“Man, the rational animal, can put up with anything except what seems to him irrational; whatever is rational is tolerable” – Epictetus, Discourses
Photo Credit:“Fountain pen – Wikipedia,” photo from Petar Milošević, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_pen#/media/File:Fountain_pen_writing_(literacy).jpg
In my last post, I included an epigraph from Euripides’ play The Phoenecian Woman, which stated that “The words of truth are naturally simple.” This is, I think, a great synopsis of the power of truth to clarify and structure our language, and also a remarkable profession of its natural or at least ideal simplicity. When we come to understand an inspiration or idea, or grow in appreciation for one, its simplicity speaks to us and calls us toward itself.
This is one thing that Profesor John Erskine noted in his essay The Delight of Great Books. Published in 1920 to advocate for Columbia’s new course “Humanities,” the book features a chapter “On Reading Great Books” which analyzes the significance of literature and particularly its significance to Columiba students. Erskine’s main concern is the propagation of a historical approach to understanding literature, and how this ruins the personal dimension of literature, which is extremely important in analyzing world literature. He writes, for example, about the way that the typical approach to the Great Books provokes unideal responses in interested students. While Erskine claims authors “wrote to be read by the general public, and they assumed in their readers an experience of life and an interest in human nature, nothing more” (11), Erskine laments the fact that “we make the mistake of fearing that the immortal things of art must be approach through special studies and disciplines” (11). In doing so, we tend to create a sense that “even if we were prepared to read the classics, we should find them dull” (11). For Erskine, this is a tragic mistake because it is the words of literature that bring us toward the appreciation of literary work, rather than extensive analysis of intellectual history.
Erskine’s approach to instruction of texts within the Core Curriculum is one which complements the desire for the simplicity of literary evaluation and of conversations regarding the merits of works that we see in the Core Curriculum. Erskine views literature as inextricably connected to life: “The approach to literature is always through life, and if a book no longer reflects our life, it will cease to be generally read, no matter what its significance for antiquarian purposes” (16).
We may disagree with what this approach to literature implies – that the classics are classic in virtue of their continued relevance to our lives or our perceptions of our life. Nevertheless, Eskine recognizes that there is something timeless about certain great books insofar as they “grow with our maturing experience and other books do not,” and such a distinction helps us learn “how to distinguish a great book from a book” (29). This view does still commit him to a relativization of what it is that causes our appreciation of the texts. Our appreciation of a great book is contingent upon its relevance to our lives and its connection to the “our sense of life and
our vision of it,” and the truly “imaginative literature” has the function of propagating this “sense of life” (26).
One can see the way in which a type of subjectivism may follow from this line of thought. If literature is a medium for a connection to our lives and even if there is a sort of “eternal relevance” to the great literature, how are we ever going to manage to pursue the truths outside of ourselves through literature? Erskine does not deny that there are such truths in the world, but he does qualify his view of the way to truth by claiming that because the precise nature of the truth is so difficult to manage, and given the wild adaptability of language, we each tend to carry around with ourselves a certain conception of the truth that we believe to be the truth and that we can often choose to immortalize in various ways; Shakespeare wrote his plays to do so, as did Milton write Paradise Lost to justify his views on theology and other matters. But, Erskine insists that what remains relevant to us in the great books is their continued recognition of “truths” in our own lives, even if we view certain parts of these books antiquated or, for example, think that Milton’s theology is preposterous.
I’m inclined to disagree with Erskine on this point. I do think that one of the meritorious aspects of every great book is its ability to call us out of ourselves. Its propagation not merely of relevant connections to contemporary phenomena or personal views but rather to overarching cross-temporal themes or ideas that have some connection to the truth, even if the road to such truth is a rocky and hazardous one that many of us may never traverse well enough to avoid catastrophe. Nevertheless, Erskine’s belief that the Great Books are powerful because they continue to find important connections to the life of the reader is an attempt to rescue the discussion of great literature from transforming into a purely “scientific” diagnosis of the contextual clues surrounding the creation of any work of literature. It is also Erskine’s call to perceive the words on the pages of great books as things that should not yet be doomed to eternal desolation on a library’s untouched bookshelf somewhere – the ink is not yet dry, the words are still vibrant and connected to our lives, even if we wilfully refuse to observe such connections.
I hope that in reinvestigating one Professor’s claims regarding the relevance of the great books to a student’s education, we can overcome a type of haughtiness that emerges in the classrooms, in lectures on the Core, and in other venues. This pride comes from certain complaints levied against the Core such as, “why do we need to read the works of dead white men who lived centuries ago?” Such comments have a far more pernicious effect than any of us realize, since in the very act of reading and discussing these works, we are engaging with them. We may not particularly appreciate them but, in Erskine’s “century-old” estimation, we are indicating their continued relevance to our lives, their ability to speak the “words of truth” to us. This is worthwhile even when we disagree strongly on the nature of the truth.
To abandon the Great Books out of spite or ingratitude seems to be a very unreasonable thing to do. As a friend of mine once said “the past is sinful, but it’s still your past.” We don’t need to agree with everything that the history of the Western tradition represents to respect the Great Books. Rather, we need to appreciate their relevance, look for their splendor, and use our reason to uncover their recesses. In doing so, if we have a more optimistic view of man’s ability to come to understand the truth than Erskine did, we come closer to seeing how the “words of truth” on a page of Herodotus or Machiavelli might lead us closer to understanding the truth.