The famous philosophical maxim inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in the sacred Greek precinct of Delphi is “Know thyself,” an imperative at the heart of the Western tradition of liberal education. It includes both the Greek tradition of political philosophy inaugurated by Socrates and the rich and ample resources proffered to Western men and women by biblical revelation. A corollary to that imperative is the Platonic/Aristotelian call for thoughtful and conscientious human beings to “care for the soul” as the one thing most needful, a call that also powerfully resonates in the Christian tradition.
Yet for all its formidable achievements, the contemporary Western world has lost touch with both indispensable imperatives, not least because our dominant currents of thought have attempted to explain away the soul. These currents are determined to reduce the human being to a sophisticated animal bereft of meaningful self-consciousness, moral agency, mutual accountability, and the rich interiority that is nothing less than the “image of God.”
Even as modern man rejects a noble and humanizing appreciation of “sacred limits and restraints,” as Leo Strauss called them, and any real appreciation of the “greatness and misery of man” (in Pascal’s inimitable words) that defines the human condition, we proudly proclaim ourselves lords and masters of nature. At the same time, we jettison the true grounds of liberty and human dignity and increasingly deny that there is any soul or self for us to know or care for.
Moreover, as Alexis de Tocqueville and Walker Percy pointed out, modern intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and scribblers of all sorts delight in affirming that man is nothing but a brute, a preprogrammed automaton, a soulless product of subhuman determinants, a plaything of the historical process—anything but a human being with consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility. Both Tocqueville and Percy pungently observed the damning paradox that our “demi-savants” proudly delight in: proclaiming themselves to be beyond freedom and dignity, thus revealing themselves to have souls, even if profoundly distorted ones. Human beings can never completely escape the “grandeur and misery” that defines our condition. Today’s ideological perversions unintentionally confirm this point, and abundantly so.
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