Every year, when I teach Plato’s Republic, something subtle happens to the students. At first, the students are confident. They are articulate, well-read, informed. They have opinions about justice, politics, freedom, identity. They have listened to podcasts, read articles, absorbed arguments. Their minds are not empty. And yet, somewhere around Book VII, the atmosphere shifts. […]
Author Archives: Jan Bentz
Sapere aude—dare to know. With this bold exhortation, Immanuel Kant claimed to have summoned an entire age to ‘intellectual awakening.’ It was the clarion call of the Enlightenment, a command for mankind to liberate itself from the presumed shackles of authority and immaturity and to begin thinking independently. In the philosophical revolutions of the seventeenth […]
There is a kind of education that chills the soul. It operates with impressive order, produces well-timed outputs, and maintains impeccable discipline—yet something essential is missing. No spark leaps between minds, no encounter lingers after the lecture, no personal memory anchors the learning. The institution runs smoothly, but no one remembers why it began. It […]
“[…] we have seen beauty to result from the highest ideal and must therefore be sought in the most perfect union and equilibrium possible between reality and form.” When Friedrich Schiller published his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in the 1790s, Europe was reeling. The French Revolution had promised liberty, equality, and fraternity—and […]
“Every true education is education toward freedom,” wrote Edith Stein, the Carmelite nun and Catholic philosopher who was martyred in Auschwitz in 1942. For Stein, freedom did not mean independence from truth—as though liberty consisted in choosing without reference to any objective good—but rather the inner strength to recognize truth and live in accordance with […]
Today, Christians are faced with the choice between Scylla and Charybdis: must they bow to the ideals of political liberalism, which is based on the values of the person and personal “rights”, or can they indulge in the nostalgia of a medieval “holy kingdom” and reject the secular state altogether? The first option is hardly […]