ROGER SCRUTON
The Harrowed Tradition
The
controversy over the curriculum began in classical Athens. Although
Plato briefly settled the matter in favor of philosophy, it was the schools
of rhetoric that were to have the widest influence in the Hellenistic pe–
riod, when the Roman curriculum (which would in due course be the
curriculum of the medieval university) was first put together. The dispute
between philosophy and rhetoric has not ended. Indeed, it has a perennial
character that suggests something deep is at issue, something to do with
the conflict between truth and power. The purpose of rhetoric is to em–
power those who learn it; the purpose of philosophy is to enlighten. But
philosophy won its following by persuading its students that enlighten–
ment brings power. Through philosophy, therefore, we gain the prize of
the rhetoricians without stooping to their methods and, in particular,
without taking our eyes from truth as the supreme goal of speculation.
Today, the vestiges of this dispute are visible in American universities.
Radicals argue that a traditional curricu lum exists not as a guide to some
objective truth about the human condition , but to create and sustain the
ruling power. The curriculum has no intellectual authority, only a tacit
political endorsement. We should feel free to change it - indeed, we may
even be obliged to change it - in order to empower those who have suf–
fered injustice under existing systems of privilege . Often these arguments
- which exist in as many vulgar and refi ned forms as there are species of
academic disaffection - are accompanied by an attack on the very idea of
truth. Some, on the dubious authority of Nietzsche, argue that the notion
of an objective truth about the human condition is a chimera and that the
pursuit of truth is always the pursuit of power under another description.
In
a triumph of sophistical reasoning, the American philosopher Richard
Rorty has managed to use the pragmatist ideas of John Dewey to banish
the concept of truth from philosophy itself, so as to leave the political
community, albeit a community composed uniquely of people like
Rorty, as our sole point of reference.
This new eruption of the age-old contest between philosophy and
rhetoric promises to tear the American academy apart and to undermine
Editor's Note: This essay is a shortened version of a lecture given at Boston
University, December 3,1992, "On Humane Education," in which the author's
argument was more completely presented.
