R. M. Hare
My first call in Oxford was at the house of R. M. Hare, of Balliol, who is one of the more influential Oxford philosophers.
His evangelistic zeal for the subject consumes him. He is renowned throughout the university for his kindness, for his selfless teaching (“Have you considered a career in the civil service?”, and for writing an exciting book in his field, "The Language of Morals.” He is also famous for his eccentric tastes, which I encountered for myself while lunching with him. When I arrived, he was sitting in a caravan — a study on wheels — in the front garden of his house, reading a book. He hailed me from the window, and said, "I find it much easier to work here than in the house. It's quieter, don't you agree?" He looked like a monk, though he wasn't dressed like one; he wore a well-made dark tweed jacket and well-pressed dark-gray flannel trousers — and he had his legendary red and green tie on. After talking for a few minutes through the door of the caravan, we went into the house and joined Mrs. Hare and their four children for lunch. I felt relaxed at his table. His children spoke in whispers and were remarkably well-mannered. His wife was douce and poised. I had been told that invitations to his country-house reading parties during vacations were coveted by able philosophers at Oxford, and now I could see why. At the table, we talked about Hare's interests. "I like music very much — it's one of my principal relaxations," he said at one point. "I listen in a very catholic way to all kinds of music. I deliberately don't have a gramophone, because I think it's better for one to catch what there is on the wireless instead of choosing one's own things. I take in quite a lot of modern stuff, although I don't enjoy it as a whole. I listen to it in the hope that one day I will. Also, on the wireless I have to listen to Beethoven. I'd never go and get a gramophone record of Beethoven. As a schoolboy, I liked him very much, but when the war began I was — as I think most of us were, or anybody at all sensitive — very troubled by war and whether one should be a pacifist. And I can't explain why, but it suddenly became clear to me, listening to Beethoven and to Bach and comparing them, that as food, musical food, for anybody in that kind of situation, Beethoven was exceedingly superficial and insipid. But principally superficial. To be precise, it appeared to me one wintry day in 1940 that his music rang exceedingly hollow." At the end of lunch, Mrs. Hare told us she would bring us coffee in the caravan, and I followed Hare to his wagon retreat. I asked him if there was a key to linguistic philosophy. "No," he said forcefully. "There isn't a method that any fool can get hold of in order to do philosophy as we do it. The most characteristic thing about Oxford philosophy is that we insist on clear thinking, and I suppose scientists and philosophers are agreed on what constitutes a good argument. Clear thinking, of course, is especially important in my own field of moral philosophy, because almost any important moral question arises in a confused form when one first meets it. But most of those who come up to Oxford are not going to be philosophers; they're going to be civil servants and parsons and politicians and lawyers and businessmen. And I think the most important thing I can do is to teach them to think lucidly — and linguistic analysis is frightfully useful for this. You have only to read the letters to the Times — unfortunately I forget them as soon as I've read them, or I'd give you an example — to come across a classic instance of a problem that is made clearer for one, and perhaps would have been made clearer for the writer, by the ability to take statements to pieces. My own hobby is town planning. I read quite a lot of the literature, and it's perfectly obvious that immense harm is done — I mean not just confusion, academic confusion, but physical harm, roads being built in the wrong places and that sort of thing — because people don't think clearly enough. In philosophy itself, unclear thinking has led to a lot of mistakes, and I think it is my job to take my tutees through these mistakes and show them the blind alleys in the city of philosophy. They can go on from there. Careful attention to language is, I think, the best way not to solve problems but to understand them. That is what, as philosophers, we are mainly concerned with." I asked how, exactly, attention to language helped in understanding problems. "Suppose I said, 'That chair over there is both red and not red,' " he replied. "This would make you say, 'That can't be right.' Well, I say partly it's the same sort of thing that would make you say 'That can't be right' if you wrote down 'fullfil,' spelled f-u-l-l-f-i-1. If you wrote down 'fullfil' that way and you saw it on a page, you would say, 'That can't be right.' Well, this is because you've learned, you see, to do a thing called spelling 'fulfill,' and you've also learned to do a thing called using the word 'not.' And if somebody says to you, 'That is both red and not red,' he's doing something that you learned not to do when you learned the word 'not.' He has offended against a certain rule of skill (if you like to call it that), which you mastered when you became aware of how to use the word 'not.' Of course, learning to use the word 'not' isn't exactly like learning how to spell, because it's also knowing something about how to reason. It's mastering a very elementary piece of logic. The words for 'not' in different languages are the same, but not quite the same; there are variations. For example, in Greek you've double negatives; you say, 'I have not been neither to the temple nor to the theatre.' This is why Oxford philosophy is based both on simple reasoning and on exhaustive research into language — in this particular case, into the word 'not.'" Hare's ideas about moral philosophy, I learned, were influenced by his experiences in Japanese prison camps in Singapore and Thailand, where all values had to be hewn from the rock of his own conscience. In the artificial community of the prison, he came to realize that nothing was "given" in society, that everyone carried his moral luggage in his head; every man was born with his conscience, and this, rather than anything in society, he found, was the source of morality. (As he once wrote, "A prisoner-of-war community is a society which has to be formed, and constantly re-formed, out of nothing. The social values, whether military or civil, which one has brought with one can seldom be applied without scrutiny to this very strange, constantly disintegrating situation.") Indeed, the rough draft of his first book, "The Language of Morals" — on the strength of which he was eventually elected a Fellow of Balliol — was hammered out in the grim and barren prison compounds. He went on to tell me that his present views, which were a development of his old ideas, were that ethics was the exact study of the words one used in making moral judgments, and that judgment, to be moral, had to be both universal and prescriptive. "This means," he explained, "that if you say 'X ought to do Y,' then you commit yourself to the view that if you were in X's position, you ought to do Y also. Furthermore, if you have said that you ought to do Y, then you are bound to do it — straight-way, if possible. If you say that X ought to do Y but you don't think that in the same circumstances you ought to do it, then it isn't a moral judgment at all." In effect, let your conscience always be your guide. "If you do not assent to the above propositions," Hare went on energetically, "then you do not, in my opinion, really believe in any moral judgments. You cannot answer 'ought'- questions by disguising them as 'is'-questions." He admitted, however, that most of the philosophers at Oxford were not much interested in moral philosophy. For that sort of philosophy one had to go to the Continent and to Existentialism. What was the relationship between Existentialism and British philosophy? "The thing wrong with the Existentialists and the other Continental philosophers," Hare said, "is that they haven't had their noses rubbed in the necessity of saying exactly what they mean. I sometimes think it's because they don't have a tutorial system. You see, if you learn philosophy here you read a thing to your tutor and he says to you "What do you mean by that?' and then you have to tell him. I think what makes us good philosophers is, ultimately, the method of teaching. But you ought to see Iris Murdoch about Existentialism. She's read the big books." He'd read only little Existentialist books, he said. He had no sympathy for people less good than Miss Murdoch who "let rip on Existentialism and use it as a stick with which to beat 'the sterile Oxford philosophers.' " Was it possible to be a philosopher and have a religious faith? Hare pointed out that some of the Oxford philosophers were practicing Christians. He went on to name some Catholics: G. E. M. Anscombe; her husband, P. T. Geach (who, though he was not teaching at Oxford, was still "one of us"); B. F. McGuinness; and M. A. E. Dummett. "If you wish to be rational," he went on, "you've got to look for some way of reconciling formal religion, science, and philosophy. I personally think you can reconcile only two of these things. As a philosopher, you can work out your own personal religion, which may or may not conform to what any particular church says, but I think it's slightly sophistical, say, to be a Catholic and then insist that Hell is scientific. Some philosophers here think that they can serve all three masters, and the way they reconcile religion and science is revealing. They take the dogmatic attitude and call it 'empirical': 'When the bad go to Hell, they will verify the statement that the bad go to Hell.' So much for the scientific principle of verification! I think if you are a Catholic and are going to be a philosopher, you're almost bound to do one of two things. One is to stick rigidly to the formal kinds of philosophy — I mean mathematical logic, pure linguistic analysis, and that land of thing. The other is to do ordinary philosophy — my sort — but with a distinct slant." It was getting late in the afternoon, and I said I must take my leave. We went back into the house, so that I could say goodbye to Mrs. Hare, and she insisted on our taking another cup of coffee. "I hope your afternoon has been worthwhile," she said. "I have learned all the philosophy I know from reading the proofs of my husband's books." Mr. Hare had been candid and informative. Like all good tutors, he was a little idiosyncratic and somewhat oracular but very approachable.
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