We do not “own” truth, however. We can copyright our words, we can register our inventions, but we cannot possess something universal as if it were our private property. The truth will not only “make us free” but it is itself free. We all come in fact to know the same truth, otherwise we could not communicate at all with one another. This is why the modern-day denial of truth is, at the same time, a denial of real human communication and, consequently, in place of truth, an exaltation of power. But if we are helped by others to learn something, of course we ought indeed to be grateful to them.
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While uneasily following, probably for an eventual job, whatever curriculum he has selected or is given, he will nonetheless begin to look about on his own. He needs a certain practical good judgment. At a deeper level, he searches for some way to go; he must, in other words, find “another sort of learning.”
What might this other sort of learning be? The first thing to remember is that most great changes, most great encounters with the truth, with what is good, begin in quiet, insignificant places. Oftentimes, small beginnings appear as if by chance, though even chance is subsumed into our calling. So what wakes us up might be what Aristotle called “wonder,” a curiosity about what something means or what something is. It might be a love, an awareness that we are not complete in ourselves by ourselves. Even our knowing begins not with knowing ourselves, but with knowing something that is not ourselves, some other thing that is.
http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=45ae993f-51b2-446c-ae72-b72ee67c475d&page=2
While uneasily following, probably for an eventual job, whatever curriculum he has selected or is given, he will nonetheless begin to look about on his own. He needs a certain practical good judgment. At a deeper level, he searches for some way to go; he must, in other words, find “another sort of learning.”
What might this other sort of learning be? The first thing to remember is that most great changes, most great encounters with the truth, with what is good, begin in quiet, insignificant places. Oftentimes, small beginnings appear as if by chance, though even chance is subsumed into our calling. So what wakes us up might be what Aristotle called “wonder,” a curiosity about what something means or what something is. It might be a love, an awareness that we are not complete in ourselves by ourselves. Even our knowing begins not with knowing ourselves, but with knowing something that is not ourselves, some other thing that is.
http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=45ae993f-51b2-446c-ae72-b72ee67c475d&page=2
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