Thanks to science, we are confronted with new discoveries every day. But there are some things that science can’t teach us, and which we need to learn without its help. This point was made marvelously in an essay in the Atlantic monthly by Clancy Martin, who was discussing the increasing number of popular books written by philosophers. In that essay, Martin supplied a wonderful quote from Soren Kierkegaard which I thought I would share with you:
Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing … Thus, no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.
I would add to this that no adolescent seems to want to learn any of these lessons from their parents either. But that would be changing topics.