Immanuel Kant was a philosopher in both senses which are familiar to us today. That is, he sought the truth about the nature of reality, examined the nature of knowledge, and reflected on value, and studied the contributions of his predecessors to these speculations, from the ancient Greeks onwards. Someone who does these things is a philosopher, and Kant did them to a superlative degree. He was also a philosopher in a second sense, namely that of the professional philosopher. Unlike many figures in the philosophical canon he worked in a University – the same one throughout his long life. He taught students and took his part in administration. He was twice Rektor of the Albertina University in Königsberg;Footnote ¹ and like many of us today who teach, research and publish, and also function for periods as Dean, Provost or the like, his administrative experience made him aware of how the system exerts its pressures. These pressures apply not just within the University itself, where there are rules and “ways of doing things” which need to be respected and understood even if sometimes to be challenged and changed. Like ours today, Kant's University operated in a wider context of state administration; and those in the University had to be sensitive to these external constraints as well.

In Königsberg the state had great powers of direction over the Universities. Sometimes these were worn relatively lightly, but sometimes they bore more onerously, as we shall see shortly from Kant's problems with publication. The Universities of today have many stakeholders: the Faculty, the ancillary staff and the students whom they teach and service, and also the government departments concerned with education, including its funding.Footnote ² Then there are also the vast sectors of corporate and private enterprise which may benefit from the fruits of academic activity, whether it be the spin-offs from research or the students who emerge, improved, from the University experience. Academic freedom may in theory have advanced greatly since Kant's time, but in practice it remains considerably constrained, perhaps as much as Kant found it 200 years ago.

I intend, first, to examine Kant's account of the significance for government of academic knowledge and activity, then to consider the relevance of this account in a 21^st century context, and finally to offer some recommendations regarding the best role for philosophy now. Kant will turn out to be a good mentor in these matters.

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The Conflict of the Faculties (in German Der Streit der Fakultäten) is a compilation of three essays written by Kant in the mid-1790s.Footnote ³ The individual elements had a chequered genesis, since Kant's earlier writings on religion had attracted the adverse attention of his Government; and these essays, as he makes clear, are in some ways a response to that constraint. However, through fortunate change of high officials, the whole collection of three essays could safely be published in 1798.

The Faculties in the title are those in a University; and in Kant's time these were distinguished as “higher” and “lower”. The higher faculties were Theology, Law and Medicine; and the lower one was Philosophy. This lower faculty comprised not only philosophy, as we now narrowly understand it, but also history, geography, literary and social studies, and also natural science – indeed everything which in more recent contexts might be included in the Faculties (variously named) of Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Economics, and Science.

Before I begin, let us note how these distinctions still remain in our contemporary system. Many Universities and national University systems have higher doctorates – typically in Law, Medicine, and Theology or Divinity – which are contrasted with the “lower” Doctorate of Philosophy. A somewhat paler reflection of Kant's system is found in the fact that the “higher” degrees are associated with extended periods of study. An obvious example is the graduate school in the USA system, where typically students progress from “lower” non-vocational studies in humanities or social and natural sciences to “higher”, professionally-oriented studies. Here the progression is from Bachelors through Masters to Doctors degrees; but the connection between progression and temporal extension is there.

Kant examines the nature and rationale of this division between faculties, and draws conclusions as to how a University and a government should conduct themselves in relation to each other. He recognises that a University functions within a State and that the government of the State inevitably has authority over the workings of the University. The State, conceived in weakly ideal terms, is concerned with the welfare of its citizens; and Kant argues that this welfare can be brought under three broad headings: physical health, personal security, and the fate of our souls after death. These concerns have generated bodies of knowledge which are studied in Universities within the Faculties of Medicine, Law and Theology respectively. Of course, there is much more to the State's oversight and regulation of the welfare of its citizens under these headings; this further governmental activity needs the participation of what Kant calls the “businesspeople (Geschäftsleute) or technicians of learning”. He means clergymen, magistrates, and physicians; and these are to be distinguished from the academics of the University. The special role of the academics is to extend knowledge in their area of interest by the use of reason, always with the awareness that they do so in cooperation with the non-academic elements in the governmental set-up.

So much for the higher Faculties. The contrast with the Faculty of Philosophy is that this lower Faculty carries no responsibility for any of the general functions of government, and so there is no cadre of “businesspeople” or other state apparatus. That is the sense in which such a Faculty is “lower”; it is less essential to the operation of the State. But of course it has value, which is why it is endorsed and supported by the State. This value consists in its total and exclusive dedication to the pursuit of rational enquiry. It is a value which it shares with the higher Faculties; that must be so because these Faculties, like Philosophy, form part of a single University dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

The upshot is that while the regulation of the higher Faculties is complex, subject both to the external discipline of government control and to the internal University discipline of reason, the case of the lower Faculty is simpler; here reason alone is in charge.

This is Kant's account of the rationale for the academic structure of a University. Its style will be recognisable to those familiar with his philosophical thinking. Compare his account of dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason. There Kant examines purely rational metaphysics and finds within it three working parts – namely, psychology, cosmology and theology. He characterises each in terms of the utterly non-empirical subject which each professes to investigate – the soul, the entire universe, and God. Then he makes the crucial move of deriving each of these concepts from the logical forms of reasoning – categorical, hypothetical and disjunctive syllogism.Footnote ⁴ The last move is crucial because it shows not just that metaphysics takes these particular paths but how and why it does so.

Or consider the dialectic in the Critique of Practical Reason.Footnote ⁵ Kant finds in the tradition of moral philosophy an emphasis on the cardinal importance both of virtue and happiness as constitutive of the supreme good; and he illustrates these trends in the tradition by summarising the theories of the Epicureans and Stoics. But as he goes on to note, we may become aware of a tension between these views of the good; and it turns out that there is a deep conceptual reason for this unease. The connection between virtue and happiness can be neither analytic nor synthetic; and so it seems that there is an irresoluble antinomy between the two theories of morality which elevate each of these concepts respectively to the chief position.

In this dialectic the historic contrast between two forms of moral philosophy, and the different moral intuitions that underpin each of them, is shown to be based on a fundamental philosophical distinction. The protagonists in the earlier debate may well have been unaware of the grounding, any more than were the pretenders to metaphysical science in the Critique of Pure Reason. But Kant still takes his dialectical analysis to provide the key to understanding the philosophical phenomena.

In the same way his anatomy of the University has both empirical and normative dimensions. It sets out schematically the main divisions of academic work and it also explains why there is a deep basis in human social nature to require that matters have to be ordered this way.

This analysis is only prefatory to Kant's main theme in The Conflict of the Faculties, which is to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate forms which the eponymous tension may take. The legitimate conflict arises from the fact that members of each kind of Faculty are engaging their powers of reason on issues that may overlap their areas of knowledge. In this case there is rational basis for the initial disagreement and for further investigation. Kant illustrates the matter (understandably enough, given the vicissitudes of his recent experience of publication) from the case of Philosophy and Theology. Theologians are professionally committed to seeking religious truth through scriptural exegesis, but for philosophers the reasonableness of religious beliefs is itself a test for the authority of scripture, not the other way round. An example more pertinent to our day may be taken from the relation between the focuses of Medicine and Philosophy. Those who work in the higher Faculty will of course apply reason to medical decisions; they are not government agents who seek merely to enforce the insights of the experts upon an ignorant society. But like the theologians they have their authorities, whether it be the Hippocratic rules or the results of some current extensive and influential epidemiological survey. For the philosophers, however, the status and credit of such authorities is a matter that is open to rational investigation.

Kant insists that although there is possibility for conflict in these and other similar ways, the conflict is legitimate. Each party, from either side of the Faculty division, is applying reason in ways that seem to them to be appropriate. The member of the higher Faculty takes it as criterial that reasoning in their particular field should respect without question certain fundamental principles and premises; without this respect the reasoning would not be medical or theological. But the philosopher, approaching what he takes to be the same issues, operates under no such constraint. Anything may need scrutiny and demand justification if it is to be retained; and that includes the professionals' basic foundations.

While this kind of intellectual conflict is legitimate, although deep, it must be distinguished from an illegitimate conflict. This is hard to do. The conflict becomes illegitimate when members of either Faculty seek to exclude members of the other from rational debate simply on the grounds that they lack the appropriate specialised intellectual authority for such engagement. An example would be if the theologians sought to trump the participation of philosophers on issues of religion, by invoking their superior knowledge of biblical exegesis. Similarly medical experts might want to silence the philosophers in their debates by appeal to their knowledge of protocols approved by the State medical boards.

Anecdotally I may report from my own experience of particular University committees, the intervention of an engineering professor to upbraid a professor of literature at a general meeting of Deans of Faculties. Before them was a report from some sub-committee, and in it was a sentence containing three verbs. The professor of literature was not inclined to fault the report, at least for linguistic style. But, said the engineering professor, didn't his learned colleague know of the rule which forbids more than two verbs in one sentence? The engineer had acquired some mechanical rule of style, suitable for engineering reports perhaps; on this basis he supposed that he could silence debate in any context by citing this particular feature of good expression.

Is there a converse aspect to such illegitimate conflict? Could the philosophers be faulted for failing to recognise that experts from the higher faculties have an equal right to contribute to rational enquiry on relevant matters? Kant gives no examples and no indication that he saw a problem in this area. It is indeed hard to suppose that a group of philosophers or social scientists might exclude medical experts from a debate on, say, euthanasia, or legal experts from one on civil disobedience. But consider the possibility of the following scenario. The philosophers are all professionally committed to the recognition of some distinction which currently they take to be fundamental – such as between ethics and metaethics, or first-order and second-order value enquiry, or between any of these and applied ethics. Those who do not respect these distinctions without doubt or demur are not part of the circle. Then they welcome into their debate medical or legal experts who do not know and perhaps, on much further reflection, do not really acknowledge these distinctions. I leave you to imagine how the contributions of these non-philosopher “experts” would figure in the philosophers' further programmes.

So we have been able to follow Kant as he distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate conflict among faculties and to recognise his rationale for doing so. As members of the academic community all parties are required to honour their commitment to rational debate, unconstrained by external authority. This discipline permits them to approach a common issue in ways that are appropriate to their particular faculty; and in this way conflict may occur in their rational responses. The conflict turns illegitimate when such a difference of approach becomes an excuse to silence and exclude the other completely from the debate. When this happens, a fundamental principle of academic life is undermined.

Kant's presentation of this complex roadmap of the intellectual lives of faculty members depends in turn on his account of the different faculties, and in particular on the distinction between the higher and lower ones. We examined this earlier, and saw how it is based on a subtle combination of historical/sociological features and a priori/philosophical ones.

2

Kant was then, and we are now. Two hundred years on, much has changed in philosophy and the theory of government and education. The general state of knowledge, the divisions and organisation of academic research and teaching, and respect paid – at least in lip-service – to the values of free enquiry, are all significantly different from the way they were in Kant's day. Yet a great deal remains much the same; and I want to highlight some of these similarities and consider what we may learn from Kant in our assessment of the present situation.

I shall consider the matter particularly from the perspective of the philosopher, as Kant does. Our understanding of “philosophy” is a good deal more restricted than what was included in the “philosophy” of its eponymous Faculty. But much that can be said about present academic philosophy, in this current narrow sense, extends in more or less diluted form to the disciplines which are differently named in current academic thinking but which formed part of Kant's more inclusive Faculty. In what follows I shall mainly use “philosophy” in the modern sense.

Until about twenty years ago, at the earliest, the philosopher could be regarded as the paradigm of the “lone scholar”. Each person pursued a series of research projects for which, from beginning to end, he or she bore sole intellectual responsibility. To be sure, there were cordial and convivial relations with colleagues; but these were essentially optional and set up no obligations on the particular directions, let alone outcomes, of philosophical enquiry. We taught our students as we saw fit, mainly having regard to sharpening their minds as best as possible to the philosophical subtleties of the topics under consideration. The views of other philosophers might have played some part in this pedagogy; those of non-philosophers would mostly play no part at all. Where there was exception to this general practice in philosophical enquiry, it would be based on collaboration with respected colleagues in strictly adjacent disciplines; and the same would be true of research which extended beyond the strict boundaries of philosophy.

This “lone scholar” is nowadays something of a dinosaur. The species is far from extinct, since that description still holds good of most working philosophers. But they are supposed to be on the way out, and perhaps they are. The pressures for change are both internal to the academy and external too. Research in philosophy is now meant to be directed to outcomes which are announced in advance and delivered on time; and its esteem is increased if it is supported financially. The larger the funding application, the more easily the grants come; and a good strategy for increasing the chances here, as well as scoring other points, is for the project to be international and multi-disciplinary. Goodbye, lone scholar!

This form of pressure for change, unwelcome though it may be for many if not most philosophers, could be regarded as internal to the academic community. It is, after all, driven by large funding councils and the senior echelons in University administration; and they are supposed – and suppose themselves – to have as their primary aim the advancement of research and knowledge in philosophy, as in all other subjects. Somewhat more external pressures on academic philosophers to mould their ways into new forms comes from governmental emphasis on the importance of “knowledge transfer” and “the information economy”. What these and similar terms connote is the application and availability of academic expertise to the wider purposes and interests of society and the economy. The demands from these sources and those from the research funding bodies may interact and reinforce each other, insofar as each of the two parties has regard to the aims and methods of the other.

Philosophers respond to these pressures as they see fit. It is certainly not with enthusiasm and is in large measure with considerable reluctance. This is not because they object to the aim of disseminating philosophical knowledge and enquiry as widely as possible in society, including into the worlds of corporate business and government decision-making. The problem is that the concepts, language, methods of “knowledge transfer” and so on are most unlikely to engage the philosophers' minds in any way that makes rational response possible.

Kant would surely react in the same way as our contemporary philosophers to the mixture of obscure ideological and economic pressures which I have just indicated. However my concern here is to explore the more particular relevance to this contemporary situation of the ideas and arguments mounted in The Conflict of the Faculties. So let us visit our contemporary academic scene in that spirit.

Between Kant's time and ours all Universities sought and generally achieved a greater detachment from the State than prevailed in that epoch. Thus it has come to be thought inappropriate for the State to prescribe or direct University research and teaching; but it did and does take an interest in promoting third-level education and supporting it financially on behalf of the wider population. Exercises such as the Research Assessment Exercise and Teaching Quality Assessment in the UK, and similar audits in other countries, are endorsed in principle by the government but run in detail by those within the academic community.

While the ideological involvement of the State in the Universities has declined, a converse expansion has taken place within the fields of study covered in the Universities. So today we have many Faculties, Departments and fields of research and teaching which were unheard of in Kant's time. Let us leave aside Golf Studies and Tourism Studies. The newcomers which I want particularly to concentrate on are Education, Business Studies and Psychology. The prehistory of these studies goes back to ancient Greece, of course, and early elements of all three can be found in Kant's own works. What has come about much more recently is the detachment and subsequent autonomy of these subjects from the earlier intellectual context in which they were embedded; and very often this earlier context was Philosophy.

These newer studies connect closely with the concerns of governments. With their many Ministries or Departments of Education, Employment, and other human resource and business resource activities, governments welcome the input of academic expertise into their own non-academic projects. And the academics are often content to oblige, since here come further sources of grant funding with consequent enhancement of the academics' standing and reputation within the University system. So the loop closes. The Government is hands-off as regards the academic content in the Universities. However it does provide a major source of funding in some systems, which is a precondition of the Universities' ability to function at all. In other systems where private funding is more widespread, the government encourages this through tax advantages. While government thinking does not seek to manipulate the content of academic thinking, developments in certain academic disciplines may influence government thinking. For example, changes in academic theory about the motivations of employees, may well become reflected in government policies for reducing unemployment in the workforce. In general the three academic subjects of Education, Business Studies and Psychology are all apt to be heavily involved in such dialogue with government.

3

Now let us return to Kant and his conflicts among the Faculties. What could he tell us about the current situation? Remember that Kant's main purpose was to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate conflict. He had no quarrel with conflict as such. It is the illegitimate forms that he seeks to expose; and these occur when considerations other than the pursuit of reason and truth may influence matters.

Surveying our scene, Kant would perceive that while government and the academic community are distinct, they connect in a number of ways. The government has overall control, of course, as it does over most of what else goes on within the State. It has particular control of the Universities through finance; but mainly it exercises this lightly, and notably so as regards the content of academic activity. On the academic side, some parts of the University relate more closely to the detailed concerns of government than do others. Kant's map of the Faculties is no longer helpful, nor is his distinction between the higher and the lower. But what remains pretty constant between his time and ours, is a general connection between government and the academy, and differentiated connections between parts of the latter and the whole of the former.

Kant's focus on the role of government concerns authority, rather than direct control. The connections between different academic subjects and various functions of government are themselves various; and this is the phenomenon which lies at the root of what interests Kant most, namely the contrast between legitimate and illegitimate conflict among the faculties. I shall now explore this contrast in terms of our contemporary academic context.

Do we have legitimate conflicts? Most certainly. It is perfectly possible for, say, a philosopher and a management expert to debate the value of work and employment in the contribution this makes to the quality of life. They may, from their different academic perspectives, take different views, with the philosopher emphasising the significance of the wider life context within which the work occurs, while the management expert insists that considerations about the quality of life depend on whether the person is employed or not – and if not the quality is reduced to almost zero. Or there might be debate between a philosopher and a legal expert about the rights and wrongs of discrimination among persons; here too legal sensitivity to the niceties of a complex regulatory regime might well lead to an assessment different from that of a philosopher who may regard all legal regulation as needing to be based on moral principles. A third example takes a philosopher and a social psychologist who argue about the significance of people within an organisation. The psychologist takes people to be fundamental; but the philosopher suggests that the purposes of the organisation may override the interests of the people who are from time to time involved in it.

All such debates and disagreements are in order because they take place among members of the academic community who share a respect for the rational basis on which such debate should be conducted. But some forms of conflict between the modern faculties are, on Kant's analysis, illegitimate. We may use close variants of the examples just given. If the management expert seeks to trump the philosopher and close the debate on the value of employment by citing the fact that it is a central plank in the programme of a government recently elected by a large majority, he is trying to silence the voices of reason by appeal to authority. Of course, it may be that all parties, including the philosophers, accept that authority without qualms; but that does not lessen the illegitimacy of this particular conflict. The only authority which should prevail in debate within the academy is that of reason. In this particular case there is an asymmetry between the experts in management and philosophy, since the former advances governmental authority as a fundamental premise of his skill, which the philosopher does not do. That is why this conflict is illegitimate.

The same comments could be applied to a debate about discrimination among persons, where a philosopher's examination of the case to be made against discrimination by affirmative action is met by insistence that this policy has been given favourable treatment by a government's recent legislative acts. Or the dispute might concern the merits of giving preference in employment to ethnic minorities; and into the debate would come reference to recent government directives in the employment and social fields. Many more examples could be cited; but I trust that the general point is becoming clear.

Government does not seek to determine the content or even the direction of academic research and debate. Occasional examples to the contrary, such as Charles Clarke's aspersions on medieval studies in the UK or attacks on evolutionary theory in the USA, tend to redound to the discredit of the politicians involved. Normally, the government's professed interest is in facilitating the discussions about these issues as autonomous activities. Of course, government has many interests in other respects in directing the nation's life. Meanwhile there are some faculties in the University that have a special academic interest in various of these areas of policy; and I have drawn attention to them in my examples. Ironically they have flourished because of the State's desire to stand back from the direction of academic activity. The consequence is that these academic experts know much about the details of government policy and take such policy more seriously in their evaluation of rational priorities. Herein lies the potential for the souring of proper academic debate.

The abiding value of Kant's analysis in The Conflict of the Faculties is to alert us to the subtle dangers that can arise in academic debates. It is perfectly proper that philosophers and business studies experts should pool their rational resources in some area – such as employment policy – of mutual interest. Nor should we expect their conclusions from the debate to be always and seamlessly the same. What Kant grasped in his time, and what we need to remind ourselves of today, is the distinction between right and wrong ways of deriving and supporting these conclusions.Footnote ⁶ Perhaps his best comment, and the one most pertinent to our own times, comes – characteristically for Kant – in a footnote (Akademische Ausgabe 7:20):