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

This week we're continuing our exploration of Idealism and we're taking a big leap in time and space from the 18th century Ireland of Bishop Berkeley, to Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries. And to talk about that we're joined by researchers into the history of idealism in this country, both from Macquarie University: Dr Marnie Hughes-Warrington from the Department of Modern History, and Dr Ian Tregenza from the Department of Politics and International Relations. Welcome to you both.

Both: Thank you very much.

Alan Saunders: Well, let's begin with a very basic question. For the purposes of this discussion: what is Idealism?

Ian Tregenza: Yes, idealism is certainly a very ambiguous term, and it is worth clarifying. Perhaps a good place to start is just to talk a bit about the distinction between idealism and realism, and their different approaches to philosophy. So a realist approach to the question of knowledge and truth would say something like: that there is a distinction to be made between the external world and the knowing mind, and that knowledge comes about when what's in the mind corresponds to the external world. This is fundamentally what knowledge and truth is all about.

Well the idealist would respond to that by saying that that way of putting it really begs the question, because we can never get beyond the mind, or outside the mind, and that the world is always an object of our understanding or an object of our perception, so there is a strong link between the mind and the world. So this is one of the things that idealism wants to get beyond; that sort of distinction, that dualism.

Now that's a general account of idealism versus realism, but the tradition I suppose that we're really looking at is a tradition of thought that really developed in the late 19th century in Britain, and it came to dominate British universities from about 1870 up to the First World War, and by extension, it also influenced Australia and Australian intellectuals of that time and subsequently.

Alan Saunders: Marnie, I suppose if I have a mental image certainly of early 19th century Australians, I imagine sort of pragmatic, down-to-earth, roll-your-sleeves-up types; so essentially I imagine people whose default position is some form of realism. So when did idealism, and how did it arrive in Australia?

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Well, really you can trace it back to around 1850, and we have early characters such as Charles Strong who through religious activities calling for new idealist philosophy in Australia, but really it takes off in the 1880s at the foundation of the universities in Australia. And most of the first philosophers that are hired to work in those universities were new idealists, or idealists; most of them in fact were trained in Glasgow, and Edward Caird is responsible for many of them in terms of teaching; some of them from Oxford, but mostly from Glasgow, some from Edinburgh and they all come out in a big wave in the 1880s and really dominate thinking in Australia philosophically, from around 1880 to around 1914, 1915. So they're the major tradition at that point philosophically.

Now why it is we may not know about them is a really interesting question. I guess Australian philosophers like to think of themselves as realists, and they paint that tradition back in their own history, and so people like Passmore have made a distinction between philosophy in Australia and Australian philosophy, and he's talked about realism as Australian philosophy but this new idealism, or idealism as simply philosophy in Australia.

Alan Saunders: We should say that John Passmore, the historian of philosophy, he was a pupil of John Anderson, another man from Scotland, and Anderson of course was the big enemy of idealism in Australia, wasn't he?

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Indeed he is, and I think that we shouldn't underestimate the importance of John Anderson in painting Australian philosophy as realist, and that's still today, influence in the way in which we think about philosophy in Australia. Of course we like to distinguish him from Francis Anderson who was a new idealist who came before John.

Alan Saunders: Well we'll come on to Francis Anderson in a minute. Marnie, you've just used the phrase 'new idealist', so Ian, perhaps you could fill us in on what is new idealism, what was new about it?

Ian Tregenza: I suppose what was new about it is that really as I mentioned before, idealism has a very long history, and arguably it goes back to Plato. Plato developed a version of idealism, and there have been different kinds of idealism. We mentioned Bishop Berkeley before, an 18th century idealist. New idealism is really we're referring to that tradition of what's called British idealism of the late 19th century, so it's just a sort of a new incarnation, a new version of I suppose an older way of approaching philosophy. I don't know if Marnie wants to add to that.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: And of course at that time the particular issues of the day that were interesting to people are picked up in that philosophy and shape it. So although new idealists wrote on a whole host of issues, one thing that we find in common with them is an interest in the revelation of civilisation or empire through the activities of mind, so it really is a late 19th century take on an earlier form of philosophy.

Alan Saunders: Well before we go on to Empire and the kingdoms of this world, let's look at the divine world. Ian, to some people, idealism did look just like an attempt to salvage religion from the battering it had taken in the 19th century, didn't it?

Ian Tregenza: This is certainly how many people have interpreted it, and there is something to be said for that sort of criticism. Many of the idealists had close associations with the church, many of them in fact were ordained ministers, and I think partly what's going on, there's a broader sort of context here, and it's partly the changing character of the university itself. So we're shifting from the idea that the university is an ecclesiastical or church-based institution, to a secular institution. I think that's part of it. But also it is, as you say, it's a response to certain intellectual developments in the 19th century, particularly the rise of Darwinian biology for one; and secondly, and possibly even more important than that, was the rise of the new historical scholarship, the so-called higher criticism that was coming out of Germany and was forcing people to really re-think the basis of Christianity, the nature of revealed religion, the nature of the Scriptures, and this sort of thing. And what a lot of the idealists did in response to this, is that they didn't abandon Christianity entirely, in fact many of them as I say, were quite pious and involved with the Church, but they did want to reformulate Christianity and to reinterpret it, and to get away from the idea of a supernatural intervening God, to get away from the idea of miracles and this sort of thing.

Alan Saunders: I suppose one question that should be asked here is this: last week we were looking at the work of George Berkeley and he thought there was no need, in keeping with what you said at the beginning Ian, he thought that there was no need for a material explanation for our perceptions: we see, we hear, we touch, but these sensations that we experience when we do these things, they can be accounted for without recourse to material substance as a mode of explanation. How do we get from there to politics?

Ian Tregenza: Yes.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: It's a really good question.

Ian Tregenza: It's an excellent question. Well, I mentioned before that one of the things that they're trying to get away from is all types of dualism. So a dualism between the mind and the world, a dualism between secular knowledge and religious knowledge, but also they were very interested in getting away from the distinction between the State and the individual. And so they were responding to a lot of their liberal ideas at the time, the so-called classical liberal ideas, which were highly individualistic and set up this polar opposition between the State and the individual, and they wanted to argue that the State and the individual should be thought of as a unified whole, so they were new liberal thinkers. So really what they're looking for is they're looking for reconciliation, at different levels; at the level of the mind, and also at the level of society.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Can I expand on that and say that Yes, of course it's all about mind and ideas, but they find these things in all kinds of places, so you can read a pamphlet by Portis on nuclear energy and beyond page 3 it then becomes evident that he's talking about Hegelian Spirit at that point. Or he's talking about industrial reform, and many of them wrote on industrial relations, industrial reform. After about page 3 it becomes clear again that they think that industrial reform and industrial relations really is about the realisation of greater and greater aggregates of people and that the Spirit expresses itself through these practical activities that people have, through the family, family activities, so day-to-day activities, we see the spirit in those things and they write about these quite practical political activities in that way.

Alan Saunders: I think we're going to have to go into this in a little more detail, because you talk about Hegelian Spirit, so that's a reference to GWF Hegel, the great 19th century German philosopher. I usually find I have to take it on trust that he's a great philosopher, because I find him well-nigh impenetrable, and he talks a lot about spirit, and given that we've just been in a sort of religious context, what does spirit mean in this context?

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: In the hands of the people that we're studying, it can mean a whole range of things. Some of them are quite religiously inclined, and so spirit can correspond to the mind of God, for instance. For others, spirit can mean more of a kind of group feeling and you find everything in between those things. I'd say in the late 19th century, with the first group of philosophers here, we're really finding people in which religion and idealism overlap quite nicely, and then later on you're getting people saying, Oh no, it's not really God, it's actually more a kind of group spirit that's out there, and it's realising itself through our activities.

Ian Tregenza: Or just the notion of progress. This is often how it's interpreted: there is this sort of broad spirit that runs through history and is revealing itself over time, and that is broadly an Hegelian way of viewing progress.

Alan Saunders: Yes, I was going to say it's a dynamic notion, this spirit, isn't it?

Ian Tregenza: Yes, that's right.

Alan Saunders: It has been suggested that new idealism is a colonising philosophy. Marnie, you've already mentioned Empire; is this fair, is it a coloniser's philosophy?

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: At first sight that's a fair thing to say because some of them like Mungo McCallum 1st, he believed that his work was for the service of the Empire, but then if you look more deeply, things complicate that picture. Firstly, you can argue that very shortly the philosophy in Australia diverges from British philosophy and we see some interesting things happening there. The other thing that complicates it of course is that the people that are thinking this way in Australia don't stay in Australia. They go back and forth between Britain, and the ideas that they have and the variations on idealist thought that they produce here, are then delivered back to Britain. So you couldn't say it's a kind of one-way model that the Empire is bestowing to us, it's moving back and forward and importantly, we found that really sometimes people think that Empire means a kind of imposition of a statist model and they implicate Hegel in that as well. And really, we don't think that's quite right, we think that actually the State has less emphasis in Australian philosophy than it does in Britain at the same time and so there's a variation there and perhaps we're not taking on board what's going on in Britain.

Alan Saunders: And this, despite the fact that I would have thought that in the 19th century the State, or the States, would have more of an influence on people's lives than the central government did in the UK, because Australians, despite the national self-image of more the rugged individualists, have actually always looked to authority for economic assistance, social change and so on.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Interestingly, I guess, often State is at that time corresponded to Nation-State, and Australia of course doesn't have a Nation-State in 1880, and so that's one complicating factor there. I'm not sure that people really do view a central authority at that time as what they want to see themselves as realising. I think Australians are perhaps a little bit more individualistic than that, and want to tug at that authority.

Alan Saunders: A thought that has just occurred to me in the context of Empire is that in the 18th century George Berkeley went to America. I think he was going to establish a college there; it never happened. But while he was there, he wrote a poem which contains the celebrated line 'Westward the course of Empire takes its way', and the notion was that you had Empires which began in the East, they gradually moved west to Greece, and then to Rome, and now there was the British Empire which was going West across the Atlantic and creating the New World. So it's a notion that there is a spirit of Empire moving across the globe, and if you like, of a torch being handed on from one empire to the next. Now obviously the Westward bit didn't really work, so it would now have to be 'southward the course of Empire takes its way', but is there an element of that in the way these people are thinking?

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: There certainly is, and of course Hegel mentions Australia in his philosophy of history, he talks about the torch of civilisation passing on and he says at the very end that Australia is where it might - which is really lovely, and many of our thinkers really did think that. Now what's interesting is they didn't think it that it stopped with the British Empire, they thought the story was still unfolding and that Australia, when it reached maturity, as they thought India and other parts of the Empire like Canada, when they reached maturity they would help Britain to realise an even greater world community, so there would be a movement beyond Empire at that stage, which is really interesting.

Alan Saunders: Now from everything that both of you have said, and perhaps Ian, you might like to take this one: it's true, isn't it, that idealism clearly had an impact in this country that went beyond the university, beyond the academy.

Ian Tregenza: Yes, it went far beyond the university. And in fact many of these figures could be characterised, even though they wouldn't have used the term themselves, because the term came around a little bit later, but they could be referred to as public intellectuals and they really did think that philosophy had a broader social function and a social role. And so many of them for instance were actively involved in spreading educational ideas, so they were involved for instance, in setting up the Workers Education Association, the WEA, that was one manifestation of it. Marnie's already mentioned before industrial arbitration as an important sort of manifestation of this version of idealist liberalism and broadly in religion and religious ideas. So they were looking to go well beyond the university, and they had an influence and a reach well beyond the academy itself.

Alan Saunders: And Ian, you've said that it was a dominant philosophy in this country until about 1914. Now the big event of the year 1914 is one calculated to foster a certain dislike of things German in this country. Was it the German origins of a lot of idealism, of people like Hegel for example that did for idealism? Was it tainted by association?

Ian Tregenza: I don't think you could say that about Australia. You could certainly say that about Britain. In Britain, the idealists came under attack because of their associations with Hegel and with Hegel's so-called Theory of the God-State and there was a famous case of R B Haldane who was the Lord Chancellor at the time, and he was actually forced to resign his position because of his sympathies with German philosophy, and so in Britain certainly it was associated with strong anti-German feeling; in Australia perhaps less so. The idealists in Australia simply didn't come under the same type of criticism I think, and even one of the key figures Marnie's mentioned before, Mungo McCallum who taught at the University of Sydney, he had a German wife and he'd studied in Germany, he had a lot of strong connections with Germany, but he was quite willing to criticise the German theory of the State, the Hegelian theory of the State; he didn't feel the need to defend German philosophy in the way that a lot of the British idealists did at the same time.

Alan Saunders: In fact he did blame it for the war, didn't he?

Ian Tregenza: Yes, that's right.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: I think again this returns to this issue of the State being perhaps not so emphasised in Australian philosophy and to the point where even later new idealists in Australia, Jerry Portis, he wrote a paper called A Study of Dictators in the World, and he argued that people like Hitler, although he didn't say it directly, were really helping to clear the path of freedom on the world. So yes, we were living in World War II and World War I was rather nasty, but for the greater scheme of things good things were going to happen out of even that, and then the Germans would be our friends beyond the cessation of hostilities. And these things were often given during the war, so one can only imagine the response to these lectures and sermons.

Alan Saunders: Well, it is the case, isn't it, that Australian idealists were very keen to foster internationalism. Marnie, you've talked about the possibility of India helping the British Empire to achieve some world civilistion beyond Empire. What did they mean by internationalism? Were there a wide variety of interpretations of internationalism amongst the idealists?

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Yes, there were some interesting views. Portis, for instance: he views the international community as being like a family, and that Britain, recognising that its children have grown up. Edmund Morris Miller from Tasmania, he has a slightly more kind of political view of the community; it's about interstate relations. Many of them see internationalism as being about the League of Nations, and they think that's the best realisation of internationalisation that's come about and then of course when that falls over, they are ever hopeful and say of course the United Nations will be the realisation of the internationalisation that we seek in the world story of freedom.

Alan Saunders: Well let's turn to another big figure; we've mentioned Mungo McCallum. Francis Anderson, who was he and what were his views?

Ian Tregenza: Francis Anderson came out to Australia - originally he actually came out to work as a minister in the church that Charles Strong was leading in Melbourne, called the Australian Church which had split with the Presbyterian church down there. And he was there for a couple of years and then he took a position lecturing in philosophy at the University of Sydney and subsequently became professor in 1890 and retired in 1922. And he had a profound influence on generations of students, and encouraged them to be active in the world, active citizens, and very much in the tradition of the late 19th century figure, T.H. Green, who did much the same thing from Balliol College, Oxford.

Alan Saunders: Francis Anderson you said was at Sydney University till 1922, which is roughly at that time that John Anderson (no relation I take it) arrives. Can we blame the decline of - we've already talked about this, but can we really blame the decline of idealism in Australia solely on that one man?

Ian Tregenza: No, I don't think so. I think there are broader trends at work here. In Britain you've got the rapid decline of idealism from after the First World War, and I think Australia is really part of that, you know, picking up on the same intellectual trends. But certainly John Anderson was a very forceful personality, a very forceful figure and he really set himself up against idealism. And so he did have a big role to play, but there were more forces at work, certainly.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: The other important thing to know is of course that not everything happens just at Sydney University.

Alan Saunders: Yes, of course.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: There are of course new idealists in Melbourne associated with Henry Laurie, and W. Boyce-Gibson and then his son and wife, Lucy Boyce-Gibson, so there were three of them there. They then teach Edmund Morris-Miller who goes off to Tasmania, we have William Jethro Brown in Tasmania, he then goes off to England, both in London, Aberystwyth and then ends up in Adelaide with William Mitchell and Jerry Portis. So we have very strong groups of new idealists in Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania and Adelaide, so we can't just speak about what's happening in Sydney as influencing the direction of philosophy in Australia, there are these strong growths, and perhaps some differences in their interests between Melbourne for instance, and Sydney.

Alan Saunders: But its disappearance I think has been strikingly complete. I remember when I was a postgraduate student at the Australian National University, listening to a paper by Eugene Kamenka from the History of Ideas Unit, who had been a student of Anderson, and he was talking about Anderson's philosophy. And he was, as it were, through Anderson, attacking positions that not only had I never felt tempted to hold, but I'd never even heard of. He said (we won't go into this now but he said), 'Anderson holds strongly that there is no such thing as an internal relation'. And I thought, I have no idea what an internal relation is. You know, this just was not an issue for me, it had just gone completely, and it has sort of vanished completely, hasn't it?

Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Well it did but actually in the '90s there was a kind of rebirth of interest in it, not just scholarly interest, but I do remember that people were very interested in tracing the roots of New Labour in Britain, back to T.H. Green, and to idealist thought; people were trying to understand Blair's government and his program for change, and they looked to idealism to understand that government which is really -

Ian Tregenza: I think the revival of interest has had more to do with social and political philosophy than metaphysics and epistemology and that sort of thing. But nevertheless, I mean Marnie's right; there has been something of a scholarly revival in that area.

Alan Saunders: Well, Marnie Hughes-Warrington and Ian Tregenza, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Both: Thank you, Alan.

Alan Saunders: The Philosopher's Zone is produced by Polly Rickard with technical production this week by Michelle Goldsworthy. I'm Alan Saunders and I'll be back next week with another Anderson, and a sworn enemy of idealism, John Anderson.