Great Books: A Primer

A guide for the perplexed

At the end of last week and over the weekend, what I will generously term “a conversation” broke out online about great books pedagogy. I am being generous in calling it a conversation because I think that many participants behaved extremely badly and quickly became more interested in scoring rhetorical points than in understanding what one another were saying. Because I count people on multiple sides of this discussion as friends, I think it is in everyone’s interest to lay out some basic terms. I write this as a kind of primer of the great books style of education for anybody who might be interested to know what exactly those of us who practice this form of education claim to be doing.

“Great books” is a form of general education that aims at cultivating the distinctive human capacities for language and reason through guided discussion of worthwhile primary texts.

This compact definition covers all the bases, I think. It packs a great deal into a relatively short amount of space, so it’s worth going through the terms to spell out what’s happening here.

Great books is a form of general education. The distinction being made here is between general education and specialized study. In the American university system, a certain portion of one’s degree is set aside for “general education,” meant to provide intellectual breadth to complement the more concentrated and specialized studies that form the “major” or “concentration” of a university degree. At most American colleges, this takes the form of a checklist of distribution requirements: a certain number of credits in humanities, some in social science, some in natural science, and probably some kind of writing requirement and perhaps a diversity requirement. Maybe there’s a “quantitative reasoning” (i.e. mathematics) requirement somewhere in there too. The courses that might fill out this list are chosen from whatever each individual department has decided to offer: there is no coordination or attempt at order. A great books program in the typical mode replaces many of these requirements with a set of seminars organized around canonical works of literature, philosophy, history, and political/social theory, taught by faculty from the various subject areas covered by the texts.

General education is a distinctive part of the American college curriculum, drawn from the English portion of our higher education system’s heritage. (A teacher of mine once remarked that the American university was a mutt of an institution, modeling the undergraduate college on the British model, the graduate schools on the German model, and making a distinctly American innovation in the form of the business school.) The original archetype is Literae Humaniores at Oxford, a degree meant to be a general education in literature, history, and philosophy through the study of Greek and Latin authors but which grew to encompass modern philosophy as well. Great books itself is an attempt to create a “modern” gen ed for an era in which students cannot be presumed to have had a classical education and thus cannot study the ancient authors in the original. One might object to the existence of gen ed in the first place; it is absent from most higher ed systems around the world. That may be a discussion worth having, but general education is a longstanding part of the American degree system; it is unlikely to go away, and so it is worth thinking about how one can do it well.

The point of creating a separate class of general education courses is, in large part, to clarify the job of the faculty. Anyone who has taught for any significant amount of time at an American college knows that there is an enormous difference between teaching students who are specializing in your field and students who are taking a course to fulfill a requirement. They have different questions and different goals, and it is unbelievably difficult to pitch a course at both groups simultaneously or to teach both groups well at the same time. A great books program solves this problem by delineating clearly between general and specialist courses so that, in courses of each type, a teacher can focus on doing one thing well rather than trying to do two things badly.

Great books aims at cultivating the distinctive human capacities for language and reason. In addition to being classified as general education, these courses have a very general aim. We great books people sometimes use the starry-eyed language of wanting to help students “be more human,” but I think it’s important to specify what this means: becoming better at using the specifically human (and closely related!) powers of thought and speech. I think the best way to do this is to use these powers in a setting where they can be criticized and where better ways of using them can be modeled and practiced. This, incidentally, is the primary role of an instructor in a great books seminar: to model careful inquiry that is conscious of its limitations and aims at saying something true, not just something agreeable, and to keep the discussion moving along productive lines rather than degenerating into performative “debate” or getting stuck on questions that are only answerable with secondary literature. I certainly do not want to downplay the importance of secondary literature, but I do want to draw a distinction between the kinds of questions on which a group of people can productively work with minimal secondary aid—that is, questions appropriate for the seminar—and those more appropriate for discussion outside of class or for a more specialized kind of class.

Here I can’t help but reveal my fundamental biases that arise both from my background in oral-traditional epic poetry and from my fondness for Wittgenstein. I am pretty firmly attached to the idea that what we call thinking is almost entirely coterminous with language and that it is therefore a fundamentally social process rather than an individual one. The great breakthrough of literacy is that it makes possible a kind of dialogue with only one living person involved, as long as that person has access to the record of someone else’s thinking in the form of a text. Nonetheless, the canonical form of thinking is social, and so learning to think also means learning the virtues (that is, the rationally-grounded habits) of a good interlocutor. These habits, and awareness of them as habits, are, for me, the primary goal of general education, because they are what will serve students best in directing their own studies both during the rest of their time at university and for the rest of their lives.

Great books pedagogy achieves its goals through guided discussion. I have gone over some of the details of this portion already. The instructor is not, in practice, dispensable but aspires to dispensability, in that we aspire to so thoroughly inculcate the habits of attention both to text and to peers into our students that they no longer require our interventions. What a good instructor brings is not necessarily technical knowledge about the text but experience having productive conversations and knowledge about both the potential and the limits of non-expert discussions. This is, I think, a kind of knowledge that every scholar has a duty to acquire precisely because it is the knowledge necessary for beginning any kind of inquiry. We cannot begin a question with all of the context; indeed, we will not finish it with all necessary context because any text, especially something really worth reading like the Iliad or the Divine Comedy or The Brothers Karamazov, touches on so much that one could spend a lifetime “preparing” to read it. One must at some point stop preparing and simply read, and recognize that there may be questions that one does not presently have the resources to answer. Even in translation, Homer is likely to provoke questions about formulaic diction and how one can build a poem out of formulaic phrases; one can acknowledge such questions while also acknowledging that answering them requires technical knowledge of archaic dialects of Greek that is generally only available through graduate-level training in classical philology. And speaking from my own experience, the answers to these questions are genuinely fascinating, and it’s a joy to demonstrate this to students! But in a great books program I have a particular mission in the classroom, a mission that I share with my colleagues who are teaching roughly the same syllabus that I am, so I am obliged to stick to that mission and encourage students who are curious about technical questions to talk with me outside of class.

Finally, great books pedagogy carries out its discussions using worthwhile primary texts. This is a slippery term: as many people point out, a translation is a kind of secondary source. But one can generally use a kind of Potter Stewart standard here: there is a strong and obvious difference between attempting to convey, as transparently as possible, what a source is saying in the same order and manner as the original and commenting, elucidating, or otherwise radically altering the form and manner of the original. A translation of the Summa Theologiae, or a portion of it, will contain the same number of questions as the original; each question will contain the same number of articles; each article will contain the same number of objecta and responses; &c. A commentary is a much more open-ended thing; indeed, some of the greatest commentaries rise to the status of original works in their own right, like Machiavelli’s commentary on Livy or, one might daringly suggest, Vergil’s commentary on Homer (or indeed Homer’s commentary on Homer!).

The category of “worthwhile” is much harder to define, and many answers will depend heavily on local conditions and limitations. Some texts are worthwhile in theory but very difficult to teach in practice: Don Quixote and the longer novels of Dostoevsky demand more time than is often practical in many programs, so one must either excerpt them or teach something else. It might be worthwhile to teach Euclid in a program that emphasizes the history of scientific and mathematical thought, but programs without that emphasis will probably choose something else. Programs seeking to outline a certain amount of intellectual history will prize texts that are in explicit conversation with predecessors: Hobbes is not only a genius in his own right but also a powerful rebuttal to Scholastic thought even as he holds fast to certain formal modes of Scholastic reasoning. But the key criterion is a certain kind of inexhaustibility: the faculty who will continue to teach these texts should be able to continually deepen their own understanding, not only through such secondary reading as they see fit to do but through continuing to read the text anew and discuss them with colleagues and students year after year.

When all of this is done well, the effect is a kind of intellectual fountain of youth for an instructor: one finds one’s thinking enlivened and invigorated in ways that many of us thought we had left behind in our undergraduate or early graduate years. This energy and joy, if one lets it show through to one’s students, is the most universally effective motivation available: students cannot help but notice the genuine enthusiasm and love for intellectual work that animates their instructor, and all but the most cynical will respond to it with at least mild curiosity about what, exactly, could possibly cause such odd and undignified behavior in a sensible adult. This is the beginning of the real holy grail of great books teaching, which we cannot control but always hope for: the awakening of philosophic eros, the itch in the soul that will bring forth its long-forgotten wings. If it happens to just one student, the seminar was worth it; if it happens to two, you have witnessed the magnum opus of the alchemists; if it happens to three, you have seen the back of the Most High as he passed by and you will not be the same. I have gone far past easy intelligibility here; those who have seen it do not need it explained, and those who have not will not hear it. The only way to go further is to come and see.