Axe murderers explain the significance of philosophical novels

[The] puzzles and paradoxes of philosophical reflection are not best aired in the narrow, arid corridors of philosophical tracts; and that Plato was wrong to think that literature had nothing to offer philosophy. It is one thing to study John Stuart Mill’s defence of utilitarianism in ethics; quite another to read the passage in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), where Raskolnikov tests utilitarianism to its limits by taking an axe and cleaving an old lady’s head in two. Illustrations of this sort might even persuade us that moral philosophy needs the novel for the fullest possible expression of its aims.

 That was the best part of this essay, which is on  the rapidly disappearing field of philosophical novels.

Even with that wonderfully rich treasure trove of philosophical novels, it appears that academia routinely misuses and abuses them.  If ever a Russian literature (in translation) course, for instance, is offered at most colleges and universities that are not the big-time research universities, it seems like that the focus is on the stories and rarely ever on the philosophical issues.  

I spent three years in college and wrote three and a half stories but I read everything I could get my hands on. White Teeth is really the product of that time; it's like the regurgitation of the kind of beautiful, antiquated, left-side-of-the-brain liberal arts education which is dying a death even as I write this. Generally, an English Lit degree trains you to be a useless member of the modern world

When increasingly students are not led towards reading and understanding some of those masterful and insightful works, well, it becomes difficult for them to appreciate many other things in life, including this awesome satire from The Onion:


Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

Kafka Airport, and Dostoevsky Hotel the world's worst!

Again and again I am just amazed at how the people at The Onion continue to generate awesome pieces like this one. I almost spilt the coffee, thanks to a LOL moment, when the "newswoman" reported that guests at the hotel killed another guest.
And throughout the video, the references to "kafkaesque" images and words. Simply awesome.
It would have been a fantastic experience to have been fellow students when these Onion people were in college. Wait, maybe there are this good because they did not go to college? As Twain put it, they did not allow college to stand in the way of their education? :-)

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

Do the "humanities" serve any purpose at all?

Yes they do.
But, if taught and learnt with a certain approach. Certainly not the way we torture students with the humanities now. If I were an undergrad, I would hate taking anything in the humanities! Why? Because, the focus has shifted from helping students comprehend the world and understanding their own individuality and individual place in this world, to some horribly rotten dumbed down version of doctoral topics so that professors can then pretend to be ultra-smart in the eyes of students. No wonder then students are left wondering why there is a focus on some strange abstraction and theory when all they want is to "get the gen.ed. out of the way." So, that is what we have at the end of the undergrad experience: that the humanities are to most students something to endure if they want to get a college degree.

That is not how it ought to be. I found so much of valuable insights into what it means to be human from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Dickens, Narayan, Saroyan, Maugham, ..... I am so glad I read them and reflected on them on my own time and not in a choking classroom environment. The Grand Inquisitor by itself was a profound experience. I am willing to bet that most humanities departments rarely guide students towards the Grand Inquisitor.

The trigger for these thoughts came while reading this essay in Wilson Quarterly. In it, I liked this part the best (I don't agreee with everything in that essay):
[Many] of those who speak for the humanities, especially within the organized scholarly disciplines (history, English, and the like), have not quite acknowledged the nature of the problem. The humanities reached unprecedented heights of prestige and funding in the post–World War II era. But their advocates can only dream of such status today. Now the humanities have become the Ottoman Empire of the academy, a sprawling, incoherent, and steadily declining congeries of disparate communities, each formed around one or another credal principle of ideology and identity, and each with its own complement of local sultans, khedives, and potentates. And the empire steadily erodes, as colleges and universities eliminate such core humanities departments as classics (or, at the University of Southern California, German), and enrollment figures for humanities courses continue to fall or stagnate.