Wills Rooney3/4/15

English 190The University: Chaos sans the Good

Offering over fifty disciplinary majors, numerous

study-abroad opportunities in all corners of the globe, a

sprawling domestic campus with a nationally renowned medical

center, and a satellite school in China, Duke University is

grand. Unified, though, it is not. And in this sense, Duke

is the archetype of the post-modern research “university” –

a massive conglomeration of departments, institutes,

laboratories, and bureaucracies that are assimilated only by

an overarching name and by financial interdependence. At

some point, one must ask the question whether these

establishments, with such deep investment in a diversity of

unrelated pursuits, can hold claim to being concerned

seriously with the education of undergraduates.

Irrespective of their willingness to admit it, the honest

answer is, more often than not, “no.”

The short explanation is curricular deficiency, which

stems from deeper teleological confusion. For the

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university to make a legitimate claim to be invested in the

intellectual, moral, and (perhaps) spiritual development and

welfare of its students, it must assent to a logos higher

than itself, namely transcendent truth. However, the post-

modern university is not in the business of engaging

transcendent truth, the light that bestows human life with

ineradicable meaning and that directs the human person

toward genuine flourishing.

Instead, due to a paradigmatic metaphysical shift

influenced by Francis Bacon, institutions of higher learning

are preoccupied with critical methods of inquiry, which are

specific to each unique field. To their credit, these

methods yield awesome material findings. Yet, the post-

modern university, staunch in its commitment that

materialism and method have the monopoly on legitimate

knowledge, cannot offer a broader account of how these

discoveries and methodologies are related or why they are

intrinsically significant. Its curriculum, unlike that of

its medieval and reformation-era counterparts, contains no

leitwissenschaft, no metaphysical guiding science that provides

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the unifying source of intelligibility to otherwise

disparate pursuits. As such, the contemporary university is

confused, still in search for a coherent telos that it cannot

and will not find in the material order of reality alone.

Accordingly, the students who emerge from universities often

also leave confused about what is knowable and what

constitutes a meaningful life. It is thus not until the

university reintegrates the transcendent realm – the realm

of meaning – that its project will again become

intelligible.

I

For the ancients and scholastics, the pioneers of

intellectual education, jettisoning the transcendent realm

from the education would have been unfathomable. For the

education’s very grounding and end lay in the transcendent.

In Book VII of The Republic, Plato illustrates this in his

famous allegory of the cave. The purpose of the education,

Socrates explains to Glaucon, his interlocutor, is to aid

the soul in its ascent out of the cave and into harmony with

the sun. In literal language, the education ought to

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cultivate the intellect away from opinion and toward

knowledge of the Good. Pure transcendence, as it is

described by Socrates, is “the cause of all that is right

and fair in everything—in the visible it gave birth to light

and its sovereign; in the intelligible, itself sovereign, it

provided truth and intelligence” (Plato, 517c). The Good is

the source of all meaning and life, and most importantly, it

is the end to which all actions, particularly intellection,

should be directed.

It is thus no surprise that later in Book VII, when

Socrates considers the best disciplines to study, he esteems

most highly dialectics (metaphysics, logic, and

epistemology) because of its capacity to explore the Good.

Dialectics “is the copestone of the sciences and is set over

them; no other science can be placed higher; the nature of

knowledge can no further go” (Plato, 534e). Not only does

dialectics provide mathematics and geometry with their

shared analytical foundation, but it also, in turn, allows

the human mind to study astronomy and other disciplines

whose analytical modes are contingent upon mathematic and

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geometric logic. For Plato, an education without dialectics

would cease to be an education. Punting on the greatest and

most fundamental question – the source and nature of truth –

is not optional. It is what makes the entire educational

project, the raising of the soul from the cave, coherent.

Coming to know the Good is the telos of the education.

The Platonic conception of the education as the process

of elevating the soul toward the Good was well developed in

Christian theology from late antiquity through the Middle

Ages. As universities became more organized around communal

monastic life in the early scholastic period, theology

succeeded dialectics as the highest intellectual pursuit.

By then, the transcendent Good was no longer just the source

of light outside of the cave. That very Good, God, had

revealed himself through Holy Scripture and later become

incarnate, revealing himself in the flesh directly to man.

Humans could access God through Scripture, prayer, and

discursive theology. Though the direct route to God

permitted dialectics to drop one rung in the ladder of

knowledge, the telos of the education and, accordingly, of

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the university remained consistent: to help the human soul

grow in relationship and communion with God.

With the university’s purpose firmly planted in the

spiritual formation and ultimate flourishing of the human

person, all pursuits were understood in the context of their

relation to God. Saint Bonaventure, a Franciscan

scholastic, provided a systematic account of this in his

speech, “On The Reduction of the Arts to Theology.” For

example, Bonaventure explains how the production, effect,

and fruit of an artisan’s work – a mechanical art – reflect

Christian anthropology, God’s creation, and the procession

of the Trinity (Bonaventure, 49). When the artisan produces

an effect, a proceeding relationship exists between the

concept of the effect in his mind and the actuality of the

effect. Bonaventure compares this to the relationship

between God and man. As the artisan makes his work (the

effect) in his mental image, God made man in his perfect

image.

The analogy continues through the artisan’s effect and

fruit. To realize its end – beauty, usefulness, and

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endurance – the effect in its production requires the

employment of human knowledge, will, and perseverance, which

are the three respective elements that conduce to a

flourishing human life (Bonaventure, 51). Indeed, the

flourishing human life implies the communion of the soul

with God, which Bonaventure demonstrates is realized in the

fruit of the work. When the artist derives praise, benefit,

or delight from the effect, the fruit of the effect is

realized. This fruit corresponds to the telos of the human

soul, which is to praise, to serve (be of benefit to), and

to delight in God (Bonaventure, 53).

Though complicated, Bonaventure’s project is important

in the context of the post-modern university because it

demonstrates the contingency of all knowledge and ethical

action, no matter how oblique (i.e. in the case of

artisanship), on the metaphysical order, specifically God.

To divorce the university and its charge, the student, from

a metaphysical end would render the whole educational effort

futile.

II

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Thus far, I have spoken of a classical and medieval

metaphysical picture that conceived of existence as an

integration of matter and form. This picture is contingent

upon a transcendent logos, a logic to creation that provides

the source of the world’s deep intelligibility to the human

intellect. As such, studying the transcendent was simply

part of studying reality.

However, the massive paradigmatic shift to which this

essay has been building was catalyzed by a radical

metaphysical reconfiguration. This reconfiguration

effectively bifurcated reality in a way that matter and form

were divorced from each other and subjected to different

methods of investigation and standards of truth. How those

standards cohered became irrelevant because the relationship

between the realms became irrelevant. The material realm

was subjected to strict, objective, methodological scrutiny,

and the formal realm was reduced to, at best, a matter of

subjective, private conjecture, about which nothing could be

said with certainty. It is in the context and legacy of

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this shift that the modern and post-modern university begins

to lose its internal coherence and telos.

The man in great part responsible for this shift was

Francis Bacon, renowned as “the father of modern science.”

In 1620, he published the Novum Organon, a diatribe against

the Aristotelian and scholastic metaphysical project of

hylemorphism (matter and form) and a call for total

epistemological reform. This new organon aimed to restart

the project of human knowledge by turning the focus from

conceptual induction to methodological uniformity. Only

then, when the mind is no longer left to its own

intellectual devices, which are “inherently apt to suppose

the existence of more order and regularity in the world than

[they] find there,” is real knowledge attainable (Bacon, 8).

The possibility of a comprehensive logos upon which the

absolute predictive power of method (i.e. mathematics and

physics) is contingent was thrown out the window. Instead,

“what we should be attending to is matter, its

microstructures and changes of microstructure ... and the

laws of action or motion” (his emphasis; Bacon, 11). There

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is no need to worry about metaphysics, Bacon argues, for as

soon the intellect begins to contemplate, it has already has

deceived itself. Metaphysics are fantastical. Scientific

methodology is for cleansing the intellect and entering the

kingdom of man; only a little child can be so deluded as to

enter the kingdom of heaven (Bacon, 18).

Indeed, Bacon’s words were polemical, and their impact

on modernity is indelible. But much of his metaphysical

claims, which extend beyond the scope of this essay, were

unfounded. Nevertheless, it is worth calling attention to

the dichotomy between Plato’s humility and Bacon’s arrogance

with regard to the Good. Even Plato, the first great

Western philosopher, admitted that he did not know what the

immaterial, transcendent Good exactly entails. Part of this

would have proceeded from the humility that the pursuit of

the transcendent necessitates; the seeker of knowledge is

always subordinate to the infinite source of knowledge. But

Plato’s ambiguity about the Good’s essence still did not

dissuade his interest in the intellectual pursuit of it nor

obstruct his hope of knowing it one day. For, as has been

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stated, the Good is the grounding relationship that exists

between inquiries and that permits the drawing of

conclusions about their relations to one another; it is the

highest, unifying essence of intellection (Plato, 531d).

Thus, the true lover of wisdom, who is the philosopher, must

pursue this for its own intrinsic sake, and he will do so in

communion with other people and other disciplines. It is a

fully shared, even dialogic affair. And that the Good is

not fully known or may not ever be fully knowable to the

finite human intellect does not take away from its beauty,

its truth, or, chiefly, its reality.

Meanwhile, Bacon superciliously eradicated metaphysical

truth claims from the realm of “real,” scientific knowledge,

in the process toppling a nearly 2,000 year-old tradition of

thought. And with that Bacon ultimately destroyed the

foundation upon which the coherence and telos of the education

and his own method was built. It is not surprising that

Bacon’s confusing and unjustified bifurcation of metaphysics

into “meta” and “physics” has led to the confused

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contemporary institutions that so religiously implement this

methodology today.

III

It is difficult to say exactly when Bacon’s “new

organon” was subsumed into the mission of the modern

university. Certainly, in America, that occurred at some

point between 1646, when Harvard’s founding charter was

published, and 1818, when the Rockfish Gap Commission

determined the form and function of the University of

Virginia. The diametric teloi articulated by the two

founding documents are telling; clearly, by 1818, serious

changes had taken effect. At Harvard, the charter read,

“every one shall consider the main End of his life and

studies, to know God and Jesus Christ which is Eternal Life

(John 17:3)” (American Higher Ed, 8). Consistent with the

classical and scholastic conceptions of the education,

Harvard established that its purpose was to cultivate the

human person such that he could achieve his ultimate,

transcendent purpose. The Harvard education was designed to

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bring the soul out of the cave and into communion with God.

Its school motto, veritas, accurately captured this.

Nearly two hundred years later at Virginia, the

education conceived was no longer concerned with human

flourishing in any transcendent sense. Instead, the

University’s founding commission, purporting to have made a

discovery in higher education, was to serve a pragmatic,

utilitarian purpose: to be an incubator for future statesmen

and leaders of society, “on whom public prosperity and

individual happiness are so much to depend” (American Higher

Ed, 194). Consequently, the flourishing of man was to be

measured vis-à-vis his contribution to the state. With the

university now aimed toward practical, governmental ends,

its mutable telos was at the disposal of those who lead, in

Bacon’s words, “the kingdom of man” (supra). And for

Jefferson et al., this kingdom of man was to be built within

a vision of an eschatology of moral and material progress.

The education would “engraft a new man on the native stock”

and improve “what in [man’s] nature was vicious & perverse,”

as if to accelerate some sort of eugenic, evolutionary

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change (American Higher Ed, 196). In the process, it would

pass down the mass of general knowledge “for successive and

constant accumulation … indefinitely, to a term which no one

can fix or foresee” (his emphasis; American Higher Ed, 196).

At this point, the university education had lost any

and all metaphysical foundation. So long as the university

contributed to the monotonically increasing trajectory of

“progress,” it was good, even if two points on that line

were literally incommensurable. There was no longer any

notion of subservience to the Good; the education was

subservient to the wants of man. And with the wants of man

always oriented toward the future, observance of the past

was rendered obsolete. History, the classics, metaphysics,

and the like became irrelevant; they would provide temporal

and cosmological context to society and human existence that

would obstruct unwavering material progress. Besides, human

flourishing measured vis-à-vis an immaterial, transcendent

source of objective ethics has no calculable method by which

one’s success can be determined, and it certainly does not

evolve over time. Indeed, the Rockfish Gap Commission

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report criticized the Native Americans and the Church for a

“bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of

their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to

look backward for better things and not forward” (American

Higher Ed, 196). That rhetoric presciently foretells the

transhumanist idea that holds significant clout in the post-

modern university; that the human person is a conglomeration

of cellular matter that is to be adjusted and transformed to

the heart’s desire toward an indefinite and unrealized end.

With ontological bifurcation, metaphysical truths are

decidedly out of the picture. To put things in Augustinian

terms, the telos of higher education had transitioned from

pursuing the City of God to erecting an illustrious Earthly

City. In Platonic terms, one might say that the prisoners

in the cave were freed from their shackles but concerned

only with maximizing the comfort of their experience in the

cave.

IV

In the contemporary context, anything but the Good is

in play, which is why the university is in such a state of

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confusion. As a result of the aforementioned Baconian

bifurcation, the transcendent order is unrecognizable even

to most professors. It has been either delegitimized as

immeasurable by any “approved” critical method; or, perhaps

worse, it has been jettisoned altogether in an effort to

reduce reality to purely material causes, without reflection

on the source from which these material causes gain their

infinite intelligibility. (That is to say materialists

peculiarly hold that humanity’s incredible ability to

predict accurately and precisely the laws and order of the

material realm can be accounted for by the material realm

itself.)

Either way, the idea of a universal good substantiated

by first principles has been supplanted by pluralism for

quite some time. In 1937, John Dewey wrote that, “any

scheme based on the existence of ultimate first principles,

with their dependent hierarchy of subsidiary principles does

not escape authoritarianism by calling the principles

‘truths’” (American Higher Ed, 952). He then proceeds to

compare the first truths of Aristotle and Saint Thomas

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Aquinas to “those” of Marx, Mussolini, and Nazism,

explaining that it is unclear “who is to determine the

definite truths that constitute the hierarchy” (American

Higher Ed, 952). In the vein of Jefferson’s view of

history, Dewey was impressed by Saint Thomas’ ability to

“adapt” Aristotle to the thinking of his time, as if he were

trying to bring an old intellectual fashion back in vogue,

just with a medieval cultural twist this time around.

It is this sort of reasoning (if it can be called such)

that has led to the utter confusion of the contemporary

university about its telos. First, in his argument, Dewey is

employing what Plato would have called “opinion,” or

intellectual sloth. He has not considered the metaphysical

or epistemological rigor of the diverse “first principles”

he so casually and unilaterally dismisses. Second, when the

education is divorced from the transcendent Good, it quite

literally ceases be education. To “educate” is to “educe”

or lead out, presumably from the Platonic cave. But if the

transcendent is rejected, the very light at the entrance of

the cave ceases to exist, and our source of intelligibility

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and logos (and very being) is gone. Under its current

materialist paradigm, the university cannot make the claim

that it is genuinely invested in the education of

undergraduates.

This is what Brad Gregory refers to in his book, The

Unintended Reformation, when he discusses “incompatible

assumptions and claims … taught to undergraduates,” who have

no idea where to begin when asked “to evaluate contrary

claims in disparate disciplines “(Gregory, 302). The post-

modern university has gotten so engrossed in the pedantry of

method that its disciplines can longer meaningfully engage

with each other. The idea that this can be remedied by the

buzzword “interdisciplinarity” is a mirage. The root cause

of the problem, of course, is the disappearance from the

university curriculum of a leitwissenschaft, prima scientia, or

metaphysical commitment, which can contextualize discrete

methods in a broader ontological framework. Yet to express

this in overtly theistic, Bonaventuran terms would be surely

received as blasphemy by the establishment of the secular

academic elite.

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With so many unrelated and unconnected fields of

inquiry, the post-modern university cannot purport even to

be pursuing knowledge in a communal, unified effort. To

return to literal etymology, this is idiotic, from idios,

Greek for “a lonely, private (uneducated) person.” And

because the Good is something transcendent, interpersonal,

and communally realized, the contemporary university is

nowhere near engaged in the formation of the person toward

an authentic, intersubjective moral end. Sadly, in the name

of pluralism, most universities would likely concede that

they have no interest in forming its students morally, as it

would be beyond their purview. That ought to speak for

itself.

In closing, perhaps the most significant indication of

how far astray the post-modern university has wandered from

its roots is the school motto. Today, they appear to be

cute anachronisms. As mentioned earlier, Harvard’s motto is

veritas, truth, in accordance with its telos as established in

1646. Today, the mission statement of Harvard College does

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not contain the world “truth.” Rather, its first mission is

“to create knowledge,” and its last is “to serve society.”

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Works Cited

Bacon, Francis, Novum Organon, 1620, Sakai PDF.

Bonaventura, “De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam,” (On the Reduction of the

Sciences to Theology), (ca. 1248-1256), Sakai PDF.

Gregory, Brad. The Unintended Reformation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. Print.

Plato, and Allan David Bloom. The Republic of Plato. New York: Basic, 1991. Print.

Hofstadter, Richard, and Wilson Smith. American Higher Education:A Documentary

History. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1961. Print.

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