My winters were spent in unbordered bush n snow drifts

n on The Hill

behind the school

where everyone would

slide.

A city of children, classless, kinda

cause no one had fancier coats

or thought they were better than anyone else

cause they weren’t:

everyone’s dad worked in the mines

n their moms at shops in town

or cut hair in their living rooms

to earn a few extra bucks.

Day n night the Hill would draw us

together on toboggans

or solo on a Krazy Karpet

n if you didn’t have either

you could use some cardboard

or even old

boots whose treads had worn out

(but not a sled: sleds were snow machines

in case ya didn’t know).

Maybe some bigger kids would push us smaller ones back down the hill

before we had scrambled back to the top

but ya just had to take it

you couldn’t be a suck in those days.

Later, when we had become jaded teenagers

we would still go sliding

drinking rye from the bottle

on the lip of the scary steep slopes of the gravel pit.

It was like falling over a cliff

drunk as hell.

Everyone crashed before the bottom

but that’s what made it fun

n the bottle waiting for us

back at the top

promised the illusion of warmth, even when it was wicked cold.

I never thought about it then

but I did the other day, that

probably there are classless cities of children

in the desert

n maybe they go sliding down sand dunes,

(but not in boots, obviously, but Krazy Karpets would work).

It’s probably hard to find a 40 pounder of CC

in the desert

but maybe they have other stuff to drink

but whether they do or not

I bet

if they are alone in their city of children

doing whatever kids do in the desert

they smile

cause they feel safe

n together

n even if the bigger kids push the little ones around

its all in fun

n you can’t be a suck

in the desert either, but ya learn to

laugh n take it

just like on our Hill.

I haven’t gone sliding in decades

but I can still feel

the dirty February snow spraying my cheeks

and freezing to my toque.

When I think now about what I have been doing

I guess I’ve mostly read:

philosophers n poets n novelists n historians n economists n political scientists,

I have thought up n down

over, under, n sideways,

in straight lines n spirals n circles,

even dialectically.

I have thought long, and I have thought hard

n me n all the serious people I have read

think we know what’s what

but whatever we think we know

it’s not been enough

to stop the same shit from happening

over n over n over.

Today I can’t say

that I know anything much fer sure,

so I could be wrong

but this much seems clear:

that babies who need to be in incubators

should not have to be wrapped in tin foil

because they had the misfortune

to be born into somebody’s war.

I really don’t know much for certain anymore,

so I could be wrong

but it seems clear to me

that if the price of whatever

is that tiny creatures

who don’t want anything except to be warm

have to be wrapped in tin foil

to survive the night

then that price is too high

and whatever it is

that caused people to destroy

the cocoon that those babies needed

is not worth it.

One more thing seems clear to me,

but I could be wrong,

still, I think that anybody

who– every cell vibrating with terror-

doesn’t run away

cause babies can’t wrap themselves in tin foil,

those people who stay behind and maybe tell those babies stories

about how they used to go sliding– on icy hills or sandy dunes

or whatever–

who stay close and promise them that they will get through the night

and grow up and go sliding

or whatever the citizens of the city of children will do in the future,

I think maybe those people should be leaders,

cause they don’t read and write about what should be done

in the future

but do what must be done.

right now.

On my trips home to visit my mom in Sudbury, I always stop on the side of the road to collect rocks for the garden. Most of them are Cambrian Shield granite, but I have a few pieces of the nickle ore that still forms the basis of the local economy. The ore was formed in a magma lake created 1.8 billion years ago when a meteorite slammed into the region.

Last week I was sitting in the garden with Josie when I brought her over to a piece of the ore and told her to put her hand on it. I do not remember exactly what we had been discussing, but I wanted to illustrate a point about the relativity of time, about how what seems agonizingly long from a human perspective is nothing from geological point of view. If the ore could sense and think, would it even be able to register the 80 or so years of a human’s life? It would be the briefest flash of light, gone before the rock could even concentrate its attention to see if something worth investigating had happened. Even the whole history of the human lineage, a couple million years, would not be to it as an afternoon is to us.

I made a point to find some ore because it reminds me of who I am and how I got here. Had the meteorite not slammed into primeval Sudbury, there would have been no nickle-copper ore, and therefore no mines, no smelter where my father worked, and so maybe no father, no mother, no me. My sitting in the garden with Josie is one act in a cosmic drama billions of years old. And so is your sitting wherever you are sitting. And the causal connections that led to my or your being here and there, and one person’s doing one thing and another person another, and people meeting and becoming friends and colleagues are so innumerable, so improbable, that thinking about them sends a shudder through me. Had any one thing been even a little different, I would not have been born, or I would have become something else, and made different friends, or not made any at all, and would have had to sit alone in my garden rather than with Josie.

But however improbable a life is, if you are living it, then the whole 14 billion year history of the universe has worked out in your favour. Whatever you achieve or do not achieve, your life is of singular value. Once you are gone nothing ever, no matter how many trillions of years the universe will last, will be you again. And that is why we feel such pain at the death of our friends.

Although our lives are near miraculous singularities and the rocks will long outlast us, we are conscious of the passing of our days. And yet, how many days do we waste, wishing we were doing something other than we are doing, or fidgeting, restless and bored?

No mortal creature should ever be bored because no one knows for certain which moment will be one’s last. As has happened too frequently over the past three years, I was brutally reminded again yesterday of this hard truth– harder even than the ore in my garden– when I learned of the death of my friend and colleague Cate Hundleby. I was working upstairs when Josie called for me to come down, a quiver in her voice told me that something was seriously wrong. A tree had fallen in our back yard the day before and taken down the power line. I was worried that it had begun to spark or started something on fire.

But the news was far worse.

Our friends Tory and Len were in the yard, telling us that Cate had died earlier that day.

One goes numb, not quite capable of feeling the meaning of that news. One’s mind immediately goes back to the last time one saw the person, the vividness of the memory resists the thought that one will never see them again.

I called Cate ‘Big Cat’ because of her Chesire cat-like grin. I gave her the nickname very soon after she came to Windsor. I was on the committee that hired her and we were friends from the moment that she started working and living here. She lived on the same street as Josie and I, only half a block away. We would see her walking her dogs, first Abbie, then Chloe, and now, never again. Like the Chesire Cat, she has disappeared, leaving only the memory of that grin.

Cate was a transformative addition to the department, not the first woman in its history but the first feminist philosopher. When she started working here she had made a name for herself as a feminist philosopher of science. As her worked developed, it turned towards argumentation theory, where she made original contributions to a feminist theory of argumentation. She authored the Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on feminism and argumentation, edited an important collection of essays on the work of Trudy Govier, and was instrumental in founding Canada’s first PhD Program in Argumentation. She was a loud and effective voice for change within the department, the university, and the philosophical community generally. Her arguments were not always easily received in the department, but we are the better for her efforts and contributions.

These are facts, but people are not just facts. We cannot capture the texture of a life, how they interweave with the lives of others and things, by saying what people did and what they were like. Life is experience and activity; our contributions have helped make things the way they are, but the person cannot be recreated from the traces that they left behind. Only memory can preserve the Élan vital.

Josie and I sat somberly in the garden yesterday, remembering our friend and toasting her. As we sat there, a hummingbird began to feed from a flower of a late blooming hosta. Neither of us could remember ever seeing a hummingbird in twenty years of living here.

I am a man of reason and science. I know that rocks do not experience that passage of time and that hummingbirds are just hummingbirds.

But our superiority over the rocks is that we can imagine, and pretend, and project meanings, and act as if.

And so we looked at the hummingbird and said good bye to our friend.

A few seconds later, it rose from the hosta and flew away.

ChatGPT has set off a panic, not only amongst some educators, worried that it will encourage plagiarism (or perhaps even call into question the nature of authorship) but amongst media prognosticators and a few maverick tech mandarins (whom I always suspect of raising alarms only in order to raise share prices) that AI is coming not only for academic integrity, but our very humanity. They are not wrong to worry. A long history of science fiction dystopias have painted a picture of uncaring machines turning on their creators. Moreover, people who know a lot more about the science (forget about the fiction) plausibly speculate that an artificial intelligence would likely have very different motives than a natural intelligence, motives that we might find malignant but it would find normal. Hans Moravec, a robotics engineer and prophet of the post-human age argues that just as technologically advanced human societies conquered and exploited less technologically advanced societies, so too will an artificial superintelligence likely eliminate the fleshy form of life as inferior and irrelevant. Nick Bostrom, a leading transhumanist philosopher likewise warns his more cheery transhumanists that there is no guarantee that a superintelligent machine would care one whit for the joys and moral principles of human beings. I take these warnings seriously, but I also think that the nightmare scenarios that they paint of coming robot wars tends to distract from a less spectacular but probably more dire (because more probable) threat that the further development of AI poses.

Part of that threat concerns job markets: now that middle class intellectual and professional careers are threatened by AI they are desperately ringing the tocsin. The stoicism that they preached to generations of manual workers faced with technological unemployment is noticeably absent in their pleas to governments to start to regulate and restrain further AI research. Their hypocrisy aside, this side of the danger is real, and twofold.

On the one hand, we still live in a capitalist society where most of life’s necessities are commodities. In order to access the goods and services that we need we require an income, and for most of us that income means selling our labour power. That side of the problem could be addressed if the surplus value produced by our labour were collectively controlled rather than privately appropriated as profit. If collectively produced wealth were democratically controlled, we could rationally reduce socially necessary labour time. Surplus wealth would then create the conditions for everyone to enjoy more free time. Needed goods and services would be publicly funded and available on the basis of need. The realm of freedom, as Marx put it, would expand in proportion to the reduction of the realm of necessity (of having to labour for the sake of survival and development).

However, the second side of the problem would not be solved, and might even be exacerbated, if the liberatory promise of technological development were realized. The problem here is existential rather than social or economic. The technotopian dream behind the development of AI is to collapse the difference between freedom and necessity. Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity is Near, argues explicitly that the emergence of machine intelligence is a new plateau of evolution. He interprets evolution in teleological terms as tending towards higher levels of integrated complexity and intelligence. The logical end point of this development is omniscience– God is not a transcendent spiritual reality but the future outcome of the development of life.

In Kurzweil’s view, human beings are but a stepping stone on the way to the emergence of omniscience. Artificial Intelligence is the necessary next step. Out of humanistic concern for well-being, he argues, we must have the courage to let our creations unfold along their own evolutionary path. Our transhuman present will become a posthuman future. There will no longer be flesh and blood human beings, but instead, our consciousness will be preserved within the neural networks of the superintelligence– God– that succeeds us.

One might be tempted to dismiss this speculation as utopian theogony and not science, but I think we have to examine carefully the way in which it understands human values and the good for human beings. As I argued in both Embodiment and the Meaning of Life and Embodied Humanism: Towards Solidarity and Sensuous Enjoyment, the real danger of technotopian arguments is not that they might be true at some distant point in the future, but that they change how we understand human intelligence, human relationships, and the good for human beings in the present. Although Kurzweil and other technotopians claim to be the inheritors of the humanist values of the Enlightenment, they in fact understand human intelligence and the good for human beings in machine terms. Consequently, they fail to understand the essential importance of limitations– another word for necessity- in human life.

Think of the importance for our psychological well-being of feeling needed. One of the signs of serious depression leading to suicidal thoughts is the belief that the world will be better off if one kills oneself because no one needs you. An effective therapeutic intervention involves convincing the person that in fact others do need them. But why does anyone need anyone else? Because we are limited beings; we cannot procure everything that we need to live through our own efforts; we cannot endlessly amuse ourselves but need to talk to others; the objects of our knowledge lie outside of ourselves and we must work to understand them. So too the objects of our creative projects: they must be built from materials with their own integrity which might not be receptive to our designs. We must therefore work to realise our ideas and have to have the strength to bear failure and the humility to change plans. The good for human beings emerges within this matrix of material necessity. The difference between having a real and an imaginary friend is that we have to work on ourselves to convince other people to like us.

Kurzweil wants, in effect, to abolish this difference. Once material reality has been absorbed by virtual reality there will no longer be a meaningful difference between real and imaginary friends. In a real and not metaphorical sense all friends– in fact, all of reality– will be a function of the imagination of the superintelligence. Since for Kurzweil everything, including inanimate matter, is information, nothing essential would be lost once the material is replaced by the digital simulation. We only hang on to this metaphysical distinction because our minds– our information processing capacity– remains attached to a needy body that depends upon connection to nature and other people. But that archaic metaphysics is maintained by fear: as the Singluarity approaches we must have the courage to die in our fleshy body to be reborn– as St. Paul said– in our (digitized) spirit body.

Just as love of one’s neighbor can easily be converted into a divine command to destroy the enemy, so too transhumanist philanthropy can become a war against what is most deeply and fully human. That is the real danger: that artificial intelligence will re-code the way that we understand our evolved and social intelligence and cause us to prefer the former to the (much more subtle, rich, and complex) later.

Science has long generated metaphorical ways of understanding life. Aristotelian science understood living things as active souls shaping passive matter; in the Enlightenment this conception gave way to a mechanistic understanding of life (as, for example, notoriously expressed in La Mettrie’s epochal Man a Machine (1748). Today that metaphor is giving way to the metaphor of life as information and intelligence as information processing. Since information processing is just what computers do, it is no exaggeration to say that we are coming to understand ourselves as a reflection of the machines that we have built. Whether or not they turn on us, Terminator like or not, they will kill something essential in us if that metaphor takes hold to the extent that we start to think that our intelligence is solely in our brain and our brain is an information processor.

I am not denying that the advances made by AI researchers are not real or much of our intelligence can be captured by computational models of neural activity. But that which makes human intelligence distinct from machine functioning is that it is inseparable from caring, meaningful relationships to the environment. We are not brains in vats, (as Hilary Putnam entertained in a famous thought experiment) but living intelligences standing in meaningful relationships to the natural world, each other, and the universe as a whole. As Teed Rockwell shows in his brilliant book Neither Brain nor Ghost, we cannot understand what brains do if we abstract their activity from the embodied whole of which they are a part. What we see, feel, etc. are not unique functions of the discrete activity of brains but are shaped by the whole nervous system in complex relationships to the world. And– as Marx argued, presciently in the 1840s– the senses themselves are affected by historical and social development. Would Aristotle hear music or unbearable noise if he were brought back to life and taken to a rock concert?

Thus the real danger of further AI development is that it will cause us to dehumanize ourselves and off- load more and more forms of meaningful activity and relationships to a virtual world. And I have no doubt that barring some global catastrophe that collapses social institutions, this result will come to pass (despite my best efforts in Embodiment and the Meaning of Life and Embodied Humanism). Talk of regulating AI development is nothing more than hot air. If researchers are forbidden from pursuing their projects in one jurisdiction another will make itself available. The perceived economic and military “benefits” are simple too alluring for governments to seriously pass up. (I say “perceived’ because, as economic historian Robert Gordon has shown, the last decade of the computing revolution has not produced the expected rise in labour productivity).

Whatever the real or imagined benefits, as the technologies become more ubiquitous they will reshape our social relationships. Hartmut Rosa shows (in Social Acceleration) how a technology that is disruptive to one generation becomes the new normal for a later generation. Opposition to technologically driven social change quite literally dies out.

Old school humanists like me might fret at the loss of spontaneity and risk in social life, but a person born today will not understand the value of spontaneity and risk if they grow up in world where they expect all uncertainty to have been programmed out of existence. And that leaves me with a question that I cannot answer (well, perhaps I can, but do not like what I think that the answer might be): are the values of embodied social existence really universal and ultimate (as I have argued) or are they relative to an undeveloped technological era, perhaps to be admired by future cyborgs in the way we can appreciate the beauty of Aristotle’s hylomorphism without believe that it is true?

Howard Woodhouse is Professor Emeritus and Co-Director of the Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit in the Department of Educational Foundations, University of Saskatchewan. Critical Reflections on Teacher Education is both a resume of his long career as a philosopher and teacher and a diagnosis and suggestions for cures of the malaise of the school system and teacher education. In this slim but complex volume he argues that the continued intrusion of capitalist market values into schools has extended to the curriculum and methods of faculties of education. If left unchecked, this tendency will undermine the capacity of future teachers for critical reflection and autonomous judgement, turning them into little more than transmission belts for government policy and corporate interests. “Without a basic understanding of philosophical issues and their relationship to educational practice” he writes, new teachers “will become lost in the demands of hierarchical school systems that emphasize conformity to rules and policies, which negate the necessary autonomy of qualified judgement defining their profession.” (1)That this transformation would negate the vocation of educators to enable students’ intellectual growth is of no concern to today’s self-styled “reformers.” Woodhouse’s argument alerts educators to the crisis, explains the importance of philosophy to teacher education, and makes a number of practical suggestions for the transformation of classrooms at all institutional levels.

He supports his argument with evidence drawn from his own long career as a philosopher, from the educational philosophy of Bertrand and Dora Russell (and to a lesser extent, John Dewey), the philosophy for children movement, and the place-based educational philosophy and practice of Indigenous communities from whom he has learned in Saskatchewan. He integrates these distinct strands of argument by showing how they are forms of “life-value,” a term he adopts from the work of John McMurtry. McMurtry’s epochal philosophical achievement was to have demonstrated that all values are functions of the needs and capacities of living, sentient beings. Whatever is of value either serves living things as a resource that satisfies their needs or is an expression of their sentient, intellectual, or creative capacities. The Russell’s’ understanding of education as growth, the cultivation of the philosophical capacities of children, and the First Nation’s understanding that scientific knowledge grows up out of lived experience of the nurturing power of the land are all expressions of this underlying principle.

His latest critique of the intrusion of market values into the educational system extends the reasoning of his previous book, Selling Out, from the university system into the primary and secondary school systems. Both books build on the pioneering argument of McMurtry’s “Education and the Market Model” (Paideusis, 1991). In that seminal paper, McMurtry contrasted the values that rule the capitalist market place (all goods are understood as saleable commodities available for purchase by anyone willing to pay the price) with the value that organizes educational systems (the growth of intellect and sensibility through conjoint efforts with teachers in structured but open-ended inquiry). As is evident, the value that organizes educational systems is undermined to the extent that market values invade. To become educated, students must struggle to understand; the burden of inquiry cannot be alleviated through a cash transaction. The work must continue until insight has been achieved, only to start again, in search of deeper and more comprehensive understanding. If education were a commodity then the insights could be purchased, but even if one could buy diplomas they would not acquire the cultivated intelligence that the piece of paper signifies. The problem is solved, McMurtry and Woodhouse both worry, by transforming the content of education. Instead of open ended inquiry schooling becomes a matter of mechanical skill acquisition, efficiently delivered and standardized tested.

The book is organized into five pithy chapters. Each begins with a short personal reflection that motivates the philosophical argument to come. Despite their concision, each is richly illustrated with appropriate historical evidence. The first chapter details the way in which the market model has infiltrated faculties of education in Canada, the UK, and the US. The consequence for future teachers is that their careers will be “reduced to that of technicians working to advance the goals of the market.” (11) However, even that reduction is only a first step. The ‘reformers’ ultimately aim at doing away with living teachers altogether. Woodhouse cites Robert Heterich, president of Educom, an academic-corporate consortium, who advocates “‘remov[ing] the human mediation … and replac[ing] it with automation’ … to reduce unit costs and programme students for the market.”(24) The emergence of ChatGPT perhaps brings this dream closer than educators might have feared.

To the objection that machines cannot teach because machines cannot think, technocrats will respond (as they do in the case of “artificial” intelligence), by redefining teaching as that which the teacher bot can do. Human intelligence is bound up with our self-conscious awareness of our vulnerable being-in-the-world. Therefore, it is not algorithmic, even if some basic operations can be formalized and replicated by machine functioning. All intelligent reflection and action is bound up with meaningful interpretation and caring interacting with the natural and social environment. However impressive the operations of technologies like ChatGPT, they are not alive, do not care, and therefore cannot produce meaningful interpretations of the problems their creators claim they can help solve. However, this objection disappears if intelligence is defined as the machinic assembly of sentences. If students are taught that intelligence is the execution of algorithms then, after a few generations, that is what everyone will believe intelligence is, and the existential basis of the criticism will be undermined.

The same fate awaits teaching if technocrats like Heterich win. All teachers have to rely on routines and rules of thumb which those who would eliminate the teacher believe can be formalized and programmed into a machine. However, as with human intelligence, the affective and communicative core of teaching would be eliminated. Teaching is not the efficient transmission of information; teaching is the multi-sided ability to frame problems in such a way that students form the desire to investigate it on their own. Only through their own efforts can students grow intellectually. The role of the teacher is to help them find their way into whatever problem is under investigation. If students are taught that education is simply the efficient assimilation of skills and data, then they will lose the affective connection to problems that genuine education stimulates. The result will be that the human project terminates in our having replaced ourselves with machines. What will replace the role of effort and striving as sources of meaning in our lives no one can say.

Woodhouse exposes the supreme danger of these trends. He anchors his alternative vision in the educational philosophy of Bertrand and Dora Russell. Woodhouse demonstrates that, despite his occasional lapse into scientism, Russell was, at heart, a humanist and the educational philosophy that he and Dora developed placed the free development of the student at its centre. For the Russells, educational systems should be modelled on the principle of living development that governs the natural world: “The metaphor of growth runs throughout Bertrand and Dora’s educational philosophy … “the humanistic conception of education” they write ‘regards the child as a gardener regards a young tree … as something with an intrinsic nature, which will develop into an admirable form, given proper soil and air and light.”‘(34) Gardening is both joyous and terrifying: one plants the seeds in well-prepared ground but one cannot force them to grow. So too with teaching: the teacher prepares the ground by framing the problem in ways that the students can understand, but then must trust the students to do the work themselves. As the gardener cannot force the tree to grow, so too the teacher cannot brow beat the students to learn. Their task is not to force but to enliven the inner principle, the “desire to know” which, as Aristotle said, lies at the root of human relationship to the world.

Even when well-intentioned, the move to turn teachers into testable skill-transmitters would destroy the nature of education. Anyone can memorize times tables; writing Principia Mathematica requires imagination and drive, not just mastery of the rules of formal logic. ChatGPT can assemble sentences, but until it feels the joy of awakening each morning and the utter desolation of the loss of a loved one, poetry will elude it. Education enables students to find their own voice: some as mathematicians, perhaps, and some as poets, but all as sensitive, reflective, confident but not dogmatic citizens of the world. To become educated is to become alive to the world as a question. Thinking is– as Dewey understood–active intervention into the order of things, the very opposite of parroting the correct slogan or learning what you need to say to get the job. The world will always exceed our grasp, but that is a good thing: the inherent questionability of things ensures that there will always be something meaningful for the next generation to do (as long as there is a next generation).

Despite Russell’s reputation as a stuffy and conservative analytic philosopher, criticism was central to his philosophical practice. “The essential characteristic of philosophy,” he argued, “which makes it a study distinct from science, is criticism. It examines critically the principles employed in science and in daily life, it searches out any inconsistencies there may be in these principles, and it only accepts them when, as the result of a critical inquiry, no reason for rejecting them has appeared.”(32) One can immediately see the importance of this practice of philosophy for teachers and students. If education is not to degenerate into indoctrination, then teachers must be able to think critically about the curriculum they are being asked to teach, and to have the intellectual courage to oppose curricula that suffocates thinking under dogma. By being critical themselves they will instill in students the need to intervene when unsupported arguments circulate as facts or when narrow ideology demonizes and attacks. However, a genuinely critical practice is humbling: no one has all the answers, every position can be questioned, and when one is the target of criticism one knows that one owes one’s interlocutor a reasoned argument.

This capacity for (self)-criticism is central to the vocation of philosophy and education, but it can also– if it is practiced as an end in itself– conflict with philosophy’s positive, life-serving dimension. Life is not only opposition (although we must have the strength to oppose). Life is ultimately worth living because it is an opening to the beauty and magnificence of the universe. Social problems are problems precisely because they impede those who suffer from them from living– feeling, thinking, acting, relating, savouring, enjoying– to the fullest. The principle of life-enjoyment is the root which feeds all struggles. Criticism has to maintain connection with this root lest it degenerate into nihilistic skepticism or despair. Everything is open to challenge, true, but for the sake of expanding understanding, not drowning it in doubt. Woodhouse does not explicitly pose this sort of challenge to Russell’s definition of philosophy, but the final three chapters make clear that he is implicitly aware of these sorts of dangers.

The third chapter focuses on the principles and practices of the philosophy for children movement. First developed in distinct but related directions by Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp, the effort to incorporate philosophy at every level of education was motivated by the goal of freeing education from rigid bureaucratic structures. Instead of a teacher standing in front of the class drilling students until they can perform the appropriate repertoire, Lipman, Sharp, and their followers reconceived the relationship amongst learners as a “community of inquiry.”(61) Inspired in part by John Dewey’s understanding of education as problem-based inquiry, the proponents of philosophy for children wanted to turn the class room into an incubator of children’s native curiosity.(62) The teacher would be more shepherd and less drill sergeant and the child viewed as a unity of affect and intellect alive in wonder to the world, needing guidance but able to find their own way together with their co-explorers. Thinking of themselves as a community they would feel united in common purpose, but they would also understand that as a community of individual minds, each person sees the world from their own angle. Hence students would also discover for themselves the inevitability of disagreement, the need for dialogue, and respectful argument as the primary means for resolving disputes.

The movement has made some headway in Canada, the UK, the US, but Woodhouse is keen to stress that the trend has been away from philosophical education of any sort. Obviously, if teachers lack philosophical education they will be in no position to cultivate philosophical dispositions in their students. Philosophy is essentially a practice, not trivial familiarity with this or that thinker from the past. Woodhouse defends philosophy first as disposition and practice and second as an academic discipline. The life-value of the academic discipline is not expressed by the fact that exists but in the difference that it makes to those who study it. The development and nurturing of a philosophical disposition towards intelligent criticism in the service of truth and life-enjoyment must be the guiding idea.

No institution is more human than education. Animals learn but their cognitive capacities, no matter how impressive, are minute in comparison to human thought and feeling. It can expand to the edge of the universe and ask what still lies beyond; it can shrink to the size of a quark and imagine the world from that perspective; it is capable of the most tender and subtle refinements of meaning and a generator of metaphorical connection without limit, but poorly educated it is also capable of justifying genocidal violence. Thus, it is not hyperbole to argue that the human future depends upon the quality of our educational institutions and educators.

Woodhouse makes this connection between education and survival through the example of climate change. The final two chapters focus on the link between philosophical education for teachers and their ability to motivate students to understand the problem and become the sort of engaged citizens who can help solve it. In order to advance his argument, Woodhouse draws inspiration and insight from the place-based learning at the heart of Indigenous societies. Drawing on the knowledge of both Elders and Indigenous intellectuals, Woodhouse shows how the holistic (affective, intellectual, practical, and spiritual) understanding of the complex interrelationships upon which life depends must be integral to life-valuable climate change education. Woodhouse cites Marie Batiste and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood to explain the connection between Indigenous and “Western” science. “The traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous peoples is scientific in the sense that it is empirical, experimental, and systematic. It differs in two important respects from Western science, however: traditional ecological knowledge is highly localized, and it is social. Its focus is on the web of relationships between humans, animals, plants, natural forces, and landforms in a particular locality, as opposed to the discovery of universal laws.” (89) While I agree that this difference is real, I do not think that it is best understood as a difference between Indigenous and “Western” forms of science.

The more important point that Batiste and Youngblood are making here, I would say, is that science has a common, practical root. Chemistry does not originate with the periodic table, but with cooking and other forms of life-serving transformation of substances. Taxonomy does not begin with Linnaeus but with long-evolved local understandings flora and fauna and their uses. Medicine does not begin with the MRI machine but with caring attention to vulnerable bodies and the medicinal properties of plants. It is true that the science that has developed since Galileo and Newton demands generalization of results expressed as mathematically formalized regularities, but I think that this demand should be understood as continuous with and a development of that much longer practical history of science rather than as cliched “Western” alternative to older forms of knowing. The mathematical notations that supposed “Western” science employs are not Western in origin but Egyptian and Greek (geometry), Indian (the all important value of 0), and Arabic (algebra). Science, practical and mathematical, has always been an international and cross-cultural practice. Like all forms of knowledge (including religious and philosophical) science can be deployed in ideological ways to justify domination. The best means to oppose this very unscientific use of science is to demonstrate its deeper and more cosmopolitan origins rather than (ironically) allow “the West’ to take credit for the extraordinary and undeniable achievements of post-17th century mathematical natural science.

That said, the more important point is to insist upon the connection between genuine knowledge and the understanding, maintenance, and development of natural and social life-support systems. Woodhouse integrates the various strands of his argument by invoking McMurtry’s “primary axiom of value.” The axiom holds that all value whatsoever either serves life as a means of satisfying a need or expresses the sentient, intellectual, and creative powers of living things. The value of the engaged, reflective, and critical form of education that Woodhouse depends is clearly explained by the axiom. The human intellect needs education in order to develop its full range of abilities, and the educated person experiences life more fully, is capable of a greater range of activities, and is reflectively aware of the interests of others, other living things, and nature as a whole. Life cannot be lived anyway one wants or is able to pay for; since the world exists outside of our won minds and skins we must take into account the needs of others, contribute to their satisfaction in some way, and, overall, strive to live in way which are to “coherently inclusive” of the needs and goals of others.(98)

Education is our first and last line of defense. It must be approached as the hard but joyous work of exploring our universe and the problems of human social life together, in respectful but sometimes difficult argument. Cats and crows can master a few skills and we should admire them for it, but human intelligence is not the mastery of skills and teaching is not the transmission of information. If Covid taught teachers anything, it is that on line platforms are useful for transmitting information, but make actual pedagogical communication extremely difficult. The desire to learn develops best when living learners work together in shared space, challenging and inspiring each other to expand the circle of understanding ever wider.

In his correspondence with Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi argued that when “there is war, the poet lays down the lyre … The poet will sing the true note only once the war is over.” (The Mahatma and the Poet, 93). Note that Gandhi does not say that when war comes the job of the poet is to rhapsodize about the glory of armed conflict, but that the poet has to stop composing verse and contribute to the cause. Gandhi thus implies an opposition between war and poetry. When there is war, there is no time for verse. But war is not something to be celebrated but endured and overcome. The true note can only be sung after the conclusion of hostilities.

I think something similar can be said of philosophy. If it comes to a fight then the philosopher, as a member of a community under attack, has to put down their pen and fight alongside their comrades. In other words, where war begins, philosophy, like poetry, ends. The poet does not glorify and the philosopher does not justify; they fight, if they must, for the the restoration of the conditions in which thought can unfold and verse can be composed free from fear and violence.

I was motivated to reflect on these issues by an article I read by a philosopher who abandoned his work to take up arms in Donbass. I am not judging his decision to fight, but I do question his understanding of the relationship between philosophy and war. Andrey Korobov-Latintsev argues that philosophical argument is analogous to war and philosophical education akin to military training:

“For a philosopher, the military path – the path of war – is quite natural. In reality, such a scholar is always engaged in this process – the conflict of ideas. He understands that war is the forefather of all things and since he is looking for the origin of everything, turning to war, both as a subject and an element of existentialism, is natural.”

Heraclitus argued that all things are born of strife, but strife comes in many forms and is not necessarily military in nature. But setting aside the historical question of whether or not “war is the forefather of all things,” Korobov-Latintsev is wrong to draw an analogy between the conflict of ideas and armed violence. In truth, they are opposites, not analogues. The conflict of ideas leaves both parties to the dispute standing; military violence tries to kill the enemy. War begins where argument fails. One might say that war is the failure of philosophy, and not, as Korobov-Latintsev implies, philosophy by other means.

I would go further: philosophy is not, first and foremost, a conflict of ideas, but a search for the most important truths of human existence: where did we come from, what is our purpose on earth, how ought we treat each other, are shared values possible, are there definitive answers to these questions? Philosophy begins, as both Aristotle and Descartes noted, in wonder. Before we answer, we question, before we categorize, we are open to what presents itself. We look to the heavens in awe, feeling insignificant and unique at one and the same time. The universe is immense and we are as nothing. And yet, the stars- distant, silent, beautiful- cannot ask themselves about their place in the whole. Only we can. And so far as we know, we are the only creatures who ever could, can, and will be able to ask those questions.

Real questions, questions posed from a position of receptive openness, are peaceful. The interrogator’s questions are violent, but they only ask what they already know. Their question is meant to intimidate, to terrify, to elicit the confession that will justify the punishment that has already been decided. The philosophical question is peaceful: knowing what they do not know, philosophers open themselves to the universe and ask it what it all means. Not hearing an answer, they go in search of others for help until they find a truth. Having found it, they do not keep it to themselves but immediately share it with everyone who is willing to listen. Openness to what presents itself and a desire to share the truths that have been found: those are the dispositions of the philosopher. As Plato argues in Gorgias, philosophers have a “thirst for victory when it comes to knowing what the truth is,” because the truth is “a good, common to everyone.” The philosophical victory does not leave the enemy vanquished, bloody, and dead on the battlefield, it elevates everyone by showing them what they really need to live fully.

Korobov-Latintsev traces the origins of “just war theory” to Plato. I am not sure what work he is thinking of, but Plato does discuss the origins of war in The Republic. However, his goal is to understand its causes, not to justify one side or the other. War breaks out, Plato argues, when a society becomes motivated by superfluities. Once human desires grow beyond the basics of what we need to live we become undisciplined and greedy, and once we become undisciplined and greedy, we require more resources. Once a society exhausts its resource base it must appropriate that of a neighbouring society. War is the means by which others’ resources are seized.

Plato is not concerned with the justice of war. According to the definition of justice he later defends, all wars would be unjust because they ultimately result from a disharmony in the souls of those who demand more than their fair share. If anything, Plato tries to understand the causes of war so that armed conflicts can be avoided. Certain desires and policies make war necessary, not just. But since people can reflect upon and change their motivations, this necessity is embedded in a deeper layer of contingency. Given a set of unquenchable desires as motivations, people will demand ever more resources. People come into conflict with their neighbours, in other words, because they are in conflict with themselves. Cure the malaise in their own souls, Plato implies, and they will live in peace with others.

Whatever one thinks about the details of Plato’s politics, I think that these arguments continue to teach us important lessons. They teach us that the aim of philosophy is not to justify either side in a war but to understand its causes. Philosophy, like poetry, is a peacetime pursuit: if philosophers want to promote the conditions in which everyone can reflect on the fundamental problems that shape our time on earth, then it is our job to contribute what we can to the solution to the underlying conflicts that start wars. Plato’s account of the origins of war is speculative but contains an important truth, confirmed time and again in history: resources are at the root of most large scale conflicts. If no group ever sought to appropriate the lands and labour of others, there would be no war. Demonizing and chauvinistic ideologies arise to justify armed violence but they are rarely its cause.

Unless philosophers want to accept the truth of those ideologies then they are obliged by their vocation (to understand the causes of events) to oppose argument to violence. It is never the part of a philosopher to justify one side or another in an armed conflict, because the existence of the armed conflict is proof that rational argument has collapsed into a hardened conflict between one-sided positions. That philosophy is opposed to war does not mean that philosophers are indifferent to injustice or believe that victim groups should simply accept whatever treatment their tormentors impose on them without fighting back. People have the right to protect themselves and their societies.

But philosophy, as fundamental inquiry, serves the cause of justice by working beneath particular arguments pro and contra war to draw attention to the underlying drivers. Unless we are satisfied with a world where the solution to one conflict immediately gives way to another somewhere else, then we need the sort of abstract, general inquiries into causes that philosophy can provide. The point is: one or another side may have legal and moral right on its side, but philosophy is not concerned with that historical question but the deeper problem of how members of the same species, who share fundamental needs and capacities, who prove themselves capable of understanding one another and getting along, degenerate into violent conflict.

Thus, we should approach the problem of war in the register of necessity, not justice. If a society’s lands are invaded, if their people are enslaved, then they will fight back. The right of self-defence follows from the physical necessity of self-protection. But having exposed the particular histories that lead up to the outbreak of warfare, I argue that philosophers have to go one step further to expose the deeper layer of contingencies from which necessities emerge. I mean that historical events are never absolutely necessary. Given decisions a, b, and c, d becomes necessary. Philosophy re-traces this history but argues that while d follows from a.b, and c, a itself was not necessary. If instead of a.b, and c, the group had chosen policies 1,2, and 3, then 4, not d, would have followed. Philosophers have the difficult task of trying to walk their fellow citizens back to the moment where there was a real choice between a and 1.

For fulfilling this duty philosophers can expect to be attacked. They will be denounced as fence sitters, or worse, enemy agents. But philosophy does not sit on the fence. It is militant and partisan, but on the side of truth. Unless someone looks out for the truth: not the truths that link a,b, and c, but the deeper truth, that different values and goals lead to different possibilities and that reason can uncover common ground, then we will be condemned to stay stuck in the cycle of armed violence. Different combatants will rotate in and out but the wheel of destruction will always be setting one or another part of the globe on fire.

Korobov-Latintsev concludes that wars are ultimately justified by their results. He points to the principle of “‘jus post bellum’ (rights after war),” explaining that “this means that the world after the war should be better than the world prior to the war.” However, he does not specify the time frame for analysis. Over a long enough time frame, the traces of even wars of extermination will fade. One might argue on this basis that World War Two was justified because it gave rise to the EU, the UN, and catalyzed anti-colonial revolutions. But note; we are justifying the war to living people, not to the people who fought and died in it. If there was a way to create international institutions that, at least in principle, offer legal and diplomatic alternatives to war, if there had been alternatives to colonization, then the world that would have followed had they been chosen would have been better than the world that followed the war, because the same good results would have been achieved without the deaths of 60 million people. The people who died fighting for the cause would have been alive to enjoy the benefits.

Yes, but philosophy must deal with reality or consign itself to irrelevance, my opponent will say. In the real world people must fight. Talking about what might have been the case is a cowardly distraction from the battlefield action. Even a pacifist like Gandhi recognizes the necessity of war.

Too true, I respond, philosophy does deal with reality, and sometimes one must fight. But reality is not so simple as the historical links between choice a and consequence b. Human reality is a field of possibilities. Once Frost’s traveler on a snowy evening has chosen his road, the alternative disappears behind him. The politician is like the traveler after he has had made his choice: to him, there never was any other road. But although it cannot be seen from where the traveler ends up, there once was another road, and he knows it. Philosophy is the reminder that the other road was real.

The ever-intensifying political polarization between “liberals” and “conservatives” (in the American senses of those terms) have occluded a clear understanding both of the nature and the importance of academic freedom. While some egregious and indefensible mobbing attacks on academics like Kathleen Stock (who had the audacity to argue that sex is biological reality that has important health and political implications for women’s lives- quelle horreur!) or the firing of Frances Widdowson by Mount Royal University in Calgary (because she questioned the dominant narrative around residential schools and the influence of Indigenous traditions on Canadian university campuses) provide grist for the conservative mill that universities have been captured by woke cry babies incapable of argument, the reality is that conservatives are a far bigger threat to academic freedom.

If anyone doubts this claim then they are not paying attention to news out of Florida. Governor de Santis has launched a full scale attack on the intellectual autonomy of Florida universities. His warm up exercise was to fire the entire board of the small liberal arts focused New College of Florida and replace it with Christopher Rufo as Chair and hand picked Republican supporters. The new Board, under the guise, of course, of political neutrality and academic rigour, threatened to fire professors and eliminate programs that adopted a critical perspective on contemporary American reality. This move came after he forced the closure of an accelerated program on racial history on grounds that it teaches (generally undefined, by its opponents) Critical Race Theory. The new Bill before the Florida legislature threatens to go much further:

“The legislation, filed this week, would also require that general education courses at state colleges and universities “promote the values necessary to preserve the constitutional republic” and cannot define American history “as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” It would prohibit general courses “with a curriculum based on unproven, theoretical or exploratory content.”

The American Association of University Professors is right to warn that if passed, the very existence of Florida universities as centres for free inquiry and argument would be threatened. If taken at its word, the last set of provisions would lead to a ban on string theory and other scientific theories “based on unproven, theoretical or exploratory content.” It would also rule out courses in art and creative writing that demand students go beyond established canons of practice, because by definition, going beyond established canons of practice is “exploratory.” Indeed, what living tradition of thought, scientific, humanistic, artistic, or social scientific is not exploratory at its leading edges? And if universities are not exploratory at their leading edges, they serve little purpose.

In any discipline, one studies its past in order to go beyond it. History does not simply transmit facts about the past. Historical research uncovers new documents, gives voice to excluded perspectives, and re-interprets settled interpretations in light of the continued effects past events and ideas have on the present. De Santis’s bill, aimed as it obviously is at what he takes to be left-wing biased research, would quite literally destroy Florida universities. They would become mere transmission belts of hackneyed republican interpretations of American history that no serious student of that country of whatever political persuasion could accept. One might argue that the constitutional norms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution establish a sufficient political foundation for solving the problem of racism, but how could anyone who impartially examined the evidence disagree with the basic argument of Critical Race Theory: America was shaped by the slave economy and its effects are felt in the structure and operation of every American institution and the daily reality of African Americans still today?

Perhaps someone would disagree with that reading of the evidence. Excellent. If they have a better interpretation, they should be encouraged to share it. And then defenders of Critical Race Theory can respond. What cannot happen without destroying the university system is for state power to rule one side of the debate illegal and ban it. No one on the left that I know of is proposing that left-wing state legislatures ban the teaching of classical liberal doctrines of formal equality or making courses that argue that America gave the purest expression of those principles illegal.

There have indeed been overzealous demonstrations by students and faculty that have prevented right-wing speakers from speaking. Demonstrations and counter-argument are one thing, preventing speakers from speaking is another. The Stock and Mount Royal cases are more serious because they resulted in the two academics losing their positions. These are egregious violations of collegiality and academic freedom that not only threaten the intellectual integrity of the university but provide ammunition for the right wing. We can be certain that de Santis’s frontal assault on the independence of universities will be replicated elsewhere. And if the Republicans are elected in 2024, perhaps with de Santis as leader, maybe with trump. watch out.

But does my argument not depend on a naive belief in the political neutrality of knowledge and universities? No, it does not. I have a sound understanding of the history of Western universities in general and the role that ideological justification of the status quo (first the hegemony of the Catholic Church in medieval society, then various imperialist projects and capitalist modernization) have played in their development. Major American universities would not have the wealth that they enjoy if they were not the recipients of massive amounts of military funding. Universities are integral parts of the knowledge economy, which is an integral part of capitalist society, which remains contradictory in all the ways past generations of critics have noted.

Universities are also contradictory institutions. Since the nineteenth century they have been an essential component of national development strategies, but they have also provided space for the critique, from a variety of perspectives, of those development strategies. In the 1960’s the (now mostly anachronistic) image of the campus radical professor emerged in a context where students were leading the movements against imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the soullessness of a future dominated by stratified corporations and the ‘company men’ who ran them.

That critical function of universities is as essential to their history as their function in preparing the next generation of national leaders. Without academic freedom, universities would not have been able to play that role. However, like every right, it cuts both ways: it protects the rights of radical critics to freely articulate their criticisms, but it also protects the right of critics of radicals to criticize in turn.

Academic freedom is thus not essentially a principle of radical criticism or a conservative tool to “repressively tolerate” critique within polite limits. It is a principle that has developed to allow the contemporary university to exist as a space for free intellectual inquiry into anything that can become the object of intellectual inquiry, including the past histories of the various disciplines, the exclusions that have shaped them, and the limited range of voices formerly allowed to speak. Universities are not indoctrination zones for any political perspective. At their best, universities enable students to learn to think critically and independently, to compile and assess evidence, to test principles for coherence and consistency, and to reason, analytically and critically, about the operation of major social institutions and the value systems that guide them (as well as imagine alternative value systems that might guide them in a different future).

Education is not about learning how to mindlessly chant slogans, whether from the left or right. As Marx argued, the question of objective truth independently of human action is a scholastic question: in practice, human beings must prove the truth. But if they are going to prove the truth (whether in physics or philosophy) they have to be able to think: gather evidence, draw inferences, expose contradictions, propose novel syntheses. Learning to think also involves– and this point proves painful for dogmatist of the right and left– to accept that other people think differently. The university provides a space in which those disagreements can be solved rationally, through open debate and comparison of arguments pro and contra. Peoples feelings simply cannot get in the way of this exchange. Education is a not a safe space: it is a conflictual space in which different positions confront one another and accepted truths of any sort contested.

Argument is hard. Listening to counter-arguments that cut against values that define your commitments is painful. De Santis’s bill shows us how not to deal with the problem. Making a theoretical position illegal does not make it go away, as he would hope, but it does destroy the integrity of institutions that are vital for any contemporary society, however one believes that it should be run. But shouting down a person with whom you disagree does not make their position go away either. More likely, it strengthens it because it allows conservative politicians to argue that there is nothing backing up critical perspectives other than shrill, irrational moralism. Since the right tends to be far more ruthless when it wins state power than the left (compare Margaret Thatcher to Jeremy Corbin, Trump to Biden) the left has a pragmatic reason to protect academic freedom. But beneath that pragmatic, must lie a deeper commitment to the belief that the truth will out. If our theories are ultimately the more truthful, then we need to develop them through through open inquiry alongside competing theories and “prove their truth in practice” through and sharp but peaceful argument with our opponents.

My favourite argument in Plato’s Republic concerns the nature of freedom. In Book 3 of The Republic he argues that free people govern themselves by applying the appropriate standard to their conduct in any given situation. Hence, where people rely upon external authorities to make their decisions or get them out of trouble, (his example is doctors and lawyers) the society and the character of its citizens is corrupt. By that metric we live in corrupt times indeed.

I was put in mind of this argument by the news that Erika Lopez Prater, the adjunct professor whose contract was not renewed by Hamline University in Minnesota because she was accused of “Islamophobia” has commenced legal action against the institution. Its not the health of her soul that I worry about– what choice does she have to correct the maligning of her character and competence?– but the soul of her accusers and, more generally, the soul of academic institutions as they drift ever further from a clear understanding of their raison d’etre.

The case stems from a class in art history in which the professor showed a medieval painting of the angel Gabriel in conversation with the Prophet Mohamed. A Muslim student in the class was offended and trotted out the usual cliche’s about not feeling included just because something they were studying made her feel uncomfortable. Instead of acting like a student and challenging the professor in class, i.e., engaging in an argument about whether or not the painting should have been shown, she ran complaining to the boss.

Remember when students thought they were a revolutionary vanguard!

What makes this case all the more disturbing is that the painting was made by a Muslim artist and was shown during a section of the class devoted to Islamic art. How expanding the content of the class beyond the Western canon constitutes Islamophobia is beyond me. A true Islamophobe would either ignore or disparage the histories of Islamic art. In this case, a good faith effort to explore non-Western traditions– are we not constantly enjoined to “diversify” the curriculum?– ended up costing the professor future contracts.

Numerous American Muslim organizations and Islamic professors have weighed in to the controversy to note that there is no absolute prohibition on depicting the prophet Mohamed. As one would expect, the complex philosophical, scientific, theological, and artistic histories of Islam contain different positions on the permissibility of depicting Mohamed. The class could have become an occasion for challenging myths about the intellectual uniformity of the Islamic tradition and its domination by dour fundamentalists, i.e., the caricatured view constructed by real Islamophobes. Instead it became yet another sorry instance of well-meaning people falling victim to cliches. The professor, academic freedom, and the integrity of academic institutions suffered the consequences.

Justifying the egregiously stupid decision to not renew the professor’s contract, the president of Hamline University argued that ” “Prioritizing the well-being of our students does not in any way negate or minimize the rights and privileges assured by academic freedom,” Miller wrote. “But the concepts do intersect.”

They absolutely do not intersect and anyone who thinks that they do should resign their position as a leader of an academic institution. Universities are nor care homes for students’ psychological well-being. They are places of study in which no topic or work can be taboo. If the investigative context calls for it, then The 120 Days of Sodom or Mein Kampf must be on the reading list. If the context calls for it, then medieval paintings of the Prophet Mohamed must be on the syllabus. Universities do not exist to protect or preserve the integrity of religious or other traditions: they exist to question them. No external authority no matter what their beliefs or politics can determine the content of courses or the direction of research. Course content can only be determined by the problem under investigation; the direction of research can only be determined by professors’ interests and the conclusions that they can coherently defend when challenged.

Administrators who do not understand these fundamental, defining principles of the institution need to step down from their roles.

What about student well-being? No student who is at university for the right reasons– to grow intellectually– should ever be offended by any subject explored in good faith in the classroom, on the reading list, or in a public lecture. Academic freedom is based on respect for differences, but it cannot be limited by the worry that some subjects might cause offense. In the classroom context respect entails explaining clearly to students the reasons why certain problems or texts have to be investigated. To avoid topics because some students might take offense is the very opposite of respect: it is demeaning to the student as learner.

Everyone at a university: students, professors, administrators, is a learner. Learners learn by being challenged. Being challenged means being confronted with that which we do not know, with that which we might disagree, with events from history that might disturb, even horrify. When I was an undergraduate at York University (a school with a high proportion of Jewish students) I took a class on the ways in which totalitarian ideologies spread. (It was called, if I remember, Morality and Ideology, and taught by a Professor Katz, I believe). We had to watch Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. How do you think the Jewish students felt watching Hitler rant and rave at Nuremberg? How many recalled their own relatives killed in the Holocaust when they heard a Polish villager tell Lanzmann that they did notice that all of a sudden the Jewish villagers disappeared, but they didn’t care?

I would guess that they felt pretty damn uncomfortable. But no one complained. Prof. Katz was not fired. Everyone understood that the Holocaust and Nazism were historical realities that we must understand if we are to prevent their recurrence. (Perhaps they are still spreading because too many people are afraid to do the hard work of historical understanding and think that “comforting” slogans will protect us from real social dangers). Ignorance, intellectual cowardice, and averting one’s eyes from complex realities do not solve real problems. Nor do cliches and bathetic platitudes about compassion and inclusion solve the problems of hatred and exclusion. Social change does, but real social change depends upon an understanding of history and causes.

The same argument holds in this case. Islamophobia is not stopped by ignoring the complex, rich, and contradictory history of Islam, but by freeing people who are not aware of its richness and complexity (as the student at the heart of this case clearly was not) from their caricatured and cliched misunderstandings. If one-sided views are not challenged, then real Islamophobes will continue to conflate Islam with fundamentalist violence and oppression. Where better than the university to explore these problems?

Nowhere, provided that those who assume leadership roles in the university accept that their role is to serve the primary purpose of university: to challenge ourselves to know better. Smart people behave stupidly when they fail to govern their decision by the appropriate principle. The President of Hamline believed that she had some personal duty of care towards an individual student when her primary duty is towards the institution as a centre of learning. Academic freedom, as I have argued before, is not a personal right held by academics as individuals that allows them to say anything they feel like saying. Academic freedom is a collective right that ensures that that which needs to be studied can be studied without interference from external forces with an interest in suppressing critical thought and argument.

Academic freedom not only will produce discomfort, it ought to produce discomfort. The moment of discomfort is the moment of learning. They have chosen to come to university and must expect that they will be confronted with issues and arguments that challenge their beliefs. Universities bring together the growing totality of human thought and expression. They cannot be transmission belts for any particular culture nor can they erect firewalls around some subjects or positions just because they may offend someone’s religious sensibilities. It would be profoundly wrong to try to hang a painting of Mohamed in a mosque, but, by the same reasoning, it is profoundly wrong to try to prevent critical and historical inquiry into historical depictions of Mohamed.

Administrators must have the strength of character to defend the principle of academic freedom or they must resign.

When it comes to any artwork, the only questions that the artist should ask before they release it to the world are: do the parts fit together in the context of the aesthetic logic of the whole; and do they contribute to the unified effect they are striving towards? The question can never be: will they offend? Once artists start censoring themselves for fear of public opprobrium, art is dead.

Art is killed by the desire to please or conform to public political sensibilities not because its function is to offend, but because its function is to push. Art does not push a particular political line but rather the limits of experience. Art expands the human sensorium; it changes the way we see, hear, feel, touch, and smell the world. It enters into conflict with the commonplace and cliche because it is the result of our creative power. Art that simply repeats what everyone already accepts, or conforms to the limits of polite sensibility is not art because it is not creative. “Creative” does not mean “shocking” or “scandalous.” It means that existing elements of meaning and expression (words, brush strokes, musical notes, etc.) are combined in such a way that something unprecedented is produced.

In order to exist as art, all such creative works must be submitted to public judgment, evaluation, and criticism. However, being open to judgment, evaluation, and criticism, they must also withstand it. If a work cannot withstand criticism it was not yet ready to enter into the world. If it was ready to enter the world, it must hold its own regardless of what critics and people at large think.

To withdraw a work from circulation and instrumentally revise it to accommodate complaints is quite literally the death of art– the extinguishing of the power of creation by the fear of censure and the need to conform.

The liberal left pretends that “cancel culture” is a figment of the right’s imagination. If only that were true. Every week brings new whinging demands for artists to withdraw works that for whatever reason offend sensibilities. These demands are not only politically reactionary, they stem from a deep misunderstanding of the language of art.

Let us consider a few recent examples.

Last week, Beyonce agreed to remove the word “spaz” from a recent release because it was deemed “ableist.” That she would do so is perhaps explicable by the fact that she is a pop artist and does not want to incur the commercial costs of alienating her fans. Such an explanation does not work, for two reasons. First, and most importantly, pop artists are artists. Second, all art has a commercial dimension. Any artist who makes concessions, either for the sake of sales or to appease critics ceases to be an artist.

The problem runs deeper than any particular artist’s reactions to criticism. When critics seize upon a word like “spaz” and argue that it should be removed because it is offensive, they completely misunderstand the language of art. The language of art is not literal: a word, an image, a sound are not chosen by an artist to covey a literal meaning; they are chosen because they help solve a problem specific to the art work. Hence the words do not convey the same force of commentary on the real as they would if they were used in everyday speech. A racist character is a novel is not a racist, because they are not real people but characters whose ‘life’ serves a literary function. The literary function is neither to celebrate nor condemn racism: any work of art which is that literal fails as art. The literary function of characters, as with the elements of any form of art, is to contribute to the realization of the work as a whole. They are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ not according to whether they express ‘good’ or ‘bad’ character traits, but according to whether they contribute to the successful realization of an aesthetic whole. This distinction, upon which the existence of art depends, is continually ignored by the chorus of the perpetually offended. Any artist who withdraws or revises a work simply because a group of the public is incapable of distinguishing the referents of artistic and ordinary language ceases to function as an artist. If “spaz” was the right word then it was the right word and Beyonce should have stuck by her decision. If it was not the right word then the song should not have been released until the right word was found.

The stakes are higher than the lyrics of pop songs. Documenta 15 was disrupted by a complaint a large work by the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi contained caricatured portrayals of Jewish people and was antisemitic. The piece in no way advocated violence towards Jewish people or any other group. The collective apologized and explained that the work was meant to criticize the violence of the Suharto regime. The content deemed antisemitic resulted from their exploration of the connections between Suharto and Mossad. The Artistic Directors– another Indonesian art collective, ruangrupa– agreed to first cover the mural and then remove it. Documenta is no pop song but one of the most important international art festivals. That the organizers gave in to pressure and that the artists themselves felt compelled to apologize is sad but not shocking testimony to the failure to understand the dangers of censorship.

A with the racist character, the artistic use of caricature has to be judged in the context of its contribution to the art work as a whole. Jewish comedy abounds in caricatures of Jewish characters, but these are not normally denounced as antisemitic. They are not antisemitic not because they are typically written by Jewish comics, but because they are not commentaries on Jewish people but characters written for humorous effect. They same reasoning must be applied in the Documenta case. The goal here was not humour but political criticism. One might object that the criticism was rather too obvious and literal, but regardless of how one assesses the work, the only relevant question is: did the figures work coherently within the art work as a whole? If so, they are valid in the context of the piece, and the organizers of the show should have defended it.

The validity or otherwise of art works does not mean that they are above criticism. But criticism is the opposite of censorship. Criticism– at least good criticism– engages with the work, perhaps exposes weaknesses that artists can then push beyond in subsequent efforts. The danger of the Documenta case is not that the removal of this particular work is another successful attempt to link political criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism– although it is that– but that it reveals that aesthetic illiteracy has penetrated the highest echelons of the art world. If they do not understand that censorship does not solve political problems like ableism or anti-Semitism but just kills art, who will stand up for the integrity of art work?

The public has a right to criticize, not to remove or question the right of art works to exist. Another recent controversy involving a new work by one of England’s most important sculptors, Antony Gormley saw students at Imperial College London complaining that they were not “consulted” about the installation of the new work. No wonder, and than god they were not. Some complained that the work was too “phallic,” reading a large square protuberance from the lower middle of the structure as a penis. Gormley contested that reading. That he bothered to engage with this puerile philistinism speaks positively to his character, but the debate is beside the point. One must read the sculpture first of all as a sculpture, as an arrangement of material parts to produce a certain formal coherence which can be interpreted in different ways. No one interpretation– including Gormley’s– is correct. Any art work worth erecting– (no, not in that sense!) in public should generate discussion and debate. The problem with the student objections (aside from its crass, unthinking literalism, thin-skinned over-sensitivity, and platitudinous, prudish moralism) is that they assume that they should carry the day. Their position is thus as dogmatic as it is mindless. Fortunately, the school has refused their request to remove it.

Remember when student’s led the struggle for free speech and the free exercise of the artistic imagination? It is a sad day for campus politics when we have to rely on the administration to defend artistic creation.

But let’s not get too excited about sensible administrators. They can still behave like tyrants. On the same day that the Gormley controversy was being reported the Royal College of Music suspended pianist Alexander Romanovsky. Romanovsky performed with a Russian musician at the theatre in Mariupol that was the site of alleged Russian atrocities. The venue was sure to stir controversy, but art cannot push in the ways I discussed above if it is afraid of controversy. If administrators are afraid of risk, they should move to the City and work for insurance firms rather than run art schools. Since when do school authorities decide where musicians can perform or suspect their motives for performing? If the job of musicians is to play music, we have here a case of someone being suspended for doing his job. Or was it because he had the temerity to perform with a Russian?

When Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem premiered in 1962 to consecrate the new Coventry Cathedral (the original was destroyed in World War Two), he included included a German soloist. The fact that its first performance occurred 16 years after the end of the war is besides the point. There would still have been many veterans and civilian victims in the audience, but Britten understood that music, perhaps more than any art, envelopes listeners in a shared experience that breaks down barriers. Peace requires difficult encounters. If music helps cross divides it has to go to the frontiers to work its magic. Writing to his sister about the Requiem, Britten said that he hoped it would make people “think a bit.” The piece is powerful, but not powerful enough to force people to think.

Underlying each of these attacks on creativity and art work is the naive belief that if everyone were just nice and “inclusive” the problems of the world would go away. Aside from the irony that those who preach inclusivity are typically the first to loudly demand the exclusion of anything that they do not understand or enjoy, the belief is based on a profound misunderstanding of social change. Slogans and platitudes do not change the world. Nor does art, for that matter. Art changes sensibilities, hopefully in the direction of deepening desires for as yet unexperienced forms. As senses and mind open towards the new and difficult, then might emerge the formation of people who demand a better world, one devoted to free expression, interaction, peace, and creative expression.

My friend and collaborator Douglas MacLellan have just completed our 4th chap book: Peace Quatrains. The book is composed of verses by me and photographs by MacLellan. Our collaborations began years ago as parts of the Mayworks Windsor Festival. The Festival has run its course, but MacLellan and I were motivated to continue on by the war in Ukraine. The book is not a protest, much less a solution, but perhaps bets thought of as a lament for the persistence of the human capacity to choose the wrong road when the right one (peace) stretches out clear as day before us.

From my Introduction:

My approach to social philosophy is to get beneath surface explanations of events to tease out the historical causes of conflict.  I have always resisted arguments, whether expressed in moralistic or religious language, that violence is baked into the human condition.  Instead, I have built my work on the conviction, adopted from Marx, that the depth cause of all forms of social violence is the private ownership of and control over the resources and institutions that everyone must access if they are to survive and flourish.  If we can get the social institutions right, I have always argued, we can create the conditions for social peace.  Once the conditions of social peace have been secured, everyone will be free to develop themselves according to their own interests and talents.  Life will be—so far as possible for a dependent and mortal creature—free and self-directed.  

But there has also always been another side to my work, darker in spirit, subterranean, exposed to the sunlight only rarely– which worries that necessary as it may be to believe that there are social solutions to every problem, the truth might be that the source of conflict and violence lies deeper, in some ultimate perversity of human nature that drives us to consciously destroy whatever we have built up.  This thought is not original:  Schopenhauer argued that were we to create an idyllic state boredom would drive us to attack each other, and Freud, of course, famously argued that we were pulled in opposite directions by Life and Death instincts.  But perhaps the John Spencer Blues Explosion expresses the thought most eloquently: for whatever reason, people are driven to “fuck shit up.”

Is there a better description for the war between Russia and Ukraine (with the US and NATO hiding in plain sight)? 

One can comprehend Putin’s raisons d’etat for invasion:  he does not want to be encircled by NATO, NATO gave Russia assurances in 1991 about not expanding beyond the German-Polish border, the need to protect Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine.  But what does understanding those historical and political causes achieve?  Perhaps only further evidence that rulers regularly make colossal mistakes when they do not compare what makes political sense from a particular perspective with what makes sense, not only from an overall strategic perspective (is a given policy likely to achieve its aims?), but from a human perspective (what is necessary, nationally and internationally, to secure the conditions for social peace?) 

What is necessary is an instituted commitment to sharing the world’s resources and using them only to satisfy our natural and social needs.  Instead, the world has war again.  The philosophical verses contained in this book won’t solve anything, and I hope they are a little more than naively hopeful.  I see them as honest:  the causes of war lie deeper than political-economic conditions, in the thousands of years old desire for conquest.  If we are ever to be free of war, we have to free ourselves from this desire to constantly impose partial perspectives and interests on the whole.  We must learn, as Kierkegaard argued in Either/Or, to value possession (savouring, contentment) over conquest.   The verses can be read (but of course you are free to follow your own thoughts as you read them), as counterposing different deep sources of conflict with suggestions as to how we might cultivate an ethic of contentment.  

The form of the book was inspired by Brecht’s War Primer.   

You can purchase a copy by following this link:

https://douglas-maclellan-photographer.square.site/product/peace-quatrains/32

New Year’s Day dawned dreary. Covid cases continued to spike. I knew that the winter term would begin once again on-line. I worried that I would not be able to hide my absolute lack of enthusiasm for another 12 weeks of sitting in front of my computer pretending to teach from my students.

And then things go worse.

At about one o’clock, as I was working on a lecture, an email notification popped up. John McMurtry, path-breaking Canadian philosopher, my doctoral dissertation supervisor, and critical interlocutor and friend for 25 years had died.

The news was deflating but not unexpected. In one of those strange coincidences that seem to surround death I had reached out to him on the day of the solstice to wish him season’s greetings and to send him a paper I had just finished. The strange thing is that I did not want to write the paper, but felt some push to do so. I wrote it very quickly, at the behest of Chinese organizers who invited me to submit a proposal for a conference on political economy. The time frame was very short and I initially thought about ignoring the invitation. But something gnawed at me. I wrote the proposal and then the full paper in only 2 weeks. The paper put McMurtry’s idea of “life-capital” to work in a re-reading of the core principles of Marxist political economy. I sent him the paper on the solstice. In his response, he told me that the bladder cancer from which he had been suffering off and on for a few years had returned, and that he knew that his time on the planet was drawing to a close. Philosophical to the end, he did not lament his fate but told me that he was at peace with death, knowing that he had given everything he had to life.

There could be no clearer illustration of what Socrates meant when he said that philosophy is a preparation for death. He did not mean that adopting this or that set of principles dispels the fear of death; he meant that a properly cultivated philosophical disposition enables one to live the right way, so that when the end comes, one can face it knowing that one has lived every moment as fully as possible and struggled to do the right thing as much as beings of limited intellect and contradictory passions can do.

John instilled that philosophical disposition in me. It was his greatest strength as a supervisor. Never be lazy, he would urge, spell out the argument, don’t skip steps, be rigorous, and above all, don’t simply repeat things that have already been said. “Say it fresh or don’t say it,” he once told me. I have tried to follow that advice in every sentence I have written since.

John was, as the name of the column he used to write for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives newsletter The Monitor stated), an iconoclast. He was not always easy to work with and he could be a trenchant (but not dogmatic) critic of others’ work (including my own). But he did not cultivate disagreement for its own sake: if someone thought that his arguments were inadequate or failed, he wanted to know what, in particular, the problems were. He also wanted to see a more comprehensive alternative articulated. His commitment to the “unforced force of the better argument” (Habermas) led to many broken chains of communication with other philosophers. Ideally, one would hope that all philosophers would be committed to debate until an agreement acceptable to both sides was reached. That was often not the case. I was included on many an email chain where the opposite would happen: under persistent questioning from John people would, like Socrates’ dialogue partners, just walk away rather than continue the discussion.

For the past 25 years the cause of the aporia was always the same: the inability or unwillingness of philosophers from other traditions to demonstrate how their positions answered the key problems of philosophy in ways that were as comprehensive and practically efficacious as the “life-value-onto-axiology” John spent the last quarter of his career developing. From my sometimes observer and sometimes participant perspective, I felt that sometimes John might have interpreted acceptable conditions of agreement in too-fine-grained terms. Consequently, opportunities for overlapping consensus, to borrow a term from Rawls, were missed. However, in the main I would see people hunker down in their traditional position rather than open themselves to the possibility that McMutry had found a genuinely new set of concepts– implicit in, but not systematically developed by, Eastern and Western philosophical traditions.

John often attributed this reticence to careerism and gate-keeping, but I think the answer lies deeper, in the path-dependencies that emerge after years and decades of work. Few and far between are Saul on the road to Damascus epiphanies: people tend to stick with the ideas they have worked on over the course of their career, not because it provides a pay cheque, but because their whole self has been invested in them. Philosophers thus regularly miss opportunities for real philosophical growth, but perhaps that tells us that philosophers are human beings too and cannot always follow the ideas where they lead.

McMurtry’s ideas led from analytic Marxism towards what G.A. Cohen, his supervisor at the University of London (before Cohen moved to Oxford) “some of the most exhilarating philosophy I have ever read.” Though exhilarating, the orienting idea of his new departure is in fact as old as recorded human thought and as easy as breathing to understand: all value in the universe depends upon the existence of sentient life. All coherent scientific, philosophical and political thought must begin from the principle that life-support is the foundation of every other good. Every other good, in turn, is an instrumental condition of healthy living or an expressed and enjoyed capacity of living things. Unlike the dominant trends in analytic and continental philosophy at the time he began to chart this course, McMurtry maintained that values were not subjective dispositions or cultural constructs but fundamental elements of the lived world (hence the ten cent term “onto-axiology”– values grounded in being). Subjective dispositions and cultural systems had to be judged in terms of the degree to which they enable the health and development of living beings (and not just humans– life-value philosophy is resolutely anti-anthropocentric). Life-value thinking thus opened the way to a coherent synthesis of scientific, philosophical, and political understanding, if people would drop their one-sided commitments and re-think their arguments in life-value terms.

Few were willing to do so explicitly (although, if one looks at work from the last twenty years, it is remarkable the extent to which the problems of need-satisfaction, global health, environmentally coherent public policy, and life as a foundational value appear). McMurtry claimed no credit for this global turn, and I think that positions like Sen’s or Nussbaum’s were cases of reaching similar places by different roads). What McMurtry did that no one else did was to articulate a systematic, universal foundation for positions like Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to social justice or Doyal’s and Gough’s theory of human needs. His achievement was not nearly as overtly influential as it should have been in academic philosophy.

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I think this lack of explicit influence bothered John, but I also believed him when he said, repeatedly, that what matters is that the ideas circulate, not personal recognition. One has the right to the work, not to the fruits, he would say, paraphrasing Krishna’s advice to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. I learned that passage from John, and I have meditated on it many nights when petty professional jealousies stir in my mind and heart.

Just do the work as well as you can do. Then do it better again the next day. Nothing else matters.

Central to John’s later philosophy was the idea that each person is part of a greater whole of life. He derived this position from Indian philosophy on the one hand (the ultimate identity of consciousness and being in a boundless oneness beyond ego and its attachments) and Marx’s idea that the “individual is the social being” on the other. We both emerge from and depend upon social connections to each other and to the earth. If we meditate on that fact it becomes clear that the value of our lives is not exhausted in our ego-centric attachment to our own existence, but is in truth realized in the contributions that we make to the universal social subject. This universal subject has no natural life and death and is not bounded by the finitude of individual consciousness. When we identify our good with the good of that boundless social subject we can die secure in the knowledge that our ego dissipates but we live on in the future of the life-whole that our contributions helped sustain.

Having satisfied himself that there was nothing more for him to give, he passed peacefully into the ego-less universality of earth and memory.

When I learned of John’s death I did not feel so much sad as philosophically alone; the possibility of further conversation about life-value philosophy seemed over. But the dialogue can continue because the ideas still exist, and that is just how John would want it to be.