Elsewhere in his work Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 132 - 36) explains how philosophy became a Fach (academic subject) or professionalised discipline, beginning with neo-Kantianism in the nineteenth century German university. The process was completed after WW2 in the American university system where philosophy acquired a professional organisation with journals, a peer review system, grants, PhD training and all the other paraphenalia of the sciences. The earlier preponderance of patronal authority - which is still more or less the norm on the continent - gave way within the Anglo-Saxon system to formal-professional authority with a strong collegial elite of elderly eminences grises. [NB Previous chapters of The Ends of Science have given a detailed typology of disciplinary authority, the patronal and formal-professional types being two among many. CS] This authority rules with a very strong hand, excluding and outlawing any philosophic perspective other than that which falls within the analytic spectrum. Occasional open rebellions against this draconian rule attest to this fact. Thus at the 76th annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York in December 1979, a group of rebels, among them such prominent figures as William Barret and John Smith, "charged that the APA has become a monolith and intolerant, that its programmes neglected philosophic issues and that its leadership has lost contact with other philosophers". The academic political reasons for the dominance of analytic philosophy are openly acknowledged, and the upshot was "that the APA was dominated by people espousing analytic philosophy, preventing those with other perspectives from having an effective say in the organisation." As John Lachs puts it, in philosophy "power is an important and lucrative matter". "It was made clear that differences between the European Continental, historical position and the Anglo-Saxon Analytic position were not merely an abstract matter but touched on such practical matters as grants, government support, endowments, publishing and the placing of students and friends in faculty positions." It remains to be seen how this particular insurrection will fare, though one cannot be sanguine about one that seeks openly to assault an entrenched organisational position.
Perhaps because of previous failures at open reform, there have been many attempts to infiltrate continental philosophy into Anglo-American university by the backdoor of other departments. Thus the so-called "deconstructive" movement in literary criticism is partly such an attempt to smuggle in continental thought - mainly that of Derrida and his predecessors such as Heidegger and Nietzsche - through departments of comparative literature, English, French and German. This tactic has caused an inordinate amount of confusion and bitterness among the older style literary critics who cannot understand how and why their theories are being outflanked by something that claims to be more sophisticated than mere criticism but which they see as less interested in literature than in literary philosophy. [one might add older style anthropologists, classicists, historians, political theorists and numerous others. CS]. The battle lines are being drawn, with the opposed literary camps organising in cliques and possibly to become rival professional bodies. [One sees a whole front of the contemporary culture wars opening out from this point. Sickening stuff. CS] If the deconstructionists succeed in taking over some departments completely, two kinds of philosophy will be taught in Anglo-Saxon universities which have nothing to do with each other. This is already the situation at Sydney University in Australia. Rorty's (1982, p.328) rather blase' view that all this is "not much more, in the long run, than a matter of what sort of professors come under which departmental budget" seems mistaken, because once departmental divisions are set up there is no way of breaking through them and the discipline becomes fragmented, narrowed and impoverished.
Analytic philosophy and continental philosophy are already narrow, puristic subjects, the one stemming largely from the ideas of Wittgenstein and his predecessors Russell and Frege, the other from those of Heidegger and his predecessor Husserl. Both versions have by now become highly abstruse and almost empty of substantive content. Both shun involvement with the sciences, the arts or politics or with any other extra-mural thought. Practitioners of analytic philosophy have even gone as far as to show a disinterest in history, including the history of philosophy itself, so that they have almost lost touch with the metaphysical traditions of philosophy. The younger practitioners are little interested in the classics and are almost solely preoccupied with the latest issues of the journals, as set out by the prestigious figures of the field. The result, as Rorty sees it, has been as follows:
"Analytic philosophy was thus left without a genealogy, a sense of mission, or a meta-philosophy. Training in philosophy turned into a sort of "casebook" procedure, of the sort found in law schools. Students' wits were sharpened by reading pre-prints of articles by current fashionable figures, and finding objections to them. The students so trained began to think of themselves neither as continuing a tradition nor as participating in the solution of the "outstanding problems" at the frontiers of science. Rather, they took their self-image from a style and quality of argumentation. They became quasi-lawyers rather than quasi-scientists - hoping an interesting new case would turn up (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 227)"
Like philosophy, politics is a subject of great antiquity which was transformed beyond recognition to become present political science. A brief sketch of this metamorphosis is offered by Habermas:
The discipline of politics has also experienced an insurrection against its current reduction to the “science of political behaviour”. As long ago as 1967 a Caucus for a New Political Science was founded to work within the instituted discipline appeared subsequently in a representative publication by members of this new caucus. Once again the main burden of the criticism is against the organized conformity of the discipline and its attempt to institute the behaviouralist paradigm as the sole intellectual content and method of politics. This disciplinary prescription was frequently buttressed by reference to Kuhn’s idea of a single paradigm per science. Peter Euben sums up this approach:
“A paradigm must be ‘enforced’. To achieve a science of politics, we need enforcers, we need those whose authority in a community of political scientists would function in ways comparable to that in the community of science. Tolerance for diversity within such a community, as within the “normal political science[‘ it would be there to defend, would necessarily be limited in order to guarantee cumulative knowledge.”
Euben predicts that such a paradigm community would soon cease to have much to do with real politics and become an ivory tower discipline: “the community of political science will be fairly small, embrace the concept of professionalism maintained by one or two core journals and the key textbooks, provide opportunities for closeness, common purpose etc.” This course, however, has not been followed since the pull of real politics is too strong to resist, especially by leading professors called to political office or advisory capacities. The converse danger is that the discipline will be staffed by ready apologists for the regime and its policies.
This evolution has been steadily taking place since the 1950’s, especially in American universities where politics is now frequently the study of what politicians are currently engaged in doing, mainly with the purpose of offering them acceptable academic advice and so making the scholars indispensable to the politicians – the example of Kissinger and Brzezinski looms large in the aspirations of political scientists. Long before he had assumed office, Brzezinski had already proffered such a programme for political studies:
“As engagement in the world is encouraging the appearance of a new breed of politicians-intellectuals, men who make it a point to mobilize and draw on the most expert, scientific, and academic advice in the development of political programmes . . . (so) the largely humanist-oriented, occasionally ideologically-minded intellectual-dissenter, who saw his role largely in terms of proffering social critiques, is rapidly being displaced either by experts and specialists, who become involved in special governmental undertakings, or by generalist-integrators, who become in effect house-ideologues for those in power, providing overall intellectual integration for disparate action.”
He has been as good as his word, both as academic and politician. Most other academic mandarins have followed suit. The result has been that foreign policy, diplomacy and international relations studied at present are mainly concerned with the balance of power in the period since the end of the war, with nuclear deterrence as a technical speciality and with the major power blocs as areas of specialization. The study of domestic policy, government and institutions has become focused on the current workings of corporatist representative democracy, concentrating on parties, pressure grops, administration, and the strategies and tactics of electioneering – the last even going to the ludicrous extreme of attempting to become established as a special science with the name of psephology. One-party systems are the preserve of specialists calling themselves Kremlinologists and China men. To this body of studies at the top of the status ladder are sometimes added bits and pieces derived from other sciences, such as political sociology or psychosocial politics, or the occasional subjects dealing with issues such as totalitarianism or Third World politics. An outline of the main modern ideologies is presented largely for undergraduate teaching purposes, though since the “end-of-ideology” thesis these are looked on more as historical curiosities. Only the ex-student radicals, with their influx of new Marxisms, have altered this development a little here and there. Political theory is frequently presented only for teaching purposes as a potted history of political philosophy. Political theorists have gone to the length of trying to establish a separate association called the Conference for the Study of Political Thought. But such secessions do not improve the discipline as a whole, which now suffers from an absence of integrating theories. There is usually nothing of what used to be considered the main staples of politics: no comprehensive theory of the State (Staatslehre), no theory of sovereignty, right or law, no ethical political philosophy or morality of power, no comprehensive theory of representation or power and authority, no utopian speculations, no comparative study of political systems in different countries and epochs, no political economy, no study of politics in relation to culture, no study of the “spirit” of politics, such as the classical concern with the civic virtue of citizens. In short, there is hardly anything left of what was thought worthy by classical political thinkers, as indeed Habermas declares.
History is also an “intermediate” subject, situated somewhere between the social sciences and the humanities but of late tending more to the social sciences, so much so that much historical writing is no more than applied social science. This position, coupled with period overspecialization, the endemic disease of historical scholarship, produces those cherished titles of historical monographs which are regularly paraded for the delectation of other academics, titles such as the perhaps apocryphal, “the economic consequences of the wooden peg in Norwegian shipbuilding 1311 – 1388”. The historians sometimes embrace with pride this view of themselves as applied social scientists. Thus Le Roy Ladurie declares: “we historians form the rearguard of the avant-garde. We leave it to researchers in more sophisticated disciplines to carry out the dangerous reconnaisances”. But the ultimate consequence of this attitude is that history simply becomes antiquarian social science. The problems dealt with in the social sciences might be relevant and important when applied to contemporary society, but they lose their purpose and become in a certain sense anachronistic when referred to a distant age. The economic consequences of using one kind of riveting technique rather than another in modern shipbuilding are certainly worth studying, but “the economic consequences of the wooden peg in Norwegian shipbuilding 1311 – 1388” are almost certainly not worth pursuing. What interests us in relation to our own society need not necessarily have any importance in relation to past societies. Historians of the Annales school and many other schools have gone to great lengths to compile mountains of data on past societies of the kind we possess of our own. Even the work of Braudel at times reads like an encyclopaedic survey complilation not sustained by any overarching historical conception. It is as if the catalogue of ships had swallowed up the epic of history. The effect of all this is that, seen in the mirror of the social sciences, the past becomes a ghostly reflection of the present.
Some of the other humanities still suffer from an older form of antiquarianism; to them the present appears as a reflection of the past, for they ensconce themselves in museums of past culture where they live off the remains of the dead. But although they are mostly preoccupied with dead culture, the spirit of scholarship is conducive to a denial of this fact because of the academic sense of objectivity and impersonality and its attribution of ever-presentness to dead artifacts, treating these as if they were living things and dead texts as if they were live deliverances. Some humanities departments give the impression of being mausoleums in which death is denied. This image can have its ludicrous side, as when scholars and critics identify with their antique objects of study and deck themselves out with the trappings of the past, pretending to finer feelings, higher moralities, greater culture than their more humdrum colleagues in the sciences. Some are capable of forgetting themselves to the extent of transporting themselves imaginatively into their favourite period as if to escape the grim realities of the unideal present. At that point such antics cease to be amusing and become harmful to present culture, for a delusory denial of the past as dead can lead to a forgetfulness of the present which loses all sense of living realities. The ideal objects and texts that are the subject matter of humanistic study are usually far removed from the culture of the present; only through a difficult mediation that is fully aware of them as dead and past can they be meaningfully related to present life.
The continuing development of the humanistic disciplines was premissed on such interactions between the living present culture and the dead cultures of the past. The onset of the nineteenth century saw a flowering of these disciplines, with history, philology and comparative literary studies in the vanguard, partly because the decisive changes then taking place - for instance the various revolutions, political, economic and intellectual - provoked a need to rethink the past. Out of this emerged the Historicist attitude to the past, which was intellectually productive as long as changes in culture continued to stimulate changes in perspective on the whole of the past and gave rise to new ways of interpreting history. When, however, the present uses and relevance of history no longer mattered, when it became merely scholarly, then a purely Historicist antiquarian mentality set in and dominated the universities. A crisis of scholarship ensued in the late nineteenth century in all cultural studies, which had become increasingly fixated in their own past since the present was incapable of generating changes of viewpoint in terms of which the past could be re-examined. As Weber warned at the time "the points of departure of the cultural sciences remain changeable throughout the limitless future as long as a Chinese ossification of intellectual life does not render mankind incapable of setting new questions to the eternally inexhaustible flow of life." Such a "Chinese ossification" has indeed ensued, but it was arrived at by a round-about route that at first sought revitalisation from the very fount of presentness and modernity.
The cultural movement known collectively as Modernism provided the last vital, living impulse for the redirection of the humanities. Although the Modernist masters arose and developed in an avant garde environment of metropolitan culture, usually neglected and shunned by academics mired in the Historicism of cultural studies, they were quickly absorbed into university curricula once their modern-classics status had been established. All the great writers, composers, painters and architects of the pre-WW2 period became accepted academic cynosures after the war. Academics thrived on this discovery of the modern geniuses and busied themselves in incorporating them into the traditional canon. On this basis modernist aesthetics were developed and established as schools of criticism and programmes of instruction in all the humanistic disciplines. It seemed as if the humanities were still in touch with living culture.
However, the impulse proved short-lived. Once modernism as a movement collapsed and the avant garde of artists gave themselves over to ever narrower, more extremist and outrageous experiments, academics who followed suit or even tried to keep up found themselves having to propagate a cultural nihilism in total contradiction to their professional role. The artists could create reputations by attacking the cultural expectations of their audiences, but the critics could not similarly assault their readers, mainly their students. As broad cultural movements in the arts gave way to fickle changes of fashion, frequently manipulated in the metropolitan centres by dealers, impresarios and media advertisers, it became increasingly more difficult for the academics to treat these changes with the seriousness their academic approaches by definition demanded. Some tried and found themselves swept up as apologists for every passing fad or fancy. What Hilton Kramer has called the Camp aesthetic was the coup de grace of criticism; as practised by Warhol, Cage, Ashberry and the post-modernist architects, the Camp fashion sought to treat art as a sophisticated in-joke and ridiculed every pretension to serious meaning [that seems like a bit of caricature, especially applied to Ashberry; though the predominance of fashionable art in-jokes in post-avant-garde art seems undeniable; surely that is better attributed to the epigones of conceptualism, pop art and New Poetry etc than to Warhol, Ashberry etc themselves. CS] The predilection for style without meaningful content could not lend itself to academic critical treatment or interpretative discussion.
Camp art was preparation for the final joke of all, the artificial revival of the very excrescences of nineteenth century Historicism and Victoriana against which the Modernist movement had been launched in the first place. At this point the antiquarianism of the market-place could join hands with the traditional antiquarianism of academia [hello, JA!]. Academics could now with good conscience extol the virtues of the very outdated art they were earlier forced to abandon by the Modernists but which in their heart-of-hearts many of them must have preferred all along.
Thus like a ghost the museum has re-entered living culture; the antique has come alive. The Modernist movement, together with the general cult of progress it subserved, was itself responsible for this outcome. In the name of modernisation and rationalisation it sought to clear away all the accretions of the past, to sweep away the rubbish of history and put in its place the bright, clean, functional and new. Thus architects razed supposed slums of the older urban environments and surrounded the historic cores of the old cities, which they dared not demolish, with the high-rise habitations in which few of them preferred to live themselves. The historic buildings left behind were preserved as museum relics. A similar process ensued in respect of old objects so that in the face of mass-produced disposable goods every old-fashioned artefact assumed the status of a treasured antique. Thus the antiquarian-become-antique has taken on the aura of the irreplaceable, the cherished, and in time will be something to be reproduced and imitated. The old becomes the new. Art nouveau imitated again is made over into new art.
All this inevitably means that the humanities will be without the cultural stimulus from the outside world that they need in order to re-orient themselves. A "Chinese ossification" [NB the Weberian reference is to the traditionalism that settled over the Middle Kingdom under the Ming and Qing from the seventheenth century onwards, not to any sort of world-historical Chinese conservatism] is upon them; it is doubtful whether they can escape it. The humanities in the universities are doubly isolated; they are cut off from contact with an outside cultural world by the commercial desert of the culture industry, and they are immured within the prisons of university departments by the sciences surrounding them. Without stimulus from outside, without sources of reference, without new standards of value and significance, without any kind of living relevance, they quickly degenerate either to sheer antiquarian scholarship or to critical bickerings in a void, forever revaluing or re-interpreting the few accepted masterpieces. The attempts to overcome this impasse by a direct importation into the university of present "relevance" has only aggravated it. To bring raw ideological and political issues or social problems into humanities research trivialises it even further. Thus, for example, pop culture, ethnicism or feminism can hardly provide a re-orientation of literary studies which will prove fruitful in a re-thinking of the major authors or a discovery of new ones. Even if some of these movements are undoubtedly just causes, it does not follow that they will prove to be intellectually innovative. There is no way of revivifying a humanities discipline short of a new approach to its subject, and that cannot be politically willed or concocted; it must be painfully worked for and attained as the outcome of a new orientation of the present on the past.
For similar reasons, the direct importation into the university of artists, political intellectuals or even bohemians by giving them academic jobs - which they usually gladly accept as they represent the only security they can hope for - is debilitating for them in the long run and does nothing for their more professional colleagues. Their own artistic or intellectual work must inevitably suffer in an academic setting, which is both too constricting and too demanding, and is mentally and emotionally wearying without offering the stimulus of new experience. For these reasons some artists and writers have preferred menial jobs to the comforts of the university. Political intellectuals must give up all hope of political effectiveness in academia where their only potential followers, the students, are too fickle and too transient for any lasting political commitments. Inevitably the professional academics come to look on the artists and pseudo-politicians in their ranks with suspicion and resentment, and sometimes not without justice they see them as pretenders, charlatans and panderers. In the institutional setting where all are competing for the same rewards, even those who might have started off differently soon become absorbed. The proper setting where academics, artists, political-intellectuals and journalists can meet on an equal footing with no fear of competition is not the staff room of a department. Unfortunately, however, there are now no public scientific societies, no political debating circles, no salons and even no literary cafe's where such disparate people can meet. An occupationally stratified and status ordered society makes it more difficult for intellectual intercourse to take place than does one merely divided into classes. As a result "the intellectual vocation . . . is largely obsolete, an archaic profession; the intellectual has gone the way of the cobbler and the smithy," as Atlas puts it.
The problems besetting the humanities are very different from those confronting the natural or the social sciences. Nevertheless, they all come together to make up the complex predicament which constitutes the crisis of knowledge and the university. And that crisis in turn relates to the critical situation of culture and society and the dangerous state of humankind in a technological civilisation. Each of the issues we have encountered in the university has its analogues in the social world as a whole. Overproduction, specialisation, the division of labour, bureaucratic hierarchy, and so on in knowledge are parts of a general economic and social condition. Technified instrumentalism in science is one dimension of the general technological reification. Quantificaiton, abstraction, and formalism in methodology relate to the rationalisation of life as such. All the problems of language in relation to knowledge have their correlates in the fragmentation and separation of languages in all modes of discourse, public and private. The difficulties in the relation of present to past that we encountered in the humanities are inherent in the relation of present to past that we encountered in the relation of our advanced technological civilisation to its own more traditional ancestors, as well as to the whole of human history which it is displacing. Thus the crisis of knowledge and the university is part of a general crisis of world culture, one of whose main symptoms is the cultural meaninglessness of science [which forms the topic of another subsection to Chapter 6 - which now follows. . .CS]
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