Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture

Honest people just get out, leaving the field to those who don't mind deception or don't recognize it. - Linda Seebach, "Scientist Takes Academia for a Ride with Parody"

Last August's Intellectual Prudence discussed Literary Critic Frederick C. Crews' remark on the "Nietzschean scorn" often leveled by humanities intellectuals at what he called "intellectual prudence." Last week, in slate.com, Ron Rosenbaum warned "against the kind of grad school-nurtured exegesis of Shakespeare most egregiously represented by James Shapiro in the section of his book, 1599, wherein he purports to read Shakespeare’s mind and discover that Shakespeare would have wanted to cut, trash, delete, and disappear Hamlet’s final soliloquy; one of the high points of the play and of Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre." Rosenbaum concluded:

But grad school for literature, I can't advocate. I escaped Yale before it became the center of the frenzied fad for French literary theorists, as a result of which students read more about arcane metaphysics of language, semiotics and the like than the actual literature itself. But, even though many of the most sophisticated contemporary intellectuals who once bought into this sophistry (such as Terry Eagleton) have abandoned it, the tenured relics who imposed this intellectual regime are still there, still espousing their view that literature itself is only to be understood through their diminishing deconstructing lens. I can testify to it, having sat through enough seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America conferences to last a life time. Please don't waste your life this way.

Extreme as this may sound, it resonates with my own experience. I attended two humanities classes of a major state university the day after the historic presidential election of 2008, certain that there would be at least some reaction to the opening of the presidency to minorities. After all, isn't diversity a mantra of the academic left? But it was business as usual.
In Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsig called the university the "church of reason," devoted to the disinterested search for truth. A church of reason would, as Socrates said, "follow the argument wherever it leads," without regard to the conventional wisdom or to social pressure. But the inhabitants of the faculty lounge are as much a subculture as any other, a vested interest which logically would be subject to sociological study in much the same fashion as an anthropologist studies the folkways of a stone age tribe. Such a meta-intellectual analysis of the intellectual would ask, as Crews once did, "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"
But there is resistance to this. The Dissenter was once accused by a philosophy TA, in fact, of harboring the notion of a "meta-intellectual" examination of the way academic philosophy is taught. Anyone who did not realize that such a critique is self-evidently wrong, he implied, reveals intellectual inadequacy.
Much of what we consider the intellectual heritage violates the principles of the intellectual discipline. It is true that there are intellectuals who critique the intellectual tradition (Crews, Orwell, Popper—who spoke of "intellectualists"—and others) but the pressure not to break ranks is strong.
Here is a rough draft, written some time ago, critiquing Great Books-ism:

• Most of those who claim to participate in intellectual endeavors are metaphysically confused: 1. No clear concept of what the realm of the senses does and does not tell us; 2. Failure to distinguish between the kinds of knowledge afforded by nature, by the aesthetic, and by the mystical, and failure to distinguish between the knowledge methods applicable to each; 3. Using, impermissibly, metaphysical certitude as a standard of deductive proof; 4. Inattention to the cognitive problem posed by the difference between mathematics as an incorporeal conceptual order and mathematics as a predictor of the behavior of real physical systems (2 + 2 = 4 by the rules of the game mathematics, but 2 oranges + 2 oranges = 4 oranges is a falsifiable prediction about the future). Mathematics is not reality. It is a description of the possible relationships between real things.
• Iron age ontology and epistemology (i.e., Plato's philosophical idealism and such descendants as postmodernism)
• Inadequate definition of fact/truth
• Failure to examine the sociology of the great thinkers and of the intelligentsia
• Absence of meta-intellectual analysis
• Complacency about the reckless mind
• Inattention of the intellectual class to its own methodology. For example, are evidence and reason an indispensable starting point or simply one of many approaches which may be adopted?
• Treating propositions unworthy of critical inspection as if they were holy writ
• Reverse ad hominem; that is, treating the notions of canonical figures as indiscussable
• Failure to define the standards of the intellectual discipline
• Incoherence: Failure to recognize that two great, mutually inconsistent ideas cannot both be true
• Anti-intellectualism: Countenancing the notion that power can impose its own truth (cf. Nietzsche et al.)
• Anti-intellectualism: Failure to enforce a global prohibition on all argument by fallacy, including ad hominem
• Anti-intellectualism: Rejection of Kant's observation that a good will is the one indispensable intellectual quality, as all the others can be subverted to anti-intellectual and unethical ends
• Anti-intellectualism: Lack of comprehension that the intellectual realm defines an implied ethical order (cf. the cynicism of German idealism). As Benda cried, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”
• The intellectual tendency to embrace esotericism and with it, elitism
• Crime against humanity: the Leo Strauss doctrine that intellectuals are the only humans that matter and therefore, as a kind of Herrenvolk, are entitled to treat the rest of the human instrumentally (as Kant said, as means only, and not also as ends).

Any one of these could in itself be the subject to one or more posts. However, "reverse ad hominem" may have a bearing on the lack of response to Obama's precedent-shattering election noted above. Where ad hominem purports to discredit a proposition by discrediting the person who propounds it, reverse ad hominem implies that a proposition is valid because of the greatness of its author.
For example, Plato, whom many humanities academics may consider the greatest thinker of all time, dismissed political democracy. It is quite possible that the historic election of 2008 was dismissed in the classes I witnessed because they were influenced by Plato's attitude toward democracy.
Does this seem preposterous? See "Scientist Takes Academia for a Ride with Parody", by Linda Seebach:

Physicist Alan Sokal of New York University meticulously observed all the rules of the academic game when he constructed his article on postmodern physics and submitted it to a prestigious journal of cultural studies called Social Text.
The people he cites as authorities in cultural studies are the superluminaries of the field, the quotations he uses to illustrate his argument are strictly accurate and the text is bristling with footnotes.
All the rules but one, that is: Sokal's article is a parody. Under the grandiloquent title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," it appeared in the Spring/Summer 1996 special issue of the magazine, one entirely devoted to "the science wars," as the editors term the tension between people who actually do science and the critics who merely theorize about it. ...

Sokal's successful spoof calls into question the intellectual standards of the whole field.
If you're chuckling, but inclined to think it's just professors doing their usual angels-on-a-pinhead thing, please do think again. Tuition and fees at the priciest private universities run nearly $1,000 for each week of class. Taxpayers pick up a big chunk of the bill for public universities. Many of those classes are being taught, it appears, by professors who deny the distinction between truth and falsity and consequently can't distinguish double-talk from rational argument.
Maybe some of the junior professors and the graduate students do know what they're hearing is nonsense, but think it would be harmful to their careers to speak out. Living with such deception, possibly for a lifetime, is profoundly corrupting. Honest people just get out, leaving the field to those who don't mind deception or don't recognize it. ...
There is a political point to Sokal's demonstration, but it's not the right-wing one he's sure will be attributed to him. He's proud to call himself a leftist, and his resume includes a stint teaching mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. "If you take up crazy philosophies you undermine your ability to tackle questions of public policy, like ecology," he said. "It really matters whether the world is warming up."
I don't remotely share Sokal's political views, but I agree with him that the corruption of clear thought and clear language is dangerous. And corruption has to be exposed before it can be cleaned up.

One might also note that Thomas Jefferson was horrified by what he found in Plato, noting that "Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school . . . "

I amused myself [recently] with reading Plato's Republic. I am wrong, however, in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to get through a whole dialogue. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this? How the soi-disant Christian world, indeed, should have done it, is a piece of historical curiosity. But how could the Roman good sense do it? And particularly, how could Cicero bestow such eulogies on Plato? Although Cicero did not wield the dense logic of Demosthenes, yet he was able, learned, laborious, practiced in the business of the world, and honest. He could not be the dupe of mere style, of which he was himself the first master in the world. With the moderns. I think, it is rather a matter of fashion and authority. Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school, and few in after years have occasion to revise their college opinions. But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him his sophisms, futilities and incomprehensibilities, and what remains?In truth, he is one of the race of genuine Sophists, who has escaped the oblivion of his brethren, first, by the eloquence of his diction, but chiefly, by the adoption and incorporation of his whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity. His foggv mind is forever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen through a mist, can be defined neither in form nor dimensions. * * * Socrates had reason, indeed, to complain of the misrepresentations of Plato; for in truth, his dialogues are libels on Socrates. - Jefferson writing to John Adams