Category: Academia

Can the Humanities be Saved?

Excerpts from, and commentary on, John Gray, Why the Humanities Can't be Saved.  HT: Karl White.

It is hard to see why any sensible person would enroll in a humanities degree at the present time. A common argument used to be that the humanities taught students how to think. [. . .]

This is not an argument that can be made today. “Critical thinking” has become a cluster of progressive dogmas, which are handed down as if they were self-evident truths. Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.

They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not just mistaken but malevolent. When enforced in universities, this is a prescription for censorship and conformism. What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought. Losing the ability to think while attending a university may be considered a misfortune. Incurring fifty or sixty thousand pounds of debt in order to do so looks like carelessness.

It looks more like stupidity.

The decline of the humanities is one of the defining facts of the age. Yet there has not been a great deal of serious discussion of its causes. In the Eighties and Nineties, an influential critique argued that universities had been co-opted by “tenured radicals”—the title of a provocative book published by the American art critic Roger Kimball in 1990.

As Kimball saw it, an academic nomenklatura controlled sectors of higher education and used its position to attack the values of the societies that funded it. Any version of a western canon was discredited, and its origins in classical philosophy and Jewish and Christian religion disparaged.

There is some truth in this critique. Though they remain ineffably redolent of the bourgeoisie at their most sanctimonious and self-deceiving, academic radicals define themselves by their opposition to the bourgeois civilisation that produced and now supports them. Kimball’s critique also identifies a key feature of tenured radicalism: it is self-reproducing. Through their powers of patronage, the nomenklatura decide the prospects of new entrants, and exclude anyone who deviates from the party line. No young scholar who fails to genuflect to it has any prospect of a future in academic life.

So far, so good.

What this analysis fails to explain is the appeal of the ideology this class has adopted. Marx may be worth re-reading in a time when capitalism is entering another of its recurrent crises. But how could a turgid mishmash of Heidegger, Derrida and Lacan have gained such a stranglehold on institutions of higher learning?

The metamorphosis in liberalism that has occurred over the past generation has played a role. From being a philosophy of tolerance aiming at peaceful coexistence among divergent world-views, it has become a persecutory orthodoxy that tolerates no view of the world other than its own. If the contemporary academy is hostile to liberal values as they used to be understood, one reason is the rise of a new liberalism that dismisses these values as phony and repressive. But this only pushes the question one step back. Why has illiberal liberalism become so popular?

Gray notes correctly that "persecutory orthodoxy" has replaced the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance and then asks a very important question. Why has this illiberal liberalism taken hold?   His answer follows.

Part of the answer may be found in a short, strange and inexhaustibly interesting volume that was published nearly a century and a half ago. The chief subject of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy(1872), is the nature of Greek tragedy, which he interpreted as an art-form that overcame the lack of meaning in human life by reframing it as an aesthetic spectacle.

The most celebrated aspect of Nietzsche’s interpretation is his claim that Greek drama turns on an interaction between an Apollonian striving after reason and order, and a Dionysian yearning for chaos and frenzy. But the most important section of the book, to my mind, comes when he applies his account of Greek tragedy to the secular faith of modern times, which he calls “Socratism” — the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth.

“Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist,” Nietzsche writes, “who in his faith in the explicability of things, attributes the power of a panacea to knowledge and science, and sees error as the embodiment of evil.” [. . .]

The end-result of Socratism for the West is “a resolute process of secularization, a break with the unconscious metaphysics of its previous existence”. In turn, the triumph of Socratism leads to a violent rebirth of mythic thinking, inspiring the frenzied totalitarian movements that Nietzsche saw coming and which, ironically, he was blamed for inspiring.

Writing when Europe’s high bourgeois civilisation seemed unshakably secure, Nietzsche foresaw the present crisis of the humanities. Deconstruction is Socratism in an extravagant form, an all-out effort to subvert the myths and metaphysics that underpinned western civilisation — not least Socrates’s own faith in reason. [. . .]

Like Plato, Socrates was the mouthpiece of a mystical faith. It was this—not any process of ratiocination—that allowed him to assert that the true and the good were one and the same. The ideology of deconstruction aims to demystify this Socratic faith, along with everything else. As Nietzsche understood, once Socratism knocks away its metaphysical foundations it becomes a type of nihilism.

Gray is asking an important question. How did "persecutory orthodoxy" come to replace the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance? This philosophy includes belief in free speech, open inquiry, and acceptance of dissent, all underpinned by the belief that at least partial insight into the truth is possible by dialectical means, that is, by dialog, discussion, and friendly competition in a 'free marketplace of ideas.'  On classical liberalism, dissent is not hate, as it for the persecutorily orthodox, but a goad to inquiry. If you disagree with me, I don't hate you for it; I try to see what I can learn from you. I take your disagreement as a reason to examine my beliefs more carefully.  I assume that there is a truth beyond both of us.

The assumption, of course, is that the world is intrinsically intelligible, and that it is possible to know something about it as it is in itself.  Logos can and must supplant mythos as the guide to truth and to life.  There is an impersonal truth, a truth that is not perspectival and merely expressive of the interests and the will to power of individuals and tribes, but is instead objective and absolute.  And again, this truth is assumed to be knowable, to some extent at least.

Gray, leaning on Nietzsche, is in effect telling us that these assumptions about intrinsic intelligibility, truth, and knowability are part of a "mystical faith," Socratism, according to which "the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth." This faith in reason, in the value of critical examination, and in its efficacy at getting at the truth, then gets turned upon the very project of rational inquiry.  The upshot is that the Enlightenment project, which begins with Socrates, undermines itself.  Skepticism and nihilism result.  Faith in reason wanes when reason cannot secure life-guiding results acceptable to all.

The critical assault on the dogmatism of tribal traditions and myths having failed, new dogmatisms arise:  people need to have life-guiding beliefs.   Only the rare Pyrrhonian skeptic can live adoxastos, and even for him that is arguably only a rarely attained ideal. The vast majority cannot live belieflessly. Thus arise dogmatisms that persecute other dogmatisms. There is, for example, the dogmatism of the hate-America leftist with his slanderous talk of systemic racism.

The question again, is: How did "persecutory orthodoxy" come to replace the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance? It is not clear to me what Gray's answer is.  He may be telling us that the "mystical faith" in reason is as groundless and mythical as any other myth, and that once this was appreciated suspected late in the history of the West by Nietzsche, it was just a matter of time before that the "mystical faith" was de-mystified and a sort of perspectivism arose that at once privileges its own tribal perspective while denying that there is any absolute 'perspective' (e.g. a God's eye point of view or that of an ideal spectator hovering above the flux and shove of history).

This privileging of a mere perspective seems definatory of the contemporary culturally Marxist Left.  It is at once both relativistic and dogmatic. It denies that there is objective truth by holding that truth is relative to tribal interests while at the same time dogmatically asserting those interests as if they were absolutely valid.

What is unclear to me is whether or not Gray agrees with Nietzsche that there are no facts, only interpretations; no truth, only power; that Being has no intelligible bottom, that, in the end, Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! (From the eponymous and posthumous book.)  If such a view is accepted, then there is no saving the humanities.

If Nietzsche’s diagnosis is even half-way sound, some awkward conclusions follow for the future of the humanities. Many lament the collapse of standards of truth and evidence in higher education. But what is their remedy? To restore rationality, no doubt. It seems not to have occurred to them that this may not be possible. For the most part, those who lament the condition of the humanities are evangelists for the Socratism that has led the humanities to where they are now.

But how does Gray know that there is an inevitable slide from "Socratism" to "persecutory orthodoxy"?  That the former must lead to the latter? It could be that the faith in reason is a true faith and nothing 'mythical' or 'mystical,' and that the loss of that faith was a grave mistake sired by decadence. Or better: Socratism was never a mere faith but a rational insight into the importance of reason and its power to lead us toward truth. Our falling away from that insight would then condemn us, not reason.

The claim that the Enlightenment Project undermines itself is a mere claim from one perspective among others. Those who make the claim privilege their perspective for no good reason: that a belief enhances one's power over others is no good reason for believing it to be true.  Those who reject that perspective have been given no good reason to accept it. The defenders of "Socratism" are entitled to stand their ground and assert: You Nietzscheans are wrong, and indeed non-perspectivally wrong.

For "Socratism" to undermine itself, it would have to be non-perspectivally true that it bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.  That is something a sort of inverted Hegelian could maintain, but not a Nietzschean.

But suppose now that I assert that I have rational insight into the objective, non-perspectival, truth that the world is intrinsically intelligible, and knowable to some extent at least, and that what I know is true non-perspectivally  — what stops that claim from being a dogmatic assertion? I cannot prove it. I can of course presuppose it. My opponent, however, can presupposes the opposite. The specter of groundless and ungroundability arises.

 

Euthanizing Liberty

Chad McIntosh sees an upside in the recent closures of philosophy programs.  I agree with him.

In conclusion, I now see the closure of philosophy departments, along with others in the humanities, as a good thing, for three reasons. First, institutions of higher education have already devolved to the point that the humanities are a mere vestigial organ. Their removal helps clarify the image of these institutions as something other than true universities. Second, removing the humanities will help slow the spread of the insidious ideology destroying society that’s incubated there. Finally, it’s plausible that the future of the humanities is better off in the hands of independent lovers of wisdom. So, to all the institutional bureaucrats just thinking about the bottom dollar: cut the humanities! Slash, chop, dice, hack them into nothing. Leave thinking about the bigger picture to those who know what a real university is.

Since the spirit of true philosophy has fled the leftist seminaries, a New Monasticism is needed to preserve and transmit high culture:

I will end on a (slightly) more hopeful note. In his 2017 book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher says orthodox Christians should think of themselves as a people in exile, and that their best chance of preserving their faith and traditions is to form quasi-monastic communities within this increasingly hostile post-Christian culture. Those of us who still believe in the university, classically understood, would do well to consider adopting a similar strategy. Since we can no longer depend on modern institutions of higher education as places where the great classics of Western thought and tradition can be faithfully taught, learned, and engaged, we will have to do those things on our own. Thankfully, we are not in wholly untrodden territory. Homeschooling parents have been blazing these trails for a long time. As for aspiring academics, William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is a model. True, few people have the means to support themselves as an independent scholar. But those who find a way will be precisely those seek knowledge for its own sake. The independent scholar will not have to continually debase himself by justifying his own field of study to some institutional bureaucrat or even to his colleagues. Furthermore, being unburdened by the duties of managing classes of disinterested students and time-consuming administrative tasks, he is in a position to do his best work.

The Academic Job Market in the ‘Sixties

Robert Paul Wolff tells it like it was:

. . . I reflect on the ease and endless rewards of my career, moving from comfortable position to comfortable position, and compare it with the terrible struggles of young academics trying to gain some sort of security and time for their own scholarship in an increasingly hostile job market.  The 'sixties, when my career was being launched, was a time of explosive growth of higher education in America.  Spurred by the G. I. Bill and the post-war economic boom, and fed by an endless stream of young men avoiding the Viet Nam draft, colleges and universities virtually metastasized.  State universities, which had existed ever since the Land Grant Acts of the 1860's, suddenly sprouted satellite campuses.  State colleges plumped themselves up into universities, and Community Colleges became State Colleges.  [I will add that junior colleges were renamed 'community colleges.'] There were so many new teaching positions to be filled that in the sixties and seventies graduate students were being offered tenure track positions before they had become ABD [all but doctorate].

BV: I'm  a generation younger than Professor Wolff.  By the time I began applying for jobs at the end of the '70s things had become grim and the gravy days of the '60s were a thing of the past.  But I lucked out and got a tenure track job in '78 right out of graduate  school at the University of Dayton.  Lucky me, I had no other offer.  I later learned that in the '60s there were four philosophy hires in one year at U.D., some of them sight unseen: no interview.  One of these gentlemen couldn't even speak English!  And of course the quality of the people hired was relatively low.

It is also worth pointing out that the '60s and early '70s were also a time when what William James in 1903 called the "Ph.D Octopus"  acquired many more tentacled arms.  New graduate programs started up and new philosophy journals as well.  Another Harvard man, Willard van Orman Quine, cast a jaundiced eye on the proliferation of journals in his delightful "Paradoxes of Plenty" in Theories and Things (Harvard UP, 1981):

Certainly, then, new journals were needed: they were needed by authors of articles too poor to be accepted by existing journals.  The journals that were thus called into existence met the need to a degree, but they in turn preserved, curiously, certain minimal standards; and so a need was felt for further journals still, to help to accommodate the double rejects.  The series invites extrapolation and has had it. (196)

At the same time, the Cold War and the Sputnik scare triggered a flood of federal money into universities. Most of it, of course, funded defense-related research or studies of parts of the world that America considered inimical to its interests [Russian Research Institutes, East Asia Programs, language programs of all sorts], but some of the money slopped over into the Humanities, and even into libraries and university presses.  For a time, commercial publishers found that they could not lose money on an academic book, since enough copies would be sold to newly flush university libraries to enable them to break even.  Those were the days when a philosopher willing to sell his soul (and who among us was not?) could get a contract on an outline, a Preface, or just an idea and a title.  The professor introducing me at one speech I gave said, "Professor Wolff joined the Book of the Month Club, but he didn't realize he was supposed to read a book a month.  He thought he was supposed to publish a book a month."  Well, we all thought we were brilliant, of course.

Then the bubble burst.  First the good jobs disappeared.  Then even jobs we would never have deigned to notice started drying up.  Universities adopted the corporate model, and like good, sensible business leaders, started cutting salaries, destroying job security, and reducing decent, hard-working academics to the status of itinerant peddlers.  Today, two-thirds of the people teaching in higher education are contract employees without good benefits or an assured future.  Scientists do pretty well, thanks to federal support for research, but the Humanities and non-defense related Social Sciences languish.  The arts are going the way of high school bands and poetry societies.

The truth is that I fell off the cart onto a nice big dung heap, and waxed fat and happy, as any self-respecting cockroach would.  My career happened to fit neatly into the half century that will, in future generations, be looked back on as the Golden Age of the American University.  There is precious little I can do for those unfortunate enough to come after me.  But at least, I can assure them that their bad luck is not a judgment on the quality of their work.  And, of course, I can write increasingly lavish letters of recommendation in a desperate attempt to launch them into the few remaining decent teaching jobs.  I would have liked to do better by them.  They deserve it.

A Reader Needs Advice re: Graduate School

The following is from a reader who approves of my idea of soliciting advice from the rest of you, many of whom are better apprised than me of the current academic climate and job market. Name and identifying details have been elided.

If you have a moment to offer some advice on the situation I've found myself in, I would be very grateful. If not, no worries. 
 
I moved a great distance from home with my wife (still within my country, ____) to attend a Ph.D. program in philosophy. I am [under 30]. The faculty member whom I desired to supervise my work is well-known and respected in her field and her interests align perfectly with mine. I completed the first year of my Ph.D., satisfying all my course requirements, only to learn yesterday that my supervisor has taken up a new position elsewhere in ___, and effective immediately will no longer be part of our department. I knew this was a risk of attending a school for the sake of one person. My gamble did not pay off. It is too late for me to transfer schools for this year. Waiting another year to reapply to other programs seems like a waste of time, especially at my age. There is no one at my department who can supervise my current interests (and if there are, they are nobodies). Part of me wonders if this is a sign to get out of academia now while I have the chance. But the skills I desire to acquire and the questions I want to pursue can only be acquired and pursued, 'professionally' anyway, in academia. What to do?
 
You did not say whether your wife is employed (and making good money) or whether you have children or intend to have them in the near future. Is she supportive both spiritually and materially? These are relevant factors.  Since you are a white male getting close to 30 whose political leanings are broadly conservative (else you wouldn't be corresponding with me), my advice is to leave academia now.  The job market is brutal, you are getting old, and the academy is a hostile environment for conservatives.  This is advice I tender with my 'practical hat' on, not my 'idealistic hat.'  I could say that philosophy is a noble calling worthy of years of sacrifice, that the genuine article needs to be defended and upheld in the currently decadent halls of academe; but that is advice I would feel comfortable giving to myself alone.  Rather than put up with the low pay and humiliations of the academic world, why not find the modern-day equivalent of lens-grinding and make like Spinoza pursuing philosophy as a free man unburdened by the institutional constraints of the leftist seminaries? Is it not nobler to separate truth-seeking from money-making, subordinating end to means?
 
Related:
 

Academentia

The Mandatory Banality of University Presidents. Excerpt:

Outrage has been stirred. An “incomprehensible loss” (Bacow) has befallen us. “Anger, pain, and fear” (Casey) have been unleashed. Something must be done to bring about communities that are “truly safe, supportive, and inclusive for all” (Price). Worse, this killing comes on top of the epidemic that “has profoundly disrupted the lives of people worldwide” (Bacow) and we “know it is even more challenging to support and lift each other up during this global pandemic, with the added difficulty of social distancing” (Barron).

Political Correctness in the Philosophy Journals

I found the following in a technical article on the philosophy of time by a male author:

The defender of the spotlight theory also embraces past and future objects, but she accepts a "fuller" conception of these objects than the Williamsonian.  According to her . . . .

Suddenly I am distracted from the abstruse content by the injection of politics where it does not belong. "Another lefty," I think to myself, "signalling his virtue and flaunting his political correctness." The use of 'she' and 'her' is not only jarring but also slightly comical. Women are famously 'under-represented' in philosophy, to use a lefty expression that conflates the factual and the normative, but few who work in the philosophy of time are women. This is not to deny that there are women who have made outstanding contributions to this, the most difficult branch of philosophy.

My complaint will of course leave the lefty cold. 'She' feels that standard English with its gender-neutral uses of 'he' and 'him' is sexist, presumably because it excludes women. It does no such thing, of course, but the lefty will remain unfazed. But I know how they feel, so I have an irenic suggestion.

Let's honor the classically liberal principle of free speech. You write your way and we'll write our way.  We will tolerate you, your beliefs, and your modes of expression, but we expect the same in return.  Will it work?

I doubt it. There is nothing classically liberal about the contemporary Left. In fact, we conservatives are the new (classical) liberals, and leftists are the new authoritarians.  Peace with such dogmatists seems not to be in the cards.  Free speech and open inquiry are not among their values. So unless we can achieve the political equivalent of divorce, we should expect tensions to run high.

David Stove Pays Tribute to David Armstrong and Comments on the Malignancy of the Left

Excerpt:

But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in general: an attack which has proved to be almost as successful as it was unprecedented.

Armstrong DavidThis attack was begun, as everyone knows, by Marxists, in support of North Vietnam’s attempt to extend the blessings of communism to the south. The resulting Marxisation of the Faculty of Arts was by no means as complete as the resulting Marxisation of South Vietnam. But the wound inflicted on humanistic learning was a very severe one all the same. You could properly compare it to a person’s suffering third-degree burns to 35 per cent of his body.

After the defeat of America in Vietnam, the attack was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists. Lenin once said, “If we go, we shall slam the door on an empty house”; and how well this pleasant promise has been kept by the Russian Marxists, all the world now knows. It is in exactly the same spirit of insane malignancy that feminists have waged their war on humanistic learning; and their degree of success has fallen not much short of Lenin’s. Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high. But I cannot believe it.

David did all that he could have done, given the limits set by his position and his personality, to repel this attack. Of course he failed; but then, no one could have succeeded. What he did achieve was a certain amount of damage-limitation. Even this was confined to the philosophy-section of the front. On the Faculty of Arts as a whole, David has had no influence at all—to put it mildly. In fact, when he spoke at a meeting of the Faculty, even on subjects unrelated to the attack, you could always have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It is a curious matter, this: the various ways inferior people have, of indirectly acknowledging the superiority of others, even where no such acknowledgment is at all intended by the inferior, or expected by the superior.

By the end of 1972, the situation in the philosophy department had become so bad that the splitting of the department into two was the only way in which philosophy at this university could be kept alive at all. In this development, David was the leading spirit, as his position and personality made it natural he should be. Of course he did not do it on his own. Pat Trifonoff’s intelligence and character made her an important agent in it. Keith Campbell’s adhesion to our side, after some hesitation, was a critical moment. But while I and certain others were only casting about for some avenue of escape, David never gave up. He battled on, and battled on again, and always exacted the best terms, however bad, that could be got from the enemies of philosophy.

Stove DavidThe result of the split was far more happy than could have been rationally predicted at the time. In fact it was a fitting reward for David’s courage and tenacity. For the first twenty years of the new Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy have been fertile in good philosophy, to a degree unparalleled in any similar period in this or any other Australian university. The department has also enjoyed a rare freedom from internal disharmony. As I have often said, it is the best club in the world, and to be or have been a member of it is a pleasure as well as a privilege.

There will certainly be no adequate official acknowledgment, from anyone inside the university, of what is owed to David. What could someone like the present Vice-Chancellor possibly care about the survival of humanistic learning, or even know about philosophy, or history, or literature? Anyone who did would never have got a Vice-Chancellor’s job in the first place. If there is any acknowledgment forthcoming from the Faculty of Arts, David will be able to estimate the sincerity of it well enough. It will be a case of people, who smiled as they watched him nearly drowning in the boiling surf of 1967–72, telling him how glad they were when, against all probability, he managed to make it to the beach.

But anyone who does know and care about philosophy, or does care about the survival of humanistic learning, will feel towards him something like the degree of gratitude which they ought to feel.

Old and Jaded

The trick is to get old without becoming jaded.

My valued colleague H. N. couldn't pull it off. He had a certain depth and a certain wisdom, and we were on good terms. He knew how to take my intensity and he wasn't threatened by my intelligence: his was a healthy self-confidence. But he had become lazy and complacent among unstimulating colleagues. I couldn't engage him. An idea of mine might be dismissed with "That's already in Spinoza." Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. "But what do you think of the idea?" No answer. Didn't care. Tired, jaded.  

He was dead wood on the path to petrification. Jaded, he was turning to stone.

What I didn't say to him out of affection and because it would have done no good:  What are you doing here? You have the wherewithal to retire. Why do you continue to draw a salary? 

The Ashtray Has Landed: Errol Morris versus Thomas Kuhn

Talk of philosophy being a blood sport is usually and rightly metaphorical. But on occasion, actual weapons are brandished even if not deployed. You will recall Wittgenstein's poker. But perhaps you haven't yet heard of Thomas Kuhn's ashtray.   Curiously, pokers and ashtrays have something to do with fire and smoke, devilish elements.  A philosopher's devil, say I, is his own ego.

Philip Kitcher: 

Almost half a century ago, as a recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin fascinated by the history of science, the young Morris was rejected by some of the most prestigious graduate departments. Thanks to the efforts of one of the field’s major stars, Thomas Kuhn, he did eventually find his way to Princeton’s program in the history and philosophy of science. But his time there did not go smoothly. Matters came to a head in a one-on-one discussion of a paper he had written for Kuhn’s seminar. The emotional temperature rose. And then rose some more, until the tête-à-tête was ultimately punctuated by an overflowing ashtray. Launched from Kuhn’s hand, the ashtray hurtled across the room.

Read the rest.

Kuhn ashtray

The Fall of John Searle

By now you will have heard that the distinguished philosopher, John R. Searle, has been stripped of his emeritus status  at the University of California, Berkeley. He was found to have violated sexual harrassment policies.  A long-time reader of this blog astutely observes that things went worse for Peter Abelard, and then adds:

Also, behaviour which would not have shocked me if it had involved an investment banker (although investment bankers often get a bad press in that respect), shocks me in a philosopher. OK, philosophers are not priests. But there is a sort of commitment to, er, What Is Higher, and I don’t see any such commitment in what has been described of Searle. E.g. watching pornography in front of students, with the explicit intention of making them aware of the pornography, or of making a signal of some kind, not sure what. (E.g. did he imagine that the pornography would create some desire in a female student one third of his age? Then he is a silly old fool. But then no fool like an old fool).

I am slightly surprised that my correspondent, an old man, a conservative, a man of the world, and a philosopher reports being shocked. As I would put it, we are concupiscent from the ground up, and in a social climate in which the old-time restraints have been removed, is it any surprise that a man like Searle who sports a huge ego — I've seen him in action — and is an atheist and a naturalist to boot, should get in touch with his inner lecher, especially in a far-Left Left-coast venue such as Berkeley, California?

Of course, I am not condoning his bad behavior; I condemn it. I'm just not shocked by it. The man considers religion to be in bad taste. No curb on his behavior from that direction!  With a Luciferian (phosphorescent, light-bearing) intellect and an ego to match, widely-respected, he probably considered himself bullet-proof. Pride comes before the fall. And no fool like an old fool, as my correspondent notes.

Didn’t I tell you of Kingsley Amis’s remark that sexual desire was like ‘being handcuffed to a lunatic’? Right, but he also said the benefit of middle age was being released. So he acknowledged the absurdity of the desire. Searle apparently did not acknowledge such absurdity. I mean, it’s fairly absurd in a young man, but wholly and fantastically absurd in a man aged 86, or whatever it is.

Amis is right, except that middle age is too young for release. I say you are young until 30, middle-aged 30-60, and old thereafter.  If you feed your sex monkey, he can torment you throughout that middle-aged period and beyond depending on your level of vigor.  It is interesting, and indeed important, to note that according to St. Augustine, who had wide experience in these matters, no man achieves continence without divine assistance. So rather than say that insatiable lust is absurd, I prefer to say that it is  border-line demonic.

Lord Russell, if I rightly recall, refused to remain faithful to his wife even in his 80's.  Now that truly is absurd. You chase a woman. Suppose you catch her. What the hell do you do then? Sniff her hair like creepy Joe Biden?  It is natural for a young man to be on the prowl, and you would entertain certain doubts about a young man who wasn't; but an old man on the prowl cuts a ridiculous figure, and is failing to make use of his old age for what it is good for: finally breaking his bondage to the flesh.

Searle story here. Something about the philandering Freddy Ayer, here. And if, after all that salaciousness, you are by any chance  interested in Searles'  ideas, go here. 

Searle