APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Articles

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If radical skepticism and relativism, which puts into question any form of objective knowledge, is defended by a teacher or a professional association of philosophy teachers or a school board, then they do this no doubt to prevent a teacher from presenting what they consider his "own private"-and allegedly inevitably purely subjective-opinions, as having the authority of reason or of objective truth. From the standpoint of relativism, any advocacy of one's own private and subjective standpoint constitutes a form of deception of students, by presenting an entirely personal subjective opinion as "the" truth or genuine philosophical knowledge.

But since philosophy by its very essence consists in the pursuit of wisdom and truth, and since the radical skeptical and relativistic positions are internally contradictory and also in conflict with the evident human capacity to gain objective knowledge in philosophy, such a position, from which a verdict against advocating philosophical positions in the classroom would follow, can in no way be rationally defended. Consider that any attempt to abstain from expressing any philosophical position in the classroom is both impossible and fraught with internal contradictions. The opinion that one should not advocate any theses in the classroom is a philosophical position, and to defend this principle is advocating it! Aristotle reports in his Metaphysics of the behavior of the skeptic Kratylos, a student of Heraclitus, that his effort at complete consistency in his skepticism failed. This skeptic was led by his "abstention to advocate any position in the classroom" and by his skepticism to the point where he remained silent for many years, for his skepticism forbade him any utterance. But, Aristotle tells us, he was still unable to abstain from making some signs when he wanted to indicate affirmative or negative responses to certain questions put to him. Even these signs still bound him to hold some absolute truth and to defend such principles as the principle of contradiction. For if the skeptical teacher had really doubted or denied that principle, to indicate by means of signs "yes" or "no" would have amounted to the same thing, and not have made any sense. Thus even the most radical skeptic, as long as he moves his finger to indicate some opinion, advocates the principle of contradiction. It is an entirely impossible and contradictory illusion, to demand from teachers of philosophy that they abstain from expressing any philosophical opinion of their own in the classroom. Instead, one should encourage them to philosophize themselves, but to do so well, and to lead students to philosophize also and as well as they.

Of course, to philosophize well implies that teachers should be very careful when they defend in the classroom certain philosophical positions. They should not merely "advocate" but rationally justify them upon a serious and critical investigation into the truth of the position they defend. Thus they should not blindly and dogmatically "advocate" but rationally and seriously argue for the positions they hold to be correct, and always be open to objections, to critical questions, and to more thorough investigations of the things themselves of which they are speaking. As soon as they merely "advocate" their opinions in a blind, closed-minded, irresponsible way, they certainly fail against the ethical principles that should guide our teaching and responsible defense of positions in the classroom and as scholars.

To experience their teacher seriously investigating with them truth about the things themselves, about real logical laws, about the foundations of moral imperatives, about value, about ultimate being and meaning or the problem of evil, about the nature and dignity of the human person, has a profound and salutary pedagogical effect on students. They learn from the example of their teacher what a serious quest for knowledge and for truth, and thus for philosophical wisdom, is and what hard labor it implies and requires. For only if philosophy is more than empty repetition of opinions, only if it is more than doxa and the report on doxa, is it philosophy at all. For this reason, the philosophy teacher should not only have a right, but a duty to defend all those positions which, in his scholarly and pedagogical quest for truth, he has come to recognize as true. Abstention from all judgments and positions where these are open in principle to knowledge and are of extreme existential importance for students, is not a virtue but a terrible vice of a teacher of philosophy who then gives his students stones instead of bread. Let me specify the limits and applications of this right.

One issue concerns the mode in which a teacher of philosophy should defend a philosophical truth-claim. And here, certainly, we find specific requirements of pedagogy which go beyond the demands of reason and philosophy itself. Just think of the Socratic method of teaching. Socrates never conveys directly and immediately his positions to the students, but he leads them to the discovery of the correct answers to certain philosophical questions by carefully conducted dialogues and carefully designed questions put to the students themselves. And as a pedagogical tool, the concealing of the teacher's position and the appeal to students themselves to inquire into, and to discover truth on their own, is an excellent form of pedagogy. The excellence of the Socratic method does not exclude, however, that other great teachers, such as Aristotle, at least as far as we can gather from his writings, preferred the simpler and more expedient lecture style and the systematic and clear exposition of what they considered to be the truth. Here one should leave room for the freedom of the respective teacher to use his method of teaching; as we cannot imagine Aristotle to just have used the Socratic method, we cannot imagine Socrates to have used an Aristotelian, let alone a Hegelian mode of expounding philosophy in a lecture style.

Still a very different issue concerns the attitudes which should inspire the philosophy teacher in defending certain philosophical positions or in asking questions geared towards the students' own discoveries. A teacher of philosophy should certainly do his questioning, answering, or expounding in a manner far removed from politicking or advocating some party line: The students should feel no shyness to object and ask questions, the teacher should never intimidate his pupils or instill fear in a student. More importantly, he should never manifest any form of contempt for a student's opinion, let alone for his inferior level of education or intelligence. Both a systematic exposition by philosophy teachers and the questions they discuss should reveal a profound respect for each student, a full and simple awareness of the problems the student raises, and a humility of the teacher in front of the immensity of truth and the unfathomable depth of the philosophical problems they address.

Still distinct is the issue of whether philosophy teachers have a right to "advocate" positions in the classroom which do not pertain to the sphere of philosophy at all. Here of course the teacher should at least make a clear distinction between those positions for which he believes to exist philosophical evidences and positions which he adopts only on political, religious or personal, experiential grounds. Nevertheless-provided that the defense of such positions does not fill an inordinate amount of time spent in the classroom-even the expression of positions which go beyond the strict limits and confines of his subject matter ought to be admitted. In other fields, you will almost never find a lecture on astronomy, or, chemistry, or physics, or biology, in which a scientist will not express also certain philosophical opinions on which he is not competent and which in a certain way fall outside the scope of his own discipline but which nevertheless have a bearing on the subject matter at hand. Thus we should not exclude all advocacy of views which go beyond a teacher's discipline, but should only warn him against inordinate digressions. Teachers themselves should insist on exercising self-restraint so that they do not abuse the precious time in the classroom for defending their own views in areas which do not pertain to their subject matter, thereby failing to teach on those areas of human knowledge, such as philosophy, which they agreed to and were hired for.

Now it is also the task of a teacher of philosophy to represent a living communion with the great thinkers who preceded him and to convey specific knowledge about the history of philosophy. In this pursuit, it is certainly wrong if a teacher of philosophy misunderstands his "right to advocate his own opinions" so as to give his students nothing but his own opinions, no matter how good they are, instead of informing them also carefully about the great insights and ideas of those classical, medieval, and modern thinkers whose thought he is asked to expound to them. It would be an absurd vanity and silliness of a teacher to overlook that most great insights of philosophy were gained before by other thinkers and that he should give them credit for them. But the duty of the teacher of philosophy to do justice to the thought of those great books or movements in the history of philosophy which he has the task to explain to his students, in no way impedes him from defending at the same time his own philosophical insights. On the contrary, a careful consideration and examination of the philosophical issues and positions at hand will show that it is impossible for any teacher to do justice to any great philosopher's thought without philosophizing oneself, and without seeking to distinguish the discoveries that philosopher made, from his confusions, from wrong ways to pose questions, or from errors. For this reason, precisely, he or she will be the best teacher of the history of philosophy who understands the invitation reason itself addresses to each philosopher and human being: to think about things themselves and not just about opinions of others. He or she will be the best teacher who truly becomes a "learner" from the great thinkers in the history of philosophy, all of whom advocated not what they regarded as their mere opinions, but what they intended as those truths that disclose themselves to our intellects. Augustine puts this well:

Speaking of skepticism and relativism recalls a recent anecdote with which I wish to conclude. Prof. John Silber addressed the 20th World Congress of Philosophy with a superb example of his own pedagogy. He gave a value relativist and brilliant student an "F" on his paper. When the student appeared in his office, furious, he rejected Professor Silber's reply that justice was a mere matter of subjective taste, even though that was the thesis he had maintained in the paper! Silber then entered into a philosophical dialogue with the student that eventually led to the student's abandoning his value relativism. In similar fashion, we philosophers should all seek ingenious ways, fully respectful of the dignity and freedom of students, to lead them to knowledge of things themselves. This responsibility applies not only to the teaching of young undergraduates, who are fond of hearing their teacher's opinions, but to the teaching of philosophy on all levels!

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Notes

1. See, for example, my Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit: Die Transzendenz des Menschen in der Erkenntnis (Salzburg, 1972; second ed., 1976) and Back to Things in Themselves: A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism (Studies in Phenomenological and Classical Realism, Boston and London, 1987).

2. Cf. Dietrich von Hildebrand, Memoiren und Aufs„tze gegen den Nationalsozialismus 1933-1938: Ver"ffentlichungen der Kommission fr Zeitgeschichte, mit Alice von Hildebrand und Rudolf Ebneth, hrsg. v. Ernst Wenisch (Mainz: Matthias Grundewald Verlag, 1994); see also Josef Seifert (ed.), Dietrich von Hildebrands Kampf gegen den Nationalsozialismus (Heidelberg: Universit„tsverlag Carl Winter, 1998).