 This page is an archive from the previous version of The Row Boat, which is why it doesn't look and work the same as the current version. However, these archives are fully functional and integrated with the new system.
Why does this site permit advertising?
Powered by Little Logger |
The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Against the Classics11/11/2006 15:36:07Anybody whose poked their head in a university these days has probably picked up on the debate people are having about the pedagogical and cultural importance of the Classics. That is also to say, the Canon, or the Great Books. Those texts which are characterized by beloning to a capitalized group, being important by virtue (this is contentious) of either intrinsic worth or historical influence or both. My bias is my experience, of course, I went to Brown University, the stuffy New England school famous for its New Curriculum (c. 1969) that mandates (and hardly even offers) no "introduction to western thought" courses and issues no distribution requirements. And look how I turned out. The past week or so I've been reflecting on Meaning in History, written by the German philosopher Karl Löwith in the late 1940s. It argues that the modern idea of progress in history, and with it much of modernity, is a continuous outgrowth of Christian eschatology. The modern age is confused, in turn, because it is stuck between two loves: Christian faith and Hellenic reason, dependent on each, unfaithful to both. This strikes me as a profound pessimism on the part of human possibility (perhaps deserved in the wake of WWII in Germany), but more importantly a dangerous shortsightedness. It begins with an ahistorical idealization of each of these paradigms, an unjust appropriation of the people who belonged to them, and an unwillingness to make creative room for the present. One of the unintended benefits of America's plagued educational system is that it mainly dismisses the Greeks as educationally important, for the first time in the West since the Renaissance. There are negative consequences of this. But there are also positive ones. We are able to see the Greeks finally for who they were a bit more, a productive civilization that was human like us, had some luck conquering, and was generously valorized in turn by their conquerors. Even the most apparently liberated of the Germans, like Nietzsche, were force-fed the glory of the classics so much that they failed to realize they were actually ushering in new ideas, not rediscovering old ones (which itself is a Platonic aesthetic of course). I do not mean to say that classical literature and thought should not be read. Actually, I wish I had studied it more. But I wish I had studied a lot of things more, like biology and Arabic. There is greatness to them, but so also in a lot of other places. Teaching the classics was conceived in part as the foundation of a common educated discourse. I think now, though, the whole idea of this kind of foundation is being sufficiently problematized by pluralism that it cannot be justifiably imposed. A stronger social foundation is a broad grasp of the classics of world traditions and skills in the dynamic process of cross-cultural negotiation. Science is also critical of course, in dialog with humanities. One of the most pongiant critiques of the classics I've seen is Henry Miller's The Colossus of Morousi, his travelogue of Greece, which I read when I was traveling there myself. In it he repeatedly chides the British tourists, who go looking for semblances of the Greece they were taught as children to be their intellectual progenitors. In doing they look right past the human wonders of modern Greece, which have advanced to a wholly new caliber, imperceptible to the British, who in the process of appropriating this false history have not only lost touch with someone else's present but their own genetic and geographical past. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
remark on theology - 11/11/2006 20:29:32
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
|
| |
