
to call it. Ne'er the twain shall meet, at least for most of us
under 45 years old. It is the historical importance of the GBs
that makes me read them: I want to understand how my world got
this way, and Aristotle is damned important to understanding,
say, Christianity; which is crucial to understanding Martin
Luther King, Jr. "Universal appeal" and 17th reading" as means
of defining "classic" is so much BS to me.
3. I think that Richard Tarnas' Passion of the Western Mind makes
clear the importance Plato and Aristotle and all the rest of the
GB "authors."
4. Doesn't the introduction to the GBs contain a consumer's warning?
5. My first grader is in a bi-lingual class (Spanish/English) and
it's great. I have no worries that her English is suffering--in
fact, I think it heightens her interest in language.
Opps...martini time.
Tom
Vance Maverick
|>
|> 1. Janet believes the GB and/or GC to be exclusive of those
|> outside the academy (that is, the traditionalWestern educational
|> or cultural "structure"): I thought the whole point of the GB
|> series was "lifelong learning" accessable, via purchase or the
|> library,to building managers like myself. That is certainly why
|> I bought the GBs.
The questions of access and obligation are separate. It's
right and good that you (or anyone) should be able to find
the books if you're interested. But I don't think you should
feel obliged to read them. If I read Janet right (that is,
if the subset of my own opinions to which I ascribe her
words is a fair one), she's not saying the GBs are exclusive,
she's saying their supposed *inclusion* of everything and
everybody is a false claim -- the kind of false claim that
is made partially true by being acted upon.
|> 2. All this talk about "17th reading" and "finding meaning" and
|> relevance sounds like "Me Generation" cliches. And perhaps that's
|> why many of us have troble with the attitudes of Hutchins and Adler:
|> we look for what is important to us personally in art or philosophy.
|> Hutchins/Adler came/come from another generation [...]
But these phrases you label as belonging to the "Me Generation"
are theirs.
|> Ne'er the twain shall meet, at least for most of us
|> under 45 years old.
How was Aristotle closer to Hutchins than to you or me?
|> Opps...martini time.
Beer time in Berkeley,
Vance
SCIENTISTS - Brian Dorland
>Janet Lafler declares:
>>>The insistence on particular "Great Books" as the foundation for a "liberal
>>>education" appears to me to be essentially totalitarian.
>
I disagree with this interpretation...more later.
>I think that totalitarian is exactly the right word for his philosophy. I
>had the experience of participating in one of his week-long seminars for
>"gifted" students when I was in high school, along about 1980. I remember
>it pretty well. We read a Socratic dialogue (I believe it was the one
>on piety), a bit of Aristotle, Machiavelli's _The Prince_, The Declaration
>of Independence, parts of Rousseau's _The Social Contract_, and _The
>Communist Manifesto_. (It was in the course of reading _The Social Contract_
>that I discovered that I'm unable to read something of weight and listen
>to music at the same time.)
>
>I can summarize Adler's pedagogical style thus: 1) have students read
>Great Books; 2) tell them what to think about them (e.g. Marx was wrong);
>3) if a student voices disagreement, browbeat her or him until s/he either
>agrees with you or shuts up; 4) allow a severely limited discussion, con-
>trolling all of the parameters of said discussion as much as possible;
>5) if a student questions the parameters of the discussion, ignore him
>or her.
>
The problem here would seem to be an inability to distinguish Mortimer
Adler from the notion of the "Great Books". As an alumnus of St. John's
College, I can state most definately that the two are not equivalent.
Adler is an honorary alumnus of St. John's, and he is constantly
hovering about the campus (for obvious reasons). I recall when I was a
freshman, a tutor of mine told us to go enjoy his annual talk, but to
thank god that Adler was not a tutor at the school. The reasons why
became cear after his talk; they are more or less the observations you
list. He is intolerant, rigid, and doesn't seem to particulary care
about what any one else has to say about the works. He seems at his
best explaining his own thoughts.
In fairness to Adler, I wonder how many times he has heard ostensibly
"new" ideas--I expect he has heard the same interpretations and readings
over and over again for the last fifty years. My thoughts about Adler
boil down to this: 1) He is a great patron of St. John's College and the
notion of the great books as the preferred substance of a liberal
education 2) He has some interesting observations about the books 3)
He would not be a good teacher 4) He is not "one of the pre-eminent
philosophers of the twentieth century" (I think one of his books said
this).
There is nothing totalitarian about the books themselves. Classes at St
John's take the form of discussions about the material under
consideration. The ideal tutor at St John's does not teach, but rather
gives direction
the class when it needs it, and lends the wisdom to be expected from one
who has read the works under discussion many times. This does not
obtain at all times and with all tutors, they are human, but is
generally the modus operandi of the classes. There was no
totalitarianism in my classes, though students had the responsibility of
defending their ideas to the other students.
Now whether the books themselves are exclusionary is a different
question. I would prefer to discuss this later.
>>> Are there "Great Books" from Western Culture which don't
>>>derive from this central tradition? If so, than how do we recognize them?
>
>>In _How to Read a Book_ by Adler and Charles Van Doren, the definition
>>of a great book is ``a book from which you can still grow on the 17th read''.
>>Thus, we recognize them by getting 17 good reads out of them. Short of
>>that, we try to find them by listening to the recommendations of other
>>readers.
>
>What do you make of the fact that some readers do not even get one good
>read out of some of the "Great Books?" Is it the fault of the reader,
>the fault of the teacher? How many readers does it take for the book
>itself to be suspected? Does it matter who the reader is?
>
You do point out a common occurence. Calvin and Rabelais come to mind
for me. I recall feeling like I had missed the joke with Rabelais. I
found him unfunny and tiresome, unlike the rest of my class. Calvin I
simply found to be ridiculous. Oh well. That the authors had a great
impact on western culture cannot be denied. The judgement of "great
bookness" cannot be a particular one, but must be more or less
universal. I would say that my readings of these two works have very
little effect on whether they are great books.
I expect you might be talking about another problem. I imagine this has
happened often to people who have purchased the Great Books set:
The new owner happily plunks down on the sofa with one of the books,
Kant, for example, and begins reading his new purchase. Within a minute
or two, he realizes that he has absolutely no idea about what the authro
is talking about; the book goes onto a bookshelf and none of the books
are ever looked at again.
All I can say to this is that it requires effort to read the books, some
more than others. This is as it should be. I don't think all of the
books are for everybody, and I don't think anyone should expect to get
anything out of the books without expending work. If you want
effortless reading, read Tom Clancy.
No one makes the claim that the criterion for being a great book is lack
of mistakes. Adler himself says the books have more errors in them than
true statements. His claim is that they have more truth in them than
other works which don't make the list.
I think this is an acceptable analysis. I may disagree with Aristotle's
notion on the natural slave (actually, in fairness to Arsitotle, I
should say "I may disagree with _my understanding_ of Aristotle's
notion..."), but I do not therefore ignore the _Physics_; similarly, I
note that Abraham Lincoln suggested at one point that free blacks be
resettled in Africa-my disagreement with this statement does not poison
the rest of his great corpus of writings for me. These are people we
are talking about, not gods. It may be that that is the sort of
treatment you object to, and if so, I would agree.
There is nothing _a priori_ excusionary about the works or the authors
except the one rule that must apply in any conversation: one must have
heard the conversation in order to expect to participate. This
necessarily excludes those who by virtue of the exigencies of thei own
times and cultures could not read the books. This would include women
up to the nineteenth century (more or less) and the poor up to the
twentieth century. This is not an indictment of the great books, but
rather an historical statement.
One can write about anything one pleases, but if you do not contribute
to the conversation, it would seem clear that you would not become part
of it.
I do think its funny that many "anti-canonists" are unknowingly quite
canonical. Freedom of expression, minority rights, democracy, et al are
all quite canonical, and anyone who thinks that the writings of Marx
constitute a revolution against western tradition would be surprised
(maybe dismayed is a better word) to learn that Marx is one of the most
referentially western author I have read.
In summary, I would say that you should not let your experience with
Adler poison your understanding of the great books.
Bryan
SCIENTISTS - Brian Dorland
This is where we may revisit the Whitehead quote. All the strands can
be traced to Plato in one way or another (I would say that most are
traced through Arsitotle).
Bryan
SCIENTISTS - Brian Dorland
>
>> And, do you think any of the "Great Books" are truly Great? In other
>> words, do you deny that it is possible to construct a list of "Great
>> Books" or do you simply think that the lists which have been constructed
>> are poor lists? What I am wondering here is whether you would agree
>> that a list that consisted of, say, The Bible, any work of Shakespeare,
>> and maybe two or three other books (you choose which) is acceptable.
>
>The problem I have with a Great Books list isn't that great books
>don't exist; it's just that singling out a book as worth of inclusion
>on that list suggests not just that it's great, but that it is greater
>than the books that don't get on the list. That is, it limits the
>concept of greatness.
If one does not use discression in defining greatness, then it tends to
lose its meaning. This is to say that if there are thousands fo great
books, then the modifier great starts to become merely good.
I think putting the book on "the list" is _intended_ to single it out from
all other books.
>
>I would feel better about such lists if there was always a prominant
>consumer's warning label printed at the top of them: something like
>"Here is a list of three or four books that are widely regarded as
>great. They have been selected, more or less arbitrarily, from
>thousands of other books that are also widely regarded as great."
>
>Oh, and incidentally: I don't think that every Shakespeare play is
>great, and I don't think that all of the Bible (pretty much an
>anthology, after all) is, either.
I don't think anyone would claim that all of Shakespeare's works are
great. This doesn't mean that most of his works are not great, or that
his corpus is not great.
One item of interest to those follwoing this thread: the
"canon" as maintained by St. John's College is in flux. Every year,
a few works are added and others are removed.
Bryan
Anand Bemra
>That said, I think one can look at past periods of western history, and
>look in particular at educated persons in those periods, and I think
>one can see that *some set of books very like these ones* would
>have been known among the liberally educated persons. I've spent since
>1986 (roughly) reading in this set, mainly the Bible (considered as the
>zeroth volume) and the Greeks, ....
I have been brought up in an Hindu environment, and didn't have
to read the Bible. Although there were several occasions which
presented itself and encouraged me to read, like the Gideon Society's
efforts and the occasional preacher turning up at my door on a
lazy sunday morning, I never made avail of these oppurtunities.
What caught my eye recently was a line in movie review of "Manufacturing
Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media" by Darrin Nowakowski. In there
he quotes Chomsky as saying that the Bible is "the most genocidal book in
the whole canon of literature". This obviously was shocking and still is.
I still don't know why he said that. Or may be Chomsky is misquoted.
I mean, I can see the point in Sinehead O'Conor ripping up Pope's photo-
graph in order to show her resentment of organized religion, but this
is a little different.
> Mike Morris
> (msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
--
Screw PBS & NPR news. Tired of news "sanitized for your protection?". Try:
misc.activism.progressive, "Lies Of Our [NY]Times", "Z" magazine (Boston).
KPFA 94.1 FM (Bay Area), 90.7 (L.A.), 90.1 (Houston, TX), 89.3 (Washington, DC)
These are my opinions, not my employer's.
mi...@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
> mechanics. And, from another point of view, the Principia is certainly
> an important book and one should know what it is and where and when it
> was written.
>
> However, _reading_ it, while more or less fun depending on personal
> taste, isn't going to contribute very much to someone's education. If
> reading such original sources is suddenly deemed essential then I for
> one bow out of any pretense of education since I am _not_ going to try
> and wade through `Kapital' :-).
You raise an interesting question. There are books so central to
contemporary thought that knowing what's in them is vital, but so
diffcult that reading them is nearly out of the question for the
non-specialist.
That would certainly go for just about all of Kant and Hegel, for
example. One could name a hundred others.
So we rely on secondary sources--an incongruous solution, when one is
dealing with highly formative books!
Have any of you succeeded in reading something "unreadable" out of
determination to bypass the secondary sources, without being
specialists? I can't even make much sense out of Spinoza in its
original form...
Ken
--
=============================================================
= mi...@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu = these late monkeys of the West =
= opinions are mine alone ==== they throw language around ===
= and not my employer's ========== as if words were =========
= or his henchpersons' ================ bananas =============
============================================ - Skywoolix ====
Robert C. Paulsen, Jr.
In article <A8C5CF6A...@ksg.cs.gmr.com>, Kurt Godden
(god...@predator.cs.gmr.com) writes:
>
>Last night I was perusing my <1 year old copy of Adler's "The Great
>Ideas" to see how it might differ from its original publication as the 2
>vol. "Syntopicon" in the Great Books series. He mentions in his Preface
>that Britannica published a 2nd edition of the series in 1990 and added 6
>additional volumes (nos. 55-60) containing works from early 20th century
>authors that the editorial board was predicting would eventually be held
>up as classics. Unfortunately, he didn't list those authors or works.
>If anyone happens to know, I'd love to hear the list.
>
>-Kurt Godden
>
Vol 55: William James
Henri Bergson
John Dewey
Alfred N. Whitehead
Bertrand Russell
Martin Heidegger
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Karl Barth
Vol 56: Henri Poincare
Max Plank
Alfred N. Whitehead
Albert Einstein
Air Arthur Eddington
Neils Bohr
G.H. Hardy
Werner Heisenberg
Erwin Schrodinger
Theodosius Dobzhansky
C.H. Waddington
Vol 57: Thorstein Venlen
R.H. Tawney
John M. Keynes
Vol 58: Sir James G. Frazer
Max Weber
Johan Huizinga
Claude Levi-Strauss
Vol 59: Henry James
Bernard Shaw
Joseph Conrad
Anton Chekhov
Luigi Pirandello
Marcel Proust
Willa Cather
Thomas Mann
James Joyce
Vol 60: Virginia Woolf
Franz Kafka
D.H. Lawrence
T.S. Elliot
Eugene O'Neill
F. Scott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner
Bertolt Brecht
Ernest Hemmingway
George Orwell
Samuel Beckett
--
Robert Paulsen | rpau...@beowulf.win.net |
Highland, NY 12528 | 7402...@compuserve.com |
| pau...@ibm.vnet.com |
Janet M. Lafler
Mike Morris (msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca):
>object to). To me it adumbrates Godwin's Rule.
>head. ``Dogmatic'' means inflexible of thought.
I don't want to start "duelling dictionaries" here, but my definition of
totalitarian doesn't make any reference to the use of the instruments of
force. (This is implied in "authoritarian," which is part of the definition
of "totalitarian," perhaps.) The program that I'm trying to discuss, goes,
in my mind, far beyond inflexibility of thought, to an attempt to enforce
one's point of view (not necessarily by means of violence, but by subtler
avenues of authority) on people in general. However, my dictionary (the
American Heritage) lists "dogmatic" as a synonym of "dictatorial," so I
suppose it fits my general idea.
Perhaps we can agree, though, that Mortimer Adler is often not a good spokesman
for the "Great Books." (I think it goes beyond that, but I won't belabor the
point.)
Janet Lafler (ja...@netcom.com):
>> What do you make of the fact that some readers do not even get one good
>> read out of some of the "Great Books?" Is it the fault of the reader,
>> the fault of the teacher? How many readers does it take for the book
>> itself to be suspected? Does it matter who the reader is?
Mike:
>I think it does matter who the reader is, to some small extent.
>But, if I take Homer or Shakespeare or Aristotle or Plato, I
>believe these books are rather above our dislikes, and that, if
>I haven't grown by reading them, the fault is mine (or, granted
>the pedagogical method which introduced them to me). That is
>*my* experience of these books---that one can always look at
>them anew and grow thereby, learn something new, see something
>new. It is also *my* experience that most books aren't like that.
>Most books are either 0-time readables (i.e. a waste of time) or
>are 1-time readables (you read them once, you learn something,
>or are entertained, and you are then beyond them).
>
>Now, I frankly find it hard to believe that you, or indeed any
>literate person would be all that different in this regard....
>17-time readability is quite an objective quality of the book
>itself.
This is the core of our disagreement, and I don't think there's much
point in discussing it further, since neither of us is liable to make
any arguments the other hasn't heard before.
Mike:
>On the other hand, there's
>a real question which has been raising its head with me in this regard
>lately. That question is whether it is wise to spend time trying
>to read broadly---read alot of books, perhaps, trying to fit in
>both ancient Greek literature and modern Japanese fiction---or
>rather wouldn't it be better to spend more of my time with Aristotle,
>or Homer, or Shakespeare, admitting that I'm not going to do it all
>and that perhaps it'd be better to concentrate on doing the best
>of it well.
This is, indeed, a real question, and much more interesting to me than
the one we have been discussing. It's a problem I've been tussling with
for most of my life; I tend to lean towards breadth, rather than depth,
but on occasion this tendency frightens me a lot; I almost physically
feel that I'm making a great mistake; but then I look at the alter-
native (depth, to the exclusion of breadth) and think that would be a
great mistake, too. Unfortunately, being well-read both in terms of
breadth and depth is simply impossible for most, if not all of us, es-
pecially since giving "Great Books" (however one defines them) a quick
once-over doesn't count for much.
In your writing, though, you refer confidently to "the best," as though
you know what and where it is. This is something I've never been sure
of; if there's a best, I don't think that I, or anyone else, knows what
it is. This is what keeps me leaning towards breadth, rather than depth
-- the fear that, through adhering to orthodox notions of what is good
and great, I may miss some hidden, buried treasure that might change my
life in ways I can't even imagine. On the other hand, maybe I'm just a
dilletante.
Janet:
>> I believe that some works within the tradition may aspire to universal
>> appeal, and others not. And I think that it's quite easily demonstrated
>> that many "Great Books" do not naturally appeal to anyone who happens to
>> pick them up.
Mike:
>You have immediately lost me with your word ``appeal'', since we get
>into what I was discussing with Heather before. ``Appeal'' doesn't seem
>to me to have a whole lot to do with it. Let me make an analogy: If
>you want to learn calculus, so that you may take a beginning course
>mechanics and electromagnetism and be given a beautiful scientific
>insight into half the phenomena in our universe, you are
>first going to have to learn trig, which means first algebra,
>which means eventually first that you have to learn multiplication
>tables. OK, no one finds doing multiplication tables appealing,
>or even necessarily intrinsically beautiful when in the 5th grade.
>They are work to do. But, if you want to get to the beautiful
>stuff, which as a human being endowed with rational soul you are
>capable of getting to, you have to do the multiplication tables.
>
>I would suggest that Aristotle is much like multiplication tables.
>It is work to read him. But, because some people don't find that
>work appealing, or let certain prejudices stand in the way of
>reading him, doesn't convince me that the beauties aren't there,
>or aren't accessible to any student who tries.
And I suggest that there's an important distinction to be made between
work and drudgery. Learning multiplication tables is drudgery (for
everyone but Joann). Reading Aristotle is (or ought to be) work. Work
is not necessarily unpleasant; ideally it's joyful, exciting, exhilerating,
as well as difficult. It may be unpleasant from time to time. Drudgery
is, well, drudgery. Something you do because you have to, and no other
reason.
I don't mean to suggest a book without immediate appeal to most people
is not worth teaching; what I mean is that, given that many great and
wonderful books are difficult and *not* obviously attractive, we have
to find ways of removing barriers to appeal (more on this below), not simply
shove books at kids and say "read this, it's good for you." (The "bitter
medicine" school of literature.) We have to give kids reasons (or better
yet, let them find their own reasons) for wanting to read. Otherwise,
reading Aristotle (or anything else) *will* be drudgery.
Also, I disagree with you fundamentally that certain books are the foundation
of thinking in the way that arithmetic is the foundation for learning math.
But again, I don't think there's much point in rehearsing these arguments.
Janet:
>>The problem with asking people to look beyond the sexist or racist aspects
>>of "Great Books" to the human, universal stuff that lies beneath them
>>(promises, promises) is that those aspects may poison the reading exper-
>>ience, especially if the reader feels that the work is being forced on
>>her or him. Aristotle's sexism is not reason for tossing all of Aristotle
>>out the window, but it has certainly stood in the way of my feeling that
>>Aristotle has anything to say to me. Aristotle wouldn't even _want_ me to
>>be reading his works.
Mike:
>This is exactly what I call tokenism.
This is exactly what makes me think you haven't been reading what I'm
saying, but are reacting in a knee-jerk fashion to what you think I'm
saying.
I had trepidations about posting the above, because I knew it would probably
provoke this sort of reaction; and I should have clarified a couple of things
before posting it. Here goes.
Mike again:
>I think it is an irresponsible and dogmatic way to read.
I think it is neither, since it was based on gut reaction, not ideology;
and it's a reaction I would much rather not have experienced. As I said
above, this sort of experience is not one which ought to lead one to throw
out or discount Aristotle; what I'm trying to get at is a pedagogical issue
having to do with how these books are approached at all.
When I was first reading Artistotle during high school and college, I had
on a number of occasions the experience of feeling that a door was being
slammed in my face. This was an almost physical sensation, and a familiar
one. Walls crashing down, doors slamming, bolts being thrown; this is what
I have often seen in my mind's eye when I read what the "great thinkers"
have to say about women. It's not something I had control over when I
was a kid, though I think I've attained the critical distance to control
this reaction now. (It's quite different from my critical, intellectual
feminist reaction.) What it springs from, partly, is just the assertion
that you were making earlier, that these books are "beyond our dislikes,"
The prevailing attitude towards these books was that they held some essen-
tial truths, that they were written by thinkers far wiser than you or I,
even if everything they wrote was not literally true, as had been shown
by the work of later, equally great thinkers who "stood on the shoulders"
of these giants. Criticizing them was not *my* place. By reacting in this
way, I was told, I was missing the point; and so my chance to talk about
what was bothering me about the texts, and so open the doors that had been
slammed and the bolts that had been thrown, was simply dismissed, much as
you dismissed it. It became very hard for me to read some books, because
my personal, individual reaction to them was, to put it bluntly, wrong,
as I was told again and again. And, talking to friends over the years, I
think this is an extremely common experience.
I don't know if you'll understand this, but that's the best I can do
at explaining it.
As for homeschooling your kids, good luck with it. I was homeschooled, to
a large extent, though never formally. I went to public schools, but in
retrospect, most of my real learning took place at home. Still, I'm glad
I went to public schools; I learned things there, sometimes painfully, that
I could never have learned at home.
Benjamin P. Carter
>I can't see why the Principia would be in there.
Maybe because it's one of the most influential books of all timeory.
>(Of course, the publishers are just in the business of shifting ink and
> wood pulp, so they probably picked it based on weight and having a well
> known author and impressive title).
I agree that that crowd in Chicago is not to be trusted. Watch out for
bad translations!
Benjamin P. Carter
b...@netcom.com
>--
>r...@cogsci.ed.ac.uk _O_
> |<
Mark Taranto
> To be sure, Shakespeare is even now much studied, and the
> same may be said for some of the other great writers.
Not as much as they used to be.
When my first wife entered the English Lit graduate program at the
University of Minnesota in 1975, courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare and
Milton were requirements for entry.
When I visited with Joe Green, last winter, he informed me that they
were no longer required courses, that it appeared that many
undergraduate students at the U of MN were graduating without taking
courses in *any* of these authors, and that the courses were not
offered as frequently as they used to be.
If Joe is still on-line, perhaps he can comment on further on this.
What is happening at other universities?
Mark
mi...@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
[...]
> Much of the problem with teaching these books derives from the dilemma
> of getting kids to see any connection between, say, Aristotle and their
> own lives; and my personal opinion is that such a connection is rarely
> there to be found. (I've never yet discovered any relevance to mine, and
> I'm a lot more susceptible to pure philosophy than most people, coming
> from an intellectual family and general environment.)
[...]
I've never flamed anybody before but this is too much! Janet,
you remind me of a former colleague of mine who once remarked that he
had never understood what use logic was, since he was able to do
everything he needed to do without it.
That's why he's a *former* colleague.
Ken
Richard Caley
>>I can't see why the Principia would be in there.
>Maybe because it's one of the most influential books of all timeory.
Obviously, what I was questioning was whether the importance lies in the
text or in the ideas.
Principia would be `great' no matter how good or bad Newton's writing.
Hamlet would at least fall in value had it been written in the style of
Jeffery Archer.
--
r...@cogsci.ed.ac.uk _O_
|<
Vance Maverick
In article <janetCD...@netcom.com>, ja...@netcom.com (Janet M. Lafler) writes:
> Much of the problem with teaching these books derives from the dilemma
> of getting kids to see any connection between, say, Aristotle and their
> own lives; and my personal opinion is that such a connection is rarely
> there to be found. (I've never yet discovered any relevance to mine, and
> I'm a lot more susceptible to pure philosophy than most people, coming
> from an intellectual family and general environment.)
I've never flamed anybody before but this is too much! Janet,
you remind me of a former colleague of mine who once remarked that he
had never understood what use logic was, since he was able to do
everything he needed to do without it.
Ken, I think your own logic is a little leaky. Your former colleague,
as you report his words, is failing to make a distinction between
practical logic (understanding implication) and the study of logic --
and I think you too deny this distinction, though you and he drew
opposite conclusions about his need for study. You appear to be
applying his story to claim that no-one can think without having read
the canonical works on what thinking is. Tell me I'm wrong,
Vance
Matt Austern
> When my first wife entered the English Lit graduate program at the
> University of Minnesota in 1975, courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare and
> Milton were requirements for entry.
You should take a look at Terry Eagleton's _Literary Theory: An
Introduction_, though. Close study of these authors is a very recent
phenomenon. In fact, the whole idea of "English Literature" as an
academic discipline is a very recent phenomenon. (Definition of "very
recent": less than a century.)
Sometimes, traditions aren't as old as we think they are.
sarah catherine canfield
>watching "The Simpsons" or "Beavis and Butthead" than they do on any
>intellectual activity, I despair. Perhaps I'm just turning into my
>parents, though.
I won't try do defend "Beavis and Butthead", as I've only recently been
exposed to them with the advent of my new roommate (who fortunately is very
bearable other than her unfortunate attachment to such a terrible program),
but I will make a point in defense of "The Simpsons":
In a recently rerun episode, when Bart and Lisa are at Kamp Krusty and the
children revolt and overthrow the incompetent kamp counsellors, the ensuing
savagery reminded me of _The Lord of the Flies_. I had just made this
observation when a pig's head on a stake appeared unobtrusively in the
background of one scene. While not necessarily highly intellectual fare,
this at least indicates a degree of cultural awareness beyond most of the
tripe currently on the airwaves.
Just my two bits,
Fuzznuzz
--
Fuzznuzz n. The name given a person who mistakenly waits for her siblings
to address her by her proper name, then loses patience.
Mark Taranto
Re the study of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton:
ma...@physics.berkeley.edu writes:
> Close study of these authors is a very recent phenomenon.
I don't believe you.
> In fact, the whole idea of "English Literature" as an
> academic discipline is a very recent phenomenon. (Definition of "very
> recent": less than a century.)
Only because the well educated gentlemen of that era were expected to
read *everything*.
Mark
Mark Taranto
What a surprise! The Canon discussion has made its semi-annual return.
My suggestion for a book which should be read by everyone:
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW, I LEARNED FROM MY CAT
My favorite piece of advice from the book:
Sometimes you have to stop and eat the roses.
Gault Millau's guide to Paris is another essential.
Mark
John Lovett
Jack Campin wrote:
One way to look at this would be by analyzing what people had in their
personal book collections at various times in the past, so we could work
out empirically what the "canon" really was in, say, Goethe's Germany.
(How many people then would have owned remotely as many books as there are
in the Great Books set?) This should be doable by looking at inventories
of estates or commonplace books. Has it ever been done?
A...@DUNAD.CO.UK Replied:
Here's a catalogue of books left by Daniel Campbell, MP for Lanarkshire,
at Islay House in November 1776.
[List of books deleted]
For another view of what was read by educated people in the 18th
century, here is a list of publications reviewed in two issues of
The Gentleman's Magazine from 1768.
T. Harris Dissected, by Geo. colman.
An Account of Denmark, ancient and modern.
An Essay on Disease, incidental to literary and sedentary persons, with
proper Rules for preventing their fatal Cconsequences. By S.A. Tillot,
M.d., Professor of Physic at Berne.
A seasonable Letter on the late treaty with Nizam Allee Kawn, and the
commotions in consequence on the coast of Coromandel: Addressed to the
serious consideration of the present directors of the East-India
company, and the Proprietors of India Stock. Williams.
The Caricatura: or Battle of the butts, as it was fought at Brentford,
&c. on Monday the 28th of March, 1768; being a copy from Mr. Hogarth's
March to Finchley. With a Research into the Records established under
the ancient two kings of Brentford. By E. Whirlpool, citizen and
haberdasher.
An Essay on Design in Gardening.
A Letter to the Right Honourable the Earl of Shelburne, on the fatal
consequences of suffering the French to invade Corsica, and possess the
Sovereignty of the Mediterranean Seas.
The Utility and Equity of a Free Trade to the East-Indies: Showing, that
the People will be fully employed to improve their fortunes; and that
the government will acquire several millions per ann. revenue; besides a
contribution of ten millions from Great Britain, Ireland, and North
America, for a free trade.
The Doctrine of Inflammations, founded on Reason and Experience, and
cleared from the contradictory systems of Boerhaave, Van swieten, and
others. By Daniel Magenife, M.D.
A Letter to the duke of Grafton, on the present Situation of Public
Affairs.
Things as they are. Bingley.
A Letter from T. Harris to Geo. Colman, on the affairs of Covent Garden
Theatre, to which is fixed an Address to the Public.
The conduct of Ralph Hodgson, Esq; none of his Majesty's Justices of
the Peace for the County of Middlesex, in the Affair of the Coal
Heavers.
JOHN WYLIE
liberal education with desperate hopes of a career
in academia, I've been following the Essential Books
thread with more than mild interest and would now
like to throw in my meager contribution, though I
do not wish to incite any argument, as I am woefully
unqualified to defend myself. I would, however, like
as much broad, public response to my following query as
is possible (and/or warranted).
In the past 18 months I have read, in addition to
works assigned to me for some particular course, the following,
in hopes of broadening my education (in the firm belief that
reading literature pertaining *only* to one's degree program
is a kind of tunnel-vision):
1. The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry
edited by J.D. McClatchy.
2. The Top 500 Poems
edited by William Harmon.
3. Understanding Science
by Arthur N. Strahler.
4. How the World Works
by Boyce Rensberger.
5. The Story of Psychology
by Morton Hunt.
6. On Moral Fiction
by John Gardner.
7. Case Closed
by Gerald Posner.
8. Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie.
9. Introduction to Language
by Fromkin and Rodman.
10. The Annotated Lolita
by Nabokov and Appel.
11. Don't Know Much About History
by Kenneth C. Davis.
12. The Thousand and One Nights
(4 vols.) by Mardrus and Mathers.
13. M.C. Escher His Life and Complete Graphic Work
by F.H. Bool, et al.
14. Best American Essays 1992
edited by Susan Sontag.
Now for my question: *None* of these ranks as a Great Book,
but I've learned, I feel, much from all of them. Have I been
wasting my time? I am regarded, amongst my fellow classmates,
as extremely well-read and intelligent, but I am tempted to go
down to my local library and check out the Great Books series
(although I've already read about 25% of the titles for various
classes) just to catchup with you guys, although I have to admit
that my instructors don't seem to have read too many of them either.
Perhaps I need to transfer...
Any comments regarding the above list (what sucks, what
doesn't, what's next, etc.) are welcome. No flames, please; I'm
insecure enough as it is.
Feeling Ignorant,
JJ
wy...@animal-farm.nevada.edu
Marguerite Petersen
I'm not Joe but I am going to comment anyway. :-)
In *my* day (a few decades ago) we studied Shakespeare in High
School. I remember this in particular because as a good reader
(and presumably some verbal skills) I got to read several parts
in class. We didn't get to Chaucer and Milton until Freshman
English in college, though.
Marg
--
*************************************************************************
"Insufficient facts always invites danger, Captain."- Spock in Space Seed
Marg Petersen pet...@kira.csos.orst.edu Charter Member of STOFF
*************************************************************************
Janet M. Lafler
>>...I don't think that the brilliance, importance and beauty
>>of many of the "Great Books" is naturally obvious. In some cases, I
>>doubt that it's there at all; in others, I think it's only there for
>>someone who is already motivated to do intensive study of the subject.
[...]
>>I'm not against "Great
>>Books" (well, maybe some of them), I'm against force-feeding them to
>>students, and against a rigid definition of what a "Great Book" is.
Jim Hartley (ez01...@dale.ucdavis.edu):
>....do you think any of the "Great Books" are truly Great? In other
>words, do you deny that it is possible to construct a list of "Great
>Books" or do you simply think that the lists which have been constructed
>are poor lists? What I am wondering here is whether you would agree
>that a list that consisted of, say, The Bible, any work of Shakespeare,
>and maybe two or three other books (you choose which) is acceptable.
I was going to say that I'm against the list itself, but that's not
really true; I'm against the authority implicit in the list. I hope
this makes sense, because I can't think of a clearer way to phrase it.
I would love to be able to say "Yeah! The Bible and Shakespeare! Can't
get more basic than that!" And undoubtedly these works, and others con-
tained in the GB series, are at the very least important because of their
historical influence. But, in all conscience, I wouldn't want to make a
list. Yes, there are books that I think should be widely read and taught.
Yes, there are books whose importance in the English-speaking tradition
has been firmly established. But I quail at the idea of a list because
I think it is self-fulfilling. A book is on the list because it's on
the list. It has somehow risen, as Mike Morris would have it, "beyond
our dislikes." At this point, I begin to worry, because I don't think
that anything, even a book, should have such monumental authority.
Or perhaps it is just that, when I'm told that a work is great and universal,
I'm perverse enough to react by thinking "Oh yeah? We'll see about that!"
An odd footnote: I frequently argue with my beau about the usefulness
of the "canon," but from the opposite bank of the river (i.e. facing in
the opposite direction, but not taking a diametrically opposed view) than
I've been arguing from in this thread. I considered it a major triumph
when he told me that he enjoyed a production of "Romeo and Juliet" that
he saw earlier this week, since he's always grumbling that Shakespeare is
"inaccessible."
Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself....
/Janet
P.S. My mother, an atheist of Jewish extraction, taught the Bible as
literature on the sly in her high school English classes back in the
early '60s, because she was appalled that many of her overwhelmingly
Protestant students had never read the Bible. She could have gotten in
trouble for "teaching religion," but fortunately none of her students
told on her.
Janet M. Lafler
Janet Lafler (ja...@netcom.com)
>>I'm not against "Great
>>Books" (well, maybe some of them)....
Jim Hartley (ez01...@dale.ucdavis.edu):
>Could you give a few examples of the books you are thinking about
>here, i.e., could you list a few of the books in the "well, maybe
>some of them" category?
No. I couldn't.
(Hmph. He asks me to post flamebait!)
/Janet
Mike Morris
I wrote:
That said, I think one can look at past periods of western history, and
look in particular at educated persons in those periods, and I think
one can see that *some set of books very like these ones* would
have been known among the liberally educated persons. I've spent since
1986 (roughly) reading in this set, mainly the Bible (considered as the
zeroth volume) and the Greeks, ....
Anand Bemra writes:
I have been brought up in an Hindu environment, and didn't have
to read the Bible. Although there were several occasions which
presented itself and encouraged me to read, like the Gideon Society's
efforts and the occasional preacher turning up at my door on a
lazy sunday morning, I never made avail of these oppurtunities.
Which is the partial reason for my qualifier ``western'' above. There
is no way that I would consider the Bible an *essential* component of
someone's education who was brought up in a Hindu environment. Nor
do Adler/Hutchins make the claim that their selection is other than
a selection from the western cultural sphere. They seem to think there
are two such spheres, western and eastern, though I might want to
subdivide into 4 or 5---western, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Islamic---
with all kinds of subdivisions, branchings and joinings---a vast
delta system?
I would also say that any canonical list of the GB nature would clearly
be country-specific. That is, if one tried to make a GB set for France,
I think much of the latter half of the set would be chosen differently.
Anand writes:
What caught my eye recently was a line in movie review of "Manufacturing
Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media" by Darrin Nowakowski. In there
he quotes Chomsky as saying that the Bible is "the most genocidal book in
the whole canon of literature". This obviously was shocking and still is.
I still don't know why he said that. Or may be Chomsky is misquoted.
I mean, I can see the point in Sinehead O'Conor ripping up Pope's photo-
graph in order to show her resentment of organized religion, but this
is a little different.
Well, from my perspective, and my reading of the Bible, Yahweh is a
murderous beast for a good bit of the Old Testament. He commands
wars of tribal extermination. Anyway, I would say that Chomsky is
right about this. (Though I have no desire to argue the point
with any Christians out there this may offend.)
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Mike Morris
I wrote along the lines that multiplication tables were drudgery, and:
I would suggest that Aristotle is much like multiplication tables.
It is work to read him. But, because some people don't find that
work appealing, or let certain prejudices stand in the way of
reading him, doesn't convince me that the beauties aren't there,
or aren't accessible to any student who tries.
Joann Zimmerman writes:
Poor analogy, Mike. Perhaps I am/was perverted, but I found myself enjoying
the multiplication tables--when I encountered them in the second grade.
Given that for the next three years I learned no new mathematics with the
exception of long division, which I also found to be fun, this was a rather
sensible reaction on my part. The use of the multiplication tables was an
excellent standin for a lack of ritual in my early religious life: learning
them and repeating them wholesale was roughly equivalent to the repetition
of Hail Marys and Apostles' Creeds; answering random questions on them in
class ("Joann! What's 8 times 7?") functioned as the equivalent to reciting
random portions of the Catechism. The eminently *logical* arrangement of
the multiplication tables seemed to me to be some sort of formal art.
Now, if you wished to use integral calculus as your example, you'd find
little argument from me ...
I was wondering if anyone was going to call me on this, especially
since, in my own case I remember being a 3rd grader and worshipping
at the feet of 4th graders who *knew how to multiply*! It all
seemed such a wonderful mystery, and, yes, I did get off on the
beautiful patterns which appeared in the tables when we did them.
But, Joann, I must admit that I've always dismissed that as
my own perversion and assumed that most people saw it as interminably
dull drudgery. Also, I'm not sure that I ever saw all those worksheets
as other than dull makework.
Funny you should mention calculus, because I have a theory about that,
based on being a math-and-physics inclined undergraduate at Purdue
in '78-'82. I got into tutoring in math courses (eventually TA-ing
physics courses) and remember particularly being a help-person for
a course on calculus for the social sciences. Students would come to
me *convinced* that calculus was hard, beyond mortal comprehension.
But my observation was that, invariably, the stuff that tripped them up
was *not* calculus specific. Typically they had to do a homework
set of 20 integrals, say, and doing these might require some
trig substitutions and algebraic manipulations. I found that the
problem was always with the algebra---students just couldn't be trusted
to manipulate algebra longer than 2 or 3 lines and get it right. So,
they'd make some *algebraic* mistake [a common one is forgetting
to distributively multiply, like 2*(10x^2+ 3x+7)=20x^2+6x+14 except
they'd forget to multiply the 7 by 2 and write it as 20x^2+6x+7 or
something] and this'd lead either to just the wrong answer (which
they could see was wrong from the solutions in the back of the book),
or to hopelessly complicated math because their error made it
so that some miraculous cancellation which was designed into the
problem didn't cancel. Anyway, the difficulty they attributed to
calculus I think was often lack of sufficient technical competence in
doing the algebra, which I have been known to theorize might go back to
not doing enough multiplication tables to begin with, though, in
your case, multiplication tables would not seem to be to blame. Perhaps
a hated algebra teacher somewheres along the line (he puts on his
best Freudian surmise)?
Which reminds me that I was really blessed with good math teachers
throughout. My algebra teacher in junior high I remember particularly
for setting these complicated problems in simplification for
us to do on the board, and we'd sweat through it and he'd
ask for the answer in the end, and it'd always boil down to
something simple like ``10q''. And he'd catch you off guard with
``You're welcome.''
Speaking of the merits of memorization and the drudgery of tables
and rosaries and the like, I often wish that I was made to
memorize more stuff in grade school. Particularly dates and
poetry. I'm sure it would've been dull enough at the time,
but I'd sure like to have ``The 100 Greatest Poems'' or
somesuch at the tip of my tongue now. Also, for dates, I find
that those historical periods where I have a pretty good command
of dates, I can read something new and immediately place it
in a ready-made historical frame. Context and all.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Nancy Cruz
I would like to purchase a bible for literary studies. Is there a
version I should ask for? Is there a particular publisher I should
seek out? (Old and New testament)
Thanks for any help.
Nancy
--
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Nancy Cruz - a.k.a. "Tensha, the Icewoman" | New York University |
| cr...@lab.ultra.nyu.edu |Ultracomputer Research lab|
+--------------------------------------------+--------------------------+
Mike Morris
I wrote:
It's really that word ``totalitarian'' I was objecting to (and still
object to). To me it adumbrates Godwin's Rule.
...In any event, ``totalitarian'' means to me they hold a gun to your
head. ``Dogmatic'' means inflexible of thought.
Janet Lafler writes:
I don't want to start "duelling dictionaries" here, but my definition of
totalitarian doesn't make any reference to the use of the instruments of
force. (This is implied in "authoritarian," which is part of the definition
of "totalitarian," perhaps.) The program that I'm trying to discuss, goes,
in my mind, far beyond inflexibility of thought, to an attempt to enforce
one's point of view (not necessarily by means of violence, but by subtler
avenues of authority) on people in general. However, my dictionary (the
American Heritage) lists "dogmatic" as a synonym of "dictatorial," so I
suppose it fits my general idea.
I guess, Janet, I am politically quite concerned about uses of
language which conflate psychological hurt with physical harm,
such as ``pornography is violence against women'' and the like. My
defense of free speech, for instance, is grounded on the moral
consideration that my reaction to offensive speech is *my* choice,
i.e. on the moral sovereignty of my own mind. Thus, offensive
speech cannot ``offend'' me without me choosing to be offended.
Now, my indignation might well be righteous, or it might be
flying off the handle, which judgment of my behaviour will depend
on external, and I think objective, standards of politeness and morality
But, offensive speech ``neither picks my pocket nor
bloodies my nose''. Anyway, dictionaries or no, I would insist
that there is a huge difference between enforcing one's ``[mere]
point of view'' on people by *force* versus doing so ``by subtler
avenues of authority''. If you like, I refuse to believe in, to reify,
those ``subtler avenues''. And I fail to see anything in your description
of Adler which says other than that he is a bad teacher in person and
inflexible of thought.
Lexicographically, again, if you say ``totalitarian'' to me, I
immediately think ``Hitler and Stalin'', versus ``authoritarian'',
which I'd consider to be a weaker kind of strongman rule---i.e.
``totalitarian''=``total state control of everything it can'',
``authoritarian''=``strong centralized state control''=``Latin
American dictators''. That, at any rate, is what *my* schema for
these terms begins to conjure up when I hear them, so that I
thought you were being metaphorical at best in calling Adler
``totalitarian'', and I was objecting even to this metaphorical
usage, Adler in my reading of him being rather singlemindedly
democratic, and even social-democratic (what I call
social-engineeringly left), in his books.
Janet:
Perhaps we can agree, though, that Mortimer Adler is often not a
good spokesman for the "Great Books." (I think it goes beyond that,
but I won't belabor the point.)
I think we can agree on this much, except that, having read _The
Great Conversation_ as well as _How to Read a Book_, I find his
lists, and his rationale for them, much more sensible than people
like to give him credit for. I don't think he claims these are the
*only* great books, for instance. I do think his list is topheavy
with History of Ideas and Philosophy stuff, slim on imaginative
literature (very thin on the novel, for instance), but I
also think this fits what he has set out to do and that perhaps
it is sensible to think of literature as epic + history + philosophy
+ science + essay + novels instead of as mainly novels. His list
claims to cover only the western tradition, and it is plain
the set is geared to an education in American citizenship,
not French citizenship, say.
Janet wrote:
What do you make of the fact that some readers do not even get one good
read out of some of the "Great Books?" Is it the fault of the reader,
the fault of the teacher? How many readers does it take for the book
itself to be suspected? Does it matter who the reader is?
I wrote:
I think it does matter who the reader is, to some small extent.
But, if I take Homer or Shakespeare or Aristotle or Plato, I
believe these books are rather above our dislikes, and that, if
I haven't grown by reading them, the fault is mine (or, granted
the pedagogical method which introduced them to me). That is
*my* experience of these books---that one can always look at
them anew and grow thereby, learn something new, see something
new. It is also *my* experience that most books aren't like that.
Most books are either 0-time readables (i.e. a waste of time) or
are 1-time readables (you read them once, you learn something,
or are entertained, and you are then beyond them).
Now, I frankly find it hard to believe that you, or indeed any
literate person would be all that different in this regard....
17-time readability is quite an objective quality of the book
itself.
Janet:
This is the core of our disagreement, and I don't think there's much
point in discussing it further, since neither of us is liable to make
any arguments the other hasn't heard before.
Well, I will say only that this division between 0-timers, 1-timers,
and 17-timers is what Adler and Van Doren talk about in _How to
Read a Book_ and that I have found it to be empirically true---
i.e. it fits my experience of reading books. Again, I would repeat
here that I see plenty of room for different lists of which
books are 0-timers and which are 1-timers. Also, I would add
that it has been sometimes my experience that some 1-timers
have been more *personally* important to me than 17-timers (usually
because I credit them with introducing me to good stuff I wouldn't
have met otherwise). Finally, I would say that I think I perfectly
well understand not *liking*, say, Aristotle. I also understand
reading him carefully and not liking him, or reading him and arguing
with him. But, whether we like or dislike him, whether we read or
do not read him, the 17-time readability I am speaking about has
to do with his intellectual complexity, the richness of his
work as an object of intellectual contemplation. Thus, I think
it stands objectively in the work.
I should say that I've read through the complete works of
Aristotle in translation once (23 volumes in the Loebs), and this
summer I went along to a seminar where I went through the _Politics_ and
the _Nicomachean Ethics_ again. Now, that's 2 reads of these
works, not 17, but I was simply astounded at how tight and rich it
is. All based on a worked-out metaphysics. I was astounded
at how tightly one has to argue, to study, these texts to
try to, say, make a pass at understanding what he is saying
about natural slavery.
Me:
On the other hand, there's
a real question which has been raising its head with me in this regard
lately. That question is whether it is wise to spend time trying
to read broadly---read alot of books, perhaps, trying to fit in
both ancient Greek literature and modern Japanese fiction---or
rather wouldn't it be better to spend more of my time with Aristotle,
or Homer, or Shakespeare, admitting that I'm not going to do it all
and that perhaps it'd be better to concentrate on doing the best
of it well.
Janet:
This is, indeed, a real question, and much more interesting to me than
the one we have been discussing. It's a problem I've been tussling with
for most of my life; I tend to lean towards breadth, rather than depth,
but on occasion this tendency frightens me a lot; I almost physically
feel that I'm making a great mistake; but then I look at the alter-
native (depth, to the exclusion of breadth) and think that would be a
great mistake, too. Unfortunately, being well-read both in terms of
breadth and depth is simply impossible for most, if not all of us, es-
pecially since giving "Great Books" (however one defines them) a quick
once-over doesn't count for much.
In your writing, though, you refer confidently to "the best," as though
you know what and where it is. This is something I've never been sure
of; if there's a best, I don't think that I, or anyone else, knows what
it is. This is what keeps me leaning towards breadth, rather than depth
-- the fear that, through adhering to orthodox notions of what is good
and great, I may miss some hidden, buried treasure that might change my
life in ways I can't even imagine. On the other hand, maybe I'm just a
dilletante.
There was a lovely thought in one of the essays I've read recently
by Leo Strauss, concerning moral absolutes. It went something
like ``It is true we may not know which of two mountain peaks,
wrapped in clouds, is higher, but this does not mean we may
not say that either peak is taller than the valley between them.''
That is what *I* mean by speaking confidently of the best books.
I am sure that the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro are excellent works,
even that they might repay my reading them again. I'm pretty confident
that the Robert Ludlum novels I've read wouldn't repay my reading
them again. Homer I'm confident will repay 17 more reads.
Anyway, until I feel like I've read something (which may be never
at this rate), I will probably err on the side of not rereading
the stuff that is best as much as I might like to. Though rereading
some stuff (and more poetry in my reading) are New Year's Resolutions
I've tried to make and failed to keep in the past.
Janet:
I believe that some works within the tradition may aspire to universal
appeal, and others not. And I think that it's quite easily demonstrated
that many "Great Books" do not naturally appeal to anyone who happens to
pick them up.
Me:
You have immediately lost me with your word ``appeal'', since we get
into what I was discussing with Heather before. ``Appeal'' doesn't seem
to me to have a whole lot to do with it. Let me make an analogy: If
you want to learn calculus, so that you may take a beginning course
mechanics and electromagnetism and be given a beautiful scientific
insight into half the phenomena in our universe, you are
first going to have to learn trig, which means first algebra,
which means eventually first that you have to learn multiplication
tables. OK, no one finds doing multiplication tables appealing,
or even necessarily intrinsically beautiful when in the 5th grade.
They are work to do. But, if you want to get to the beautiful
stuff, which as a human being endowed with rational soul you are
capable of getting to, you have to do the multiplication tables.
I would suggest that Aristotle is much like multiplication tables.
It is work to read him. But, because some people don't find that
work appealing, or let certain prejudices stand in the way of
reading him, doesn't convince me that the beauties aren't there,
or aren't accessible to any student who tries.
Janet:
And I suggest that there's an important distinction to be made between
work and drudgery. Learning multiplication tables is drudgery (for
everyone but Joann). Reading Aristotle is (or ought to be) work. Work
is not necessarily unpleasant; ideally it's joyful, exciting, exhilerating,
as well as difficult. It may be unpleasant from time to time. Drudgery
is, well, drudgery. Something you do because you have to, and no other
reason.
I guess I'm failing to see the distinction between work and drudgery
here. That is, learning multiplication tables is for the good of
eventually being competent at calculus, say. It is joyful, just
not immediately transparently so. (One might also consider doing
scales and exercises when learning to play a piano. One does it
*because* the joy is to come, though this is often not immediately
apparent to the student.)
I don't mean to suggest a book without immediate appeal to most people
is not worth teaching; what I mean is that, given that many great and
wonderful books are difficult and *not* obviously attractive, we have
to find ways of removing barriers to appeal (more on this below), not simply
shove books at kids and say "read this, it's good for you." (The "bitter
medicine" school of literature.) We have to give kids reasons (or better
yet, let them find their own reasons) for wanting to read. Otherwise,
reading Aristotle (or anything else) *will* be drudgery.
I don't know about this. I'm more of the ``do your scales, learn
how to do the drudge work and the joy *will* come later'' school.
I fear the idea (as deceptive) that we ought to make schooling
appealing, because I connect that with a Sesame-Street kind of
need to be entertained and ultimately I connect it to
all the superficialities of MTV, sitcoms, and Reagan-era soundbite
and USA Today opinion-poll democracy. Sometimes I think you just
have to sit down and memorize the declension of the noun in
all six cases, and you need that if you're ever gonna master
Greek so you can read the good stuff and reap the joy to be found.
Janet:
Also, I disagree with you fundamentally that certain books are the foundation
of thinking in the way that arithmetic is the foundation for learning math.
But again, I don't think there's much point in rehearsing these arguments.
We do disagree fundamentally here, especially with respect to Aristotle
and logic, or try Euclid and math.
Janet:
The problem with asking people to look beyond the sexist or racist aspects
of "Great Books" to the human, universal stuff that lies beneath them
(promises, promises) is that those aspects may poison the reading exper-
ience, especially if the reader feels that the work is being forced on
her or him. Aristotle's sexism is not reason for tossing all of Aristotle
out the window, but it has certainly stood in the way of my feeling that
Aristotle has anything to say to me. Aristotle wouldn't even _want_ me to
be reading his works.
Me:
This is exactly what I call tokenism.
Janet:
This is exactly what makes me think you haven't been reading what I'm
saying, but are reacting in a knee-jerk fashion to what you think I'm
saying.
On the contrary, I think I have definitely been reading you here.
I will say that I've been playing Bad Cop to Kurt Godden's Good
Cop here (which I figured I was allowed to do, since I played
Good Cop to Nichael Cramer's Bad Cop in discussing Moses and the
Pentateuch with Jim Hartley).
Janet writes:
I had trepidations about posting the above, because I knew it would probably
provoke this sort of reaction; and I should have clarified a couple of things
before posting it. Here goes.
I have read what you have written, but I still don't understand
why when Aristotle, say, believes in slavery, and when chances
are I would have been a slave in 4th-century Athens and not a
free citizen of the polis, and yet I don't react to Aristotle in
a gut way which has to do with being personally threatened by
him, but rather I am interested in discussing with him *why*
it is he believes in natural slavery and just *who* are the
natural slaves anyway and do they have different _teloi_ (ends)
than other human beings and do we recognize them by their behaviour
and is this not a confusion of Is/Ought on Aristotle's part,
maybe all human beings are equal precisely in having equal
_teloi_, etc..
Anyway, part of my response here was conditioned by your saying
somewhere (I think it may have been to Kurt) something like
Aristotle (or these authors) ``are the products of their
time, their society''.
I've mentioned that I've been being introduced to Leo Strauss
lately, and one of Strauss' big axes to grind is historicism,
meaning precisely this notion that we can place an author, a thinker,
in time and understand him as a product of his historical
environment. To Strauss, and I have a great deal of sympathy
for his argument, this is the A-number 1 prejudice of modernity.
It gives us a kind of smugness for reading Aristotle or Plato
that history has allowed us to see over them. It becomes an
excuse for not reading them, for not taking them seriously,
for dismissing them as mere products of their environments.
It throws away the possibility that they may be simply true,
or that they may be far more clever than historicism gives them
credit for being.
I do think that the past is *the* multicultural trip, in a way
that reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez isn't, and that's what I meant
by tokenism. Really I should have said that this is a prejudice
which allows us to weigh modern thought more highly than ancient
thought because we see thought as embedded in history. This is
one reason I fear calls to ``extend the canon'' to minorities and
women---because I figure to do that, unless we are exercising
some kind of tokenism which picks reading Mary Wollestonecraft over Thomas
Paine, say, we are mostly going to be have to be picking 20th-century
works by women and minorities---i.e. we are going to be buying into our
own modernity, our own modern prejudice, in a very big way, precisely
at a time when the world has become much more homogenized than it ever
has been before. I.e. there may be no other escape from our own tunnel
vision than the past, even when much of that past history has been
unpalatable.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Nancy Cruz
[STUFF DELETED]
>When my first wife entered the English Lit graduate program at the
>University of Minnesota in 1975, courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare and
>Milton were requirements for entry.
>
>When I visited with Joe Green, last winter, he informed me that they
>were no longer required courses, that it appeared that many
>undergraduate students at the U of MN were graduating without taking
>courses in *any* of these authors, and that the courses were not
>offered as frequently as they used to be.
>
>
>
I was an English Lit major in Undergrad at NYU. There was no way one
could graduate without having been exposed to all three of the above
mentioned authors. Required course were broken up into periods and
you had to take at least two colloquim courses which focused on one
authors works. One also had to take a survery course of each period.
If I remember correctly the periods consisted of Modern (1900 +),
1660-1900, & up to 1660, American Lit.
I must painfully admit that I had never heard of Caucer nor Milton
before entering college. Ug!!
Nancy Cruz
>I won't try do defend "Beavis and Butthead", as I've only recently been
>exposed to them with the advent of my new roommate (who fortunately is very
>bearable other than her unfortunate attachment to such a terrible program),
>but I will make a point in defense of "The Simpsons":
>
>In a recently rerun episode, when Bart and Lisa are at Kamp Krusty and the
>children revolt and overthrow the incompetent kamp counsellors, the ensuing
>savagery reminded me of _The Lord of the Flies_. I had just made this
>observation when a pig's head on a stake appeared unobtrusively in the
>background of one scene. While not necessarily highly intellectual fare,
>this at least indicates a degree of cultural awareness beyond most of the
>tripe currently on the airwaves.
>
> Fuzznuzz
>
Acutally I believe the vocabulary level on "The Simpsons" is higher than
most t.v. programs. Never mind that it deals with very real issues in
an extremely witty way. Then again, i've always considered "The
Simpsons" a program for adult viewers.
Rebecca Crowley
Anand wrote:
: Darrin Nowakowski. . . quotes Chomsky as saying that the Bible is "the
: most genocidal book in the whole canon of literature".
To which Mike Morris responded:
: Well, from my perspective, and my reading of the Bible, Yahweh is a
: murderous beast for a good bit of the Old Testament. He commands
: wars of tribal extermination. Anyway, I would say that Chomsky is
: right about this. (Though I have no desire to argue the point
: with any Christians out there this may offend.)
Well, *I'm* not offended. That would be silly. :-)
"in the whole canon of literature"? Quite possibly. Not having
context, one might speculate that Chomsky meant, 'gee, what a lot
of murdering Yahweh personally does in this book, what with Sodom, Gomorrah,
the Flood, Jericho. And that's not counting what he told his people to
do'. One might also speculate, 'look at all the genocidal campaigns launched
in the name of the Bible/Biblical God'. Content or effect, take
your pick.
As bloody-minded and bloody-acting as Yahweh may or may not have been,
I really don't think you can argue he behaved significantly
worse other gods of similar vintage. The Assyrians, for example,
had some truly vicious gods, and behaved accordingly. . .
They do not, however, have anywhere near the lobby and are not,
consequently, "in the whole canon of literature".
I've been reading Peter McWilliams' _Ain't Nobody's Business if
You Do: the Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society_ --
specifically, that chunk in the middle about the Bible and consensual
crimes. It has a few choice things to say about Yahweh, and genocide,
some of which are devoted to pointing out how graphic the Bible itself
is (so why _are_ some people trying to censor books with less graphic
stuff in the name of the Bible) and some of which are devoted to putting
that violence in a historical perspective (also the rather horrid
treatment of women, and a few other odds and ends). The book itself, at
800+ pages, is repetitive (big surprise there), polemical (bet you didn't
expect that, either?), and irreverent (I should shut up with the
parenthetical remarks now). I had randomly opened to the middle to apply
the page y rule, and wound up buying it so I could read that section. I
think it would have made a wonderful book in its own right, one I would
have bought a half dozen copies of and foisted off on my friends.
(But at $22.75 and I don't know how many pounds, I will probably
lend out this copy and maybe buy one copy as a gift.) "See? All that
stuff you complain about certain xtians? Has *nothing*
to do with the Bible. Just like I've been telling you all along.
Here. Read this. Read this now." It had a weak concluding
section, I felt (the "sermon" to xtians set off my 'I don't
need to be an activist for your agenda, either, buddy' meter),
but otherwise was a great dose of sanity about a touchy subject.
He's going to make a lot of people mad, but I hope they'll
actually bother to go _read_ the sections he quotes. It'd do
them a world of good. (If you do go read this book, I strongly
suggest you have a Bible handy when you read this section. McWilliams'
is only *mostly* honest about how he quotes stuff -- he slides
a few ringers in if you're not paying strict attention. I'm taking
the boxed quotes from everybody and her sister in the corners of
the pages with an ephah measure of salt as a result. Oh, and
get a worthwhile translation. He uses NIV for specific (and good)
reasons, but it can be obnoxious at times -- probably
a New Jerusalem with full footnotes would be optimal. Then you
can get their take on testicals/testament, too. (-: )
I haven't decided whether I would recommend the book as a whole,
however, as I suspect that it won't necessarily "convert" many
people. People who already subscribe to the "your right to
swing your fist ends where my nose begins" school of rights
and freedoms will appreciate it -- but I think they'll get a little
tired of it in spots. I think it will just annoy a lot of
people who want a more paternalistic system. I don't know
about the fence-sitters; this might do some good.
Heh. Give it to a teenager. That might do some real good.
Rebecca Crowley
standard disclaimers apply
rcro...@zso.dec.com
Jim Hartley
>>....do you think any of the "Great Books" are truly Great? In other
>>words, do you deny that it is possible to construct a list of "Great
>>Books" or do you simply think that the lists which have been constructed
>>are poor lists? What I am wondering here is whether you would agree
>>that a list that consisted of, say, The Bible, any work of Shakespeare,
>>and maybe two or three other books (you choose which) is acceptable.
> Janet Lafler replied:
>I was going to say that I'm against the list itself, but that's not
>really true; I'm against the authority implicit in the list. I hope
>this makes sense, because I can't think of a clearer way to phrase it.
>
>I would love to be able to say "Yeah! The Bible and Shakespeare! Can't
>get more basic than that!" And undoubtedly these works, and others con-
>tained in the GB series, are at the very least important because of their
>historical influence. But, in all conscience, I wouldn't want to make a
>list. Yes, there are books that I think should be widely read and taught.
>Yes, there are books whose importance in the English-speaking tradition
>has been firmly established. But I quail at the idea of a list because
>I think it is self-fulfilling.
Suppose a person came up to you and asked, "You know, Janet, you are
a well read person. I would really like to learn about Western
Civilization; I would like to read "the best of what has been
said or written." Could you let me know where to start? In other
words, could you let me know which books are important in the English
speaking tradition and which you think should be widely read and taught?"
Would you tell such a person, "No, I won't give you a list; go
figure it out for yourself"? I would imagine you wouldn't. Rather,
you would probably give the person a list of books. (Am I wrong?)
I don't think the Great Books series or any of the hundreds of other
such lists are really all that different. There are a lot of people
who want to know which books are most important. Why shouldn't
people who know such things share it with people who want to learn them?
Now, if you and I (and Adler, for that matter) were to sit down and
draw up a list for the hypothetical person above, our lists would
not be identical. You might put _Hamlet_ on your list; I might include
_King Lear_. Differences like this don't matter, which is why there
is no ONE definitive list. I could not seriously tell you that your
list is ridiculous because it has _Hamlet_ instead of _King Lear_.
However, suppose that instead of putting _King Lear_ on my list, I included
no work of Shakespeare, but rather included an Alice Walker novel.
Then, you could tell me my list was bad. It is, I believe, indisputable
that Shakespeare is a more important writer than Walker. If someone
wants to read those books which should be widely read and taught, surely
we agree that Shakespeare belongs on that person's reading list. In
agreeing on this point, however, we have started making our own list.
There may still be a host of differences between our lists, but the
discussion is now on a different level; we are arguing about which
books belong on the list, not whether the list should exist. Nobody
that I know of declares that there is only one answer to the question
of the content of the list. There is vast room for disagreement.
--
Jim Hartley
jeha...@ucdavis.edu
"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably
not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." H.L. Mencken
Jim Hartley
>>>I'm not against "Great
>>>Books" (well, maybe some of them)....
>
>Jim Hartley (ez01...@dale.ucdavis.edu):
>>Could you give a few examples of the books you are thinking about
>>here, i.e., could you list a few of the books in the "well, maybe
>>some of them" category?
>
>No. I couldn't.
>
>(Hmph. He asks me to post flamebait!)
:-)
Sorry about that. I asked the question out of curiosity. However, now
that you mention it, I can't say I blame you for demurring.
Vance Maverick
Suppose a person came up to you and asked, "You know, Janet, you are
a well read person. I would really like to learn about Western
Civilization; I would like to read "the best of what has been
said or written." Could you let me know where to start? In other
words, could you let me know which books are important in the English
speaking tradition and which you think should be widely read and taught?"
Would anyone ever ask such a question? Or are the terms in which it
is phrased already a pure product of the Hutchins/Adler attitude
toward what a literature, a culture, a tradition is? Why would a
stranger to the West assume there was a useful answer?
Vance
Mike Morris
Allan Burns writes:
I have been following this debate, and thought that at this juncture,
without directly responding to any of the interlocutors, I would add
my voice to the general tumult. My perspective, I think it safe to say,
is somewhat different than any so far offered--but not for that do I
think it will please Mr. Morris.
I make only scattered comments in what follows.
Allan writes:
A reiterated gripe here seems to run as follows: that in
abandoning a Great Books Liberal Education the U. S. has done itself and its
children a grave disservice. But, for better or worse, the U. S., a
materialist, pragmatic, business-oriented society, cannot--at least most
of its constituents have come to believe--subsist on an essentially
contemplative education.
Agreed that the U.S. neither can nor should devote schooling exclusively
or essentially to the great books. There are plenty of other things
which *also* need to be taught in the schools.
The U. S., no less a cave than any other "culture," has found for
itself the most expedient, democratic education: all our complainings are
not likely to change this a whit.
This is unclear to me altogether. I think American parents have
abdicated their children's education to the schools---hence
large scale whining about the poor quality of the school system, but
widespread individual satisfaction with the quality of local schools. I
think other cultures, say, in which children seem to perform better in
school have families who care more individually for their children's
schooling than Americans tend to. There is no reason I think why Americans
could not choose to do *better* than Americans now do.
When a great conservative educator of the likes
of Irving Babbitt or Allan Bloom comes along, they can be said to perform the
valuable service of propagating a "rhetoric of discontent" that challenges
complacency in the cave, at least locally and momentarily. But to pretend that
the cave can be excavated by a liberal education and exposed to the radiance
of sunlight is the purest idealism.
Excavated, no. I certainly wouldn't think anyone here is claiming that.
It is only by virtue of individual exercise of vita contemplativa that the
cave might even be avoided.
Does anyone here seriously believe that a
smattering (or even heavy heaps) of Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, et al. would
seriously improve our situation, in either social or educational terms, when
our students will be the same disaffected students and our teachers mostly,
as they must be in so large an educational system, incompetent?
Yes, I do. I think our situation is that bad, yes. I.e. I do not hope
for ascent from the cave by all of society. What I do hope for is a slightly
better general education, a little higher standard of prerequisite for
exercise of citizenship, a little higher intolerance for the soundbite
inanities that have become the political norm.
The thrill of discovering a great philosopher or great poet almost
invariably comes on one's own (or through the facilitation of the
rarest of teachers, rare, too, perhaps, for you and not necessarily
others). There is something irreduciably subjective about this
process--even if the lamps unearthed are not themselves merely our
phantasmal reconstructions. This subjective element *must*, by its
nature, elude our pedagogical schemes. (An old adage involving a
horse and water comes to mind.)
To me, there are 2 reasons for schooling in these books:
(1) They might be the portal to the examined life as the highest
possible pursuit of an individual's happiness, and (2) They are an
essential background to the exercise of citizenship.
I would agree that (1) is something only to be found on one's own,
perhaps long after all schooling is done. That is, I do not
expect schooling to include these books for this purpose other
than as a preparation to a lifetime of self-education. I do think
that schooling ought to include some of these books, however, at least
for purpose (2).
If we examine this subjective feature further, perhaps we might see,
too, that the books one most profits by and learns best to live with
are not necessarily of what, in Mr. Morris' terms, or the terms of The
Five Foot Shelf, are the greatest.
Some of the most personally important books to me
have been what I have called 1-time readables. Also
it seems to me that some of these books would have 0-time readables
for another person, or indeed most other persons.
But
firsthand knowledge, at least for the most, will inevitably be confined
to one look at a translated text.
It need not be so confined. It might be 2 looks, or indeed many
looks at one special text that one may be drawn to. But,
for this to happen it needs to be thinkable that one might
actually read these texts again in afteryears, i.e. that normal,
everyday nonspecialist persons might actually read these books
after their normal schooling is done. It would have to be
societally acceptable (dare I hope encouraged?) to read them,
which is at odds with the current pop anti-intellctualism. Anyway,
I disagree that these texts are only for the specialist. It may
be that only a specialist, or in fact only a rare genius can
make an addition to the study of, the reading of these, books. But,
many more people than specialists it seems to me can grow and learn
from them.
Part of my point here is that not all of us were "cut out" to
read, or even understand, at a low level, the Great Books.
This may in fact be the case. Leo Strauss would seem to suggest that
it is. However, I do not believe that the experiment has ever been
really tried.
We can hardly expect that the average student will have much interest
in scholarly and philosophical questions.
But, philosophical questions seem to me to be far from scholarly questions.
Far from specialized questions.
Perhaps it is even arrogant of us
to expect that they should be interested. Only in a democracy has anyone
imagined that everyone was educable to a level where they would be fascinated
by the least problems presented by peripatetic philosophy or a Joycean text.
Adler, in the _Paideia Proposal_, begins and ends with the credo ``Every
child is educable''. This doesn't mean everybody's capacities are equal,
but rather that if children's minds are like pitchers, we ought to strive
to fill them up to the brim with as much fine wine as they'll take, instead
of settling for pitchers that are only 10% full of soapy dishwater.
Not
all edification, I would certainly say, is equal: certainly not if the
choice is Plato or MTV.
The real choice (I mean in real high schools) isn't even that---it's
down to videos of ``littrachur'' versus MTV.
But the application of one's limited powers of understanding
to any great body of texts--particularly those books that edify one most--
this, it seems to me, is liberal education, not dogmatic devotion to a list
of books only the greatest of polymaths could ever hope to understand or
see the "true" value of.
I don't think anyone is advocating the canon quite this dogmatically,
even Adler with his Great Books set, howsomever dogmatic he may be.
I believe it is better to
know, deeply, something worth knowing (and by definition, I think, this
must remain open, but yet exclusive), than to be merely an autodidactic
dilettante who thinks one must know what one never can.
It isn't clear to me whether breadth or depth is better. A lot of
books, autodidactically read over many subjects and interests, or
a few great books pursued intensively. Both poles of readership,
however, may be subject to the criticism of attempting to know what
one never can. On the other hand, if true education is the quest and
not necessarily the achievement of the quest, then I don't see a reason
for preference for one over another. In fact, what I see are Scylla and
Charybdis on both sides of pursuing one to the exclusion of the other.
But the greater problem in practice (in my estimation) is with
over-specialization.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Eric Simonoff
or degree of interconnectedness with other "Great Books" (or even with
lesser books). Under these guidelines, the Alice Walkers of the world
will always suffer, because they are a) so recent and b)are not part of
the sacred continuum.
That being said there is still something immensely valuable about
adhering to the closed set of Great Books and that is the clear and
readily recognizable way they fit into an enormous literary puzzle. As a
teaching tool, it is worthwhile to demonstrate that literature does not
exist ina vacuum. that, in fact, it need not even exist wihin its own
era or time zone. for example, there exist seven centuries worth of
commentary of THE DIVINE COMEDY, thus enabling a student (any student) to
enter into a dialogue across centuries with some of the greatest scholars
of all time. of course, this is not the case with ALice Walker.
Futhermore, much of the other "Great Books are themselves commentary on
yet other Great Books. Dante on Virgil, Virgil on Homer, etc.
WHen I hardthat Homer had not made the cut at Stanford I thought, Why
keep Virgil? No Virgil, no Dante, no Milton, etc etc.
george m jacobs
debate may be found in the following:
Simonson, Rick, & Scott Walker, eds. _The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-
Cultural Literacy, Opening the American Mind_. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf
Press, 1988. (ISBN 1-55597-114-8, ISSN 0743-7471)
From the 'blurb': "The issue of cultural literacy has been the subject of
intense debate in the past two years. Several bestselling books about the
deficiences of our educational system as well as changes in basic
curriculum at more than one major university have contributed to the fervor
of this debate.
"Fueling this national controversy is the question of what body of
knowledge constitutes cultural literacy. While many argue for a return to a
'back to basics' curriculum, equally energetic voices call for a revised
curriculum, one which embraces both traditional western classics _and_ the
classics of non-European cultures, among them African, Asian, and Latin
American.
"This volume brings together thirteen essays which suggest the range of
knowledge _truly_ literate individuals need to possess. Essays by such
writers as James Baldwin, Carlos Fuentes, Michelle Cliff, Paula Gunn Allen,
Ishmael Reed, and Wendell Berry enlarge our perspective to include a variety
of voices and heritages which contribute to the vibrant culture of the
United States.
"Also included is a beginning list of names, places, dates, and concepts
which are part and parcel of a multi-cultural fabric."
What I find interesting about this collection is that it seems not to
question that there should be a *canon*, but, rather, focuses on expanding
the canon.
--
Mike Jacobs * Arizona State Museum * The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 * tel: 602-621-6312 * email: jac...@gas.uug.arizona.edu
Jim Hartley
>On the contrary, I think I have definitely been reading you here.
>I will say that I've been playing Bad Cop to Kurt Godden's Good
>Cop here (which I figured I was allowed to do, since I played
>Good Cop to Nichael Cramer's Bad Cop in discussing Moses and the
>Pentateuch with Jim Hartley).
Uh, do I need a lawyer?
Jim Hartley
> Suppose a person came up to you and asked, "You know, Janet, you are
> a well read person. I would really like to learn about Western
> Civilization; I would like to read "the best of what has been
> said or written." Could you let me know where to start? In other
> words, could you let me know which books are important in the English
> speaking tradition and which you think should be widely read and taught?"
>
>Would anyone ever ask such a question?
I have asked this very question several times in my life. (Well, I
didn't ask Janet, but all the same).
>Or are the terms in which it
>is phrased already a pure product of the Hutchins/Adler attitude
>toward what a literature, a culture, a tradition is?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I accept that there is such
a thing as "the best of what has been said or written." Given that,
I wonder just what falls into that category.
>Why would a
>stranger to the West assume there was a useful answer?
Well, this is a terrible way to answer the question, but why wouldn't
a stranger to the West assume there is a useful answer? For example,
I know very little about Chinese culture. However, if I were inclined
to learn about it, I would begin by asking "what is the best of what
has been said or written in Chinese culture." I am virtually certain
that an answer could be provided.
Vance Maverick
[of the question "What's the best in culture X?"]
I have asked this very question several times in my life.
I've never asked it. This is a difference in our personalities, to be
sure, but that's exactly what I wanted to expose.
>Or are the terms in which it
>is phrased already a pure product of the Hutchins/Adler attitude
>toward what a literature, a culture, a tradition is?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I accept that there is such
a thing as "the best of what has been said or written." Given that,
I wonder just what falls into that category.
I understand. However, I wonder how widely people accept such a
thing. For me, the interesting thing about the literature, the
culture and the tradition is that they are happening *now*, among live
people, through music, food, writing, commerce, and ordinary speech.
The great books, if any, are on the periphery for most members of the
civilization, and to start with them is deeply bibliocentric and I
suspect more than a little Western, yea verily Arnoldian.
>Why would a
>stranger to the West assume there was a useful answer?
Well, this is a terrible way to answer the question, but why wouldn't
a stranger to the West assume there is a useful answer?
I just don't think this notion that cultures are forever culling and
summarizing themselves into a canon, and that this canon serves as
guide for natives and newcomers alike, is very natural. We've got
this notion, obviously: but in the West it has a well-known history.
I know very little about Chinese culture. However, if I were inclined
to learn about it, I would begin by asking "what is the best of what
has been said or written in Chinese culture."
I would begin by trying to learn about my interlocutor's intellectual
life. (This is not speculation: my wife is Chinese, and though I know
she knows some of the Chinese canon, that's not what I've tried to
learn from her.)
I am virtually certain that an answer could be provided.
Of course. Where you and I differ is in our estimate of the utility
of the answer -- and perhaps in our idea of what it means to
understand a culture.
Vance
Janet M. Lafler
>I will say that I've been playing Bad Cop to Kurt Godden's Good
>Cop here (which I figured I was allowed to do, since I played
>Good Cop to Nichael Cramer's Bad Cop in discussing Moses and the
>Pentateuch with Jim Hartley).
I didn't realize that I had been arrested. Or am I only being held
for questioning?
I'm not saying another word without my lawyer present.
Andrew Dinn
>In article <janetCD...@netcom.com>, ja...@netcom.com (Janet M. Lafler) writes:
>
>[...]
>
>> Much of the problem with teaching these books derives from the dilemma
>> of getting kids to see any connection between, say, Aristotle and their
>> own lives; and my personal opinion is that such a connection is rarely
>> there to be found. (I've never yet discovered any relevance to mine, and
>> I'm a lot more susceptible to pure philosophy than most people, coming
>> from an intellectual family and general environment.)
>
>[...]
>
> I've never flamed anybody before but this is too much! Janet,
>you remind me of a former colleague of mine who once remarked that he
>had never understood what use logic was, since he was able to do
>everything he needed to do without it.
Of course, what he didn't realise was that when he thought about things
he was really just doing logic all the time and if he ever thought
something which was not sanctioned by formal logic then of course he
really only thought that he thought it because in fact it had to be
unthinkable.
The point of course is that he didn't need a mathematical tool to
formalise his arguments because he was quite capable of using language
itself without falling into error. What's more, he was quite right in
doing so. Have you ever tried to use a proof in formal logic to argue
that you should have kippers for tea instead of stuffed peppers? that
abortion is a good/bad thing? that atoms in hydrogen gas come in pairs?
that the square root of 5 is not a rational number?
Even in the last case (where it is possible) a proof in logic would be
so vast that you couldn't be sure it was not full of mistakes and you
would take the result on trust because you had *better* ways of
arguing for it.
Logic is a specialised formalism used in very special circumstances
and appropriate to the activities of only a small number of
people. Janet is quite right to argue that the works of Aristotle have
equally limited utility. Perhaps the world would be a better place if
everyone was in the position where they could benefit from Aristotle's
wisdom (I have some sympathy with the idea but not much). However, it
is flying in the face of reality to suggest that most people, even
most US students, would profit from being made to read Aristotle.
(Obviously they all ought to read Wittgenstein and Thomas Pynchon
first. There, I said it before Zeleny did, so yah boo sucks. :-)
Andrew Dinn
-----------------------------
Our Motto - A Proper Lisp Now
Ted B Samsel
Yes, indeedy. A stirling tome, this.
--
Ted....
Steve Berman
Janet:
Also, I disagree with you fundamentally that certain books are the
foundation of thinking in the way that arithmetic is the foundation
for learning math.
We do disagree fundamentally here, especially with respect to Aristotle
and logic, or try Euclid and math.
Nobody has to read the Categories or the Prior and Posterior Analytics to
learn and understand logic, nor the Elements to learn and understand
geometry. But everybody has to learn arithmetic to do more advanced math.
--Steve
Mike Morris
Mike Jacobs mentions:
Simonson, Rick, & Scott Walker, eds. _The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-
Cultural Literacy, Opening the American Mind_. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf
Press, 1988. (ISBN 1-55597-114-8, ISSN 0743-7471)
I was quite annoyed when reading this book. The list was fun, of course,
and some of the essays were wonderful, but I was annoyed mainly by Simonson
and Walker's introductory essay, because I thought they were very
unfair to E.D. Hirsch & Company, and they painted Hirsch as though
Hirsch were a canonist or Great-bookser and conflated him with Allan
Bloom and then misrepresented both as basically hawking something like
Adler's programme.
If one reads Hirsch's book, it is clear that, except for the science,
Hirsch is trying to avoid being *prescriptive*. Simonson and Walker
attack him for being prescriptive. Then they turn around and play
prescription themselves. Except Hirsch explicitly says he's *not*
advocating everybody go read Shakespeare or the Bible. In fact, his
game is to be *descriptive*---go out and measure what culturally
literate Americans know. Now there are lots of subcultures to choose
among, but Hirsch looked at literacy as evidenced by readers of a
good American paper---the New York Times---figuring that people
who could read a paper like that were the politically empowered
people in the States. So, what Hirsch did was collect up all
allusions from the New York Times editorials and even sports pages
which the editors didn't bother to explain, which the editors just
assumed the readers would know. Hirsch reasoned that if you couldn't
``get'' those allusions, then you were probably excluded from participating
in American national discourse at an informed level. In no way did
Hirsch argue one shouldn't know other stuff as well, both stuff in common
with other Americans and stuff in common with whatever other subcultural
groups one is a member of know.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Mike Morris
I wrote:
I will say that I've been playing Bad Cop to Kurt Godden's Good
Cop here (which I figured I was allowed to do, since I played
Good Cop to Nichael Cramer's Bad Cop in discussing Moses and the
Pentateuch with Jim Hartley).
Janet Lafler writes:
I didn't realize that I had been arrested. Or am I only being held
for questioning?
I'm not saying another word without my lawyer present.
You and Jim both. I've heard there's a good one somewhere around
here, but it could be he's become a Washington lobbyist.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Mike Morris
Thomas Listmann writes:
2. All this talk about "17th reading" and "finding meaning" and
relevance sounds like "Me Generation" cliches.
I don't know about ``finding meaning'', but ``17th reading''
corresponds to my experience of reading books. The term does
not come from Adler, though. The division of books into
0-time readables, 1-time readables, and 17-time readables
is my own translation of Adler and Van Doren's description
of what makes a great book in _How to Read a Book_. Why 17?
That's in honor of a high school teacher my wife had who claimed
that one couldn't consider oneself educated until after
one had read Hamlet 17 times.
4. Doesn't the introduction to the GBs contain a consumer's warning?
It certainly does, and it tells what the selection is claiming
to be, which is not often what assume it's claiming.
5. My first grader is in a bi-lingual class (Spanish/English) and
it's great. I have no worries that her English is suffering--in
fact, I think it heightens her interest in language.
I assume that this responds to my own remarks regarding learning
Spanish. In no way did I mean those remarks to be construed as
adverse commentary on bilingual education. What I did mean is that
I am alarmed at how very little is being taught in American schools,
based on things like the high-school English teachers in Milwaukee
when we lived there who showed videos to their classes before they'd
discuss a book *because their students would not read any assigned
material*. One teacher said his class had rebelled onetime at having
to watch a video in black and white. Now, I assume that there are
locally better schools than Milwaukee high schools, but it
nevertheless makes me think that not many canonical books are being read
by students in Milwaukee high schools, so that advocating ``broadening
the canon'' in such an environment ends up giving kids one more excuse
not to read anything. Anyway, my Spanish analogy was meant to point
to this.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Keith Morgan
The great books, if any, are on the periphery for most members
of the civilization, and to start with them is deeply
bibliocentric and I suspect more than a little Western, yea
verily Arnoldian.
Just sticking with western civ for the moment, how else can we learn
the central preoccupations of an age than from its books, music, art?
We could just read histories but that's filtered interpretation. I get
your point about chinese civilization but certainly reading has
*something* to do with understanding.
By the way, I love the accusation of bibliocentrism.
Keith
--
Keith Morgan
kamo...@mit.edu
Jim Hartley
>If one reads Hirsch's book, it is clear that, except for the science,
>Hirsch is trying to avoid being *prescriptive*. Simonson and Walker
>attack him for being prescriptive. Then they turn around and play
>prescription themselves. Except Hirsch explicitly says he's *not*
>advocating everybody go read Shakespeare or the Bible. In fact, his
>game is to be *descriptive*---go out and measure what culturally
>literate Americans know.
In fact, Hirsch has said that to be culturally literate, it is
not necessary to ever read even one of the classics. Hirsch believes
it is enough to know who Hamlet is; there is no need whatsoever to
actually read _Hamlet_. Thus, if one were to read Hirsch's
_Dictionary of Cultural Literacy_ instead of the Classics, one
would be Culturally Literate by Hirsch's definition.
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
In article <CE170...@watserv2.uwaterloo.ca>, msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca
(Mike Morris) says:
>
>
>> The U. S., no less a cave than any other "culture," has found for
>> itself the most expedient, democratic education: all our complainings are
>> not likely to change this a whit.
>
>This is unclear to me altogether. I think American parents have
>abdicated their children's education to the schools---hence
>large scale whining about the poor quality of the school system, but
>widespread individual satisfaction with the quality of local schools. I
>think other cultures, say, in which children seem to perform better in
>school have families who care more individually for their children's
>schooling than Americans tend to. There is no reason I think why Americans
>could not choose to do *better* than Americans now do.
I agree we can do better, but only within the limitations imposed by a
capitalist, democratic, materialist environment--which may not be very well at
all. I have not been exposed to the "widespread individaul satisfaction" Mike
cites. I would not want my argument to depend too heavily on personal
testimony, but I can adduce my high school, which was when I attended it ranked
in the top twenty in the nation. I got by doing absolutely no homework; my
education depends almost entirely on influences outside this school experience;
and the school itself was literally brimming with drugs, diaffection, and
manifestations of physical violence. I imagine many others have had similar
experiences with secondary school. There isn't too much room for idealism in
my book; but of course there's no room for an exaggerated or capitulating
pessimism either.
>> When a great conservative educator of the likes
>>of Irving Babbitt or Allan Bloom comes along, they can be said to perform the
>>valuable service of propagating a "rhetoric of discontent" that challenges
>>complacency in the cave, at least locally and momentarily. But to pretend
>>that
>>the cave can be excavated by a liberal education and exposed to the radiance
>>of sunlight is the purest idealism.
>
>Excavated, no. I certainly wouldn't think anyone here is claiming that.
>It is only by virtue of individual exercise of vita contemplativa that the
>cave might even be avoided.
But, if we are going to continue to use this Platonic metaphor, musn't we
accept that there is no middle position between being inside and outside the
cave? (Plato, in his intransigence, certainly would insist on this.) The
consequences of this (and perhaps even the adequacy of the metaphor) might be
explored at greater length, but I move on for now.
>
>
>> I believe it is better to
>> know, deeply, something worth knowing (and by definition, I think, this
>> must remain open, but yet exclusive), than to be merely an autodidactic
>> dilettante who thinks one must know what one never can.
>
>It isn't clear to me whether breadth or depth is better. A lot of
>books, autodidactically read over many subjects and interests, or
>a few great books pursued intensively. Both poles of readership,
>however, may be subject to the criticism of attempting to know what
>one never can. On the other hand, if true education is the quest and
>not necessarily the achievement of the quest, then I don't see a reason
>for preference for one over another. In fact, what I see are Scylla and
>Charybdis on both sides of pursuing one to the exclusion of the other.
>But the greater problem in practice (in my estimation) is with
>over-specialization.
I agree that specialization presents its dangers, and I also think my argument
was not presented with sufficient lucidity. Let me try to re-state and qualify
it while I respond. The student, initially at least, must attempt to absorb
as much information, as many impressions as possible, both from books and life.
The student, hopefully, expands (like the universe) in all directions nearly
simultaneously. But this expansion, to keep up the astronomical analogy, can
lead to mere diffusion, like a hot young blue star grown into a bloated red
giant. The student eventually knows enough to know that he knows very little.
(In fact I would argue that a central pedagogical problem today is that
students do not even know enough, upon entering college, to know they are
ignorant: this seals the door, and nothing is learned at all, because learning
hasn't been learned to be valued. The failure is largely that of parents.)
But to return to our student: as a student qua student, there is nothing wrong
with expansion. The complications of life (work, marriage, etc.) will, in any
event, prevent expansion too far in even fairly ambitious cases. It is well
to be well-rounded, and in one sense an education that produced such a citizen
would fulfill well the classic democratic ideal. To produce such students
should be one goal of our universities (but in praxis almost certainly never
will be, at least as long as we are more a capitalist market state than a
classic democracy). But the argument is complicated further when we consider
the student not in the capacity of student, but rather in that of teacher (for
teachers, at least good ones, are always both students and teachers). The
university professor, at least, must profess something, and to do this requires
saturation in that something. The argument I previously borrowed from Leavis
applies in this case: the professional student in the liberal arts, after an
initial saturation, must, inevitably, specialize. For the very tenuousness
of knowledge in any subject, as long as one gropes with many with a faulty
human memory, comes home to the professional, if not before, then certainly
during the very process of teaching. The ideal of the "generalist" or the
"Renaissance man" is, I think, gone forever given the incredible vistas of
historical and theoretical knowledge. Only the specialist, one might argue,
knows how little most know about anything: for to know something well is
inevitably to find out how difficult the process of knowing is. Obviously, we
are not all (thank God!) specialists in the liberal arts; but I simply want to
clarify that my argument was intended to have two "prongs," one for the
student qua student, one for the student qua teacher. If the former resembles
an expanding universe, the latter resembles a solid planet accumulated from
astral debris that has now found its (hopefully) proper orbit. The teacher
must, as Stephen Dedalus did, navigate between Scylla and Charybdis: for there
surely is such a thing as over-specialization. I take this to be a failure to
perceive relations between one's speciality and the greater mass of knowledge
and history in general. One must be able to bring to bear at least that
modicum of learing in all the major subjects that pass under the banner of
liberal education to teach, successfully, a given subject; but one must also
know that subject like a blind person knows the arrangement of furniture in
their rooms. Thus, the teacher inclines more than slightly to Charybdis (if
that is what represents specialization). I draw out this argument not to be
contentious, but only to clarify what I failed to do at first. Let me repeat
that I advocate the deepest saturation possible, in life, in knowledge, and in
art, but that I also believe a rigid determination of what is valuable (such as
a list of Great Books to be studied) can be an impediment. To understand the
value of a single Great Book is first to feel its connections with everything
else, from one's life, to the historical circumstance out of which it grew, to
all the texts that inform it and that it informs--and all of this without the
tarnish of received opinions and established, inflexible views. If our
students today learn the value of only a few such books, I believe it will be
from the hands of a teacher who can convey the full significance and context of
the few Great Books (and there are many, though not perhaps as many as some
"contemporaneists" would have us believe) they are truly capable of teaching.
(And, yes, I think this does mean that to teach Goethe one must be fluent in
German--just for starters). Hopefully, ideally, a student would encounter
many such teachers, and from that a well-roundedness would emerge that can
either be used to enter the work-a-day world or to begin training in a
specialization that will pass at least one part of the sum on to the next
generation. For those who have read this far: please forgive me the size of
this paragraph.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
Vance Maverick
[I wrote:]
The great books, if any, are on the periphery for most members
of the civilization, and to start with them is deeply
bibliocentric and I suspect more than a little Western, yea
verily Arnoldian.
Just sticking with western civ for the moment, how else can we learn
the central preoccupations of an age than from its books, music, art?
How does one determine the centrality of a preoccupation? Perhaps in
that it's manifested in books, music and art?
We could just read histories but that's filtered interpretation. I get
your point about chinese civilization but certainly reading has
*something* to do with understanding.
Of course. What I'm trying to say is something like this: if we value
the GBs of a society because they clue us in to more general patterns
in it, then why not go straight to the general patterns, as manifested
in daily life? Either because we think that the books will yield
faster and more completely to our understanding, or because we really
value book culture for itself.
By the way, I love the accusation of bibliocentrism.
And coming from me, it could hardly be construed as an insult.
Vance "when in doubt, read a book" Maverick
Robert Grumbine
the Great Books of the Western World) are missing or sidling around
what I think is the most significant part of the question.
Question as I take it: What are the essential books for a liberal
education?
This has two elements -- What is a liberal education? and Which
books are essential to obtaining a liberal education?
Most of the great books postings have been focussed on the question
of whether the great books are essential to obtaining a liberal education.
For my own part, I'd have to say no, as there is a huge set of also
great books which are not put on a given list which one could study
instead and as a result create a liberal education. Hence, any one list is
not essential.
What is a liberal education? and, with respect to the great books,
would you have a liberal education if you studied only them? I'll
assert no. I'm taking liberal education to mean 'educated across the
spectrum of human understanding'. You would be ignorant of
history, mathematics, science, art, and music, for starters. Without
a knowledge of history and the current state of the world, you cannot
possibly sensibly read any work of political philosophy (which many
of the books involve) for example. Without a greater background in
mathematics and science, you cannot understand most of the few math
and science books (e.g. Newton's Principia) which are on the list at
all.
It is routine to define liberal arts and liberal education in terms,
essentially, of what constituted a 'gentleman's' education 100-200
years ago. As such, the fields I mention are excluded, and one
_can_ describe the knowledge of a 'liberally educated' person in
terms of the contents of a list of books. This was a narrow education
then, and is ludicrously narrow now.
Aside: As far as the whole Great Books debate(s) go(es), I have to
chuckle (or be embarrassed, depending), as I went to the University of
Chicago (grad school). And that Robert Hutchins, via my great aunt,
tells me that my grandfather had a connection to the origins and
content of the Great Books curriculum.
--
Bob Grumbine
rm...@access.digex.net
formerly rm...@grebyn.com
Janet M. Lafler
Kurt Godden (god...@predator.cs.gmr.com) writes:
>Thank you very much. For the new reader of this thread, "GC" refers to
>the Great Conversation--the metaphor for the multiple threads running
>through the so-called Great Books of the past 2.5 thousand years.
My advice to the new reader of this thread is to get out while you
still can! Don't post, or you'll never be free again!
>>Janet M. Lafler (ja...@netcom.com) lays down the gauntlet:
^^^^^^^^
Oops. Thanks for correcting this. Originally I wrote "gantlet," but
that's what you run, not what you throw down. Though, actually, my
dictionary lists "gantlet" as an alternative spelling of "gauntlet,"
making things all too confusing....
Janet M. Lafler (ja...@netcom.com) writes:
>>You're right. I should have said "does not" instead of "cannot." I
>>agree that the GC proports to be able to address any question, but I
>>think that's one of the claims that's quite simply not possible. Any
>>conversation must have defined parameters in order to be coherent; and
>>these definitions are going to create structures of thought which exclude
>>certain ideas, thoughts, modes of expression.
Kurt:
>I disagree slightly in that I believe that whatever great and crucial
>questions have not yet been discussed in the GC still could and can be by
>future authors. That is, the GC expands appropriately to include
>whatever humans regard as the great issues, in much the same way that a
>personal conversation may follow tangents and flow according to the
>desires of the participants.
I agree with Matt (I think it was Matt), who was wondering, then, just
what defines the GC. If it is universal and can address any question,
then why put borders on it at all? And, of all the conversations going
on all over the room (for of course, this is a great gathering, and every-
one is talking at once) why necessarily pick the spirited debate going on
over by the refreshment table rather than the little tete-a-tete going
on in the corner?
Janet:
>>I think that these two pedagogical questions are inextricably linked.
>>Much of the problem with teaching these books derives from the dilemma
>>of getting kids to see any connection between, say, Aristotle and their
>>own lives; and my personal opinion is that such a connection is rarely
>>there to be found.
Kurt:
>Hutchins' response to this is that surely the great questions and issues
>that are weaved into the GC are the same as those that are pondered by
>every individual (at *least* during adolescence!): Who am I? What is
>the meaning of life? Does Truth exist? Is there a God? (Does God
>prefer Chinese over, say, Vietnamese food?)
While Vietnamese food can be quite good, Chinese food is undeniably Great
Food; I think it's rather above our dislikes....
I would agree that nearly everybody does this sort of searching during
adolescence. I certainly did, though often the most important question
seemed to be "How am I going to get through another day in this hostile
environment where everybody hates me?"
My experience with what "Great Books" I read at the time, though, was that
they didn't really address these questions; at least, not in the way that
I was experiencing them. I love Shakespeare, for instance, and was heavily
into Shakespeare as a teenager. But what I loved about Shakespeare, in
retrospect, was his "otherness." For me, Shakespeare was escape from my
own dilemmas into dilemmas which were alien, mysterious, and intriguing.
They didn't seem to have much bearing on my life, and that's what I liked
about them.
Of course, Shakespeare's work is fiction, and entertainment; but I could
say almost the same of the more rigorous philosophy I was reading at the
time, in that it provided an intellectual escape from the emotional pain
I was suffering. (I hasten to explain that nobody was beating me up or
anything like that; I was going through the usual traumas of adolescence,
typical, but no less painful for all that.)
I'm sure that some will think that I'm completely misguided in this, but
I believe now that the "eternal questions" are not really intellectual
questions at all, but spiritual and emotional ones.
Janet:
>>I know that it's
>>apostasy, but I don't think that the brilliance, importance and beauty
>>of many of the "Great Books" is naturally obvious. In some cases, I
>>doubt that it's there at all; in others, I think it's only there for
>>someone who is already motivated to do intensive study of the subject.
Kurt:
>He also responds directly to this issue. He says that many of the Great
>Books do certainly require laborious effort to read, but that the effort
>is worth it (else they would not be generally regarded as great books).
I'm a little upset that everyone seems to be interpreting this statement
of mine to mean "These books are just too hard for little me, and I'm not
going to read them!" I can see how the statement might invite such a
response, but that wasn't really what I was trying to convey. I haven't
been complaining about difficulty, but about the assumption of universal
connection.
Kurt again:
>I think that this claim has received empirical justification (in a sense)
>from the r.a.b.ble who often have stated the same thing (frequently in
>condescending tones) regarding the reading of such books as Finnegan's
>Wake, Gravity's Rainbow and the like. While there may certainly be
>disagreement as to which books constitute the Great Ones, the payoff for
>expending the effort in reading them is viewed as the same.
I'm not convinced, though, that because a work is "difficult" it is nece-
ssarily particularly profound. Complexity of thought isn't necessarily
depth of thought; sometimes, indeed, it's childish and cowardly. I get
very irritated at big, complex, difficult books which end up saying very
little....
Mike Morris
Janet Lafler wrote:
Also, I disagree with you fundamentally that certain books are the
foundation of thinking in the way that arithmetic is the foundation
for learning math.
I responded:
We do disagree fundamentally here, especially with respect to Aristotle
and logic, or try Euclid and math.
Steve Berman writes:
Nobody has to read the Categories or the Prior and Posterior Analytics to
learn and understand logic, nor the Elements to learn and understand
geometry. But everybody has to learn arithmetic to do more advanced math.
Agreed, but it depends on how we are reading Janet's ``in the way
that''. My point is that, yes, we don't have to read these books
to understand geometry or logic, but the books that we do read
in order to understand geometry or logic, or the teachers who
teach these subjects to us, rely ultimately on the foundation of
the Elements and the Organon. We may *learn* how to think directly from
other sources, but the idea of proof and deduction comes from these
books. I.e. we need to read either the books themselves or some
later gloss on them. Either that, or reinvent the wheel, but we
could presumably do that with arithmetic.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Mike Morris
I wrote:
If one reads Hirsch's book, it is clear that, except for the science,
Hirsch is trying to avoid being *prescriptive*. Simonson and Walker
attack him for being prescriptive. Then they turn around and play
prescription themselves. Except Hirsch explicitly says he's *not*
advocating everybody go read Shakespeare or the Bible. In fact, his
game is to be *descriptive*---go out and measure what culturally
literate Americans know.
Jim Hartley adds:
In fact, Hirsch has said that to be culturally literate, it is
not necessary to ever read even one of the classics. Hirsch believes
it is enough to know who Hamlet is; there is no need whatsoever to
actually read _Hamlet_. Thus, if one were to read Hirsch's
_Dictionary of Cultural Literacy_ instead of the Classics, one
would be Culturally Literate by Hirsch's definition.
Exactly. Which means to some of us who might tend to be more
pedagogically prescriptive, cultural literacy is only a tiny
part of what good education ought to be, which I think Hirsch
acknowledges in the book (I've read only the first one---the list
and its apologia---, *not* the dictionary).
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Mike Godwin
Janet M. Lafler <ja...@netcom.com> wrote:
>I'm not saying another word without my lawyer present.
You rang?
--Mike
--
Mike Godwin, (202) 347-5400 |"If the doors of perception were cleansed
mnem...@well.sf.ca.us | every thing would appear to man as it is,
Electronic Frontier | infinite."
Foundation | --Blake
Diane L. Olsen
wrote:
> My advice to the new reader of this thread is to get out while you
> still can! Don't post, or you'll never be free again!
I know I'm going to regret this....
> I agree with Matt (I think it was Matt), who was wondering, then, just
> what defines the GC. If it is universal and can address any question,
> then why put borders on it at all? And, of all the conversations going
> on all over the room (for of course, this is a great gathering, and every-
> one is talking at once) why necessarily pick the spirited debate going on
> over by the refreshment table rather than the little tete-a-tete going
> on in the corner?
One of my most joyous discoveries a few years ago was the wonderful
conversation among the great (mostly women) English novelists of the 17th,
18th, and 19th centuries. (Documented in Moers, _Literary Women: The Great
Writers_, and many, many other places.) I'm talking about hundreds of
writers, most of whom predate Jane Austen, many of whose books were
bestsellers in their day. It's only later that their work was retroactively
marginalized. Janet said earlier that the GC concept is totalitarian. I
find it to be annoyingly revisionist as well. [All right, I'll get off my
little soapbox now.]
> While Vietnamese food can be quite good, Chinese food is undeniably Great
> Food; I think it's rather above our dislikes....
I was hoping for a smiley here....
> Janet:
> >>I know that it's
> >>apostasy, but I don't think that the brilliance, importance and beauty
> >>of many of the "Great Books" is naturally obvious.
Unlike that of Chinese food.... :-) (Sorry. I've read a lot of
rec.food.cooking, and people DO often talk that way about food -- or
rather, _cuisine_. See above.)
> I haven't
> been complaining about difficulty, but about the assumption of universal
> connection.
> I'm not convinced, though, that because a work is "difficult" it is nece-
> ssarily particularly profound.
I'm with Janet on both counts.
Diane L. Olsen "A woman with a mind is fit for all tasks."
Word Witch --Christine de Pizan (c.1363-c.1431)
General Magic, Inc.
dia...@genmagic.com
Nichael Cramer
Good Cop to Nichael Cramer's Bad Cop in discussing Moses and the
???
Matt Austern
> One of my most joyous discoveries a few years ago was the wonderful
> conversation among the great (mostly women) English novelists of the 17th,
> 18th, and 19th centuries. (Documented in Moers, _Literary Women: The Great
> Writers_, and many, many other places.) I'm talking about hundreds of
> writers, most of whom predate Jane Austen, many of whose books were
> bestsellers in their day. It's only later that their work was retroactively
> marginalized.
I'm not sure to what extent that's true; I think it largely depends on
what it means for something to be marginalized.
Certainly most English novels in the 18th century were written by
women, and certainly many of them were popular. Still, I think it's
reasonably clear that the novel was then only beginning to be taken
seriously as a literary form. For the most part, that is, novels were
entertainment, but Literature was something else entirely. (There's a
comment along those lines in Northanger Abbey: Austen writes that she,
unlike other authors, wouldn't write a novel about a heroine who would
not herself condescend to read one, but whose reading material would
always be more respectable than that.)
It's interesting to note how much attitudes have changed in so short a
time: nowadays, if you look at a list of Great Literature, most of the
works on that list would probably be novels.
Which leads back to the subject of such a list... One reason I would
be hesitant to offer a list of "the best books ever written", if
anyone asked me, is that the candidates for such a list depend so much
on historical accident. I can only recommend those books that I have
read, and I can (for the most part) only read those books that, for
one reason or another, are still widely printed and read today.
Survival of a book, like survival of a species, so often depends on
chance occurrences unrelated to merit.
--
Matthew Austern Maybe we can eventually make language a
ma...@physics.berkeley.edu complete impediment to understanding.
Janet M. Lafler
>The questions of access and obligation are separate. It's
>right and good that you (or anyone) should be able to find
>the books if you're interested. But I don't think you should
>feel obliged to read them.
The funny thing is that I, who have been making a case against
this obligation, nevertheless feel it myself. I feel really
guilty that there are many of the canonical "Great Books" I
haven't read. (If anyone wants to use a psychological argument
to dismiss my contribution to the discussion, this is the time
to do it.)
>If I read Janet right (that is,
>if the subset of my own opinions to which I ascribe her
>words is a fair one), she's not saying the GBs are exclusive,
>she's saying their supposed *inclusion* of everything and
>everybody is a false claim -- the kind of false claim that
>is made partially true by being acted upon.
Yes, this is something that I would agree with, though I'm not sure that
I made exactly this argument. This distinction is where I part company, I
think, with some of those making the "multi-cultural" argument; I'm less
concerned with the canon being exclusive than with its assumption of
inclusiveness.
Ian Feldman
brand new release? Otherwise, please supply publisher/ ISBN
data. And what, exactly, does it have to say on the subject
of consensual crimes?
Thansk much in advance.
__Ian
Robert C. Paulsen, Jr.
In article <1993Sep27.0...@nevada.edu>, JOHN WYLIE
(wy...@nevada.edu) writes:
[most of list deleted]
> 6. On Moral Fiction
> by John Gardner.
[most of list deleted]
> Any comments regarding the above list ...
John,
John Gardner's work strikes a chord with me, especially his
novels. _Sunlight Dialogs_ is probably his most famous, but I
prefer his later writings, in particular _Mickelsson's Ghosts_ (a
novel) _Freddy's Book_ (novel within a novel), _The Art of
Living_ (short stories) and _Grendel_ (a long epic poem telling
the Beowulf story from the point of view of the monster).
To borrow a phrase I read somewhere, Gardner's novels are "full
of philosophical musings" -- apparently the same ones I
personally wonder and think about since they seem so close to
home. He also tells a damn good story -- the reader (at least this
one) is seduced by the plot and cares deeply about the
characters. His novels are "big" and intricate with twists and
turns, dark corners, mysterious happenings, many characters and
satisfying resolutions.
Gardner is one of those authors I wish I hadn't read yet so I
could discover him all over again.
- Bob
--
Robert Paulsen | rpau...@beowulf.win.net |
Highland, NY | 7402...@compuserve.com |
U S A | pau...@ibm.vnet.com |
Diane L. Olsen
ma...@physics16.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern) wrote:
>
> I'm not sure to what extent that's true; I think it largely depends on
> what it means for something to be marginalized.
>
> Certainly most English novels in the 18th century were written by
> women, and certainly many of them were popular. Still, I think it's
> reasonably clear that the novel was then only beginning to be taken
> seriously as a literary form.
> It's interesting to note how much attitudes have changed in so short a
> time: nowadays, if you look at a list of Great Literature, most of the
> works on that list would probably be novels.
While it's apparently true that 18th English novels were not considered
Great Literature (tm) in their day, that hardly refutes what I said about
women novelists from past centuries being "retroactively marginalized." The
fact remains that even now that novels, a literary form pioneered and
almost completely dominated by women in the 17th and 18th centuries, *are*
considered Great Literature, we still hear *far* more about the handful of
men novelists of that time than we do about the hundreds of women novelists
who were their contemporaries.
> Which leads back to the subject of such a list... One reason I would
> be hesitant to offer a list of "the best books ever written", if
> anyone asked me, is that the candidates for such a list depend so much
> on historical accident. I can only recommend those books that I have
> read, and I can (for the most part) only read those books that, for
> one reason or another, are still widely printed and read today.
>
> Survival of a book, like survival of a species, so often depends on
> chance occurrences unrelated to merit.
Agreed. And not just because of the women novelist issue. (Actually, I
think Aphra Behn, who's arguably the first novelist in English, was
marginalized as much because she wrote dirty (bestselling :-) ) books as
for any other reason.)
I'll say one more thing, and then I'll post no more: If you like _Pride and
Prejudice_, you *must* ( :-) ) read Fanny Burney's _Evelina_. Actually,
another one of Burney's books, _Cecilia_ I think, is supposed to have been
the actual book that inspired _P&P_. But I find _Evelina_ to be closer in
spirit to _P&P_. Anyway, *this* is the kind of thing that turns me on as a
reader of novels: To look up Jane Austen's favorite novelist and read
*her*.
Nichael Cramer
Mike Morris writes:
>If one reads Hirsch's book, it is clear that, except for the science,
>Hirsch is trying to avoid being *prescriptive*. Simonson and Walker
>attack him for being prescriptive. Then they turn around and play
>prescription themselves. Except Hirsch explicitly says he's *not*
>advocating everybody go read Shakespeare or the Bible. In fact, his
>game is to be *descriptive*---go out and measure what culturally
>literate Americans know.
In fact, Hirsch has said that to be culturally literate, it is
not necessary to ever read even one of the classics. Hirsch believes
it is enough to know who Hamlet is; there is no need whatsoever to
actually read _Hamlet_. Thus, if one were to read Hirsch's
_Dictionary of Cultural Literacy_ instead of the Classics, one
would be Culturally Literate by Hirsch's definition.
A related problem with Hirsch's Dictionary is that, in many cases the
entries were not so much data of "Cultural Literacy" as they were
commonly held misconceptions; i.e. things that everyone knows, but
which weren't, in fact, so (points of Cultural Illiteracy, perhaps).
In particular I'm thinking of things like that mythical book "Alice in
Wonderland"; or "Ararat" the mountain never mentioned in the Bible; or
all those famous non-quotes like "All that glitters is not gold" or
"gild the lily" or "play it again, sam"; all of which showed up in
early editions of Hirsch's books.
N
Charles Bishop
The ISBN is 0-913580-53-6
I don't know what the section on consensual crimes (?) says since it
is on my stack of books to read.
Charles cbi...@netcom.com
Richard Caley
>I accept that there is such
>a thing as "the best of what has been said or written."
It seems such a strange thing to accept. How is it possible to compare,
say, `Hamlet' with `The Meaning of Relativity'? They are so completely
different that it's as bad as comparing The Art of the Fugue with
Concorde. Completely different conceptual classes to me. Even comparing
novels gets very silly very fast.
--
r...@cogsci.ed.ac.uk _O_
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