At the same time, I do wonder if we have a somewhat romanticized image of the academy of the past. Augustine and Nietzsche both left their jobs at their respective universities, and neither seem to look back on the experience favorably. Nietzsche in particular looks back on his professorship at Basel as a "blunder," and Augustine I remember had a great deal to say about getting cheated out of his tuition by his students. Vico, too, had to settle for an academic position he favored less - I think he wanted to be head of the Jurispudence department or something, and ended up teaching something like rhetoric. What I want to say is, the petty politics, the stringent competition, the sheer incompotence (I'm guessing) of the colleagues of these great thinkers - must always have been around.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Bryan, but I think the Tocqueville section you're referencing is the chunk around that chapter titled something along the lines of Why America Has So Many Ambitious Men but Such Small Ambitions. The redeeming(?) counterpart seems to be when he walks into the senate and finds all the Great Men there, and decides (I'm sorry, I'm butchering this shamelessly) that this is so because the senators are not elected by the people, and thus removed from this whole democracy business. This of course, is not to say that such a bubble cannot coexist with a democractic system.

In any case, Bryan, I do think we do need a bit of time to tell who and what's going to end up lasting. It seems that great ideas seem great when we can index them - that is, be able to summarize and come up with key terms and phrases sorting what it is they're saying into mental boxes of associations, and only when we are able to reduce them this way can we link them to other thinkers, locate them in the history of ideas, probe for their relevance today, etc. Just as, only now in the second half of this decade (when are the flying cars coming??!!), do we begin to find ourselves in a position to dub sometihng "so nineties," I think we're still waiting for the ideas of the early/mid 20th century to settle.

I personally think the problem has more to do with specialization: the fragmentation of knowledge into separate disciplines - particularly between the Humanities and the Sciences - makes it harder, I think, to think 'outside the box.' Where have all the Renaissance people gone? Was it a coincidence that so many of our classic philosophers - including political philosophers - were also mathematicians?

(Matt: congratulations!)

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [6:51 PM]

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