You would think the scholars who study the canon of Western literature would agree about what the Great Books say, but disagree about how great they really are.  Well, there is a good deal of debate about how great they are, but even more about what they say -- though this is more true of some books than of others.

Take Plato’s dialogue, Republic, which includes a famous analogy between the city and the soul.  Some call it the first true work of political philosophy.  Others say the book is only about the soul, and the political parts are just metaphor.

Among those who do think it is about politics, some say Plato really believed all the outlandish things he put in Socrates’ mouth -- that philosophers should be kings but spout noble nonsense, that the ruling class must share everything in common including wives and children, and that men and women must lead the same way of life.  Others have treated the work more nearly as a satire -- as though he had said “Here is how you would have to live to have peace, but of course it would be ridiculous.”

And then there are those who see the book as navel-gazing, holding that its real concern isn’t politics or the soul but the tension between philosophers and the city.  Or that its true concern is education.  Or that the true topic of the dialogue is dialogue itself.

There are devastating objections to all these views.

The puzzle is so vexing that I sometimes assign grad students who are reading Republic for the first time simply to work out what question they think the dialogue is chiefly trying to answer.  Initially, most assume that the question is “What is justice?”  But as soon as discussion begins, their consensus collapses.

The first thing they notice is that almost immediately, the participants in Plato’s dialogue are sidetracked into asking why anyone should even care about being just, considering that it seems contrary to selfish interest.  Plainly, “Why should I be just?” is not the same question as “What is justice?”

But wait – but wait – but wait –

By the time they finish they have a dozen theories of the real question of the dialogue.  And that, of course, shapes their understanding of everything else about it, including whether the question has been answered.

I enjoy such mysteries, but only up to a point.  As my favorite saint wrote about another riddle of authorial intent, “The purpose of the study of philosophy is not to learn what others have thought, but to learn how the truth of things stands.”

How easy that is to forget.

Plato agreed.

A reader comments:

You’ve been blogging about faculty attitudes toward morality and religion.  Let me share an incident from my introduction to anthropology course some years ago.  It was a graduate “core” course, but some undergrads took it too; the grads had more work, more reading, and weekly tutorials.

Before and during class one day there was talk about new discoveries about cannibalism.  While forensic anthropology was not my thing, my best recollection is that the issue of cannibalism among the Indians of the Southwestern US had just been decisively proven by a forensic anthropologist from Berkeley named Tim White.  White's analysis of human bones from an Anasazi pueblo in southwestern Colorado, site 5MTUMR-2346, reveals that nearly thirty men, women, and children were butchered and cooked there around A.D. 1100.

While the professor and some of the students were kicking this around, four female undergrad students became restless and visibly sick at their stomachs.  Several expressed verbal outrage (“That's horrible!”).  The professor was visibly perturbed and spoke directly to the outraged students.   She seemed outraged by their outrage, as well as gravely disappointed.  “If you're going to be anthropologists,” she said, “you're going to have to learn to see things from the people's point of view.  You can't be getting upset at them.”

This did not sit well with everyone.  The professor began the next class by announcing she had been called by the president of the university the previous night.  He himself had been called by the fathers of some of the students.  Their families had been caught up in the holocaust, and they did not appreciate the professor invalidating the moral values of their daughters; there is indeed right and wrong.   She went on to explain to the class that she was not saying we do not make judgments, but the anthropological gaze is about describing culture, not judging it.

Reply:

Your professor’s surprise and dismay about her students’ healthy response to cannibalism is interesting and revealing.  A colleague once commented to me about what happened when he  assigned his freshman class to read the bioethicist Peter Singer’s defense of infanticide.  Those students too were upset (which heartens me) – but he was puzzled that they were.  In his view, their response was intellectually immature.  It was as though he thought the task of moral philosophy was not to uplift and improve our moral judgments, but to desensitize us to moral distinctions.

Something of the same notion comes across in your professor’s statement “The anthropological gaze is about describing culture, not judging it.”  Do you notice her tacit assumption?  She didn’t consider moral facts to be real facts, for if they were, then the description of culture would include evaluating it.  You don’t thicken description by throwing out facts, but by getting them all in.

The ancient historians and students of society took the opposite view.  Aristotle, for example, thought that in classifying the different kinds of political societies, the moral motives of the ruling class are just as important as their social composition.  In other words, if in one state the ruler promote the common good but in another they promote their personal interests, these are different kinds of government, and if you don’t see that, then you are hardly seeing at all.  He distinguished six basic kinds of regime – kingship, aristocracy, polity, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy – in one column the good ones, in the other, perversions of the good ones.  Our approach would distinguish only three.

My point isn’t that we shouldn’t suspend moral judgment; I don’t think that we can.  Whenever we imagine that we are suspending moral judgment, we are deluding ourselves.  What is actually happening is that certain moral judgments which are recognized as moral judgments are being pushed out the front door – but certain others which are not admitted to be moral judgments are slipping in the back door.  We don’t judge cannibals; we do judge those awful judgmentalists.

Question:

I'm curious whether you know of any undergraduate degrees that are exclusive to the study of natural law.  If there are none that you know of, do you know of any program that has natural law as its main emphasis?

Reply:

No, I don’t think there are any such programs, but don’t be discouraged; there shouldn’t be.  The best way to prepare for the study of natural law is to get a broad, classical liberal arts education which is heavy in ethical and political philosophy.

Of course you will want teachers who are well-informed about the classical natural law tradition and sympathetic to it.  It would be wonderful if they taught other subjects, such as history and psychology, from the perspective of natural law.  You should supplement your classroom studies with independent reading about natural law, and if you tell me what you’ve read already, I can suggest other things to read.  But I don’t think it would be good to try to turn natural law into the whole content of your major, even if there were such a program.

The Wisdom books present some surprises – among them, a fair sampling of paradox.  Take for example the book of Proverbs, which includes a number of apparently inconsistent sayings colliding head to head.  This pair is from Chapter 26:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.  Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.

“See?  The holy literature of the Christians contradicts itself!”  But no.  Such juxtapositions are deliberate.

There really are reasons to confront fools on their own terms, and there really are reasons not to.  To know when to speak and be silent, one must weigh the reasons case by case.

One who has not meditated on this vexing fact will hardly have grasped what the craft of rhetoric is for.

Adapted from this book

It may seem that the possibility of forgiveness matters only on the assumption that there is, in fact, a God -- that without the lawgiver, there would be no law, and therefore nothing to be forgiven.  The actual state of affairs is more dreadful, for the Furies of conscience do not wait upon our assumptions.  One who acknowledges the Furies but denies the God who appointed them -- who supposes that there can be a law without a lawgiver -- must suppose that forgiveness is both necessary and impossible.  That which is not personal cannot forgive; morality “by itself” has a heart of rock.  And so although grace would be unthinkable, the ache for it would keen on, like a cry in a deserted street.