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outdistance other older civilizations which remained embedded for much
longer periods of time in religion, nature, and immutable community
structures. Further enriched by the tenets of the Enlightenment, the
French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, representative democ–
racy, the rule of law, and the market economy, as well as an ever more
finely honed morality based on individual responsibility, these shared
principles have served to promote and solidify the cultural, economic,
and political achievements of the West.
Hence, it is not accidental that the "texts" reflecting these funda–
mental shifts in cognition have come to play an important role in the
academic curriculum down to our own time. In that such texts reflect
the emergence and subsequent institutionalization of the
organization of
knowledge
and the
cognitive style
peculiar to the West, they synonymously
provide us with an illuminating record of the evolution of modern
thought and Western culture alike. In other words, far from engaging in
a simplistic glorification of the West, the texts that have come to consti–
tute "the canon" allow us to glean a sense of the civilatory process that
revolutionized the world. At the same time, I think it of some impor–
tance to understand that while distinctly modern forms of cognition and
knowledge have undoubtedly been a product of the West - and, perhaps
more precisely, of particular geographical regions and social groupings–
they are not the exclusive property of the West. They are available
to
anyone or any group caring to cultivate them, just as they can be disre–
garded, even dispensed with, by groups who once were distinguished by
this distinctive cognitive mode.
In the forefront of this revolution in thought stood philosophers
and men of learning who, at one and the same time, became the carriers,
the advocates, and the guardians of the revolutionizing approaches to
knowledge. These tiny platoons of men of letters, originally located in
niches of Western society - the monastic orders and the courts of the
powerful - only slowly found a home in a separate institutional order.
The firm institutionalization of the pursuit of human knowledge in the
university was accomplished only with the rise of the Enlightenment.
This, again, did not occur overnight. It took considerable time and in–
genuity on the part of scholars to create an autonomous space free from
external interferences, be they of theological, political, economic, or
vernacular provenance. It was a hard-won autonomy, and the challenges
were many. Then as now, as the history of Nazisni and Communism
in
our own century shows, scholars cannot always be relied upon
to
defend
this precious intellectual freedom.
Let me repeat my main argument: the modern university must be
seen as a product as well as a carrier of the forces of modernity. As an
