Philosophy.com

2003-02-04T05:27:00.000-08:00

Philosophy.com has moved

At long last. Stage two of the renovations have been completed. Philosophy.com has moved from Blogger to Moveable Type.

Its new address is Philosophy.com

Do come and visit when you have a moment. The new look wewblog kicks of with a piece on trust, terror and politicians.

2003-02-02T18:48:00.000-08:00

Rob is back
blogorrhoea is back from vacation and Rob has come up with some very fine postings. Nice solid length, very meaty. Take a look.

Rob is taking the weblog in a new direction----the emphasis is on content. It is a move away from the journalist-inspired weblog structured around whats current in the media flows. That style, the quick grap, the witty biting comment and the link, is popular with readers, but it is not appropriate for other kinds of material that are in need of a longer blog.

He is not the only one. There are others. A sample.
Myirony.com is another cross over---it has a good posting on the posssibilities of world government by chutney.

And Mindfloss has some solid postings on political philosophy and the intellectual roots of anti-Americanism.

And Jim Ryan at Philosoblog has some longish postings on conservatism based on a review of several books by John Kekes.

There are solid explorations of moral philsophy and abortion at Calvinist Libertarians

There is a solid article on America and empire on the collective blog Innocents Abroad. The article by Collin May is the first of 3 parts.

Need I go on? I have made my point?

A different form of weblog is developing. It is one based around an educated public, informed understandings and a critical perspective. As Jim Ryan observes ''the quality of inquiry is high in the blogosphere. Most physical campuses are the doldrums by comparison."

I can only affirm that.

Rob is leading the way in developing this new form in Australia. Its cutting edge.

2003-02-01T16:14:00.000-08:00

Transgressing analytic philosophy

In previous posts I have mentioned the stranglehold that the school of analytic philosophy had over the philosophy institution in the now deceased liberal university. This was especially the case in case in Australia where the work of analytic philosophers was primarily directed at constructing a mechanistic materialism ( nature and people as machines) which had its roots in Descartes and modern physics.

Those who were keen on reading what analytic philosophy called continental philosophy were generally not taken seriously, found it very difficult to get full time jobs and were treated as outsiders. To be accepted in professional philosophy you had to work with the language game of scientific materialism, go all starry eyed about the great names of the analytic canon and work to contribute another brick in the edifice of knowledge about important philosophical problems.

So how did analytic philosophy become post analytic? It certainly did not come about through the work of continental philosophers. They were mostly ignored and, by and large, were content to explore continental philosophy, rather than engage in criticisms of the mechanistic research programme. Hence the development of the analytic/continental divide.

Richard Rorty offers a convincing explanation of the shift from analytic to post-analytic philosophy in his ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND TRANSFORMATIVE PHILOSOPHY paper. He says that the shift came about from self-criticism within the analytic school, through a criticism that chipped away at its foundations and calling its scientific pretensions--- of putting philosophy on the secure path to science----into question.

Rorty says that there is no need to ignore or avoid analytic philosophy as some of those who have embrace continental philosophy have done. The story he tells is about:

"...why you need to study certain selected analytic philosophers in order fully to appreciate the transformative possibilities which the intellectual movements of the twentieth century have opened up for our descendents....Analytic philosophy may not have lived up to its pretensions, and may not have solved the puzzles it thought it had. Yet in the process of finding reasons for putting these pretensions and puzzles aside it help earned itself an important place in the history of ideas."

In telling this story Rorty say that that the significance of German Idealism (Kant & Hegel) was that it cleared a path that lead us around empiricism. The significance of the transformation of analytic philosophy is that a cleared a path beyond scientism

What happens when the two paths away from empircism and scientism cross? Where does that lead us? What kind of philosophy can be found at such a cross roads?

A literary philosophy ---ie., one that works in the literary institution-- according to Rorty, but thats another weblog.

2003-01-29T00:17:00.000-08:00

1 & 1=?

What happens when you put Francis Fukuyama's 'the end of history' ( the best possible social order has been found and it is capitalist liberal democracy) and Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' (as the main political struggle of the 21st century) together?

Easy: the clash of civilizations is the end of history.

What does that mean?

It means that a militant fundamental Islam is the chief enemy of capitalist liberal democracy. So we get the remainders of the historical past (the forces of reaction or Islamo-Fascism ) needing to be overcome by an armed liberal social order.

It only takes a bit of jigging and a bit of Christian spin, and hey presto, out pops President Bush and the US neo-con republicians with their war on terror.

Who said philosophy was not useful?

2003-01-27T00:12:00.000-08:00

Australia Day

Australia Day = nationality = nationalism. Its about the flag, the nation, the bonds that tie us as a people, the common culture; and, in these times of war, patriotism or love of country. On Australia Day nationality is seen as a good thing-----eg., we are proud to be Australian---and we celebrate Australia Day in a variety of ways. This an easy-going, relaxed and populist nationalism.

Two quick asides. First, the 26th of January is an odd choice because the nation had yet to be formed when James Cook landed. The nation only came into being with the federation of the colonies in 1901, the formation of the nation-state, and British colonialists turning into Australians. The moment of Federation would be the more appropriate date for celebration.

The moment of federation also evokes the principle of self-determination in order for Australia to achieve its own sovereignty. It invokes the nation state, a political community and citizenship.

Secondly, many dismiss nationalism as inherently bad, and they say that it should be rejected altogether. On their account nationalism is violent, ethnic irrational, barbarous, tribal, xenophobic, racist. On more extreme accounts nationalism leads to gas chambers, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. So nationalism is devoid of any emancipatory force that would serve the cause of human autonomy, freedom and self realization.

This ethno-nationalism has little connection with a multicultural, or culturally pluralist Australia, where there is a national majority and different minorities sharing a common public culture.

The proper response to this dismissal is to say that there are nationalisms and nationalisms. For instance, the nationalism of a super power such as the USA is different from that of Scotland, which is different from Serb nationalism, which is different from Australian nationalism. Not all these are an ethno-nationalism centred around ethnicity.

My interpretation of the populist understanding of nationality in Australia is that it is a form of cultural nationalism, which is based on a sense of belonging to the nation. When 'a sense of belonging' is unpacked it assumes that the nation is a community constituted by shared beliefs and mutual commitment. It holds that the nation is extended in history, connected to a territory and marked off from other communities by its distinct public character, which is generally defined in terms of a common language.

The limits of this populist nationalism are not hard to find. One limit in Australia is to the idea of the cohabitation of different nations within a single sovereign nation-state---eg. an aboriginal nation or a Greek nation. A multination state is Canada (Quebec) not Australia. Another limit is that, though we Australians easily accept a cultural nationalism (Australia versus England in cricket), we are more reluctant to embrace a nationalism that involves the political community and citizenship.

2003-01-25T06:37:00.000-08:00

Disillusionment

I noticed that Shelly at Burningbird is very down on blogging. She says here that from where she sits blogging is pretty much all about:

"entertainment and profundity. That's all this is -- smoke and mirrors.It's about links and popularity and one upping each other, and posting and running around seeing who links to us and checking our ranks. How many of you check your popularity in the morning before you read your so-called 'favorite' weblogs? There's no ethics or honor, friendship, pathos or beauty in the hypertext link; it just is. But we use it as a judgement of worth, and that's the saddest thing I've seen since high school. And I quit high school."

That was about two weeks. Her life was a bit topsy turvey then.

But the issue remains. Why blog?
Well you ain't going to win the popularity stakes with philosophy.com. Its a very low traffic site with no links at all, apart from my own----as far as I know. So there must be other reasons than smoke and mirrors, entertainment, links and popularity.

Why blog? It can be answered by another question why write? We write because we have something to say, in this case about philosophy and the contribution it can make to public life. This involves learning towrite in a different kind of way to academic philosophy, but not to popularity and seeking links for their own sake.

2003-01-24T23:24:00.000-08:00

Richard Rorty

Much has has been made of the very real and debilitating Continental/analytic divide in academic philosophy. In response many talk aboutneeding to build bridges across the divide and how they appreciate the bridge building currently being built by postanalytic philosophers.

It is, therefore, suprising that Richard Rorty, who has done of lot of bridgebuilding should be so quickly dismissed. More considerate commentators say that he leaves them cold; or even though they-----eg.,purse *lips* square jaw appreciate aspects of pragmatism, American pragmatists like Richard Rorty doesn't appeal.

What Rorty has been able to achieve from the perspective of someone who was nearly ground down into the dirt and hung out to dry by analytic philosophers in Adelaide whilst doing their PhD in the philosophy institution is an opening to other ways of doing philosophy. After Rorty you can discuss Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidgger, Adorno, Derrida, Foucault etc legitimately. After Rorty you can talk about philosophy needing to transform itself. After Rorty you can talk about philosophy allied to literature rather than science. You may not agree with lots of things that Rorty says but at least he has opened the windows of the philosophy institution and allowed some fresh air in. That's important because it was getting to be so stale in the philosophy institution that it was becoming difficult to breathe. Though philosophy was a part of the Humanities in the liberal university it saw itself as a part of the natural sciences. Analytic philosphy drew a stark divide between philosophy (ie., scientific philosophy) and the rest of the humanities including literary criticism.

In his paper ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND TRANSFORMATIVE PHILOSOPHY this state of affairs is addressed by Rorty He says that the 1960s left movement did not change the way that philosophers understood their discipline. They became politically active and continued on with doing analytic philosophy and concentrating on the hard core specialities ---metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and science. Everything else, including the history of philosophy was seen to wimpish and girlish-----it contributed to opinion rather than knowledge much like literary criticism. Rorty says:

"..analytic philosophers would like, above all else, to feel that they are adding bricks to the edifice of knowledge...That sense of definitiveness and finality is what analytic philosophers yearn for." This is "deeply ingrained in the culture of analytic philosophy" and it leads to "the ideal of the pursuit of non-time-bound, unrevisable, truth."

Consequently, analytic philosophers dismiss histories of philosophy as being more like literary criticism than genuine philosophy " because it invites intellectual historians to tell another competing story about the same trends, just like setting up a literary canon invites the next generation of critics to revise that canon."

Rorty argues that the division between analytic and non-analytic philosophy roughly parallels C. P. Snow's contrast between the scientific and literary culture. Rorty says that:

' Most people who go in for what analytic philosophers call "Continental philosophy" are willing, and often eager, to fuzz up the boundaries between philosophy, intellectual history, literature literary criticism and culture criticism.They are relatively indifferent to the results of the so-called hard sciences....The typical reader of Heidegger and Derrida views the hard sciences as handmaidens of technological progress, rather than as providing windows through which to glimpse reality unveiled."

Most of these readers would concur with Nietzsche giving priority of art and literature to science, the need to view science through the eyes of art, and the emphasis on an art-centred education rather than a science-centred education. In an art centred-culture the poets determine our ends whilst the scientists merely provide the instruments and means to realize these ends.

Rorty's use of C. P. Snow's two cultures thesis is useful because it highlights the differences between analytic and continental philosophy in a way that is readily understandable. So what do those in the humanities do? According to Rorty they tell stories about past transformations in human culture:

"these are stories about, for example, how the Greeks got from from Homer to Aristotle, how literary criticism got from DR., JOhnson to Harold Bloom, how the German imagination got from Schiller to Habermas, how Protestantism got from Luther to Tillich, and how feminists got from Harriet Taylor to Catherine MacKinnon.These narratives tell us how human human beings managed to change their most important self-descriptions. All such narratives are endlessly contestable, and endlessly revisable in the light of more recent changes."

Such narratives are then woven together with one another and the resulting tapestry is what Hegel called 'holding our time in thought'. Rorty says that this alternative understanding of philosophy gives us a plausible understanding of what humanities department in our universities offer their students:

" By telling stories about past transformative encounters members of these departments hope to put students in a better position to have similar encounters of their own...Holding one's time in thought is the humanities what puzzle-solving is to the sciences."

What they are doing is making things hang together by telling stories about how past transformations do or do not hang up. Rorty says the "greatest non-analytic philosophers of our centurry, Dewey and Heidegger, spend a lot of their time telling stories about decline and about progress, stories which led their readers to reconceive themselves and their surroundings."

This account by Rorty opens a doorway into an other way to write philosophy to the analytic conception of system building scientific knowledge by professionals through solving deep philosophical puzzles within a materialist program of scientific research. It opens up a doorway through which you step through to make contact with people trying to put the old and new together, trying to make sense of historical and cultural change, trying to make human life hang together in a rapidly changing world.

2003-01-22T21:54:00.000-08:00

Interesting blog

I just came across this by chance. purse lips square jaw. Its by Anne Galloway. She has a post on the continental and analytic philosophy conflict called 'The Philosophical Divide'. Have a read. It has some very good insights.

For an institutional, post-analytic attempt to cross this divide, see Centre for Post-Analytic Philosophy. Its burb says:

"For the greater part of this century dialogue between the two traditions has been rare and, on the whole, unhelpful. But there is now an increasing recognition that analytic and continental philosophers genuinely ought to have something to say to one another.

Although the crisis in analytic philosophy and the need for rapprochement between analytic and continental philosophy are fairly widely recognized, there has until now been no institutional forum within which dialogue between the two traditions can be fostered and from which a new, "post-analytic" philosophy might arise."

This puts the finger on the pulse of academic philosophy. There is a huge divide and my experience in it, whilst writing my PhD was that there was little comprehension between the camps and a deep hostility. It was an enemy/relationship that bordered on an unspoken---cold-- war.

Those who help to construct bridges across the divide --eg. Richard Rorty--should be affirmed (as well as criticised,) because they are going to be treated with suspicion by those on both sides of the philosophical divide.

2003-01-21T20:34:00.000-08:00

A paradox
Have you noticed this?

Those liberal warriors (eg., Bob Carr's mob in NSW) who are fighting the war on terrorism as a force of oppression that threatens human freedom and democracy are compelled, during the course of the fight, to forsake freedom itself. They are foresaking the very thing---freedom---that we are fighting for.

It is necessary, the liberal warriors for the new global order say, because the terrorists could be anyone, they could strike anywhere and at any time. The enemy looks like one of us but he/she cannot be properly identified. They add that the figure of the enemy is the funadamentalist opponent of liberal tolerance.

(It could even be the Greens, according to some in the Australian media. Rarely is the enemy Christian right-wing fundamentalists).

Many have noticed the paradox. Some philosophers give it a name:self-destructive dialectics.

Pray tell me again. What are we fighting for?

Law and Order? Security? Others say it is to kill as many Taliban soliders, Al Qaeda members, terrorists or Iraqis as possible--take your pick as those to be killed changes every six months.

What then makes our life worth living in a world of blind fate? What do we dedicate our lives to in this new order?

Survival? Mere survival?

What a bleak life we are fighting to defend from the enemy

2003-01-20T21:16:00.000-08:00

Richard Rorty

Here is a link to a recent text by Richard Rorty, the American pragmatist philosopher, that was listed on his home page.

The text is called, The Decline of Redemptive Truth and The Rise of a Literary Culture, and it can be found here.

When I have some time I will summarize the argument and comment on it. It is very appropriate to both the postmodernist debate that flares up every now again in the Oz blogworld and to the recent debate about the writing of Australian frontier history. The concept of truth is a key assumption in both debates.

2003-01-20T06:42:00.000-08:00

Conservatism

Some recent weblogs at public opinion have been exploring conservatism in an attempt to get a bearing on, or understanding of, what Australian conservatism stands for, or means, these days .

Some work on this 'understanding what conservative means' has already been done by other webloggers. For instance, John Jay Ray at Dissecting Leftism is happy with a minimalist definition of conservatism as suspicion of big government. Though this does capture the limited government stance of conservatism, it fails to distinguish conservatism from non-statist forms of liberalism---eg. libertarianism.

At Philosoblog Jim Ryan has this to say:

"Being conservative means accepting traditional values on trust; until you come across enough evidence to reject one of these values, you will not. But if you cling to traditional values, come what may, no matter what the evidence against them, then you might just be a reactionary."

This is a reflective conservatism not a dogmatic one. If you are dogmatic you are a reactionary.

This has been picked up by One good turn in terms of the importance of tradition.

"It is not clear to me, however, what it would mean to accept a value (traditional or otherwise) on trust. How would you evaluate whether the value holds up to the evidence? Let's take, for example, the value of freedom of association. I suppose the relevant evidence would be the good and bad things that come from having this value. But if we try to judge in this way, where are we getting our notion of good and bad from? Wouldn't this be part of our conservative package? As I see it, the problem is that, under this formulation, it looks like we need some fundamental standards grounded independently of the tradition in order to judge the tradition."

He acknowledges that:

" While I do believe that conservatives have an inherent trust in their tradition, and begin from that trust, they should not be satisfied with simply being trusting. Rather than being imitators of the past, we should strive to make the wisdom of the past our own. When we understand why our traditions have taken shape as they have, we become equal to our ancestors, and not simply beholden to them.

To say that we can understand our traditions is to say then that understanding is not fundamentally traditional. Thus I would claim that conservatism is more of a temperament than a philosophy. A conservative looks to tradition as a trustworthy place to find truth, believing that we can only safely venture upon new ground if we can maintain what makes us strong."

This does capture the importance of tradition. But which tradition? We all live within traditions, even liberals. Many people have this temperment of understanding the tradition they live within---even libertarians and Marxists.

What we see in these brief remarks is an unwillingness to characterise conservatism as a political philosophy. Why this reluctance?Could it be that what is taken to conservatism is actually liberalism? In Blinded by the Right the neocon David Brock spells out what he takes to be the core neo-conservative values that he embraced as a result of his confrontations with the political correctness of the academic left in the early 1980s These are:

..."respect for the Constitution, scepticism about government power, defense of privacy and individual liberty, pluralist discourse, civility and restraint." (p. 311)

These are, as Brock acknowledges, classic liberal values. He spend a decade working and writing in the world of Washington politics for the conservative movement he discovered that this movement 'stood more often than not for precisely the opposite of all these salutory values." What he discovered in the partisan politics of the moment was 'the right- wing ideology of exclusion, intolerance, prejudice and hate underneath.' (p. 311)

What conservatism is as a philosophy is very unclear.

2003-01-18T18:37:00.000-08:00

Reading and Writing

These are some remarks that come from reading Joseph Duemer's remarks on poetry here. He says:

" In any case, I'm no longer interested in poetry or theories of poetry that don't attempt--however ridiculously--to save the world. Maybe I can make a beginning toward understanding the art I've practiced more than thirty years by forgetting about poetry & thinking about language."

Well, I find myself no longer much interested in philosophy that is not connected to public life;or does not have as its goal making the world a better place and so enable human and non-human flourishing.

Joseph also connects his remarks on poetry to philosophy here. He says:

"Poetry & philosophy are sometimes said to be at war with each other, but from another viewpoint, I think that both poetry & philosophy are about justice. Not in the narrow sense of "the justice system," though that's part of it--justice, rather, as akin to temperament in music: an adjustment toward the human & particular, away from the abstract."

Well I concur with the movement away from the abstract and theoretical, to the human and the particular. And I would add back to the common life that all share in the nation state. I would add to 'philosophy is about justice ' that it is also concerned with the good life because I am not a liberal.

2003-01-17T04:01:00.000-08:00

Something Interesting

This book review indicates the classical conception of philosophy as a way of life, rather than the academic conception of philosophy as theory, system building, logical analysis, resolving abstract problems or the theory part of natural science.

I think that Thomas Hobbes rather than Christianity killed off this conception of philosophy, or drove it underground. It was recovered by Nietzsche. Foucault was its great modern exponent. That gets overlooked by all the liberal humanist attacks on him for his relativism and nihilism.

Philosophy as a way of life? What could that possibly mean? For some idea have a look here at the post on 18.11. 2002 by Christopher Robinson. It has nothing to do with teaching professsional philosophy in academia abdn writing a few articles for philosophy magazines. What is offered here is a romantic conception of philosophy as a way of life, though not in the sense of living on the mountain tops with the eagles. It is an austere life, lonely life disconnected from other people and living for ideas.

This is more or less a version of the artist in the garrett passionate about truth remodelled on Wittgenstein, who Robinson says:

"He sought solace in austerity. He offered a glimpse of an alternative style of life that market forces push out of view. If not for the visual contrasts afforded by eccentrics, philosophers, the mad, and dissidents, only mainstream conformism would be imaginable. At the center, what counts as protest is buying into new fashions. Innovative thinking is revered for its profitability. Intellectual energy is absorbed the demands of television. When Wittgenstein says 'a philosopher is not a citizen of any community ideas' we need to see that this is not a matter of personal choice on the part of the philosopher. Philosophy itself is viewed as dangerous by society."

On this romantic model philosophy as a Socratic way of life is similar to that of eccentrics, the mad and dissidents; ie those nomadic types disconnected from, and excluded by normal society. They live a life at odds to the 9-5 work world, families, mortgages and politics and do not really care about such things.

I find it an unattractive way of life. I tried living this austere life once: the poverty; isolation; living in an community of alcoholics, bums, unemployed and artists near the gas works in a run-down working class cottage down the road from a foundary. I survived financially by doing 4 hours work a day in a factory-----from 6am-10am--- and this enabled me to devote the rest of the day to my books, photography and writing. A single man's life really.

2003-01-16T16:17:00.000-08:00

Australian History: How do we speak within the web of power?

Cathie Clement, the Perth-based historian, has posted a long piece on the ACPHA Discussion Forum here on Tuesday, January 14. It is a long and important post.

It starts by responding to comments made by Uncle at ABC Watch about who can speak and who cannot speak in public debates about the meaning of Australian historian. It then moves to defend the role of oral history in the writing of Australian history in response to Quadrant-style attacks that oral history amounts to little more than bush gossip” and “tales my granny told me”. It then discusses the role of the professional historian in our public debates about what the various, competing interpretations of Australian history mean for us.

What Cathie says in terms of the role of politics in the formation of public opinion is important. She says:

"The current clash between historians and their supporters is a by-product of people viewing the world and sources of information from different positions. To some extent, I can empathise with both sides. Perhaps that is because I have never had much time for either ideology or theory. I recall trying to explain that outlook to someone and being told that, if you sit on the fence, you get shot at by both sides. I would argue, however, that sitting on the fence is quite different to occupying the middle ground. I would also argue that the fence that runs through the middle ground in the current debate is the key to understanding it".

Cathie sees the professional historian as standing to one side of the political battles in the cultural wars where people's views are within different political perspectives and their interpretations of texts are informed by their politics. For the connection between Australian history, public opinion, culture wars, see public opinion.

The historical expert is a bit like the expert in a court of law. They are independent and not partisan in a political sense. This is the old liberal conception of (empirical) historical reason and scholarly research being above politics. Its admirable but it has been mugged by reality of the culture wars.

We all know and have experience of situations in a court of law or in public policy that scientists and experts speaking for different interests whilst saying that they are non-political. So we have the doctor from Big Tobaaco, the environmental scientist for a polluting aluminum company etc etc. Now we have historians from different political interests speaking up within a left-right axis.

How do we make sense of that? Can we? What can we do about it?

Cathie has a good go. She adds:

"It seems to me that thinking of a similar sort [The political question of interest splitting fair and square down a Left/Right axis] has pitted the “conservative” and/or “right-wing” historians against the “orthodox” and/or “left-wing” historians in the current debate. Why is it so important for people to prove that their view of history and/or the world is the only valid view? Why not simply acknowledge that Australia’s history consists of thousands of cameos? Why not strive to find a middle ground where the good and the bad aspects of our past can be examined dispassionately?"

The simple answer to her question: 'Why is it so important for people to prove that their view of history and/or the world is the only valid view?' is power. We are in a cultural war and this war involves a conflict over the meaning of Australian history. Power not the validity [of the argument] is what is being contested here. Power is about passion and the cultural wars are about hating the enemy and looking for allies to help destroy the enemy.

So what does this mean for Cathie's second rhetorical question?

"Why not strive to find a middle ground where the good and the bad aspects of our past can be examined dispassionately?"

Well, the short answer is that we are in a war, not participating in a seminar behind the ivy clad walls of the ivory tower. In war we don't find the middle grround to examine things passionately. Thats diplomacy and we are at war because diplomacy failed and compromise was not acceptable.

Many would say that the world of power is terrible and shocking. We should return to the world of the academic seminar, a world of reason where people can sort out or discover truth. This implies that the world of public affairs should be organized according to the conventions of the academy. So speak the academics. But not those involved in political life. They understand that public affairs operates according to a different "logic" or different conventions. The name for this different way of speaking and writing---a name rarely mentioned these days is rhetoric: the effective speaking and writing or the art of persuasion.

See Silva Rhetoricae.It is the world of the classical Romans who figured out how philosophy could be involved in political life. See Cicero's rhetorical treatise De Oratore, "On the Orator".

So how do we speak within the webs of power? We speak rhetorically. Those who write the speeches for politicians know all about rhetoric.

2003-01-15T05:52:00.000-08:00

An insight into the neocons?

Neoconservatives are ex-liberals. Dave Brock, Blinded by the Right, said that. They are ex-liberals mugged by reality----who said that? (Irving Kristol, the conservative behind the The Public Interest and The National Interest).

The debate over conservatism is not good in Australia. We are very unclear what the different strands of conservatism are and what they mean. For the media conservatism centres around John Howard: he defines what Australian conservatism stands for. How does this differ from neo-conservatism?

Want to know more about neo-cons? For a quick grab see here and here and here and here

Want a bit more depth? Then here.

Neoconservatives are not the Old Right, the cultural conservatives who were fearful of the economic and social consequences of unfettered capitalism and immigration, and isolationalist skeptical of American engagement abroad. That was Pat Buchanan-----or the Pauline Hanson One Nation movement. They were not the religious New Right of Jerry Falwell in the US or Fred Nile in Australia. Nor were they libertarians of the Cato Institute in the US or Catallaxy Files in Australia who wanted the government out of everything, even though the neocons were in favour of small government, free markets and individual freedom.

Neocons are those who broke with the anti-war movement left over Vietnam; saw the academic left as anti-American cultural radicals; saw the political correctness of the dangerous radicals as a soft totalitarianism; defended traditional standards of a scholarship in the universities. Their manifesto was Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir by Norman Podhoretz, the editor of the intellectual monthly magazine Commentary, who began began his professional life as a literary critic but became a publicist: a writer of current public topics or a journalist who makes political matters his speciality.

What the neoconservatives stand for is very relevant to Australia. They were part of the Reagan administration's strategy to force a right-wing economic and social agenda on the country by political means. This is what the Howard Government is doing and C. Pearson is one of its court intellectuals.

With the demise of the Cold War in the 1980s the passion and rationale for the neoconservatives evaporated: anti-Communism was the rallying point of their politics. The old Soviet enemy---the evil empire--- was no more. The historic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism was no more. The sharp tongued polemicists and sharp elbowed operatives and talking heads then turned their attention to mobilizing resentments against liberal culture ----feminism, multiculturalism, affirmative action, environmentalism, public education.

2003-01-13T18:49:00.000-08:00

Working through the Past

I notice that both of our academic bloggers, John Quiggin and Ken Parish have said that it is time to move from the recent Ryan Windshuttle dispute about Australian pioneer history. Exploring truth and error in the footnotes to the academic texts has been exhausted. Their judgement is that there is little more to say unless something new comes up.

Is this the case? Well, I received this email from Rosemary Farrow. This is what she says:

"There is no absolute truth in history. There are facts which are recorded by people, and the process of interpretation begins with the first witness and report, through the lines of journalists and historians from the event itself to the present. Individuals interpret events, judging their relevance and importance according to contemporary cultural, personal and political dynamics.

It is because of these variables and the constant rewriting of history that we require academics to provide evidence and arguments to support their conclusions. And we require them to suffer review by their peers through academic journals. Its called academic rigor, and it can get a bit nasty. Careers sometimes hang in the balance. Academic supremacy becomes synonymous with the truth, and the battle for one becomes the battle to define the other.

In a socially controversial area of study, this process gets played out more publicly, and sometimes to the detriment of the study, and its subjects. The publicity provides another arena and another set of weapons to use in the battle for supremacy. At this point the academic process itself takes on a political role. One could question the validity of any 'truth' to emerge from such an adversarial, even gladatorial process.

Much would be gained in this if more source material were to be published. Having read compilations of early public documents and government correspondence, I can assure those who want to look (sorry, no link as yet) that far from being inaccessible or dry, they offerflavours and textures to the understanding of frontier history not possible from reinterpretation - a closeness to the event. Our history is young yet - perhaps too young to become the unique province of academics."

Rightly said. Our history is to important to be left to the academics. The interpretation of Australian history is about power, tactics and strategies of a battle for supremacy. Though this is pretty obvious to those who work and live in political life, it is what academic historians such as Dick Moses Rendering the past less unpalatable want to close down.

Power and truth don't travel well together and academics have trained to instinctively displace politics in favour of truth, even though they are well aware that the political dynamics of the present shape the way we view history. Hence we have the 'academic squabbles' view by those involved in political life.

What is the political battle over history about? It is a conflict between friends and enemies over how we understand history in the present, the meanings of the past for the political battles in the present, and a coming to terms with the past. This a battlefield of polemics and rhetoric in a public world where there has been a lack of historical awareness of what happened on the frontier and since. The Hindmarsh Island Bridge Affair in South Australia indicates how history and politics are deeply inter-meshed in the present. The politics involved ranged from protecting indigenous rights and securing protection for Aboriginal groups against racially discriminatory legislation to the soft totalitarianism of the left liberal thought police, with everything inbetween.

We are a people with no historical memory of what happened. Our history---including anthropology has been marked by a forgetfulness' or a 'disremembering' that has been 'practised on a national scale' for two centures. Our history has been a view from a window which the writing of history has carefully placed to exclude an Aboriginal history. The view from this window onto the continent, as constructed by history/anthopology texts, is a Whig narrative of the coming and development of British civilisation'. the significance of the work of Henry Reynolds and other historians is that they have addressed this forgetfulness in the form of of an historical 'remembrances' by reminding White Australia of what it would prefer to forget about its history.

The remembering of and alternative aboriginal history is painfully being recovered, and it is proving to be deeply traumantic, as indicated by the recent Bringing Them Report. The politics is a working through the past; not in the sense of the unpleasant task of clearing away or tidying up the acummulated documents on a desk; but in the psychoanalytic sense of coming to terms with a painful past that has wounded us as a people. That is why it is traumatic.

2003-01-12T12:46:00.000-08:00

Windshuttle, Ryan & Multiple Interpretations of History

I had promised to finish the post last Friday on this issue. The high temperatures in Adelaide over the weekend made it difficult and what little time I had in the 'cool' early morning temperatures was spent painting. This stuff is complex and it requires that you have your wits about you. Mine deserted me in the heat. I was only good for painting. And I could not post late last night because the server was playing up.

Where we had got to in the previous post was that if we view history as 'a complex terrain in which multiple stories and interpretations are represented', then we cannot evaluate the different interpretations. What it does mean is that we have a problem: how do we going about evaluating the competing interpretations of Australian frontier history offered by Windshuttle and Ryan?

As Ron Brunton puts it an email to me: 'why should we prefer a near 'genocide' interpretation to a 'nun's picnic' interpretation (Professor Claudio Veliz's remarks at the launch of Windschuttle's book)'.

Brunton points out that Lyndall Ryan failed to show this is so in her article, 'No historian enjoys a monopoly over the truth', in The Australian, December, 17, 2002. What she did say there
was that she and Windshuttle 'used the same sources to arrive at different conclusions'; that the history of the Tasmanian Aborigines cannot be definitively written; that no one can claim a final and complete "truth"; that the nature of historical interpretation lies at the heart of our differences; and that these differences are a part of a continuing debate about the consequences of colonisation.

If we read this article sympathetically we can interpret Ryan as dumping Absolute truth; as saying that each historian claims to be speaking the truth; that there are multiple interpretations of frontier history; and that her interpretation was better than Windshuttle's. She is not saying that all truths are equally valid as John Quiggin, and others claim.

What she did not do is then provide the justification for why her genocide interpretation was better than Windshuttle's. No argument was given. Ryan was treated roughly at this point by the empiricists and little attempt was made to tease out what she was getting at- in terms of the meaning of her text. She was roundly condemned and turned into a casuality of the empiricist gatekeeping against an interpretive history that focuses on text, writing, interpretation.

The first thing that needs to be done is to establish the reasonableness/plausibility of the 'two truths' position. That we need to do this indicates both the dogmatism of the defenders of empiricist history---there is only one way to write history---and their lack of charity in interpreting the texts of their opponents----they speak nonsense.

What these accounts say is don't bother trying to elucidate the different truths position. It cannot be done. There is only one Truth in history. When Ryan talks about different truths she is confused, is speaking nonsense---how can there be different truths?---- and needs to get herself sorted out if she wants to retain her credibility.

We have shown that the 'different truths' position is not unreasonable if you dump Absolute truth; and that there are good grounds to do this in the writing of history.

How then can we make sense of the 'different truths' position. One way that has been suggested is to consider the different interpretations as maps that enable us to make sense of our history. They are akin to the different maps of the city which enable us to get around the city--and so forms of practical knowledge. Different maps do different things, and as they represent the reality of the city from different perspectives, the have differnt truths The maps can be wrong in the sense of being misleading due to being badly drawn, out of date, leaving things out, or putting in things that are not there.

What the map interpretation of different truths position does is indicate that the Ryan position is a reasonable one. It lies somewhere in the middle between the extremes of John Quiggin's Absolute truth position and Windshuttle's account of the po-mo position in which we are all wrapped up in our cocoons, projecting our biases, prejudices and interests onto an empty text, incapable of communicating with another and unable to decide between different interpretations. She is not saying that we should coexist with different interpretations (maps) or pick whatever story (map) suits you. She is saying that her map does a better job than Windshuttle's in enabling us to understand frontier history.

If so then how do we go about judging, weighing up, evaluating which interpretation is the more reasonable, plausible or truthful? Empiricists say this decided by facts because our interpretations are just interpretations worked up from historical facts. So if you get your facts wrong then you must change your interpretations. Facts are foundational.

There is a lot of dodgy philosophy going on here as I have pointed out in previous posts. The historical facts are written texts ---police reports--- that stand in need of interpretation. They are interpretations of what happened and may be misunderstandings. Consider the Massacre Creek incident around 1915 in the East Kimberleys, Western Australia. In commenting on this Sir William Deane says:

"It is clear that there was throughout Australia, including the Kimberley at these times, often reluctance on the part of police to file adverse reports or to bring proceedings against white settlers in respect of extreme physical retribution against Aborigines for the killing of livestock on traditional lands. It needs little imagination to conceive that that reluctance could well be heightened in a case where a former police constable was involved.

At the same time, there would be few lawyers, at least of my generation, with relevant experience who are unaware of how misleading and unreliable untested police reports of alleged verbal statements by illiterate, particularly illiterate Aboriginal, accused or witnesses can be. If one were to restrict acceptance of oral indigenous history in relation to the killing of Aborigines to those cases where there was confirmatory police evidence or action, the resulting sanitised version of the events of the dispossession would be contrary to plain fact and even commonsense."

Police records stand in need of a little critical interpretation.

Secondly, Windshuttle's empiricist appeal to historical fact relies on police reports and dismisses the oral history of Aborigines. Their stories are not considered to be a form of historical knowledge. If we take the Massacre Creek incident again we find that oral history is quite strong and as Cathie Clement has argued, it is unreasonable to simply ignore the indigenous oral history to the extent that it is not supported by police records. Sir William Deane again:

"In the case of Mistake Creek, the oral history is remarkably strong. As published and as recounted by Kija people, it lacks any dreamtime element of the kind that can occasionally lead to confusion between fact and allegory. The foundation of that oral history presumably lies in the eyewitness accounts of three Kija people who survived the massacre."

Nor do we treat oral stories as fact.Oral history can involve misunderstands, since just like police records, it involves interpretations. As Ken Parish says:

"...excessive reliance on oral history is also problematic. Even eye-witnesses to any given event typically differ significantly on what they saw. Moreover, their memories fade over time, and are embellished unconsciously by reconstruction and fabulation. Courtroom lawyers are familiar with these problems. Inaccuracies are compounded enormously when stories are successively retold over time. That is why strict rules of evidence exclude hearsay. Oral history concerning events of more than a century ago is almost certainly tenth-hand hearsay at best.

That is not to say that oral history should necessarily be rejected, just that it should be treated with extreme caution and generally not accepted as necessarily true unless corroborated in some reasonable way."

As Cathie Clement points out in her remarks in the comments box in John Quiggin Keith Windshuttle establishes his "facts" by ignoring Aboriginal oral evidence, drawing on selected pieces of documentary texts, and even using her own 1989 book. Windshuttle's historical "facts' are woven with multiple layers of interpretation. What the empiricists are doing doing is acknowledging the extent of interpretation they are engaged in writing frontier history, or the way historical 'facts' are enmeshed in layers and layers of interpretation.

Facts cannot be treated as foundational because the empiricist foundation is built on heaps of presuppositions that can be, and has been, challenged by historical reason. Instead of gracefully conceding these points (they are ignored), dogmatic empiricists defend their empiricist history by saying that it is not reasonable to say that if your 'facts' are fundamentally wrong and not change your interpretation'.

If only things were that simple!

This position basically ignores the different levels involved in 'interpretation': these levels are hierarchical as start from theory-ladened observation and go to the historical paradigm being prerequisite to observation. This means that Historians write their history from within particular paradigms, historical traditions or discourses and that they do not change their discourse because they have made an error that X people were killed at place y in time p. They will revise their interpretations of this particular incident---eg. Massacre Creek---- but stay with working from within their genocide or settler discourse. These historical discourses are systematic with multiple stands and they are never really verifed or falsified as such ---eg., the settler discourse is still going strong despite being shown to be flawed in terms of its covering up of the massacres of Aborigines. The discourses are abandoned or replaced over time, even though practitioners like to write the history of discourses as a linear, progressive history.

Different bits at different levels of a discourse are going to revised on different grounds --some because of empirical evidence--a date here, an incident there -- there whilst other levels will be revised on political grounds----the big genocide level. Empiricists will say that political commitment has nothing to do with it----but this ignores the way that historical knowledge functions as a practical knowledge that is part of our particular political projects. Historical knowledge is not simply a body of theoretical knowledge that will be completed one day. We need to think of historical knowledge in terms of knowledge/power.

Other levels of our discourse will continue to remain unchanged---eg., the particular empiricist philosophy that underpines it all. So the politics can change---a shift from left to right----whilst the commitment to history as a empiricist science remains unchanged. This is what happened with Windshuttle.

In arguing this I am not attributing all this to Ryan, nor saying that it is implied in Ryan's text. It starts from the insight of 'learning to think historically' in Ryan's text, but then moves on to show that an interpretive writing of history is able to make sense of what is happening in the historians dispute. Hopefully the defenders of an empiricist history will become less dogmatic, a little more hermeneutically self-reflective about their own practices, and begin to acknowledge the historicity of understanding.

2003-01-11T04:52:00.000-08:00

This looks good

Philosophy, like physics and engineering, has traditionally been a male dominated enterprise. But the women have decided things to need to change. Philosophy is just too important to be to the men. Rightly so. They came close to destroying the creativity of philosophy in Australia. The women, especially this one rescued it. And some of the interesting work is being done here
So check out this from California. It looks good.
And so do the back issues.

One of these back issues, Vol. 3, Special Issue, April 2002, is entitled, "Rawls' Law of Peoples and International Terrorism'. It has an article entitled, 'Terrorism and the Philosophy of History'. In this article we find the following statement that undermines the religious Bush/Howard scenario of good and evil. It says:

"Terrorists are not merely pathological. They are political agents who utilize what I want to call a calculus of terror. This is the negative caricature of a utilitarian or hedonic calculus. The calculus of terror is designed to bring about certain ends. It is a rational decision procedure based upon the insight that terror disrupts social structures. The terrorist is not interested in causing pain per se: terror is not simply causing pain or killing. Rather, the terrorist is interested in using the threat of pain in order to antagonize a people and destabilize a social structure. Terrorism is evil insofar as it aims at destabilization and disruption. It is insidious in that it destabilizes and disrupts by creating an atmosphere or mentality of fear. It is significant, for example, that the September 11th terrorists succeeded in disrupting the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the Western world by the "mere" hijacking of four airplanes resulting in the deaths of over 3,000 people. In strictly utilitarian terms, terrorism is an economical means of political activity. In this sense, political agents who use terrorism are not pathological at all, but are quite rational: they know how to do cost-benefit analysis in order to maximize the results of their activity."

If we are engaged in a war against terrorism then we should treat the other side as engaged in war also.

2003-01-09T05:46:00.000-08:00

Multiple interpretations of history

In a recent posting at John Quiggin's weblog, called, 'More from Ron Brunton', John quotes from an email sent by Ron to John. John says:

"I'll quote another passage with which I'm in (almost) complete agreement".

He then quotes the following two paragraphs from Ron Brunton, who is referring to Windshuttle's book:

"For instance, Lyndall Ryan, who receives the heaviest battering in the book, wrote an article for The Australian which could be read as a collective suicide note for her profession. She did not contest Windschuttle's allegations of fact against her, and even admitted to a few `minor errors' in her footnotes. But she had her `truth', Windschuttle had his, and history was a `complex terrain in which multiple stories and interpretations are represented'.

Fine, but if there is no way of deciding between such strikingly different accounts, why do we need university departments of history? Perhaps the public interest would be better served by closing them down and using the money to establish schools of astrology or feng shui."

John then makes his quick comment about his disagreement:

"My main concern with the last suggestion is that one of our 'enterprising' Vice-Chancellors will take it seriously. I'm sure there's a big unmet demand for degrees in feng shui."

My main concern is with what these two guys agree on. They agree that to say, that history was a `complex terrain in which multiple stories and interpretations are represented', means that there is no way of deciding between such strikingly different accounts.

So there is no need to have university departments of history, since what we have is non-science masquerading as science.

Hence the public interest would be better served by closing them down and using the money to establish schools of astrology or feng shui.

There is no pretence with non-sciences like these. Unlike Ryan's sort of history you get what you see.

Therefore, Ryan is an idiot (along with all postmodernists). Thats my gloss and it is put in to indicate that I am making an interpretation of John and Ron's text.

That is my reconstruction of the implied Brunton/Quiggin argument, which they claim is what Ryan actually said. My concern here is not with what Ryan said. It is with the philosophical trick being played by Ron and John. ie., their rhetorical question that poses as a knock down argument. There is no argument given by Ron and John at all. All we have is a rhetorical question. Its all smoke and mirrors. Indeed, these are destitute times when senior academics engage in such tricks to defend their conception of history as a science, or, more minimally, an empiricist history.

My concern is with the way an interpretation has been disparaged without any engagement at all with the conception of writing Australian history as the deciphering of the meaning of a text---either the primary/archival source, the secondary meaning of the texts of historians which overlays the primary texts; the possibility of supplementary meaning or the possibility of interpreting otherwise; and meaning as something other than deciphering, such as invention or creation of meaning.

Ron and John engaged in interpretation at the second level:they makes comments and offer interpretations of the work of Ryan, Reynolds and Windshuttle. This is particularly obvious with Ryan----they offer a particular interpretation of one of her texts----an article which is not produced. The meaning of this text they say, is one in which there are multiple truths, stories and interpretations, that we cannot evaluate these interpretations, and so we can kiss Australian history goodbye.

I am labouring the obvious here for a particular reason. Ron and John are engaged in the practice of interpretation (of Ryan's Text) and they are implying that their interpretation is the correct/right one. So, and this is my point, they are tacitly saying that we can choose between competing interpretations. But they offer no grounds/criteria for why we are able to decide between competing interpretations.

It is quite clear that we do have conflicting and multiple stories and interpretations of frontier history in Australia ----otherwise the historians would not be arguing about what happened. They are arguing about interpretation and meaning not just fact. This is openly acknowledged in Robert Corr's post, 'More on Windshuttle', here by Dr. Raymond Evans.

An ontological point can be made here. Our human existence is such that it is involved within a giveness of meanings that are embodied in texts. This world of meanings---let us call it culture--- form the background to the present. Some of these meanings lie neglected in the background, others have an active presence and are pursued----eg., the conception of the frontier relationship between Aborigines and white settlers as one of conflict, war and massacres. This example indicates that these meanings are structured, have a past and a future. They appear to us, e who live in historical time, as a kind of horizon. The flow of our historical existence is the disclosure of meaning. This practice of ongoing fundamental deciphering of meaning requires elucidation, and so we have hermeneutics.

It does not follow from viewing history as 'a complex terrain in which multiple stories and interpretations are represented' that we cannot evaluate the different interpretations. What it means is that we have a problem: How do we going about evaluating the competing interpretations? What is involved in this? And, as we all know, we are going to get a variety of ways at resolving this problem.

By blocking this problem Ron and John (an anthropologist and economist) close out all the attempts by an interpretive/hermeneutical tradition to address the problem, and they do so in order to defend their view that history is a science. They are gatekeeping, as they are saying that there is no other kind. To say otherwise is to commit collective suicide as a profession. The name for this trick is Enlightenment blackmail.

Keith Windshuttle is far more honest: he acknowledges the existence of a literary history, and he then argues against his case against this literary conception of history, albeit badly. He presents arguments. We cannot say the same for Ron and John.
(unfinished)

2003-01-06T03:35:00.000-08:00

Windshuttle, Fabrication & writing Australian history

The political debate over the writing of Australian frontier history is in full swing. See public opinion and mentalspace for the latest shots fired by those on the lefty side of politics.

One of the conservative claims about lefty frontier history is that the misuse of, or errors in the use of historical sources means an untruth, which means fabrication, which means fakery and lies. You can find this junk argument---its all fakery and lies ----in Padraic P. McGuinness Tackling fakery in the halls of Academe. I'm not going to address the counterattack here because it concentrates on minor errors and cheap point-scoring, avoids the deeper underlying that are more difficult to 'refute', and is unwilling to concede that the art of history writing could be to avoid misunderstanding. Its the deeper issues underlying the minor errors and point scoring that I want address in this post, because they inform the way that Windshuttle approaches public debate with his opponents.

Lets put the lies and fakery to one side and concentrate on fabrication. What does that mean in terms of writing Australian history? It means writing a different kind of history to the standard empiricist one. But what kind of historical writing? We have made suggestions along the lines of interpretation at philosophy.com from the perspective of a hermeneutical tradition concerned with understanding and misunderstanding texts.

How is this different kind of writing history understood by conservatives? The following article A Critical Essay on the Impact of Postmodernism on the Historical Profession gives us some idea. It says that:

"....postmodernist theories have transcended across the boundaries of the fabricated literary world and into the supposedly objective and scientific discipline of history. The zealots of postmodernism would state that history as a factual narrative fails because of a flawed system of language that can neither accurately tell history nor drive man’s interpretation of reality. They would, in a few short and ironically understandable words, state that history, like literature, is merely a fabrication, a fictionalized account of events that may or may not have even happened".

So fabricated history is literary history. History is akin to fiction and it is more like a novel than a classic history book. So we go from the positivist account of history as an objective and scientific discipline to postmodern fiction. This is how Windshuttle sees things in his History, Truth and Postmodernism. He says:

..."the essence of history has continued to be that it should try to tell the truth, to describe as best as possible what really happened. Over this time, of course, many historians have been exposed as mistaken, opinionated, and often completely wrong, but their critics have usually felt obliged to show they were wrong about real things, that their claims about the past were different to what had actually happened. In other words, the critics still operated on the assumption that the truth was within their grasp.

Today, these assumptions are widely questioned, even among some people employed as historians themselves. Many theorists of postmodernism, or of cultural studies, which is another name for the same thing, assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past or to use history to produce knowledge in any objective sense at all. We can only see the past through the perspective of our own culture."

What is happening here is that an extreme position is being constructed and imposed on different kinds of writing. It is given the name 'postmodernism' and nearly everyone responds like Pavlov' dog: they go of their heads, let fly with one liners, forget to use their minds and engage in point scoring. Windshuttle breaks with this to the extent that he gives us the prevailing assumptions of postmodern history writing. These are, in Windshuttle's words:

"1. Truth is not an absolute concept but a relative one. Different cultures and even different political positions each have their own truths.

2. History cannot give us any knowledge in an absolute sense. Different ages reinterpret the past for their own purposes.

3. We do not have access to any such thing as a real world. What we think of as reality is a construct of our own minds, our language and our culture.

4. The meaning of any text is in the eye of the interpreter. People of different ethnic, sexual and cultural backgrounds will read historical evidence their own way, and that way will be different to people from other perspectives.

5. History is thus not fundamentally different to myth or to fiction. When historians look at past cultures they cannot be objective, nor can they escape from the cocoon of their own politics or culture. What historians see in the past are their own values and interests reflected back at them."

Windshuttle then gives examples of historians who write in this postmodern tradition. He says:

".... the guru of the postmodernist movement, the American historical theorist, Hayden White, author of Metahistory, tells us we should "recognise historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented than found". One of the movement's newest advocates, Hans Kellner, co-author of A New Philosophy of History, goes further and claims: " 'truth' and 'reality' are, of course, the primary authoritarian weapons of our time". The three authors of the new national history standards for American high schools (Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross Dunn, History on Trial, 1997) assure us: "Modern historiography has taught us that historians can never fully detach their scholarly work from their own education, attitudes, ideological dispositions and culture." Disinterested scholarship "is not simply an uneducated view. It is also an ideological position of traditionalists and the political Right."In short, they say that if you believe in truth and objectivity you reveal yourself as a conservative. If you reject these concepts you become a radical."

One way to evaluate this text is to ask: how convincing is the argument? Mu judgement is not very. There are some big philosophical tricks going on here----I recognize them from my academic days only too well. They were wheeled out against me as a graduate student like a machine gun by those philosophers whose masculine comportment was hard-edged materialism. They were designed to make the opponent, woolly powder puffs. Windshuttle's use of them derive from the work of David Stove, an analytic philosopher who hung about Sydney University for many a long year -- for far too long. The tricks are designed to construct the opponent's position as a subjective idealism, which basically means that the world is simply what is in our heads. What fool would think that in academia? QED.

This is trick is update by taking into account the shift to culture in academia by lefty's grooving on semiotics or poststructuralism. Subjective idealism is then reworked into cultural idealism by Windshuttle, and hey, presto, out pops postmodernism. The overall strategy deployed to produce this is a dualist either or. QED. Basically, its philosophy by numbers, but its amazing how many buy it, hook line and sinker.

Lets do a bit of philosophy to show the tricks. Lets take 1 & 2 and apply them to the interpretative conception of writing Australian history that has argued for at philosophy. com. Windshuttle says:

"1. 'Truth is not an absolute concept but a relative one.' This is what has been argued here on the grounds that we cannot catch a skyhook, escape our history and see the world as if from God's eye. Windshuttle continues, " Different cultures and even different political positions each have their own truths". Well....we do have different interpretations of Australian history---- that is what all those history books are that have been written since the 1850s---- and of our living traditions, such as the Anzac one. But that doesn't imply dumping truth per se, which is what Windshuttle implies. What is displaced at philosophy.com is a crude correspondence theory of truth (mirroring fact) in favour of the disclosive truth of interpretation. (See the previous post Oral history, historical fact, interpretation). This interpretive position is closed out by Windshuttle. He wrongly presumes that there is only one account of truth. That's trick no.1.

Now for Windshuttle's " 2. History cannot give us any knowledge in an absolute sense. Different ages reinterpret the past for their own purposes." This captures our position at philosophy.com and so we are in agreement here.

So what does Windshuttle infer from these two points? This is the job of:
" 3. We do not have access to any such thing as a real world. What we think of as reality is a construct of our own minds, our language and our culture."

Note trick no 2----the crude either or used that is as a wedge by Windshuttle's Humean empiricism. If it is either access to the real world or reality is a construct, then there is inbetween. This wedge drives out the middle ground of history as a historical representation of what happened. That history---eg, the constellation of texts of Reynolds, Ryan, Windshuttle and others-----is constructed by them out of various materials including primary documents, stories, other texts etc. It is a fabrication since it is an interpretation of what happened.

This interpretative does not preclude us representing what happened on the frontier in the 19th century.-----we can represent what happened through our cultural concepts and senses. What is denied is that we can get out of cultural concepts and access things with a blank mind. Its the argument Kant used against Hume over 2 centuries ago, and given a historical twist by Hegel, and accepted by most continental philosophers from Marx onwards. This philosophical tradition abandons the transhistorical subject of knowledge outside of social determination in favor of viewing knowers as socially situated.

Like Stove, his philosophical mentor, Windschuttle ignores this philosophical tradition. He doesn't engage with it and so his empiricism is a dogmatic one grounded on faith not reason. Pretending otherwise is trick no. 3. Not many spot it. And diehard empiricists aren't going to tell you that their classical foundations are built on sand are they?

How then does Windshuttle view his interpretative/hermeneutical opposition, which places the emphasis on understanding the meaning of a text rather than explaining human action.? His perspective on his opposition is indicated by:

"4. The meaning of any text is in the eye of the interpreter. People of different ethnic, sexual and cultural backgrounds will read historical evidence their own way, and that way will be different to people from other perspectives." Windshuttle's opponents are constructed into subjective idealists.

This implies that the text is empty and that we active interpreters project our content by way of interpretation onto the text. Note the superbig Trick used here. This subjective idealism trick is employed to do a job. It blocks out the whole semiotic or structuralist position, which places the emphasis on language proper ---its rules, signs or grammars---rather than the individual. Windshuttle knows about this semiotics/structuralist tradition----see here----but he avoids engaging with it in favour of a straw dog opponent.

This is how he can makes his position appear to be reasonable and his opponents unreasonable. Its philosophy by numbers since he simply avoids tackling the hard stuff about language, how language works and how our cultural concepts are embedded in language. Basically Windshuttle is a dirty fighter. He is out to win the battle in the culture wars and so he constructs straw dog opponents---postmodernism.

Why a straw dog? Well, consider the way that I approach Windshuttle's text. I am not treating it as a blank upon which I project my own interpretations. I am interpreting the words, sentences and paragraphs by trying to understand them in terms of the philosophical underpinnings. I am doing so in terms of the structure of thee text---the way Windshuttle organises his text in terms of the oppositional duality of empiricism and postmodernism.

This avoidance enables him to deliver the knockout blow, a namely " 5. History is thus not fundamentally different to myth or to fiction." Hence we have the polar opposite of writing history based on truth. This writing history as myth or fiction is the opposite because, when historians look at past cultures they cannot be objective, nor can they escape from the cocoon of their own politics or culture. What historians see in the past are their own values and interests reflected back at them. So the only way to avoid this is to escape history and adopt a God's eye perspective. Hence we come back to the starting point of the circle at 1. about truth. Absolute truth is the way to escape the circle.

This conclusion can be challenged. If a text could mean anything, then it really has no meaning. This is not the case with Windshuttle's text and most texts. When interpreting Windshuttle's historical text I am not trapped in my own lefty cocoon seeing only my values and interests reflected back at me. These values and interests are biases that orientate and inform my reading of the meaning of Windshuttle's text, since I locate this in the cultural wars. Others do the same including Windshuttle. These biases or prejudices are not something independent of, or supervienient upon, a language, but they are embedded in the meanings of our concepts themselves. Thus Windshuttle's biases are embedded in his dualism----empiricism is good, postmodernism is bad. In adopting this particular language Windshuttle has adopted the empiricist tradition and this shapes his interpretation and understanding of postmodern texts.

Secondly, the text is not a mirror since it has a particular context, and content. My prejudices (lefty values and interests) may lead me to misunderstand the meaning of this text because they lead me to concentrate on the way that Windshuttle's argues against his opponents. There are competing interpretations of Windshuttle's text as others since a historian, as distinct from a philosopher, may have a different understanding of the meaning of Windshuttle's text quite differently. Yet both us can still be respectful of the text's particular context and content but locate it relationships to other text differently. My location of Windshuttle's text within a field of other philosophical texts would not be the pathway followed by a historian: she would choose other history texts. Both of us work within different horizons so to speak, but we can come to some agreement about the meaning of Windshuttle's text and help to correct one another's misunderstandings.

So we can reject Windshuttle's conclusion that writing history differently can only mean that history is not fundamentally different to myth or to fiction.

As I said this is philosophy by numbers.

2003-01-05T20:14:00.000-08:00

Economics, Markets, Philosophy

I had been planning to start writing on this theme for some time. I was going to do by picking up some comments that I had made atPublic Opinion about the failure of electricity markets and National Competition Policy, and by drawing on some of the work on California electricity market by Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem. Xmas got in the way.

In the meantime I came across some very fine work on the limitations of neo-classical economics by Rob Schaap at MORE ECONO-POLEMORRHOEA.. Itwas posted on 27th December and is an extended commentary on the Ross Gittens article, December 23 article, 'Beware of economists wielding simple models'.

Rob's posting is very high class work. But you will need your wits about you and to have some time to much over the argument. It is an extended piece of writing.

Blogorrhoea is very much a companion site to philosophy.com----it is a philosophical commentary on public things and the postings by Rob arevery much on the sort of things that I would write. But Rob does it all so much better---its a class act.

There are extended comments to the above post. These are followed up by a further post NECESSARILY WANKY RESPONSE TO INDIGNANT DERRIDA-DERIDING ECONOMIST that responds to the comments of Derrida-Deriding Economist.

Rob is a high class blogger with a sharp intellect and a keen eye.

2003-01-05T05:40:00.000-08:00

Mugged by reality

There is a bit of a story currently being told in Australia these days about how the new conservatives were once part of the Left. The story they tell is that the lefty theory they held in the 1970s got mugged by reality during the 1980s and so they became liberal conservatives in the 1990s.

Now it is unclear what conservative liberal means as a tradition in Australia. According to one Christopher Pearson it does seem to embrace cumulative wisdom and experience, the common suburban life, the work ethic, committed family life, unselfconscious patriotism and regular churchgoing. But Australian conservatives are having recognition problems because conservatism is not treated as a respectable, contending philosophy that enables us to make sense of the world. Hence the conservative lament. How the Australian conservatives must envy their American counterparts.

'Mugged by reality'---its a great line. What does 'mugged by reality' actually mean? Presumably, it means the theory of the Left doesn't stack up. Left theory is out of kilter with reality in some way. What does that mean? And what is Lefty theory?

The Weekend Australian (no link) indirectly addresses these questions by downloading an article from The Economist. called, 'Poor Marx, he wasn't so prescient after alll.' You know the story---its was the story been told throughout the 20th century in one variation or another. Marx got it wrong. The variation this time is that Marx got it wrong where it really mattered. The Economist says that:

"On everything that mattered most to Marx, he was wrong. The real power he claimed for his system was predictive and and his main predictions are hopeless failures."

Funny I thought that the power of Marx's economic science was its explanatory power, not its predictions. Marx was a scientific realist not a positivist. But I understand thats academic stuff. Its minor points that academics fight over to the death and now one else really cares because they have their feet firmly planted on the ground. Of course, The Economist is not willing to grant that Marx's economic system was a part of the scocial sciences, ie ., part of economic science. We get this claim:

"[Marx] was also capable of stupefying dullness and impenetrable complexity. Try the opening pages of Capital (it picks up latter). In his scientific work, as he calls it, he minted jargon at an befuddling rate underlining terms to emphasis their opacity, then changing their meaning at will. Adding to this fog, what Marx believed in 1844 was probably not what he believed in 1874----the only constant was his conviction that what he said at any time was both the absolute truth and fully consistent with what he said before."

Clearly fog is not science. Of course, neo-classical economics is crystal clear, simple and easily understood, the terms are properly defined; economists are fully consistent over a 30 year period, and they do not believe in absolute truth. Oh yeah? Whose kidding who here?

Still the science stuff doesn't really matter, since it is the big picture stuff that really matters in the real world. As the voice of economic reason in the real world The Economist continues:

"Concerning the outlook for capitalism, one can always argue that [Marx] was wrong only in his timing---in the end, when capitalism has run its course, he will be proved right. Put in such a form, this argument, like many other apologies for Marx, has the advantage of being impossible to falsify. But that does not make it plausible."

Note the shift to Karl Popper's philosophy of science with the word 'falsify'. What's happened to positivism? Discreetly left behind because it has done its job of showing that Marx has nothing to do with social science. A line must be drawn in the sand here, and during the last 50 years a lot of intellectual energy was spent in showing that Marx's system was non-science and up there with astrology.

If Marx as irrelevant to modern economics then we are left with politics. And Marx is all about politics ---the class struggle and all that Communist Manifesto rhetorical stuff about revolution and workers of the world uniting. The Economist generously acknowledges that Marx was a "compelling writer punching out first rate epigrams at a reckless pace", and that class antagonism "is the sin qua non of Marx."

Did Marx have anything to offer other than "expressing himself brilliantly"? Nope. Marx got class politics wrong too, so very wrong. Here is The Economist again:

"...class is an idea that has become blurred to the point meaninglessness ... the class war, if it existed, is over."

Silly old me. I thought that class was an economic relationship not just an idea.That it was a social relationship based on the capitalist mode of production----hence we different classes, such as unemployed, working class, middle class, professional and managerial class and the owning class or bourgeoisie. And we still have capitalism as far as I know even though this word is never used these days-----competitive liberal economy is what is in fashion. It has a better ring to it than capitalism, which connotes capital sucking out the life blood of labour and discarding it on the rubbish heap. I thought that capitalism had become ever more global with the fall of the Soviet Russia and that global capitalism was truly dynamic and revolutionary in terms of reshaping society.

Why does class and class war not exist, according to The Economist? Wait for it:

"In western democracies today, who chooses who rules and for how long? Who tells governments how companies will be regulated? Who in the end owns companies. Workers for hire---the proleteriat.... And this is because of, not despite, the things Marx most deplored: private property, liberal political rights and the market."

So Marx is conclusively refuted, yet again.These refutations have happen so many times throughout the 20th century. And still Marx lives on.

Are you convinced by this argument:---that where it mattered most Marx could not have been more wrong? Are you convinced that the reason why Left theory has been mugged by reality is that Marx is irrelevant to modern economics? Are you convinced that we should become liberal conservatives with suburban values?

Strange to say, not even The Economist is convinced that Marx is a ghost from the past. Though it has the decisive, knock-down argument---Marx was very wrong where it mattered----it is confronted by Marx, as a philosopher, social scientists, historian and revolutionary being popular----far more so than Adam Smith apparently; is still accorded respect in academia, and still has a continuing influence in western culture. So people must think that Marx has something to offer than than only having "an enviable flair for hysterial invective."

Though The Economist realises this it does not give an account of why this so. It only addresses it by showing that Marx got it wrong where it mattered.

Seems like the conservatives and the market liberals have still got a bit of explaining to do about the Left being mugged by reality.

2003-01-03T21:03:00.000-08:00

Oral history, historical fact, interpretation

Slowly the conservatives are coming foward to elaborate their position on 'we have to defend empirical history at all costs from 'lefty bias', lefty's 'pushing their barrow', the 'black armband view of Australian history', and the 'leftist historical orthodoxy prevailing in academia' as embodied in Henry Reynolds. In this defence, they stand by historical fact and draw a line in the sand between historical fact and the Aboriginal oral tradition or interpretation. See Battle of the black armband

So what do people such as Tony Staley, a former federal Liberal Party President and now board member of the National Musem of Australia, mean by historical fact? What is the historical fact that makes national history authentic and historicallly accurate?

It is a reasonable question since there are no eye witnesses still alive today. Alas, Staley does not say but he does imply that historical fact is what makes history true.

But we know what they are. They are historical sources. What are historical sources? Clearly, it is not local Aboriginal oral history because this history is what is explicitly rejected in the name of historical fact. Windshuttle, for instance, explictly attacked the National Musem of Australia for presenting Aboriginal oral tradition as historical fact. It would appear that police records are historical fact.

But why are police records treated as fact and so deemed to be true? What makes these records true rather false? Has not the police, as an institution, been shown to doctor their documents? Why do we not treat these records as downplaying the killing of Aborigines by white settlers? Do not these records not need to be interpreted in the light of other sources about settler roving parties, their relationships with military parties. Why are police records treated as historical facts and not as written texts that need to be interpreted by historians?

I presume the historian goes to a musem, library or other such institutions pulls out the archives and goes through a bunch of old documents which are treated as primary sources for a local history. The historian is skilled in the 'methodology' of hermeneutics, or the study and practice of the art of interpreting texts ravaged by time and cultural differences to discern their meaning, and uses this methodology---or better still skill--- to help gain an understanding of frontier history. So why should we not be suspicious of the settler ideology buried in these written texts?

What Staley does is to assert that these historical sources are facts and to deny that the police records are written texts that need to be interpreted. He gives us no reason for this assertion nor for his assumption that these police records should be seen as mirroring reality, rather than covering up or distorting what actually happened.

We can think differently about truth. Let me suggest something. If we adopt an interpretive approach to historical texts then gaining an understanding of frontier history would involve truth as describing a condition or process which suddenly or gradually shows itself, and can be concretely appropriated. That which was ignorable, hidden, and avoidable----the massacre of aborigines---now becomes obtrusive, unforgettable, and unavoidable. This process is one where that which “is” ---frontier warfare--- is discovered, uncovered, and recovered. Truth is a process of bringing into light, that which “is “readily graspable---eg., through the work of Henry Reynolds----and thus this readily graspable of frontier warfare becomes a part of the historical time-space of Australia,as disclosed by a process of historical interpretation.

Frontier history is both the record of beings coming into the light--the massacres of Aborigines----and then retreating back into darkness --eg., through the work of Windshuttle. History is a continuous struggle to unconceal truth.

We can do history without assuming the correspondence theory of truth in which historical resources, such as settler police records, are assumed to be historical fact.

2003-01-03T06:06:00.000-08:00

Possible Changes

Negotiations are under way to develop philosophy.com in a more collective direction with different people writing on it. This would give the weblog more diversity within the overall field of continental philosophy. It would make the weblog more experimental in terms of exploring the different kinds of writing in a philosophical mode.

2003-01-02T18:40:00.000-08:00

A passage from Heidegger

Some food for thought over the weekend. It is taken from Heidegger's essay, What are Poets For?

"What is deadly is not the much-discussed atomic bomb as this particular death-dealing machine. What has long been threatening man with death, and indeed with the death of his own nature, is the unconditioned character of mere willing in the sense of purposeful self-assertion in everything. What threatens man in his very nature is the willed view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channelling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man's being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects. But the peace of this peacefulness is merely the undisturbed continuing restlessness of the fury of self-assertion which is resolutely self-reliant. What threatens man in his very nature is the view that this imposition of production can be ventured into without any danger, as long as other interests besides----such as, perhaps the interests of faith------ retain their currency.

...What threatens man in his very nature is the view that technological production puts the world in order, while in fact this ordering is precisely what levels every order, every rank, down the uniformity of production, and thus from the outset destroys the realm from which any rank and recognition could possibly arise."

M. Heidgger, Poetry, Language, Thought (p.116-7)

This needs to be mulled or pondered over. Basically, Heidegger is arguing that human willing, in the form of purposeful self-assertion, is what is dangerous. When coupled to the system of technology we are threatened with a single endless winter----darkness----or a destitute time.

"But where there is danger, there grows also what saves us."

These lines, which are from the German poet Holderin, signpost the way from the abyss.Thats what poets are for in a destitute time.

Do we encounter such poets today when the talk of our politicians is about war? Does not the purposeful self-assertion coupled to the war machine threaten us with danger?

Happy weekend everyone.

M. Heidgger, Poetry, Language, Thought (p.116-7)

2003-01-01T15:20:00.000-08:00

Windshuttle, empirical history, language

Windshuttle's understanding of empirical history implies that the historian can see the evidence of history if they can somehow scrub their minds clean and see it for it is. We need this scrubbing clean to avoid abusing the evidence of history through our politics, prejudices and interests and so obtain objective knowledge of historical reality. This 'scrubbing clean' implies that we can stand outside our situatedness in history and our perspectival understanding within history. It implies a God's-eye standpoint, namely one that has broken free from our cultural beliefs, cultural schemes, traditions, interests and tested them against something known---the evidence of history---without their aid. In this way we can discover the way history really is.

I for one have no idea what it would be like to be at that standpoint. Why not? Because of what is missing in Windshuttle's account---language. We see the empirical evidence from within our language, we interpret the empirical evidence of history from within language, and the evidence of history are historical texts within langauge. What Windshuttle implies is that we can climb outside our minds to see how how things actually are. He ignores/overlooks that what stands between the historians mind and the evidence of history is a public language.

So how do we get outside language to attain God's eye standpoint? Well that question makes no sense to me. It is asking me to step outside human history into a nonhuman reality---to transcend human history through using a skyhook. As far as I can see Windshuttle is chasing an illusion. As far as I can see the conventions and methodologies we devise for evaluating historical claims, arguments, assertions, interpretations in writing our history are internal to our language. Notions like, reference, correpondence, truth, evidence by which we come to an agreement about the truth content of historical claims are internal to language and to our overall view of the world. This rootedness in history, language and meaning cannot be avoided.

2002-12-31T15:04:00.000-08:00

Windshuttle, History, Mythology

I came across this claim about history in a piece written by Glenn Milne on the National Musem of Australia (NMA) called Museum set for fight over who owns the past. In it Milne quotes Keith Windshuttle as follows:

"In a paper delivered to a conference at the NMA, Windschuttle attacked Derrida's theory at its core. He said: "If you abandon the principles of empirical history – that evidence is independent of the observer and that truth is discovered rather than invented – you consign everyone to their own cultural cocoons, from which all they can do is talk past one another. No debate can ever be resolved."

"The replacement of history by mythology," he calls it.

Milne basically accepts this attack as a king hit. Oz bloggers have shown that Milne has no idea of what Derrida is on about in Keith & Jacques & Glen & Jack and Junk Journalism

So let us address Windshuttle's claims that he made at the National Musem of Australia. Previous postings on this blog have shown that Windschuttle's big claim, that shifting to interpretive mode of history writing involves the replacement of history by mythology, is not the case. We have argued that what it means is a different kind of history writing---one that openly acknowledges the role of interpretation in history. Windshuttle wants to close out this kind of history, and he does so by defending a positivist conception of history as science, whose method is to objectify actions as events to be causally explained. This is the philosophical dimension of the cultural wars.

If we shift from an empiricist kind of history to an interpretative one does that consign everyone to their own cultural cocoons, as Windshuttle claims?

It would initially appear that Windshuttle is right here because everyone is operating within a hermeneutical circle and working from their own cultural traditions. Does that mean that all we can is talk past one another and that no debate can ever be resolved?

The answer to all three questions is no, no, no. A quick sketch of why to show that it is not as open and shut as Windshuttle makes out.

Everyone is not consigned to the cultural cocoons of their own traditions and prejudices because of the overlapping nature of our competing interpretations and the ongoing revision of these interpretations in the light of criticism. This process happens through public dialogue---as we see with the historians.

It is not the case that all we can do is talk past one another with no one listening. A dialogue is akin to an ongoing conversation in which we do listen to what the other person is saying to us. If we don't listen then we have a monologue. What we do in a conversation is revise the prejudices and question the assumptions of cultural traditions which give us our orientation in the world in the light of what others are saying.

Nor is it the case that debates can never be resolved. Sure, we do not have debates being finished in the sense of a cricket match being finished: someone has won, someone has lost and thats it, game over. Debates are ongoing because we do not have absolute knowledge or truth. But debates can be resolved in terms of people in the conversation reaching some form of overlapping consensus about where things stand on a particular issue; an issue played out in a historical sense; or another issue then arises with its different and conflicting interpretations.

This hermeneutical dimension can also be found in natural science and in economics. What this indicates is that the empiricist/positivist model of knowledge that Windshuttle is using as a weapon in the cultural wars is flawed. Thats why things are not as cut and dried as he makes out.

2002-12-30T18:50:00.000-08:00

Interpretation or Fakery

One of the consequences of writing history whilst living it, is that we live within a circle of interpretations that reach way back into our history. The recent discussion of the Windshuttle, Reynolds, Ryan accounts of Tasmanian Aboriginal history in the media indicates that we have conflicting interpretations of what happened and that we are being asked to evaluate and choose between them. We do not stand outside history or the hermenutical circle to do this. We do it from within.

The response by one Padraic P. McGuinness Tackling fakery in the halls of Academe is to sidestep the circle of interpretation to concentrate on the misuse of primary sources and to argue that none of the primary sources supports Ryan's story. McGuinness argues this empiricist case as follows:

"It is true that there is more than one "truth" to be discerned in any historical account, and there are always shades of grey. But there should be no misunderstanding of what Keith Windschuttle in his recent writings has been saying. He is not just contesting interpretations of what happened to Aborigines in the past, but is pointing to something much more serious, the deliberate falsification of our history ... This cannot be dismissed with post-modernist twaddle about differing truths, shades of grey or whatever. The real mystery is what the various writers who have used this kind of methodology have thought they were doing."

Why the falsification? That is the question that is posed nuy McGuiness. The case for falsification is made by selecting a particular incident from Lyndall Ryan's The Aboriginal Australians. McGuinness says:

"This describes a massacre in May 1827, where Aborigines kill a kangaroo hunter in reprisal for shootings of Aborigines, then burn down a house because its owner's stockmen had seized Aboriginal women, kill several other whites, and then in retaliation a white vigilante group is formed and massacres many Aborigines (Windschuttle, p. 139). Ryan gives three sources.
Unfortunately, none of the sources supports her story, and there is simply no evidence of motives or reasons on either side, or even of any massacre."

From this McGuiness infers that:

"This is fiction. Nor is it an isolated instance of this technique of writing "history". This cannot be a matter of occasional slips or errors of haste. It is about the construction of a version of Australian history which is simply not supported by the evidence cited, very often non-existent."

McGuinness then concludes: "There is a serious case to be answered." It is one of fabrication. The issue for him is: Why fabricate the evidence? Why the deliberate falsification of our history? This is the case that has to be answered. The historians are in the dock. The charge is that they are pretending to write history. As they guilty of falsifying history they have written fiction and trampled on truth.

Hang a mo.---historical understanding is not simply about the intention of the historian. Nor are in a courtroom facing judge and jury for a crime. What McGuinness is trying to do here is to escape the hermeneutical cirlce by appealing to psychological data----deliberate falsifcation of data----that is external to the text.

We are in the public sphere and we have an issue of interpretation as well as the use or abuse of primary sources. The primary sources are texts which are interpreted by the historian and they advance interpretations of what happened in history based on their reading of these texts. What McGuinness is eliminating here is interpretation. We have truth and error. Errors in the use of primary textual resources=fiction=fabrication. Nothing more need be said. Goodbye to interpretation. So speaks an empiricist.

We cannot say goodbye to interpretation just like that in the name of an empiricism that dogmatically states, the facts ma'am, just the facts. We need to accept that our historical understanding is prejudiced and historically conditioned, and that we anticipate or project meaning in order to understand a particular text. We do not read a text with a raw, decultured eye. We read it from within a tradition. We may misread, misinterpret, not see the inconsistencies in the text, but we then revise the textual meaning in the light of latter readings by others.

This revising is open to Ryan and Reynolds. As the latter says you can read our early pioneer history with the bias of our prejudices with the Windshuttle, Reynolds and Ryan books side by side. Revising textual textual meaning and dealing with conflicting interpretations of a text is a normal activity.

2002-12-29T01:19:00.000-08:00

Interpretation and historical fact

One issue that has arisen recently in our public culture is concerned with the roles of fact and interpretation in history. This has come up with respect to both the writing of Aboriginal history--were there massacres, frontier warfare and the destruction of a people (the Tasmanian Aborigines)?; and the Tampa Affair---were the children really thrown overboard by their parents as claimed by the Howard Government during the 2001 federal election?

Views on the relationship between fact and interpretation can be, and often are, quite stark. They can be found for instance in Bernard Slattery's post at Brain Gaze, called DIFFERENT DRUMS. He says:

"I don't know how anyone who values logic can tolerate any left movement that has been polluted by moral equivalence. To speak of ''different truths'', as that stupid, disgraced historian Ryan did, is bunkum. There are facts and lies. In ignoring facts, Ryan and her apologists from the academic left are prepared to accept lies as truth."

There is no role for interpretation here in historical knowledge ---just truth and lies. This implies a belief in science and truth based on a positivist philosophy of science that says historical explanation must conform to a natural scientific model. Slattery's politics sit on top of that positivist foundation. Though Bernard has changed his politics from the 1970s --eg., he has shifted from leftwing to rightwing---he leaves the positivist foundation untouched. As a conservative now Bernard sees things in very black and white terms. Truth =correspondence to fact, there is only one truth (Absolute Truth) and anything else is lies ie., not true. The left has gone postmodernist and so given up on positivism, history as a positivist science and Absolute Truth. This is a disgrace according to Slattery, since it leads to different truths.

Well the academic left has gone postmodernist. The question to ask here is why? Maybe they had good reasons to do so? These have to do with the role of interpretation in historical understanding and the way this undermines what Bernard has cast in eternal bedrock.

One way to come at this is through a comment Allan McCallum made in response to the posting on public opinion. He asks how would we interpret the Tampa affair if we had all the facts from the start. This acknowledges our historical situatedness in these events and our retrospective understanding. Well let us assume that the Senate Inquiry was able to discover all the facts---it didn't due to the Howard Govt preventing the appearance of Ministerial advisors before the Senate Committee----but let us assume that it did. Let us assume the fiction of an Ideal Historian. This then eliminates any falsity or lies.

Would having all the facts resolve the issue? The question does implies a complete knowledge of these events. The answer is no. Why not?

Well, we would be still arguing about the meaning or significance of what happened in the Tampa incident. So we would begin to ask: What is the proper relationship between Ministers and Departments? Should the upper levels of the bureaucracy be politicized? Should Ministerial advisors be accountable to Parliament? Should we close our borders to refugees? What is the appropriate role for the Defences Forces to play. And so on and so on.

Values and politics are embodied in these questions and so the historical meaning of these events depends on our historical horizon or perspective. And the meaning of particular events is a function of their relationship to other events that come after them and indicate their significance.

So rather than being one God-like perspective we have a multitude of perspectives. This means that our historical understanding is partial and perspectival. We could have a complete knowledge only if we could know all the possible stories of the Tampa incident and all the points of view from which it could be discussed. But this is not possible. Though we understand historical events from a wider perspective than our predecessors---eg. Anzac-----we also understand the Anzac tradition from a narrower one than the one our heirs will acquire. So we cannot assume knowledge of the end-point of history and attain a historical understanding that is not dependent on our place in history. We are too situated and immersed in the flow of history.

Historical understanding is incomplete, and is always being revised and reworked by challenging previous interpretations. That is what is happening with Windschuttle's response to Reynolds and Ryan's and the leftie conception of Aborigines as resourceful guerilla fighters against the British invaders. This contested the white pioneer conception of aborigines murdering white settlers and plundering their property.

So there are good reasons to shift away from positivism. Those foundations are historical not eternal and they can be changed. The academic left has shifted away from positivism to interpertation. If you want to be a positivist these days you are required to argue your case.

If we come back to present history wars we find that Windschuttle has been reworking the archives/primary sources and digging more facts from old texts and saying that he is doing a better job than earlier leftie historians. But his historical understanding also involves him running an interpretation of the destruction of Tasmanian Aborigines as he contests the orthodox view of Reynolds and Ryan.

So we are left with different and competing historical interpretations. We live within a circle or web of interpretations of different and interrelated texts.

2002-12-28T23:33:00.000-08:00

New Blog

This is a background weblog to my other public opinionweblog. It will have infrequent postings that explore the philosophical aspects of public policy broader cultural issues in more depth. Though this philosophical dimension is gestured to the public issues considered by public opinion they cannot be considered by that weblog.

Postmodernism

Here is a little something from the archives of public opinion that was posted as part of the postmodernism debate.

Tuesday, November 05, 2002
Posted 18:07 by Gary
A Policy Note on Heidegger
John Quiggin says that he finds it hard to make sense of Heidegger on deconstructing a tradition. In having a go he says in a note, 'Heidegger and the Nazis' (Monday November 4, 2002), that:
' A complex philosophical or political proposition can't be assessed in isolation - it's necessary to examine both its underlying assumptions and its implications.'

This is true.(a quibble: I prefer 'argument' to 'proposition'). But in assessing the argument, assumptions, implications (not to mention the historical tradition these belong to ) it is not a case of standing outside in the street examining the scaffolding of a building. We are inside the building. Or inside language.

Consider neo-classical economics. It is a very sophisticated theoretical edifice that has been built up over a long time. It takes a lot of hard intellectual labour to work up an understanding of how markets work in a theoretical sense. We need to understand the language because economists now dominate the policy making table, are reluctant to let others into the policy room----eg. ecologists or CSIRO scientists----and many of them engage in gatekeeping operations. (The ABC Four Corners Program on the CSIRO report forecasting a range of possible outcomes for the year 2050 showed that). It is difficult to assess this tradition as a whole from the outside because those of us in the policy-making world are inside it. We live within its horizons so to speak, and the language of markets is the language of policy makers. We speak it as if it were our own. It is our own.

Yet we need to assess this [scientific] tradition because market instruments are being used as the key governance mechanisms to drive water reform across the Murray-Darling Basin. Big things are claimed for it by economists, and the policy makers go along with them, even accepting the claims as if they are shiny truths.

Many involved in water politics are sceptical. They reckon that the market will lead to the efficient allocation of scarce water resources, but they doubt that this efficiency will lead to effective environmental benefits. However, in assessing the way the processes or logic of a deregulated market shapes the conduct of irrigators, we have to work from within the economic tradition.

Crudely speaking, Heidegger argued that science depended up the metaphysical assumptions of a disengaged modern philosophy with its dualisms of subject/object, mind/body etc. If these are deeply embedded in economics, then they would be very hard to stand outside of. It would take a lot of work to dig our way out.

John Quiggin appears to say that we can stand outside a tradition. He says 'Heidegger's [Stone's] understanding of his own philosophical position led him to derive the implication "I should support the Nazis" [conservatives]. It seems clear that something is badly wrong in Heidegger's [Stone's] thought, but it is not immediately obvious what is wrong. There are two possible responses. If you believe that at least some of Heidegger's [Stone's] work contains valuable insights, you should try and isolate the problem, then salvage those points that are unaffected. If you are doubtful about the value of the entire enterprise, you are justified in concluding that the salvage job is unlikely to be worth the trouble.'

This is too neat and quick. It is looking at the enterprise as if were an object separate from me.

Stone was basically a spokesperson for the Treasury's free market tradition under the Hawke and Keating Labor Government and lead the push for dismantling Fortress Australia. We---another economist----can assess this or that argument of Stone about the value of free markets or globalisation, and acknowledge that his case for globalisation does or does not contain valuable insights that can be salvaged. But what economists don't do is dump their economic tradition as a whole. They work inside their 'home' sifting and building away as they construct and reconstruct their models of the economy. Few indeed are doubtful about the value of the entire enterprise.of economics as a social science. They may be doubtful of different schools and take economics in different directions, eg., Hayek; so we end up with have a family of schools in economics. But how can an economist dump the tradition that makes them an economist and still remain an economist? They don't. They question it from within.

If we are assessing the economic arguments about the value of water trading for shaping the conduct of irrigator's conduct towards a more sustainable way of doing things, then we do not care about the personality of this or that economist ( eg., John Stone or Graeme Samuel), their politics which we may violently disagree with, or their moral failings as human beings. We are interested in the flaws in the argument eg the public benefit test in competition policy. But we are also interested in the tradition (the systematic body of economic thought itself) which stands behind the arguments that are put forward by neo-liberal politicians and economists. We are interested in the tradition because of the possible ecological benefits of governing through the market . And we pose a question: 'how can privatising the commons and introducing water trading produce ecological benefits?

So in John Quiggin's terms we 'play the ball, not the man'. And we can agree with John's following statement that ' the validity or otherwise of a philosophical [economic] argument should not depend in any way on the credibility of the person who makes it. This claim would rule out the argument "Heidegger's [Stone's] theories led him to become a Nazi, [conservative] so they must be wrong". But they would also rule out any sort of argument from authority. That is, except for purposes of academic courtesy it would be wrong to mention the source of particular arguments let alone to make claims of the form "Heidegger (Samuel] put forward this proposition and therefore it deserves to be taken seriously", which in practice are made all the time.'

Am I picking a fight with John in saying this? Is John Quiggin trying to pick a fight with somebody willing to defend Martin Heidegger as Don Arthur suggests in his 'Turtles miss the global economic train - Jacques Derrida lost in Adelaide suburb - the phenomenological John Quiggin', on Monday 3rd November? I'm not sure. (I am not defending the man, his intentions or his politics). We seem to have a consensus.

Let me then push things beyond this consensus. As we know, Heidegger called into question the value of the entire enterprise of modern science and philosophy (including economics) because of the way it enframed reality as a resource to be controlled and manipulated for human use. Policy makers work inside this enframing and they came to think of themselves within this tradition (eg., as human capital), using instrumental reason to conquer inland Australia for economic growth. They think they are the movers and shakers using their machines and technology as tools to build their dams in the Snowy Mountains and turn the Snowy inland to create prosperity. But they end up being shaped, driven and controlled by the growth machine of developmentalism, which thanks to jone Stone & Co is now propelled by competition in the global market. They find themselves propelled along by the forces of the global market place to become ever more efficient, ever more productive, so as to sell ever more exports to create ever more profits. And they know they are ripping the guts out the country. They don't like it.

If we cannot take this developmentalism off like an old suit or some smelly socks, then what can we do? Heidegger suggests that we find those marginal practices and ways of viewing our relationship within nature that are buried within the broad economic tradition; these can open up to different ways of doing things. This is a dwelling on the earth and it is a practice that conserves and saves the earth. Today we call this living sustainably.

I am defending the central deconstructive thrust of Heidegger's philosophy, its return to, and recovery of the everyday world we inhabit as a counter to the abstract, modern scientific tradition (utility machines in a clockwork mechanism) and a concern to live sustainably on the earth. Am I picking a fight with John Quiggin?

And more on postmodernism
This is taken from the archives of public opinion

Sunday, December 08, 2002
Posted 16:20 by Gary
Martha Nussbaum, Michel Foucault, Power

This piece picks up on the second article that Tim Dunlop linked in his post Pomo RIP (28th November). The article The Professor of Parody is by Martha Nussbaum, who just happened to be in Australia at ANU working on this years Tanner Lectures on Human Value called, Beyond the Social Contract:Toward Global Justice.

What caught my eye with Nussbaum's review of the work of the postmodern feminist Judith Butler were her passing comments on Michel Foucault. I had intended to pick up on these. Fortunately the academic Oz bloggers who commented on Tim Dunlop's post were also critical of Foucault. Since the ideas were not discussed there I will take some up and see what happens.

In the first bit of the passage that I have selected, Nussbaum says that postmodernism is more insidious that provincialism:

"Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible."

After describing this threat to the American academy Nussbaum then traces these postmodern ideas back to the French poststructuralism in general, and to the work of Michel Foucault in particular. She says:

"These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways."

Well I would say wrongly, since Foucault's thesis that we are involved in networks of knowledge/power also involves acts of resistance as a form of countervailing power. Thus as a member of academic philosophy in a a regional university in the grip of provincialism, I was working within the disciplinary knowledge/power of analytic philosophy that worked to ensure that I became an analytic philosopher. And it was an enormous amount of pressure. I resisted this pressure and the formation of my self/comportment/identityas a philosopher. I did so through acts of resistance that eventually involved turning to continental philosophy, and then using its ideas to engage in a critique of analytic philosophy. So the ' fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power' does not apply due to resistance.

What I was engaged in was fighting one kind of philosophy with another kind of philosophy within an academic philosophy institution. So Nussbaum's claim is appropriate when she says:

"We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible."

Now this is pretty unfair. My identity as a philosophy was tied to the knowledge/power of analytic philosophy (I as anti-analytic philosopher); I could never change the network of power of analytic philosophy across Australian universities in a large-scale way;and I could never escape from this network of power if I was to work as a philosopher in an Australian university. All I could do was to find a space within this power network to work differently, and I chose to do this by developing tools and ideas from continental philosophy to transgress the limits of analytic philosophy. And that's all I could be expected to do as a Ph.D student. A life of political activism in reforming the institution of philosophy (along the lines of Maoism) was not going to get me a Ph.D., and I needed that to have any credibility within the philosophy institution.

Nussbaum is unfair because what else is academic life but fighting ideas with ideas? So what is Nussbaum suggesting? That we scholars engage in trade union politics to protect the staff from the negative impacts of economic reforms instead of doing scholarship---reading the Greeks to recover different kinds of philosophy to the scientific one propounded by the analytic school? She cannot be serious. And she is not. She has engaged in the same enterprise of finding alternative ways of doing philosophy in her book, The Therapy of Desire. Nussbaum does not like a literary philosophy that works in terms of the weapons of parody and poking fun--the weapons deployed by Richard Rorty to deflate the pretensions of serious, analytic philosophers to be the master thinkers. And Richard Rorty was very good at it because the analytic philosophers were stung into response.

We can escape from the disciplinary power of a philosophy institution by stepping outside the university and into the legislature to locate philosophy within political life as the Romans did. But that is stepping from one knowledge/power network into another one and into different modes of resistance. Yet we still are engaged in a battle of ideas as well as getting the numbers.

So Nussbaum is misleading here. Why is she?

UPDATE:Because she is defending her liberal humanism. And to do so she will block Foucault's power network thesis in terms of it lacking any ethical depth. Consider the following remark:

"Try teaching Foucault at a contemporary law school, as I have, and you will quickly find that subversion takes many forms, not all of them congenial to Butler and her allies. As a perceptive libertarian student said to me, Why can't I use these ideas to resist the tax structure, or the antidiscrimination laws, or perhaps even to join the militias? Others, less fond of liberty, might engage in the subversive performances of making fun of feminist remarks in class, or ripping down the posters of the lesbian and gay law students' association. These things happen. They are parodic and subversive. Why, then, aren't they daring and good?"

It's a good question. This is where ethics would come into play. And Nussbaum knows a lot about ethics. It is her forte. She continues:

"Well, there are good answers to those questions, but you won't find them in Foucault, or in Butler. Answering them requires discussing which liberties and opportunities human beings ought to have, and what it is for social institutions to treat human beings as ends rather than as means--in short, a normative theory of social justice and human dignity. It is one thing to say that we should be humble about our universal norms, and willing to learn from the experience of oppressed people. It is quite another thing to say that we don't need any norms at all. Foucault, unlike Butler, at least showed signs in his late work of grappling with this problem; and all his writing is animated by a fierce sense of the texture of social oppression and the harm that it does.'

So how did the late Foucault grapple with this ? What did his ethical turn back to the Greeks result in? Well we won't find the answer in Nussbaum. She has the scholarly knowledge of Greek ethics to tell us what he was trying to do. But she is determined to keep Foucault outside the gate. So she blocks. Foucault dumps norms. Period. Nussbaum say:

"But let there be no mistake: for Butler, as for Foucault, subversion is subversion, and it can in principle go in any direction....For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one's fellow students."

No attempt is made to engage with Foucault's ethical notion of care for self and creating the self as if it were work of art.' Norms are involved here, not of social justice, but involving a reworking of ' human dignity'. This is a poststructuralist turn to ethics through a return and re-reading of the Greeks. How does this transgress the limits of the univeral norms of liberal humanism?

You have to look elsewhere, since Nussbaum wants to leave us with a Foucault ensared in postmodern nihilism. Hence the negative reaction to Foucault. The ethical dimension is obliterated.

These are notes but they do indicate the gatekeeping that takes place in academia.

A book Review from the Archives

Sunday, October 20, 2002

Posted 12:02 by Gary
Interlude

My involvement in political life means that I am unable to read as many books as I would like to these days. All I can usually do is scan books quickly.

I am currently 'reading' a book by Robert Kirkman called, Skeptical Environmentalism: The Limits of Philosophy and Science,(Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2002).

This text is primarily concerned with the more basic principles (ie.metaphysics) that inform the work of many academic environmental philosophers, rather than debates over concrete matters of policy, such as the issues pertaining to the Murray-Darling Basin. Being a sceptic (a Humean mitigated sceptic) Kirkman seeks to raise doubts about environmental philosophy, especially its speculative project that seeks to construct an ecological world view (or metaphysics). The core of this metaphysics holds that the natural world is relational; that humans have a moral obligation to respect and preserve the relational order of nature; and that widespread acceptance of these claims is the key to solving the environmental crisis.

I introduce this book into the Oz blogosphere because it offers an evaluation and critique of environmental philosophy that transgresses the standard position held by many of the dogmatic defenders of a fundamentalist Enlightenment. This position conventionally holds that environmentalism is a new religion that is hostile to science (ie natural science and economics). Hence it is against reason. For a crude version of this thesis see the Oz blogger Aaron Oakley who wrote on Monday, October 7, 2002:

"I am a Perth-Based scientist. I used to be a member of the Wilderness Society (In the late 1980's). Through what I learnt as a science student in the early 90's, I came to realise that the Green movement had abandoned science and reason in favour of hysteria. The greens were more interested in poisoning public opinion than getting to the truth. Thus, the Greens would use any argument, no matter how badly thought out, to sway the masses."
and:
"Welcome to BizzareScience.blogspot.com! Here we will examine all the schmucks who abuse science for political purposes (Greenies, politicians, etc)."
http://www.bizarrescience.blogspot.com/ "

Here environmentalism as a religion has been reduced to hysteria. Others reduce it to nonsense. This does not allow much space in the public forum to have a public debate in civil society. The public sphere ( ie., a network of communication/dialogue, information and points of view) is no longer considered a sounding board for problems that need to be solved in liberal democracy and to furnish them with possible solutions.

In contrast, the philosophy book by Kirkman does recognize what environmental philosophers do, namely to identify and then critique the destructive way of thinking that is culturally embodied in our conventional, instrumental relationship to nature. This way of thinking says Kirkman has generally been identified as the mechanistic view of nature traditionally that is associated with Descartes and Newton and a reductionist natural science. This view is seen to reduce the non-human world to a mere collection of isolated physical entities with no value or purpose of their own. The speculative project of environmental philosophy, says Kirkman, seeks to replace this metaphysics with an ecological/organic one centred around relatedness.

Kirkman argues that this speculative project should be abandoned as speculative nature philosophy (eg. that of Hegel) spins a cobweb of concepts that bears little relation to reality. Hence it has severe limitations. ( In passing Kirkman is unfair to Hegel as the latter was philosophically engaging with the key concepts of the mechanistic metaphysics of the natural sciences of his time, and arguing for an organic metaphysics. Hegel not does do away with science. He philosophically engages with it through an immanent critique.

An organic metaphysics came with the development of an ecological science at the end of the nineteenth century. Kirkman is good on tracing the metaphysical debates within this science as ecologists endeavoured to work out what an organic metaphysics could actually mean and refine their concepts. However, those workign on speculative philosophical project simply pick, choose and appropriate the bits that suit them. However, science may one day show that the natural world is fundamentally relational and that an organic metaphysics may not be firmly grounded in reality, ie true. This uncertainity about the correct metaphysics places limits to relying on ecological science, or drawing conclusion from the sciences.

Kirkman's scepticism seeks to transform this speculative project in order to open environmentalism up to more promising directions eg. environmentalism as advocacy. Philosophers have an important role to play in the public discussion of environmental problems-these problems have cultural, moral and political dimensions- and philosophers can act to expose the illusions at the core of our currrent self-understanding. It should take a practical stance by taking a more direct engagement with concrete philosophical problems. They can do this by acting as advocates for one point of view (whatever that is) and by participating in public deliberation as mediators and facilitators. In the latter role they can clarify the terms of public discussion and debate, raise important questions, and point out the limits and consequences of various arguments.

This is a useful and clearly written book. ( I have not deal with the moral obligation to respect and preserve the environment. Another Interlude perhaps). Its conception of philsophy in public life as advocacy captures what I have been trying to do in political life, and the way I have deployed the tools of philosophy in public debate over the River Murray.

It would be a pity if this text were not widely read. It shows our political masters in Canberra that though the disciplines of humanities cannot increase the wealth of our nation though the innovative application of high-tech research, they are useful in terms of the fostering the public good of enabling a civilised liberal society.