In May 2014, I put pen
to paper finally after mulling for some months, some years. For most of this
year I have been out of the classroom. I was ‘owed’ some non-teaching time. I
have three months to produce research outputs in order to maintain my position.
In the second half of 2014, I will be taking long service leave, the first such
time I’ve been in a job long enough to earn long service stripes. I will
probably continue to write (I may visit Finland briefly).
I am a retiring
academic. Or I am being retired. Basically, having reached fifty at the end of
2013, my race is run, I am no longer a bright young thing; I shall not qualify
for ‘early-career research’ advantages. Indeed, given my research, I am no
longer considered a research prospect. What I do is not worth supporting
according to the researcher zeitgeist which determines these things.
What do I do? I teach,
think and research in the area of northeast Asian security but not in ways that
generate dollars, or yen. I think and I write about why it is human beings
continue to make decisions about going to war. Those who fight—who do the
actual combat— and return, it seems are overwhelmed by war’s futility. I’m
trying to nut out that problem.
As these posts unfold,
I shall discuss the ways and means I arrived at these questions. For many years
now, my work has been about politics in all its dimensions. I find it a
compelling and intriguing way to ask ourselves the big questions about life,
the human condition and the universe. I’ve decided to put it all down now
because I have reached a point I feel I must.
My thinking is
influenced by many. In recent times, I’ve reached settlement on four key
people: Immanuel Kant, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and Hannah Arendt. These
four are at the centre of a complex web of contributors however and over time,
many other will appear in this two-dimensional stage play. My key themes are
politics and education, thinking and political philosophy. The boundaries are
very porous though and aspects of my other lives will weave their respective
ways in and out of the main road. These might include, but not be limited to,
music, art, photography, sport, politics (oops, mentioned that already),
friends, life and death.
But to order the work
in some way, I have opted to mimic the collection of essays by Hannah Arendt,
Between Past and Future. The essays in the volume she wrote are exercises in
thinking and ‘their only aim is to gain experience in how to think’ (BPF, 14).
Arendt’s eight essays
by and large resonate today and I have decided to follow most of these, but
with perhaps a modern refurbishment. Most of these essays, as I read them,
could have been written today. For me, this is one of the questions I keep
returning to as I take a more philosophical route in my research…why do we
continue to ask the same questions and seek the same answers…years, decades,
centuries later? From the table of contents, her titles are:
Preface: The Gap
Between Past and Future
1.
Tradition
and the Modern Age
2.
The
Concept of History: Ancient and Modern
3.
What is
Authority?
4.
What is
Freedom?
5.
The Crisis
in Education
6.
The Crisis
in Culture: Its Social and Political Significance
7.
Truth and
Politics
8.
The
Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man
Arendt was a
German/Jewish émigré in the United States having left European world war two
began to emerge. My circumstances couldn’t be more different. I am Australian,
I sit here in a Brisbane suburb having lived a reasonably fortunate life. And
yet, I have been most affected by the very questions Arendt asked in her later
years…these posts will be my responses.
From the point of view
of 21st century Australia and the so-called Asian Century, I think I
can address these broad topics as well. What follows will certainly be
prognostications on History, Authority, Freedom, Education, Culture, Truth and
Politics. Rather than Space, however, I think I need to think about
War/Peace…I’m not sure if I will have a Modern Age to describe by the end…we
shall see.
This is a slight
change of direction for this blog, or perhaps this is where this blog was
always going to go. Perhaps, in 2015, it will be a book. It will not rate at
all next to the magnitude of Arendt’s works but it will nonetheless, be an
exercise in practicing thinking, and I hope she might appreciate that.
It is the reason why I
have sought to tentatively call this set of writings:
Future Tension in Past/present tense: Thoughts
on the way to a posthumous memoir
Posthumous only in the
sense that having been an ‘academic’, a professional thinker, for some years
now, I ought to leave something behind, eventually. I’m not going anywhere just
yet, nor will I die with a clean sheet of paper in my typewriter as Arendt
allegedly did. One of my favourite little aphorisms in Japanese is the
expression
言いたいことありすぎて
‘There are too many things I want to say’
I shall explain this
over the next few posts as well. I am at heart, a teacher and writer,
challenging the present norm that your value can only be measured by the size
of your grant…it’s time I wrote some more.
I am inspired by these
writers and thinkers. I do not pretend to be like them. I do not pretend I will
have their levels of philosophical sophistication. I just want to say some of
the many things I need to say…
Cheers.
