Opinion: Local colleges shouldn't merely *allow* diverse viewpoints—but teach “inquiry as a form of life”
L.P. Boitard: Socrates standing before seated group of men; figure of Justice stands behind him, 1750.
The viewpoint diversity platform (even lauded—however hollowly—by SJSU) is well-intentioned, says Law & Liberty's R. J. Snell, but fails to get at the heart of true liberal education: shared inquiry. Like Socrates, Snell thinks colleges shouldn't view their plane of differing ideas as a battleground—but an opportunity to question, learn, and pursue truth together.
If intellectual monopoly among the faculty is a significant cause of bias in the selection and teaching of texts, then unless and until conservatives attain critical mass among the faculty nothing like traditional scholarship is likely to occur. If the Left is going to proselytize, but conservatives are unwilling to do the same, we can still insist on access to the competitive market of ideas. It’s viewpoint diversity among the faculty or bust.
I see the reasons for this stance, but begrudgingly, offering faint cheers and choking a bit on the final “hurrah.” At the moment, viewpoint diversity is necessary triage, but it presupposes that education is a competition rather than an inquiry. On this conception, the teacher helps students access the best arguments for and against a position. Of course, students need to understand a text, but the central task is weighing and evaluating strengths and weaknesses so the student can judge for herself. This gauntlet model attacks and whatever survives is affirmed until suffering a knock-down blow. Take the Opposing Viewpoints series, for instance, in which relatively brief essays provide arguments for and against a position, without providing much access to the philosophical, anthropological, or economic commitments the arguments rely upon. Understanding is a necessary precondition, since we want to correctly grasp claims, but judgment is the point. Viewed this way, the Socratic method is a fitting model of instruction. The instructor probes for weakness, contradiction, lack of evidence, false assumptions, or absurd implications; if the class is lively other students will join the attack. The strong survive this lecture-hall-Darwinism, although judgments are only provisional and always threatened. Judging, to borrow a phrase from John Milbank, is “just suspended warfare.”
The marketplace of ideas is clearly preferable to overt advocacy and indoctrination, but Socrates, still the exemplar for liberal educators, did something quite different and far better. He allowed his interlocutors to share inquiry on the way to understanding. It might seem obvious that Socrates engages in the method I deny of him. When Polus leaps to defend Gorgias, with all the high spirit and energy implied by his name—a colt—Socrates refuses to entertain long speeches and insists on question and answer: “But if you have any interest in what has been said and wish to set it right, then, as I said just now, retract whatever you please, question and answer in turn … and refute me and be refuted.” Polus grudgingly accepts this constraint, chooses to question rather than be questioned, and eventually, albeit sulkily, admits his position is “fantastic,” prompting Socrates to tease, “We must disprove that.” Polus responds quite simply—“Yes, that is so,” apparently recognizing his loss. Perhaps. Or, it might be the dialogue shows us not the defeat of the arguments of Polus but rather the taming of Polus, the wild colt.
It’s no small matter to accept the Socratic condition of inquiry. Socrates refuses sophistry, a supposed technique or method—Socrates says “routine”—of persuading others to accept judgments. Question and answer is not a non-sophistical method of refutation but, rather, as Eric Voegelin suggests, “the difference between existential honesty and intellectual argument.” Polus, the sophist, is ready to argue, but only in the way of “those who fancy they are refuting in the law courts. For there one group imagines it is refuting the other when it produces many reputable witnesses to support its statements whereas the opposing party produces but one or none.” Witnesses are marshaled in support of a statement, as when reasons are given to support a judgment, but Socrates is uninterested in this. Instead, he asks Polus to “try out what I consider the proper form of refutation” in which there is one, and only one witness, namely “the man” with whom Socrates is speaking, in this case, Polus. It is not the arguments of Polus under investigation but the person, Polus himself, and not about his intellectual prowess but his existential commitments and loves. At several points in the exchange, Polus posits his own tastes as the criterion of reality, as when he suggests that Socrates, like himself, would obviously envy the man who does whatever he wishes whether justly or not; to which Socrates provides no counter-argument at all but simply a rebuke: “Hush, Polus!”
Polus is tamed, broken in the old language of making a horse fit for the saddle, not by this or that argument but by the existential order Socrates represents: the order of inquiry. Especially in the early and early-middle dialogues, Socrates insists on his ignorance; he does not know and neither does the interlocutor. Socrates is not pushing arguments in defense of his judgments but so that his interlocutor admits their lack of knowledge. The interlocutor, if honest, is in the same place as Socrates, namely, that of not knowing but wanting to know. He is not persuading them to accept his claims, for he makes none, but tries to convert them to inquiry as a form of life.
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