In academia, reason and its concomitants\u2014objective truth, fact, and knowledge\u2014are under fire courtesy of the postmodern leftists that dominant the professoriate.<\/p>\n
From whence springs this animus against the classical ideal of liberal learning?<\/p>\n
The initial impetus, it seems clear, was animus against the theocentric worldview\u2014Christianity\u2014within which the University came to be.<\/p>\n
By the lights of the classical ideal of a liberal arts education, the essential mission of any institution of higher learning is the facilitation of the disinterested pursuit of Truth.\u00a0 Universities existed for the sake of cultivating within students the excellences of head and heart, the intellectual and moral virtues.<\/p>\n
Notice, this traditional understanding relies upon an assumption that was taken for granted for much of the history of Western civilization, the assumption that between ontology and virtue\u2014metaphysics and ethics, ultimate reality and moral goodness\u2014there exists an indissoluble bond.<\/p>\n
Western Man\u2019s affirmation of the ontology-morality connection was most prominently embodied in what is widely known as \u201cthe Great Chain of Being.\u201d The latter, endorsed by the ancients and medieval thinkers alike, is the idea that there are degrees of reality or being, and that the more reality a thing possesses, the more goodness it possesses.<\/p>\n
Plato\u2019s \u201cTwo Worlds\u201d theory is the most robust illustration from the ancient world of this metaphysical vision.\u00a0 For Plato, reality is divided into two orders of existence. On the one hand, there\u2019s the world of such \u201cUniversals\u201d or \u201cForms\u201d as Truth, Beauty, Justice, and, most importantly, \u201cthe Good.\u201d\u00a0 On the other hand, there is our world, the world of \u201cparticulars,\u201d a world comprised of the many individual perceptible things that we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell from moment to moment.<\/p>\n
The Universals are most real, for this perishable world of particulars depends upon it. The Universals are also, hence, superior to this fleeting world of ours.<\/p>\n
Christian thinkers, represented by the likes of Saint Augustine, preserved the Great Chain but made God the apex of all being. For Christians, God is most fundamentally real and, thus, maximally good.<\/p>\n
Within the framework of the Great Chain, then, reality is of objective<\/em> value.\u00a0 <\/em>It is not subjective or otherwise \u201csocially constructed.\u201d Reality is a hierarchical unity.\u00a0 And Truth, the object of knowledge, is not comprised of propositions.\u00a0 Truth is <\/em>being, the highest being.\u00a0 In Christian thought, Truth is a Person (or, more specifically, three <\/em>Persons in One).<\/p>\n The repudiation of reason and truth as masks is a repudiation of the Christian suppositions that have underwritten Western civilization for most of its lifespan.<\/p>\n Karl Marx, with his \u201cdialectical materialism\u201d that reduced both the theistic claims of Christianity and all appeals to reason to the function of an historically-specific, dominant mode of the means of economic production, was the first to recognize that the assault against objective reason and that against Christianity are one and the same.\u00a0 Yet Friedrich Nietzsche, with his infamous declaration that \u201cGod is dead,\u201d made the link between the two explicit.<\/p>\n In Book III of Joyful Wisdom, <\/em>Nietzsche proclaims God\u2019s death and laments that \u201cfor millenniums yet\u201d people will have to \u201covercome his shadow!\u201d He was not in doubt as to the implications of a Godless universe.\u00a0 \u201cThe general character of the world\u2026is to all eternity chaos; not by the absence of necessity, but in the sense of the absence of order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic humanities are called.\u201d The universe \u201cis altogether unaffected by our aesthetic and moral judgments\u201d and \u201cit\u2026knows no law,\u201d for \u201cthere is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the \u201cfour errors\u201d in which \u201cMan has been reared\u201d is his belief that whatever \u201ctables of values\u201d he happened to devise at any given moment \u201care eternal and unconditioned [.]\u201d\u00a0 The ideas of \u201chumanity, humaneness, and \u2018human dignity\u2019\u201d are \u201cdeducted\u201d from this \u201cerror\u201d and the others.<\/p>\n It is not coincidental that Nietzsche immediately follows his declaration concerning the morally, aesthetically, and theologically-neutral character of the cosmos as he conceives it with his attack on knowledge and even logic.<\/p>\n \u201cThroughout immense stretches of time,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe intellect produced nothing but errors [.]\u201d\u00a0 Admittedly, some of these errors \u201cproved to be useful and preservative of the species,\u201d but they remain, nevertheless, \u201cerroneous articles of faith\u201d that, today, \u201care almost the property and stock of the human species [.]\u201d<\/p>\n And what are these falsehoods? They are the notions of \u201cenduring things,\u201d \u201cequal things,\u201d \u201csubstances, bodies [.]\u201d\u00a0 They as well include the ideas \u201cthat a thing is what it appears, that our will is free,\u201d and \u201cthat what is good for me is also good absolutely.\u201d It was until much later in time, Nietzsche continues, that this traditional conception of \u201ctruth made its appearance as the most impotent form of knowledge.\u201d Reason is not \u201cgenerally\u2026an entirely free and self-originating activity\u201d but, rather, \u201cthe force of the impulses in cognition [.]\u201d<\/p>\n As for logic, it \u201coriginated in men\u2019s heads\u2026out of the illogical [.]\u201d Nietzsche summarizes his position: \u201cThe course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle in impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust [.]\u201d\u00a0 Humans \u201cexperience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us.\u201d<\/p>\n In the 20th<\/sup> century, the French existentialist, atheist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre approvingly quoted Dostoyevski\u2019s famous claim that \u201cIf God did not exist, everything would be permitted.\u201d Sartre regarded this proposition as existentialism\u2019s \u201cstarting point.\u201d\u00a0 Without God, \u201cman\u201d is \u201cabandoned,\u201d \u201cfor he cannot find anything to rely on\u2014neither within nor without. \u00a0Neither within him nor without does he find anything [objective moral standards] to cling to.\u201d<\/p>\n Gone with God is \u201cthe possibility of finding value in an intelligible,\u201d \u201cany a priori Good,\u201d for there is \u201cno infinite and perfect consciousness to think of it.\u201d<\/p>\n Sartre is convinced that if God does not exist, then neither does human nature.\u00a0 His point is that \u201csince there is no God to conceive it, there is no human nature.\u201d<\/p>\n The assault against reason is, in the last analysis, an assault against the historical Christian consciousness of Western civilization.\u00a0 In a future essay, we shall see that for the contemporary postmodern academic left, this attack is an attack on white people, and white heterosexual Christian men (or \u201cmales\u201d) in particular.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In academia, reason and its concomitants\u2014objective truth, fact, and knowledge\u2014are under fire courtesy of the postmodern leftists that dominant the professoriate. From whence springs this animus against the classical ideal of liberal learning? The initial impetus, it seems clear, was animus against the theocentric worldview\u2014Christianity\u2014within which the University came to be. By the lights of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n