literature and its decline

Once upon a time, literature was the standard of academic excellence.

Young men and women read great books, driving them to contemplate the human condition. The college years were about students transforming themselves into reflective adults, and literature offered the passageway. Books instigated arguments over morality and iniquity. “Romeo and Juliet” provided students with pick-up lines. “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Pride and Prejudice” provoked debates over the proprieties of human social interactions.
Before international relations, anthropology, psychology and political science became trendy subjects, literature was understood as a repository of knowledge.

No longer, it seems. Literature is not high on the list of majors, nor is it a requirement for those studying hard science. Pre-med, engineering, architecture, computer science and business majors can often graduate from college without taking a single literature class.
Is literature not functional enough for modern-day students because it lacks empirical facts?

“Can anyone think that there is more understanding to be gained about the human heart from Freud than from Shakespeare?” asks Myron Magnet in an essay in City Journal. “Can anyone think that the studies of Margaret Mead or Alfred Kinsey tell us anything nearly as true as Ovid or Turgenev?”

Truth and Decline

Since Hegel’s time, the intellectuals have been losing faith in philosophy, in the idea that redemption can come in the form of true beliefs. In the literary culture which has been emerging during the last two hundred years, the question “Is it true?” has yielded pride of place to the question “What’s new?”

Heidegger thought that that change was a decline, a shift from serious thinking to mere gossipy curiosity. (See the discussions of das Gerede and die Neugier in sections 35-36 of Sein und Zeit) Many fans of natural science, people who otherwise have no use for Heidegger, would agree with him on this point. On the account Richard Rorty is offering, however, this change is an advance. It represents a desirable replacement of bad questions like “What is Being?”, “What is really real?” and “What is man?” with the sensible question ...

“Does anybody have any new ideas about what we human beings might manage to make of themselves?”

Enlightenment and decline

What does that mean "to decline"?

As Oswald Spengler said, the idealists of the early democracy regarded popular education as enlightenment pure and simple - but it is precisely this that smooths the path for the coming Caesars of the world. And we know now that he was partly right about that point.

In "The Decline of the West" (1922), the 19th century was the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money. But in this 20 th century blood and instinct have regain their rights against the power of money and intellect. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, was nearing its end...

The masses have accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars like Hitler, Mussolini or Staline, the strong men, and have obey them. Life has descend to a level of general uniformity, a new kind of primitivism...

Rome in a day

The decline of Rome, as Gibbon said, was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it has subsisted for so long.

Our world today

With metabole, we are always after the decline (meta-ballein...). This principle maintains that our world today continue to be a world because it works after the decline in its main structures.
It is a condition of its existence .

After the decay is removed, and the filling is placed, problems can actually occur. It is our live to cope with this kind of situation.