[BITList] No simples

[John Feltham]

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Anderson,  John  (1893-1962), philosopher and social critic, was born in Stonehouse, Lanarkshire, 30 miles south-west of Glasgow, on 1 November 1893, the third of the five children of a radical schoolmaster, Alexander Anderson (1863-1947), and his wife, Elizabeth Brown (d. 1942), teacher, pianist, and poet.

Education and influences

John followed his brother William (1888-1950), later to be professor of philosophy in Auckland, New Zealand, by going with a bursary to Hamilton Academy (1907-10) and then (1911) on to Glasgow University. At first he concentrated on mathematics and physics until his brother induced him to turn to philosophy. In 1917 he graduated MA with first-class honours in mathematics, natural philosophy, and philosophy after winning prizes in Greek, economics, and political science. In open competition with graduates from all the Scottish universities he won in 1917 the Ferguson scholarship in philosophy and in 1919 the Shaw fellowship, which required four public lectures. His title was 'The nature of mind'. When on 11 September 1926 he applied for the Challis professorship of philosophy in the University of Sydney he could claim to have lectured for nine years, at first in Glasgow, then in Cardiff (1917-19), and finally in Edinburgh (1920-26). He left marks wherever he taught, especially in respect to his contribution to the then prevailing battle between defenders of the traditional classical education and those who sought to turn universities into training colleges. The vigour of his intervention led to his being compared with the non-religious covenanter Henry Morton in Walter Scott's Old Mortality (1816). His educational writings were later brought together by a Welsh philosopher, D. Z. Phillips, as Education and Inquiry: John Anderson (1980).

Anderson's exceptionally long period as an undergraduate (1911-17) created a deep interest in student affairs which he retained for most of his life. In the period 1914-18-his health prevented him from being called up-he published sixteen articles in the Glasgow University Magazine, some literary, some political. They are listed and described in Brian Kennedy's well-named biography, A Passion to Oppose (1995). Anderson called himself Jude, characteristically referring to Hardy's widely condemned book Jude the Obscure (1895).

What kind of philosophy did Anderson learn in Glasgow? His principal teacher was Sir Henry Jones (1852-1922) who carried further the tradition of Scottish Hegelianism, which sought to reconcile Hegel with Christianity but also, unlike English Hegelians, emphasized the way in which Hegel moved from one area of human culture to another, always considering them in the light of his general principles. Anderson continued to admire this side of Hegel and substantially tried to imitate it, although he totally rejected Hegel's general principles as well as the Scottish attempt to make a Christian of him.

Another major influence was the Australian-born philosopher Samuel Alexander (1859-1938), then a Manchester professor, who spent friendly months-Anderson liked his personal style-delivering the Gifford lectures (1918) published as Space, Time and Deity (1920). Rejecting Alexander's metaphysical evolutionism, according to which in the beginning was space-time out of which mind, matter, and God were generated, he took over the view that to be was to have a place in space and time. There was a realism in Alexander, too, which Anderson more fully developed as a consequence of reading G. E. Moore (Mind, 1903) and American realism as presented in the co-operative work New Realism (1912). Thereafter he regularly described himself in all his work as a realist. From William James he learned that relations are perceived by us, not imposed upon isolated ideas.

In Edinburgh Anderson felt himself sufficiently secure financially to bring to its end, by marriage on 30 June 1922, his lengthy courtship with a miner's daughter, Janet (Jennie) Baillie (1892-1987), whom he had originally met as a rival in Hamilton Academy. Their only child was another Alexander, shortened to Sandy (1923-1995), who was later to become the head of the philosophy department in Newcastle, an industrial city 90 miles north of Sydney. Edinburgh influenced Anderson in a number of ways. After Glasgow he found his colleagues conservative and 'kirky', and therefore chose to live in the miner's town of Eskbank, 12 miles south-east of Edinburgh. Nevertheless he learned a great deal from his scholarly colleagues. He was not himself a scholar but liked to centre his lectures, except for logic, around individual philosophers, presenting his own views by way of a criticism of them. He particularly admired Greek philosophy because it tried to give an account of the world rather than of perception, in the manner of British philosophers, whom he criticized as not having paid adequate attention to their continental critics. His Sydney students would soon be made aware of his scholarly hero John Burnet (1863-1928), an Edinburgh product although then at St Andrews, of the Edinburgh Plato scholar Alfred Edward Taylor (1869-1945), and, in the case of Kant, Descartes, and Hume, of Norman Kemp Smith (1872-1958).

Professor in Sydney

Anderson's application for the professorship in Sydney, probably incited by two things-his impatience with kirky Edinburgh and his admiration for Samuel Alexander-was supported by his conservative Edinburgh colleagues. Sydney was used to Scottish-educated professors. They were mostly conservative, sometimes extremely so. The first professor of philosophy, Francis Anderson (1858-1941), had been a product of Glasgow Christianized Hegelianism. He was in some quarters regarded as radical because he fought for the replacement of pupil-teaching by the setting up of a teachers' college, and in the course of the First World War had supported the setting up of the League of Nations. This degree of radicalism Sydney could endure. But what of a man who had signed up as a communist immediately on his arrival, who was unashamedly an atheist, a realist where philosophers were expected to be idealists, who freely mixed with students when he was expected to meet them only in classes or, very occasionally, in their studies? Trouble was bound to loom ahead. His students at first found him difficult to comprehend. His Scottish accent, the tweed suit he wore even in the heat of summer, even his general appearance at a time when what is now a multicultural city was little varied in appearance, were hard to take. He liked to think of himself as having a Gypsy background. Donald Horne (b. 1921), who was to be one of his ablest students, describes his first sight of him thus:

He was in his late forties, very tall, gangling, striding loosely past in a brown suit and a green hat with an upturned brim, usually sombre, with his pipe jutting out from between his teeth. He seemed an embodiment of what was grave and constant in human suffering, but sometimes he would wave an arm at a student ... and smile ... His huge, sad, eyes seem to sag right down into his face, pulling the cheeks down with them, lost in wisdom ... I was gripped by the need to know him. (D. Horne, The Education of Young Donald, 1967, 245)
There could be no doubt that his general appearance was melancholic. But it is also true that he could smile and wave at his students and could induce in them a need to know him. He could drink with them in pubs and the best of them he might invite to his home in Turramurra on Sundays. Professors were at that time well paid. Anderson joined most of them in having a garden house in the area north of Sydney, with a gardener and a maid. Jennie would play the piano to accompany his singing of Hebridean songs, Mussorgsky, Mozart, and Gounod. Or he might play records of Duke Ellington. Or tennis on the then commonplace court.

When Anderson applied for his professorship he had very little to refer to in the way of publications, even by the standards of that time. Two articles, he said, and a textbook on logic, which was then being considered for publication. To his considerable distress the book was not accepted and he never wrote another standard-length work, although he wrote some 200 papers and just before his death brought forward a collection of 32 papers, Studies in Empirical Philosophy (1962), which he regarded as being central to his philosophy, including two papers he wrote to clear up what he took to be misunderstandings. The book is prefaced by a lengthy introduction entitled 'John Anderson and twentieth century philosophy' by John Passmore. After 1962, the date of his death, former pupils brought forth collections of his other papers, accompanied by prefaces and annotations, and wrote accounts, often to some degree critical, of certain areas of his writings. Most of his pupils, however, learned from his lectures. These lectures have not been published; only in the Anderson archives in Sydney University can one find examples, or reports, of them.

Anderson's philosophy

It is impossible to offer in a short space Anderson's complex arguments; one can offer nothing more than a bare outline of his positions. His realism is direct: what we are immediately aware of are states of affairs. There are no simples; complexes are the minimal forms of existence; what happens arises out of the meeting of complexes. He describes himself as an empiricist, since he maintains that all knowledge is based on experience, but he rejects the view, typical of British empiricism, that experience is of sensations, or of sense-data. Like Heraclitus, he argues that we have always to expect the unexpected; since there are no simples we can always overlook some of a thing's characteristics. There is no being outside space and time and hence no God or any other sort of absolute being. Relativism he sees as a common error-defining a thing as that which stands in a certain relationship to something else, as when mind is defined as that which is conscious. In fact, minds are complexes of emotions; they are what is conscious but emotions have their own character as, for example, affection, and they can co-operate or conflict with other emotions. He was influenced by Freud but there is in Anderson's philosophy no ego, although of course there is egoism. In a similar way-here Marx was an influence-human societies are conflicts, and alliances, between social movements; there is no all-powerful state, although the institutions referred to as 'the state' have, of course, variable powers which social movements try to reduce, or increase, or seize. Again under Moore's influence, he takes ethics to be concerned with elucidating good forms of activity. For Anderson these include enquiry, love, art, and freedom. He does not, as Moore does, define 'right' as the production of goods; it is for him a political concept to be fought for or disputed. His aesthetics, too, defines beauty not in terms of the effects of works of art on human beings, which would be relativism, but as something perceptible in the structure of works of art. His writings on art are brought together as Art and Reality (ed. Janet Anderson, 1982).

The logic Anderson taught was the logic publishers had rejected. As often with him it is in some ways conservative, in other ways radical. He retained the four forms-all, some, some not, no. But he rejected the view that there were also singular and hypothetical propositions. These, he argued, could be expressed in the four forms, as could all everyday statements. What is asserted or denied is always the existence of particular states of affairs. His pupils, particularly lawyers in the making, found that the exercise of putting statements into logical form helped them to argue more clearly, relating states of affairs to one another. There is a general, critical, account of his logic, which is also, for Anderson, his ontology, in A. J. Baker's Australian Realism (1986).

Politics and other activities

Aside from his lectures Anderson presided over two staff-student societies: the Literary Society and the Freethought Society. In the university at that time literature courses were wholly devoted to earlier centuries, and the approach was strongly biographical. The Literary Society, in contrast, was devoted almost entirely to twentieth-century writers except in the case of Russian writers, who were not at that time taught. Anderson was particularly enthusiastic about the banned Joyce's Ulysses; it was circulated in a cover entitled The Book of Common Prayer. But this created no public disturbance. Neither did his emphasis on an aesthetic rather than a biographical approach, although it aroused hostility in the English department. The society published as a pamphlet Anderson's Some Questions in Aesthetics (1932).

The Freethought Society had been set up by a group of left-wing students but was soon under the control of Anderson and his followers. Anderson's presidential address (9 July 1931) could scarcely have been more provocative. The Australian public had set up all over the continent war memorials as substitutes for the graves of soldiers killed in the First World War, all of them overseas. Anderson argued that they stood in the way of an intellectual examination of Australia's participation in that war. He was threatened with dismissal after a parliamentary debate demanded it. He was at that time lecturing to his first-year class on Plato's Apology. His pupils saw him as a modern Socrates; but unlike Socrates he survived.

There were to be other attacks on Anderson from a religious point of view. But in this case the university senate argued that Sydney University was a secular institution. The senate's earlier statement had been much more doubtful, upholding in general terms free speech but strongly attacking his views. Politically Anderson changed his allegiance. He switched from Soviet communism to being a Trotskyist, having political discussions in his room with trade union Trotskyists, after a communist Melbourne journal, Proletariat, refused to publish his article 'Leadership and spontaneity', published by the Freethought Society as 'Censorship in the working class' (1932). He was still very interested in Marx, claiming that the Soviet Marxists did not read him, but only writers who pretended to have read him. But he also turned to Georges Sorel, Benedetto Croce, and Giambattista Vico. To the horror of many of his followers he wrote in 1943 a favourable article on Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State (1912). He also adopted political attitudes which greatly disturbed them. He was in fact a very disappointed man. He had hoped to see a free and productive society brought about by the working class. Now he found them content with welfare awards. He had once seen in science the supreme example of free enquiry but he found it selling out to industry and instruments of war, promising secrecy. He did not like, either, the way in which the Freethought Society had now become a city organization, based on hotels, calling themselves 'libertarians' or 'the Sydney Push', still organizing discussions, often referring to him, but taking as the society's central doctrine complete sexual freedom. He felt generally quite out of touch with the new generation. 'The Push' is analysed and related to Anderson in Anne Coombs's Sex and Agony: the Life and Death of the Sydney Push (1996). Anderson's socio-political views, with their emphasis on such doctrines as that liberty always has to be fought for, can be found in A. J. Baker's Anderson's Social Philosophy (1979).

Anderson liked to chop wood but in July 1962 he went too far, collapsed, and died in hospital at Turramurra on 6 July. His funeral was at the relatively near Chatswood crematorium, the next day. The valedictory address was delivered by the psychologist W. M. (Bill) O'Neil. His legacy was a group of philosophers who, in very different ways, were to be internationally well known, but he also had a permanent effect on psychologists, lawyers, and critics. And beyond that he strengthened in Sydney the idea of political and intellectual liberty.

John Passmore 

Sources  B. Kennedy, A passion to oppose (1995) + personal knowledge (2004) + Sydney University, Anderson archives + G. Suter, 'Bibliographical study on the philosophy of John Anderson', [n.d.] + Dialectician, 1987, U. Newcastle, Anderson MSS [special number of journal; repr. 1993] + W. M. O'Neil, 'Anderson, John', AusDB, vol. 1
Archives University of Sydney FILM University of Sydney, Stout archives, home footage
Likenesses  W. Dobell, oils, 1961, Australian National University, Canberra · W. Dobell, oils, 1962, University of Sydney; repro. in J. T. Gleeson, William Dobell (1964) [see illus.] · photographs, repro. in Kennedy, A passion to oppose



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