How to Keep From Losing Your Mind

Educating Yourself Classically to Resist Cultural Indoctrination

Deal Hudson

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781505113532
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Liberal education is nothing other than the acquisition of a free mind.

Unfortunately, too many of us have a mind shackled by ideologies and moved by outside forces. We're pulled and pushed by trends and the prevailing culture. Higher education has become ridiculously expensive and is producing graduates whose minds are anything but free, filled as they are with the prejudices of their teachers.

Only when we break these shackles and habitually exercise a free mind can we call ourselves liberally educated.

In How to Keep from Losing Your Mind, Deal Hudson will show you how to avoid the false open-mindedness and groupthink of the modern "-isms" promoted by the PC arbiters of our cultural milieu. Instead you'll learn to:

• Form the habit of reconsideration, the key to a truly open mind
• Entertain doubts about your own immediate opinions
• Argue coherently from first principles, instead of repeating ideological talking points
• Recognize prejudice and propaganda
• Avoid sloganeering and engage in real thought

This book will enable every person to rise above the shouting, the name-calling, and the brutal incivility of public discourse and rediscover the pleasure and benefit of contemplating the meaning and noble aims of human life.

PART 1

Beauty: The Irresistible Canon

CHAPTER 1

You Must Change Your Life

Do you recall the first time you visited a great museum, such as Uffizi Gallery in Florence, or a magnificent Gothic church, like St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City? You probably saw something that made you stop and stand still. You gazed. You became conscious of yourself staring, and perhaps you looked around to see if anyone noticed you. But you looked back, not caring what anyone else thought. You let yourself gaze until your newly-awakened thirst was quenched, at least for a moment.

Think about how that moment made you feel and what thoughts you had. Did you feel not only delighted but also challenged? It’s hard to explain, but I’ve felt that challenge many times. A philosophy teacher at the University of Texas played the opening “Kyrie” of J. S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I was stunned by its beauty. Suddenly I wanted to have my teacher’s ears, as it were, and his knowledge of classical music. I wanted to discover all the beauty in music. It was like my first reading of the Apology at the urging of the school janitor: a door was opened to treasures that have enriched my life ever since.

I’ve been fortunate to have teachers, friends, and family members who introduced me to what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought or said.” I did not “get it” on the first try. Strangely enough, it took me a while to warm up to Beethoven, not the symphonies, but the piano sonatas and the string quartets. Later I realized that my ear had needed more education, the kind that comes with many hours of listening to classical repertoire. Asking a teenager to listen to a late Beethoven string quartet is like handing them the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. But once the connection to Beethoven is felt, a sense of awe overcomes you making you wonder how anyone could feel that deeply and express it in music. That awe in itself is a challenge; namely, to plumb the depth of the human condition as profoundly as the composer. The challenge comes in the form of a question: can you follow? Yes, I answered, not because of any unique ability on my part, but because I had been happily captured, a kind of love at first sight.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), considered by some the greatest poet of the twentieth century, lived as a young man in Paris for several years while working as the secretary to the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rilke made regular visits to the Louvre and the other museums in Paris, but one day a particular sculpture from ancient Greece caught his eye, inspiring him to write a poem:

Archaic Torso of Apollo (1908)

Although we never knew his lyric head

from which the eyes looked out so piercing clear,

his torso glows still like a chandelier

in which his gaze, only turned down, not dead,

persists and burns. If not, how could the surge

of the breast blind you, or in the gentle turning

of the thighs a smile keep passing and returning

towards that centre where seeds converge?

If not, this stone would stand all uncompact

beneath the shoulders’ shining cataract,

and would not glisten with that wild beast grace,

and would not burst from every rift as rife

as sky with stars: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.¹

Rilke’s last line comes as a surprise. Like breaking the fourth wall in the theatre, the poet confronts the reader with a demand: “You must change your life.” It’s the sculpture’s missing “lyric head,” specifically its eyes “which looked out so piercing clear” that measure us while we gaze back. Rilke describes a moment when the roles are reversed: the artwork is sizing up the viewer, “for here is no place that does not see you.”

The surprise of the poet’s admonition wasn’t in what he said but in that he said it. It’s as if Rilke chose to make explicit what has been implicit in our encounters with the great work of an artist or a writer. He makes explicit what I would call the aspiration that’s awakened. What is aspiration if not the urge to “change your life?” The root of the word is the same as that of “spirit,” which is the Latin aspirare, meaning “to breathe.” How appropriate is it, therefore, to call the beauty of art “breathtaking.”

There are various ways to explain such an encounter, but the one that makes more sense than the others is the consideration that human beings are each a unity of body and spirit. St. Thomas Aquinas expresses this connection in his definition of beauty: “that which upon seeing pleases.”² “Seeing” here stands for the power of all the senses when they encounter a pleasurable object. These objects immediately become objects of the will’s desire. From the will’s perspective, anything desired is a “good” because in possessing it we experience satisfaction and fulfillment. There are many things we desire, which we believe, rightly or wrongly, are connected to the Good.

For example, understanding is a good: the moment we understand something better, say, what we learn about prejudice from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or the nature of romantic love from Romeo and Juliet, we feel satisfaction and hope. We are satisfied that we know and hopeful that the world can be understood and that we can see further into the heart of man. No one wants to walk in darkness day after day. This is why we are naturally drawn to happy endings, where the human struggle leads to resolution: At the end of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, for example, we are elevated to hear something heavenly. At the conclusion of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, we revel in a boy being returned to his family. And in John Ford’s The Searchers, we are relieved when a man’s murderous rage towards his niece is overcome.

These moments, of course, are not consigned to endings. Think of the tragedies that leave us wiser but less satisfied—like Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The insight and recognition the reader experiences in tragedy, the catharsis of fear and pity, is itself a good that triggers aspiration for more and more lasting goods.³ Along with the ancients, I believe this drive is rooted in the natural human desire for total fulfillment, the Good itself, which the Greeks referred to as eudaimonia, and which used to be translated as “happiness” but has recently more often been rendered as “well-being.”

The same inner desire that delights in Keats, Mozart, or Spielberg will only be encouraged to look for a permanent, lasting satisfaction, happiness. Thus, an archaic torso of a man, lacking a head and extremities, through the power of its form can beckon you to “change your life.”

A Confession

As a young man, I went to the Great Books looking for the Good, my eyes fixed on finding identity and definition. I was drawn to ideals for life because I lacked direction. Many of the modern works being called ‘classics’ put me off; their darkness troubled me. I decided they portrayed an overly pessimistic view of the world. I was looking for ideas and images to guide me. At the time, I couldn’t tolerate much ambiguity and uncertainty.

For example, the shattering realism of films like Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now went places I could not follow. I did not complain of them being depressing, as many did, but of being unintelligible—their nihilism did not make sense to me. This was also true of the celebrated artistic anti-heroes and -heroines of the ’60s, such as Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Bob Dylan, Herbert Marcuse, Gloria Steinem, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. There was something there I could not see, that I was unable to understand or appreciate. Nabokov’s Lolita, for example, which is now considered a masterpiece, I avoided reading on religious grounds until later in life only to find it was a profound moral tale. The same goes for Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—his virtual compost of human failings initially left me cold. As much as I am annoyed by people who call serious films “depressing,” I was acting in the same way without knowing it.

Time passed, and I embraced only those works that fit within my field of recognition. But years later something changed: Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now became favorite films. The whole genre I would have called “the dark side” became recognizable to me. What had happened? Life happened. I spent twenty-three years in the academy as a student or a professor. When I started making a living outside a university, I realized my life had been cloistered. The rough-and-tumble of running a business and becoming involved in national politics introduced me to the other side of life, a wider world, where envy, wrath, and betrayal are common—in other words, the world of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare.

____________________

¹ Rainer Maria Rilke, Requiem and Other Poems, trans. J. B. Leischman (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), 115.

² Summa Theologica I.39.8. St. Thomas Aquinas, Suuma Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 3 vols. (New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc, 1947). All subsequent quotations are taken from this translation.

³ Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature, trans. Leon Golden (Prentice-Hall Inc., 1968), 11.

CHAP...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Beauty: The Irresistible Canon
• Part 2: Truth: Bad Ideas in Motion
• Part 3: Goodness: Love Is the Crux
• Bibliography