The Humbling of Genuine Knowledge

The following excerpt from George Steiner's autobiography Errata about his University of Chicago student days strangely touched me. It carries the simple lesson that some of the most important insights in life are to be had only as a result of dogged persistence, humility, and willingness to be stretched.

Provided they kept mute, undergraduates were allowed to sit in advanced seminars. Enter Leo Strauss: “Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. In this class-room, the name of . . . who is, of course, strictly incomparable, will not be mentioned. We can now proceed to Plato’s Republic. Who is, of course, strictly incomparable.” I had not caught the name, but that “of course” made me feel as if a bright, cold shaft had passed through my spine. A kindly graduate student wrote down the name for me at the close of the class: one Martin Heidegger. I trotted to the library. That evening, I attempted paragraph one of Sein and Zeit. I failed to grasp even the briefest, seemingly straightforward sentence. But the vortex was spinning, that ineradicable intimation of a world new to me in depth. I vowed to try again. And again. This is the point. To direct a student’s attention towards that which, at first, exceeds his grasp, but whose compelling stature and fascination will draw him after it. Simplification, leveling, watering down, as they now prevail in all but the most privileged education, are criminal. They condescend to the capacities unbeknown within ourselves. Attacks on so-called elitism mask a vulgar condescension: towards all those judged a priori to be incapable of better things. Both thought (knowledge, Wissenschaft, imagination given form) and love ask too much of us. They humble us. But humiliation, even despair in the face of difficulty — one has sweated the night through and, still, the equation is unsolved, the Greek sentence not understood — can lighten at sun-up. In those two years at Chicago, one as an undergraduate, one in graduate-school, the mornings were prodigal.