[lit-ideas] Tom Hart and Reading Lists

From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:58:12 -0800
Tom Hart (see http://web.me.com/tehart/Jurassic_Rants/Welcome.html ) wrote
of reading (during retirement) the stuff he missed out on earlier, e.g, ". .
. . stuff like Kant, Hegel, Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, Ariosto,
Machiavelli, parts of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and blogging about it.
I'm also reading less pretentious stuff, mostly science fiction."

 

In a sense I did what he is doing, but I did it earlier.  I grew up having
contempt for my many of my teachers which carried over into college; so I
developed a "reading list" of books I wanted to read at the earliest
opportunity, especially books rejected by professors I didn't respect.  

 

Tom writes of not liking the jobs he held and I sense a hint of Catholic
guilt for not engaging in work with social benefits (although this could be
my imagination).  I can relate to this concern a bit, but I can't really say
that I hated working in engineering because I became good at it and enjoyed
mastering matters I wasn't educated for, but I was often more interested in
completing the gaps in my education (the ones I was aware of) than my
engineering assignments.  I recall once, for example interesting a couple of
fellow engineers in a slow reading of one of Ockham's works.  

 

Douglas, McDonnell Douglas, and Boeing hired a lot of people educated in
matters not directly related to engineering.  I recall working with and
debating a fellow named Cy Gallick who was working on his PhD in Geology.
After he earned as much money as he was interested in he quit to complete
his degree and find a job more to his liking.  I recall another fellow who
was educated in Economics.  He hated engineering, but on the plus side fell
in love with his boss's secretary and went with her to live in Montana.
"Bill," I asked.  "What will you do in Montana?"  "Anything but this," he
said.  "I don't care.  I'd rather work in a hardware store than do this."  

 

People educated in English seemed to last a bit longer.  English was at the
time considered to be the closest could get to a classic education; which
would equip a graduate for any sort of work he was interested in.  I had a
great number of discussions and debates with Lee Griffith, a graduate of
Duke University.  He abandoned his education, I forget why, after getting an
M.A. in English.  His interest was Criticism, and since I was always writing
poetry, he was always offering his opinion, but we also read and debated a
lot of the same things.  Lee could do the work well enough, but after a
divorce, he drank a bit too much and lost interest in keeping his job.   All
of which is to say that I worked on my reading list during the time I worked
as an engineer in aerospace and didn't wait for retirement.  

 

In recent years I have taken up a parallel concern.  Perhaps we all know
that ideas, climates of opinion, change from one generation to the next, but
how can we put the accepted ideas of today in "proper perspective," and,
perhaps, avoid the foolishness that historians will see in us a hundred
years from now? That is, can someone step back, figuratively step outside of
the accepted "truths" of this age the way historians do with earlier
periods?  Impossible, historians will tell us - at least generally
impossible because we can't dredge up and set aside all the assumptions we
were raised with.  They are in us like a cancer that can't be pulled out
without killing us.  That is generally true, but not entirely so else
historians and social scientists would not be writing the books they do.  

 

I have been rereading H. Stuart Hughes' Consciousness and Society, The
Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930.  Hughes wrote this book
in 1958.  He didn't set out to do quite what I described in the preceding
paragraph. Instead he sought to determine the impact of some of the great
thinkers of the preceding generation upon the generation in which he lived.
Hughes conscientiously describes his own presuppositions: "In my own case, I
might proffer the information that while I am American by nationality, my
intellectual formation has been largely European.  Originally it was
Anglo-French: Cartesian logic, the common sense of Locke, the skepticism of
Hume were already in the background of my education long before I had read a
line of these philosophers.  And I still fall most naturally into a
'rationalistic' way of thought.  But an exposure to Germany and to the
German idealist tradition came early enough in my life to effect a radical
change in orientation.  More recently I have been primarily concerned with
Italy, and the tranquil persuasiveness of Croce has been ever with me."

 

Ah, "Croce."  I never encountered him in college, or if I did he made no
impression.  After my first reading of Hughes' book I purchased translations
of Croce's Theory of Aesthetic and History of Aesthetic, and while I have
yet to read them, they have been added to my "list" which is getting longer
rather than shorter.  

 

In my quest to put our age into some sort of historical perspective, I have
been interested in theorists, especially Fukuyama who have sought something
similar.  In reading Hughes treatment of the Positivists, he said that none
(or few?) are thorough-going determinists; so what of Fukuyama?  I don't
recall wondering about it before, but in picking up Hegel's view that
Capitalism (now Liberal Democracy) is to be the end of history, isn't that
rather deterministic of him?  Fukuyama didn't put matters in deterministic
terms.  Marx may have when he predicted Socialism to be the end of history,
but Fukuyama was interested in following Kojeve in his criticism of Marx and
his observation that while Marx may have turned Hegel on his head, events,
especially the fall of the USSR in 1989, have set Hegel back on his feet.
Perhaps one can make a deterministic inference from Fukuyama's arguments,
but I doubt that he himself would.

 

Another of the intellectuals Hughes will be discussing is Weber who gave us
the "Protestant Work Ethic," which bothered me a bit in aerospace because I
finished my work more quickly than anticipated and as a consequence spent
long periods reading such writers as Ockham.  

 

And does the Protestant Work Ethic extend into retirement?   Perhaps in
earlier periods retirement was a matter of getting too sick and feeble to
work any longer.  What sort of perspective can we put Tom and me into: two
retirees working on their book lists - and, sometimes, feeling guilty about
it?

 

Lawrence
[lit-ideas] Tom Hart and Reading Lists

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