A DEDUCTION OF UNIVERSITIES
Griffiths, A. P. [1965] (2010). A deduction of universities. In Philosophical analysis and education (pp. 127-140). Routledge.
INTRODUCTION
I SHALL try to show what a university essentially is. I shall then discuss how its essential nature is related to those further functions which it sometimes performs, or are thought by some that it should perform: which, not being a part of the essence, may be called accidents.
No philosopher is in a position nowadays to set forth gaily on discussing the essence of something. To many ‘essentialism’, even with regard to institutions, is a methodological Sin against the Holy Ghost. Essentialism—the idea that we must set out to discover the necessary characteristics of things in order to know them—may often be nothing more than the examination of our own definitions. The essences we discover may be merely nominal. Something more than our own classifying activities must be related to the thing if we are to say not merely what it as a matter of fact is, but what it must be. The idea of the end or purpose of a thing may supply this: if we conceive men, trees, the world, as somehow aiming at perfection in their own kind, it becomes possible to speak of their essential nature at least in terms of potentialities. But we do not any longer conceive natural objects in this way, and we do not talk of their essences. Institutions, however, are not natural objects. In their case, essentialism, while still having dangers for the careless, may be unavoidable.
Even though institutions are not as Mill claimed1 ‘at every stagc of their existence made what they are by voluntary human agency’, they are what they are at any time of their existence because of the quality of the thought of their members. What an institution is, what differentiates it from others, cannot be explicated in terms of empirically observable factors such as physical movements. Thesc may in principle be the same in different institutions; and the differentia can only be the way the members themselves conceive it.2 If so, for institutions the essence—the idea—is prior to existence: not, of course temporally prior in all or even many cases, but logically prior; in that, unlike stones and the sea, institutions cannot logically be unless they are conceived as such-and-such.
I am not of course suggesting that we can make institutions come and go, appear and disappear, by the magic of thinking; or that we can by thinking make social institutions be whatever we like—even where ‘we’ means not you or me but all of us. For we cannot think whatever we like, and we cannot do whatever we like, and in consequence there are limits on what institutions are possible, and surprises about what institutions become actual. The limits of possibility are set by the (cultural and not merely logical) limits of thought, and by the (physical, cultural, social, economic, etc.) limits of practice. The inner demands of thought may, especially in the face of the pressures of the world, transform the mind that thinks it and revolutionise the institution that embodies it. This is above all true of the institution whose idea is an Ideal which involves value. Where the institution is conceived as aiming at the perfec tion of some activity, the perfect realisation of which is open, and could not be known until it is long pursued, it may develop according to what seem, in retrospect, inevitable steps, which could never have been predicted from its earlier nature. On the other hand, those institutions whose ‘end’ is limited by articles, such as a project to build a war memorial or to prevent a road running through a park, having clear and definite criteria for deciding when their activities are successful or unsuccessful, complete or incomplete, may be regarded as the product of conscious human will, but incapable of producing the surprises or development that is characteristic of more ‘open’ institutions.
This openness of those institutions whose essence is related to an ideal explains how it is possible both that their nature depends on how men conceive them, and yet at the same time men may argue interminably about what their nature is. What they are arguing about is very often what would count as satisfying the Ideal which constitutes the essence. For this reason the fact that people say the most diverse and even contradictory things about what some institution such as a university is for, does not necessarily mean that they are not all trying to talk about the same thing. And for this reason also, we should not be misled by this bewildering variety of views to think that there is nothing for it but to give up talking about what a university is for and talk only about what it does. What all universities, without exception, do, is warm the air slightly in their immediate vicinities. As soon as we say that it would be idiotic and irrelevant to mention this as an account of what universities do, we are entering on the road to essentialism. We have given up merely observing practices, and are beginning to prescribe them.
What then I propose to do is to present a ‘deduction’ of the idea of a university; attempting to understand the institution in terms of a justifiable Ideal. I shall try to show that there is a region in the firmament of values that must be filled; and that, in general, it is the institution which people tend to call a university that serves to fill it. I shall be saying at once what a university is and what it ought to be. I shall then, in the last section, go on to discuss some of the things which, while remaining itself, a university may or may not also be.
ESSENCE
What makes an activity valuable considered as an end rather than a mere means?
This question is a vast one. To deal with it in all philosophical rigour, we should first enter into what are called ‘meta-’ questions about the logic, epistemological status, and justification of value judgments. This would take us a long way from the immediate topic and, judging by past efforts, we should probably never get back again. Here, I can make only certain suggestions, based on a consideration of the nature of an activity as such, which I hope will have some plausibility as a general account.
I am speaking of activities, and not other states of being or states of mind: of action
rather than passion. Many things, such as warmth, pleasure, serenity and excitement, are thought to have value but are not activities at all.
Activities are things people engage in, which they may or may not know how to do. Not all the things people do are activities. If asked ‘What are your spare time activities?’ a man could answer ‘Oh, breathing, blinking and sneezing’, rather than ‘none’, only as a snub or a bad joke. Nor would we normally speak of ‘knowing how’ to breathe (unless we are talking about operatic singers or swimmers), or how to blink, or how to sneeze; because not being activities these things are not pursued in accordance with rules or standards. We do not do them well or badly, we simply either do or do not do them. If anything is to be an activity it must allow the possibility of effort, for the presence of standards implies the possibility of success or failure, and hence trying. No activity is of much value in itself unless it presents the need for effort to the degree that it is in some way strenuous: standards too easily followed cease to involve conscious attention and become mere habits (e.g. counting, amusing when one first starts on it as a child but a bore after a while). It would be a mistake quite obviously to have a simple linear scale of the value of an activity based only on its degree of difficulty. The more valuable difficulty differs qualitatively rather than quantitatively from the less valuable one. The specific terms of value we use in respect to activities are ‘absorbing’, ‘interesting’, and ‘fascinating’. It would seem that the difficulties an activity presents in order to be satisfying in this sense must be varied, unpredictable in detail, and requiring constant adjustment and the exercise of new modes of action. This must have something to do with the fact that activities are valuable only as modifications of consciousness, and more valuable as these modifications are richer and capable of indefinite development without mere repetition. They are not those that can be done with half a mind, mechanically, or passively. The objects of valuable activities must possess a quality which we might call reciprocity. In acting on it, it bounces back again and one may miss it or it may bump one in the nose; or it may return from an unexpected angle which presents itself as a discovery demanding a new response. Bouncing a ball from an uneven wall is more interesting than from an even one. The responses required are more varied and unpredictable, and require more absorption and engagement. Practising boxing with a punchball is more interesting than pummeling a fixed leather bag; boxing with a man, more interesting and difficult still. It is true that if the punchbag is hard and heavy enough it may be even more difficult to hit it than to box with a man; but all this involves is a quantitative increase in one of the many difficulties involved in boxing a man, not the increase in quality of difficulty which arises from the manifold variey of a human opponent’s responses. Playing chess against oneself is less satisfactory than playing it with someone else roughly as good; on one’s own one gets less or none of the challenging surprises provided by a good player. Activities involving personal relationships, such as fatherhood, possess this quality in the highest degree: every action may elicit a response which requires a new adjustment. An artist in paint or words is, again, frustrated and at the same time satisfied by the response of his material. The permanence and fecundity of the reciprocity of the object of an activity seems to determine much of its value.
Of course the relative difficulty of an activity may present in addition a positive disvalue. It must not be so difficult as to be impossible even to attempt, and it must not be utterly and quickly exhausting. But this does not affect my point; everyone would probably agree that the lazy, the easily tired, the relatively inactive, miss a great deal in life. We pity the weak and the unable, and perhaps try to make up for the poverty of their lives by giving them more from the passive sources of contentment, such as a rubber teat.
Some very important activities derive their value from their effects rather than what they are in themselves. We may continue with them very wisely when they are mechanical, uninteresting, effortless or dull; but unless we are mad this will only be because we are concerned with some further end they happen to serve. Emptying dustbins (trashcans) neatly might, just possibly, be an interesting task at first, but it would make an odd permanent hobby. Nevertheless, the efficient disposal of waste is undoubtedly of the utmost value. But we must not, because impressed by the important byproducts of human activity, forget that some human activities have a value of their own. Emptying dustbins will, we hope, one day be done entirely by machines; but not our dancing or our conversation.
Any activity which is pursued as an end in itself is an expression of love. Activities are pursued according to standards, and the objects proper to them are either (as an ideal to be attained) sought or (as in some degree already actual) improved on. For a man to regard something as an end to be sought or cherished or improved rather than harmed, not because of other things but for its own sake, is for him to love it. His activity may be explained by some further end, in which case it is that and not the object of the activity he loves; or he pursues the object because he loves it. Otherwise, his behaviour is unintelligible. To learn to pursue an activity as an end in itself is, then, to learn to love it. I mention this point because the account I have given may seem somewhat soulless. Why should these formal characteristics, so cerebrally detected, have anything to do with what is of value to people? Surely, to be valued, something must be liked or loved as well? My answer to this is ‘Not as well; I am trying to articulate what it is to love’.
Now the pursuit of learning—the study of physics, history or philosophy—is clearly an activity whose objects possess reciprocity. They provide the kind of interest which is not readily exhaustible, and which provides challenges at every stage which cannot be satisfied except by digging more deeply. Every acquisition of knowledge seems to reveal a host of new and often more subtle and difficult problems. Without care, we get no answers or misleading answers when we put nature to the question, and the next question we ask will be determined by the last one we got. In history, literary criticism, and philosophy, we are engaged in a dialogue with other men, in which we value the unpredictability of their responses and—at least ideally—the unexpected upsetting of our own views. These activities differ, however, from many other valuable ones in one most important respect. Two men who are pursuing them both pursue the same object. Their objects are universal, and at the same time concrete, in that what each man gets is not an instance of, but a relation to, the same thing as his fellow. (All such objects are qualitatively and not numerically identified). The object of the activity of conversation, or fatherhood, is an individual person (conceived under a limiting description) in which every situation is concrete and unique, shared, if at all, by at most a few. The tennis player is faced with an individual opponent, and he faces a series of new situations defined in terms of the numerically distinct participants and hence peculiarly his. They cannot be shared or passed on. Where the object of a non- universal activity—such as a mistress—is passed on, it is pre-empted. But physics, history, or philosophy are not diminished for me if others pursue them. I may be jealous, or, more reasonably, envious, of the better philosophical achievements of others, but I cannot be jealous because there are other philosophers as I might be if my wife had lovers; for I cannot, even mistakenly, conceive philosophy as mine in the way that I might—possibly mistakenly—conceive a woman as mine. I cannot speak of my history, my physics, as I can speak of my singing, my son, or my tennis match. As universal and public, physics or history must be pursued under different conditions from those under which non-universal objects are pursued. It is not only that these objects can also be pursued by others; they must be, if I am to pursue them myself. And I cannot pursue them properly and seriously if I ignore the work of others. They require the check of the opinions of others. and this is possible as well as necessary because they are public and objective in a way that other activities are not. They all involve the pursuit of truth.
The pursuit of learning is, then, an activity having value as an end in itself. But because its objects are distinguished from others by their universality, they can be sought only in a certain kind of environment. It must be one in which there is time to pursue the activity; for the universal objects of the highest excellence are those which demand most systematic attention, and are practically inexhaustible. It must provide the freedom within which the new challenge can survive, in which whether an argument or some fact is considered depends on the standards of the activity rather than any external criterion, such as its social acceptability or its political convenience. It must be an environment in which communication is possible with others who are engaged in the same pursuits.
This environment is one which has been traditionally provided by universities, especially for their senior members. While other societies may have fulfilled this function, such as classical Athens, it was only because they, too, provided the required environment. Leisure in Athens made the pursuit of learning possible; freedom, of the kind idealized by Pericles in his funeral speech, made it live; and the smallness of the community made its sharing easy. The leisure that made learning possible in Athens was, of course, a consequence of the exploitation of others who were not permitted to share in it: the slaves on the land and in the mines, the over-taxed colonies and tributaries, and everyone who was taken advantage of by the commercial superiority of Athens. In this too Athens was similar to the modern university, for there also the pursuit of learning is carried on at the expense of those who have no part in it.
The centre of learning, existing as it must outside Eden, demands a great deal from the community in which it exists. It demands its keep; and (what may be more difficult to give) it demands its indulgence, for it is a place where the most important prejudices, which may be essential for the stability or even the existence of its surrounding community, may have to be questioned, and perhaps destroyed.
As I have described it, there seem to be cogent reasons why anyone who is not a member of a centre of learning should not want it to exist, and no reason why he should. To him, the centre of learning could be justified only in terms of its by-products. Before going on to discuss these, two things need to be said. First, that we, who for our own selfish purposes (or in concern for the selfish purposes of others who love learning) want to defend universities, should be careful, in our zeal for pointing out their useful byproducts, that we do not end up forgetting what we were essentially concerned with, rather than the mere by-products. Secondly, we must not too quickly reject the value and importance of selfish activities.
It is only a kind of lunatic puritanism that would condemn all selfish activities. If an activity is supposed to have value only in its contribution to the well-being of others, then value can reside only in effects, only in what is suffered and not in what is done. This is to ignore the value of activities as such altogether. Furthermore, the pursuit of mathematics or history is not viciously selfish in the sense that greed is. Pursuing them does not prevent, but rather enhances, their pursuit by another. Except that a mathematician withdraws his hands from the production line, he diminishes no one.
The relevance of the last point might be disputed on the grounds that in practice the pursuit of learning can be the privilege of only a few. It is sometimes said that the pursuit of universal activities as I have described them requires much time and energy; so those who engage in them must be the few who can be spared in the community’s productive effort. In any case, only a very few are intellectually capable of the pursuit of universal objects.
Certainly, if history or physics or philosophy are to be advanced, there must be some people who dedicate a considerable part of their lives to them. But once the pursuit of phys- ics or philosophy exists as an institution, others who have much else to do may participate in it. Thus the selfishness of the few is a condition of the satisfaction of the many. That only a few are intellectually capable of the pursuit of universal objects is simply not in accordance with the facts.3 It will require the presence of those more practised in such pursuits, but it is possible for many to reach a point (as many do who are awarded bachelor’s degrees, or attend three-year extramural classes) where they produce the guessing, insight and argument that must take place at the growing point of a subject.
ACCIDENTS
There can be no doubt that universities often provide the environment necessary to the pursuit of learning as I have described it. But it is not enough to say this if I am to show that a university must essentially be a centre of learning. For universities do other things too. They usually set up to teach; they preserve and even further culture; they help people to acquire useful arts which later enable them to increase productivity, decrease productivity, and perform other desired economic functions; they may be supposed to turn people into better citizens. In addition to these things, which may be and indeed all have been mistaken for the essential function of the university, they do other things too. They are thought by some to be incomparably the best, if the most expensive, marriage bureaux on earth. They are in some places essential to the maintenance of good semi-professional football teams. They are often decorative, places of tourist resort and, as I remarked before, they all warm the air slightly. I shall not think it necessary to concern myself with the second set of university functions. It would clearly be quite idiotic to suggest that they might be considered the essential functions of a university, because it would mean that universities are not at all distinct from correspondence clubs, sporting clubs, national parks or warming pans, respectively. This shows that we do not invent the concept ‘university’ to represent these functions (or we would not have a different concept), we do not conceive the institution in this way. And what it is is how it is conceived. So I need only concern myself with the first set of functions, because some people do conceive universities as essentially distinguished by them. To show that they are wrong, it will be necessary to show that these functions can be conceived as functions of the university only so far as they are dependent on the central function, the pursuit of learning. This however one can only do in so far as one believes they are possible; and as I shall argue, perhaps the last is not.
(i) Teaching4
Some universities are said to have begun by scholars taking pupils in order to be able to live. Many universities today are full of teachers who are teachers because that is the only way they can get enough money and live in the right surroundings to pursue their subjects. This may be a sufficient explanation of why people who have as a major aim in life the pursuit of universal objects become university teachers (or, perhaps, monks). But it makes the matter look rather too accidental. The activity of teaching is peculiarly compatible with the pursuit of universal objects, in a way that other work, even part-time work, is not. For certain kinds of teaching, at any rate, are nothing but the practice of the activity in public; the pupil and the teacher form the community within which the universal object is publicly possessed. The dialogue between pupil and teacher need not be fundamentally different from that between scholar and scholar. Its avowed end is not the same: it is the initiation of another into a universal activity, not the discovery of truth. But this can be done only by treating the dialogue as if its end were the discovery of truth. The pupil is introduced to the activity by participating in it with someone more advanced who is for the moment more concerned for the state of mind of the individual than the advancement of his subject, but who shows the pupil what a concern for the advancement of his subject amounts to. It is true that even this is too much to ask of some; there are university dons who hate their pupils for interrupting their real work, until one as advanced and brilliant as himself obtrudes on his attention as would a colleague.
However, to say that teaching is peculiarly compatible with the pursuit of universal objects does not show that it is the pursuit of universal objects which is the essence of the university. It shows merely that university scholars may well teach, not that university teachers must be scholars. But for the latter it is enough to say that for anyone to be introduced to a universal activity, he must be in the presence of someone who practises it, and who does so in a way which shows most manifestly the standards and principles of the activity. There is no way of introducing people to these activities except by helping them to practise them. But no one can simply be instructed how to practise them. They possess reciprocity in the highest degree. At every stage they require the stance of doubt: the readiness to meet challenge. Every step must be questioned and one must always be prepared for—indeed look for—refutation. One cannot be prepared for refutation unless one knows what refutation is, and that means knowing what it is to refute. The pupil is from the beginning the critic of his teacher’s work, and his aim is to overthrow it if possible (as indeed it must be the scholar’s aim, if he is concerned for truth, to see his work overthrown). From the beginning the pupil must take an active part:5 it is the teacher’s cross to bear with initially simple-minded and half-baked objections so that he may eventually be proved wrong with good ones.
So the teacher must be concerned for his pupil as well as for his subject; but if he is teaching history, for example, his concern must be for his pupil as a possible historian rather than as a future wageearner.6 What he has to do, whether he himself loves his own subject or pursues it only for some further end such as making a living, is to lead the pupil to act as if the pupil loved the subject: for only in this way can he bring the student to see what this love consists in. It is only in this way that the pupil can come to pursue the subject properly, that is, by the standards internal to it, rather than as a mere means which may be restricted to serve an external end. (More about this in section iii). In these circumstances it would be reasonable to expect what does indeed seem to be the case, that the best teachers tend to be those who do love their subjects, for whom their subjects are ends in themselves. Such people will want to be at a centre of learning rather than an institution which does not satisfy this description. They will want people to talk to on their own academic level, the leisure to pursue their subjects, and the freedom to do so not so much as they think fit but as they judge the subject demands. Introducing people to universal objects must be done then at centres of learning, because you must go where the people who can best do it are to be found.
(ii) Education
To acquire the practice of a universal activity may not, perhaps, be to become educated. If we regard an educated man as someone who has the knowledge and sophistication which is common to some civilisation, his ability to pursue a universal object will not be sufficient for him to be educated. He may be a barbarian in most respects; and this means that every senior member of a university may be a barbarian and still be a satisfactory scholar in his own field. There may be philistine pure mathematicians, philosophers with no aesthetic sense, physicists who never read the newspapers, philologists who spend half their time glued to the telly, and mediaevalists who think science is some kind of hand- soiling tinkering with gadgets. To some extent, this seems to be becoming more generally true, especially of non-scientists: people interested in the arts seem far less able to discuss or understand scientific interests than scientists are able to discuss and understand the arts. At any rate, the common mode of conversation throughout a whole university often seems to tend towards sheer gossip: for personalities seem to be all that each man can talk about other than his own subject.
If this is inevitable, we have a choice: universities either as centres of learning or centres of culture, it would seem. Are universities for turning out educated men of culture, or for turning out people who can do physics or history or philosophy? If the former then they are not essentially centres of learning. If the latter, and the gap is unbridgeable, they will not be centres of culture at all.
But let us now ask, if this is inevitable what, then, would a centre of culture be? It would be a place where people pursue not only physics, but philosophy; not only philosophy, but music; not only music, but engineering (nobody can understand our world and be an all- round cultured man without a knowledge of the nature and problems of engineering); not only engineering, but theology. It is difficult to see why, if they can do all of these things reasonably well, they cannot do one of them well. In which case, the centre of culture is a centre of learning too. But it is also difficult to see why, if they cannot do any one of them well, they should be expected to do all of them reasonably well. If it is inevitable that centres of learning cannot be centres of culture, then it is inevitable that there cannot be centres of culture: it means that our culture is not only fragmented, as C.P.Snow would have it: but that it is necessarily fragmented.
On the other hand, if this is not inevitable, then a centre of learning should provide the environment in which a man can acquire a general culture if he can acquire it at all. For it is there that the growing points of a culture—at least so far as it concerns universal objects— are; and it is there that he will come into contact with those who are most deeply immersed in some aspect of culture. What he may well not do is to meet those who are concerned with the growing points of culture so far as it concerns non-universal objects. He will not meet painters, poets, or international tennis players, and he will not meet many of the best composers. There is no reason why a university should not extend itself to being a patron of the non-universal arts, if it can afford it, as many American universities have done. (Such writers as Frost and Auden, such composers as Schoenberg, who hated teaching harmony, and such footballers as I cannot name, have found niches in American universities from time to time). This should not however be at the expense of its central function as a centre of learning. These other lonelier activities will go on somewhere whether the university environment is provided or not. The university environment, with its air of public criticism, is often inimical to the artist. Artists do not always fit well into institutions, especially ones not primarily dedicated to their purposes. Above all, we do not want to turn poets into literary critics, painters into art historians, or great musical innovators into teachers of elementary harmony: and this not for the sake of universities but for the sake of poetry, literary criticism, painting, art history, and Schoenberg.
(iii) Useful Arts
In their Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage Bergen and Cornelia Evans say of the term ‘liberal arts’: ‘It means, etymologically, befitting a free man. In practice it means a course of studies comprising the arts, natural sciences, social studies, and the humanities, which is not designed, as are courses in engineering, business administration, forestry, and so on, to have an immediate utility’.7 There may seem to be no obvious connection between the etymology and the present meaning of ‘liberal arts’: can’t an engineer, or a dentist, be a free man? But there is this interesting connection. There is a sense in which the pursuit of philosophy or physics or history is the pursuit of a free man whereas business administration or forestry is the pursuit of a slave or at least a servant. It is the sense in which the former pursuits are of value in themselves to those who pursue them,8 as a pursuit of universal objects; whereas the latter are pursued as a means only, so that people will pursue them only (as slaves) under threat of punishment or (as servants) for the sake of reward. But if this is the reason for the distinction, the examples mentioned are dangerously misleading. The distinction is not really one of different studies. Painting, physics, psychology and Latin may all be pursued ‘so as to have an immediate utility’; while engineering, business administration, forestry and dental caries may all be studied simply because they are interesting. If, in a university, the study of Latin as a language is robbed of its historical and philological interest because efficient schoolteachers of Latin, who are being processed in the university, have no need of such things, we are treating the students like slaves who have to be equipped with hoes or hammers. If psychology is studied just so far as it might be of use to those who later on will have to advise advertisers about the most efficient methods of deceiving the general public, it has ceased to be the pursuit of a universal object. What makes the distinction is not the field of study but the way it is pursued. It cannot be pursued as a valuable universal object if arbitrary limits are set on what determines the importance and relevance of any question within it; that is, if the standards of relevance become extrinsic to the activity, it loses the fecundity of reciprocity which makes it valuable.
To say that in universities subjects are pursued as ends in themselves is not then to say that they are all useless; it is only to say that their use does not determine the way they are studied. Confusion in this matter may account for the contemptuous attitude displayed by some members of arts faculties to their scientific colleagues; as if the latter were somehow engaged in trade. That their own subjects are largely useless, and many sciences undoubtedly useful, does not necessarily mark any difference in the way in which these subjects may be approached. The same may be said of those subjects coming under the heading of ‘technology’. Technological problems are objective, public problems, which are related to those trying to solve them in exactly the same way as the problems of physics or literary criticism. That, in solving them, it becomes immediately possible to build a bridge does not mean that, in pursuing them, those who studied them would lose interest if they did not happen to want a bridge. Indeed, far from its being the case that such subjects are not ‘liberal’, their usefulness often depends on their being treated in a disinterested liberal way (as Bell Telephone Laboratories have shown). This is fortunate for universities and for those useless subjects pursued in them; were it not true there would undoubtedly be less of them.
Turning out people with technical abilities is not, then, incompatible with the essential function of a university; but it will become so if this aim is allowed to determine its activities. We may also say that when this aim does become the determinant of its activities, it fails to achieve this aim on the highest level.
(iv) Preparation for Life
Education is often held to have as one of its primary aims the training of character; if so we might demand of institutions of higher education that they also have this aim. Not inevitably, however; for we may question, in the first place, whether we should think of universities as being very centrally concerned with education, rather than the pursuit and passing on of universal activities; or, in the second place, whether all education, at every stage, involves the training of character. But it is a hoary idea that universities should concern themselves with this aim; that they should be turning out good citizens and, indeed, as the highest reaches of the educational system, that they should be turning out the best citizens—the aristocrats who will lead.
I shall not concern myself here with the inegalitarian aspects of this view, or with the dangers to the ideals of democracy of leadership cadres. I am writing about universities, not the best way to run society. What I shall ask is whether this aim seems even possible in any institutions which look remotely like universities.
I am not going to argue that leadership, etc., cannot be learnt. But the context in which it is learnt seems as a rule a very different one from an academic institution. In the Army and Police force there are semi-academic institutions such as the Staff Colleges. But no one thinks that it is at such places that the qualities of leadership are developed. The students are those who are already some distance up the ladder of leadership and, being leaders, are acquiring certain specific information and skills. Trade unionists get sent to various educational institutions during their careers, but they acquire the qualities of a good trade union leader in the work of the union. Leadership, the ability to handle men and make decisions showing practical judgment, while requiring certain initial qualities of mind and character, seems to be developed by practising it and not something else.
On the other hand, graduates do not seem to possess these qualities of character strikingly more than anyone else. So if we are to regard universities as schools of leadership, we shall have to ask them to do rather different things from their present practice. It must not be too different or we shall not call them universities at all. This means that if anyone is going to put forward the Platonic view that certain studies ultimately produce the qualities needed in leaders of men, he will be required to make quite specific suggestions as to which studies, in what way pursued, will have this effect. Obviously I cannot deal with all such suggestions here. I shall content myself with the discussion of one such recent suggestion, that made by Professor Nowell-Smith in his inaugural lecture at the University of Leicester.9 It is an interesting one because it involves a very explicit suggestion that university studies should be limited, in arts faculties, in just the way that technical subjects may be, by being supposed to have ‘an immediate utility’: the reverse view to that which takes a pride in the uselessness of arts subjects. Only here the ‘immediate utility’ is in terms of desirable effects on the characters and minds of the students, rather than on their economic value.
What the student should acquire at the university, according to Nowell-Smith, are the ‘skills required for living’;10 since university students ‘are marked out by their talents as leaders and it is they who will have most to contribute to the solution of our social, moral and political problems’.11 The academic training should develop not special but general skills: ‘creative imagination, practical wisdom, and logical thought’.12 The view is directly in contradiction to the one I have been putting forward. These general skills are not simply valuable by-products but developing them is the essential function of the university. The aim of the university should explicitly not be ‘to teach literature, history, or philosophy, but those skills that are required for living’ to the majority of students.
I think this view is doubly dangerous. In the first place, it may lead us to neglect those valuable functions which, essential or not, can be performed only by a university. In the second place, and I conclude by arguing this point, the aim is not a possible one. It would be foolhardy to sell universities to the public on such grounds; one fears what might happen when it is seen that the Emperor is nothing but clothes.
Nowell-Smith’s suggestion is that the ‘skills required for living’, creative imagination, practical wisdom, and logical power, may be developed by a (partial) study of literature, history and philosophy respectively. If these are skills, they are very odd ones. Notice that most ordinary skills—swimming, tight-rope walking, or carpentry—can be acquired only by practising them; you cannot acquire the skill of swimming without going to the water. But it seems that we can get practical wisdom by studying history and creative imagination by studying literature. Secondly, these skills seem to have no direct manifestation. We can tell that people can swim by seeing them swimming. We cannot tell they have practical wisdom by seeing them do any particular sort of thing. We may be misled on this point because there are sometimes good tests for the possession of qualities of this sort; intelligence tests are an example. But the relation between intelligence tests and intelligence is quite different from the relation between swimming tests and the ability to swim. One could actually learn to swim by doing lots of swimming tests, just as some people learn to play the piano by mastering a series of graded test pieces. One cannot acquire intelligence by doing intelligence tests. This suggests that it is a mistake to regard such qualities of mind as imagination, practical wisdom, and logical power as skills at all, for this will lead us to think they can be acquired in the same way that skills are acquired, and that once acquired they may have one uniform manifestation. In fact such concepts as intelligence or practical wisdom must be ‘schematised’ before they can be applied: that is, given a concrete sense in terms of some particular activity. For different activities performed by the same individual may manifest different degrees of intelligence or imagination. It may be true that an intelligent man is more likely to make an intelligent boxer than an unintelligent man; yet an intelligent boxer may be an ‘unintelligent man’. You may be able to tell whether a man is a logical historian by seeing how well he is able to solve logical puzzles; but it is not conceptually impossible to find a brilliantly logical historian who in fact cannot do logical puzzles (for example he may be quite put off by too great a degree of abstraction). We know he is a logical historian because of the way he does history. Such qualities as logical power or imagination are not skills like the ability to ride a bicycle or blow smoke rings, and they are not manifested as pure intelligence or pure wisdom, as riding a bicycle and blowing smoke rings perfectly manifest the corresponding skills. They are manifested in the way some things are done; ‘imaginative’, ‘wise’, ‘logical’ and ‘intelligent’ are adjectives which derivc their sense from the adverbial form. Intelligence, imagination and wisdom are the qualities needed to do things intelligently, imaginatively and wisely, and the force of these adverbs will depend on what they qualify (which may be understood by realising that the question ‘Does an imaginative scientist need more or less imagination than an imaginative poet?’ is a nonsensical one). Furthermore, all these qualities are needed to pursue any activity well.
I shall try to illustrate these points by looking at the suggestions Nowell-Smith makes more closely and in greater detail, before drawing my conclusion.
He regards history as involving examples of practical wisdom and as capable of developing it. But the study of history surely already pre-supposes some practical wisdom, and a lot of imagination (sympathetic, if not creative imagination; but I am not too sure of the distinction). It would seem that the study of political institutions is an art: some people have a flair for understanding the nature and processes of such institutions as the Soviet Communist Party, a flair which is essential for any good political analyst. This is also true of understanding the past. If imagination is necessary to the study of history, no less is analytical intelligence. Nowell-Smith says ‘the historian will be all the better as a historian for some philosophical training’. Perhaps. But a historian without considerable logical and analytical intelligence would be no historian worthy of the name. He must be able to detect inconsistencies in his theories, and to characterise the past in meaningful and viable concepts. Probably, he will not consult the philosopher about where he fails: he is more likely to be corrected by other historians, who know better what he is talking about.
The same sort of thing may be said for either literature or philosophy. In literary criticism we do not develop creative imagination, but we surely require that the critic should be imaginative, in that he is able to perceive connections, significances, ambiguities and comparisons of a non-obvious kind in the works he is studying. The connection with practical wisdom is at least as plausible as in the case of history. (It is perhaps more plausible. History might equally be regarded as the record of the manifold follies of men as of their wiser decisions. To distinguish the one from the other means bringing practical wisdom to it, not getting it from it.) In the novel, in drama and in epic and other poetry, there is not only often an abstractable set of situations which are of interest to the moral sense: the moral sense is essential to the appreciation of the work itself, to the significance of its images and its development. Anyone who reads Lear without realising its preoccupation with the idea of love and its demands and misuses misses a great part of the value of the work. Equally important to the critic is the capacity for logical thought and careful analysis. As in history, his second order concepts must be consistent, meaningful and viable; but the critic must also bring his logical sense to bear on the work itself. There are arguments in literature, world-views, the posing of problems, even though these are not its primary end; but they are elements of the work, and it is impossible to appreciate or criticise them unless the critic has the necessary analytical equipment.
Again, all these qualities of mind are necessary to the philosopher. The reason why analytical thought is so much more important in philosophy is because it is an absolutely necessary condition of any philosophical view that it should be clear and consistent. It cannot put up with the openness and ambiguities of a literary work—which indeed are a part of the value of literature—and it cannot reflect the empirical modesty of history, which accepts concepts and hypotheses for their working value. So on the critical side in philosophy one can usually make do with analytical expertise. But this merely destructive criticism is not sufficient to a good philosopher. Philo sophy never exists in a vacuum; philosophical thought always goes on against a background of other people’s philosophical views. Sympathetic historical imagination is necessary to appreciate philosophical work of the past. Furthermore, the power of imagination is necessary to the development of one’s own philosophical views: since seeing connections, picking out important and central concepts, and the perspicuous understanding of a language game are not matters o£ deduction or calculation or mere painstaking analysis.
Imagination, wisdom, and intelligence seem then to be necessary conditions of pursuing any of these three subjects, and, indeed, anything else, well. But it would be a mistake to think that they are generally developed by any activity requiring them. In pursuing history or physics, or philosophy, in facing the difficulties of these activities and overcoming them, one becomes better at history, physics or philosophy. Perhaps this means becoming a more intelligent, imaginative, and logical historian or physicist or philosopher. But it certainly does not mean becoming a more intelligent boxer or philologist or soldier, or a more imaginative poet or joke-teller, or a wiser father or trade union leader; or a wiser, more imaginative more logical and intelligent man.
There are human activities which need universities for their pursuit where one may acquire the ability to pursue them, and which require the possession of such qualities of mind as intelligence, imagination and practical wisdom. There is no reason to suppose that the consequence of learning to pursue these activities will be anything other than the ability to pursue them; but being able to pursue them is nevertheless a good thing.
NOTES
1. J.S.Mill, Representative Government, Chapter 1.
2. Consider, for example, what might make a ritual dance an attempt at magic, a form of
amusement, or an act of public worship. For further arguments see P.Winch, The Idea
of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).
3. This will seem to some to be unwarrantable dogmatism. Here I can refer only to the investigations of the Robbins Committee (Committee on Higher Education, Higher Education [Report of the Committee under the chairmanship of Lord Robbins, 1961–63; London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1963], esp. Chapter VI), and earlier investigations of the British Association of University Teachers. It is, I fear, true, that very many dons in England have bitterly opposed the view that there is a pool of untapped ability, as the ghastly phrase goes. Generally however their remarks seem to have been made ona journalistic, intuitive level. Some now seem to have been convinced by the Robbins Committee report, but find new arguments to oppose the expansion of Universities (one prize example being the claim that while bigger Universities would not necessarily be academically bad, it would diminish the moral influence of the writer and other dons over his students. Enough said.).
4. My argument in this section has been considerably modified in discussion with Professor R.S.Peters.
5. This leads, at least in my own teaching of philosophy, to a pedagogical problem which I have never satisfactorily resolved. To teach students what it is to refute, it is sometimes necessary to give them practice by defending to them a not easily defensible position. A second reason for doing this is that they may be inclined themselves to reject a commonly rejected position—such as psychological hedonism—because it is commonly rejected and not because they have seriously worked through the reasons against it. But taking up the rôle of devil’s advocate sometimes results in the student’s doubting the sincerity and seriousness of the teacher. This I think illustrates what I have been saying. There is bound to be a kind of tension resulting from the fact that in teaching one is not primarily seeking truth but must at the same time present to the pupil an example of that search.
6. This is not a distinction without a difference. Only via such distinctions can one give the concept ‘love of persons’ any content at all. I should argue that there is no such thing as love of a person as Such; only of a person under a given description. Forms of love of persons are thus discriminated in terms of the description under which their objects are conceived, and the activities which are their expression are consequently very different, as fatherhood differs from friendship, being a good daughter differs from being a good wife, and the love of a wife is different from the love of a Queen (which must lead to difficulties in the life of a Prince Consort).
7. B. and C.Evans, Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 274.
8. Ignore the other dimension of meaning of the word ‘liberal’, that a liberal course is a general course. I have discussed this issue in the preceding section.
9. Education in a University (Leicester University Press, 1958).
10. Ibid., p. 7.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
