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Why Dan Tehan should embrace philosophy .
By Daniel Gregory
In his Australia Day Address in 2006 , John
Howard said that Australia ’ s “ dominant cultural pattern comprises Judeo- Christian ethics , the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment and the institutions and values of British political culture ”.
The speech was controversial . Howard set out his vision for how history should be taught in schools , increasing attention to “ the great and enduring heritage of Western civilisation ”, and argued against the introduction of a bill of rights .
But the words quoted remind us of something which is easy to forget : the Liberal Party and conservative parties generally derive their central values – indirectly but unmistakably – from what was primarily a philosophical movement : the European Enlightenment .
It is not merely ironic , then , that the federal government is moving to increase the HECS contributions that university students must make to study philosophy and to reduce its own contributions . It is perplexing . Why would a political party withdraw support from the discipline to which it owes its ideological heritage ?
What many political philosophers of the Enlightenment emphasised – most notably John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government – was that it is not the natural state of humans to be governed . Individuals are inherently equal , so the “ divine right ” to rule which monarchs claimed cannot be a legitimate source of authority . The whole institution of government can only be legitimated by the consent of the governed . Even then , a government must not trespass upon whichever freedoms the people do not cede to it .
What the Liberal Party believes in is individual initiative ; freedoms of thought and speech and worship ; and limited government , which promotes individual initiative and leaves fundamental freedoms untouched . Enlightenment thinking has had enormous influence across the political spectrum , but its echoes in the Liberal Party ethos are especially loud .
So why is the Minister for Education , Dan Tehan , proposing reforms that will make it harder to study philosophy ? Officially , the rationale is economic : the government wants to encourage students to pursue areas of study which will make them ‘ jobready ’ and they do not place philosophy in this category .
Employers disagree : data presented by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York ( originally sourced from the US Census Bureau ) show an unemployment rate of only 4.3 per cent for philosophy majors in the US six months after graduation – not as good as finance but better than industrial engineering .
Some critics see in the government ’ s proposed reforms the continuation of a sustained project to dismantle the humanities in Australia . It is especially hard to see why it would lead to philosophy being targeted . As a group , philosophers do lean left , but there have been very influential conservatives among their number in Australia .
David Armstrong , the Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University for many years was actively involved in the anti-Communist Australian Association for Cultural Freedom and sat on the editorial board of Quadrant . His colleague , David Stove , wrote a paper setting out his political views transparently titled , ‘ Why You Should be a Conservative ’. John Finnis , an Australian legal philosopher who spent much of his career at Oxford , has argued publicly for deeply conservative positions on social issues for decades .
Whatever influence Australian philosophers have had on politics , it has not been uniformly progressive .
Why would a political party withdraw support from the discipline to which it owes its ideological heritage ?
The truth , I suspect , is that the government has no coherent rationale for increasing the cost of studying philosophy . It is what happens when you put together an assumption that studying philosophy does not develop job-relevant skills , a vague sense that the humanities are hostile to conservative politics , and a funding crisis in the higher education sector precipitated by a global pandemic .
But has the government not noticed that it is attacking the field of study in which its purported values were developed ? Or does it not care ?
Probably both . Dan Tehan is an intelligent man but I doubt he thinks much about his party ’ s intellectual heritage . And even the most knowledgeable and thoughtful parliamentarians usually maintain only a loose relationship with the philosophical foundations of their political views .
Philosophy is a discipline , not a set of beliefs . All philosophical theories – including the political theories stemming from the Enlightenment – are vigorously debated . There are also certainly political theories in philosophy which are anathema to conservative politics .
So , Dan Tehan is not repudiating any particular set of beliefs , but he is repudiating a way of rigorously thinking and contesting ideas from which his own political beliefs derive ( even if , like many politicians , he has never thought much about the basis of those beliefs ).
Immanuel Kant offered this as the ‘ motto ’ of the Enlightenment : “ Have the courage to use your own understanding .” It was an expression of optimism for individual rationality and potential . I hope Dan Tehan might find this courage and reconsider his proposal . ■
Daniel Gregory completed a PhD in philosophy at the ANU and is Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany .
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