Worst of all, when exposed only to simplified and modernized tidbits of philosophy, students can begin to take philosophy itself for granted. If one can easily approach and understand Kant and Aristotle, and one need only look to them to inform contemporary disputes, they become decidedly less lovely. And if one doesn't love Kant and Aristotle, can one really find solace in Marx or Foucault?

Of course, youth itself does not prevent students from taking ideas seriously. On one hand, there are the seniors reclining in Sanders' balcony, pondering Kant's thoughts on a free market for women's eggs, and then there is the 20 year-old Friedrich Schelling writing to Hegel. "We must take philosophy further! Kant has destroyed everything; but how is everyone to notice? You would have to crush it to bits before their eyes to make it tangible to them!" Or the 19 year-old Marx who, upon reading Hegel, wrote to his father, "There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time indicating a new direction." Or John Stuart Mill whose intellectual crisis at age 20 led to mental breakdown--would that Core courses made Harvard students prone to similar breakdowns!

Precious few students take ideas so seriously; those who do tend to be either devout Christians struggling within a Fallen world or social justice zealots roused to a frothing fervor by mistreated proletarians in faraway lands. Students are politically apathetic, we're told by countless pundits who 30 years ago proved conclusively the virtues of the same apathy they now decry. But political apathy isn't as much the problem as is intellectual lethargy--a much more troubling ailment in which so many Core courses are complicit.

And it's not so much the fault of professors, who make a living by taking ideas seriously. It seems that in a noble attempt to inspire students to share their scholarly excitement, they have crushed great learning into mediocre bits, lest students choke on it. They have reduced great revelation to mere relevance. In the process, the great thinkers who might otherwise inspire men and women to greatness, become cold marble busts sitting mute while scores graduate without their sage teachings.

Hugh P. Liebert '01 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column will resume in January.