“名不正，則言不順” Translation: If names be not correct, language is not in accord with the truth of things. Paraphrased: The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name. Confucius, Analects, 5th millennium BC, Chapter 13
The university does not work as it does not mean its name. Uni-, -versity refers to a single word to describe reality. It does not require attendance at any of these institutions to recognize that they are composed of separate departments, but it may require attendance to see just how much they dislike each other. It was surprising to me to attend university, looking for truth, and finding that professors within the same discipline are frequently going to bat in faculty and research meetings.
In my personal experience, the best example of this is the discipline of anthropology. Anthropo-,-logy means the word of man. To anthropologists, its divisions do not represent mere difference in approach, but fundamental disagreement about mankind. There are the biological anthropologists who seek to understand the our nature by looking at biological phenomena. While granting the importance of cultural factors, they do not consider these the foundation of man. Separately, there are the cultural anthropologists who emphasize the fungible nature of man across space and time. Unfortunately, these people do not take biological phenomena seriously. Nonetheless, I believe most of them value the biological fact of their heart pumping. The importance of biological phenomena extends to the realms of life and death, co-extensive and enabling the emergence of life, like an anthropology department faculty meeting.
The university is the home of the one word of reality. Despite this claim, within even one discipline, there are significant divisions that frequently bring people to aggression and prevent calm discourse about objectivity. In philosophy of science or epistemology, there is a commonly discussed idea about emergent phenomena, or a hierarchy of reality or chain of being. For this approach, physics is the foundation of reality, followed by the building of chemicals (chemistry), the origin and evolution of life (biology), and so on (primatology, psychology and economics, etc.). When I took materialist objectivity sincerely, I gladly accepted this framework. As a philosophy student, I took lectures about the standard model of particle physics as lessons in ontology, as its foundation even. In this view, reality is a natural unfolding of subatomic particles and atoms vibrating in the void, quantum field resonance, leading to Beethoven’s Fifth, spectator society and Big Macs.
My belief in this ontology has been broken in recent years. I believe this change of mine represents what is happening in the university in the blur of subjectivism and objectivity. I came to a new place of understanding when I realized that my beliefs and interpretation of the world influenced the world, let alone other people or my conception of my self.
“Verum esse ipsum factum.” Translation: Truth is itself a deed. Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova, 1730 AD
The writing and work in parapsychology and psi phenomena is immense and as scientifically respectable if not more than most forms of scientific activity today. To emphasize the importance of humility in the sciences, look no further than this research paper in biomedicine that demonstrates that about 90% of published cancer mitigation research fails to replicate. That is a failure rate of 9/10 for successful, published research in cancer biomedicine. Meanwhile, psi phenomena have consistently reproduced across over fifty years. Dean Radin, the Director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, published a book titled “Real Magic” in 2018 AD that demonstrates small but significant effects for psi phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance and telekinesis.
Reality and its constituent phenomena (or noumena) get more complicated. It was this research that led me to realize the idea of a standard block universe theory, demystified and thoroughly deterministic, simply does not describe ontology properly. Pair that with a philosophy of mind approach that now wrestles with the fact that reality is in some way mental. We may, now, enter into a radically subjectivist philosophy.
Despite this, this is not the first rodeo for subjectivism. Magic exists, as the magicians in Pharaoh’s court who competed with Moses demonstrated, or witch doctors today in Tanzania. The difference, merely, is the West has begun to utilize the scientific method to examine it. This sort of research is still taboo in the academy, despite the participation of respectable universities like Princeton University and Yale in it. So, reality is not clearly objective, at least in the manner that we thought. Our thoughts, somehow, influence reality.
So the cultural anthropologist decries the biological anthropologist as a dirty determinist or sexist, and in some way, the most reproducible methods of scientific research today show that perhaps this is not ineffectual. Despite the fungibility of reality, though, Radin argues that this does not imply a contradiction regarding the laws of reality, or a fundamental mysterianism, but only that our understanding of natural law is incomplete. The existence of psi phenomena, or magic, does not negate objectivity, but its demonstrated effects show that we, in fact, live in an objective, true and lawful universe that evidences itself in all its ways.
So, then, the search for truth looks for a principle that can unite the disciplines that seek to burst the universe into contradicting disciplines. This leads to the all-powerful God of the universe. It is important to worship God, He who made things as they are eternally and unchanging. In His light, there really is a universe (i.e., one), and the possibility of a single word (i.e., universe) to describe it.
It is only by stepping into the unity of Truth in light, compassion and humility that any social activity called “the university” can succeed. Its technocratic, anti-scientific and philosophical attitude, and opposition to student and professorial initiative only serves to stifle creativity and couch the professional managerial class with ill-gotten gains. The university is for the Truth and the Good, not only collegiate social life.
Veracity as Virtue 