visual aid to blog post at http://superfani.com

1. The Ten Tenets of
Liberal Humanism
A critical practice in the reading of texts

2. Quality is timeless. Tenet One
Plato combined Truth and
Beauty into the highest
idea: the Good; to him this
is timeless and not
contingent.
This is a way of thinking
“not for an age, but for
that may be said to be all time.”
mirrored more or less
- Ben Johnson on William
intentionally by liberal Shakespeare
humanist critics.

3. Tenets Two and
As thus, of course the text Three
is context-independent.
Meaning and quality are
inherent, not applied from a
meta-language (be it
authorial intent or
sociocultural conditions, or
theories about those).
(Authorial) Intention is
This focus on the words on irrelevant to the
the page is called "close- meaning of the text or
(focus)-reading." image.

4. Human nature is also Tenet Four
timeless;
Plato’s ideas again apply
(see Tenet One).
Original creation is less
important than tradition.
Continuity is more
"In every age the deeds
important than innovation. of men remain the
Express the truth and same” – Legend of the
nothing else. Galactic Heroes

5. And since human nature is Tenet Five
timeless, so is our
individual essences, the
"transcendent subject".
Not that we are
unchanging; merely that we
change the dress in which
our essences walk.
Spiral Energy by any
other name (hot blood,
The essence itself may not guts, etc.) rocks as
change. hard.

6. Culture is to transmit Tenet Six
humane values and make
life better (the Good,
blessed be Plato).
This transmission is not to
be obvious, dogmatic,
programmatic - it is to
simply be part of the work.
Hard work and guts,
can compensate for
lack of genius talent.
Can it?

7. Form and content are to be Tenet SeveN
a whole.
Not that they always are;
striving for and reaching it
is a sign of quality.
Style serves the
substance and we are
compelled to appreciate
both in tandem.

8. The text must use the best Tenet Eight
words or images to
communicate its ideas.
There must no unnecessary
or narcissistic artifices that
must get in the way of
experiencing truth.
This is a ‘Central
This is what makes the text Dogma’ in Liberal
beautiful and good, and Humanist critical
they call this “Sincerity”. practice.

9. Show, don't tell. This in a Tenet Nine
more all-encompassing
fashion than one normally
might think of it;
ideas are not to be told, but
acted upon, embodied in
the narrative.
Liberal Humanists will
not like your show,
Index; where exposition
is done almost entirely
through dialogue.

10. Criticism exists as a Tenet Ten
middleman between the
work and the reader.
It is to make the work more
comprehensible, its
inherent message more
clearly apparent.
No pre-concieved ideas are
Ideas aren’t made by
to be had; critics are introspection but rather
conduits of meaning, not through experience of
creators or systematizers. the text. (p) John Locke