The novel as a "moral playground"

Last Friday's lecture given at St. John's by one of our faculty and the subsequent conversation focused on the thesis, here paraphrased: The novel is a moral playground, not a pulpit. The reader experiences life in all its moral complexity vicariously through the characters in a (good) novel, but the author does not preach to him/her about which moral choice should prevail.

I question the universality of such a statement, but apart from that, here are a few questions worth considering on the topic, some of which emerged from the post-lecture conversation:

• Is it possible to have beauty (e.g. in poetry, music etc.) without meaning or message?
• In what way do/don't poets/novelists instruct?
• Are there species of meaning, e.g. philosophical, musical, poetic...? If so, can one exist apart from the other?

Plato: Meno

Meno's opening question, "Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught?" is quickly redirected by Socrates to the question, "What is virtue?" on the grounds that one cannot speak about virtue without knowing what it is.

While this at first seems quite reasonable, I wonder what the nature of the problem here is. What constitutes knowing a thing (here virtue)? The discussion between Meno and Socrates moves on to the topic of definitions. Does knowing a thing demand that we have a definition for it? Is Socrates implying that all knowledge is verbal in the sense that one only knows what one can explain in words?

Furthermore, what exactly are definitions for? (I believe Postman has some comments on dictionaries in "End of Education".) How do they function in our attempt to use words as signs for signifieds?

Slavoj Zizek: What does it mean to be a revolutionary today? Marxism 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw

An intriguing definition of modernity (at 33:51 minutes): "Modernity is when Descartes says, 'The beginning of my philosophy was: First I was an idiot and laughed at others, other cultures. Then I asked myself: But what if my customs are in the same way idiotic for the others' view (...)?' This is the beginning of modernity, European modernity, to experience your own cultural background as something ultimately contingent, irrelevant and so on.

I would like to trace that phenomenon through the last several hundred years of history.

Steiner: After Babel

What is the nature of those "secrets" of a language, those elements that cannot be translated into another language?

Or: What leads a translator to say the following? "The highest ideal of a translation from Greek [or any other language, SPM] is achieved when the reader flings it impatiently into the fire, and begins patiently to learn the language for himself." (P. Vellacott in the intro to Aeschylus: The Oresteian Trilogy, Penguin Classics)

What books to read...

James Schall's subtitle to Another Sort of Learning must be one of the most thought-provoking ones I have read: "Selected Contrary Essays on How Finally to Acquire an Education While Still in College or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure Time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found"

What does the contrast between schooling and education imply?

What is captivity? Schools?