On becoming a better person – John McWhorter in NYT:

‘For several years I taught the Core Curriculum course “Contemporary Civilization,” and I do think it made a better person out of me, as well as the dozens of students I ushered through it.
That course is a two-semester marathon requiring every sophomore to read dense texts week after week and come prepared to discuss and write about them. It starts with Plato’s “The Republic” and continues with (this is but a partial list) Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible, St. Augustine, the New Testament, Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke, Adam Smith, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Du Bois, Fanon and many others. And as much of a climb as this can be for students (and their teacher), it does make one a better person.
Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” for example, is initially a forbidding piece of work, seeming to meander through assorted definitions of vague- and perhaps quaint-sounding concepts such as happiness and virtue. However, to guide students through what Aristotle is getting across is to reveal invaluable insights about the human endeavor — one of my favorites of which is that what Aristotle means by virtue is excellence, as in excelling. His “Ethics” offers a light to shine through the difficulty in figuring out what the point of existence is — of finding something we do well and doing our best in it as a prime justification for existence. One day, it’s over for each of us, but you tried, and did, your best with what you were given.
Rousseau is perhaps best known for his concept of humans beginning as “noble savages.” These figures supposedly led largely solitary lives and lacked language and even capacities for discernment. We must, in a nod to Menand, acknowledge that anthropology and paleontology have put this to rest as any kind of scientific fact about the origin of humans — humans emerged as, and have always been, social, rational beings. And we must acknowledge the Eurocentricity in his characterizations.
The key thing is that Rousseau did not see this “noble savage,” a clueless brute, as noble at all. His notion of semi-paradise was small, basically egalitarian societies, with the idea that everything went to pieces when humans conglomerated into hierarchical civilizations. The problem as Rousseau saw it was masses of people condemned to wrest “iron and wheat” from the earth — while a fortunate few reaped the benefits thereof.’

(…)

‘I especially enjoyed teaching Immanuel Kant’s “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.” One of his categorical imperatives proposes an ultimate ethical obligation, to “act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” That is not, mind you, the old Golden Rule, because “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” could mean that you decide to be lazy and be OK with other people being lazy as well. This fails under the categorical imperative because it would be a poor universal law — a society of layabouts would be a hungry and threadbare one.
However, the categorical imperative leaks when you try to apply it to, say, suicide (Is it wrong because we wouldn’t want all people to do it?) and lying (Is a lie intended to avert catastrophe inherently wrong?). What we ultimately get from Kant is how elusive any truly universal principle is, especially if we consider that different peoples worldwide might have differing perspectives on such matters.’

Read the article here.

It’s always touching when the humanities are being defended with the idea that they make you a better person, a virtuous person maybe. The humanities as orange juice or broccoli or a green salad (or a religious exercise for that matter) not that tasty maybe, but healthy as hell.

If universal principles are elusive and so much dependent on circumstances, why are Kant and Rousseau and Aristotle immune to different perspectives?

I’m all in favor of reading Kant or Rousseau, but believing that reading Kant makes you a better person is akin to the thought that you can live forever if you believe that Jesus died for your sins. Knowledge, wisdom and goodness are not necessarily connected.

How can you defend the humanities without simply declaring that the effect of reading great thinkers provide you with a ‘democratizing impulse’?

Some of these great thinkers might be dead and white, but that's no excuse for feel-good-philosophy.