This week, through a question-and-response format, I offer some reflections on “Great Books”, Critical Thinking, and the purpose of university in an effort to dispel what I believe to be some underlying misconceptions about the value of reading and studying various texts (like Shakespeare or Plato) in the context of formation. I hope to offer a fresh point of entry. Here are the main points:
1. Close Reading produces Critical Thinking.
2. Critical Thinking is a moral activity.
3. Literature is the most efficient site for performing close readings.
4. Eagerness or Curiosity, not “Great Books”, is the ideal condition within which close readings are generated.
5. “Great Books” offer the most consistent body of literature and the widest possible set of readers to converse with.
6. AI undermines formation by impairing collective eagerness.
What is the value of a university education?
The cultivation of Critical Thinking, meaning growth in intellectual and moral (humane) maturity.
How is Critical Thinking cultivated?
Critical Thinking is achieved via close reading in which the reader attends to the logical relationships (syntax) of the object in view and practices the construction of meaning. The object could be a painting, stellar chart, opera, drama, chemical analysis, sculpture, movie, verbal argument, dataset, logistics map, murder scene, overflowing toilet, short story, employment agreement, etc. In the process of close reading, an individual encounters competing patterns or interpretive options which exist prior to the encounter and suddenly are revealed to be an environment within which the act of reading and thinking occur. This experience of revelation – moving from surface of the “text” to its hidden ground or pattern – can be reversed and repeated, which forms the essential movement or mental gesture that ultimately results in intellectual formation and critical thinking.
Example of this process:
A plumber arrives at a client’s home, shuffling past a very rusty car with a broken windshield and tiptoeing around bags of garbage to get to the front door before being met by a woman who appears overtired, clearly struggling to manage three irascible, small children in a messy home. The toilet is clogged. A close reading of this situation gives the plumber the option to behave humanely by recognizing and responding to the obvious destitution of the client. Such a capacity (the training of humane awareness) need not be achieved by pouring over the grammatical construction of a Shakespearean sonnet, but it will only be acquired if the plumber had previously learned to pay attention to these sorts of patterns and clues, and see in them a moral obligation. Otherwise, as with any other client, he might have filtered out or explained as uninteresting (meaning facts that did not involve or obligate him) the various clues, plunged the toilet as quickly as possible, and left the woman with a bill she has no means to pay. The syntax of this scene is the perception of a logical connection between various parts, leading to a variety of interpretations (including, “she is poor and needs help”) that can then be acted upon.
What is the benefit of cultivating Critical Thinking by means of literary study?
The chief benefit is the capacity of literature to endure repeated close reading gestures leading to fresh experiences of revelation combined with the relatively straightforward scaling of individual close reading to various social dynamics (large or small classroom; instructor and learner or peers-only; highly contextualized or vestal encounters). Some objects (i.e. the plumbing example above) have a natural critical decay in which the scene of analysis or close reading dissipates or is reduced in scope, accessible only in its afterlife in memory; other objects require technical competency before close reading is viable (i.e. many STEM fields, linguistics). Critical Thinking still develops in these fields, but re-reading in community is best-suited for the sustained cultivation of Critical Thinking.
Is “Great Books” misleading as an ideal set of objects for the cultivation of Critical Thinking?
The short answer is yes. There is no ideal set of objects, only an ideal posture of eagerness (studere) or curiosity, which causes Critical Thinking to flourish because the subject attends with interest and therefore develops the capacity to overcome difficulties present in any field of study. However, what is typically meant by the “Great Books” or Western Canon of literature, is a collection of texts that showcase either original ideas or a degree of technical capacity proven to offer close readers sustained and varied experiences of revelation in addition to providing breadth of ongoing community engagement. Contemporary readers of Socrates or de Tocqueville participate in a rich conversation with writers and thinkers from their own century, or from the preceding fifteen, all of whom have attempted to conduct their own close readings, grappling with ideas at the centre of what it means to be human. This does not mean “Great Books” ought to be valorized or afforded a special position as decanters of Critical Thinking compared with a sea of unworthy literature. Rather, given the scope of a university education, Critical Thinking is most readily achieved by giving students as many opportunities to perform close readings and as many imitable interlocuters of the same objects as can reasonably be managed in order to produce as many experiences of revelation as possible in their time at the university. The value of a university over a library, in this respect, is in its arranging ideal conditions for this process: (time, texts, interlocutors, instructors), but the same procedure could be achieved (and often is) by an individual willing to pay for library late fees, or a weekly club eager to finish a novel and discuss it. What has so often been misunderstood, both by proponents of “Great Books” as well as detractors, is the role of re-reading or continuous, repeated encounters with the same objects in the cultivation of Critical Thinking. Just as bricklayers, by repeated use of the same bricks, grout, scaffolds, trowels and hammers, achieve a high degree of critical awareness of their craft (which might culminate in their ability to perfectly cut and set a partial brick in place with one stroke), so Critical Thinking is best served by repeated encounters with the same objects, especially when those objects are shown by historical precedent to be mediators of many experiences of revelation. The challenge is that students, having met an object once, often carry away an impression that they have “read” it. For a seasoned reader, close reading and Critical Thinking does occur with first exposures, but as a strategy of formation, few suggestions could be more detrimental than for a student to “move on” from an object they have encountered once. As it stands today in contemporary university culture, the reading situation is even more dire. Students do not complete many of their books and yet still proceed to render their judgements and perform close readings, constructing all manner of meanings about a thing they have not rightly encountered. This merely ensures their intellectual progress will be opaque to themselves and stunted into dependency. Hence why “Great Books” is a useful launch pad for Critical Thinking – it reasonably predicts timeless ideas and compelling syntax will be encountered with opportunity for a range of conversations across time and culture, facilitating habits of close reading for an eager student.
Why is morality included in the definition of Critical Thinking?
For thinking to rise to the level of maturity, it must account for obligation. Childish thinking perceives only the self and instinctual benefits that instrumentalize others. When revelation occurs (movement from surface-experience to pattern-recognition), the individual meets alternative notions that precede and underwrite their own, which gives rise to moral awareness. What ought the individual to think, believe and feel, or how ought they to behave in light of the other? Childishness sees no other, but devours the pattern, incorporating it as an extension of the self, and thus eliminates any moral frame or duty to another. But Critical Thinking enlightens by placing the reader continually in the path of other minds. This does not depend on “Great Books” or a set curriculum that is particularly moral in subject; concerns of obligation arise in the contemplation of a sunset or cartoon just as readily as the recitation of a creed or examination of a philosophy paper. It depends, rather, on eagerness to encounter, contend with, imitate, or explain the logical relationships and patterns of meaning made available by the close reading of any object and its interlocutors. The development of moral maturity does not guarantee a reader will be prudent, just, courageous, or temperate, but the cultivation of Critical Thinking will necessarily embed moral categories, which the individual may tolerate, disdain, contort or embrace. The claim that some injustice has been dealt to us (an idea we learn to articulate from a very early age) such that we are owed a remedy or restitution is itself a marker that we have read closely some scene or experience, discerned competing interpretations, and evaluated between these interpretations. In alerting others to the injustice, we are necessarily inviting them to join as a reader, sharing some standard of evidence or morality. We may be bending their ear and colouring their view in our appeal, but it is nevertheless engaging moral faculties in our minds. Thus, you cannot cultivate critical attention without awakening moral awareness. The same technique that trains the reader to recognize patterns and logical relationships also trains the reader to recognize obligation. This is built into the grammar of language (and here, language means not simply words on a page, but the code essential to the production of an object, be it clay, paint and canvas, stage and costumes, etc.), which involves a recognition of the relationship between words laid out according to a custom handed down to the reader. In the sentence, “John assaulted Jane”, the moral implications depend upon the syntax; to reverse actor and recipient alters obligations (“Jane assaulted John”). Each sentence inaugurates a critical inquiry that is itself moral, and the grammar skews our starting point. The second instance may prompt a meretricious evaluation (“did John deserve it?”) or a pragmatic one (“was Jane in danger”) to justify the actor, whereas the first sentence stirs up moral discomfort or outrage if the same procedure is engaged (“did Jane deserve it?”). This sort of moral training occurs all the time in daily life (though the stakes are often hidden below the surface) and is very much heightened by natural obligations (like parenthood). The advantage of a university is its focus on the sort of re-reading that offers a student many and varied encounters with shared objects, and so (like the bricklayer), training in the range of responses possible and their moral entailments. In this sense, the procedures of a university may be unlike, though complementary to, religious instruction. The goal of the university is to train the faculty of apprehension itself, recognizing the logical and moral dimensions of such training. Religious instruction begins with a set of stock commitments or creeds that shape interpretation and obligation for community and individual.
How can Critical Thinking be trained in an Age of Social-Media and A.I.?
The essential function of Generative Language Models is the disruption of the conditions of Critical Thinking and their cohesion (time, text, interlocutors, instructors), though this is partly an extension of other technological habits (ubiquity of phones). The disruption occurs because the outcomes of Critical Thinking (writing, argument) are easily and quickly feigned by these applications, undermining the eagerness and curiosity of the student, which as I noted above, is the ideal posture for the cultivation of Critical Thinking because it fortifies the student against the strain and difficulty inherent to formation. Via constant attention to Social-Media (conceived broadly), student engagement is assaulted by dis-traction, a drawing away from close reading tasks. These two factors are highly addictive or habit-forming. It follows that Critical Thinking can only be trained if eagerness is upheld and distraction limited. One final element in connection with the function of “Great Books” bears on the intersection of Social-Media, A.I., and Critical Thinking: shared objects diminish substantially in a digital age, not necessarily because individuals are not eager for good, beautiful, or truthful things, but because their lives, relative to those of our predecessors, are exposed to overwhelming varieties and rich sub-communities of objects at every given moment in time. The intense privacy of modern experience must be part of the calculus of eagerness, for it is not merely the task of the university to offer up a path or course through the wonders of “Great Books” (or an equivalent set of objects for inquiry), but the university must also contend with a vast range of influences and points of departure that make the cohesion of a community impossible, since daily encounters with objects may differ so widely and natural curiosity is superficially sated. Many receive a deluge of memes, advertisements, articles or videos as they “doom-scroll” or browse, but the algorithmic nature of the digital sphere ensures significant disparity between one individual’s experience and another’s. This dual nature of Social-Media (an ever-available melting pot and a privatized escalator of interest) pulls against sustained attention to the logical relationships of an object of inquiry. Student bodies, since they have so many other things they can immediately turn to and engage with, will find it difficult to generate an environment of eagerness outside of a classroom setting (and often even within!). A group of beloved instructors can model eagerness to mitigate these effects, inviting students to observe and participate in conversations that naturally rise to the level of close reading, but such a commitment must be thorough to be at all effective, meaning the instructors must model an entire lifestyle and community of traction and curiosity. “Great Books”, though not a panacea, offers continuity not merely for a course or student body, but with contemporaneous university experiences (other students across the globe also reading Jane Austen) and our forebears, providing raw materials for the production and sustenance of eagerness.
Todd Anderson (Stuff of the Rind, Sand and Sail, The Reluctant Prophet) writes the newsletter Mirth to share a behind-the-scenes look at his writing process as well as to offer readers the first fruits of his poetry and reflections. He grew up in the forests of small-town Ontario, contending against nature in all its beauty and harshness. His training as a literary scholar of Latin and English literature inflects his love of poignant turns of phrase, but it is the influence of his family and their myriad adventures together that infuses his story-telling and poetry with its substance and power. Todd lives and writes in Ottawa with his wife and six children. If you are interested in supporting Todd’s work, please follow the links below to donate or buy his books.
Todd Edward Anderson 