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Chapter 6 Canonical Dynamics Polarized Academics Relativism turns out to be foundationalism or methodism with the essential taken as temporal and particular rather than timeless and universal. Contemporary canonists locate that essence in the present, progressivists locate it in the future, ethnic relativists limit it to the history of a tribe or a people. Because they have restricted the scope of the community for which certain ideas, texts, and persons are canonical, relativists are anti-canonical egalitarians with respect to whatever lies beyond the scope of their canon’s relevance— trans-ethnic or global or historically inclusive intellectual and educational canons are at best fanciful constructs, at worst attempts at hegemonic imposition by a momentarily dominant era or ethnos. The anti-canonists are the only ones who take a thoroughly deconstructivist approach to canons, seeing them all as arbitrary and self-serving—to be avoided or, insofar as they are unavoidable, to be divested of any objective, much less any transcendent, aura of significance. It would seem, therefore, that our journey through the differing senses of an educational canon and the metaphysical presuppositions undergirding each has ended up with a simple polarity. Either there is an objective hierarchy of importance that undergirds a rationally defensible standard by which to rank things as essential or unessential, as central or peripheral. Or there is no such hierarchy, and in the absence of any objective standard all judgments of importance are subjective, situationally biased, and probably self-serving. Either the quest for a viable educational canon is justified, however difficult such an undertaking might be, or it is a chimera that we would be better off to avoid. 90 Higher Education in the Making We are back to the dichotomy that Bruce Kimball argues is as old as Western civilization: the competing traditions of the “philosopher” and the “orator” (1986). On the one side, he argues, are those who propose a methodus , a method or set of standards which if adhered to will lead us to objective truths that are independent of cultural biases. On the other side are those who offer a modus, a way to articulate our personal and cultural values clearly and to come to a consensus about our differences concerning them (1995: 102). Although these two traditions share similar concerns about the importance of education for attaining truth and for becoming good persons and responsible citizens, they “are fundamentally divergent in their respective views that either language or experimental method is the primary conduit and source of knowledge and values” (1995: 56). On the right side of the chancel, the traditional canonists are arrayed, foundationalists and methodists alike. Across from them sit the critics of tradition, advocates of a plurality of canons or of no canon at all. Each side fires cannonades of assertion and invective across the aisle separating them, each outraged at the refusal of the other to acknowledge the obvious, each muttering about the dark reasons that clearly must constitute their opponents’ real motivation. John Searle, for instance, chides the “cultural left”—his label for anticanonists —because they confuse epistemology with ontology. “All investigations are relative to investigators. But it does not follow, nor is it indeed true, that all the matters investigated are relative to investigators” (sec. 3). Metaphysical realism, contends Searle, is presumed in the sciences, indeed “everywhere except in English, French, and cultural studies.” An objective reality independent of our interpretations of it is the presupposition of all linguistic communication, and so even in attempting to argue against realism its opponents only end up exemplifying it. Searle dismisses the anti-canonists as philosophically muddleheaded and their views on education, therefore, as not worthy of serious consideration. Francis Oakley goes further. The problem with the critics of a canonical methodus is their “intellectual malfeasance and moral confusion.” Without some standard of judgment, a “morality of process” against which our intellectual claims are measured, we are “severely compromised” as a community, our quest for disinterested truth and social justice at the mercy of those who are most effective in appealing to our momentary passions and interests (1992a: 165). Even Rorty attacks the cultural Left, distinguishing his own activist “reformist Left” politics from its unremittingly negative petulance, accusing its adherents of being unpatriotic. They imagine themselves to be a “saving remnant” s truggling against entrenched powers and principalities they despise unbearably. So “it becomes increasingly difficult for members of such a movement to think of themselves as fellow citizens, to say ‘we...

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