In all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature, and so on.
David E. CooperThe garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another.
David E. CooperWhat impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths about reality and human existence.
David E. CooperI rather shared Nietzsche's conception of the kind of individual that an ideal education should be cultivating. 'Authenticity' is not Nietzsche's term, but as used by some existentialists, it nicely captures what Nietzsche admired - the resolve of an individual person to forge his or her own 'table of values', to be emancipated from strait-jacketing conventions, traditions, and ideologies. As embodied in the 'Overman', authenticity is the antidote to 'bad' nihilism.
David E. Cooper