THE CORE CURRICULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
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This philosophical feature of time has its mirror in a philosophical fact
about the self. From the Romantics through the existentialists to the post–
modernists, there has been a quest for what the philosopher Richard Rorty
calls "the authentic self." How do you locate the authentic self? You strip
away all culture, all history, all institutions, all of the so-called social con–
structions of self. Even language and reason must go. The problem is,
having stripped away everything that makes us human, there is not much
left. The approach is, I guess this is a pun, self-defeating. It is like peeling
an onion. The unrelenting logic of this approach led Jean-Paul Sartre to call
his magnum opus
Being and Nothingness.
Guess what nothingness is. It's the
self, or what is left of it, after being "peeled."
Similar logic has led postmodern theorists to conclude that the text
has no author, raising profound questions about whether it has a meaning
or indeed whether there is a text at all. Michel Foucault, the postmodern
historian of prisons and other oppressive institutions, finally concludes that
all institutions are oppressive, even language, and hence even his own
denunciation of oppression is oppressive. He sees no way out of this con–
ceptual dead end.
When an approach becomes a
reductio ad absurdum
of itself, you need
to consider whether there's a different, more illuminating way of thinking
about things. I want to suggest that we start over from a different set of
assumptions. First, let us stop talking about "the self" as some purely inte–
rior, subjective, self-preoccupied nucleus. We are not selves; we are people,
full-bodied, real, living, breathing, thinking, talking people. We are not
interior atoms; we are born into families with parents, who live in com–
munities, which have cultures, languages, and institutions. Take them away
and we are barely human, like children raised by wolves. And we have pasts.
We are longitudinal beings. We have biographies. Our families and com–
munities have traditions. Our nations and civilizations have histories. They
make us who we are. They provide the seed bed for what we can become.
Civilization is fragile. If it is not passed on, it disappears. It is not in
our genes, not in our DNA. Biologically we live in the Stone Age.
Civilization as we know it is the product of thousands, perhaps millions
of years of human development. Why did
Homo sapiens
replace the phys–
ically stronger Neanderthal man? No one knows for sure but a striking
fact is that, while the Neanderthals also had fire, they built a separate fire
in a new place each time and then left it behind as they moved along.
Homo sapiens
built hearths, stable fireplaces that were in fact the same
fireplace we passed along from one generation to the next. Passing on is
what civilization is all about. Miss Julia Mortimer, a schoolteacher in
Eudora Welty's
Losing Battles,
understood this: "She didn't ever doubt but
that all worth preserving is going to be preserved, and all we had to do
