"The Great Conversation Revisited"- Critique, Pt. 1

“The Great Conversation Revisited” by R.

There are at least two ways that one may look at the books collected into the Great Books of the Western World series. It is possible (and possibly advisable) to consider them as nothing more than attractive and durable set of books that word nerds will no doubt find a use for in the course of their otherwise empty lives. Believe it or not, I’ve actually sat up in bed at 2 AM before and wondered aloud if I had any Aristophanes lying around. So, if your overall anxiety level goes down knowing that you have access to more Montaigne than you know what to do with, the Great Books are definitely your huckleberry. It is my deep suspicion that fewer sets of the GB have been sold to that purpose than say that of, say, ornate bookshelf filler.

Series associate editor, Mortimer J. Adler acknowledges as much in “The Great Conversation Revisited”, his foreword to the second edition of the Great Books collection, but he also goes a great deal further to defend the loftier ideals that went into its compilation. While it may seem odd to begin an exploration of the Great Books and the Conversation they represent with an essay written in response to series’ editor Robert Hutchins’ original defense of the Western canon, “The Great Conversation”, there are pragmatic reasons to do just that. First, while Adler did not pioneer the movement to return the classics to the classroom, it was clearly his initiative that continued to raise the bar on that effort and, in many cases, move it past pedagogical theory into actual practice. Hutchins’ essay, though sweeping in its scope and intensity, spends more time defending the wisdom in obtaining a liberal arts education than it does defending this selection of writing as its representative. Adler, in contrast, is a wonder of evangelistic brevity, meticulous in laying out clearly defined terms for his arguments and then defending them with evidence.

Section One- The Great Books and the Great Ideas

Adler begins his long and winding argument with an analogy, positing that just as there are “goods” (or necessities) of the body (listing food, drink, sleep, clothing, and shelter among their number), so also does the mind require “goods” of its own; information, knowledge, understanding and wisdom. While information and knowledge are widely seen as doubling with each passing moment, few, Adler argues, would say that the world is suffering from an overabundance of wisdom and understanding. Just as removing any one of the goods of the body negates to some extent the efficiency of the others (ie sleeping nude on the ground in the middle of the tundra), so does information/knowledge likewise suffer from a lack of wisdom and understanding as a complement. Put simply, Mortimer Adler believes (and wants you to believe) that the wisdom and understanding in Western culture (in essence, the Great Conversation) had traditionally been and could again be transmitted by the writings contained in this collection.

Before launching into a full-frontal defense of that idea, he lists the criteria that went into selecting the works included and a couple more that were necessarily not included in the process.
These criteria warrant a moment’s consideration as they can as easily serve as at least some of the criteria by which the reader may consider an individual work’s inclusion into the collection as a whole. Adler lists Contemporary Significance as his first criteria, insisting that it must address the concerns common to humanity across the millennia as opposed to the specific concerns of its time. Second, the work must be of adequate profundity and sophistication to warrant not only being read, but being read a number of times in order to extract the fullness of meaning. Last, Great Works must be of extensive relevance to the Great Conversation, whether in addressing several of its core themes or in just a few but to a depth that transforms it into an unforgettable landmark on any journey concerned with understanding a given issue.

Equal consideration should also be given to Adler’s non-criteria as partial clues to the identity of the barbarians he presumes to be massing at the gates of civilization. The influence of a particular work on culture was not considered out of context of its relevance to the Great Conversation. This is one of Adler’s safety hatches for those who would point to a mass of literature from every place in the world that was not Europe or America as worthy of equal consideration. While he acknowledges the possibility that writings from the Far East (and by logical extension, the Near East, the Middle East, Africa, and South America) may be of equal literary merit, he punts the task of indexing exactly how those traditions might relate to the Western canon down the field to future scholars in search of an emerging global human culture. His second non-criteria is that no work is included by virtue of the truth that it supposedly contains. In this sense, he offers the Great Books not as a repository of truth but as a record of the quest to uncover it, acknowledging that “no human work rises to the perfection of being devoid of logical flaws.”

Section Two- The Great Conversation

Adler dedicates the second section of his essay to what Hutchins identifies as the defining characteristic of Western culture, the Great Conversation, and uses the opportunity to articulate and defend the aims of the collection .He presents three editorial additions to the Great Books of the Western World collection as evidence of the Great Conversation’s existence and unique importance in world culture. First, the Syntopicon illustrates that canonical writers are compelled to address the Great Ideas whether by virtue of their common membership in the human race (as Adler would suggest) or participation in a more limited, specifically Western experience. Secondly, he points to the Author-to-Author index as a more visually oriented proof of the influence of tradition that is visible from the earliest Greek dramatic poets up through the 20th century. Finally, the Author-to-Idea index supports Adler’s assertion that “most of the great authors, with the possible exception of a few mathematicians and natural scientists have made significant contribution to the Great Conversation in relation to a large number of great ideas” [30]. I’ll grant that all three features, especially the Syntopicon which represents an enormous amount of information relative to the other two touted, do add to one’s enjoyment of the work. They strike me, however, as less of a proof of an objective phenomenon (ie the Great Conversation) and more the kind of labor of love that dwelling on a particular idea in a number of ways (the liberal arts ideal) is likely to produce.

If the first half of this section is overly pragmatic in its exploration of these editorial contribution, Adler turns didactic in the second. His purpose is two-fold; one, overt and one, implicit. While enunciating the difficulties of folding the 20th century writing into the easy framework otherwise provided by history, Adler cannot resist seizing the opportunity to excoriate 20th century values as intrinsically responsible for this aberrant disjunction with the past. Adler uses his discussion of the Author-to-Idea index to further an argument that the 20th century represents, “a clear break between this century and the twenty-five centuries that precede it in the tradition of Western civilization” [31]. Though he concedes that the 20th century writers, “address themselves to the same set of Great Ideas to which their predecessors contribute,” Adler seems at once irritated and self-impressed that the Syntopicon had to be extensively re-redited to allow for the novelty of 20th century thought and writing. He goes on to describe the timbre of these revisions as necessitated by “the disagreements of the 20th century authors to their predecessors or their departure from the ground covered in early centuries [as well as] the breaking of new ground” [31]. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

This digression (mitigated in the Great Conversation collection by Clifton Fadiman’s “The Contributions of the 20th Century” that is viciously sandwiched in between Adler and Hutchin’s dueling screeds against modernity) is noteworthy for reasons fundamental to a full appreciation of Adler’s purpose. The urgency with which both Adler and Hutchins attack the perceived inadequacies of the 20th century is the organizing impulse behind the Great Books program. They find its education ill-considered; its trend towards hyper-specialization intellectually dangerous and its writing, by and large, inadequate to the legacy it bears as its influence. The comprehensive ideal set by the publication of the Great Books of the Western World series, however, insists that its editors swallow the bitter pill of modernity to prevent charges of ethno- and phallocentrism from settling like a dark cloud over their supposedly definitive presentation of the most important writings in the Western tradition. It is an irreconcilable tension that surfaces over and over again throughout the Great Conversation.

Reclaiming Liberal Artistry - Part I

Reclaiming Liberal Artistry
Part I

For Christmas in 2007, my Father gifted Rob and I with a complete set of The Great Books of the Western World series which, as the title implies, comprises a representational selection of the greatest thinkers that Western culture has yet to manifest. Of course, the works of our species’ more recent creators are only marginally represented as we have not yet had time to weigh their contributions against those of our Western ancestors and those of our Eastern and Indigenous relatives are absent completely.


Our process of reading these “Great Books” was commenced by candlelight and glowing fireplace during an horrific ice storm that devastated power lines and hundred year old trees indiscriminately. After each selection, we engaged in an oral discourse of the writings covering a broad range of considerations and conclusions. It was a good and learned situation which went smoothly for a period of time but seemed to deconstruct itself into oblivion when I was defeated by Augustine and Rob by Rabelais. Also during this time, there began a currently shared urge (inspired by Rob) to compile our thoughts in writing as a means of gaining a more tangible foothold in our heritage. We both received our higher learning degrees from the only liberal arts university in the state of Oklahoma where we embraced this method of learning. We have been avid readers our whole lives and as a result have become solid writers in the process of indulging in our favorite past time.

The reasons behind this need for a more secure footing are that we were and still are witnessing Western culture’s slow and painful degradation. Or, in the words of Robert H. Hutchins, "the headlong plunge into the abyss" from which our civilization may not return. This is not a new phenomenon; we both understand this to be truth, but rather a generational experience that in many ways each of the authors of the “Great Books” are attempting to explain. For me, this realization did not make it easier to resume our readings of the series. I have been harboring misgivings specifically about revisiting the material that runs counter to my personal ideas of truth and, especially, equality among “men”. I recognize the fallacious elements of actively engaging this perspective but I also cannot deny its existence.

The year 2009 finds us starting anew and we will be responding to each of these authors using the written form. I find myself excited but also filled with trepidation as we begin this endeavor. I am looking forward to recreating within myself the discipline of writing which requires regular practice and dedication; reclaiming my own liberal artistry. I want to renew and strengthen a lifelong habit. It is an emerging of who I truly see myself to be which is, at heart, a word-nerd and/or an artist of the pen. Poetry has been my chosen form of creative expression since becoming a liberal artist. I find metaphor and the art of twisting language to be most enjoyable though I have also written some prose. But, the main point beyond all of this is that I WANT to write and writing takes practice, diligence as well as affording the reader/writer another method of understanding whatever they may be reading.

However, since reading Leonard Shlain’s Alphabet vs. the Goddess – The Conflict Between Word and Image, I have found myself equally distressed about the written word and the consequences that we have seen throughout our history from its use. Shlain’s observations of Western civilization are that a neurosis manifested from literacy which caused left brain dominance and thus a sort of war upon the right brain that inspired those qualities that it informs to be suppressed, repressed and demonized: images, non-linear thought and most universally, the feminine.

“There exists ample evidence that any society acquiring the written word experiences explosive changes. For the most part, these changes can be characterized as progress. But one pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power in the culture. . For now, I propose that a holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world are the essential characteristics of a feminine outlook; linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract thinking defines the masculine.” (Shlain 1998)

Shlain argues that every person possesses these “opposite perception modes” in equal measure but that rampant alphabetic literacy void of right brain stimulus has had obvious and violent ramifications within the evolution of our culture. These arguments ring of truth and as a result I continue to endure volatile emotions when I think of immersing myself in the words of those authors whom I remember from my previous liberal arts education to be representative of the more devastating consequences that this neurosis of written language has inflicted.

This is a deeply rooted emotional reaction with which I am attempting to contend. This reaction is beautifully irrational and wholly right-brained, however, it is real and must be given its proper due and respect. I’ve spent a good portion of the years since receiving my bachelor’s degree on a journey of exploration where I have learned much of what can be known of Goddess-based ideas and cultures influenced by the Divine Feminine prior to the solitary Sun God’s “Word” dismantling of this ancient wisdom piece by piece with each stoke of His followers’ pens. I continue to find this occurrence unsettling and without resolution. Part of what my journey has thus far revealed to me is that each and every one of us is missing at least half (probably more) of what we could call the “Great Wisdom” of our civilization. For that reason, it seems to me that we are a people who are struggling to lay claim to an already fractured and broken culture.

Please understand the nuance of wording between the “Great Books” and what I am terming the “Great Wisdom” of Western concepts and ideas. These "Great Books" are only a small part of a greater tapestry of knowledge and wisdom. And the deepest irony is, of course, that these books reveal to us in many ways a further degradation of an already disjointed entity. This reality makes it difficult to avoid emotional reactions to the words that remain no matter how valuable and pertinent these works are for all of us today.

However, Shlain also helped me recognize that what has been true in our past is not equally true in our current time. This continued evolution of Western thought results mostly because of frenzied changes in the ever present influences of our culture, especially in regards to information technology. In our time, we have equalized our brain stimulus by integrating images and the word into our day to day lives and we are beginning to see the balance between the genders reach a more equitable place. However, there are now different problems on our horizon. We find ourselves living in a time where we are each awarded “political power and leisure time” by our democratic and, in some ways more balanced society and yet, the education of our people is suffering from a seemingly mandatory anorexia which is creating perhaps the greatest danger to our species yet (Hutchins, 1952).

Robert M. Hutchins takes up this worrisome manifestation in inspiring ways in “The Great Conversation” which is the introductory essay for the first edition of The Great Books of the Western World. A discussion of Hutchins’ observations will continue in Part II of “Reclaiming Liberal Artistry”.

LOOK, IT'S A KITTY!

LB: What's a Liberal Arts Education Good For?

by Michael Roth from the Huffington Post

Over the next few months, in homes across America, seventeen and eighteen-year-olds will be conferring with one another and with their parents about a life changing decision: What college to go to! After months of research, visits, and advice from "experts," these young men and women must now decide: Where will I be happy? Where will I make friends? Where will I get an education I can afford now, and an education that will remain valuable for years after graduation?

In this same time period, our government officials will be deciding where an investment in America's economic infrastructure will do the most good. Commentators from different political perspectives have often noted that one of the great advantages of America is its peerless higher education system. Although other sectors have diminished international roles, higher education in this country continues to inspire admiration around the globe. When politicians talk about this, they often emphasize the research output of large universities, but the focus should also be on American undergraduate liberal arts education. Liberal arts in the USA provide not only a pipeline of talented and prepared students to the great graduate schools, but also a model for life-long learning that other countries are beginning to emulate.

More at What's a Liberal Arts Education Good For?

And Now For Something We Hope You'll Really Like...

There’s really no good way to tell your friends that you’ve decided to start a ten year reading program and, what’s worse, that you both intend to write about the experience online but here we all are. Hi, we’re Rob and Kendra and we’re word nerds; so much so, that once gifted a set of sixty books purporting to represent the Western tradition of writing as well as any sixty-volume set might be able, that we couldn’t resist the almost ludicrous task of reading and writing about them.

Kendra and I both graduated from the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma (USAO for the initiated), the state’s only publically funded liberal arts university. I think it’s safe to say that neither of us chose USAO specifically because of its liberal arts education style or could have articulated exactly what a liberal art might look like. If pressed, I might have tried to identify the Humanities as the liberal arts; liberal in the sense that they would really only prepare you to teach or write instead of doing something eventually profitable like accounting or working with computers. The best I could tell coming in, the biggest difference between USAO and other schools I had looked at was the emphasis that was placed on the interdisciplinary core (IDS) curriculum, required of every student regardless of their field of study. While every school had its own general education core requirements, USAO placed a lot of focus on the format of these classes; team taught by two professors from complementing disciplines with the focus progressively weighted towards expository writing as the means of assessing the our academic progress.

Independently determined to avoid the pitfalls of assured success, Kendra and I both chose English as our course of study without realizing the amazing leg up it would give us in the IDS core. In both the IDS core and classes in our major, we were essentially asked to read a metric butt ton of material and then write in response to it. By the time we finished, neither of us was particularly interested in joining the ranks of academia but we were decent writers, if by virtue of nothing but practice. Though, between us, we have held a wide range of jobs (musician, zookeeper/zoo management, retail and office management, archeology, comics writer, substitute teacher), that skill of being able to collect data, analyze and then synthesize it into a written response has benefited us at every turn.

When we received the Great Books of the Western World as a Christmas present in 2007 from Kendra’s father, it sparked something off inside that led us to reexamine our educational experiences from a new vantage point with a better appreciation for its value relative to other, equally capricious, educational decisions we could have made. Would knowing then what we know now have improved upon the education we received? The beauty of the liberal arts education is in its process, exposing students to the great writers while creating the necessity for that student to develop meaningful writing habits in response to the coursework.

Urged onward by a crushing ice storm that cut power to our house for five days, we began the reading program immediately, advancing in fits and spurts relative to the difficulty of the material assigned.

We stayed “on the wagon” for about six months before being defeated by Augustine and Rabelais respectively. For me, the reading without the response just didn’t have the same appeal and, despite out best efforts to discuss together what we had read, we found it difficult to keep those discussions organized in a way that ensured that we got to the essence of the work in question.

And so that is how we ended here, starting up a blog as the vehicle for writing in response to reading down the Ten Year Reading List for the Great Books of the Western World. The first draft of this entry was a really gloomy reading of the world we live in and offered this kind of continuing liberal arts education as an antidote for what ails us. Upon reflection, I felt kind of stupid suggesting reading better books and writing about them is any kind of curative against real world ills like poverty, disease, famine or global warming. If the house is burning down, by all means, grab a bucket of water before you grab a book about the history of fire fighting.

Equally, as we are confronted by a daunting set of challenges, some very old and some very new, we believe that now is not the time to jettison our understanding and appreciation of two and half millennia of writing that just might provide some of the answers we desperately need.