Marile Cărţi

Nu este departe vremea întoarcerii maeştrilor, oamenii care se vor ocupa de cîte unul, doi sau trei şcolari, folosind conţinuturi individualizate şi metode particulare. În timp ce şcolile de stat vor livra en-gros pachete de cunoştiinţe (cam cum livrează mobilă Ikea…), maeştrii – ebenişti vor sculpta şi şlefui minţi şi caractere. Îmi închipui un tip de educaţie umanistă care să se bazeze pe marile cărţi ale Occidentului (Canonul Vestic), citite în livezi şi discutate în jurul unui foc de tabără. Un vis a la Goethe? Poate. Dar văd că-n alte părţi, ideea Marilor Cărţi este luată foarte în serios - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books. Ce sînt Marile Cărţi? Acele scrieri care au relevanţă pentru omul modern (adică pentru om, în general), sînt inepuizabile la lectură, relevînd mereu sensuri şi frumuseţi, şi au marcat istoria Occidentului în ultimii 2500 de ani. Cum maeştii pun pe primul loc lupta cu entropia informaţională, lista e scurtă. Aruncaţi un ochi pe ea şi gîndiţi-vă cîte titluri aveţi în bibliotecă şi cîte aţi citit... Apoi gîndiţi-vă la cinci Mari Cărţi româneşti. Care să fie?

1. Homer: Iliada, Odiseea
2. Vechiul Testament
3. Aeschylus: Tragedii
4. Sophocles: Tragedii
5. Herodotus: Istorii
6. Euripides: Tragedii
7. Thucydides: Istoria Războiului Peloponeziac
8. Hippocrates: Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes: Comedii
10. Plato: Dialoguri
11. Aristotle: Opere
12. Epicurus: "Letter to Herodotus", "Letter to Menoecus"
13. Euclid: Elementele
14. Archimedes: Opere
15. Apollonius: The Conic Sections
16. Cicero: Opere
17. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil: Opere
19. Horace: Opere
20. Livy: Ab Urbe Condita - Istoria Romei
21. Ovid: Opere
22. Plutarch: Vieţi Paralele
23. Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus: Discourses; Enchiridion
26. Ptolemy: Almagest
27. Lucian: Opere
28. Marcus Aurelius: Către sine
29. Galen: On the Natural Faculties
30. Noul Testament
31. Plotinus: Eneadele
32. St. Augustine: "On the Teacher"; Mărturisiri; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri: The New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; Divina Comedie
38. Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; Povestirile din Canterbury
39. Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli: Princepele.
41. Desiderius Erasmus: Elogiul nebuniei
42. Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More: Utopia
44. Martin Luther: Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. François Rabelais: Gargantua şi Pantagruel
46. John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne: Eseuri
48. William Gilbert: On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quijote
50. Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon: Eseuri; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; Noua Atlantidă
52. William Shakespeare: Teatru şi Poezie
53. Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler: The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
55. William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
57. René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discurs despre metodă; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton: Works
59. Molière: Comedii
60. Blaise Pascal: Scrisorile provinciale, Gînduri; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza: Etica
63. John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedii
65. Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; "Monadology"
67. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift: "A Tale of a Tub"; A Journal to Stella; Călătoriile lui Guliver; "A Modest Proposal"
69. William Congreve: The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley: Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope: "Essay on Criticism"; "The Rape of the Lock"; "Essay on Man"
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Scrisorile persane, Spiritul legilor
73. Voltaire: Letters on the English, Candide, Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson: "The Vanity of Human Wishes", Dictionary, Rasselas, Lives of the Poets
76. David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, Essays Moral and Political, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, On Political Economy, Emile, Contractul social
78. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Bogăţia naţiunilor
80. Immanuel Kant: Critica raţiunii pure, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critica raţiunii practice; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon: Declinul şi Căderea Imperiului Roman; Autobiography
82. James Boswell: Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: The Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Edmund Burke: Reflecţii asupra Revoluţiei franceze
87. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth
88. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
89. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Fenomenologia spiritului; The Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
90. William Wordsworth: Poems
91. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
92. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma
93. Carl von Clausewitz: Despre război
94. Stendhal: Roşu şi Negru, Mănăstirea din Parma; On Love
95. Lord Byron: Don Juan
96. Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
97. Michael Faraday: The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
98. Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology
99. Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
100. Honoré de Balzac: Le Père Goriot; Eugénie Grandet
101. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men, Essays, Journal
102. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Litera stacojie
103. Alexis de Tocqueville: Despre democraţie în America
104. John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
105. Charles Darwin: Originea speciilor; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
106. Charles Dickens: Opere
107. Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
108. Henry David Thoreau: "Civil Disobedience"; Walden
109. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Capitalul; Manifestul Partidului Comunist
110. George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
111. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
112. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crimă şi pedeapsă, Idiotul, Fraţii Karamazov
113. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
114. Henrik Ibsen: Teatru
115. Leo Tolstoy: Război şi Pace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
116. Mark Twain: Aventurile lui Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
117. William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
118. Henry James: The American; The Ambassadors
119. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Aşa grăit-a Zarathustra ; Dincolo de Bine şi de Rău; Genealogia moralei; Dorinţa de putere; Amurgul Idolilor; Anticristul
120. Jules Henri Poincaré: Ştiinţă şi Ipoteză; Science and Method

121. Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
122. George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
123. Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
124. Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
125. John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
126. Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
127. George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
128. Lenin: The State and Revolution
129. Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past (the revised translation is In Search of Lost Time)
130. Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
131. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
132. Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
133. James Joyce: "The Dead" in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
134. Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
135. Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle
136. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
137. Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
138. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; Cancer Ward
139. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Philosophical Investigations

P.S. La un moment dat, m-am plictisit să trec în româneşte titlurile apărute şi la noi... Ce-aţi mai adăuga, pînă la 150? Eu aş propune
 
140. Rene Guenon - Simbolurile ştiinţei sacre
141. Camus - Mitul lui Sisif. Caligula
142. Ernesto Sabato - Abaddon Exterminatorul, Eseuri
143. J.L. Borges - Opere
144. Ernst Junger - Heliopolis, Eumesvil
145. Raymond Aron - Opere
146. J.F. Lyotard - Condiţia postmodernă
147. Michel Foucault - A supraveghea şi a pedepsi
148. Carl Gustav Jung - Opere
149. Richard Dawkins - Gena egoistă, Un rîu pornit din Eden, Himera credinţei în Dumnezeu
150. Stephen Hawking - Scurtă istorie a timpului, Universul într-o coajă de nucă
 
Dar cinci Mari Cărţi româneşti?