The Western Canon

An important aspect of the Western Canon is that it is a large body, corpus if you will, of thought on almost any imaginable topic relevant to the human condition. The most important aspect is that it is a shared corpus.

If I've read the The Bacchae and you've read The Bacchae I can use it to illustrate a point about chaos versus order. You could then use Friedrich Nietzsche's take on Apollonian and Dionysian as part of a counter-argument. Again, if we both have read his writings. Likewise, one could even reference Atticus Finch when talking about justice. Or...well...you get my drift. Alluding to shared works let's us use rhetoric that is simultaneously more concise and rich.

The choices made regarding what books are part of the canon obviously contain normative value. If I say the Iliad is part of the canon and that a feminist, lesbian, Latina migrant worker's story is not, then that attributes more value to the Iliad than the other. And one could, and many have, argued that this is a problem because it gives more value to the work of a dead white man than a living, lesbian, Latina woman author, but that's a stupid argument. The Iliad has more value because it has demonstrated its worth by remaining relevant for thousands of years. It contains themes and messages that are universal in the human condition.

I guess one could counter my statement by saying that there are no universal themes, and that we can only get at Truth through shared experience with as wide a range of voices as possible. And I agree to a point. We should all endeavor to understand as many people's lives as possible. But when it comes to what to teach in a curriculum with limited time and resources those limited time and resources are best spent teaching classical, time-tested texts that have survived through the centuries. That way we have a shared literary tradition to reference, and we can subsequently debate the merits of other works using references to that shared corpus.

Will this necessarily constrain the debate? Yes, but it provides a framework with which to understand and express our thoughts on other works to each other and ourselves. I might even say that it adds a bit of Apollonian order to the Dionysian chaos of human existence, but that would presume that you were familiar with Greek Mythology and Drama, as well as Western Philosophy...

The problem is that the most important thing to me about the Western Canon, what makes it most useful, is that other people know it too. If others haven't read much of it, then it loses much of its value. To the extent that it is no longer taught or there is less interest in reading it, it dies.