No, actually I want to apologize for sounding ungracious! When I added that little pronunciation key.

Your “Ike and Tina” heading just reminded me of how many people might be tempted to say “Ike” instead of “Eekay”…for the name of the Greek ways of knowing, including all the epistemes and technes, based on the suffix -ike added to the name of the kind of thing (arithmetike, grammatike, poietike, rhetorike, mousike, etc — for those who haven’t a clue what we are talking about….)

I love the fact that readers are talking to each other here, btw. I’ll log in later with my own 2 cents worth….

You suggested that “chess knowledge fits much more into the humanities”, which is generally in line with the point I was trying to make. As I understand it, Janet has, as I understand it, the thesis that in modern (as opposed to postmodern) thought that science (in partiuclar physics) has a kind of a “lock” on what consititutes a valid “way of knowing”, and scientific knowledge is seen as the only legitimate knowledge. I was using chess as a kind of counter-example, which is both a different kind of knowledge than strict scientific knowlge, but is also accepted as a legitimate form of knowledge (in it’s own field, or course).

I was not trying to be quite as harsh with the humanities as your response seems to have me being. I was trying to say that humanities – at least to those of the more scientific bent – do not alway make it clear what they are studying. My thesis is that the conflict between humanities and sciences is more of one of competing – and conflicting – claims rather than of any per se rejection of “ways of knowing”, and perhaps at least occasionally the conflict may be more apparent than real in that the two are really looking at two different parts of the phenomena under investigation.

Science, at least the natural sciences, are based to their very roots, both philosophically and methodolgically, on the absence of final causes in the natural world. Rain may water the crops, but that is not the teleological end of rain, any more that eroding mountains, something rain also does, is its teleological end. A carbon atom has no final cause. Evolutionarily, a birds wing certainly allows the bird to fly, but is not the final end of the wing; the wing, as lacking any “true” final cause (Searle uses the word “function” here), is free to change its function, as with the penguin, to a flipper for swimming.

Of course, using science (engineering) is putting the natural laws in service to ends which we as people provide, and thus does have some aspect final causes – a bridge does have the end (function) of spanning a river (although natural bridge, in VA, does not – it just is).

I am not sure how we would fit such teleology into natural science. As for Aristotles other three causes, I don’t see how they have proven to be very useful, at least in science, so they are in that sense obsolete, in that they do not play a role in the modern scientific understanding of the world.

~Rick~

In your chess example, chess can perhaps provide loose metaphors to science, but nobody expects chess to agree with science because ideas about chess are describing something very different. All of the physical sciences, on the other hand, need to agree because they are essentially describing the same object–the natural world. Each describes different facets, but it would be impossible to have biology without having chemistry, and both of these would be impossible without physics.

Chess offers an interesting model from a scientific perspective in that it is a closed system with a variety of specific rules governing all motions, but ultimately the knowledge of chess operates on a very different level from science. Science aims at material causes and and formal causes, which are hardly issues at all in chess. The “form” is set in the board and the rules, and the real knowledge of a chess master is in the final cause and the efficient cause. A person playing chess comes to the board with a specific aim, to defeat the opponent’s king by putting the king in checkmate, but science is generally uninterested in final causes, which is what makes chess strategy irrelevant as a scientific knowledge.

In this aspect, then, chess knowledge fits much more into the humanities.

Of course, you criticize the humanities for failing to articulate exactly what they profess to be studying and, implicitly, for lacking the universal agreement of science (or at least the sense that universal agreement is a goal that can be striven toward). Indeed, the postmodern humanities have no clear sense of what they claim to be studying, and they are becoming less and less relevant in the public sphere, because there is no universal purpose explicitly understood within the humanities. The humanities, along with society more broadly, have jettisoned telos, and so the disciplines are losing their ability to talk about what is the purpose of our study, and even what is the object of our study.

Of course, I wonder, too, if science isn’t also fraught with this challenge in some sense, and it becomes most apparent at the extremes of science as mathematicians and theorists attempt to identify the very, very big and very, very small. Language of telos seems to intrude into science on these fringes as scientists talk about the “God particle,” etc. How would our sciences function differently if they recognized in their object of study a final cause? Or do you think that Aristotle’s four causes is an obsolete model? Or do you think that science ought to be exempt from considering higher-level causes, and teleology in particular?

I know nothing of the band. “Blert” is no more than a random web name that I use from time to time, although I do know USE and am an acquaintance with many of the members from a long time back…although that was when most of them were “The Lincolns” and another was part of “Sidney.”

Alas, the web is a dangerous place, especially as an academic, and I prefer to avoid leaving tracks that can be traced back to me in an easy Google search, especially since I’ll be looking for a job next year. Maybe after I get tenure…or after I retire.

I am an old honors student of yours, though, so it is interesting to check back in on you from time to time.

Thanks, too, for the comments. When I’ve graded a stack of Shakespeare papers and exams, I’ll digest them more leisurely and perhaps get back with a comment.

Eagleton thus simply “talks past” them. He agrees with them in a manner they cannot accept while attacking them on the very point he agrees with them on.

——————–

I think you are being too harsh in your criticism of what you take to be the “scientific” “way of knowing”.

Take, for example chess. I don;t think anyone on the “scientific” side would disagree that a chess master lacks knowledge of chess. But chess is in many ways the opposite of science. Science is trying to understand the system which gives rise to the observable “brute facts” in the natureal world. Chess is pure institutional fact; the knowledge is of chess is about the consequences of institutional rules that “count as” legal chess moves. There is nothing in chess like a the law of gravitation – there are only heuristics, approaches that in general are advantageous or disadventageous; no chess opening will guarentee a win. Nature has no purpose, no end; chess does (to win).

You have said that the order lies in the “to be known” – this is true of nature and science, and of chess. One of the things that they have in common; what makes them both acceptable “kinds of knowledge”, is that in both the data (the results of measurements, the position of the pieces on the board), are public. We can. at least, agree on what we are studying. A rook is either attacking the opponent’s queen or not – on that we can agree, whether we be male or female, black or white, russian or american, young or old. And, at least because we also agree on the standard (checkmate), there is at least the possibility that we can agree on what to do about it (take the rook with the queen, move the queen out of the way, sacrifice the queen for a positional advantage, etc.) This is the same for science – measurements are public in this sense. Either the light form the star is acts like the star is wobbling back and forth or not. Given proper instruments, this behavior of the light is the same whether we be male or female, black or white, russian or american, young or old.

Another thing is, I beleive, is that in both cases we can articulate – based upon this public data – what it is that we are studying. A book on chess openings is exactly that, a book on chess openings. It is not a textbook on geology or a theological argument. An article on evolution is exactly that, an article on evolution – those that try to treat it as somethin more are misusing it. On eof the problems with “the humanities” is often the inability(?), unwillingness(?) to articulate what exactly they profess to be studying, and how the public data relates to this filed of inquiry.

Another thing that comes into play here is what I call “universality”; that all true knowldge “fits together”, or at least, does not contradict. This is a hallmark of science; that discoveries in one filed may well have – and need to fit in with – what is known in all other fields. Chemistry has to fit in with physics and biology; if they disagree then (at least one) is wrong as evidence by the disagreement.

Chess is, of course. completely separate – it needs not agree – because its realm is – and is acknowledged to be – different. But the fact that something as different as chess can be accepted as a “way of knowing” I think raises questions as to your claim of a monolithic western “way of knowing”. If chess masters started claiming that chess somehow illuminated science, and scientists were wrong on, say, biochemistry, becasue their theories were seemingly in conflict with chess theory, then we would start seeing the same sort of dismissal we see with religion today. It is not a “different way of knowing” per se that is the problem; it is the claim that the applicaton of these “different ways of knowing” are “truer” in other realms than their own.

~Rick~

(Do you know my friends in USE, in Seattle?)

Your very thoughtful comments show what it is that we have lost since the Renaissance, the ability to substantiate the truth claims of each discipline in its own form-al terms. Remember that the “entirely personalistic wisdom” you refer to is not a truth-claim at all, and so not a competitor with the valid truth claims of the various disciplines, but is the RESULT (within the knowing subject) of experiencing those irreducible many validities in knowing. (Also notice, this is about KNOWING, not about KNOWLEDGE, and the shift to being concerned with knowledge and substantiating its necessary truth is a huge part of the problem, in part because it re-conceives truth as something whose very being humans can exhaust and reduce realtive to themselves, so that “absolute truth” ends up reducing truth to merely what humans can formulate of it.)

But we in our world have no way to substantiate the validity of disciplinary truth claims because we keep looking for a single universalist truth instead, and we keep thinking that is needs to be substantiated precisely by either an appeal to the concrete object (naive empiricism leading to sophisticated positivism) or by some indubitable logical ordering among idealities (naive idealism leading to analytical logicism).

Actually, no one can really respond to what I am doing until I get the theory itself out there, the theory of knowing a la the Greeks (and as evidenced also among poststructuralist semioticists) and continuing through the Renaissance, that does NOT seek a universalist truth, as the terms for such came into operation first in the modern scientific, post-Reformation, world of thought.

I am deeply satisfied to see that my own theoretical work has taken on a substantial shape over the past months, along with the texts and tools to make it cogent for others, but it requires too long and too very demanding a textual argument to put here on this weblog.

In it, I am attempting to “restore a lost breathing” by giving a new kind of substance and energy to some forgotten theoretical motions (form-ality itself) that theorize how humans come to know, or to engage efficaciously, in knowing any sort of thing whatsoever. (The “opening” of that possibility lies in the “sort of” or the “kind of,” in the way that things are also kinds of things — a path that we have forgotten how to think, though Husserl, Heidegger, the “logicist” analytics, have all struggled mightily to find one.)

And yes, it is true, as you say, that the “kind of thing” itself is thus put into question — and can never be taken back out of question thereafter, but that is precisely the path that knowing travels (and must always travel), ever since Socrates put the kind of thing in itself — the Eidos or Idea or (Aristotle’s) “species” — into dynamic play as the unreachable but determinate goal of a trajectory of knowing, a “path into the light” which can then gain its own community, develop its fitting methodologies, and benefit from an actualized HISTORY of its own theory and practice. (As with theology in the West, or the natural sciences in the West, except that both were seduced into a different, triumphalist theory of their own truth.)

Basically, the Greco-European truth-claim prior to the rise of science was restricted and focused, because it was always disciplinary and therefore inherently LIMITED, and therefore in need of interaction with other narrow and determinate kinds of truth-claims to reach its own being within the human subject. (On an analogous level, each Christian had to struggle, for example, with the truth of the humanity of Christ as our divine Beloved, and the truth of the divinity of the same person, or with nature as created good by God, and with nature as fallen (but sustained by grace), and so on, and on. These various truth-claims taken by themselves were simply heresies that could not nourish a deeper contact with that toward-which these determinate truth-claims pointed. It is quite one thing to state a truth (claim) and quite another thing to come to terms with it in relationship to other truths, but we have lost sight of the theory of this latter kind of knowing.)

So the Greco-European sort of truth-claim is that truth is found IN the on-going human (disciplinary and personal) determination of the determinate “kind of thing” to which each kind of knowing is addressed, and such a history of determinations must always be in subjection to the depth and riches of structure and operation that continue to lie IN the kind of thing (never fully known) itself, as a determinate human knowing progresses.

This (kind of) history of knowing is perfectly capable of revising its own origins by redefining its own kind of thing, as it continues. IN fact, that is the very path that it walks! Its path (hodos) is its method (meta + hodos) — the original Socratic insight. And as Parmenides said, the path into the light “always returns to where it began.” (To the putative eidos as telos of knowing, or the “kindness” of the kind of thing in its form-al dimensions. But it returns, only in order to begin again.)

Now I can show that what Galileo and Newton were doing in the 17th century in forging their new natural philosophy as a way of knowing into (directed towards) “the motions of solid bodies” followed this archetypical “path” of knowing and continues to do so to this day. But their working as physcial scientists was mis-understood philosophically, and interpreted from the beginning as a brand new kind of method — one that achieved a new kind of truth, a “universal” method seeking a “universal” truth.

This new “truth” is one that ALL BY ITSELF applies to everything, and makes humans masters of absolute KNOWLEDGE, but only by reducing everything to solid bodies in motion, which can certainly be done for the natural kinds of things, if we ignore their kindness, except for their kindness as solid bodies that obey laws of motion and gravitation. (We see right here what earlier thinkers knew, that the same physical objects can support many ways of knowing, each as valid as its methodology and historical-theoretical development is capable of making it, because physical objects actually contain so many kinds of structure and attributes. Which is a substantial formal validity. It is not that science studies physical concrete attributes and humanities study non-physical ones. Every discipline studies aspects of the external world.)

Bacon and Descartes and Leibnitz in particular inshrined this new and unheard-of triumphalism of method (and monolithicism of “reality”) through their self-reading or self-interpretation of early classical physics, at the same time that they reconceived the world as made of two stuffs, res extensa and res cogitans…. Even though physics itself has advanced far beyond these accompanying epistemological clothings provided for it by early modern philosophy and epistemology, nonetheless modern “theory of knowledge” of course could not advance with the advances in the sciences; hence the troubles the arts and sciences are in today in the English-speaking tradition, as we are realizing that none of them has a universal or necessary truth that is absolutely established either by empiricist or rationalism. We invented our own nightmare: either we have absolute truth, or else “anything goes.”

This is the aporia of our time, in our own historical cultural setting. (We have never needed a universal knowledge: we have only needed the formal abilities and equipped subjectivities to address our own day.) We must find a way to think through the impasse, to think ourselves back onto the path that is a struggle of knowing but that is formally defined amid other formally defined struggles of knowing. We have to un-weave the absolutist truth-claims we have so carefully woven together and enforced upon ourselves. (The results of which we see in the wars of science and religion and the rise of various fundamentalisms in their Modernist guise.)

What I am doing is bringing back into the light of our (epistemic) consciousness the ways in which (speci-fic) truth is substantiated in its own disciplinary communities, which on the one hand makes the truth claims of each community more modest in their very constitution, but, on the other, gives all of them a real purchase on the reality of the external world. (Neither side — the hard sciences vs cultural theory — will be entirely happy, in the short run.)

Basic to my efforts is making languages and model-making formally fresh and determinative again, while leaving room for the humanist subject as agent, not as a perfectly “free” agent, which has no meaning (and was never in view until the modern logicist era, which brackets history), but as a local-historical agent able to read the lines of force and the degrees of freedom available (from where we now stand) — and to read them TOWARDS a future that is “possible” from wherever we stand in our historical and cultural contingencies of formation.

Not to read them absolutely. Only to read them “possible” or probabilistically, potentially effectively ENOUGH — with “good enough” formal thinking — in order to initiate into the future something that might tend toward the good. (Then the other shoe drops, that the more effective it is in that direction, the more liable it is to be made into its own opposites, a truth about truth well-known to pre-scientific Christians, among others. But Americans are an optimistic people, so we won’t perhaps emphasize this…?)

(Also compare: Arendt’s “nativity” of the human “actor” — the one who is individuated and historically situated enough to be capable of initiating powerful actions within the community).

So let me conclude by using one of your sentences:

“The basic law of logic, the law of non-contradiction (A is not non-A), demands that of all competing truth claims, only one can be true, and yet the dogma of “toleration” in our society has put this principle into suspension in the public sphere.”

This is PRECISELY the problem. Notice here this triumphalism of “only one (truth) can be true” — balanced against its polar other, that “anything goes,” that every truth is equally valid (relativism). The problem lies in our intellectual formation as moderns, in the way we frame the question on a deep-structure level. (And as post-moderns, because we have not read the lessons of the great Continental poststructuralist theorists. We have seen them too much as “relativists,” which is all they CAN be within our framework.)

This “basic law of logic” was to Aristotle simply the law of “demonstration” (apodeictic) — it was NOT the “way” in which — the path along which — human disciplines travel “into the light” with respect to their chosen kinds of things. Demonstration by its very constitution comes into play only AFTER some determinate knowing has taken place, after the fact, when definitions and first principles have already been hazarded, and then only in the “necessary” sciences of geometry and arithmetic. (But even here, no one could follow the most basic geometric demonstrations, unless one had already spent some time, with a teacher preferably, looking at plane figures and observing them and moving them around…so notes Aristotle in Metaphysics….)

Now Galileo actually did something quite distinctive. He took available formalisms from geometry and arithmetic and then he used them to build models and make definitions with respect to the natural processes that he was closely observing. The history of physics ever since has been one of naming and defining hypothesized entities (mass, speed, acceleration, all of which were from the start FORM-AL “kinds of things,” by the way) and developing them theoretically, as checked by experimental corrections, a disciplinary practice of knowing which will always reach out for new formalisms as they are developed in geometry-mathematics, but within those fields — the algebraicizing of geometry that Descartes accomplished or the calculus developed by Newton and Leibnitz, developed AS MATHEMATICIANS, and so on to Einstein’s use of Cartan and Minkoswki and so on and on.

In fact, this use of the formalisms studied by other disciplines, in order to build models of natural-world kinds of things, makes physics closest to what was for Aristotle (I believe) the archetypical discipline, poietike or the ike of “poetics,” which he showed was the ike of making “wholes” that are used as devices for knowing other “putative” wholes in the external world. Aristotle thought that the external world (including the shared human worlds in their local and cultural plurality) provided as PRODUCTS what could then be taken as the raw materials for other human ways of knowing, just the way that nature produces trees as formal products, and trees therefore possess the dunamis or intrinsic, built-in potential “power,” that suits them to being made into rafts or houses, by the productive arts of making rafts or houses.

In the same way, though Aristotle did not know it, the formal products of geometry and mathematics would have intrinsic formal powers, making them suitable to become the raw materials for models built by other disciplines (physics, chemistry…) as ways of seeing into natural processes and structures.

Well, I’ve actually done a better job of giving a glimpse into what I’m doing than I thought would be possible, perhaps. It’s certainly helpful for me to be prodded into these synopses of my off-line work…. So thanks again for your offerings.

Brad Gregory, a historian at Notre Dame, gave an interesting talk that I attended a few days ago drawn from his current project that ought to be published sometime in the next couple years by, I think (?), Harvard UP. I understand what you are trying to suggest in these posts, but my sense of Gregory’s argument poses some criticisms and challenges to what you say about knowledge and its place in society. I can’t say that what I offer matches Gregory’s argument precisely, but I have to give credit for many of these thoughts where it is due.

As you talk about this “struggle to interpret these materials and traditions” of faith, isn’t this problem of interpretation precisely the postmodern conundrum that we face? It is not anymore just that we have many ways of knowing, but that we cannot even agree anymore on what it is that we are attempting to know (what that “to-be-known” is), and that we have no hope of reconciling our disagreements with one another. The basic law of logic, the law of non-contradiction (A is not non-A), demands that of all competing truth claims, only one can be true, and yet the dogma of “toleration” in our society has put this principle into suspension in the public sphere. Religion and now even the entire humanities are consigned to a deeply private space, and thus they have little value in secular society that demands a commodification of goods.

Whereas through the medieval and early modern centuries, and even into modernity, people expected that the false competing truth claims would eventually fall aside, now we simply hold these claims in isolation from one another. Adherents to a given view ardently hold their beliefs to be true, but their claims are never put through the rigor of being tested and challenged by other views. Indeed, anyone who attempts to weigh the truth claims of two religions or two systems of belief against one another is labeled as dogmatic and intolerant, and the conversation ends there.

Our means for interpreting biblical materials and traditions have dissipated following the Reformation. Pre-Reformation, the medieval church was one of great diversity in religious expression and practice, but it was held together by a common liturgy and sacraments, and clergy closely guarded the authority of interpretation. Priests could disagree, of course, but the centralized structure of the church always pulled back toward commonalities. By the seventeenth century, however, people were struggling with competing interpretations, and the rightness of any interpretation became a matter of divine inspiration, except that this “inward light” or whatever it might be called often produces deeply competing truth claims from different people, and verifying or disputing that an individual’s “feeling” of God is impossible. People simply had to agree to disagree, which perhaps found one of its profoundest expressions in the First Amendment, initially maintaining the hope that everyone would eventually return to the fold. The Western states’ guarantees of religious toleration in exchange for political loyalty carried with it a powerful secular domination over religion, which has brought us to the secular agnosticism that pervades today. People in our society want to hold their beliefs to be true, but doing so would deny the truth value of other people’s beliefs, which shows a lack of toleration that is tantamount to treason against society and the state. To be a part of this society means to hold one’s beliefs to oneself and not to have them come into contact with others’ beliefs.

In many respects, then, I think that your formula of “the telos of the liberal arts tradition” as producing an entirely personalistic wisdom rather than a scripted doctrine is, in fact, a very post-Reformation understanding of the matter. (Even the “liberal arts tradition” as a label for everything from Socrates onward seems highly anachronistic since this notion of education really only began to be articulated during the rise of Humanism, which, no surprise, coincided closely with the Reformation.) You may well be able to work out in your mind bridges among various cultural divides based on semiotic theory, etc., but in the larger system of our secular culture, this only goes to reinforce the diversity and irreconcilability of truth claims. Your view necessarily rejects others’ views, but the articulation of your view merely adds to the accretion of perspectives that exist in our society. As long as nobody actually poses a danger to anyone else, our society rules simply that all of these views ought to be able to exist at once, and so any new addition to the wide ocean of beliefs merely reinforces the rights of others to hold vastly differing views from your own.

Especially when you arrive at the question of what this means as an educator, I think you position becomes extremely complicated by the secular pluralism that our society enforces. Yes, one on side Dawkins claims to have the truth, and on another side a Christian fundamentalist professes to have the truth, and on another side a Muslim claims to have the truth, and so on, and occasionally frictions erupt as people fire shots at each other, but society overall enforces the secular dictum that we cannot make any firm judgments among these views. Yet, in enforcing this, society effectively reduces those views to irrelevance in the public sphere. How does an educator bring back religion and the humanities (anything that requires interpretation) to a place of prominence in the public sphere without posing a threat to the secular state that tells us to avoid such conflicts?

I guess here’s the problem I still see, even after admitting your very just remarks. The group that is represented by (or see themselves in league with) the Dawkins crusade are not saying: “These religious people ought not to attack science. They are not helping society. They are ignoring the validity of scientific knowing.” That is what I wish they were saying. I say it too.

No, it’s the part where Dawkins and the strident bloggers are saying “These religious people are stupid and dangerous because they think God exists, when it is obvious to any rational human being that such a claim is refuted by science.”

Eagleton is focusing on this part and it is what stands out for persons trained like Eagleton or me, when we read Dawkins. (It’s the ontological and epistemological assumptions that undergird Dawkins’ views, just as they undergird the views of his extremist opponents.)

This is where the problem becomes a matter of intolerance and pre-judging the “work of knowing” in one sphere, on the basis of what one knows in another sphere. This refusal to take into account the validity of other ways of knowing is what makes Dawkins and the fundamentalist anti-evolutist, in this one respect, exactly alike. The problem is, in other words, that respected and highly intelligent faculty persons like Dawkins can think that it is perfectly okay for him, and intellectually valid, to practice such a monological and exclusivist way of thinking as a teacher of the liberal arts. Something is very muddled here, in our grasp of what the liberal arts are about in their fundamental intellectual underpinnings.

As an educator, I am interested in what the liberal arts education can effect in this regard. Everything I say is best taken (in my hopes) in terms of “how do we educate with regard to this?”

So when I said, “science should get out of the religion business,” I meant that scientific educators crusading against religion in general or against belief in God in general do not advance the cause of helping students to grapple with the fact that things look very different from within different ways of knowing and that they need to hold their own commitments within a context of being open to the insights and profound depths of other ways of knowing.

In this sense, Eagleton was defending the intellectual validity and the deep rational significance of world-historical theological thinking — against the seeming strictures of a Dawkins who would seem to rule that possibility out in advance — because “belief in God” is prima facie stupid and incorrect, so what COULD ever come out of it? (I remember the comment thread on the Eagleton criticism of Dawkins’ lack of theological background. One young scientist said, “Why does anyone need to know anything about religion to know that it is ridiculous to think God exists” — or words to that effect. This is illiberal thinking, pure and simple. This is what we need to try to show students and challenge them to develop out of it, without attacking their core commitments to science or to their faiths.)

And this Dawkins maintains, when clearly his own definition of “God” is extraordinarily limited and reductive. The word for him excludes the “numinous” and “that which is evocative of awe and reverence,” for instance, as in his interview I discussed in my post “Bravo for 3 Quarks Daily.” He says he believes in something out there more wonderful than anything we could conceive, but won’t admit into his thought world that this is the central identification of “God,” for huge numbers of religious persons throughout history.

As educators, we cannot stop political forces from crusading against evolution by re-inforcing the dogmatic structure of thinking that underlies their way of thinking and making truth claims. But we can attempt to educate students into respect for scientific and for religious ways of knowing by getting them into deep contact with those ways of knowing, which I think is the liberation that is sorely needed by so many students who come to us already imbued with a dogmatic view about what “reason” or “revelation” may be — i.e. the sole source of absolute truth, instead of profound ways of struggling with the pursuit of truth, the struggle that can turn them into a knower who can respect and personally integrate very different perspectives. But I don’t see this happening on campuses that are themselves divided into two camps and reinforcing dogmatically shaped truth-claims.

This is not advocating a mushy “anything-goes” relativism, either, although even THAT is preferable (as a learning stage) to “I have the truth and that’s all there is to it.” I do not agree with Allan Bloom that a wariness with respect to absolutist truth claims is a regrettable “relativism” among students on our campuses, but I agree that it needs to be developed into something much sharper and finer and more excellent, an ability to test and appreciate the validity of various ways of knowing in their own methodological terms and to become thereby a new kind of knower, that “centre of thought and responsibility” that the liberal arts education is aimed at producing.

It surely may seem that theorists need to “get real” but I believe they are trying, in the best cases, to get real by grasping the deeper formal constructions underlying the political and social problems we are beseiged with. Again, I think we need a much sharper, clearer theory of what knowing is like, that in its very constitution, it requires “irreducibly many” ways of knowing (methodologies) addressed to many different kinds of things.

We seem to have grasped that different CULTURES need to be respected and not dismissed out of hand from beforehand (though Dawkins comes very close to this with respect to religious cultures such as Islam). But we more fundamentally need a multi-methodologies or a multi-disciplines understanding of the arts and sciences (of knowing truth) as well. The trouble with this is that it will put the onus right back where it belongs, on the individual humanistic subject, the “free citizen,” who is the place where the new agility has to emerge and be brought to bear on the issues we need to “get real” about.