Moral Education, the Canon, and the Good Life
by squelchtoad
I tend to feel about people who say that the Western Canon “teaches us how to live the good life” more or less the way that music critic Alex Ross feels about a certain kind of classical music fan:
I don’t identify with the listener who responds to the “Eroica” by saying, “Ah, civilization.” That wasn’t what Beethoven wanted: his intention was to shake the European mind. I don’t listen to music to be civilized; sometimes, I listen precisely to escape the ordered world. What I love about the “Eroica” is the way it manages to have it all, uniting Romanticism and Enlightenment, civilization and revolution, brain and body, order and chaos.
There may be an education in human flourishing to be found in the Western Canon, but it’s not the only meaning that can be found therein, or even necessarily the right meaning. I’d venture to say that most of the Canon’s constituent works were not written to edify. That doesn’t mean they’re incapable of teaching us; it just means we should be wary of destroying them as complex texts by reducing them to sources of homilies. You’ll sometimes hear people say “This above all, to thine own self be true.” and attribute the quotation to Shakespeare. They’ll typically neglect to mention that he places that saying in the mouth of the buffoon Polonius.
Moreover, if we really want to receive a moral education from the Western Canon, we’re probably better off not looking for one. Moral insights tend to sneak up on us. What we find when explicitly looking for a “moral education” often looks suspiciously like a defense of what we already believe bolstered by copious literary and philosophical name-dropping.
I do think that experience with the humanities contributes to human flourishing, but not because I see the Western Canon as a source of easy moral pedagogy. Rather, the experience of having my mind shaken and disordered, and the experience of the new order into which it settles after the seismic activity has ceased, has been, for me, the Western Canon’s—and Beethoven’s, and mathematics’s, and cultural studies’s—contribution to the goodness of my life.
Reading the Western Canon hasn’t made me much more confident that I know what the Good Life is or how to live it, but it has been a good experience in my life.
I like your rebuttal of an idea that is both cheesy and wrong (and one which I have endorsed in my past). When we read Shakespeare, we shouldn’t do so in the expectation of receiving instructions for how we ought to behave.
Here’s an idea that is cheesy but maybe true: The liberal arts are not instructions for living the good life, but components thereof. We don’t get any moral answers from the Canonical authors, but their questions are worth asking for their own sake because (here’s the cheesy part) the good life consists in part of considering about the good life.
Interesting implication of this line of thought: We all know about “art for art’s sake.” The thing is, Directed Studies and the Canon you write of include a lot of philosophy, too. Do we do “philosophy for philosophy’s sake”? Does that place philosophy in a category with art, and other things we do for their own sake, like play? Or is philosophy different, something that is only actually worthwhile if it gets us a little closer to the correct answer about how to live?
Thanks for your astute (as always) comments.
I think some philosophy does seek the Good Life. I’m therefore more comfortable with people looking for a moral education or at least being open to moral persuasion when they read Aristotle’s Politics or Ethics than when they read The Illiad. But not all philosophy is about politics or ethics, at least not explicitly.
I admit that just about any idea can have certain ethical and political implications. I further admit that just about any new idea shapes, however subtly, our worldview and therefore our actions. I even admit that the Good and the True may be identical or closely tied (that’s a philosophical question!). That said, when a work considers primarily the True (and does not take the True to be identical with the Good), we do it a disservice if we immediately look within it for the Good.
My point is about good (Good?) reading. Reading for moral lessons can be particularly poisonous when reading literature, but it’s also inappropriate when reading certain kinds of philosophy.
Concrete example: I think that Humean epistemology has certain moral implications. So does Hume, clearly. But I’m more comfortable discussing the implications of Hume’s epistemology for his ethics after reading Hume’s own explicitly ethical writings.
“What we find when explicitly looking for a “moral education” often looks suspiciously like a defense of what we already believe bolstered by copious literary and philosophical name-dropping.”
–Bah, of course that’s true, in the short run. But isn’t the idea that after two or three years, our critical tools start to chip through even our own egos? Aren’t two seniors at Yale, who came from opposite ideological dispositions, better able to have an actual conversation, more candid about their ignorance and biases, and less aggressive overall than they were as freshman?
And to play devil’s advocate. You write, “Moral insights tend to sneak up on us.” Maybe. But can’t our brains appropriate snuck-up experiences to rationalize prior positions as much as they can appropriate texts for that purpose?
a) Possibly. I hope so. Perhaps, though (see your post on the YPU) you’re being too optimistic about Yale as a whole. It routinely stuns me how many of my classmates cannot even talk to a conservative, let alone have a productive discussion with one. Some of these people have read Burke (or others), but that appears not to have helped. Why? Perhaps because when they read him they were engaged in something just as antithetical to good reading as reading-for-the-Good: reading in order to condemn morally.
In short, I think (and I wish I’d pointed out in my post) that the stereotypically rightist and leftist ideas about why you should read the Canon—to learn at The West’s feet and to attack The West’s hegemony at its foundations, respectively—are two equally poisonous sides of the same coin.
b) Let me be less sophistic and more economist- or calculator-like about what I meant by “Moral insights tend to sneak up on us.” When we change our minds, we don’t usually admit to ourselves that we’re changing our minds. [Insert glut of social science research here]. Looking back on my own education, I have can think of several times when I read a philosophical work (or heard a good speech), thought “of course! I know that!” and admitted to myself only much later, upon reflection, that I hadn’t, in fact, “known that” prior to reading the work.