Raimond Gaita

RAIMOND GAITA (1946- ). Raimond Gaita was best known as a moral philosopher before the publication of his memoir Romulus, My Father (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1998). The book is a striking example of what feminist life writing critics have termed 'relational autobiography', using the outward-turning form of the memoir to focus on the author's parents, and in particular on the figure of his father. It is a work which is remarkable for the spare, stripped-down prose in which it narrates terrible events, including the descent into madness of both parents, the suicide of the mother and her lover and the affliction suffered by those around them. Yet this is not a tale of a childhood in hell: instead, Gaita narrates it in a way which emphasises the profound influence of his father's example of integrity on his own values and his outlook as a moral philosopher.

Raimond Gaita was born in Dortmund, Germany in 1946. His Romanian-born father and German-born mother emigrated to Australia in 1950. This background gives Gaita's view of Australia a distinctive tone, which includes both a deep appreciation of its landscape and culture, and an ability to set its mainstream culture against another set of cultural values, those which he identifies as emanating from his father's European culture. Gaita studied philosophy at Melbourne University, gaining a Masters degree, before going on to acquire a PhD from the University of Leeds. He worked as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury before moving to work at Kings College, University of London. Gaita now divides his time between Australia and England, reflecting his appointment as Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University and Professor of Moral Philosophy at Kings College.

If Gaita is at home in Australia, his mother, chronically unfaithful and suffering from a never defined form of mental illness, lost herself in this alien environment. Gaita resists the temptation to define his mother's outlook, which he has argued remains unknowable ('A Reply' 64) and she is a sparsely drawn but haunting figure in the memoir. Dominating the memoir, as its title suggests, is another figure, that of Gaita's father, Romulus: passionate in his responses to tragedy, in his 'Old Testament integrity' (175), and later in life, in his madness. This final tragedy pulls against Gaita's childhood sense of his father's immense strength, a bulwark that protected the child against the terrible events which surrounded him.

Gaita speaks of tragedy being 'the genre which first attracted my passionate allegiance'; he sees it as illuminating 'the events of my childhood' (124). The comment casts light on one of the most distinctive qualities of the memoir: the restraint with which it tells a tale of love, infidelity, suicide and madness. In other hands, this tale could have been garishly melodramatic: Gaita's treatment, however, gives it great power. Gaita fuses his sense of the Australian landscape, and in particular its quality of light, with the lives he depicts. He writes that 'the grey and equally rounded granite boulders that stood among the long yellow grasses, sharply delineated at all times of day by the summer sun' gave 'colour' to his 'understanding of suffering' (123). For his mother, though, a dead red gum becomes 'a symbol of her desolation' (23), while his father's eye 'turned away offended' from the sparse foliage of the gum trees (14). Alex Segal notes that such techniques mean that Gaita gives 'sensuous embodiment to Romulus Gaita's values – but with reference to a beauty to which he is blind' ('Speaking', 15).

In Romulus, My Father, Gaita creates a powerful fusion of his philosophical concerns with the form of the memoir, noting that Plato once said that 'those who seek wisdom are clinging in recollection to things they once saw' (74). Gaita shows how his own search turns back towards his father, how these memories have shaped his life and his own quests for understanding. Although Romulus(a blacksmith) did not share Gaita's love for 'the life of the mind' (196), he is nonetheless presented as forming Gaita's commitment to it.

Gaita's oeuvre includes a range of books on philosophy, all of which can be seen as potentially illuminating his autobiographical work (the connections and dissonances between Gaita's philosophical and auto/biographical work have been most fully explored by Segal). Gaita's books centre on moral philosophy, often approached in a rigorous academic fashion, as in his most renowned work Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), which has now been republished in an expanded edition. He has also published a number of books written for a wider audience, including The Philosopher's Dog (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2002) and A Common Humanity: Thinking Love and Truth and Justice. A recent article, 'Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics' in The Quarterly Essay (16 (2004)) reflects his well-known role in Australia as a public intellectual. Other works include The Unexamined Life: Socratic Reflections on Education (London: Macmillan, 1991). He also edited a collection entitled Value and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch (New York: Routledge, 1990) and has published many articles in philosophical books and journals, as well as contributing articles to journals such as Quadrant.

Further reading:

Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Gaita, Raimond. 'Romulus, My Father: A Reply'. The Critical Review, 41 (2001): 54-65.

Parker, David. 'Multiculturalism and Universalism in Romulus, My Father'. The Critical Review, 41 (2001): 44-53.

----. 'Reply to Raimond Gaita.'. The Critical Review, 41 (2001): 66-67.

Segal, Alex. 'Goodness Beyond Speech.' Philosophical Investigations, 27 (3 July 2004): 201-221.

----. '"Speaking With Authority": Biographical and Ethical Reflection in the Work of Raimond Gaita'. Auto/Biography, 10 (2002): 11-19.

----. 'Work, Character and Invisible Virtue: Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father in the Context of his Philosophy.' Meridian (forthcoming)