Critic's blog: Tamas Pataki

2 October, 2006
Tamas Pataki, ABR critic

Tamas Pataki is best known to ABR readers for his La Trobe University Essay ‘Against Religion’, published in the February issue to an unusually heated response. Here, he writes about his background, his critical approach, his reaction to the controversy caused by ‘Against Religion’, and his views about what makes a good book review.

I was born in Sarvar, a small town in the west of Hungary. My parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors and rather demolished by the experience. My father was a skilled tradesman but an indecisive man. He had been planning for years to escape Hungary with his family, but did not act until 1956, at the precise moment the revolution erupted. This coincidence, combined with my once blond hair, has tended to induce suspicions in fellow émigrés that I descended from a family of fascists fleeing Soviet tanks.

My education in Brighton Road Primary State School was essentially Victorian. Ceramic inkwells, nibs and copperplate script were on the way out as I was learning English, but biros were still strictly prohibited. The few poems I know by heart are by Tennyson and Charles Kingsley. I was taught what a bowyang was. In Elwood High we calculated sin, cos and tan using logarithmic tables. At Melbourne University, it was my half-hearted intention to be a mathematician, but I discovered there what novels were and, falling between two stools, took an honours degree in philosophy, and subsequently a doctorate. For the latter I chose to travel, and was supervised in Melbourne by Graeme Marshall, an educated philosopher (now a very rare bird) with a serious interest in the philosophy of mind and action, and, in London, by the late Joseph Sandler, one of the most eminent of psychoanalytic theoreticians. Their interests became mine. I went on to do stints in the Australian federal and Victorian public services ('organisation development', in the main) and to lecture in philosophy in various universities, something I still do intermittently.

I have published several philosophical articles in good academic journals and in five or six academic anthologies, and co-edited (with Michael Levine) Racism in Mind (Cornell University Press, 2004). Whilst Robert Manne was editor of Quadrant, several of my pieces on psychiatry, art, pornography and other topics appeared there. I have reviewed for The Australian, The Age, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Metascience and, of course, Australian Book Review. A review essay, 'Narcissism Incarnate', in The Australian's Review of Books (August 1999) won the Australasian Association of Philosophy Media Prize.

The La Trobe University Essay 'Against Religion' (ABR, February 2006), provoked unusually heated controversy in a literary journal. My purpose was polemical, so the reaction was pleasing. Religion is seeping into almost every corner of political life, and its influence requires exposure and examination. Much that we count as religion contains, in its psycho-social expressions, seeds of destruction. Much of it shares the same underlying psychological structures as various forms of racism and other kinds of prejudice. And yet, there is a great difficulty in censuring religion: the acute awareness all people have of the immense consolations provided by it, especially to those whose lives are blighted and without hope. The belief that enabled me to write the essay - very probably a true belief - is that if I was right about the wishful and delusional foundations of the kinds of religion I targeted, then nothing I or anyone else could write would in the least deprive such people of their consolation.

Essays and critical discussions (in which the reader's familiarity with the text is presupposed) are quite different animals from reviews, especially short ones. It's a humdrum thought, but I think that the first task of a book review is to give the reader a reasonably detailed idea of the subject. Any good book is about many things, of course, and most reviewers instinctively sift for - what is in their lights - the main thing. This will vary according to genre, and in other ways.

Books of philosophy or of ideas (which are mostly what I review) usually seek truths about fairly abstract matters using rational means: they present germane observations and arguments, and reason to conclusions. If I can understand them, I try to give some account of the chief conclusions and arguments, and try to place them and their author in historical and philosophical context. If there is space and occasion, I try to give some sense of the work's organisation, texture and style. If there is still more space, I try to engage the work critically from my own perspective, something of which will have rubbed off on the exposition in any case.

Undoubtedly, reviews should aspire to be intelligent, well written and entertaining. It is often easier to achieve those aims if the review is used mainly as a springboard for the exploration of the critic's own related ideas, which may well be more interesting than the book's. But if a review fails to assist the reader in deciding whether the subject is worth reading about, it fails to be a good review, although it may still be a worthy, or even wonderful, piece of writing.