Encountering the Beautiful
James Matthew Wilson wants to overcome the opposition of mythos and logos. This involves going back to Plato, who is often read as setting up this opposition.
The Medium Against the Message: The Dilemma of Utopian Narration
The inhabitants of utopia, their creators insist, are happy. But their lives are depicted as so relentlessly public, so entirely ordered and uneventful that their posited felicity is not something that many readers would willingly share.
A Lucid Portrayal of Ambiguity: Locating Meaning in Hawthorne’s ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’
Hawthorne’s tale is a finely crafted, perspicuous representation of aporia, that befuddlement or confusion. This is the kind of world we live in, and these are the kinds of creatures we are.
A Common Sense Approach to Literary Criticism
Seaton differs from other traditionalistic culture warriors in proposing a novel intellectual framework for this state of affairs.
‘God’s Middle Children’: Metaphysical Rebellion in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
The rebel does not understand his sense of justice as subjective and arbitrary but as universal and authoritative.
Politics and Monsters: The Unmediated Desire for Order and Meaning in Shelley’s Frankenstein
There are people who, like Walton, will attempt to transform the state into an unrealistic paradisiacal land.
The Common Core Standards: A Utilitarian Straitjacket for Education in America?
According to proponents, these new standards are “research and evidence based,” seemingly taking for granted that empirical data alone could provide sufficient warrant for the Common Core’s one-size-fits-all educational goals.
Literary Study and the Social Order
The question of the moral and social effects of literary study is so knotty that even people who have made a career of teaching literature sometimes reverse their beliefs concerning the effects of the study of literature upon human conduct.
The Deceitful Artwork: Beautiful Falsehood or False Beauty?
Formalists separate the aesthetic and the ethical. In this article I argue that moral considerations may play a decisive role in our appreciation of particular works of art.
Antigone’s Flaw
Some theorists define politics as who gets what, when and how. Alasdair MacIntyre defines it as "civil war carried on by other means."
Realism, Romanticism, and Politics in Mark Twain
Mark Twain and Irving Babbitt Accordi...
The Humanities and Substance
The original studia humanitatis which arose in fifteenth century Italy was “a cultural revolution."
Aesop, Aristotle, and Animals: The Role of Fables in Human Life
While animals cannot reason, plan for the future, or think through a long-range plan of action, people can and should engage in these actions. Why should we choose to act like animals when we can choose not to and when we can create an environment in which acting like animals is unnecessary?
Geometries of Force in Homer’s Iliad: Two Readings
The idea that war might somehow be mediated by reasonable agreements, heroic values of resistance, and religious scruples, such as those governing the burial of the dead, has been reduced to a shambles by the internal dynamics of war and the logic of violence itself.
George A. Panichas Conservator Extraordinaire
Ultimately, it is this reverence, this humility before God, and this faith in the goodness of life that are at the heart of Panichas’s long and productive career, and that also underlie the sort of conservatism that he has defended so admirably over the course of the past four decades.
The Hidden Depths in Robert Frost
Over a long and accomplished career, Peter J. Stanlis has often worked at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and political
philosophy, and this emphasis is evident in Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, a study that explores Frost’s relationship to developments in the sciences, the humanities, and politics from the age of Charles Darwin to the time of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.
Babbitt, Literary Positivism, And Neo-Positivism
There is another major element in Babbitt’s criticism which has a strong resemblance to the positivist method, even to the original statement of it by Comte. This is the concept of the interrelationship of all knowledge.
Peter Viereck (1916-2006)
Peter Viereck was born in New York City in 1916. He died on May 13, 2006, at the age of 89 in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in the same house on the edge of the Mount Holyoke College campus where he and his family had lived since he started teaching at the College.
The Moral Sense in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim
This is the story of a man in search of some form of atonement once he recognizes that his dream of “the success of his imaginary achievements” constitutes a romantic illusion.
Sic Est in Republica: Utopian Ideology and the Misreading of Thomas More
Utopia provides the earliest antidote to utopian ideology, which it subtly ridicules by the ironic deployment of stylistic variation.
Nietzsche on the Cross: The Defense of Personal Freedom in The Birth of Tragedy
At the conclusion of his writing career, Nietzsche ironically and unintentionally ends up affirming a perspective on life that resonates with what can be termed a “Christianity of Joy.”
Shakespeare’s Critique of Machiavellian Force, Fraud, and Spectacle in Measure for Measure
Shakespeare has the Duke stage a brilliant Machiavellian parody of the extremes of the Christian apocalyptic expectation of rewards and punishments by demonstrating their political usefulness.
Harmony and Beauty, Disease and Suffering: Indeterminacy a Necessary Condition for Free Will
It follows, then, in the light of the Anthropic Principle, that, if man is to exist as a subject endowed with free will, the iniquity of nature, pain and suffering must also exist.
The End of Art Theory
In the present age Hegel claims that "the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit."
In the Clearing: Continuity and Unity in Frost’s Dualism
Frost’s perception of the continuity and unity in historical events came to him through an intuition, or revelation, expressed in “Kitty Hawk”: “Then I saw it all.”
Concerned with Everything in the Universe
In the history of writing history, there are a handful of volumes that become established as a model. The most recent work by Jacques Barzun is such a volume.
‘Beyond Presentness’: The Practice of Criticism
In Panichas’ view, the critic’s responsibility consists, first, in identifying “the highest things,” and then in articulating how this time-bound aesthetic form can function as a means of transcendent revelation.
How We Know What We Know: Babbitt, Positivism and Beyond
Careful, in-depth attention to questions of knowledge is one of the preconditions for a reinvigoration of the humanities and social sciences. In the study of man as a social and cultural being, how is knowledge obtained?
Allen Tate and The Catholic Revival
Yet while the "southern mode of the imagination" in Tate's work has received extensive scrutiny, the Catholic mode of imagination in his writings has been left largely to conjecture.
Deconstruction: Fad or Philosophy?
Like other great neologisms—ones we wish we would have thought of but didn’t—deconstruction has suffered the fate of its own ascendancy.
Chinese Reactions to Babbitt: Admiration, Encumbrance, Vilification
Irving Babbitt, the great American humanist, was bound to the modern Chinese culture even though Babbitt himself might not have been aware of it. His erudition and glamour enticed a dozen young Chinese scholars into Harvard University to seek instruction from him.
Voyaging with Odysseus: The Wile and Resilience of Virtue
The only way to do this properly, it seems to me, is to travel along with Homer, hitting the highlights and commenting as I go.
Locke the Hermenaut and the Mechanics of Understanding
How does Locke understand language and its role in conveying information and meaning between persons?
Kafka’s Afflicted Vision: A Literary-Theological Critique
The novel’s aesthetic and interpretive complexity, it will be seen, underlines the multi-layered meaning of salvation itself, in a modern world in which salvation is not necessarily one of divine grace, of deliverance from sin and damnation, in short, of redemption in the hands of an all-powerful God.
Croce in America: Influence, Misunderstanding, and Neglect
The prestige of historical figures rises and falls, and the tendency for the biggest to fall hardest may be especially prevalent in intellectual history. But there seems something anomalous about Croce's case, as René Wellek, the distinguished historian of criticism, recently emphasized.
Peter Viereck: Reconciliation and Beyond
In 1997, at eighty years old, Peter Vier...
Dignity in Old Age: The Poetical Meditations of Peter Viereck
Viereck, ever audacious, gives us an account of the poet’s dying and, in consequence, of what our own might be if we could pull it off.
A Humanist Romanticism?
When poets go wrong in this book, which they sometimes do in spectacular ways, they do so for morally comprehensible reasons. Gurney reminds us that Christian virtues can be practiced not only by pagan poets but by readers like ourselves.
Bedeviled by Boredom: A Voegelinian Reading of Dostoevsky’s Possessed
When existence is understood as boring and burdensome, often a more dangerous rejection of reality follows.
The Last Man of Letters? The Singular Life of Russell Kirk
Many autobiographies are written with an eye toward settling old scores, but this is not one of them. These memoirs are striking because of the absence of any rancor or bitterness toward old intellectual or literary adversaries.
Left and Right Eclecticism: Roger Kimball’s Cultural Criticism
Mark Lilla held that for Kimball "the cause of the Sixties was quite simply . . . the Sixties. They just happened, as a kind of miracle, or antimiracle—Why did such a profound revolution take place?" In my opinion, Kimball’s reply is not entirely satisfactory.
Joseph Conrad’s Moral Imagination
Literary interpretation is at its maximum free of dogma.
Building Bridges: The Importance of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Humanism for the Humanities
Herder’s goal was to work against social fragmentation and contribute to restoring the human being to its “original unity,” which comprised more than the sum of its individual parts.
Céline: Unembellished Man
The book’s insights are insights into our century, and what strikes us most is that it is life and not just a marble tribute.
The Tears of Priam: Reflections on Troy and Teaching Ancient Texts
Unlike most other texts, the “classics” have the potential to upend our typical modes of understanding, challenge our baser impulses, and confound our historically and culturally constituted presuppositions.
Irving Babbitt and Postmodernity: Amplitude and Intensity
There are many ways to re-read a classic...
An Insufficient Case for the Canon
The canon is necessarily developmental, and one system can be peremptorily displaced by another.
Dostoyevsky and Malthus: Debunkers of Utopianism
Then there is the matter of the fixity of human nature and of its separateness from that of the rest of the animal creation, which is also a central assumption, I believe, of all truly conservative thought.
Postmortem for a Defunct Ideology: A Dialectical Underworld Analysis
They have every luxury and convenience and no punishment—except one. The only torture visited upon its denizens is that they must live in solitary; no debates, conversations, gossip, faction meetings, conspiracies, cross-talk, backbiting.
This Side of Grace: Allen Tate and the Consolation of Catholicism
Tate argued against both censorship by Catholic authorities and what he termed the literary "angelic imagination," advocating instead the Dantesque "symbolic imagination."
The Sense and Sensibility of Betrayal: Discovering the Meaning of Treachery through Jane Austen
Betrayal changes not only our sense of the world, but our sensibility toward the world.
A Worthy Kaddish
He deliberately sets out to defy Platonic Truth, worshiping the Shadows—the felt, believed, imperfect, flawed perception of touched reality. This—and nothing else—is truth, or at least the only truth that matters.
Lincoln, Macbeth, and the Moral Imagination
A few years before my grandmother died,...
Two Kinds of Criticism: Reflective Self-Scrutiny vs. Impulsive Self-Validation
The older, humanistic tradition look to literature for cultural self-criticism, while the postmodernists look for reinforcement of their pre-existing impulses.
Shylock’s Conversion
The thesis of this essay is simply state...
Quantification and Intelligence Testing: A Reassessment
Though not a student of the history of t...
Progressive Change in Emerson’s “The Conservative”
Emerson scholars have long noted the ubi...
Being “Other Cheeky”: Moral Hazard and the Thought of Stanley Hauerwas
At its core, the emphasis on communal perfection seeks to quell the religious anxiety generated by a faith that is demanding, uncertain, and absolutist in its claims.
Altruism and the Art of Writing: Plato, Cicero, and Leo Strauss
Justice’s enemies, both Ancient and Modern, were not entirely wrong.
Shackling the Imagination: Education for Virtue in Plato and Rousseau
In an ironic turn, the highly imaginative Rousseau worries about arousing the imagination of his pupil. He regards the imagination as “the most active of all” the faculties, but also highly undesirable.
The Legacy of Peter Viereck: His Prose Writings
Much of Peter Viereck’s prose writing wa...
Burke’s Higher Romanticism: Politics and the Sublime
It is argued here that understanding Burke’s romanticism is an important part of understanding Burke. Understanding Burke’s romanticism also helps one understand the subtle ways in which aesthetics, ethics, and politics interact.
Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Burke
It is good to see that Burke is being systematically studied. O’Brien gives his reader a broad overview of how Burke pursued his causes in Parliament and in his writing.
Morality and Virtue In Poetry and Philosophy: A Reading of Homer’s Iliad XXIV
It is apt for Plato to describe the quar...
On the Future of the Humanistic Tradition in Literary Criticism
Until recently, the humanistic impulse h...
War’s End: A Short Story
This story is loosely based on an encounter between the Russian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei and the American photographer Robert Capa, as reported by Michael Specter of the New York Times, in a July 1995 interview.
Poetry Now and the Space We Live In
Not many poets of recent years have been...
Poetry and the Mystique of the Self in John Stuart Mill: Sources of Libertarian Socialism
After Mill discovered Romantic poetry he decided to abandon the “mere reasoning machine” that was his old self—and he emerged from this period a changed man.
Depoliticization from Within: Not Taking a Fall with Richard Brautigan
The alternative provided by Brautigan is a flight of fancy, an imaginary celebrity in dreamland, where self and world work out just the way we want them.
‘The English Patient’: A Classical Tragedy of Love and Paradox
It is no accident that "The English Patient"—surely the best movie to come on the American screen in a very long time—chooses the Greek Herodotus as a leitmotif.
The Intellectual Kinship of Irving Babbitt and C. S. Lewis: Will and Imagination in That Hideous Strength
According to Lewis scholar Alister McGrath, “From about 1937, Lewis seems to have appreciated that the imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.”
Jacob and Esau
Esau grew to be a “natural man,” a man of the field and the hunt, an “elder” or more primitive image of humankind, while Jacob grew to be a “smooth” civilized man, a logo-centric man of the tent, or the polis.
To Dreamworld and Back: A Movie Out of the Ordinary
In a non-didactic manner, the film offers a lesson that our time badly needs to learn: that all is not gold that glimmers.
Sources of American Republicanism: Ancient Models in the U.S. Capitol
If America seeks a future inspired by the virtues of its past, then it must derive inspiration not merely from the founders but also from the Hebraic and Roman Republics.
The Coleridge Circle: Virtue Ethics, Sympathy, and Outrage
The Romantics’ value pluralism anchored in virtue ethics is not an abstraction but a concrete negotiation with a world that is by turns beautiful, baffling, and outrageous.
Emerson on Plato: Literary Philosophy, Dialectic, and the Temporality of Thought
Emerson sees his work as an extension of Plato's.
From ‘Inner Check’ to ‘Bank Check’: Post–Babbitt Literary Criticism
I shall concentrate on four themes in Babbitt’s writings that are relevant today to the discipline of comparative literature as well as to related disciplines for which the study of literature may be more important than is generally recognized, whether or not these themes have been reflected in recent critical texts.
Can Virtue Be Taught?
There are pleasures too numerous to mention within literature, the fine arts, history, mathematics, science, and philosophy. We cannot say with any assurance, however, that these pleasures will dispose the person to virtue.
Schooling for “Deep-Knowing”: On the Education of a Pithecanthropus Erectus
The student’s psyche must approach its beloved (the beautiful) with reverence, and under the discipline of the intellect.
History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Thus it is my purpose in this article to discuss the balance of similarities and differences between Simms and Nietzsche on the question of historiography.
Lyric Poetry, the Novel, and Revolution: Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere
A careful reading of Kundera’s observations about the novel suggests that they do not quite cross the border to unmeaning, but in any case it is the novels themselves that embody the deeper insight, as the author himself would no doubt cheerfully concede.
Homer’s Humor: Laughter in The Iliad
Few critics have stressed the humorous aspects of the Iliad, or pursued Pope’s hint “That Homer was no enemy to mirth."
“The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”: The Utopian as Sadist
Only these figures, their inner lives properly regulated, are meant by nature to rule the rest, just as the head rules the body. “A multitude,” Plato asserts, “cannot be philosophical,” a capacity reserved for a select few.
Goethe’s Faust: Poetry and Philosophy at the Crossroads
There is much that is still alive in Santayana’s philosophical explication of Goethe’s Faust, especially Goethe’s appeal to the understanding to be derived from phenomena themselves.
John Milton: Postmodern Hero?
He cut to the truth, and that characteristic, Hawkes believes, makes his work even more essential to our times than to his.