The Great Books and Why We need to Study Them

Mechelle M. Halili

We all understand that knowledge, understanding, and wisdom are transferred from the minds of great thinkers of the past. These great thoughts are developed in the context of their lifetime and were then written down in order for the succeeding generations to understand, to contemplate and to learn from. Great men have captured their ideas and thoughts and formed them into writings that reflect the intellectual, cultural, religious, political, etc., views of their time. The struggles, failures, and triumphs that beset their existence were recorded in print and curated in the undying annals of literary collections. Thus, if one wants to be a great mind, then one must read the great minds. If one wishes to be wise, then learn from the wise.

People of great wisdom are generally rare or unavailable to us due to distance or most have already passed on, the most available way for us to “converse” with them and know their thoughts is to read what they have recorded. As a matter of fact, most great thinkers did the very same thing that we might do pertaining to them. This was generally their starting point in knowing what others before them have thought, so as not to make the same mistakes that others have done in the past or re-invent the wheel for each generation. They have built on earlier thinkers’ foundational thinking and worked their way developing these foundations, or in some cases refuting them with their more recent ideologies and principles. Hence, nothing is really new under the sun. All ideas stem from or were simply modifications or enhancements of prior thoughts and ideas. These reflections were the refined and purified ideas of great thinkers as stated by Descartes in his Discourse on Method.

The dialectical discourse that are recorded on print including the critiques, responses, arguments, form the normative approach to studying the thoughts of the sages of the past.

Yet, most of this methodology of the study of great minds come from views presented in the Western World. If one would take a close look at the collections of books being studied as part of the curriculum of Great Books, one would see that the curricular list of suggested readings come mostly from Western writers and thinkers. Simply open a Google search on the topic of the Great Books, and you will instantly be flooded with a barrage of items from Aristotle, Plato, the Aeneid, writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, writings from Homer, Shakespeare, and so on. Is it really a fact that there are a few or fewer Eastern thinkers that were recorded other than Confucius, Lao Tzu, a few Japanese, Indian, and Islamic writings?

Learning from the great minds from an Eastern perspective is important to see how Eastern ideology, faith, ethics, philosophies have evolved over the centuries. There is nothing wrong in the studies of the Western thought, yet it is clear that the study of how man developed should first begin from where he began, his closer roots, his home. It was from the Eastern thinking, after all, that “knowing others is wisdom; knowing yourself is enlightenment.”

Going back to the general approach to learning the thoughts and ideas of great thinkers, we can see that students can fully maximize their understanding of these past ideas through a process called dialectics or dialectic exchange. This is the living discussion of theories, understandings, realizations, etc., of great minds with others who have also read the same writing. Through this process, the great ideas in print come alive and find context in the present minds of the ones conducting the discourse. They can either be reflected on, re-established, applied, or refuted based on the contextual analysis and application of the ideas to the existing situation of the time, taking the thoughts and ideas and pushing them father into context, further developing them.

The discussion of great Books continues to be the backbone, the foundation of liberal education. The Socratic method of questioning the statements and assumptions is one truly one great way to delve into the great minds of the past. Socrates has mastered “the art of questioning” and made it an integral part of traditional, and even the higher, more advanced pedagogical approaches of the times from Bloom. His is an approach that dissects, analyses, applies all these great thoughts into the current way of life of the readers. His method is one which promotes the fluidity and freedom of thought that is foundational in the learning of great minds from great thinkers of the past.

The author is Teacher

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III at Lourdes Northwest Elementary School