September 22, 2012 at 12:52 P.M. I was prevented several times from accessing this essay. I will now attempt to make necessary corrections of inserted "errors." I can never be sure -- which is probably the purpose of these tactics -- of being able to write from one day to the next. If more than two days pass without alteration of these texts, it means that I am prevented from writing or have been injured somehow.
September 21, 2012 at 2:30 P.M. "Errors" were inserted in this essay overnight. The name "Arthur Schopenhauer" was altered and, probably, will be altered again in the future. This is one part of the frustration and anxiety-inducement that I have described previously. Please see "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System" and "How censorship works in America."
I will try to make the necessary corrections, again. I am unable to edit my writings at other blogs, no bold or italic script is available to me, and I must print my essays from public print shops. My writing continues to be plagiarized. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
I do not drink alcohol. I have never been an alcoholic. I have never been charged with a crime, anywhere. This should respond to any continuing lies from New Jersey aimed at changing the subject. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
I believe the U.S. government is aware of these crimes committed against me. New York city and state may also be aware of the "situation." The rights of library users and other members of the public are endangered, every day, Mr. Kelly.
Seven of eleven computers at the Morningside Heights branch of the library have been disabled, moments after a person claiming to be from"tech support" stopped by this library branch earlier in the week.
I wonder whether this individual was working for someone other than library personnel?
For many poor persons there is no other access to the Internet than public library computers. I cannot accept that these criminal tactics aimed at hurting me, perhaps, will go unpunished or may be dismissed as mere "political partisanship." ("Does Senator Menendez have mafia friends?" and "Is Senator Bob For Sale?" then "Is Senator Menendez a Suspect in Mafia-Political Murder in New Jersey?")
Italics and bold script were not available during the writing of this essay. I have no control over the size of this text.
John Searle, "The Storm Over the University," in Paul Berman, ed., Debating P.C. (New York: Dell, 1992), p. 85.
Brand Blanshard, "The Uses of a Liberal Education," in The Uses of a Liberal Education and Other Talks to Students (Chicago: Open Court, 1973), p. 27.
Robert Pippin, "Liberation and the Liberal Arts," in The Aims of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), p. 163.
Joseph Epstein, "Who Killed the Liberal Arts?," in The Weekly Standard, September 17, 2012, at p. 23.
Unlike most readers of Mr. Epstein's recent article in The Weekly Standard, perhaps, who believe, as I do, that the author is largely correct in what he is saying in this disturbing essay, I am very sad to acknowledge the validity of Mr. Epstein's argument.
People who read many books, especially works that are -- or were -- regarded as classics in the humanities have noticed, what may tactfully be called, a "decline" in the general fund of knowledge of so-called "educated persons" in America. A similar decline is seen in other countries.
Like George W. Bush who once said: "Education are important!" I believe in the liberal arts and in the value of education for everyone. I understand that articulating this obvious truth -- regardless of my Leftist politics -- will expose me to accusations of "elitism." I am not an "elitist" in the pejorative sense of the term. ("Why we should not hate George W. Bush.")
Debate has raged recently over the question of whether college is "worth it." By "it," evidently, is meant whether the cost of a college education is "economically worthwhile." People wonder whether expensive tuition at an elite institution is "cost effective" in the long term.
The answer is "yes, college is worth it." A degree in the liberal arts is very much "worthwhile" regardless of what you do for a living.
While it is true that college graduates earn more money than most drop-outs -- allowing for Bill Gates and other exceptions -- it seems irrelevant (to me) how much money or how "successfully" a person will earn a living after college, or what professional schools (if any) he or she will attend, or even whether a person will earn a living in business, or work much harder as a homemaker. ("Let's Hear it For the Boys.")
The major reason for earning a degree in the humanities (or liberal arts) is spiritual and emotional. Education is concerned with cultivation of the self designed to allow persons to become who they are. The enrichment derived from education -- including moral improvement -- is an internal phenomenon that has little to do, as Oscar Wilde noted, with "rubies and pearls" as opposed to wisdom and taste.
"One recurring fallacy deserves special mention. There is ... a persistent confusion between epistemology and ontology; between how we know and what it is that we know when we know. It is an obvious fact that our epistemological efforts are undertaken by historically situated people, subject to all the usual imperfections, not merely of prejudice but of intellect. All investigations are relative to investigators. [This includes scientific investigations.] But it does not follow, nor is it indeed true, that all the matters investigated are relative to investigators." (Searle, p. 111.)
In an age of few genuine political beliefs, declining religion, collapsing standards -- often questionable standards that should collapse! -- something always endures, because it should endure, the misfortunes and vicissitudes of life. This something is called "beauty" and "truth." These are words that often produce a snicker from persons who deem themselves educated today. Perhaps this trendy nihilism and decline in educational achievement are related developments. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist" then "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
I. "The best that has been thought and said."
Mr. Epstein defines the idea behind "the curriculum at the College of the University of Chicago [as] the Arnoldian one, abbreviated to undergraduate years, of introducing students to the best that has been thought and said in the Western world. Mastery wasn't in the picture. At least, I never felt that I had mastered any subject, or even book, in any of the courses there. What the school did give me was the confidence that I could read serious books, with the assurance that I needed to return to them, in some cases over and over, to claim anything like a genuine understanding of them." (Epstein, p. 27.)
The problem is that Mr. Epstein's assumption (which I share) that there is such a thing or category as "the" best in the humanities is regarded as absurd today, often by classics professors specializing in the early episodes of "Star Trek." I like "Star Trek," but I have never mistaken the t.v. show for "Hamlet." Worse, the notion of "mastery" associated with the understanding of books is obsolete: "It's, like, whatever ..." ("Shakespeare's Black Prince" and "Whatever.")
Not only archaic -- in an era when everything is "relative" -- but absurd or "patriarchal" is the mere suggestion that excellence is something that inheres in works of art or philosophy independently of the "subjective" reactions of students of these works. It's whatever you like, right? Wrong. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
You like "Hamlet." I like "Star Trek." There is nothing more to say -- unless you are an "elitist." Such a dichotomy between "subjective/objective" realms is a little too simplistic. These so-called high cultural versus prosaic tastes may not be mutually exclusive, you say? In practice, they often are mutually exclusive.
"Elitism" does not mean a concern with excellence to which all may aspire. Elitism, in the bad sense of the word, is a denial that everyone can achieve or appreciate excellence since the good things are reserved for a special or privileged few. ("Is Humanism Still Possible?" and "Nihilism Against Memory.")
It is essential to recognize the complexities of these matters, of what Hans-Georg Gadamer describes as the FACT that there are objective features of aesthetic reality to be appreciated, if we are to explain our "internal" reactions of approval or admiration in "joining with" that reality. This is to suggest a continuity in our subjective "experience" of the objective realities we inhabit and create.
Taste and judgment must be developed by recipients of great works in order for those "real" qualities to become apparent. Artists and recipients create masterpieces together, but not anything or everything can be deemed a masterpiece. In deciding that some work of art is bad or ordinary, one is also tacitly appealing to aesthetic standards.
Recognition is one achievement or result of the discipline earned through a traditional education in the humanities. The struggle to offer such an education to more non-traditional students must not lead us to diminish intellectual standards or cheapen taste.
I continue to believe that these standards of excellence have something to do with the few works with which we associate the word "great." Professor Blanshard said: " ... the noblest and purest pleasures are the result of an acquired taste which itself must be won laboriously. That is what college is for to help one acquire the tastes that make possible the deeper delights." (Blanshard, p. 37.)
II. "Was Captain Ahab Gay?"
With the focus on rights of previously excluded groups and our new insistence on equality for persons once denied all recognition has come a focus on somewhat eccentric readings of great masterpieces. This is in order to determine their degree of compliance with fashionable P.C. values. I may well agree with these values, or I may disagree and reject them. More important is how well or insightful is the argument for a particular interpretation or judgment of a great work as distinct from the politics of the interpreter.
It has become crucial, for instance, to determine Hamlet's views on racial equality or the number of traffic lights in London, gender issues and the prospects of Machester United in the football finals, atheism and other trendy concerns while ignoring, too often, some of the perhaps "larger" themes dramatized in Shakespeare's play. (Again: "Shakespeare's Black Prince" then "Serendipity, III.")
A danger, however, is the assumption that, because all persons are equal (a Western humanistic value) and white males (booo!) have written an excessive number of literary masterpieces or philosophical classics, there must be an equal number of great books written in the past by, say, homosexual eskimos that have been excluded from the curriculum. We certainly need to find great books written by outsiders that have been ignored by society.
Regrettably, dreaded white males were the only persons in centuries past who received the necessary education (or social permission) to write and publish serious prose and poetry. Like me, today, many persons in the past were censored or prevented from writing by envious or stupid persons and unjust social mores. This grim reality in the past has, no doubt, impoverished all of us. ("The Northanger Arms on Park Avenue" and "Master and Commander.")
Nevertheless, it must be said that there are probably very few undiscovered masterpieces. It should also be admitted that great works written by white males do not become less great because they were beneficiaries of this system of oppression. A genius need not be -- and often is not -- a particularly nice guy or gal.
A solution is extension of education to more people as opposed to denial of the merits of works of genius central to our civilization. It is these works that have provided us with the very standards by which we now judge them and also with political values that we hope to serve by doing so.
Shakespeare has taught us a great deal about the equality of persons -- including persons of African ancestry -- as he had excellent reason to know, who are depicted in his plays as profoundly human and complex characters like everybody else:
"A bright young female graduate student one day came to ask me if I thought David Copperfield a sexual criminal. 'Why should I think that?' I asked. 'Professor X thinks it,' she said. 'He claims that because of the death in childbirth of David Copperfield's wife, he, Copperfield, through making her pregnant, committed a crime.' All I could think to reply was, 'I guess criticism never sleeps.' ..." (Epstein, p. 28.)
A great work of literature is more than a source book of examples of the lack of charity or political "incorrectness" (by our standards) of our ancestors -- ALL of our ancestors are represented in such works. (Again: "Master and Commander" then "Magician's Choice.")
Great books are about ultimate and unavoidable questions in every life: What is good? How should I live? What will I die for? How do I love her? Or them? What is national identity? How will I face death?
A hint may be to find the book's greatness. Try to read the best rather than the worst book before you. Try to discover the best interpretation of the film in the multiplex. Enjoy the finest music or painting that you contemplate or examine. Do not reduce the work of art to the smallness of our transitory political concerns as opposed to the great issues that are always with us.
It make take time -- sometimes decades of your life -- to live up to a great masterpiece. That is O.K. In fact, that's good. You will continue to grow and your education will become finer after your departure from the university. I assure you that Shakespeare will always be waiting for you, along with many more like him (Miss Austen), to smile at your shared misfortunes, offering to continue to participate in your life and dreams. In addition to Allan Bloom, you may wish to read David Denby's memoir-account of the "Great Books" course at Columbia University.
The relationship that becomes possible for "students" with great works of art, as a result of the good fortune of acquiring a higher education early in life (or at any time), is life-long because this relationship has little to do with how much money we have. It is a relationship that can save your life. We feel that we "belong" to some art objects and they "belong" to us. We love some authors because they seem to understand and love us. ("Hansel and Gretl.")
III. "The consensus has split apart."
This returns us to the crux of the problem: There is no "greatness," we are told, no agreement on better or worse books, no "best" that has been thought and said for many young people today. "Whatever. It's all relative."
The books you read are, undoubtedly, for you to accept or reject, but please do so intelligently. About most great books, if people are honest, there is widespread agreement and will always be such agreement. This has nothing to do with whether you share an author's view of life. A great poet (Larkin?) or philosopher (Hobbes, Schopenhauer) may offer a view of life or opinions we deplore, even as we admire his or her genius. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")
The notion that we must ALL struggle and learn in order to be worthy of judging a masterpiece is now regarded as "elitism" by many sadly deluded young people. I call it reasonable modesty to approach a work seen as a product of genius by generations of scholars with some humility or even trepidation. Before I reject Descartes or Aristotle, it is in my interest to understand what I am rejecting and to think carefully about my reasons for doing so.
This is certainly not to deny that some works will speak more powerfully to us than others. The importance of individual works will depend on our needs as much as their merits. Still, at the highest level (yes, this means Shakespeare, especially), there is something for you in all great works that you should -- indeed, MUST -- find if you are to assess the work properly.
Become good enough as a reader to appreciate Shakespeare as an author. If you do not feel or preserve or achieve a connection to the symbolic works of your civilization, the social bond and even your identity may disintegrate by becoming disconnected from your community. The center will not hold. All things fall apart.
Fragmentation is a real danger for America today because we have become tribalized, divided by race, ethnicity, religion, gender in ways that (because they cannot be spoken in polite society) threaten to obliterate what unites us in a single cultural/political community. Nowhere is this more evident than in our national elections and corrosive politics, but even in our movies we see this targeting of works to ever smaller groups. Understand that, as an American (whatever your ethnicity), YOU are a member of a community that includes Jefferson, Lincoln, Brennan, the Clintons or Reagan, and Barack Obama as well as many others.
"The contention in favor of a liberal arts education was that contemplation of great books and grand subjects would take students out of their parochial backgrounds and elevate them into the realm of higher seriousness. Disputes might arise from professor to professor, or from school to school, about what constitutes the best that was thought and said -- more Hobbes than Locke, more Yeats than Frost -- but a general consensus existed about what qualified to be taught to the young in the brief span of their education. That consensus has split apart, and what gets taught today is more and more that which interests professors." (Epstein, p. 29.)
Will this fragmented education in an endangered culture be sufficient to hold us together as we face the challenges of the twenty-first century?
