Contemporary Philosophical Proposals for the University by Aaron Stoller & Eli Kramer

Author:Aaron Stoller & Eli Kramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

“Culture” and “University”: A Communicative Option?

What, then, can we make of the juxtaposition of “culture” and “university”? Can a narrative be woven that brings the two concepts together in a substantial way? Perhaps the key questions are these: can it sensibly be said that the university should have a concern with or for culture, and, if so, what form might that concern take? In what way(s) might it be exhibited by the university? And would or could any such exemplification carry across the university’s disciplines, or would it be confined to certain disciplines? Could there be a kind of universal—that is, a transdisciplinary —culture characteristic of the university as such?

A generation ago, Alvin Gouldner 17 came close to offering an answer to these questions. The university could be said and be seen to exemplify a “culture of critical discourse.” In other words , the academic culture (or, at least, an academic culture) was not to be sought in particular kinds of knowledge and understanding (a la Ortega ) but rather in ways of legitimately coming to know the world. It was to a communicative sense of academic culture that we should turn.

However, that culture , Gouldner implied, was being gradually usurped by an incipient academic culture that was much more technical and instrumental in character. This could have been read as a particular version of the “two cultures” debate. But in that case, true culture—the culture of critical discourse—was to be found only sparingly, if at all. It was more a matter of glimpsing the kind of culture that the academic life, at its best, exemplified. This was not, and perhaps could not be, a culture universally characteristic of universities.

Jürgen Habermas , in his monumental Theory of Communicative Reason, might be called in aid here. For Habermas precisely posited that there lay within rational discourse a universal set of conditions—“validity conditions”—that acted at least as a standard against which any discourse purporting to be rational could be judged. There was just a limited set of such conditions: sincerity, truthfulness and appropriateness. These were held to be presuppositions of a rational discourse.18 The problem is that it was never entirely clear why just these and only these should be felt to constitute the validity conditions of a rational discourse.

What of argumentativeness, that is, of the disposition to proffer and pursue an argument? What of persistence, of the disposition to continue doggedly with a conversation? What of courage, namely, the capacity to enter a debate even when the argumentative tide is running in entirely another direction? What of the capacity to listen, to give and take, empathically to enter the ground of the other? And what of creativity, of an interest in rocking the boat and coming forward with ideas, perspectives and frameworks that might, in due course, not only come to constitute a new paradigm but open an entirely new way of understanding the world? And so perhaps one could go further, identifying conditions that seemingly have to be upheld if a culture of rationality is to be sustained within the university.

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