A few weeks ago we reported the closure of the Philosophy Department at Middlesex University, and since then the fight to keep it open has continued. Alongside many thousands of people signing petitions, there has been a two-week occupation of one of the large administrative centres on the Trent Park campus, and after that was broken up by a high court injunction there was a follow-up 24 hour occupation in a library. Now the university has announced suspensions of four students and three professors in the faculty. Some of the suspended students are international students and there is worry that their suspensions could impact on their visas to stay in the country. On the faculty side, suspended staff members are being told that they cannot attend meetings with their unions. Anyway, higher quality news is available from http://www.savemdxphil.com and I recommend you all check it out, in the meantime I would like to engage in some speculation as to what this situation is really all about.

I have had the feeling for a few weeks that this isn’t really about philosophy at all. Well it is and it isn’t. What you have, in the Philosophy Department at Middlesex is something very different from a lot of the rest of the university. Where other departments are focussing on providing vocational qualifications in non-traditional subjects, the Philosophy Department has been at the height of rigorous academic critical thought. And so, I believe, in getting rid of the philosophy department, the university may be preparing to become fully privatised. If they target philosophy, where they know there are a whole lot of people who would object to privatisation who would go too, if the lefties already withdraw from the university, if the battle looks like it is lost when the philosophy department goes, then they know they can probably have a clean sweep when some company decides to buy the university from the government.

And this goes along with all of the government’s current projects of selling off public services (for example royal mail, but I can’t see that HE won’t be affected too), in order to recoup money to pay off debt. It doesn’t matter much if there’s an academic blacklist on the university if you happen to be turning it into a private service-provider offering basic-level vocational courses to whichever international students bring in the most money for the company.

Yes, we do need to be defending the humanities, as they are being hit particularly hard by the current wave of cuts, and the emphasis on universities making money themselves, but we need to do this with an eye on the broader tendency towards privatisation, and if we don’t we may miss out on our opportunity to critique an agenda that not only challenges some types of education, but all higher education in this country.

In other Middlesex-related news, there’s a rally this afternoon (4pm) at the Hendon Campus, for those who oppose the cuts. It would be good to get as many people down there as possible.

On Tuesday the Guardian printed a fascinating and excellent piece by the philosopher Etienne Balibar. Unfortunately they chose to give it the slightly misleading title “Europe is a dead Political Project“. In fact Balibar argues that the European Union, it’s currency, it’s government and its technocrats, is looking doomed, but that this urgently poses the need for a new European civil society, built from the bottom up:

Does this mean that, in order to reverse the course of recent history, to shake the lethargy of a decaying political construction, we need something like a European populism, a simultaneous movement or a peaceful insurrection of popular masses who will be voicing their anger as victims of the crisis against its authors and beneficiaries, and calling for a control “from below” over the secret bargainings and deals made by markets, banks, and states? Yes indeed.

Balibar’s call is timely. Such a movement is a necessity, and it is a movement that must be pan-European. Of course we must direct our fire at our own national states, solidarity begins at home; but we should do so in constant communication with movements in other countries. The first test is Greece. Can effective European solidarity with Greece be built that can overcome xenophobia and austerity?

One place where more discussion is required is Balibar’s mention of the social democratic parties of Europe, what he calls the left. He is certainly correct that they have “surrendered to the dogmas and rationales of neoliberalism”. In Greece they are the ones driving through the austerity measures, in Britain we have just ended 13 years of neo-liberal, third-way Labourism. However, it does not follow that  “it has lost every capacity to express social struggles or launch emancipatory movements”. This is a question that we are posed with sharply in Britain at the moment. Our traditional social democratic party has moved from government to opposition. We should not be at all surprised if they begin to more clearly express, and even launch, social struggles. This creates strategic questions for those who have long ago rejected these organisations that cannot be shirked by reminding ourselves of their past crimes.

Balibar’s piece is part of a debate on the European left that needs to happen. This debate itself won’t stop the austerity measures that Europe’s elite want to impose in every single country. However, it is important that there is a debate which can shape the form that resistance to these measures can take, and that can allow us to share experiences across borders. Small steps taken in that direction ought to become big strides as soon as possible.

BREAKING NEWS – PLEASE REPUBLISH!

Earlier this afternoon all staff in the Arts and Education section of Middlesex University received the following email:

 Dear colleagues,

Late on Monday 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, Ed Esche,
informed staff in Philosophy that the University executive had ‘accepted his
recommendation’ to close all Philosophy programmes: undergraduate, postgraduate and
MPhil/PhD.

Philosophy is the highest research-rated subject in the University. Building on its
grade 5 rating in RAE2001, it was awarded a score of 2.8 on the new RAE scale in
2008, with 65% of its research activity judged ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally
excellent’. It is now widely recognised as one of the most important centres for the
study of modern European philosophy anywhere in the English-speaking world.

The MA programmes in Philosophy at Middlesex have grown in recent years to become
the largest in the UK, with 42 new students admitted in September 2009.

The Dean explained that the decision to terminate recruitment and close the
programmes was ‘simply financial’, and based on the fact that the University
believes that it may be able to generate more revenue if it shifts its resources to
other subjects – from ‘Band D’ to ‘Band C’ students.

As you may know, the University currently expects each academic unit to contribute
55% of its gross income to the central administration. As it stands (by the credit
count method of calculation), Philosophy and Religious Studies contributes 53%,
after the deduction of School admin costs. According to the figures for projected
recruitment from admissions (with Philosophy undergraduate applications up 118% for
2010-11), if programmes had remained open, the contribution from Philosophy and
Religious Studies would have risen to 59% (with Philosophy’s contribution,
considered on its own, at 53%).

In a meeting with Philosophy staff, the Dean acknowledged the excellent research
reputation of Philosophy at Middlesex, but said that it made no ‘measurable’
contribution to the University.

Needless to say, we very much regret this decision to terminate Philosophy, and its
likely consequences for the School and our University and for the teaching of our
subject in the UK.

· Professor Peter Hallward, Programme Leader for the MA programmes in
Philosophy,

· Professor Peter Osborne, Director, Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy,

· Dr. Stella Sandford, Director of Programmes, Philosophy

As many readers will know, the philosophy department at Middlesex is one of the most important departments working on continental philosophy in the UK. It has, for a long time, been a centre for people working on critical theory, aesthetics, marxism, psycho-analysis, and radical philosophy. To say that such a department made no measurable contribution to the university is an absolute travesty. The figures speak for themselves, but do not show the great contribution that this department has made to academic life both in London and around the country.

Straight-up racist that sucker was simple and plain,

Motherf**k him and John Wayne.*

Chuck D’s immortal rhyme more or less sums up my attitude towards Martin Heidegger in my more polemical moments. Heidegger was a Nazi. Whilst countless others of his generation fled, spoke out and resisted, he happily worked away under the regime. This fact should colour how we think about him. I don’t believe that it could not, and am suspicious of those who claim it can’t. However, this odd article on Comment is Free raises a peculiar thought. It apparently endorses the following idea:

He calls for the books to removed from the shelves of philosophy departments and rehoused under the history of Nazism. This is eminently sane. Being and Time deserves its place alongside Mein Kampf – as the work of a dangerous and deluded mind.

Unfortunately the iron law of Comment is Free, that all posters have to operate like cheap point scoring computers rather than rational commenters, has taken over, and no-one is really engaging with this idea. It is wrong, though not for the facile reasons most of the posters suggest. Heidegger’s arguments are not Nazi philosophy. This is different from the claim, which I am sympathetic to, that Heidegger’s philosophy was compatible with, even friendly to, Nazism. What I am saying is that Being and Time was not the official philosophy of the Nazi state. There is a stronger case for saying that Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which became elevated to the official philosophy of the Soviet Union, being bracketed under the history of communism. An even stronger one for Stalin’s wretched Dialectical and Historical Materialism. But Heidegger wasn’t used in this way. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics was not ‘the Nazi take on Kant’, his lectures on Plato and Aristotle were not ‘how fascists should see the ancients’. Heidegger’s work is philosophy, and whether good or bad, should be seen as such.

Personally, I would have Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in a philosophy section (as my library does), and couldn’t care less what happened to Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Heidegger’s work, too, belongs in the philosophy section. I do not feel able to make decisive judgement on whether his work gave ammunition to fascists, as I have only recently begun to engage with him. I have my suspicions, and cannot but read his early work without thinking about what he went on to do. Nonetheless, this itself is a philosophical question. Removing Heidegger from the philosophy section dodges it, rather than clarifying it.

*50 Third Estate points to the first person to tell me who Chuck is actually referring to.

Guest post by Carl Packman

Islam is enemy No. 1 of much contemporary criticism, either by the angry EDL men on the street, to new atheists asserting that Islam is incompatible with Enlightenment societies, to critics such as Nick Cohen and David Aaranovitch’s’ with their claims to present Islamic bad boys (and girls) as the real threat to leftist sentimentalities.

But many of the targets taken by the above miss the mark, leaving the perception that Islam itself is the enemy. But this shortfall does not render left wing opposition to Islamism impossible.

It seems at first an odd place to start but our solution here can be found with Freud. At a time of massive vulnerability for European Jews, it would have been easy for many to resign themselves to victimhood and group together under the pretext of their hitherto shared history. However in 1939, between being robbed and forced to emigrate from occupied Vienna by the Nazi’s for being Jewish and partaking in one of the disciplines they referred to as ‘Jewish science’ (psychoanalysis), Freud decided to pursue the subject of the historical arrival of monotheism (which he attributes to Moses’ being an Egyptian priest of Akhenaten, and not, as is commonly assumed, his being originally Hebrew). As such, in a letter he told Arnold Zweig “Moses created the Jews” and, in his last substantial book Moses and Monotheism stated that “it was not God who chose the Jews … but Moses”. Matthew Sharpe, author of the book Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real noted that ‘Freud did not attempt to restore or reassert the ‘purity’ of Judaism against its detractors. He offered a demonstration that Moses, Judaism’s law-giving Father, was already impure: an Egyptian stranger’ (p. 246). By doing this, Freud observed that everything we thought we knew about Jewish history grounded inaccurately. Freud enjoyed the benefit of achieving two things, firstly producing a philosophically adept justification for the mental utility and historical genesis of monotheism (for Freud, monotheism revealed the end of object worship, and the beginning in belief in the absent, an astonishing mental accomplishment), and secondly undercutting everything the Nazi’s thought they knew about Judaism, even if this was to undercut the knowledge of the Jews themselves. And after all there is no better tool for defeating critics than to show that everything they know is wrong.

The way in which to utilise this tool for Islam is clear. In order to undercut criticism of Islam from the unpalatable voices, while maintaining an opposition to Islamic fascism, one must champion Islam’s alternative, forgotten or disavowed history, and then ask questions as to why this has been disavowed, and by whom.

Professor Ali A. Allawi in his LSE seminar In Search of Islam’s Civilisation noted that political Islam post-1976 (a time of relative freedom in Iraq he states) disavowed its ethical dimension, preferring to appease the status-quo by being rules based and not ethics based. A compulsion for corruption soon crept in to fill the gap, attempting to predicate itself on purely Islamic measures. The relationship between Islam and capitalism, for example, had to overcome some treacherous boundaries with regards to what was ethically sound in the religious system. The result being that Islam dressed elements usually frowned upon – the banking system for example – into palatable products (halal banking). Ironic, really, that what Allawi situates as the genesis of Islamism – rules based Islam and not an ethics based Islam – was the attempt to forge an Islamic version of a model many would attribute to US-styled capitalism. Strange to think that the Middle Eastern anti-Imperialist movement might have been grounded by a sly attempt to create capitalism with an Islamic face.

The events of the 1970’s in the Middle East changed Islam in a way that has not been significantly altered ever since (which is rather hard to accept given the severity of events that have since taken place, but what I mean is simply Islam has continuously been on the defensive since the seventies – after Iraq/Afghanistan nothing has changed, only maintained), and it is worth remembering this point when promoting a counter-hegemonic version of Islam, though this merely satisfies the political body of Islam. Where are we to address Koranic issues? Crucial information should be sought from Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, Sudanese liberal reform figure and believer in a version of progressive Islam, expressed in his book “The Second Message of Islam”. For Taha, we should be reminded that the Koran had been revealed in two locations, firstly in Mecca where Muhammad and his followers were minorities, and in Medina where the city was brimming with Jews and Pagans. During his verses in Mecca, Muhammad promulgated a “peaceful persuasion,” whereas in Medina the verses are filled with rules and intimidations. The Medinan verses, the first message(s) of Islam, were directed to a whole community of early believers and not Muhammad alone, according to Taha. These messages were a sort of ‘historical postponement’ as George Packer puts it in his New Yorker article on Taha. It was the Meccan verses, the second message of Islam that would represent, for Taha in his revisionism, the perfect religion, an acceptance of equality and freedom that, in seventh-century Arabia, Muslims were ready for. This provided his grounds for a progressive Islam, or at least a return to Islam in its truest form, since disavowed in its Medinian emphasis on rules based Islam.

Examples of Taha’s revisionist spirit can be found in today’s Iran; one particular person held in high regard is Grand Ayatollah Sanei who recently called Ahmadinejad’s presidency ‘illegitimate’ and ‘against Islam’. He is outspoken on matters such as the prohibition of nuclear weaponry in Islam, equal status for women (which, surely, must include not banning them for being too good at motor car racing), equality for non-Muslims and well known for issuing a fatwa against suicide bombing. Another well known example is Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montarezi, recently described in the New York Times as ‘an adversary the state has been unable to silence or jail because of his religious credentials and seminal role in the founding of the republic.’ He too questions use of the term Islamic government when it is referred to the one in his homeland.

What might initially be problematic about this counter-hegemonic revision is that it seeks to find the best in Islam and disavow the bad bits. The question remains; are the bad bits Islam’s problem? The answer is of course yes, but the way around it is not to simply bracket what is good and bad Islam, but, rather, what is and is not Islam. What has been said about Freud’s work on Moses is that it is largely speculative. Where the Islamic counter-hegemonic history does not fall short to this problem is that it has legitimacy both in its textual revision, and in its ethical methodology (that is to say both historically and practically).

Why might this be helpful for critics of Islamism? Simple, what Freud did show with his work on Moses is that the enemy cannot have reasonable grounds of criticism without a reasonable understanding of their enemy. By restoring a lost history for the Jews, Freud was able to throw off course Nazi criticism of Judaism. Equally, the way in which we are legitimately allowed to criticise Islamism is by taking a fuller understanding of what Islam actually is. This is where cohorts of New Atheism, particularly Sam Harris in his book The End of Faith, fall short. His arguments tend to perceive the true expression of Islam to be in Islamism, and very often purposefully conflates the two, describing good Muslims as not practising their religion to its proper end. Another example in Michel Onfray’s book The Atheist Manifesto, he waxes that ‘Islam is fundamentally incompatible with societies that arose from the Enlightenment’. How do these criticisms stand up with the ideas printed above? They describe an Islam that is rules based, which itself has erroneous groundwork, and so are by no means prepared for the counter-hegemonic history of Islam, which is not merely equal in its legitimacy to fundamentalist Islam, but rather destroys any legitimacy fundamentalist Islam claims to hold.

Carefully applied, the counter-hegemonic history of Islam may well be the vital tool needed for the left to maintain their opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, enemies of Islam who conflate Islam with Islamism, and portions of the left who sing about moral relativism with their fingers in their ears.

Guest post by Tendai. N

Philosophy has an unfortunate reputation outside the world of philosophers. And even people who understand themselves to be philosophers are often poets more than anything else. One reason for this is a lack of understanding about what philosophy is, and does: there’s a belief that philosophy is the name given to a Sunday afternoon’s pot-addled meditations; or the name given to “what you feel strongly about”.

To make my starting assumptions clear, I suggest the following description of philosophy. I take philosophy to be a form of inquiry, whose method0logy is based on rational argument, logical rigour, and the ability to absorb counterexamples. A philosophical claim, like a scientific one, is capable of verification or falsification, and possibly capable of observation. You can have good philosophy without speculation about what’s behind the universe. That’s so 19th century. Philosophy, in short, is something you do, not merely something you read or feel.

Foundations of good political philosophy

On the face of it that would sound like an ideal method for arriving at political positions: reason, logic, and general applicability are attractive characteristics for a political idea. But obviously political and moral philosophy (two sides of the same coin) runs into unique problems. The most glaring difficulty is that they relate to the choice of values. Individual lives are incommensurable, so many of their values are incommensurable too. How, then, do you justify telling somebody what to want to do?

The weakest attempts to persuade on those lines make reference to such vague and made-up things as “duty”. I’m not being flippant in calling duties “made up”, but I’m drawing attention to the problem of treating what are essentially social fictions, as things that were ‘read of universe’. To paraphrase one philosopher I admire, “we are not conscripts in the army of virtue, we are volunteers”. In other words, the only reasons that enjoin action are personal ones. We are not in all cases, to be required to act as though we were not ourselves. It is, after all, a requirement of liberty to only make minimal demands on the will of an unwilling other.

One attempt to get round this is to presume that we all want to be rational. But cognition is not magnetic, rationality is not normative – I may well have no reason to want to be rational. I’m not going to stop smoking, drinking or eating copious amounts of shortbread because it’s rational to stop. Reason is only applicable in so far as it allows for your chosen goals, and, possibly, in selecting those same goals. But I imagine 70% of our lives have nothing to do with reason, and don’t need to.

OK, we might say, then “do as we say because justice requires it”. This seems a stronger argument for requiring action. In our societies, with their rigid and uneven allocations of power, unpredictable shifts in those allocations, there is a “something for everyone” appeal in a good theory of justice. In the absence of perfect future knowledge, justice as a value is basically in everybody’s best interests. Regardless of their respective weaknesses, I think this is something Cohen, Rawls and Nozick address with exceptional insight.

Objectives of good political philosophy

So we at least have a way, in principle, of arriving at a scheme of values. Should political philosophy stop there? The trouble is that a programme of values may take no account of where it must operate. And this is one point on which many philosophers who dabble in politics fail miserably, and a key reason why they are not often taken seriously.

One of the reasons why Marx, Hayek and Dworkin are so successful in gaining influence on institutions and their agents, is because they take into account (and give an account of) how institutions in society work, and make decisions. There is a tendency in ideological discourse to speak as though our “duties” trump the social mechanisms that will allow us to fulfil them i.e. “moral duties are more important than the law”. They may or may not be, but that offers no advice on how to achieve those ends in a law-constrained society.

For political philosophers to be taken seriously, they must not only prescribe values impartially, but they must also understand what it takes for an official or institutional agent to take and implement a decision: that to close Guantanamo Bay one must overcome a mountain of paperwork, and the resistance of unwilling institutions. Norman Geras, in my opinion, is an example of the sort of philosopher who does this well. This practical aspect of political philosophy is, I think, too often ignored by philosophers and intellectuals. If they can give useful analysis on these sorts of issues, then they become infinitely more useful.

Conclusion

I don’t think philosophy is merely opinion – it’s not an alternative form of self-expression. And philosophers should resist the temptation to use it as a prop for their personal inclinations. I won’t name names, but the left suffers from political commentators who do just that. This is often coupled with an unpalatable cynicism and contempt for society, the West, and the politically uninterested. It causes liberals to be taken less seriously, and is a waste of intellectual energy better used in providing workable ideological and practical programmes.

As a liberal I am perhaps naturally inclined to the rational. The magic of reason is in reducing the risk of error, and the time spent being held back by error. To this extent, philosophy can be a powerful ally to those in power. And that’s at least one good reason to do political philosophy well.

Something marvellous from Alain Badiou on the poverty of so much philosophy:

[Mao said] “Cast away illusions, prepare for struggle.” Hold to the truth, cast away illusions and fight rather than surrender, whatever the circumstances. The trouble is that, nowadays, the word ‘philosophy’ is used in an attempt to force upon us quite the opposite maxim, which might read: ‘Cling to your illusions, prepare to surrender.’

We have seen a ‘philosophy’ appearing in magazines that looks like a vegetable-based natural medicine, or euthanasia for enthusiasts. Philosophizing would appear to be a small part of a vast programme: keep fit and be efficient, but stay cool. We have seen ‘philosophers’ declaring that, as the Good is inaccessible, if not criminal, we should be content to fight against various forms of Evil, whose common name seems to be ‘communism’, when it is not ‘Arab’ or ‘Islam’.

And so we revive ‘values’ that philosophy has always  helped us to get rid of : obedience (to commercial contracts), modesty (in the face of the arrogance of the ham actor on TV), realism (we must have profits and inequalities), utter selfishness (now known as ‘modern individualism’) colonial superiority (the democratic goodies of the West versus the despotic baddies of the South), hostility to living thought (all opinions have to be taken into account), the cult of numbers (the majority are always right, obtuse millenarianism (the planet is getting hotter under my very feet), empty religion (there must be Something), and I could go on.

So many ‘philosophers’ and ‘philosophies’ do nothing to stop this, and instead wear themselves out trying to infect us with little articles, debates, blazing headlines (‘The Ethics of Stock Options: Philosophers Speak out at Last’) and boisterous roundtable discussions (‘Philosophers: The G-String or the Veil?’). This permanent prostitution of the words ‘philosopher’ and ‘philosophies’ will get you down in the long run. At the rate things are going, it is not just cafes that will be described as philosophical. We will end up going to the philosophical outhouse. (Pocket Pantheon, Verso 2009)

 I find it hard to read that without thinking of this pathetic excuse for an intellectual:

Reports are emerging that the philosopher G.A. Cohen died in the early hours of this morning aged 68. Cohen was most famous as arguably the most significant of the ‘Analytical Marxists’, who attempted to systematise Marx’s ideas into the schemas of analytic philosophy. Implicit, and often explicit, in this task was the purging of the Hegelian core of Marxism. I believe this to be both a doomed and rather pointless project, and there is no doubt that the trajectory of these thinkers was away from radical politics, to greater or lesser degrees. However, the whole point of Post-Marxists is that they are (or were) some kind of Marxists, and we shouldn’t allow the liberal philosophical establishment to claim Cohen as one of their own too quickly.

Cohen’s 1978 work ‘Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense’ is exactly that: a rigorous defense of Historical Materialism. At times it is in breathtaking detail, and the considerations about exactly what constitute modes, means and relations of production, for example, are of importance to any Marxist today (incidentally it is far from clear what makes this peculiarly ‘analytic’ that allows it to be distinguished from earlier Marxist thought). It is a sincere attempt by someone committed to socialism to defend the ideas of its most significant advocate. Cohen’s great failing, however, was to emphasise too heavily the primacy of the forces of production as a driver of history, ignoring the subjective element of human action. Without understanding the crucial role that Marx affords human beings in making history (but not in circumstances of their own choosing), Marx remains a caricature, and hard to defend.

Cohen was a student of Isaiah Berlin, the Cold War philosopher who’s article ‘Two concepts of Liberty’, shaped the terrain of subsequent debates about freedom. Whilst Cohen was not the only one, he was a prominent and powerful critics of this false dualism. In a typical passage he writes:

My principal contention, one that contradicts very influential things that Isaiah wrote, is that lack of money, poverty, carries with it lack of freedom. I regard that as an overwhelmingly obvious truth, one that is worth defending only because it has been so influentially denied.

Whilst to many readers of this blog this also seems an overwhelmingly obvious truth, it is difficult to exaggerate how controversial a claim it was, and still is, in the context of late 20th Century liberal philosophy. For this alone he should be applauded.

No doubt Cohen’s life will be celebrated by many people who’s ideas he would have loathed. The analytical marxists became Post-Marxists, and even Cohen, as the best of them, grew pessimistic. This of course, is music to the ears of anti-marxists. But Cohen should be celebrated, and claimed in the Marxist tradition. An odd branch, sure, but a venerable one.