George Steiner · 2003 · EPUB · Calibre ID 3587
Resurfaced in The Ignorant Master (2026-10-15).
Role in the triad
Opponent: the eloquent defense of mastery and discipleship.
Why this book
Reads the Meno against Rancière (Socrates makes autodidacts; the slave boy’s proof is unsound); names in one sentence that ‘Master’ carries the stain of slavery and sets American self-made talent against the magisterium.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “Masters have destroyed their disciples both psychologically and, in rarer cases, physically.” (Intro) | “The Master learns from the disciple and is modified by this interrelation in what becomes, ideally, a process of exchange.” (Intro) | “Exemplary teaching is enactment and can be mute. Perhaps it ought to be.” (Intro) | “One might say that whoever grasps Socrates’s intention is made an autodidact, especially in ethics.” (ch. 1) | “And it has been shown that the geometrical proof that Socrates elicits by his midwifery from the slave boy in Meno is unsound.” (ch. 1) | “The very word ‘Master’ carries the stain of slavery.” (ch. 5)
Themes
America · betrayal · discipleship · eros of teaching · mastery · Meno · Norton Lectures · refusal to teach · Socrates