Mansfield on Brann, or, Why read the classics

Peter Edman

Harvard prof Harvey Mansfield has an article in The Weekly Standard on the work and latest book of Eva Brann of St. John’s College, Annapolis.

The piece is entitled “Greek Books, American Life,” (20 June 2005). It’s an interesting appreciation and critique, implying that her devotion to deep study in the Greek and other classics may be undermined by an American tendency to skim over the stuff that’s hard or irritating.

Of course, that’s not always a bad way to read people like Nietzsche, says Brann, in Open Secrets/Inward Prospects: Reflections on Word and Soul. Worth noting for a good assessment of Jefferson vs. Madison, and for the following quote. 

In a discussion of her work in the classics and their application to contemporary life, Mansfield notes that

Much of the danger comes with modern psychology that replaces soul with self. When Socrates urges “Know thyself,” he means that you must learn to know the common human soul within yourself, not the peculiar disposition of your self. When, instead of learning about your endowment, you get to know your peculiarities, you start to look and soon find some excuse for them. You give up the idea of self-control and give yourself over to expert control from outside, from experts in human vagaries that have been declared no longer to be sins. And what do the experts say? They urge experimentation with yourself as if you were a scientist testing a new hypothesis on a subject. A scientific experiment of this sort cannot fail because a negative result is still something positive learned, but a spell of what is touted as “experimentation” on your soul can wreck your life.

Our principle has become Just-Now. Nobody can live by that principle consistently, and so nobody should try to do so.

Gleanings, Character and Ethics, Faiths and Worldviews, Mon 27 Jun 2005