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as it were balances in some very interesting way the kind of relativism
you're talking about, another kettle of fish.
Victor Kestenbaum:Just to perhaps better define my point, I was think–
ing of the relativizing tendencies which are indeed worrisome and are not
desirable. We find relativizing tendencies expressed in various ways. What
would we put in its place? Well, we
might
think of something that looks
like absolute knowledge or absolute truth, but in some sense absolute truth
would require an absolute standpoint, as my colleague Erazim Kohak
points out in "Truth and the Humanities." That's a contradiction in terms.
On another matter. Charles Frankel, in his book
The Case for Modern
Man
in an essay, "Liberal Society and Ultimate Values," says the liberal out–
look asserted that there was a larger realm of truth independent of human
beliefs, which human beings could never say they had grasped definitively,
a larger world by which all human creeds and ideals must always be
checked. This asserts that there are things that transcend the human scene.
It
is not a denial of it and it is precisely this allegiance to a realm of truth
which is always larger than the realm of human knowledge that led to the
rejection of the belief in absolutes. After all the wailing and moaning about
relativism, what then?
Igor Webb: This morning you quoted Oakeshott. This reminded me of a
reading of sound poetry I attended in 1969. These poets discovered that
words are composed of sounds, and so the poetry they wrote was com–
posed only of sounds, you know, "rrrrr." Well that's true, words are
composed of sounds. Yet to make a curriculum of literature into sound
poetry would be to take an observation which is true to an absurd con–
clusion. I had the same feeling about the sophistication of the contingency
observation you made. In the situation in which I think people on the
panel are talking about the inability of students to read and write, we
shouldn't forget the contingency of our knowledge, but neither should we
make it the center of the curriculum.
Steven Marcus : It seems to me that simply to oppose in some naked way
the notion of two choices, either radical relativism or a belief in absolute
truth, is not what happens or what should happen, because most of the
time what we rely on, especially in the humanities, are various kinds of
consensual agreements without either radical this or absolute that, that is
to say there is what
T.
S. Eliot called a "common pursuit of true judg–
ment." Now, how are you going to define those terms in any rigorously or
exclusively logical way? As long as you have something that at least
momentarily resembles an intellectual community, in a sort of classroom,
