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I 0 g 0 m a c h i a .. THE CONFLICT OF THE FACULTIES Edited by Richard Rand University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln & London Copyright © 1992 by the University of Nebraska Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the minimum require ments of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39·48-1984 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Logomachia: the conflict of the faculties I edited by Richard Rand. p. em. Papers originally presented at a symposium on the topic of Kant's Der Streit der Fakultaten. It was spon sored by the English Department of the University of Alabama in 1987. ISBN 0-8032-3884-3 (d.) ISBN 0-8032-8940-5 (pbk.) 1. Education, Higher - Philosophy-Congresses. 2. Education, Higher-United States - Philosophy Congresses. 3· Philosophy-Congresses. 4· Academic freedom - Congresses. 5· Philosophy and religion - Congresses 6. Law - Philosophy - Congresses. 7· Medicine-Philosophy-Congresses. 8. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. Streit der Fakultaten. I. Rand, Richard A. (Richard Aldrich). LB2322.2.L64 1992 378' .001-dC20 92-6977 CIP Text in Adobe Minion, designed by Robert Slimbach, typeset by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. The paper is Glatfelter 55 lb. Natural. Book design by R. Eckersley. vn Preface 1 Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties Jacques Derrida 2 35 Institutions of Change: CONTENTS Notes on Education in the Late Eighteenth Century Christie McDonald 3 57 The Injured University Timothy Bahti 4 77 The University Founders: A Complete Revolution PeggyKamuf 5 97 The Idea of a Chrestomathic University Robert Young 6 127 Ancillae (The Concord of the Faculties) John Llewelyn 7 155 The Philosophy of Electrical Science Alan Bass 8 195 Canons and Metonymies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida 219 Contributors PREFACE These papers were read at a symposium sponsored by the English De partment of the University of Alabama in 1987, 'Our Academic Contract: The Conflict of the Faculties in America: As indicated by the title, the symposium took for its topic Immanuel Kant's Der Streit der Fakultaten (1 798) .1 Some papers deal directly with that essay, others indirectly, working out of it, against it, around it, or away from it. n. The impetus for this symposium came from a similar event held at Columbia Univer sity in April198o, celebrating the centennial of Columbia's Graduate School. More precisely, it came from a lecture delivered there by Jacques Derrida entitled 'Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties.'2 Included here as an indispensable point of reference, 'Mochlos' made a singularly powerful impression, calling attention to Kant's essay (a work unknown even to many specialists in Kant studies), proposing a compellingly de constructive reading of that work, and taking it as a point of departure for further thoughts on the institution of the university. n. In The Con flict of the Faculties, Kant spells out the blueprint for the modern re search university, assigning, within that blueprint, a site for those who would pursue the work of 'reason' - the 'philosophical' faculty that con fers the Ph.D. degree, as distinguished from the faculties oflaw, medi cine, and theology. Kant develops a juridical basis for the resolution of intra-university conflicts, and of conflicts between the university and the state, with the state serving at once as the professor's patron and censor. Kant's essay, in point of fact, is an occasional exercise, written after the occasion of censorship befalling his own publications in Prussia during the 1790s. Seizing the moment of censorship, and working that moment as a lever of opportunity (mochlos is a Greek word for 'lever'), Kant pre sents his own schematic proposal for the protection of academic free dom. His blueprint caught on with his fellow philosophers (among viii Preface them Wilhelm von Humboldt, who drew up the plan for the University of Berlin in 1810), becoming a success so canonical that, when American universities adopted it at the end of the century (Columbia was one of the first to do so), a subtle and intricate invention had turned, so to speak, into a self-evident machine somewhat unmindful of its own inau gural circumstances. M. How, in a context where charters are cherished (the Declaration oflndependence comes to mind), could The Conflict of the Faculties have remained so utterly ignored? It is as if, to borrow a Kantian distinction, 'historical' knowledge had been forsaken for an (as sumed) acquisition of'rational knowledge.' Derrida's 'Mochlos' itself does not address the problem; rather, it advances an argument that Kant's essay, in the very premises of its scheme, may have foreclosed its own transformation into effective political freedom. In Derrida's read ing, Kant builds his edifice (and his essay) upon a metaphysical determi nation oflanguage, one which holds that language can only happen either as action ('performance' in an executive sense) or as description ('constative' speculation). Kant, who is seen to promote this binary op position of concept and deed, theory and decree, appears to contrive a division oflabor in which the philosopher confines his public language to utterances of a constative mode, and resigns to the sovereign the per formative language of command. The commonplace of the university as an 'ivory tower' finds its support in such a reading-all the more a 'tower' insofar as philosophers, for Kant, preside over the academy somewhat as the sovereign presides without. Philosophers, the 'lower faculty; preside in the sense that they are held to judge, insofar as it is ra tionally possible to do so, the truth-value of matters concerning the 'higher faculties' of theology, law, and medicine. Where the higher fac ulties are seen as a bureaucratic extension of the state, the lower faculty is charged with judging the theoretical validity of the given law, medical procedure, or ecclesiastical statute; the higher faculties ought not to in hibit the publication of those judgments, and Kant holds the state itself responsible for keeping all intramural jurisdictions separate and dis tinct. (Kant's inversive nomenclature is ironic: 'The reason why this fac ulty, despite its great prerogative (freedom), is called the lower faculty lies in human nature: for a man who can give commands, even though he is someone else's humble servant, is considered more distinguished than a free man who has no one under his command.')3 M. Hinging, as 'Mochlos' construes it, on an untenable or unreal concept oflanguage, tx Preface giving rise to many a parasitic effect, Kant's blueprint could not, and did not, merely happen. In the United States, indeed, the earliest research professors of philosophy (those with Ph.D.'s who also taught the subject known as 'philosophy') were primarily theologians: for example, George Sylvester Morris, a diligent reader of Kant and Hegel who organized the (Ph.D.) philosophy department at Johns Hopkins (Royce, James, Peirce, and Dewey were his colleagues and pupils), was above all a dogmatic Protestant from the Calvinist milieu of Vermont. In his paper 'Univer sity Education' (delivered in 1883, published in 1886), Morris imagines, without directly mentioning Kant, a scheme that duplicates the blue print of The Conflict of the Faculties, except that he grounds his concep tion of 'truth' on a verse from Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians ('Our sufficiency is of God').4 For Morris, in fact, the mission of the lower faculty was identical to that of a higher (theological) faculty. Morris's disciple Dewey, himself by origin a dogmatic Vermont Protes tant and also a somewhat impatient reader of Kant, pursued, through out his lower faculty career, the kind of power politics supposedly reserved for the higher faculty: his dealings with Nicholas Murray Butler and his rupture with Charles Beard, during the troubles of 1915 at Co lumbia, cast a hollow light on the ongoing political realities of academic freedom as a lower faculty prerogative.5 ~After retrieving The Conflict of the Faculties, and letting it withdraw into the shadows of its de construction, 'Mochlos' closes with an opening onto the future, marking a call for responsibility at once 'older' and 'younger' than the one an nounced in Kant's 'juridico-egological form' and its 'ideal of decid ability.' Such a new responsibility, arising from the 'beyond' of the university's future (much as the university itself'commenced' with an extra-juridical, extra-curricular event of foundation), can only take the form of a 'negotiation-with'-with, among other things, the legacy itself of Kant. Derrida proposes a politics of the negotiating party, with every work negotiating even as it states a premise or a theory. 'Mochlos' does not offer a blueprint; at the most, it offers an imperative to negotiate the 'monstrous' future. The future is something we cannot know-hence a 'monster' to be saluted with a measure of fear - and one that might 'march forth' from the title itself of 'Mochlos.' The future is for negotiat ing: the unthinkable (the monster) is itself a rudder, a lever, and also a point, the pressure point of intersection in a leveraging movement, as of a pair of scissors or a nutcracker, in the movement known as 'decussa- x Preface tion' (after the Latin decem, or 'ten,' from the Roman numeral X, a x, graphic equivalent for the Greek letter as found, for example, in the word J.Lox>..o.,). This movement, which is not to be confused with the process of economic circulation called a 'chiasmus,' is succinctly de scribed by Sir Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus (1 658): Physicians are not without the use of this decussation in severall operations, in ligatures and union ofd issolved continuities. Mechanicks make use hereof in forcipall Organs, and Instruments of Incision; wherein who can but magnifie the power of decussation, inservient to contrary ends, solution and consolidation, union, and division, illustrable from Aristotle in the old Nucifragium or Nutcracker, and the Instruments of Evulsion, compression or incision; which consisting of two Vectes or armes, converted towards each other, the innitency and stresse being made upon the hypomochlion or fulciment in the decussation, the greater compression is made by the union of two impulsors.6 The thought behind the Alabama symposium was in part a recuperative one-to reintroduce Kant's essay to an American readership ('Mochlos,' moreover, is published here for the first time in English). But how to proceed without effacing the actual remoteness of Kant and his topics? Referring to the Columbia centenary, 'Mochlos' notes that commemora tive exercises in academia tend to occur either as birthday parties ('com memorative aesthetics' is the actual phrase), or as anatomy lessons where speakers explore, with transparent objectivity, a textual presence open to public view. But it also mentions a third option, the possibility of a deconstructive encounter, re-elaborating its matter into an 'entirely new problematic.' A protocol was therefore proposed that would let the essays of Kant and Derrida go out to the various speakers and respon dents before, during, and after the time of symposium:7 to let the two essays 'read' the invited speakers, with essays and speakers warring, set tling, reporting, thinking, constating, figuring, founding, promising such was the aim of the proposal. Kant himself may be said to have set the topics for these papers: thus Alan Bass, a psychoanalyst, speaks of Kant and medicine through the figure of Freud; Timothy Bahti also draws on medicine to ponder a problem of balance in literary studies to day; Robert Young pursues the traces of Jeremy Bentham across the po litical conflicts of the British university scene; Christie McDonald and