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The key to Marcuse's thought is his thesis that effective social criticism depends upon a philosophy of two-dimensionality-that is to say, philosophy conceived primarily as a criticism of what is. Alasdair Maclntyre rightly points out that Marcuse thinks the central concern of philosophy should be "with the structure of what can be thought and therefore confronts actuality with possibility." His is a driving passion to correct. And the basic distinction that runs through all of Marcuses works and defines the dual dimension which generates serious thought is the distinction between things as they are and things as they might be.

When I first began to study philosophy, there was not much concern with its political implications. One thought of philosophers as being a few removes from the public forum, concerned with loftier matters, operating far from the untidiness of the social scene in a cool oasis where the imagination could play and consciousness unfold at its own pace. It was a pure world, to be sure, and the purist view is by no means an obsolete one. Just the other day I heard a well-known philosopher in heated argument with a campus activist say that the responsibilities of a professional philosopher end with his profession, that his political obligations qua philosopher were nil.

I write, as a number of colleges, my own included, arc in political recess. It is obvious that student enthusiasm has waned considerably since last spring when emotions ran high and momentous crises shook campuses across the land. Only a minority of institutions are in recess; an even smaller minority of students are actually engaged in campaign work, and they aren t likely to make much difference one way or the other. Shall we then put the whole matter out of mind (as many educators are doing) and look forward to a return of normalcy, to smooth sailing in the placid academic waters of yore?

A recent letter to the editor of one of the newspapers I read suggested that our present era should go down as the Age of Apprehension rather than the Age of Aquarius. The writer went on to list thirty "crises"—ranging from Russia to a higher rate of V.D.—that depress the minds of the citizenry. He then concluded: "And just in case any reader refuses to get drowned by these, there's always the H-bomb hanging over our heads." The news, to be sure, is rarely good these days. But it is more than a question of bad news. A letter of this sort rather vividly and even pathetically expresses the widespread sense of malaise that characterizes these times. We seem indisputably to be living through one of those periods of cultural collapse that periodically overtakes history, a time when the human estate is at low ebb, only tenuously connected to the sources of its replenishment.

I have never been convinced of the Marxian belief that thought is the outcome of social conditions, particularly the modes of production and exchange. It seems to me that the opposite is more nearly true, that the social substance in any given age is primarily defined by its climate of ideas, its philosophical worldview, if you will. The structures of society derive their being as well as their significance from the prevailing philosophy; truth is always a function of a state of consciousness, of the way we view things.

Towards the end of his tenure as president of Sarah Lawrence College Harold Taylor attacked "the present system of lectures textbooks survey courses standard requirements of subject matter examinations md grades" for failing "to touch the inner consciousness of the student or to dtil with his motivations his emotions his aims ind his needs." It was a typical call for relevance in education.What I want to do is examine some of the puzzles and hidden assumptions that attach to the relevance-in-education controversy, We need not raise such misty questions is What is the relevance of relevance? (although this is sometimes done) But it does seem imperative to begin with the basic question: Relevant to what? Taylor's answer to that question would appear clear enough.

"There are two kinds of truth," the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, used to tell his students, "small truth and great truth. You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth."I suggest it might be helpful to view Christianity and communism as two great truths, in Bohr's sense. The issue between them is not so much one of truth and falsehood as the more comprehensive opposition of the kind exhibited by different philosophies of life, each making claim to man's total allegiance. This opposition ought in fact to be a form of creative collaboration, for the truth never'competes with itself, only with error.

Nothing stays fixed very long in our world. Change is the natural context of our lives. Some would claim that it is the very philosophical climate of the times. The spontaneous operation of the modern consciousness is to strain anxiously toward the possible, the not-yet. This is now so habitual a stance that we sometimes forget it is a relatively recent one. It is our principal heritage from the nineteenth century. Before then, change had never been experienced as 50 vital a factor in cultural life. That century, if we agree with J. S. Mill, was marked by a transition from a prevailing worldview that was relatively static and timeless to one predicated upon constant and even violent change.

Leo Tolstoy once remarked that "certain questions are put to mankind, not that men should answer them, but that they should go on trying." The highly complex Middle East situation in which we must deal with the rights of Jews and Arabs against the background of a power struggle between a Russia and an America with nuclear weapons often seems to be one of those questions. I do not here propose to offer any final answer. But I will try to state clearly what I conceive to be some misconceptions blockinga possible solution.

There are presently 6.7 million students in some 2200 American institutions of higher learning. Their numbers have doubled in the past ten years and will double again in the next ten.This statistic alone indicates that the university is no longer a shady retreat where scholars and students leisurely engage in the search for truth. The university has become a major power in our societal life. It shares with society in general a frenzied dynamism, the pursuit of immediate objectives, a labyrinthian structure and the lust for prestige. One couldn't imagine a university without, for example, a well-staffed public relations office. The American university today is in almost all senses of the word a new university.

In our present program of higher education the student is by and large the odd man out. This holds particularly in the larger university complexes where the iron law is that the student is made for the system. The symptoms of the student's discontent with this predicament are obvious enough: restlessness, estrangement, apathy and, increasingly, outright rebellion. According to a report by the National Student Association there were 221 major demonstrations at 101 campuses in the first six months of this year.