At the University of Durban-Westville, whose mission statement promises "to make university education accessible to all, especially to students who are financially and educationally disadvantaged", we have a discipline problem. The world of education, of rules of attendance, of assignments and impartial grading is not the world of the township.

In his 1998 study of student attitudes at our university, Jack Johnson-Hill asked students whether university studies could be seen as opening the gates to lifelong learning, rather than simply a hurdle to be jumped before getting to a job. The reply came that this was impossible since the institution at present was so alien to the external conditions of students’ everyday lives.

Whether it was a matter of coordinating a feast to celebrate the bringing back to one’s home of the spirit of a deceased grandparent, arranging a ‘safe house’ for a relative under attack, or contributing time and labour to a community development project, most students viewed their period at university as compartamentalised intervals in an otherwise dense web of community interactions and relationships. Because virtually all of these interactions represented involvements with blacks [i.e. Africans] only, the alienation from the university which they evoked was symbolic of racial alienation as well as of cultural alienation.(1998:54)

 

Given this condition of alienation, it becomes clear that the university is faced with one dimension of a much larger problem. For constructive engagement in the community of free citizens – the post-Apartheid ideal – requires education. It requires the necessarily slow but rewarding acquisition of habits of thinking and writing that are part and parcel of participation in the political debates. Given the nature of a society emerging from a very dysfunctional and divided past, this is not possible without a heavy emphasis on student-focussed education, with a large dose of the humanities. I will try to explain what I mean.

Modern political thought of the line from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, to Mill and Bentham offers a series of discussions on the nature of the most suitable social arrangements for our society, maximizing individual freedom and the general contentment of the members of the society. Its context is the formation of the industrialized, urbanized, secular world that is our own context, too. It has been foundational in shaping our present global setup of liberal democracy. Our present task, it seems to me, would be to come to a critical evaluation of its shortcomings, so as to form ideas for the future. Without this prior engagement, any proposals – and the Marxist and neo-Marxist are the most obvious here – are likely to be globally unrealistic and in general unconvincing.

But before one can interest the student in this tradition, one must feel that the liberal democracy (and its universities) has something going for it, that one can identify to some extent at least with its general institutional arrangements for meeting people’s needs and accommodating their ideals – property laws, educational structures, free market, and so on. We have to begin with the problem of alienation, or more specifically the problem of the ghetto mentality, bred of the apartheid suburb/township divide. Many or most students seem not to feel at all confident that the university and its practices are "for them". Rather, they are seen as an obstacle course, a series of hurdles, that have somehow – it matters not how – to be negotiated in order to achieve the qualification and so an entry – not into the ‘normal’ world of middle-class society – but into the class of the privileged few who have power. "You’ve failed me," is the remark one often hears from a student, as if failure is an event which occurs without reference to objective standards at all. There is a misunderstanding of the nature of an academic discipline as a social practice.

In this situation, a discussion of the ghetto mentality is a good starting point for philosophy studies. A useful description is given in Joseph Pistone’s account of his work as an undercover agent in the Mafia:

I grew up in a city, an Italian, knowing what the Mafia was. As a teenager I played cards, shot craps, played pool, went to the track, hung around the social clubs. . . I knew some guys who were mob guys. . . . I knew some of them were killers. Even as a kid I knew guys that were here today, gone tomorrow, never seen again, and I knew what had happened. I knew how wiseguys acted. I knew the mentality. I knew things to do and not to do. Keep your mouth shut at certain times. Don’t get involved in things that don’t concern you. Walk away from conversations and situations that aren’t your business, before anybody asks you to take a hike. You handle yourself right in those situations, that’s how you get credibility on the street. They say to themselves, ‘Hey, this guy’s been around.’ Growing up in that environment, I could have gone the wiseguy route. I knew guys that did. It happened that my mother and father were straight, and I grew up with their values. I grew up as a guy who would work for a living, raise a family, obey the laws. Other guys became badguys. (Pistone, 1987:114-5)

 

But there are moments of moral dilemma. One incident he relates:

I was out bouncing with Mirra and a couple other wiseguys and their girlfriends. About four in the morning we went for breakfast. Suddenly Mirra turns obnoxious with the waitress, bitching about cold eggs and bad service. He cranks it up, getting nastier, making a scene. Finally I say, ‘Hey, Tony, it’s not her fault, she’s doing the best she can.’ That sets him off worse. He leans across the table and says, . . . "You don’t ever tell me what to say or not to say or how to act.’ ‘I don’t mean to, Tony. I just thought maybe you could ease up on her.’ Then he launches into a tirade in front of everybody. . . . I had to shut up because it was only going to get worse and go totally out of control. So I say, ‘Tony, you’re right. I probably was out of line.’ (1987:135-6)

 

What matters in this ghetto culture (the culture often associated with immigrant communities) is not the broader ethics of the society, but the narrower ethos of the group, where criminal activity, for example, might be acceptable. Ethics as commonly understood – a broad respect for persons – falls away under the higher demands of the group and getting and maintaining power in the group. The rules and practices of university life would similarly be viewed as fairly dispensable, judged as "other", unsuitable for "us".

Does township life encourage a ghetto mentality? Johnson-Hill explains why normal ethical absolutes could be bypassed:

This is because, living within a sea of poverty, racism and unemployment – where there are few job training facilities, and where crime and contact with criminals are everyday occurrences – the man with ‘style’ becomes ‘everything’. To have ‘style’ is to wear new clothes, to drive a good-looking car, to have girls and to look and act sharp. For the most part, the only persons most young people see, or come in face-to-face contact with, who have style are the pimps, gang leaders, robbers, car hijackers, drug pushers and warlords. The life of crime, although perceived as an extremely risky way of life, is thus considered by many unemployed black youth as the only available option, especially if one seeks to become somebody, because ‘without style you are nothing in the townships’. (1990:59)

 

Students seem in general to agree that there is something to the comparison drawn here. It would seem that there is a prerequisite for a serious engagement in a course of study on political theory, a kind of moral conversion. Something that students from the suburbs might never have to confront, during their university studies, in particular if these are in the sciences.

What these examples teach us is that there are certain ground rules for engaging in university study, and these are ethical matters. Philosophical discussion assumes a certain commitment to respecting persons as, at least, sources of argument. One way of understanding the subject matter of philosophy is, indeed, as the analysis of the capacity of persons to come to the truth (epistemology) and, to some extent, to act on it (ethics). Political philosophy, as I understand it, is the critical evaluation of beliefs about various alternative social arrangements. The idea that it is worthwhile spending time analyzing the coherence of such beliefs, examining the grounds for holding those beliefs to be true, the plausibility of the premises – all of which abstracts from the context of the role of those beliefs in securing and maintaining power in the group – is something that takes time to get used to.

The point here is that this problem seems largely unnoticed by present shapers of higher educational policy and absent from the minds of many university administrators. It is in the humanities that these crucial, de-alienating, steps will be taken, or not at all.

University teaching in South Africa has been transformed over the past few years so as to make its degrees more marketable under present global conditions. Every course (now modules, half semester or full semester) has had to be recast as a unit of a program, with outcomes related to identifiable marketable skills. Departments are no longer part of the teaching or administrative structure of the university, they are simply disciplines within the programs. In general, and in accordance with trends world-wide, this means a downsizing of the humanities. Our former department of philosophy is now a subdiscipline within a school of governance (alongside public administration and tourism) which, in turn, is part of the Faculty of Law and Commerce. Emphasis is on "through-rates", and students are quick to calculate where the through-rate is being escalated to meet the budgetary requirements (failures are penalized by withdrawal of state subsidies to the university).

This means that the notion of a discipline, that is to say, of a cooperative social practice with its autonomous standards of excellence, is under threat. Or at least, in present day South Africa it is a site of struggle. Academics are challenged to make the disciplines anew, make their impact felt under new conditions, and draw upon their rich history in a new way.

It would be unfortunate if the demise of Apartheid led to the demise of debate in South Africa. Under those stringent conditions of the apartheid regime, every bit of space allowed for debate was exploited to the full, and with enthusiasm and commitment. Under the new pressures of globalisation, with a popularly elected but undecided and wavering regime, we owe it to ourselves and our students to use the space still allowed for the renewed celebration of our intellectual heritage.

Not much reflection has been given to the coincidence, in the last decade of the twentieth century, of the fall of Soviet Communism and the collapse of Apartheid. But the triumph of liberal democracy (T.O.L.D., as in "I told you so") took away the most potent symbol of an alternative to the dominant Western model of the good life, that of atomistic and genderless individuals seeking to maximize their benefits. Whatever the actual merits, if any, of that particular alternative, we are faced now with the threat of a new, relentless, conformity which neutralizes debate. Disciplines, autonomous, engaged and each with their own history, are points of resistance.

The first Philosophy Seminar Series reflected in this work was held during April and May of 2001, and was to some extent interdisciplinary. The broad theme that emerged was that of philosophy as protest. This is appropriate to a university that draws its student body from the disadvantaged section of the community.

In the contributions from Pithouse and McCabe, we are introduced to thinkers who were aware of being out of the mainstream of philosophy. In his analysis of the humanism of Frantz Fanon, Richard Pithouse argues for a distinction between reactionary and revolutionary humanism. Fanon’s revolutionary humanism, however, is built up through his critical dialogue with Sartre. Influenced by his medical and psychoanalytic studies, he presents a new, more embodied, view of the existentialist value of freedom. Touching on the controversial idea of a normative notion of human nature, Pithouse shows how, in Fanon’s writings, a creative spirituality is evident, a poetry which engages the reader not only intellectually, but on a much deeper emotional level.

In a very different way, Gerard McCabe offers us, in his brief but evocative sketch of the philosophy of John MacMurray, a vision of personal community as an ethical ideal. For MacMurray, setting himself against the dominant Cartesian philosophical tradition, the subject is best understood as agent, and agency entails engagement rather than detachment as the defining characteristic of persons. Furthermore, such engagement intends personal community or friendship. The sustainability of such relations, MacMurray argues, is made possible through the empowering presence of God and is celebrated in religion.

There follow six aspects of protest against a dysfunctional and limiting social status quo. Pravasan Pillay argues that the world of business is set up so as to compromise the personal integrity of job seekers, who are required to submerge their sense of self, to put on a mask, for the purposes of the ends of the business. Refiloe Senatla questions the place of moral judgments in an unjust society, seeing in the action of Dostoevsky’s character Raskolnikov, a protest against such injustice. She questions whether the sense of criminality here is not better seen, in spite of the author’s intentions, as simply a failure of nerve on the part of Raskolnikov. Can criminality carry any stigma at all in such an unjustly structured society?

In the next two papers, contemporary attitudes to nature come under scrutiny. Richard Sivil takes up the protest against the largely unquestioned misuse of the environment in our society, the result of an anthropocentric and limiting orientation in our lives and behaviour. In my own contribution, I offer a critique of the idea of "disgrace", with reference to J.M. Coetzee’s well known novel, and argue that it needs to be seen in the light of the suggestion (in The Lives of Animals) that there is a need to accord respect to nature, in particular animal life.

The last paper has been added to the work of the Seminar and is by Nkorinathi Sotshangane of the University of Transker and in a positive manner attempts to identify the nature and principles of an applied ethics for service in the public sector.

There is a unity in these papers, but it is a unity of orientation, rather than of the content of the ideas. This is as it should be, philosophical traditions – Marxist, humanist, Thomist, anarchist, existential or analytic – should be subordinate and not dominant in healthy discussion. In this way, philosophy challenges any totalizing tendency in our emerging nations.

Johnson-Hill, J. 1998 Seeds of Transformation. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications.

Pistone, J. 1987 Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia. Signet.