I am currently reading a book about philosophy, literature, and the Western educational tradition. Since I'm not actually studying any philosophy in Philosophy 103 I thought I'd try to study on my own. So I bought David Denby's Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and other Indestructible Writers of the Western World.
Denby, a Columbia University graduate and film critic for the New York Times, decided to audit Columbia's two core humanities courses at age 48 to see if the so-called Great Books were as great as all that now that he had the advantage of age and the wisdom of experience, and then write a book about it. He critiques the teachers, the canon, and the students. He also provides a memoir of his undergraduate days and attempts to reconcile his youthful opinons with his current thoughts on the books and authors.
It's not too bad so far, and I'm certainly enjoying getting an introduction to a variety of texts I would not normally consider reading. It has reminded me, somewhat hilariously, that I once denounced Aristotle as a sexist pig to my philosophy teacher. I was 16 at the time. My teacher was forebearing as I recall, but unfortunately unable to place Aristotle's ideas in the proper context for me. I hadn't read enough history and wasn't particularly good at grasping the big picture. I didn't realize Aristotle had quite a number of dubious ideas besides the notion that women were incapable of higher thought. Besides, at 16 I was easily outraged.
It has also reminded me that I have about two minutes patience with middle aged men who revel in their intellectual self-importance. I detect a faint hint of condescention, a sense of playing down to me (presumably I, the reader, did not attend a top school like Columbia so this is to be my introduction to the classics and he's making sure I know how tough they are to read). Too, there's something unpleasantly fatuous in the way he gushes over the professors' ability to teach non-modern texts to modern teenagers. I suspect my main problem with this book will be that it has too much David Denby and too little objectivity. I thought I was getting literary criticism, not a midlife crisis. Oh, well, it's interesting enough, and I value the opportunity to revisit certain schools of thought now that I, too, am older and wiser, or at least less callow. I'll certainly be able to decide if I wish to read anyone further after skimming through Columbia's courses with him.
Not Aristotle, I assure you.
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