Lebenskünstler

“An education in which skills, narrow intellect, and information have no connection with insight, imagination, feeling, beauty, conscience, and wonder and that systematically evades all engagement with the great, central issues and problems of human life, is a wasteland.”

“…an exquisitely stupid cleverness adept at taking the world apart with no grasp of what it is doing, nor apparent concern.”

“An adequate conception of education, an education of imagination, will always strive for that way of knowing which springs from the participation of the person as a total, willing, feeling, valuing, thinking being- a way of knowing that leads to the wisdom in living that makes personal life truly possible and worthy. It will have as its prime purpose, as its ground and aim, the complete, harmonious realization of the full capacities and potential of the individual as a whole person. Any conception of education that arises from some other or lesser concern or that fastens on a partial or isolated aspect of the total person will finally abort, delivering only fragments of persons and figments in place of reality. And by its nature, such a lesser education cannot avoid serving purposes that will be basically nonhuman and ultimately inhuman.”

[quoting David Bohm] “…insight is not restricted to great scientific discoveries or to artistic creations, but rather it is of critical importance in everything we do, especially in the affairs of ordinary life.”

“Rather than the sense of self indweling and sustained by a living and meaningful world in which the boundaries between self and world, self and other, are not sharp but flow and merge into one another, the modern experience has been increasingly that of a self separated sharply from other selves, and detached from nature, standing as a self-enclosed subject over against nature as object.” [the critical academic expert is exemplary]

“…chronological snobbery and temporal provincialism that so constrict the modern mind set.”

[and this especially on the academically ‘gifted’] “Those who display the requisite intellectual skills are singled out as special for their proficiency in the use of an aspect of mind that has no intrinsic relationship to the art of living well as persons…Most have been ill equipped by their education to live well as persons, to find delight in friendship and love, in the joys of sound and touch and color…”

– Douglas Sloan in Insight-Imagination: The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern World