JOHN R. SEARLE
697
portant distinction in quality between the two, and
we think we can jlls–
tify the clailll that there is a distinction.
The standards are not algorithmic.
Making judgments of quality is not like measuring velocities, but it is not
arbitrary either.
A third assumption behind the tradition is that one of the things we
are trying to do is to enable our students
to
overcome the mediocrity,
provincialism, or other limitations of whatever background from which
they may have come. The idea is that your life is likely to be in large
measure a product of a lot of historical accidents: the town you were
born in, the community you grew up in, the sort of values you learned
in high school. One of the aims of a liberal education is to liberate our
students from the contingencies of their backgrounds. We invite the stu–
dent into the membership of a much larger intellectual community. This
third feature of the traditional educational theory, then, is what one
might call an invitation to transcendence. The professor asks his or her
students to read books that are designed to challenge any complacencies
that the students may have brought to the university when they first ar–
rived there.
A fourth assumption made by the traditionalists, which is related
to
the third, is that in the Western tradition, there is a peculiar combina–
tion of what one might call extreme universalism and extreme individu–
alism. Again, this tends to be tacit and is seldom made explicit. The idea
is that the most precious thing in the universe is the human individual,
but that the human individual is precious as part of the universal human
civilization. The idea is that one achieves one's maximum intellectual
in–
dillidl/(//
potential by coming to see oneself as part of a
l/Ilillersal
human
species with a universal human culture.
A fifth feature of this tacit theory behind educational traditionalism
is that a primary function of liberal education is criticism of oneself and
one's community. According to this conception, the unexamined life is
not worth living, and the examined life is life criticized.
I
do not know
of any intellectual tradition that is as savagely self-critical as the Western
tradition. Its hero is Socrates, and of course we all know what happened
to him . "I would rather die by the present argument than live by any
other," he said. This is the model we hold up
to
our students: the lone
individual, standing out against the hypocrisy, stupidity, and dishonesty of
the larger community. And that tradition goes right through
to
the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, and
Bertrand Russell, to mention just a few. The tradition is that of the ex–
tremely critical intellectual commentator attacking the pieties and inade–
quacIes, the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the surrounding commu–
nity.
