Enlightenment from Athens to America: Reason and Religion in Democratic Society

Dr. Jennifer Hockenbery
Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department, Mount Mary College November 8, 2007

Enlightenment. What is enlightenment? Do we believe in it?
Do we believe in a transcendent truth, or transcendent truths, which we expect will enlighten our minds so that we may know how we ought live and how we ought live with each other? Do we believe that we can pursue these truths through empiricism, through rationalism, through education, and through dialogue or simple conversation?

Or is there is a lack of trust in the intellectual process of empiricism, rationalism and dialogue? And if there is such a lack of confidence, does this threaten all institutions of education, particularly the American university. Moreover, does it threaten the idea of democracy, itself?

When we think of ancient Athens we think of not only the birthplace of democracy, but also of an Agora of Ideas. We imagine a place filled with people talking, debating, discussing. Indeed, Athens was a city where those who were accused of corrupting the youth were not decadents, but sophists who corrupted youth by talking to them about rhetoric and physics and poetry.

And yet we have to be careful not to forget the historical facts that mar this ideal. For example, the great proponent of conversation, Socrates, was executed by Athens. Women were put on trial for teaching and practicing natural science and medicine, for women were forbidden in these subjects.. Aristotle was exiled, at least in part, for being Macedonian. Athens was not as open to universal dialogue as we might wish.

Yet, the Idea of Athenian dialogue is so beautiful and so important I want to hold it up for a moment. Then, I want to talk about how and why we are falling short today of this ideal and how important it is to strive again for a world that fosters a marketplace of ideas. And I will discuss how the ancient world also fell short of the ideal, and how their response to their short comings might help us as well.

So I am going to make two claims. The first is that there is an intellectual crisis today that undermines our ability to trust our senses, our reason, and each other. The second is that there is hope for a re-newed optimism in the struggle towards enlightenment.

First, there is a crisis. This is a crisis caused by a clashing dichotomy between skepticism and its twin sister neo-Gnosticism (or fundamentalism). By skepticism I mean the view that truth is beyond our reach and that the best a wise person can do is see that nothing can be known surely. This often degenerates into a more radical form of skepticism that claims that any opinion is as good as any other opinion, thus truth is not worth pursuing. By neo-Gnosticism I mean the view that truth is accessible only to an elite and not by reason or empiricism or dialogue. Moreover neo-Gnostics claim that the truth is not communicable to those outside the circle of the elite. The two go hand in hand both today and throughout history. In antiquity academic skepticism was, arguably, followed by an ethical and political apathy on one hand and a rise in Gnostic sects who promised hope and salvation for those who chose their group.

This is a crisis that goes beyond the academy and is making political and personal psychological threats to our well being as a species. But as I stated I believe that there is hope that there is another alternative besides skepticism and Gnosticism, an alternative that gives priority to empiricism, rationalism, and dialogue rather than to esoteric teachings.

I believe that the ancients have something to teach us on both these accounts. First, the ancient Academy was quickly turned into a battle ground between Academic skeptics on one hand and Gnostic groups on the other. Our crisis was their crisis long ago. And second, the ancient philosophers searched for many ways to resolve these battles so that philosophy could continue. Their legacy may encourage us.

I do want to spend a little bit of time giving evidence that there is a great crisis today. I will argue that there is a distrust of the modern scientific method—of the process of hypothesis, empirical evidence, rational inquiry and new hypothesis. And in addition there is a distrust of the philosophical enterprise that marks most of the liberal arts—this being the attempt to learn from authority and from empiricism by way of critical thinking in the midst of this dialogue to form better and truer conclusions. And this crisis in the academic arts and sciences is evident in that growing elements of the population seem to believe that academy is irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst.

Perhaps our first clue that this crisis was beginning was the surge in students who were more eager for a technical rather than a liberal education. But perhaps this is more the result of a greater population of students entering into college than ever before, many of them first generation college students. Or perhaps this has been a complaint since Socrates argued with Protagoras, the lament that the student wants only technical expertise to help him achieve his goals of financial or political success and does not want an investigation of his culture, his world and his self, much less a philosophical or spiritual investigation into those very goals of success that he desires.
But perhaps, we worry, that what is new is that more and more colleges are adopting a customer service model of education, cutting back core requirements, offering and accepting degrees in administration or leadership rather than in the traditional arts and sciences. And too, there is more and more pressure to assess the lessons taught as if the lessons taught in college were a specific technical knowledge set that could be scanned by a computer. For example the Spellings report hopes to "take the mystery" out of college teaching by making higher education a set of objective questions and answers which is clearly useful to a student's needs as a worker in the market. This is in contrast to a view that education helps students learn to think generally opening their minds in order that they might see the world in a better, truer, and more holistic way. This is in contrast to the view that education helps students flourish as people, not just as workers.
Despite these changes that faculty might lament are lessening the influence of the arts and sciences, more and more citizens fear that very influence. For example, many parents, pastors, and even political leaders are warning students to beware their teachers' lectures. This is not only true at the college level but even in the secondary and elementary science classroom where children are told by parents and even school boards that their science teachers may be purposively giving them only part of the story, in order to sway them into a godless worldview. At the college level, there are training camps for conservative fundamentalist Christians that aim to fit students with an armor of defense against the secular liberal agenda they are told they are bound to face in the university classroom. In the Chronicle for Higher Education there have been several articles and letters by faculty members who have claimed that students have walked out of their classrooms never to return saying only that they believe the professor, who was schooled in rhetoric and critical thinking, would persuade them to her own bias and away from their own sincerely held beliefs. By way of personal example, a colleague at my small women's college who had a class of 15 students found that she could not engage them in discussion of a text she had assigned of environmental ethics. When she asked if there was a problem a student claimed that because the text assumed an evolutionary stand point she had opted not to read or discuss it. When asked if her classmates agreed with her view, twelve of the fifteen said that they also refused to read or discuss any text that presumed evolution was true.

So that I can explain that the issue is broader than any particular religiously held belief, I must mention that last year a student wrote a letter to the editor at our college newspaper in which she claimed that she had been forced to take the introductory philosophy and theology course required of all students even though she was an atheist. She said that the professors claimed not to indoctrinate the students but to present texts for discussion,. However she found the text and lecture so convincing that she found herself compelled towards Christianity. She was writing to the paper in order to argue that atheist students not be required to take the course lest they be persuaded against their will towards Christian beliefs.

The problem here is not the specific views or sincerely held religious beliefs of any
student. The problem is the broader view that a student is helpless in the hands of biased professors. The difficulty is the idea that knowledge, discussion, and education blind us rather than free us. To say that the university is a place of indoctrination and should be abolished, as a group writing to the Chronicle of Higher Education suggested last month, is frightening. This says to students ,"You can't learn at college". The subtext is "You can't learn anywhere". This group advocated shutting down the university and allowing all education to be done on the internet, for there students can access only information that corresponds with their beliefs.

Of course there is some truth to the idea that a student is easily persuaded by her teachers. Socrates warns Hippocrates about swallowing the teachings of Protagoras without proper evaluation lest his soul be corrupted. But Socrates' point is not to keep the young man isolated from a teacher, but instead to teach the young man how to engage in dialogue so that he, and even the sophist, might grow and learn. For Socrates dialogue was the key, and while many dialogues end in aporia, Socrates always left his door open (even in the middle of the night) for both young men and educated sophists to talk to him.

Not so are many day. The rise of skepticism and its twin sister fundamentalism has set a tone that conversation, science, and rational inquiry is simply not possible. Students fear that their professors are trying to convert them to secularism, or the liberal agenda, or Christianity; so they refuse to engage in the course. Or they seek universities that refuse to allow the free inquiry that most used to expect on campuses. For example the Chronicle recently highlighted Pensecola Christian College which forbids video games, movies, all but classical music, most television channels, and all Bibles that are not the King James translation. This college is not losing students, but has grown from 100 to 5000 students. In addition, it publishes the leading textbooks for Christian primary and secondary schools and for Christian home-schoolers. Thus, this is not a small or isolated movement, but a growing force in the world of education.

This fundamentalist college is not alone in its urge towards censorship. Several elite colleges have recently banned performances of the Vagina Dialogues and other plays which may offend the students. More striking is the fact that the political heads of state set policies in the Patriot Act that refuse to allow certain scholars like Tariq`Ramadan (a scholar of Islam visiting at Oxford University) entry to the US, effectively banning them from American academic conferences.

All of this shows a profoundly anti-Socratic and also anti-scientific world view. We don't trust empiricism, rationalism, and dialogue to show students and colleagues the way. We trust only censureship because we believe there is no criteria by which we can judge truth. It is also profoundly anti-democratic, for democracy presumes that the best path to wisdom lies in the laissez-faire marketplace of ideas.

But even to make this argument requires that we believe in sitting down together and discussing history, philosophy, theolog and we are having a hard time doing that.
We are in a crisis, and this is not a crisis for the academy alone or for professors who fear for their disciplines, but for world politics. How do we talk to each other unless we believe that discussion has a chance at leading us to better understanding? And if don't believe in discussion and cooperation, we don't believe in democracy, at the national or at the global level.

And beyond this as a political crisis for the world, there is the very personal human crisis that results if we believe that human beings, the homo sapiens, the knowing men, are creatures who were created to be (or who evolved to be) truth seekers.

So is there hope for humans as homo sapiens, as world citizens, as supporters of democracy, and supporters of the academy? Yes, and I believe the hope lies, at least in part, with the academy stepping up to reassert the possibility and importance of conversation and rational inquiry.

I propose that the role of the liberal arts in the academy is not simply to dogmatically assert its superiority to those who have lost trust in rational inquiry. This only fuels the support from those who feel abandoned by the elitism of the sciences. Instead, the academy must truly make the case for the university as a space for empirical observation, rational process, and communal dialogue that leads to better answers. And it can do this by examining its own basis for making such an assertion.

To do this the academy must examine its own role in creating the crisis. Many academic fields have become so specialized and elitist that they have simply stopped providing writings and lectures for the common person, therefore creating a gulf between the academy and the populace. By requiring for tenure the publication of one or even two books, professors have been forced to abandon excellent teaching and town and gown relations to write books with new, and therefore usually more obscure or specialized, contents. When great thinkers choose to address the general populace on important issues of our time, they often get labeled as populists, and therefore as inferior, scholars.

If the academy believes itself relevant to everyday human wisdom seeking, it should seek to engage the everyday human. A priority should be in teaching undergraduates, including those, perhaps especially those, who will graduate not to be future academics but to be citizens, technicians, professionals, politicians , and others engaged in human life outside the academy. Certainly some specialty journals and books are appropriate but these should not comprise the vast majority of academic books and journals as they do now. Writing intelligently for the public should be considered important scholarly work.

But there is a deeper cause to this crisis. As I said earlier I believe the twin sister of fundamentalism is skepticism. When the Academy after Plato turned skeptical, Gnostic groups gained membership. Both in the Greek world and in the Roman, academic skepticism and the growth of a wave of Gnostic cults were often simultaneous. Thus it is natural that the post-modern skepticism of the academy has given rise to a wave of cross cultural fundamentalism or neo-Gnosticism. If the academics preach that we cannot find truth using reason, empiricism, and dialogues, certainly leaders outside the academy will rise to say that they have found a truth which cannot be proven or communicated to those outside the group itself. Indeed, the neo-Gnostic preaches a fear that rational inquiry, dialogue, empiricism, only leads us away from the esoterically known truth. And the arguments of the academics are used to protect the position, as they are quoted to say that all other opinions are also beyond the grasp of reason and the senses.

By way of example I offer R.C. Lewontin, a Harvard academic who has written critiques of Darwinian evolution from a Marxist or Neo-Lamarckian perspective. He explains the bias Darwin had for Victorian capitalism, stating that Darwin admits getting the idea of natural selection from reading Malthus' Essays on Population. But in claiming that biological theories have ideologies attached that are not scientifically verifiable, Lewontin has opened a door to Creationists who use his arguments not only to debunk a theory of competition in natural selection, but to debunk the entire concept of evolution. In fact, they use his work to debunk the scientific method as such, claiming that since biologists have biases they are no more reliable than any other opinion. The claim is made that hypothesis, experiement, analysis and conlusion gives no better answers than a literal Biblical account that is simply believed.

The skepticism of post-modern philosophy is used to debunk the mission of truth seeking in many of the sciences. But the result is not an academically skeptical public which we hoped, but rather a rash of neo-Gnosticism. Often the same population that distrusts the academy and mainstream churches and media outlets eagerly believes groups or spokespeople who promise to tell a secret truth that others neither believe nor understand. These groups use skepticism to persuade their followers that scientists and others are dogmatic and unwilling to look beyond their presuppositions, while at the same time refusing to question the presuppositions of their own group.

Now that's not to say I suggest that the academy stop using academic skepticism. I know that the Union for Concern Scientists told Lewontin he needs to stop writing populist works the debunk Darwin because they are being used to debunk science as such. But in this I believe that the UCS is committing the same error as those they oppose. The solution cannot be that we just make claims that we cannot substantiate and refuse to enter into dialogue. On the contrary! Instead, the academy needs to advocate for itself as a place for dialogue and truth seeking, by advocating a position that allows and requires conversation and search.

I believe there is a common belief among the members of the academic sciences, although we have different language to express that faith, which allows academics to hold this position. This belief holds that reality is ultimately grace-ful. In other words, we hope that the world, complex though it may be, reveals truth to those who seek it. The revelations are slow to be sure, and often what we theorize at first is falsified later. But still there is a sense that we are learning

Robert Neville, a philospher and theologian and Boston University said to Michael Malone in an interview on the television series "A Parlimenet of Minds, : the following quote that paraphrases the faith of most academics today.

"Experience teaches, Reality teaches us. It usually teaches us that our hypotheses are wrong, but not wholly. Wrong, a little bit wrong. So you have to modify your positions. I think that unless philosophy takes as its topic philosophy, it's going to be dealing with reality and reality will correct it. Maybe not fast enough but that's pretty much like grace."

This is a position that encourages debate and skepticism but not radical skepticism. And in not encouraging radical skepticism, it is a position that also does not encourage Gnosticism. We must believe that we can learn. Scientists make mistakes, and we would be silly to give them our blind allegiance. But we are not incapable of seeing any truths in this world. Not everything anyone comes up with is equally valid or invalid. We can recognize some positions as wrong, and some as better. And this recognition gives us hope.

From the ancients to the moderns, most scientists and philosophers fought both Gnosticism and skepticism. Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William of Occam, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein believed firmly that the world is made in an understandable way by a Rational Nature or by a God who created humans with minds capable of understanding it. These thinkers believed strongly that if we looked at nature and at ourselves we would find order. God does not play dice with the universe. The simplest and most clear answer is the most correct answer. Our minds were made to find such simple and clear answers.

Other thinkers like Heracleitus, Luther, Kierkegaard, Bohr, Schrodinger and Heisenberg suspected chaos and mystery where Aristotle and Einstein expected order and clarity. But still these thinkers saw profit in the search and the discussion, remaining theologians, philosophers, or scientists until their deaths. How? Because while they were less certain that their minds were made to understand and less certain that the world is orderly, they realized that we are able to understand that limit to our understanding. To realize that maybe reason only gets us so far is to see that reason does tell us something, if only that it is limited. For example, Godel proved the limits of logic, by using logic.
Bohr, Shrodinger, and Heisenberg used both experiments and mathematics to show that the electron does not behave in a predictable manner. Chaos is not as chaotic as we might think. In modern physics and post-modern philosophy, there are still rules, equations, and the amazing heart pounding realization that we, with our tiny brains and our tiny life spans on a tiny planet have figured out something about the very basic substance of the universe.

Belief that we can learn from each other and from our world allows academics and the public to read and to listen to that which may seem dangerously convincingly true. We may converse without fear that error will enslave us too deeply to emerge. Such a belief is the foundation for science as the pursuit of learning. It forbids the formation of isolated communities and requires instead universal conversation that will allow both the university and the humans it serves to flourish. An investigation of this foundational faith will strengthen the academy and sooth the crisis of the sciences. It will explain how we can and must be skeptics but also can and must keep the conversation open. It allows us to continue to be homo sapiens, people who desire to know.