Joseph Epstein, writer, professor, and exemplar of cultivated sensibilities, gave the keynote speech at ISI's 2008 Dinner for Western Civilization. The lecture is reproduced this month in The New Criterion.

Epstein writes with a level of eloquence and wit that sets him far above the average class of editorial writers. At the risk of sounding extreme, I argue that this speech should remain a perpetual classic in the canon of conservative, or just good, reflection on the importance of literature in higher education.

Without pretension and yet obviously armed with a mind of devastating precision, Epstein argues for the superior value of knowledge gained through literature. For literature, he writes, offers insights about life, beauty, and human experience that lie deeply, at the level of the heart, soul, and instinct, that cannot be dislodged by the falsifying reality of intellectual abstractions.

Here is a short excerpt to tease your interest. But I would recommend strongly that you read the whole thing, or watch it in ISI's online lecture library.

quote:

One of the most important functions of literature in the current day is to cultivate a healthy distrust of the ideas thrown up by journalism and social science. Novels and poems can be the antidote here. “The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity,” Milan Kundera writes. “The novelist says to the reader: things are not as simple as you think.” When he is working well, the good novelist persuasively establishes that life is more surprising, bizarre, fascinating, complex, and rich than any shibboleth, concept, or theory used to explain it. A literary education establishes a strong taste for the endless variousness of life; it teaches how astonishing reality is—and how obdurate to even the most ingenious attempts to grasp its mechanics or explain any serious portion of it! “A man is more complicated than his thoughts,” wrote Valéry, which, if you think about it, is happily so.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Samantha Clark,

Many thanks for this.