Ms. Little brought up a valuable point during our discussion on Monday that I do not want to let slip away.
We were discussing the democratization of the university and the effects democratization might have on the ability of students to critically interrogate dominant institutions, values, and policies. Leo Strauss was of the opinion not only that university instruction should be insulated from social, political, and economic pressure, but also that university’s had a responsibility to convey to students more than mere technical proficiency. Students needed to be equipped to situate their own knowledge and research within a universe of questions and theories (the “Canon”) that Strauss believed had remained fairly stable with only minor amendment since the 5th or 4th centuries B.C. To abandon this canon or to revise it easily was a disservice to faculty, students, and world alike.
But, of course, as Strauss knew only too well, those students with sufficient resources would be free to avoid the scourge of democratization by earning entry into the nation’s elite universities, those which Strauss felt confident maintained a commitment to the canon. Such students would enter the fast track to the halls of power, while those students left behind would probably perform worthwhile services as engineers, technicians, and managers of the new economy. But, because they had not been introduced to, much less mastered, the canon, they would not join the Guardians in their quest to govern the Good Society.
This interpretation would appear to identify multi-culturalism with the democratization of the university and to identify both multi-culturalism and democratization with an education that fails to equip students with sufficient critical knowledge and skills to responsibly govern themselves, much less others. Later in the course, when we read Allen Bloom, we will no longer have to infer these apparent associations since Mr. Bloom will make them explicit.
So, perhaps the question we might want to raise is whether the multi-cultural thrust to college instruction, rather than being construed as a political or social requirement—and for this reason academically suspect—might not instead be construed as an intellectually necessary requirement along lines already outlined for us in GFW Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Is our mastery of this other non-western, multi-cultural canon demanded not so much by political pressure from special interest groups, but, to use Hegel’s argument, by Reason’s need to rise above its particularity and embrace the universal?
Having discovered this broad range of particularities that do not fit (or at least do not fit easily) into the western canon, do these other particularities not thereby demonstrate the particularity and therefore the insufficiency of the western canon itself, which has not turned out to be universal after all?
How might Messrs. Strauss or Bloom respond to this argument? They might embrace it, but only so long as this enlarged and extended canon did not erase or remove or otherwise jeopardize the integrity of those works to which these new works stand as provisional supplements. In other words, so long as Fanon and Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard find their place alongside Hobbes and Locke, Machiavelli and St Thomas, the Bhagavad Gita and Aristotle—rather than replace them—I feel certain that Messrs. Strauss and Bloom would raise few objections.
Their problem, however, is that often the canon is not expanded at all, nor even replaced. Rather, the very idea of canonicity is itself abandoned and replaced by whatever happens at the moment to be the current fashion. Critical reflection, which must place the present into doubt and allow the present to be interrogated from another vantage point not its own, is replaced by identity thinking, which always mistakes itself and its own identity as the necessarily valid vantage point of critique.
Here instead of a dialogue that extends across decades and centuries, students master a “canon” whose very recognition, much less validity, is judged month-to-month and year-to-year; a “canon” therefore that, instead of inviting critical dialogue across the decades or centuries forecloses upon even the possibility of such a dialogue.
And why might Messrs. Strauss and Bloom object to this constantly shifting canon, this canon-in-fashion-today? They might object to this canon-of-the-month not only or even primarily because it deprives students of the critical knowledge and skills they need to think and to act, but more importantly because they feel that this attenuated canon would deprive the world of the only being in whose thoughts and actions we may have reason to hope.
Would they be correct? I am not sure. But I suspect that the relegation of the less wealthy and less creditable among us to institutions that do not entrust us with the canon is not by accident. I suspect that this move disempowers “us” as much as, or perhaps even more than it empowers the “them.”
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