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in the "haze of sentiment" the philosopher Arnold Ruge warned against
more than a century ago.
These reflections take us to the highly problematic question of how
to integrate the cognitive mission of the university with our modern
historical situation, in which the value commitments of academics and
students have their origin outside of the university. This is a long-stand–
ing problem, and multiculturalists cannot be held responsible for it. The
dangers of modern knowledge becoming simultaneously over-rational–
ized, over-aestheticized, and over-moralized have occupied scholars
working in the tradition of Max Weber for some time and cannot be
dealt with here. Within the context of our argument, we may merely
observe that the tensions deriving from the gap between academic
knowledge and the different order of knowledge individuals gain in the
course of their ordinary lives have made the university vulnerable to ac–
cusations both of irrelevance and of cultural imperialism. Irrelevant, be–
cause the inner dynamics of cognitive rationality propel academic con–
ceptualizations and efforts to work on ever higher levels of abstraction
and aridness, thereby becoming increasingly unable to bind academic
knowledge back to experienced reality. Imperialistic, because the rational
mode of thought is increasingly diffused from the academy into wider
society, reaching deeper into ever more parts of the Iifeworld of individ–
uals, frequently with disastrous effects.
Philosophers like Jurgen Habermas write about "the colonization of
the Iifeworld by rationality" to describe this trend. A general discontent
with the progressive rationalization of the lifeworld has served to unite
students and intellectuals of the 1960s generation into a counterculture
movement aimed at bringing vernacular sentiments, at least as envisioned
by themselves, back into the academy. To be sure, the counterculture in
its pure form is dead today, but multiculturalism and other movements,
such as feminism and environmentalism, based on similar cognitive predis–
positions have taken its place. Common to all, however, is the premium
paid to sentiments and passions and the neglect of cool, dispassionate
thought fostered by the modern university.
It may well be, as the ethiologist Lionel Tiger has argued, that pas–
sion and sentiment are expressions of youth and closer to human nature,
while cognitive rationality is a game of older people, one which requires
elaborate, ingenious, and even expensive pedagogical devices to hone and
foster cognitive habits, in order that people may function in a modern
world driven by technology and the alienating systems of bureaucracy.
Perhaps, as Tiger is inclined to argue, there even may be dimensions of
gender involved in fundamentally different approaches to life and knowl–
edge.
Be this as it may, within the context of the present argument, I
