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What in the world does beauty have to do with the Core, and especially with the teaching of the Core? I did a deep dive into its history to find out.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Columbia University Press published comprehensive books of works taught in Contemporary Civilization that could be widely distributed to students. I recently was able to get my hands on an old 2-volume hardcover set of all of the works that might “prove useful” for teaching Contemporary Civilization in 1954. These beautiful soft-red, gold, and black books, complete with a sublime Columbia logo, contain an astounding array of authors and texts. Not only are there more authors and texts contained within than we now cover in CC, there are more than could conceivably be treated in a year-long course. Mill, the tradition of Historical Materialism, Lenin, Bernstein, Shaw, Sorel, Nietzsche, Pope Pius XI, the Oxford Conference, and Columbia’s very own John Dewey are all covered in just one chapter (Chapter X of XXVIII) in Volume 2 of the edition.
Should we bring back the distribution of a standardized, highly aesthetic, and overly comprehensive book for CC? In perhaps the zenith of first semester Lit Hum, Plato claims in the Symposium that beauty is the form that we are compelled to by virtue of love (eros) par excellence. This is echoed by Aquinas in his enumeration of the five principal transcendentals: truth, goodness, beauty, unity, and being. Clearly beauty, the compelling transcendental, is deeply and metaphysically intertwined with well-ordered love.
We shouldn’t love the Core simply because it is the Core, but a la Kant (The End of all Things), since we are required to partake in it anyways, we ought to make it worthy of love. This general proposal should be especially compelling to those who are unhappy with the current lack of intellectual and demographic diversity in the Core. We love beauty, and as such, I propose that we start by taking note of the Core’s history and thus work to cultivate its aesthetic.
There is something primitively compelling about beauty, and hence, if we desire our education (educare) to be formative, our pedagogy should incorporate proper aesthetics into its presentation. Returning to the historical tradition of printing and distributing standardized, aesthetic, and hardcover editions of the works to be covered in CC is a worthwhile starting point. As nice as a bunch of paper-back Oxford World and Penguin Classics look on the shelf together, they are no aesthetic match for the Columbia Press Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West editions of the 50’s. Neither are they distinctively “Columbian”, and hence are bound to not last long on the shelves altogether.
If we wish for the Core to have a lasting impact on the contemplative lives of young scholars and professionals, we ought not require that they buy or rent a number of ugly paper-back copies of works of literature and philosophy, only to show up torn and crumpled in the “giveaway” pile of first and second-year residence halls at the end of the calendar year. Walking through the McBain lobby and seeing copy after ripped copy of Herodotus’ Histories and Shakespeare’s MacBeth lying on the ground made it abundantly clear to me that the Core has a duty to fulfill in this relevant respect. I would guess that fewer students, if gifted a beautiful hard-cover copy of the texts to be read for a given Core class, finished with a distinctive Columbia seal, would be willing to throw their books away at the end of the term.
In addition to its potential important contribution to physical aesthetics, overly comprehensive high-quality Core editions give more flexibility for a diversity of authors and viewpoints to “fill out” the Western tradition. There are only so many works that can be covered in a single term – that is, if we are to give even a cursory treatment of each. Hence, there is a natural tradeoff in adding and omitting works from the Core syllabi. Even if large swaths of the works are not covered, a comprehensive Core book like that of the 50’s allows for students to see more fully how the works they are reading fit into a larger tradition. Further, it allows the curriculum designers to add additional authors without the full levity of omitting an author – keep them in the edition, but cover something else instead. Students who keep these beautiful books post-graduation on their shelves have the opportunity to return to them again and again and invariably find something novel.
In further posts, I hope to explore other lost Core traditions of which we would do well to take note. While seemingly trivial, I maintain that the historic aesthetic of the Core books themselves is not something to overlook.