USUPhilosophy

So there’s a new edition coming out of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (coupled with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) where the “n-word” is systematically replaced by “slave”. (See the article here.) The main idea of the editor Alan Gribben is that people aren’t reading one of the greatest works of American literature merely because the work has frequent use of a word that now carries a tremendous emotional charge it didn’t carry back in Twain’s day. So, he says, take out the offending word, and encourage people to read the great work. (Note, of course, the obvious point that this is only a single edition of the work, and there will be plenty, yes, plenty of tamper-proof editions of the original work available for the rest of time.)

I say good for Gribben and NewSouth books. They are of course at the receiving end of a withering blast of scorn from textual purists who think the replacement constitutes censorship or some deep violation of a virginal text. Hogwash. Indeed, an argument can be made that retaining the “n-word” violates Twain’s text, since the word itself has changed in meaning over time. Certainly Twain never meant eyebrows to be raised every time the word made an appearance, and so retaining it fundamentally alters the good humor of the text. But the main point is this: if such a replacement allows Mark Twain to enter the public schools of America, then so be it!

And, yes, I could even go for renaming Melville’s work Moby Richard if it meant people would actually read the thing.

USU philosophy alumnus Sohrab Ahmari has this opinion piece in The Guardian taking on a historian’s claim that “Human rights groups are spear-carrier[s] for the ‘exceptionalist’ belief that the west has a providential right to intervene wherever in the world it wishes.” Ahmari replies with the oh-so-imperialist sentiment that maybe all kinds of people would like to enjoy basic human rights.

Kleiner shared this with me. It’s part of an introduction Lewis wrote to a translation of Athanasiusʼ On the Incarnation. His immediate concern is with books of Christianity, but obviously the main idea is much broader.

“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire. This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

“Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (“mere Christianity” as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

“Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence on society”  – Mark Twain

I recently read an excellent book by Phillippe Beneton called “Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement.”  Equality by default is “founded on an idea of man which breaks with all the humanism of the West.  Man is pure indetermination, autonomy without a compass, liberty without a vocation, he is what he makes himself.”  We have more rights in the modern age and our culture is more egalitarian, but we find ourselves dispossessed.  Modern man finds himself emptied out and isolated.   Since autonomy and liberty have become absolute values, and culture has been “deconstructed” and relativized to death, we have no bearings remaining to find our way.  This, then, gives rise to a mechanistic understanding of the person and society as “virtues, customs, and forms recede in favor of methods, rules, and procedures.”

One chapter applies this view to academic dress (an essay called “The Alma Mater and the Necktie”).  The problem with the loss of the necktie (and the general shabby dress of most academics these days), is that the loss of form leads to a loss of seriousness on the part of everyone involved in the education process.  These forms (culturally inherited norms around dress and such things) help us to see distinctions “among activities, times, ways of being”.  The academic who dresses in the proper form rejects the idea that everything is equivalent, that going to class is no more serious an affair than going to see a movie.  The proper form of dress, then, helps to communicate the seriousness and nobility of the experience of philosophical inquiry and wonder to the student.  After all, teaching is about more than transmitting information to students.  Teaching also concerns teaching “attitudes of the intellect”.  So, Beneton says, respect for proper academic dress help cultivate the “habitus required for intellectual life”.

One rather surprising claim – it is actually less de-personalizing to wear a “uniform” than to wear whatever one wants.  When we wear whatever we want, he suggests, we make it more difficult to develop certain forms of personal relationships and to see distinctions between different activities and ways of being.

I think Beneton is really on to something with this view.  One of the things I have learned from teaching large classes (150-200 students) is that form matters.  In such classes, it is impossible to develop personal relationships with more than a handful of students.  As such, many students make all sorts of judgments and pre-judgments about the instructor and even the discipline he teaches based on how the instructor walks into the room, what they wear, how they speak, etc.  As a concrete example, I am always surprised by how often my beard comes up in my evaluations.

I have always dressed pretty well to teach, but have considered wearing a tie for some time.  In particular, I have often considered wearing a bow tie.  I like the bow tie because of how it looks, but I also have fond memories of them.  I grew up wearing bow ties to Cotillion for many years as a child and young man.  (Cotillions are ballroom dancing lessons – we learned to dance, boys learned to bow, girls learned to curtsy, we learned formal table manners and social graces, this sort of a thing).

Anyway, the Beneton essay put me over the top.  Beneton is right, it is not up to me what I wear.  To think it is entirely up to me is to think that I have liberty without vocation, autonomy without a compass, that I am whatever I make myself.  The tie says NO to all of this modern autonomous nonsense.  So, then, the tie and the bow tie will be my little contribution, the little blow I strike, against the culture of autonomy.  Take that!

In my Contemporary European Philosophy class, I often remark that Nz’s declaration of the death of god (and Foucault’s sequel, the death of the subject) turned out to be, shall we say, rather premature.  The death of philosophy has been oft declared, and all who have declared it dead are now long dead while philosophy continues to plug along.

Many of our blog readers are likely aware of Stephen Hawking’s new book, in which he declares that “philosophy is dead” (you guessed it, science killed it).  But this response from John Haldane is worth reading.  He responds to several arguments (multiverse, spontaneous creation) raised in Hawking’s new book, and concludes:

“As Hawking and Mlodinow occasionally seem to recognize, far from philosophy being dead, having been killed by science, the deepest arguments in this area are not scientific but philosophical. And if the philosophical reasoning runs in the direction I have suggested, it is not only philosophy but also natural theology that is alive and ready to bury its latest would-be undertakers.”