Much concern has rightly been given to the advent of the internet and its evident displacement of the human mind into a digital landscape. But although the concerns are real, a Luddite regression only hides from problems that will continue to grow.
We must, instead, rise to this as a challenge.
The Lyceum Institute seeks to aid its members pursuit of better habits, especially of careful thinking, and not just the preservation of truth, but its strengthening. This is not a program, a course, a certification process, nor simply a place to find content for passive consumption, but rather something to become a part of one’s life: a digital medium that directs one towards the development of perfective human habits, rather than deviant ones; habits of humility, generosity, insightful interpretation, willingness to hear, ardor for the truth and deepening one’s understanding, security in forming one’s beliefs, contentment, and worldly detachment. It is an enclave for thinking, differentiated from the world “outside” not by viewing it through a lens of gnosticism, but by instilling and maintaining a dispassionate devotion to the truth. It is where one may go after having observed the chaos, the disorder, the blind ideological adherence, and the sophistical machinations of the wider “intellectual” world, to learn, study, think, and most of all converse with others following a common path. It seeks the improvement of individual understanding through communal effort in fostering philosophical habit.
Digital life allows for unique educational opportunity. For one needs to do more than merely read books or blogs or articles to become educated: education always being a matter of a certain training, which entails not only reading or passive consumption of information, but the interpretative processing of that which is received and—perhaps most importantly of all—a critical conversation with others through which that interpretation may be refined and improved. No mind lives and thrives all on its own, and while reading the works of great writers is an encounter with their minds, it is one-directional only. Something more is needed—other persons, who bring not only their own minds, but all the minds they have read, all the minds they have encountered, in some way to your own.
More about this unique approach of the Lyceum Institute can be read in our Founding Document, Education and Digital Life [via Amazon – Print] [via Newsletter – Digital] [Purchase – Digital]