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Callicles' challenge
Author(s) -
Gaita Raimond
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
critical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.111
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1467-8705
pISSN - 0011-1562
DOI - 10.1111/j.0011-1562.2005.00613.x
Subject(s) - acquiescence , obligation , value (mathematics) , pleasure , subject (documents) , socrates , sociology , higher education , pedagogy , aesthetics , law , epistemology , political science , psychology , philosophy , machine learning , neuroscience , politics , library science , computer science
Callicles challenged Socrates to show that a lifelong devotion to the life of the mind could be worthy of a human being who has more than mediocre aspirations. Academics in universities, I argue in this essay, are under a defining obligation to try to make authoritatively living in their practice an adequate response to Callicles' challenge. That distinguishes universities from other institutions of higher education and it should be part of a deepened understanding of what it can mean to pursue a subject for its 'intrinsic worth'. A failure on the part of academics to articulate the intrinsic value of university study as something deeper than a higher pleasure is one reason why universities have been unable to resist the pressures to justify themselves in vocational terms. Those pressures, and the acquiescence of academics in a managerial newspeak, have debased the ways academics speak of what they do, deny students the means to identify the treasures that a university education can give them, and make it almost impossible for students and their teachers to resist becoming children of their times.