Salvation by Words
More thoughts on Naomi Kanakia's What's so Great About the Great Books
First part here.
In the first chapter of WSGAtGB?, N.K. discusses her decision to structure each chapter as a question, presenting both sides of the argument without trying to resolve the contradictions, since the “answer to the question is the entirety of the position”. She says this is what Hegel meant by aufheben, which I’m in no position to dispute, having read only a bit more Hegel than Proust. But the overall impression I got from the book is not sublation, but the psychological term splitting, also known as black-and-white thinking: if something is good, it is very good; if it is bad, it is very bad, even evil.
The reader, assumed to be a good person like N.K. and her wife, is promised that reading Great Books will be transformative, maybe in a totally different way than they have been for N.K., but still unequivocally good:
To open the Great Books is to begin a conversation. And the nature of that conversation is different for every person. Everyone who’s had a sustained encounter with these books has felt something, has felt themselves changed by them. That’s the whole reason people like me tend to recommend these books—because they do destroy you, in some way, but the destruction is good.
If you’re not one of the good ones, though, if you’re one of those “other people”, well, your evil is entirely your own fault:
What about those other people, who read these books, took the wrong lessons, and now are trying to erase people like me from existence? Well, I don’t care about them. From their perspective, they are doing what they think is right, but from my perspective, they are doing evil. Tolstoy gets no blame for their evil, just as he gets no credit for whatever good choices I’ve made. The relationship between the Great Books and human character and behavior is too strange to put in words.
It’s a bit strange to say that you don’t care about people who you think are doing evil. What N.K. appears to mean is: I’m not going to let the existence of these people diminish my enjoyment of these Great Books. Which is fair enough, but it brings us right back to the moral relativism that the likes of Allan Bloom thought the Great Books could inoculate us against. To convince others, it’s not enough to argue something is good or evil from my perspective, but that it is good or evil tout court. This can only be done through having discussions and debates with actual people with different experiences and perspectives than us. Reading a book offering a different perspective than our own can be prepare us for such difficult conversations, but it cannot replace them. Throughout WSGAtGB?, N.K. assigns qualities to the Great Books that are properly assigned to human beings, such as having (bad) politics, integrity, rigour and courage.
N.K. says she’s not a college professor and is not interested in questions of pedagogy, but despite all her hedging she is in fact advocating for a specific course of self-study centred on reading the Great Books, which is what she believes is the essence of what is called a “liberal-art education”:
In his book, Allan Bloom made an explicit, albeit embarrassed, case that students should be taught from the Great Books. While in Deresiewicz’s essay, it’s unclear what specific course of study is being advocating for. A lot of times these polemicists call for a “liberal-arts education,” but they clearly don’t mean the medieval ars liberae. Nor do they mean the study of Greek and Latin classics in the original. I think they simply mean mandatory literature classes where a few of the classics are taught in a small-scale seminar format similar to that used at liberal-arts colleges.
I’m sure where she get’s this impression. The reading list at St. John’s College, which prides itself in its Great Book curriculum, sounds very much like an updated version of the medieval ars liberae: “philosophy, literature, political science, psychology, history, religion, economics, math, chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, music, language, and more”. Furthermore, students are taught enough Greek and French to be able to do their own translations. Learning how to translate even a mediocre foreign text develops skills that reading even the greatest text in translation cannot. Ditto for attempting to solve a mathematical problem yourself, rather than simply reading a story about a mathematician.
N.K. writes that those who want art to either ennoble society or change the status quo are “attacking the idea, derived from the Enlightenment that we arrive at the truth by reading as much as possible, from as many sources.” The Enlightenment is a contested concept that groups together several intellectual developments, but neither rationality nor empiricism can be boiled down to the idea that the truth can be arrived at simply be reading a variety of sources. The great religious and philosophical teachers of the past did not encourage their followers to revere the Great Books, but to be wary of them (Socrates’s warnings about the written word in the Phaedrus; Jesus’s opposition to the Pharisees).1 Since we’re not all lucky enough to know a Socrates, Plato offers us the next-best thing. A Great Book offers us the opportunity to enter into something like a dialogue with a Great Soul, but we shouldn't mistake it for the real thing.
In the last chapter, N.K. summarises what she takes to be the concrete benefits of reading the Great Books:
The argument I’ve tried to make is that (1) taste exists, (2) learning to appreciate the Great Books will develop your taste, and (3) a developed sense of taste will allow you to make finer moral distinctions in the rest of your life.
N.K. writes that “what the Marxist critical theorist Terry Eagleton called “the ideology of aesthetics” is at the core of her “own argument for appreciation of the Great Books”:
The Great Books, above all, develop our taste: our ability to appreciate great lit-erature. But we can also use that taste in all facets of life. Taste is the ability to discriminate, to discern fine nuances, and to see what truly exists within an ob-ject, versus what we are projecting onto it. Someone with taste can read a book and say, “It’s not for me, but it’s still a Great Book,” just as someone with taste can hear another’s position or view another’s action and see the internal logic and discern whether there is any true integrity there. A person with taste does not excuse everyone, and they don’t fall for every seemingly plausible argument. It’s that “instinct for cleanliness.” A cultivated individual senses which positions and which actions are dirty and then tries to avoid associating with those positions.
Given how such terms have been used throughout history to justify exclusion and oppression, I’m surprised that N.K. seems to endorse the association between virtue and cleanliness and between dirtiness and vice. The context of the quoted phrase, from Nietszche’s Beyond Good and Evil, doesn’t make it any less problematic:
What most profoundly divides two men is a different sense and degree of cleanliness. What help is all honesty and mutual utility, what help is all the good will for each other: in the end the fact remains - they "can't stand each other's smell!" The highest instinct for cleanliness puts the person marked by it in the strangest and most dangerous isolation, as a saint: for that's simply what saintliness is - the highest spiritualization of the instinct in question. Any awareness of an indescribable abundance of pleasure in the bath, any lust and thirst which constantly drives the soul out of the night into the morning and out of cloudiness, the "affliction," into what is bright, gleaming, profound, fine; just as such a tendency singles out - it is a noble tendency - so it also separates . The pity of the saint is pity for the dirt of those who are human, all-too-human. And there are degrees and heights where the saint feels pity itself as contamination, as dirt . . .
This view of saintliness is a far cry from Jesus’s association with lepers and prostitutes. Christ and the Buddha both challenged the obsession with cleanliness that empowered the Jewish and Brahmin priestly castes, but Christians and Buddhists are just as likely as adherents of other faiths and ideologies to get enamoured by their own sense of purity. N.K. claims “I don’t perceive myself as subordinating my own judgment to that of the experts; instead, I perceive the cultivation of my taste as a process of training myself to see what they see.” Again I’m struck by N.K.’s confidence in the reliability of her own perceptions, especially when Eagleton uses the term “ideology of aesthetics” to suggest that the development of “aesthetic judgment”may involve more sinister motives that the cultivation of a “true” appreciation of the beautiful and hence of the good:
The enheartening expression of this doctrine, politically speaking, would be: ‘what appears as my subordination to others is in fact self-determination’; the more cynical view would run: ‘my subordination to others is so effective that it appears to me in the mystified guise of governing myself.’
One does not have to be a Marxist to take the cynical view seriously. The cultivation of aesthetic taste and moral judgement necessarily involves the suppression of personal preference to pursue an objective, or at least not purely subjective, ideal. The fear of the Lord is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom. Reading the Great Books is a great way to cultivate one’s literary taste, which is definitely useful for a professional writer like N.K., but the link between literary taste and moral discernment is far from straightforward, as a brief glance at the lives of the authors of many of the Great Books will attest. N.K. says that she avoids introductions and commentaries and prefers to get immersed in the text itself as in a dreamworld. This is a perfectly respectable way of reading these texts, but sometimes she writes as if they sprang from the head of Zeus, rather than being written by particular men and women in a particular historical context and in conversation with other Great and Not-So-Great Books.
For Murdoch, it is the judgement of the artist rather than the critic that serves as a model for making moral judgements in our own lives. In her 1972 Blashfield Address delivered to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, tilted Salvation By Words, she starts by observing that the métier of the artist as “vehicle of truth” is threatened by “science, philosophy, and forces arising within art itself”. She is particularly interested in the criticisms of art made by Freud and Plato:
Plato outlaws the artist for reasons which are remarkably Freudian. He regards art as the base addressing the base, created by and for and about the lowest part of the soul. Art studies the unstable and the various, what we might call the neurotic, which it can easily and amusingly depict. Goodness, which is steady and unified and ‘uninteresting’, art cannot understand or represent. (Plato is thinking mainly of writers of course.) Art moreover makes us ‘relax our guard’ (Plato’s phrase) and indulge vicariously in adventures of emotion which we would not tolerate as part of our real life activity. Art is a false consolation, celebrating the mediocre and the mean and excusing self-indulgent emotion.
Murdoch admits that false consolation can be derived from good art as well as bad, but that great art reveals to us both the importance of ideals and the impossibility of reaching them:
I myself very much believe in the importance of the work of art as an attempted formal unity and completed statement. There is no substitute for the discipline of this sort of attempt to tell truth succinctly and clearly. This particular effort is uniquely world-revealing. I do not think that the traditional production of works of art is ending or should end. But art is not discredited if we realise that it is based on and partly consists of ordinary human jumble, incoherence, accident, sex. (sex, though it produces great thought forms, is fundamentally jumble: not even roulette so much as mish-mash.) Great art, especially literature, but the other arts too, carries a built-in self-critical recognition of its incompleteness. It accepts and celebrates jumble, and the bafflement of the mind by the world. The incomplete pseudo-object, the work of art, is a lucid commentary upon itself.
I think this is what N.K. means by the “rigour” and “integrity” of the Great Books. In the face of technological developments, Murdoch argued for the continued relevance of the serious study of literature because of the fact that human culture itself is based on words:
We must not be tempted to leave lucidity and exactness to the scientist. Whenever we write we ought to write as well as we can, in order to meet the dangers of which Plato spoke, and in order to defend our language and render subtle and clear that stuff which is the deepest texture of our spirit. When George Jackson deplored time wasted upon Latin that could have been used for maths or science he was wrong from his own point of view. Of course the exactness of science has an importance which is not likely to be underestimated. But the study of a language or a literature or any study that will increase and refine our ability to be through words is part of a battle for civilisation and justice and freedom, for clarity and truth, against vile fake-scientific jargon and spiritless slipshod journalese and tyrannical mystification.
I agree with N.K. that the Great Books are a gift to all humanity, irrespective of national, class or ethnic background and political affilitation, but I also believe that those of us who have been in position to appreciate this gift should strive together to overcome rather than reify these divisions:
The great artist, like the great saint, calms us by a kind of unassuming simple lucidity, he speaks with the voice that we hear in Homer and in Shakespeare and in the Gospels. This is the human language of which, whenever we write, as artists or as word-users of any kind, we should endeavour to be worthy.
In a footnote, N.K. says if you’re only going to read one of the Great Books, it should be the Bible.