These study questions are part of the study over Josef Pieper’s Only The Lover Sings. For a general introduction to this study you can go HERE. If you’d like to learn more about Study The Great Books or to find another text to study, you can go HERE to learn more.
Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find these in the Text and Note them in the Margins)
Temperance, Appearance vs. Reality
Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)
What fact will those who concern themselves with culture and education experience “again and again?”
What was the setting and occasion from which Pieper wrote this brief essay?
In Pieper’s conversations with fellow passengers, what are some things which he noticed that others did not notice?
According to Pieper, why does “the average person of our time” lose their ability to see?
What is the first thing which “The restoration of man’s inner eyes” depends upon according to Pieper?
What, according to Pieper, “constitutes the essence of man as a spiritual being?”
What kind of man “inevitably falls prey to the demagogical spells of any powers that be?”
What did Pieper say is “a better and more immediately effective remedy” to curing man’s ability to see than mere abstention from the “visual noise” of the day?
What did Pieper say “The mere attempt…to create an artistic form compels the artist” to do?
Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)
What does it mean to have “the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is?”
Why might Pieper have found it remarkable that his fellow passengers had not noticed many of the various things he mentioned?
When Pieper said “There does exist something like ‘visual noise,’ which just like the acoustical counterpart, makes clear perception impossible” what did he mean by that?
Why might one assume that “TV watchers, tabloid readers, and movie goers exercise and sharpen their eyes” in the process?
What did Pieper mean when he wrote “The ancient sages knew exactly why they called the ‘concupiscence of the eyes’ a ‘destroyer’?”
Pieper wrote, “there exists a limit below which human nature itself is threatened, and the very integrity of human existence is directly endangered.” In the context it was said, what did he mean by this?
Why might the “impoverished” man be susceptible to falling prey to “the demagogical spells of any power that be?”
Why might participating in artistic creation be a powerful way of helping man regain his powers of sight (in the inner-eye sense)?
Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)
Since the time Josef Pieper first wrote of the problem of there being “too much to see” which creates a “visual noise” that desensitizes us to being able to see what matters, reality itself, things have clearly only become more chaotic and not less. How do we navigate the modern world of constant media (often in our pockets everywhere we go) so that we don’t become blind to what is real? What do you think of the advice given in this essay for curing this ill, is it still good and practicable advice for our own time? Are there any other suggestions you might make as to how we can be in tune with reality as God made it and shut out the noise?
Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)
Read Matthew 6:22-23 and Proverbs 21:4. How might we relate these passages of Scripture to what Josef Pieper has said in this essay?
Read 1 John 2:15-17. Connect what the apostle is saying here to Pieper’s essay.