The Humorous becomes the Grotesque

7. Classic :  Education is the art of periagoge, of turning around (Plato). 

    Modern :  Education is the art of adjusting people so solidly to the climate of opinion prevalent at the time that they feel no “desire to know.”

Education is the art of preventing people from acquiring the knowledge that would enable them to articulate the questions of existence.

Education is the art of pressuring young people into a state of alienation that will result in either quiet despair or aggressive militancy.

8. Classic :  The process in which metaleptic reality becomes conscious and noetically articulate is the process in which the nature of man becomes luminous to itself as the life of reason. Man is the zoon noun echon.

   Modern :  Reason is instrumental reason. There is no such thing as a noetic rationality of man.

9. Classic :  Through the life of reason (bios theoretikos) man realizes his freedom.

    Modern :  Plato and Aristotle were fascists. The life of reason is a fascist enterprise.

The enumeration is not even remotely exhaustive. Everybody can supplement it with juicy items gleaned from opinion literature and the mass media, from conversations with colleagues and students. Still, [the enumeration makes it clear what] Whitehead meant when he stated that modern philosophy has been ruined. Moreover, the conflicts have been formulated in such a manner that the character of the grotesque attaching to the deformation of humanity through the climate of opinion becomes visible.

The grotesque, however, must not be confused with the comic or the humorous. The seriousness of the matter will be best understood, if one visions the concentration camps of totalitarian regimes and the gas chambers of Auschwitz in which the grotesqueness of opinion becomes the murderous reality of action.       

Published Essays 1965-1985 (CW  Vol 12)

"On Classical Studies"

pp 258, 260

A number of similar excerpts can be found HERE.