questions for colloquium

A few questions from Garry for next Friday (the first one may provide one way of taking up the question just posed by Andy):

1) At one point in his Love the Questions Ian Angus says the following: “I wanted to show how self-expression and self-development was a vital modern moral practice. I wanted to show why many of the great modern poets and philosophers—Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Baudelaire, Wilde, and Rilke himself—saw nothing more important than this great struggle, nothing to which it could be secondary, risking and suffering poverty, ostracism, madness, and death in its name” (29-30). The significance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is to be found in the degree to which it forces us to take seriously the idea that there may be “nothing more important than [the] great struggle” Angus describes.—Discuss and reflect, while doing so, on the kind of contribution that literature or art (only literature or art?) can make to our understanding of this matter. And/or: Can you think of any other modern work that you think might serve us as well as or better than A Doll’s House in this context?

2) In his “Reconceiving the University and the Lecture,” after explaining why he finds the notion of a Great Books curriculum inadequate (because it presupposes “possibilities of agreement of a kind which do not at present exist”), Alasdair MacIntyre poses the question “What then is possible?” and answers it as follows: “The answer is: the university as a place of constrained disagreement, of imposed participation in conflict, in which a central responsibility of higher education would be to initiate students into conflict” (230-1).—Discuss and bear in mind also what he says about “the capacity of the contemporary university not only to dissolve antagonism, to emasculate hostility, but also in so doing to render itself culturally irrelevant” (219).

3) The fact that, as he sees it, “the official spokespersons of the academic status quo have with rare exceptions responded with stuttering ineptitudes” to external critics who are asking the university to justify itself; this, according to MacIntyre, provides us with a glimmer of hope. See pp. 221-2 for an explanation (which includes his recommendation of “intellectual and moral warfare.”


4) There are some significant overlaps and some significant differences between the accounts offered by Bill Readings and Alasdair MacIntyre of the current state of the university.—Discuss which ever part of this strikes you as being most challenging.