If Australian philosophy exists, what is it?
CORRUPTING THE YOUTH. A history of philosophy in Australia. By James Franklin.
465pp. Sydney: Macleay. Aus$60. - 1 876492 08 2
As an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne in the 1980s, I
recall a story that used to circulate to the effect that Australian
philosophers were realists (the term prefixed by the obligatory
adjective "hard-headed") because we lived in a harsh, sunlit
environment where no misty meadow or morning fog obscured the objective
reality of a mind-independent physical universe.
Exchanging knowing winks, we understood that this climatic fact
explained why ethereal Britain was the historic anglophone home of
idealists, who did not believe reality existed outside the mind, and
later of anti-realists who doubted whether one could ever reach beyond
concepts, language and available evidence to the simple, unqualified
truth of any matter.
It did not take us long to realize that the story was a myth. For in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Australian
philosophers were all idealists as well, including the Scottish-born
duo Sir Francis Anderson at Sydney and Sir William Mitchell at
Adelaide. They too basked in the blinding Antipodean light, but they
had brought with them from the motherland a system of thought described
by the iconoclastic Sydney philosopher David Stove
(1927-94) as "an important holding-station or decompression chamber for
(the nineteenth) century's vast flood of intellectual refugees from
Christianity".
More importantly, idealism served as the essentially secular if
nominally Christian moral foundation of empire, which sought to
inculcate in colonial youth a lively sense of those capitalized
concepts so beloved of idealists descended from Hegel: History,
Progress, Destiny, Duty, the State.
The idealist project, having moulded not just the universities but the
schools and the youth groups (such as the Scouts), if not the whole
Australian approach to social cooperation, crashed to earth when
another Scot, John Anderson (no relation to his predecessor) assumed
the Chair of Philosophy at Sydney in 1927.
In James Franklin's words, Anderson reacted forcefully against
"anything that smelt of a sentimental attachment to another world, or
of consolation or uplift". His philosophical views were utterly
materialistic and mechanistic; he was a determinist and a reductionist,
seeing in objective reality no more than the play of social and
individual forces. The individual must always strive to liberate
himself from "compulsion" and "conformity", enabling the "spirit of
enterprise" to range, free of the dictates of conscience, over all
possible ways of living: "This is, therefore grasp it" should be the
goal of education.
Sure enough, the ideas of John Anderson were a hit with the young,
turning him into the seminal influence in Australian philosophy.
Students packed his lectures, eager to be told what they wanted to
hear: the concept of moral obligation was a fraud, merely repression by
another name; there was no such thing as conscience; and, needless to
say, "free" love was one of the prime goals of the "free" spirit.
(Franklin notes that Australia's first female philosopher, whom the
married Anderson invited as a second-year undergraduate to his study
for a "small talk about her essay", was the beneficiary of a certain
kind of "positive discrimination".) Above all, Anderson urged his
students to criticize anything and everything, whatever the authority,
however plausible the idea. He himself, having embraced Communism pre-
Stalin, later became disillusioned with the new order of the 1930s and,
having been spurned by the Communist Party, joined the Trotskyists.
Progressively alienated from them, he was, by the 1940s, a fierce
critic of Communism and set up the Free-thought Society as a vehicle
for condemning authoritarianism in all its forms, going as far as to
say: "the theorist cannot recognize any limitation of free speech and
academic freedom, and has the right to be as blasphemous, obscene and
seditious as he likes, whatever offence may be sustained by vested
interests".
The students loved it. As for the parents, well, they might have been
horrified to learn that a subversive masquerading as a professor was
educating the young minds of their offspring, but they could take
comfort in one fact -when it came to criticism, Anderson held firmly to
the doctrine that it could be aimed at everyone except Anderson: "I
don't like classes that talk back", he wrote.
Sydney philosophy, observes Franklin, developed "into a small and
isolated pond, where grew strange and antique forms no longer found in
the open sea . .
. . (S)trict toers of the Andersonian line, however second-rate, were
preferred to independent thinkers". Still, an interesting fact emerges
among many: one of the toers, Paul Foulkes, was the real author of
Bertrand Russell's coffee-table best-seller The Wisdom of the West
(1959). Reviewers gushed over Russell's "inimitable style", not
realizing that it had indeed been imitated. The foreword by "Russell"
even thanked Foulkes for his editorial assistance! (Franklin is quick
to point out that the deception was more on the part of the publishers
than of Russell himself.) The authoritarianism of Anderson, his
incredible sway over generations of Sydney philosophy students, and the
consequent stunting of Australian philosophy's engagement with
developments abroad, all might be lamentable; but he also inspired many
with a love of inquiry and rigorous thought.
Stove, both a pupil and a critic, says: "yet for every person whom he
made a philosopher he left ten people, I should say, with a respect for
philosophy, and a recollection of what it is like to wrestle in earnest
with desperately difficult intellectual questions".
Australian philosophy is in large part about the influence of Anderson,
but it encompasses much more, and Franklin has done a very thorough
job. Reading his lengthy book, however, one comes away with the
-possibly accurate -impression that the history of philosophy in
Australia is a history of one affair after the other (in the amorous
and political senses). A chapter of Corrupting the Youth is devoted to
the Orr Affair, the case of the first Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Tasmania (1952-6), ex-Queen's, Belfast, and St Andrews,
with a fake cv as long as his publication record was short. He seduced
a second-year ethics student, was assaulted by the girl's boyfriend and
father, made counter-accusations against them, was sacked and had his
appeal dismissed by the High Court. Australian philosophers revolted at
the brutal treatment of a colleague and the Tasmanian chair was
blacklisted for decades.
Next there is a chapter on the Gough- Kinsella Affair. Dr Victor
Kinsella, a Sydney surgeon, denounced in a pamphlet the atheistic,
materialistic Andersonian philosophy, and was seconded by the Anglican
Primate, Dr Gough, who, in 1961, blasted from his pulpit the
"soul-destroying philosophies" being foisted upon the Sydney youth. The
newspapers, as Franklin says, were full of it for weeks. The New South
Wales Youth Policy Advisory Committee, to whom the pamphlet was
submitted, inexplicably did not find enough evidence to support the
charge, though Anderson had already been denounced unanimously by the
state parliament in 1931 for ideas "calculated to undermine the
principles which constitute a Christian state".
Then, of course, there are the famous Sydney Disturbances, which led to
the splitting of the Philosophy Department, in the early 1970s, into
the Department of General Philosophy -Marxist and revolting to the core
-and the Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy, which was led
by people such as David Armstrong -Australia's most eminent living
philosopher -and which perpetuated the Andersonian tradition of
rigorous analytical thinking. David Stove said his years in T&M
were the happiest of his life -it was what an academic department
should be -yet the end finally came a few years ago when T&M
folded. GP remains, but, as Franklin sadly observes, "Sydney is no
longer a city where a student can find a respectable course of study in
philosophy".
Linking Anderson to the 1970s strife is "The Push", that twenty-year
affair (mainly amorous) during which, in Barry Humphries's words, "a
fraternity of middle-class desperates, journalists, drop-out academics,
gamblers and poets manques, and their doxies" hung out in the Royal
George pub, drank themselves silly, gambled on the horses, and slept
with each other's girlfriends. The inspiration? Anderson, of course.
Australian libertarianism (not just libertinism) found its feet during
those many long hours of arguing whether the tote should be privatized.
Since the Communist Party was marginalized throughout the Cold War, and
the Labor Party split, the Push was a colourful attempt to fill the
ideological vacuum. And it did produce Germaine Greer, one of the few
women with the courage actually to enter the Royal George and argue
with the blokes:
In Sydney (having escaped the "Melbourne Drift"), I found myself driven
back, again and again, to basic premises, demonstrable facts . . . . If
ever, of anyone, I desired a good report, I desire it of them, my
guides, philosophers and friends, the Sydney Libertarians. I found out
that in Sydney there were at least intellectually rigorous people and
that they could teach me something.
If Franklin's history sounds rather Sydney-centric, that's because it
is, and he makes no apologies for it. This bias rankled with the
present reviewer; we Melbournians have to make do with a chapter on
"the Melbourne Spectrum".
Melbourne philosophy is perhaps notable for two influences, both due to
the lack of Andersonian reach south of the Murray River. One is that of
Wittgenstein, perpetuated through the dominating presence of A. C.
Jackson (father of the respected Canberra philosopher Frank) and
Douglas Gasking at the University of Melbourne. The Wittgensteinian
grip was still to be felt when I was there two decades ago, and
extricating oneself from it could be a difficult though health-giving
task.
The other major influence was that of Catholic philosophy, which stood
firm against the nihilism of Andersonian thought and its
reductionistic, materialist descendants. As Franklin shows in an
accurate and sympathetic chapter, traditional scholasticism, always
realist and rigorous, aims at the reconciliation of reason and
religion, espousing objective morality, a defence of the proper place
of science in human thought, and avoiding woolly thinking in all its
guises. Alas in later years, the Wittgensteinian and Continental
influences, which mingled with each other in Melbourne, also found
their way into Catholic thinking, with the result that genuine
scholasticism, once propounded with confidence by philosophers such as
Eric D'Arcy (later Archbishop of Hobart), Dr Patrick Ryan and Dr Austin
Woodbury, was last seen hiding out at a small centre somewhere in
Sydney. (Do not look for it at the Australian Catholic University.)
Where is the action today? In one chapter Franklin outlines the
Continental influence, in all its gory glory. "Francofeminism", as he
calls it, is the intellectual haven where a philosopher can extol the
"phallic drama" of classical logic as "the logic of domination", where
not-p (p being some proposition) is defined in terms of p, which is the
"controlling centre". This arrogant dualism of p and not-p, with its
patriarchal oppositionalism, is of course to be shunned.
As is the masculine concept of the body, in favour of a metaphysics of
mucus (yes, mucus), "which always masks the passage from inside to
outside, which accompanies and lubricates the mutual touching of the
body's parts and regions". (The author of these words was appointed by
General Philosophy in the 1980s.) Less exasperating is the chapter on
environmental philosophy, in which Val Plumwood (formerly Routley,
widow of Richard Sylvan, also formerly Routley) emerges as a leading
player, more famous perhaps for her celebrated survival of a crocodile
attack than for her philosophy of the outback. Of more interest,
though, are the chapters on philosophy of mind and philosophy of
science, in which Franklin sketches, among other things, the
influential ideas of Australian Materialism pioneered by Jack Smart,
David Armstrong and U. T. Place (his brain touchingly bequeathed to
science, so that his "mind equals brain" theory might one day be proven
right).
Franklin also highlights Armstrong's important work on metaphysics,
especially the laws of nature. The book ends with a survey of applied
ethics, made famous by Australia's most feted and reviled intellec-
tual export, Peter Singer.
Franklin sketches Singer's influence in bioethics, passing via the
Helga Kuhse plagiarism affair. (Kuhse, Singer's deputy director at
Monash University's Centre for Human Bioethics, reproduced without
attribution a large part of an article published in 1984 by Suzanne
Uniacke.) Franklin also gives due weight to the fierce opposition
Singer has aroused in thinkers such as Rai Gaita, John Finnis, Jenny
Teichman and others. This is where Australian philosophy gets closest
to real life, and the debate still smoulders.
Is there such a thing as an Australian philosophy? The very idea of a
national philosophy ought to make one's flesh creep as much as that of
a national music or a national art. Anderson is right: "there is no
more an Australian literature than an Australian philosophy or
mathematics. There is a world literature to which Australians
contribute". Philosophy, like art, music and mathematics, aspires to
universal truths and ideas, to touch intuitions and emotions rooted in
human nature -no matter whether the idea is thought up in the quad with
the jacaranda tree or in a Left Bank cafe. Hence, when Australians talk
of a national philosophy, as they sometimes do, it really speaks of no
more than the well- documented "cultural cringe". On the whole, though,
Australian philosophers are today more engaged with international
currents of thought than ever -even if the cringe re-emerges in the
obsequious and uncritical welcome handed out to the latest fashionable
(usually French) thinker on an Antipodean junket.
James Franklin - himself a shining example of what is fine in the
Australian intellectual tradition - has produced a splendid book. The
coverage is huge, the research encyclopedic, and the footnotes are
almost exhausting in their multitude. Corrupting the Youth is a unique
reference tool and obligatory starting point for future researchers,
although the footnoting is damaged by a number of sloppy and inaccurate
citations, and the bibliography is a bit of a mess. (To cap it all off,
there is a scandalous falsification, not entirely the author's fault,
of the famous Monty Python Australian Philosophers sketch reproduced at
the end of the book.) The illustrations are often charming, all the
anecdotes are there, and the lightness of touch and fluency of style
are accompanied by many penetrating comments and insights. Franklin, a
mathematician by profession at the University of New South Wales, is
also a published philosopher, and the author of a highly regarded book
on the history of probability theory. One feels he could write on any
subject he liked with intelligence, sympathy and erudition.
Australian philosophy should be grateful that he has turned his hand to such a monumental subject.
