How important is it to read the popular classics of philosophy and literature?

[Blackstock]

@Leaper

How important to whom? Should we expect, say, the Japanese or Egyptians to read the “classics” (which, as defined in the OP, seem to be all Western works)? If so, which African or Asian or South American “classics” should they be expecting us to read to be consider intelligent and well rounded?

It’s funny you should say that, because I’m an Egyptian who never lived in an English-speaking country. The works mentioned above have the property of being world classics, not just in the English language. I’ve seen them translated into Arabic but was never bothered even trying to read the Arabic version.

When it comes to what’s considered to be a literature/philosophy classic in the Arabic language, or what many people refer to as the best Arabic films ever made, I still maintained my distance, instead resorting to other modern, or relatively lesser-known works. I’ll hazard mentioning something personal here that’s not entirely relevant to my original question, but I’m generally used to discovering things on my own, which applies to music, art, film and other forms of human expression.

@Busy_Scissors

With artforms that have been around a long time (e.g. novels), or a really long time (painting), they’re no longer developing in a linear obviously-getting-better way. Their development is much more fragmented and smaller in scale, hard to appreciate nowadays. What some of the classics give you is a sense of wonder in how the work set a new, enduring standard - in a way that is no longer possible as the artform has matured. The most revered classics, like a Rembrandt painting, or *Ulysses *, say, are almost anti-influential. They have a timeless, preserved quality IMHO. Like a summit of excellence was reached that cannot be repeated, and all the other artists and writers had to take a step back and do something else.

That is true, but I find that a lot has changed about the way a story is told, at least when it comes to fiction. Modern literary devices and narrative techniques have tremendously evolved throughout the centuries. I’ll try to explain this in the following way. Let’s assume there’s a fable written in 11th century England (or whatever it was called back then):

11th century: A princess marries a commoner. They live happily ever after.

12th century version: A princess is in the castle. Her father, the King, doesn’t like the common, but agrees to let them marry after the princess’s persistence, and they live happily ever after.

13th century version: A princess is in the castle. Her father is sick, there’s a court villain who wants the princess for himself, and there’s a commoner. The villain conspires but fails, and the commoner marries the princess.

14th century version: Add a bottle of poison to the above formula.

et cetera.

I am sure you get what I mean. Now, while there must be some value in the original story that may compel me to go back and read it; a value such as the writing style, the language, or something else, I find that I get a more evolved form of the story if I just pick up the 21st century’s version, in which the story has developed in every sense, with all its core elements accentuated and intensified. Do I make sense?

That goes for fiction.

When it comes to non-fiction, and though it may be valuable to read The Origin of Species to take a look at pre-DNA Darwinism, I find that a modern book will include better research, citations, and a better articulation of the ideas in the book, let alone every other aspect, really.

If you’re a professional researcher though, by all means go for the original.

@Drunky_Smurf

Yep, he stopped learning right after high school. Shame really.

I never said I stopped learning. I find it to be an extremely arrogant claim to make to say that you’ve learned enough. I’m just wondering about how essential the ‘classics’ are to the mental and emotional development of a 21st century man.

[marshmallow]

It’s a good way to see a different perspective. But it can be eye rolling. You can tell this woman is an untrustworthy harlot, she had sex before marriage!

On the plus side, old literature is free of Freudian psychology. So that’s nice.

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Voyager

In my experience engineer either read literature or are somewhat ashamed about not reading literature - at least to the point the average person is. English majors brag about not knowing math - engineers would never brag about not knowing Shakespeare.

Agreed, and I’m saying this particular cultural consensus is misplaced.

@Peremensoe

OK, what’s the argument for calculus here?

I’m guessing statistics is more important. Math in general can teach that there exist certain systematic methodologies for solving certain problems. As an aspect of that, calculus addresses rates of change, and conveys that a rate of change is a property of 2 variables, one of which isn’t necessarily time.

Literature is useful. But a big part of it involves suspension of disbelief which is to say that fiction works with building blocks that are intuitive -biases deep inside our makeup- but not necessarily realistic. Too often not realistic. Math and science take the opposite tack - their building blocks are understandable but not always especially intuitive, with a goal of being uncompromisingly realistic, which is to say empirical. (Yes, yes, math is not empirical. But it does involve semi-intuitive building blocks working towards surprising yet undeniable conclusions. Different than literature.)

Intuition and common sense are all well and good, but they have their limitations in technical fields, at least until new intuitions are constructed.

@Blackstock

When it comes to non-fiction, and though it may be valuable to read The Origin of Species to take a look at pre-DNA Darwinism, I find that a modern book will include better research, citations, and a better articulation of the ideas in the book, let alone every other aspect, really.

If you’re a professional researcher though, by all means go for the original.

1. A few may disagree, but I suspect most professionals prefer working off of textbooks rather than originals. Admittedly sometimes an older but great author can be mined for newish insights, but that’s a different sort of reading.

2. Nice thread and welcome to the board Blackstock.

@Slow_Moving_Vehicle

The solution? Start teaching Shakespeare in translation.

You can also read a heavily annotated treatment. This work has one page of Shakespearian text for every page of explanatory notes.

[Grrr]

@John_Mace

I find people who blab about Catcher in the Rye to be a bunch of phonies.

See? This is what I’m talking abaout. I get why this is funny.

[Voyager]

@Blackstock

When it comes to non-fiction, and though it may be valuable to read The Origin of Species to take a look at pre-DNA Darwinism, I find that a modern book will include better research, citations, and a better articulation of the ideas in the book, let alone every other aspect, really.

If you’re a professional researcher though, by all means go for the original.

The reason to read The Origin is not to learn biology, but to see how amazingly right Darwin got it even if his inheritance mechanism was totally wrong. Sometimes the basic principles of a field are more clearly seen from a very early work. Almost never is the first work also pretty much the final work - the only exception I know of is Shannon’s information theory.

I have a book of selections of original scientific papers from Copernicus to 1800. That shows the evolution of scientific thinking and writing quite well.

[wolfpup]

I think the OP’s premise about “having to know things” is fundamentally misguided and kind of sad, and our educational system is partly to blame. Kind of reminds me of my high school experience with studying Shakespeare, where the goal was to pass the test and the best part of the class was when the bell rang.

How that changed with university, not just in literature but in all forms of what we refer to as the “pursuit of knowledge”! Some of structured education is invariably annoying and stupid but the magic threshold is crossed when you realize that it’s fun and enriching and valuable just because it makes you happy to know things and appreciate things. On the subject of Shakespeare, I was fortunate to be in a Shakespeare class in first year university in which the prof was a world-class authority and irrepressible enthusiast on the subject. I was majoring in science but this one excellent class in the arts engendered an appreciation for Shakespeare that has lasted my whole life.

[Novelty_Bobble]

It is an ever-expanding problem. So many classics, too little time.

I have to say that, for myself, being forced to read something is an almost guaranteed turn-off. How can it ever live up to the hype that generations of learned people claim for it?

For that reason it may be that the classics I’ve most enjoyed are those that I stumbled upon by accident as a youngster, without any real coercion. They are works that I’ve re-read since and as I’ve aged I’ve naturally found further layers of complexity and meaning.
Wuthering Heights, Dickens, Orwell…and I took my then girlfriend to a production of “the taming of the shrew”. I went with low expectations but once my brain adjusted to the construction and delivery I was able to appreciate the language and that proved a gateway to other plays and poetry.
Similarly with music, being told to sit down and appreciate a piece would be a turn off. whereas…accidentally turning on BBC4’s “proms” series and catching the last few minutes of Saint Saens symphony no.3…I was transfixed, the work spoke for itself and I appreciated it on it’s own merits.

So all that poncey waffle is just to suggest that you maybe allow yourself some room to stumble across these books with an open mind. Perhaps load a few up as ebooks for when you’ve nothing else to read and you mood allows you to think “yeah, I’ll give that a bash”.

Going against my personal preference for discovery, if I simply had to suggest anything for you, It’d be Animal Farm then 1984 by Orwell. Quick reads, simple language, but profound ideas that are relevant (scarily so) for today’s world.

[Blackstock]

@Novelty_Bobble

It is an ever-expanding problem. So many classics, too little time.

I have to say that, for myself, being forced to read something is an almost guaranteed turn-off. How can it ever live up to the hype that generations of learned people claim for it?

For that reason it may be that the classics I’ve most enjoyed are those that I stumbled upon by accident as a youngster, without any real coercion. They are works that I’ve re-read since and as I’ve aged I’ve naturally found further layers of complexity and meaning.
Wuthering Heights, Dickens, Orwell…and I took my then girlfriend to a production of “the taming of the shrew”. I went with low expectations but once my brain adjusted to the construction and delivery I was able to appreciate the language and that proved a gateway to other plays and poetry.
Similarly with music, being told to sit down and appreciate a piece would be a turn off. whereas…accidentally turning on BBC4’s “proms” series and catching the last few minutes of Saint Saens symphony no.3…I was transfixed, the work spoke for itself and I appreciated it on it’s own merits.

So all that poncey waffle is just to suggest that you maybe allow yourself some room to stumble across these books with an open mind. Perhaps load a few up as ebooks for when you’ve nothing else to read and you mood allows you to think “yeah, I’ll give that a bash”.

Going against my personal preference for discovery, if I simply had to suggest anything for you, It’d be Animal Farm then 1984 by Orwell. Quick reads, simple language, but profound ideas that are relevant (scarily so) for today’s world.

Thank you for your answer. I do feel the same way. If I have to do it, then that’s that. But sometimes I did end up benefiting from works I’ve read through ‘coercion’.

I did read Animal Farm, 1984 and The Clergyman’s Daughter for Orwell. Loved 1984 most of all.

[don_t_ask]

For those wishing to come at the problem from an entirely different direction may I recommend Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

A good length excerpt is available at Book Browse.

This encounter with the infinity of available books offers a certain encouragement not to read at all. Faced with a quantity of books so vast that nearly all of them must remain unknown, how can we escape the conclusion that even a lifetime of reading is utterly in vain?

Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Grrr

The thing I like about reading the classics is I’m constantly catching obscure references made to them on Television and movies. It’s like, “Hey I got that! That was a shout out to A Tale of Two Cities!” or “Hey, that was from Catcher in the Rye!”.

It’s the small joys in life.

And I think THIS is the real reason to be well versed in the classics. It gives everyone a common pool of literary references that allows you to shorthand stuff, sort of like a literary idiom.

I can shorthand a man’s desire to achieve more than his father and impress his mother by referencing Oedipus. Shakespeare didn’t say it first and he didn’t even say it best but he said it in a way that was widely distributed and understood by people who come from the western European literary tradition. Same with the classics like the Iliad and the Odyssey. Its not like other cultures don’t have their own classics from which you could draw similar literary idioms. Romance of the Three Kingdoms has many of the same elements of jealousy and war and folly, the Journey to the West has many of the same elements that pretty much any story of an adventurous journey might have. Lord of the Rings has many of both.

Today we have a deep pool of sources for these literary references and as the world’s premiere producer of movies and shows I daresay that many years from now, people will be making literary references to all sorts of stuff in our movies and shows. I don’t know what those references will be but I am confident that they will be there. Perhaps people will be screaming “KHAAAAAAAANNNNNN!!!” while shaking their fists at the heavens for generations to come. Perhaps people will be saying Marsha! Marsha! Marsha! to refer to the plight of the middle child. Or darth vader to reference the round trip from good to evil back to good again. Or Bluto’s iconic speech about the Nazi’s bombing pearl harbor. I don’t know but for me, these classics mostly function as a form of literary shorthand.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@BrainGlutton

Right – what he means is that without reading the classics he knows enough – knows it from reading non-classic literature and media; which does not rule out a lifelong learning process, only one that requires a classics reading-list.

Scientists and engineers are pretty smart, but I daresay there are many who haven’t looked at a “classic” text since high school.

And they sometimes have trouble communicating with people who are not engineers and scientists because they are not operating with the same menu of easily expressible ideas.

[thepillar]

@Blackstock

It’s funny you should say that, because I’m an Egyptian who never lived in an English-speaking country.

Have you read any or some of the Ancient Egyptian literature?

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@aldiboronti

You certainly don’t have to read the great works of literature, but these works weren’t randomly picked out of a hat, “Oh, we’ll call these ones great”. They are great because of the powerful and overwhelming effect they have when read. Some of the most memorable reading experences of my life have been reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Montaigne, Rabelais, the list goes on (I’ve been reading voraciously for the last 50-odd years).

As I say, no one will make you read these books but it’s to your impoverishment if you don’t.

In that case: under no circumstance is “Iphigenie auf Taures” a “great work of literature”, and most of the rest of the old German classics can go suck on a rusty hosepipe.

Seriously, skip Goethe and Schiller. They’re awful. Maybe it’s just 200-odd years of the Seinfeld Effect, but at least to me, they seem incredibly preachy, boring, and incredibly pretentious. Even if they influenced much of western literature, it’s absolutely no fun to read them.

[tim-n-va]

A few years ago someone (can’t recall) asked people (celebrities of some sort) what book they were embarrassed to admit they hadn’t read. The answer I liked most (again, can’t remember who) was that you can never read everything you want to read, you are going to miss something, no reason to be embarrassed.

For similar reasons, I reject the idea that there is anything that must be read. I would have trouble relating to someone who thinks they’ve learned enough but if that makes them happy, I’m good with it.

[Latro]

@thepillar

Have you read any or some of the Ancient Egyptian literature?

Like?

[Shodan]

@Budget_Player_Cadet

Seriously, skip Goethe and Schiller. They’re awful. Maybe it’s just 200-odd years of the Seinfeld Effect, but at least to me, they seem incredibly preachy, boring, and incredibly pretentious.

That is to say, they’re German.

But reading the classics needs to include (IMO) a certain amount of stuff like this. Some of the classics are classics because they express a certain Zeitgeist. You can read The Sorrows of Young Werther almost as parody, albeit unconscious parody. It reminded me somewhat of The old Curiousity Shop - completely over the top, but being aware of what appealed to the audience gives you insight into what kinds of things they found thrilling.

Faust, OTOH, I will defend as great literature quite apart from its Zeitgeist, as great poety in its own right.

Not all classics have to be “good”. They need to express something as well as possible. If you don’t read Die Lieden des jungen Werthers you miss that characteristically German mix of hysteria and depression that led them to build cities like East Berlin.

Regards,
Shodan, Hysterically Depressed German
Our Motto - “We Do as We are Told, Providing It’s Cruel”

[BrainGlutton]

Who, I wonder, is writing and publishing now, who someday will be included in the “Classics” canon, and shelved in the “Classics” section and represented in Cliff’s Notes and appearing on summer reading lists and discussed in English or Comp Lit or Philosophy courses?

[Shodan]

Ursula LeGuin.

Regards,
Shodan

[Latro]

50 Shades of Grey was quite the popular read in our times and controversial as well.

Might end up on some reading lists…shudder.

[BrainGlutton]

@Latro

50 Shades of Grey was quite the popular read in our times and controversial as well.

Might end up on some reading lists…shudder.

Only on those that also include the works of de Sade. (Now there’s a Classic author for ya!)