The search for truth

The Wisconsin state government’s recent discussion about removing “the search for truth” from the mission statement of its state university system is deeply misguided but not surprising. In most post-modern secular universities, studies are typically limited to the material order of reality. Questions about the transcendent order of reality—the existence of God, the good, objective truth, justice and moral order, and an externally derived meaning of the human person—have been largely excluded from the contemporary curriculum and relegated to the sphere of private judgment and personal opinion.

Such questions, however, have been the subject of rigorous and scholarly analysis for over 2,500 years, and we should not be so presumptuous as to dismiss them as unfit for academic inquiry for want of “scientific” verification. Questions about how to live a good life and how to service society are eternally grounded in the human condition. They are timeless and provide the unifying lens through which a wide spectrum of knowledge can be assimilated.

As such, the university, by its very definition, has an obligation to consider those questions. Authentic knowledge, as Plato conceived it, is to know the good, which transcends all disciplines and resides at the apex of reality. Such critical engagement with such fundamental questions, then, is a crucial element of a liberal arts education, no matter what discipline of study. Studying microcellular biology to extend the human life does not realize its significance, per se, until we understand what the meaning of human life is.

At Duke, small pockets of courses explore life’s deepest questions, but too often those questions are considered only as historical artifacts and not examined on their own merits, as first principles fundamental to human meaning. The current curriculum review provides an opportunity to remedy that deficiency.

Students should be exposed to these first principles and considerations of the transcendent order of reality early in their undergraduate careers to frame their course of studies, both inside and outside the classroom. To that end, we propose that the revised curriculum adapt Writing 101 courses—which all students take within their first two semesters at the University—to delve into these questions and engage with writings that take seriously the existence or non-existence of, for example, objective truth, the moral order, virtue, justice, love and an infinite God. These courses would incorporate a canon of readings. For starters, we suggest Plato’s "Republic," Aristotle’s "Ethics," Saint Thomas Aquinas’ “Five Ways” proving the existence of God from his Summa Theologiae and Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the “Will to Power.” Such a canon has precedence in other universities like Columbia, where it is part of the required core curriculum.

Engaging with these questions should not cease in the first year. Rather, they should permeate all studies inside and outside the classroom, at Duke and beyond.

The post-modern university explores every last detail of the material order and presumes an intricate and comprehensive intelligibility—like “The Theory of Everything.” At the same time, it seems to steadfastly decline to consider the source of that intelligibility. That we are able to explore so much materially, then, suggests the existence of an immaterial realm. For Duke to continue to ignore that realm will eventually disqualify us from claiming the status of a “university” in any meaningful or authentic sense of that term. Simply speaking, the university without a transcendent foundation fails to achieve its telos.