Are Great Books programs bad for you?

9/29/2011

4 Comments

 
I recently read an article that criticized Great Books programs because, the author claimed, they often lead students to skepticism. He wrote, "When examined carefully, the great thinkers contradict each other. The student is thus thrown into confusion because he has not the wit or experience to see the dangers of these contradictory positions. He begins to doubt if anything can be known if those said to be great prove each other wrong."

I will admit that there is some truth to this charge. During the course of PLS, I often felt this kind of tug toward skepticism. But (my first question) is a healthy dose of skepticism necessarily a bad thing? I suspect we would have fewer wars if there were more skepticism in the world.

My second question: What is the alternative? The "solution" that the author proposes seems to be to have students read the Great Books all through the lens of a "genuine philosophic understanding," by which he seems to mean one particular philosophical worldview that the students assume and take for granted in all their subsequent philosophical investigations. Where can they get this "genuine philosophical understanding" before they have even begun their study of philosophy? Well, it is passed on to the students from their "betters."

It seems to me there are two aspects of philosophy, a critical aspect and a constructive aspect. Imagine knowledge as a building in construction. (Why do I always picture knowledge as a building?) One might argue that the critical aspect comes and must tear down everything that is false and unsteady, and then the constructive aspect comes along and builds something back up, only for the critical aspect to come back again later and check for the soundness of this new structure. This process goes on indefinitely, but hopefully each time the weaknesses are taken out and a structure is built back up, it grows a little stronger and more steady, until finally a building stands which is pure, universal truth.

The author of the article I am talking about seems to have left no room for the critical aspect of philosophy; rather, a philosophical system is assumed off the bat, on the word of others - as if new building is thrown up, and before checking it for structural soundness, the crowds are ushered in, risking its collapse on their heads. The lord of this building stands on its roof and condemns nearby buildings from the vantage point of his building, but has never checked to see if his own building is wobbling underneath him.

-Joey
4 Comments
Adam F.
9/29/2011 03:07:32 pm

Joey- I agree that philosophy is both critical and constructive, but are there any neutral, objective standards of rationality to which one can appeal to begin philosophical discourse? Rationality is historical in character; the fact that so many of the great thinkers disagree with each other is a testament to this fact. If you are not given a tradition within which to begin philosophizing, then where can one possibly start? If one enters a Great Books program without any clear philosophical presuppositions, then he/she will probably just assume the philosophical presuppositions of the world around us, which are generally relativistic and skeptical but at the same time dogmatic about relativism! There is no way to read the Great Books without a philosophical system already in place in one's mind, implicitly or explicitly. Even the fact that there is a list of “Great Books” implies a tradition—why were others left out? Even not assuming a philosophical system or tradition is inadvertently assuming a philosophical outlook which presupposes that reason is capable of discerning a good system from a bad system. And the fact that there are so many different "systems" out there right now is why many post-modern philosophers doubt whether any true philosophical knowledge is possible! So, maybe pursuing the Great Books within a tradition isn't a bad thing after all if it excludes the possibility of meta-philosophy.

I personally think that reason is capable of discerning a good tradition from a bad tradition, but only within a tradition which is already internally coherent by its own standards of rationality (the Aristotelian one is a good candidate, in my opinion). Then, it becomes an issue of the philosopher becoming a philosopher-historian (which is paradoxically non-Aristotelian), and going through the history of ideas to gain a very precise and detailed understanding of why and how one idea evolved into another idea to start a new tradition, and then understanding why one should either accept or reject that particular evolution of thought. This process presupposes a critical link between philosophy and history. One of the problems with the Great Books ideology is the lack of historical perspective-it simply assumes that all the authors are in dialogue with each other and that all the texts are answers the same "perennial question". In reality, Plato's Republic and Hobbes's Leviathan are not answers to the same questions, but answers to very different questions which are historical in nature. It is impossible to say that two works from different times are about the same things when an entire process of historical change has taken place between them; in the course of history, problems change alongside their solutions. Understanding this process is only possible through great erudition and a broad historical perspective, which seeks not only to read books but to understand the societies and cultures in which they were written.

When pursued from a historical perspective, the Great Books (or philosophical history, for that matter) can yield real knowledge about the human mind that no other social science can. I'm taking this course at Boston College called "The Legitimacy of Mankind", taught by a visiting French professor named Remi Brague. Yesterday, he said that it is a great paradox of modernity that a greater emphasis is continually placed on studying what is not human (natural science) with the hope that it will benefit humanity. I thought this was a very astute observation, and very true. Ultimately, an education in the Great Books is an education in what has been made by the human mind, not the natural world as it exists independently of the mind. It is only through learning what other minds have done in the past that we can know what our own minds are capable of.

Anyways, I'm starting to ramble, and I'm afraid that my thoughts may begin to seem incoherent unless I actually write an essay on this topic.

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Joey
10/7/2011 09:42:33 am

Adam - thanks for the thoughtful response.

I agree that there is no completely objective, rational platform to start building philosophy upon. One always starts with certain assumptions. But when you say you need a "tradition" within which to start philosophizing, I'm not sure exactly what you mean. If you mean a religious tradition, I am not convinced that a religious tradition will be much help in constructing a philosophical system. Many different philosophical systems have been constructed within the Christian tradition, and the same goes for the Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim traditions. This is because the origins of those religions are texts that are more literary than philosophical in nature; they usually tell stories or make mysterious pronouncements, rather than giving philosophical arguments or absolute statements about the nature of being. Of course, they do contain some absolute statements, but even those statements (such as "No one can come to the Father except through me") need to be further interpreted before they are inserted into a philosophical framework.

If, on the other hand, you mean that one needs a philosophical tradition to start philosophizing in, well, then that's just kind of begging the question. You're starting out within something that has already been constructed, rather than constructing something for yourself. You might tweak something here or reinterpret something there, but what I think you're proposing is to start out within one system and leave it basically intact.

Still, besides starting out within a religious tradition or starting out within a philosophical tradition, I think there is at least a third way. You can start out from a platform of common sense and empirical observation and allow yourself to be informed by all those religious traditions and philosophical traditions, but without making a premature commitment to any one of them. You can take from those traditions piecemeal to build up your own new tradition, or you can sort of try to unify all those traditions, which would require tweaking all of them a bit and probably throwing out some parts that don't seem to fit with the rest. I suppose when it comes down to it, what I'm really saying is the ultimate platform is reason and observation. Reason can't prove anything beyond the shadow of a doubt (I think Descartes showed that pretty well), but it can do pretty well by at least checking to make sure that one's belief system is coherent. And perhaps empirical observation cannot prove anything about a higher or a metaphysical reality, but it can prove a lot of things within this world. Anything beyond those two things is a matter of faith.

Also, I'm confused as to how you can argue both that one needs to start within a philosophical system and also that all philosophical systems are relative to the history that produced them. If the latter is true, then the philosophical system you're starting with is also a historical evolution of thought, so why start out with that system and prioritize it before any other system? But if you are only arguing that one cannot help but start with certain premises of one's own, then I cannot disagree with that. The difference is lies between starting out with an entire philosophical system wholesale, or starting out with a few fundamental axioms (i.e., objects of faith) such as the ability of reason to discern truth from falsity. I think one should, and indeed cannot help but do the latter, but one shouldn't do the former.

Also, your point that the variety of different "systems" out there right now is a cause of relativism is interesting. You imply that this is a modern phenomenon. Weren't there philosophical "systems" before the modern era? Or maybe there was only one system, the Aristotelian/Scholastic one, which was why relativism was never a big problem then. Maybe the solution is to stop treating philosophy as a system. I think that's what Heidegger was trying to say when he advocated returning to the pre-Socratic way of thought.

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Adam F.
10/15/2011 02:05:08 pm

Joey- Thank you for responding to my thoughts. I think some of my points need further clarification to answer your concerns.

The notion of “traditions” is complex, because it is not always clear where one tradition begins and another ends, and how we can delineate between different traditions. Broadly speaking, when I used the word “tradition”, I meant a set of shared figures, texts, and axioms which serve as the foundation for subsequent thought. Traditions can be characterized as a certain self-avowed method of doing philosophy. I did not mean religious traditions, although philosophy can certainly play a role in religious thought. I also misused the word “system” in my first post. I should have clarified that I think that philosophical systems come out of philosophical traditions, not the other way around, and some systems are even anti-systematic in nature.

I was at a conference last weekend about the divide in 20th-century philosophy between the Analytic and Continental Traditions. Very basically, neither side can understand each other, because they speak different philosophical “languages” and share different presuppositions about what philosophy is. This is a very serious problem, especially from the Continental perspective, since the dominance of Analytic philosophy from the beginning of the 20th-century has sought to repudiate other ways of doing philosophy.

What is needed today is for both sides to understand and to respect each other’s views on language and methodology. If we could understand historically where the divergence began, and then re-enact those thoughts in our mind which led to the divide, then perhaps we can find some common ground. This is what I meant when I talked about working within a tradition. It means that while we must have a clear tradition to start philosophizing within, we can still build upon and change that tradition. I am not advocating that we stay in the past, but rather, work on creating better philosophy with the past in mind. So, I don’t think that you can start out as a subjective thinker in the 21st century, read the ‘Great Books’, and then start using reason to blend different ideas and traditions together or to create a new tradition. Such a method not only seems ahistorical, but extremely uncritical of one’s own subjectivity in presuming that reason has the power to discern right from wrong on its own.

The problem of historicity—that with historical knowledge comes the knowledge of the relativity and possible untruth of one’s own position—is a serious concern. It is a sort of philosopher’s paradox: even the historicist appeals to non-historical standards in making claims about the superiority of one theory over the other. Basically, I think we have to understand that our philosophical knowledge is both relative and limited. However, given that we have to start within the context of a certain tradition, I think that we can still build upon the past while acknowledging that we are not purporting to have developed the perfect philosophical system. This was the conceit of the Enlightenment thinkers, epitomized in Hegel, and successfully destructed by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. There is always the possibility that sometime in the future, a new thinker will come along, and show that we were wrong about certain things, and improve upon some of our thought while rejecting other aspects of it. As MacIntyre says, what we have to do now is “to aspire to provide the best theory so far as to what type of theory the best theory so far must be: no more, but no less.” Hence, the kind of historicism which I advocate excludes all claims to absolute knowledge.

I don’t know if this answers your concerns about my initial position, Joey. I was really interested in these types of questions during senior year, but I had no idea that so much literature exists on the problem of historicity. Indeed, much of post-modern Continental philosophy since Heidegger deals with many of these issues. If I’ve done a poor job defending my position, it is because of my own lack of historical knowledge and reflection. I am not claiming that any of the ideas I advanced are my own. Very few ideas, if any, are truly original. I am merely presenting my best views so far, based on my limited experience in philosophy.

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Joey
10/17/2011 10:09:45 am

Okay...I'm not sure I necessarily understood all you were saying, but from what I can tell I think we are saying basically the same thing. You can't simply assume a system a priori, but you also can't have the conceit that your reason is powerful and independent enough to simply come up with the truth all on its own. Indeed, the best you can do is try to understand all that came before you as fully as possible, and then, working within that tradition, try to improve upon it. You admitted that "we can still work upon and change that tradition," which is really all I was trying to say. My complaint with the original article by Fr. James Schall was that he seemed to ignore the possibility for improvement and development of the current tradition; rather, it seemed to me he was saying that we should simply assume a certain philosophical vantage point (that of orthodox Christianity) and then judge all other philosophical traditions from that vantage point alone, without looking critically upon that vantage point itself.

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