by Allan Bloom (1987)
This is a condensed version of Allan Bloom's 382-page magnum opus, which is well-written, but perhaps a bit too lengthy and scholarly for many tastes. This summarized version retains all of the author's major points, with each paragraph ending with a reference to the equivalent page in the full-length book.
Contents
Foreword by Saul Bellow
Preface
Introduction: Our Virtue
PART ONE: STUDENTS
- The Clean Slate
- Books
- Music
- Relationships
- - Self-Centeredness
- - Equality
- - Race
- - Sex
- - Separateness
- - Divorce
- - Love
- - Eros
PART TWO: NIHILISM, AMERICAN STYLE
- The German Connection
- Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature
- The Self
- Creativity
- Culture
- Values
- The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa
- Our Ignorance
PART THREE: THE UNIVERSITY
- From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede
- - Tocqueville on Democratic Intellectual Life
- - The Relation Between Thought and Civil Society
- - The Philosophic Experience
- - The Enlightenment Transformation
- - Swift's Doubts
- - Rousseau's Radicalization and the German University
- The Sixties
- The Student and the University
- - Liberal Education
- - The Decomposition of the University
- - Conclusion
"The heart of Professor Bloom's argument is that the university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. Liberal democracy in its generosity made this possible, but by consenting to play an active or 'positive,' a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society's 'problems.' Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes and the university has become society's conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences." (p. 18)
"The heat of the dispute between Left and Right has grown so fierce in the last decade that the habits of civilized discourse have suffered a scorching. Antagonists seem no longer to listen to one another." (p. 18)
This book is written from the perspective of a teacher, which means from the perspective of someone occupied with understanding human fulfillment and helping his students -- with their particular set of tastes, desires, and capacities -- achieve it. (p. 19)
"No teacher can doubt that his real task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice." (p. 20)
A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, "what is man? ... In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them." (p. 21)
During my career, "What [students] bring to their higher education ... has changed, and there with the task of educating them has changed." (p. 21)
This book is a "report from the front," an attempt to understand the current generation. (p. 22)
My sample -- students from the top universities -- is biased, but it is also taken from the students who will go on to influence society the most. (p. 22)
"For modern nations, which have founded themselves on reason in its various uses more than did any nations in the past, a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis they face." (p. 22)
"There is one thing that a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. ... Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating." (p. 25)
"Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. ... Democratic education ... wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime." (p. 26)
However, its ideas about what this means have changed over time, starting with a faith in the human rights of the U.S. Constitution, but ultimately changing to (now) mean "openness", i.e., relativism. (p. 26-27)
Liberalism has always tended towards increased freedom -- i.e., decreased regulation. But "it was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge. ... It begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all ... [and] of course the result is that ... the argument justifying freedom disappears, and ... all beliefs begin to have an attenuated character." (p. 28)
Modern education is concerned mainly with correcting ethnocentrism -- showing students that their preferences are merely accidents of their culture and that no single culture is better than any other. The roots of this movement are found in the problems (racism, mistreatment) that arose due to the multicultural nature of American life. (p. 29-30)
The Founders envisioned a society where individuals were bound together by their belief in and adherence to the rights of the Constitution. Minority factions were seen as a bad thing, detracting from social cohesiveness. (p. 31)
However, the provision of equal rights did not guarantee equal treatment, and minority groups suffered. This caused them to retreat into their minority identities and oppose the majority -- indeed, "much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority. ... The very idea of a majority -- now understood to be selfish interest -- is done away with in order to protect the minorities." (p. 32-35)
The problem with teaching cultural relativism is that all cultures (other than western cultures) are ethnocentric. Furthermore, ethnocentrism is, in a sense, necessary: "The reason for non-Western closedness, or ethnocentrism, is clear. Men must love and be loyal to their families and their people in order to preserve them. ... The problem of getting along with outsiders is secondary to, and sometimes in conflict with, having an inside, a people, a culture, a way of life. A very great narrowness is not incompatible with the health of an individual or a people, whereas with great openness it is hard to avoid decomposition." (p. 36)
"In short [students] are lost in a no-man's-land between the goodness of knowing and the goodness of culture." (p. 37)
The historical assumption of the human sciences was (and remains) that an objective human nature exists and can be discovered -- if not by reason itself, then at least by empirical science guided by reason. Science was a method to allow us to rise beyond the prejudices of our culture in order to discover the truths of human nature. It was a mechanism for opening our minds, an instrument of openness. (p. 37-38)
Yet the dogmatic modern assumption is that human nature does not exist, that our ways of being are culturally determined, that our minds are inherently constrained -- "closed" -- by cultural influences. (p. 38)
Today, "the human sciences want to make us culture-beings with the instruments [science and reason] that were invented to liberate us from culture...: cultural relativism, historicism, the fact-value distinction -- are the suicide of science. Culture, hence closedness, reigns supreme. Openness to closedness is what we teach." (p. 38-39)
"Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is a democratic prejudice." (p. 40)
"There are two types of openness, the openness of indifference ... and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude." (p. 41)
The openness of indifference advocates the removal of all requirements in education -- why should students learn languages or philosophy? But the reality is that, "to be open to knowing, there are certain types of things one must know which most people don't want to bother to learn and which appear boring and irrelevant ... true openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present." (p. 41)
The modern university does its best to knock down every prejudice of its students, yet it replaces them with nothing. (p. 42)
"Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty. ... In [nature's] place we put a gray network of critical concepts, which were invented to interpret nature's phenomena but which strangled them and therewith destroyed their own raison d'etre. Perhaps it is our first task to resuscitate those phenomena so that we may again have a world to which we can put our questions and be able to philosophize. This seems to me to be our educational challenge." (p. 43)
Americans have always seemed less familiar with Western tradition than their European counterparts. At first this seems like a pity, but there is a sense in which this is a strength, because (a) those who do come to appreciate it see it as something vital and new, rather than stale and old like European students do, and (b) it is evidence that a particular culture is not a prerequisite for knowledge -- it suggests that the democratic ideal is correct. (p. 47-49)
I used to be convinced of this. I used to think that education was nothing more than the process of feeding the inborn hunger for knowledge, the process of following our nature. But, "at the very best, it is clear to me now that nature needs the cooperation of convention." And at the very worst, perhaps convention is more important than our natural curiosity; perhaps a culture really is needed to foster true learning. And I fear that, as Nietzsche warned, what little of that culture we have is decaying. (p. 49-51)
On the surface, Americans seems to lack a true culture or set of traditions. But most of them grew up with a shared knowledge of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and "contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political [and intellectual] traditions of any nation in the world." And this tradition is not confused or counterbalanced by a history of monarchy or aristocracy. (p. 52-55) li>
So we have a culture in which to root education, but we have begun to undermine it. The idealism of the American founding has been explained away as mythical, selfishly-motivated, and racist. And so our culture has been devalued. (p. 55-56)
Religion, too, has been explained away, but this has left us without a standpoint from which to understand our experience as humans. Parents "have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world." (p. 56-57)
"Nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth. ... Tradition has become superfluous." (p. 58)
Americans used to all at least be familiar with the Bible, Shakespeare, and Euclid. And "it linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material. ... I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the [Bible] ... provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things." (p. 60)
During my tenure students have changed, and "the gradual stilling of the old political and religious echoes in the souls of the young accounts for the difference between the students I knew at the beginning of my teaching career and those I face now." (p. 61)
"I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. The soul's longing ... may well require encouragement at the outset." (p. 62)
Literature is critical because it presents to young people the range of possibilities of human types -- both good and bad. (p. 62-64)
But students are less and less exposed to literature, and as a result, "they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives. ... [Therefore,] people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise. What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside." (p. 64)
Without exposure to literature, students usually resort to the movies. But movies do not provide the "distance from the contemporary" that students need, and so this only reinforces the belief that the here and now is all there is. (p. 64)
The latest enemy of an appreciation of literature is feminism, which tries to undermine the legitimacy of virtually the entire western canon. (p. 65-66)
The loss of literature has also meant the loss of heroes. In a "perversion of the democratic principle," this lack is almost admired, since being oneself is the supposed goal. But whether or not it is seen as desirable, students invariably seek role models. And without literature, they only have those around them (and in the media) to emulate. (p. 66-67)
"As it now stands, students have powerful images of what the perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing." (p. 67)
"Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music." It is accessible twenty-four hours a day and it is also portable, so that nothing prevents students from listening to music -- even while studying. (p. 68)
Classical music is essentially dead. It slowly turned from being the object of genuine appreciation to a tool for demonstrating sophistication before it was emphatically displaced by rock music. (p. 69-70)
Students today understand better than their predecessors the famous passages on music in Plato's Republic, and they are indignant that he would rob them of something to which they are so attached. (But "indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt. ... So it may well be that through the thicket or our greatest corruption runs the path to awareness of the oldest truths." Perhaps these [indignant] students are closest to understanding Plato's concerns.) (p. 70)
Plato -- and Nietzsche also -- understood that "Civilization or, to say the same thing, education, is the taming of the soul's raw passions -- not suppressing or excising them. ... To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul." (p. 71-72)
Hobbes, Locke, Smith and all of the Enlightenment rationalists, on the other hand, were so caught up in what they thought of as the sovereignty of reason that they neglected any discussion of music, i.e., the passions. (p. 73)
"Only in those great critics of Enlightenment and rationalism, Rousseau and Nietzsche, does music return" and it has remained essentially unchecked since. (p. 73)
Modern music has "risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions." (p. 73)
With both its beat and its lyrics, modern music speaks directly to the undeveloped and untutored sexual desire of young people. And they know this. It gives them that which their parents insist they have to wait until they are older to have. It was inevitable that the unchecked encouragement that music provides would ultimately lead to the sexual revolution, in which this "parental authority" needed to be overthrown. (p. 74)
We are left with a culture filled with "the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art. ... In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such." (p. 74-75)
Parents are in denial about the effects of their children's indulgence in rock music, and have thereby lost "control over their children's moral education at time when no one else is seriously concerned with it." (p. 76)
The rapid growth of the music industry has largely gone under the radar, and this has contributed to the problem. Prosperity has led to a focus on leisure, but the meaning of leisure has been diluted to "amusement". A real understanding of "fulfillment" is entirely missing. (p. 77)
The Left has largely given rock music a free ride, seeing it as "coming from beneath the bourgeoisie's layers of cultural repression." But the success of music (along with higher education) is better understood by its role in fulfilling "the bourgeois' need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have undangerous experiments with the unlimited." (p. 77-78)
Mick Jagger was the icon of the rock music movement, and is a kind of hero for young people -- much like Napoleon for the French of the 19th century. The promise of rock music was a rediscovery of the state of nature, free from the repressions of civilization; but with those repressions removed, all we have left is "show business glitz. Mick Jagger tarting it up on stage is all that we brought back from the voyage to the underworld." (p. 78-79)
My concern is not a moral one, it is related to music's effect on education. "I believe it ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education. The first sensuous experiences are decisive in determining the taste for the whole of life. ... Rock music encourages passions and provides models that have no relation to any life that young people who go to universities can possibly lead. ... [And] without the cooperation of the sentiments, anything other than technical education is a dead letter." (p. 79)
Students today are largely apathetic about any concerns outside of themselves. There isn't any malice in this self-centeredness; but it has become so entrenched in American culture that it isn't even recognized as unusual. (p. 82-86)
The decline of the family and the increasing ease of geographic mobility have left Americans with a degree of independence previously unexperienced. (p. 86-87)
"This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature -- spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone. ... Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves?" (p. 87-88)
Students today, whatever their politics, believe in equality. "It is more than a belief, it is an instinct, felt in their bones." They are surrounded by students of all types of backgrounds, and they genuinely believe that everyone has gotten to where they are due to natural or earned ability alone. (p. 88)
Thus Harvard, Yale and Princeton are not what they used to be -- "the last resorts of aristocratic sentiment within the democracy." There aren't even social climbers anymore, "for there is no vision of a high society into which to climb." (p. 89,90)
"The lack of prejudice is a result of students' failing to see differences and of the gradual eradication of differences." (p. 91)
"The one eccentric element in this portrait, the one failure ... is the relation between blacks and whites." Although black students are present on campuses, they "have, by and large, proved indigestible." (p. 91)
White students are uncomfortable about this fact, because they know it violates their ideals of equality. Yet they remain silent, because they are at a loss about how to handle the situation. (p. 91)
After the civil rights movement, it was assumed by everyone that equality and full integration would soon be achieved, even if there was some disagreement among good-willed people about the best means of getting there. (p. 93)
But then the Black Power movement arrived and the universities conceded to identity politics, which took the form of Black-themed courses, quotas, and an unwillingness to fail black students. (p. 94-95)
"The black student who wants to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to the black group has to pay a terrific price, because he is judged negatively by his black peers and because his behavior is atypical in the eyes of whites. White students have silently and unconsciously adjusted to a group presence of blacks, and they must read just for a black who does not define himself by the group." Affirmative action cements this dynamic. (p. 95-96)
Unlike any other, America is a country founded on and formed by philosophical principles, and we have now allowed them inform our private lives -- including our sex lives. These principles, freedom and equality, have arrived in two waves: the sexual revolution (freedom) and feminism (equality) -- ideals that are to an extent inherently at odds with each other. (p. 97-98)
The sexual revolution was largely anticlimactic. "In fact ... sexual liberation might be interpreted as the recognition that sexual passion is no longer dangerous in us, and that it is safer to give it free course than to risk rebellion by restraining it." (p. 99)
Yet sexual liberation was inegalitarian, since those with youth and superior looks profited the most. (p. 99)
Although the sexual revolution encouraged sexual freedom, feminism sought to curtail it, because the sexual freedom of men invariably led to objectification, subjugation, and abuse of women; it was inherently sexist. (p. 100-101)
Feminism seeks to suppress modesty, because modesty is central to the mechanism of male-female involvement and attachment. Just as Plato advocated in The Republic, feminism calls for a large degree of social intervention (birth control, abortion rights, day-care centers, etc.) in order to overcome the natural differences between the sexes. (p. 101-103)
The restriction of pornography is favored by both feminists and conservatives, but for very different reasons: feminists because it promotes male domination and conservatives because it loosens sexual morals. (p. 103-104)
Sexual restrictions of every kind have almost completely evaporated, and students today are entirely used to the lack of sanctity or inhibitions surrounding sex. (p. 106)
Men and women are now essentially the same in all academic and political aspects of life; sexual differentiation is something reserved almost exclusively for the bedroom. (p. 107)
Despite their exposure to history, this state of affairs has left today's students incapable of identifying with any of the great works of literature that touch on the subject of sex or gender; they are simply seen as irrelevant. (p. 108)
"Civilization has seemingly led us full circle, back to the state of nature taught to use by the founding fathers of modern thought. But now it is present not in rhetoric but in reality." (p. 109)
The idea of modern political philosophy was to deconstruct the existing social structure so that it could be rebuilt in a way that would facilitate a balance of the needs of all individuals (i.e., a social contract rather than a social structure indulging those already in power). However, this effort was predicated on the modern assumptions that (a) nurture is more important than nature and (b) that man's end is individualistic rather than collectivist. The Ancients thought otherwise on both counts. Of course, the reality is that both nurture and nature matter, that man's nature is simultaneously individualist and collectivist. (p. 109-113)
"In the tightest communities, at least since the days of Odysseus, there is something in man that wants out and senses that his development is stunted by being just part of the whole, rather than a whole itself. And in the freest and most independent situations men long for unconditional attachments. The tension between freedom and attachment, and attempts to achieve the impossible union of the two, are the permanent condition of man. But in modern political regimes, where rights precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over community, family and even nature. ... The spirit of this choice must inevitably penetrate into all the details of life." (p. 113)
The project of modernity has been more liberating for men than women, since women are still more constrained by their natural ties to (and, it seems, desires for) childbearing. (p. 114)
What modern thinkers failed to anticipate was the decay of the family that came with the deconstruction of social structures. Yet the family represented the single strongest mechanism for curtailing selfishness, an intermediary between the individual and the state. Parents -- particularly fathers -- no longer have a motivation to provide for their children. The enticement of their wives was the old motivation, but given our modern ideals of equality between the sexes, modern women understandably no longer want to play that role, and the family has crumbled. (p. 112, 115)
Rousseau attempted to reinstate sexual differentiation through his promotion of Romanticism, and he succeeded for about a century. But this concept is incredibly foreign to modern students. They see chivalry and courtly love as absurd. What remains is mere individualism; "everyone has 'his own little separate system.' [from Emile]" (p. 117)
"This continual shifting of the sands in our desert -- separation from places, persons, beliefs -- produces the psychic state of nature where reserve and timidity are the prevailing dispositions. We are social solitaries." (p. 118)
"The most visible sign of our increasing separateness and, in its turn, the cause of ever greater separateness, is divorce." Yet politicians ignore it and psychotherapy facilitates it. (p. 118)
Children of divorced parents struggle to learn because they lack the emotional stability to handle nuanced ideas as well as the confidence and optimism required for intellectual daring. (p. 120)
Young people are excessively sensible about love. They would never let themselves be drawn into a relationship by "mere" passion. (p. 122-123)
Men get sexual gratification more easily now than in the past, but they also face comparison to other men and the performance anxiety that comes with it. Women are happy to be free of having to provide what they previously offered men, but "they are dogged with doubt whether men are very impressed by what they are now offering instead." (p. 124)
Traditional gender roles in relationships have vanished, but nothing has been left in their place. Given the changes in medicine and technology, the feminists had a strong argument in advocating for women to be admitted into the workplace. But in the absence of social norms regarding gender, young people are left trying to understand what they want from the opposite sex as opposed to figuring out how to get it. (p. 126-128)
The restructuring of the family requires that men subdue their masculine character. "And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them 'care' is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail. ... The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved towards the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern to include others [i.e., his wife and children], rather than commanding men to cease being concerned with themselves." (p. 129)
"I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them." (p. 130)
"All of our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion." (p. 131)
"Rousseau, the founder of the most potent of reductionist teachings about eros, said that [Plato's] Symposium is always the book of lovers. Are we lovers anymore? This is my way of putting the educational question of our times." (p. 133)
Unlike other animals, humans do not reach their peak at puberty. The greatest parts of their lives lie ahead of them. "This means that the animal part of his sexuality is intertwined in the most complex way with the higher reaches of his soul ... and the most delicate part of education is to keep the two in harmony." (p. 134)
Modern students are lacking the longing that is critical for a full enjoyment of life. They are complacent. And the universities do not see themselves as providing for such a longing. (p. 134-136)
The entrance of Freudian psychology into academia (in the forties and fifties) was the last time when the academy harbored the hope of explaining life's mysteries -- touching on both human sexuality as well as philosophy and art. Yet it fell short, because it explained the latter purely in terms of the former. Something more is needed. (p. 137)
Value relativism is the modern replacement for traditional morality, and "constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism." (p. 141)
On the one hand, it can be seen as a liberation from the burden of old morality; but on the other it can be seen as a call to a "higher" morality -- one that is "beyond good and evil", and thereby requires a deeper degree of commitment from both its adherents and creators. (p. 142-143)
This dichotomy loosely maps onto the distinction between "other-directed" versus "inner-directed", famously portrayed in Woody Allen's Zelig, though the distinction is based on David Riesman's book The Lonely Crowd. But Riesman's ideas are merely a watered-down version of Eric Fromm, which in turn is a watered-down version of Heidegger, a disciple of Nietzsche -- both German. (p. 143-147)
Value relativism has sunk so far into the American consciousness that its vocabulary has become colloquial: we talk about 'charisma', 'life-style', 'commitment', 'identity', etc. "Although they, and the things to which they refer, would have been incomprehensible to our fathers, not to speak of our Founding Fathers." (p. 147)
"In short, after the war, while America was sending out its blue jeans to unite the young of all nations, a concrete form of democratic universalism that has had liberalizing effects on many enslaved nations, it was importing a clothing of German fabrication for its souls, which clashed with all that and cast doubt on the Americanization of the world on which we had embarked, thinking it was good and in conformity with the rights of man. Our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by German architects." (p. 152)
"We chose [to import] a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had its starting point dislike of us and our goals." (p. 153)
The question isn't even asked whether the German doctrine of value-creation is contrary to democratic and egalitarian ideals; but it certainly seems to leave room for their opposites and perhaps promote them -- i.e., value relativism seems to allow for fascism. (p. 154)
The great question is, why were these ideas so readily adopted by Americans? "Is there something that the American self-understanding had not sufficiently recognized or satisfied?" (p. 155)
"Although nihilism and its accompanying existential despair are hardly anything but a pose for Americans ... they pursue happiness in ways determined by that language [caring, self-fulfillment, expanding consciousness, and so on] ... a search for an inwardness that one knows one has, [but] the inner seems to have no relation to the outer. No wonder the mere sound of the Existentialists' Nothing or the Hegelians' Negation has an appeal to contemporary ears. American nihilism is a mood. ... It is nihilism without the abyss." (p. 155)
Nihilism is revealed by a chaos of the passions, which Nietzsche believed on the one hand would lead to the decomposition, but on the other might provide the basis for the creation of comprehensive new worldviews. (p. 156)
However, young Americans do not have the education needed to make Nietzsche's redeeming hope possible; their passions are too far impoverished, confused, and therefore impotent. (p. 156)
"We are a bit like savages who, having been discovered and evangelized by missionaries, have converted to Christianity without having experienced all that came before and after the revelation. ... We are almost utterly dependent on our German missionaries or intermediaries for our knowledge of Greece, Rome, Judaism and Christianity ...; however profound that knowledge may be, theirs is only one interpretation; and that we have only been told as much as they thought we needed to know. It is an urgent business for one who seeks self-awareness to think through the meaning of the intellectual dependency that has led us to such an impasse. The following explanatory dictionary of our current language [i.e. the next four sections] is meant to be a small contribution to that undertaking." (p. 156)
Continental thought has always looked down on America as base and superficial, too tied to the material world and not sufficiently introspective or concerned with the finer tastes in life. The people of liberal democracies are seen negatively by Continentals as "bourgeois", while Americans see themselves as "middle class" -- which carries none of the same negative connotations. (p. 157-161)
Americans were proud of democracy and believed their revolution was a great success. Continentals, however, were less convinced: "If the noble and the sacred cannot find serious expression in democracy, its choiceworthiness becomes questionable." (p. 159-161)
Americans have never really doubted the compatibility of universal freedom and equality, as have Europeans. (p. 161-162)
The Enlightenment sought to extend to all men what had previously been reserved for only the upper end of society. Reason was thought to enable the common man to see the benefit gained by working with others to achieve the mutual satisfaction of their desires by the control of the natural world. (p. 164-165)
Prior to Locke, man was seen as having both a selfish and common interest. Hobbes and Locke built their theories on the idea that man was purely selfish but that the private interests of individuals could be pitted against each other to produce public good. This led to the crucial idea of rights. (p. 165-167)
"From the point of view of Gods or heroes, [the democratic project] is not very inspiring. But for the poor, the weak, the oppressed -- the overwhelming majority of mankind -- it is the promise of salvation. As Leo Strauss puts it, the moderns 'built on low but solid ground.'" (p. 167)
In spite of their basic agreement, Rousseau disagreed with Locke that the rational self-interest of individuals would lead to a peaceful society. "In other words, [Rousseau thought that] enlightenment is not enough to establish society, and even tends to dissolve it." And Rousseau was so persuasive that he "destroyed the self-confidence of the Enlightenment at the moment of its triumph." (p. 168)
"For Hobbes and Locke nature is near and unattractive, and man's movement into society was easy and unambiguously good. For Rousseau nature is distant and attractive, and the movement was hard and divided man." (p. 169)
"[Rousseau] restored the pre-modern sense of the dividedness of man and hence of the complexity of his attainment of happiness, the pursuit of which liberal society guarantees him while making its attainment impossible. But the restoration takes place on very different grounds, as can be seen in the fact that in the past men traced the tension to the irreconcilable demands of body on the soul, not of nature and society." (p. 170)
The United States is the stage on which the conflict between these two ideas about the state of nature (i.e., Locke's and Rousseau's) plays out. What is interesting is that they exist side by side in many aspects of American life, despite being incompatible in principle. (p. 172)
Although a precise definition remains elusive, "the self is the modern substitute for the soul." (p. 173)
Man used to strive for fulfillment by taming his bodily desires in order to live virtuously. But this changed after Machiavelli (and Hobbes after him) suggested that instead we ignore virtue and follow our desires, which find their root in the state of nature. (p. 174-175)
Following their advice, "our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us." (p. 175)
Locke then replaced the virtuous man with the rationally selfish one. "Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism." (p. 175-176)
"All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men's reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared." (p. 176)
"Having cut off the higher aspirations of man, those connected to the soul, Hobbes and Locke hoped to find a floor beneath him, which Rousseau removed [by denying] the simplistic harmoniousness between nature and society that seems to be the American premise. ... Man tumbled down into what I have called the basement [where Rousseau] discovered all the complexity in man that, in the days before Machiavelli, was up on high. ... Rousseau still hoped for a soft landing on nature's true grounds ... [but] the existence of such a natural ground has become doubtful, and it is here that the abyss has opened up." (p. 176-177)
"Locke appears to have invented the self to provide unity in continuity for the ceaseless temporal succession of sense impressions that would disappear into nothingness if there were no place to hold them." (p. 177)
Psychology came to us "in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected by liberal society. ... Modern psychology has this in common with what was always a popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli -- that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it." (p. 178)
"The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things." (p. 179)
"The very expression dignity of man, even when Pico della Mirandola coined it in the fifteenth century, had a blasphemous ring to it." Prior to this, it was only God who was dignified -- not man. And God was dignified in his freedom, his ability to create. If man was to be elevated, he, too, must be free; he, too, must be able to create. (p. 180)
And so, following Rousseau and our dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment, we have elevated creativity above reason as the ultimate virtue, and the artist replaced the philosopher and scientist at the admired human type. (p. 181-182)
Yet those who praise creativity don't realize why. They admire it without seeing that it is the result of Romantic thought absorbed into democratic public opinion. And it has influenced the whole political spectrum, from Left to Right. (p. 181-182)
The meaning of creativity has been diluted. The democratization of creativity is at odds with itself, because "creativity and personality were intended to be terms of distinction. ... Now that they belong to everyone, they can be said to mean nothing. ... They are the bourgeois' way of not being bourgeois." (p. 183)
Culture is everything that enables man to live in society in spite of his desires, which pull him in uncivil directions. For example, all men feel sexual desire, which "is promiscuous and inclines man toward freedom." However, "the free choice of marriage and the capacity to stick to it ... is proof of culture, of desire informed by civility. ... Something of [this] kind must occur in all aspects of man's life in order to produce a personality, the fully cultured human being." (p. 185-187)
We use the word culture as almost identical to people or nation, as in "French culture" or "Iranian culture". But we also use it to refer to art, music, literature, education, etc. -- "in short, everything that is uplifting and edifying, as opposed to commerce." The link between these definitions is that "culture is what makes possible, on a high level, the rich social life that constitutes a people ... all that binds individuals into a group with roots." (p. 187)
"Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bonds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science." (p. 188)
However, for the Greeks, an art higher than culture was politics. Yet politics has been subsumed by culture. Indeed, "the disappearance of politics is one of the most salient aspects of modern thought." (p. 189)
The source of this disappearance is first articulated in Rousseau's The Social Contract (II,7), where he emphasized that "The legislature must 'so to speak change human nature, transform each individual, who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which that individual as it were gets his life and being; weaken man's constitution to strengthen it.'" (p. 189)
Rousseau believed that "individual self-interest is not sufficient to establish a common good. ... The founder of a regime must first make a people to which the regime will belong." He must change human nature by creating a culture. (p. 189-190)
But "changing human nature seems a brutal nasty, tyrannical thing to do. So instead, it began to be denied that there is such a thing as human nature," and this current of thought instead conceived man as primarily a product of culture. (p. 190)
These two ideas can be seen in American politics today: respect for human rights (Hobbes and Locke) on the one hand and respect for cultures (Rousseau and Kant) on the other. They are often in conflict. "Sometimes the United States is attacked for failing to promote human rights; sometimes for wanting to impose the 'American way of life' on all people without respect for their cultures." There is a war between the universality of the Enlightenment and the particularity of the counter-Enlightenment. (p. 191-192)
"This attempt to preserve old cultures in the New World is superficial because it ignores the fact that real differences among men are based on real differences in fundamental beliefs ... differences that caused our ancestors to kill one another." (p. 192-193)
This idea of culture was introduced in an attempt to give dignity to man, in spite of the reductive materialism of modern science -- yet it didn't try to contradict modern science, so the dignity of both man and science suffered. (p. 193)
After reviewing the history, "we have come back to the point where we began, where values take the place of good and evil." (p. 194)
The Germans (Nietzsche and Weber) recognized as early as 1919 that the scientific spirit was dead, that reason cannot establish values. But Americans (naïvely, and largely unknowingly) still held onto the rationalist dream, written as they were into our political foundations. (p. 194-195)
When those ideas came to the U.S. (via Weber), "a very dark view of the future was superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys." (p. 195)
Nietzsche did not proclaim "God is dead" in triumph, but in anguish. "Honesty compels serious men, on examination of their consciences, to admit that the old faith is no longer compelling. It is the very peak of Christian virtue that demands the sacrifice of Christianity." (p. 196)
That reason "is unable to rule in culture or in soul ... constitutes a crisis of the West ... [whose] regimes are founded on reason." Previous regimes relied on religion, but Enlightenment undermined religion. (p. 196)
Rousseau and others recognized this. "The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it." But Nietzsche saw this was impossible. (p. 196-197)
We are left with no religion, but we still have religious impulses. (p. 197)
"The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil. To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is good because we love it. It [became] our decision to esteem that makes something estimable." (p. 197)
"Stripping away the illusions about values was required, so Nietzsche thought, by our situation, to disenchant all misleading hopes of comfort or consolation, thereby to fill the few creators with awe and the awareness that everything depends on them. Nihilism is a dangerous but a necessary and a possibly salutary stage in human history. ... It can break him [Man], reduce him to despair and spiritual or bodily suicide. But it can hearten him to a reconstruction of a world of meaning. Nietzsche's works are a glorious exhibition of the soul of a man who might, if anybody can, be called creative." (p. 198)
No reflection on value-creation can shed light on value-creation. Even Freud's attempt was flawed in that it relied on science, a product of the id, in its attempt to understand the id. Only the most basic values, such as fear of a painful death, are actually shared and a potential basis for a common human experience. Beyond these, every value must be created, and there is no standard against which to judge those (created) values other than their ability to preserve or enhance life. (p. 199-201)
"Since values are not rational ... they must be imposed." Will, or commitment, is the primary virtue; it is the equivalent of (what used to be) faith. "Nietzsche was not a fascist; but this project inspired fascist rhetoric, which looked to the revitalization of old cultures or the foundation of new ones, as opposed to the rational, rootless cosmopolitanism of the revolutions of the Left." (p. 201-202)
Nietzsche was a cultural relativist. This meant he anticipated war, because wars are inevitable when values are imposed and unrooted in truth or anything objective. (p. 202)
Nietzsche understood that there was a paradox at the heart of his work -- philosophy in a cultural relativist framework was impossible. He tried solving this problem by positing the will to power as a replacement for the will to truth. (p. 203-204)
Nietzsche thought the artists of his time either cowards in their unwillingness to be truly creative (like Flaubert) or else fakers (like Wagner). He respected only Dostoyevsky. (p. 205-206)
"Nietzsche restored something like the soul to our understanding of man. ... The unconscious replaces all the irrational things -- above all divine madness and eros -- which were part of the old soul and had lost significance in modernity. ... But the difference between the self and the soul remains great" because Nietzsche demoted reason. In this respect he is further from Plato than Locke or Descartes. (p. 207)
Socrates had long been the archetypical philosopher, because he questioned the myths and commonly held beliefs -- questioned them to his death. But Nietzsche believed that the philosopher's role was to create new myths, new values, and therefore he disparaged Socrates. (p. 208)
Again, the vehicle for these ideas in the United States was Weber, and specifically his "Protestant Ethic" (which later evolved into the term "work ethic"). Though many didn't realize it, his thought was at odds with Marx, since Weber wasn't a determinist or materialist. But Weber was also at odds with Locke and Smith, because he didn't believe values were rational or rooted in human nature; they had to be created, imposed -- just like Calvin imposed them in northern Europe. (p. 208-209)
This idea caught on like wildfire, in spite of its conflict with free-market ideals. But people had ceased to study the good arguments for liberalism because, being the dominant ideology, it needed no defense. So a religious justification easily supplanted them. (p. 209-210)
Indeed, "there is a continuous skewing of the historical perspective towards religious explanations. ... Marxism is [construed as] secularized Christianity; so is democracy; so is utopianism; so are human rights. ... [Weber] makes it impossible to take Hobbes or Locke seriously as causes of that history, because ... [they] were just unconsciously transmitting the values of the Protestant ethic. ... Dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts." (p. 210-211)
This popularized the idea of "charisma", which Weber believed was essential in true leadership. "Mere competence could only serve already established goals. ... It must at least be supplanted by charismatic leadership in order to be pointed in the right, or any, direction." (p. 211-212)
"Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler. ... He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader -- the demagogue -- hoped for by Weber." Weber was not looking for something so extreme, but "when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits." (p. 213-214)
"Hitler did not cause a rethinking of the politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary -- it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here." And it remains dominant. (p. 214)
"After Hitler, everyone scurried back to the protective cover of morality, but practically no one turned to serious thought about good and evil. Otherwise our President, or the pope, for that matter, would not be talking about values." (p. 214)
The language of values implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social, and personal. It has been facilitated by a softening and blurring of the idea of religion and "the sacred", which are no longer seen as dangerous. "These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle." (p. 214-216)
Until now I've spoken little of Marx, but that is an easy omission because he no longer speaks to most students. This is exemplified in what has happened to his term ideology, which was intended to mean a false system of thought used as a tool of oppression, but which (through Lenin) came to be used as a descriptor for Marxism itself. It was clear that there was no place within Marxism for Marxism to take refuge from the accusation that is was merely a tool of power (i.e., not truth), which of course undermined its own legitimacy. "Ideology" is now synonymous with "values". (p. 217-219)
"Very early in this century the effects of the encounter with Nietzsche began to be felt within Marxism." An example is seen in the attitudes towards the violence of revolutions: previously it had been seen as a necessary evil to instate a new (better) order. But this has changed, because now violence is seen as a good -- a demonstration of the new virtues of will and commitment. (p. 220)
This is straight from Nietzsche: if creativity is the highest value, and creativity is the product of chaos (via strife and overcoming), but man is creating an order of peace, then chaos must be willed. "Determination, commitment, caring ... become the new virtues. ... There is also something of this in the current sympathy for terrorists, because 'they care'." (p. 221)
"The continuing effort of the mutant breed of Marxists has been to denationalize Marx and turn Nietzsche into a leftist." They appropriated "the last man" and "superman", which they identified with Marx's bourgeois and the victorious proletariat, respectively. (p. 222-223)
They (e.g. Marcuse) also appropriated Freud, blaming his diagnosis of neurosis on capitalism, but completely ignoring the contradiction between Marx's fundamental principles and those proposed by Freud. (p. 223)
Although great writers have never been comfortable with equality ("which has no place for genius") and therefore are the exact opposite of Marx, they have also always been enemies of the bourgeoise. So when the Left embraced Nietzsche, it also appropriated and benefitted from the authority of 19th and 20th century literature. (p. 223-224)
"The later Marxists in Germany were haunted by the idea of culture, repelled by the vulgarity of the bourgeoise." (p. 224)
"In general, sophisticated Marxism [turned into] cultural criticism of life in the Western democracies. ... But none of it came from Marx or a Marxist perspective. ... It was, and is, Nietzschean, variations on our way of life as that of 'the last man'." (p. 225)
If we look back to the now-popular distinction between "inner-directed" and "other-directed" (Riesman, The Lonely Crowd) referenced at the beginning of this section, we can now see that outer-direction maps onto the rational values derived from the demands of the market or public opinion, while inner-direction maps onto Nietzsche's charismatic value-creation. "There isn't a single element of Marx in any of this." (p. 225)
"This egalitarian transformation of [Nietzschean ideas] permitted anyone who is not on the Left to be diagnosed as mentally ill." (p. 225)
"So Nietzsche came to America ... [but] somehow the goods got damaged in transit. His conversion to the Left was easily accepted" because Americans cannot conceive of someone who isn't optimistic about human nature, and so "a language developed to explain to knowers how bad we are has been adopted by us to declare to the world how interesting we are." (p. 226)
These ideas are central to the questions asked by anyone who lives a serious life. Yet Americans have taken these ideas, "and treated them as though they were answers, in order to avoid confronting them. ... America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divorces, and it is moving with the aid of modern philosophy towards no-fault choices." (p. 228)
"Nietzsche sought to restore conflict, ... to restore the tragic sense of life ... at the moment when nature had been domesticated and men become tame. [But his] value philosophy was used in America for exactly the opposite purpose -- to promote conflict-resolution, bargaining, harmony." After all, "if it is only a difference of values, then conciliation is possible." (p. 228)
"We have here the peculiarly American way of digesting continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending." (p. 147)
"Man has always had to come to terms with God, love and death." But Americans, through a misinterpretation of European thought, "are learning to 'feel comfortable' with God, love and even death." (p. 230)
"The way we digest the European things is well illustrated by the influence of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice on American consciousness." The protagonist, Aschenbach, on vacation in Venice, discovers his true desires (his love for a young boy) but finally perishes due to a plague without acting on them. Although Mann seeks to show, with gravity, that "the coming to awareness of the infrastructure of culture is deadly to culture," it was not received this way by Americans, who instead "took it as an early manifest of the sexual liberation movement," overlooking the fact that neither Nietzsche nor Freud (nor therefore Mann) would have endorsed sexual liberation. (p. 230-232)
"Nietzsche ... the man who said all greatness requires 'semen in the blood' who not have sympathized with men obsessed by sexual repression, who could not make something sublime out of their eroticism, who longed for 'natural' satisfaction and public approval to boot. ... Any explanation of the higher [i.e., sublimation] in terms of the lower [i.e., sexual desires] has that tendency, especially in a democracy, where there is envy of what makes special claims, and the good is supposed to be accessible to all." (p. 232)
Even Freud "ultimately seemed too moralistic, not open enough. But all one had to do was imagine new social structures that demanded less repression for their functioning. This was where Marx was useful. ... Freud, riding the crest of a wave of German philosophy, enabled Americans to think the satisfaction of the sexual desires was the most important element of happiness, ... although this was surely not his intention." (p. 233)
"Just as we had cut away the camouflage disguising economic needs -- such as the Pantheon and Chartres -- in order to concentrate more efficiently on those needs themselves, so we demystified sexual desires, seeing them for what they really are, in order to satisfy them more efficiently." (p. 233)
"[Weber's term] 'Life-style' justifies any way of life, as does 'value' any opinion." The term 'counterculture' is the same family -- terms that are "draped in the authority lent by their philosophic genealogy," which "provide moral warrant for people to live exactly as they please." (p. 235)
How can we, as Saul Bellow says, rediscover "the magic of the world under the debris of modern ideas?" Perhaps by banning some of the terms described in this and the previous sections -- this would force people articulate the philosophies for which they stand as proxies. (p. 237-238)
"As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum's Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to occupy the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation." (p. 239)
"This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism has culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary?" (p. 240)
"When I was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life." The gothic buildings promised a fulfillment of our spiritual needs in a way that was absent in the mid-west, as well as in America. (p. 243)
And through the course of my career, that promise was met. Though the university has its weaknesses, it has provided me with a full life. "The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties. But such debunking can obscure them, and it has." (p. 245)
"Tocqueville shows how a democratic regime causes a particular intellectual bent which, if not actively corrected, distorts the mind's vision. ... The great democratic danger ... is enslavement to public opinion." (p. 246)
Although democracy is supposed to let every man decide for himself, the reality is that not every man has the time, capacity, or ability to decide everything for themselves. And in the absence of authority or tradition, "the common beliefs of most men are almost always what will determine judgment." (p. 247)
In the European aristocracies or monarchies there were parties representing the voice of the non-ruling groups (the people or the church, respectively), which "provided a place for dissenting opinions to flourish." But in a democracy, there is no nondemocratic party. (p. 248)
"The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside. ... Repugnance at the power of the people, at the fact that the popular taste should rule in all arenas of life, is very rare in a modern democracy." (p. 249)
"The democratic concentration on the useful ... makes theoretical distance seem not only useless but immoral." (p. 250)
"The mere announcement of the rule of reason does not create the conditions for the full exercise of rationality." (p. 251)
"Reason is only one part of the soul's economy. ... The issue is whether the passions are its servitors, or whether it is the handmaiden of the passions." The older, more traditional orders made efforts to guide and protect reason, and this is the purpose that the university must serve in a democracy if we want to preserve the freedom of the mind. (p. 251-252)
In a society prone to intellectual conformity (i.e., a democracy), "reason has become a prejudice for us. ... Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice." (p. 253)
"The deepest intellectual weakness of democracy is its lack of taste of gift for the theoretical life. ... It is necessary that there be an unpopular institution in our midst that sets clarity above well-being or compassion, that resists our temptations and urges, that is free of all snobbishness but has standards." (p. 252)
"The university's task is thus well defined ... to maintain the permanent questions front and center. This it does primarily by preserving -- by keeping alive -- the works of those who best addressed these questions," while remaining open to the new. (p. 252-253)
In an open (democratic) society, it is more important for the university to have "intransigently high standards" than to be too inclusive, because the society is already inclusive. Likewise, it is more important that the university focuses on the heroic, because a democratic society levels. This is not dogmatism, but precisely the opposite: what is necessary to fight dogmatism. (p. 253-254)
"The university must resist the temptation to try to do everything for society. The university is only one interest among many and must always keep its eye on that interest for fear of compromising it in the desire to be more useful, more relevant, more popular." (p. 254)
"The university's task is illustrated by two tendencies of the democratic mind": the tendency to abstractness (i.e., generalization) and the tendency to determinism. (p. 254)
Abstractness because "the very universality of democracy and the sameness of man presupposed by it ... make the mind's eye less sensitive to differences." Concreteness, "the hallmark of philosophy," is needed to counteract this. And determinism because, with unlimited liberty, events "appear to be moved by impersonal forces," over which a democratic man has no control. (p. 255)
"In a democracy where men think they are weak, they are too open to theories that teach that they are weak, which ... have the effect of weakening them further." (p. 256)
The Enlightenment was an attempt to reduce the tension between the existing regime and those who disagreed with the ideas it upheld. In order for this to happen, those in power needed to be convinced that the free pursuit of knowledge is good for society (which is what the Enlightenment thinkers believed). This was daring, because the ultimate aim was "to reconstitute political and intellectual life totally under the supervision of philosophy and science." But it was a huge success, and the free university was at the center of it. (p. 256-260)
"This very special status of what came to be called academic freedom has gradually been eroded, and there hardly remains an awareness of what it means. ... Reason has been knocked off its perch, is less influential and more vulnerable as it joins the crowd of less worthy claims to the attention and support of civil society." (p. 260)
"The authors of The Federalist hoped their scheme of government would result in the preponderance of reason and rational men in the United States. ... [They] did not desire diversity for its own sake," but to prevent the dominance of a single dominant sect. "This requires an atmosphere where the voice of reason is not drowned by the loud voices of the various 'commitments' prevailing in political life." (p. 261)
Knowledge is the goal, and the theoretical disciplines (as well as the practical ones, like engineering and medicine, which provide the tangible value) were united under philosophy in order to serve civil society. But "this project has lost its unity and is in crisis. Reason is unable to establish its unity, to decide what should be in it, to divide up the intellectual labor. It floats without compass or rudder." (p. 261-262)
"Enlightenment was the first philosophically inspired 'movement', ... (Enlightenment is certainly responsible for liberal democracy, as is Marxism for communism). ... What is most profound and interesting about Enlightenment is its radical and self-conscious break with the philosophical tradition in the mode and degree of its political activity." (p. 262-263)
Enlightenment thinkers essentially agreed with the Ancients that the philosophic life was the highest life; what they disagreed about was how philosophy applied to society. The Ancients thought that philosophers alone could become enlightened, and would never be fully appreciated by those who could not escape Plato's proverbial cave. But the Moderns believed that it was possible to enlighten all men. (p. 263-265)
It was the Moderns, not the Ancients, who took Plato's championing of philosopher kings seriously. The Moderns didn't become kings themselves, of course, but their political schemes were put into practice, with philosophy at the helm. (p. 266-267)
"Enlightenment is an attempt to give political status to what Socrates represents," even if Socrates himself would not have believed it wise. (p. 267)
"The gradual but never perfect success of that [attempt] turns the desire to be reasonable into the right to be reasonable, into academic freedom. In the process, political life was rebuilt in ways that have proved intolerable to many statesmen and thinkers, and have gradually led to the reintroduction of religion and the irrational in new and often terrifying guises." (p. 267)
"The history of Western thought and learning can be encapsulated in the fate of Socrates, beginning with Plato defending him, passing through the Enlightenment institutionalizing him, and ending with Nietzsche accusing on him." A history of being cherished "ends with his spiritual execution in the name of culture at the hands of the latest of the great philosophers." (p. 267-268)
"The character of the experience Socrates represents is important because it is the soul of the university." (p. 268)
The fact that Socrates and other philosophers had trouble with the law is "a result of an essential opposition between the two highest claims on a man's loyalty -- his community and his reason." (p. 269)
The philosophic experience contains many elements: satisfaction, pride, confidence, independence, and happiness. But above all else is the recognition that the poetic or mythical accounts of the human experience are false, and that one is thereby liberated from them. (p. 270-271)
"Freedom from myths and their insistence that piety is best permits men to see that knowledge is best, the end for which everything else is done, the only end that without self-contradiction can be said to be final. ... Man as man, regardless of nation, birth or wealth, is capable of this experience. And it is the only thing men surely have spiritually in common." (p. 271)
"Universities came to be where men were inspired by the philosophers' teachings and examples. ... When those examples lost their vitality or where overwhelmed by men who had no experience of them, the universities decayed or were destroyed." (p. 272)
"Prophets, kings and poets are clearly benefactors of mankind at large, providing men with salvation, protection, prosperity, myths, and entertainment. ... Philosophy does no such good. All to the contrary, it is austere and somewhat sad because it takes away many of men's fondest hopes. It certainly does nothing to console men in their sorrows and their unending vulnerability. ... It therefore has an almost impossible public relations problem." (p. 273-274)
"The actual charges against Socrates were corrupting the youth and impiety. ... [He] collided not with culture, society or economy but with the law -- which means with a political fact. The law is coercive." Therefore what philosophers needed to survive was political science, which they founded ... "making the world safer for philosophy." (p. 275)
One can analyze the situation at Socrates' trial, where "there are three groups of men: most do not understand him, are hostile to him, and vote for his condemnation; a [second] group also do not understand Socrates but glimpse something noble in him ... and vote for his acquittal; finally, a very small group knows what he means [but they are too few to have an influence]. Therefore, the whole hope for the political salvation of philosophy rests with the friendliness of the second group, good citizens and ordinarily pious, but somehow open." (p. 276-277)
"And it was to such men, the gentlemen, that philosophy made its rhetorical appeal for almost two thousand years. When they ruled, the climate for philosophy was more or less salubrious. When the people, the demos, ruled, religious fanaticism or vulgar utility made things much less receptive to philosophy. Tyrants might be attracted to philosophers, either out of genuine curiosity or the desire to adorn themselves, but they are the most unreliable of allies." (p. 277)
Socrates believed that popular moral fervor always rules in civic life (indeed, it is what put him to death). Either the philosopher must rule absolutely, or stand aside in political matters. The philosopher "who attempts to influence ... ends up in the power of the would-be influenced." (p. 278)
"The real radicalism of ancient thought is covered over by its moderation in political deed. ... The Ancients had no tenure to protect them and wanted to avoid the prostitution to which those who have to live off their wits are prone." (p. 279)
Philosophers began seeking allies in gentlemen, who had the freedom to "appreciate the beautiful and the useless." In the Ethics, for example, Aristotle essentially describes virtue as what gentlemen already practice. In the Poetics he further bolster's philosophy's position by connecting it to poetry. (p. 279)
And then Plato's dialogues introduce Socrates, but not merely as a teacher; he is a personality -- akin to Jesus or Achilles. Few readers are untouched by at least one part of the dialogues. (p. 281-282)
Philosophy remained always on the sidelines, courting aristocratic allies and relating to all others only "ironically, i.e., with sympathy and from a playful distance," because those others were unenlightened. "Toleration, not right, is the best [the philosopher] can hope for, and he is kept vigilant of the basic fragility of his situation and that of philosophy." (p. 282)
"Thus [the philosophers] appeared to be 'relevant' without forming their minds to the prejudices of the day. This protected them from the necessity or the temptation to conform to what is most powerful. Classical philosophy was amazingly robust and survived changes as great as are imaginable, such as that from paganism to the revealed Biblical religions." (p. 283)
The Enlightenment was a radical departure from this distance between philosopher and politics. If philosophy, as Machiavelli suggested, could be used to leverage the dominant passions of men rather than exhorting that men practice virtue in spite of those passions, it would be able to supplant priest, politician, and poet. (p. 285-286)
This was done in two stages: Descartes introduced the idea that science could promise men satisfaction, and Hobbes promised that the policeman could be made effective in a new political order based on fear of violent death -- such that man could feel safe. (p. 286)
"In fact, rights are nothing other than the fundamental passions, experienced by all men, to which the new science appeals and which it emancipates from the constraints imposed on them by specious reasoning and divine punishment." (p. 287)
"All of this meant that the philosophers switched parties from the aristocrat to the democratic." According to the claim of Modern philosophy, "the people, who were by definition uneducated and the seat of prejudice, could be educated, if the meaning of educated were changed from experience of things beautiful to enlightened self-interest." (p. 288)
"The philosophers, however, had no illusions about democracy. ... They knew they were substituting one kind of misunderstanding for another." But "they took a dare on the peculiar form of reasoning that comes from the natural inclinations. They seem to have been confident that they could benefit from the rational aspect and keep the irrational one from overwhelming them." (p. 289-290)
This wasn't a wager they made without calculation or gravity. "It was not by forgetting about the evil in man that they hoped to better his lot but by giving way to it rather than opposing it, by lowering standards. ... Selfishness was to be the means to the common good, and they never thought that the moral or artistic splendor of past nations was going to be reproduced in the world they were planning." (p. 290)
The Enlightenment thinkers' view of human nature has recently been criticized as shallow. But their belief that reason is the fulfilment of humanity is not obviously any less substantial than the rival religious or poetic claims. ("Locke [only] appears superficial because he was not a snob.") (p. 292-293)
Jonathan Swift "saw what was intended and spoke up against it in the name of the Ancients and of poetry. Gulliver's Travels is to early modern philosophy what Aristophanes' The Clouds was to early ancient philosophy." (p. 293)
Through Gulliver's visits to fictitious islands, Swift shows how absurd and tyrannical he believes a regime based on science would be, detached as it necessarily would be from the human perspective. This is exemplified by the fact that the scientists on the islands "cannot understand poetry, and hence, in Gulliver's view, their science cannot be a science of man." (p. 294-296)
Some of Swift's criticisms were prescient, though natural science and the human sciences encountered different fates. (Natural science has found power even within the Soviet Union, though the same isn't true of History or Political Science.) (p. 297)
Natural science is morally neutral and "increases man's power without increasing his virtue, hence increasing his power to do both good and evil. ... Some people assert that we have to reinvent politics in order to meet the danger. Swift tells us that politics was already reinvented by the founders of Enlightenment, and that is the problem." (p. 297-298)
"Science has broken off from the self-consciousness about science that was the core of ancient science. This loss of self-consciousness is somehow connected with the banishment of poetry." (p. 298)
"Here Rousseau bursts on the scene, just at the moment of Enlightenment's victory. ... It is, Rousseau argues, more than doubtful that science produces happiness." And his impact was far-reaching. After Rousseau, "the fringe bohemian, the sentimentalist, the artist became at least as much the teacher and the model as the scientist." (p. 298-299)
This inspired Kant to overhaul the Enlightenment's project, "to make coherent the relationship between theory and practice, reason and morality, science and poetry. ... Rousseau had pointed out that the ancient tension between the thinker and society, supposedly resolved by Enlightenment, had resurfaced in new and very dangerous ways. Kant tried again to resolve it. ... What he did was to demonstrate that nature, as understood by natural science, does not comprehend the whole of things. There are other realms, not grasped or graspable by natural science, which are real and leave a place for the reality of the experience of humanity [and importantly, freedom]. Reason does not have to be abandoned to defend humanity." (p. 299-300)
The Kantian framework became the basis of (first) the German universities and (later) the rest of Western universities, and allowed for great progress in the natural and human sciences. (p. 300-301)
But "there was a haunting doubt as to the reality of the realm of freedom. ... At what point does the natural man stop and the free begin?. ... Can one plausibly postulate a noumenal freedom, the expressions of which are predictable in the phenomenal field?" Amid these doubts, "natural science continued to seem substantial, while romanticism and idealism inhabited imaginary cities, sublime hopes but little more." (p. 301-302)
Philosophy was pushed aside towards the humanities, no longer the ruler in the university. "The natural scientist was both the image of the knower and the public benefactor; the humanist, [merely] a professor." (p. 302)
"The problem of the knower in the perspective of the modern understanding was formulated over and over again" by Goethe in Faust. "The scholar Faust, meditating in his cell, translates the first line of the Gospel According to John, 'In the beginning was the word (logos)'; then, dissatisfied with the description he says 'the feeling', which also does not quite do; finally and definitively he chooses to reinterpret it as 'the deed'. Action has primacy over contemplation, deed over speech." (p. 302-303)
"The theoretical life is groundless because the first thing is not the intelligible order but the chaos open to creativity. There can be no contemplation where there is nothing to see. ... If deeds are the most important thing, then the scholar is by definition inferior to the doer." (p. 303)
The Ancient philosophers have always been a touchstone for Western thought when it seems to have lost its way. Rousseau was familiar with antiquity and urged his readers to make reference to it. But he cared more about its cultures and less so about its philosophers, who were treated like relics. (p. 304-305)
"Men of the Enlightenment looked down on Greek thinkers because they thought them wrong. Romantics respected them because their truth or falsity became a matter of indifference." (p. 306)
"Here is where Nietzsche enters, arguing with unparalleled clarity and vigor that if we take 'historical consciousness' seriously, there cannot be objectivity. ... The discovery of culture as the element in which man becomes himself produces an imperative: Build and sustain culture. This the scholar cannot do. ... Greek scholarship retired to the universities, where it was again a dead piece of learning, unable itself to inspire or produce a compelling vision that could transform men. ... The Greek splendor, which had formed such heroic figures just a half-century earlier, became a mystery." (p. 307)
Nietzsche, who understood this and thoroughly appreciated that splendor, blamed philosophy; in fact, he attacked Socrates. "Nietzsche's indictment of Socrates is that his rationalism, his utilitarianism, subverted and explained away that great stupidity which is noble instinct." (p. 307-308)
According to Nietzsche, "the scholar cannot understand the will to power, not a cause recognized by science, which made Alexander different from others, because the scholar neither has it nor does his method permit him to have it or see it. The scholar could never conquer the mind of man." (p. 309)
In the German universities, "artists received new license. ... Nietzsche's war on the university led in two directions -- either to an abandonment of the university by serious men, or to its reform to make it play a role in the creation of culture." (p. 309)
"But it was Heidegger ... for whom the study of Greek philosophy became truly central." He too, "had cast the most radical doubt on the whole enterprise of modern philosophy and science." And he looked to the pre-Socratics for an answer, having agreed with Nietzsche that Socrates was wrong. (p. 309-310)
But "perhaps they did not take seriously enough the changes wrought by the modern rationalists and hence the possibility that the Socratic way might have avoided the modern impasse." (p. 310)
Nietzsche introduced the idea that Socrates corrupted Plato and Aristotle; they did not pervert him. "We did not progress from Socrates, but he marked the beginning of the decline. Reason itself is rejected by philosophy itself. Thus the common thread of the whole tradition has been broken, and with it the raison d'etre of the university as we know it." (p. 311)
"Thus it was no accident that Heidegger came forward just after Hitler's accession to power to address the university community in Freiburg as the new rector, and urged commitment to [Nazism]. ... That he did so was not a result of his political innocence but a corollary of his critique of rationalism. That is why I have entitled this section 'From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede.'" Heidegger did precisely the opposite of Socrates: he didn't distance philosophy from politics; he put both the university and philosophy in the service of German culture. (p. 311)
"If I am right in believing that Heidegger's teachings are the most powerful intellectual force in our times, then the crisis of the German university, which everyone saw, is the crisis of the university everywhere. ... Our present educational problems cannot seriously be attributed to bad administrators, weakness of will, lack of discipline, lack of money, insufficient attention to the three R's, or any of the other common explanations. ... All these things are the result of a deeper lack of belief in the university's vocation. One cannot say that we must defend academic freedom when there are grave doubts about the principles underlying academic freedom. ... In order to find out why we have fallen on such hard times, we must recognize that the foundations of the university have become extremely doubtful to the highest intelligences. ... What happened to the universities in Germany in the thirties is what has happened and is happening everywhere. The essence of it all is not social, political, psychological or economic, but philosophic. And, for those who wish to see, contemplation of Socrates is our most urgent task. This is properly an academic task." (p. 312)
The university's concession to the student protests of the late 1960s was the inevitable product of the university consciously undermining the value of what was taught "while turning over the decision about value to the folk, the Zeitgeist, the relevant" -- and then feeling guilty that "its distance from the world made it immoral." This is exactly what happened in the German university in the 1930s, albeit for causes on the opposite end of the political spectrum (though, as I have argued, those opposite causes were informed by the same German ideas). (p. 313-314)
This isn't surprising, considering that hardly anyone in the university saw its distance from the world as necessary (as did Socrates). In the absence of no other interest worth defending, the demands of social injustice drew professors' attentions. (p. 314)
"The fact that the universities are no longer in convulsions does not mean that they have regained their health. As in Germany, the value crisis in philosophy made the university prey to whatever intense passion moved the masses." (p. 314)
Students could see through the rhetoric and knew that their teachers didn't believe in the value of academic freedom, so they also knew there would be no resistance to their demands. (p. 315)
No university administrator who knew or cared what a university is would have acquiesced to student threats and demands; yet even those who criticized the 1930s German restrictions on academic freedom were weak, at best, in their response. (p. 317)
Students and some professors wanted to radicalize and politicize the university. And the non-radical professors, lacking a true belief in (and in some cases, even an understanding of) the abstract ideals they professed, collapsed under the pressure. (p. 319)
As a result, the university was dragged more firmly into public opinion, and academic rigor waned due to the impoverishment of alternative perspectives. "Nothing that was not known to or experienced by those who constitute the enormous majority -- which is ultimately the only authority in America -- had any reality." (p. 319)
The core curriculum -- and along with it, the sense that the university should have a vision of what an educated person is -- has progressively been eroded. And "it will not be so easy to recover the knowledge of philosophy, history and literature that was trashed," because the structures that kept them alive (the church, aristocracy, the university) don't exist the way they used to in Europe. (p. 320-321)
Academics sometimes talk of the sixties as a time of academic vitality -- this couldn't be more wrong. "The sixties were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts." (p. 322)
"The fifties were one of the great periods of the American university," in part because we, since 1933, had been importing some of the best thinkers in Europe. We had largely cut ties and become academically independent of the contemporary European university. We had a lot to lose in the sixties. (p. 322-323)
Another myth "is that McCarthyism had an extremely negative impact on the universities. Actually the McCarthy period was the last time the university had any sense of community, defined by a common enemy. ... Academic freedom had for that last moment more than abstract meaning ... [and] there was a heightened awareness of the university's special status as a preserve against public opinion." (p. 324)
"A final ... mythology of the sixties is the alleged superior moral 'concern' of the students." Rather, it was histrionic fervor in the service of old (and fading) moral reasoning. "Indignation or rage [rather than the older notions of duty, honesty, or humility] was the vivid passion characterizing those in the grip of the new moral experience, [passions that are] most inimical to reason and hence to the university." (p. 325-327)
It was also difficult to take the moral indignation seriously when the indignant were having so much fun: drugs, sex, loosened academic requirements, draft avoidance, etc. The students themselves knew it was playacting, but this was easily ignored because they could see their supposed revolution on television -- that made it real. (p. 328-329)
"A final note about an aspect of the students' motivation that has not received sufficient attention: In addition to the desire to live as they pleased, a covert elitism was at work among them. A permanent feature of democracy, always and everywhere, is a tendency to suppress the claims of any kind of superiority, ... particularly with respect to ruling." (p. 329)
Democracy intentionally thwarts political ambitions, but it cannot extinguish them. These students, although from the most elite schools, were faced with stiff competition and "the prospect of having to work their way up in the dreary fashion of such contemptible persons as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon." But the universities, like a polis, could be seized, and the students could end up on the covers of magazines. "How irresistible it all was, an elite shortcut to political influence." Yet it was an influence that had neither been earned nor merited. (p. 330-332)
The student protests undoubtedly contributed something to the ultimate good of the civil rights movement, but that contribution was probably marginal, and it was built on an intellectual capital that they wasted. Afterwards, "they returned to the university, declared it bankrupt and thereby bankrupted it. ... It is very doubtful whether there is a teaching about justice within [the university] now. ... The very thing the sixties students prided themselves on was one of their premier victims." (p. 333-335)
The importance of a university education cannot be underestimated, because in four short years, a student "must learn that there is a great world beyond the little one he knows, experience the exhilaration of it and digest enough of it to sustain himself in the intellectual deserts he is destined to traverse." His ability to fulfil his potential in life depends on it. (p. 336)
Yet the university is strikingly unable to assist the student in this endeavor. The student is overwhelmed by a "democracy of the disciplines" to choose from, but the university offers no unified vision of what it means to educated -- nor even a set of competing visions -- in order to guide this choice. So instead, students give up on liberal education and opt instead for career training (to which the liberal arts can even be seen as an impediment), which at least has a clear objective. (p. 336-339)
"[The] undecided student is an embarrassment to most universities, because he seems to be saying, 'I am a whole human being. Help me to form myself in my wholeness and let me develop my real potential,' and he is the one to whom they have nothing to say." (p. 339)
The reality -- kept secret by the universities -- is that, if the focus is career preparation, they don't have enough of substance to fill most four-year programs. So they fill them instead with study abroad options, individualized majors, and niche or watered-down courses. (p. 340-341)
"For a time the great moral consciousness alleged to have been fostered in students by the great universities, especially their vocation as gladiators who fight war and racism, seemed to fulfill the demands of the collective university conscience." (p. 341)
Universities are somewhat like churches in that "nobody is quite certain of what [they] are supposed to do anymore, but they do have some kind of role either responding to a real human need or as the vestige of what was once a need, and they invite the exploitation of quacks, adventurers, cranks and fanatics. But they also solicit the warmest and most valiant efforts of persons of peculiar gravity and depth." (p. 342)
In an attempt to convey an image of purpose, in the eighties universities are now trying to replace some of the core requirements removed during the sixties -- a much more difficult task than the removal. These efforts produce curriculums that are not comprehensive, "do not point beyond themselves and do not provide the student with independent means to pursue permanent questions independently. ... They tend to be bits of this and that." (p. 342-343)
These courses are usually the introductory classed in each discipline and might be valuable to students if they use the best professors. "But they rarely do, and they are too cut off from the top, from what the various faculties see as their real business [the advanced classes]. ... The intellectual problems at the top cannot be resolved administratively at the bottom." (p. 343-344)
"The only serious solution is the one that is almost universally rejected: the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classic texts, just reading them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them." (p. 344)
"None of the three great parts of the contemporary university is enthusiastic about the Great Books." The natural sciences are benevolent to them as long as their adoption doesn't steal their students or resources, but otherwise they are indifferent; the social scientists are hostile because the classic texts would displace them and imply that their efforts to become truly scientific are empty; and the humanities are divided, though mostly they are (because they are specialists) either critical or jealous of the way the Great Books are taught. (p. 345-346)
"In the aftermath of the [sixties student protests] at Cornell, and I had a chance to learn something about the articulation of the university as it decomposed." No discipline reacted well, but various disciplines reacted in characteristic ways. (p. 347)
"The professional schools -- engineering, home economics, industrial-labor relations and agriculture -- simply went home and closed the shutters. ... They just did not want trouble and did not feel it was their fight." (p. 347)
"The natural scientists were above the battle, an island unto themselves, and did not feel threatened. ... They were able to avoid the fury by distancing themselves from certain unpopular applications of their knowledge, by insulting the government which supported them, and by declaring themselves for peace and social justice." (p. 347-348)
"They adopted the rhetoric of anti-elitism, antisexism and antiracism, and quietly resisted doing anything about the issues in their own domain. They passed the buck to the social scientists and the humanists, who proved more accommodating and could be more easily bullied." (p. 351)
The humanities represented the core of support for the revolution -- the reasons for which "are obvious and constitute the theme of this book." (p. 351-352)
"The professors of humanities are in an impossible situation. ... Their realm is the always and the contemplative, in a setting that demands only the here and now and the active. The justice in which they believe is egalitarian, and they are the agents of the rare, the refined and the superior." Their offerings were devaluing quickly, so they "jumped on the fastest, most streamlined express to the future." (p. 353)
"This left the social sciences as the battleground, both the point of attack and the only place where any kind of stand was made." Everyone with a program fought to make the social sciences report the facts that fit their agenda. "In particular, the crimes of elitism, sexism and racism were to be exorcised from social science, which was to be used as a tool to fight them and a fourth cardinal sin, anticommunism. ... Discussion of the underlying issue, equality itself, had long been banished from the scene." (p. 353-355)
"As in the Middle Ages ... the major student activity in social science was to identify heretics. ... It became almost impossible to question the radical orthodoxy without risking vilification, classroom disruption, loss of the confidence and respect necessary for teaching, and the hostility of colleagues. Racist and sexist were, and are, very ugly labels -- the equivalents of atheist or communist in other days with other prevailing prejudices -- which can be pinned on persons promiscuously and which, once attached, are almost impossible to cast off. Nothing could be said with impunity. Such an atmosphere made detached, dispassionate study impossible." (p. 355)
"This suited many social scientists, but a new, tougher strain emerged out of the struggle. Some saw that their objectivity was threatened, and ... the pressure revived an old liberalism and awareness of the importance of academic freedom. Pride and self-respect, unwillingness to give way before menace and insult, asserted themselves. These social scientists knew that all parties in a democracy are jeopardized when passion can sweep the facts before it. ... Such social scientists were not necessarily all of the same personal political persuasion. Their fellow feeling consisted in mutual respect for the motives of colleagues with whom they did not always agree but from whose disagreement they might profit, and in attachment to the institutions that protected their research. At Cornell one found social scientists of left, right and center -- on the admittedly narrow spectrum that prevails in the American university -- joining together to protest the outrage against academic freedom and against their colleagues that took place there and continues in more or less subtle forms everywhere. ... It was inspiring to be momentarily with a band of scholars who were really willing to make a sacrifice for their love of truth and their studies, to discover that the pieties could be more than pieties, to sense community founded on conviction." (p. 355-356)
"How are they today, the big three that rule the academic roost and determine what is knowledge? Natural science is doing just fine. Living alone, but happily, running along like a well-wound clock, successful and useful as ever. ... But where natural science ends, trouble begins. ... And it ends at the part or aspect of man that is not body." (p. 356)
The social sciences and humanities both try to treat this aspect of man; but they try to do so very differently. "The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not." (p. 357)
The social sciences, following in the tradition of Locke, treat man as predictive (deterministic) and without a soul; while the humanities, following in the tradition of Rousseau, act as if he is not animal and does not have a body. Neither discipline fully succeeds. (p. 357-358)
"Man is the problem, and we live with various stratagems for not facing it. The strange relations between the three divisions of knowledge in the present university tell us all about it." (p. 359)
"To look at social science first, it might seem that it at least has a general outline of its field and a possible systematic ordering of its parts," but the appearance is deceiving, because any of the disciplines can be seen as a subsidiary of any of the others. Furthermore, there are internal disputes over the degree to which the scientific method can or should be applied in the discipline. (p. 359-360)
What one sees today are economics and cultural anthropology self-sufficiently and confidently forming the poles of the social sciences, with Locke and Rousseau as their respective patrons, and political science and sociology -- quite heterogenous, not to say chaotic in their contents -- strung between the two poles. (p. 361-362)
"Economists teach that the market is the fundamental social phenomenon, and its culmination is money. Anthropologists teach that culture is the fundamental social phenomenon, and its culmination is the sacred. Such is the confrontation -- man the producer of consumption goods vs. man the producer of culture, the maximizing animal vs. the reverent one. ... The disciplines simply inhabit different worlds." (p. 362-363)
"Political science resembles a rather haphazard bazaar with shops kept by a mixed population. This has something to do with its hybrid nature and its dual origins in antiquity and modernity." (p. 365)
It has recently attempted to delegate some of its domain to other disciplines, like economics, so they can be treated scientifically. But the delegated parts are incapable of describing man in any state where he acts unpredictably -- like in war. So political science remains more comprehensive. (p. 363-364)
"Obviously, then, the glory days of social science from the point of view of liberal education are over. Gone is the time when ... there was the expectation of a universal theory of man that would unite the university and contribute to progress, harnessing Europe's intellectual depth and heritage with [American] vitality ... [a time when], to young people, the sociologists and psychologists who trod the university's grounds could look like heroes of the life of the mind. They were initiated into the mysteries and might help us to become initiates too." (p. 367-368)
"Such an atmosphere as surrounded social science in the forties was obviously of ambiguous value for both students and professors. But something akin to it is necessary if American students are to be attracted to the idea of liberal education and the awareness that the university will cause them to discover new faculties in themselves and reveal another level of existence that had been hidden from them." (p. 368)
"The hopes for a unity of social science have faded, and it cannot present a common fron. ... Gone is the cosmic intention of placing man in the universe. ... The social sciences have become an island in the university floating alongside the other two islands, full of significant information and hiding treasures of great questions that could be mined but are not. ... The students are aware of this and do not turn to the social sciences in general for the experience of conversion [or to understand] the meaning of life." (p. 368-369)
The establishment of MBA programs has led to an explosion of enrollments in economics, the pre-business major. This has warped students' perception of the purpose and relative weight of social sciences. (p. 370-371)
"The third island of the university is the almost submerged old Atlantis, the humanities. In it there is no semblance of order. ... It is somehow the repair of man or of humanity, the place to go to find ourselves now that everyone else has given up." (p. 371)
"The humanities are the repository for all of the classics [many of which] claimed to be about the order of the whole of nature and man's place in it, to legislate for that whole and to tell the truth about it. If such claims are denied, these writers and their books cannot be read seriously." (p. 372)
"The kinds of questions children ask: Is there a God? Is there freedom? Is there punishment for evil deeds? ... were once also the questions addressed by science and philosophy. But now the grownups are too busy at work [on science], and the children are left in a day-care center called the humanities." Students whose are naturally inclined to philosophy are very quickly rebuffed by the fact that their teachers do not want or are unable to respond to their needs. (p. 372-373)
The humanities have suffered more than other parts of the university because they (unlike the natural sciences) are not able to confidently assert that they are pursuing the important truth. "The contents of the classic books have become particularly difficult to defend in modern times, and the professors who now teach them do not care to defend them. ... [They] have long been desperate to make their subjects accord with modernity instead of a challenge to it." (p. 373-375)
"Fine art and music are, of course, in large measure independent of the meanings of books," and the languages, though they read books, do so only under the guidance of professors of language -- for whom the content of the books is secondary to teaching the language itself. (p. 375-376)
"Most interesting of all, lost amidst this collection of disciplines, modestly sits philosophy. It has been dethroned by political and theoretical democracy, bereft of the passion or the capacity to rule. Its story defines in itself our whole problem." (p. 377)
Philosophy, in spite of its history, is still possible. It "was not ever a very powerful presence in universities. ... and probably could disappear without being much noticed. ... In some places existentialism and phenomenology have gained a foothold. ... But, in sum, the philosophic landscape is largely bleak." (p. 378)
"All of the language catalogued in Part Two was produced by philosophy ... [but] in America its antecedents remain unknown. ... [this] means that the philosophic content of our language and lives does not direct us to philosophy. This is the real difference between the Continent and us." (p. 379)
Comparative literature, started to solve the division of literature on the basis of the language in which it was written, has largely fallen into the hands of Deconstructionism, such that there is no text anymore, only interpretation. "Thus ... the knowledge of what these texts have to tell us, is turned over to the subjective, creative selves of these interpreters, who say that there is both no text and no reality to which the texts refer." (p. 379)
"This fad will pass ... but it appeals to our worst instincts and shows where our temptations lie." (p. 379-380)
"These are the shadows cast by the peaks of the university over the entering undergraduate. ... The university's evident lack of wholeness in an enterprise that clearly demands it cannot help troubling some of its members. The questions are all there. They only need to be addressed continuously and seriously for liberal learning to exist; for it does not consist so much in answers as in the permanent dialogue. ... One cannot and should not hope for a general reform. The hope is that the embers do not die out." (p. 380)
"What is essential about ... [philosophical enquiry] is reproducible in almost all times and places. [Any student] and his friends can think together. It requires much thought to learn that this thinking might be what it is all for. That's where we are beginning to fail. But it is right under our noses, improbable but always present." (p. 381)
"The real community of man ... is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, in principle, of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good. Their common concern for the good linked them; their disagreement about it proved they needed one another to understand it. They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found. The other kinds of relatedness are only imperfect reflections of this one." (p. 381)
"This is the meaning of the riddle of the improbable philosopher-kings. They have a true community that is exemplary for all other communities." (p. 382)
"This age is not utterly insalubrious for philosophy, [but] we need philosophy more than ever. ... I still believe that universities, rightly understood, are where community and friendship can exist in our times. ... [But] one should never forget that Socrates was not a professor, that he was put to death, and that the love of wisdom survived, partly because of his individual example. This is what really counts, and we must remember it in order to know how to defend the university." (p. 382)
"This is the American moment in world history, the one for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved upon our universities. ... The gravity of our given task is great, and it is very much in doubt how the future will judge our stewardship." (p. 382)
THE END