H. P. Grice, "G. J. Warnock on the 'visum'"

G. J. WARNOCK ON H. P. GRICE ON "VISA" 

I carried my researches on to Magdalen. There I intended to draw out Irish philosopher G. J. Warnock, who held one of the keys to the Austinian legend. This legend was as ubiquitous as the stained-glass windows, and it might be presumed to illuminate the dark room of Oxford philosophy, for J. L. Austin, who had died a few months before I began my quest, had dominated Oxford in much the same way that Wittgenstein had dominated Cambridge. In the course of an Oxford-to-London telephone call, I asked John, "What was the source of everyone's veneration of Austin?" and he said, more analytically than unkindly, "Every cult needs a dead man." He likened the Austinian sect to primitive Christianity, though he added that he did not think the worshippers would ever be blessed with a St. Paul. As it happened, I had attended one of Austin's lectures, just out of curiosity, while I was an undergraduate, and had been entranced by his performance. To look at, he was a tall and thin man, a sort of parody on the desiccated don. His face suggested an osprey. His voice was flat and metallic, and seemed to be stuck on a note of disillusion. It sounded like a telephone speaking by itself. The day I was present, he opened his lecture by reading aloud a page from Ayer's "The Problem of Knowledge." He read it in a convincing way, and then he began taking it to bits: "What does he mean by this?" He bore down heavily on Ayer's argument with regard to illusion — that you cannot trust your senses, because they are sometimes mistaken. He said that the passage about people's having illusions made this sound as if it were much more frequent than in fact it was — as if when people saw a stick in water and it looked bent, they were inevitably deceived into thinking that it actually was bent. Austin turned around to the blackboard and, leaning forward, drew a sort of triangle with a thin, crooked stick in it. He added a cherry at the end of the stick. "What is this supposed to be?" he asked, facing us. "A cocktail glass?" And he drew a stem and a foot, asking as he did so, "How many of you think it is a bucket?" He lectured in a deadpan voice, peopling the room with Ayer's deceived men, all of whom would take the glass to be a bucket. This was Austin's way of saying that no more people were deceived by Ayer's stick in the water than by the glass on the blackboard, that Ayer's argument about the fallibility of the senses was much less cogent than he made out, and that most of what the logical positivists called illusions were in fact a madman's delusions. I was told that Austin performed like this day after day, mocking, ridiculing, caricaturing, exaggerating, never flagging in his work of demolition, while the skeptical tutees watched, amused and bemused, for behind the performance — the legend — there was the voice of distilled intelligence. Austin's trenchant remarks on philosophers would make a small volume of cherished quotations, and among them would surely be a clerihew he wrote on the Harvard logician W. V. Quine: “Everything done by Quine/Is just fine./All we want is to be left alone, To fossick around on our own. When I arrived at Magdalen, I found Warnock reading the bulletin board in the porter's lodge. He looked slightly younger than Hare, and was round-faced and rather tweedy; his appearance went with round-rimmed glasses, though he didn't have any glasses on. He was, however, wearing a rather nice, formal V-shaped smile. Yes, he was expecting me, he said, and took me straight to the Senior Common Room for lunch. Wamock is the custodian of Austin's papers, but we didn't talk about Austin right away. Once we were in the S.C.R., I asked him about the lightning attack he and D. F. Pears, of Christ Church, had made on Gellner and Watkins in a discussion on the B.B.C. Third Programme in 1957. After Gellner's polemical book appeared, some of his detractors had claimed that this broadcast had provided him with both the motive and the cue for writing it — that when the articulate Oxford pair defeated the less articulate Gellner and his satellite, Watkins, the defeat had made Watkins sulk and Gellner write. "I wish I'd known that that little rapping of the knuckles would lead to the big storm," Warnock said. "Gellner is a rather sensitive chap." I had not expected him to show even this much sympathy for Gellner, for I had been told that Warnock was one of Austin's two or three favorites, and I knew Austin was one of Gellner's main targets. The lunch was a communal affair, an occasion for general conversation, and I was not able to draw Warnock out until it was time for coffee, when all the other Fellows settled down to their newspapers and we managed to find a corner to ourselves. Once I had mentioned Austin, Warnock needed no further urging. I just sat back and listened. "Like Wittgenstein," he said, "Austin is a genius, but Wittgenstein fitted the popular picture of a genius. Austin did not, God forbid. Nevertheless, he did succeed in haunting most of the philosophers in England, and to H. P. Grice it seemed that his terrifying intelligence was never at rest. H. P. Grice used to wake up in the night with a vision of the stringy, wiry Austin standing over their pillow like a bird of prey. Their daylight hours were no better. They would write some phil-osophical sentences and then read them over as Austin might, in an expressionless, frigid voice, and their blood would run cold. H. P. Grice was so intimidated by the mere fact of his existence that they was not able to publish a single esssay during his lifetime." Austin's all-consuming passion was language, Warnock went on, and he was endlessly fond of reading books on grammar. He thought of words as if they were plants (botany) or insects, which needed to be grouped, classified, and labelled, and just as the entomologist was not put off by the fact that there were countless insects, so the existence of thousands of words, Austin thought, should not be a deterrent to a lexicographer-philosopher. "Austin," Warnock said, "wanted philosophers to classify these 'speech acts' — these promises, prayers, hopes, commendations." In Austin's view, most philosophers in the past had stumbled on some original ideas and had spent their time producing a few illustrative examples for their theories, and then as soon as they were safely dead other philosophers would repeat the process with slightly different original ideas. This practice had frozen philosophy from the beginning of time into an unscientific, non-cumulative state. Austin wanted to thaw the ice of ages, by unflagging application of the intellect, and make philosophy a cumulative science, thus enabling one philosopher to pick up where his predecessor had left off. "He envisaged the future task of philosophers as the compilation of a super-grammar — a catalogue of all possible functions of words — and this was perhaps why he enjoyed reading grammar books so much/' Warnock said. "He was extremely rigid in pursuit of details, and he had the patience and efficiency needed for this difficult task. If he had not died at forty-eight — he had cancer, you know — his detailed work might have led to some beautiful things." "Was Austin influenced by Wittgenstein?" I asked. "Oh, no," Warnock said quickly. "In all of Austin's papers there is no evidence that he ever really read him. I do remember one or two of his lectures in which he read a page or two of Wittgenstein aloud, but it was always to show how incomprehensible and obscure the Austrian was, and how easily he can be parodied and dismissed." I was getting worried by the fact that I was supposed to admire Austin as a man, and said, "Were there some things about him that were human?" "Oh, yes," said Warnock, with a smile that indicated a faint donnish disapproval of my question. "He was one of the best teachers here. He taught us all absolute accuracy." I repeated my question in a slightly different form. "He really was a very unhappy man," Warnock said quietly. "It worried him that he hadn't written much. One lecture, 'Ifs and Cans,' which appeared in the Proceedings of the British Academy in 1956, became famous, but it is mainly a negative work, and he published very few articles and, significantly, not a single book. He read, of course — an enormous amount — and the margins of everything he went over were filled with notes, queries, and condemnations. When he went to Harvard to give the William James lectures, in 1955, he took everyone there by surprise. Because he hadn't written anything, they expected his lectures to be thin, for they judged the worth of scholars according to their big books. From his very first lecture they realized that his reading was staggering. To add to his writing block, he had a fear of microphones, and this prevented him from broadcasting, like Sir Isaiah Berlin; this was another source of unhappiness. He took enormous pride in teaching, but this began to peter out in his last years, when he felt that he had reached the summit of his influence at Oxford. Toward the end of his life, therefore, he decided to pack up and go permanently to Berkeley, where he had once been a visiting professor and where he thought he'd have more influence as a teacher. But before he could get away from Oxford, he died." Warnock was in the middle of straightening out and editing Austin's papers, and he told me there were scores of bad essays that Austin had written for C. G. Stone at Balliol. "These essays are of little value because Stone set him useless subjects," Warnock said. It was probably his education at Shrewsbury, rather than Balliol, that got him his Firsts, the Magdalen tutor thought. Besides the bad essays, his papers included only two sets of lectures — one on perception, the other the William James addresses. But both of them were in note form, and would not total much more than eighty thousand words when Warnock had finished turning them into sentences. Warnock was worried by his task of filling out his master's lectures. If, by some miracle, the Austin- Warnock composition did add up to a hundred thousand words, then the publishers might be persuaded to bring out the work in two handsome volumes. Otherwise, there would be only one posthumous book, along with the few published articles, as a record of Austin's genius. (Some time later, the Oxford University Press brought out a small book, "Sense and Sensibilia," by Austin, reconstructed from manuscript notes by Warnock. ) There were, of course, his many devoted pupils, and they would commemorate him. Austin's family life, I learned, had been conventional. "Austin married a tutee, and had four children," Warnock said. "He was a good husband and a good father. His daughter, now eighteen, is about to come up to Oxford; his elder son, who is seventeen, is going to do engineering. The third child, a boy of fourteen, is very clever, and is about to go up to Winchester. He looks very much like Austin, and we have great hopes for him. The youngest child is a girl." It was time to go, and as Warnock walked out to the porter's lodge with me, I asked him a bit about himself.  Unlike most of the other philosophers about, but like Strawson, he had not read Greats straightway. He had done P.P.E. — a combination of modern philosophy, political science, and economics — before going on to a year of Greats and a prize fellowship at Magdalen. He had been very fortunate in having Isaiah Berlin for his tutor, and also in having a philosopher for his wife. She and Warnock had together managed the Jowett and they had decided to get married after they were officers emeritus. He was writing a book on free will — one of the oldest chestnuts in the philosophical fire. His parting injunction to me was to see Strawson. "He'll be able to tell you some more about Austin," he called after me, waving.