great books of enemies

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The Great Books:Enemies of WisdomFrederick D.

The study of philosophy is not directedtoward discovering what men may havethought but toward knowing what is true.-St. Thomas Aquinas,In Aristotelis Libros DeCoelo et Mundo, 1, lect. 2NOT MORE THAN thirty-five years ago, agraduating senior in liberal arts in mostAmerican Jesuit universities had to pre-sent six years of Latin, two of them on thecollege level, or-failing that-two yearsof Greek in order to receive the degree ofBachelor of Arts. As a concession-Latinwas already dying on the high schoollevel-he could obtain, without the classi-cal languages, a strange degree calledPh.B., Bachelor of Philosophy. Scribbledafter a mans name, the Ph.B. could easilybe mistaken for a Ph.D., but outside of thisdubious credit it was obviously a cut underthe classical A.B. and expressed the Soci-etys conviction that a degree in thehumanities without classics was theequivalent of Hamlet without the prince ofDenmark. But this commitment to classi-cal studies, as prominent as it was, was notreally the distinguishing mark of a J esuiteducation. Nor was it theology, whichafter all was taught at all Church-sponsored schools. The seal o a J esuiteducation was eighteen hours of philos-ophy, the study of which was constitutedby arigorous and systematic education inthe scholastic tradition, beginning withlogic and usually ending with ethics.(Many poor devils chose philosophy astheir minor subject simply to avoidanother eighteen hoursof credits added toan already heavily burdened i f rich cur-riculum.)

Wilhelmsen

In the still ghetto-dominated Catholicismof the times, the post-immigrant inferioritycomplex that plagued the Church inAmerica disappeared within the walls ofJesuit schools. We were the best educatedmen in the nation and we knew it. Wewalked tall, and there was little, if any, ofthat hankering after the Ivy League thatoften troubled many of our WASPbrothers in academia. Not only was ourChurch right, but we had the reasons toprove it. Secularism in the academy wasonly just aborning. Dueling with it was likecrossing swords with a sea of marsh-mallows. No contest. We had the tools todefend ourselves, and they had beensharpened and tested through four cen-turies o the famous Ratio Studiorum. Inother things we were not unlike our non-Catholic fellow university students. Wewere football crazy and girl crazy, and weprobably drank only a little more than therest of the American university com-munity. But we made a difference, andthat difference was rooted in our classical,and, even more, in our philosophical for-mation. We stood down for nobody. Thenwe went to war.A lthough it was otherwise, naturally, inour study of literature, which was builtaround the mastery of an inheritance ofbooks, our philosophical education wasnot centered on a list of Great Books oreven around the exegisiso key philosoph-ical texts. T he French explication destexteswas not unknown to us. We did a lit-tle of it, but it did not form the center of ourphilosophical studies. Teaching was car-ried on in the classroom by balancing asubject matter-the philosophy of being,of nature, of man, of morals, etc.-with

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the cultivation of a number of habits ofreasoning enabling students to come toterms with those subjects, at first timidly,then with growing confidence, and finallywith the ring of certitude and the delightof understanding. (At the University ofDetroit, where I began my undergraduatestudies, during my junior year Father Ber-nard Wuellner, S.J., introduced a textualcourse in the Summa Contra Gentiles ofSt. Thomas; we read only the L atin orig-inal, something no junior class could do to-day, but the course was a kind of bonuswhich supplemented the systematic ap-proach.) Towards the end of the period 1am discussing these subjects were oftenlocated within history. Etienne Gilsons n-fluence was crucial. But the goal remainedthe same: mastery of subjects and the ac-quisition of habits in pursuit of thatmastery. When the stout lad who haddone his apprenticeship was examined bya board of his betters at the end of hisstudies, he might have been asked to de-fend Aristotles hylomorphic theory orAquinass distinction between essence andexistence or the principle of the double ef-fect. He was rarely called upon to ex-egetisize the texts in which these doc-trines might be found. He was asked tobreak down a problem to its essentials, toreason about it, and, if possible, to make aconclusion and thus affirm a truth. Wewanted truths, the reasons for them, andthe capacity to orchestrate them. Thatconstituted the study of philosophy on theundergraduate level in the vast majorityof American Catholic colleges and unitrer-sities. Textual analysis was reserved forthe few who pursued graduate studies. Buteven there4 remember it well because 1did my Masters work at the University ofNotre Dame under Y ves Simon and GeraldPhelan-it was assumed that the studentbrought to these advanced courses habitsof philosophizing already born in hisearlier years. The goal, on the graduatelevel as well, was to dominate the text andnot be dominated by it.Underlying this approach to philosoph-ical studies, found o course not only inJesuit institutions but in all Catholic

schoolsof higher learning, were a numberof presuppositions, themselves philosoph-ical. Possibly the most important wasAristotles understanding of the study ofphilosophy. Given that the Stagirite standsas the source of the scholastic tradition,given that we were all educated scholas-tically, the premise in question very natur-ally guided our instruction. The Phi-losopher, as he was called by everybodyuntil late in the Renaissance, insisted thatphilosophy was not a reality, neither thereality o nature nor the reality of booksnor the reality of personal experience.Philosophy was a unique way of under-standing reality, a stance a man learned totake towards being. Neither totally objec-tive nor subjective, philosophy-as withthe other sciences-was a way, in truth anumber of ways, of understanding things.Things are different. Therefore there aredifferent ways of understanding them.Even the same reality can be captured bythe mind in more than one manner. Akind of an abstractive act disengaged asubject of discourse and of reasoning, anunknown thing, for the inquiring mind.Once that subject was located and disen-gaged, the human intellect came to under-stand it through a series of predicates.Thus a body of doctrine was crafted intobeing, the being of knowing. These pred-icates, for the most part, were achievedthanks to reasoning about the topic underdiscussion. Since Aristotles very definitionof science, epis@mc?, scientia, involvededucating the mind of the beginner by amaster to reason accurately, swiftly, andwith a measure of pleasure, he built up abody of conclusions. These conclusionsconstituted the science along with thereasons establishing them. Philosophy wasnot out there in ahallowed list of books;philosophy was not out there in nature.Philosophy was in here, within a mindannealed in philosophical discourse. Verystrictly and formally, philosophy was iden-tified with certain habits of the mind.Philosophy is not a substance that walksaround on all fours, a thing. Philosophy in-volves a range of virtues, of habits of themind, through which things are under-

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stood in their causal structures. Evenmore: philosophy is not its own historyalthough the man who ignores thathistory, as Gilson once wrote, is doomedto repeat it.Paradoxically the modus philosofandodominating the A merican Catholicacademy at that time was simultaneouslypersonal and traditional. Given that aphilosophers habit is his own individualpossession, it cannot be exchanged withanyone elses habit. The tools for the ac-quisition o philosophy are public, butphilosophy itself is a personal achieve-ment. Unless I am merely repeating byrote somebody elsesthinking, most likelythe teachers (I admit that a good deal ofthat went on), the interiorizing of philo-sophical truth took place within the in-telligence of one man. His philosophizingby definition could never be that ofanybody else. Unless I do the thinking,grasp the insight, produce the conclusion,then neither thinking, nor insight, nor con-clusion takes place in me. The issue isalmost self-evident. There is a common-place in St. Thomas Aquinass psychologyaccording to which all learning occurswithin an imagination and an experiencestirred by a mans own history and en-counter with being. Two students cangrasp the same reality, but each one willdo so according to his own peculiar modeof knowing. An old scholastic tag insiststhat things are received according to themode of the recipient: quidquid recipiturrecipitur secundum modum recipientis.Abroad common tradition was received bystudents, but like a seal it was coined inthe indefinite plasticity of human nature.Certainly Aquinas meant something dif-ferent to the mid-twentieth-century mindthan he did to the thirteenth century, andhe even meant something different tostudents sitting in the same classroom. Insuch fashion better minds absorbed thetradition, shaped it in new ways, and evenadded to it. Everything that is not tradi-tion isplagiarism, according to SalvadorDah. Ironically the more traditional wasthe teaching, the more original was theproduct. A string of splendid philosophers

and teachers made their names within theAmerican Catholic philosophical com-munity, and yet each one of these philos-ophized in his own way, enriching theThomistic tradition. Submitting himself toa common inheritance brought forthliberty in the professor; when he walkedinto the classroom, he literally taughthimself.In such fashion a broad oral traditionwas created in the Catholic Americanphilosophical community. Universitiessuch as Vanderbilt and Dallas have em-phasized the character of an oral traditionin American Southern letters. Y et almostunnoticed there grew into maturity aphilosophical oral tradition among thosewho were bred on the scholastic style ofphilosophizing. Thousands of graduatesfrom Catholic schools were united in thatall of them had been nurtured from thesame sources. When these men met so-cially or even at conventions, a broadfellowship knit them into friendship. Com-ing from all over the country, from a hostof colleges and universities, belonging toall kinds of professions and commercialenterprises, they rarely had read the samebooks; but they had all studied the samesubjects. They all shared a commonmethod of reasoning on ultimate issues. (Ican recall personally a number of soldiersduring World War 11 who gloated, whenthey were not raising hell, in engaging inthe most abstruse philosophical conversa-tions which bewildered their other com-panions in combat. They knew the samesubjects; they had mastered, up to a point,the same rational tools of argumentation,and they had the same Catholic universitybackground. Those I knew were mostlyenlisted men, but I remember one poorshavetail who forgot his importance andinsisted on butting in: he always ended thenight bloodied and bereft of dignity andoften of sobriety, but in that he simplyshared our common humanity.)This oral tradition was fiercely Latin inthe clergy, where these subjects had beentaught in that language. Within the laitythe conversation was in English, but theEnglish itself was artificial and stiff, heav-

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ily Latinized, full o clichCs, fixed in itsvocabulary. This made communicationpossible between men who had comefrom all over the country and who hadstudied in many different institutions.Philosophy was an enterprise principallytalked out loud, not written down. Cer-tainly this was a distant echo of the MiddleAges, when books were scarce and theacademic disputation, dominating educa-tion, was savagely masculine. Undoubt-edly more students were educated in thescholastic tradition during the first half ofthis century and even beyond than wereeducated in Europe in the entire MiddleAges. We gloried in a fellowship: within,community; outside, chaos.Then came the chaos-around 1970 or afew years earlier. The decline of thescholastic tradition in American Catholicuniversities coincided with the heavysecularization of the American academyat large, which began sometime after1965. There were many causes for this saddemise, but I cannot halt this little essay inorder to study them. Suffice it to say that awhoring after federal money, an itch forconformity, a misunderstood ecumen-ism-all these and other factors con-tributed to a dismantling of the olderorder within the Catholic community.Soon enough we were aping BehemothU., as Russell K irk called it. An intellectualfellowship withered into a sorry simul-acrum of itself. The doors were opened.The chaos from outside settled like debrisand dust within halls from which orderhad been banished.The hiring of teachers with no educationin the scholastic tradition and no burningcommitment to Catholic education, ofPh.D. recipients with no common bond be-tween themselves except the doctorate,created the same kind of vacuum that hadplagued the public universities fordecades. Nature abhors a vacuum-onceagain good Aristotle-and administratorsand others soon sensed that somethinghad to take the place of the older scholas-tic method. Some unifying principle had toknit together undergraduate studies inphilosophy because the existent Tower of

Babel was intolerable. Requirements inphilosophical studies shrank fromeighteen hours to nine, then to six, and inone Catholic university in California tothree. Men having no common vocabu-lary, sharing no set of ultimate truths,each one spinning about in his own littlebox, all together sowing confusion andskepticism in the minds of those unfor-tunate charges under their tutelage,created an anarchy that could not long en-dure. Administrators seemed too pusillani-mous to recall seven hundred years ofpapal insistence on the pre-eminence ofSt. Thomas Aquinas and of the scholasticmethod, which ought to preside over thestudy of philosophy.Thus were born the Great Books. Theycame into vogue to cure the patient. In-itially conceived outside the Catholicacademy in Chicago, St. Johns, and else-where, the proponents of the Great Bookswould introduce students into the wide in-heri tance of the West by centering theireducation on the reading of original texts.(weare interested here only in how this isaffecting education in philosophy: I totallyabstract from the fanaticism that wouldhave studentso physics and mathematicsspend their time reading pre-Copernicantexts.) There is, of course, more than onelisto Great Books: any committee chosenby a dean can draw up its own. The mostfamous is the Hundred Great Books drawnup by M ortimer Adler and Robert Hutch-ins: a list curiously weighted, in itsmodern listings, in favor of the Anglo-American world and remarkably light inwhat it includes of contributions from theLatin inheritance. Be that as it may, the in-tentions moving these men to implementtheir proposals, often by draconian admin-istrative fiat, are sufficiently well-knownthat it suffices merely to list them.A lthough the Great Books movemententered the Catholic university structurebecause of the collapse of the scholasticmethod, it did not enter asadialectical op-posite to the older order. The contentionwas and ismade that the older A mericanpragmatism has failed; that the smorgas-borg approach to college courses is with-

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tradition of the West is effectively en-shrined in its most significant writtenworks. But behind these pious intentions-as good as they might be-repose threepresuppositions, sometimes not expressedformally but always exercised in the class-room: (1) disengaging the meaning of atext equals philosophizing; (2) the teacheris little more than a midwife whose roleconsists in leading the student to read

ical habit. The Great Books approachtends inevitably towards producing theskill needed to read intelligently a philo-sophical work, but it does not, of itself,help turn a man into an incipient philoso-pher. Indeed, in practice, he is over-whelmed with textual meaning, and hismastery thereof squeezes out the cultiva-tion of philosophical habits of reasoningand concluding. A fter a time, when askedwhat he thinks of a given philosophicalproblem, he reaches for a text. Insidiouslyhe comes to think that the understandingof literary philosophical meaning is theequivalent of doing philosophy.(2) Weighing the second prejudice, wemust note that the very location ofphilosophy as a discipline, indeed a seriesof disciplines, shifts from the personalnourishment of habits of thinking aboutthe real to the mastery of a number ofphilosophical classics. Concerning this lat-ter, little need be said. Bergson oncewrote that it takes a lifetime to master asmany as two great philosophers and thevery best we can do with the rest is to gaina gentlemans awareness of their role andimportance within the development ofWestern intellectuality. It were better toknow one of them thoroughly than toknow all of them superficially. No deepprinciple guides this observation: it isbased simply on the economy of timegiven an undergraduate in a handful ofcourses dedicated, in a hurry, to hisphilosophical education. But anyone whohas given over his life to the pursuit ofphilosophy knows from both the pain andthe joy of his own experience that themore he enters into the thought of amaster who proffers him the truth, the lesstime he has to spend on the rest of them.More to the point, the less comfort andnourishment he takes from perusing theirworks. It is a mark of the professional thathe knows what books he does not need toread, indeed ought not to read, becausethey get in the way of his pursuit of truth.St. Thomas Aquinas spoke of a kind ofsin-probably a minor sin-which is curi-osity, wanting to know what may beworth knowing in itself but which is

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foreign to the destiny a man has given hisown life. Hewas thinking of the cleric whoignores the things of God and busies him-self with pure philosophy. But longbefore Aquinas, Plato pointed out that amark of the philodaster, the false philoso-pher, was his knowing many things butknowing none of them in depth. The GreatBooks approach tends to flatten the entiretradition as it lines up book after book,text after text, with which it thins out thestudents capacity to judge, to evaluate, toput in hierarchy, to concentrate uponthrough years of study or to slough offwith an afternoons reading, soon to beforgotten or relegated to a modest rolewithin a mans hunt for the truth of things.Enthusiasm like a love affair limitsbecause it intensifies, and such enthusiasmand love are forbidden the poor chap whomust labor through thousands of pages ofstuff indiscriminately. Were he to discrim-inate because his mind gripped somethingwhich might give him a toehold on theprecipice of being, he would soon becomea very bad boy indeed because he wouldneglect the syllabus-that sanctified cow-hallowed by the acolytes of a new dogma.For them what is important is not to learnhow to think philosophically and thus tomake ones own a number of philosoph-ical truths. What is important is to getthrough (the spatial metaphor is signifi-cant) the syllabus, to read all those books,to give reports on their content, butgenerally to refrain from personal judg-ment. This last is probably wise: nobodywho read all that stuff would have theleisure needed to ponder philosophicallyproblems and eventually conclude, comeup on one side or another of two contra-dictories. Aristotle insisted that philosophyis the highest instance of the lifeof leisure,but there is no leisure for boys and girlswho are expected to gorge themselves onthree thousand years of texts and thenregurgitate them come examination day.To remember all the data, as suggested,leaves no time for judgment. Y et judg-ment, says St. Thomas, is the mark of thephilosopher of being and the philosopherof being is the Philosopher, just as a genus

is often named for its highest species.(3) Weighing the third o these preju-dices-the conviction that books makesense to students without being located

within the historical context that gavethem birth and in abstraction from the liv-ing tradition in which they play theirpart-we must note that a kind of philo-sophical fundamentalism akin to its religi-ous counterpart has insinuated itself intomany departments of philosophy givenover to Great Bookism. Y et very few, ifany, philosophical masterpieces speak bythemselves to the contemporary student.This isspecially true when they are read,as they usually are, in translation. A manmust work himself into the preoccupationsand hidden convictions of an age beforehe can even begin to understand anoriginal text in depth. This is common-place to contemporary scholarship, but itis ignored by Great Books zealots. MarshallMcLuhan used to insist to the author thatno text can be understood in isolationfrom its audience: that audience is itshistory. (For instance, St. ThomasAquinass Questiones Quodlibetales VI11makes little sense unless seen in the back-ground of the enormous Augustinian pres-sure under which he lectured.) Plato andthe rest of them are supposed, piously, tospeak to the eighteen-year-old, fresh fromfour years of high school ignorance. J ohnSenior wrote somewhere that a manought to read a hundred good booksbefore he reads one great book, but ourhigh school graduates have read nothingat all. Y et they are asked to cope withHume and Spinoza without having thefaintest hint o the kind of world withinwhich those men lived and thought. Thiscontempt for history might be a constitu-tional American disease lurking within asensibility that suspects that everythingviable man has done, he did on this side ofthe Atlantic, saloe-of course-a fewdozen Great Books. Emerging out of anew world in which the book has lost itspre-eminence as a tool of communication,the students are forced back into analmost savage and reactionary appren-ticeship in the reading of books in

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univocal abstraction from their history.These books are of ten treated with thereverance and awe properly restricted tothe Sacrament on the A ltar.What suffers and are stifled before theycan be given birth are those personalhabits of philosophizing to which we havealready referred, the possession ofwhich-again I repeat Aristotle-consti-tute philosophy itself as aseries of acts ex-ercised by amind which thereby comes toknow reality under this or that aspect.Let us here cut the cackles and come tothe horses: this is philosophy as under-

stood by the scholastic tradition. Philos-ophy is not the reading of books; philos-ophy is not the contemplation of nature;philosophy is not the phenomenology ofpersonal experience; philosophy is not itshistory. These are indispensable toolsaiding a man to come to know the thingsthat are. But that knowing is preciselyknowing and nothing else. We once weregiven this, not too long ago, in the Amer-ican Catholic academy. With a few honor-able exceptions, we are given it no longer.This iswhy philosophy isno longer talkedinto existence. It is no longer talked intoexistence because it is no longer thoughtinto existence. Men think largely by talk-ing, and the thinking needed to produce ascholastic disputation, for instance, simplyhas ceased to exist on our campuses. Ourstudents often cannot spot a middle term ifyou dangle it in front o their noses. Theymay be exposed to logic in some cases,but they rarely use it because the masteryof a subject matter is no longer central totheir study of philosophy. They try tomaster the reading of books (they do noteven succeed in that), not subjects, forget-ting all along-because they have notbeen told-that these very books had astheir end not themselves but an under-standing of reality.The scholastic structuring of philosophyinto a number of courses given over to theexploration of certain subjects dateslargely from Aristotle, although histeaching was refined and revised throughcenturies of probing, testing, and con-cluding. A watershed for this tradition is

St. Thomas AquinassCommentaryon TheTrinityo f Boethius (a Great Book if thereever was one, although I have never seenit so listed). As this tradition developed, anumber of topics came to be associatedwith the subjects themselves because theyare inherent to their elucidation. For in-stance, the problem of change was centralto the philosophy of nature; being was thefocal point of the philosophy of being;liberty was intrinsic to the philosophy ofman; the good proper to man to ethics;later and under the pressure of rationalismand idealism-knowledge to epistemol-OgY.Basic methodology followed on the ac-tual exercise of philosophical acts andsimply articulated, in a theoretical fashion,what was already being done within theminds of philosophers. T he eye and thehand and the spirit were always fixed onthe real, the world in which we have ourbeing. It followed that a number of tradi-tionally agreed upon topics would bestudied in these basic disciplines. Theywere, in truth, intrinsic to them. Withinthis structure, however, the teaching pro-fessor was left free to develop his subjectas he saw fit. Since teaching isa synthesisof several arts and not a science, it cannever be reduced to any univocal mold.One mans nectar isanother mans poison.One man comes into his own lecturingwhereas another may prefer a moreSocratic approach. One professor mightprefer to lay the problem on the table inall its dialectical complexity and thus con-front students with contradictory solutionsas he guides them through this mazetowards the light of truth. Another pro-fessor might prefer to unfold his subjectfrom its beginnings in history, developingit as though it were a detective novel.Such was Gilsons genius. Some teacherswill mix up all these approaches in acocktail which isof their own making. Butwhere the scholastic tradition dominatedin the American Catholic communitywhich I have known from both sidesof thepodium, the teacher was perfectly free toorchestrate his own artistry. A bsolutelynobody, neither dean nor committee nor

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chairman, infringed on his liberty, hisacademic freedom, to teach as he saw fit.Nol i tangere was writ large as a prologueto the bill of rights of professors. Certainbasic commitments were demanded ofhim as a member of a Catholic educationalcommunity obedient to the Magisteriumof the Church. Certain critical issues,hallowed by tradition, awaited his elucida-tion: e.g., the existence of God, the free-dom of the will, the dignity of the person,and the like. He taught subjects system-atically, but his style of teaching was thework of his own strategy and sensibility. I tis quite evident that the Great Books ap-proach to the teaching of philosophy, iftaken seriously, violates that liberty. Notonly, as pointed out, does the student suf-fer, but his teacher is truncated from theoutset as his teaching is pressed downupon a Procrustean bed. No veteran edu-cated in the older and better order ofthings would submit to such a violation ofhis dignity.Often the objection is made that thescholastic approach makes for rigidity inthe classroom. The objection has a certainvalidity, and more than one of my readerswill remember some dried-up ghost of ateacher who mumbled his yellowing andthumb-crumpled notes, who assumed thatnothing had happened of interest since thethirteenth century, and who dribbled outhis never-ending rosary of syllogisms alto-gether without style or explanation. Hestill does in a few places. Often he is adelightful fellow, but as a teacher he is adisaster. But let us never forget that thecorruption of the best is the worst. Let ustake an instance, if not of the best, thenhopefully o the better:Assume that 1 am teaching the philos-ophy of man. My immediate topic, a sub-jectwithin a subject, is symbolism, and mygoal is to lead my students to a number ofjudgments about the being of symbols. Imight well read to them and ponder theopening lines of T.S. EliotsBurnt Norton,or I might comment on the homilies ofOrigen on the Song of Solomon. 1 mightfollow this up by commenting on A quinason the morality of dreams or on the role of

the phantasm in cognition; on J ohn of St.Thomas on second intentions and M aritainon magic; Guardini on power and HugoRahner on play; on medieval heraldry orcontemporary jazz; on M cLuhan on sub-liminal seduction; on the relations be-tween essence and being. l will undoubt-edly have read widely on the topic frombooks both great and not so great, buteventually I will come forth with a syn-thesis of doctrine stamped with the forceof my being because transmuted in thealchemy of personality. I will havebecome my subject, and in professing it tomy students, I will be professing myself:a labyrinth of experience and judg-ment, of acceptance and rejection, ofreasoning on the nature and being of sym-bolism. Nobody else could have producedthis theory because it is the effect of acomplexity eminently personal, and, to adegree, free. Such a systematic approachis the very reverse of arid. It frees themind to roam around a subject and invitesstudents to do the same. The professor, inthis instance, is not trying to get hisstudents to read everything he has readon the subject: they have not the time, theskills, the sophistication, or the languages.His game is not what A quinas or Freud oranybody else said about symbolism: hisgame issymbolism, a subject of being nowbombarded by a host of predicates, eachone of which affirms some truth of thesubject itself.

A further objection brought against thescholastic method maintains that studentswere taught out of textbooks and neverhad to consult original works. The objec-tion goes hand in hand with the complaintagainst reading secondary sources. Thereis more than one college in this nationwhere such reading is not only discour-aged but almost forbidden. I once did a l it-tle finger exercise in counting the numberof texts wri tten within the scholastic tradi-tion in this century in the United States. 1came up with some sixty of them, some inLatin, most in the vernacular, some for-mally published, others simply mimeo-graphed or xeroxed. According to myopinion two or three were brilliant, most

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were satisfactory, and a handful were hor-rible-this following, I presume, the curveof human intelligence itself. Every pro-fessor of philosophy who isworth his saltwrites his own text, a text which is hiscourse, whether he publishes it or not. Thetext exists in his notes or in his head. If hedoes not write this text down in one wayor another, he is not a professor becausehe has nothing personal to say about hissubject. He might just as well have disap-peared behind his list of Great Books.When the complaint against texts is madeby Thomists, as it sometimes is, the issuebecomes comical. Even among many ofthe lists of the Great Books are to be founda number of commentaries on Aristotle bySt. Thomas Aquinas. His two great Sum-mae, in turn, were textbooks for-& in theclassroom.One of the vast differences that blastedan abyss between medieval and modernphilosophy consists in the truth thatmedieval texts are all textbooks, hand-maidens to the spoken word, whereasmost modern philosophical works are justbooks to be read. What Marshall McLuhancalled the Guttenberg Revolutiondivides as does a sundering sword one en-

tire philosophical tradition from another.The scholastic tradition was intended tobe spoken out loud as I have insistedearlier. These two worlds cannot belumped together under the rubric ofGreat Books. Great Books fanaticism,once again, ignores the audience and in sodoing reveals its parochialism, its inno-cence towards history. We no longer livein a book-dominated culture; to treat ourstudents as though we did is to violatetheir very psychic structure. Today weenter a new kind of Middle Ages, butGreat Books people still absent-mindedlybehave as though they were living in theeighteenth or nineteenth century.A philosopher ends where he begins,and that beginning is his love of wisdom.With Parmenides we enter through a gateand find there a house, modest becausenot itself the House of God, but a housenonetheless, divided into rooms and builtupon floors united by staircases, thereforehabitable and fitted for human living.Within this house we find order-the markof Wisdom. That Wisdom has been ex-pelled from our schools. As a philosopher Imourn its lossand desire, nostalgically, itsrestoration.

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