A lecture I gave on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College on July 13, 2011…

Contents

Part One
Part Two
Coda

In what sense are we freed through a liberal education? In my lecture tonight, I want to discuss one answer to this question, which nonetheless leads, I think, to two ideas, opposed ideas, of what liberal education is. The lecture is accordingly divided into two parts: a first part where I discuss the answer; then a second part where I discuss the two ideas.

Part One

For the answer, I turn to an essay entitled “The Idea of Liberal Education,” written by Jacob Klein, a former tutor and dean of St. John’s College. For in that essay, Klein tries to address my opening question, I think, in the most elementary way he can. Let me quote two passages from the essay to show you what I mean. Here is the first passage:

The idea of liberal education, then, whether you accept or reject it, is not definable in terms of some peculiar subject matter. Some applied sciences may well fall outside its scope. But, by and large, any formal discipline may form its vehicle and basis. It is not the subject matter that determines the character of studies as liberal studies. It is rather in the way in which a formal discipline, a subject matter, is taken up that is decisive: whenever it is being studied for its own sake, whenever the metastrophic way of questioning is upheld, whenever genuine wonderment is present, liberal education is taking place.[1]

And here is the second passage, which explains what Klein means by the word “metastrophic”:

I have said before that within the confines of our horizon there is the expected as well as the unexpected, the old and the new, the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar. We do, however, experience a kind of question which, as it were, tends to smash the bounds that limit us. We do occasionally stop altogether and face the familiar as if for the first time—anything: a person, a street, the sky, a fly. The overwhelming impression on such occasions is the strangeness of the thing we contemplate. This state of mind requires detachment, and I am not at all certain to what extent we can contrive its presence. We suddenly do not feel at home in this world of ours. We take a deep look at things, at people, at words, with eyes blind to the familiar. We re-flect. Plato has a word for it: metastrophê or periagogê, a turnabout, a conversion. We detach ourselves from all that is familiar to us; we change the direction of our inquiry; we do not explore the unknown anymore; on the contrary, we convert the known into an unknown. We wonder. And we burst out with that inexorable question: Why is that so? To be sure, we have raised the question “why” before. I can certainly ask: Why did it snow yesterday and does not snow today? Why did Mr. X say this or that to Mr. Y? But this “why” I am talking about now is of a different kind. It does not lead to any discovery or recovery. It calls myself into question with all my questioning. It compels me to detach myself from myself, to transcend the limits of my horizon; that is, it educates me. It gives me the freedom to go to the roots of all my questioning.[2]

Now, by calling these passages elementary, I don’t mean that they are perfectly clear. I’m not even confident that all I’m about to say on their behalf is what Klein actually meant. But what is clear, I think, and this is what I take to be elementary about the passages, is that Klein writes them in trying to capture something about the essence of liberal education—or to borrow his word for it, the idea of liberal education—that lies beneath any particular book, or subject, or curriculum, or institution, that we might identify with liberal education. And there must be some such idea, I think, for any such identification to be judged correct, or true.

I also believe that Klein is essentially right in his description of this idea—though again, I will later want to say that his description actually leads to two ideas. But for the moment I will call it one idea. Or as Klein again calls it: the idea. And it does seem to me that liberal education must have something to do, at bottom, with a certain kind of questioning that involves our conversion. Let me try to spell this out in my own way by generalizing on Klein’s example of a “why” question. Suppose we were compelled to ask, not simply “Why is that so?,” but “Why is anything so?” Why is there something, in other words, rather than nothing? It is this question, I think, that provides a paradigm for the kind of question Klein has in mind. For there is perhaps nothing so familiar to us as the very presence of the world; yet also nothing that can seem so strange, so accidental or arbitrary.

And to question this presence is to call myself into question in turn, insofar as I too am a part of this presence, or something rather than nothing. Indeed, I myself—and here I mean all of us insofar as we can each say “I myself”—I myself am perhaps the most familiar thing that I encounter in the world, yet I can also seem the most strange, the most accidental or arbitrary. For why do I exist? Or more exactly: why am I this human being here, in front of you right now, existing at this time and place rather than at some other time and place, or even not at all? Or looking at my strangeness the other way around: why is this human being me and no one else? Why is his point of view my point of view?

This question can be even more unsettling when we start to wonder what the answer could be. Surely it would encompass my own birth, and that of my parents, my grandparents, and so on, back to some origin of the world as such. But would the answer thereby encompass me? It’s easy to doubt it. It can seem, in fact, as if the answer in this sense might exhaustively explain my existence in the world, yet without explaining—or even acknowledging—how that existence is indeed mine, and no one else’s. And it can start to look as if the origin of my own point of view upon the world, as indeed my own, escapes, or perhaps I should say surpasses, all explanation. But then the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” would seem to have no answer, at least when directed at me—when the question becomes: “Why am I something rather than nothing?”

More unsettling still, it is through this same point of view, this seemingly inexplicable point of view, that the world gains its very presence. Leaving the source of its existence aside, that is, we could say the source of its presence lies in this point of view. For the world is made present to me through the point of view upon it that I share with no one else, just as it is made present to you through the point of view upon it that you share with no one else. But this means that the world becomes present, and in this presence becomes questionable, through the very point of view that seems to surpass all explanation. It can then start to look as if the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has no answer at all, even when not directed at me. At the very least, the question would surpass any answer that might be given to it, in whatever way, if there is one, that I who ask the question surpass any account that might be given of me. And leaving aside whether there is an answer to this question, we could say that the question itself is permanent rather than provisional. Or as Klein puts it, the question doesn’t lead to any further discovery or recovery, insofar as there is nothing to discover in the world, or to recover in myself, that might dispense with the question once it is raised. The question reveals a difference for me, which no discovery or recovery can entirely resolve, between the way that being something rather than nothing is readily explained, and the way that being something rather than nothing seems inexplicable.

Now, Klein also says that such a question educates me, giving me the freedom to go to the roots of all my questioning. But it is tempting, I think, to draw just the opposite conclusion from what I called the permanence of the question. For wouldn’t its permanence suggest that the world is indeed accidental or arbitrary? And what more could we learn from such a question in that case, about either ourselves or the world, save that both exist as a brute, inexplicable fact? What more could we learn, in other words, save that there is no freedom possible in such a world, and thus no place for a liberal education. But this is not Klein’s conclusion, and I think that here too he is right. Here is one way to think about why. The way I surpass all explanation in this context is the way I am free of all explanation—or more simply put, the way I am free. Or to say this more exactly if elaborately: there is no explaining the origin of my point of view upon the world, insofar as it is mine alone, because in this respect, my point of view is an origin, rather than having one. Or let me say this again still more elaborately: my point of view as mine is not an outcome of the world, which might be explained in being traced back to an origin; rather, it is an origin in itself. And a crucial sign of this is indicated by Klein in what he calls the roots of all my questioning. For because my point of view is an origin, I am in a position not simply to explain the world, or find answers in it, but to wonder about the world, and ask questions of it. The reason that the presence of the world can then be put into permanent question, the reason we can wonder “Why is this so?” of anything at all, is not because the world is radically contingent, but rather because it is radically originating. And the world is perhaps most essentially originating, in a way that makes a place for liberal education, in the very possibility of questions that are permanent rather than provisional—which is to say, questions we can ask of the world that remain questions even when answered.

Let me try to spell all this out one last way before moving on. There is, we can suppose, a way that the world is simply there for us, or present to us. And this establishes what we might call a horizon of acquaintance with things, within which they are always already present, and in that sense unquestionable. This is not to deny the existence of questions within such a horizon, but rather to say that any such question has some answer in front of it, that relies on the very presence of what is being questioned. And because of this presence, the answer can in effect supplant the question, in what we might regard as the continual advance in knowledge that we can make within this horizon, just insofar as our questions about the world have answers. We could even identify this horizon, I think, with everything there is to learn about the world. And if this were the only horizon available to us, liberal education would be, in a literal sense of the word, mathematical, where we learn the things that can be learned.

But this is not, it turns out, the only horizon available to us. And this changes—or converts—the idea of liberal education radically, from having a mathematical orientation to having a philosophical one. For the very presence of the world, again, can become utterly strange, where we wonder why it is there for us, and what gives it the very presence it has, the very presence that establishes our horizon of acquaintance. This experience of strangeness and wonder is only possible, I think, where there is a larger horizon available to us—if “horizon” is still the word—that encompasses our horizon of acquaintance. And within this larger horizon, we could say that things are inherently questionable, which is to say, that things are present to us only insofar as they are questionable. This is not to deny the existence of answers within such a horizon, but rather to say that any such answer has some question behind it, that relies on the very questionability of what is present. And because of this questionability, the answer is prevented from supplanting the question. What the answer does instead, we could say, is address the question. And within this horizon, then, there is no advance, in the usual sense, in our knowledge of things, but rather a deepening of it. We might think of this deepening as a continual clarification, within this horizon, of why, and to what extent, our knowledge of things is knowledge. And this clarification is possible just insofar as our answers have questions about the world behind them, to which they are the answers. We could even identify this horizon, I think, with everything there is to wonder about the world, or ask about the world, that makes us learn, in making us want to learn, and in that way able to learn. And since this is a second horizon available to us that encompasses the first, liberal education is no longer mathematical, but again philosophical, where we might say, if paradoxically, that we learn the things that can’t be learned.

That such things can’t be learned is acknowledged by Klein, I think, when he mentions that he is not at all certain to what extent we can contrive the presence of the state of mind that allows us to wonder. Indeed, Klein’s further description makes it seem as if this state of mind comes largely unbidden: suddenly rather than deliberately. And this should be no surprise, I think, if this state of mind finally reflects the way, at such moments of wonder about the world, we are indeed an origin rather than an outcome of the world, or free rather than determined. But if this means that the wonder at the heart of liberal education cannot be contrived, then any curriculum of liberal education becomes puzzling. For what is the curriculum for? This is a second question that seems to have followed from the answer to my first. For the way we are freed through liberal education, at least on the answer I have just discussed, is through the detached state of mind that allows us to wonder about the world. Yet there nothing, let us suppose, that can compel that state of mind. But if so, then again, what is a curriculum of liberal education for? Why does it exist?

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Part Two

For one answer to this question, I can turn to another essay by Klein on liberal education, this one simply entitled “On Liberal Education.” And again Klein tries to answer this question in an elementary way. Here is one passage to show you what I mean:

Let me talk, then, about such a program. It has first of all to select the material which would compel the learner to reflect and to get rid of the sediments in his thinking so as to enable him to reach the level of intellectual clarity. This material is available in the great documents of human seeing, hearing, imagining, and understanding, that is to say, in the Old Testament, in the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, in the New Testament, in Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Darwin, the great novelists of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, Freud, Whitehead and many others. The task is to read these works, which contain our intellectual heritage—which, in turn, is permeated by vagueness and sedimentation—in such a way as to re-awaken the insights in which they are rooted and to reflect on these insights and their ultimate assumptions. This task is tremendous; at best, only a beginning can be made.[3]

Here is how I understand this passage, in light of my earlier discussion. On the one hand, there is nothing sufficient, of itself, to produce the state of mind that allows us to wonder about the world. On the other hand, there is something necessary to produce it. For it turns out that our horizon of acquaintance with things is not something we possess; it is rather something we inhabit. Or even more exactly, it is something we are embedded in. Klein’s way of putting this, indebted to Husserl, is that our thinking about things is, in the first place, sedimented.[4]

Leaving the details of Husserl’s complicated account for this aside, I think we can see the possibility of this predicament in the way I earlier described our horizon of acquaintance with things. For this is again the horizon within which things are unquestionable, in being always already present. Things thus go unquestioned within this horizon, in most cases simply, but in other cases, again, by answers that supplant the questions that led to them. But now consider another way of putting this last point. Let us say that the answers cover up the questions that led to them. If this were true, then moving beyond this horizon, and back to the questions behind those answers, would seem impossible in any immediate way. For we would first have to uncover what has been covered up. Or as Klein puts it, we would first have to rid ourselves of the sediments in our thinking, and in that sense work at clarifying our minds. But this, then, is one answer to my second question, of what a curriculum of liberal education is for, or why it exists. It exists to free us from our embeddedness in one horizon so that we might reach the other horizon, even if there is no guarantee that we will.

Now, in discussing this answer, I have made no mention yet of great books, or what Klein calls those great documents of human seeing, hearing, imagining, and understanding that contain our intellectual heritage. But to say they contain this heritage is already to suggest how they become central to a curriculum of liberal education, so understood. For this is to say, I think, that these books have established the very horizon that we find ourselves embedded in, even as they themselves become embedded in that horizon, under layers of scholarship and commentary. To free ourselves from our own embeddedness thus becomes a matter of freeing these books from their embeddedness. And this means reading them in such a way, as Klein says, as to reawaken the insights in which they are rooted.

But what could Klein mean by this? For the moment, I think we can safely infer that he means, at the very least, that great books will have to be read carefully. For reading them in a cursory way would seem to risk, if not ensure, that we will read them only from within the very horizon we are trying to escape. And this, then, tells us not simply what a curriculum of education is for, but how it works—in what I will now call one idea of liberal education. For in essence, the curriculum works through the careful reading of certain great books. And everything else that might be found in this curriculum—the study of language, the activity of conversation—would be for the sake of that end. The curriculum would exist as a whole to help us read such books as best we can.

It is no surprise, in any case, to find this view of reading attributed to Klein by the former tutor J. Winfree Smith, in his history of the St. John’s Program. “Klein,” he writes, “thought an absorbing preoccupation with the content of a great book to be a necessary condition for learning.”[5] But what is surprising, I think, is the context of this remark. For it is made to contrast Klein’s view with that of Scott Buchanan, who with Stringfellow Barr founded the very program at St. John’s where great books are read. “Buchanan,” writes Smith, “was content if a student acquired only a superficial acquaintance with the content [of a great book], provided that it were sufficiently suggestive and provocative of thought; if the thought moved far away from the book, that was no matter for concern.”[6] More surprising still is an earlier passage in Smith’s book, again about Buchanan. For there Smith offers a mixed assessment of Buchanan’s way of thinking—or as he calls it, Buchanan’s way of philosophizing—which evidently aimed at producing unities out of diversities, yet for that reason led Buchanan to make what Smith calls “simple blunders” in a “cavalier” reading of great books.[7] Yet Smith goes on to suggests a link between Buchanan’s careless way with great books and the very character of the St. John’s Program:

What has been said about Buchanan’s way of philosophizing should be of help in understanding what his conception of the program was, why with all its emphasis on tradition it was not in any way committed to the past as past or to the thought of any particular thinker, why it was as ambitious as it was, and why it might be called philosophical in a large sense. Just as Buchanan himself was not particularly concerned to discover an author’s meaning, neither was he particularly concerned that that should be the aim of the students. He expected them to get from their readings some thoughts, some insights, some questions which, though they might even spring from a serious misreading, would spark discussion and result in whatever the free intellect might learn.[8]

Now, this passage about Buchanan, I think, is where we find a second idea of liberal education opposed to the first idea. For let us again ask the questions: What is a curriculum of liberal education for? And how does it work? Under the first idea of how it works, we have to read great books carefully, but under the second idea, we can read them carelessly. And this goes hand-in-hand with contradictory answers to the question of what the curriculum is for, which is implicit in Smith’s striking description of the intellect in the passage above: as something already free and ready to learn. For this suggests that under the second idea, the curriculum does not exist to free us from our embeddedness in the horizon of acquaintance. For we are not embedded there, even at the start. Instead, because of our intellect, which again is already free and ready to learn, we are located in the other horizon, and can wonder about the world from where we stand. And since our access to this horizon is therefore immediate, there is no need for a careful reading of great books to get us there.

But why, then, does the curriculum exist, under this second idea? What is the curriculum for? I think we can understand this by considering Buchanan’s own way of affirming the freedom of intellect. Consider, for example, a famous address he once gave in 1958, entitled “The Last Don Rag.” Here is a sampling of the questions Buchanan imagined asking the students of St. John’s College at their last don rag : “Do you believe in and trust your intellect, that innate power that never sleeps?” “Do you recognize the action of this power as you live and learn?” “Have you, in the course of your life, before, after, or while you were at St. John’s, become your own teacher?” “Have you yet recognized that you are and always have been your own teacher?”[9]

Now, one reason that would-be students at this don rag, in hearing that last question, might answer “no”, is because they went to the college where great books are the teachers. So, at any rate, goes a famous slogan of the college, which was popular in Buchanan’s day.[10] But I think the two sources of teaching could be regarded as one and the same, under this second idea of liberal education. Since the intellect on this view is again already free, and our access to the horizon of questioning immediate, our relation to great books is not, fundamentally, that of a reader, but rather that of a writer. This is just another way of saying, at least on this idea, that our point of view upon the world is an origin rather than an outcome. Insofar as our point of view is individually ours alone, we possess the point of view of an author. And the careless way we might read a great book bears less resemblance, in its indifference, to what we would find in superficial summaries of that book, and more resemblance to what we might find in the book itself, when its author speaks of past great books in a cursory and even dismissive manner, as a way of starting from scratch. So this way of thinking about the second idea, I think, leads to the following positive answer of what a curriculum of liberal education is for, and a fuller answer of how it works. We encounter great books not as artifacts of thought to be studied, but rather as models of thought to be imitated. And the point of imitating them is not to clarify our minds, but rather to cultivate them. So the curriculum, under this idea, is where the reading of great books is only one exercise, even if the central exercise, among the many that develop the intellect. The study of language would have a place, as would the activity of conversation. But these would now, in a sense, be for their own sake, or at least for the sake of the intellect’s self-assertion, and perhaps its self-knowledge, in coming to know that it is indeed always free and never asleep. Or to put the contrast of this second idea with the first idea one final way: the curriculum as a whole would exist as if to help us write great books as best we can, read them as we will.

Now, there are two more ways we might contrast these two ideas of liberal education that I find interesting, and mention them for what they might be worth as a way of concluding my lecture. The first way brings me back to the question of what Klein could mean when he says that we have to read great books in such a way as to reawaken the insights in which they are rooted. Now earlier, I inferred from this only that we have to read great books carefully. But Klein says more than this, and does so, I think, to distinguish a merely careful reading from a truly thoughtful one, which in this context means distinguishing the kind of careful reading that simply adds another layer of scholarship and commentary on top of the book in question, from the kind of careful reading that digs through these layers, and reaches the book itself. But even that is not quite what Klein says. Or rather, he says more. For the book itself, in his description, is rooted in certain insights. And the insights, in turn, are to be re-awakened by the reading. But this suggests that the reading is accomplished, finally, insofar as we have rid ourselves of a kind of sleep in our thinking, rather than a kind of sediment. Or as Buchanan might well have put it, the reading is accomplished, finally, insofar as the intellect in us, being always free and never asleep, is applied to the book, allowing us to re-awaken its insights rather than merely recollect them. Or more simply put, but again on Buchanan’s behalf: the reading is accomplished when we can read the book as if we were writing the book. In any case, I think we can see a possible difference here between the two ideas on the very character of thought. For under the one idea, where sedimentation is the difficulty, thinking would be a kind of transparency; while under the other idea, where somnolence might be thought the difficulty, thinking would be a kind of wakefulness.

The second way we might contrast the ideas turns me briefly, and finally, to another difference between Klein and Buchanan noted by Winfree Smith in his history of the St. John’s Program, when he tells of how Klein became dean at the college in 1949, and was now in charge of the curriculum established by Buchanan: “Convinced as he was of the fundamental rightness of that curriculum he [Klein] was not about to make any revolutionary changes. Precisely in that respect he was unlike Buchanan who, as [Mortimer] Adler once said, thought that whatever had become established must have something wrong with it and who in 1943 had reported approvingly to his son Douglas the remark of a young faculty member that ‘almost everything has to be rebuilt if we are to go on’.”[11] In a related vein, Buchanan himself once remarked to Smith, years after leaving the college, that he and Stringfellow Barr never believed they had founded the program they were credited with, and even seemed to suggest that the program’s survival in its original form was a sign of failure rather than success. “They thought of themselves,” so Smith reports, “not as having found, but as being in search of a liberal arts college. He [Buchanan] seemed to have got the impression that we at St. John’s, without having found, had stopped seeking.”[12] It looks from this as if what Klein took as his duty to conserve, Buchanan would have taken as his duty to destroy, and then rebuild. This difference too is explained, I think, by what I have called two ideas of liberal education. We might say that the college, in this case, is like a great book itself, which under one idea can be contemplated as if it were already written and ready to be read, yet under the other idea can be contemplated as if the writing were still to be done. We might well ask under which of these ideas our college is best understood.

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Coda

In the question period of this lecture there was one question, asked in various forms by several tutors, that I thought worth briefly addressing in a “coda” to this lecture. One way to put the question (and thanks to Harvey Flaumenhaft and John Verdi for their particular formulations of this) would be as follows: is there anything in the Buchanan idea of liberal education, as I accounted for it in my lecture, that would require the reading of great books? Is there anything in that idea, in fact, that would require any reading of any books? Another way to put the question (thanks to Anita Kronsberg for her formulation of this) would be: what is it about great books that Buchanan found so important as to give them a central place in the program at St. John’s, or more generally in a curriculum of liberal education?

One way to address this question, I think, would be through what Klein and Buchanan did agree about, in their understanding of the program. Smith describes this agreement as follows:

Klein certainly to a very large extent shared the opinions on which the St. John’s program as Buchanan had envisaged it had been based; that the end of liberal education is the intellectual virtues and that the best way to develop and to cultivate the intellectual virtues is through intensive acquaintance with the whole intellectual tradition of the Western World and through the liberal arts.[13]

Just from this passage, we could say, on behalf of either idea of liberal education discussed above, that an encounter with great books has a central place in liberal education, insofar as it provides the intensive acquaintance with our intellectual tradition that helps to develop and cultivate the intellectual virtues.

Buchanan’s own way of putting this point, which includes explicit reference to great books (or what Buchanan here calls “the classics”), can be found in the first catalog for the New Program that Buchanan wrote in 1937:

It is the purpose of the new program at St. John’s College to recover the great liberal tradition of Europe and America, which for a period of two thousand years has kept watch over and guided all the other Occidental traditions. All liberal colleges ought to be devoted servants of this great tradition, and this is the secret of their tenacious attempts to discharge their functions against many odds.

The tangible and eminently available embodiments and tools of this great tradition are the classics and the liberal arts.

But while this passage otherwise encompasses the agreement between Buchanan and Klein described by Smith, there are two formulations in the passage that I suspect distinguish Buchanan’s view from Klein’s. First, Buchanan says that the purpose of the new program is to recover—where I imagine Klein might prefer to say recollect—the tradition in question. Second, Buchanan says that liberal colleges ought to serve—where Klein might prefer to say study—this tradition. The reason for these differences, I think, has to do with the role of sedimentation in Klein’s understanding of this tradition, along with a related and radical difference between ancient and modern thought, neither of which seems to have informed Buchanan’s conception of the tradition, at least originally. Smith notes, for example, that in the original 1937 catalogue statement, no mention is made of the Cartesian revolution, yet this becomes explicit in the very next statement of 1938–39, which Smith speculates is from Klein’s influence upon his arrival in 1938: “It may be that the emphasis on the Cartesian revolution had resulted from conversation between Buchanan and Klein who was particularly insistent on the revolutionary consequences for all modern thought of Descartes’ way of thinking.”[14]

In any case, the way I might capture this difference in light of my discussion above as as follows. Under both ideas of liberal education, great books establish our horizon of acquaintance with things. But under one idea, which we could identify with Klein, emph{this founding has already happened}, and needs to be recollected, demanding a particular sort of encounter with great books, which I characterized as “careful” reading above. But under the other idea, which we could identify with Buchanan, this founding can happen again, and needs to be recovered, demanding a particular but different sort of encounter with great books, which I characterized as “careless” reading above, or more positively, as the kind of reading performed by the would-be writer of a great book rather than by the would-be reader of one.

But repeating this point about reading allows me to conclude this coda with what may be a more compelling way than I offered in the lecture of thinking about the difference between careful and careless readings of great books. We could think of this as the difference between a reading that is principally interpretive and a reading that is principally imaginative. And on the interpretive reading as I envision it, we would read, say, Leibniz’s Monadology to address a question like “What did Leibniz mean by ‘monad’?”, striving in this way to gain clarity or comprehension about a concept or idea that has indeed already informed our understanding of things, however implicitly or unknowingly. But on the imaginative reading as I envision it, we would read Leibniz’s Monadology rather to address a question like “What about the world makes Leibniz’s use of `monad’ meaningful?”, striving in this way to gain through the book an actual perception of the world that can now, and perhaps forevermore, inform our understanding of things. Or to put this difference one final way, in the interpretive reading questions of meaning are prior to questions of being, since on this idea we are inheritors of a horizon of acquaintance through the book in question; while in the imaginative reading questions of being are prior to questions of meaning, since on this idea we are benefactors of a horizon of acquaintance through the book in question.

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