Reading Set Precepts

Dale Larson
Grays Harbor College
Each of you is required to write a "set" of brief responses to the primary readings assigned in Philosophy 100. By primary readings I mean those essays included in Klemke or our class handouts. Whenever more than one essay is assigned, you must respond to at least one. This task serves as ideal preparation for class conversations, essays, and tests.

I ask that each submission include these four parts.

Favorite Passage: Quote a sentence or two from the text that you especially like. The passage should be central to the author's explicit or implicit argument. Be sure to cite the page so we can find it during class.

Least Favorite Passage: Quote another sentence or two that you don’t like. The passage should contradict or weaken the author's argument or narrow the scope of its logical application. Again, cite the page.

Summary: In several fully textured, grammatically complete sentences, state the author's main argument, including  what the author is arguing for as well as what the author is arguing against. Write objectively, as if the author were restating his or her own argument. Quoted words or phrases  help.

Personal Response: Briefly indicate your response to the argument as summarized, clarifying any grounds you have for agreement or disagreement. Write with personal conviction, weighing the argument in the scales of your own reason and experience.
 
 

Reading Set Example

Text: Jacques Barzun, "Conversation, Manners, and the Home," The House of Intellect (New York: Harper, 1959), 60-65, 68.

Favorite Passage: "The genuine exercise or true conversation sifts opinion, that is, tries to develop tenable positions by alternate statements, objections, modifications, examples, arguments, distinctions, expressed with the aid of the rhetorical arts — irony, exaggeration, and the rest — properly muted to the size and privateness of the scene" (61).

Least Favorite Passage: "For conversation — as must be said of most good things in this infatuated age — is the antithesis of education" (68).

Summary: With intellectual pleasure as its aim and contradiction as its starting point, Barzun thinks true conversation "sifts" rather than "exchanges" opinion. But wherever the sentiment of equality prevails, such conversation typically languishes since rather than having the "play of mind" count as a democratic possibility,  social "subversion" counts instead. According to Barzun, no matter how politely one expresses disagreement, "the reasoning goes: you are one against several = you are wrong = you are a fool," with conversation  ceasing.

Personal Response: Although I sympathize with Barzun's argument, I am troubled by his anti-democratic tone. Perhaps he comes nearer to naming what upsets him when, in quoting William James at the end (p. 68), he implicitly commends James's careful distinction between "vulgarity" and "aristocracy." Vulgarity is Barzun's real target, not democracy. We should see that, in America at least, rather than being the "antithesis" of education, conversation is its "essence." How else, except by democracy's abrasively educational, socially contentious conversation, can anybody — perhaps even Aristocrats — get polished?