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What is the best sort of life for a human being? Socrates claimed in 400BC that a
man lives a happier life if he’s just, even if he is thrown starving into prison for the
rest of his life than if he is unjust and he is celebrated and honored all of his days
and is never caught for his crimes. Could that possibly be correct? If not, why not
and what difference should the question make to us now? What moves the human heart?
Shakespeare’s characters throw us into the depths of lust, envy, greed, pride, ambition.
What do those characters have to say about the way that we act or that we behave or that
we believe? And if so, what difference would it make to read about them in Shakespeare
and why Shakespeare whose Elizabethan English is very difficult for us who speak modern
English to understand? Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651 a book called Leviathan, one of the
two or three most influential works in the history of thinking about government and politics
in western society. He was writing from the midst of a raging civil war and he argued
that unless we gave all the power, unless we surrendered all ultimate control to a legitimate
king that we would all rob and kill each other. Was he right about that? Is that the way
things actually work and is the question relevant to us today when we no longer believe in kings?
Hello. My name is Jeff Brenzel and I'm the dean of undergraduate admissions
at Yale University. I'm also the master of something called Timothy Dwight College,
which essentially means that I live with 400 of the very undergraduates that I picked myself
and yes, it is unusual for an admissions dean to live 24/7 with the outcomes of his own
decisions. I also lecture from time to time in the philosophy department at Yale and my
work in philosophy centers around ethics and also the history of the ideas that we’ve
had about something we like to call human nature. Speaking of human nature, one of
my personal heroes, Aristotle, claimed that by nature everyone seeks to know, everyone
desires to know. For the purposes of this talk I'm going to assume that you are already
an intellectually curious person and that you’re not only chasing after knowledge
as hard as you can. You’re also trying to build up the skill sets and acquire the
kind of capacities and abilities that you’re going to need to become a better learner overall. Also
I'm going to assume that you’re not only trying to increase your stock of knowledge,
but that you’re seeking to grow in wisdom as well and wisdom is something distinct from
knowledge and I'm going to come back to that a little later. If these things are in
fact true about you then here is my advice in a nutshell. Make a choice in college
to read some old books, even a substantial number of old books. My argument will be
that reading the right old books in the right way is better than reading only new books,
much less using only new ways of learning that have nothing to do with books at all.
So yes, I'm a throwback. I have a somewhat unpopular view of what you should do with
your college education. What I'm going to try to persuade you is that my advice is going
to make a difference to your education or at least that you should test my advice to
see if it’s worthwhile and determine for yourself. But let’s be careful about
what I'm claiming and what I'm not claiming. I'm not claiming that you should read only
old books or that old books are better because they’re old or that you should never read
any new books or that new books are worthless. Only that you should read and learn how
to read some old books, but which ones would those be? How do you learn how to read them
in the right way? Why should you read them in college and how could doing that change
your life for the better? How is that going to make you smarter and moreover, how is it
going to make you wiser? The Dialogues of Socrates, Aristotle’s Ethics, Oedipus
Rex, the City of God, Leviathan, Dante’s Inferno, King Leer, Paradise Lost, War and
Peace, there are a lot of these books, but why spend a significant amount of your time
on books that by definition are outdated? Why not go after the books that bring every
up to date? Don’t we know those people already knew and much, much more? So
a little personal background here, I went off to university in 1971. No one in my
family had ever graduated from college, much less a place like Yale. I was from—I had
gone to an all Catholic, boy’s high school. I had never visited across the state line.
I never had even been on an airplane before the one that swept me off the New Haven, Connecticut.
My folks assumed that I was going off to become one of two things, a doctor
or a lawyer. That is the sort of thing that happened to you when you went off to a university
like the one I attended. Doctor, lawyer, there is nothing wrong with doctors or lawyers,
far from it. The point was that you go to college in order to find paying work. College
equals a job. Now when I actually showed up at Yale I applied in total ignorance
and almost by accident to a special freshman year program called Directed Studies. So
what is Directed Studies? In Directed Studies you take three four-year courses in the history
of western thought and philosophy, in literature and in politics. You start with what the
classic Greeks had to say and then you roll forward with the centuries until you end up
about a century behind where we are right now. There are no textbooks. There
are no summaries. There are no Cliff Notes. You read only the original works and it
was both the single most difficult and the single most transforming educational experience
that I've ever had. About 15 years ago I came back to Yale after founding companies,
managing organizations and after earning a PhD in philosophy and I'm having the opportunity
there today to teach in this very same program that I took over 30 years ago. So
I've’ gotten to know these classic works fairly well. I've become familiar with them.
I've seen their effects on students and I've had the chance to stack them up against
my own life experience and stuff that I've read from lots of modern books, so here I
am ready to give you some good reasons to look into the classics yourself. Now
the first thing to point out is something that I think you already know, but that you
might not have noticed that you know. There are a lot of books out there and you don’t
have much time. The Library of Congress has over 20 million volumes. That is the
largest library in the world. That is not counting the journals, the publications. That
is not counting the internet. It’s not counting the blogs. It’s not counting
Wikipedia. It’s not counting the entire Googleplex. Meanwhile down here on the
personal level I'm 58 years-old. I've been a pretty strong reader for about 40 years.
Back home I've got a personal library of about 2,000 books, volumes and if you do the
math that is about 50 books times 40 years, about 50 books a year. It’s about a book
a week. I hope you can see the problem. My problem, which is also your problem,
which is we aren’t going to make it through the Library of Congress, not only that, we’re
not going to get to 99.999% of everything that has ever been written. You know
Mahatma Gandhi said live as though you’ll die tomorrow, but learn as though you’ll
live forever. Now Gandhi was as aware as you and I are that we’re not going to live
forever and of course that means that you are going to have to be extremely picky about
what you choose to read, even if you live according to Gandhi. You literally have
no other choice, but now it seems I've only made my job harder because I have to persuade
you that with this precious time that you have for learning and study, which is dwindling
all the time that you’re going to take some of it and devote it to things that are outdated.
So I've enlarged, you might say, my task. So let’s focus on the principle of necessity
and that means the principle of having to make these difficult and time consuming choices.
I’d like to give you five reasons, five rough and ready criteria for identifying a
classic of literature or philosophy or politics. Now no one or two of these criteria are
going to be decisive, but I think if you put them altogether they’re going to prove actually
to be quite useful. So my five criteria or marks of a great book, a great classic
in the sense that I'm using the term are these. So first, the work addresses permanent concerns
about the human condition. From a philosophical perspective it has something to say about
the way we should live. From a literary perspective it has something to say about
imagining the possibilities for how we could live and from a historical perspective it
tells us how we have lived. That’s mark number one of a classic. Mark number
two is that the work has been a game-changer. It has created profound shifts in perspective
and not only for its earliest readers, but for all the readers who came later as well. Mark
number three is that the work has stimulated or informed or influenced many other important
works, whether directly or indirectly. Mark number four is that many generations of the
best readers and the most expert critics have rated the work highly, one of the best or
most important of its kind, even if those experts and readers shared no other views
than that and even if they violently disagreed with the work. Mark number five is that
the work usually requires a strenuous effort to engage and understand, but it also rewards
the hard work strongly and in multiple fashions. Before we think about what these criteria
rule in let’s think about what they rule out. You might say, as my wife said to me
the other day. “Jeff I've just read this classic on cat breeding.” But that book
however good it is would not fit the criteria that I've laid out for you here. Why? Even
though my wife would be upset and I'm rather fond of cats myself, why? A book on cat
breeding does not address permanent and universal concerns about the human condition. Most
broadly informed readers and critics are not going to see it at the top of their book list
and it’s not going to require a strenuous effort of the kind that I'm imagining here. So
let’s contrast that book with an acknowledged classic, perhaps the greatest of the American
novels, Moby Dick. That was all about whales wasn’t it? Bigger than cats obviously,
but otherwise it’s the same sort of thing. Well no. Herman Melville does use a story
about whale hunting, which includes an enormous amount of material about whales to weave a
mighty fable, a fable about good and evil, about the human will, about the mysterious
connections that bind people together or the differences that drive them apart and about
the human struggle with nature in the very largest sense of the word and our struggle
with our own natures as well. Though virtually ignored when it was published—though
virtually ignored when it was published Moby Dick later became a game-changer. It has
continually grown in the estimation of the best readers and critics. No significant
American writer is unaware of its influence or doesn’t take account of it in their own
work. It’s a superb challenge to read. It becomes the more rewarding the more effort
that you put into it and the older you get typically the more you get out of it, though
even less experienced readers often find it extremely moving if they make the good effort
to persist with it to the very end. So here is the narrator Ishmael describing—so
here is narrator Ishmael describing mad Captain Ahab who is locked into an obsessive hunt
for the whale Moby Dick, the whale that cost him his leg: “All that most maddens and
torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks
the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil to
crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt
by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst
his hot heart's shell upon it.” Well aren’t people always advising you to pursue
your passions? What if some passions are worse than others? And here is Ishmael thinking
about life and fate. Now he is sitting in the whaling boat where the long lines are
attached to harpoons and the lines snake all around your feet. When the harpooner spears
the fish with the harpoon the line jumps out and if you slip or you get caught up in the
coil of the rope it yanks you out of the boat to a virtually certain death. So Ishmael
says: “The graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen
before being brought into actual play- this is a thing which carries more of true terror
than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in
whale lines.All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in
the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils
of life. But if you be a truephilosopher, though seated in a whale boat, you would not
at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with
a poker, not a harpoon, by your side.” So what is Ishmael telling us here? At one
level he seems to be saying that a wise person, someone who fully and completely understands