Inheritance as an assignment

There are two ways to stand in front of a cathedral. One is to admire it, photograph it and move on, which is the posture of the visitor. The other is to ask how it was financed, engineered, argued over and completed across three generations, and what that would require of anyone attempting something comparable now. The second posture is uncomfortable, because it converts an object of admiration into a standard.

European achievement in philosophy, Roman and canon law, the sciences, representative institutions, architecture, music, painting and letters is routinely treated in the first way, including by its defenders. It is praised as a possession. Praise is cheap, and a possession that requires nothing of its owner is not really owned.

The alternative is to treat the inheritance as an assignment: unfinished work, addressed to whoever is willing to take it up, with the same seriousness that produced it. This is more demanding than either celebration or repudiation, and it is less satisfying than both, because it offers no settled position from which to speak.

It also changes what education is for. If the tradition is a possession, the task is transmission and defence. If it is an assignment, the task is competence: knowing the material well enough to continue it, and being honest about which parts have gone dead. That distinction runs through everything the Academy does.