49720709 jacob klein on wonder

8/2/2019 49720709 Jacob Klein on Wonder

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1 01 The Idea ofLiberal ' . ' . . .. . , .

. . ' Education

T e volurne of noise made about education a l l over the coun-try for many years now has, in recent months, increasedto such a crescendo that no man with a sane m ind should try-to add an o te to it. Yet this is what I am doing. There is, of Course,dw ays some justification for talking about education: the desireto clarify th e problem itself and t o outline certain principlesof education th a t ought to underline all possible practicalapplications, The problem of education, and certainly of liberaleducation, has nothing to do with satellites, rocketry, theorganization or disorganization of the Pentagon , or the SovietUnion, And yet it is not by chance, as we shall See, th at thesetopics creep into all that educational talk. Nor c an it be spokenabout in t he jargon of educational psychology th a t takes forgranted a great many things and ignores even more. I shall usesimple term s a t th e risk of being trite an d saying things th a teveryone seems to khow anyhow. All I want is to remind youof things that you do know.

First published in The Goals of Higher Education, ed. W.D. Weatherford, Jr. (Cam-bridge, Mass,: Harvard Unjversity Press, 1960).


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158 The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein

Every o ne of us ( that is, every human being on this earth ,withou t exception) is in some way educated . By this I mean thateveryone assimilates from his early childhood sets of customs,beliefs, opinions of all kinds, ways of behavior, and even waysof feeling and reacting. Wit'hout this elemental kind of educa-tion we could not become members of our families, of clans,and of all t he smaller or larger communities to w hich we belong.To be a h um an being means to be educated in this elementalway, to be educated in the elements of human life. Ours is adouble growth, double nourishment, double ripening. Ourmaturity as human beings does not necessarily coincide withour m aturity as living organisms, whereas no such discrepancyseems t o exist in the case of our'incomprehensible cousins, theanimals. T h e nourishment tha t leads to ou r hum an m aturityis provided for us by our parents, our friends, by the innumerablerelations, associations, and hierarchies th a t bind us to the lifeof our communities; most of the tim e we are rather passive recip-ients of this kind of feeding, the lowest and yet pe rhaps mostim portant level of what I have called elemental education. Mostof the t im e,w e ar e not even aware of it.We ar e much more aware of another level of elementaleducation, the on& hat takes place through what is loosely called"experience." W hen we invoke experience, we mean mainly thedisappointrnents , difficulties, troubles, obstacles, sufferings, andcatastrophes tha t we have encountered, succumbed to or over-come, a n d keep anticipatiilg. We become wise (not all of us,to be sure) through such adverse experiences. An elementalgeneraliza tion takes place, variously called ritua l, or tradition ,or "ways of doing things," or "the wisdom of the ages."And a t this point a new medium of education Comes to thefore, the medium of deliberate reflection and of systematic pro-cedure. In this medium the troubles and obstacles are lifted, bya process of conscious form alization, to a new level, th etheoretical level. They become problems. How to solve them hasto be learned : formal disciplines are required to bring a prob-lem into focus; th a t is, to disentangle the kerne1 from the shell,to proceed methodically, to aid our memory, to make visiblewha t is obscure. This cannot be done withou t effort and, just


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The Idea of Liberal Education 159as experience is basically painful, formal learn ing is intrinsicallydifficult. W ha t I am now describing is th e way of form al educa-

. tion th a t grows out: of our elemental education and rem ainsrooted in i t, ~e can dispense w ith i t only at the expense of our .winning clarity an d greater skills and greater ease to cope withthe necessities of life.' . Have I now given a com plete stofy of education? Obviouslynot. I spoke of l iftin g th e troubles and obstacles encounteredin experience to a new ,level tha t I call theoretical, and 1introduced th e notion of form al disciplines th a t have to bemastered before theore tical problems can be solved. B u t ,howdoes th is lift ing .ta ke place? How is elemental .educationtransformed into form al edueation? D id I not skip something .

,crucial a t this po int? I did. 'I neglected to. mention th e level ofthat lifting.an d transforming operation: our questioning. I have,therefore, to retrace m ystep s arid tb digress qu ite a b it in orderto consider the phensm enon of questioning at some length .

There are many ways of questioning and as many, of Course,of answ ering. Most of our questions are concerned with actionsand the means to carry them out. Not only questions like these:"How do you do that?" or "How does one proceed to achievethis end?" but also ones like these: "'Have you a pencil?" or"Where is Sw arthmore Avenue?" For these latter questions meanthat I need a pencil to w rite something down and th a t I haveto go to that street for some definite purpose. Most questionsare indeed of iipractical nature; th a t is, they refer to our doing 'and acting. Another class of question is formed by queries ofa gossipy nature, stemming from our passions- or example,from malice, grudge, vanity, or envy, I suspect that this classof questions is num erically as large as th e first one, if not larger.And closely related to the gossipy class there exists a class of q u a -tions rooted in w hat m ay be called "idle curiosity." I t is worth-while to reflect fo r a mom ent upon the natu re of idle curiosity,a curiosity, th a t is, no t guided by any malevolen t or benevolentfeelings. All gossip has an element of curiosity in it, of wonder-ment, and that means some quest, however infinitesimal,


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160 Th e Lectures und Essays of Jacob Kleinhowever distorted, for knowledge. If we were to adopt themetaphor "body of knowledge," we might perhaps say, using afamous ph rase from recent political and military history, tha?gossip constitutes the soft underbelly of knowledge. Gossip isthe smal13tributeha t our passionate and appetitive life pays- n .very, very small coins- o intellectual life. And it may even reacha nobler part of the body of knowledge, if channeled in a properdirection. This brings us to still anpther class of questions, whereidle curiosity is replaced by a kind of passionate or, if you please,serious curiosity. Questions raised out of idle curiosity are, sitrictlyspeaking, none of our business. But when we raise them becausewe attach very definite importance to th e answers- ha t is, wh enwe make it ou r business to know th e answers-we deal w it hquestions of a d ifferent nature . I n a trial, where crucial factshave to be established, or in our travels, confronting unfam iliarcustoms,'we ask questions in order to win certainty about things,situations, people and the ir character, and so forth. Such queriescould be properly called exploratory questions. In raising th emwe want to know, either in order to base a judgement on theknowledge obtained or just sirnply in order to know. It mus tbe granted t h a t it is not always easy to draw the line betweenidle curiosity and this nobler kind of curiosity. And I should ad d,of Course, tha t there are other kinds of questions tha t do no tquite fall into th e classes I have mentioned- or example, politequestions, affectionate questions, rhetorical questions- hat weneed not consider now.Whatever th e difference between these kinds of questions,the practical ones, the gossipy ones, th e exploratory ones, a n daI1 the others, they all have something in common. They alloriginate w ithin th e horizon of our daily lives, a horizon t h a tincludes the familiar and the surprising, routine and novelty,tha t which has precedents and that which has not. T he usualand the unusual are labels put on things and events w ithin t h eframe of ou r com mon and conflicting experience, T he unex-pected is still woven out of th e texture of t h e expected. And itis this fram e of th e fundamentally familiar th a t actually allowsus to formulate our questions. That is: they can be put in10words. O ur questioning is guided by language itself, which isoriented toward the world around us as we know it, including


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The ldea of Liberal Education

those parts or el'ements or fa ctors that in some way remain h id-den to us. There a re usually some dark corners behind or beneathpieces of fu rn iture in a room fu ll of light. The world has manysuch dark corners, Questions of th e kind I have mentioned arelike flashlights, the beam of which.w e direct towards those darkcorners. T his beam is our language. And. i t is not too difficultto See th at the articula tions of,language correspond to the waysin which w e ri is e questions and try to answer them. Aristotle,.in his analysis of language, has shown how th e vaiious modesof being which determine th e structure of w ha t we call a world,our world, ou r not too .hospitable home, are prefigured in th evariobs fo rm s of our questioning. The names of his categories . 'are,. for th e most p a r t , interrogatives. .Let m e now consider another aspect of our questioning; In ..raising a qbestion we expect an answer. A question, by its verynature, wants to b e satisfied; Or, :in other words, questions assuch are possiljle (insluding the so-called impossible ones). onlyon the assumption th at there k.som ething which we do not knowbut which can be known. And this something is expected toappear in any answer. A question is indeed a state of m ind (the 'state of mind of us as questioning beings) in which we wantto know w ha t we do not know. T h e phenomenon of ques'tion-ing points to .the possibility, a t least,. of knowledge. The answertha t we get is, for th e most par t, an opinion; We live, for t h e 'mostpart, in holding and m eeting opinions. But th e importantthing.ab ou t opinions .is precisely that they cannot avoid pu t-ting on.the cloak of knowledge. The possibility of our havingopinions rests on th e possibility, a t least, of our having truth:In our thoughtful m oment; - nd there are not too many- wetry to See whe the r our opinions, our answers to questions, are'tru e or no t.

Questioning, then , presupposes as unquestionable that the reis something not known: the unknown. And it does that , i t seemsto me,'in two fundamentally different ways. The unknown isundergood either as something no t yet known or as somethingonce known but forgotten. W hatever the relation between tim eand thesubstance or state of knowledge, the temporal characterof questioning compels us to envisage the way.to knowledge inthis .double temporal perspective. The way to knowledge can


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162 The Lectures and ~ s s a ~ sf Jacob Kleinbe understood either as the pursuit of the not yet known (asdiscovery of th e not yet known) or as the pursuit of th e onceknown (as recovery of th e once known), Prophecy an d diviningare the primordial forms of the first kind of pursuit, myth-making the primordial form of th e second kind, Derivative forms(by this term I do not mean to imply any censure) are w hat wecall science and history Science is forever on th e way to discoverthe not yet known; history is forever recovering the once known.Both embody the type of questioning that I have called theexploratory kind in its purest form . But both also depend ona qui te different kind of questioning th a t I have, with sometrepidation, to consider now.

I have said before th a t within th e confines of our horizonthere is the expected as well as th e unexpected, th e old an d thenew, the known and the unknown, the familiar and theunfam iliar. We do, however, experience a kind of question which,as it were, tends to smash the bounds th a t limit us. We do occa-sionally stop altogether and fac e the familiar as if for th e firsttime- nything: a Person, a street, Sie sky, a fly, The overwhelm-ing impression on such occasions is th e strangeness of the thingwe contemplate. This state of m ind requires detachment, andI am not at all certain to what extent we can contrive itspresence. We suddenly do not feel at hom e in this world of ours.We take a deep look at things, at people, at words, with eyesblind to the familiar. We re-flect. Plato has a word for it:metastroph?? or periagogz, a turnabout, a conversion. We detachourselves from all th at is familia r to us; we change th e direc-tion of our inquiry; we do not explore th e unknown any more;on the contrary, we convert th e known into an unknown. Wewonder. And we burst out with th a t inexorable question: Whyis th at so? To be sure, we have raised the question "why" before.I can certainly ask: Why did it snow yesterday and does not snowtoday? Why did Mr. X say this o r th at to Mr, Y? But this "why"I am talking about now is of a different kind. I t does not leadto any discovery or recovery. I t calls myself in question with allmy questioning. I t compels m e to detach mysel from myself,to transcend the limits of my horizon; th a t is, it educates me.It gives me th e freedom to go to th e roots of all my questioning.I can begin to understand that even our gossiping may ultimatelyrest on the transcendent power of this "why"; that even the


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The ldea of Liberal Education 163

children's "why,'. repeated endlessly to the disgust of theirmothers and fathers, may ultimately derive from the hum anpossibility of a to ta l conversion.

111. . . .It is time to revert to th e point th a t prompted m e to digress,into a consideration of th e phenom enon of questioning. The

question was: How does elemental education transforin itselfinto formal e ducation? ,,Ican try to answer that now.Elemental education th a t Comes to us through experience,and mostly through adverse experienck, congeals into .manykinds of hab itual opinions.nd tradiiional beliefs. But hum anquestioning never stops. In p art icu lar , there is the.tendency togo t o the roots of: our experience, to . explore th e hot yet knownor the once known b u t forgotten. 'On the other hand, we arebound, a t some point a t least, to .reflect, in wonderment and, de tachk en t, not only on all th a t offers itself'to our exploration,on all the visible, the.audible,' and th e intelligible about us, bu t .also on our doing this questioning an d exploring, on the meansand tools..that :we use in , h is enterprise, on ourselves as ques-tioning a nd exploring beings. Th is m etastrophic reflection, inconjunction with our exploratory questioning, leads us to th e

establishment of those formal disciplines that I mentioned before,The phenom enon of language, .for example (it is only an exam-ple, but a significant one), presents itself to us in all itsStrangeness. We reflect about it, about our speaking to eachother, And in exploring this phenom enon this is what we See:we understand each other in speaking an d, ,no doubt, we also 'misunderstand each other, th e lat ter perhaps more easily tha nthe former. But it is ,not difficult for . us to See that 'allmisunderstanding is based on some understanding. In our speak-ing, in our language, we convey to each other thoughts tliat wewant to b e understood, and w e achieve this purpose in spite ofal1,thefailings that we may experience. This means that we knowhow to speak, even if our speech is irnperfect, We know howto link words with each other, how to arrange a sequence ofsuch assemblages bf words, how to em phasize or de-ernphasizesome of them , how to m ake sense, how to tell what we mean,


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164 T he Lectures u nd Essays of Jacob Klein.and how to conceal w hat we mean. Not.only do we know howto speak- th a t is, to speak imperfectly-we also know aboutthis very imperfection. This knowledge, if formalized and.for-mulated, becomes th e discipline of grammar, I t is of li ttle usein our actual speaking, and yet, upon reflection, we cannot fai lto See how utterly dependen t on gram matical forms we are inour ac tua l speaking. A similar reflection upon speech 'leads usto the form al discipline of logic. And I should like, a t the riskof'being tiresome, to add another exam ple derived from.a con-tinuing reflection upon our speech. Th e ac t of speaking presup-poses th e distinguishing of one word from another an d therelating of .one word to another. I t presupposes, th a t is, coun t-.ing, For counting is distinguishing and a t the.Same time rela tingone.th ing to anoth&. At all times, therefore; speaking an d th ethinking involved in it have been understood as a so.rf of com-puting. This does not mean that in speaking we have an expficitknow ledge. of num bers. . But reflecting and pursuing ourexploratory cpestioning, we arrive at thq formal discipline ofq ith m et ic ; that is, th e science of num bers and their relationson which all our computing is based.,There is no limit to th e further exploration of those fo rm aldisciplines, They get enlarged and'refined;branch off into otherdisciplines, combine and support each other, and finally encom -pass whatever m ight be knowable in our world; they becom eall the scientific. and historical disciplines taugh t and lea rnedaround the globe. Their acquisition is called formal education.And I c an repeat now with somewhat grea ter clarity w ha t Isaid earlier: formal educa tion grows ou t of elemental educa-tion but remains rooted in it. T he formal disciplines come intob dng as th e result of our hum an ability to detach ourselves fromour fam iliar and conflicti'ng experiences, to turn about, to ask 'th e radical question "why" and to persist in it, pursuing a t th esame time the exploratory questioning within the horiion inwhich we live. That is why th& heoretical level thus reachedalways remains a two-sided one: the form al. disciplines an dsciences.can also be applied disciplines and sciences; theore ticalproblems have or can have direct relation to our doing and mak-ing, to our practical life. I t is only when w e dedicate ourselvesto the radical, m etastrophic questioning, when we free ourselvesfrom the eier-presen t concern that the burd'en of li.fe imposes


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The Idea of Liberal Education 165

upon us, th a t form al education becbrnesliberal education, thatthe fo rmal disciplines become liberal disciplines or liberal arts.Obviously, this is a precarious and.even perilous kind of business.But I do no t know of anything worthwhile that is no t precariousand perilous.

The idea of liberal education was conceived by t he Greeks.For them it meant an education proper to the free and noblemen in contradistinction to slaves and other people engaged inany kind of menial work. To be a free man m eant to be a m anenjoying leisure- hat is, precisely, a man not under any necessityor compulsion to do servile work. But to have leisure in tu rnmeant primarily d'ealing with affairs of the state, pursuingpolitical ends, and also pursuing knowledge and wisdom . T heGreek word for leisure, scholZ, is significantly the root of th eword "school" in Latin as well as in all our vernacular languages.Leisure m ea nt schooling; that is, the opportunity to lea rn . T hehistory of education is the history of the meaning of t h e term"school." Let me quote from Aristotle's PolitZcs (VIII,3): "Natureherself, as has often been said, requires that we should b e ablenot only to work well, but to use leisure weU; for, as I must repeatonce and again, the first principle of all action [that is, th e endfor the Sake of which any action is undertaken] is leisure . . .and therefore the question must be asked in good earnest, W hatought we to do when at'leisure? Clearly we ought not to beamusing ourselves, for then amusement would be th e end of life."And A ristotle goes On: "It is clear, then, that the re are branchesof learning and education which we must study with a viewto the enjoym ent of leisure, and these are to be valued for theirown Sake." To study for the enjoym ent of leisure and i n leisuremeans to be engaged in liberal education, It is an arduous task.This kind of education does not look for som e goal or goodbeyond itself. I t is in itself its own end , Long before Aristotleand long after him, even under totally different social condi-tions, tllis Statement defined liberal learning and liberal educa-tion. W h a t this understanding of liberal education assumes isthat man's most proper and specific character is his desire to


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. !.The Lectures und Essays of Jacob Kleinknow. Only in pursuing this goal is man really man and reallyfree, To acquire th e various means tha t enable man to persistin this pursuit is to cultivate the arts of freedom,

The idea of liberal education, then, w hether you accept orreject it, is not definable in term s of some peculiar subject mat-ter. Some applied sciences may well fall outside its scope, But,by and large, any formal discipline may form its vehicle andbasis. I t is not the subject matter th a t determines the charac terof studies as liberal studies, I t is rather the way in wliich a for-mal discipline, a subject matter, is taken up that is decisive:whenever it is being studied for its own sake, whenever the? . -P *metastrophic way of qu'dtioning is upheld, whenever genuinewonderment is present, liberal education is taking place.Foremost among the form al liberal disciplines are, of Course,th e mathematical disciplines, the physical sciences, th e scienceof life, the sciences of language-gram mar, rhetoric, andlogic- and also the great works of literature, those incomparablemirrors of man. But it is a rather fanta stic idea to equate liberalstudies with the so-called humanities; as if mathematical andscientific disciplines were less hum an th an historical or poeticor philosophical studies. And do we not know tha t philosophyitself can be studied in the most illiberal way?

Liberal education is a precarious and even perilous kind ofbusiness. Let me show you the gre,at obstacles tha t stand in itsway. These obstacles are not external impediments, nor do theystem from nonrational sources in m an. O n the contrary, theseobstacles are rooted in wha t is specifically human in man, andit is not possible not to meet them.1.Th e first obstacle is th e learning situation itself. W ha t isthe ideal learning situation? I t is the more or less continuouscontact between a Student an d his teacher, who is another stu-dent, more advanced in many ways, bu t still learning, himself.This situation usually does not prevail; in fact, it is extrernelyrare. Since time immemorial, institutions of learning, especiallyhigher learning, have been established, called "schools"- an d


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The ldea o j Liberal Education 167the ambiguity of the term becomes immediately apparent.Institutionalization means ordering of activities into certain pa t- 'terns; in th e case of learning activities, in to classes, schedules,Courses, curriculums, examinations, degrees, and all' thevenerable and sometimes ridiculous paraphernalia of academ ic .life, The point is tha t such institutionalization cannot be avoided:

. .both th e gregarious and the rational character of man compelhim to impose upon himself law s and regulations. Moreover,th e discipline of learning itself seems to require an orderly andplanned procedure, And yet w e .a ll know how this scheduleroutine can interfere with .the spontaneity of queitioning andof learning aq d the occurrence of .genuine.wonderment.A stu- . .dent may even never becom6 aware t h k there is the possibility 'of spontaneous learning which .depends merely on himself and . , .on nobbdy and nothing else. O nce the institutional characterof learning tends to prevafl, th e goal of liberal education *aybe completely lost sight of, whatever other goals may be s'uc-cessfully reached, And I repeat, this obstacle is not extraneobs .to learning. I t is prefigured in th e rnethodical and systematic'chgacte r of exploratory questioning. It has to,be fa'ced over .aridover again.2. T h e se'cond obstacle t o libe ral education is our condition ' ''as heirs of intellectual traditions. H ere again, it is man's ownrational natu re that brings this obstacle about. ~ n i m a l so notpass on their skills to their progeny in such .away th at those skillscan accumulate and grow. Man, and only mdn, .does preciselytha t. H is skills and knowledges are many,-storied edifices. Eachgeneration adds something to w h a t has been previously built 'and preserved. We are proud of this fac t and 'call it progress.,And, indeed,.such progress does exist in definite areas. But this .very fac t confronts us with t he ever-prgsent danger of sedimen-tation, fossilization, or pe trification of our knowledge. We arefond of pointing to thk European universities of the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries which exhibit those petrifying tenden-cies rathe r clkarly and are prone to exalt the fresh wind of theRenaissance and Humanism th a t blew all the accumulated dustaway, But it behooves us to look a t our own institutions of higherlearning and to discern these Same tendencies among us. Weare not immune. ~ h i ' sanger is inherent in all learning an d all


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168 Th e Lectures und Essays of Jacob Kleinscholarship, an d liberal education can never ignore it.

3, But t h e most serious obstacle is th e relation of liberaleducation to th e political community, the state. The Greeks, youremember, saw in leisure, in schooling, th e source of a twofoldactiyity: the pursuit of learning and of political ends, Greekthought, i n fact, circles continuously abou t these two highestpoles of hum an life, T he relation of man to his citizenship, tothe obligations that flow from his being a citizen, a memberaf a political com munity- this relation is one of th e great andst'anding themes of al l classical philosophy, M an conceived asa politicai animal and man conceived as a being desirous to knoware not necessarily identical. W h a t com plicates m atters is th eimmediate a n d compelling interest t hat any state takes in th eeducation of its children and you th. Plato's Republic is devotedto this them e. Aristotle says (Politics, V, 9): "Of all things I havementioned, t h a t which most contributes to th e perrnanence ofconstitutions is the adaptation of education to the form ofgovernment," and (in VIII, 1):"No one will doubt that thelegislator should direct his attention ~ b o v e ll to th e educationof youth, or th a t the neglept of education does harm to states.The citizen should b e moulded to suit th e form of governmentunder w hich h e lives." And let us listen to champions of politicaldoctrines differing sharply from th e conservative and aristocraticviews of Aristotle. We all know how decisive Jefferson considerededucation t o be for th e preservation of th e republican fo rm ofgo w nm en t. I n a letter to John Adams (October 28, 1813), forexample, h e speaks of a bill he had prepared but w hich was notadopted by th e Virginia legislature: "It was a bill for th e moregeneral diffusion of learn ing . This proposed to divide everycounty into wards of five or six miles Square, like your tournships;to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing, andcommon arithmetic; t d provide for the annu al selection of thebest subjects from these schools, who m ight receive, a t the publicexpense, a higher degree of education a t a district school; andfrom these district schools to select a certain num ber of the mostpromising subjects, to be completed a t an university, where allthe useful sciences should be taug ht . W orth and genius wouldthus have been sought out from every condition of life and com-pletely p repared by education for defeating the com petition of


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The Idea o j Liberal Educationwealth and birth for public trusts," This educational scheme isconceived as a means to an end, a political end. And HoraceMann, in th e middle of the nineteenth century, has this to say:"The establishment of a republican government without well-appointed and efficient means for the universal education of. the people is the most rash and foolhardy experiment ever triedby man." How often is the phrase "education for citizenship"used in our schools today! I need not m ention the present-daypressure for a change in the educational System of th e countryto be undertaken for the Sake of political ends, The dem andsof the political community to which we belong are indeedinexorable. I t is impo rtant to understand, however, that the ideaof liberal education cannot be easily reconciled with thosedemands. I t is im portan t to See that there is a definite tensionbetween the exigencies of political life and the self-sustained goalof liberal education. This tension is very great, Consider th a tultimately th e existente of a state (any sta te) involves the ques-tion of life and d ea th for any of its members. But consider alsoth at no less is a t stake for a comm itment to leisure in th e tr ueunderstanding of this word, I can hardly think of a betterillustration of th at tension tha n th e story of Archimedes' dea th,which I shall recoun t by way of conclusion.There a re many versions of that story, It seems, a t any rate,that Archimedes took an active and even decisive part in thedefense of Syracuse, his hom e town, when i t was besieged byth e enemy, and h e contrived , by means of ingenious machinery,to repel th e attacker. He was fulfulling his civic duty. His endcame when a Roman soldier stepped close to t he place wherehe was d raw ing his figures on the sand , This is how Plutarchrelates one of th e versions: ''A Roman soldier, running upon h imwith a draw n sword, offered to kill him . . . . Archimedes, look-ing back, earnestly besought him to hold his hand a little while,that he might not leave what he was then at work uponinconclusive and imperfect; but the soldier, nothing moved byhis entreaty, instantly killed him." The figures on the sand andth e problem they represented were for Archimedes a questionof life an d death ; or should we perhaps say a question of m oretha n life and dea th? W hether this story be true or not, it makesus See the precarious position that i s th e lot of any genuine


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170 The Lectures und Essays of Jacob Kleinsearching an d questio&ng; i t makes us See the ultimate incom-mensurability between this kind of searching a,ndquestioning,the basis of all liberal learn ing , and the implacable.conditions~of our existence. But what would the world be like if that search-ing and .questioning were not possible at a113

49720709 jacob klein on wonder

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