The Death of Learning by John Agresto

Author:John Agresto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books

A Note on Magic

I’ve just argued that among the wonders of the liberal arts is the knowledge that through our study of these arts we might possess the minds of great but long-dead authors and thinkers, that we might attempt to make their minds live in ours.

One might be shocked by that formulation, since at first blush it appears to be some kind of mystical claptrap. But if there’s any truth to it, it is clearly something wonderful, marvelous—nearly magical.

Let me have recourse once again to Aristotle. I freely admit that Aristotle has been, for me, first impenetrable, then difficult, but is now a serious and happy part of my intellectual life. Along with Socrates, Shakespeare, Galileo, and Newton, Aristotle is an intellect of towering genius, a genius with whom I have tried, over years, to come to terms. But “coming to terms” with Aristotle has meant reading, asking him questions, getting exasperated, then making him into someone with whom I can have a conversation. In time, old Aristotle became to me, and to many of my colleagues, a friend.

When you consider it, this is surpassing strange. Aristotle is dead. In a real way, extremely dead. But, in a more important way, hardly dead at all. You see, the most immaterial thing about him turns out to be the most permanent and solid thing about him: his mind.

People may want someone else’s features or strength; we may want something physical and bodily. But we can never really possess someone else’s material body even with the best of medical science at our disposal. We can, however, have the part of him or her that’s not material. We can possess someone else’s mind. Aristotle’s body has been a-moldering in the grave for millennia, but his ideas and reasoning—his mind—can live forever in us because he wrote and we have learned how to read.

Thus, by reading today but looking back, we can possess the mind of perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived. Is this not the magic, the stupendous magic, of the liberal arts?

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