There are potentially two ways of reading Two Great Problems. The first is as a clarion call to a particular re-structuring of academia. The second is in terms of the essay’s philosophical persuasiveness, by reflecting on its commitment to ‘civilization’ and an Enlightenment. As far as I am concerned, the project is far more successful according to the first approach. However, I shall consider both in turn.

 

Nicholas Maxwell’s essential and perennial message — that universities need to shift their activity from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry — is reprised in Two Great Problems with characteristic passion, clarity, and attentiveness to possible objections. If I was a cynic I would say that more than a little material — particularly diagrams and lists — are parachuted in from previous books, for instance from How Universities Can Help Create a Wiser World (2014). On the other hand, these figures are made to do important work in Two Great Problems in terms of illustrating Maxwell’s ideas, and indeed there are some new tables as well.

 

Fundamentally, Maxwell’s argument runs like this. Modern academia has inherited and continually practices a damagingly irrational form of inquiry, inherited from the botched attempt of Enlightenment philosophes and their descendants (Comte, Marx, Mill) to learn how to make progress towards a better world by imitating the progress-achieving methods of natural science. Thus, the general aim of academia is to acquire knowledge about phenomena, and incidentally and rather haphazardly then apply this knowledge to solving important social problems. How such problems are articulated and presented to academics is, of course, a moot point.

 

What’s wrong with this agenda then is that knowledge is being acquired irrationally because it lacks the necessary, pre-defined aims, which would be determined by a co-operatively rational investigation into which problems are worth applying methodologies of inquiry. Maxwell’s paradigm of wisdom-inquiry, on the other hand, would begin from a democratic, public discussion (including in primary schools!) about what is of value in life, and to identify those things which obstruct progress towards a wiser world. Academics, intimately engaged in this discussion, would weave these aims into their disciplinary work and so be held accountable to wisdom by a non-academic world.

 

Wisdom-inquiry would be more transparent, more service-oriented, rationally co-operative, and emotionally involved than traditional knowledge-inquiry. Maxwell is attentive to trends in academia which imply that some people at least are moving along these lines already. Yet ultimately, he justifies his work by stressing the need to intellectually convince academics of the damaging irrationality of their current paradigm of inquiry. It is, therefore, at the intellectual level that Maxwell seeks to effect the greatest change. However, I have my doubts about the effectiveness of this strategy, and at this stage would like to commend Maxwell for his thought-provoking and useful presentation of some tangible changes which academics can begin to implement, to varying degrees, in their own work and in their academic institutions.

 

As a critique, I think Maxwell’s over-reliance on the Enlightenment — albeit framed as a New Enlightenment — essentially hoists his own petard. Although Maxwell’s argument rests on identifying faults in the original Enlightenment program that inaugurated social science, his uncritical reprisal of ‘civilization’ as the goal of wisdom-inquiry leads him down a path of commitment I do not think wisdom-inquiry actually need entail.

 

Maxwell tends to share the Enlightenment’s commitment to the possibility of cosmic perfectibility through rational, human means. Yes, he is careful to point out that power play (human corruption) is often involved in sabotaging the implementation of wisdom-inquiry, thus broaching the very un-Enlightenment idea of human sinfulness. His general theme and assumption, however, is that ‘most of us have a deep interest in the creation of a more civilized world’, and that education is the means to this end; for ‘human nature is the product of cultural evolution’. This is a classically Enlightenment position, stressing progressive perfectibility in the finite.

 

Although Maxwell discloses and then criticizes the Romantic opposition to the Enlightenment, and opts for a rather nebulous via media, I do not think he fully recognizes the significance of this Romantic opposition. On the one hand, Maxwell extols intuition, imagination, idiosyncrasy, awe and wonder. Yet on the other hand, his commitment to essentially Enlightenment values means that one’s anthropology — one’s view of the human being — becomes, as Nikolai Berdyaev explored in his Slavery and Freedom (1943), fundamentally objectivized. What I mean by this is that Maxwell approaches problems of living as if they are ‘out there’, independent of the concrete person. On the one hand he praises literature for its particularization of human joys and sorrows, but on the other hand sets up a paradigm of academic inquiry which rests on the exteriorization of such experiences, as pathways to ‘civilization’.

 

I support the desire to democratically discuss with others some of the great existential problems that we may face, and to re-orient education along more meaningful lines. But a commitment to ‘civilization’ ends up needlessly objectivizing this project by exteriorizing an idea of human perfectibility. In essence, the project pulls away from ever-needful attention to the experiential worlds of actual human beings, such as a certain kind of literary education might afford, and sets up impersonal concepts such as ‘civilization’ and ‘wisdom’ as a common good (or idol) to which actual individuals are liable to be sacrificed — sacrificed because of an Enlightenment belief in the possibility of such concepts’ perfectibility.

 

While I own the valuable need to shift academic paradigms and continue to frame meaningful education in terms of self-knowledge, insight into the lives of others, and some apprehension of successful ways of framing and managing the great task of living our lives, I feel uneasy about resting this project on a New Enlightenment grounded on impersonal concepts such as ‘civilization’. We might always hold up this test: does an educational proposal move us toward the existential worlds of actual human beings, or away from them? If actualized, will such proposals ultimately bring us face to face with our neighbor, with whom we have to do?

 

Link to eBook.

 

 

© 2016 Richard Vytniorgu

 

 

 

Richard Vytniorgu

 

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Nicholas Maxwell response, published Oct 11, 2016

 

I am grateful to Richard Vytniorgu for what he says about my “clarion call” for a revolution in academia in his review of my ebook Two Great Problems of Learning: Science and Civilization.  I am somewhat baffled, however, by his criticisms of my concern that we should try to make progress towards a more civilized world.

Vytniorgu says that I believe in “the possibility of cosmic perfectibility through rational human means”.  He says that what I advocate “sets up impersonal concepts such as ‘civilization’ and ‘wisdom’ as a common good (or idol) to which actual individuals are liable to be sacrificed – sacrificed because of an Enlightenment belief in the possibility of such concepts’ perfectibility”.

I can find none of this in my book, and much that stands in stark opposition to it.  In the book I first indicate what I take civilization to be when I say:-

 

“One could surely say, entirely uncontroversially, that absolutely minimal requirements for civilization, for global wisdom or enlightenment, are: (1) people do not periodically slaughter each other in their millions; (2) people are not politically enslaved by brutal dictatorships; (3) millions do not live in extreme poverty while millions of others live in comparative wealth; (4) the human world shows some respect for other forms of life on the planet and does not indiscriminately exterminate other species; and (5) the way of life is sustainable in the long term. Our world, despite all its scientific, technological and intellectual sophistication, satisfies none of these five elementary requirements for civilization.”

 

It seems to me very odd to say that, in advocating that we should try to do something about these ills that beset our world I am, by implication, advocating that individuals be sacrificed – sacrificed essentially to alleviate human suffering!  This criticism seems especially unfounded given that I explicitly criticize far left and far right political programmes of the past that have indeed sacrificed individuals for a distant goal.

In his review, Vitniorgu manages to ignore what is perhaps the central theme of the book: our basic aims, both in science and in life, tend to be profoundly problematic.  We need to try to improve our aims and associated methods as we act, as we live.  I argue that we need a new conception of rationality which requires us to represent problematic aims in the form of a hierarchy of aims – aims becoming less substantial and specific as we go up the hierarchy, and so less problematic.  In this way we can create a framework of relatively unproblematic aims and methods, within which much more substantial and problematic aims and methods can be improved as we act. 

This is applicable to science.  The aims of science are inherently problematic in that they have problematic metaphysical, value and political assumptions inherent in them.  And it is applicable to personal and social life.