For what it's worth. From
The New York Times:
Thirty
years ago, in 1987, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago
named Allan Bloom — at the time best known for his graceful
translations of Plato’s “Republic” and Rousseau’s “Emile” — published a
learned polemic about the state of higher education in the United
States. It was called “The Closing of the American Mind.” The
book appeared when I was in high school, and I struggled to make my way
through a text thick with references to Plato, Weber, Heidegger and
Strauss. But I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in
the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.
What
was it that one learned through a great books curriculum? Certainly not
“conservatism” in any contemporary American sense of the term. We were
not taught to become American patriots, or religious pietists, or to
worship what Rudyard Kipling called “the Gods of the Market Place.” We
were not instructed in the evils of Marxism, or the glories of
capitalism, or even the superiority of Western civilization.
As
I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we
did was read books that raised serious questions about the human
condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of
our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed
lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.
To
listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no
proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to
entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind —
this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of
Chicago.
It’s what used to be called a liberal education.
The
University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea
is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea. Socrates
quarrels with Homer. Aristotle quarrels with Plato. Locke quarrels with
Hobbes and Rousseau quarrels with them both. Nietzsche quarrels with
everyone. Wittgenstein quarrels with himself.
These
quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at
least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over
the distance of decades, even centuries. Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out. (Read more.)
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