Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 09:57:25 +1100
From: Michael Matthews <m.matthews-AT-unsw.EDU.AU>
Subject: PKF: Wal Suchting Eulogy


Dear Members of Australasian Philosophy List,

Two weeks ago I posted a note advising of the death on Jan. 12 th of Wal
Suchting, a retired Sydney University Reader in Philosophy.

For other purposes a eulogy has been written, which I thought I would post
on this network for those that might have an interest in reading it.  It is
two pages long.

Also a list of Wal's publications has been organised.  If anyone would like
a copy please contact me at the address below.

Regards,

Dr Michael R. Matthews
School of Education Studies
UNSW
Sydney 2052

WALLIS ARTHUR SUCHTING (1931-1997)
SOME NOTES ON THE LIFE OF AN AUSTRALIAN PHILOSOPHER

Wal Suchting was born in 1931 in the small north Queensland sugar-cane town
of Gordonvale, he died on January 12th in the inner Sydney suburb of Ultimo.
The scholarship, the command of languages, and the broard grasp of the
history of ideas and culture, that he bought to bear on philosophical
issues, particularly those of epistemology and methodology raised by Marxism
and by the sciences, has seldom been equalled by Australasian academics.
With the current productivity-driven transformation of universities, it is
less likely to be equalled in the future.

He was an only child, brought up in north Queensland country, sugar-cane,
towns (Australia's 'deep north') where his father was a police sergeant.  By
his own account, his youth and family life was less than happy, to put not
too fine a point upon it (as he was fond of saying).

His intelligence ('titanic' as an academic friend described it) stood out
early, and he won a place in the prestigious Brisbane Grammar School for the
last two years of his education.  He boarded in a house near to a former
north Queensland school friend Ted D'Urso who was already in the second year
of philosophy studies at Queensland University.  Ted introduced Wal to
philosophy which, along with Wal's already strong interest in literature and
the arts, filled his final years of school.  His earliest writings - 'To
Shelley: A Sonnett', 'Thoughts on the Function of Criticism in Art',
'Demophilus: A Socratic Dialogue' - were published in The School Window
(1947-48), an annual of the Brisbane Grammar School.  While at school, and
immersed in the aestheticism movement, he was selected to represent
Queensland in a national colloquium of Australia's young intellectuals.

In 1949 he commenced the study of philosophy, history and literature at
Queensland University.  At the end of his first year he spent the summer
vacation teaching himself Italian.  He wrote an essay on Dante's The Divine
Comedy that won first prize in the Australian Dante Alighieri Society's
competition.  This was the first sign of his life-long commitment to, where
ever possible and despite the effort, reading authors in their original
tongue.  In 1951 he graduated from Queensland University with first class
honours in philosophy, shared with his soon-to-be wife, Marie Leaver.  

After an M.A. at Melbourne University on 'The Concept of Necessity in Marx
and Engels', in 1954 he commenced a Ph.D. degree on 'The Criterion of
Empirical Verifiability in Science'.  In order to read ancient texts on this
subject he learnt Latin and Greek; and then German, Russian, French and
Spanish to understand the texts and arguments of the European philosophers.
This concern with the mastery of languages was one reason why the thesis
extended four years beyond his scholarship funds, and why during this time
he became a high school history teacher.  It was also a reason why one
examiner described the thesis, awarded in 1961, as 'a terrifying piece of
work'.  The following year, 1962, he was appointed to the Philosophy
Department at Sydney University.

Wal cared about words and what they meant.  He regarded language as the
greatest component of human culture. He took delight in reading well written
and elegant prose, poetry and philosophy.  He laboured as a craftsman over
his own writings.  He was a wordsmith.  He strove for elegance, but not at
the expense of clarity; and he did not allow clarity to obscure nuances of
meaning.  He had an abiding animus for sloppy, careless and confused
writing; and for dishonest euphemisms, jargon and pretense.  In his last
years he despaired at how the humanities in Australia were encouraging all
the things he hated.  In particular he regarded the bulk of postmodernist,
constructivist and feminist writing as destructive of language and scholarship.

Wal's despair with the scholarly world was only heightened by his experience
of having to work together with a person widely held as the 'Prince of Hegel
translators' on a translation of Hegel's The Encyclopedia of Logic published
in 1991.  Wal and the very prominent north American scholar had in 1986
independently submitted a new English translation of the Logic to Hackett
Publishing Company.  The director urged them to pool their work and make a
joint translation.  This was the beginning of, as Wal said in
correspondence, 'one of the most miserable periods in my life'.  Wal's
interpretations and judgements were repeatedly overruled and he was driven
to ask that a 'dissenting, minority foreward' be included in the
publication, listing the numerous points of difference between himself and
his prestigious co-translator.  

Wal derived bitter pleasure when the early reviews in major journals -
Review of Metaphysics, Mind, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain,
etc. - endorsed his minority report and said, as in the last mentioned
journal, that 'This reviewer is of the opinion that [the collaborators]
would have done better to heed the advice of their colleague, Suchting, as
set out in his minority comments on terminology'.  The whole experience only
confirmed Wal's pessimism about the state of university scholarship, and
confirmed for him the wisdom of his 1990 request for early retirement from
Sydney University.

The Hegel episode is also indicative of another feature of Wal's scholarly
life: he strove to understand those he disagreed with.  He did not believe
in cheap shots, or in repeating others' critiques and analyses.  He was a
life-long Marxist who had no sympathy for Hegel's idealism, yet he worked
for years on mastering the philosophical and cultural contributions of
German Idealism, and on providing a faithful English translation of Hegel's
Logic.  He also was an atheist who read the Bible daily in ancient Greek.
And for a while he toyed with learning Hebrew to do this better, but was
exhausted by the prospect.  He wilted when he read work parroting claims
about 'Positivism', 'Modernism', 'Scientism', 'Empiricism', 'Marxism' and
other supposed bogeymen, by people who had never bothered to read or
understand the views.  

Wal was a meticulous teacher.  When teaching courses on Hume, Hegel, Dewey,
Marx, Popper, Foucault he picked the central texts and strove to have his
students understand them.  He would spend days on the preparation of one
class if only for two students.  Progressive pedagogy passed him by.  He had
too much respect for his students, and for the texts and ideas he was
dealing with, to get by with 'throwing some ideas about' or 'facilitating
students' responses to the author'.  He saw such ploys as basically bull
sessions, and an abnegation of the educative function of the teacher.  He
thought that the immense problems of education could only be solved by
providing students with good books and with teachers who understood them.
Other more high-tech and costly proposals he saw as simply adding to the
problem.

Wal had an enduring interest in the intellectual and cultural achievements
of the scientific revolution.  He believed that the history of philosophy
was inseperable from the history of science, and that those seriously
engaged in the former needed to be seriously engaged with the latter.  To
complement his training in the humanities he taught himself the rudiments of
physics, and of mathematics, by working through every page and example in
Feynman's three-volume Lectures on Physics.  

Some of Wal's early publications (1967, 1969) were on the conceptual
structure of Newtonian mechanics, a topic he returned to in 1993 in one of
his final reviews (in Science & Education) where he took exception to
interpretations of a prominent Newton expert.  Something of Wal's style is
manifest when he says 'the limits of the review forbid following the author
into the "waste howling wilderness" wither his footsteps are directed by his
original false compass readings'.  Of the mistakes in the text, he said that
they were:

Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th'Etrurian shades
High over-arched embower.

The style strained collegial relations.  But Wal thought that academics
should resist the 'Macdonaldisation' of discourse.  Not surprisingly he did
not bother with the academic circuit.  In his thirty-year university career
he attended one conference, and came back from that regreting the time away
from his library and music.  A consequence was that his reputation was
limited.  But he never thought that academic fame and, God forbid,
popularity, was a substitute for ideas understood and arguments followed
through.

>From the early 1950s Wal was engaged by the study and exposition of Marx's
fundamental philosophical ideas.  Needless to say he read Marx in the
original.  In 1972 he taught at Sydney University the very first course in
Australasia on 'Marxism as Philosophy'.  The course was attended by
hundreds, and had a lasting impact on a generation of Sydney philosophy
students.  Two books gave public face to this engagement: Marx: An
Introduction (Harvester, 1983), and Marx and Philosophy (Macmillan, 1986).
His final academic work was a brace of four articles - on experiment, on
empiricism, on falisificationism, and on epistemology - for a
soon-to-be-published German Encyclopedia of Marxism.

After retirement he contributed to international science education by
writing a series of long and scholarly articles for the journal Science &
Education.  These articles, published yearly from 1992 to 1997, ranged over
the cultural significance of science, constructivism, scientific method, the
sociology of scientific knowledge, hermeneutics and science, and Newtonian
mechanics.  They all bear the stamp of his scholarship, love of language,
and reasoning power.

Wallis Suchting belonged to a fast disappearing academic world.  Few
students now spend seven years on a Ph.D. because they want to master
relevant languages.  One publication a year does not get anyone tenure or
renewal of a contract.  Time spent on scholarship, and on reading original
sources in their original language, is not rewarded.  Wal in the end was
deeply pessimistic.  He saw everywhere in the arts and social sciences that
the pursuit of publications irrespective of their quality, and the pursuit
of research dollars, was corrupting the search for truth and understanding,
and interfering with the time required to prepare good classes.  He saw less
and less evidence that universities were fostering, or even caring about, a
love of learning.  

				Michael R. Matthews, School of Education Studies, University of New
South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia.

Dr Michael R. Matthews
School of Education Studies
University of New South Wales
Sydney, 2052
AUSTRALIA
fax: 61-2-9385-6135
ph.: 61-2-9418-3665
email: m.matthews-AT-unsw.edu.au

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