"The university is in the best position to know — assuming good will — to know what its needs are for hiring and terminating," she said.
Something was descending slowly, like a heavy theatre curtain, inside my body; I felt my will to know the truth ebbing into a happy, warm insanity.
"Unlike you, a believer," the smug atheist boasts, "I don't need to know everything, and I lack the hubristic will to know about life, the universe, and everything". Yet, ironically, this attitude of renouncing the will to know is much like the dogmatic, religious attitude towards understanding the natural world, only inverted against metaphysical speculation.
If you believe even a fraction of what it reports from the front line, where the primary task facing educators is, as Henry admits, to insure that "nobody kills anybody," then something is indeed dying in our will to know.
In his 1974 "little history of truth in general", Foucault distinguishes two kinds of truth in a way that is reminiscent of the theses we find in Lectures on the Will to Know (see e.g. LWK, pp. 31-32).
The will to know must have been singularly unbending in a man for whom even God's banishment or death was incidental to finding the truth about finch beaks, barnacle mating and primate laughter.
