Adams’s Education

The argument of this book has been based upon one major assumption, namely that epistemologies have ethical implications, that ways of knowing are not morally neutral but morally directive. Accordingly, the major contrast developed thus far has been between the Weberian epistemology that connects knowledge fundamentally to power, to the prospect of technical mastery of the world, and communitarian epistemologies that connect knowledge fundamentally to understanding, to the pursuit of the truth of matters. This broadly articulated contrast has in turn informed two distinct conceptions of academic life and of the nature and purpose of the academic vocation. On one account, the soul of the university is Wissenschaft, on the other, edification. My discussion, in this epistemological and ethical context, of religious matters, especially the suggestion that certain spiritual virtues are indispensable to learning, has thus far been justified primarily on historical grounds. I have tried to show, first, that the Weberian conception of the academic calling derived in part from a transmutation of religious terms, and second, that for most of Western history religion and higher learning were interdependent in ways that have largely escaped the notice of many present-day analysts of the university. Then, in Chapter 3, I tried to demonstrate that, in spite of the triumph of Weberianism, practices that are central to the academy, such as teaching, learning, and scholarship, still depend for their success upon the exercise of spiritual virtues like charity. If these observations are correct, my analysis and criticism of the current understanding of the academic vocation are not yet complete. For the following questions arise: Why do so many contemporary academics believe that their sense of vocation ought to conform to the ideal type developed by Weber even as they at the same time resonate to the more spiritualized conception of teaching and learning articulated by Parker Palmer? Is there a peculiarly modern and secular spirituality that gives a deep measure of meaning to the academic vocation as Weber described it and at the same time blinds its practitioners to their own necessary reliance upon virtues that are distinctively religious?