"The Temple of Intellect": Higher Meanings for American Universities

From okeysalamanca.com

By Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971)
Emeritus Professor of International Law
Purdue University
lberes@purdue.edu

“The university is the temple of intellect, and I am its high priest.”

Miguel de Unamuno [1]

Politics does not take place in a vacuum. Always, it is reflective or epiphenomenal. Among the multiple sources of such reflection, universities and higher education are variously important. In essence, though not conspicuous, the “temple of intellect” can have a determinative impact on politics.

There is more. Behind every brick and mortar university lies an idea of higher education [2]. As we were reminded by 20th century Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno [3], this is not a narrowly mundane idea. On the contrary, it is a genuinely sacred notion.

Regarding connections between the world of politics and the world of universities, this is a time for utmost candor. These are defiling moments in American intellectual life, moments in which university degrees are crudely measured according to presumptive income benefits. To reduce such moments (they could never be eliminated altogether), more deeply meaningful standards of assessment will be needed. These standards would underscore that Americans should not attend a university exclusively or even primarily for financial rewards. To be sure, vocational certifications are indispensable, but universities have a more basic responsibility. It is to provide enduring benefits of  “personhood” [4], a provision that would “feedback” into assorted and interrelated political spheres.

This argument is not mysterious. The explanations are unhidden. Anyone who is familiar with the “learned professions” (e.g., medicine, law, business, finance, engineering, etc.)  should already understand the core differences between higher education and training.

 In the United States, advanced professional training is enviable and indispensable, but even “successful professionals” rarely seek more than an elementary acquaintance with literature, art, music, history [5] or philosophy. They are content with being trained. In essence, they  have succumbed to what Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset famously called “the barbarism of specialization” [6]. Most worrisome, they have succumbed without offering even a scintilla of intellectual resistance.

There are relevant details. This American surrender of deeper learning opportunities is not merely regrettable. It is also deeply ironic and widely dissembling [7]. Just when we most desperately need credible reassurances that the vital human  struggle for science and reason can expect support from our universities [8], most Americans envision only one more self-centered opportunity for personal financial enrichment [9].

There is more. The rabidly anti-intellectual ethos of American life extends far beyond brick and mortar institutions to the university as an idea, as Miguel de Unamuno’s clarifying “temple of intellect.” Today, almost everywhere, university curricula are largely “epiphenomenal.” They express only a “shadow” of “mind.” 

For millions of Americans, including those with warm attachments to “elite universities,” hyperbole and simplification have become convenient substitutes for serious thinking. Large numbers of citizens remain fervidly loyal to illiterate and law-violating policies of “anti-thought.”

 Elucidating ideas about the American university should now be brought together. Accordingly, the core American pathology should be understood as a national “disease,” a collective unwillingness to prefer serious learning to political contrivance. Earlier, German writer-philosopher Thomas Mann identified such unwillingness as a recurrent strain in human history. In the main, said Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann, this strain represents “the gradual absorption of the educated classes by the masses, the simplification of all functions of political, social, economic and spiritual life.”

During his stay at Princeton, Mann summed it all up in a singularly subsuming word: “barbarization” [10].

There is more. Over time, some of this “barbarization” has been expressed in jurisprudential terms. International law remains an integral part of the law of the United States, but virtually no American recognizes or understands this vital inclusion. For present clarification, it is codified at Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution (the "Supremacy Clause") and at several U.S. Supreme Court decisions, principally, the Paquete Habana (1900). In the words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, "International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination.  For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations."

"The crowd," observed 19th century Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, "is untruth." Obligingly, even today, anti-reason’s undaunted American minions insist upon chanting their gibberish in a reinforcing chorus. Even for those who have just a minimal acquaintance with modern history – and this means virtually all Americans of any age - the dark tenor of such primal chanting should be distressingly familiar.  For the present writer, it’s the same chanting that brought him to the United States from Holocaust-torn Europe at the end of World War II.

In the end, truth is exculpatory. “What is the proper role of the American university in protecting the United States from Jose Ortega  y Gasset’s ‘mass man?’” These questions should be raised repeatedly, especially in universities. We can’t possibly expect coherent answers to questions that have never been asked.

There are variously critical specifics. Generally, the Founding Fathers of the United States did not believe in democracy. Most agreed with Alexander Hamilton's trenchant observation that "the people are “a great beast."” Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most democratic of the Founders, tied any residual hopes for a durable American democracy to more properly dedicated systems of citizen education. In his Notes on Virginia, the future president described "the people" as "rubbish” from which a small number of gifted individuals could be "raked” each year. This was not a flattering or optimistic metaphor. But it was Jefferson’s descriptive way of saying that a democratic mass per se must always be docile and anti-intellectual.

When Sophocles, an early Greek tragedian, held "despicable" any king who would place his own personal popularity ahead of national well-being, he also (in common with Aeschylus and Euripides) lamented that a corrupt leadership would inevitably spawn a corrupt commonwealth. When King Oedipus discovers his own "tragic flaw," the Chorus recognizes causal connections to the famine and disorder then prevailing in Thebes. 

In order to combat such refractory harms, special responsibilities should fall on the shoulders of capable professors and their students. Even if our universities can no longer be conceptualized as “temples of intellect,” they can still stand for something more  faithful to human virtue and scientific truth than perpetual self-aggrandizement. In principle, at least, the “high priests” of such welcome elevations could include representatives from all walks of American life, but the initial transformations should come “from within.” Should this counsel be opposed or disregarded, whether wittingly or unwittingly, the United States could soon face a determined era of anti-reason. Any such outcome would be execrable and unforgivable.

The “Temple of Intellect” should mean much more than a place of professional training or wealth improvement. It should designate a “sacred” venue for humanistic education and authentic learning. Among other things, universities will meaningfully impact politics, national and international.

[1] Don Miguel, speaking against Spanish fascism as rector of the University of Salamanca, on 12 October 1936.

[2] As explained in dialogues Philebus, Phaedo and Republic, “Forms” are everywhere immaterial, uniform and immutable. To serve humankind, they must express not the concrete or physical events of any specific moment in time, but an Idea that soars above all tangible particularities.

[3] In this connection, recall Plato’s classic argument in The Republic that an underlying Idea (“Form”) is always more “real” than any of its tangible manifestations. See by Professor Louis René Beres at Horasis (Zurich):  https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/.

[4] See, by this writer, Louis René Beres, Daily Princetonian: https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2018/06/a-core-challenge-of-higher-education.

[5] Says Jose Ortega y Gasset in Man and Crisis (1958): "History is an illustrious war against death."

[6] See Ortega’s twentieth-century classic, The Revolt of the Masses (1932). See also, by present author Louis René Beres: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/09/13/american-democracy-and-the-barbarism-of-specialisation/.

[7] Such destabilization extends to world politics in the “Westphalian” system. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) concluded the Thirty Years War and created the still-existing state system. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119. Together, these two treaties comprise the "Peace of Westphalia."

[8] See Karl Jaspers’ clarifying tour de force, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952).

[9] Says Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man: "The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself' is false and against nature."

[10] See Stanley Corngold, The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton (Princeton University Press, 2022). As an elucidating parable, Mann’s justly famous “Mario and the Magician” represents a metaphor for intellectual decline and tyranny under the Nazis.

Louis René Beres, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University, was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). He is the author of many major books and several hundred articles dealing with world politics, philosophy and international law. His twelfth book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy. Dr. Beres’ related writings can be found at The New York Times; Yale Global Online; Modern War Institute (West Point); War Room (US Army War College); Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); Special Warfare (Pentagon); Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; global-e; Oxford University Press (Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence); Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard); American Journal of International Law; American Political Science Review; BESA (Israel); The Hudson Review; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; The Hill; Jurist; The Atlantic; Air-Space Operations Review (USAF) and World Politics (Princeton). Professor Beres was an original member of the Princeton-based World Order Models Project in the late 1960s. A previous contributor to the Princeton Political Review, he was born in Zürich at the end of World War II.