Philosophy then and now

London has been home to many philosophers, some native, others transient, just like the melting-pot of Londoners today – John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper to name a few. I went looking recently for some of them. What I found was disappointment and hope. My search was frustrated but also inspiring.

Over in leafy Wimbledon, the plaque for German-Polish philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was distant and barely discernable through the locked gates of the building where he once resided for a year, so I couldn’t get a decent shot for his Open Plaques listing.

Meanwhile in picturesque Kensington Square, I found the plaque of moral and political philosopher John Stuart Mill covered at every angle by scaffolding and nets, making clear sight of it for a good photo impossible.

What set me on this philosophers’ trail wasn’t history but current events. Despite the unbearable lightness of media, interest and demand for philosophy is not just undimmed but actually increasing on university campuses, as the New York Times reported in 2008.

Philosophy has commanded headlines in the last two months for different reasons, since Middlesex University announced they were shutting down their philosophy department, also home at postgrad level to the internationally renowned Centre for Research in European Modern Philosophy (CREMP). The decision sparked a series of local and international protests, with academia internationally joining the outcry, and a letter signed by 30+ leading professors and writers sent to the New York Review Of Books just last week.

Climaxing in a 12-day sit-in of the department itself by students and teachers which was animated throughout by open philosophy and literature workshops and tutorials, the occupation was ended by a court order and was followed by suspension of 3 academics and 4 students involved, and further protests by students, wider university staff and campaign supporters helped by a popular Facebook group and campaign blog.

I went – along with Tom Morris and Gauti Sigthorsson – to an event at the ICA on May 19th where students and academics from different colleges asked “who’s afraid of philosophy?”. The panel explained what was happening at Middlesex – and discussed what could be done – with an audience packed in over two rooms. The night also provided some broader insight into the evolving UK university system, where learning itself is no longer intrinsically valued but subject to business-driven outputs and measurements.

One speaker talked of the experimental open-endedness and un-measurability of intellectual enquiry as a source of dread among university managers. They described the attack on them as “not anti-intellectual, but the new organic intellectualism of the accounting structure.”

“The transformation of the university into a business is regularly presented as a fateful condition,” observed another speaker. In this context, he continued, university managers present “philosophy as a threat to an established jargon.”

This week came the news that 4 of the 6 departmental staff are decamping to a new postgraduate CREMP department being established by Kingston University. Whatever happens next – in the ongoing disciplinary proceedings launched by Middlesex University against staff and students and to the remaining undergrad students themselves – the whole episode has opened up discussion and awareness of the issues faced today by those in search of non-vocational learning as the managerial ethos bears down on the education sector.

The backlash triggered in this case suggests there is still a thirst for pure learning, and not much public appetite for its erasure. JS Mill might be behind bars right now, and the continental Schopenhauer out of reach, but the real value of philosophy transcends the limits of accounting. Strip away pure enquiry and we’ll all be a lot poorer.

[This post is dedicated to Dudley Knowles]

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