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SHILO BROOKS: Welcome back to The Free Mind podcast, where we discuss philosophic and political ideas with adventurous disregard for intellectual trends. I'm Shilo Brooks from the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I'm joined today by Jeff Black, professor at St. John's College, a unique great books college with campuses in Annapolis, Maryland, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jeff has served as an associate dean of the graduate program at St. John's, and he's been a distinguished visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, resident Fellow in Civil-Military Relations at Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the Air Force Academy. He's author of Rousseau's Critique of Science and several wonderful essays on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Our discussion today explores what the so-called great books are, how reading them can provide a liberal education, and why they're still relevant and perhaps more relevant than ever in today's political and cultural landscape. Jeff Black, welcome to The Free Mind podcast. I wanted to talk to you a bit about great books and great books education. This, I suspect, is foreign to a lot of our listeners, that there are great books, why they're great, how they educate. And so I thought we'd have a little conversation about that today, and I wanted to start by asking you what makes a book great. What is a great book?

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JEFF BLACK: Well, thanks, Shilo. And thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, so this is a hard question. I teach at a school that is sometimes called a "great books" school. And the faculty itself disagrees about what makes books great. So lemme give you a sense of my idea about this and also where I see the difficulties or the complexities. The first thing that occurs to me is that it's tempting to think that a book is great because it has a great effect in history, right? So I guess I call these famous books or books that seem great because they're famous, and I think ultimately that's a wrong way to go about looking at what makes a book great. But it's not a bad place to start, because there are some books that seem to have had a big effect, they've maybe caused revolutions, or that a lotta people are very impressed by. And often, those are the books that we look to to think, "Hey, is this book really great? We should read it." And then I think if the book is truly great, what you find is that it has two qualities, and I call those qualities intensity and extent or comprehensiveness. So I'd say this: for me great books are the books that turn out to be very deep, you look at any part of them, and you put a question to that part, and it gives you a kind of answer, and also very extensive, even comprehensive, that they talk about the whole of human life or they offer a whole possible world. So whereas, a lotta books, they're part of a world, and they talk about part of a world, I think each great book could be understood as a world in itself. Now, those might be weird answers. What d'ya think? Does that strike a chord with you?

SHILO BROOKS: Certainly, it seems to me the greatness of a book could be predicated on the degree to which one can continue to return to it and it provides a wellspring of information. The way I put it to my students sometimes is that I change but the books stay the same, yet it appears to me that the books are changing, because I read them when I was 18 and, then 25 and then 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 and every time I come back to them, they say something to me deeper. I'm able to get some new piece of wisdom out of them. As I age, their greatness becomes manifested to me all the more because their profundity speaks to me more as I've lived more life, as I've experienced more of the world, as it were. That occurs to me as something about a... It's not a book you read once. It's not a comic book. People talk about great movies in this way or great songs. You could listen to a great song 1,000 times, or a great movie, you watch it however many times, and there's always something there for you. I think a great book is that principle writ large. I wanted to return to one thing you said though. You mentioned in response to my question about the way in which great books pose or attempt to answer perpetual, and you put it enduring, questions. You said or at least it seems to me that this would presuppose that human nature doesn't change. If these books can still speak to us, the Iliad, what it is that Homer was trying to communicate or write about or get at, Plato, Spinoza, Nietzsche, all the way through history, there's something distinctively human, permanently human... And that would have to be the case if the questions were enduring. So I'm curious. Does the very notion of a great book or a canon of great books like the one that's presented at the school at which you teach... Does that presuppose the permanence of a human nature for which these enduring questions can have meaning?

JEFF BLACK: Yeah, this seems right to me. So one series of great books that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about is books written by Nietzsche. And one of the things that both impresses and also puzzles me about his thought is that, on the one hand, he seems to think that being the way he is, is a permanent possibility for human beings or a durable possibility for human beings and, on the other hand, he seems to fear that there might one day be no more people like him. And I guess that could be a factual outcome, right? It could be the case that there just are never any more of one kind of human being. That would be a great loss. But I do think that, ultimately, I come down on the side of the view that these possibilities will endure as long as human beings are substantially like they are now.

SHILO BROOKS: Yeah, don't get me started on Nietzsche. [Jeff laughs] I'm gonna have you back on [laughs] for the Nietzsche podcasts. But your reference to him... I certainly agree with what you say about his thoughts. Occurs to me though when I think of Nietzsche as a writer of great books, let's say, that Nietzsche more than many other authors even in the canon of the great books is in conversation with those who came before him. He's in conversation with Plato. He's in conversation with Christianity, with the Bible. He's in conversation with Schopenhauer, all kinds of writers. And so is it a distinctive feature of a great book that they speak to one another? In other words one can go to Barnes & Noble, and one can buy the latest romance novel. And, while I don't deny the great virtues of romance novels [chuckles] at all, I don't think that those novels are speaking necessarily to one another or trying to answer these fundamental or enduring questions, as you put it, whereas great books can. And, if there is a cannon, there seems to be authors who are in fact name-checking one another. Nietzsche will use Plato's name. They're directly in conversation with one another. So can you say something about the way in which the great minds speak to one another and whether, within the series of great books, whatever they are, there is a kind of conversation or is that illusory and we're just making that up.

JEFF BLACK: No, no, I think it's real, and I think you've given the "Masterpiece Theater" or PG-13 version of it. I'd call it they're cursing at one another across mountain tops or something like that. Lemme try and explain what I mean by that. If it's true that one sign of a great book is it contains and implies a world, that it aspires to be comprehensive or total, that means it tries to exclude other worlds. That means that it has to take on other worlds and say, "It's me. It's not that other one." And that means that... It is a conversation. That's an entirely apt word, but it doesn't quite capture what I think is a degree of necessary antagonism that makes the interaction between great books very dramatic and very exciting. On some level... I don't wanna be too melodramatic about it. But the whole of existence is at stake: what is the truth about the way of things? What is the truth about existence? "I, Plato, say one thing." "I, Nietzsche, say another thing." And the existence of Plato, for Nietzsche, is, on the one hand, an incitement, "Somebody else did what I'm trying to do," and, on the other hand, some kind of problem, "If he did it, if he completed an account of the world that satisfactory, there's no place for me, certainly not as his equal or even to surpass him," right? So there, I think, is a kind of antagonism that's different. Romance novels could imitate one another. They could applaud one another. They can be fashionable and, therefore, like one another. And the same is true of scholarship. Lots of books respond to one another, but they don't have this edge to them that says the whole of existence is at stake.

JEFF BLACK: Yeah, that seems right. But ours is a... What would I call it? A syncretic age, an age where we like to just mash everything together. And so while your correction is entirely apt, I was overstating the case, I do think that the overstatement is helpful to us, right? In other words I think there's a sense in which people can come to a great books education thinking that it's a book club conversation among the great authors where they all more or less agree about everything and they all approve of one another simply and there are no difficult choices to be made. I really do think that it's more about difficult choices than it is about agreement although I don't wanna overstate it. And sometimes these authors conceal or understate the debt that they owe to previous writers. And so one of the things involved in learning about them is in fact uncovering how much they do agree. That's right. e24fc04721