Dwight Macdonald

I stumbled across this book review by Dwight Macdonald - who was described as a "critic's critic" - or something like that. Since (a) I'd never heard of this influential man of letters from the 40s and 50s and (b) I aspire to me a critic's critic's critic, I felt I should read more of the dude. I came across this essay, his evisceration of an attempt to create a definitive Great Books collection: "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club."

So, as a long delayed student of Master Dwight, I have to say that this guy is one-thousand percent spot on. I have spent many years trying to understand Greek philosophy (and only so I can try to understand Maimonides) and Macdonald gets the problem with books about the Ancient Smartguys correct:

A fifth of the volumes are all but impenetrable to the lay reader, or at least to this lay reader -- the four devoted to Aristotle and Aquinas and the six of scientific treatises, ranging from Hippocrates to Faraday. "There is a sense in which every great book is always over the head of the reader," airily writes [series editor] Dr. Hutchins. "He can never fully comprehend it. That is why the books in this set are infinitely rereadable." I found these ten volumes infinitely unreadable.

There is a difference between not fully comprehending Homer and Shakespeare (in that one is always discovering something new on rereading them) and not even getting to first base with either a writer's terminology or what he is driving at. Aristotle and Aquinas should have been included, I would say, but four volumes is excessive. Furthermore, no expository apparatus is provided, no introduction relating their Weltanschauung to our own, no notes on their very special use of terms and their concepts. Lacking such help, how can one be expected to take an interest in such problems, vivid enough to Aquinas, as "Whether an Inferior Angel Speaks to a Superior Angel?," "Whether We Should Distinguish Irascible and Concupiscible Parts in the Superior Appetite?," "Whether Heavenly Bodies Can Act on Demons?," and "Whether by Virtue of Its Subtlety a Glorified Body Will No Longer Need to Be in a Place Equal to Itself?" In fact, even with help, one's interest might remain moderate. In the case of a philosopher like Plato, essentially a literary man and so speaking a universal human language, the difficulty is far less acute, but Aquinas and Aristotle were engineers and technicians of philosophy, essentially system builders whose concepts and terminology are no longer familiar. [Italics mine]

Replace "Aquinas" with "Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed" and I could have written that paragraph (and using, presumably, far fewer cigarettes or shots of Rye).

This is back from 4/25/07 & finished on 8/8/07 and all I had was the link and the blockquote.