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PARTISAN REVIEW
or Augustinian in the Middle Ages, whether one was a Cartesian or
Baconian in the seventeenth century, whether or not one read
Rousseau, and how one read him, in the late eighteenth century.
These are not merely texts for schoolchildren or postadolescents,
examples of "cultural pluralism"; these are value systems or ideologies
that are a matter of life and death . Why this illustrious Commission
should have ignored this fundamental fact I cannot understand.
The most amazing and troublesome aspect of this report is its
absence of intellectuality. I can well understand this from people
who are not academics and scholars, who are not well-informed. I
have in the past year encountered a significant number of corporate
executives who vehemently affirm their devotion to the humanities
without knowing
anything
of the intellectual history of the twentieth
century. But one would have expected a very different perception
from the extremely lettered and experienced members of this Com–
mission . There can be no more dismal testament to the problems of
the humanities in American life than the Rockefeller Commission's
total failure to discuss the central intellectual issues in the humani–
ties at this time .
In just about every field of thought and endeavor that the hu–
manities embrace, we have in the last fifteen years witnessed the
most profound intellectual upheavals, the deepest and most deeply
felt conflicts over theory that the Western world has seen since the
onslaught of the Enlightenment upon more traditional and hierar–
chical culture in the eighteenth century. And these conflicts - whose
outcome will shape not only formal academic disciplines but our way
of understanding literature, history, and philosophy, of understand–
ing ourselves and the world into the next century-whether fought
out in Cambridge , Massachusetts or Cambridge, England, in Paris,
Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Boston, or New York, remain largely unre–
solved . The importance and far-reaching significance of these intel–
lectual issues cannot be exaggerated. I would have expected this
illustrious Commission to address itself to , at least comment upon,
this situation . It has absurdly chosen not to do so. It is as if one pub–
lished a report on the American economy without mentioning the
automobile, energy , and telecommunications industries.
If
the Commission had chosen not to abdicate intellectuality
and learning in favor of supermarket "cultural pluralism," it might
have come around to considering one of the most difficult and troub–
ling questions in the last forty years of American intellectual life.
Why have innovations, discoveries , and breakthroughs of great sig-
