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

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.