The Professional Practising Philosopher at a Business School

This transcript of an interview with John Armstrong, Philosopher in Residence, at Melbourne Business School conducted by Alan Saunders's Philosophers Zone programme on the ABC suggests the possibility of a business school syllabus that deals in the history and philosophy of ideas. Armstrong says a business school can offer an environment in which questions such as What makes a good business? What makes a business career successful in a broader sense rather than just economics; What are the bigger images of success in life? can be genuinely explored and the reaction from the participants in his programmes has offered rcih learnings from both sides!!

Alan Saunders: This week we polish up a tarnished idea and ask whether it's really as tarnished as all that. The idea is civilisation.

Hi, and welcome to The Philosopher's Zone, I'm Alan Saunders.

Our guide to civilisation is the author of a new book about it: Associate Professor John Armstrong, who's Philosopher-in-Residence at the Melbourne Business School, which is part of the University of Melbourne. And when he joined me for a conversation about his new book, I wanted to ask him about the Media Prize of the Australasian Association for Philosophy, which he was awarded a few months ago. It's directly relevant to his book on civilisation because in accepting the award, he talked about his approach as a professional philosopher, to reaching a much more general audience, beyond the philosophical cloister.

John Armstrong: The thing that I was trying to say was that there's a connection between finding an audience and the sense of what it is that you think you're doing, what it is you're trying to say. I think we've got an image of reaching out, which is based on simplification. So the intellectual academic who has very complicated ideas, thinks 'I'll make these very simple and then more people will be able to understand them.' And I realise that's not what I think I'm doing in the books that I write. The way I write is to ask myself 'What do I really care about; why do I think this is important? What is this idea doing in my life?' and then trying to bring that in to a sort of public discussion.

So it's really saying there's an issue of intimacy and of self-awareness of thinking, What do I love? Why do I love this thing that I think is very important in serious communication that can make sense to more people, and I wanted to bring that issue to greater awareness among my sort of academic colleagues.

Alan Saunders: Well let's turn then to an idea that clearly is of importance to you, and it's the subject of your new book. The book is called In Search of Civilisation: Remaking a tarnished idea. Why do you think it's a tarnished idea?

John Armstrong: If you ask what sort of associations have people had to the word 'civilisation', you could say that at some point in the past, like say the end of the 19th century, people had very, very positive associates to that term. They thought civilisation was utterly wonderful and important. Then when you start looking into the middle of the 20th century, you get some quite negative reactions to the idea of civilisation; it's seen as a problematic sort of dodgy concept. And I'm interested in asking the question, How could we in a sense, re-make the concept of civilisation so that it genuinely continues to deserve the enthusiasm and high status that it once had in the past?

Alan Saunders: Yes, it's in particular trouble, isn't it, given that we live in an age of relativism, when it's very difficult to say that any social phenomenon, whether it's a piece of behaviour, an example of behaviour, or a work of art, is better than any other. And if you can't do that, the idea of civilisation is bound to be in trouble, isn't it?

John Armstrong: That's right. There's a very peculiar tension there. I think that relativism is often motivated by generosity, it's that people don't wish to look down on, or be hostile to anything that other people happen to like. So that there's a sort of goodwill that's built into the relativist position. But at the same time, I think often people who have that goodwill, look round at the world with dismay and think there's so much that seems to be going wrong. And so I've been very struck by the tension between the goodwill that says 'Let a thousand flowers bloom; everything is fine, all is good', and then sort of turning around on the other hand and saying 'We live in this shallow, pointless consumer society in which everything comes down to the economic bottom line', and you want to say 'Hang on, how do you think these two positions go together?' So I think that it's correct to say that relativism would be a problem, but I don't think it's necessarily a very kind of insurmountable problem, a very big problem for the idea of civilisation. I think that we could retain the goodwill without having to be kind of extreme relativists.

Alan Saunders: There's a problem that clearly has exercised you at various times in your life, and this is that if you want civilisation, somebody's got to pay for it, and I mean pay for it in a quite literal sense: shell out the money. And you then potentially get the situation where over here you've got civilisation, you've got the finer things in life; you've got art and thought or whatever. Over there, you've got the grubby business of getting and spending, of actually making money, and then you ask yourself can you dwell in both these worlds, which you might well have to. Is that a genuine tension, do you think?

John Armstrong: I do, I think it's a very deep issue, a very important issue for our society, and actually close to the centre of the idea of civilisation. I think the really central idea of civilisation is the integration of material prosperity, that's the getting and spending bit, and spiritual prosperity, that's the meaning, ideas, the finer things, depth of meaning, depth of understanding. And that the idea of civilisation is that these two human projects are integrated and really help one another. It's not just that they coexist, it's that they actually assist one another. Take an architectural example: if you think about say the building of St Paul's Cathedral in London, which was an enormous financial undertaking in the 17th century, for a city. They devoted vast resources to it. But those resources were devoted to a project that had an extremely noble aesthetic, intellectual moral purpose. And it was the capacity to hold these two sides together which meant that not only could they have that kind of product, the society could produce a building of that quality, this is I think an instance of as it were the material resources and a spiritual depth, integrating and really assisting one another.

I grew up with a real fear that these two sides would just fall apart, that people who had sensitivity, who cared about ideas, who loved beauty, or complexity of meaning and so on, would in a sense be unequipped to go into the kind of struggle of life, and people who were blunter or less interested in ideas and so on, would just in a sense, get hold of all the resources. And I think that's a sort of terrifying vision and a horrible prospect for the world. But it's no good just lamenting that, what I think has to happen is that one's understanding of it, our society's understanding of spiritual prosperity of ideas and values and meanings, has to be somehow more amenable to conversational engagement with the material aspects of the world.

Alan Saunders: Is that why you're a philosopher-in-residence at a business school?

John Armstrong: Absolutely. And very important for me to say I'm not there as the bringer of the news, saying 'Look, you lot don't know anything about philosophy, I'm going to tell you', it's much more of trying to see where the points of contact already exist, and I've been very struck by the number of people within the business world that I've met, who are longing for the big ideas, the philosophical discussions, the talk about what should we be doing with our lives? What makes a good business? What makes a business career successful in a broader sense rather than just economics; what are the bigger images of success in life and so on. And I think that there's a tremendous appetite there, but that that appetite hasn't really been acknowledged or understood from within an academic intellectual culture, so I see this as an opportunity for self-education, to understand better where philosophy can fit in a society.

Alan Saunders: There's a wonderful story about some perfumed Bloomsbury aesthete walking along the streets of London during World War I, and a woman with a white feather comes up to him and asks him why he isn't out there with our boys, fighting for civilisation and he replies, 'My dear, I am the civilisation they're fighting for'. And it seems to me that you could say that the guys out on the Western Front, if you accept that civilisation was in danger, and that fighting on the Western Front was a way of defending it, that those people in the mud were actually doing the work of civilisation, rather more than he was.

John Armstrong: Absolutely. I'm maddened by people like that, and I think it's an unbelievably decadent position, which is to say 'I'm so wonderful', but the real point there is it's an insane risk. If you say 'I'm so wonderful', that's really a claim on other people, that they ought to really admire what this person does; they ought to find in it, tremendous value and worth, and I think that's just totally false. That person simply has this terrible cultural hubris, they think, Well my life is so wonderful that all these other people ought to live like me, and anyone can think that, the task is really to have a conception of things that deserves to be loved by other people, and is presented in such a way that it genuinely wins love and admiration. And I think that there's a real danger that people who have privileged access to things, to ideas or high culture and so on, just think that other people ought to love it, and don't really ask the question, Why? Why should other people care about this? Why should they be so impressed? And I see that anecdote, which is rather wonderful, as exemplifying an extreme form, a danger which I think we see still today, but of course it doesn't take quite such extreme forms, but it's definitely still there.

Alan Saunders: You've just used the word 'decadence'. In the book you talk of two polarities: barbarism and decadence. What is barbarism in this context? Because it's not the Barbarians attacking from without, is it?

John Armstrong: No. If you're looking at civilisation as the integration of power and sensitivity or strength, and sensitivity. Barbarism is then strength without sensitivity. So a tremendous capacity to do things but not very much inward reflection or depth, or understanding about why something's really worth doing. Then on the other hand, decadence is as it were sensitivity without power; all this kind of refinement and delicacy of thought, but incapable of bringing it powerfully to the world in making great things actually happen in reality.

So I see barbarism and decadence as features of modern sophisticated societies, rather than forces of darkness kind of out there somewhere else that might come and invade the city and that sort of thing.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you're with The Philosopher's Zone and I'm talking to John Armstrong from the University of Melbourne, about his new book In Search of Civilisation: Remaking a tarnished idea.

John, one of the key concepts for you is that of flourishing. Now flourishing seems to be rather different from simply being happy, so what is flourishing?

John Armstrong: Well the idea is taken from Aristotle's Ethics. Aristotle basically looked round in his society at the people he thought were making the best go of life, were really admirable and seemed to be capable of doing the most interesting and worthwhile things. And he tried to identify the characteristics that enabled those people to live so fully and well. And he also thought of that kind of achievement in life as flourishing a sort of biological metaphor you think of a plant flourishing, it's growing really well. That notion is sometimes translated as happiness, but I think that invites confusion. Flourishing is compatible with all sorts of pains and difficulties and losses and disappointments and so on. So the fact that someone is living a really sort of rich and interesting and viable life, doesn't mean that they're going to feel sort of buoyant and cheerful all the time because many of the important processes in life, having relationships, bringing up children, undertaking risky but serious work, are going to involve disappointment, frustration, loss, anxiety and so on. So I think that flourishing is helpful because it doesn't give us this misleading idea that living a good and worthwhile life is the same as being sort of cheerful and buoyant all the time.

And there's a second consideration as well. You know there's a lot of discussion about the relationship between money and happiness, so that getting more money sort of makes people a bit happier, and then it sort of flattens out. And it's the same with consumption, that the more things you have, well you get a little bit happier, but quite quickly it starts to flatten out. So it says the notion of happiness doesn't take us that far in terms of understanding human development. But flourishing is something that can keep on going. So someone who makes very good use of large resources, is doing something that's a tremendous human achievement, but its tremendousness and its goodness is not going to be reflected by the fact that they'll be more happy than other people, and I wanted to try and capture that sense that flourishing is something that can keep on increasing in a way that perhaps happiness doesn't.

Alan Saunders: Well something that might be pulling us down is what you call 'the beast in me', the darkness in the human psyche. And the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought that without government the world would just be what he calls 'the war of all against all', we'd just be at each other's throats all the time, and you use a very nice phrase of Hobbes, you say that he sees civilisation as 'a rigorous artifice, designed to save us from ourselves'. Is that, in part, what civilisation is? Is it a mechanism to protect us from our darker selves?

John Armstrong: I think it is. But not just to protect; also help us cope, because I think that protection is never complete. The phrase 'the beast in me' I have to say is meant slightly autobiographically, and it's not just meant to be there's a beast in other people, this is a section of the book that is a bit of a self-examination as well. There's a phrase I like very much, 'the crooked timbers of humanity', which I think originally comes from Immanuel Kant, which is the idea that we're not perfectable. Out of these crooked timbers you'll never be able to build the perfect building, they're not perfectable. So we have to cope with our imperfections. And at one level that's going to be protecting ourselves against our own capacity for rage and self-destruction and damaging other people and so on, and I do think that that is an important function of civilisation. It's very nice to imagine that really everyone is lovely, and just sort of left to their own devices we'd all be sort of so happy and sweet together. I dream of that, but I don't think that's a realistic picture of the human condition.

But not just that sort of police force level, I think it's also about how we cope with our own capacities for self-destruction, so that civilisations are a lot to do with recovery. It's the idea that you do things that you think 'Oh, I'm such an idiot, why did I do that? I'm rotten to this person, I damaged my prospects, and so on', and that the task of civilisation is to help us learn constructively to not get too self-critical, which would then bring other sorts of problems with it, really to cope with our own self-destructive capacities a bit better.

Alan Saunders: Let's talk about the way in which we can become acquainted with the finer things of civilisation, the things that might encourage us to hope for a better understanding on our part, or just simply better behaviour on our part. The person that you invoke in this context is a man whose name I now know how to pronounce because you very helpfully tell us how to pronounce it, Abbot Suger, tell us about Abbot Suger and where he fits into the story.

John Armstrong: Yes, he's a fascinating character. He was in a sense the CEO, or the leader, the Abbot of an important church establishment, a big abbey in France in the Middle Ages, in the 12th century. He was tremendously interested in bringing people into this religious centre. So he thought of his religious centre as holding great spiritual importance for that society, it was the centre of something tremendously precious. But he was very aware that the barons and the government and all the other people in that society had lots and lots of other things that they were very concerned about, and weren't automatically going to appreciate or come into this precious, important arena of value and spiritual meaning.

And he came up with the idea that as a sort of developmental process, that we have, as it were, beginning versions of what was in the core of the religious meaning, the core of the abbey as it might apply to religious ideals. It might be as it were the kind of full pure blast, but that we have all sorts of beginning versions of that in our lives all the time. So he thinks, Imagine someone who's very interested in gold ornaments, as the baron likes his golden cup. And Suger thinks Well that's in response to beauty and brightness, and that's a start, that's a step on the way to, not just appreciating the grandeur of the cup, but let's say the grandeur of an idea. Or not just the beauty of gold sparkling in the firelight, but of spiritual beauty, moral beauty, intellectual beauty. And so he wanted to, as it were, catch hold of people by the sleeve and bring them towards his more sophisticatedly noble vision of spiritual prosperity. And I think that he is an exemplar of a process that is incredibly important.

Alan Saunders: What would an Abbot Suger of the 21st century be doing?

John Armstrong: I think for example, he would not panic about popular culture, but nor would they pander to it. So for example, they would look at the works of JK Rowling, the Harry Potter series, and they'd say, 'This is about very, very interesting and important themes, the struggle of good and evil and about the loveliness of elaborate stories and so on.' And they'd think How can I engage? I've got a different vision of where I want people to go. I want them ultimately to love the philosophy of Plato or I want them to be interested in Logic, or I want them to understand the history of the world, or something, which things are not really there in JK Rowling. How do I engage with that existing enthusiasm? And learn a lot of the lessons of communication, the lessons of enthusiasm that those books teach us. There's something I want to emphasise about Suger was that he was not a populist, that is, he didn't think the barons were just great as they were, he was really interested in what they cared about, but he retained his own vision, his own sense of the true ideals, and I think that's what the Suger of today would really be holding on to.

Alan Saunders: And ultimately our object, what civilisation is about for you, it's what you call spiritual prosperity?

John Armstrong: Yes. When we talk about a person's spirit, often what we mean is their overall personality, their character, and by spiritual prosperity I mean prosperity of a person's inner life I suppose, that is connected to their character, to how they see the world, what's it like to be that person. So spiritual prosperity is intended on my part, to absorb intellectual components, but also to do with what a person's sensitivity is, what they're like, what they're responsive to, why they find things funny, or interesting. It homed in really on three big characteristics of spiritual prosperity.

One is attachment to higher things, the second is the experience of depth, of depth of meaning, depth of feeling. And the third is mental space. These are three metaphors for trying to understand spiritual prosperity. They all require elaboration, but it's a sort of as you say, a starting point for getting the discussion going in what do we mean by spiritual prosperity?

To elaborate just a little: mental space I think is about the capacity to hold on to more than one significant idea at the same time; it's often connected to holding on to conflict. And so I imagine mental space as a kind of containing environment in which you can hold on to conflicting but important, good things, and gradually work out what you need from both.

Alan Saunders: I've been talking to John Armstrong about his book In Search of Civilisation: Remaking a tarnished idea. Details of the book on our website.

John Armstrong, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

John Armstrong: Thank you very much, Alan.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2009/2699460.htm