Great Books

I have been thinking and talking a lot recently about the place of Great Books and the study of the textual foundations of Western Civilization in the modern American university.  Not only are these central to my teaching, I am a beneficiary of this pedagogy.  Columbia, my Alma Mater, is famous for its Core Curriculum, a series of required courses such as 'Lit Hum' and 'Contemporary Civilization' = CC) originating in the curricular reforms of the World War I period.  I had the unusual experience of being both a student and a teacher in Columbia's Core Curriculum: Columbia was my first teaching job after I finished graduate school, and I was assigned a section of CC.    Needless to say, the experience was transformative for my own intellectual and professional development.

Over the past few days, I've been reorganizing and cleaning out some of my bookshelves and located some of the books I used in college in CC.  

Some of the books I used as an undergraduate in CC at Columbia

Two quick reflections that I hope might be worth sharing.  The word I often use in how I approach these texts is by way of 'alienation' - and I mean it in the Hegelian sense of Entfremdung, rather than the juridical sense of a jus abutendi.    People, of course, have different views on how to approach texts such as these.  My approach is to achieve a critical distance of alienation, and for two reasons.  One is that it's vital for us to cultivate the distance necessary to lose that sense of ownership, of familiarity, to something we might feel somehow belongs to us.  Romans called this suum.  What I'm trying to cultivate in the classroom and lecture hall is the opposite: alienum.  That removal is absolutely essential.

This is perhaps harder for some than for others.  It came very easily for me.  As a nineteen year old child of immigrants enrolling in CC and reading Aristotle and Hobbes for the first time, it was all foreign to me.  But, as I often tell friends, it is precisely that foreign-ness that eventually allowed me to become the scholar and teacher I am now.  If you see these texts as suum - as 'your own' - entitled to a special privileged access and commissioned to a kind of guardianship role of preservation, you won't be able to 'do' anything with the texts.    (this is why I believe my Roman law students, for whom Justinian and Gaius are totally foreign entities, despite their centrality to Western jurisprudence, do extraordinarily well when they go onto law school).

Of course, 'alienation' is paired (again borrowing from Hegel's system) with reconciliation.  And the point of cultivating an artificial alienation is precisely to achieve that.  

The second reflection: Some of you know that I'm a classically trained cellist.  But what I noticed, especially beginning in graduate school, is a curious asymmetry in the musician's study of 'the repertoire' and the humanist's study of 'the canon.'  Classical music is just that.  There's no need for any qualification as 'Western' because its universal scope is meant to be accessible to all of humanity.  Beethoven, in particular, is an outstanding humanist in this respect, and we can learn a great deal from how he wanted his music to reach us - as he addressed us, via Schiller, in the Ninth Symphony - as siblings.  It is the ultimate inclusive message.

From my marked-up Allemande of the Fifth Suite.  In my teen years, I studied the Bach Suites with Fred Zlotkin in New York, one of the champions of performing Bach with full Baroque ornamentation.  Any cellists on this blog?  What do you think of the bowings?  I tried several variations over the years.  These work best for me, partly adopted from Casals.

Just as I think Bach, Schubert, and Brahms represent music that everyone should experience, so should everyone have the chance to read Aristotle, Cicero, and Rousseau.  Not everyone agrees with me.  But at least what I can do is explain how my musical training has shaped my own pedagogical reasoning on this point - but especially for political theorists.  Theorists who work their way through the canon are invariably better theorists.  I would say the same, more generally, about political scientists too.