because it has somehow come to be regarded as sacred? No. What we have come to call the canon grew alongside western civilization and western history, as men and women held
conversations with contemporaries through scholarly enterprise and planning over time.
Does it mean the canon might be worthless because it is nothing more than a cultural phenomenon? No. Aristotle’s principle of
noncontradiction – a formal presentation of basic mental operation – continues to reflect the basic parameters of, and legitimate the criticism within, western thought, just as Homer and Chaucer, Dante and Shakespeare, Milton, and Dostoyevsky provide depth to thought through the nuances of literary form. And all of these will be challenged or supported when other cultures and their canons are studied and brought into relation with one another.
If one is to be honest, then a person must recognize culture for what it is. Michael Oakeshott provides a very strong definition:
A culture comprises unfinished intellectual and emotional journeyings, expeditions now
abandoned but known to us in the tattered maps left behind by explorers; it is composed of lighthearted adventures, of relationships
invented and explored in exploit or in drama, of myths and stories and poems expressing
fragments of human self-understanding, of gods worshipped, of responses to the mutability of the world and of encounters with death. And it reaches us, as it reached generations before ours, neither as long-ago terminated specimens of human adventure, nor as an accumulation of human achievements we are called upon to accept, but as a manifold of invitations to look, to listen and to reflect. Learning here is not merely the acquiring of information (that produces only what Nietzsche called a “culture philistine”), nor is it merely “improving one’s mind”; it is learning to recognize some specific
invitations to encounter particular adventures in human self-understanding.48
Thus, if common sense and intellectual honesty would suggest our western intellectual history has been one continuous – but certainly not uniform – conversation marked by studious comprehension and serious criticism over time, then nothing but impatience and a desire to realize political agendas can be at the foundation of this contemporary debate about the end of individualism. Born of an environment distinguished by its scholarly ignorance (or, political sophistication in light of scholarly ignorance), contemporary academics have realized a long dormant but potentially dangerous aspect of their nature: the desire to be a preacher.49 And politicians, who, since the time of Socrates, have been threatened by intellectuals and thus desired to protect themselves by holding the power of gods, have found before them the opportunity
readily to pronounce and enforce truth.
For example, populism appeals to the interests and conceptions (such as hopes and fears) of the general population, especially when contrasting any new collective consciousness
push against the prevailing status quo
interests of any predominant political sector.”50 However, it is often characterized as a movement that sets the general populace – or
It’s a topsy turvy world in which what is touted as being liberal is not enlightened. A cautionary tale to those individuals who believe their best interests lay with the group, because if populism has revealed anything, it is the case that the end of individualism would end personal responsibility and shut down open discussions with one another.
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