Philosophy Now Forum

The character of the actual suggests the impotence of the encounter with education. With the university. Today, the university, speaking very broadly, but also with emphasis on the highest teaching it can provide, favors diversity over tradition. And this means, it becomes wide and asks about the supposed richness of the cultures to the same extent as it ceases to take its own foundations seriously. The situation is radically paradoxical because the concept of culture is Western and born of the Western tradition. The West first announced itself as embracing of the cultures, which it presented as lesser forms of itself. Thusly, it was the only culture that admitted the existence of the others as part of a positive plan. In our own time the university criticizes itself relentlessly for its supposed lack of knowledge of each other culture and its implied parochialism. The parochialism consists in not following the Western tradition with sufficient zeal. That zeal which would know all the other parts of the world which have been conceived under the positive world plan of the West, the knowing and taking into itself of the "cultures." Each culture hears of the others constantly, and is constantly upset and stimulated by the others, and so each is in the same way effected by each other. One ignores the other only in the conscious knowledge of ignoring the other, and all resistance to the "global" is a conscious release of one's effective powers to the "global". Education can not withstand the general destruction of the possibility of saying what is important. Thusly history becomes impossible not because anyone disagrees about the facts, as only the most marginal and frustrated do, but because there is no political entity from which to center the importance of the events of any history. Thus the human being is left more and more in the grips of the latest and the most actual, of a supposed stock of products called facts. The facts are produced in the course of the various compartments of research and correspondingly their measure and sense is but their technical use. What is most actual then is the ideology, neither true nor false, which steams energy into the human zeal for living in a technological fashion through total propaganda which invades every part of human life. The more the propaganda is linked to the educational system, and most of all the elite universities, the further it disappears from mere conversation. Mere conversation becomes a dimension in which what is already familiar through the total propaganda is restated as clearly and, therefore, effectively as possible as a perpetual rehearsal of what is cogent to the popular understanding. The end result is something that has not happened before, which is the collapse of the political understanding into the storm of the scientific understanding. The political understanding, or the common sense entry into becoming human of the human, the one being who is born a year early, and so born unformed, finds itself refused all tradition or depth, it is at once awash in the turbid sea of scientific understanding. The scientific no longer stands higher, as what one might ascend to, but is indistinguishable form the lowest stratum of common sense. Therefor the possibility of mere discussion, most of all the discussion with one's self, is menaced by the actuality of today and its constant high noon.