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Sunday, January 10, 2016

Strauss: What is Liberal Education?



Let us face
a difficulty so great that it seems to condemn liberal education as an absurdity.

Since the greatest minds contradict one another, they compel us to judge; we cannot take on trust what any one of them says. On the other hand we cannot but notice that we are not competent to be judges.

Yet we must face our awesome situation, created by the necessity that we try to be more than attentive and docile listeners, namely, judges, and yet we are not competent to be judges.

As it seems to me, the cause of this situation is that we have lost all simply authoritative traditions in which we could trust, the nomos*** which gave us authoritative guidance, because our immediate teachers and teachers' teachers believed in the possibility of a simply rational society.

[But as it turned out, now] each of us here is compelled to find his bearings by his own powers, however defective they may be.

The liberal education which you have acquired will avert the danger that this warning will be understood as a counsel of despair [because there is this hope that ...]


By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.

Leo Strauss: 
What is Liberal Education?
Here shortened 90% --
For the complete text see 
http://www.ditext.com/strauss/liberal.html

       Address delivered at the
       Department of Political Science
       The University of Chicago

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*** nomothetic = Relating to the search for abstract universal principles. See dictionary    http://wordweb.info/ 
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By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.
It is probably Strauss´second best sentence. It is difficult to recall later because it seems to be circular, but isn´t.

The "home of your mind" is where your mind likes to rest among your own collection of things. Ideallly, there is little trash and few items of obligation.


Postscript

It is in this essay that Strauss mentions an aristocracy to be created inside the democracy. He sometimes says things like that, doesn't he, but it is no reason to ditch him and all of his writings.


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