“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” Thus begins Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Bloom famously explores the nature and origin of the Weberian distinction between “facts” and “values” and offers the widespread embrace of it in the Academy as the principle source of the intellectual decline of the university. Tocqueville wouldn’t have been surprised by the widespread embrace of the distinction, given the tendency of people living in democratic ages to embrace “general ideas.” This tendency toward abstraction is highly visible in my students. We read The Prince a few weeks after Aristotle’s Politics. I ask them to compare the two thinkers’ accounts of human motivations. Almost immediately someone will say that Machiavelli is a “realist” or a “pragmatist,” while Aristotle is an “idealist.” It’s very difficult to get them to shake this habit of running to abstractions. Bloom argues that “concreteness, not abstractness, is the hallmark of philosophy. All interesting generalizations must proceed from the richest awareness of what is to be explained, but the tendency to abstractness leads to simplifying the phenomena in order to more easily to deal with them.”
Both the relativist, and his mirror image, the totalitarian, depend upon abstractions not rooted concrete human experience. I want my students to be willing to make judgments, sound judgments, based on their reflections on what they read, see and hear. But how does one teach that? The ability to make sound judgments depends on what Bloom calls a rich awareness. What is awareness? How can it be made rich? I think it has to do with an ability to apprehend variety in human experience—to seize on a range of human longings and connections. The activity of judgment depends on the ability to make distinctions. When we judge this or that to be so, we subsume something under a predicate—we unify. But distinctions are separations—we say this is not that. But notice that this very separation depends upon the bringing together of the two terms. It depends upon a perhaps inchoate sense of the need for a distinction, a kind of urgency. As the philosopher Robert Sokolowski puts it, “This urgency occurs when we become dissatisfied with the generic and feel that some sort of distinction (or identification) needs to be made. It is the state of tipping into thought. A person who is dull does not sense this urgency…[He] fails not primarily in being unable to appreciate a completed distinction; he fails primarily in not sensing that there is an issue for distinction…What can be exasperating in such a person is not his inability to grasp a distinction, but his failure to see the need for one.” What a proper liberal education might offer then is a kind of education which would encourage dissatisfaction with abstraction. It takes seriously that knowledge of human experience is possible and necessary. The making of distinctions (e.g., the difference between liberty/license, teaching/indoctrination, kindness/fondness) allows language to properly reflect the reality of things—we “let things be what they are.” Sokolowski argues that mass opinion and our educational system are both biased toward what he calls “explanation by decipherment.” We are inclined to explain the given, what we experience, by what is hidden, the truth lurking behind mere appearances. The surface of things, our experience of the word around us, we demote to the “conventional” or “ideological.” Sokolowski thus argues that it is no accident that “we tend to feel there is little value in making and clarifying manifest distinctions, and equally little value in teaching others such distinctions and in helping them to make distinctions themselves; it seems better to teach them ‘the true theory’ that tells what is behind the things that appear.”
This is why the dissident experience can be so instructive to those of us in the West who did not have to experience totalitarianism. They dedicated themselves to the recovery of the pre-reflective meaningfulness of human experience, which had been denied by a world saturated by mendacious ideology. Our task today is perhaps more similar to that of the dissidents than we might expect.