In this text Stanley Fish raises an important issue. He denies the claim that a humanities education should be concerned with an education for citizenship that is advocated by this weblog. He does in terms of reviewing a book called Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates For Lives Of Moral And Civic Responsibility (Jossey-Bass, 2003), which is product of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
The argument for an education for citizenship is based on fostering a commitment to moral and civic responsibility. As Fish states it, the claim involves the following:
"If a college education is to support the kind of learning graduates need to be involved and responsible citizens, they must go beyond the development of intellectual and technical skills and ... mastery of a scholarly domain. They should include the competence to act in the world and the judgment to do so wisely."
Fish says that is his main objection to moral and civic education in our colleges and universities is not that it is a bad idea (which it surely is), but that it's an unworkable idea. Why? Because "democratic values and academic values are not the same and that the confusion of the two can easily damage the quality of education."
They are different. Ensuring that good and moral citizens can be fashioned by a curriculum can be in conflict with academic values. Lets grant Fish that.
But is that the end of the matter? Hardly. Fisk appears to have a very narrow conception of the university:---it is primarily, if not solely, an academic institution that teaches a narrow set of skills. A university is concerned with both academic values and commercial values---eg. the professions or training for a job. These values are in tension, if not conflict, as Derek Bok suggests in his recent publication, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. With that said it is the case that gaining a degree to get a better job is a central reason why students go to university--they reckon it is better to be a lawyer than a cleaner in terms of future income. As suggested here
"People go to university because if they don't they'll have to do dreary boring difficult low-status jobs for no money all their lives....Poetry and history and classics are all very well but they don't pay the mortgage or the children's tuition at their elevator up the social ladder. So MBAs outnumber humanities degrees and students decide, however reluctantly, to read law or medicine rather than literature or philosophy."
So a university is both an academic institution and a commercial one. The danger is the colonization of the former by the latter. Is it similar with democratic virtues or capacites? Can a university be an academic institution and an ethical institution in civil society?
At one level yes. A university enables the acquisition of both the intellectual virtues (organizing material, writing essays, asking questions, evaluating interpretations etc) to be able to function in an academic institution and democratic virtues of citizenship that are centred around autonomy and thinking about public issues. It is not a question of the curiculum fashioning good and moral citizens as Fish puts it; it is more a fostering of moral and political virtues or capacities that enable students as citizens to think for themselves and to participate in political and civil life. How they think for themseves and participate in civil society is up to them. But they need the capacity to be able do this.
The traditional justification for studying literature at university was that the skills of close reading and interpreting texts (novels, poetry etc) made you a good researcher and a better person. It was the becoming a better person that was the bridge to the wider virtues. Fisk denies this. He says:
"You might just make them into good researchers. You can't make them into good people, and you shouldn't try...the emphasis on broader goals and especially on the therapeutic goal of "personal development" can make it difficult to interest students in the disciplinary training it is our job to provide. (This has spectacularly been the case in the teaching of writing where the twin emphasis on personal development and the appreciation of other cultures, especially those that have been marginalized and/or oppressed, has been an all-out disaster because very few students have actually been taught to write.)"
Personal development is a misleading way to interpret the moral virtues of citizenship. What we get, as Fisk points out, is a 'mish mash of self-help platitudes, vulgar multiculturalism... and a soft-core version of 60s radicalism complete with the injunction... to "love one another right now."' Australains would recognize this mish mash as left liberalism. Conservatives would quickly add that lefties in the humanities are turning out more lefties. Leftys' would say that the old humanities fostered an elite British way of life in Australia.
However, the literary institution's emphasis on the interpretation of texts can be broadened from literary texts to the texts of everyday life, such as the texts of the media, politics and advertisements. It is in the shift from a disciplined based English to cultural studies that students can, and are encouraged to interpret the texts of everyday life.
The purpose is not to just decipher the author's intention or meaning as the author intended, but to become aware of the historical biases or prejudices of the media (what some call their political agenda), and to highlight the ideology of the text (meanings in the service of power)
It is to foster a conversation or dialogue within the constraints of our historical circumtances through the creative putting together of meaning about certain events in public life and and even create other meanings of these events.
It is also to encourage a playing with words of a text and its interelationships by stretching the limits of the langauge to deconstruct the meaning of a media text and to open up new insights-eg, the role played by the US media in the Iraq war whilst living with the way this media power is used.
That is a rough hermenutical account (with its different strands) and it suggests the ways that academic virtues can and do overlap with those of citizenship.
When you leave the academy to pursue a non-academic career it is assumed by the faculty staff still hanging on that you are chucking in the discipline of philosophy. You have left the university and so are no longer doing philosophy.
If they are in a generous frame of mind they will concede, that maybe you can do philosophy at home as a sort of hobby with a few friends interested in the same books. They will acknowledge that you do read a few books and have a chat about some of the ideas you came across in the books over a few wines and nibbles. It's called a reading group. But it has little resemblence to a reading group inside the academy.
If pressed on the point they will say that you are no longer a professional philosopher. They are the professionals, the proper philosophers. You are not, nor can you be. The tacit judgement is that those doing it outside the academy are just not up to doing philosophy in the proper way. .
What they--both analytic and continental philosophers in academia--- will not grant is that their conception of philosophy is just that: a particular conception of philosophy. Philosophy as practiced as a theoretical discipline in the academy is philosophy. There are no other kinds of philosophy that can be, or are, practised outside the confines of the philosophy. You nearly always the hear tone of ridicule in such academic judgements about philosophy practised outside the academy.
What these academic philosophers actually refuse to grant is the possiblity that as the teachers and guardians of academic philosophy they talk the talk but they do not walk the walk.Their whole identity as professionals depends the refusal.
This academic stance is a grotesque misreading of the philosophical tradition. An alternative kind of is philosophy as a way of life and it was a common conception of philosophy in classsical Greece or Rome. It is generally accepted that Socrates is the common placeholder for a life of examination---both of one's own life and an examination of the culture in which one lives.
Philosophy as a way of life is a life of lived experience, and not a set of doctrines organized in disciplinary terms; a way of being-in-the-world that is communcated through dialogue. In this conception of philosophy it is daily life that provides us with an opportunity to do philosophy not academic disputes about this or that doctrine (eg., metaphysical realism).
Ironically, the tradition of this alternative conception of philosophy is being recovered by those working in the academy. There are different ways of doing it. Its most popular contemporary expression is here
The names most associated with philosophy as way of living are Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. In postmodernity this conception of living is generally given an aesthetic stress as a shaping or creating of one's life. It is a literary interpretation.
That the debate over the higher education institutions in Australia is conducted in very utilitarian terms should come as no suprise, since Australia's public philosophy is utilitarian one. Currently, the key issue in the debate is the private/public funding of the university. The funding issue mostly ignores any consideration of the impact of the corporatisation of the liberal university that we find here. And what is rarely spoken about is the connection between the university as an ethical institution in civil society and the broadening of liberal democracy.
Consider this response to Brendan Nelson's proposed reforms to higher education. Davidson makes two points. First:
"Behind the razzle-dazzle, with the promise of an injection of an additional billion dollars of taxpayer funds, is a scheme for creating a two-tier system that will intensify the competition for a place in the top tier based on family wealth and, hence, ease the competitive pressure based on ability."
He is dead right. Creating a two-tier system is the whole point of the reform exercise. Secondly:
"All this is being done in the name of excellence and diversity (and equity). According to Education Minister Brendan Nelson, it is important that Australia gets at least one university in the top 100 in the world. What does this mean?
The best answer I can come up with is that Nelson and the others who are pushing this line mean one of the top 100 universities in terms of resources per student. Note this means measurement in terms of inputs rather than outputs."
Again, rightly said. A nation-state that aims to be part of the new knowledge economy must have one world class university. even if it is only for reasons of prestige.
And that's where things usually stand in Australia apart from the push for the full deregulation of the education sector. Davidson, however, does make an additional point in his defence of the public funding of universities. This public funding is justified in terms of 'the "external" benefits of higher education in the form of a more civilised and richer society of benefit to everybody, including those who couldn't benefit from university training.'
Therein lies the broader problem. What does "the benefits of higher education in the form of a more civilised and richer society" actually mean today. In a corporatised university the biosciences have a ready answer. It means wealth creation. It makes society richer. But what of the non-vocational humanities and social sciences? The answer is usually given in terms of civilised rather than utility. Instead of appealing to utility they usuallytalk in terms of scholarship, research for its own sake and academic values. Often they mean what Timothy Burke over at Easily Distracted has called the "the university as a sacred, artisanal institution." That looking back to the mediaeval university means an elitist conception of high culture, a sensitive shudder at the vulgarities of the market and a small exclusive university surrounded by a moat with its drawbridge drawn up. The justification? To contemplate the nature of things, says Anthony O'Hear:
"I must withdraw from the immediacy of the 21st century and its insistent noise and its economic and political imperatives. there is a case for periods of study and reflection on the best that has been thought and known, without ulterior purpose, where they can turn away from things of the world to the concentrated examination of things of the mind and spirit, including the natural sciences."
That is yesterday's answer: the university as the ivory tower and the academic as the monk. That is how such justifications by philosophers are interpreted in Canberra, which has its eye on the knowledge economy and the wealth of nations.
But the conservatives do not budge. On they go.O'Hear continues:
"...the universities must keep themselves separate from the worlds of business and the economy, and from the instrumental and utilitarian demands which quite properly operate in those areas."
O'Hear's talk about the ivory tower, illlumination and making me a better person just cuts no ice with the razor gang. They are only too happy to make the cuts to public funding deeper in the name of fostering individual responsibility and entrepreneurship in a market culture. If you cannot cut it then you become unemployed or find another job. O'Hear, as a member of the senior faculty effectively becomes an ornament in the corproate university, just like the flowers in the Vice Chancellor's rooms.
O'Hear will not back off though. He makes the big distinction between education and training.
"...this Government [Blair's Labor Government in the UK] and the last have shown themselves incapable of understanding the notion of a university as a place of education rather than of training. And that is as strong a reason as one could need for removing universities from the clutch of the state."
To be educated means being enlightened and this makes "me more of a human being, less of a stranger to the human condition, and to increase my sensitivity, awareness and reflectiveness."
And you can hear the politicians moaning. Give us a break they chorus.
Is there an alternative pathway for the non-vocational humanities and social sciences? Is there one that takes us beyond the traditional confines of yesterday and offers a viable alternative to wealth creation favoured by the utilitarian neo-liberals?
Yes there is. It is a well known pathway that has not been trodden of late. We can uncover it by picking up two threads. One is suggested by Invisible Adjunct's remark, which connects the university to civil society rather than the market:
"The way I see it: either the university is supported by a broader civil society to which the university lends some sort of support (not uncritical or unthinking, of course, but some sort of support), or civil society will cease to support the university."
What can the content of this relationship mean? A suggestion is indicated by another thread made by Timothy Burke's interpretation of the university as a sacred, artisanal institution. He codes this in terms of citizenship. He says:
"...most of the academics who decry the intrusions of the market into academic life are totally unwilling to embrace an alternative return to the university as a sacred, artisanal institution whose legitimacy derives from its relationship to the democratic public sphere and ideals of citizenship."
So the benefits of higher education from the non-vocational humanities and social sciences in the form of fostering a more civilised and richer civil society lies with an education for democratic citizenship. But what does an education for citizenship mean? Academic people smile when they hear this link between education and citizenship. They politely hear you out then turn back to the issues of jobs and funding.
Well, education for citizenship offers a way of linking the academic values of the university, taking an applied turn and reskilling. Let me spell it out in terms of philosophy. The academic value of the discipline of philosophy is acquiring the virtues of critical thinking (ie., critique); but a doctorate in philosophy only trains you to use these skills in terms of the problems of the discipline and the art and craft of being an academic. But there are no jobs in philosophy o rso few that it does not matter. Canberra is not interested in public subsidies for philosophers.
So why not apply the academic skills of critique to the problems that matter to those in civil society, rather than to the perennial problems of philosophy, such as asking what is time?; can a machine think etc ? Why not, in other words, go to work as a researcher for an non-government organization? Or for a politician? Why not a philosophy in political life? Sure that requires some reskilling because you no longer write books or academic papers. You do other kinds of writing. But it is still an intellectual practice requiring research, writing and critical thinking skills. Of course it doesn't pay to be too ambitiousabout an intellectual's adventures in politics.
Apart from power it is that reskilling bit which is where academics go a bit ga ga. They sort of choke on that even if they are attracted by power. Thus Invisible Adjunct says:
"So I've been reading up on how to leave the academy. It seems I need to identify a "skill set," the better to make my skill set "transferable." At the moment I am not optimistic. Frankly, I am not very skillful at identifying the skills that I might transfer. I am willing to attribute this to a failure of imagination.....I don't buy this business about the humanities PhD as an opportunity to hone a valuable set of skills. I just don't believe my history Ph.D. has given me "transferable skills" that will be of interest and of value outside the academy....That said, I can't spend the rest of my life decrying the waste, though waste is exactly what I think it. Since I'm not quite ready to give up and go home, it's time I learned how to maximize my utility."
This objection is expressed well.
The quick response is that it is not a waste since some valuable kill have been acquired by doing a PhD comapred to a B.A Nor is reskilling in philosophy to engage in a political life a transfer of skills. It cannot be since the work is quite different. It is a reskilling in the form of reshaping those general skills to a specific mode of work in a political life---eg. researcher/advisor with an understanding of the media.
In philosophy it means making contact with the rhetorical tradition, reading the texts associated with the classical Roman idea of philosophy in political life, thinking critically about public issues from a political perspective of making a Australia a better society and engaging in public debate. It means another way of writing philosophy to the current disciplinary conception of writing philosophy.
Oh no, you can't do that, I hear on all sides. That's just philosophy you speak of. Its not plausible for history. As Invisible Adjunct says, I just don't buy this business of about the humanities' PhD as an opportunity to hone a valuable set of skills.
Well, a PhD is a very valuable set of intellectual skills/capacities that have been acquired through a long, hard and gruelling apprenticeship in mastering a field of knowledge and in knowing to ask the right questionsand to sort through the sense from the nonsense. These are acquired through engaging with texts, interpreting texts, evaluating other conflicting interpretations of texts, making judgments about which interpretation is better and defending that judgement in open debate with one's peers. (Lots of philosophy in there).
So we have the skills to deal with political texts, the texts of public policy (ie reports etc), journal articles and the conflicts and interpretations around those texts. In learning to do this (generally on the job) we are reskilling ourselves. Its easy for those trained in the humanities because they intuitively understand themselves to be engaged with texts and do not see themselves doing science.
Reskilling? I hear the mumurs now. How horrible! Haven't I done enough reskilling acquiring a PhD? Why more?
Well, what is the practice of running a weblog but another way of using those academic skills in a different way, and does not that involve a process of reskilling on the job. A weblog is not really a part of the normal disciplinary discourse of the academy. It is more within the public sphere, connected to journalism and the little magazines of civil society. In running a weblog we are critically working away on the problems that matter to us as citizens. In running a weblog we are already connected to civil society and engaged with issues as citizens.
Public opinion is my modest attempt to show that it can be done---step away from the academy, floating free in civil society, and finding ones way through the maze with a concept of public reason. But a really good example is Lawrence Solum's excellent Legal Theory Blog I have in mind the the superb account he has been giving of the politics of the judicial confirmation process as a political war: the confirmation wars. This is legal reason as a public reason with an eye on the political process----apart from the academic material--understood in tetms of the friend/enemy distinction.
What the humanities in the university should be doing, whilst they train students to acquire their PhD's, is to broaden the craft from being useful as an academic in a particular discipline to being useful as an intellectual worker in civil society. They fail miserably at this broadening because they only see the academic job for the few as the end point; they pretty much turn a blind eye to all those who have to find intellectual work outside the academy. In doing this they have dirty hands in the Machivellean sense. They should be hauled before the tribunal of public reason and charged with incompetance, lack of accountability and irresponsibility. And then sentenced.
To speak politically, this has happened in Australia. The humanities have been judged by a liberal political reason. This has used the market to discipline the academic humanities for their shocking practices, which have wrought so much suffering and misery. In many ways they deserve the unemployment that is currently being visited on them. The tragedy is the suffering of the innocents.
This is so good. It says there is life outside the academy for those with PhD's. It says it so well. In doing so it counters a common view amongst academics who do not
"...seem able to imagine that PhDs who step outside the academic fold might find employment anywhere other than the typing pool. Is it so astonishing to consider that people with the skills and intellectual acuity to complete a doctoral degree might actually thrive outside the academy, in a wide range of jobs?"
The problem lies with the academics, their cultural capital and job snobbery. They---radicals included--- look down on those PhD's who fail to gain employment in academia and engage in intellectual practice outside the academ. This looking down happens even though these academics feel, and are, betrayed by an educational system they once had a vocation for.
'Look down' is too weak. They disdain, and have a deep contempt for, the non-academic world---especially for those engaged in intellectual practice (researchers) in political life. It is cultural snobbery.
And this rings so true:
"My other friends who were leaving, or thinking about leaving, academia and I could often, in my last year or two of graduate school, be found having what I came to call "detox sessions," where we would simply rehearse to one another the psychic assaults academic life can make on one grown dissafected with it, and reassure one another that leaving didn't make one bad, or stupid, or a failure."
That is the attack---you have to leave because you are a failure and stupid, even though there is a general "understanding in [our] bones of how bad the economic "restructuring" of higher education is for us all in the humanities. The charge of being stupid and a failure is a weapon employed by the senior academics over those in grad school doing their PhD's and over the junior faculty. Its an instrument of governance---like guilt in the Catholic religious system. Its a snobby little worldwhere knowledge is used as a weapon.
The academy turns its back on you. Closes the door. Spurns you. Rejects you for choosing an alternative career. Its the violence of that rejection by those living the tenured life which is what is so suprising.
There has been a lot of negativity towards postmodernism in Australia in the conservative academy and amongst Oz bloggers. Most of it is kneejerk rejection based on a constructing a strawman called pomo. Speaking personally I have not met pomo, but many bloggers assure me that they have had the pleasure, and they say that I much the poorer for the lack of experience. If it did I would understand why I should return to the empiricist fold.
I'm not convinced having made an acquaintance with this kind of a postmodernism:----what Invisible Adjunct calls the democratization of the ironic and skeptical stance that was once the privilege of first a senatorial and then an aristocratic elite.
Having schooled myself in continental philosophy for many a long year I noticed the lack of understanding of the hermeneutical practice of interpreting texts in an empiricist culture around the issue of writing Australian history, the fetishism of facts in the Windschuttle debate in pioneer history and the puzzlement about the practice of deconstruction. In Windshuttle debate an empiricist understanding the relationship between language, thought and world was so deeply ingrained that any questioning of it seemed tantamount to idiocy. And as for deconstruction, why it was little more than an parlour game for jaundiced left-wing intellectuals. And, as for differance, well, the less said about that sort of nonsense the better.
So I thought I would introduce this article on Derrida, legal theory and the practice of deconstruction. It is notable for its clarity and showing that legal texts are ripe for the practice of deconstruction. Deconstruction practice is not just about philosophy and literary criticism.
Jack M Balkin,the author of the article, has a good weblog too
I have always wondered about US nationalism.
From the outside---here in Australia--- it is so patriotic as a nation and very nationalistic. Fervently so. Yet it does not recognize its civic nationalism nor that of others, eg. Iraq.
This article helps an Australian to understand why.
This text recalls an old idea once the core of conventional thinking. The text says:
"AUSTRALIANS used to talk about "smoothing the pillow of the dying Aboriginal race". The racism of that idea has been thrown on history's scrap heap, but the underlying pessimism of that attitude has survived in a strange way. Most people who accepted indigenous Australians as equals in principle still didn't expect any solution to our endemic problems. Least of all did they expect a solution worked out by indigenous people."
The old idea isassimilation. It has its roots in the dispossesion of Aborigines from their lands and the nineteenth century idea of the Aborigines eventually dying out. However, assimilation has not died, nor has it been thrown on history's scrap heap. Assimilation never went away. It went backstage. It has new life with talk of genocide, multiculturalism and the national security state; a new lease of life in an Australian conservatism that is structured around Anglo nationalism.
Assimilation (sometimes the word integration was used) was a way of governing aborigines after 1945 and it represented a break with the older policy of protection on reserves in which the disappearance of the Aboriginal people was a stated aim of public policy. Assimilation replaced the older biological notions of race and biological determinism (character traits based on blood) that had become discredited. Assimilation meant absorption--- the absorption of indigenous peoples into mainstream society: the future for Aborigines lay in them becoming a part of a homogeneous Australian society, not being placed outside it in reserves.
What did assimilation as a process of being absorbed into Australian society mean? As a mode of governance it meant that Aborigines were to live like white Australians. They were to become a part of a single Australian community with the same rights and responsibilities, observing the same customs, and influenced by the same beliefs, hopes and loyalties.
Assimilation meant the denial of cultural difference. The affirmation of cultural diference gives us multiculturalism.
It does not take much to rejig assimilation to make it a political response to non-European migration. The non-white migrants were welcome here provided they lived like white Australians, observing their customs and habits, having the same loyalities etc. The social cohesion of the liberal state was premised on everybody being Anglo-Australians----the cultural patterns of the migrants had to be destroyed and replaced by the cultural patterns of the Australian way of life.
What is problematic about assimilation is the cultural assumption that the European (ie British) way of life was superior to all others--Aboriginal way of life, Chinese, Vietnamese and Iranian way of life. The future of the non-white peoples lay in discarding their remnants of their "archaic" way of life. That is why all were expected to become British; expected because it was a better way of life. What is best for immigrants and those granted asylum is that they abandon their distinctive cultural beliefs and practices and adopt those of the Anglo-Australian majority.
Lefty liberals who live within the Enlightenment tradition continually dismiss Australian conservatives as yesterdays men. It is said that they are uncomfortable with with, and disdain, the major change in social values and cultural beliefs over the last 40 years. They belong to the baggage of history.
This is a misreading. It dismisses rather than tries to understand. It is too caught up in the genocide episode surrounding the Bringing Them Home report of the 1990s, and the various denials about genocide happening in Australia.
Assimilation is alive and well in Australian conservatism. It is a core strand of this political tradition. This strand says that we Australians live in a threatening world. We are anxious, if not terrified, because the terrorists could strike at any time. Australia is a target. We need to feel as one. One-ness is necessary for the national security state. There is no room for the political affirmation of cultural difference. What is required is an unsullied Union Jack flying proudly over the Australian continent.
What assimilation means is that the conservative conception of a sense of belonging to the nation-state was historically premised on an Australian ntionalism is an ethnic white nationalism, and not on a civic one based on citizenship. Today it premised on an Anglo-nationalism. A nationalism that affirms its superiority to the barbarism of the Nazi's, the Balkans, Cambodia and Islam.
Ken Parish has a good post on the proposed market reforms to the universities by the Howard Government in the Costello Budget. Ken basically supports the general deregulatory thrust of the proposed reforms, even though he works at a regional university that will be disadvantaged by them.
However, he is worried about the impact deregulation will have on the humanities and he addresses one of the abiding concerns of this weblog:---the plight of the non-vocational humanities. Ken says that the:
"...non-vocational humanities disciplines are unlikely to attract substantial numbers of full fee-paying students, with the result that these faculties will probably continue to wither on the vine at an even faster rate than over the last decade. The "sandstones" will maintain viable non-vocational humanities faculties for prestige reasons, but regional universities will probably move incrementally towards an almost entirely vocational mix of course offerings. NTU's abolition of its English department a few years ago will be seen as the "cutting edge", though not in a favourable sense.
I would like to see substantial numbers of full-fee scholarships offered for undergraduates enrolling in non-vocational humanities disciplines, in recognition of their value to an enlightened, truly civil society and the fact that market mechanisms are simply not an appropriate means of funding them."
This recognises the connection the humanties have to fostering a democratic liberal society:---an education for citizenship. It is a good point that needs to be made again. It is an argument that is the same as advanced by public opinion and philosophy.com: in a corporate university the non-vocational humanities have little future.
Brendon Nelson, the federal Minister of Education knows it, but his reforms are selling the humanities short. In these reforms he is acting as a mouth piece for John Howard wearing his neo-liberal hat.
Ken then changes tack to address the postmodern humanities that have become politicized since the 1980s. He says that his desire for a substantial commitment to the humanities in the corporate university:
"...isn't likely to occur under a Coalition government, because most conservatives appear to see the humanities in caricatured terms as the "enemy": hotbeds of ratbag leftist activism intent on neo-marxist resistance to neo-conservative orthodoxy. There are some Labor politicians with not dissimilar views, while Simon the Unlikeable shows no sign that he even understands the dimensions of the problem."
Why is it unlikely that a revitalised non-vocational humanities will occur int he near future.? Ken says that the humanities have only themselves to blame:
"One of the problems, of course, is that the Tories' caricatured perception contains a certain core of truth. You only need to visit Gary Sauer-Thompson's blog to see what I'm talking about. In the rarefied, if increasingly poverty-stricken, domains of humanities academia, "take no prisoners" class warfare against the "neocons" is the name of the game. Either it hasn't occurred to Gary and his comrades that they're acting out a latter day version of Rorke's Drift with the "neocons" cast as the Zulus, or they've decided "death or glory" is the only honourable alternative."
This is a bit quick. I have no idea of what Rorke's Drift with the "neocons" cast as the Zulus means---but it does sound suicidal. Is it then death or glory? Hardly. Public opinion takes a very different pathway to the "take-no prisoners class warfare against the neo-cons. Public opinion has a philosophical bias in so far as it is an example of a reinvented or transformed philosophy. There is some background to reinvention here. Public opinion is a a rhetorically-informed one that operates outside the academy as a critical voice in public life.
Why so? Because, as has been argued in this weblog, philosophy needs to do something about its current situation, given the ongoing destruction of philosophy in the corporate university. Philosophy needs to find a way to survive --- to find an afterlife to being caught up in academic politics. Philosophy can do this if it sloughs off a lot of its academic baggage, undertakes a critique of itself as an professional academic discipline, takes the applied turn, recovers its roots in rhetoric and becomes engaged with public issues, such as the environmental crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin.
If philosophy is to be true to its heritage of critical thinking, then the way for a public philosophy to facilitate or foster an enlightened, truly civil society is to be critical of conventional opinion, prejudice, habitual thinking, myths, ideology associated with a neo-liberal mode of governing a population etc. Being critical of the current orthodoxy in public life is what the ethos of the enlightenment means. Critique is the lifeblood of federal democracy.
Ken Parish distorts this conception of a rhetorically-informed philosophy in political life to the extent that he locates a public eco-philosophy back inside the academy, where it is a part of the embattled humanities fighting the cultural wars by defending postmodernism and political correctness from the conservatives through a politics of difference. In doing so he makes the philosophical voice of public opinion stand for the postmodern humanities inside the sancturies of the academy. Or is it a placeholder for a bunch of old Marxists singing the Red Flag, and talking passionately about the class politics of a blood drenched history of Australian capitalism?
Not so. Public opinion takes its bearings from those old Romans who thought that philosophy can and should be a part of political life. Its approach is shaped by an Aristotlean concern for a good and flourishing life. And it works within an Australian ecological tradition
John Quiggin has a post on utilitarianism. It is a simple post and it indicates the naiviety of the utilitarian tradition in Australia.
John starts okay. He says that utilitarianism "is usually presented as an ethical postulate, that good actions are those which promote 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' or some such." Then he makes a good point when he says that "utilitarianism only makes sense as a public philosophy, that is as a way of assessing public policy, and it's pretty clear that this is how Bentham intended it." All well and true.
Things go downhill after this. John's claim that in "its role as a democratic public philosophy, utilitarianism lacks serious competitors" is plain wrong (rights-based liberalism is strong in Australia and hegemonic in the US). So is his claim that in an aristocratic society public philosophy is just individual ethics. That is a very poor reading of the aesthetic of Edmund Burke and the romantic culture and society tradition.
Both of these traditions (social contract and aesthetic ) have always contested utilitarianism, and John, like most economists, more or less brushes them aside. It is standard practice for utilitarian economists in Australia to dismiss their critics as irrational, thereby implying that only they are rational (ie. meaning they are scientific.) Utilitarianism along with economics as a value-free social science aspires to be imperialistic. The problem with such gatekeeping strategies is that the critics make good points but they are rarely taken up.
Consider the criticism made by those in the philosophical tradition (Frankfurt School) that philosophy.com is a located with. This weblog (which works under the sign of nonidentity of concepts and their objects); public opinion (which works under the sign of negative critique); and junk for code) (which works under the sign of the culture industry). They take their philosophical bearings from Adorno & Horkeimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason, Adorno's Minima Moralia and Adorno's Negative Dialectics. I mention it like that because of stuff like this on the web.
A good account of Adorno and a defence from the misleading criticism of Habermas can be found here If we apply their critique of the Enlightenment to utilitarianism then it has tow strands of argument: utilitarian reason is an instrumental reason; the utilitarian subject is powerless in the sense of being an appendage of social machinery.
Utilitarianism has subjectivised reason (its utility-maximizing individualism) and reduced it to an instrument to efficiently serve given ends (eg., using reason to efficiently allocate resources). So it became incapable of setting values and goals or setting critieria to evaluate the competing value ends of individuals (eg., between wealth creation and sustainability). Uitilitarian reason is also an instrumental reason that is the service of political power and the profit of corporations, where it has been traditionally used to dominate and control nature for human betterment.
This mode of critique does not reject not instrumental reason outright. Rather it is critical of the hegemonic role that instrumental reason in liberal society plays and desires a fuller conception of reason though not a pre-Enlightenment one. It is one that critically works within a given conceptual system (such as neo-liberalism) by focusing on the non-identity of concepts and object (eg., the concept of self-organizing market does not fully represent civil society; instrumental reason does not fully represent reason).
The second line of criticsm addresses the way that utilitarianism makes the subject the foundation of its rational choice system building. It is argued that instead of the individual being at the centre of the social universe (the market) making all those choices that drive the evolutionary process along, he/she's room to manoeuvre is tightly constrained by social and political machinery. Though the social object (corporations and the state) call the shots not the subject, the subject is not done away with. It is humbled by the priority of the object.
These two lines of criticism have enough weight (plus the references to the social contract and aethetic traditions) to affirm the point made by Lawrence Solum that utilitarianism faces serious challenges. And we have not even mentioned central problem for why it faces serious challenge----its willingness to ride roughshod over individual & minority interests (and rights) in the name of the greatest happiness (utility) for the greatest number. No have we mentioned the way that the value of the individual over a community approach is sneaked into Treasury's value-free policy prescriptions.
What John Quiggin should be saying is something far more humble. Utilitarianism is the hegemonic public philosophy for the neo-liberal state in Australia where it has been used as a weapon to roll back the welfare state and deregulated the market. If you are going to talk about utilitarianism as a public philosophy then you need to step out of the text books into public life.
This is a welcome change to the usual portraits of philosophers----dead white men.
The philosophy underpining it can be found here
I'm not sure about this as a way to popularize philosophy and take it out of academia. Philosophy really does need to be taken out of academia. There it is in danger of being buried as a discipline in decline that only specialists in academic have access to.
But this way?
aaah!
This lacks angst. And that music! And where's the movement of the historical concept? Where's the critical passion?
This looks like something old, dusty and musty that is tarted up to sell.
There are lots of quotes by one Margaret Thatcher on Australian Libertarians. She must be something of a pinup girl for a blogger called Stephen Dawson.
One entry that caught my tired eye is this quote on the nation-state from Maggie Thatcher :
"My view was -- and is -- that an effective internationalism can only be built by strong nations which are able to call upon the loyalty of their citizens to defend and enforce civilized rules of international conduct. An internationalism which seeks to supersede the nation-state, however, will founder quickly upon the reality that very few people are prepared to make genuine sacrifices for it. It is likely to degenerate, therefore, into a formula for endless discussion and hand-wringing." [Emphasis added]
What libertarianism got to do with supporting the nation state? National borders are a constraint on human liberty and freedom of movement. The nation state is al about the concentration of power. The nation state is the home of conservatism.
I thought that libertarianism was about freeing people from the constraints of traditional political institutions; and a radical form of laissez-faire in which the economic activity must be actively liberated from the bondage of needless political constraints (including the nation state) in order to achieve prosperity.
Libertarianism has to do with the free (global) market not defending the nation state. Or should we say that this quote represents the conservative moment in Australian libertarianism; the way that these two different discourses currently overlap.
I see that the negative commentator over at public opinion was looking for some handouts (public funding) from the latest Costello budget so that he could criticize a neo-liberal mode of governance. A bit of irony perhaps? A gesture of critique?
Needless to say the pessimistic commentator didn't get a crumb from Treasurer Costello. Nor is it likely that critical public intellectuals or the humanities will be publicly funded as long as utilitarianism is a public philosophy in Australia. The numbers just don't crunch too well for the humanities, no matter how much you try and jig them. Technoscience gives you more bang for the buck in terms of increasing the wealth of the nation. How can you beat numbers? Do they not mirror reality at its joints?
Yet the negative commentator has raised an important issue---the role of critique in liberal democracy. He implies that it is important hence it should be funded. Of course many violently disagree with the positive role critique plays in the public sphere of liberal democracy. Consider the views of that well-known conservative Michael Duffy. Duffy wants to dampen down critique. He says that the broad and pervasive culture of irritation (does this mean complaint?) in Australia has its roots in the expansion of the humanities in the 1970s and 1980s. So the humanites should be done away with. The universities will be better off without them. Duffy, with his gesture to Lenin, is explicit:
"What is to be done? The expansion of the universities and public artz bodies, starting in the '50s, was a response to the Cold War. Even men of the world believed there was a need to show that our ideas were better than theirs. That the appar atus they established to achieve this should be largely taken over by the Left was an unforeseen outcome. The time has come to respond, not just because the Cold War is over but to stop the production of future generations of the irritated.
Let us close down the humanities faculties and all the artz organisations now. This will hurt legions of bureaucrats, teachers and curators, but not art. Nothing could be better for art than to realise Richard Flanagan's vision and turn our artists from being merely irritated to passionately outraged."
Ken Parish says that Duffy's article is "truly inspired." Ken teaches law at a regional university in the Northern Territory. Law is generally considered to be a part of the humanities. So Ken is doing himself out of a job for the sake of the nation. Can that be right? Is Ken being ironic?
On a more serious note check out Duffy's smoke and mirrors:---the way critique as a part of a liberal education has been reduced to 'irritation'. Critique, once seen integrally tied to democracy is now represented by Duffy as whingeing, moaning and feeling sorry for oneself.
What we see here is an expression of Australian conservatism's dumping the Enlightenment heritage. Critique was okay for getting rid of the Absolute monarchs and old those old customs, habits and traditions in order to increase the scope of human freedom. But critique has done its job. It is not to be allowed any more freedom. It has no role in the present. It needs to be dampened down, if not squashed.
So what is wrong with Duffy's view of critique? Most people do think it is being negative, criticising, harping and so something destructive. Hence it should be dampened down and replaced with looking on the brighter side of things; we shoudl be looking at the good things not the bad ones. There is a deep underground hostility to critique in Australia and Duffy has voiced the conservative understanding of why critique is bad.
The key problem with Duffy's squashing critique is that he overlooks the way it greases the wheels of a federal democracy. Shortly the Senate will be considering the Costello budget, and most political journalists say that the Senate will reject the neo-liberal reforms of health and education that move towards the consumer paying for these public services. Is this not the Senate engaging in political critique of the policies of the Howard administration?
Oh I know the response of the Howard Government. It is much the same as their old enemy Paul Keating. They are rehearshing their lines already. We have a mandate to govern. The Senate is blocking our legislation. They are unrepresentative. They should back down and pass the government's legislation. Is this not a political critique of the Senate in a federal democracy.
No? How about the criticism of the former Governor General, Sir William Deane, for being political by the Howard Government? For his strong support for reconcilation between white and black. How about the criticism of the High Court for its judicial activism by Ministers in the Howard Government and the Liberal movement? Is this not political critique?
These examples serve to make my point that Australian federalism, with its separation of political power between the judiciary executive and the legislature, depends upon critique to function. Each of these institutions subjects the other to critique, thereby reducing the despotism that each institution would gravitate to without critique. Critique is an essential part of the political process of checks and balances federal democracy; a cornerstone of political reason if you a partial to foundational metaphors.
This perspective enables us to understand the significance of Duffy's reduction of critique to irritation. He us saying that citizens should not engage in critique as part of the process of checks and balances. Since they moan and whinge they are not mature people who can think for themselves, have something to say and are capable of resisting established opinion of the day and the authority of existing political institutions. Citizenship is just as much a part of the political process as the legislature. So Duffy is bringing critique in the hands of citizens to a halt.
But Duffy's conservatism is doing more than bringing critique to a halt in the public sphere. He is telling us citizens to capitulate before reality: we underlyings should keep quite. The guardians are in control. They know what they are doing. They are guided by their inherited stands and values. They--as superior beings--- have things in hand and are doing a good job. So those who engage in critique undermine unity, cause devision and are subvert established political authority. Critique weakens that authority. It is wrong for that established political authority is in the right hands.
I just love this guide for prospective students. I had forgotten that there is such a thing as philosophical humour. Link courtesy of Tom Runnacles
Honestly its all about dead white men walking.
This lecture series by Richard Rorty in Oxford looks interesting in light of the current diifficulties facing the humanities. The link is courtesy of Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory Blog/
What sort of role can/should philosophy play in our culture? My guess is that Rorty will say something along the lines of it being a rhetorical/literary role; something that will enable philosophy to step outside the academy and find a non-academic life of its own in civil society. (Does anyone know if these lecture series go online?) Rorty opens up a space to think differently about the way philosophy can be practiced.
Maybe the only future for a discipline like philosophy lies in its capacity for self-criticism, and consequently, for reinventing itself creatively. It is a romantic and Deleuzean conception of philosophy. And this is how it reinvents itself creatively: philosophy creates new concepts.
Where does that leave philosophy as rhetoric; as a public reason? Do we have the development of different kinds or forms of philosophy that draw on all sorts of texts? Do we insist on the differences and the diverse styles and ways of writing philosophy in postmodernity? Insist on the repeating the different ways of forming questions?
This long post by Jacob Levy at The Volokh Conspiracy on Political Philosophy and Political Theory (April 15, 8.10am) is very good. I missed it when it was first posted.
I can basically confirm what Jacob says here about political philosophers and political theoriestsin the modern liberal academy. He says
"The two groups study much the same questions, read and write for much the same journals, and attend many (not all) of the same conferences. They are intellectual next-door neighbors; to mix metaphors, the wall between the humanities and the social sciences distinction is very thin at this point. But they have different institutional homes."
They are different institutional homes. Philosophy.com comes out of a philosophy department rather than a political science/theory department. It was a philosophy department dominated by Anglo-American philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and epistemology and which had little contact with the political theoriests in the political science department even though they read the same texts----Kant, Hegel, Marx etc. The concern in the Anglo-American philosophy department was with the rigor of 'the argument' above all else, and the political theoriests (like the literary theoriests) were looked down upon because their argument was weak.
Of course the latter argued. This argument stuff is all about gatekeeping since continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno and Derrida were also dismissed because they did not argue. It was the gatekeeping that created the narrow insular world that deflected all the cross overs in the humanities (and affirmed the cross overs between philosophy and the natural sciences).
Jacob gives another way the distinction works. He says that:
"Given the structure of American doctoral programs, this means that a political theorist and a political philosopher-- even if they have complete overlap in their core interests-- will be differently trained. The philosopher will almost certainly study formal logic, very likely study ethics and moral philosophy broadly rather than political philosophy narrowly (and, often, legal philosohy as well), and study at least some topics from philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaethics. The theorist may well take statistics and/or formal theory (i.e. rational choice and game theoretic mathematical models). The theorist will certainly study one or more of American politics, comparative politics, and international relations in some depth, and may also study American or comparative constitutional law."
It's very true. What ithis means in practice is that political theorists are more interested in the history of political thought than are political philosophers. When Anglo-American political philosophers turn to the history of political thought, they do so to extract an argument, not to study a particular person or group of persons, set of influences, or the historical context. It is the argument not the history that is of concern.
What Jacob does not detail is the reaction that has taken place to this modernist Anglo-American philosophy from the 1980s. This is a key concern as it lead to the embrace of continental philosophy and the analytic/continental divide. becames far more important and the political philosophy/political theory divide fades. The latter distinction only remains a crucial one within the horizons of Anglo-American high culture. As Chris Bertram over at observes "real difference between the two environments is, I suspect, as much a matter of who you have lunch with, go to the pub with after the seminar and so on." Even then, American and British cultures give the distinction a different feel, as Tom Runnacles observes here.
My reaction as a grad student reading Hegel was one of recoil to Anglo-American philosophy. That recoil saw me take the history turn (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is the crucial text), situate myself within the Frankfurt School, then read the texts of continental philosophy from the perspective of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. The abiding concern was to find as a way out of the analytic bottle and to find a different way to write philosophy. The Continental philosophical tradition provided a doorway. the Anglo-Continental divide becames far more important, and the political philosophy/political theory divide faded.
Jacob's putting the anglo-american/ continental distinction to one side is taken up by Russell Arben Fox.(Tuesday, April 15, 2003) It is important to do this. What was deeply resisted in the philosophy department was introducing texts by Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Richard Rorty, Hannah Arendt, along with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno and Jurgen Habermas. What we have here is the philosophical background to the cultural wars that have their source in the analysis of cultural predicament of American liberal society articulated by Allan Bloom in his The Closing of the American Mind (1987). It is here that we find the conservative charge of the nihilism of a New Left that had drank too deeply from the Nietsche/Heidegger tradition of continental philosophy. Behind Bloom, of course, lies Leo Strauss.
This deep resistance made it Anglo-American philosophy department, despite the undergraduate courses on Hegel and Marx and dialectics. The resistance was because they were not really doing philosophy and if they were doing philosophy some of the time they just plain wrong. That was known without reading any of the texts----apart from dipping into Rorty who was dismissed as a frivolous litterati spinning cocktail chit chat.
As Mathew Yglesias comments this analytic/continental divide was a bit of a furphy. What he says about the division between Anglo-American and "continental" philosophy is interesting and useful. He says the distinction is misleading:
"....because many (most?) of the progenitors of so-called "analytic" philosophy were Germans or Austrians -- Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Popper, etc. Rather, I think what you're looking at is the anti-historicism that's been adopted by most English-speaking departments as part of the quest to put philosophy on the secure path of a science."
He's dead right. The key to the conception of philosophy as a science goes back to Hobbes. What we find in the texts of Hobbes is the rejection of the rhetorical tradition and the turn to a scientific philosophy based on system building theory, a foundation of a few axioms and deductive reasoning. So the recoil from analytic philosophy is from a particular conception of philosophy---one based on mathematics and natural science (physics)---to finding another way of writing philosophy.
Hence the significance of Wittgenstein's therapeutic conception of philosophy: it enables us to find our way out of the analytic flybottle.
I spent Sunday morning catching up with reading some of what has been written in the bogsphere whilst I was on holidays. A lot has been happening. In the blogs on academia I can only pick up on the traces of what has already been said and gone the way of yesterday's papers for an Australian audience. Maybe I can then point to a direction for the humanities.
I came across this post by Kenneth Mostern (courtesy of Easily Distracted) on academia. Kenneth says he once was committed to the academic institution, was someone who, having succeeded in getting the proverbial "good faculty job," and considered it his political responsibility to care about the institution. In short he accepted that academic life was a vocation----as did I. Both of us lived within the Marxist tradition within the liberal university.
And that's where the problem lies. As Kenneth says:
"Yet in a short period of time this caring, this emotional commitment, had apparently evaporated. Academia had gone from being my vocation to being the independent source of my most extreme alienation."
Kenneth then describes academic life to a T. I can only concur and affirm with what he has said in this essay about the academic vocation coming to an end. The essay has aroused various and insightful by fellow webloggers some of which are quite pertinent for those working in the humanities. A useful summary is offered here by Russell Arbern Fox over at Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg. What does the end of the academic vocation mean for those working in the humanities?
Kenneth says that the cause of his alienation from academic life was that he was in:
"...a department without an intellectual life, where once smart people did everything in their power to avoid a real conversation, looking forward only to the next time they had an excuse to leave the city.....no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship. Faculty are socializing, going out, schmoozing all the time, and the ideas that supposedly drive the work they do are not being discussed.....The one conversation everyone is having incessantly is the one about the micropolitical maneuvers within the department. This conversation is, of course always done with armor on, with an eye toward alliances and enemies already made, with everyone watching to find out which camp the new faculty member will join."
My experiences exactly. Academia was no longer a haven from the heartless world of the markeplace: it had been deeply penetrated by the ethos of Hobbesian shopkeepers full of mutual antagonism and suspicion. This lack of conversation in the heartland of liberalism does not bode well for liberalism
Kenneth then says:
"While it remains true that the power differential between tenured and untenured faculty makes the ubiquity of fear particularly threatening to the careers of junior faculty members, the longer one stays the more one discovers that one's unhappiness is simply an example of the larger misery of faculty members. Senior faculty don't exactly help or support one another either. Tenure might lead to a sense of security; it surely does not breed happiness."
Academia is a miserable and unhappy place since "department life alienates people once committed to the life of the mind." Many academics are miserable, unhealthy and depressed. They continue to survive. But, as Hippo Dignity, says, there is life outside academia; it is an option to spending stressful, impoverished years "plugging away" in the hope that you just might "eventually" land that tenured job. This post by Hippo Dignity captures the tough reality of the academic job market in the humanities. In Australia there is little prospect.
Like Kenneth my leaving academia for a political life produced the sense that I could finally get on with the things that are genuinely important to me. I was time serving in academia, drying up as a human being, dying inside. Like Kenneth it fractured my romantic relationship with Suzanne; created conflicts about location; it lacked any sense of community; had little intellectual conversation; and very little by way of intellectual energy. My basic mode of being was a melancholic one of living a damaged life in a cruel authoritarian environment. Terror was inside the dreary teaching and research routines of the regional liberal university.
The essay was picked up by Timothy Burke over at Easily Distracted. He responded to it by addresssing what he says is the "puzzling vacuum at the heart of academic life." He loves academia, but he is acutley aware of that the vacuum at the heart of the university is the strange conversational silence about the link between academic work and the national conversation about the sort of society we want to live within. Timothy says the vacuum of 'we never talk anymore' is not because academics are too busy----that is the reason that is mostly commonly given. It has more to do with a way of life that has inculcated a fear of speaking plainly and feelings of shame, paranoia and wariness.
So true. That is why such a damaged life is more than the necessity for professional academics becoming specialists working on a narrow range of problems in a single area. Its not the specialization per se thats the problem; its the gap beween the ideal and reality in this mode of life.
Dump the illusions about academic life and what do you get? There are other ways to engage in intellectual practice. There are other forms of life that are more supportive. There are other conversations going on in civil society outside academia. What this points to is that the humanities have lost their way. To put it philosophically: the price of their liberty is their homelessness. Hence the deep sense of futility that is impossible to shake off coupled to the sense of nihilism that threatens to keel over into jaded disillusion that borders on despair. The humanities no longer feel at home in the world.
They have lost the justification for their existence----moral education, construction of new forms of subjectivity, civic virtue as counters to the anarchy of the marketplace. Moral education and civic virtue are old words that have lost their currency; but they once expressed the sense that there is more to social existence than naked self-interest and anarchy of the free market and the coercive law and power of the state. The humanities were once the elite legitimating forms of the liberal social order, but their traditional versions of subjectivity (unique, autonomous, self-realizing etc) are inadequate to our experience of deregulated market life. These old cultural forms are called into question by the very processes of the social system that we live, and this finds academic expression in phrases like 'death of the subject', 'death of the author' etc
Yep, that is a bit of old Marxist analysis. Crude, but sufficient for the job at hand, which is to figure out what all this means for the future of the humanities. What it suggests----and this is the whole point of the post---- is that we do not have the new words to express the public sense that naked/raw self-interest and the will to power are not all there is to human life. That old insight at the dawn of the liberal capitalist order still stands. We feel this public sense in our bodies and we know it in our emotions. We try to make do with the old empty, reified concepts because living life as defined by the free market ----as a gang of robber barons or having the hand in the till----is too unbearable. But the old words and cultural forms don't do the job anymore. So we feel stranded and live in a vacuum.
The vacuum in the public conversation is currently filled by the conservative discourse of God, family, freedom, national security and terrorism, and that gives liberal humanists the historical tremors. But they know that their own inadequate categories are adrift from their sensuous practice. Yet we---including old Marxists---- continue to desperately hang onto these old liberal words even though we know that they are but ghostly imprints of our history that mutely gesture to a better form of life.
My concern is with the humanities not the social sciences. The latter have largely become an instrumental reason that act to faciltate the governance of a population by the liberal state. (No doubt many sociologists would disagree. they would say that its right for economics but not sociology). However, it is the humanities that have been traditionally concerned with meaning, value and purpose of a common human life in a liberal social order.
Continental philosophers since Schiller have been concerned with these themes under the sign of the aesthetic (now culture). They have considered this concern to be a political project. Schiller, for instance, is remembered for the powerful passionate protest at the human devastation caused by the emergent liberal capitalist order in the name of the aesthetic education. That wrecking of human capacities has now spread to academia and so is no longer concentrated in factories and call centres.
In an interesting response to this post by Invisible Adjunct on the status of the humanities Archidamus-on-the-Web makes the following comment. It is stated that:
"As for all the concerns about a dearth of intellectual community in the humanities, I've always thought the humanistic disciplines focused more than anything else on the cultivation of the individual. Even the most social of our activities--teaching--is focused (at least in my view) on individual students. Sure, the job market stinks, academic politics are petty and pathetic, but for now at least, my "job" is to sit around and read books. It'd be nice if I can make a career of it, or I might decide to do something else. But whatever I prefer, do I really have the right to complain if no one's willing to pay me to just sit around and read books and teach students information of questionable use?"
Are the humanistic disciplines focused more than anything else on the cultivation of the individual? Well, many liberals would say yes. We cultivate ourselves to make us better people (self-realization) than the engineers and the accountants. The culturvation of the mind is how the humanities understood themselves within the two cultures debate in the twentieth centur.
It was a plausible defence of the humanities once. But it would go down like a lead ballon in Canberra when philosophers hitched a ride on Virgin Blue to plead their case for more public funds for philosophy in the forthcoming budget. The politicians would like to hear something along the lines of the humanities as creative industries. I would not advise any philosopher trying to make that defence unless they wanted to get a bit of pleasure in being treated with contempt by those who tacitly understand Australia to be a nation of Hobbesian shopkeepers located in a space of mutual, unsociable antagonism.
Can we give a better defence of the humanities? One that sounds plausible? Here's one based on the aesthetic that comes from German philosophy. Its got legs as they say in politics. It is derived from salvaging what is usuable, viable, valuable, from a shipwrecked, liberal humanist tradition that once stood resolutely and proudly against instrumental reason of science.
The humanities speak of the humane, the concrete, particularity and humane subjectivity within a common world of everyday life. This stands in contrast to the formalism and abstraction of modern theory represented by the mathematical equations and computer modelling of modern economics. (Philosophically this division can be traced back to Aristotle contra Plato). So the aesthetic refers to sensuous human perception and emotion; it refers to a lived life with its sense of belonging in a common world.
This way of talking can be given a materalist twist by reading humane, concrete, particularity in terms of the sensuous human body. It is the body versus the theoretical. As embodied beings we are in the world as experiencing organisms not objects; and so we act in the world in terms of sensusous self-actualising activity.
We can then talk about the powers and capacities of the body and connect this to autonomy and self-referentiality as a mode of being. As embodied creatures we live a certain sort of life and require certain conditions to enable us to live a flourishing life. (Reading the 18th century understanding of aesthetic throught the Aristotlian tradition). Hence we have a certain kind of subject in early modernity: sensitive, passionate and individualist linked by fellow feeling and bodiy affection.
That bodily life is lived within a social order of modernity and it is shaped by habits, pities, customs, sentiments, affections, opinion (what Hegel called Sittlichkeit or concrete ethical life) as well as public law and abstract right. Within that liberal social order the particularity of bodily desire is educated or encultured (Bildung) through practice within a world of social bonds, sentiment and civic virtue.
Those of a lefty persuasion would then say that the creative capacities of the body are inscribed by law and mutilated by social structure, and so we have the suffering human body and a damaged life. Hence we have an emancipatory politics that has its roots in a rebellious, desiring body that recoils from the hegemony of the theoretical.
This justification has got legs. It goes without saying that asking for lots of public funds for a critique concerned about the suffering of others cause by the market and the state would not receive a good hearing from the educational reformers and bureaucrats in Canberra. You might get something if the argument was phrased in terms of a community of sensibility (need another word for sensibility) and mutual solidarity.
In picking up on my reading of some favourite weblogs I missed whilst on weeks holiday in Mallacoota I came across this paragraph from Invisible Adjunct's great blog on the influence of the Straussians in the US. It says:
"One thing I do know: Liberalism has taken quite a beating of late: we liberals have been kicked around the block and back again more times than we care to mention. I think the time has come -- indeed, the time has almost come and gone -- but there is still time for a bold re-assertion of the principles of the Enlightenment. Never mind "refusing the blackmail of Enlightenment." There's no blackmail: you are free to accept or reject its tenets as you see fit. But you do have to take sides, sometimes there is no other option than to take a side. I propose coming down on the side of freedom, equality, material progress, and a resolutely this-worldly orientation toward politics."
These fighting words should be read in the context of a recoil from a Leo-con conservatism. I have a lot of sympathy for the words even though as a good lefty, I've done my bit to give liberalism a bit of a beating for its univeralism, abstraction and individualism.
I find the tendency to abstraction in this post. Who on the centre left would not come down on the side of "freedom, equality, material progress, and a resolutely this-worldly orientation toward politics"? Who on the centre left would embrace unfreedom, inequality, material regression and utopian politics? Do I sense a bit of blackmail here?
The question we should ask is: what is the content of the Enlightenment's material progress in the late twentieth century. This is what I judged it to be. The equivalent in the US would be the damming of the Columbia River. As with River Murray in Australian many Americans hold that the Columbia is now environmentally threatened and that drastic action should be taken to reverse the changes made to the turn the Columbia into an organic machine.
Its a quick hit I know. And the Soviets were even worse. But that is what the liberal Enlightenment historically meant as a resolutely this-worldly orientation toward politics concerned with material progress and human betterment. Human betterment meant more than wealth; it also included freedom and equality. The liberal Enlightenment has historically stood for environmental destruction as the price for human wellbeing. Liberalism deserves a beating for the way that it has turned nature into an industrial machine. Tis liberalism as a way of life that needs to be placed under the critical eye.
Nor is it a simple matter of being free to accept or reject liberalism's tenets as you see fit. These tenets are part of are heritage; deeply embedded in our culture and practices and very difficult to shake off. The public policy debates largely take place within liberalism and so are largely family quarrels. Step outside the horizons of liberalism and you step into a big black hole and so are not heard. Such is the way of things for those like Mr Jones who go to Canberra.
Don't we need a little bit more of this and that? A little bit more of an immanent critique of liberal reason? A critique that is part of the Enlightenment tradition but is deeply critical of it? We could with a bit of Hegel to counter Strauss and Mill/Locke and to help us ask what sort of freedom are we talking about? A bit of Nietzsche to take a hammer to the idols of modernity? And a little bit of Marx to ask what sort of equality are we talking about here would not go astray?
And just to put the cat amongst the pigeons I have always been very partial to Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism. See here and here.
It is a slow return to work after the week long holiday in the wilderness around Mallacoota Inlet. The holiday was a leaving or escaping from a stressful urban life to replenish my health. It is the emotion that all the 4 wheel drive adverts appeal to as they sell their latest airconditioning bushbashing model for jaded middle class consumers. It is sad to see romanticism trashed.
The Croajingolong wilderness on the eastern coast of Australia near the Victorian and New South Wales border was such a contrast to the standard view that nature is an enemyand that it has to be tamed and reconstructed into an agricultural and industrial machine. Despite the inroads of industrial tourism and a history of local commercial fishing that had depleted fish stocks, there was recognition that wilderness had intrinsic value.
The latter view was embodied in the landscape we drove through as we travelled from Adelaide to the Great Dividing Range. The landscape had been shaped by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electricity Scheme. It assumed that technology can change for the better, that the power of science can solve all the nation's problems, that scientific practice is apolitical and that technology + science can provide the knowledge to harness natural resources for the benefit of the nation's population.
The Snowy Mountains Scheme embodied the view that modernizing country through science and techology was the role of the liberal state. Under this modernist ethos the broad development of the natural resources of the nation required a partnership between science and the state to undertake research and promote industrialization. The Snowy Mountains Scheme is a twentieth century icon of Australian modernity.
So the history of the landscape is one of rivers are transformed into organic machines and old growth forests become wood factories through the use of brute force technology. Tomorrow's bounty in the form of economc growth will be the result of todays technology (agriculture+electricity+dams) is the justification. This utilitarianism favours short-term economic considerations over long-term environmental ones.
Technology and science are then linked to the bureaucracies, universities and financial institutions by the political machinery to create a brute force politics that pushes aside all opposition to development.
That was the history of the landscape I drove through on the way to spend a week in the wilderness. That history is being reworked or transformed in the knowledge economy with biotechnology and genetic modification under a neo-liberal mode of governance under the guise of excellence. The shift is from creating the wealth of nations from physical assets (natural resources) to creating wealth from the nation's intellectual resources through the development of science-based industries. It is the commercial importance of science and technology that is stressed as the way to shape the nation state's future.
In the knowledge economy the loose linkages between the bureaucracies, universities, industry and financial institutions are tightened by the state to shape and structure the exploitation of intellectual capital for the sake of wealth creation.