The Closing of the American Mind: A Summary

The Clean Slate

• I used to believe that American students came to the university with a “clean slate,” that is, without prior education about their deeper selves or the world beyond their superficial experience. And although this was ostensibly a pity since they lack much of the knowledge that Europeans students receive in their youth, it was also a strength because it afforded them the excitement of discovering the depths of the western tradition as if it was new, rather than being so used to it from childhood that they were bored of it. p. 47-61

• I also believed that the ability of American students to learn in spite of that lack was a testament to the truth of the democratic ideal, that education was accessible to anyone, irrespective of the culture into which they were born. p. 47-61

• But I’ve begun to see that (a) Americans had more of a shared culture than I used to believe, and (b) that learning is more contingent on a shared culture than I thought. The latter is supported by the fact that learning has declined as our culture decays—just as Nietzsche said was happening. p. 47-61

• So students today come to the university with less than they did when I started my career. “There is less soil in which university teaching can take root.” p. 47-61

Books

• Literature is critical because it presents to young people the range of possibilities of human types—both good and bad. Yet students are less and less exposed to literature, and therefore have only movies (which are too caught in the present moment to be of true value) or pop psychology to tell them what people are really like and what they themselves can aspire to. p. 62-67

Music

• Young people today are absolutely addicted to music. They listen to it constantly, and they are indignant at Plato’s scheme (in The Republic) to ban music and thereby rob them of something to which they are so attached. The enlightenment thinkers ignored music completely, while “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. 68-79

• “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 deal letter.” p. 79

Relationships

Self-Centeredness

• “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. 82-88

Equality

• Students today have a genuine and deep belief in equality and the ability of anyone to advance themselves in society; but this says as much about the lack of a vision of a high society as it does about their lack of prejudice. p. 88-91

Race

• Relationships between blacks and whites have proved far more complicated than hoped in the wake of the civil rights movement, which makes students uncomfortable—it violates their ideals of equality. Black students who want to focus on learning cannot do so without being judged negatively for forsaking their black identity. p. 91-96

Sex

• The sexual revolution was pervasive but anticlimactic—launched, in some ways, by “the recognition that sexual passion is no longer dangerous in us.” Its ideals of freedom (liberation) and equality (feminism) are inherently at odds with each other. p. 97-104

• Sexual restrictions of every kind have almost completely evaporated, and students today are entirely used to the lack of sanctity or inhibitions surrounding sex. The disappearance of sexual differentiation anywhere outside the bedroom has been similarly widespread. p. 105-107

• Students can no longer identify with the old literature that touches on sex or gender. p. 108

Separateness

• Modern political philosophy prioritized freedom over attachment, individualism over collectivism, rights over duty—and this priority permeates into all the details of life. p. 109-113

• Much of the trend towards individualism has been related to the decay of the family, which was the one structure that curtailed the selfishness of men. Yet it is clear in which direction we are going with respect to sex and the family. p. 113-117

• “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 solitaires.” p. 118

Divorce

• “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

Love

• Young people are excessively sensible about love. They would never let themselves be drawn into a relationship by “mere” passion. With the liberalization of sex and the abandonment of gender roles, young people are confused about how to navigate romantic relationships. p. 122-129

• “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

Eros

• “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

• 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 German Connection

• The German philosophy of 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.” It has sunk so far into the American consciousness that its vocabulary has become colloquial: we now talk about ‘charisma,’ ‘life-style,’ ‘commitment,’ ‘identity,’ etc. p. 141-147

• “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 [i.e. egalitarianism and democracy].” p. 152-153

• Yet it has been imported nonetheless, and given that we lack the education to really understand it, we’ve watered it down to a vague feeling: “American nihilism is a mood…. It is nihilism without the abyss.” p. 154-155

• Without an understanding of the history of those ideas, we are left only with the German interpretation of them—which is only one interpretation, and an apparently dangerous one. p. 156

• The next four sections help understand the genesis of those ideas. p. 156

Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature

• 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. p. 157-161

• 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

• 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

• 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

The Self

• Locke and Montesquieu believed that one’s own good was identical with the common good. But this view is naïve; “Rousseau knew much better.” 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..174-176

• “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

Creativity

• Following Rousseau and our dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment, we have elevated creativity above reason as the ultimate virtue, and the artist has replaced the philosopher and scientist as the most admired human type. p. 180

• Those who praise creativity don’t realize that it is the result of Romantic thought absorbed into democratic public opinion. p. 181-182

• 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.” p. 183

Culture

• Culture is everything that allows man to live in society in spite of his desires, which pull him in uncivil directions. p. 185

• “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 Rousseau, who 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

• 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. p. 191-192

Values

• 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

• 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. 195

• 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

• “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

• 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 “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. p. 199-200

• 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

• The vehicle for Nietzsche’s ideas was the sociologist Weber, who introduced the idea of the “Protestant Ethic” (which later became “work ethic”). Since values weren’t 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. Oddly, “dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts.” p. 209-211

• This popularized the idea of “charisma,” which Weber believed was essential and more important than competence in true leadership. p. 211-212

• “Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler…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

• “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 Nietzscheanization of the Left and Vice Versa

• “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

• “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

Our Ignorance

• 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.” p. 228

• Nietzsche sought to restore conflict, but Americans have misinterpreted him as promoting conflict-resolution. p. 228

• 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

• Neither Nietzsche nor Freud would never have approved of sexual liberation, but both (with input from Marx) have been appropriated to support the sexual revolution. p. 232-233

• “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. 235

• Generally speaking, the philosophical weight of modern ideas has been used to “provide moral warrant for people to live exactly as they please.” p. 235

• It is a difficult task to recover the original meaning of these ideas; but that is the critical task if we are to avoid allowing them to enslave us. p. 237

From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede

Tocqueville on Democratic Intellectual Life

• As Tocqueville shows, “the great democratic danger…is enslavement to public opinion” because every man does not have the time or ability to think through every issue for themselves. In the absence of authority or tradition, “the common beliefs of most men are almost always what will determine judgment.” p. 246-247

• “The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.” p. 249

• “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. 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 Relation Between Thought and Civil Society

• The Enlightenment was an attempt “to reconstitute political and intellectual life totally under the supervision of philosophy and science.” p. 256-260

• 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 [The Enlightenment] 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

• 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. 262

• “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 Philosophic Experience

• “The character of the experience Socrates represents is important because it is the soul of the university.” p. 268

• The philosophic experience contains many elements: satisfaction, pride, confidence, independence, and happiness. But above all else is the liberation from the poetic and the mythical. This experience “is the only thing men surely have spiritually in common.” p. 270-271

• Philosophy does not provide a people with safety, salvation, or entertainment. “It is austere and somewhat sad because it takes away many of men’s fondest hopes…. It therefore has an almost impossible public relations problem.” p. 273-274

• Socrates was put to death because he collided with the law; he was convicted of corrupting the youth and impiety. This collision is typical for philosophers and is the “result of an essential opposition between the two highest claims on a man’s loyalty—his community and his reason.” p. 275

• Therefore, in order to survive, philosophers needed to win the favor of the law, of politics. And from the political sidelines, for almost two thousand years, they did this by courting the favor of “gentlemen”—aristocrats who had influence and “do not understand Socrates but glimpse something noble in him.” p. 276-277

• 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…. 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. 279-283

The Enlightenment Transformation

• The Enlightenment was a radical departure from this distance between philosopher and politics. p. 285-286

• 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.” 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…[and] seem to have been confident that they could benefit from the rational aspect and keep the irrational one from overwhelming them.” p. 292-293

• “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. 290-293

Swift’s Doubts

• 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

• 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

Rousseau’s Radicalization and the German University

• Rousseau, too, criticized the Enlightenment’s assumptions. “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. 298-300

• The Kantian framework became the basis of (first) the German universities and (later) the rest of Western universities, but doubts persisted, and philosophy was relegated to the humanities, “no longer ruler in the university.” p. 300-301

• “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.” Action superseded truth. p. 302-303

• This is where Nietzsche entered, arguing that culture and philosophy cannot coexist, so culture must replace philosophy. p. 307

• Nietzsche attacked Socrates because his rationalism subverted and explained away noble instinct. p. 307-308

• 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

• Heidegger too, “had cast the most radical doubt on the whole enterprise of modern philosophy and science.” p. 309-310

• But “perhaps [Nietzsche and Heidegger] 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

• “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 Sixties

• The student protests that took place during the 1960s were the direct result of the philosophical trends that I have just described. They replicate almost 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

• Students and some professors wanted to radicalize and politicize the university. And university administrators, lacking a true belief in (and in some cases, even an understanding of) the abstract ideals they professed, collapsed under the pressure. The university was dragged further into politics and academic rigor waned. p. 314-319

• That the sixties were a time of academic vitality, that McCarthyism had a negative impact on the universities, and that students had a higher moral concern are all myths; their opposites are closer to the truth. p. 322-327

• Much of the students’ motivation for involvement in the protests was the promise of notoriety, which is otherwise difficult to attain in a democratic society. p. 329-330

• Ultimately the 1960s accomplished very little and at great expense to the integrity of the universities. p. 333-335

The Student and The University

Liberal Education

• A student’s ability to fulfil his life’s potential depends on the quality of his university education, yet the university is strikingly unable to guide the student in this endeavor; it has no vision of what an educated person should know. p. 336-341

• Efforts to establish a core curriculum have crept back in since the 1960s, but they are ineffective. p. 342-343

• Despite its shortcomings, “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

• Yet, for different reasons, “none of the three great parts of the contemporary university is enthusiastic about the Great Books.” p. 345-346

The Decomposition of the University

• “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. p. 347

• The professional schools avoided the turmoil completely. p. 347

• The natural sciences paid lip service to the protests but ultimately remained unengaged. p. 347-351

• 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…. 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…. 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

The Disciplines

• “How are they today, the big three [the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities] that rule the academic roost and determine what is knowledge? Natural science is doing just fine…running along like a well-wound clock…. 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.” Neither discipline fully succeeds in describing man. p. 357-358

• The social sciences give an impression of order but internally they are conflicted over which takes precedence and how far the scientific method should be applied. 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

• Economics and anthropology have very different views of man; they “inhabit different worlds” p. 362-363

• Gone are the days when the social sciences held promise of providing a universal theory of man. “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. 367-369

• “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 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.” p. 372-373

• “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

• Historicism and Deconstructionism turn students away from anything the old texts had to tell us. p. 377-379

• “This fad will pass…but it appeals to our worst instincts and shows where our temptations lie.” p. 380

Conclusion

• “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…. 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…. 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…. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good…. 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.” 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

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