To cut or not to cut

Miguel de Unamuno, centre with beard, leaves Salamanca University in 1936

The world seems to be divided between those who love to cut and those who hate cutting. I propose the terms temnophiles and temnophobes (from the Greek word temnein, to cut) for these two tendencies and I admit to being an inveterate temnophobe. In the garden this has predictable consequences. The privet hedge grows luxuriantly towards the sun and shuts out light. I put off trimming it – there might be birds nesting in there; don’t risk decimating the thing just when it’s starting to get established.

I find excuses not to prune the spiky pyracantha and the indomitable viburnum, which would probably benefit from being cut back. Maybe I am not quite as temnophobic as a friend in south London who protested when his wife removed some ivy that was engulfing a shed, but I run him close. The wife speculates that there are psychological reasons behind this – are we both afraid of having the wayward tendrils of our souls snipped off by a Fate with shears?

But this is not just a horticultural or even psychological issue. There is no more important or contentious question in today’s politics than the timing of cuts that most people believe are inevitable. Cartoonists are having a ball depicting gleeful executioners and a variety of sharp-bladed instruments from halberds to those long knives protruding from chariot wheels pioneered by Boadicea (now there was a lady, like one of her successors, who liked to cut).

But I think politicians should beware of excessive temnophilia. They might like to recall certain words spoken by a maverick professor at one of the 20th century’s defining moments. The place was Salamanca University and the date October 12 1936. Catalonia and the Basque country, said Francisco Maldonado, are “cancers on the body of the nation. Fascism, the healer of Spain, will know how to exterminate them, cutting into live flesh, like a determined surgeon free from false sentimentalism.” This sanguinary rhetoric was greeted by a cry of “Viva la muerte!” General Millán Astray, later to be Franco’s propaganda minister, added: “Death to intelligence! Long live death!”

Listening to all this was the rector of the university, the poet, novelist and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who had, incidentally, briefly supported Franco’s uprising. His morally courageous response (recorded by witnesses) has rung through the decades. “This is the temple of intelligence,” he began, “and I am its high priest. You are profaning its sacred domain. You will succeed, because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. In order to convince it is necessary to persuade, and to persuade you will need something that you do not possess: reason and right in the struggle.”

. . .

Cutting, in other words, can go to people’s heads, and unleash savage orgies of destruction. But remembering Unamuno’s brave stand against bloody philistinism, and the place where it happened, is particularly apt at this time. No politician or bureaucrat in our time would dare to cry “death to intelligence” but closing down successful university philosophy departments, such as the one at Middlesex University currently facing the axe, amounts to pretty much the same thing.

Not just the planned closure but the arguments brought forward to support it deserve the strongest rebuke. The decision is “purely financial”, according to Dean Ed Esche. Philosophy is not as lucrative to the university as, say, business, though its six members of staff generate no less than 5 per cent of the university’s total research income, way above the per capita average. On a “purely financial” basis there would be no future for any humanities subject. Esche implies that philosophy is not useful, and does not contribute to that misbegotten entity called UK plc.

The use of philosophy may not be as obvious as that of computer engineering; philosophy does not help to solve immediate practical problems but it can help to clarify and dispel misguided notions and vagabond endeavours on which immense resources can be wasted. Philosophy debates the ultimate ends of human living, about which the most abject confusion now reigns.

And as for philosophy not contributing to the economy, well, the axe-wielders of Middlesex should have come along to the How The Light Gets In festival of philosophy and music at Hay-on-Wye last week. Young people who might have been mainly drawn to the music events flocked to talks and debates on subjects such as why the brain is not a computer (from the indefatigable Raymond Tallis) and how philosophy has neglected the wisdom of the body (I chaired that one). When I bumped into the admirably clear-headed Cambridge professor of philosophy Simon Blackburn, he told me that philosophy talks that would have attracted a handful of undergraduates when he was a student in the 1960s now drew full houses.

All this goes to show that when you cut you must make sure you are not attacking the vital green shoots that may be pushing up in the most unexpected places.

harry.eyres@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres