HOW ANYONE can believe that Sydney could produce in its own backyard a philosopher of world significance or even minor significance shows how little understanding there is of the conditions required for philosophical thought.
Sydney of course is one of the nicest places under the sun. The location, location. A young settlement, brightly lit. It has come late to just about everything, and enjoyed both the advantages and disadvantages of that. The first arrivals were conveniently composed of thieves, forgers and unmarried mothers, accompanied by unshaven soldiers and tragic magistrates, the shopkeepers, brewers and road-builders, the brick-makers, midwives, followed by farmers and farmhands and others (the horse-dealers, publicans, four-eyed tailors, stunted fettlers), all hoping for a fresh start. They could hardly be expected to pursue philosophical interests – most of them couldn’t write their own names. For the first fifty years there was only a handful of books in the entire country. Other missing ingredients were slavery, or an imbalance of religion and superstition in daily life, or else a collective stammering of the self, a general mood of darkness and obscurity, and some would include a cold climate, all of which have in earlier times turned people to philosophy for answers. By the time Sydney passed through and built upon its original settlement and began standing on its own two feet, philosophers, if there were any, found hardly any problems left for them to tackle. The important philosophical questions had more or less been settled. The remaining questions were paltry; they could all fit onto a pinhead. People in Sydney still interested in philosophy were reduced to commenting on the work of others, and in their isolation became world authorities on figures at the margins, such as Charles Peirce or the terrifying Joseph de Maistre.
In the late nineteen seventies there used to be a man who lived in a boarding house in Glebe, a thin shortsighted man, with an exceptionally wide mouth. Most days he could be seen in the park at Black Wattle Bay, lolling about and squinting up at the clouds for hours at a stretch. When he wasn’t doing that he’d be seated on the park bench, sharpening a blue pencil with a pocketknife, as if he was refining an original idea. He wasn’t known to rattle on about anything, let alone thoughts of a philosophical nature. He kept his thoughts to himself. Children were occasionally caught throwing stones at him. He may have been one of those who’d lost their marbles in the war. And yet – or rather because of all this – people said he was a philosopher! What a country. Greengrocers and policemen were fond of giving a tolerant wink in his direction, ‘the philosopher’, or ‘our very own philosopher’.
At the very word ‘philosophy’ people in Sydney run away in droves, reach for the revolver; they look down at their shoes, they smile indulgently; they go blank.
It is different in other places; Berlin, Copenhagen, Vienna come to mind. There, philosophy is not in the awkward, remote background, but in the foreground of everyday life. These are places where the philosopher has his rightful position, that is, on a pedestal. It is common in those old cities to find a philosopher’s image cast in bronze and his most difficult propositions being discussed over breakfast, and certainly every other evening on the radio.
Meanwhile, Sydney never bothered itself with philosophical questions; as a consequence, philosophers are nowhere to be seen.
Such an absence normally would leave a hollow centre, an entire group of people living without the benefit of long sentences – foundation sentences; yet we can now see how the lack of interest in one field encouraged a rushing across into an adjacent field, the way passengers crowd to one side of a ship when a harbour comes into view.
Psychology, and its vine-like offshoot, psychoanalysis.
In Sydney it’s hard to bump into anyone who isn’t in analysis, or has been, or is about to be.
From being the most unphilosophical city in the world, Sydney has become the most psychological city in the world.
Rows of terrace houses in the inner suburbs, and rooms in small office blocks close to medical centres, have been fitted out with the heavy curtains and the chair and the couch in duplication of the cave-like atmosphere first tried and found to yield interesting results in Vienna, on the other side of the world. In the long summer months on the footpaths, when the windows of these rooms are raised like so many open mouths, a murmuring hum can be heard, blending into one, each and every word and sentence circling around the self, nothing else. In early evening, women doing well in big business, earning heaps, hurry away from it all for the regular appointment. And they enjoy it – the endless sentence. Who knows what sacrifices they have endured and confusions vaguely felt – all for their work? Others – perhaps soldered to their father’s hip, or baffled by the broken marriage – drop everything at three or four to make it there. An excavation through words. It can be hard work. And these patients are the articulate ones. Emerging after fifty minutes on the dot they can be seen hurrying along the footpath in a return to ordinary life, the everyday in all its complexities, its apparent breadth, its incompletions, some wearing an exalted expression, while fumbling for the keys to the car.
What is going on here? The skies are blue, forever cloudless – is that it? A great emptiness sending people back to themselves. Now that the city is up and running, no longer a country town, there’s been a transference from the landscape and its old hardships to the self ? Various repressions are said to be hidden away, ‘frozen anger’ is one of the terms used. They say it is a matter of gradually lifting the layers, to find the original self, where there might be recognition, which then allows a suggestion of hope.
It has become the age of the self; confessions in public all over the place, the spillage of the ‘I’, and in private, in a quietly structured manner (the therapist has replaced the priest). And who is doing this talk? Not ill, at least not seriously, the self-obsessed personalities have a concentrated, almost technical interest in the self, as if they were specimens. Interest in others tends to be perfunctory, impatient, showy. It is they who have a natural attraction to analysis, where again they can dwell solely on themselves, the problematical ‘I’, and, since this is the very source of their difficulties in the first place, there is a real danger of psychoanalysis not uncovering, but giving shape to, and confirming, a person’s self-obsession. Eight, ten years in analysis is not uncommon. In Sydney parents have been sending their own children, not yet in their teens, into psychoanalysis – ironing out the unformed mind before the unevenness of everyday life could give proportion or self-correction.
Years spent murmuring the endless circling sentence, while the analyst remains almost, though not quite, hidden.
A philosopher would not allow this; but when needed there were none.