1. In my continuing outreach to the Porchers, let me highlight an argument against “Great Books” education that I read and heard lately in various places by the eminent Dr. Pat Deneen. (I’m too lazy to link and Patrick is free to correct.)
2. First off, it’s relativistic. The student learns that certain books are great, but they disagree on God, morality, science, and all that. So the student has to judge which kind of greatness is most true and the best guidance on how to live. But said student also learns that he or she is much dumber than Plato, Thomas Aquinas, and Nietzsche. So how to judge? What right does insignificant me have to judge? This promiscuous appreciation for greatness, to say the least, is not an obvious cure for the moral impotence and confusion of our time.
3. This relativism is especially a problem, Patrick adds, in the best seller by Allan Bloom.There we get the strong impression that great thought has emptied the contents out of moral life–beginning with religion and the family. And because the Enlightenment isn’t really touched by allegedly deep criticism by Maritain (and other neo-Thomists), T.S. Eliot, and so forth, there’s no going back. So these days the choice is between being a philosopher and being nothing, but most people can’t be philosophers. And philosophy is nothing more than living constantly in light of the finality of death and has no moral content beyond what’s good for philosophy. Not only that, finally all the great books–the ones by the philosophers–agree on this philosophy or nothing thing. (Obviously I’ve given my own spin on this to get your attention.) Patrick goes too far in calling Bloom a relativist; he has a standard. But how helpful is it, really, in deciding how to live these days?
4. A lot of Great Books education is combined with a kind of uncritical deference to the philosophic wisdom of the American founders. But from the point of view of a professor at a Catholic university (Patrick’s), don’t we have to be judgmental about the efforts of, say, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke not only to “tame” but to destroy Christianity [see the symposium on Strauss referenced below]? And don’t we have to explain [employing the truth about who we are] why they failed, contrary to their intentions or at least hopes (says Patrick and me)? So don’t we have to criticize our “political Fathers” for being so Lockean (says Patrick especially)? We can’t quote Jefferson on “monkish ignorance and superstition” as if he were simply right or great or whatever! I would add, following the example of the best American Catholic “public philosophers” John Courtney Murray and Orestes Brownson, that we should, as loyal Americans [we Porchers and REM fans are all about standing for the place where we live], actually explain why our Fathers built better than they knew–which means criticizing their thinking and affirming [most of] their practice with a theory that at least wasn’t completely their own.
5. Patrick also says that a Catholic university should give “the pride of place” in teaching Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Not only are they “our team,” so to speak, but they teach much truth that can’t be found in other great books. That means, it seems to me, rejecting the ancient vs. modern distinction as the key to understanding the West and even reason vs. revelation the way it is understood by many Great Books teachers.
6. We American Catholics or just we American realistic postmodern conservatives don’t necessarily know that much about Maritain or Eliot, but we do know that our American Thomists Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor know stuff that Jefferson certainly didn’t [and, I willingly admit, even Maritain didn't and MacIntyre doesn't].
7. Still, the polemic for teaching “Great Books” remains very valuable in pushing the teaching of “real books,” as opposed to technical books, textbooks, or trendy books.
And I have admit that I always give the “lawyer’s argument” for the great book I’m teaching, while often merely alluding to criticisms both tentative and pointed.The Catholic approach is not appropriate for a teacher at a non-Catholic college, and my approach usually has the effect I can’t completely explain of making my smart Christian students more Christian. And maybe even my Deist students more Christian over the long haul, at least. I don’t claim to be evangelical enough to even know how to make that my primary “learning objective.”
May 5th, 2010 | 10:35 am
I suspect I’ve dropped into the middle of a discussion I don’t understand, so pardon me if I’ve got this all wrong, but –
The theoretical merits of Great Books in a vacuum is one thing; their merits in comparison to what’s actually going on is quite another. As the sci-fi author (and fellow St. John’s College grad) John Wright points out: Having a Great Books education is like being a man with a memory in a land of amnesiacs.
In practice, a Great Books education does (at least) these things for the learner:
- disabuses one of the idea that modern thinking is just way better than old thinking simply by virtue of being modern. The first serious encounter of the 18-year-old mind and Plato, for example, puts that to rest.
- introduces one to the Great Conversation, shorthand for ‘wow – brilliant people have been thinking hard about really important stuff for a long time’.
- gives one a taste of logic and elegance and coherence in thought. A Great Books educated person would be less likely to fall for the vapid incoherence of, say, Dawkins or Ayn Rand.
But mainly, it puts even our little non-brilliant lives in a human context: we’re not brave rebels carving a New Man out of hitherto unworked raw materials, to live in a newly unencumbered world of our own making. Rather, all the paths being considered have been trod and retrod. We know where each fork in the road leads. We can choose to believe – the dangers and rewards of that choice have been well explored. We can choose radical unbelief – starting with Descartes and moving through to Nietzsche, we can see how that works out. The burden is on us if we think: this time, it will be different!.
Plus, you get to avoid tedious lectures and texts imposed by the intellectual hacks that seem to make up the bulk of college professors. Plenty of good profs out there, don’t get me wrong, but not most, in my experience.
May 5th, 2010 | 12:00 pm
Joseph, All that is very reasonable and a good corrective to a position that I state too extremely.
And obviously the Deneen position is still a great books one. You’re right especially that it’s a good antidote to the various modern “solutions,” even if presented in light of yet another solution.
May 5th, 2010 | 2:12 pm
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May 5th, 2010 | 2:35 pm
Thanks, Peter, for a serious consideration of my argument. Too many people looked at the title that was assigned to my essay and concluded that “Deneen has gone crazy, he’s against Great Books!” Nonsense, at least the second clause. If you’re interested, read what I have to say and at least attack me for the right reason: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/why_the_great_books_arent_the.html
For the record, I don’t call Bloom a “relativist.” I wrote: “For Bloom, an education in the Great Books was to be at best a perpetual kind of suspension of belief, an eternal kind of play of ideas by philosophers. If Bloom resisted the “decisionism” that one sees in Kronman, at the same time he rejected the idea that there could be, or ought to be, any criteria by which one ought to judge between various philosophies. In the end, his peculiar understanding of Plato was to be recommended – the knowledge that we do not know.” I was thinking in particular of Bloom’s defense in his follow-up essay “Western Civ,” in which he defended himself by positioning himself between the relativism of liberals and the moralism of … Walker Percy. Bloom argued that his position maintained the belief that there was a truth, but denied that a philosopher could know what it was. Hence, maybe I could call it “a belief in the truth that dare not speak its name,” or something clever.
Anyway, Peter’s is the most serious response to my piece on the terms I intended my reflections to be taken. A response that doesn’t come close was here: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/04/why_the_great_books_are_the_an.html. Let me just state in very brief where Peter and I differ most substantially, which is not about the substance of his evaluation of the Great Books, but his loopy “Building better than they knew” Studies thesis. I’ve discussed his thesis here: http://patrickdeneen.blogspot.com/2008/09/peter-lawlers-america-rightly.html . If more occurs to me to say, I’ll say more over at the Porch – stay tuned.
May 5th, 2010 | 2:47 pm
Thanks.
I think we’d agree that seeking ‘solutions’ to what are essentially cultural (and ultimately moral) problems through any sort of formal educational program is a road to perdition. You’re not going to school the effects of sin away. In my stay at St. John’s College (a college, despite its name, with no religious affiliation and in fact a fairly strong anti-religious bias among many of the faculty), there was a small but committed group of Christians – mostly Catholics – who found the Great Books liberating and fortifying, AND a smaller group of former agnostics/atheists who actually followed the ‘Great Discussion’ well enough to find faith – typically, the Catholic faith.
BUT – the vast bulk of students, who came in with little or no religious sensibility, may have gained a little more respect for the absolutes that underlie any sort of compelling morality, but hardly – based on the evidence – adopted such morality themselves, let alone the faith that promulgates it. And you didn’t have to look far to find Marxist or Freudian loonies.
Anyway, the Great Books might be a good solution for certain kinds of intellectual blindness and laziness, but, devoid of a appropriate cultural/family/community context, they’re unlikely to help much with the deeper issues your original post touched on.
Their greatest value may well lie in supplanting the other college options, as most college degrees seem, in effect, to simply attempt to inoculate their recipients against ever having to think again.
May 5th, 2010 | 9:06 pm
An excellent and important discussion — thanks Peter, Patrick and others. My take: praise and study of the Great Books is certainly an honest and useful strategy against the ever-more-ascendant scientism and relativism. But as a free-standing commitment, drawing no nourishment from a practical world informed by some substantial moral-religious-metaphysical content, the Great Books must indeed finally cash out as relativism or nihilism. Allan Bloom at best barely resisted this fatality.
This is to say: no true greatness without goodness. Deneen is right that the passage from vulgar relativism to the Great Alternatives can only end in a higher relativism or “decisionism,” if there is no ground for choosing some of the Great Books over others. Consider this possibility: is Rawls’ THEORY now one of the Great Books, as the latest APSA poll of political theorists would seem to suggest? But of course this would be a Great Book to liquidate the tradition of all Great Books, to render them meaningless. The problem is, though — and this is something Bloom and other Great Books partisans are rarely candid about — a great many of the Great Authors (certainly Marx, no doubt Hobbes and all his followers), if taken seriously, do not provide grounds for taking seriously the “Tradition” of Great Books. It follows that a true, lucid proponent of Great Books cannot be an ecumenical, above-the-fray proponent. As Tocqueville said in his polemic (yes, polemic! why not?) against materialism and pantheism: “we need to raise men’s souls, not to complete their prostration.” Or: “All those who still appreciate the true nature of man’s greatness should combine in the struggle against it (pantheism).”
Bottom line: you can’t really believe in Great Books without believing there is something Great. And, though this would require more development, I would stake this claim as well: There is no sense of Greatness that does not connect in some way, that does not share a common reference point, with a Goodness that precedes and supports Greatness. (These arguments are developed, by the way, in an old bestseller I edited: America, the West and Liberal Education, Rowman & Littlefield 1999, including essays by Allan Bloom, Tim Fuller, Michael Gillespie, Michael Platt, among others.)
May 5th, 2010 | 10:14 pm
Very interesting discussion. Bloom himself, though perhaps not overcoming the difficulty that each of the above others mention, was not unaware of it. He was, after all, always considering whether his students had the requisite character to benefit from his brand of education. He seemed to think that real benefits required on ‘strength of soul’ and in the absence of that a great books education could indeed produce moral complacency. A great books education might cultivate strength of soul but by could not by itself produce it. No prizes for noticing the ‘aristocratic implications’ of this view of things, and whether it’s the appropriate one for America of our day is not a question I feel competent to answer.
That said: I think one shouldn’t overstate the extent to which Bloom and others believed the great books contained only ‘skeptical teachings’. Though I can’t say for sure, I would suspect Bloom may have been sympathetic to the view that one might call the ‘Dekonstruktion’ and ‘Rekonstruktion’ of Knowledge that appears in Plato’s Republic and elsewhere is correct — that Plato offers a true account of knowledge. But these matters can quickly become unintelligible, or “esoteric,” as we used to say.
As for great books for pedagogy,in my rather limited experience, it seems to me that young Americans are in large measure totally unequipped for whatever benefits accrued from such an approach. Limited or no knowledge of history, not to say anything resembling the foundations in the classical language which are a prerequisite for study of these works. The attempt to teach the great books absent these foundations can often produce comical results; the students introduced to such a ‘big ideas’ but having few practical or more immediate ideas with which to compare them, can get lost in the vaguest abstractions even when an author intends something quite concrete, or even simple.
I therefore find myself most sympathetic to a baby steps approach. More classics and serious language study, more literature, more history, more propaedeutic rearguard action. It would of course be helpful if some with real devotion to true character formation became high school principals.
beckstudies.blogspot.com
May 6th, 2010 | 12:49 am
Patrick Deneen… Nietzsche is not a fascistic nihilist, that is the most incoherent point i have ever heard made. You are citing the inane raving of the simulacra of imagination, whose position is laughable. I hope that my opinion of Nietzsche promotes his work as a great books because they are.
May 6th, 2010 | 7:46 am
Of course Ralph is right. Pat I think has the loopy and nonloopy parts of my post confused. Building Better Than They Knew Studies flows right out of the mainstream tradition of American Thomistic Catholic Thought. All I had to do is highlight that fact. Needless to say, I’m very grateful to Ralph and Pat–as two of the greatest authorities on “The Problem of Great Books” from a great books perspective–for taking time out to remind us of what they think.
May 6th, 2010 | 8:42 am
Well, let me add an additional question, then. All of you gentlemen teach at more or less religiously-affiliated colleges. What about those of us at de jure, or at least de facto, secular shops? Does this make any difference to the way one should teach the great books?
Incidentally, another critique of great books education that’s worth considering is Robert Nisbet’s. Although Nisbet was a great advocate of traditional liberal education, he saw greats books programs, especially on the Hutchins/U of C model, as an intellectual straitjacket for both students and faculty. Part of this reflects his concern that an emphasis on a few “great” books obscures the many valuable insights of modern thinkers. Is there room on such a curriculum for, e.g., Weber or Durkheim? Let alone Foucault who has, at least if he is read judiciously, quite a lot to teach us.
May 6th, 2010 | 10:33 am
1 Sam, my point 7 is about the contextual thing. My college is not denominational, vaguely Christian in spirit, has a mixed but pretty liberal and technical faculty, and students of all sorts but many very religious. So it’s tough to generalize from THAT. I’ve spent time at Pomona and am not sure what I would do there. The straight St. John’s approach would confirm, I think, much of their students confidently postreligious complacency.
2. A weakness in the Great Books approach, of course, is its overconfidence that mere social scientists are derivative and inferior thinkers. There’s some truth in that thought, but it’s not the whole truth in, say, the cases of Weber and Durkheim. It’s possible to learn from Foucault, no doubt, but I certainly wouldn’t bother to teach him to undergraduates. But I think even Rawls is too boring and unenlightening, finally, to be worth the effort [I know I'm contradicting the overwhelming judgment of my fellow theorists in the APSA].
3. An important problem with too much emphasis on Great Books is neglect of ordinary HISTORY and GOVERNMENT.
May 6th, 2010 | 10:51 am
Peter, I’m so proud of your Pt. 2, above. If the APSA calls for an investigation I’ll do all I can to help, you can count on that.
As an autodidact and following, I hope, Voegelin, I’ve got to be careful what books I buy (I have to buy them because I must mark them up a bit). And, at my age, I don’t have the time to fool around with derailed modernists.
You know you and Ivan, et al, should put together a ‘list’ of books for the ‘senior’ crowd, sort of “Books to read before your time’s up!”
May 6th, 2010 | 2:48 pm
Great Books themselves aren’t as important as whether students learn to talk with each other about them. A group of students who over an extended period of time (years not a semester) read the same books together and talk about them have a common culture, language, and set of ideas. Students share the experience of learning these books together. My first solitary encounter with The Republic was less interesting than when I read it again with others–then, The Republic became a common wellspring of ideas and images to be discussed. Conversations build on each other among the same group of students, and every new conversation includes past conversations. We read the same books, we know something of each other’s positions, we know how to refer to ideas, thinkers, and passages common to everyone. These ideas, thinkers, passages, and images become part of our daily lives and conversations (and even jokes) with each other. Moreover, this changes how I think about certain thinkers and books. I will try to reconsider Aquinas’s teaching on kingship more charitably because I love my friend who finds much merit in Aquinas. I say love and not respect, because respect for someone else only leads me to be polite. Friendship might lead me to see something new in spite of my prejudices.
This is the best and only really good way to learn. Though not easily institutionalized by a program or founded by a professor. I’d rather students became friends than philosophers.
May 6th, 2010 | 5:12 pm
I’d rather students have REAL philosophic inclinations that guide their friendships, instead of veiled, superficial ideas that no one a better belief than me because i read the book too. Sorry the Deist, but we can rank things, including ones knowledge being greater than anothers, thats not prejudice, thats reality.
May 7th, 2010 | 10:04 pm
Excellent!
I posted my own commentary on the same, though my remarks were not so learned as the ones left above. I thank you all.
http://washingtonrebel.typepad.com/washington_rebel/2010/05/no-book-on-the-great-books.html
May 9th, 2010 | 1:57 am
Patrick Deneen… One more thing. If you cared to read Nietzsche instead of relying on poor sources which attempt to guide his thought in a certain direction — you would realize that bloom with in fact a nietzschian. His lectures on Nietzsche show a real depth and care that reflects real rumination. A fact that is sorely lost by your extreme position you take on Nietzsche. In fact in On Truth and Lies, followed up by The Gay Science he expounds upon the morality of greatness of which transcends explaination or as Wittgenstein said cannot be told only shown. With the logical conclusion that it manifests itself in us our greatness manifested in eternal becoming. His critique of the bible or “great books” is similar to yours in that interpretation does not adequitely shine forth in a slave morality of being which posits equality of self. Of course under good… The goodness as Ralph says is really boring hell as lawler puts it. Becoming or a state of self conscious skeptism is truly enriched and powerful in it’s overcoming of being and all it’s putrid vestiages thAt have dragged us down such as relativism which was fought and hated by bloom.
May 9th, 2010 | 12:32 pm
[...] book, and of chronological progess, with the last books seeming to be the most advanced arguments. Dr. Peter Lawler adds a further dimension to this problem: “But said student also learns that he or she is much dumber [...]
May 11th, 2010 | 12:14 am
This Deneen fellow, if he has read the great books, has surely not understood them. Anyone who has read the great authors cannot but see the continuity between them–the canon is certainly not one large mishmash from which a reader may choose whatever they like. Nietzsche comments on Hegel who comments on Kant who comments on Rousseau and all to some extent contemplate the entire tradition. Moreover, any serious student would not simply agree with any particular author and throw out all the rest. The great books are great because they each command a lifetime of appreciation and study. One does not reach a particular author, declare the end of philosophy, and stop thinking (one might declare the end of philosophy and start thinking, but I digress).
And this approach is not equivalent with relativism in the sense that everyone agrees that Plato and Nietzsche and the like are far superior to mediocrities like Deneen. This sort of ‘promiscuous’ respect for greatness is precisely all that one needs, and if we had it, this conversation would not be taking place. The “problem” with our postmodern society is not the epic battles between devoted Lockeans and dedicated Rousseauians or Hobbesians or Nietzscheans or whatever. The “problem” is not even nihilism properly speaking but the prevalence of degenerate social theory, barren Enlightenment economics and natural science, and hypocritical Sunday school cant (or Kant).
Of course, there will inevitably be some students who will not approach the great books with the seriousness or intelligence required. Very well–at least they were exposed to great thinkers and still better that they run off misquoting Locke or Nietzsche than having been intoduced only to the nonsensical musings of some tenured moron.
I would entertain the possibility of choosing to teach only great books that reinforce a current regime. Thus Locke and Toqueville, etc. in America. The curious students will see clearly that they need to look further. Those who do not do so can carry on with an admirable if slightly complacent civic spirit. But in our degenerate age, I’m not sure such precautions would amount to much anyway.
May 11th, 2010 | 9:03 am
So, Strepsiades, you’re as eloquent as your namesake is inarticulate. And I agree with you that the Locke, Tocqueville reninforcing the current regime strategy is lamer than its adherents think. But I can’t quite trust anyone who is so proudly contemptuous of his degenerate times. For one thing, “Great Books” education may find its most natural home in degenerate times, for much the same reason that the open-minded discussion of THE REPUBLIC takes place in a decadent democracy. And, as Nietzsche says, one dimension of the problem of Socrates is that he had no solution to the problem of Athens. That’s one reason that your namesake finally had no use use for him and he became a “born again Zeus believer.”
May 11th, 2010 | 9:52 am
Good discussion!
Keep in mind a point that Richard Posner made: one reason why people with liberal arts educations don’t seem to be all that virtuous may be that they merely have gained a bigger smorgasbord of rationalizations for their vices. “The example of Alexander’s chastity has not made so many continent as that of his drunkenness has made intemperate.”(Pascal). So there is a case for teaching one approach—Aquinas, Plato, Confucius, or whatever–and teaching it well.
Keep in mind, too, that students need to learn orderly thinking, which may require courses with problem sets of some kind, whether in logic, geometry, economics, or chemistry. Or even law— law schools do a great job of introducing mushminds to verbal logical thinking in a single year.
May 11th, 2010 | 10:31 am
The teaching one approach well approach is also pushed by Charles Murray in REAL EDUCATION. It’s hard to agree with the “it doesn’t matter which approach” thought, though. A Straussian, though, might say that the best introduction to philosophy is really taking one’s time with a single philosopher. And from that view, Aristotle might the way to go, simply because it’s not as necessary to know his relationship to his predecessors as it, say, for even Locke. For Catholics, it might be best to go with Aristotle and thenThomas Aquinas’s corrections of Aristotle, his tempering of magnanimity with humility etc.
May 11th, 2010 | 11:59 am
Prof. Lawler,
Thank you for your comment and your wit.
I use “degenerate age” as shorthand for what you call “the moral impotence and confusion of our time” in point #2. I quite agree that many of the great books were written in “degenerate” times and perhaps speak most forcefully to those living in such times. Whether or not any particular teaching of the great books represents a cure–or should be taken up merely as a cure–for these diseases is another question, which does not go undebated within the canon itself, as everyone here well knows. Yet another reason perhaps to read at least some of them.
May 18th, 2010 | 9:41 am
[...] of the Great Books philosophy that clash with genuine educational goals. See Peter Lawler’s Great Books? and the discussion thereafter. (I wrote a lesser post in response to Lawler’s great [...]
May 20th, 2010 | 11:16 am
“I’m too lazy to link and Patrick is free to correct.”
I’m sorry, but this is pretty much the Web equivalent of a print essay that begins “I was too lazy to hit the shift key or type in punctuation — fill it in for yourself.”
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