COMMENTARIES ON JOHN ANDERSON BY FORMER STUDENTS OR COLLEAGUES

Transcription

1 COMMENTARIES ON JOHN ANDERSON BY FORMER STUDENTS OR COLLEAGUES W.H.C. Eddy It is a great honour for me to give the John Anderson Memorial Lecture for 1972 and, before I come to my lecture proper, I should like to say a few things about Anderson himself. By these lectures we try to commemorate Anderson s work as a philosopher, his integrity, his lifelong effort to develop a rigorous system, the breadth of his interests, the fertility and daring of his thought in many fields, his devotion to the academic life and his clear ideas about the moral content of that life which involved him in many public controversies from the Anderson case in 1931 to the Orr case and Gough case in the late fifties and early sixties. I have heard it said that as a teacher, Anderson did everything wrong but that in spite of this he was a great educator. I agree that he was a great educator but I cannot agree with the first part of that assertion. Its main reference I think is to the fact that he dictated his lectures. No doubt powerful arguments can be brought against this practice though Anderson also brought powerful arguments in its favour. But, setting this aside, he certainly did many things right. His example of concentration on issues in three years of lectures I heard only one joke which I shall mention in a moment and no other form of titillation of his audience his careful correlation of essay subjects and lectures and their timing, his meticulous reading lists, and the passionate care he took in his marking these were all models for any teacher. He was able to recall, 20 years later, the marks he had given me for a particular essay and to discuss its contents with me. These are two excerpts from Adult Education and its Intellectual Environment, Eddy s 1972 John Anderson Memorial Lecture, reprinted in Quadrant, January-February, 1973, Vol. XVII, No. 1, pp P.H. Partridge Anderson as Educator My fellow-contributors to this symposium will be explaining and discussing the more particular and technical aspects of Anderson's doctrines. I shall speak of him as a teacher, and seek to explain the reasons for the influence he exerted over his students, the impact he made upon the intellectual life of his university in the first decade or so after his arrival in Sydney. That influence was greatest during the thirties. Anderson arrived in Sydney in 1927, which was also the year in which I entered the university. I intend to dip into my memory to see if I can recollect what it was in his teaching that caused so many of us to fall under his sway. What were the general characteristics of Anderson's teaching which attracted students 1

2 to him, which caused him to be so novel and compelling a force in the life of the university during the early years? I suppose each of his students would want to speak for himself, and each perhaps would give a different answer. I can only speak for myself, and, in my own case, I would place first the search for coherence and comprehensiveness that characterised his teaching. He had retained from his idealist training the notion of a philosophy as being a system or a "position" - the idea that a philosophy provides some fundamental apparatus of understanding and criticism which illuminates all the fields of inquiry: science, politics, morals, psychology, art. It is a conception of the nature or role of philosophy which has since lost standing; nevertheless, it was his development of this conception in his lectures, writings, and not least in informal discussion, which helps, I think, to explain his impact as an educator. I do not want to suggest that he was not primarily inter ested in the technical problems of logic and of philosophy proper: this would not be true, and if his philosophical views had not been so original and interesting, his development of them in neighbouring fields would not have been so interesting either. But Anderson certainly believed, and induced his students to believe, that philosophy is not simply another specialism, but that it is, in some sense, the most important of all subjects: in the sense that it gave one a necessary key to the understanding of science, human nature, society and art. From Anderson, then, we got a sense (it may have been partly an illusory sense, but I won't argue that matter) of the relatedness of the different branches of culture; the idea of a common theoretical or "critical" approach to the different fields of intellectual creation and discovery. Anderson's philosophy was, from one point of view, a criticism of culture. For that reason, it provided an education of an unusually broad and fundamental kind. It was not merely that he introduced one, as any other cultivated and perceptive teacher might have done, to the important things that were being said and thought in the contemporary world and linked them to the history of thought. Anderson was, of course, no mere expositor, not even merely a critic. He was still very young when he came to Sydney: between 1927 and 1937, he was thinking strenuously, still developing his position." And consequently those of us who studied with him (or later worked with him) had the experience of being associated with a thinker engaged in the work of creating a very impressive intellectual construction. He was hard at it, working over the thought of many writers - Russell, Moore, Alexander, Marx, Freud, and so on - accepting, discarding, modifying, relating, reaching out to take in new territory. This is what made him a great teacher in that decade. He commanded few of the usual arts and skills of the "good teacher"; he was never popular, spectacular or "interesting." But he has been one of the few original and also systematic thinkers who have worked in this country (perhaps, in the field of the humanities, the only one). And his closest pupils at least were in touch, therefore, with an ambitious project of intellectual construction going forward: they could observe at first hand what intellectual creation is like. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold." At a certain stage the impetus weakened. One explanation maybe this: Anderson never could have been wholly satisfied in finding solutions to philosophical problems in the narrower sense. His philosophising was fed not only by absorption in intellectual exploration or discovery, but also by moral and political passion. In this respect, his mind has never lost the impress of his Hegelian predecessors and his Marxist and socialist 2

3 teachers. Moral and social criticism, a view of the nature or foundations of culture, are for him an essential object of the philosophical enterprise. It was his idea of a "fully worked-out position," taking in the various as pects of life and culture, including the moral and political which in his case fed the intellectual fire. And which, incidentally, attracted to him students of such diverse interests. What he had derived from or built upon Marxism was, for this reason, vital to his whole position. Perhaps, then, it was the re -examination, and ultimately the total rejection, of Marxism which was forced upon him by the course which Communism took in the thirties and forties which halted the forward-moving direction of his thinking, and threw him so much into the posture of intellectual resistance and opposition. I have been emphasising "creative." Anderson himself has always made a great deal of "criticism"; he has often identified education with criticism. I must add a separate word about this. Anderson's students learned from the example of his lectures (and, in the thirties, could not have learned this lesson as wel l from any other teacher) what critical thought is: its power when brought to bear upon fundamental conceptions and beliefs. And what was important was not only his extraordinary single-mindedness and concentration in pursuit of a piece of intellectual analysis and argument; one must remember also the character of his own beliefs. He brought to Sydney a new kind of philosophically -based social criticism. From him one learned that the idols and orthodoxies of social life - the state, religion, patriotism, loyalty, the assumptions and conventions of accepted morality - were neither natural necessities nor matters simply of taste or opinion, but legitimate subjects of philosophical argument. He employed against the pieties of our own time and place the Socratic weapons, the logical examination of meanings and justifications. It seems to be a very simple thing to make a point of; yet 1 doubt whether anyone had questioned religion or political piety in Sydney in quite that way. The point is not that Anderson's own views were themselves radical and impious; there were other teachers, both earlier and contemporary, who had rejected some of the political and moral orthodoxies: J. F. Bruce, for example, brought to bear in his lectures a brilliant sarcasm against many aspects of religion and the state; and may indeed have had a greater immediate influence upon many students uninterested in coherent argument. What was novel and important in Anderson was his manner of rejecting them: by confronting them with a considered and coherent philosophical position. A philosophical position built from many diverse and transmuted materials: philosophical realism and empiricism, Marxism, Freudian psychology, and material derived from literary sources, writers like Shaw and Wells and Bennett. Anderson, the critic, was an important influence; yet 1 feel that often he has been too much identified with criticism. I know that some of his colleagues (some of those, e.g., who saw him in action only on university committees) picture him as a critic of almost inhuman acuteness and pertinacity, a corrosive mind, but essentially obstructive and unconstructive. I have heard it asserted that this is the type of mind he created in his students. It is a false picture. For it was from Anderson that many of us learned the excitement of speculation. At his best he had (as I still think) unusual powers of theoretical imagination, a rare capacity for throwing out novel and illuminating ideas; he was a great starter of theoretical hares. And he could do this in almost every field that engaged his interest; in philosophy proper, in ethics, psy - chology, politics, literary criticism. His theoretical fertility was, in fact, one of his attractions as a teacher. And, as a thinker, he appeared to be most att racted and 3

4 stimulated by those who had the same temper and capacity - men like Alexander, Vico, Marx, Sorel or Freud. On the other hand, he was no great scholar; 1 do not think that he has ever had any particular respect for scholarship as such when not combined with theoretical power. He would probably be content to appropriate to himself Hobbes's arrogant selfjustification: if had read as many books as others have, I would be as foolish as they are. He was fond of saying, I am like Berkeley - a non-reading philosopher" (pretty hard on Berkeley, and even hard on himself); and I remember his once rejecting my praise of an historian with - "but he's a bloody bookworm!" There was a serious weakness here. Not only in his own work, but even more in the training of students he was preposterously indifferent to the techniques and the craftmanship of scholarship. But Anderson never does things by half, and he suffers more cruelly than most men from the defects of his qualities. No doubt, like many others, he would have accomplished something less as an original thinker if he had been less self-absorbed and selfenclosed within his own thought. But he has paid a rather heavy price, as 1 shall suggest. Undoubtedly he has displayed a great gift of theoretical imagination, although it is a gift he has not fully exploited. His patience and application have not equalled his imagination. He has rarely tried to work out in detail his own theoretical insights or to apply his often exciting intimations of truth to the emp irical facts they purport to explain. And thus almost all of his potentially most important work remains as fragments and sketches; and 1 am not speaking here of the submerged and possibly greater part - the material of several books which is buried in students lecture notes. Many things have contributed to this sad result (which we hope he will use the years of retirement to retrieve), and one of them is what I have just mentioned: his own intellectual self-sufficiency, his lack of interest in the parall el work of his contemporaries. Such a continuous interest may have provided the stimulus for some further working-out; certainly the absence of this interest has impaired both the quality and the influence of his thought. I do not know why, but, from the time of his arrival in this country, he has not attempted to feed it into the mainstre am of international philosophical and social speculation, or during these three decades to replenish it from the stream. And, since Anderson has been an acute and original thinker, the river as well as the tributary has lost something of value. There are other things as well, strongly-held views and quirks of character. He has always insisted that controversy and polemic arc conditions of intellectual or cultural vigour; and he himself has always had an unquenchable appetite for it - though I remember R. C. Mills once describing his brother, the late Professor William Anderson, as the "argumentative member of the Anderson family. It cannot be doubted that, as a result of some of the great controversies in which he has taken part, he has influenced the course of intellectual history in Sydney and per haps further afield. I think this is true of his stand on several occasions on academic freedom; and his sustained polemic against Stalinism in the early thirties and later still against Marxism of any colour deeply affected the political thinking of Sydney students. But Anderson is perhaps wrong on the general question of the functions of polemic; he might claim Russell as a co nfirming instance, but perhaps after all addiction to polemic or controversy, very much attention to public issues, do not combine well with and assist sustained theoretical path-breaking. It is an arguable 4

5 point; in any case, Anderson has always held, I think, that participation in political activity is a source of strength to the philosophical thinker. But much of the controversy he has engaged in has been in the academic politics of his own university. He has given years of his life to the interminable wranglings of academic politics. And this is connected with one of the strangest features of his character. He is as local as a magpie. It would be hard to think of a man of comparable ability who has lived so much immersed in the local scene, and so much enclosed in his own personal circle. The scene being so limited, provincial, remote from the world's intellectual centres, the personal circle so much below him in intellectual calibre, the original thinker in him has clearly been struggling against very heavy odds. But as a teacher he has striven not only to create a philosophical "position," as I have explained, but also to create from among his pupils what he calls a "school. The "school," as he sees it, is characterised by its members' adherence to a common position, Anderson's position. He has had his "school"; the intellectual and emotional relationships with those within his circle, students and others, have been extraordinarily close. This is one of commonest criticisms of his teaching: it has often been said that he produces too much intellectual uniformity, that he docs not encourage independence, that his "school" exhibits too often the intellectual and emotional peculiarities of a sect. This is much less true now than it may have been in the early thirties, because many of Anderson's students have had time to stu dy in other universities abroad. They can begin the task of bringing his thought into critical relation with the other important work that has been done in philosophy in the last thirty years. But Anderson himself has chosen to devote himself to the building of a local Sydney school; he has exerted influence more by lecturing and by intimate association than by writing: but he has not tried to do what he could easily have done - play a part in the great philosophical world. As I have already suggested, I think it a great pity. But, no doubt, on this as on all other points, he would not lack an argument to defend himself with. For some reason there comes here to my mind a remark I once heard him make of a colleague who, during the last war, took leave from the university to accept an important war-time appointment. "Poor --- he believes in sacrificing the interests of his university to those of his country." It is the kind of joking remark that sticks in the memory because it somehow expresses a whole personality. This one happens to be also the epitome of a political philosophy. W. M. O Neil, Some Notes on Anderson s Psychology, The Australian Highway, September, 1958, p. 69 and p. 71. He [John Anderson] has a fairly standard set of assumptions within which the specific questions are framed and a standard machinery for seeking the answers. It [Anderson s approach to psychology] also arises in part from the generality of his philosophy. His is not a narrow philosophy. It is not a philosophy concerned only technical and quite special issues as so many contemporary philosophies are. It is in many ways a philosophy in the old and rather grand style. In one respect, however, it 5

6 is different from the grand comprehensive systems: the critical component is so strong that in many areas the system is presented in no more than broad outlines. A great deal of the old wood has had to be cut away and only the general shape of the tree as planned is evident. But although he is in some ways a radical, he is also a conservative. More important reasons for Anderson s lack of influence are that he has little sympathy with the concerns of contemporary psychology and that contemporary psychology has come to have little patience with a predominantly logical mode of settling problems. I regret this, for his influence upon my own basic psychological views has been greater than that of any psychologist I have encountered, either in the flesh or through the printed page. The Australian Highway, September, 1958, p 51. 6