Gavin Ardley’s Marvellous Perception of the Nature of the Modern Sciences
Part Three:
Gavin Ardley’s Obituary
“Universities, he was one to say,
‘have drifted dangerously towards utility,
collapsing into being mere
technical institutes’.”
[This
Obituary of her father was kindly indicated to me by Gavin’s daughter,
Elizabeth.
Obituary
Gavin Ardley
We received
earlier this year the sad news of Gavin Ardley’s death on 12 March [1992?].
Among other achievements in his life, he was a founder of Prudentia, and devoted to its fortunes a great deal of energy and
affection. He had also been a member of the Department of Philosophy in the
University of Auckland for twenty five years, retiring in 1981. Since we
announced his death briefly in our last number, several people have written to
us, recording their sorrow and respect.
Dr Bruce
Harris writes from Macquarie:
I first
met Gavin Ardley in England, and then knew him as a colleague at Auckland for
many years. It soon became apparent that Gavin had much in common with the
Classics staff, particularly through his deep attachment to Plato and his love
of teaching the Platonic text in the setting of Greek philosophy generally. He
valued the study of ancient
thought
not only for its inherent worth but as the source of those humane values he
sought to practise in his own work as an academic. The intellectual history of
the western world was for him a continuum from its ancient past, and his
religious convictions were also closely linked with that history. His
contributions to Prudentia reflected
the breadth of his interests and his essential humanitas. He had only a limited sympathy with the linguistic
philosophy fashionable in modern Philosophy departments, and would like to
claim that it began as footnotes to Plato!
The
journal began from conversations we had in the late sixties, springing from a
feeling that the usual journals in our fields did not sufficiently encourage
cross-disciplinary interests. It was launched on a shoe-string budget,
dependent entirely on the good offices of Mr Mortimer of the University
Bindery. It is good to see that its title has been retained
and that
its scope is still wide — ‘the thought, literature, and history of the
ancient world and their tradition’. In these days of relative neglect of the
humanities in universities (at least in funding), it is important that those
working in ancient studies and the source of our whole western intellectual
tradition be seen to present a united front. Gavin Ardley certainly adorned
that tradition in Auckland.
Dr Dougal
Blyth writes:
I knew
Gavin only in the final years of his long teaching career at Auckland, when he
supervised a research essay on Aristotle’s Metaphysics
for me, and taught courses on Plato’s Laws
and Republic, which I attended as
part of my M.A. in 1979-1980. I was one of a small group of postgraduate
students Gavin then had, including Hermann de Zocte, Paul Beech and Carl Page,
among others.
Gavin’s
method of teaching was leisurely, ordered, measured. He displayed in his own
pedagogic manner the aversion to that ‘enthusiasm’, as he called it, which he
thought so little of in passionate polemic. Among the scholarship on the
importance of leisure in education and philosophy to which he directed our
attention was a paper of his own on the role of play in Plato’s philosophy, and
the balance to be had between the pedant and the boor (a very Aristotelian
ideal). In teaching the Laws, he
emphasized the appropriateness and significance, for the meaning of the
dialogue, of its speakers and their context: old noblemen, with nothing better
to do in the heat of the sun than to rest in the shade and discuss government;
a conversation neither idle nor practical. Just such a conception seemed to
govern the pace and direction of his readings from lecture notes and small
group discussion, which form his postgraduate teaching took.
I found
Gavin’s mode of direction of my independent work congenial, useful and, again,
relaxed. In suggesting additions to my bibliography, he drew upon a wide
reading knowledge beyond the confines of recent analytical criticism of
Aristotle. He delicately elicited slightly more precise formulations of my points,
indicating questions yet to be addressed, in a manner almost suggestive of the
possibility that if one was so inclined, one might just as well overlook them.
One day I was surprised to hear him encourage ‘the clash of ideas’; another to
find him asleep in his office armchair.
After he
retired, I saw Gavin relatively frequently about the campus and in the
University Library, researching in the New Zealand and Pacific collection,
during the few years before I left to study overseas. He certainly approved, from
a distance, of my efforts with the classical tongues. I met him again when I
returned on a visit in 1986. He walked more slowly and had more time to chat,
quite willing to stop and hear about my intervening experiences and plans. His
ever urbane yet humble manner, his cheery yet reserved demeanour, and his kind
eye, along with a spirit seemingly embodying a model of gentlemanliness from
another, more refined age, will remain as a cornerstone for me of my memories
of those years as a student at the University of Auckland.
John
Morton, Emeritus Professor of Zoology, wrote in the University News:
Born in
1915, Gavin Ardley graduated from Melbourne University in both physics and
philosophy. For a spell he lectured in nuclear physics and studied the beta ray
spectrum of Radium E. From war service in northern Australia, he went to
Britain where he researched on Galileo. He came back in 1948 to teach science
at Geelong Grammar School. 1954 to 1955 saw him back in Scotland as a master at
Gordonstoun. After the war Gavin had a year’s working spell in the Australian
outback, moving about by railway jigger. This was an experience he was to value
all his life. It was in the bush camps, with their assorted human company, that
he determined his future should be in philosophy. This was to bring him to
Auckland in 1957.
In a
University where we could still easily get to know each other, Gavin Ardley was
a colleague to be valued. He came to stand for some important things.
He’d have
been wryly amused if told this. Yet he felt an intense privilege in belonging
to the University. Drawing from the past capital of generosity and freedom, he
believed we were also there to extend it. He knew how to use time unhurriedly.
He’d have deplored nothing so much as crowded classes and syllabi, with
students thinking themselves there to be crammed. Universities, he was one to
say, ‘have drifted dangerously towards utility, collapsing into being mere
technical institutes’. Right through the years Gavin was to take seriously the
ties of friendship. As president of the Senior Common Room, in the old
Pembridge days across Princes St, he did much to create its early bonds. In the
University his personal links went well beyond his own
discipline, spacious enough as philosophy (still with psychology and politics)
must at first have been. But Gavin’s command also of science, history,
theology, English literature, international politics was wide and impressive.
With an acute, inquiring mind, there never seemed to be the astringence that
would have made him a specialist or, in the modern research sense, a
deep-sampler. More than analytic, his world view was reconciling, unfashionable
for a philosopher as it might seem. ‘Today’, he once lamented, ‘world views are
optional extras, a matter of personal taste, carrying no authority. So we all
just muddle along’.
For Gavin
Ardley, as with Catholic St Anselm, belief needed to precede understanding. On
such foundation, any accounting for the world had to rest; never, he would
insist, to be ‘comprehended’. But enough of it could be ‘apprehended’ to be
enjoyed. It was with this enjoyment — ‘play’ in its best understanding — that
he believed philosophy, or even the stringent, self-critical discipline of
science, was to be done.
For Gavin
it involved, too, the versatility to get along with all kinds of people and
fortunes. Gavin Ardley’s lectures were beautifully structured and delivered. He
was among the last of us to keep the traditional gown. For the last lecture I
heard him give (it was on Martin Buber), he’d been called in from retirement
and began without introduction. Fascinated, a student broke in, ‘But who are
you? Where do you come from?’ With bland enjoyment Gavin explained, ‘I’m a
gardener’.
In
retirement he was devoted to his home garden in Parnell. With the same temper
he seemed to cultivate his scholarly field, and to see the world. He never lost
his fascination with travel, as in Europe and the Middle East. Above all, there
was his abiding love of outback Australia. In Auckland for many years he was a
keen stalwart of a tramping group.
In
political caste Gavin Ardley had to be accounted a fine vintage Tory. Get an
ideology, he’d have said, and you’re dead. So he revered Burke. And he most of
all distrusted intellectual Pharisaism, and what used to pass for ‘enthusiasm’.
He disliked supposed thought that was ill-thought or shoddy. Like modern
Oakeshott he might have accepted politics as a civil ‘conversation’. Carried on
with integrity, it could occasionally be serviceable to the world.
Gavin’s
interests in policy and diplomacy went almost globe-wide. As its president, he
was to bring Auckland’s Institute International Affairs to a new level of life,
with a choice of exciting contemporary speakers.
Of his
writings, the most pleasurable to a layperson is perhaps his Renovation of Berkeley's Philosophy (1968).
Just as lucid was the early book Aquinas
and Kant: the Foundation of Modern Science (1949). He jointly founded and
edited the classics/ philosophy periodical Prudentia.
Here I recall his elegant little essay on Aristotle’s respect for particulars
and the diversity of things; it showed me — inter
alia — why Aristotle is still the prototypal biologist.
Almost to
the close of his life Gavin Ardley kept his Common Room ties alive. Where else,
but in the opportunity of such exchange, was the centre of a university? He was
a generous man that books read, good talk, and the silence of the outback had
all contributed to form. Like his own notion of the philosopher, he was himself
a ‘grave-merry man on the side of common sense’.
In his
retired years we’d know where to find him, coming in to Old Government House
late on Fridays with the familiar black beret Hilaire Belloc might have worn.
As the years drew in, these visits got fewer. I wish that, on those last
Fridays, I’d turned up more often.
….
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