Where has society fallen in the quest for great ideas? Along the lines of this question, Walter Benjamin frames The Life of Students. His writings have led me to believe that there is a third societal structure between the oikos and the polis: the academy. These three social structures clash perpetually, with the academy caught in the middle, viewed in part as a transition between oikos and polis, a bridge created to serve the oikos/polis duopoly. Benjamin writes that people “naively deny the…gulf between ideas and life by pointing to the link between the universities and the state” (Benjamin 39). The state and oikos view the academy as its graduation from infant of the oikos to active, capable member of the state. The oikos supports this warped, bridge perception of the academy because it, too, seeks prosperity and recognition. The two combating social structures find a common child to care for in the academy of ideas. But this child is not without warring parents. Who shall deem the ideas taught and discussed as tenable, as true?

The oikos and the polis both see the threat that their child can pose to the current duopoly on societal power they hold. One can simply view the political depiction of Socrates: a crazed man, wild and reckless for questioning normative ideas and tainting the youth. The academy, in the eyes of the oikos and polis, is not meant to be a place where ideas are truly tested, where true thinking occurs. Rather, it is meant to serve as the tissue connecting the two conflicting hearts of modern society. It is the valve between oikos and polis. But let the academy truly call out the ways of the oikos or polis in a manner inconsistent with how this should be done, and see the labels cast. As Benjamin writes so clearly, “And if a university in this way is hostile toward academic study, even though such study can pretend to have claims to ‘relevance’ to the immediate concerns of the state, how much more sterile will its approach to the arts and Muses be? By directing students toward the professions, it must necessarily fail to understand direct creativity as a form of communal activity” (Benjamin 42). The university (or the academy, at large, under the firm conjoint dominion of the oikos and the polis) exists solely to foster the maintenance of the current societal duopoly. It does so under the romantic guise of progress and free ideation, but there are certain ideas not to be touched, as Benjamin elucidates further in his discussion of eros. These ideas threaten the societal fabric that has proven jointly beneficial to the oikos and polis, so they must be eradicated and deemed poisonous to the youth, as the questions of Socrates were so deemed.

The oikos and polis have granted themselves a divine nature. They have accomplished this through the defining of one’s career as one’s “vocation,” a term first used in a Christian context to refer to a call from God. One now practices a vocation in the polis, and thus the academy is forced to train a person for his or her vocation. One can certainly feel passion for a job or some other way that one inserts and extracts value to and from society, but to deem this a “calling from God” makes clear the divinizing of the polis, which serves the oikos with the academy as the trodden bridge in between. Ideas, in this context, are nothing more than play in free time when one is not attending to one’s “vocation.” These so-called vocations leave us lacking any sense of meaning or understanding. We then return to the divine polis for an answer, which tells us to work harder, earn more, and better support the current duopoly, only to begin the cycle again. May we soon realize that the power of the academy and the beauty of the pursuit of ideas should not be limited to climbing society’s ladder but rather as an end in itself, perhaps the ultimate end.

-Charlie, May 2024