Today’s readings from Seneca contained dissections of syllogisms and the like. Nothing jumped out at me.
Well, except the comment that the study of the liberal arts (which in his definition, I think, more or less maps to our modern definition) has as its objective the creation of a free man.
But there is only one really liberal study, – that which gives a man his liberty.
Letters, 88.2.
I imagined a college class taught with this aim. College-age me would not have reaped much from that class, as I imagined myself wise but unskilled. How wrong I was (about wisdom).
We all imagine we know virtue, until we come face-to-face with a test of character. We all imagine we know what is good and what is evil. Hitler? Evil. Trump? Evil.
Pick your bogeyman. It doesn’t matter. It is interesting that evil can be neatly encapsulated in pointing at The Other smugly. As if that makes you good! In fact, the fruitful and only place worth looking is within.
This is a task I could not and did not perform in my twenties. Only in my early thirties, confronted by the cumulative consequences of my decisions, did I become open to looking within.
I faced a stopping point that could not be excused by bullshit excuses to myself, a stopping point that I knew no one else had created. (This certainty took a great deal of time, even after hitting the wall, to accept).
So now I am at the point in life where there is no classroom, no teacher, yet I am engaged in a course of story of the liberal arts — the study of matters that make me a free man.
There is no other liberty.
And I study with fervor and intent that the student me never possessed.