In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Egalitarianism Foundationalism and methodism today are everywhere in disarray. Whether we look to particular academic disciplines or to common sense, the confidence is dissipating that some contents or procedures are beyond dispute. Our cultural and intellectual tradition, in the lingo of its Jacobin detractors, is being deconstructed. What the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did to political privilege, the critiques of the twentieth century did to intellectual privilege. The cultural aristocrats who are the beneficiaries of an intellectual canon of substantial or procedural knowledge, with their elitist claims about what is the case and what is not, are cast out in the name of those who come proclaiming new and previously unenfranchised egalitarian understandings, practices, and creations. We find ourselves committed to egalitarianism once we take seriously Kant’s notion of the autonomous individual—if, that is, we interpret autonomy as a feature of human nature, a fact of our humanity, and not as the consequence of an educational process. We no longer believe that heteronomy is our natural condition and autonomy its transcendence, the subjugation of our appetitive nature to the discipline of reason. Autonomy, rather, is our natural state, and if we act heteronomously it must be because our natural propensities have been distorted by the artificial forces of societal compulsion. As Rousseau puts it in that famous phrase near the beginning of The Social Contract, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (paragraph 5). Rousseau claims that any social hierarchy is a structure of dependence : whoever is at a lower level of the hierarchy is subservient to everyone who occupies a higher level. For us to be free, our relationships to others Chapter 4 Anti-Canonists must be reciprocal, an exchange among equals. Therefore, we cannot be free unless we are freed from our bondage to the status society has imposed on us, freed from dependence on another’s command and on expectations grounded in the prestige accorded our family or tribe or nation, or grounded in the importance of the work we do. Charles Taylor calls the contemporary demand for equality, the insistence on a whole cascade of rights and entitlements, a “politics of equal dignity” (38) based on the Kantian notion of autonomy combined with Rousseau’s notion of freedom. For us to be treated as truly human, it is argued, we must all be treated with the equal dignity that is our birthright. No longer are hierarchies understood to be natural facts, our dignity found in fulfilling well the status to which we were born. Nor are hierarchies understood as necessary features of social organization, our dignity found in fulfilling well a status attained by our own lawful efforts. Rather, our dignity is independent of hierarchy and must be recognized and honored no matter where we are located along whatever arbitrarily constructed levels of social order happen to constrain us. The manual laborer and the social outcast deserve as much praise as the corporate officer and the aristocrat because they all have an innate equal dignity that trumps their social differences. If all hierarchies are arbitrary constructs, the intellectual hierarchies that organize knowledge must be also. And if social status hierarchies put us in chains, snatching away our natural freedom and dignity, then so also our belief systems must be forms of imprisonment. The task of education should be to rescue us from what we have been taught, to free us from the iron maiden of claims about foundational truths and procedural conditions for assuring objectivity, for these are claims that undermine our autonomy. Universal and necessary truths are the tools tyrants use to justify their control over us. This critique of objective knowledge is as old as Protagoras who argued that humans are “the measure of all things.” He and his fellow sophists were referring to ethical norms, but their reasoning was readily generalizable: what we know is influenced by who we are. We stand somewhere in order to see; we think by means of culturally acquired ideas; our desires filter our beliefs. There are no universal truths or values, only what someone or some group at a particular time and in a particular place take to be true or valuable. Michel Foucault gave these arguments contemporary salience when he showed, in Madness and Civilization and then in Discipline and Punish, that even something as fundamental as the essence of one’s humanity is a social construct . He described how eighteenth...

Share