Tradition & Historical Consciousness: A Few Random Observations: Part Two

The question now becomes: Is it possible to revive a tradition and build something of lasting value while avoiding anachronism? If so, how? These have become ever more pressing questions since the 19th century, when the rise of modern historiography threatened to turn all fields of study into relativism.

A brief examination of two thinkers’ struggle with this problem will help us grasp it better. The first thinker is Friedrich Nietzsche. By education and training, Nietzsche was a classicist who concentrated on Greek history and literature. However, as he embarked on his professional career, he began to grapple with the problem that would occupy the rest of his troubled life: The modern rationalistic and scientific mind (which he ultimately traced back to Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy) had destroyed any kind of absolute value in the world by eliminating God. But, now that God was out of the picture, what point was there in living? What value could man find in life? What value could Nietzsche find in life? Nietzsche did not think that modern reason could tell man why he should want to live. This is the point of his famous aphorism in The Gay Science, in which the madman runs onto the marketplace in broad daylight holding a lantern, asking the burghers where God is now that they have killed Him. The death of God was not an occasion for joy but a reason for despair—unless man could find another source of value in this life. Nietzsche’s early dilemma, then, was that he had rejected the transcendent God of Christianity, the prior source of all value, as simply a form of “slave morality,” but had not yet found anything with which to replace Him.

Nietzsche’s solution to his dilemma—to be found even in his earlier, less iconoclastic and less stridently atheistic texts—is to make man into a creator of value. This was the Umwertung aller Werte he sought to bring about. The Dionysian ideal of The Birth of Tragedy is an early version of this idea of man as creator of value. In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, he examines different viewpoints from which to write history, and he finds that the proper viewpoint is from the view of the great man who is capable of creating value. “You can only explain the past by what is highest in the present” (§ 6). “Thus, history is to be written by the man of experience and character. He who has not lived through something greater and nobler than others, will riot be able to explain anything great and noble in the past. The language of the past is always oracular: you will only understand if as builders of the future who know the present” (§ 6). These quotations, of course, can be read as meaning merely that the historian must himself possess a certain greatness of soul in order to understand the past; he must be on the same level as the men he is trying to interpret for the present. However, Nietzsche emphasizes less the traditional moral and intellectual virtues than the nebulous quality of creativeness; virtue is excellence in accord with a recognized standard, whereas creativity consists of creating that standard for oneself. It is in great part a rejection of the study of history.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, though, Nietzsche takes the concept of the great man who can create values even further. In that book’s prologue, Nietzsche portrays Zarathustra as a mythical figure who during his time of solitude on the mountain has become so full of wisdom that he must now descend to his fellow man and unburden himself of the values he has created. (The idea of a man spending time on a mountain to grow in wisdom is a common trope in myths.) Most tellingly, among the people he meets, he recognizes a kindred spirit in the dying tightrope-walker, in the man who could dance above the abyss—one of Nietzsche’s favorite images of how the great man should live, as opposed to the “last men” Zarathustra meets down below. The tightrope-walker knows that he has nothing solid under his feet (no Grund) but a flimsy wire and through his own virtuosity and daring he turns something pointless like walking between two buildings into a work of art. He mocks death and the ultimate meaninglessness of his own act: his own creativity is the source of value. The myths handed down by the gods have no place in Nietzsche’s thought.

Nietzsche saw the problems created by the death of God and traditional values and by the rise of relativism, but ultimately decided to bury those values even deeper by turning the Dionysian self into the creator of value. History would no longer be a real standard for Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s respect for the Greek tradition, paradoxically, led him to reject tradition as a standard for behavior—the individual would judge history through his own creativity.

Our second thinker would agree with Nietzsche that there must be a standard by which to judge history and tradition, but his own position would be more humble. Rather than looking for the standard within himself, this thinker sought it in the teachings, in the tradition, of the Catholic Church. This second thinker is J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien shared with Nietzsche an intense passion for language and literature, though they worked in different fields. Instead of concentrating in Greek and Latin (which he had already mastered before university), Tolkien chose to dedicate his studies to Old and Middle English as well as several other medieval languages, such as Old Norse and Old Finnish. While he was a historical scholar of the first rank in his chosen field, he was also a tremendously imaginative author. Many of his works arose from his desire to fuse his literature and language studies with his studies of myth. As mentioned yesterday, it was Tolkien’s discussions of myth with C.S. Lewis that led the latter to convert to Christianity. In his incomplete poem The Fall of Arthur (which was only published in 2013), Tolkien tried give these legends a more English feel by adapting the alliterative system of Old English verse. The young Tolkien started on the myths that were published after his death as The Silmarillion as a way of practicing his invented languages. Even in his invented languages, he strove for historical verisimilitude. He developed different dialects of the same language and even extensive histories of each dialect, which he described in the appendices to The Return of the King. In his myths too he strove for historical verisimilitude. In The Lord of the Rings every story has a back story and every song has a legend behind it. In all his works Tolkien intertwines history and myth in every detail. He created a mythical world by means of historical consciousness in such a way that myth and historical consciousness were not in conflict inside that world.

It is this intertwining of myth and history in a common origin that is the essence of tradition for Tolkien. Tolkien depicts the very first act in the creation of Middle Earth, in The Silmarillion, as a series of harmonious melodies springing forth from the mind of the Creator. Soon, however, an evil spirit introduces dissonance into the melodies, which the Creator nevertheless finds a way to incorporate into his own music. The harmonious melodies are the basis of all our traditions; anything we can create is a reflection of this ideal, which, as Niggle finds out (in Leaf by Niggle), can only be realized with the help of God in the next life. However, in this life, in history, the artist must be fundamentally humble. His task is to reclaim the beauty of the original melodies, but his powers are limited: he can only engage in “sub-creation,” to use Tolkien’s term. God creates history; our task in history is to reclaim our principles: the Creator’s harmonies. At the beginning of history stands a myth, and in history we must reclaim this myth.

For Tolkien, then, any tradition—whether in art, literature, language—is a historical means by which we return to our origins. History by itself is not as important. Indeed, Tolkien called this life “a long defeat.” What matters is how we shape our tradition is to lead us to God, the foundation, the Grund, that Nietzsche tried to do without, but neither successfully nor happily.

Tolkien does not give us a blueprint for how to integrate tradition and historical consciousness. There just is no easy way to synthesize historical scholarship with a distinct literary sensibility. It takes a genius like Tolkien to achieve what he did. However, Tolkien did prove in his work that it was possible to use history to re-establish a connection to myth and tradition in the modern world and he showed us what such a synthesis could look like.

Tradition & Historical Consciousness: A Few Random Observations: Part One

Dear reader: I apologize in advance for the disjointed, rambling nature of my next two posts, but my vanity tells me that they are interesting enough and just barely coherent enough to merit publication here.

 Here at the Guild Review one of our abiding interests is the place of tradition in the modern world and in what way we can shape that tradition. The very idea of shaping tradition, however, may seem problematic to some. Most of us reading this blog, I assume, are Catholics, for whom the most important tradition is the deposit of faith, which was complete upon the death of St. John, from which nothing can be subtracted and to which nothing can be added; it can only be more perfectly understood and expressed by the Church. One is rightfully hesitant to shape that tradition; much safer simply to assist in handing on that deposit of faith to future generations unchanged. As graduates or friends of the University of Dallas, we went to college to learn from the tradition, not necessarily to “shape” it. It is arrogant in the extreme for a youth to think that he will revolutionize any particular field of learning; much better to listen in respect to our elders before setting on a lifelong journey of learning. Finally, the phrase “shaping tradition” also smacks of poorly-disguised novelty, usually imposed upon an indifferent group of people to encourage more “enthusiasm.” How often have we heard school administrators trying to win support for an unpopular program by proclaiming that “the tradition begins now”?

But, hopefully, all of us here would recognize that there is a legitimate place for all of us to “shape” our tradition, to one degree or another. Unfortunately, however, we tend to think of tradition as a culture’s or religion’s roots in history and not as the flower and fruit of the plant which spread the seed and preserve that plant for the future. To understand tradition and how we should shape we need to understand its relation to historical consciousness.

More precisely, we need to develop a historical consciousness that is in harmony, not in conflict, with tradition. Christianity can supply us with that proper understanding of historical consciousness and tradition. In more primitive cultures, tradition is opposed to historical consciousness in the form of myth. According to Mircea Eliade, in a pre-historical culture everything relates back to illud tempus, “that time” when the gods walked the earth. (Eliade uses the phrase “in illo tempore,” which he takes from the customary beginning of the Gospel in the Latin Mass: “At that time [Jesus]…”) Myths are concerned with origins. Any deviation from the example of the gods set forth in the myth is a sin.

Christianity clearly shares some of these qualities of myth. However, there are two crucial distinctions between Christianity and other ancient myths. The first is the distinction that Tolkien explained to C.S. Lewis in 1931: Christianity is a myth, but it is a true myth. And by “true” we of course mean “historically true.” Our God actually did create the world and then entered into that world and performed the actions that form the basis of our Christian myth. For Christians the origin with which we are concerned is not just the creation of the world, but also the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in history. But, as Catholics, each time we attend Mass, we also enter into what Eliade calls “mythical time”: we are present at the un-bloody renewal of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. What happens at Mass is essentially the same event as happened on the cross nearly 2,000 years ago.

The second crucial distinction is that Jesus preached that he would come again at the end of time. He ends the history of this world by judging the living and the dead. Our actions on earth matter—we are not condemned to endless cycles of reincarnation. The time between our origin, redemption, and eschaton has a direction in which we are free to move closer to or further from God. Through the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Second Coming Christianity gives history a movement from beginning to end; eschatology transformed myth into history. Christianity gives history a shape; it is up to us—with God’s grace—to shape our Christian tradition within history.

But, how should a Christian shape a tradition? One way Christians have always shaped their tradition is by reclaiming their principles—their origins—in the creation, redemption, and continuing sanctification of the world. Every time a Christian meditates on the life of Jesus and ponders how to apply that true myth to his life he is shaping the tradition in his own life and those around him. But, Christianity also allows its followers to subject the principles of other cultures and religions to itself; everything that is good can be referred back to Jesus Christ in some way.

An example should make this second way of shaping tradition a bit clearer. In Scholasticism: Problems and Personalities of Medieval Philosophy, Josef Pieper depicts scholasticism as a twofold endeavor: to recover the learning of the ancient world and to synthesize it with Christianity. The barbarian invasions had devastated scholarship in the late Roman Empire and many authors have been lost in part, if not in whole. All this is well known. But, then, in a somewhat surprising move, Pieper compares the project of medieval theologians with the Great Books programs of mid-20th-century America. In both instances, there was sufficient source material, but this source material needed to be catalogued, understood, and finally synthesized. The cultures undertaking these projects were arguably intellectually underdeveloped and in need of spiritual roots to prepare them for them for the role they were to play on the world stage. Both projects sought to rescue the ancient wisdom from the barbarism of the present age.

However, there is one important difference between the intellectual atmospheres of these two periods that needs to be emphasized: in modern America, historical consciousness is far more developed than it was in medieval Europe. Until relatively recently in history, it was possible to be considered learned while having only a very general idea of the past; that is impossible now.

One key effect of this increased historical consciousness is to turn anachronisms into glaring errors. While increased historical consciousness is generally good, it can also overshadow the main point in a novel, a piece of art, or in philosophy. For instance, when he employs examples from etymology, St. Thomas Aquinas loves to explain the origin of the Latin word lapis (“stone”) as a compound of laedere (“injure”) and pes (“foot”). This etymology is, of course, incorrect. But, how many readers will lose trust in Aquinas once they find out inadequate his knowledge of historical linguistics was, even though it really has no bearing on his philosophy? Likewise, it can be more difficult to appreciate past works of art when we recognize their anachronisms. For instance, any visitor to Charlemagne’s cathedral in Aachen with even a minimal knowledge of the history of architecture will notice the incongruity between the original octagonal Romanesque chapel (and its distinct Byzantine influence), the high Gothic apse, and the Baroque side chapel (the Ungarnkapelle). Finally, certain ideas about art become laughable when viewed in their historical context. Opera, for example, began as a pet project of wealthy and learned Florentine noblemen who thought they were reviving ancient Greek music and drama, especially in the form of a singing chorus. This anachronism does nothing to affect the aesthetic value of any particular opera, but it may color moderns’ views of their forebears.

Who Should Govern?

One of the most important and enduring questions of political philosophy is, ‘Who should govern?’ If we take ‘politics’ to refer not only to government but to the whole life of the city, the question of who should govern includes not only who should be president or mayor, but also admiral, CEO, high school principal and countless other roles.

The question of who should govern is often intertwined with the question of how they should be selected. Democracy is an answer to the question of selection, but it does not tell us whom we should elect, or why. Likewise, the ancients enjoyed dividing regimes into those governed by the one, the few and the many. This distinction, though helpful, most directly answers the question, ‘How many should govern?’ Shy of truly universal and direct democracy, someone will be excluded from some portion of governing; on what basis do we select those who do participate?

These matters were rattling around in my head when a friend asked me to name historical heavyweights (of the modern era) who were born into privilege. The question implied that those descended from previous governors ought to govern, and are broadly capable of doing so, by virtue of nature or training. I was surprised, however, to find that some of the first people to come to mind were self-made men, whose titles followed, not preceded, their success. William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke’s father was only a minor nobleman. Sir Francis Drake, Sir Francis Walsingham, and Lord Burghley were all more or less middle class men who were knighted for their hard work and intelligence. Admiral Lord Nelson was the son of an Anglican priest; Sir Winston Churchill was not born a knight (though he was the grandson of a duke). This is not to say that those born into privilege cannot also be accomplished leaders; Pitt the Younger, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Carl Gustaf von Rosen, Otto von Habsburg, Fra’ Andrew Bertie and Fra’ Matthew Festing come to mind.

Who, then, should govern? Are we limited to exploring historical examples, or are there principles we can identify?

Having turned over the question a few times, I have settled on a three-fold answer: Equality. Hierarchy. Merit.

There is a logical sequence to these three ideas. Before all else, we must acknowledge the fundamental equality of all men. Common experience teaches that death comes for all of us; divine revelation teaches that we are all made in the divine image. Any further statement about who should govern or in what manner must take into account this basic equality, in dignity and in death.

Though all men are equal, they are not the same. Some are stronger, some are faster, some are more intelligent. A football coach would be a fool to consider his linemen and wide receivers interchangeable; likewise, he would be a fool to play his first and third strings for equal amounts of time, simply on the basis of their equal human dignity. The natural result of such differences among men is hierarchy. We must be clear that this hierarchy is circumscribed by the deeper human equality, and pertains only to certain qualities or functions. The fastest receiver may have a right to be in the starting line-up; he does not have a right, by virtue of his speed, to dictate morality to the third string receivers. Thus, those who reject hierarchy altogether are in error, but so are those who slavishly support it in all things.

If hierarchy naturally exists, within a broader framework of equality, who should be in its upper echelons? Here I contend that merit is the operative principle. This may seem obvious; if we are to have three strings on a football team, who wouldn’t put the fast receivers in the first string? But if this is obvious with regard to football, it is often less clear with regard to politics. As already suggested, the question of who is meritorious is often confused with how they are selected. This is not simply a matter of semantics, but can cloud our thinking.

The democrat, for example, is interested in experience and honesty, but would usually tell you that he votes for someone with whom he agrees on key issues. Notice, however, that the question has become self-referential: merit is defined primarily by views, which are measured against the individual voter. The voter does not ask, ‘Does this candidate conform himself to reality?’ but ‘Does he conform to me?’ (I have observed similar behavior from my colleagues in the historical profession. When asked what they thought of a given author, they frequently reply, ‘I liked Smith. I agreed with his main points.’ To which I sometimes respond, ‘I don’t care if you agreed with him or not. Is he right?’) While most voters would like to think that their own views conform to reality, and therefore candidates who conform to the voter also, by extension, conform to reality, I cannot help but think that our discourse has become so self-referential as to forget about the broader criteria of merit or reality.

Aristocrats are liable to be similarly confused about merit. They would, of course, argue – as my friend’s question implied – that a family history near the top of the hierarchy produces men who are more meritorious. But this too is frequently reduced to a shorthand that tradition or birth should dictate who governs, and as a consequence is in danger of forgetting why they should govern. Even so-call meritocrats often reduce merit to the means by which it is measured: civil service exams, years of experience or outcomes of one’s previous work. These may be good measures, but can easily become fossilized, forgetting about merit. Likewise, one must remember that poor examinations or faulty rubrics will inadequately assess merit.

Frankly, I have no silver bullet for determining merit. It is an elusive thing which is not easily defined, measured or agreed upon. But I think we would do well to at least keep the discussion focused on merit, rather than allowing peripheral matters to take center stage.

The prudent man, when choosing a leader – of a city, a nation, an academic department or a business unit – should recall that leaders govern those who are fundamentally their equals, though it is permissible and even advisable that particular individuals exercise leadership in certain areas. Finally, those choosing leaders, seeking that elusive quality of merit, would do well to find someone who conforms himself to reality, who comes from a tradition of excellence and who has demonstrated his capacity in education and outcomes.

If you want to accuse me of giving a bland and platitudinous conclusion to one of the most lively questions of political philosophy, next time you are at a political rally, try shouting, ‘Equality! Hierarchy! Merit!’ You might have some explaining to do.

Reviving Languages in the Classroom

In much discourse today, "tradition" looms in our minds as a monolith, imposing and utterly unmovable. But traditions are actually much more fragile than we often think, and even the best-intentioned attempts to preserve them can alter them radically.

A good example to illustrate this point is language. Language is the means by which we interact with people, without which no other tradition would be possible. Language obviously does not live by itself; it must be taught to each child that comes into the world, and must be cultivated by adults. Most people, though, never consciously thought, as they grew up themselves, about what language they were learning, nor do they consciously decide what language they will teach to their children. Children simply take their language in with their mother's milk--which is why the Germans call their native tongue their Muttersprache. Yet there are times when individuals and communities must make a conscious choice to hand down the language they have spoken for generations. This usually happens when another language has become dominant in the area, whether through demographic change or some socio-political reason. How many extinct languages in the world today are nearing extinction, supplanted by other languages?

Sometimes, the language will not die but will linger on its deathbed until it can be revived. Today languages are usually revived by means of classroom instruction. But traditions, such as a language, cannot really be revived in a school without changing the tradition itself. The moment formal instruction is needed to maintain the basic elements of a tradition, that tradition has changed significantly: the tradition is neither entirely old, nor entirely new, but a tertium quid. The drive to preserve the tradition, while it can save the tradition from extinction, never preserves the tradition entirely intact.

One example of such a language that nearly died out before being revived in the classroom, but has undergone great changes because of its revival, is Irish. By 1900 the Irish language was largely confined to poor rural areas in the west, such as the Dingle Peninsula in Kerry, Connemara and the Aran Island in Galway, parts of Mayo, and northwest Donegal (see the parts in green on the map to the right). These regions are known today as the Gaeltacht; Irish is still the ordinary means of communication in daily life there and is spoken on local radio and television. After gaining independence from Ireland, the new government made Irish an official language and introduced it as a mandatory subject in the schools. The language has even made something of a comeback in the towns and even in Dublin itself, often among the highly-educated. Because of these official efforts, Irish is enjoying something of a renaissance.

But, a strange thing has happened to the language, according to Brian Ó Broin: he has fears that there will be a "schism" between rural Gaeltacht residents and urban speakers, between those who grew up with the language and those who originally learned it in school. When members of the two groups meet, they actually prefer to speak in English because they cannot easily understand each other's Irish. As Ó Broin explains, Irish has many subtly different sounds, especially guttural sounds, that are very hard for a native English speaker to distinguish. And all these subtle differences are important:

Irish has a fairly sophisticated morphological system. That is to say, words can change form in several ways. The noun cainteoir, for instance, can mutate to gcainteoir, cainteora, chainteora, cainteoirí, and gcainteoirí, depending on its grammatical function. As we saw earlier, if the pronunciation of these mutations alters or fails, the entire grammatical system of the language becomes endangered.

One example that Ó Broin gives is that urban speakers did not "mark any masculine nouns that were in the plural or genitive." In this example, the urban speakers' failure to pronounce certain sounds correctly has led to a drastically simplified system for the declension of masculine nouns. What is being born is a new pidgin Irish spoken primarily by urban speakers, as opposed to the older, more complex form spoken in the countryside.

All this is interesting in itself (at least to amateur linguists), as an example of a language experiencing major changes in real time. It is also interesting, though, as an example of the unwitting harm preservationism can do to what it seeks to preserve. There is much reason for rejoicing at the successful revival of Irish through classroom learning, but Irish's shift from being the language of the poor to being a marker of middle-class education shows that much is lost even as a tradition is saved.

Nietzsche: Erudition vs. Wisdom

Back in April I wrote a post about the Great Books as a system of education, and argued that education should be about the formation of the individual within a tradition, and not just the amassing of knowledge.

Just the other day, though, I re-read a passage from Nietzsche's Schopenhauer as Educator and was struck by its relevance to the contemporary debate over the value of the Great Books. In section eight of the essay, Nietzsche denounces those philosophers, especially those in the Kantian tradition in Germany, who had let the state buy them off with cushy jobs as tenured university professors and thus became unwilling to question, much less criticize, the existing order. This easy accommodation with the state led to a grave danger:

This is actually the third, and the most dangerous, concession made by philosophy to the state, when it is compelled to appear in the form of erudition, as the knowledge (more specifically) of the history of philosophy. The genius looks purely and lovingly on existence, like a poet, and cannot dive too deep into it;—and nothing is more abhorrent to him than to burrow among the innumerable strange and wrong-headed opinions. The learned history of the past was never a true philosopher's business, in India or Greece; and a professor of philosophy who busies himself with such matters must be, at best, content to hear it said of him, "He is an able scholar, antiquary, philologist, historian,"—but never, "He is a philosopher."

The distinction Nietzsche draws between studying the history of philosophy and doing philosophy, between attaining erudition and wisdom, is what should guide the debate about the Great Books. Knowledge--or, as we say today, information--is of course necessary, but without a tradition to give form to that information, it will only become, as Nietzsche said On the Use and Abuse of History, "indigestible knowledge-stones." Without a coherent philosophy we will not be able to digest all the information and historical knowledge we already have and be nourished with wisdom.

Windmills & Aesthetics

While wasting time on the internet recently, I came upon two photographs of windmills on the German island of Fehmarn. (Now that I think about it, Caitlin and I might have passed by this island on our trip from Copenhagen to Lübeck a few years ago.)

The first shows a traditional windmill, the type which we Americans usually associate with the Dutch, but which, with variations, can be found across Europe--Don Quixote, after all, needed something to tilt at in Spain.


The second shows a modern windmill which is part of a windfarm on the island.


My question, to which I have no definite answer, is: When I compare these windmills for aesthetic purposes, why do I prefer the first windmill to the second? Am I just so obsessed with German culture that I prefer anything that looks German to me? That's possible. Am I just out of touch with the modern world and hankering for a tradition I've never been a part of? There's probably some truth to that accusation, too. Just maybe, though, I really am considering more purely aesthetic factors, such as the form of the structures, the materials, etc.

Nevertheless, whatever my own reasons for preferring the traditional windmill, I actually don't think that my aesthetic preference is all that uncommon; I suspect that many people share my instinctive aesthetic preference for the traditional windmill, and that many people still generally prefer traditional aesthetics to modern aesthetics. Why would that be, even though our culture generally looks down on tradition? It's a curious fact about our culture.

Finally, if a reader wants to defend the aesthetic superiority of the modern windmill, please go ahead and do so. I would love to hear that argument.

Source: The two pictures come from this slide show of the island. (The captions are in German, but if all you want is pretty pictures, who cares?)

Against the Great Books?

The Great Books are not the solution to the problems of higher education in this country. In fact, the Great Books are enemies of wisdom.

How could a proud graduate of the University of Dallas like myself say such a thing? Such a statement practically amounts to blasphemy!

But, before you dismiss me as some crazy liberal, let me point out that I am not the one who made those statements. They were made by Patrick Deneen and Fritz Wilhelmsen--hardly crazy liberals. If anything, they are usually described as crazy conservatives. And indeed, both men make their critique of Great Books programs from a conservative perspective. Last week Deneen wrote an article "Why the Great Books Aren't the Answer" which has sparked some lively discussion on a couple Internet forums. Deneen's concerns, though, are not entirely original; they were voiced years ago by one of UD's very own, the late Fritz Wilhelmsen, in his essay "The Great Books: Enemies of Wisdom."

There is a lot to think about in Deneen's and Wilhelmsen's articles, but I would like to focus on one interesting issue they both raise, and one which is, I believe, at the heart of their critique of Great Books programs: the role of tradition in a proper education.

Deneen identifies two potential effects that Great Books programs will have on most students. On the one hand, making students read a "potpourri of conflicting views"--from the ancient Greeks through the 20th century--can easily lead a student to adopt relativism or to despair of ever finding the truth once he realizes that all the great thinkers he has read disagreed radically with one another. On the other hand, many students enter college with a progressive theory of history in their mind: all of history has reached its culmination in the present, therefore the present is the best. Instead of relativism, these students will simply be confirmed in progressivist dogma. But more worrisome than either relativism or progressivism by itself is the possibility that students will combine these twin dangers of relativism to form a single monster: the dogmatic relativist. The dogmatic relativist will believe that history, and therefore truth, has culminated in relativism.

To fend off these dangers, universities, in Deneen's view, need to give students a framework within which to read the Great Books, and not simply approach them with neutrality. Ultimately, Deneen (a professor at Georgetown) believes it is necessary to teach "in the light of the standards that the Catholic tradition would provide."

Wilhelmsen in his article focuses less on the conflicting content of the Great Books and more on the inadequacy of the Great Books in fostering in students the virtues necessary for the philosophical life. For Wilhelmsen, following Aristotle, philosophy is a way of knowing; it is not found in books, but rather in the philosopher's virtues, the habits of the mind, "through which things are understood in their causal structures." Philosophy, though, also requires that a master educate a beginner in these virtues. This approach to philosophy--which Wilhelmsen describes as it used to be practiced in Catholic universities in America--is at once both traditional and personal. Each student (and teacher) submits to the tradition, but is also able, thanks to his own virtues, to contribute to that tradition. Wilhelmsen at one point even uses the word "apprentice" to describe a student's relationship to his teacher. A philosophy department at a university, then, should in this respect quite literally resemble a craft guild.

For Wilhelmsen, one of the chief follies of the typical Great Books program, besides only teaching students what others said rather than to philosophize themselves, is to teach certain texts with no regard for the historical context in which they were written. Students are expected to cope with the most varied authors "without having the faintest hint of the kind of world within which these men lived and thought." In other words, the typical Great Books program utterly neglects the importance of tradition.

Deneen's and Wilhelmsen's critiques of Great Books programs, though they emphasize different aspects of education, both rest on the assumption that a student cannot learn the truth unless he is embedded within a craft and a tradition.

This insight that has been developed by Alisdair MacIntyre in the area of virtue ethics, especially in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (in particular, chapter III: “Too Many Thomisms?”) According to MacIntyre, tradition embodies the claim that “reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry.” This claim would sound preposterous to most people today, especially in a discussion of higher education, since most people conceive of higher education as “free enquiry." MacIntyre, however, defends the rationality of tradition by pointing to two things an apprentice in any craft has to learn:

[First,] the apprentice has to learn, at first from his or her teachers and then in his or her continuing self-education, how to identify mistakes made by him or herself in applying the acknowledged standards, the standards recognized to be the best available so far in the history of that particular craft…[Second,] the apprentice has to learn to distinguish between the kind of excellence which both others and he or she can expect of him or herself here and now and that ultimate excellence which furnishes both apprentices and mastercraftsmen with their telos.

But, how does an individual’s membership in a craft connect with a larger historical tradition? “The standards of achievement within any craft are justified historically. They have emerged from the criticism of their predecessors and they are justified because and insofar as they have remedied the defects and transcended the limitations of those predecessors as guides to excellent achievement within that particular craft.”

To conclude before I quote the entirety of Three Rival Versions, I would like not to provide a complete justification of tradition--that would require me to write books I am not capable of writing--but simply to draw out three implications which Deneen, Wilhelmsen, and MacIntyre's position has for higher education, particularly Catholic higher education.

First, we must take the historical aspect of learning within a tradition much more seriously than we do now. Many of the problematic aspects of a Great Books program arise from false philosophies of history--especially, as Deneen notes, relativism and progressivism. The solution is a proper understanding of education as initiation into a craft, into a tradition. And a tradition's standards, as MacIntyre reminds us, are justified historically.

Second, if we want to restore this understanding of education as initiation into a craft, we cannot make students fumble in the dark reading all the Great Books yet expect them somehow to figure out how to philosophize on their own. And realistically, we cannot expect students to find their own way into the tradition in the four short years of their undergraduate education. College is, in many cases, already a late stage to enter into a tradition. This means we have a lot of work to do in restoring the educational craft, not only at the university level, but also in high schools, and even in elementary schools.

Third, if any healthy tradition necessarily excludes fundamental dissent in order to teach students to philosophize, we have to radically rethink our notion of academic freedom. More specifically, we have to rethink the relationship of education and religion. Academic freedom today is often portrayed as the freedom to ignore or even disparage religion. But academic freedom is not the freedom to mock what is holy, or even to read the Great Books; academic freedom--as Wilhelmsen explains--is really the freedom of a craftsman working in a tradition.


Note: For further comments on Deneen's article, see Front Porch Republic and First Things.

Society and Tradition, Form and Content

What are we to do with our traditions when the world has rejected the underlying reasons for them? How long can and should these traditions linger on? How long can and should the form of a tradition survive when it has been emptied of its content and deprived of its function?

These questions came to mind recently when I read Aaron’s post on tradition and society, as well as a short piece in “First Things” decrying the modernist dogma in architecture, “Form follows function.” What I want to do now is try to understand how this dichotomy between form and function (or content) might influence the way we think about tradition and society.

That modernist dogma is obviously not completely historically true, but it’s also not completely wrong. One way to illustrate this is to analyze one important tradition--monarchy--in terms of form and function.

Most traditions, I would guess, arise because they accomplish two important aims. First, traditions arise because they fulfill a practical function. Second, traditions arise (and endure) because they embody what that particular society views as the right order of society and the cosmos. The tradition of kingship historically accomplished both aims. On the practical level, it made sense to have a strong, respected man in authority over an entire people. The alternative was chaos, needless bloodshed, etc. On the more contemplative level, though, many peoples have viewed their monarchs as God’s representative on earth. The Byzantines have had their difficulties with Caesaropapism, but many cultures have not hesitated to reverence their rulers as gods. Furthermore, in many cultures, as anthropologists can attest, the union of king and queen was somehow reflective of nature’s fertility, as well as somehow vital to the people’s own fertility. For instance, the King and Queen of Hawaii used to ritually go out to the fields in early spring in order to lie with each other. I could list more examples, but you get the idea. These traditions were preserved because they had practical reasons, but also because they in some way represented the order of the cosmos.

I must also note one more point. The tradition, however, is not just shaped by certain social views, but in turn helps to shape and reinforce those views. So, in one sense form does follow function, but in another sense form defines function. For example, just as a particular society’s view of the order of cosmos determined the form of kingship, so conversely that society’s view of kingship can influence its religion. In the Middle Ages, many images have come down from the Middle Ages of Heaven as a type of divine court, where God takes the place of the king, Mary that of queen, and the saints as noblemen and courtiers. The very form of monarchy reinforced the idea of its function, viz. to reflect God’s order in the world.

However, in Europe, such conceptions of kingship (for whatever reasons) were outdated by the time of the French Revolution and the various revolutions of the 19th century, especially among the more “enlightened” classes of society. These conceptions lingered on among the peasants of the Vendee, or the followers of Andreas Hofer in Austria, and even perhaps among a few aristocratic reactionaries. By now, though, these ancient conceptions are dead, or persist in only the most inchoate form.

So, here was the question for a 19th-century reactionary, as Aaron recognized: What are we to do with this form, with monarchy? Should we keep it? Or, should we scrap it and start over from scratch?

History seems to have opted for the latter option by abolishing Europe’s monarchies or by so reducing them in significance that they are hardly anything more than expensive pageants and soap operas.

But, was this the right answer?

Why Invent Tradition?

Yesterday, while biking to school, I took up singing one of my favorite songs, Gaudeamus igitur, the alma mater of the University of Dallas. And that got me thinking... Texas A&M, a school known for its traditions, is not really that traditional, in the scheme of things. The Aggie War Hymn dates from the Great War. Gaudeamus dates from the 18th century, at least, possibly as far back as the 13th century.

At a place like UD, where one has the entire Western Tradition upon which to draw, things can fall into disuse and be revived again with relative ease. They are not exclusively UD's traditions, but the traditions of the West.

In contrast, everything at A&M is contrived and has been invented since the founding of the school in 1876. I suppose this is better than most schools, where traditional customs have been abandoned all together, but it seems like a lot of effort. Why not just pick up the traditions of your civilization?

Granted, UD has some non-traditional traditions too, like Groundhog and the Charity Week jail. But I think there really is a different quality, akin perhaps to Dr. Roper's observation that students at other schools throw far more serious parties than at UD, trying too hard. UD seems to play with tradition, knowing we won't break it, in a way that schools like A&M are not so comfortable doing.