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[heideggirl]

some thoughts about the “great books”

occasioned, in some sense, by this NYT op ed. I do not actually think this NYT op ed is really in any important sense about the Great Books, nor is it in any real sense a defense of Great Books programs (although I do think it is a good and interesting op ed, even if I disagree with some of its diagnoses). Because it incidentally contains the words “Great Books,” people on the internet have misread it as a defense of the Great Books and have responded accordingly, which is to say orthogonally. I do not see the following as a “response” to the op ed so much as a reflection on Great Books and Great Books programs that is as much an attempt to think through my own views as an attempt to get at the truth of the matter. 

I think a discussion of the merits of Great Books programs is distinct from a discussion of books that are great and whether/why they should be preferred. I feel fairly confident that some books are great and other books are not great, and that great books are better than not-great books and therefore have a different normative status. (That isn’t to say we should never read not-great books, of course.) But discussion of the Great Books is not a discussion of whether we have reason to prefer good books over bad ones but a discussion of programs in which students read the capital-G-capital-B Great Books, namely anointed Western classics. 

One question, then, concerns whether the Great Books are really so great. I think a lot of them are, in fact, pretty great. Of course, Great Books lists also exclude a lot of books that are at least equally great. But I don’t really think the question of whether Great Books programs are good wholly hinges on the question of whether the Great Books are themselves great, because there are plenty of reasons to read not-great books. If a not-great book is instructive for some particular purpose--it teaches you about how novels can be bad, it’s historically important, it’s poorly organized but contains the empirical information you’re seeking, and so on and on--you should read it anyway. You don’t go to college to read as many great books as possible and only great books; you go to college to learn particular things, which sometimes involves or requires reading some not-great books. 

I think that a Great Books program reading list is really like any other syllabus: it’s a list of books relevant to a particular pedagogical goal, not an attempt to exhaustively catalog everything worth reading for any reason whatsoever. And, structurally speaking, a Great Books program is like any other major, all of which have requirements precisely because a discipline delineates a specialized swatch of knowledge and so requires that its adherents acquire familiarity with particular traditions. (A person majoring in philosophy will probably have to take some classes about Plato, not just because Plato is good, although he is good, but because he is important to the discipline. Arguably, part of the reason Plato is central to the discipline is because he is good. But part of it is a question of historical contingency. And other things that are important to read are widely acknowledged as bad but influential.) 

So what is the pedagogical goal or purpose of a Great Books program? What is its subject? What is someone in a Great Books program “majoring in”? In my view, the Great Books program is a major for those interested in the grounding themselves in a particular cultural and intellectual tradition, namely the Western one, and who want to take a more interdisciplinary and holistic approach than the academy in its current iteration typically accommodates. If you are interested in the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, you may want to read works of science, philosophy, and literature, rather than just one of the above; you may want to read poetry in more than one language; and so on. 

Now, the Western cultural and intellectual tradition isn’t any better than any other cultural tradition. But it is one cultural tradition that is worth studying, in part because many of the books and artworks it produced are good, in part because its development is of interest even when (and maybe especially when) its products are pernicious. There are many innocuous reasons to care about the Western cultural and intellectual tradition. You might have an interest in some particular Western figure or work, e.g., Marx or Andrea Dworkin, in which case you are going to need to familiarize yourself with certain bits of history. No person can read everything relevant to a particular topic, but I think it would be hard to fully grasp, e.g., Marx without reading Hegel, and therefore without reading Kant, and therefore without reading Hume, and so on and on. Moreover, the culture a person inhabits may be of special interest or concern to her; she may want to understand the culture she’s in because it’s her culture, which is not in the least tantamount to designating her culture better than any other. Of course, there are plenty of reasons not to care about the Western cultural tradition too. You may have a strong interest in a non-Western figure and want to ensconce yourself in the tradition that would illuminate this figure’s work. Or you may hail from a different culture and feel it’s more pressing to understand your own culture than someone else’s. Fair enough! Also fair enough! In the same way that there are many good reasons to major in math and many good reasons to major in history, there are good reasons to care about many different cultural traditions. That is to say, the Great Books approach seems good. It just does not seem like the only good. 

So what seems bad about the Great Books approach? First, there is a problem not with any particular Great Books program but with the broader structure of institutions in the anglophone world: it is bad that there are many places where students can take a holistic, historical, and interdisciplinary approach to the Western cultural tradition but that there are far fewer places where students can take a holistic, historical, and interdisciplinary approach to non-Western culture. Second, the word “Great” is a problem--first because it might prevent students from critically interrogating the Great Books, which are endowed with undue authority, and second because it seems to imply that other books in other traditions are less great. These are all real problems we should strive to rectify, perhaps by substituting the word “great” for something more descriptive and less evaluative.

In the end, determining whether Great Books programs are a good in our flawed world is also a question of asking what role they serve in the bankrupt institutions we occupy. The primary reason I think Great Books programs are probably, on the whole, good, even if sometimes flawed when it comes to the particular books they choose and in terms of certain aspects of their institutional positioning, is that they amount to a quietly revolutionary rejection of many of the worst norms in the academy. I think it is a contingent fact of the matter that Great Books programs mount a sort of attack on bad academic practice: it is of course possible that in another world, a different major or approach would lead the charge. But in this world, Great Books programs are a good because they present alternative to the usual workings of what is sometimes called the “neoliberal university,” in which students are viewed as consumers and academic workers eke publications out for no real reason besides fear for their jobs. Great Books programs tend to prioritize faculty teaching over faculty research; they tend reject the shrinkages of hyper-specialization; they tend to emphasize the importance of a historical and humanistic approach; they tend to allow students to read primary texts rather than secondary ones; they tend to reject academic jargon; they tend to value thinking as an end in its own right rather than a means to some hideous technocratic end; and so they do tend to return us to our original reasons for studying the humanities, not solely because of what they assign (though partially because of what they assign, much of which, as I have said, good) but because of their orientation towards it. Of course, of course, of course, a Great Books program is not the only way to capture these benefits. But within the academy, which is only one of many good places to be, it is one of the best ways to capture these benefits, or so it seems to someone who did not go to a Great Books school and sort of regrets it! 

[heideggirl]

bad arguments people make on the internet, part I

maybe this is the first of many rants, or maybe it’ll be my only rant, but I often think how useful it would be to have a catalog of responses to bad internet arguments at the ready, so that instead of making them over and over I can just send them to people and move on with my life. (it would also be very therapeutic to write them out! ) 

the first (and maybe only) bad argument I'll take up is the argument of the form “you have spoken/written/published about Y; therefore, you think X is unimportant.” examples: why are you writing about graduate workers and their unionization struggles when you could be writing about less privileged groups of workers? it must be because you think people in the latter group are NOT IMPORTANT and their suffering DOES NOT MATTER. why are you writing and reading about ANTI-BLACK RACISM but NOT ANTISEMITISM? it must because you hate the Jews and think the Holocaust is NOT IMPORTANT YOU TRAITOR-TO-YOUR-PEOPLE-JERK. 

caveats: 

first, the arguments I make are about individuals, not institutions. it is certainly true that if a university has classes about Jewish studies but not ethnic studies, that is a problem and evidence of wrong-doing of some kind, because university administrators (and other institutional figures) have special responsibilities. I won’t get into the institutional question here, except to say that my arguments don’t really apply to these kinds of cases. 

second, it is true that sometimes when someone writes about one thing, but not about something else you’d expect them to care about if they were earnestly reflecting on the former thing, their motives become suspect. so, if you are very interested in what’s wrong with “cancel culture,” but you are completely uninterested in ending at-will employment, that represents at least an error in judgment if not evidence of outright bad faith. (if you have opposed ending at-will employment, that’s evidence of either logical failure or extreme bad faith.) I couldn’t explain when exactly to be suspicious of someone (at least not here), and I certainly think sometimes the evidence strongly supports suspicion. but arguments of this form--you talked about x, so you think y doesn't matter!--are wielded all the time against people in a range of contexts, and often they are stupid.  

responses to this argument/alternative explanations for why people would write about X and not Y (at least on one or two occasions):

1. it’s just not true that focusing on one thing for the span of one discussion means you don’t care about other things, much less that you think they are objectively less important. for instance, a person could write a personal essay about the death of her mother. in doing so, she wouldn’t be implying that she thinks the death of her mother is more important than the pandemic; if pushed, she probably wouldn’t say that she thinks that; the pandemic is just not the subject of her essay. it is possible to think multiple things are bad at once. it is even possible to think X is worse than Y, but to find oneself, for whatever reason, more drawn to writing about Y (more on some possible reasons for writing about Ys below). 

it is actually good that essays aren’t about everything, since an essay that were about everything would be pretty confusing. moreover,  it is okay to have a special investment in a topic you have some personal relationship to (e.g., to have a special affection for your union, or your mother). this is an important aspect of being human. it doesn’t and shouldn’t preclude also caring about people very different from you to whom you have no connection, but luckily it isn’t incompatible with doing so. 

2. if you are an academic or a writer, you are not trying to say as many true things as possible rather to say something new and interesting. in fact you have to do this in order to publish an academic paper. so you might choose to focus on, e.g., your union, about which little has been written, rather than unions in general, about which a ton has been written. example: in analytic philosophy, there has been comparatively little written about what makes at-will employment wrong, and there has been a lot written about what makes murder wrong. in choosing to write a paper about what makes at-will employment wrong, a person is not implying that she thinks murder is less wrong or less important. she is just trying to say something new--to fill a gap. 

3. this is related to--but not identical with--(2): some people (like me) feel more compelled to write about something and think about something when they don’t understand it yet. this means that I write and think more about things I'm not sure about than about things I am sure about. I feel sure that women are human beings. this isn't to say I could write an awesome philosophy paper about it (or about anything really) but is to say I don’t feel the kind of pressing curiosity about it that usually drives me to inquiry. I feel uncertain about, e.g., ‘cancel culture,’ so I feel more compelled to work through my confusions. (3) is related to (2) insofar as we often feel we understand things better because a lot has been written about them already. (although of course sometimes existing writing has the opposite effect. in my own case I find myself drawn to topics about which there isn’t a lot written yet.) 

this brings us, again, to a question implicitly raised in (2) about what public-ish and public platforms are for. are they for making interesting/new contributions? saying the truest stuff as many times as possible? expressing what you happen to be thinking about that day? talking to your friends? different platforms are for different things. magazines and academic journals are for saying new and interesting stuff. some activist platforms are and should be for saying true stuff over and over. social media for private citizens can be--and during mass-quarantine must be--in part about chatting with your friends about what you’re thinking about that da. because I'm not a celebrity or an activist or a person who holds public office, I use social media to raise questions that are actually preoccupying me. that means I talk less about things I'm sure about, and so less about things I might regard as more morally obvious or even more morally important. i don’t want to talk about, e.g., how women are people because I don’t have a lot to say about it besides “this strikes me as obvious.” whereas I have a lot to say--really, to ask--about “cancel culture.” (is it an issue? what is the issue? etc.)

4. finally, when it comes to social media, there is the question of context and audience. some people are posting primarily for the benefit of their bigoted family members, which means they think it is important to emphasize the kinds of things you would want to emphasize if you had a five-minute segment on CNN. that makes sense. other people have different audiences and so different aims. for instance, most of the people I interact with on social media are leftist writers and thinkers who agree with me about almost everything. this means that I am not primarily concerned to talk them into leftism or educate them about it. I don’t need to convince them to support Bernie because they already do. my goals, then, are (a) to learn from them, and (b) to challenge them to be consistent (as well as to just talk about whatever is on my mind, since at least some of my social media is primarily for my actual friends). 

these are some reasons why people might write about Y instead of X in a range of contexts without thinking or meaning to imply that Y is more important than X. there are probably a lot more. 

WhOooooOOOOOOooooo

[heideggirl]

Chilling with Trilling: Some Preliminaries

I have an exceptionally poor memory for the intricacies of philosophy and theory, even when I really sweat over them as I’m reading them. I retain general impressions, but the arguments all seem to evaporate. (An unbecoming confession for a would-be philosopher to make, but it’s the unfortunate truth.) I remember where I read things, what I felt when I read them, beautiful or striking phrases that appear in them, and the images summoned by bits of evocative description; I even remember what I end up concluding when a book or essay is over. What I forget is how I got there—how, exactly, the argument runs. This is why I have a much better grip on literature—or philosophy that is continuous with literature—than I do on philosophy “proper,” that is, philosophy that persuades by means of argument rather than by means of stylistic seduction. Without returning to the texts, I can recall Nathanael West describing an old woman with a “face like a baked apple, soft and blotched,” or Joseph Roth noting that a character makes a “steeple” out of his fingers when he ruminates, or Nietzsche suffocating in the “bad air” of stale ideas. But I would need to go back to an argument to give any real account of it, unless I took copious notes. For this reason I try, with mixed success, to write elaborate summaries of every work of philosophy I read.

Literary criticism of the sort Trilling writes is halfway between philosophy and literature (not that philosophy and literature are neatly delineable, as Trilling knew better than anyone; more on this point when and if I make it to “The Meaning of a Literary Idea”). I have no trouble memorizing lines like “nothing is ever thrown out of the attic of the mind”--a formulation suggesting that the arguments I lament as lost are in fact packed into some dark , mothy corner of my subconscious, alongside childhood photographs and clothes I have outgrown. Still, I often lose sight of the dialectic. And with Trilling, who insists at every turn on the centrality of thought, forgetfulness is a poor excuse.

Trilling’s essays would seem out of place in a contemporary philosophy journal. They are not as clear as they might be; they do not begin with so-called “roadmaps” that reveal at the outset what is to arrive the end, thereby excising all the delectations of deferral; they are densely, richly written, so that you have to pause and recover from almost every sentence,; and unlike most philosophy, they do not bracket the hot, sticky questions, or slice these into digestible rudiments. They ask, without apology or abashment, after art, history, ideas, ideology, and the vexed relations between them. Still, they are rigorous and insightful, and they deserve to be treated and analyzed as philosophy. I leave you to decide whether contemporary analytic practice is or better or worse insofar as it would likely exclude them. 

A few practical matters. First, I organize my private philosophy notes philosophy into “summary,” “objections,” and  “questions” sections, and I will do the same in my discussions of each essay of The Liberal Imagination, if I ever actually manage to produce any of these discussions. Second, I will focus more on clarifying and evaluating Trilling’s general claims—about the nature of art and ideas, about their relation to culture, and so on—than I do on contesting his assessments of particular works of art. I hope you enjoy what I have to say, but most of all I hope to convince you to admire Trilling as much as I do! 

[heideggirl]

this is an incredibly captivating talk that reminds me of what philosophy can be at its best and most human. I cried! (I've never cried “at” a philosophy talk before, but granted I've attended most IRL and would be embarrassed to cry.) before anyone perusing this blog is off-put and ~infuriated~ by the title, G.A. Cohen is a steadfast socialist and does not defend political or economic conservatism here; he makes friendly appeal to Marx at the end, so keep watching! (this is one of those cases where you can’t just write something off because the label attached to it is also sometimes attached to something you dislike; it’s just not what Cohen means.) 

[heideggirl]

We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously: “I think I shall praise it.”

I LOVE ROBERT HASS

[heideggirl]

We were heading toward all that makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy. But it’s no good thinking about or discussing it. It has no place next to the furious argument about who cleaned the house or picked up the child. It is irrelevant when sitting peacefully, watching an old movie, or doing an impression of two old ladies in a shop, or as I eat a popsicle while you scowl at me, or when working on different floors of the library. It doesn’t fit with the everyday. The thing no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live?”

Zadie Smith, “Joy”

I must have read this essay close to twenty times now; I read it around ten times a year, about once a month; I love it.

[heideggirl]

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is gr8

[heideggirl]

[The collector] dreams his way not only into a remote or bygone world, but at the same time into a better one in which, to be sure, people are not provided with what they need any more than they are in the everyday world, but in which things are liberated from the drudgery of usefulness.

Walter Benjamin on collecting <3 

[heideggirl]

That creep Tolstoy,’ she sobbed. ‘He. . . He. . . couldn’t even. . .’ Something about his brother dying. The serfs’ punishments have not ceased to suppurate on their backs. Woodlots. People. Someone crying under the yellow autumn birchgrove drove him wild: A new set of resolves: When gambling, that almost obsolete fever, or three days with the gypsies sparked him into pure ego, he could, just the same, write home, ‘Sell them.’ It’s true. ‘Still,’ (someone who loved her said, cold and firm while she dissolved, hypocrite, in self disgust, lectrice) ‘Still, he kept on. He wrote all that he wrote; and seems to have understood better than most of us: to be human isn’t easy. It’s not easy to be a serf or a master and learn that art. It takes nerve. Bastard. Fink. Yet the grief trudging behind his funeral, he earned.’

Somebody Trying, Denise Levertov 

[heideggirl]

You don't make yourself interesting through madness, eccentricity, or anything of the sort but because you have the power to cancel the world's distraction, activity, noise, and become fit to hear the essence of things.

Saul Bellow, “Humboldt’s Gift”

[heideggirl]

After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: “I just ferment my food now.” Most of us walk crabwise to meals and everything else. The oblique approach in middle age is the safest thing.

my god do i adore henry green

[heideggirl]

right????

[heideggirl]

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

A beautiful poem, to which I return so often

[heideggirl]

You hope, yes, your books will excuse you, save you from hell; nevertheless, without looking sad, without in any way seeming to blame (He doesn’t need to, knowing well what a lover of art like yourself pays heed to), God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good

W.H. Auden, “Post-Script”

[heideggirl]

frankly all downhill from this moment 

[heideggirl]

why does anyone ever talk about anything other than the scene in buddenbrooks where a character literally EATS HIMSELF TO DEATH 

[heideggirl]

...they knew only that they were together and yet that they must still seek each other.

Hermann Broch is good