‘Rescuing Socrates’ Review: Great Books, Greatly Missed
By: By Martha Bayles
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In 1985, when Roosevelt Montás first arrived in New York, he was an 11-year-old Dominican “with a head full of lice and a belly full of tropical parasites.” By his own account, he didn’t seem destined for a brilliant future and was “an unlikely candidate for the Ivy League.” Almost 40 years later, it’s clear that this wide-eyed immigrant has ended up blessing one particular Ivy League school as abundantly as it has blessed him.
The cover of “Rescuing Socrates” shows a marble statue of the philosopher improbably stuck in a plastic life preserver, a pop-art image that does little justice to this remarkable book. A better image would have been a photograph or drawing of a teenage boy on a busy street in Queens, N.Y., taking a volume of Plato from a stack of books thrown in the trash—because that is how young Mr. Montás first discovered the bedrock thinker of the Western philosophical tradition.
Some time after finding that volume, Mr. Montás was leafing through it in the hallway of hishigh school when he was spotted by a teacher named John Philippides. As Mr. Montás recalls, the “teacher-fire” in Philippides’s eyes lit up, and before long Mr. Montás had a mentor who would encourage him to apply to Columbia University.
Admitted through a state program for students with “financial need and academic under-preparedness,” Mr. Montás arrived on the Columbia campus acutely aware that he was “one of those students.” But rather than being allowed to languish on the margin, he was required to join his fellow freshmen in a two-year sequence of small, discussion-based, non-disciplinary classes reading major thinkers like the four profiled in these pages: Plato, Augustine, Freud and Gandhi.
Neither coldly academic nor hotly confessional, “Rescuing Socrates” is a warm, appealing narrative of how it feels to be “thrust into a conversation” with fellow students about life’s most “serious and unsettling questions.” Because it is a narrative, the book does not impose what Mr. Montás calls “an artificial compression” on the subtle and cumulative workings of this type of education. Instead he gradually reveals how the process worked. “Many of the conversations . . . went over my head,” the author writes, “but like a recurring tide that leaves behind a thin layer of sediment each time it comes, eventually forming recognizable structures, the intensive reading and twice-weekly discussions were coalescing into an altogether new sense of who I was.”
Having taught for several years in a similar program, I admire this account and appreciate the irony of Mr. Montás’s quip that foundational education—a term of art for a tradition-based core curriculum or Great Books program—is “typically most appreciated by those who least need it.” Today the shrillest reason for eliminating such programs is the claim that they promote a white-supremacist version of history and culture that oppresses all but the male, pale and privileged.
Mr. Montás is a living rebuke to this claim, as are the hundreds of black, Latino, immigrant, and low-income men and women who have benefited from Columbia’s Core Curriculum, which he directed for 10 years. At the same time, Mr. Montás is a realist. While crediting the survival of the Core to the sustained dedication of many educators whose epidermis is paler than his, he admits that his background helps to remove the air of snobbery that some Great Books programs exude.
Another oft-cited reason for ending foundational education is the transformation of colleges in recent decades, from places where students are taught the wisdom of the past into research universities where the frontiers of knowledge are aggressively expanded. As Mr. Montás laments, this “research ideal” has caused “the humanities and humanisticsocial sciences” to lose all purchase on “the human questions that breathe life and meaning into the liberal arts.”
Today, the same research ideal makes it hard to find people like Mr. Montás’s freshman instructor Wallace Gray, an English professor who published only one book but possessed a magical ability “to animate what might be alien to the student and evoke, from what might at first look like a carcass, a vital and compelling voice.” Stressing the need for such teachers, Mr. Montás recalls a comment by Janine deNovais, another Core graduate who served as his associate director: “If the Core is not taught well, the Core is not taught.”
Finally, Mr. Montás confronts Friedrich Nietzsche’s explosive challenge to “the very category of truth.” Appearing unexpectedly in the chapter on Gandhi, this confrontation includes a cogent summary of Nietzsche’s thought, leading up to the conviction that, in Nietzsche’s words, “this world is the will to power—and nothing besides!” The same intellectual current, ridden exhaustively by such 20th-century figures as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, has lately congealed into the proto-ideology known as wokeness.
I can only guess why Mr. Montás avoided the topic of wokeness. But I do wish that he had made Nietzsche one of the four thinkers who changed his life. “My crush on Deconstruction and Postmodernism was real,” he reports, adding that “the ripping open of conceptual categories, canons, and hierarchies has an intoxicating quality.” But then he continues: “I ran out of patience with the evasiveness, obfuscation, and intellectual vacuity of many of the leading voices in the field. I felt confident enough in my background in philosophy and theory to call bulls— where I saw it.” Maybe in his next book, Mr. Montás will elaborate more richly on this crucial part of his journey.
Returning to that image of Mr. Montás pulling Plato out of the trash: At one point he recalls his young Dominican self thinking, “this was one of the many weirdnesses of Americans: they threw away perfectly good stuff.” Not a bad description of what has happened to American higher education.
Ms. Bayles teaches at Boston College, where for 18 years she was an instructor in the Honors Program, a four-year sequence of foundational courses that was recently eliminated.
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The Book is:
Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation
By Roosevelt Montás
Princeton
248 pages