IN THIS entry, I quoted a college student who is studying Western philosophy. He said:

I find I have a lot to say about the mediocre texts, but not so much to say about the great texts.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Plato and Aristotle tend to leave thoughtful people in a quiet mood, especially Plato, because, to borrow a phrase, they bestride the intellectual world like colossi; they are the wisdom-teachers of the West (alongside scripture) about whom sensible people are most likely to become voluble when the opportunity comes or the necessity arises to explain their merits to the uninitiated.

I assume that “the mediocre texts” and the “works about the philosophical works of Western history” are the same. I also assume, given the university-context in which the observation locates itself, that the designated books belong to the (arrogantly self-denominating) postmodern or deconstructive discourse that has dominated the academy for the last twenty-five years, at least. A colleague from my Central Michigan University days used to say that any article beginning with the phrase “Aristotle’s error” or the equivalent (“Plato’s error”) could be assigned automatically to the archive of embarrassing folly. One waxes voluble in response to the mediocre books because they are so narcissistic and ideological. As such, they offend the intellectually mature and seem to require an immediate and explicit reckoning of their deficient syllogisms. This feeling is especially acute when someone with official status proffers such books as truer than the canonical texts on which (using the term loosely) they comment. 

(By the way, the truer truth of postmodernism and deconstruction is always the same, namely that there is no such thing as truth; that is what the modern sophists mean when they charge Plato or Aristotle with error.) 

I have had a teaching-experience during the present semester that is not inapposite to this topic. My chair asked me to take on two sections of the department’s junior-level course in literary criticism. There are two things to be said about this course. One is that students typically regard it as soporifically boring. The other is that it is typically taught using one of those two thousand page college anthologies, crammed full of articles from the last five years of PMLA. I hate the college textbook industry, so I ordered actual books for my sections of the course, including but not limited to Aristotle’s Poetics, Longinus’ On the Sublime, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. My appeal to the students was that these were eminently readable books rich with provocative ideas and that we should not worry too much whether we agreed or disagreed with a particular author or point of view; rather we should try our best to understand each book in its own terms, as fully as possible. 

In discussion, I ask, beg, and cajole the students, not to outsmart Longinus or Nietzsche, but, simply as an experiment in fairness, to advocate for them by rehearsing (that is to say, by recreating) their arguments in detail. The technique is Aristotelian – Aristotle himself recommended summarization as an excellent method of learning. Attendance in the two sections has been good, which is indicative, not necessarily of high positive interest, but of a low level of the aversion that the course has been known to inspire.

When I look back on my graduate studies, which took place in California in the 1980s, I am retroactively appalled and disgusted by how great a chunk of time was taken up in seminar by mediocre books.

Laura writes:

Yes, the mediocre works he was reading were works about. I think not all were from the swamp of postmodernism; some were congenial simplifications, which get the juices of an immature critic flowing.

That’s funny, about begging students not to outsmart Longinus or Nietzsche. It seems a common temptation for students to attempt to review a work by a great philosopher or author as if they were writing a movie review or a book review on the latest bestseller. I have told my children, “Don’t tell me whether a work is good or bad. Tell me what it says.”

Students are often given assignments that encourage them to write reviews or to approach works in a critical spirit, rather than first attempting to understand them. You make an excellent point. They should summarize, not try to outwit the giants. 

Thomas replies:

You wrote: “Students are often given assignments that encourage them to write reviews or to approach works in a critical spirit, rather than first attempting to understand them. You make an excellent point. They should summarize, not try to outwit the giants.” 

Yes – entire courses – entire departments and programs, with their rafts of courses – encourage students to adopt this (I am forced to say) repellent attitude of knowing more than anyone else has ever known and of being qualified by the possession of such knowledge to judge what you and I and other educated people would defer to as greatness. An invariable characteristic of the doctrines that foster this attitude is their reductive simplicity. The prototype of the genre is Marxism, which reduces everything to material relations, as expressed in class-warfare. Likewise, feminism reduces everything to sex-warfare and “Orientalism” to race-warfare – one side in the contest being indelibly marked by its diabolism and the other by its angelism. The professors belong, of course, with the angels.

I can report an oddly amusing behavior among students. I might describe this behavior as the blurting-out of verbal formulas, seemingly as answers to questions about assigned reading, that have nothing at all to do with the assigned reading. Perhaps I can give an example. 

Recently, to give students references by which they might understand some essays that I had assigned by René Girard, I screened Michael Cacoyannis’ cinema-adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia. Euripides’ play is about the innocence of the sacrificial victim, the likely non-existence of gods who demand holocausts, and the role of crowds in sacrificial rituals.

When I began asking questions to prompt students to coordinate the dramatic plot with Girard’s theory of scapegoating, student contributions were (as usual) non-sentential – but they were also all at once stereotypical and irrelevant. One student managed a polysyllable: “Patriarchy.” Another produced a specimen of minimal periodicity: “Society is evolving.” A third, rising to the level of a formally complete utterance, said: “Iphigenia is a strong female character; she takes command by saying that she wants to die.” 

It is absurdly easy to trace the origin of these locutions, which have almost no content at all, but which function rather as Shibboleths of indoctrination – answers that one is supposed to give because they supposedly explain everything. 

It is also absurdly easy to see that training of this type is distinctly not conducive to the development of real thinking. But training of this type is seductive. It consists in a pose of omniscience, which even the totally ignorant can imitate. 

Weaning students from such a deformation of their spirit is a delicate and often frustrating endeavor.

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