Category: Fleming

18

Rereading the Iliad, I A, B, C (updated 05/19)

In fact, we do have a lot to learn about ourselves from studying Homeric man.  Homer’s heroes are extraordinary men, but they are not the etherial saints of ethical philosophers since Kant.   ”To know the will as an ethical factor” is a gift reserved for few mortal men in any era, but ordinary people, even when they do not possess these abstract concepts, are capable of sitting on juries and pronouncing on questions of guilt and innocence. 

5

Rereading a Classic

Some decades ago the psychologist Mortimer Adler produced one of his many cultural “how-to” books with the preposterous title, How to Read a Book. If only Adler had first considered the question of how to write a book, he might never have indulged his vanity to the point of telling people they were only permitted to read the way that Mortimer Adler reads.