Futa Helu - 70th Birthday Speech

 

 Futa Helu

Speech at 70th Birthday ('Atenisi Institute)

VIDEO SOURCE: Futa Helu 70th Birthday Speech At 'Atenisi Institute

Video Description: 

Professor Helu speaks at the 'Atenisi University Seminar in celebration of his 70th birthday. Nuku'alofa, Kingdom of Tonga, 2004.

At 70, Helu had already had several strokes and each time he had recovered enough to teach philosophy again. He was no longer as lucid a speaker as he once was. Some of the long pauses have thus been edited out of this clip but his visionary ideas on education are still there.

The speech is a polemic against the degeneration of positive standards in modern culture and education and a summary of his realist philosophy of education for the Pacific.

This is a philosophy that is still under threat from the economics driven and utilitarian development models that dominant local governments advocate, models that only serve to keep Pacific peoples intellectually subordinated.

Futa Helu: The educational system I participated to inaugurate. I usually disparage the modern opposition between the classical or liberal outlook on education of the past and the utilitarian practicalist view which has now pre-empted the field in all things educational and academic. We have retreated from the play of mind, the development and delivery of thinking, and the production of clear positive standards, and we have resigned to the production of so-called useful gadgetry which have little thinking in their non-sensical hocus-pocus. Modern youth, in fact, are in a rather huge crisis the condition is reinforced by all forms of social ills of which there are myriad and among which are the legitimization of financial speculation and the glorification of technocracy. But these may be parts of the end. This is not a terribly encouraging prospect but the facts are generally supportive of this dismal thought. Poverty and depravity are increasing and will certainly finally mop up every little bit of resource like Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaohs dream the scrawny, skinny seven heads of cattle will swiftly swallow up the seven chubby strong heads of cattle this is the metaphor of our future. The selfishness and avarice have multiplied infinitely to incredible heights to leave nothing for the needy and the under-privileged. Not to mention, the frightening rise of crime and all forms of iniquitous behaviour, evil and injustice. We should always look at the upside and the downside of everything towards improvement in general.

 

For the theoretical part I have always pushed to generate and develop theories which have their origins in sudden flashes of intuition and enlightenment and after formulation of a hypothesis the long process of verification starts which consists in taking facts to test a theory by. Progress and growth in thinking is possible only through theoretical study while practicalist and technical education focus on fiddling round with things and menial work cannot develop or produce thinking.

 

 

Let me briefly digress on the production of theories, now the earliest innovation on theory started in ancient Greece by a person the name of Pythagoras, he was born in the Eastern part of Greece but he migrated to Italy where he started a school of mathematics and sciences but I would summarize his contribution as search for models. The Pythagoreans use the lyre a musical instrument to use in their investigations and from this they tried to develop theories. From music they went on to medicine or health. The second part of the development of theory is development of generalizations and experimental sciences started again by Greeks instigated by the father of medical science Hypocrates but the later Greeks took facts to be material for construction of theories now this wrong view of scientific method did start to be corrected towards the end of the fifth century in the work of Plato and the Academy and then the correct view started to emerge through Galileo during the time of the scientific revolution in which the definitive statement was given by the mathematician De Morgan and came out summarized ‘facts are there to test the theories by not to generate theories but to test theories with’ but the whole aim of education is to have understanding to have knowledge and to develop knowledge systematically, and empirically, and to be a realist.

 

Let me very briefly define those terms, empirical knowledge is based on observation and realist form of knowledge is investigation where knowledge is always taken to be a relation where the two other terms, the ‘knower’ and the ‘known’ are distinct things, but knowledge thinking is a relation. Cornford thinks that Socrates wanted to take pre-Socratics especially Anaxagoras started with analysing philosophic ideas but Socrates method was faulty and he had not fully mastered logic especially relating to the science of nature. Instead Socrates tried to propound great embracing overall concepts to explain in form and unify into a network of ideas. Progress as I have said in theoretical work requires constant servicing of ideas via proof and explanation while withholding final explanations until later etc. etc. This Socratic weakness in methodology led Socrates to drop scientific inquiry and turned to interest in conduct and morals. On the other hand, Socrates continued the work on dialectics perfected by Plato though initiated by Zeno but somehow re-founded and complemented by Aristotles. This reminds me a principle that eventually emerged in the course of the ancient history of the Greek people which became the real essence of Greek society. Many people and scholars have come to recognize this essence and became called ‘paideia’ as formulated by classicists most notably the German Werner Jaeger. According to Jaeger the gist of this Greek genius is culture and education he also says that the essential spirit of ‘paideia’ is the reality which had informed all social cultures and always all other cultures and other communities when coming of age have to return to the Greeks and the spirit of ‘paideia’. Also after the false start noticed by Socrates regarding the Ionians the modern world was corrected for our times after the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. In other words, if Socrates had had his way that is to seek the soul first would have gone in the same direction of the cultures except the Greek and all would have been wrong. The Greeks started with and into things and that is the singularity of the Greeks and their ‘paideia’. Finally we all know and theorize about science but we have not done same for art. I am now writing in book size to help somehow to rectify this deficiency.

 

I realize I have been taking too long so your Royal Highness, ladies and gentleman, I humbly rest my case.