PDETBG

On trying to have a direct experience of truth, beauty, and goodness

This blog has gone through distinct phases. It had my Nietzsche / Freud phase over the summer, then my Icelandic Saga phase over the fall, and for the past few months it's been in the Marxist history phase. I feel kind of bad about the latest phase--I keep thinking that I should impose some labor discipline and actually go through and read the Great Books. Obviously the ideal Great Books Substack would have some coherent educational purpose: it would be like a course, I take you through the Great Books one by one.

It would also have a coherent viewpoint about the Great Books and what they do.

Most Great Books substacks have an implicit Neoplatonic philosophy baked in, where the Great Books hold out the possibility for some objective and direct experience of truth, beauty, and goodness. It's like experiencing God--you can't describe the experience, but you can give people a pathway to experiencing it for themselves.

The problem (to me) is that if you believe that through contemplation some people can gain a direct experience of truth, beauty, and goodness, then it becomes much easier to hold aristocratic or monarchical political opinions, and that I think it’s ridiculous for an educated person in 2024 to be against democracy.

Obviously the kind of contemplation needed to have a direct experience (DE) of truth, beauty, and goodness is difficult, time-consuming, and inaccessible to most people (particularly those who must work for a living). Since this direct experience of truth, beauty, and goodness would, presumably, make its possessor a much better and wiser person, they are obviously better-suited to rule than other people. Moreover, those without this direct experience of TBG (truth, beauty, and goodness) can't really assess whether or not other people have it. Indeed, it is entirely possible that if we want to be ruled by People w a Direct Experience (PDE) of TBG, then we'd be better off pre-selecting some group of people as our rulers, and then educating them in TBG.

I am sympathetic to the idea that reading the Great Books (GBs) can turn you into a PDETBG, but I obviously face a major stumbling block in that many people who claim to have a DETBG also claim that trans people are obviously unnatural and earthly and incompatible with the telos of the human form.

On a broader level, PDETBG tend to be armchair thinkers, they believe they can intuit the true purpose and essential nature of things. This is a charming attribute in a writer or conversationalist, but in a ruler it leads to peremptory and far-sweeping actions. Chinese emperors are famous for these kinds of fiats, as when the first Hongwu Emperor forbade sea travel or when three separate Chinese Emperors forbade Buddhism for being a foreign religion (known as the Three Disasters of Wu).

For some reason PDETBG rarely stop and think, "Whatever exists is natural" and "What is most-constructed is least likely to be natural," Instead they regard what they read in books as being most natural, and when the real world differs from books, they condemn the real world as being unnatural.

Anyway, this is a very broad aside, and something I've treated at more length elsewhere. The point is, this kind of Neoplatonism provides a very good justification for reading the Great Books! Without it, what's left? Yes, the Great Books are a great source of aesthetic experience, and a great source of information about ideas, people, history, etc. But all the practical benefits of reading great literature simply pale in comparison with the mystic, semi-divine powers offered by gaining DETBG.

No raison d'etre for reading the Great Books will ever be as meaningful or as powerful as the notion of getting a direct experience of truth, beauty, and goodness. Because if TBG truly exist (as objective facts) then clearly getting a direct experience of them is one of the highest possible of life's goals. All other life goals--having a family, achieving a reputation in your community, finding love--require effort, money, and luck. Reading the Great Books is comparatively rather easy: you can do it as a hobby. If it is truly possible to get a DETBG, then everyone on Earth really should read the Great Books.

This is true even if the Great Books are not the only way of getting a DETBG. All we need assert is that the Great Books are *one of* the best ways of coming to a DETBG. Other routes may exist, but we could easily assert that these routes are less time-tested, less-accessible, more historically-contingent.

Hard to say.

Honestly, even with all the nonsense, and the way I've made the entire idea sound rather silly, I do lean towards the idea that it is possible to get some direct experience of truth, beauty, and goodness, and that reading the Great Books do constitute one of the best possible ways of achieving that knowledge.

But it's obviously not a box-ticking exercise. You don't just sit down with Gilgamesh, read ten books a year, and then finish up in 30 years with Thomas Mann and then you're done. No, the books only work through their action upon your soul. You need to change! And, presumably, as your DETBG increases, so does your understanding of how to deepen that knowledge in yourself.

For me, right now, there's something in Marxist history that's very compelling. I think that for a long time I have given too much credence to the aristocratic ideals that naturally bubble out of a course of reading the Great Books. I do think there's a direct experience of truth, beauty, and goodness to be gained, but I do not think that we ought to be ruled by the few. That's due to practical self-interest (I am positive that the few intend nothing good for me!), but it seems born-out by human history as well. The few seem to rule mostly in their own self-interet, rather than in the interest of the people as a whole. As such, I want to learn how to make my democratic political instincts cohere with my aristocratic aesthetic instincts. And for me that means excavating a lot of what the Great Books have buried.

I think for me, personally, I just cannot run a Great Books blog without unpacking some of that aristocratic dogma that gets backpacked in when you spend a lot of time reading Plato and Plutarch and Shakespeare and whoever else. It's not that I think aristocratic political ideals are inherently harmful--people can live perfectly good, decent lives if they believe that the few should rule the many--but I do think that they are counterproductive to the goal of reading the Great Books. I think that an unreconstructed belief in aristocracy is kind of ludicrous, obviously unworkable, and to hold to those beliefs without question really puts the lie to the idea that reading the Great Books confers wisdom or insight.

Right now for instance I've reached the part of The Making of the English Working Class that examines Luddism--the still-mysterious breakout of machine-destruction in 1811 through 1815. We don't know precisely whether Luddism was a revolutionary movement a la Jacobin France, or was it a form of trade-unionism (unions had recently become illegal due to the Combination Acts), or was it merely a set of spontaneous riots that progressed through social contagion. Both frame-breaking and belonging to secret societies became capital offenses in 1812, so very few Luddites wrote about the movement. Nor were many of them every caught or prosecuted, since the police in England were rather weak at the time. Thus, we have a popular social movement, and most of what we know about it comes from the deed, rather than the word.

This is true of many social movements throughout time. What do we really know of the Third Servile War, for instance, when Spartacus raised an army of 120,000 and challenged Rome? What were their thoughts on slavery or on the right of the few to rule over the many? What about the Cathars, with their belief that all earthly institutions, including the Church, were tainted by sin, and yet that it was possible through Christ for human beings to physically perfect themselves? What about the numerous Chinese revolutionary movements that similarly tended to combine a Daoist belief in personal spiritual purification with a belief that the ruling elite were corrupt and needed to be destroyed?

We don't know a lot about any of these people, but we do know that they had a very strong, spiritual belief that the existing order was unnatural and wrong. It wasn't merely personal grievance. Or, rather, yes it was personal grievance, but the grievance was laundered through a sense of natural right. As John Ball put it in 1381, protesting the subjection of the peasantry, "When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?"

To me, this strongly resembles the direct experience of truth, beauty, and goodness that we claim to get from the Great Books. And I think any reader of the Great Books can understand and sympathize with these feelings, if they really think about them. I mean look at the school-teacher who spends their evenings reading Plato--if we project them back into the middle ages, does that school-teacher resemble the prelates of the Church? The Orsinos and the Borgias and all the other rich Italian families who spent their time swapping offices? Or do they resemble the villagers who gathered in private barns for secret Cathar communions where they told themselves that the priests and bishops and nobles were destined for nonexistence, while they, the few, the perfect, would live eternally?

And yet if they're not careful, that modern-day Great Books devotee is likely to advocate for exactly the same sort of social system that sentenced the Cathars to burn.

I think, you know, we gain this knowledge of truth, beauty, and goodness, sure, but then it's our job to universalize--to realize that we gained it through this one very historically contingent method, and that other people have gained it in other ways. It's our job to look through the records and to look through the world, and to realize, hey, what I see in these very-different people strongly resembles what I see in myself.

Because if there does exist such a thing as a direct experience of truth, beauty, and goodness, then yeah it might not be a common experience, and it's perhaps not something most people have experienced, but it is surely not limited only to those who've read Plato. It must come in a variety of ways, and it must come through many routes we don't understand or perhaps haven't heard of. But when it comes, we ought to be able to recognize it by its effects on a person. We ought to be able to see, from how people sound and act, whether they've had some inkling of it.

It would be a shame to gain this experience that has a very real chance of united folks across time and culture, and to use it instead for the opposite purpose, as a means of running down everyone else who hasn’t read the same few dozen books we have.

This is the cover of my book. It got a very nice review recently that I think is still embargoed. The review was a starred review though, so that means it was a better review than the non-starred reviews. You should probably preorder it.