If the Dark Ages are described as being a time where classical knowledge was lost, have we reentered an age where the wisdom and knowledge of the ancients have been pushed aside waiting to be rediscovered?
Or is it already discounted in our life manifesting itself in education, film and other mediums?
Put it to you this way, are people in position of power - media, corporations, politics - learned in the great texts of Western culture as they should be given their infuence?
Sometimes they are lacking, sometimes they are adding to what future generations will regard as fully within the scope of "classical learning." The corpus grows.
ReplyDeleteAs much as I love the works of antiquity, I always admonish readers that such works are not ends in themselves (hopefully not even for Classical scholars).
Define classical and define forgotten. Good translations of the works of the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, the Indians of times long ago are easily available. I link to a bunch of e-book places off of my blog's sidebar. I see them used on any number of blogs. If you are asserting that despite their almost instant availability that too few people reference them, or do so wisely, well you are probably right.
I know some people who are stuck in the Dark Ages...
ReplyDeleteI honestly don't see the need for people to read "the classics," especially people who may take them seriously. Indeed, I am an educated man for reading Plato and Aristotle, but if I believed every word they wrote, I would be a fool.
Besides, as a writer, I am painfully aware that everything has already been said before. I rely on people being ignorant of the classics so I have something intelligent to plagiarize.
I rely on people being ignorant of the classics so I have something intelligent to plagiarize.
ReplyDeleteI rely on people being ignorant in general.
-Homer said everything.
ReplyDelete-Zeus, that's what I'm saying. There's a lack of curiosity.
Homer never said, "Women should be treated as equals, and slaves should be set free." This is particularly strange since Homer is supposedly a slave, though I think Homer never existed.
ReplyDeleteI was referring to Simpson. Homer J.
ReplyDeleteAhem.
Homer Jay Simpson definitely never existed.
ReplyDeleteDoh.
What Zeus said. What bothers me is not the number of people who have never read Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Aquinas, Tacitus or Dante -- I have whopping lacunae in my knowledge of all these -- it's the people who haven't the slightest clue when they lived, what they produced or what culture they represented.
ReplyDeleteIt does matter because the world we live in evolved from the ideas they framed or the stories they told. And it matters also because some things never change and there's a mine of value in people being able to recognize that. I posted a while back on a military group that is touring with Euripides' "Ajax" because it depicts the effects of war on a fighting man (and his family after his return) so vividly in a way everyone can recognize; it is healing, not least because of its vintage. I think knowing those works leaves us less adrift.
That's EXACTLY what I tell my wife and a few others. Interesting you made that comment.
ReplyDeleteYou don't have to write a paper comparing Dante with Socrates.
You should just know the basics; what the overall premise was, when and where they lived, what period they belonged to for, as you state, to get a grip on sense of time and perspective.
You don't have to fully understand everything. I surely don't (e.g. Hegel is just too "out there" for my taste) but I can follow and even offer a thought in conversation.