Commentary

A Great Books Education

I was exposed to the Great Books of the Western World early in my teen years. This set of books by the philosophers, historians, scientists, and literary writers of Western civilization was assembled by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. My father impressed on me early that an educated man was a man who read these books. I first read Homer's Iliad and Plato's Dialogs when I was fifteen, and ever since I have loved the classical literature.

The idea behind a great books education is that every one of us must confront several basic and deep questions of life, and that by reading the works of history, philosophy, and literature of the past three millennia, we can over time acquire answers to these questions. As Mortimer Adler points out, this education is a generalist's education, and in the broad intellectual areas of history and philosophy, we all should strive to becomes generalists. It is also an education that looks back as much as it looks forward.

The university world now appears to reject the great books education. Primarily this is a consequence of specialization, but it is also a consequence of rapid technological advancement and dramatic social change. The past as represented by Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy appear backward with their misunderstanding of basic science and their mixing of religious belief with their scientific understanding. In a culture of progress, to study the past is to study the discredited and discarded.

These trends are particularly strong in the study of science, because science by its nature is ruthlessly objective, discarding any idea that experiment and observation fail to support, and accretive, requiring a higher degree of specialization with each generation. Scientists therefore become highly specialized, often to the point of pure ignorance in any subject not directly touching the subject of specialization. The only generalizing factor in the education of a physical scientists, in fact, is the basic physical principals underlying all phenomena. We are generalists in classical mechanics, classical electrodynamics, and basic quantum mechanics, but only in these subjects.

Is there a place for the great books of Western civilization in a scientific education? The nature of science appears to be entirely at odds with the philosophy of a great books education. Is there really a point of reading Ptolemy, when his concept of the Solar System is wrong, and his knowledge of the universe more limited than that of a grade school student? Even Mortimer Adler questioned whether the sciences had a place in a more general great books education.

?I have not included science because science as it has developed in the modern world has become more and more the province of the specialists. No one of the many sciences is everybody's business, any more than law, medicine, or engineering should be everyone's profession. The particular positive or empirical sciences, along with mathematics, enter into the continuing self-education of autodidacts, only to the extent that some understanding of these disciplines or subject-matters should be part of everyone's general education. The approach, in other words, should always be that of the generalist: in other words, historical and philosophical.?¹

I suspect that to many scientists, the study of the history of science has the feel of studying crackpot theories. Why learn ideas that are in error when it takes time away from the study of ideas we know are correct? The physics profession is good about keeping track of its history, but often this is the history of success, which can at times take on the aspects of hagiography.

But the point of a great books education is that it is a deep education in intellectual history. The emphasis is not on Ptolemy's theory for planetary motion, but on why Ptolemy thought his theory was valid. Science has advanced, but the effects of human nature on the practice of science has not disappeared, and the great books demonstrate the effects and pitfalls of human nature on acquiring knowledge better than any other source short of personal experience. When we read many of the seminal works of science of the past two millennia, we see the echoes of modern pathologies in science.

Science as we practice it is a very unnatural activity. It is contrary to most of our human tendencies, which is why the development of science was so drawn out, and why we see lapses back to prescientific thinking even within the scientific profession. By studying the great books, we see these aspects of human behavior, and we see how developments within the scientific community overcame them. The study of the great books is the development of a deep memory that can only inform our work as modern scientists. For this reason, a scientist who does not look back to the writings of is predecessors is denying himself a intellectual legacy that can guide him in his work.