How much less burdensome to be incapable of error, of stupidity, of hatred and of wrongdoing, even if this meant the surrender of truth, wisdom, love and virtue. But it is impossible. The very contemplation of such an escape announces its impossibility: only mind can regret having to think. (查看原文)
The price of the intelligent activity which constitutes being human is learning. When the human condition is said to be burdensome, what is being pointed to is not the mere necessity or having to think, to speak and to act, but the impossibility of thinking or feeling without having slowly and often painfully learned to think something. The freedom of a human being inheres in his thoughts and his emotions having had to be learned; for learning is something which each of us must do and can only do for ourselves. (查看原文)
Their virtue is to be evanescent and contemporary; if they arenot up-to-date they are worthless. And this unqualified modernity rubs off on the proper concern with languages, with literatures and with histories which are thus edged into the study of only what is current in a culture. History is contracted into what is called contemporary history, languages come to be recognized as means of contemporary communication and in literature the book which "verbalizes what everyone is thinking now"comes to be preferred, on that account, to anything else. (查看原文)
They are directly concerned with expressions of human self-understanding and their place in liberal learning is assured and central: languages recognized, not as the means of contemporary communication but as investments in thought and records of perceptions and analogical understandings; literatures recognized as the contemplative exploration of beliefs, emotions, human characters and relationships in imagined situations, liberated from the confused, cliche-ridden, generalized conditions of commonplace life and constituting a world of ideal human expressions inviting neither approval nor disapproval but the exact attention and understanding of those who read; histories recognized, not as accounts of the past focused upon our contemporary selves purporting to tell us how we have become wha... (查看原文)
This is the stuff of what has come to be called a “liberal” education- “liberal” because it is liberated from the distracting business of satisfying contingent wants. (查看原文)
A culture is not a doctrine or a set of consistent teachings orconclusions about a human life. It is not something we can setbefore ourselves as the subject of learning, any more than wecan set self-understanding before ourselves as something to belearned; it is that which is learned in everything we may learn. A culture, particularly one such as ours, is a continuity of feelings, perceptions, ideas, engagements, attitudes and so fort, pulling in different directions, often critical of one another and contingently related to one another so as to compose not a doctrine, but what I shall call a conversational encounter. (查看原文)
And it (culture) reaches us, as it reached generations before ours, neither as long-ago terminated specimens of human adventure, nor as an accumulation of human achievements we are calledupon to accept,but as a manifold of invitations to look, to listen and to reflect. Learning here is not merely acquiring information (that produces only what Nietzsche called a "culture philistine"), nor is it merely "improving one's mind"; it is learning to recognize some specific invitations to encounter particular adventures in human self-understanding. (查看原文)
A culture is not a set of abstract aptitudes; it is composed of substantive expressions of thought, emotion, belief, opinion, approval and disapproval, of moral and intellectual discriminations, of inquiries and investigations, and learning is coming to understand and respond to these substantive expressions of thought as invitations to think and to believe. (查看原文)
How shall a university respond to the current aversion from seclusion, to the now common belief that there are other and better ways of becoming human than by learning to do so, and to the impulsive longing to be given a doctrine or to be socialized according to a formula rather than to be initiated into a conversation? Not, I think, by seeking excuses for what sometimes seem unavoidable surrenders, nor in any grand gesture of defiance, but in aquiet refusal to compromise which comes only in self-understanding. We must remember who we are: inhabitants of a place of liberal learning. (查看原文)
we may recognize learning, not merely asthe acquisition of knowledge, but also as the extension of the ability to learn, as the education and not merely the furnishing of a mind, as an inheritance coming to be possessed in such a manner that it loses its secondhand or antique character; andwe may recognize teaching, not as passing on something to bereceived, nor as merely planting a seed, but as setting on foot the cultivation of a mind so that what is planted may grow. (查看原文)
