Montaigne in his Essays called it ignorance doctorale (1.54). Four hundred years later an American journalist called it “educated incompetence.” It means the sort of nonknowledge, or anti-knowledge, that can follow upon higher learning, especially when theorizing about politics, morality, and the arts.

That, in the first age of mass higher education in human history, is a large matter, and far larger than Montaigne could ever have guessed. It has nothing to do with taking degrees, and my target here is not the Ph.D. industry. It is too late for that. In 1903, in a Harvard journal, William James inveighed against it in an article called “The Ph.D. Octopus,” and for eighty years and more the American nation has chosen to ignore his advice. The octopus won, in fact, as you would expect any octopus to do in single combat with a philosopher. My concern here is wider than that. It is with the sort of mistake you would have to be learned to make, though it might be enough to have talked to someone who had read a book or taken a course. It is much harder to forgive than what Montaigne called ABC ignorance, which is merely childish, innocent, and easily cured. With the ignorance of the doctors someone has been to a lot of trouble to get it wrong.

Let me give you a simple example. In November 1989, days or weeks after the tumbling down of the Berlin Wall and the democratic revolution in Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party of Great Britain held what may be its last annual general meeting—its last, because the national membership has fallen to some 7,000-odd loyalists, and after the news from Berlin and Prague its atmosphere was understandably reminiscent of a wake. “Stalinism is dead,” one of its leaders announced from the platform, “and Leninism has had its day.” That was the voice of Martin Jacques, editor of the monthly magazine Marxism Today and reputedly a lively editor and a man of some education and intelligence. He became a Marxist in the mid-1960’s. In other words, it has taken him a quarter of a century to realize that the philosophy of a German sage born a year before Queen Victoria does not work for the political societies of Europe, East or West, in the last years of the 20th century.

One is inclined to say that it would be more surprising if it did. All the principal views of Marx and Engels, after all, were formed before 1850. They were early Victorians. Early Victorian medicines are not much used on the human body, early Victorian literary views are not much taught in schools and colleges, except as curiosities, and engineers do not employ early Victorian techniques, on the whole, when they build buildings and bridges. What is surprising about Mr. Jacques and his 7,000 fellow members is that they should be so surprised. Perhaps Marxism Today will now be renamed Marxism Yesterday. Perhaps the Communist Party of Great Britain, which has not managed to elect a single member to the House of Commons since 1945 (they still have one in the House of Lords), will now call itself the Party That Got It Wrong.

But what was above all breathtaking about Mr. Jacques’s platform speech was a passing remark he made about China. Chinese Communism, he remarked sadly, “turned authoritarian” in June 1989 when the People’s Army fired on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. That “turned” shows what the ignorance of the doctors can be like. What illiterate peasant in China since 1949, or for that matter before 1949, ever doubted that his rulers were authoritarian? He might not know much about the 25-30 million said to have been killed by Mao and his followers in the first years of their rule—perhaps treble the Nazi total—or about the uncounted thousands who were killed in Mao’s last purge during the Cultural Revolution of 1967-76. But he did not doubt the general character of his rulers. The notion that the Beijing government only turned authoritarian in June 1989 is enough to make a cat laugh. How educated would you have to be to believe that?

Marxism is an Ism, and some Isms, like some sacred names, achieve a status beyond doubt. Consider colonialism. Any ordinary citizen of colonies like Hong Kong or Gibraltar knows something about how well or badly he is administered, and he probably has views about joining or not joining China or Spain. But once you call such territories colonies, and once someone with or without a doctorate invents the term colonialism, it starts to look as if all the cases might be subject to a single moral judgment. If colonialism is wicked, then it must be wrong that Gibraltar or Hong Kong should be colonies. If capitalism is wicked, as Marx said before our grandparents were born, then any instance of capitalism must be wicked, too.

The point has nothing to do with the right or left, and easy conceptualizing does not belong to any single place in the political spectrum. A highly conservative colleague, when he heard I was writing a book to prove the objectivity of literary judgments to be called The Certainty of Literature, remarked scornfully: “You believe there are absolute standards out there that everybody should submit to.” The notion that one could judge, and judge objectively, without having standards, let alone universally accepted standards, was so foreign to his mind that it was a possibility he could not even entertain. And yet on the numerous occasions we had examined together it did not occur to him to ask what our standards were, or whether we could agree about them or not; still less did he doubt that the judgments we made as examiners were objective judgments. It would not have occurred to him, in short, as he theorized confidently about the nature of critical values, to consider any instance in which he had made a judgment of value himself.

There is, as it happens, a philosophical name for nonsense of this order, and it is foundationalism.

Foundationalism is the belief or assumption that all certain knowledge depends on stated and agreed foundations, and that without such foundations one can only doubt. People who demand verbal definitions and criteria—who has not met them in seminars?—are usually victims of the foundationalist fallacy; so are those who, inside universities or outside them, call for a theoretical basis to moral or critical knowledge. Marxism, in its heyday, was a classic instance of foundationalism and its foundation was that all history is a history of class struggle. So was anti-colonialism.

There is a good deal the matter with the foundationalist case, and it may be convenient to put some of it in numbered order.

1. If all claims to truth, to count as knowledge, need stated and agreed foundations, then so does that claim. It is, after all, of enormous scope—wider even than morality, politics, and the arts. But any attempt to provide such a foundation would have to be imagined as an exception to itself: otherwise one would have to ask what its foundation was, and what (in its turn) was its foundation. There is a difficult Oriental myth that the world rests on the back of an elephant standing on a tortoise. But what is the tortoise standing on?

2. It cannot be reasonable to demand that all foundations should be stated. Much that is known, after all, cannot be stated at all: the taste of food and wine, for instance, or the intimacies of friendship and love. One can know without being able to say what one knows and, as phrases like “unconscious desire” suggest, without even being aware that one knows. Anyone who confuses knowledge with being able to give an account, then, is committing a profoundly elementary mistake, and one that runs counter to the daily and hourly experience of living.

3. The demand for agreed foundations—”What are our criteria?”—is even less reasonable. Why should agreement be needed, whether willing L or enforced in order to be certain? The earth is certainly round, however many flat-earthers there may happen to be; and murder, not to say extermination, is wrong, whatever Nazis or Maoists may say or do. That there are disagreements, then, in moral, political, and artistic judgments is no sufficient reason to say that such judgments are uncertain, subjective, or merely personal. We do not need agreement in order to have certain knowledge: silly people say silly things.

4. In A Grammar of Assent (1870), John Henry Newman remarked that, just as there is invincible ignorance, so there is invincible knowledge: truths that are certain without using words, without definitions and criteria, without agreement, without debate. Nearly a century later Wittgenstein raised a similar point in his notes On Certainty (1969) when he remarked that there are matters one knows for certain without having to verify. “Why do I not satisfy myself that I have two feet when I want to get up from a chair?” Looking, after all, would be useless: if one failed to see one’s feet one doubts one’s eyes. The same point is contained, more elaborately, in the old joke about “Can you play the violin?” Anyone who answers “I don’t know: I’ve never tried” can get an easy laugh because anyone can see that you do not have to try in order to know that you can’t.

The ignorance of the doctors, for all that, goes on, and it will survive the Beijing massacre of June 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall five months later. It will survive, as doctoral ignorances do, by looking sophisticated. For example, in a recent philosophical treatise. Contingency, Iwny and Solidarity (1989), Richard Rorty has shown himself a classic foundationalist. Quoting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a book that appeared in the same year as Mao’s seizure of power in China—”Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four”—Rorty concludes that there is no sufficient ground for any arithmetical certainty. It does not occur to him that a truth might be ungrounded and still certain. The most he can offer, in exchange, is an uncomfortable way station on the path to knowledge:

It does not matter whether “two plus two equals four” is true. All that matters is that if you believe it, you can say it without getting hurt. If we take care of freedom, truth can look after itself.

But Orwell’s point, and a far sharper one, was that to abandon all claims to truth is to abandon freedom, too. The phrase about leaving truth to look after itself comes sadly from a philosopher. To admit it is to embrace despair. But then it is the search for foundations that has led to that despair, and the next task is to persuade educated mankind that the search should never have been begun. “He who does not know truth at first sight,” the poet Blake once wrote in the margin of one of his books, “is unworthy of her notice.” A child, as Wittgenstein remarked, does not believe in the two-times table when he learns it at school: he sees that it is so. The critical mind, in our times, has become deeply, tragically conscious that it has not yet found the theoretical foundation to judgment. Now it needs to be persuaded that it has found none because there is none to be found.