Don’t Fire The Western Canon

I hope I shall not seem unduly chauvinistic in claiming the superiority of the Western canon, when I think myself merely duly chauvinistic in doing so. I do not know enough about Chinese or Indian or Islamic culture to argue that they pale beside the Western canon, but I do know that the Western canon, comprising the great works of literature, history, and philosophy produced in the West over centuries, is immensely rich, and has provided me with intellectual sustenance over a long lifetime without my coming anywhere near exhausting it.

The Western canon begins with Homer and ends (for me) with George Santayana (1863–1952). Included in it are the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, the indispensable Socrates himself, Plato and Aristotle, the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, the historians Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides, Plutarch, Livy, Seneca, Tacitus, Virgil, and Horace, moving on to Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dryden, Alexander Pope, Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Hobbes, pause to add Kant and Goethe from Germany, thence returning to England and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and J. S. Mill, the Frenchmen Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal culminating in Marcel Proust, the 19th-century Russian fictionists from Gogol through Chekhov, and on and on and on. An impressive lineup, not including the many canonical names I have doubtless left out.

About the Author

Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life.

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Defending Western Civilization

I hope I shall not seem unduly chauvinistic in claiming the superiority of the Western canon, when I think myself merely duly chauvinistic in doing so. I do not know enough about Chinese or Indian or Islamic culture to argue that they pale beside the Western canon, but I do know that the Western canon, comprising the great works of literature, history, and philosophy produced in the West over centuries, is immensely rich, and has provided me with intellectual sustenance over a long lifetime without my coming anywhere near exhausting it.

The Western canon begins with Homer and ends (for me) with George Santayana (1863–1952). Included in it are the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, the indispensable Socrates himself, Plato and Aristotle, the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, the historians Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides, Plutarch, Livy, Seneca, Tacitus, Virgil, and Horace, moving on to Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dryden, Alexander Pope, Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Hobbes, pause to add Kant and Goethe from Germany, thence returning to England and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and J. S. Mill, the Frenchmen Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal culminating in Marcel Proust, the 19th-century Russian fictionists from Gogol through Chekhov, and on and on and on. An impressive lineup, not including the many canonical names I have doubtless left out.