Homo Academicus as a Bearer of Responsibility

Abstract

The authors explore the problem of scientists’ and scholars’ responsibility for the emergence, development, achievements, and failures of the modern world-system. They hypothesize that this problem of homo academicus (understood as a collective subject) responsibility can be systematically researched in the context of scientists’ and scholars’ activities as personal social and anthropological practices concerned with re-pro-ducing the social. This article follows E. Levinas’s idea that every form of subjectivity a priori acts as a form of responsibility, while also using J. Caputo’s concept of “the end of ethics”, reframing it as a strategy of “open-ended responsibility” in which the structure and contents of responsibility always have the potential to be reconsidered. Homo academicus is one of the subjects of Modernity; it is intimately related to the production of the social. Scientists and scholars as experts, idea generators, consultants, tenured professors etc. take part in and are responsible (alongside other subjects of Modernity) for the production of images of the human being (homo economicus, politicus, religiosus etc.). They themselves act within one of those images — homo academicus. In general, since the beginning of the twentieth century the social sciences and the humanities have gone from the universal rationality of M. Weber to the idea of methodologies with limited responsibility of V. Rozin. Through our study of the existential nature of scientific activity, we come to the conclusion that scientific cognition does not just legitimize social being and point at its problems; it also establishes hope for a better way of being where there's a place for truth, values of freedom, responsibility, friendship, creativity.