The union of the beautiful and the rigorous
Why the philosophical works are an important part of the Great Books program
Hello friends, if all has gone according to plan, I am going to spent the next five hours having my face zapped by three ladies from Moldova--the final, and yet excruciatingly on-going, step in my beard-removal journey.
I continue to read E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, which continues to be excellent. One of the theses of the book is that the spirit of capitalism entered and reshaped the lives of English artisans long before industrial capitalism became common--according to Thompson, although a cobbler or builder in 1830 might work individually and without the tools of mass-production, their lives were still essentially capitalist because of the rise of out-work and sweatshop situations. Increased production of inputs, in particular cotton and yarn, resulted in a situation where middlemen used their access to financial capital to buy up large quantities of inputs and subject the sector to capitalist price imperatives.
Once I read a book on medieval economic theories, which were heavily concerned with the notion of the "just price" of goods and services. There was a price that was right and honest, and a price that was dishonest. This was essentially how artisans in 18th century England set their prices: there was no price competition, everyone simply worked at the customary price. But by subjecting the sector to price competition, artisans faced a situation where they needed to intensify their labor. The abolition (by law) of the apprentice regime and of "combinations" (trade guilds) also signified the increasing power of the merchant class and an increasing concern with lowering prices.
Its great stuff.
Have been thinking about why reading this book seems so compatible with reading the Great Books. This book, and other works of political philosophy I've read lately, seem to exemplify the Great Books program. They're not literary works, but they are well-written, with an attention to detail and to lived experience. They mix primary-source testimony and statistical analysis. They are careful with their theories--dutifully trying to reconcile apparent contradictions between history and theory.
In general, the mix of the literary and philosophical that characterizes the Great Books (i.e. we read Aristophanes alongside Aristotle, and Montaigne alongside Moliere) tends to seem odd today, when the philosophical and the literary seem very separate. And yet, to collapse the two--to say that truth is beauty and beauty is truth--also seems incorrect. The truth is that Aristotle is not a literary writer, in the way we understand the term. His work does not have beauty, unless we use 'beauty' at such a conceptual level that it ceases to relate to the common meaning of the term. Relatively view philosophical writers are truly beautiful--amongst them I count, perhaps, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx (at times), Plato, and a few others. Some of the most important philosophers (Aristotle, Kant and Hegel) are positively hideous in their writing style. But we still read them alongside books chosen primarily for their beauty.
Why? What's the connection?
The Great Books don't all have the same virtues. Many of the authors of the Great Books were singularly unlettered in other branches of those books: it is highly unlikely that Shakespeare had read much philosophical literature, for instance. But to study the Great Books involves buying into the idea that it's important for a person to have both a sense of beauty and a sense of rigor. And it would be easy to say, oh, this is an arbitrary idea, born of such-and-such society's notion of the gentle virtues. And that's true, but it's an idea that has recurred many times, in many places. It's not at all uncommon for a society to believe that a well-brought-up person must have knowledge of both the literary and the philosophical.
In China, the Confucian classics included the Spring and Autumn Annals, which are so dense that surely they cannot be read for beauty, and they include the Book of Songs, which is poetry. The Old Testament is nothing more or less than an anthology: it combines the poetic (Psalms and the Song of Solomon), wisdom literature (Proverbs and Ecclesiastes), the tale (Ruth), the chronicle (Samuel, Kings, Judges, Chronicles), the mythological (Genesis) and the legal (Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy). What is the organic connection here? Some of the inclusions in the Old Testament are so puzzling (in particular, the Song of Solomon) that surely they can only have been chosen for their beauty.
Perhaps what's at fault is the professionalization of writing. Nowadays we have literary writing and philosophical writing. Some are taught to be rigorous and others are taught to be imaginative. The practitioners of each discipline reify the particular virtues they're told are at the core of their discipline. I'm not sure: I do think this linkage between the literary and philosophical is real and natural. I think it makes a kind of sense that we can't totally articulate in today's world.
Books like The Making of the English Working Class combine the theoretical with the practical; the systematic with the personal. That's a constant tension within both literary and philosophical writing. Literary writing is beautiful, but to what end? What does it reveal about the world? There is an empty, formal beauty that many (bad) literary writers aspire to nowadays--one at odds with the deep seriousness of best writers. And philosophers are also apt to create systems that cut against the grain of lived experience. By reading both sorts of works, we cross between these two opposed tendencies and learn how to both analyze the world and live within the world.
The difference between reading the Great Books and reading about the Great Books is that the former involves a singular, unmediated encounter with a mind. As a result, the former subjects you to all kinds of quirks of the author's individual style and thought. And I kinda think that's the point: if you drained a book like Thompson's of its determinate content, and you summarized it somewhere and analyzed which of his claims are true and false, then you might come away afterwards having learned more and in less time, but you wouldn't learn what it's like to be a mind grappling with a serious question (did living standards rise or fall during the Industrial Revolution). The answer here is meaningless: you can make a case either way. What is more important is that you understand how and why it is meaningless, and that's something you can only get if you stop treating this as mere subject matter and learn to treat it as a concrete matter concerning the lives of real people.
I've made up my own, basically a compilation of other lists, which is why it's grown so unmanageably large. I've read a lot of the Russians and other 18th and 19th century books as I bounced around various universities, and that was much more fun. I had also read all the Greeks and Romans pretty intensely (though in English). so this seemed like a good way to fill in the gaps. But it is a slog sometimes. I add a healthy dollop of art and music of the period as well. I guess I'm trying to sort of immerse myself in the historical period I'm stuck in. Seemed like a good idea at the time...
My great books list, which is enormous and I am way too old to finish, is about half philosophy, theology, history and political science. I read chronologically which has its pluses and minuses. I'm stuck in the late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. And that contains a lot of very large books from Protestant reformers; Calvin, Luther, Hus and Wycliffe among others. And life is just too short to plow through all of those. So while I try to read exclusively primary works as you recommend, for these books I usually read a few chapters to get a good sense of how they write and the way they approach the issues of the day. But then I resort to summaries/analyses of their work to speed things along. Feels like cheating but otherwise I'd never move on to the "good stuff" of subsequent periods.