Several ways of starting come to mind, so here's one.
I watched the apology on Wednesday, both Rudd's and Nelson's. It's been the subject of much discussion (and, in some cases, argument) in my parts since then, so suffice to say that it touched me - it made me feel as if I were living in a better country and, strangely, it made me feel like a better person (nor, it turns out, was I the only one who had the latter response), and not even necessarily in that order. Maybe underlying both of those was a sense of hope, though that didn't come to me till later - at least not in those terms.
It was the right thing to do. The arguments against one (reinforcing a culture of victimhood, risk of compensation claims, the idea that there are more important things for the government to be doing, the suggestion that the harm done is somehow balanced out by the positives, lack of practical effect, various convoluted arguments about shame, guilt, regret, responsibility and sometimes pride, often mixed in with further confused talk about 'personal' 'collective', 'national' and 'historical' varieties of the above, etc) are specious at best; the arguments
for are simple and compelling. It boils down to this: the Aboriginal people of Australia have been wronged in a systematic, continuing and essentially incomprehensibly deep way, pursuant to government policies that, however well-intentioned they may have been at the time (if "well-intentionedness" can even have any meaning across such a divide), we now know were indefensible on any terms. Everything else is so much window-dressing.
To get back to the point, though: seeing the Prime Minister of Australia stand up in Parliament and say 'sorry', and the effect it had on those present to whom he was apologising did touch me; and more than that, it crystallised, or perhaps galvanised, something in me, a sort of dialectic I suppose, that goes something like this: I believe in the effect of the abstract, the top-down, the in-principle - philosophy and the liberal arts make the world a better place; so too poets and artists, not to mention (I sometimes these days think most importantly for me) those promulgating policy and laws of all kinds. But then again, sometimes I'm not sure I really do believe it, I mean really - seriously, how is the pro bono lawyer at the community legal centre, or the case worker helping people wrapped up in alcoholism or other drugs on the ground, or the manager of the housing agency providing temporary or emergency or crisis accommodation, not doing more good and helping more people than the person making high-level policy, however good, from on high, never mind the metaphysical detective story novelist or the cultural studies lecturer with the specialisation in gender theory?
The answer, of course, as SL pointed out tonight, is that you need both the 'high level' and the 'on the ground' - it's meaningless to just consider one in isolation from the other or from everything else and to ask 'which is more --?'. But that said (and this is what I've been coming to), for me the apology was an example of the circle being completed - a clear example of something abstract, 'symbolic' if you will, doing real good. I said it before - it was the right thing to do. That word, 'sorry' - it made a difference. It was important. But it was the whole act that was the thing. I don't think it's naivete which makes me sure that it'll make a difference.
...all of which has come at a particularly opportune time for me, actually. It's important for me to believe in the value of things done on that level (sometimes, it's necessary to be vague to be accurate), for that's the direction in which I instinctively and strongly incline myself. I basically knew it before starting at MS at the beginning of '06, and everything I've done and experienced since then has confirmed that in one way or another, for better or for worse, the nature of the path I'll take.
[the above was written at about 2am last night - hence its possibly somewhat ranty character!]
So lately, a couple of things have brought philosophy back to the forefront of my mind, and the immediate upshot has been a spurt of enthusiasm about getting together a sort of philosophy reading group. The idea germinated in a couple of separate discussions, with Jaani and Derek, and current thinking about the form it'll take is more or less summarised thus:
...readings broadly in the Husserl-Heidegger-(Gadamer)-Derrida stream (all kinds of tributaries - historical, practical, thematic, critical, etc - naturally welcome). Not necessarily reading those guys (although not necessarily excluding them either) and certainly not prescriptively limited to that field, but broadly in that latter-day 'Continental' tradition anyway...(Foucault also likely to be a key link.)
Anyway, I'm pretty confident it'll at least get off the ground; as to how long it'll last, and how successful it'll be, well, time will tell. Both of my book clubs have been going on since '06 now, one since early in the year and the other having begun somewhere round late winter or maybe spring, I think, so that may be a good omen...
Actually, for me, there's often been sort of a push and pull between philosophy and literature (quotation marks deliberately omitted), probably beginning during my later high school years and certainly since I started at uni. I kicked of my arts degree as a philo/psych major, but dropped the psych in favour of English after a semester, inspired in part (and, in retrospect, rather oddly) by Kate Atkinson's
Emotionally Weird), and never really looked back - first year English was pretty boring, but once I was through that, I enjoyed the lit part of my degree far more than the philo (though there were a couple of notable exceptions on the philo front) and really began to feel that I was working towards some meaningful positions/understandings over the course of that major.
Still, it was a real question as to which I should pursue when it came to honours. It was pretty obvious that I should do combined honours so the question was really one of which I should make my 'primary' focus, in the sense of writing my thesis in it. There's no doubt that lit would have been a lot easier, but it seemed to me that thesis-ing in philo was more likely to enable me to reach a real resolution about something important to me, and in the end, that was what tipped it.
It was the right choice, I think, even though in the end the thesis-writing wasn't exactly a sustained effort over the course of the year and the one thing that I wrote over '05 that I thought came closest to encapsulating where things were at for me was actually the paper I did for Contemporary Historical Fictions (albeit in an outline-y sort of way rather than in any real detail). The thesis wasn't the best thing I ever wrote (nor the one that I most liked), but it was pretty much the most intellectually honest and, on its own terms, rigorous, I reckon, and that counts for a lot.
I still think that a PhD may be on the cards for me somewhere down the track, and my ideas about its general topic hasn't changed much, either. It's all still completely up in the air, of course, along with everything else - but it's nice to have at least some kind of a sense of its possibility and, maybe, meaningfulness (whatever that may - the pun is unintended but, perhaps, telling - mean)...well, as I said before, time will tell. Not quite que sera sera, but not entirely different, either.
