Jacob Klein > Quotes

“The first obstacle [to liberal education] is the learning situation itself. What is the ideal learning situation? It is the more or less continuous contact between a student and his teacher, who is another student, more advanced in many ways, but still learning himself. This situation usually does not prevail; in fact, it is extremely rare. Since the immemorial, institutions of learning, especially higher learning, have been established, called „schools“ — and the ambiguity of the term becomes immediately apparent. Institutionalization means ordering activities into certain patters; in the case of learning activities, into classes, schedules, courses, curriculums, examinations, degress, and all the venerable and sometimes ridiculous paraphernalia of academic life. The point is that such institutionalization cannot be avoided: both the gregarious and the rational character of man compel him to impose upon himself laws and regulations. Moreover, the discipline of learning itself seems to require an orderly and planned procedure. And yet we all know how this schedule routine can interfere with the spontaneity of questioning and of leaning and the occurrence of genuine wonderment. A student may even never become aware that there is the possibility of spontaneous learning which depends merely on himself and on nobody and nothing else. Once the institutional character of learning tends to prevail, the goal of liberal education may be completely lost sight of, whatever other goals may be successfully reached. And I repeat, this obstacle is not extraneous to learning. It is prefigured in the methodical and systematic character of exploratory questioning. It has to be faced over and over again.”
― Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays

“Our rationalism is a symbolic one. It is the true result of the Cartesian distinction between „mind“ and „external world“. It is the true expression of the paradox of which we have spoken, that the mind, which is supposed to be sufficient to understand the world, is preconveived as a mind alienated from this same world. We approach the world not directly but by means of concepts which are abstractions of abstractions and which at the same time we interpret as being in direct contact with the world.”
― Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays

“Along the lines of our society, every one of us must "do his job" according to certain rules imposed on us by ever-working machineries. The production and consumption of goods have acquired a sort of "automatic" character. No one can escape the fatality which is the result of this automation. Our life, then, even our most intimate life, is completely conditioned by social and economic necessities which are alien to ourselves and which we nevertheless accept as the true expression of ourselves. Our work, our pleasures, even our love and hatred are dominated by these all-pervading forces which are beyond our control.

Thus, our own life does not belong to us. We appear to be in the most direct contact with the world around us, but in reality the vast machinery of our society permits us to perceive the world only through generally accepted views. The directness of our contact with the world is of the same symbolic character as the concepts we use to understand it. We can comprehend how our whole social and economic system, which we term Capitalism, and which is, in its origins, closely connected to modern ideal of knowledge and science, has acquired such symbolic reality.”
― Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays

“The second obstacle to liberal education is our condition as heirs of intellectual traditions. Here again, it is man’s own rational nature that brings this obstacle about. Animals do not pass on their skills to their progeny in such a way that those skills can accumulate and grow. Man, and only man, does precisely that. His skills and knowledges are many-storied edifices. Each generation adds something to what has been previously built and preserved. We are proud of this fact and call it progress. And, indeed, such progress does exist in definite areas. But this very fact confronts us with the ever-present danger of sedimentation, fossilisation, or petrification of our knowledge. We are fond of pointing to the European universities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which exhibit those petrifying tendencies rather clearly and are prone to exalt the fresh wind of the Renaissance and Humanism that blew all the accumulated dust away. But it behooves us to look at our own institutions of higher learning and to discern these same tendencies among us. We are not immune. This danger is inherent in all learning and all scholarship, and liberal education can never ignore it.”
― Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays