698
PARTISAN REVIEW
I will mention a sixth and final feature. Objectivity and truth are
possible because there is an independently existing reality to which our
true utterances correspond. This view, called realism, has often been
challenged by various forms of idealism and relativism within Western
philosophy, but it has remained the dominant metaphysical view in our
culture. Our natural science, for example, is based on it. A persistent
topic of debate is: How far does it extend? Is there, for example, an in–
dependently existing set of moral values that we can discover, or are we,
for example, just expressing our subjective feelings and attitudes when we
make moral judgments? I am tempted to continue this list, but I hope
that what I have said so far will give you a feel for the underlying as–
sumptions of the traditionalist theory of liberal education.
I am now going to try
to
do the same for the challengers, but this is
harder
to
do without distortion, simply because there is more variety
among the critics of the tradition than there is in the tradition itself.
Nonetheless, I am going to do my best
to
try to state a widely held set
of core assumptions made by the challengers. Perhaps very few people,
maybe no one, believes all of the assumptions I will try to make explicit,
but they are those I have found commonly made in the debates. The first
assumption made by the challengers is that the subgroup into which you
were born - your ethnic, racial, class, and gender background - matters
enormously; it is important for education.
In
the extreme version of this
assumption, you are essentially defined by your ethnic, racial, class, and
gender background. That is the most important thing in your life. The
dean of an American state university told me, "The most important
thing in my life is being a woman and advancing the cause of women."
Any number of people think that the most important thing in their lives
is their blackness or their Hispanic identity, et cetera. This is something
new in American higher education. Of course, there have always been
people who were defined or who preferred to be defined by their ethnic
group or by other such affiliations, but it has not been part of the the–
ory of what the university was trying to do that we should
eI1Wllra<~e
self–
definition by ethnicity, race, gender, or class. On the contrary, as I noted
in my list of the traditionalist assumptions, we were trying to encourage
students to rise above the accidents of such features. But to a sizable
number of American academics, it has now become acceptable to think
that the most important thing in one's life is precisely these features.
Notice the contrast between the traditionalists and the challengers on
this issue. For the traditionalists, what matters is the individual within the
universal. For the challengers, the universal is an illusion, and the individ–
ual has an identity only as a member of some subgroup.
A second feature of this alternative view is the belief that,
to
state it
