Monday, January 26, 2009

The only permitted kind








reharmonizer said...

I think it's clear that I was mystified by a number of points you made "the last time [you] advanced this claim," but my complaints were a lot more specific than that you were just "pushing aside history and yearning for a Golden Age that never existed." I had no trouble understanding that when you talked about "the loss of the university principle altogether" you were referring to an idea. Nonetheless, what gets my attention is the "altogether."

I'm still mystified after reading this post. Once upon a time, it seems, "what was encouraged was the common pursuit [of the truth]", and anyone who participated had to be prepared to be proved wrong--I like that part of the formulation, that one could be proved wrong and still be participating in the pursuit. If I felt like I was stuck in an academic milieu in which any meaningful contest of ideas had been swamped (overshadowed? trumped? hobbled?) by this new "social principle," I would hate it. But I don't accept the implied either/or, and it's not the situation I observe, though as non-voting, part-time faculty I'm not really in the thick of it.

Anonymous said...

The liberal yearns for an idealized future, the conservative for an idealized past. Each lives in a world of utopian fantasy and, all too often, utopian zealotry. The rest of us suffer at the altars of their fever dreams.

Seisei said...

I came across this blog post while doing some research on civil dialogue. I am somewhat dismayed by the decline of "civil dialogue" into a positional argument where all parties leave believing what they believed when they walked in, regardless of what was said in the room. Where is the curiosity, the willingness to admit mistakes, the ability to shift position when confronted with other evidence?

Anyway, my comment is really to say that your quotation (lovers who gaze not into each others' eyes but as friends who turn and look in the same direction) I believe comes from Saint-Exupery in Terre des Hommes: Aimer, ce n'est pas se regarder l'un l'autre, c'est regarder ensemble dans la même direction. I'd be curious to know if CS Lewis wrote something similar.