H. P. Grice, "Positivism"

A. J. AYER
ONCE AN INFANT TERRIBLE, ALWAYS AN ENFANT TERRIBLE.

My next call was at Professor Ayer's rooms, in New College. He was sitting at his desk, writing, and after he had risen to greet me, he said, rather grandly, "Would you terribly mind waiting a bit? I'm just writing the last paragraph of my address." His professorship at Oxford was recent, and he still had to deliver his public inaugural lecture. I sat down across from the philosopher at work. His whole appearance was very striking. He was a rather small man, with a fine, triangular face and a slightly hooked nose. His curly hair, turning silver gray, was beautifully brushed; he seemed to have just come out of a barbershop, and had a sort of glamorous sheen that I had not theretofore met up with among the philosophers. He was smoking not a pipe but a cigarette, in a long holder. And now, instead of writing, he was leaning back in his chair and impatiently twisting his hands. He looked rather self-consciously thoughtful. Then he leaned forward and started writing rapidly, and a few moments later he laid down his pen. "There!" he exclaimed. "I have written my last sentence." Talking in a somewhat birdlike voice, he explained that his lecture surveyed postwar philosophy in England and interpreted the philosophical handwriting on the wall. If one thought of philosophers as idealists and realists, the idealists were out — had been since the demise of F. H. Bradley (1924). The army of philosophers thus lacked a soft, or idealist, wing, though it did have marginal people like Hare, Foot, and Anscombe. Its tough wing was made up of Wittgenstein, Wisdom, Austin, Ryle, Strawson, and Ayer himself, with his logical positivism. "But then," Ayer chirped, "it's very unprofes-sional to talk about philosophers as tough or tender, dry or wet. The whole idea is quite absurd, quite absurd." He would leave all that out of his final draft, he said. We had a quick drink and then walked out of his beau- tiful college and up Catte Street and down the High to the Mitre for some dinner. On the way, I told Ayer which philosophers I had met. "A very good selection it is, too," he said. "Hampshire is the only other one I wouldn't miss if I were you." Hampshire had left Oxford to take Ayer's former chair at London University. "Why don't you catch the train with me to London this evening?" Ayer suggested. "I honestly think more Oxford philosophers will simply mix you up." I said I would think about it over dinner. We were soon dining, and during the meal I learned something about Ayer. Like the great Berlin, he was born of foreign parentage — his mother was Dutch, his father French-Swiss — and the father, like Berlin's, had been a timber merchant. "Though Isaiah's father was a successful timber merchant, mine wasn't," he added, playing with a silver watch chain and smiling. Ayer had been a scholar at Eton. He had come up to Christ Church in 1929; most of his Oxford contemporaries were rather undistinguished and had been forgotten. "It wasn't like the late thirties, which were really the vintage years of undergraduates," Ayer explained. "Oxford owes many of its great philosophers to the prewar harvest. Some of my friends, post-university acquisitions, are Left Wing playwrights and novelists — I mean people like John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain. I just like their society and their way of living, and perhaps this explains why I find London much more exciting than Oxford — also, incidentally, why people sometimes connect me with the so-called Left Wing Establishment. As for my interests, I rather like rereading old novels. I only go through the new ones when they're written by people I know. I love being on television and I love watching it, and I do think the B.B.C. is a wonderful institution. They used to invite me at least once every six weeks to lecture or to appear on the intellectual discussion program, 'The Brains Trust,' and they show those wonderful Westerns and programs like 'Panorama' and 'Tonight.' Both my stepdaughter, Gully, and I enjoy them very much. I actually don't think my television discussions interfere with my philosophy, because if I consistently worked a four-hour day on my subject I could produce a philosophical work every six months. Though I came to philosophy from Greats, as almost everyone here did — for that matter, all recent English philosophers except Russell, Wittgenstein, and Strawson were first Greek and Latin scholars — language qua language has never been a great passion of mine. This makes me temperamentally closer to Russell than to anybody else, and probably rather a freak at Oxford." By the end of dinner, I had decided to catch the train with Ayer. He had a first-class return ticket, so I joined him, and we had a big carriage to ourselves. He pulled Amis's "Take a Girl Like You" out of his briefcase and laid it beside him, and then he put his legs up on the seat opposite and asked me, with a little smile, if I had any burning philosophical puzzles. I said I really felt I was steaming away from the subject, but perhaps he could separate Wittgenstein and Austin for me, since they had now got linked in my mind like Siamese twins. "Wittgenstein was interested in fundamental philosophical problems, Austin in language for its own sake," Ayer said. "Yet Austin, despite Gellner, was not a linguist, in any ordinary sense of the word; he was not interested in etymology or in the growth of language. He applied himself only to the function of words." He agreed that there was some truth in the view that philosophy for Austin was an impersonal investigation but for Wittgenstein was intensely personal. Indeed, Wittgenstein thought of himself as a living philosophical problem. "I think that before you finish your researches, you ought to read Norman Malcolm's memoir of Wittgenstein," Ayer said. "The book is in a sense a piece of destructive hagiography; the genre is hardly a model for anyone — in any case, it's not well written — but it does incidentally reveal a few things about the saint of postwar philosophy." Ayer also said that Wittgenstein often made friends not because of their intellectual gifts but because of their moral qualities, so that some of the stories passed around about him were a little fuzzy. Until the middle thirties little was known about Wittgenstein's ideas outside Cambridge, for to give his teaching continuity he preferred the same band of disciples year after year. And although some of his students' lecture notes were authorized and circulated, his ideas of the thirties were available only to the elect until the posthumous publication of his "Blue and Brown Books." Wittgenstein's pupils were very remarkable for their intelligence and sometimes for their reproduction of the Master's mannerisms. His eccentricity was contagious, and few people came in contact with him without acquiring a touch of his habits, which fitted him, as a genius, but did not always suit others, who were just great intellectuals. His most conspicuously distinguished pupil was Wisdom but the closest to him was Miss Anscombe, whose brilliant translations of his German works would have been enough in themselves to earn her a place in the English pantheon of philosophers. Wittgenstein had a pathological fear that his ideas would be perverted by anyone who did not understand them fully. Although Ayer had never been a pupil of Wittgenstein's, once he had pieced together a statement of Wittgenstein's current ideas and published it in Polemic in the forties. This had enraged the Cambridge philosopher, and for a while he showed a snarling hostility. "He had that side to his character also," Ayer said. Ayer picked up "Take a Girl Like You" and started leafing through it. "I don't really think it's as good as 'Lucky Jim,' " he said. "In its way, that was a first-rate work." The train was jerkily jogging its way through the night. A look out the window was drowsy-making, but Ayer seemed very fresh. I racked my sleepy brain for some more questions, and finally asked him whether there was one particular quality that all philosophers shared. He was thoughtful for a moment and then said, "Vanity. Yes, vanity is the sine qua non of philosophers. In the sciences, you see, there are established criteria of truth and falsehood. In philosophy, except where questions of formal logic are involved, there are none, and so the practitioners are extremely reluctant to admit error. To come back to Austin, no one would deny the incisive quality of Ins mind, and yet when Strawson defeated him in an argument about Truth, it never seemed to have once crossed Austin's mind that he was the vanquished. To take another example, Russell attacks Strawson as though he were just another Oxford philosopher, without reading him carefully. But perhaps at his age Russell has a right to make up his mind about a book without reading it." Some of the philosophers were vain not only about their thoughts but about their personal influence, Ayer added. Wittgenstein dominated his classes, and, of course, Austin was an absolute dictator at his Saturday mornings. "Is there anything like those groups now?" I asked. "Well, I've just organized one," Ayer said. "We meet Thursday evenings, but I hope we do things in a more relaxed way than either Austin or Wittgenstein did." His Thursday meetings were very informal, he explained. There was no preordained leader, but to make the discussion effective only a handful of philosophers were allowed to join in. Disputation took place after dinner over whiskey or beer, and it centered on one subject, chosen for the term. The topic for the next term was "Time." "Truth' may be going out," Ayer said, "but Time' is coming back into the philosophical purview." "What is the spread of Oxford philosophy?" I asked. "Is it practiced far and wide?" "There are some exceptions, but I should say that you find at Oxford a fair representation of the kinds of philosophy that are studied in England, for the simple reason that Oxford staffs other universities with philosophers," Ayer said. "The real spread of Austin's linguistic philosophy is in the Dominions and the United States. For this, Ryle must take some of the responsibility. He likes Dominion and American students, and some people feel that he admits too many of them to Oxford for post-graduate work. Most students arrive already intoxicated with the idea of linguistic philosophy, but they soon find the scene much more diversified than they had expected. Not all of them profit by the discovery. So, many return to their countries to practice Austin's methods wholesale. The first-rate people in America, like W. V. Quine, at Harvard, and Ernest Nagel, at Columbia, and Nelson Goodman, at Pennsylvania, don't give a curse for Oxford philosophy, but I should imagine there are more second-rate people doing linguistic analysis in America than in England and the Dominions put together." We pulled into the Paddington station and, taking separate taxis, closed the philosophers' shop for the night. I spent that night at John's. He was in bed when I arrived, and he had left for the British Museum library when I woke up, so I didn't get a chance to talk to him until the middle of the afternoon, when he returned from the Museum to make himself a sardine sandwich.