Lost Intellectuals

How many people are there out there who value the intellect for its own sake, and are lost in a world that sees the intellect as a value only insofar as it can be traded for nonintellectual values like wealth, status and reputation? Even at Caltech and Stanford I was shocked how often students would gape in awe at the reputation of the resident intellectual celebrities, while showing little or no appreciation for the intellectual accomplishments that made them celebrities in the first place. Even at the elite universities, most students are there seeking wealth, status and reputation. It's only a select few who genuinely value the life of the mind, as an end in itself, and not merely as a means to something else. I'm sad to say that even philosophy departments are not immune from this tendency to see education as no more than a path to fame and fortune.

Understanding for the sake of understanding alone, wisdom for the sake of wisdom, virtue for the sake of virtue, and not for the sake of any nonintellectual value like wealth or reputation, is an endangered species. I am personally seeking out the few surviving specimens to offer them aid and comfort.

In 1974 American philosopher Marjorie Grene writes:

The theoretical scientist... can focus his whole attention, bringing every relevant clue to bear, on a problem wholly without appetitive or utilitarian implications, he can put his whole heart and mind into the search for understanding for the sake of understanding alone. How can he do this? First, because he himself has been nourished and disciplined by traditions cultivated within his society which have produced this kind of devoted attention to impersonal goals. And secondly, because the society itself, in its deepest foundations, respects those independently self-sustaining traditions of scientist or scholar.

This, of course, was before the Reagan Revolution, in whose wake all traditional values, including the value of disinterested, impartial inquiry, have given way to the appetitive considerations of capitalism. No student today is immune from the perverse influence of the mindset of total capitalism. And what is worse, since all serious forms of literature that offer a counterbalance to this mindset, from Plato to Marx, have been dropped from the curriculum, students are left with no intellectual resources to combat the mentality of total capitalism and assert the right of the mind to exist for its own sake, and not as a slave to the market.

In a set of 1978 lectures titled "The Birth of Biopolitics," French philosopher Michel Foucault articulately and accurately describes the mindset of the neoliberal philosophy that will conquer American politics just two years later. The market, says Foucault, has become a "site of verediction" where all questions about truth are definitively settled. "Verediction," Foucault's coinage, combines "veritas," the Latin word for truth, and "diction," declaring or saying, to indicate the set of practices and power structures that decide the truth value of propositions. The mindset of total capitalism declares there are no values outside the marketplace. The value of everything, from potatoes to "intellectual property" is decided by how much it will fetch in the market. The answer to Pilate's perennial question, "What is truth?" is now, "Truth is what sells."

The governor of Wisconsin recently proposed changing the mission statement of his state's university system. The new mission statement begins by declaring, "The mission of the system is to develop human resources to meet the state's workforce needs." In the brave new world of total capitalism, a human mind is no longer a value in itself. It is only worth educating if it can be employed as a "resource" in service to the market.