CHAPTER 13
£The Post-revolutionary Condition:
Boundaries as Philosophical Puzzles
The upsurge of Idealist philosophies is the creativity of transition one expects
when an organizational base changes. But what of the generations after the
transition? The German universities, the first to undergo the revolution, were
also the first to repudiate Idealism and settle down into academic routine.
Nevertheless, German philosophy continued to be creative, even underwent
new rounds of intellectual upheaval: materialist, positivist, logicist, pheno-
menological, existentialist, and others. We are used to seeing the German
university system as a trendsetter, from the time of Feuerbach to the time of
Carnap and Heidegger. This familiarity hides a theoretical problem.
Previously in world history we have seen academicization produce not
creativity but stagnation: a tendency toward rote learning, the scholasticization
of minute commentaries on old texts, intellectual conservatism rather than
innovation. The pattern exists for the examination system and its preparatory
schools in China, for Greco-Roman municipal lecturers, Islamic madrasas, and
late Hindu sectarian schools. At best, there is a creative burst in the first
generations, as when the ancient Greek schools were first established in the
time of Socrates’ pupils, and again in the founding period of the medieval
Christian university, before the scholastic rigidification of the 1300s. How then
can we account for the creative surge of the European universities, extending
four or five generations into the 1930s and possibly beyond?
One difference is that creativity in the modern university rides on the
ongoing process of disciplinary specialization. Chinese, Greek, Islamic, Hindu,
and late medieval Christian schools stagnated in scholasticism; in each case
their curricula became stuck in a set number of fields. The European university
pattern, in contrast, has generated an ongoing stream of new specializations.
It is the process of breaking off, and the resulting opportunities for new
combinations of ideas, that drives creativity within the academic system.
Here we encounter a second problem. Perhaps the university as a whole
prospers under this pattern; but does it not mean that philosophy is sucked dry
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