Against Great Books

I make available, below, the text of a lecture I delivered in November, 2011, at University of Texas at Austin. My thanks to the Jefferson Center and Tom and Lorraine Pangle for the invitation. My suggested title was “Against Great Books,” but it was billed instead as “Why Great Books.” You will see why the distinction is important. Be forewarned that it is a lengthy post – about 16 manuscript pages.

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Against Great Books
Patrick J. Deneen
Georgetown University

The proposed title of my lecture tonight was not “Why Great Books?,” but “Against Great Books.” I was advised that this might be too pugnacious, and a more modest title was suggested. My intention from the outset – if not wholly captured in the current title – is polemical, and I have not abandoned that ambition as readily as I abandoned the original title. I hope to raise questions about, if not books that are great, about books that promote a certain kind of Greatness. I do so in order to defend the reading of books and the ideal of liberal education, which means that we may need to be somewhat more discriminating in our recommendation of Great Books. For, there are Great Books that defend the reading of books, and Great Books that reject a book-centered education. The arguments of these latter sort have increasingly won the day – ironically, it is a set of Great Books that have contributed to the decline of the study of Great Books. If we seek to defend a program in the Great Books, we will need to inquire more fully into the ideas – advanced in some number of those books – that have powerfully transformed not only institutions of learning, but our civilization, increasingly to regard “Great Books” as an antiquated and useless pursuit. I will argue that those of us who customarily or habitually defend “The Great Books” need to reflect more extensively on the very notion of “greatness” and its relationship to a form of education that increasingly regards the teaching of “great books” – or the humanities more broadly – to be irrelevant. Above all, we need to be willing to call attention to books – and their authors – who have contributed to a trajectory in education that today has humanistic education on the ropes.

I want to begin by stipulating that many would commend the teaching of great – or “core” texts – in order to provide something more than the exercise of “critical thinking.” Across the academy today a consensus has been reached that, while we may radically disagree on the basic elements of a curriculum and hardly discuss what texts or even courses would be required of an educated human being, that we can all agree that the object of a course of study at the university-level is the cultivation of “critical thinking.” I have served on countless academic committees in which people of widely differing views about curriculum and courses all universally and enthusiastically assent to the idea that we should be promoting “critical thinking” in our classrooms. I have concluded that the only idea that is apparently impervious to “critical thinking” is the shared goal of “critical thinking”: no-one quite knows what it is, but we can all agree that we want our students to be able to do it.

Yet, many recognize that “critical thinking” is a weak hook on which to hang a justification of a program in “Great” or “core” texts. The advantage of justifying a curriculum around the banner of “critical thinking” is that its content can remain underdetermined: we seek a common, contentless outcome, and so any text or even experience that promotes a way of “thinking critically” becomes acceptable as an academic exercise. Push-pins is equal to Homer; that is, so long as push-pins can be claimed to foster critical thinking. After the ferocious curriculum battles of the 1980s – which included the Reverand Jesse Jackson marching on the campus of Stanford University yelling through a bull-horn, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ. has got to go” – it was with an almost audible sigh of relief that academics latched onto “critical thinking” as a contentless goal that allowed the responsible parties of the nation’s universities to lay down their arms and embrace the common project of cultivating a thinking style. We agreed that a university education was no longer about teaching some thing – rather, it was an agreement to teach a way of thinking critically about any thing.

A defense of an education in the Great Books often requires something more, one that does not shy away from a claim about the aim of education. The more robust claim is that these texts teach something substantive: not merely a way of thinking (though it may do this – after all the Jefferson Center itself claims that a course of study in Core Texts will foster skills in “critical reasoning, close reading, and clear, cogent writing”), but rather, a particular and substantive set of conclusions that make the teaching of these texts – as opposed to any texts or lessons – essential and necessary. This too seems to be the conclusion of the Jefferson Center, which highlights that an education in the core texts has as its aim the teaching of liberty: “The aim of the Thomas Jefferson Center is to realize Jefferson’s vision of educating citizens and leaders to understand the meaning of liberty and to exercise it wisely.” Thus, a program like the Jefferson Center has drawn a preliminary conclusion about the nature and substance of the lessons taught by the Great Books – that they teach something about liberty, and that these books – rather than any books – are the source of a particular kind of necessary knowledge about the nature of liberty essential to a citizen in a modern liberal democracy.

I will have more to say about this claim regarding liberty toward the end of my lecture, but I want merely to stress that the Great Books are recommended in this latter case because they have something to teach us, and that we should read them for more than merely for a training in “critical thinking” or even because knowledge of these texts familiarizes students with books they should read to be able to claim that they are educated, but because they will have an impact on the way that we live our lives and organize our common world together. Of course, I think this is correct, and I would even argue that part of the central necessity of the Great Books is not only because those who read them can encounter and be influenced by their arguments, but because, at their most expansive, they have had a considerable role in shaping human society – even the lives of people who did not read the books. As parts of broader culture from which they at once take sustenance, and which they in turn influence, the ideas in the Great Books have shaped a world in their image and guided not only individuals, but a whole civilization, in fostering a way of life.

I have in mind something like the following passage by the Kentucky author Wendell Berry, in a novel entitled Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006). In the passage, a young Andy Catlett (who is most likely a fictionalized version of Berry himself) is observing his grandmother making a raspberry pie. Written from the perspective of an older Andy recollecting a morning in his grandmother’s kitchen, he writes,

“A peculiar sorrow hovered about [my grandmother], and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years; it came also from her settled conviction of the tendency of things to be unsatisfactory, to fail to live up to expectation, to fall short. She was haunted, I think, by the suspicion of a comedown always lurking behind the best appearances. I now wonder if she had ever read Paradise Lost. That poem, with its cosmos of Heaven and Hell, and Paradise and the Fallen World, was a presence felt by most of her generation, if only by way of preachers who had read it. Whether or not she had read it for herself, the lostness of Paradise was the prime fact of her world, and she felt it keenly.” (36-7).

I find a few things striking about this passage. First, an adult Catlett is able to understand better things of his youth, and the world that he inhabited, through the lens of a Great Book. Secondly, he surmises, and probably correctly, that while his grandmother probably did not read Paradise Lost, that it was a book that indirectly influenced her worldview. And, third, that the dissemination of the content of Great Books, even if indirectly known to a great many, nevertheless seemed to shape a worldview not only of individuals, but the general view of a society as well. Thus, an education in the Great Books was advanced not in order that Andy (or any of our students) could arrive at a personal worldview, but in acknowledgment that the ideas contained in those books have had the capacity of shaping a world.

We have a further intimation of this fact at the outset of Berry’s book, when he compares the town in which Andy’s grandparents live – Port William – from the town in which Andy grows up a short distance away, Hargrave. Port William as a whole, in contrast to Hargrave, seems influenced as a whole by the lesson of Paradise Lost. As described by Andy, “Hargrave, though it seemed large to me, was a small town that loved its connections with the greater world, had always aspired to be bigger, richer, and grander than it was, and had always apologized to itself for being only what it was. When school was out, I lived mostly in Port William, which, so long as it remained at the center of its own attention, was entirely satisfied to be what it was.” This contrast of longing for something more – so characteristic of Satan in Paradise Lost – is contrasted to a kind of acceptance of the world as an fallen place that may require more endurance than transformation. Port William, like Andy’s Grandmother, seems to have adopted the teachings of Paradise Lost while Hargrave seems to have turned to a different set of ideas.

Berry has returned recently to a reflection on the role of books in shaping a worldview – and specifically, the influence of Paradise Lost – now to suggest that it was a part of the older wisdom of older books to teach us not only about what we ought to aspire to do, but also about what is inappropriate and forbidden. In a 2008 essay written shortly after the near-collapse of our financial system, Berry wrote first of this lesson as expressed in Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, and then points to a passage in Paradise Lost that expresses a similar sentiment:

With the issue of the human definition more than ever in doubt, John Milton in Book VII of Paradise Lost returns again to a consideration of our urge to know. To Adam’s request to be told the story of creation, the “affable Archangel” Raphael agrees “to answer thy desire/Of knowledge within bounds [my emphasis] . . . ,” explaining that

Knowledge is as food, and needs no less

Her temperance over appetite, to know

In measure what the mind may well contain;

Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns

Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.

Raphael is saying, with angelic circumlocution, that knowledge without wisdom, limitless knowledge, is not worth a fart; he is not a humorless archangel. But he also is saying that knowledge without measure, knowledge that the human mind cannot appropriately use, is mortally dangerous….

And so our cultural tradition is in large part the record of our continuing effort to understand ourselves as beings specifically human: to say that, as humans, we must do certain things and we must not do certain things. We must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans; perhaps we will cease to exist, period.

Berry here writes of the intention of authors of a number books that aimed to educate humans expressly through a commendation to understand the limits of human power and knowledge. A similar argument has been made by Roger Shattuck in his 1997 book Forbidden Knowledge, which includes chapters on Paradise Lost as well as Goethe’s Faust. In both cases, Great Books such as Paradise Lost sought to inculcate a sense of limits, a cognizance of knowledge inappropriate to humans, an effort to cultivate a capacity to accept and endure rather than the impulse to transform and escape, and sought to foster and encourage an education in the accompanying and necessary virtues that are required in a world in which such limits are recognized – virtues such as moderation, prudence, and avoidance of vices like pride and hubris. Moreover, (if we take Berry’s descriptions of Andy Catlett’s grandmother and Port William as indications), we can be cognizant of the way that books such as Paradise Lost shaped a broader worldview, even a civilization, oriented toward this understanding. And here we could look not only to a work such as Paradise Lost, but a dominant understanding of a long succession of Great Books, from antiquity and through the Middle Ages (such as the Greek epics and tragedies, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the Bible, the works of Augustine and Aquinas, among others). I want to suggest that this is one way we can distinguish between the Ancients and the Moderns (I assume you are inclined to accept…?).

What we can see in these works is a connection between the content of these books and a commendation that education rightly consists inescapably in an encounter with Great Books. For all their many differences, the Great Books in this tradition argue that there is something in the nature of reality itself – whether we understand it as nature as described by the Greeks, or the created order depicted in the Book of Genesis – that limits human power and ability to transform our situation. The appropriate disposition toward the world is not the effort to seek its transformation, but rather to conform human behavior and aspirations to that order. Hence, the primary purpose of education is learning to live in a world in which self-limitation is the appropriate response to a world of limits. Education in virtue is a central goal – particularly the hard discipline over the human propensity toward excess, particularly in the form of pleonexia or pride.

In order to advance this teaching to successive generations of human beings, education was largely ordered around an education in texts (and even languages) from this tradition (Greek/Latin; Classics and Bible). Every new generation needed a renewed education in the knowledge of human limits and the central necessity of virtue. Books themselves were understood to be a storehouse of wisdom from the past, a treasury and repository of hard-won experience and knowledge of these limits. What these books taught was itself a justification for an education centered around books. Because the present and future were believed to be fundamentally continuous with the past, the past was understood to be a source of wisdom about our condition as humans in a world that we do not command. An education in Great Books was itself a consequence of a philosophical worldview, and not merely an education from which we derived a worldview (much less sought an education in “critical thinking”).

Arguments against this form of education became common among elite thinkers in the early modern period, particularly justifications of a new kind of science that had as its aim the expansion of human control over nature. For instance, Francis Bacon wrote a succession of books and treatises – many considered Great Books – arguing that Nature should be subject to an intensive form of examination that would enable humans to extract her secrets and provide sufficient power for the “relief of the human estate.” Arguing strenuously against such authors as Aristotle and Aquinas, Bacon castigated previous thinkers for their “despair” and tendency to “think things impossible.” Asserting that “knowledge is power,” Bacon rejected the longstanding idea that knowledge consisted first in an acknowledgment of human limits. Rather, Bacon argued that it was necessary to wipe clear “waxen tablets” inscribed with older writing in order to inscribe new lessons upon them. He held a dim view toward the effort to gain knowledge through an education in books, regarding books, more often than not, as one manifestation of the “idols of the cave,” or illusions that obscured true enlightenment (NO, XLII). He excoriated “the manners and customs of schools, universities, colleges and similar institutions, which are intended to house scholars and cultivate learning, [but where] everything is found to be inimical to the progress of the sciences. For the readings and exercises are so designed that it would hardly occur to anyone to think or consider anything out of the ordinary…. For men’s studies in such places are confined and imprisoned in the writings of certain authors….” (NO, XC). Ironically, Bacon would write a book such as this – Novum Organum – in order to argue against a reliance upon books.

His was one of a long line of Great Books that argued against an education in books. One sees similar sentiments expressed in the thought of Rene Descartes, who begins his book Discourse in Method with a similar condemnation of book learning as an obstacle to true understanding. There, Descartes writes that:

as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors, I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world.

The reason, he explains, is that books are the repository of foolishness:
when I look with the eye of a philosopher at the varied courses and pursuits of mankind at large, I find scarcely one which
does not appear in vain and useless…

Descartes thereafter compares book-learning to the experience of travel, and concludes that both forms of sallying forth into the world of custom and opinion is largely a waste of time. Instead, he “shuts himself up in a room” during a cold winter’s night and proceeds to investigate what he can know purely through his own skeptical examination of his own empirical experience of reality. Famously, Descartes concludes that he exists because he knows that he thinks – a conclusion that requires no consultation of books or culture, but only what his own mind, stripped bare of all external influences, can grasp.

Francis Bacon’s secretary, Thomas Hobbes, was an avid reader of Descartes and arrived at similar conclusions about “book-learning.” In Chapter 5 of Leviathan – entitled “Reason and Science” – Hobbes rejects the counsel of those who “follow the authority of books,” and instead recommends an approach in which the learner trusts entirely his own experience and experimentation with the natural realm – and thereby, makes it possible for humans to exercise control over the natural world and attain a condition of “commodious living,” an echo to Bacon’s aspiration toward “the relief of the human estate.”

Centuries later, this line of argumentation would be employed here in the United States in defense of disassembling existing curricula that were oriented around the study of Great Books. Widely regarded as America’s most influential educational reformer, the philosopher John Dewey argued in a series of books that continue to exert great influence in schools of education that learning should be accomplished “experientially” rather than through an encounter with books. In his short work Experience and Education, Dewey argued strenuously against an education based in books at all, holding that such an education sought to transmit “static” knowledge to a citizenry that should be better enabled to face a world of rapid change. He wrote that books themselves were “to a large extent the cultural products of societies that assumed the future would be much like the past, and yet it is used as educational food in a society where change is the rule, not the exception.” Accordingly, Dewey founded an institution in Chicago called the Lab School – laboratory was to replace library; experiment was to replace knowledge gleaned from the past.

However, not only was such an education the consequence of a society that was experiencing change; rather, it had as its aim the acceleration of change with two aims: first, to actively displace cultural transmission as a norm of education, and thus, to unseat the place of “authority” and the past as a guide to action; and second, to permit greater command of the natural and human world with the aim of “growth,” particularly the growth of human power. Dewey makes this case in pointed terms in his book Democracy and Education:

Why does a savage group perpetuate savagery, and a civilized group civilization…? In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects that come within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind. Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects enter into associated behavior. Only a small number of natural resources are utilized and they are not worked for what they are worth. The advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural forces and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for securing ends….

Dewey argues that progress rests upon the active control of nature, and hence requires the displacement of the “savage” regard for the past and, arguably, their inclination to make a home in the world as created rather than seek its transformation through human mastery.

Dewey continues,

A savage tribe manages to live on a desert plain. It adapts itself. But its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use. A civilized people enters upon the scene. It adapts itself. It introduces irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits which transform the environment.

This should not surprise us, as elsewhere Dewey traces the lineage of his own thought back to Francis Bacon, acknowledging his regard for Bacon as the most important thinker in history. Writing in his book Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey acknowledged Bacon as the founder of the scientific method that now liberates humanity from the constraints of nature. According to Dewey, Bacon teaches that “scientific laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.” The job of modern science – a realm of inquiry that extends to the human sciences (such as political science) as well as to the natural sciences – is to extract the secrets of nature by whatever means possible. Echoing Bacon, Dewey revealed the severity with which the modern scientist must approach his task:

[he] must force the apparent facts of nature into forms different to those in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.

As with Bacon, a close connection is forged between the modern project of the mastery of nature and the rejection of an education focused upon the teachings of the Great Books. Only by overcoming the “static” teachings of those texts can progress be unleased; only by extending human mastery over a tortured nature can humanity achieve the true measure of their potential greatness.

Today, most educational institutions in America have been deeply and pervasively influenced and shaped by the thrust of Dewey’s arguments. While many institutions maintain programs in which education in the humanities is pursued, it is seldom the case that the grounds for such programs is based upon an ancient understanding of the role that great books play in shaping the worldviews of students and broader society. Rather, the main focus and dominant understanding at most institutions of learning today is to advance the goal of knowledge as power in the effort to secure a form of liberty in which nature no longer is thought to govern or guide human life. The focus today is upon an education in STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – with a corresponding decline of commitment to the humanities broadly, in some cases leading schools to disband entire departments once devoted to the study of the humanities through the reading of books.

At most institutions of higher learning today, at best one can only see the remnant of an older understanding of the role of Great Books to educate students in the virtue necessary in a world to which we must conform our actions. More in evidence is the newer and almost always more dominant devotion to the effort to “create new knowledge.” One can often see this exemplified in the contradiction between the older seal and motto of older institutions – reflecting a more ancient view of education based upon virtue and self-government – contrasted with more recent mission statements that stress the research and scientific mission of institutions. I have encountered few better examples of this than at this very institution, the University of Texas at Austin. The motto of UT Austin, as emblazoned on its seal, is “Disciplina Praesidium Civitate,” which is translated as “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy.” These words are drawn from a longer statement of Texas’s second governor, Mirabeau Lamar, which reads in its entirety (located in your “Hall of Noble Words,” which I am sure you all visit frequently), “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy and, while guided and controlled by virtue, the noblest attribute of man. It is the only dictator that freemen acknowledge and the only security that freemen desire.” This fuller statement – with its stress upon the relationship of virtue, authority and liberty, and with the overtones in the word “disciplina” not only of “cultivation” but discipline, point to an older conception according to which liberty was the achievement of hard-won self-control through the discipline of virtue. Moreover, the seal itself portrays the image of an open book on the upper field of the shield, demonstrating that the means by which this discipline of liberty is to be won is through an education in the wisdom, the lessons, and the cautions of the past accumulated on the pages of books that are deemed by an older generation to be essential in the education and formation of every new generation. The aim of such an education is not “critical thinking,” but the achievement of liberty governed by the discipline – even dictatorship – of virtue.

Contrast this seal designed at the time of UT’s founding with the Mission Statement devised in more recent years and found on the main web portal of the University. There – after some boilerplate about a dedication to “excellence” in education, which is about as rich in content as the phrase “critical thinking” – one finds a statement about the purpose of education at the University of Texas. According to the current mission statement, “The university contributes to the advancement of society through research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the development of new knowledge.” The stress here is upon the research and scientific mission of the university, notably the aim of creating “new knowledge,” not the effort to understand older wisdom. One searches in vain for a modern re-articulation of the sentiments of the older motto; rather than the inculcation of virtue, one finds only the emphasis upon research in the service of progress – particularly that progress that contributes to that centuries-old ambition to subject nature to human will.

What we see in this all-too brief précis of the debate between the ancients and the moderns is that two distinct and contradictory conceptions of liberty have been advanced in a long succession of “Great Books.” The first of these conceptions of liberty commends the study of Great Books for an education in virtue in light of a recognition of human membership in a created order to which we must conform and that we do not ultimately govern; the other conception was advanced through a series of Great Books that argued against the study of Great Books, and rather asserted a form of human greatness that sought the human mastery of nature, particularly by the emphasis of modern science. This latter conception of liberty did not seek merely to co-exist alongside an older conception; it required the active dismantling of this idea of liberty, and hence, the transformation of education away from the study of Great Books and instead the study of “the Great Book of Nature” toward the end of its mastery. The older conception of liberty held that liberty was ultimately a form of self-government; in a constrained world, the human propensity to desire without limit and end inclined people toward a condition of slavery, understood to be enslavement to the base desires. This older conception of liberty as self-government was displaced by our regnant conception of liberty, the liberty to pursue our desires ceaselessly with growing prospects of ongoing fulfillment through the conquest of nature, accompanied by the constant generation of new desires that demand ever greater expansion of the human project of mastery. The decline of the role of Great Books in our universities today is not due simply or merely to financial constraints or the requirement of federal funding for scientific inquiry or even science itself; preceding all of this was an argument made in many Great Books that the study of Great Books should be displaced from the heart of education.

What we are forced to consider is whether the justification of a study in the Great Books is sufficient – whether simply presenting these books as general representatives of “greatness” does not in fact contribute to the undermining of the study of the Great Books. If we do not, in the first instance, forefront a deeper philosophic claim that a certain conception of humanity within a created order is the precondition for the justification of the widespread study of the Great Books, then it is likely that such programs will remain boutiques amid a broader effort to expand the role of STEM in our institutions of higher education. Perhaps we even need to reconsider the very language of Greatness – perhaps at least considering a commendation of humble books, or at least Great Books that commend humility, in contrast to those books advancing a version of Promethean greatness which have undermined the study of books. In the final estimation, it seems dubious whether we can be indifferent toward these books, whether great or humble. Whether we study their ideas or not, inescapably they make a world in their own image. At least we have one choice: We can either understand the ideas underlying the world we inhabit, or, in rejecting the study of the Great Books, become more deeply ignorant of a world that has been shaped by a number of those books, and of the sources of the accumulating wreckage amid our Progress.