He who has something to teach and wants to teach needs to understand that, in order to make his desire a reality, there must also be someone who wants to learn. This is a fact: the best teacher is not able to overcome some of the barriers that a bad student can put up; a good student, on the other hand, is able to learn something even from the worst teacher. From this we can see that learning, in short, depends more on the student than on the teacher, who is limited to facilitating or hindering learning, stimulating or discouraging. This is the case no matter how great the teacher’s will or knowledge.
Category: Notes
An Irrefutable Logical Exposition
Something inexplicably funny happens when we come across a crystal-clear, perfect and irrefutable logical exposition that does not exert on the listeners the same brilliance and charm that radiates from the expositor’s words. Thomas Aquinas comes to mind… What can be said? Unfortunately, logic can only impress those accustomed to practicing it or, at the very least, those capable of understanding it. The work of Thomas Aquinas is an impossible feat. The proofs he presents, for example, on the necessity of God’s existence, could not be better or more logically formulated, nor more clearly explained by a human head whose expressive instrument is language. And yet they are useless, absolutely useless and hollow to most mortals.
The Antithesis of Dominant Thought
It really is an impressive phenomenon that the antithesis of dominant thought always emerges, precisely when it believes itself to be sovereign, and ends up being surprised with a violence proportional to the effort made to consolidate it. In the same way, genius emerges when the environment seems to make it impossible. And when we see that, after a few decades, the impossible happens and the tiny overtakes the enormous, we wonder at these frequent coincidences…
The Old Scholars
It is amusing to imagine how the old and very rigorous scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would react if they knew that poetry would soon come to light, under never-before-heard applause, whose recipe boils down to saying foolish things in verses with no meter, no rhythm, no punctuation and no capitalization. And imagine them comparing the much-criticized romantic insubmissions with this! But what is most curious, and perhaps too patent to be ignored, is that the phenomenon has not been limited to poetry, but has also encompassed music and, even more scandalously, the plastic arts. The common man has imposed himself and his preferences, abilities and worldview on all spheres. He has claimed all the means for himself, appropriated the best position in all functions. Finally, the revenge after so many centuries of oppression!