Resisting Temptation

Western culture, especially as shaped by the universities, prides itself on having no dogmas. We like to think of ourselves as open, intrepid, and unflinching in our pursuit of the truth. Though the very notion of truth has been battered a bit in recent decades, its impartial pursuit remains a high and honored calling. To question the value of seeking knowledge for its own sake is to risk being branded a reactionary or a fanatic.

Roger Shattuck is willing to take the risk. Indeed, he points out that this contemporary stance toward knowledge is itself a kind of dogmatism. A professor of literature at Boston University, he established himself as one of our foremost critics 28 years ago with his magisterial study The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France. Recently he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, a distinguished group of intellectuals, including Saul Bellow and Robert Alter, that challenges the theory-driven approach to literary studies championed within the Modern Language Association. Shattuck's eminence adds weight to his assertion that "the time has come to think as intently about limits as about liberation." Shattuck bases his claim on a wide-ranging survey of religion, philosophy, history, and literature. We are accustomed, he says, to the biblical warning against tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, so accustomed that we tend to dismiss it as a quaint religious notion. But so many similar warnings are sounded throughout Western literature, from the ancient Greeks to Albert Camus, that Shattuck would have us take them more seriously--not just in the humanities, where "transgression" is exalted over moral concerns, but also in the sciences, where pure research is elevated above consideration of possible real-life consequences.

In Greek mythology, Shattuck reminds us, the story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and incurred their wrath, is coupled with that of Pandora, who opened the box that now bears her name and loosed a host of evils. In The Odyssey, Ulysses stops the ears of his sailors so that they will not hear the Sirens' song, and can only hear it himself without being destroyed because he has himself lashed to the mast. While Shattuck is careful to point out here and elsewhere that in all these stories we cannot say that knowledge itself is ever simply evil, we can see that, given human nature, certain forms of knowledge are dangerous and need to be approached, as Ulysses teaches us, with prudence and precaution.

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