Imagine you have left your native country - with universal secondary education, selective higher education and widespread healthy scepticism - and you find yourself in another country, highly advanced technologically, with mass higher education. You pick off the newsstand two widely circulated publications, one paper, one magazine. On the front page of the paper - a map of the solar system - with the location of heaven clearly marked. Inside - a photograph of heaven - (resembling Salt Lake City without cars). The magazine reports the results of a poll: that 81% of the population believe in heaven, and 88% of those believe they will meet their friends and family there. This is no thought experiment. The aliens have landed, and I am one of them. My question is: what does this allow us to conclude about US higher education?

I assume that what is of value in all education is essential in higher education -- that it is not just a matter of communicating bodies of knowledge, vital though that is, but of imparting dispositions of critical inquiry. If, as Mao Tse Tung said, you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach him to fish, he will feed himself forever. And it is the focus on ways of thinking, methods of investigation, powers of judgment, and complexity of response is what makes higher education ‘higher’. But how are we to reconcile the above data with the high % of the US population that attends college. Either colleges do not, largely, have these enlightenment goals, or they routinely fail to meet them. I claim that the enlightenment ideals of higher education are subject to various kinds of corruption, and that philosophy would be the most powerful defense against these corruptions, were it not itself vulnerable to the same ailments. "Physician heal thyself" applies to the meta-physician too.

It used to be fashionable in England to contrast universities with training colleges. The former would educate minds, the latter would impart useful skills. But technological and social pressures are blurring that distinction. Social life is increasingly being managed by information systems that require only the technical ability to participate in them. There is increasingly less need to understand how things work. My tax software asks me some bite-size questions and then constructs the finished return. Even the political process, traditionally an exercise of citizenship, is now run by electoral machines. It would not be surprising if ‘higher’ education had adapted to accommodate our need to comfortably negotiate an increasingly complex humanly constructed real world. And then we might suppose that philosophy would have a diminishing role to play in education. If this story of an ever-more programmed world is true, it is one that has crept up on us. If you put a frog in water and raise the temperature slowly, the frog will eventually be boiled alive. It adapts to every minute change in temperature; at no point is there a significant enough change to justify jumping out. Invisible increments add up, and the outcome is bad for the frog.

Education has to ‘adapt’ to changing times. But, the frog adapted! To adapt successfully, the frog should have noticed something wrong, got a thermometer, kept records and jumped. I argue that it is philosophical attitudes, habits and skills that can prevent our universities from being boiled alive.

Adaptation can be active and responsive or it can be reactive. Reactive adaptation responds to surface changes without grasping their shape and logic, allows the terms of the relationship to be dictated entirely by the other party. Active adaptation tries to grasp the law of change, not to be led by the nose, but to grasp and even create the opportunities that change brings. The shapes of change rarely stare us in the face. But critical reflection can draw them out and place even them in perspective. Active adaptation requires the critical capacities which are the natural but not exclusive property of philosophy. In the short term universities can do without philosophy, or make do with an emasculated rump of technical puzzle solvers. (In the short-term Sarratt could serve flavored sawdust.) In the longer term, however, higher education will be brought to its knees if it turns its back on philosophy, and the effects on our broader cultural life will be disastrous. But this places the strongest demands and responsibilities on philosophy itself. What would philosophy have to be like to meet them?

Some worries: Ours is an infantilizing culture, sadly one of our healthiest exports to the rest of the world. How? It promotes cartoon-level simplifications of complex problems, it confuses individualism with selfishness, it promotes ignorance and disdain of what is foreign -- this applies to our own racial diversity, and relations between states, and the rest of the world. And all this with complacency and good conscience. The USA is a bold experiment - a country forged out of revolution whose greatness depends on the way it sustains that legacy. This means consolidating and developing institutions that serve its founding values of freedom, justice and equality of opportunity.

All institutions are subject to corruption. This applies to states, to the organs of state, to the universities and colleges that make up what we call higher education, and to philosophy itself. There is one specific sense and mechanism of corruption that I would like to isolate and discuss here --- which, for want of a better phrase, I will call inaugural drift. I do not simply mean that the principles on which an institution was founded are lost sight of. It would be hopelessly prescriptive to call that corruption. After all, an institution might have been founded on narrow self-interest, and only subsequently discovered the values that made it great. Or it might constructively adapt its principles. Pressure groups that promoted a universal franchise that included women understandably broadened their scope after women were given the vote. No, I mean by corruption something more technical, perhaps more frighteningly predictable -- that is, a change in the status of the rules that govern an institution’s activity from being regulative to being constitutive. I once had a friend who invented a bidding system for the game of bridge that was banned by the British Bridge Federation because it was too good. The same could be said of modern electoral politics. There is a big difference between on the one hand presenting your views to the electorate and accepting consequent success or defeat, and, on the other, fine tuning one’s expressed views to those which focus groups lead you to believe will maximize the chance of success. The same can be said of the tacit move from supposing that as a leader you are answerable to the nation -- the whole electorate, including those who voted against you or did not even vote -- to focusing your sense of subsequent obligation on those groups that elected you. If institutions are set up to serve certain ends, and in the course of time, certain regulative rules, or procedures, are set in place the better to attain these ends, corruption occurs when these procedural rules take on a life of their own, and instead of having to justify their existence by reference to original goals, they come to constitute a new game, a new reality. It is not just that the ends of the institution have changed, but rather that the structure in which regulative rules serve independent ends has been lost. If the letter of the law supplants the spirit of the law, what is lost is not just the original ‘spirit’, but the dynamic relation between the two. This form of corruption -- inaugural drift -- hides under the banner of adaptation. In fact, as I have suggested, ‘active’ adaptation would respond not to every impulse, but to the law of change. Institutions whose procedures maintain a living relationship to inaugural grounds are better suited to active adaptation than those ‘one dimensional’ institutions that most narrowly and shallowly seek to preserve themselves. Universities and colleges have enormous fundraising powers, for example, and it would not be impossible to gear admissions, teaching and other policies wholly towards the business of raising money, as if the college were a corporation like any other. This would be an obvious example of corruption, though no law was ever broken.

An analogous one-dimensionalization occurs within the individual disciplines of universities and colleges. I was once confronted at an interdisciplinary seminar on the Sokal Hoax (the publication of a spoof postmodern essay by a scientist in an apparently reputable journal) with the insistent claim (by a natural scientist) that there were ‘truths out there’ that no amount of post-Kantian, constructivist, or even deconstructivist exhortation on my part would budge. It was not that he was an epistemological realist, there was simply no intellectual space within which such issues were real to him. And he was not making a special limited claim about his slice of the world. There was just no sense that there might be disciplines which thrive on negotiating between different interpretations of the real -- i.e. most of the arts and humanities. But even in natural science this epistemological naiveté is a pedagogical disaster. To teach a student to understand a discipline as so much received knowledge rather than as an active interrogation of the world is to betray the charge of higher education, which is not to create consumers of knowledge, but its critics and creators. That should have been true at high school. How much more so at college! Of course we need to acquire knowledge before we can productively test and extend it. But what if this one-dimensional positivity about knowledge were normal in higher education? The fact that one can readily test students for their absorption of such knowledge and evaluate teachers for their capacity to convey it makes the business of delivering knowledge a ripe candidate for a source of corruption in higher education, one in which the less measurable virtues are subordinated to the more measurable. This is corruption in that it threatens the grounds for the existence of the institution itself.

If philosophy is the anti-oxidant of higher education, it is not, clearly just any mode of philosophizing that will do. Humility is a great virtue, but being an underlaborer for the sciences will just deliver positivity again after a certain detour. The problem is that corruption endangers all institutions, including philosophy. There is a story about an Irishman outside a bar one night looking on the ground under a streetlight. A man asks him what he is looking for. He has dropped a coin. And where did you drop it? Actually, I dropped it round the corner, but this is where the light is, so I’m looking here. The most dangerous corruption of philosophy is the substitution of simple problems for complex ones. Yes, we can, as Descartes suggested, break down the complex into the simple the better eventually to solve the complex one. The danger is in the substitution of the simple for the complex without remainder. The history of empiricism, for example, seems to me to be the history of the substitution of emasculated models of experience for that extraordinary rich resource with which we begin. The temptation to this substitution of the simple for the complex is huge if we are promised for the first time solutions where we only had perplexity. But unless we can find a ladder back to the level of perplexity with which we began, and unless we can remember why we started philosophizing in the first place, we may be buying local success at the price of general failure. We may, for example, be able to stipulate a scheme of conceptual relatedness in some corner of the map, without having begun to address the difficulties as they arise on what Wittgenstein called the rough ground. I recall the anger of one of my own graduate students when confronted with opposition to his declaration that ‘Philosophy is just a game’. Why was he so angry? The success of his whole life so far, including his graduate fellowship, had been predicated on this corrupt (and corrupting) assumption. Some philosophers advise: "Don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch". What kind of response would that have been to St. Augustine’s avowal of puzzlement about time, whenever he tried to think about it? This slogan has a point in questioning the value of purely technical philosophical discussions, and there is, I believe an important therapeutic dimension to philosophy. There is also an important sense in which philosophical issues are not merely formal, but arise out of concrete human concerns. But "Don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch" is a one-dimensional attitude. Sometimes we should itch, even if we don’t. At others we will start to itch madly once the scratching starts. And at yet other times, we may be in severe pain, but denying it so strongly that there seems to be nothing wrong. Philosophy is about making easy things difficult, not making difficult things easy. Just as institutions lose their way, forget what brought them into being, so the same is true of each of us - that we necessarily lose ourselves in our habitual activity. The claim that the unreflected life is not worth living is not a recipe for a head in the clouds, but for finding effective ways of keeping ourselves open to the limits and conditions of our habits, and to other ways of seeing and thinking.

No-one would dream of driving a car without binocular vision with which to judge depth and the speed of oncoming vehicles. Philosophy (and philosophical dispositions in whatever 'department' they can be found) is the most powerful source of another kind of "double vision", one which allows us to combine knowledge with its constant critical interrogation; and this is the most powerful antidote to institutional corruption. But on this very point there is huge confusion. For the dogmatic mind, binocular vision appears as blurred vision, as a threat to faith, to certainty, to the prejudice that bears up entrenched habit. For the dogmatic mind, the demonstration of limits, of conditions of possibility, of difficulties, of tensions and ambiguities is a destructive turn, to be resisted at all costs. It depicts the Gods at war with each other, as Plato complained of Homer. Skepticism, critique, and deconstruction - as once were free inquiry, experimentation, and open public discussion - are seen as threats to the established order. In fact, however, they are threats to a dogmatic monocular way of inhabiting that order, and they are the handmaidens of active adaptation, of the true responsiveness to change that a tradition makes possible. That these ‘specters’ are consistently misunderstood by non-philosophers is an indictment of philosophy’s capacity to project its own best insights. What I am calling "double vision" is a knowing, a seeing and thinking in a certain way, an adverbial modification of an activity, not seeing two (or many) things and being unable to judge between them. All too many of the mock battles within contemporary philosophy rest on this error. Institutions that abandon their founding ideals are doomed to become the playthings of forces beyond their control. Institutions that no longer know the thrill of creation and innovation become the deaf sclerotic drones of a dead past. The management of change requires that we participate in the events that pass before us in the full awareness of what is at stake in this momentous play of forces. Double vision again. Critique is not the scourge of tradition, but the force that keeps its powers alive. Critique is not the enemy of faith but what prevents faith from falling into empty repetition. Critique is the enemy of complacency, of corruption, and of cultural decay. And philosophy is its home.

Finally, I would like to propose a way of shepherding together a number of the virtues that philosophy brings to education generally and to higher education in particular, under the umbrella of what Keats once called ‘negative capability’. What he meant is quite profound: the capacity to endure uncertainty, to live with ambiguity, to keep alive questions to which one does not know the answer. Negative capability is not a synonym for intellectual laziness, a refusal or unwillingness to seek clarity where clarity is due, but rather a readiness to recognize the inherent limits, contextuality and contingency of our knowledge, what Aristotle called the different kinds of precision appropriate to different disciplines. Negative capability is clearly not in itself negative, but a capacity, or disposition to accommodate the negative. It is consonant with the recognition that there are times when the quest for certainty is pathological. That there are rarely rules for the application of rules does not rule out the need for judgment - phronesis - but makes it all the more important. Moreover negative capability infuses numerous traditional philosophical values - freedom, toleration, patience, and openness. But philosophy cannot play the role of keeping institutions healthy and vibrant, keeping them free from the cancer of corruption unless the healer heals itself. The choice is not between the caricatural options of analytic and continental philosophy - for each of these shelters vital and moribund tribes - but between the humble, subtle, open, patient, adventurous and judicious versions of each. I am far from recommending a kind of Rortyean ironic detachment. Instead of irony as detachment we should promote irony as a tolerance compatible with belief and commitment. To abandon the possibility of such a complex position, to say that this bicycle cannot be ridden, is to betray both philosophy and the culture it precariously serves.

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