In this episode, I wanted to share an essay I recently presented at a Great Books group on reading imaginative literature. Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren describe a paradox regarding the reading of imaginative literature: it is the most difficult kind of reading and yet it is also the most common. It is easy to be moved by literature, yet it is difficult to know why we are moved. In this essay, I try to unpack the paradox a bit and explore the difficulty in analyzing beauty. The essential idea presented here is that while being moved by literature is subjective and personal, the cause of the movement is always objective and transcendental. I present Adler and van Doren's method for reading imaginative literature in a way that goes beyond the subjective experience to the transcendental movement that makes great literature great.

Show Notes

How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren

Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, Stratford Caldecott

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