H. P. Grice, "Post-War Oxford Philosophy"

took from the shelf "Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir," by Norman Malcolm, with a prefatory biographical sketch by Professor Georg Henrik von Wright, of the University of Helsinki. Because each meeting with a philosopher had made me more curious about Wittgenstein, I set myself the task of finding out more about him. Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in 1889. His parents were Saxon, but at the time of his birth they were living in Vienna. His paternal grandfather was a convert from Judaism to Protestantism; his mother, however, was a Catholic, and the child was baptized in her faith. His father was an engineer, whose remarkable intelligence and will power had raised him to a leading position in the steel-and-iron industry of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ludwig was one of eight children. Both of his parents were extremely musical, and their home was a center of artistic activity. He received his early education at home, learning mathematics and the clarinet, and acquiring a burning boyhood wish to be- come a conductor. At fourteen, he was sent to a school in Linz, and after three years there he was ready for the engineering course at the Technische Hochschule in Ber- lin. He completed his Berlin course in two years and went to England, where he registered at the University of Manchester as a research student. His first step on the path of philosophy was the reading of Bertrand Russell's "Principles of Mathematics," published in 1903, to which he turned when he wished to plumb the foundations of mathematics. After Russell, he read Gottlob Frege, the German mathematician, thus coming face to face with the two most brilliant exponents of the "new" logic. He sought out Frege in Jena, only to be directed by him to go back to England and study with Russell. By 1912, he was housed in Trinity College, Cambridge, whose walls also enclosed Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and John Maynard Keynes. Young Wittgenstein was im- mediately befriended by them, and he found himself part of the golden years of Cambridge. He was therefor eighteen months, and, in addition to his other work, did some psychological experiments in rhythm and music. Even though he was on intimate terms with the leading minds of England, he did not take to the relaxed atmosphere of Cambridge life. In the autumn of 1913, he visited Norway, and he returned there later that same year in a sort of intellectual huff, to live in seclusion near Skjolden; he soon became fluent in Norwegian. His father had died in 1912, and his stay at Manchester and Cambridge had simply driven him deeper into a depres- sion whose history was as long as his life. "It is probably true that he lived on the border of mental illness," Pro- fessor von Wright says at the opening of his sketch. "A fear of being driven across it followed him throughout his life." The outbreak of the First World War found him a volunteer in the Austrian Army, and he eventually fought on both the eastern and southern fronts. For Wittgenstein, war was a time of personal crisis and of the birth of great ideas. At one moment he was calmed by Leo Tolstoy's ethical writings — which led him to the warm light of the Synoptic Gospels — and at the next he was excited by his own revolutionary views. Wittgenstein's earthquake hit the philosophers of the twentieth century as hard as David Hume's cyclone —

which swept away cause and effect from the human ex-

perience — had hit their eighteenth-century predecessors.

The new philosophical shudder started at the Austrian

front. One day in the middle of the war, while Wittgen-

stein was reading a newspaper in a trench, he was ar-

rested by a sketch of a possible sequence of events in a

car accident. As he studied it, he became aware that the

diagram of the accident stood for a possible pattern of

occurrences in reality; there was a correspondence be-

tween the parts of the drawing and certain things in the

world. He noticed a similar correspondence between the

parts of a sentence and elements of the world, and he

developed the analogy, coming to regard a proposition as

a kind of picture. The structure of a proposition — that

is, the way in which the parts of a statement were com-

bined — depicted a possible combination of elements in

reality. Thus he hit upon the central idea of his "Tracta-

tus": Language was the picture of the world. The "Trac-

tatus" and the Wittgenstein revolution in philosophy were

under way.

When Wittgenstein was captured by the Italians, in

1918, he had the manuscript of his first great philosophical

work in his rucksack, and he was able to bring it through

the war intact. He thought his masterpiece had solved

all philosophical problems, and when the work was pub-

lished (first in Germany, in 1921, and then in England,

the following year), some leading minds agreed, with

him, that philosophy had come to the end of its road.

Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was at the beginning of

his. Both his livelihood and his reputation were assured.

He had inherited a large fortune from his father, his

genius was proclaimed to the world, and he was free to

live in leisure and intellectual preeminence. But such

safe ways were not those of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In the first year after the war, he renounced his

fortune, became indifferent to the success of the

'Tractatus," and enrolled in a teachers' college in

Vienna. When he had completed his education course,

he taught in schools in Lower Austria for six years,

wandering from one remote village to another. Being

a schoolmaster enabled him to lead a life of simplicity

and seclusion, but Wittgenstein was not at peace with

himself or the world. He gave up the profession and for

a time became a gardener, working mostly at monasteries,

and, as he had done in the past, considered joining a re-

ligious order. Once more, however, the monastic life did

not seem to be the answer. Terminating his restless wan-

derings, he returned to Vienna, and spent two solid years

designing and constructing a mansion for one of his sis-

ters. A modern building of concrete, steel, and glass, it

provided an outlet for his particular architectural genius,

and according to Professor von Wright, "Its beauty is of

the same simple and static kind that belongs to the

sentences of the Tractatus.' " But architecture could not

contain Wittgenstein's soaring genius, and he spent some

time sculpturing at a friend's studio. Again according to

Professor von Wright, his sculpture of an elf has a per-

fection of symmetry that recalls the Greeks. Wittgen-

stein's period of withdrawal from philosophy was now

nearing an end. In Vienna, he heard a philosophical lec-

ture and decided that perhaps philosophy did have a

little way to go, so he allowed his old friend Keynes to

raise some money for his return to Cambridge. He ar-

rived at his college in 1929, and presented his "Tractatus"

as a dissertation for a Doctorate of Philosophy — a degree that was a negligible accolade to a philosopher with a

worldwide reputation. A year later, at the age of forty-

one, he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cam-

bridge.

As suddenly as a sketch of a car accident had inspired

the ideas in "Tractatus," so a gesture of an Italian friend

destroyed them. The gesture that divided Wittgenstein

I from Wittgenstein II was made sometime in the year

10 <33- a="" and="" economics="" in="" ittgenstein="" lecturer="" o:p="" p.="" sraffa="">

at Cambridge, argued together a great deal over the ideas

of the 'Tractatus,' " Professor Malcolm records. "One day

(they were riding, I think, on a train), when Wittgen-

stein was insisting that a proposition and that which it

describes must have the same logical form,' the same

logical multiplicity,' Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to

Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or con-

tempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an

outward sweep of the fingertips of one hand. And he

asked: 'What is the logical form of that?' Sraffa's example

produced in Wittgenstein the feeling that there was an

absurdity in the insistence that a proposition and what it

describes must have the same 'form.' This broke the hold

on him of the conception that a proposition must literally

be a 'picture' of the reality it describes." It was many

years before Wittgenstein II worked out his new ideas,

but the old views, which at one time had finished philos-

ophy forever, were discarded in the train.

Wittgenstein II, though he spent thirteen years at Cam-

bridge, did not surround himself with any of the atmosphere of an English college. The stark simplicity of his

way of living would have put any undergraduate to

shame. His two rooms in Whewell's Court were like bar-

racks; he did not have a single book, painting, photo-

graph, or reading lamp. He sat on a wooden chair and

did his writing at a card table. These two objects, with

two canvas chairs, a fireproof safe for his manuscripts,

and a few empty flowerpots, constituted the total fur-

nishings of the room that served him as both study and

classroom. His other concession to life was a cot, in the

second room.

His classes were held late in the afternoon, and his

pupils arrived carrying chairs from the landing. They al-

ways found the philosopher standing in the middle of the

room, by his wooden chair. He was slender, of medium

height, and simply dressed, habitually wearing a flannel

shirt, flannel trousers, a leather jacket, and no tie. Unlike

the other Fellows, he did not have any notes or set pro-

cedure for his lectures; he just sat on his wooden chair

and, according to Malcolm, "carried on a visible struggle

with his thoughts." His lectures were simply a continu-

ation of his other waking hours; as always, he thought

about problems and tried to find new solutions. The

principal difference between his lonely hours and the

lecture time was the difference between a monologue

and a dialogue. He would direct questions to the mem-

bers of the class and let himself be drawn into dis-

cussions, but whenever he sensed that he was stand-

ing on the edge of a difficult problem or a new thought,

his hand would silence his interlocutor with a per-

emptory motion. If he reached an impasse or felt

confused, he would say, "I'm just too stupid today," or

"You have a dreadful teacher," or "I'm a fool." He wor-

ried about the possibility that his teaching might stop the

growth of independent minds, and he was also besieged

by a fear that he would not be able to last the period, but

somehow he always managed to go on.

The years of the Second World War found Wittgen-

stein working as an orderly, first at Guy's Hospital, in

London, and then in an infirmary at Newcastle-upon-

Tyne. Toward the close of the war, he returned to

Cambridge to take up the Chair of Philosophy. When

Malcolm returned there to study with him, in 1946, he

found Wittgenstein trying, with strenuous work, to dam

the depression that always threatened to flood him.

Wittgenstein was composing Ins "Philosophical Investi-

gations" (which he kept on revising for the rest of his

life). "One day," Malcolm recounts, "when Wittgenstein

was passing a field where a football game was in prog-

ress, the thought first struck him that in language we

play games with words. A central idea of his philosophy

[in "Investigations"], the notion of a language game,'

apparently had its genesis in this incident." At this

time, most of his day was spent in teaching, talking, and

writing the "Investigations." His only relief from the

constant motion of his thoughts was an occasional film

or an American detective magazine. But this was no

opiate, and he ultimately felt compelled to tender his resignation to the Vice-Chancellor of the university.

Late in 1947, when the decision was taken, he wrote to

Malcolm, "I shall cease to be professor on Dec. 31st at

12 p.m." He did. Now began the loneliest period of his

never convivial life. He first moved to a guesthouse a

couple of hours' bus ride from Dublin, where he lived

friendless and in a state of nervous instability. He tired

easily, and his work on "Investigations" went slowly and

painfully. He wrote to Malcolm that he did not miss

conversation but wished for "someone to smile at occa-

sionally." After five months at the guesthouse, he

migrated to the west coast of Ireland, where he became

a legend among the primitive fishermen for his power

to tame birds. But there was no rest for him. He went

to Vienna, visited Cambridge, returned to Dublin, rushed

again to Vienna, where a sister was now dangerously

ill, proceeded from there to America to see the Mal-

colms, and was forced back to England and Cambridge

by an undiagnosed illness. He was eventually found to

have cancer. His father had been destroyed by this

disease, and his sister was even then dying of it. He

left for Austria and his family, but some months later

he returned to England — this time to Oxford, which he

quickly came to dislike. He called it "the influenza

area" and "a philosophical desert." After spending some

time at Miss Anscombe's house in Oxford, he visited

Norway, only to return to Cambridge and live with his

doctor. Never a happy man, he became convinced dur-

ing the last two years of his life that he had lost his

philosophical talent; he was also haunted by the suicides

of three of his brothers. He died in April, 1951.

I read the last paragraph of Malcolm's memoir: "When

I think of his profound pessimism, the intensity of his

mental and moral suffering, the relentless way in which

he drove his intellect, his need for love together with

the harshness that repelled love, I am inclined to believe

that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet at the end he

himself exclaimed that it had been 'wonderful!' To me

this seems a mysterious and strangely moving utterance."

When John returned, he found me in a sombre mood.

"Yes," he said. "Wittgenstein was a tortured genius.

He could have been a first-class conductor, mathema-

tician, architect, or sculptor, but he chose to be a philosopher." He started leafing through "A Memoir," and

read aloud: " 'A person caught in a philosophical con-

fusion is like a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn't know how. He tries the window but it is

too high. He tries the chimney but it is too narrow.

And if he would only turn around, he would see that

the door has been open all the time!' "

To both of us, this particular passage seemed to stand

as an epitaph for Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Next morning, I rolled out of my makeshift bed and,

with the help of my jottings, started writing furiously

the conclusions of my researches. To my great surprise,

complicated sentences streamed out of my typewriter

and I discovered that I had a philosophical voice keyed

somehow to the right pitch.

"Modern philosophy," I wrote, "has had two great

pushes, one from Russell and one from Wittgenstein,

and we're now waiting for another one. Like all phi-

losophies, its claim to be heard rests on two assumptions:

first, that what it says is true and lucid; second, that

these particular truths are more satisfying than any

alternative answers to the inquiring and reflective mind.

Naturally, not all reflective minds will be better satisfied

at Oxford than, say, in Paris, Moscow, New Delhi, or

New York, but some clearly are.

Oxford philosophers do not claim to be sages. In few cases, indeed, would the claim be credited if it should be made. By their own admission, they are not wiser than other men. They often assert that their researches do not lead to wisdom but only relieve certain feelings of puzzlement (which you are bound to have if you ask their questions ) . Once they have found answers to their questions, they go on living just as before, and, unlike their French contemporaries, many remain degage; they lead dons' comfortable fives in north Oxford (though even so a few manage to be evangelists, Socialists, or great eccentrics). This has led Gellner to ask what the point of their activities can be, since they seem to cure only a disease they have induced in themselves and, in many cases, in their students. Why should one pay philosophers, he asks, if philosophy really, as Wittgenstein said, 'leaves the world as it is'? Gellner 's is a mistaken objection. Certainly many philosophers are unadventurous, prosaic, and boring, but there is also H. P. Grice who certainly is not. Whatever they may do in their private lives, it cannot correctly be said that in their work they leave the world as it is.' If one man begins to see more clearly how the rest of the world is, then the world is not as it was. One man sees more truth than was seen in the past; the more widely this truth is disseminated, the more the world is changed. Indeed, once one considers this, Gellner's criticism seems absurd. For philosophy has never changed the world except by bringing to consciousness in the minds that engage in it certain truths that they did not know (or did not know clearly) before. Oxford philosophers are fond of quoting a remark of Vitters's to the effect that there need be nothing in common among all the members of a class of tilings called by the same name. If we must generalize about the Oxford philosophers and their subject, their philosophy is essentially agnostic, not in respect to the question of God's existence but in relation to many of the great problems whose definitive solution has in the past been taken as the aim of philosophy: questions like whether life is meaningful, whether history has a purpose, whether human nature is good — in fact, all the questions that have to be asked when a man reflectively considers the question 'How should I live?' It is true that most Oxford philosophers are not agnostic in religion; on the contrary, several are Catholic or Protestant communicants. But they regard these matters as being outside their philosophy. As men, they decide to answer these questions in one way; as philosophers, they teach and develop techniques that are neutral in respect to the different answers to them. Oxford philosophers tend to talk chiefly to each other — and, in cases like Grice's, occasionally to themselves. These practitioners are highly technical (even if they claim they make a 'technique of being non-technical'). There is at least one exception: H. P. Grice, who on some subjects — especially literary subjects, as opposed to philosophical ones — succeeds in being illuminating to the simple. Still, most of the philosophers go on thinking that technical philosophy is a good thing, necessary in order to keep the subject from 'popularization,' which they interpret as oversimplification or quackery. The pity is that their insistence on professionalism means that 'ordinary men' are left not without any philosophy at all but with old, dead, or quack varieties of it. Oxford philosophy, by comparison with the past, is non-systematic. Where traditional practitioners thought it right to deal with questions like 'What is Truth?,' Oxford philosophers are liable to say, following the later Wittgenstein, 'Look at all the different ways the word "true" is used in conversation, and do not take a mere cancellable unnecessary implication for the sense!' (They refuse to look into the uses of words in extraordinary speech – “unless you call my speech ‘extra-ordinary” – H. P. Grice --, like poetry, because English philosophy has been dominated since Hume by a prosaic contempt for the imagination.) When you have considered all the ways 'true' is used in ordinary speech, they say, you have understood the concept of 'Truth.' If there is a further question lingering at the back of your mind ('But all the same, what is Truth?'), this is the result of a mistake — a hangover from reading earlier philosophers. This approach — philosophy as the study of language rather than as the means of answering the big questions about life and the universe - which is basically that of the later Wittgenstein, has given Oxford philosophy a tendency to formlessness. Until recently, the body of philosophical thought has existed mainly in a vast number of small articles minutely considering a few uses of some single concept. Only the aesthetic sense of some of its practitioners – H. P. Grice, Wittgenstein I, Ayer, Hampshire, Strawson -has kept it from overwhelming diffuseness. Now there is a change coming. The Oxford school is breaking up; all the signs are that there isn't going to be an orthodoxy much longer - that things are going to get eccentric again. Austin is no more, and at the moment Ryle is not producing. Strawson is going in for talking about metaphysics in the old vein, and there is every indication that the Wittgenstein wave is petering out rather rapidly. In the ten years since Ryle tried to solve the mind-body problem by a vast number of small chapters on different psychological concepts in 'The Concept of Mind,' Oxford philosophy has begun to develop its own system builders. Probably the strict discipline of the late Austin helped induce guilt about the looseness and untidiness that these uncoordinated researches - each one precise and tidy - were creating in the subject as a whole. Two recent essays, Hampshire's 'Thought and Action' and Strawson's Individuals,' much inspired by H. P. Grice, offer quite systematic approaches to some of the most puzzling traditional problems in philosophy: the value of freedom of thought and the relation of intelligence to morality, in the first; the problem of sense data and the mind-body puzzle, in the second. The new systematic quality comes from a recent insight: that while linguistic philosophy is the study of language, certain wider truths can be deduced from the conditions that must be presupposed if there is to be language at all — or language of the kind we have. On propositions deduced from the statement of such conditions, necessary truths ( like the relation between the mind and the body ) can be built systematically. The non-systematic decades may have been an aberration — partly, no doubt, owing to the tendency of philosophers to imitate Wittgenstein II and his stylistic lapses from the poetic and architectural sensibility he displayed in the 'Tractatus.' As Shakespeare said of the pedants in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' 'They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. O! they have lived long on the alms-basket of words.' But then, as the proverb, more than two thousand years old, has it, 'Those that study particular sciences and neglect philosophy'— however defined and however studied —'are like Penelope's wooers, who made love to the waiting-women.' These sentences were no sooner out of my typewriter than they seemed to have been written by a stranger. Reading them over, I couldn't shake loose the feeling that they were one more walker on that common street where on a morning stroll I'd first met Lord Russell. In the course of my philosophical conversation with Russell, he had remarked, sucking his pipe, "When I was an undergraduate, there were many boys cleverer than I, but I surpassed them, because, while they were degage, I had passion and fed on controversy. I still thrive on opposition. My grandmother was a woman of caustic and biting wit. When she was eighty-three, she became kind and gentle. I had never found her so reasonable. She noticed the change in herself, and, reading the handwriting on the wall, she said to me, 'Bertie, I'll soon be dead.' And she soon was." Since Earl Russell was well up in his eighties at the time of this talk, I calculated that he must have spent nearly seventy adult years in devoted altercation. Whatever progress the stragglers on the easy road of cleverness might have made, there was no doubt that the tough, intrepid Russell had reached success by clambering up the brambly and precipitous path of intellectual controversy. Russell's words pandered to my long-standing predilection for following intellectual escapades, with the aid of newspaper dispatches, from the ease of my armchair.