The University and Democracy

Jaspers’s account of the university is one of the deepest twentieth-century treatments of what a university is for. The article works through his picture of the university as the intellectual conscience of its era, the indivisible link between research and teaching, and the way education and democracy depend on each other.

The function of the university

The university, Jaspers writes, is meant to function as the intellectual conscience of an era. The phrase is unusual and is doing real work.

A conscience, in the moral sense, is the faculty that holds a person accountable to their better judgement. The conscience knows what the person should be doing, sees clearly when they are doing something else, and supplies the discomfort that motivates correction. A society without a conscience can drift into any pattern of behaviour without noticing the drift; a society with a working conscience has the chance to correct itself before the drift becomes catastrophic.

The university, Jaspers argues, plays this role for an era. It is the institution most insulated from immediate political and economic pressures, most committed to the long-term work of understanding, and most capable of articulating what the era is actually doing as opposed to what it claims to be doing. A university that performs this function well holds the era accountable to its better judgement. A university that fails to perform it leaves the era without the corrective voice it needs.

The function is also that of a meeting place for different disciplines and world outlooks. The university is one of the few institutions where physicists and historians and philosophers and engineers and theologians can meet, work alongside each other, and engage with each other’s questions. The cross-disciplinary contact is part of what produces the intellectual conscience: no single discipline can see the whole, but the conversation among disciplines can come closer than any of them alone.

This is part of what Jaspers means by saying scholarship depends on a relation to the whole. A scholar whose work is disconnected from the wider intellectual life is doing technical specialised work, which has value but is not by itself scholarship in the deep sense. A scholar whose work connects to the wider intellectual life is part of the conversation that constitutes the university as the conscience of its era. The second is what Jaspers’s account asks for.

Flashcard

What does Jaspers mean by saying the university functions as the *intellectual conscience* of its era?

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Answer

It holds the era accountable to its better judgement, articulating what the era is actually doing as opposed to what it claims

The university is the institution most insulated from immediate political and economic pressures, most committed to long-term understanding, and most capable of articulating what is really happening. It is also a meeting place for different disciplines and world outlooks, where the cross-disciplinary conversation can come closer to seeing the whole than any single discipline alone. A university that performs this function holds the era accountable; one that fails leaves the era without its corrective voice.

Research as an indivisible whole

Jaspers treats research as one of the major functions of the university and links it inseparably to teaching. Discovery and research, he writes, are an indivisible whole. Science and scholarship are meaningful only when they are part of a comprehensive intellectual life that is the very life blood of the university.

The implications are several.

First, a university cannot separate research from teaching without damaging both. A teaching-only institution loses the renewal that comes from teachers who are themselves discovering; the teaching becomes second-hand within a generation. A research-only institution loses the test that teaching provides; the research becomes specialised in ways that lose contact with the wider intellectual life and the next generation of inquirers. Both functions belong together in the same institution and ideally in the same people.

Second, the comprehensive intellectual life is not optional. It is the life blood. A university that is just a collection of separate departments doing separate specialised work, with no comprehensive intellectual life connecting them, is not a university in Jaspers’s sense; it is a credential-issuing administrative unit that happens to house researchers and teachers. The university character depends on the comprehensive life.

Third, scholarship that has lost its relation to the whole has lost the thing that made it scholarship. Modern academic specialisation has made this risk acute. A scholar who knows their narrow field deeply but cannot speak with colleagues in other fields about anything significant has narrowed themselves out of the conversation that constitutes a university. The narrowing may be required by the current incentive structures of academic life; that does not stop it being a loss.

Jaspers’s three objectives of the university follow: research, education, instruction. The three are listed separately because they are different activities, but they belong together. Research generates new understanding; education forms whole human beings; instruction transmits specific content. All three happen in a real university, and the three reinforce each other.

To reach the three objectives, Jaspers adds, scholars must communicate with each other and with students, and students in turn must communicate with each other. Communication is the medium in which the whole university operates. A university whose scholars do not talk to each other across departments, whose teachers do not engage with their students in conversation, whose students cannot work together productively, is not really operating as a university. The communication is constitutive, not optional.

Flashcard

Why does Jaspers say research and teaching are an *indivisible whole* in the university?

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Answer

Because each depends on the other, and separating them damages both

A teaching-only institution loses the renewal that comes from teachers who are themselves discovering; teaching becomes second-hand within a generation. A research-only institution loses the test that teaching provides; research becomes specialised in ways that lose contact with the wider intellectual life. Both functions belong together in the same institution and ideally in the same people. Communication across scholars, between teachers and students, and among students is the constitutive medium.

Democracy as the only difficult path to freedom

Jaspers’s commitment to democracy is one of the through-lines of his work. His characteristic formulation, written after the Nazi years that had nearly destroyed it: democracy is the only necessary, if infinitely difficult, path by which men can attain their potential degree of freedom and organise the world to enhance that freedom.

Three pieces of the formulation deserve attention.

The only necessary path: alternatives to democracy (authoritarianism, traditionalism, technocracy) cannot deliver the freedom democracy is meant to deliver. The other paths produce other things, some of which can be valuable, but none of them is the path to freedom Jaspers thinks people can attain. The conclusion is reached through hard experience as much as through abstract argument; Jaspers had watched the non-democratic alternatives in operation and seen what they produced.

Infinitely difficult: Jaspers is sober about how hard democracy is. The forms of democracy do not guarantee its substance; a country can have elections, parliaments, and constitutions and still fail to be democratic in the substantive sense. The work of making democracy real is never finished; each generation has to take it up again. The infinite difficulty is the price; the freedom that democracy makes possible is the pay-off.

Potential degree of freedom: people are not automatically free under democracy. Democracy is the path toward the freedom people can attain, not the automatic delivery of that freedom. The freedom requires work on the people’s side too, including the work of becoming the kind of people capable of using the freedom well.

Jaspers did not believe that the existing forms of democracy would automatically deliver real democracy. He firmly believed, however, in the need to make constant use of the opportunities democracy holds out, as the sole route to freedom. The judgement is practical: use what is available, even when it is imperfect, because the alternative is to give up on freedom altogether.

Flashcard

What does Jaspers mean by saying democracy is the *only necessary, if infinitely difficult, path* to freedom?

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Answer

Alternatives to democracy cannot deliver the freedom it makes possible, and even democracy delivers it only through ongoing work

Only necessary: alternatives (authoritarianism, traditionalism, technocracy) produce other things but not the freedom people can attain. Infinitely difficult: forms of democracy do not guarantee its substance; the work of making democracy real is never finished. Potential freedom: people are not automatically free under democracy; the freedom requires work on the people’s side, including becoming the kind of people capable of using it well.

Confidence, autonomy, and education for democracy

Jaspers closes with three connected claims about the relationship between people and the democratic institutions they live inside.

Confidence in the people is essential. Democracy that does not trust its own people is not really democracy; it is administrative supervision of a population that happens to vote. Real democracy depends on a working assumption that the people, on the whole, can be trusted to make reasonable decisions when given the relevant information and the opportunity to discuss it. The trust is not unconditional; democratic institutions also include checks and balances against the trust failing. But the underlying trust has to be there. Without it, the institutions become hollow.

Jaspers refuses to either idealise or defame the people. He treats people as autonomous, but in need of self-education to attain that autonomy. The autonomy is real and is the foundation of democratic life; the self-education needed to develop the autonomy is also real and cannot be skipped. People are not born autonomous adults; they become autonomous through the educational work that schools and the wider culture support.

Responsibility is how autonomy is developed in practice. People become ripe for democracy, Jaspers writes, by being politically active and by accepting responsibility for solving concrete problems. The development is hands-on. You learn democracy by doing it: taking on the small civic responsibilities that come your way, working with others to solve concrete problems that affect your community, accepting the consequences of your choices and adjusting when they go wrong. There is no shortcut.

The conclusion is direct. Democracy demands the education of the entire people. Jaspers treats this as self-evident. A democracy in which most citizens are uneducated cannot work; the ignorant majority either falls under the manipulation of demagogues or fails to function as the deliberative body democracy requires. Universal education is therefore not a luxury that a democracy can add when it can afford to; it is a precondition of the democracy working at all.

The implication for the educator is large. The teacher in a democratic society is not just doing a job that has private value for the students they teach; they are doing work on which the survival and quality of the democratic society depends. A teacher who takes this seriously sees their work as a real contribution to the maintenance of democratic life. A teacher who does not is treating their work as a private transaction, missing the public dimension that gives it its full meaning.

Flashcard

What three connected commitments does Jaspers make about people and democracy?

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Answer

Confidence in the people, autonomy through self-education, and responsibility through political activity

(1) Democracy depends on a working assumption that people can be trusted to make reasonable decisions when given information and discussion. (2) People are autonomous but become so through self-education; they are not born autonomous adults. (3) People develop democratic capacity by being politically active and accepting responsibility for solving concrete problems. There is no shortcut. The work is hands-on.

Flashcard

Why does Jaspers say democracy demands the *education of the entire people*?

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Answer

Because an uneducated majority either falls under demagogues or fails to function as the deliberative body democracy requires

Democracy in which most citizens are uneducated cannot work. Universal education is not a luxury but a precondition of democracy. The teacher in a democratic society is therefore not just doing private work for individual students; they are doing work on which the survival and quality of democratic life depends. A teacher who takes this seriously sees their work as a real contribution to the maintenance of democracy.