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Sunday 22 August 2004 at 8.45am, repeated Mondays at 2.15pm

John Passmore - Semi-detached Philosopher -

9 September 1914 - 25 July 2004

Summary

The Australian philosopher John Passmore died last month. Broadcaster Allan Saunders, who presents the Comfort Zone on Radio National every Saturday, pays tribute to one of Australia's most eminent philosophers.

Program Transcript

Robyn Williams: When they celebrated the centenary of Charles Darwin’s death at his old university, Cambridge, in 1982, it was interesting to see that an Australian was invited to go there to speak. What was the significance of Darwin in intellectual life, what was his cultural legacy?

Well that Australian is no longer with us and so, William of Ockham, another philosopher, is pleased to invite Alan Saunders to pay tribute. Alan.

Alan Saunders: John Passmore died in Canberra last month, just short of his 90th birthday. He was one of this country’s most eminent philosophers, an emeritus professor at the Australian National University, and a pioneer of environmental philosophy and of applied ethics; as a historian of ideas, author of the monumental ‘Hundred Years of Philosophy’, he combined depth with daunting range; he lectured widely in Europe and the United States; he delivered the Boyer Lectures on ABC Radio; he numbered some of the world’s most distinguished philosophers amongst his friends; he was a Companion of the Order of Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academies of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the British Academy, and he once bought me a pizza.

Perhaps I misjudged him at the time, perhaps I still misjudge him, but it seemed to me an uncharacteristic gesture; uncharacteristic not in its generosity ( he wasn’t a mean man) but in being a relaxed, unbuttoned sort of thing to do. But then I saw him at an uncharacteristic time. It’s not often that some of the country’s best philosophers get together for a two-day seminar devoted to your work, but that’s what was happening to Passmore and that’s why he was in such an expansive mood when he and his wife, Doris, fresh from the first day of the seminar, bumped into a young graduate student on the streets of Canberra and took him to Pizza Hut, or wherever it was.

I suspect he thought that the degree of attention represented by the seminar was too rare. I think he felt unappreciated, or at least inadequately appreciated, in his own country, and the page or two of his memoirs that he devotes to explaining how he didn’t feel unappreciated merely strengthens the impression that he did.

‘The fact that there is an entry on me in both the Cambridge and the Chambers biographical dictionaries but not in the comparable volume edited by the Australian, Barry Jones, might suggest that my own country neglects me,’ he writes. ‘But that is not so; it has bestowed honours upon me. Inclusion in biographical volumes is a very chancy business; I was astonished to find my name in the British biographical dictionaries, indeed even embarrassed.’ No doubt.

In fact, they’re a curious piece of work, these memoirs. Their title, ‘Memoirs of a Semi-Detached Australian’, perfectly captures Passmore’s relationship with the land of his birth; he couldn’t have been anything other than an Australian and he never held a permanent position overseas, apart from the chair of philosophy at Otago in New Zealand, which he occupied for five years, yet he spent a lot of his time not being here: he was in England researching 17th century philosophy; he was in the United States as a visiting professor, in Canada as General Editor of the Collected Papers of Bertrand Russel; or in Europe, Asia or anywhere else, giving a lecture of attending a conference.

For much of the time, the tone of these memoirs is strikingly modest. This is the story of an ordinary boy from a working-class family in Manly who, through hard work and natural ability, made good. This is a poppy almost embarrassed to notice how tall it has become. On the other hand, the memoirs have what we might call their Caesarean moments. Julius Caesar wrote about himself in the third person: ‘Caesar did this’, ‘Caesar did that’, ‘Caesar conquered Gaul’, and Passmore as well, often likes to step back and watch himself from a distance.

Or rather, it’s not exactly himself that he watches; he’s interested not so much in telling you about his achievements as in telling you what other people have said about his achievements. He talks of legends that have grown up around his name; more than once he puts the record straight about a feature on his work published in The Times Higher Education Supplement in 1991, and at one point he tell us that ‘Modesty forbids me to report’, that somebody saw him as an Antipodean Oscar Wilde. Obviously, modesty didn’t forbid very forcefully.

Some of this is quite easy to understand. There are people who can’t quite believe their own lives have happened unless they can see the details set down in black and white, preferably the black and white of somebody else’s writing. Such people enjoy, I suspect, a disproportionately high representation among the authors of memoirs and autobiographies.

But there’s more to it than that in Passmore’s case. He’s trying to construct himself as the sort of public figure he never quite was in Australia. In England, he would have become Sir John Passmore, perhaps even Lord Passmore; he would have been the head of an Oxford or Cambridge college; he would have made frequent appearances on TV and radio (in the days when philosophers made frequent appearances on TV and radio) and he would have been quoted, joked about and caricatured just like any other public figure. Well, that doesn’t quite happen here. As Passmore himself wrote in 1963, ‘the image of Australia as a country devoted to physical achievement rather than to intellectual subtlety, blunt to the point of crudity, preferring rhetorical gestures to doctrine and either to rational discussion, is not only firmly established but largely true.’

Yet, he went on, Australia has established itself as a centre of philosophical enquiry. So it has, but this is not perhaps the best place for a philosopher to win fame, except amongst other philosophers (and, given the quality of philosophy in this country that’s a fame worth having).

Passmore was never a public, controversial figure in the way that Manning Clark was and nobody ever tried to turn one of his books into a musical, as happened to Clark’s ‘History of Australia’ (though come to think of it, Passmore’s ‘The Perfectibility of Man’ with its bizarre parade of utopians, idealists, religious zealots, hippies and self-mutilating ascetics drawn from 3,000 years of Western history, might make rather a good show). Of course, a historian, especially a historian who tells controversial tales about Australian history, a Keith Windshuttle, say, or a Henry Reynolds, will usually have the edge over a philosopher when it comes to getting public attention. Even as a philosopher, though, Passmore was somewhat retiring. Raymond Gaita is probably better known now than Passmore was 20 or 30 years ago, but then Gaita writes op-ed pieces about political issues and he’s edited a book on the morality of the war in Iraq, which is the sort of thing Passmore never did and never, so far as I know, wanted to do.

He was even different from his own teacher, John Anderson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney from 1927 to 1958. Anderson was a major figure of controversy in the Sydney of his day. His statements and teachings were discussed in the Legislative Assembly, he was attacked in the press, he gathered disciples around him and thanks to the influence that his work exerted, or was said to have exerted, over the Sydney Push, the spirit of his thought (or perhaps a distant version of it) survives to this day in the work of Robert Hughes and Germaine Greer.

Anderson was one of those philosophers (they’re probably thinner on the ground now than they used to be) whose influence is exerted more through teaching and lecturing than through publications. Which means, I’m afraid, that for the increasing number of people who never heard him in action, his appeal is going to remain somewhat mysterious. Nobody has ever quite succeeded in conveying to me what was so special about his work, though I did come away from my reading of Passmore’s memoirs with a sense that he’d done more than anybody else to convey to me some idea of why Anderson mattered.

Now I’m not so sure. Re-reading those pages, I find that what Passmore talks about most is not so much Anderson as Anderson’s lectures on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and in fact not so much Anderson’s lectures on Heraclitus as Heraclitus himself. About Anderson, I’m still a bit in the dark, but Passmore has convinced me of why Heraclitus mattered to him and why Heraclitus ought to matter to me.

As presented in ‘Memoirs of a Semi-Detached Australian’, Heraclitus is a philosopher of flux: change, the conflict of contrary things, is the essence of life. We cannot impose order from above; order emerges, in the way that it should emerge in democratic societies, when, as Passmore puts it, ‘contrary interests achieve a degree of balance without losing their distinctiveness.’

But however distinct we may be, we are inevitably entangled in all that lies around us. We can be spectators, says Passmore, but even a spectator can have an effect on the game: the way I look at you may have consequences for you and your behaviour.

And what I see when I see you, or what you see when you see me, will be the result of whatever information we have and our earlier histories, all of which makes for a complex tangle of relations, which is why, Passmore remarks, Heraclitus warns us to expect the unexpected. We can never possess certain knowledge or make entirely reliable predictions.

This is a useful philosophy to have. I for one find it entirely congenial, and it tends to encourage a certain pluralism, or at least anti-dogmatism, of outlook. It’s also strikingly modern. Philosophers used to be foundationalists. That is, they used to seek to ground whatever claims they made about the world in solid and undeniable foundations. In John Anderson’s youth many of them, both here and overseas but very much here, were idealists, believing that something ideal, something non-physical, ultimately underlies what we see and feel around us. Others were empiricists. They believed that our foundations had, in fact, to be what we see and feel, or, rather, our sensations of them. I see a whitish disk in the night sky and from this sensation, this sense-datum, I begin to build up my theories about the moon and its place in astronomy.

These days, many thinkers, particularly those influenced by French and other European schools of philosophy, reject any sort of foundationalism and the consequence of this rejection is often a sort of lazy scepticism; there is no way of getting to any reality beyond your immediate perceptions, so you might as well believe whatever you like. Passmore, following Anderson (and in a similar spirit to a rather more famous philosopher, Karl Popper) manages to be a non-foundationalist without embracing either scepticism or scepticism’s dark twin, dogmatism.

How much of this is Anderson and how much Passmore, I’m not sure. Anderson, as I said, was given to gathering disciples around him and it’s significant that those of his pupils who went on to have distinguished careers as professional philosophers: David Armstrong, Eugene Kamenka, David Stove and Passmore himself, worked in areas somewhat removed from those in which the great man held sway.

But whatever its origins, this open-minded, but never empty-headed, view of the world, together with a prodigious capacity for absorbing information, enabled Passmore to strike out into many areas of philosophical inquiry: not just the environment, but science, education business ethics, and the arts. If he did, as I’ve suggested, think that his achievements were insufficiently recognised in the country of his birth, a country he loved and to whose education system he was always grateful, then I rather agree with him. He enormously enriched cultural life in this country and I feel richer for having known him. It was a good pizza, too.

Robyn Williams: Dinner matters, to Alan Saunders, as it should. And you can read about Alan’s broad range of expertise, from fine music and cinema, to fine food and philosophy in the current edition of the magazine Limelight. In which you’ll also see that Alan Saunders presents The Comfort Zone on Radio National after 9 on Saturday mornings.

Meanwhile we say vale to John Passmore, with whom, by the way Alan, I did a 30-minute ABC television program some time ago.

Next week, Ockham’s Razor comes from Melbourne, where John Bradshaw has been examining brains.

I’m Robyn Williams.

Guests on this program:

Dr Alan Saunders
Broadcaster
ABC Radio National
Presenter of 'The Comfort Zone'
(Broadcast on Radio National every Saturday after 9 am)

Presenter: Robyn Williams
Producer: Brigitte Seega

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Pioneer philosopher dies, 89