atle Against the Bewitchment of Our Intelligence. I've spent some happy years
in Oxford, and to keep in touch with England I read her newspapers. I am most
at home with the Guardian, but I also like to look at the correspondence
columns of the Times, where, in an exception to the Times tradition of
anonymity, the writers are identified by name and speak directly to the reader.
I relish a contest of words, and the Times page of letters becomes for me a
street where I can stroll each morning and see the people of England — lords
and commoners — shake hands, spit at each other, and set off verbal barrages. I
began taking this engaging daily walk during my undergraduate years at Balliol,
Oxford, and I've kept up the habit, whether I have found myself in Paris,
Damascus, New Delhi, or New York. One autumn day in 1959, as I was talcing my
intellectual promenade, I met Bertrand Russell, under a signboard reading
"Review Refused." "Messrs. Gollancz have recently published a
book by Ernest Gellner called 'Words and Things/ " he said as he hailed
me. "I read this book before it was published and considered it a careful
and accurate analysis of a certain school of philosophy, an opinion which I
expressed in a preface. I now learn that Ryle, the editor of Mind, has written
to Messrs. Gollancz refusing to have this book reviewed in Mind, on the ground
that it is abusive and cannot therefore be treated as a contribution to an
academic subject. Such a partisan view of the duties of an editor is deeply
shocking. The merit of a work of philosophy is always a matter of opinion, and
I am not surprised that Ryle disagrees with my estimate of the work, but Mind
has hitherto, ever since its foundation, offered a forum for the discussion of
all serious and competent philosophical work. Gellner's book is not 'abusive'
except in the sense of not agreeing with the opinions which he discusses. If
all books that do not endorse Ryle's opinions are to be boycotted in the pages
of Mind, that hitherto respected periodical will sink to the level of the
mutual-admiration organ of a coterie. All who care for the repute of British
philosophy will regret this." I did care for the repute of British
philosophy. It is, in a sense, a dominant philosophy, with Existentialism, in
the present-day world. I had gone up to Oxford with the idea of studying it —
British philosophy has its home there and indeed is known generally as
"Oxford philosophy," even though its detractors, taking their cue
from its so-considered petty linguistic concerns, insist on calling it
linguistic philosophy. However, just reading a few essays on philosophical
subjects to my tutor made me realize that the linguistic inquiries then being
undertaken at Oxford had little connection with what I understood by
philosophy, so I immediately abandoned it and took up history instead. Now I
recalled that Gellner was a Reader in Sociology at the London School of
Economics, a home for angry intellectual orphans, while Ryle was Wayneflete
Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, from which he edited the
extremely influential, eighty-five-year-old philosophical journal Mind. The
notion of an attack on Oxford thinkers interested me, and I dashed off a letter
to Blackwell's, my favorite bookshop, for Gellner 's book. While I waited for
it to arrive, I impatiently read the subsequent issues of the Times, eager to see
Earl Russell's gauntlet taken up, preferably by Ryle. It was. This important
spokesman of the philosophical Establishment replied four days after Russell's
challenge. His communication was terse, to the point, and full of references for
diligent readers: "In the essay referred to by Earl Russell about one
hundred imputations of disingenuousness are made against a number of
identifiable philosophers; about half of these occur on pages 159-192 and
237-265." The shooting had just begun. An eighty-seven-year-old
philosopher, out of humor with "a certain school of philosophy," had
clashed with its standard-bearer, and neither of them lacked a retinue. The day
after Ryle's note appeared, the Times carried a third letter under the heading
of the week, "Review Refused," this one written by a correspondent
named Conrad Dehn. "If the imputations are justified," Dehn argued,
"this could not be a good ground for Ryle's refusal to review Gellner's
book, while if they are not I should have thought a review in Mind would provide
an excellent, even a welcome, opportunity to rebut them." There was also a
letter from G. R. G. Mure, the last of “The English Hegelians” and the Warden
of Merton. He, too, was on the side of Russell. "In a tolerably free
society," the Warden wrote, "the ban, the boycott, even the too
obtrusively cold shoulder, tend to promote the circulation of good books as
well as bad. One can scarcely expect that the linguistical Oxford philosophy
tutors, such as H. P. Grice, long self-immunized to criticism, will now rush to
Blackwell's, but I am confident that their tutees, such as P. F. Strawson,
will." I was delighted that Mure had taken this occasion to speak out
against any philosophical establishment; while I was at the university, the
undergraduates used to say of the Warden that he couldn't declare his mind,
because half a century ago Russell demolished Hegel and since then no
respectable philosopher had dared acknowledge himself a Hegelian openly. On the
following day, I found a letter from Gellner himself. "My book," the
polemicist wrote, replying to Ryle, "does not accuse linguistic
philosophers of 'disingenuousness.' . . . This word does not occur in it once,
let alone one hundred times. It does attack H. P. Grice’s linguistic doctrines
and methods as inherently evasive. . . . This claim does not require (though it
does not exclude) conscious dishonesty. ... I am sorry to see Ryle resorting to
one further device, the exclusion of criticism as indecorous, and thus evading
once again the substantive issue of the merits of H. P. Grice’s linguistic philosophy."
Gellner's letter left me baffled. I was still wondering whether Ryle had an
excuse for not reviewing the book. My skepticism was not shared by a knighted
gentleman, Sir Leslie Farrer, private solicitor to the Queen, who appeared on
the same page as Gellner. Sir Leslie defended the author of "Words and
Things" with a sharp tongue. "Ridicule," he wrote, "is one
of the oldest and not the least effective weapons of philosophic warfare, but
yet we find Ryle speaking no doubt 'ex cathedra on a matter of faith or morals,'
propounding the dogma that making fun of H. P. Grice and other members of the
Sacred College of Linguistic Philosophers is mortal sin. True, Ryle's first
description of Gellner was the word 'abusive' and his second that he 'made
imputations of disingenuousness,' but those who read 'Words and Things' ( and I
trust they will be many ) may agree with me that 'made fun of is a more
accurate description." Sir Leslie was the sixth disputant in the Gellner
controversy. In the first week of "Review Refused," the Times must
have received many letters on the subject, but of the six that it selected,
five took the Gellner-Russell side. The Times' five-to-one support of Gellner indicated
a confidence in him that, in my opinion, was not completely justified by his
letter. Despite encounters with some worldly philosophers while I was an undergraduate,
I did not associate public letter-writing with philosophers; I continued to
think of them as Olympian sages. Now this bout in the Times shattered my view of
their serenity. Instead of age and quiet wisdom, they had youth and energy and
anger. I pictured in my mind all the philosophers in England racing to the
Times office with their dispatches now that Gellner's book had given them an
occasion for their precious pronouncements. The day after Sir Leslie's letter,
the Times correspondence page was silent on philosophy, but the Queen's peace
was broken the next day by J. T. Wisdom, a Cambridge philosopher, and
"Review Refused," already a heap of pelting words, continued to grow.
Wisdom's loyalty to Ryle was unquestioning, and resembled that of a cardinal to
the Pope. "I do not know whether it was right to refuse a review to
Gellner's essay," he asserted. "I have not read it. Lord Russell's
letter . . . carried the suggestion that Ryle refused the book a review because
it is opposed to Ryle's philosophy. That suggestion I believe to be false."
Such a letter could hardly do much to advance Ryle's cause. But the next day —
a Saturday — the Russell-Gellner brigade's secure position in the Times column
was for the time being shaken by the charge of B. F. McGuinness, of Queen's.
His philosophical fusillade, though undramatic, was extremely effective. He began
impressively, "Newman had to meet the following argument: 'Dr. Newman
teaches that truth is no virtue; his denials that he teaches this are not to be
credited, since they come from a man who teaches that truth is no virtue.' He
described it as an attempt to poison the wells. A subtler form of psychological
warfare has been discovered. You belabour your opponents for systematic
disregard of truth and consistency, but you add later that there is no question
of conscious dishonesty. Thus you can safely call them both knaves and fools.
If they expostulate with your account of their views and practices, you reply:
'A typical evasion! . . . They would disown their own doctrines when criticized.'
If you are charged with being abusive, your answer is: 1 have accused them of
nothing but error!' In his letter . . . Gellner has even managed to use both
kinds of riposte at the same time. The following are some of the phrases in his
book that seem to me, in their context, tantamount to accusations of dishonesty:
'camouflage' (p. 163), 'evasion' (p. 164), 'pretence' (p. 169), 'spurious
modesty' (p. 170), 'invoking rationalizations according to convenience' (p.
171), '[devices] to cow the neophyte into submission' (p. 186), '[refusal to
avow an opinion because it] would ruin one's reputation,' 'insinuation' (p.
188), 'trick' (p. 189)." After this letter, I joined up with the minority
— Ryle, Wisdom, and McGuinness. The following Monday, a letter appeared from
Kevin Holland, of Worcester. Holland pealed precedents of "imputations of
disingenuousness," and he advanced as many facts in support of Gellner's
position as McGuinness had advanced in support of Ryle's. "In the 'Philosophy
of Leibniz' ( 1900), for example," he wrote, "Russell accused Leibniz
of a kind of intellectual dishonesty. Forty-six years later, this charge was
repeated in 'A History of Western Philosophy,' and Aquinas joined Leibniz in
the dock. Ten years ago Ryle published an essay in which, with deliberate
abusiveness,' he characterized a belief held by most ordinary people [that man
has a soul in lus body] as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.' In spite of
their 'abusiveness,' these three books are regarded by many as philosophic classics."
I put down the Times reconverted by Holland to the Russell-Gellner position
that a philosophical work could call names, heap curses on philosophers, and
still deserve to be read. It might even turn out to be a classic. For me the
battle was over — and the victory, as I now saw it, went to the majority. As
for Ryle's indiscretion — the initial injustice — it was more than corrected by
the wide discussion in the newspaper. When the book arrived from Blackwell's, I
would read it and make up my own mind about its worth. After a few days, when I
looked at the Times again, there was a ponderous epistle, in dignified diction,
from a Queen's Counsel, Sir Thomas Creed: "Socrates knew that a true
philosophy thrives on blunt criticism and accusations. No one, however inept,
who sat at the feet of the robust Oxford philosophers of 40 years ago was ever
allowed to forget the scene when Socrates, taunted by an exasperated
Thrasymachus with being 'a thorough quibbler,' with 'asking questions merely
for the sake of malice,' with needing a nurse to stop his drivelling,' implored
his accuser to abandon his proposed departure from the discussion so that a
problem might be further examined between them. So far from refusing review
Socrates forced further discussion on the recalcitrant Thrasymachus. ... Is
Socrates forgotten at Oxford? Is Plato's 'Republic' no longer read? Many will
hope that a purchase of Gellner's essay will enable undergraduates to ask those
awkward questions and make those accusations and insinuations of 'evasion,'
'camouflage,' 'pretence,' 'bamboozling,' 'trick,' which caused Oxford philosophy
tutors of an earlier generation such unfeigned delight, a delight only exceeded
by the relish with which they exploded the arguments of their accusers." Next
day, J. W. N. Watkins was in the paper. I knew something about him from the
gossip of the undergraduates in my day, and pegged him immediately as Gellner's
man. I had thought it was about time for someone to play the peacemaker, and
Watkins' letter was a white flag: "Let all parties concede that
"Words and Things' is often impolite. But having conceded this, let us
remember that etiquette is not the most important thing in philosophy. The best
way for a linguistic philosopher such as H. P. Grice to repel Gellner's attack
is to overcome their squeamishness about its indecorousness and get down to the
rebuttal of its arguments." A few days later, Alec Kassman, editor of the
journal published by the august Aristotelian Society, faced up to some
questions that had been bothering me. His analysis proceeded in the measured
rhetoric of an intellectual editorial: "The essential issue is not whether
or not Gellner's essay is meritorious; nor whether or not it is abusive; nor whether
or not, if abusive, it is therefore unfit for review: it is a fundamental one of
professional ethics and its gravamen is contained in one protasis in Earl
Russell's letter: If all books that do not endorse Ryle's opinion are to be
boycotted in the pages of Mind,' etc. The charge, therefore, is one of
dishonorable conduct in that Ryle abuses his editorial powers so as to suppress
criticism of his own views. Clearly, the allegation in general terms is
rhetorical: it is more than sufficient if a single case be substantiated. The
reply is a direct traverse — that the review was declined on the ground that
the book was found abusive. Earl Russell flatly denies this: It is not
"abusive" except in the sense of not agreeing with the opinions which
he discusses' (. . . Professor Ryle's among others). He offers no opinion on
the instances indicated by the editor. The moral case has not progressed beyond
this stage save that many . . . evidently wishing to support Earl Russell,
depart from him upon this critical point. They (for example, Sir Thomas Creed .
. .) seem mostly to claim that the book may well be abusive and no less fit for
review on that account. It is quite possible that the editor's claim that an
abusive book does not deserve a review in Mind is ill-founded or injudicious.
That, however, is a side issue, if in fact the view is one which he genuinely
held and acted on. The accusation is not that he is unduly sensitive, or
unwise, but that he is biased against any critic as such, to the consequent detriment
of his journal. . . . He publicly rebutted the specific charge in some detail,
and Earl Russell has not replied. It is about time that he did; the pages of
Mind are available to illustrate editorial policy. The allegation is a
disagreeable one, and as serious as could be made against a philosopher in
Professor Ryle's position. If Earl Russell can sustain it, he should show this.
If he cannot, he should say so, that the reputation of both editor and journal
may be cleared. That is the heart of the matter." Even though Mr. Kassman
argued from a position opposed to mine — I was still sticking to the side of
Russell-Gellner — I had to admit that he had succeeded in making the best
possible defense for Ryle. I made up my mind not to look at any more letters
from the philosophical combatants, but I could not help glancing at the
succeeding issues of the Times just in case Russell should answer Mr. Kassman.
Nineteen days after Russell had attacked the philosophical Establishment, he
was back in print with a reply. "There are two different points at
issue," Russell remarked, closing the controversy. "First, is
anything in Mr. Gellner's book 'abusive'? Secondly, should a book containing
anything abusive be, on that account alone, refused a review in Mind? As to the
first point, 'abusive' is not a very precise word. ... I cannot . . . 'reply' .
. . since Professor Ryle has not given a single instance of a single sentence
which he considers abusive. It is up to Professor Ryle to quote at least one
passage which he considers abusive. This, so far as I know, he has not yet
done. As to the second and much more important point, I do not think that a serious
piece of philosophical work should be refused a review even if it does contain
passages which everybody would admit to be abusive. Take, for example,
Nietzsche's 'Beyond Good and Evil.' In this book he speaks of 'that blockhead
John Stuart Mill,' and after saying T abhor the man's vulgarity,' attributes to
him the invention of the Golden Rule, saying: 'Such principles would fain
establish the whole of human traffic upon mutual services, so that every action
would appear to be a cash payment for something done to us. The hypothesis here
is ignoble to the last degree.' I do not accept these opinions of Nietzsche's,
but I think a philosophical editor would have been misguided if, on account of
them, he had refused a review to 'Beyond Good and Evil,' since this was
undoubtedly a serious piece of philosophical work. I note that neither Ryle nor
anyone else has denied that the same is true of Gellner's book." Firmly
turning his back on the philosophical Establishment, Russell stumped resolutely
away, carrying most of the medals. Through the fight over "Words and
Things," I acquired a renewed and rather persistent interest in Oxford philosophy.
Several English publications ran editorials about the conclusion of
hostilities, and I read them eagerly, but they did not tell me very much about
the philosophers working in England. The Times wrote its typical
on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand leader. It said, on the one hand, that
Gellner's book "caricatures its prey," and that his "barbs are
not of the carefully polished kind." It said, on the other hand, that the
caricatured philosophers "stick closely to their lasts" with
"enviable academic patronage," and regard "philosophical
problems as a sort of cerebral neurosis which it is their job to
alleviate." The leader in the Economist was no more enlightening about the
nature of this cerebral neurosis. "Why are modern philosophers hated — if
they are?" it asked. "Hardly any of them, despite their other
diversity, would claim that, as philosophers, they can tell us what to do. When
other direction posts are falling down, philosophers are assumed to be the
people who ought to be giving us directions about life. But if they cannot,
they cannot." The tone of these two comments was fairly representative of
the editorial voice of Britain's intellectual press. Gellner's book, when it
finally arrived, was equally unsatisfactory. It was passionate, polemical, and
disjointed, and grouped disparate thinkers indiscriminately — this much was
apparent even to a novice like me. The editorials had bewildered me by their
opaqueness; Gellner bewildered me by his flood of glaring light, which
prevented me from seeing through to the philosophers. At the time of the
turbulent correspondence, I was living in America, but I decided that on my
next visit to England I would seek out some of the philosophers and talk to
them about their activities. Sometime later, I found myself in London. I wrote
to three or four philosophers for appointments and started my researches into
contemporary philosophy by approaching an old Oxford friend of mine, even
though he is by no means the most unprejudiced person about. As an
undergraduate, he read Classics and Greats, the English-speaking world's most
thorough study of CLASSICAL literature, language, history, and PHILOSOPHY, and
— Greats' concession to our age — MODERN philosophy! All the time he was
working at philosophy, he hated it, but he did it as a job, and because he was
naturally brilliant, after his Schools (the final degree examination) he was
courted to be a professional philosopher at Oxford; he remained true to his
temperament, however, and turned down the offer, deciding to sit it out in
London until he spotted a good opening in Oxford classics. In the meantime, he
has amused himself by composing Greek and Latin verses and prose, and turning
the poetry of Hopkins, Pound, Eliot, and Auden into lyrics in the style of the
Greek Anthology or of Vergil, Horace, or Petronius. Having been trained in
Latin and Greek since the age of six, he reads the literature of these
languages almost faster than that of his own country. This classical, or
language, education is characteristic of almost all the contemporary English philosophers.
Aside from his Victorian training, the most typically philosophical thing about
my friend is that he constantly smokes a pipe — a habit that has long been the
sine qua non of English philosophers. Over some mulled claret late one evening
in his Chelsea back-street basement flat, he surveyed the subject of philosophy
from the tremulous heights where it had led him, and he talked to me about it
too frankly and unprofessionally to wish to be identified, so I'll call him
John. During their four years as undergraduates, the Greats men sit for
altogether twenty-four three-hour papers, and John said he imagined that
one-third of his time had been spent doing philosophy and preparing for examinations
in logic and moral and classical philosophy. "The examination in classical
philosophy was straightforward, since it meant, for the most part, reading the
works of Plato and Aristotle," he explained. "For logic and moral philosophy
we were supposed to do a certain amount of philosophical history, but in fact
we did extremely little; we started by doing a tutorial on Descartes and followed
it up by writing essays on Locke and Berkeley, and I believe we were meant to
do a couple on Hume. But these historical people are just for exercise; they
need not be brought into the exam. I never once mentioned them, and the examiners
are really rather bored to have you do so, I think." John said that Greats
men mostly read contemporary philosophers, because the philosophers at Oxford
are concerned only with their own puzzles. They are not very much occupied with
problems that interested earlier philosophers, even as little as forty years
ago. John actually went into philosophical training when, after dabbling a
little in the history of different schools, he read Vitters’s
"Philosophical Investigations" and two books of A. J. Ayer's —
"Language, Truth and Logic" and "The Problem of Knowledge,"
both of which he had to work through several times, once making notes all the
way. He was then turned loose on P. F. Strawson's "Introduction to Logical
Theory" and "Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics."
He read only the first half of "Individuals" and then skimmed the
rest, because he couldn't make much sense of it. After Strawson, to John's
great relief, came easier volumes, on ethics, by R. M. Hare and P. H.
Nowell-Smith. But the bulk, and the most important part, of his study was
articles in issues of Mind and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society —
the richest repositories of Oxford philosophy. Since the main purpose of the
Greats course is not to produce Professor I. Q. but to develop minds, John insisted
that his handling of the Schools questions was more important than the list of
books and articles he had read. Alas, once the results were published, as
custom enjoined, all the Schools papers were burned, and John could reconstruct
his brilliant answers only from memory. He considered his logic paper to be the
paradigm, both because logic is the centerpiece of Oxford philosophy and
because the principles of logic can be applied to other branches of the
subject. Examiners therefore tend to read the logic paper with more care than
any other. "Um," he began, recalling his paradigm, "there was a
question I didn't do: Is my hearing a noise in my head as mechanical as the
passing of a noise through a telephone?' The suggestion here is: Can our senses
be explained away in mechanical terms? One that I did attempt but abandoned was
'Who is Socrates?' — the figure that people greeted when they saw it coming
with the words 'Hello, Socrates,' or the person who was Socrates? You clearly
can't answer, 'This is the body that went around with Socrates.' It's also not
very nice to say, 'This is the body that went around as Socrates,' because it
sounds as if it went around disguised as Socrates. Since I couldn't make up my
mind about this, I couldn't write about it. But a stock old war horse of a
question that I did complete was 'If I know that Y is the case, is it possible
for me not to know that I know it?' And what I said about it must have been on
these lines: To know that a thing is the case is not — this is very straightforward
stuff — to have my mind in a certain position. If I know, for instance, that ice
melts when the sun shines, this means that when the sun shines I don't go skating.
In that case, it's perfectly possible that I don't consciously know that ice melts
when the sun shines. But the question now arises of whether I know it
unconsciously, and the answer is that it's possible never to have considered
this. But to analyze it still further: Once you do ask yourself whether you
know it unconsciously, can you give your- self the wrong answer? And I think
the answer to this is — Now, I wonder what I said. Um. Well. Yes. The answer is
that you sometimes say, 'I don't know whether I know it unconsciously; I don't
know whether I really know it or whether I'm just guessing.' So far so good. But
can you now go on to say, 1 thought I didn't know that ice melts when the sun
shines, but then later on I found out I did'? My conclusion was that you could feel
certain you didn't know it, and then when you came to it you found out you did.
Take this example: Suppose they said 'Do you know how to tie such and such a
knot?' and you said 'No.' And then when you were drowning they threw you a line
and said 'Tie that knot on your life belt,' and you succeeded in tying it. When
you were saved, they would say, 'Well, you did know how to tie it after all,
didn't you?' And you could say either 'Yes, I did know all the time, but I was certain
that I didn't before I started drowning' or T just found out how to do it — it
came to me when you threw me the line.' " By now, John was so lost in
philosophy that I couldn't have stopped him if I had wished to. He was puffing away
madly at his pipe, and, without pausing, he went on to the next question on his
logic paper. "My favorite in the paper, however, was the answer to another
question: 'Could there be nothing between two stars?' All these Schools
questions look very simple till you start thinking about them. What I said
about this one was 'There are two senses in which there can be nothing between
two stars'— which is always a good way of going at such questions. On the one
hand, if there is strictly not anything between two things, then they are together,
and if two stars are adjacent, then, clearly, they aren't exactly two stars —
they're perhaps a twin star. On the other hand — and this was my second point —
if I were to say to you, 'There's absolutely nothing between Oxford and
Birmingham,' meaning 'There aren't any restaurants on the road,' or something
of that sort, in this sense there isn't anything between two stars. A
distinction thus emerges between nothing and a nothing, because when you answer
the question What is there between two stars?' by saying 'There isn't anything
between them,' you tend to think there is a nothing, a great lump of nothing,
and there it is, holding the stars apart. This, actually, when you think about
it, is nonsense, because you can't have 'a nothing,' which naturally led me to
discuss the difference between space and a space. If you can't say that there's
nothing between two stars, neither can you give much account of what there is
between them. You tend to say there's a great expanse of Space, with a capital
'S,' and this is not very satisfactory, because the way you use the ordinary
word 'space' is to say there is a space between my table and my door, and that
means you can measure it, and presumably there is a distance between table and door
that can be measured. Whereas if you say there is a great lump of Space, that's
like saying a great lump of nothing or of time, which, of course, is misleading.
My conclusion was that in the loose sense, in which there is nothing between
Oxford and Birmingham, there could be nothing between two stars; that is,
nothing you could give a name to, or nothing you thought it worth giving a name
to, or nothing of the sort that interests you. But in the strict sense there
can't be nothing between two stars, because if there were nothing between two
stars, the stars would be on top of each other. How tedious, I agree, but I was
just giving you this as an example of what Greats people actually do." We
poured some claret, and drank a toast to John's success with Schools and, upon
his insistence, to his wisdom in putting the whole subject behind him. He reluctantly
drank also to my researches into Oxford philosophy. From his paradigm answer I
had received the distinct impression that Oxford philosophy was simplified, ifte,
mental gymnastics, or, at best, intellectual pyrotechnics. But I wasn't sure I
had grasped the essence, so I pressed him for his own view, and for a
definition. He twitched nervously, offered me some more claret, went into a
sort of trance, and said puzzling things like "Philosophy at Oxford is not
one thing but many things" and "Some of the philosophers there are in
one sense doing the same thing and yet in another sense doing quite different
things." And how the things they did were the same and yet different could
emerge only by talking about the philosophers individually, and even then I was
likely to get them confused. And although he didn't say it, he implied that the
best thing for me to do would be to read Greats ( of which, of course, modern
philosophy is just a part) and, if possible, get acquainted with the
philosophers themselves, as "people." He suggested meeting Gellner,
as the man who had roughly broken the calm of Oxford philosophy; Russell, as a
born controversialist who had served the mistresses of both science and art as
no one else had in the twentieth century; Strawson, as an antidote to Russell (
"Strawson is now far and away the most original thinker of what is often
called the Oxford philosophy"); Ayer, as a brilliant thinker who had his
pipeline from Central Europe and whom neither the Russells nor the Strawsons could
overlook; S. N. Hampshire, as a philosopher with a civilized view of the whole
subject — he had one foot in Continental thought, and the other in the whole history
of philosophy; and R. M. Hare, who represented the impact of Oxford philosophy
on morals — the rights and wrongs of living; and certainly one feminine
philosopher, because women's invasion of the field was a sort of twentieth-century
philosophical event. Then John went on to use whatappeared to me English adaptations
of Chinese proverbs, like "We are all squirrels in cages and we go round
and round until we are shown the way out." And how was I to find my way out?
We were back to reading Greats. To such direct questions as "Is Oxford
philosophy, like geometry, suspended in a vacuum?" I received negative
answers. "No," he said once, "in one sense we have as much real substance
as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and are even doing their sorts of things.
But in another sense ..." I wanted to find my way back to the clarity and
confidence of his Schools answers, so I pried at his mind with ancient
philosophers (who taught men, among other things, what to do and how to live)
for my lenses. "Does each of the Oxford philosophers fancy himself a Socrates?"
I asked. "I have never seen them hanging around street corners and
athletic rooms, as Socrates did in Athens, with unwashed aristocratic men, to cheer
philosophical disputations and to jeer crowds of fools." "You're
mixed up in a difficult business," he said, pouring me some claret. He
went on to explain the connection between the ancients and the contemporaries. "The
idea of Greats philosophy," he said, "is that after a few years of
work — training in clear and precise thinking — the high-powered undergraduate
can unravel any sort of puzzle more or less better than the next man. It makes
a technique of being non-technical." He smiled. "Like Socrates, we
assume the pose of knowing nothing except, of course, how to think, and that is
the only respect in which we consider ourselves superior to other people. For
us — as, to a certain degree, it was for him — philosophy is ordinary language
( but don't press me about this ordinary language'), and so, we choose to
think, it ought not to be a technical business. Although he did not know it,
Socrates, like us, was really trying to solve linguistic puzzles, and this is
especially true in the longer dialogues of Plato — the 'Republic' and the T.aws'—
where we learn quite a lot about Socrates' method and philosophy, filtered, of
course, through his devoted pupil's mind. Some of the Pre-Socratics, who provided
Plato and his master with many of their problems, were in difficulties about
how one thing could be two things at once — say, a white horse. How could you
say 'This is a horse and this is white' without saying 'This one thing is two
things'? Socrates and Plato together solved this puzzle by saying that what was
meant by saying "The horse is white' was that the horse partook of the
eternal, and perfect, Form horseness, which was invisible but really more
horselike than any worldly Dobbin; and ditto about the Form whiteness: it was
whiter than any earthly white. The theory of Form covered our whole world of
ships and shoes and humpty-dumptys, which, taken all in all, were shadows —
approximations of those invisible, perfect Forms. Using the sharp tools in our
new linguistic chest, we can whittle Plato down to size and say that he
invented his metaphysical world of Forms to solve the problem of different
kinds of 'is'es; you see how an Oxford counterpart of Plato uses a simple
grammatical tool in solving problems like this. Instead of conjuring up an imaginary
edifice of Forms, he simply says there are two different types of 'is'es — one
of predication and one of identity. The first asserts a quality: this is
white.' The second points to the object named: 'This is a horse.' By this
simple grammatical analysis we clear away the rubble of what were Plato's Forms.
Actually, an Oxford philosopher is closer to Aristotle, who often, when defining
a thing — for example, 'virtue' — asked himself, 'Does the definition square
with the ordinary views of men?' But while the contemporary philosophers do
have antecedents, they are innovators in concentrating most of their attention
on language. They have no patience with past philosophers: Why bother listening
to men whose problems arose from bad grammar? At present, we are mostly
preoccupied with language and grammar. No one at Oxford would dream of telling
undergraduates what they ought to do, the kind of life they ought to lead."
That was no longer an aim of philosophy, he explained, but even though
philosophy had changed in its aims and methods, people had not, and that was
the reason for the complaining undergraduates, for the bitter attacks of Times'
correspondents, and even, perhaps, for his turning his back on philosophy. Both
of us more or less stopped thinking at the same time, very much as one puts
down an intellectual work when thinking suddenly becomes impossible. "How about
some claret?" both of us said. The decanter was empty. We vigorously
stirred some more claret, sugar, and spices in a caldron and put the brew on
the gas ring, and while we were waiting for a drink, we listened to a portion
of "The Magic Flute." I felt very much like Tamino at the Temple of
Wisdom, except that my resolution was sinking. The claret revived it, and, with
curtains drawn against the night, I pressed on with my researches. Talking with
John, I came to feel that present-day Oxford philosophy is a revolutionary
movement — at least when it is seen through the eyes of past philosophers. I
asked him about the fathers of the revolution. Again he was evasive. Strictly
speaking, it was fatherless, except that Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein — all of them, as it happened, Cambridge University figures
— "were responsible for the present state of things at Oxford."
Blowing pipe smoke in my direction, John continued, "I think the aspect of
Russell's philosophy that will be remembered is his logical atomism, which was
proclaimed to the world in a series of lectures in 1918; the driving force of
these lectures was a distrust of ordinary speech. He argued at that time that
you had to get away from ordinary language (and disastrous grammatical errors
of past philosophers — 'is'es again), which did nothing but foster misleading
notions, and construct a language on a mechanical model — like the symbolic
logic of his and A. N. Whitehead's 'Principia Mathematica,' published in 1910 —
that would in turn correspond to the logical structure of the universe. He
thought that you could take any statement and break it up into its atomic
parts, for each part would have a meaning, or a reference, or both. What he was
trying to do was to build a formal logical system, so that you could do
arguments and logic on computers. But it is now thought that, among other
things, he confused meaning and reference, and also broke up sentences in a
totally wrong way, and therefore his philosophy is considered to be mainly of
historical interest." By now, I felt very much as though I were inside a Temple
of Knowledge, if not of Wisdom, and I asked John if he would like to tell me a
little bit about Moore, too. He said he wouldn't like to but he would do it, because
he supposed he had to. "Moore was a common-sense philosopher," he began.
"Almost unphilosophically so. His most famous article was 'A Defense of
Common Sense,' which was mostly concerned with morality. His common-sense view
was, on the surface, very much like Dr. Johnson's: I am certain that my hand is
here because I can look at it, touch it, bang it against the table. While he
did distinguish between a naturalistic statement ('The grass is green') and a
non-naturalistic state- ment ('God is good'), he held that we know both kinds of
statements to be true by intuition. ( Goodness was not naturalistic, like green,
because it could neither be analyzed in terms of any basic qualities, like
greenness or hardness, nor was it itself a basic quality.) On the question 'How
do I know the grass is green or God is good?,' he agreed with most people, who
would reply, 'Because I know it's so, and if you don't know it's so, too
bad!'" John said that Oxford people owed their faith in ordinary language
and ordinary men to Moore. But it was Wittgenstein who made John puff furiously
at his pipe. "There are two Wittgensteins, not one," he said. "There
is the Wittgenstein of 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,' published in 1921, and
the totally different Wittgenstein of 'Philosophical Investigations,' printed posthumously,
a quarter of a century later. I'm almost certain to give a misinterpretation of
Wittgenstein," John went on humbly but vigorously, "but in the
'Tractatus' he was trying to find out the basic constituents of the world, and
in a way his 'Tractatus' attempt was reminiscent of Russell's 1918 try.
According to the first Wittgenstein, the world was ultimately made up of basic
facts, and these were mirrored in language: accordingly, a proposition was a
picture of the world. Now, basic facts were made up of basic objects and basic qualities.
The basic objects were sense data — for example, a patch before my eyes, or a
feeling in my leg. But these could not exist without having some definite quality.
I mean, you could not just have a patch before your eyes — it had to be some
definite color. And you could not just have a feeling in your leg — it had to
be some definite sort of feeling. When you attached a particular color to the patch
or specified the sort of feeling in your leg, you had basic facts, which
language mirrored or could mirror. An example of a basic sentence that mirrored
a basic fact was 'Here, now, green,' meaning that you had in front of your eyes
a sense datum that was green. Just as the world was essentially built out of
these basic facts, so language was essentially built out of basic-fact sentences.
The business of the philosopher was to break down the complex statements used
in language — like 'My wife sees a green table'— into its constituent parts. In
the 'Investigations,' Wittgenstein completely gave up his 'Tractatus' ideas,
and thought that philosophical perplexity arose because people abused the ordinary
ways of speech and used a rule that was perfectly all right in its own area to
cover another area, and so they got into a muddle; he thought that you could
disentangle the puzzle by pointing out that they were misusing ordinary
language. As he wrote, 'Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence
by means of language.' It was like showing, in his most quoted phrase, 'the fly
the way out of the fly-bottle.' If in the 'Tractatus' Wittgenstein was like Russell,
in 'Philosophical Investigations' he was like Moore, a common-sense man.
Wittgenstein now thought that you couldn't ask what the structure of reality
was; you could only analyze the language in which people talked about it. A lot
of different types of structure were found in language, and it was impossible
to assimilate them all under any one heading. He regarded the various ways of
expression as so many different pieces in a game of chess, to be manipulated
according to certain rules. It was quite wrong to apply the rules of one set of
statements to another, and he distinguished several types of statements — for
example, common-sense statements about physical objects, statements about one's
own thoughts and intentions, and moral propositions. It was the philosopher's
job to find out the rules of the language game. Suppose you had been brought up
from a small child to play football. By the time you were sixteen, you played
it quite according to the rules. You probably didn't know the names of the
various rules or what, exactly, they said, but you never made a mistake about
them, and when anyone asked you 'Why do you play this way, and not that?* you
just said 'Well, I always have played this way.' Now, it would be possible for
someone else to come along as an observer and write down what rules you were
playing by, if he observed you long enough. Like the observer on the football
ground, a philosopher should primarily investigate what the rules used for
communication are." Just when I thought I had absorbed all this, John
said, "I hope I haven't left you with the impression that there is
necessarily a firm connection between Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein, on the
one hand, and present-day Oxford philosophy, on the other. Some people would
argue that J. L. Austin, in the fifties White's Professor of Moral Philosophy
at Oxford, had as much to do with shaping thinking at the university as anyone else,
including Wittgenstein. Also, you mustn't overlook the role of logical positivism
in all this." John said he would prefer not to say anything about Austin,
because he had very mixed feelings about him. But logical positivism — well,
that was another matter. A. J. Ayer, recently appointed Wykeham Professor of
Logic at Oxford, was the first Englishman to proclaim the principles of logical
positivism to the English intellectual world. After his graduation from Oxford,
in 1932, he went to Vienna and made the acquaintance of some of the most famous
European philosophers — members of the so-called Vienna Circle — who had come
together to discuss, among other things, Wittgenstein's "Tractatus."
Ayer made his reputation for life by returning to England six months later and
writing "Language, Truth and Logic," a tract of logical positivism.
"If I may put it so," John concluded, with a smile, "he has
pattered all around the kennel, but he's always been on his Viennese
leash." I knew it was getting late, but I asked John for a little more
philosophy, for the road. We had some more claret, and before we packed up for
the night, he quickly served up logical positivism. The logical positivism of
the thirties, I learned, was a skeptical movement. It claimed that any
statement that could not be verified by sense experience was meaningless. Thus,
all statements about God, all statements about morality, all value judgments in
art were logically absurd. For example, "Murder is wrong" could only
mean, at best, "I disapprove of murder," or, still more precisely,
"Murder! Ugh!" What made a statement like "There is a dog in my
neighbor's garden" meaningful was that I could verify it. If I went into
the garden, I could see the dog, beat it with a stick, get bitten, hear it
bark, and watch it chew on an old bone. The room was thick with smoke by now,
for John, in a very un-English way, had kept all the windows closed. Both of us
were tired. He put on some coffee, and we chatted about this and that, after
which, instead of trundling to my own lodgings, I dossed down on his sofa. The
next day, I hung around John's room, trying to sort out my thoughts after the
injections of Oxford philosophy administered by the sharp mind of my friend,
until the time came for me to call on Gellner, the first philosopher on my
list. During the Times' siege of Ryle, I had been first pro-Gellner, then anti,
then pro, but John had watched the whole affair with the detachment of a
philosopher. He gave me a rationalizing explanation: Good editors were
eccentric people, and potentates who ruled scholarly periodicals tended to be even
more eccentric than their counterparts on popular magazines. Then he handed me
a copy of G. E. Moore's (autobiography opened to a passage about Moore's editorship
of Mind, which made me shift my weight about uncomfortably on the Gellner-Ryle
seesaw. "In 1920, on Stout's retirement from the Editorship of Mind, an
office which he had held since the beginning of the 'New Series' in 1892,"
I read, "I was asked to succeed him as Editor; I . . . have now been Editor
for more than twenty years. ... I think . . . that I have succeeded in being
impartial as between different schools of philosophy. I have tried, in
accordance with the principles laid down when Mind was started and repeated by
Stout in the Editorial which he wrote at the beginning of the New Series, to
let merit, or, in other words, the ability which a writer displays, and not the
opinions which he holds, be the sole criterion of whether his work should be
accepted. . . . The most noticeable difference between Mind under me and Mind
under Stout seems to me to be that under me the number of book reviews has considerably
diminished. This has been partly deliberate: under Stout there were a great number
of very short reviews, and I have thought (perhaps wrongly) that very short
reviews were hardly of any use. But it is partly, I am afraid, owing to lack of
thoroughly businesslike habits on my part, and partly also because, knowing what
a tax I should have felt it myself to have to write a review, I have been shy
about asking others to undertake the task. Whatever the reason, I am afraid it is
the case that I have failed to get reviewed a good many books which ought to
have been reviewed." After reading these honest words of Professor Moore —
a good editor and a perfect gentleman, who was fanatical about avoiding prejudices
— I went to see Gellner with an open mind. I got on a bus that would take me to
his home, in S.W. 15, and an hour later I found myself on the edge of a middle-middle-class
settlement where houses stood out sparsely, like so many road signs. Trucks and
broken-down little cars sluggishly wheeled themselves through the growing
suburbia carrying vegetables, meat, and a few people to the city. A man was
standing in front of Gellner's house, holding a baby in his arms. It was
Gellner. "Come in! Come in!" he said. Gellner (a man of thirty -four)
proved to be dark, of medium height, and casually dressed. His hair was
uncombed, and he had the air of an offbeat intellectual. We went inside, and he
introduced me to his wife. He was reluctant to talk philosophy while his wife
and the infant were in the room, so we chatted about this and that, and I
learned that he was born in Paris of Czech parentage, spent his boyhood in
Prague, and had come to England with his family just before the war. When Mrs.
Gellner took the baby upstairs, he diffidently pointed out twin tape recorders
in a corner of the living room. "These Grundig machines produced 'Words
and Things,' " he said. "The Memorette recorded my words and a secretary
at the London School of Economics, thanks to this magical Stenorette, transformed
my voice into typed copy." He spoke in a quick and rather harassed way, as
though the tape recorders were at that moment catching his words on an
ever-shrinking spool. "I was going through the Times correspondence the other
day," he went on. "I have kept a complete file of it. I was elated to
find that most of the people lined up on my side." As far as Gellner was concerned,
I gathered, all philosophers at Oxford were more or less alike, since all of
them were interested only in linguistic analysis. ("Oxford
philosophy," he said, was a misnomer, since it grouped the philosophers by
the setting of their practice, rather than by the linguistic method which they
all shared in common.) Instead of regarding phi-losophy as an investigation of the
universe — or knowledge as a sort of inventory of the universe ("There are
more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"),
to which wise men from the beginning of time had been adding — the linguistic
philosophers handed over the universe to the students of the natural sciences
and limited philosophy to an inquiry into rules of language, the gateway to human
knowledge. They analyzed language to determine what could and could not be said
and therefore in a sense what could and could not exist. Any employment of
words that did not conform to the rules of dictionary usage was automatically
dismissed as nonsense. "But I answer," Gellner said, "all words
cannot be treated as proper nouns." To clarify his point, he read a
passage from one of his Third Programme broadcasts: "The . . . reason why
the dictionary does not have scriptural status [according to him, all
linguistic philosophers use the Oxford English Dictionary as the Holy Writ of
philosophy] is that most expressions are not [proper] names; their meaning is
not really exhausted by the specification of their use and the paradigmatic uses
that occur in the dictionary. Their meaning is usually connected in a
complicated way with a whole system of concepts or words or ways of thinking:
and it makes perfectly good sense to say that a word, unlike a name, is
mistakenly used in its paradigmatic use. It makes sense to say this although we
have not done any rechristening and are still continuing to use it in its old sense."
He pegged the rest of his criticism on the practitioners of linguistic
philosophy. "Out of the bunch of Oxford
philosophers," he said, "I suppose I have the strongest aversion to
Austin, who in some ways typified the things I dislike about them most. I found
his lecture technique a creeping barrage, going into endless detail in a very
slow and fumbling way. He used this style to browbeat people into acceptance;
it was a kind of brainwashing. The nearest I got to him was on some committees
that we were both members of. I always took some trouble not to get to know him
personally, because I disliked his philosophy and I knew that sooner or later I
would attack him and I didn't wish to be taken as a personal enemy. With
Austin, I had an impression of someone very strongly obsessed with never being
wrong, and using all kinds of dialectical devices to avoid being wrong. He
intimidated me with his immense caginess. Like Vitters, Austin never stated the
doctrines he was trying to get across — or, actually, the crucial thing was
stated in informal sayings, which never got into print. Thus he artfully
shielded himself from challengers. To Oxford philosophers Vitters, like Austin,
is another little god who can do no wrong. They like Wittgenstein mainly because
he gave up his achievements in the technical field and his power as a mathematical
magician for the ordinary language of a plain man — or, rather, the kind of
ordinary language that an undergraduate who has studied the classics at Clifton
and the Greats at Corpus can take to pieces." Linguistic philosophers were
thought to alleviate cerebral neurosis, Gellner said. To understand them, he believed,
one had to turn to sociology, his present professional interest. "About
the social milieu from which these Oxford philosophers arose," he went on
rapidly, "I can say nothing except what I have already said in the ninth
chapter of my book. On second thought, perhaps there is one improvement that,
on the basis of my reading of C. P. Snow, I could have made in my chapter."
Gellner said that had Snow's brilliant pamphlet "The Two Cultures and the
Scientific Revolution" existed when Gellner wrote his book, he would have
invoked it, for Snow's characterization of the two cultures was right up his
philosophical alley. "The milieu of linguistic philosophers is a curious
one," Gellner continued. "As Snow in his pamphlet, points out, there
are these two cultures — a literary one and a scientific one — and traditionally
the literary one has always enjoyed more prestige. But for some time it has
been losing ground; technology and science have been taking its place. Only in
Oxford has the literary culture managed to retain an unchallenged supremacy.
There Greats still remains at the apex of the disciplines, and within Greats
the brightest men are selected to become philosophers. But is there any
intellectual justification for this self-appointed aristocracy? Is there any
widespread theory that anybody can subscribe to as to why the Greats form of
philosophy is the highest sort of activity? I say no. The literary culture
would have perished a long time ago if it weren't for the social snobbery of
Oxford and her self-perpetuating philosophers. Linguistic philosophy is nothing
more than a defense mechanism of gentleman intellectuals, which they use in
order to conceal the fact that they have nothing left to do." Turning to
his Stenorette tape recorder, Gellner asked me, "Would you like to hear
something I was dictating this morning? It really sums up my position, and in a
sense you could say it is the essence of 'Words and Things.'" I nodded,
and he flicked a switch. "Philosophers in the past were proud of changing
the world and providing a guide for political life," the voice whispered
through the little speaker of the tape recorder. "About the turn of the
century, Oxford was a nursery for running an empire; now it is a nursery for
leaving the world exactly as it is. The linguistic philosphers have their job
cut out for them — to rationalize the loss of English power. This is the sociological
background which is absolutely crucial to the understanding of linguistic
philosophers." Gellner stopped the machine and said, "There you have
my whole sociological analysis. Full stop. In 'Words and Things,' I used
Thorstein Veblen for the sociology of the philosophers. If I were writing the book
now, I would use Veblen and Snow." Gellner picked up a copy of Commentary
from the coffee table and read me a sentence or two from its review of his
book, which implied that he had written "Words and Things" because he
had failed to get a cushy job at Oxford. "Dash it, job-hungry people do
not write my sort of book," he said. "How nasty can you really get?
As far as professional philosophy is concerned, ‘Words and Things' ruined my
future rather than secured it. I attacked the philosophical Establishment, and
as long as the present philosophers remain in power, I will never have a
position at Oxford. Whether I will be accepted again in philosophical circles
remains to be seen." Gellner offered to drive me back to the city. For transportation
he had a small truck, which he used for getting to the London School of
Economics when he missed his commuter train. We bounced noisily along the road,
Gellner making himself heard intermittently over the engine clatter. He had
more or less given up formal philosophy until the philosophers should once again
address themselves to "great issues." While waiting for the change,
Gellner was studying the Berbers of Morocco. He visited them now and again and
observed their social habits. He considered himself a synoptic thinker — one who
saw things as a whole, from the viewpoint of their ultimate significance. He
was not a softheaded visionary, and his education at Balliol, traditionally the
most rebellious Oxford college, had prepared him to battle with the
philosophical Establishment for his unpopular views. He thought that with
"Words and Things" he had galvanized men of good sense into taking
his side. Gellner left me reflective. I was sorry that my first philosopher
should dislike his colleagues so much. I was sorry, too, that he should turn
out to be a harassed man. But then I knew well that prophets are made of
strange stuff. Next day, I walked round to Chelsea to have a talk with Earl
Russell at his house. He opened the door himself, and I instantly recognized
him as a philosopher by his pipe, which he took out of his mouth to say,
"How d’you do?" Lord Russell looked very alert. His mop of white
hair, swept carelessly back, served as a dignified frame for his learned and
animated eyes — eyes that gave life to a wintry face. He showed me into his
ground-floor study, which was sandwiched between the garden and the street. It
was a snug room, full of books on a large number of subjects: mathematics,
logic, philosophy, history, politics. The worn volumes stood as an impressive
testament to his changing intellectual interests; they were wedged in with rows
of detective stories in glass-fronted Victorian bookcases. "Ah!" he
said. "It's just four! I think we can have some tea. I see my goodwife has
left us some tea leaves." His "ee" sounds were exaggerated. He
put a large Victorian kettle on the gas ring. It must have contained little
water, for it sang like a choir in a Gothic cathedral. Russell ignored the plainsong
and talked, using his pipe, which went out repeatedly, as a baton to lead the
conversation. Now and again he reached out to take some tobacco with unsteady
fingers from a tin. When we were comfortably settled with our tea, he began
interviewing me. Why was I concerned with philosophy when my life was in peril?
I should jolly well be doing something about the atomic bomb, to keep the
Russians and Americans from sending us all up in flames. Anyone might
personally prefer death to slavery, but only a lunatic would think of making
this choice for humanity. At present, when he wasn't working on nuclear disarmament,
he used detective stories for an opiate. "I have to read at least one detective
book a day," he said, "to drug myself against the nuclear
threat." His favorite crime writers were Michael Innes and Agatha
Christie. He preferred detective stories to novels because he found that
whodunits were more real than howtodoits. The characters in detective stories
just did things, but the heroes and heroines in novels thought about things. If
you compared sex scenes in the two media, in his sort of pastime they got into
and out of bed with alacrity, but in the higher craft the characters were
circumspect; they took pages even to sit on the bed. Detective stories were
much more lifelike. The paradox was that authors of thrillers did not try to be
real, and therefore they were real, while the novelists tried to be real and
therefore were unreal. The things we most believed to be unreal — nuclear war —
might turn out to be real, and the things we took to be the most real —
philosophy — unreal. The savior in him was eventually tamed by the tea, and the
elder statesman of philosophy reminisced a bit about Moore and Wittgenstein,
his Cambridge juniors, and said a few caustic words about today's philosophers
in Oxford and Cabridge. "I haven't changed my philosophical position for
some time," he said. "My model is still mathematics. You see, I
started out being a Hegelian. A tidy system it was. Like its child, Communism,
it gave answers to all the questions about life and society. In 1898 (how long
ago that was!), well, almost everyone seemed to be a Hegelian. Moore was the
first to climb down. I simply followed him. It was mathematics that took me to
logic, and it was logic that led me away from Hegel. Once we applied rigorous
logic to Hegel, he became fragmentary and puerile." I asked if he had
based his system of mathematical logic on the belief that language had a
structure. "No, it is not so much that I believe language has a structure,"
he said. "I simply think that language is often a rather messy way of expressing
things. Take a statement like ‘Every man is mortal.' Now, that has an
unnecessary implicature (fortunately cancellable) when stated in words; that
is, that there is at least a man, that at least a man exists. But if you
translate this statement into mathematical symbols, you can do away with any
unnecessary conversational implicature, as my friend H. P. Grice, of Oxford,
will agree! About Moore — the thing I remember most was his Irish smile. One had
only to see it to melt. He was such an Irish gentleman. With him, manners were
everything, and now you know what I mean by 'Irish gentleman.' To be Left, for
example, in politics just wasn't done.' That was to take something too seriously.
I suppose present-day Oxford philosophy is gentlemanly in that sense — it takes
nothing seriously. You know the best remark Moore ever made? I asked him one
time who his best pupil was, and he said 'Vitters.’ I said 'Why?' 'Because,
Bertrand, he is my only pupil who always looks puzzled in a furrin way.' "
Lord Russell chuckled. "That was such a good remark, such a good remark.
It was also, incidentally, very characteristic of both Moore and Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein was always puzzled. After Wittgenstein had been my pupil for five
terms, he came to me and said, 'Tell me, sir, am I a fool or a wise man?' I
said, 'Vitters, why do you want to know?' — perhaps not the kindest thing to
say. He said, 'If I am a fool, I shall become an aeronaut — if I am a wise man,
a philosopher.' I told him to do a piece of work for me over the vacation, and
when he came back I read the first sentence and said, 'Vitters, you shall be a philosopher.'
I had to read just a sentence to know it. Vitters became one. When his 'Tractatus'
came out, I was wildly excited. I think less well of it now. At that time, his
theory that a proposition was a picture of the world was so engaging and
original. Vitters was really a Tolstoy and a Pascal rolled into one. You know
how fierce Tolstoy was; he hated competitors. If another novelist was held to
be better than he, Tolstoy would immediately challenge him to a duel. He did precisely
this to Turgenev, and when Tolstoy became a pacifist he was just as fierce
about his pacifism. And you know how Pascal became discontented with
mathematics and science and became a mystic; it was the same with Vitters. He
was a mathematical mystic. But after 'Tractatus' he became more and more remote
from me, just like the Oxford philosophers. I have stopped reaing Oxford
philosophy. I have gone on to other things. It has become so trivial. I don't
like most Oxford philosophers. Don't like them. They have made trivial something
very great. Don't think much of their apostle Ryle. He's just another clever
man. In any case, you have to admit he behaved impetuously in publicly refusing
a review of the book. He should have held it over for two years and then
printed a short critical review with Gellner's name misspelled. To be a
philosopher now, one needs only to be clever. They are all embarrassed when pressed
for information, and I am still old-fashioned and like information. Once, I was
dining at Oxford — Exeter High Table — and asked the assembled Fellows what the
difference between liberals and conservatives was in their local politics.
Well, each of the dons produced brilliant epigrams and it was all very amusing,
but after half an hour's recitation I knew no more about liberals and
conservatives in the college than I had at the beginning. Oxford philosophy is
like that. I have respect for Ayer; he likes information, and he has a
first-class style." Lord Russell explained that he had two models for his
pwn style — Milton's prose and Baedeker's guidebooks. The Puritan never wrote
without passion, he said, and the cicerone used only a few words in
recommending sights, hotels, and restaurants. Passion was the voice of reason,
economy the signature of brilliance. As a young man, Russell wrote with
difficulty. Sometimes Milton and Baedeker remained buried in his prose until it
had been redone ten times. But then he was consoled by Flaubert's troubles and
achievements. Now, for many years past, he had learned to write in his mind,
turning phrases, constructing sentences, until in his memory they grew into
paragraphs and chapters. Now he seldom changed a word in his dictated
manuscript except to slip in a synonym for a word repeated absent-mindedly. "When
I was an undergraduate," he said, sucking his pipe, "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." After tea, Lord Russell came to the
door with me. I told him about my intention of pressing on with my researches
at Oxford. He wrung my hand and chuckled. "Most Oxford philosophers know
nothing about science/' he said. "Oxbridge is the last medieval island —
all right for first-class people. But their security is harmful to second-class
people — it makes them insular and gaga. This is why English academic life is
creative for some but sterile for many." The Open Door. 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. Next morning, I dropped in on Iris Murdoch. She, G. E.
M. Anscombe, and Philippa Foot make up the squadron of Oxford's feminine
philosophers, and they and Richard Hare make up the constabulary of moral philosophy
at the university. Among her friends and students, Miss Murdoch has the
reputation of being a saint, and she has no enemies. She's likely to go about without
a thought for her dress and without a penny in her pocket, and this absent-mindedness
perhaps has its source in her custom of living and thinking in two worlds —
philosophy and literature — both of which she inhabits with facility and
aplomb. Two of her engaging novels, "The Bell" and "Under the
Net," I had read very recently, and I was surprised that a writer of such
gifts should be only a part-time novelist. She greeted me at the door of her
study, at St. Anne's, and was immediately drawn to her. She had a striking appearance,
very much like my image of St. Joan — a celestial expression cast in the rough
features of a peasant, and straight, blond hair unevenly clipped. I determined
to steer my way to philosophy by asking her about her writing. "I do my
writing at home, during vacations," she said haltingly. "I settle
down with some paper and my characters, and carry on until I get things done.
But terms I devote mostly to reading philosophy — I haven't written any
philosophy lately. Yes, I do find time to read a lot of novels, but I don't think
I trespass on my serious reading. No, I don't think there is any direct connection
between philosophy and my writing. Perhaps they do come together in a general sort
of way — in considering, for example, what morality is and what goes into making
decisions." She had been an undergraduate at the same time as Hare and,
like him, had read Greats, but, unlike him, she had come accidentally to
professional philosophy. The aftermath of the war put her in touch with
Existentialism. "I was in London during the war," she recalled,
"and afterward went to Brussels to do refugee work. In Belgium, there was
a tremendous ferment going on; everyone was rushing around reading Kierkegaard
and Jean-Paul Sartre. I knew something about them from my undergraduate days,
but then I read them deeply." She returned to England and Cambridge to
study French philosophy and to look at English philosophy afresh. Wittgenstein
had just retired, and she regretted very much that she had arrived too late for
his lectures. His philosophy, however, still towered over the university, and
she was led up to it by J. T. Wisdom, a disciple of Wittgenstein's, and G. E.
M. Anscombe, a pupil and translator of Wittgenstein's, whom Miss Murdoch had
known from her undergraduate days. I asked Miss Murdoch if she had ever seen
Wittgenstein. "Yes. He was very good-looking," she replied, feeling her
way like a novelist. "Rather small, and with a very, very intelligent,
shortish face and piercing eyes — a sharpish, intent, alert face and those very
piercing eyes. He had a trampish sort of appearance. And he had two empty
rooms, with no books, and just a couple of deck chairs and, of course, his camp
bed. Both he and his setting were very unnerving. His extraordinary directness
of approach and the absence of any sort of paraphernalia were the things that
unnerved people. I mean, with most people, you meet them in a framework, and there
are certain conventions about how you talk to them, and so on. There isn't a naked
confrontation of personalities. But Wittgenstein always imposed this confrontation
on all his relationships. I met him only twice and I didn't know him well, and
perhaps that's why I always thought of him, as a person, with awe and
alarm." She stopped talking suddenly, and it was some time before she
resumed. Then she said that she had some tilings in common, as a moral
philosopher, with Miss Anscombe and Mrs. Foot. The three of them were certainly
united in their objection to Hare's view that the human being was the monarch
of the universe, that he constructed his values from scratch. They were
interested in "the reality that surrounds man — transcendent or
whatever." She went on to add that the three of them were very dissimilar.
"Elizabeth is Catholic and sees God in a particular color," Miss
Murdoch said. "Philippa is in the process of changing her position."
As for herself, she had not fully worked out her own views, though sometimes
she did find herself agreeing with the Existentialists that every person was
irremediably different from every other. Would she perhaps compare the moral
philosophy in England and France, I asked, remembering Hare's comment that she
had read the big books. "Some of the French Existentialists feel that
certain English philosophers err when they picture morality as a matter of
consistency with universal rules," she answered. "The Existentialists
think that even though you may endorse the rules society offers you, it is
still your own individual choice that you endorse them. The Existentialists
feel that you can have a morality without producing consistent or explicable
rules for your conduct. They allow for a much more personal and aesthetic kind of
morality, in which you have to explain yourself, as it were, to your
peers." As she talked on, it became clear to me that she was much more an
intuitive person than an analytic one, and regarded ideas as so many precious
stones in the human diadem. Unlike Hare, she found it hard to imagine the diadem
locked up in an ivory tower, or like the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.
"Most English philosophers," she said, "share certain
assumptions of Wittgenstein and Austin. You might want to look into them as persons.
They were the most extraordinary men among us." After saying goodbye to
Miss Murdoch, 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. I walked back to my old college,
where I'd been given a guest room, to pick up my mail, and was delighted to find
a letter from John, who had an uncanny gift of never failing me; he seemed to
sense my questions before I could put them. Just as Oxford philosophy, in his
words, "made a technique of being non-technical," John made a
technique of helping his friends without apparent effort. It cheered me up to
find out that his impatience with philosophy did not extend to his friend's
researches. He said that I shouldn't miss seeing Strawson. "He not only is
the best philosopher in the university but is also unrivalled as a teacher of
it," John wrote. "He's discovering new stars in the philosophical
firmament." Austin, he went on, had his equal in Strawson; indeed, at one
meeting of the exclusive Aristotelian Society, creme de la crime of all
philosophical societies, Strawson had roundly defeated Austin in a disputation
about Truth — a truth that Austin had never acknowledged. Next day, I waited
for P. F. Strawson, Fellow of Uni- versity College, Oxford, in his Senior
Common Room. Strawson, who is considered by his tutor Mabbot to be the most
high-powered and ereative philosopher in England, arrived just a little late
and greeted me apologetically. He had blue eyes with what I took to be a
permanently worried expression, and, at forty-one, looked like an elderly young
man. At lunch, I asked him to tell me a little bit about himself, which he did,
in a modest fashion that by now I had stopped associating with philosophers. He
had been schooled in Finchley, a suburb of London, he said, and he had read for
the PPE about the same time as Hare, Miss Murdoch, Miss Anscombe, Warnock. His
career, like theirs, had been interrupted by the war, the close of which found
him teaching in Wales. "I didn't know what provincialism was until I got
there," he said. He had been delighted to get an appointment to Oxford,
partly because Oxford had more philosophy in its curriculum than any other university.
This, he explained, was the reason that a philosophy planted in Cambridge had
flowered at Ox- ford. Cambridge now had only two eminent philosophers — John
Wisdom and R. B. Braithwaite — while Oxford was swarming with them. Without the
buzz-buzz, there would be no philosophy, he said; the university would be a
hive minus the honey. After lunch, as I climbed up the steps to his room, I felt
I was leaving the Oxford of lost causes behind me — the way he moved suggested
subdued confidence. We sat by the window, and for some time, as we talked, I was
aware of the acrobatic motions of Strawson's legs, which were now wrapped
around one of the legs of a writing table and now slung over another chair. We
talked about other philosophers as so many birds outside preying on the insects
that Austin had dug up for them. I felt I'd reached the augur of philosophy. On
the window sill were lying the proofs of an article called "Philosophy in
England," which was stamped "Times Literary Supplement, Special Issue
on the British Imagination." Strawson admitted that he was the author of the
anonymous piece, and while he went to telephone for some coffee, I glanced,
with his permission, at the first paragraph: An Australian philosopher, returning
in i960 to the center of English philosophy after an absence of more than a
decade, remarked on, and regretted, the change he found. He had left a
revolutionary situation in which every new move was delightfully subversive and
liberating. He returned to find that, though the subject appeared still to be
confidently and energetically cultivated, the revolutionary ferment had quite subsided.
Where there had been, it seemed to him, a general and triumphant movement in
one direction, there were now a number of individuals and groups pursuing
divergent interests and ends, often in a relatively traditional manner. When
Strawson had returned to his chair, I asked him whether he agreed with the
Australian philosopher. He said he did — that "the view of the Australian
philosopher was essentially right." For a fuller statement of his own conclusions,
he modestly directed me to the summary at the end of his article: Even in the
heyday of the linguistic movement, it is doubtful whether it numbered among its
adherents or semi-adherents more than a substantial minority of English
philosophers. It was associated primarily with one place — Oxford — and there
it centered around one man — Austin — its most explicit advocate and most acute
and wholehearted practitioner. Its heyday was short. When a revolutionary
movement begins to write its own history, something at least of its
revolutionary impetus has been lost; and in the appearance of "The Revolution
in Philosophy" [by A. J. Ayer, W. C. Kneale, G. A. Paul, D. F. Pears, P.
F. Strawson, G. J. Warnock, and R. A. Wollheim, with an introduction by Ryle,
1956] . . . and of G. J. Warnock's "English Philosophy” there were signs
that eyes were being lifted from the immediate task, indications of pause and
change. Indeed, the pull of generality was felt by Austin himself, who, before he
died, was beginning to work out a general classificatory theory of acts of
linguistic communication. It is still too early to say what definite directions
change will take. In spite of the work of Ayer, who never attached value to the
linguistic idea, and who, in his most recent book, "The Problem of Knowledge"
(1956), continued to uphold a traditional empiricism with unfailing elegance
and skill, it seems unlikely that he or others will work much longer in the vein.
There are portents, however, of a very different kind. One is the appearance of
a persuasive study entitled "Hegel: A Re-examination" (1958), by J.
N. Findlay. S. N. Hampshire's "Thought and Action,” with its linking of
epistemology, philosophy of mind, and moral philosophy, is highly indicative of
a trend from piecemeal studies towards bolder syntheses; it shows how the
results of recent discussions can be utilized in a construction with both
Hegelian and Spinozistic affinities. Strawson's "Individuals" (1959)
suggests a scaled-down Kantiansm, pared of idealism on the one hand and a
particular conception of physical science on the other. The philosophy of logic
and language takes on a tauter line and a more formal tone in the work of
logicians who derive their inspiration mainly from Frege. Finally, some of the
most successful work of the period has been in the philosophy of mind; and it seems
reasonable to suppose that further studies will follow upon Ryle's
"Concept of Mind,” Wittgenstein's "Investigations,” and Miss
Anscombe's "Intention" and
that, in them, Ryle's explicit and Wittgenstein's implicit suggestions of systematization
will be refined and reassessed. The Australian philosopher had reason enough to
claim that he found a changed situation. When knowledge of this fact of change
finally filters through to those who habitually comment on the state of
philosophy without any significant first-hand acquaintance with it, reactions
of complacency may be expected. In the anticipated face of these it is worth
reaffirming that the gains and advances made in the dozen years which followed
the war were probably as great as any which have been made in an equivalent
period in the history of the subject. A new level of refinement and accuracy in
conceptual awareness has been reached, and an addition to philosophical method
has been established which will, or should, be permanent. I wanted my augur to
divine in more detail the flights of the philosophical birds, and asked him to
tell me what was next. "Fifteen years ago," he began, with a nod to
the past, "we were perhaps over-confident, and dismissed the problems of
the great thinkers of the past as mere verbal confusions. It was right after
the war, and we were mesmerized by Wittgenstein and Austin." Some were still
under their spell, he continued, but within the last five years most had wandered
out of the magic circle. "Was the Russell and Gellner charge of sterility
in philosophy applicable, then, only to the first decade after the war?" I
asked. He thought so, he said, adding, "They are thinking of things like
Austin's Saturday mornings." He went on to tell me that these meetings
admitted only Fellows, no professors or others senior to Austin. Austin and his
pet colleagues – Grice was vice-president -- whiled away their Saturday
mornings by distinguishing shades of meaning, implicatures, and the exact
applications of words like "rules," "regulations,"
"principles," "maxims," "laws." "Even this
method, sterile with everyone else, was fertile enough with Austin and his
closest ‘soul,’ Grice" Strawson said, "though apparently not for
Berlin and Hampshire. Berlin (who wasn’t Austin’s junior) didn't last very
long, because the whole approach was uncongenial to him – he wasn’t English --
and in any case his genius lay in breathing life into the history of ideas. Most
of the other brilliant philosophers, such as my tutor, Grice however, always turned
up, and it was Grice’s St. John’s that Austin liked best" This was perhaps
what gave Oxford philosophy some sort of
unity in the eyes of its critics, such as Gellner and Bergmann, Strawson
thought, but they overlooked the fact that on weekdays Austin did encourage
(with results) people to do research in the philosophy of perception — in philosophical
psychology and philosophical physiology. "Even on his Saturday mornings he
was coming around to more general sorts of questions," Strawson added,
waggling his feet on the table. He then echoed a sentiment I'd heard again and again
at Oxford: "Austin was one of the kindest men in the university." He
went on, "As for the present, we are now rediscovering our way to the
traditional way of doing philosophy. Ryle is composing a book on Plato and
Aristotle, Warnock is reworking the problem of free will, and I'm writing a
little volume on Kant." Thus, everything was now in ferment, and he
imagined that the future might hold a philosophical synthesis chiselled and
shaped with linguistic tools. Strawson's scout brought in some coffee, and both
of us sipped it gratefully. I spent the remaining time piecing together
Strawson's intellectual biography. He spent the early fifties writing
"Introduction to Logical Theory," where he credits his tutor H. P.
Grice, and in which he tried to explode Russell's theory that formal logic was
the road to a perfect, unmessy language. Logic was simple and ordinary language
was complex, Strawson maintained in this work, and therefore neither could supplant
the other. But it was really his "Individuals," published in 1959,
that contained his present views. He devoted the second half of the fifties to
working out the distinctions presented in "Individuals." "In my
'Individuals,' " he said, "instead of analyzing the language, I ask,
following a suggestion by Grice (with whom I gave seminars on Aristotle’s
Categories) what the necessary conditions of language are. Like Kant, I reach
the conclusion that objects exist in the category of space and the category of
time, and that our language is derived from them, rather than the objects from
the language. This enables me to state that the concept of a person precedes
the idea of mind (Grice’s ‘self’) and body — that we think of a person, which includes
mind and body, before we think of either mind (Grice’s self) or body. Through
this concept of person I solve the old dualistic problem — how mind (Grice’s
self) and body, if two separate entities, can interact on each other. I answer
that I can think of myself as an objective person — which subsumes both mind
and body — when I postulate the existence of another person, such as Grice. In
my view, people's existence is objective in the same sense that, for example,
this table is hard. It is hard because everyone agrees that it is hard, and it does
not make any sense to say This is not so,' or to ask whether it is really hard.
But if everyone had a different opinion about whether this table was hard or
not, the fact of the table's hardness would, for that very reason, cease to be
objective, and one would have to speak in some such terms as 1 have the
peculiar sense of this table.' If people had peculiar senses of the table, it would
deprive the table of existence. This argument holds for existence generally.
For the existence of anything would be a private experience if people didn't agree
about it. In my 'Individuals' I establish that agreement about the hard table
is tantamount to saying that the table exists. But the sort of objectivity we
ascribe to the hard table we cannot quite ascribe to pain, for example, because
people do not agree about other people's pain, and people do not feel pain all
at the same time. If they did, we should be able to talk about pain in the same
way that we talk about the hard table. Nonetheless, I am able to establish that
pain is objective." By now, his legs were completely entangled with those of
the hard table, but it was quite clear to me that he was one thing and the hard
table another, and that both of them (hard table more than he) were objective.
It was also quite clear to me that if men were no longer just clockwork
machines, or Pavlov's dogs with ivory-tower bells ringing for their intellectual
food, then metaphysics ( or the mind ) — which until the publication of Straw- son's
"Individuals" Oxford philosophers thought they had discarded forever
— was now back in the picture. With the edifying thought that I had a mind in
some sense as objective as my body, I took my leave of the scaled-down Kant. I
returned to my college and found John in its buttery; he had come up to consult
some classical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. Once beer was served, we
settled down on a bench in a corner. "I don't really want to talk your
subject," John said, smiling, "but my curiosity has got the better of
me." "I've just come from Strawson," I said. "He explained
to me his notions about mind and body, but I did find them difficult. What do
you think about them?" "As I told you in London," he began,
reluctantly but good-humoredly, "I only skimmed the second half of
'Individuals.' " "Yes, yes," I said. "Go on." "The
ideas contained in Individuals' have a very long history," John said.
"Without going into all of it, you know that in the thirties Wittgenstein
talked a lot about the problem of mind and body. His pupils kept elaborate authorized
notes, which were only recently published as 'The Blue and Brown Books.' It was
during his lifetime that Ryle brought out his 'The Concept of Mind,' which galled
Wittgenstein very much, since it contained many of his unpublished ideas. Ryle
had reached most of his conclusions independently, but this did not assuage Wittgenstein,
who had allowed himself to be beaten at the publishing game." John
swallowed some beer and then fumbled in several pockets for tobacco, pipe
cleaner, and matches. As he filled his pipe, he blew a question in my
direction: "Would you like to know something about 'The Concept of
Mind?" I said I would, especially since Ryle, for personal reasons, was
unable to see me. "Well, it is a great work and has had enormous
influence," John said. "In this book, Ryle talks about the question
'What is knowledge?' and also talks, more significantly, about what he calls,
or, rather, what he caricatures as, 'die dogma of the Ghost in the
Machine.'" The behaviorists, he went on to explain, had maintained that
there was no mind but only a body — Pavlov's dogs — and that all statements supposedly
about the mind were covertly about the body. For them, thinking came down to
merely a movement of the larynx, for when you think you can feel your throat move,
as if you were talking to yourself. Ryle became convinced that the behaviorists
had not conquered the classic problem of the mind and the body, and went on to
ask the classic question of how one gets from the mind to the body — how the
two halves meet. When I feel a pain, how do I get, say, from the pinched nerve
ends to sensing a pain; or when I am revolted by a bad smell, how does, say,
the sulphur applied to my nostrils find its way to the inside of my mind? In
"The Concept of Mind," Ryle, like the behaviorists, dismissed the
com- monly held theory, formulated by Descartes, among others, that the human
person consists of two halves, the mind and the body, the body being material,
or visible, audible, tastable, touchable, and smellable, and the mind being
spiritual, or invisible, inaudible, untastable, untouchable, and unsmellable.
He caricatured this dualism as the Ghost in the Machine. The
Ghost-in-the-Machine men thought that when one said "I feel a pain"
or "I see a flash," one was referring to a private mental act; such acts,
unlike the movements of the body, were not veri- fiable except by the person
who performed them. "Ryle, agreeing with the behaviorists, said that in
fact we know perfectly well whether other people want things and hate things
and know things," John continued. "You tell whether someone knows something
by his actions. If I say 'I know how to read,' this doesn't say anything about the
private state of my mind, invisible, inaudible, and so on, but just means that
if you put a book in front of me I can read it. That kind of thing. There's a
whole series of potential statements that can thus be 'unpacked' — Ryle's
expression — at will. Ryle reached the triumphant conclusion that there are not
two parts to the person but, rather, one entity, which is — well, it's not just
body. This conclusion is not quite behaviorism — which doesn't recognize any
mind — but posits a machine with a plus. As always, though, various people were
soon as dissatisfied with Ryle as he had been with the behaviorists, and as the
behaviorists had been with Descartes' Ghost-in-the-Machine man. For my part,
I've never been very clear what's supposed to be wrong with 'The Concept of Mind,'
except that I myself do believe that there is a ghost in the machine and I do
not see how you can get on without one. I realize that this attitude is disreputable.
I mean absolutely disreputable, not just unprofessional, for today my belief
would be considered full of logical lacunae." Because I wanted John to
make a connection between Ryle and Strawson before I lost "The
Concept" in the philosophical fog in my mind, I didn't pause to commiserate
with him but pressed on. "How does Strawson improve on Ryle?" I
asked. "Strawson is very good in this, because he tries to preserve
something from Descartes, on the one hand, and behaviorism revised by Ryle, on
the other," John said. "He says that you can't understand the meaning
of the word 'thinking' unless you can understand both its mental and its
physical aspects. Take pain, for example. Descartes would have said that pain
was only a mental occurrence; the behaviorists, with modifications from Ryle,
said that pain was mere physical behavior — hopping up and down and going 'Ow!'
or something like that. But Strawson says that you can't understand the word
'pain' unless you understand both its aspects: (1) the hopping around and ( 2 )
the f eeling of pain; and that since both other people and I hop around when we
are in pain, and since both also feel it, pain is checkable, is, in a way,
objective. Thus, by including both these aspects in the concept of 'persons'
(which in turn includes oneself and other people), he is able to add further
pluses to the old machine. Strawson's on to something new, but all the
philosophers here are niggling at one or two logical flaws in his chapter on
persons, because most of them still tend to cling to behaviorism. There's one
chap, Malcolm, who carries behaviorism to such an extreme that he says that
even to dream is merely to acquire a disposition to tell stories in the
morning." John rose to go. "I must get to the Bodleian before it closes,"
he said. "One or two minutes more, John," I begged, and he accepted
another half pint. John told me a few things about Ryle. He came from a family
of clerical dignitaries, and this probably explained his anticlericalism. He
was educated in a "marginal public school" and at Queen's. He read
P.P.E.! The Senior Common Room
atmosphere — any Common Room would do — fitted him like a glove. He essentially
liked drinking beer with his fellow-men. He pretended to dislike intellectual
matters and publicized his distaste for reading, but he had been known to
reveal encyclopedic knowledge of Fielding and Jane Austen. He loves gardening,
and he also loved going to philosophical con- ventions, where his charm
overwhelms everyone. Philosophers swarmed round him and he is too kind to them.
He was a perfect Victorian gentleman; he would have been a sitting duck for
Matthew Arnold's criticism of Philistinism, just as he actually was for Gellner's
attack on idle philosophy. "Once, Ryle saw Berlin coming from a performance
of Bach's B-Minor Mass in the Sheldonian," John said. "Berlin was
totally absorbed by the moving experience he had just undergone. Ryle shouted
to him across the Broad, ‘Isaiah, have you been listening to some tunes again?'
" John put down his mug and stood up. "I really must go," he
said. "I hope you won't assume from my hasty picture of Ryle that I don't
like him. Actually, he's a very lovable man, and a highly intelligent one. I
simply don't share his distrust of imagination. You know, Hume devoted very
little space in all his works to the imagina-tion. He said that it was only a
peculiar faculty of mind that could combine primary experiences, enabling one
to picture centaurs and mermaids. Well, Ryle has very much te same conception.
His own images are mundane, like so many gateposts, firm in the ground."
John waved and departed. 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. "What's
on your philosophical agenda?" he asked, between bites. "I'm having a
drink with Hampshire," I said. "You'll like him very much," John
said. "He's still the idol of all the Fellows of All Souls, where he spent
many years before coming to London." He added that Hampshire was a great
figure, who was not only still admired by All Souls men but looked up to by the
whole of Oxford. This I could easily believe, because I remembered how highly
he had been regarded in my own undergraduate days. He had also been passionate
about Socialism in a youthful kind of way, which had made the undergraduate
societies court him as an after-dinner speaker. Intelligent Oxford — at least,
since the thirties — was Left Wing, and he had been a patron saint of the politically
conscious university. His beliefs were reasoned, and he was emotionally
committed to his ideas — a rare thing for an Oxford philosopher — and because his
convictions were a matter of the heart as well as of the head, he had the rare ability
to electrify clubs and societies. Lie might share his politics with Ayer, but Ayer
had only recently returned to Oxford; besides, Ayer's Socialism was perhaps a
little remote. I asked John what he recalled about Hampshire. "Well,"
he said, "as you probably know, he was a star pupil at his school — Repton
— and was very much under the influence of one of its masters. Hampshire inherited
his liberal principles from his mentor. Sometime in the early thirties, he came
up to Balliol, where he fortified his Leftist views with wider reading. The
last year of the war found him in the Foreign Office, and they didn't know what
to make of him, because he used to start discussions by saying, 'The first
tiling to do is to find out if our foreign policy is Socialistic' Hampshire claimed
he started doing philosophy because he liked to argue, but in fact he avoided philosophical
arguments." Leaving John, I taxied to University College (this time, of
London University ) , and found Professor Hampshire standing on the steps of
the building where he had his office. His hands were clasped rather boyishly behind
his back, and his curly hair was flying in the wind. "Hello!" he
called. "I've just locked myself out of the office." He looked at me
expectantly, as though I might have brought him the key. Taking hold of the handle
of the door, he shook it vigorously and waited in vain for it to spring open.
"I like the Oxford system of not locking doors," he said. "This
sort of thing would never have happened to me there. There isn't a pub for some
stretch." Nevertheless, we started in search of one. We came upon a Lyons
Corner House, and ducked in for some tea, because Hampshire was thirsty.
Sitting down, he surveyed the motley tea drinkers in the room and said,
"This is what I like about London. You always feel close to the
people." But the clatter and noise of Hampshire's people were so deafening
that we were soon driven out. We finally spotted a pub. When we had settled
down in it, I asked him about his latest book, "Thought and Action." "I'm
not very good at summing up my own arguments," he said. "But my view
of philosophy couldn't be further from Austin's. Like the ancient philosophers,
I feel our function is really to advance opinions, and I think philosophy
should include the study of politics, aesthetics . . . In fact, I think it
should be an all-embracing subject. I also think English philosophers ought to
take cognizance of Continental thought. I feel uncomfortable talking about
philosophy. I don't really like to talk about things when I'm writing about them,
and since I write philosophy, I try to avoid it in conversation as much as possible."
But he went on to say he hoped that his new book had put him in the middle of
the cultural stream of Europe. He said that, like Miss Murdoch, he was very much
interested in Existentialism and literature, and, indeed, was now mostly
working on aesthetics. He and Ayer shared many friends, but his closest friend was
Isaiah Berlin. He had just spent two weeks with him in Italy. "Isaiah,
rather indirectly," he said, "does illustrate one great aspect of
Oxford philosophy — the boon of just talking. As you know, he learned most of
his philosophy at the feet of Austin. They were both at All Souls at the same
time, in the thirties, and they used to sit around in the Common Room and talk
philosophy day and night. During the war, once, Isaiah found himself in a
plane, without Austin, and some mysterious thing happened that made him decide
to give up philosophy." Hampshire thought that Berlin now regretted giving
up philosophy, mainly because he missed the intellectual stimulation of
talking. He had no one to talk with about his subject — the history of ideas.
There were only one or two great historians of ideas, and they were not at Oxord,
so Berlin was forced to work in solitude. Since his great conversational gifts
could not be exercised in the service of his work, he relied on an occasional
American postgraduate student who was studying ideas to bring him out of the
isolation ward of his subject. The reason Berlin could not be counted as an
Oxford philosopher was simple. He worked not at pure but at political philosophy.
Where a pure philosopher might begin by asking the meaning of the word
"liberty," Berlin opened one of his lectures by saying, "There
are two sorts of no- tions of the word 'liberty' — negative and positive — in the
history of thought. Kant, Fichte, Hegel believed . . ." Hampshire rose to
get another drink and was pounced upon by a youth of about sixteen who had
heard him speak in a public lecture hall. "Sir, do you mind if I join
you?" he asked, edging his way over to our table. "If you really want
to," Hampshire said, sounding a little discouraged. He bought the boy a
double whiskey and placed it before him. The boy only sniffed at it, while
discomfiting Hampshire with repeated compliments. "I heard, sir," he
said, "you're a man of great vision, really very great vision, and you
believe in equality — independence for Algerians and Maltese." Hampshire
asked him about his interests, and the boy said that he'd always wanted to be
an engineer, but that since hearing Hampshire he had wondered whether he ought
not to be a philosopher. "I'm torn in my con- science," he remarked,
with a sigh. Hampshire counselled him to be an engineer. "In that way, you
can do more for your country," he said. After a while, the boy left, but
the philosophical calm — if it could be called that — of our conversation had
been shattered. Hampshire moved his hands restlessly, and, after some nervous
false starts, began reviewing the gallery of Oxford philosophers. His words
were reeled off in the rapid fashion of All Souls conversation, and the philosophical
lights whizzed past. "On occasion, Witt- genstein would say, "Wittgenstein,
Wittgenstein, Witt- genstein,' the 'W' Anglicized into a soft sound, instead of
the Teutonic 'V,' 'you are talking nonsense,' and he would smite his brow. He
was the only person permitted — and no doubt the only person qualified — to
utter that particular proposition. . . . Among other things, Austin was the
chairman of the financial committee of the Oxford University Press — the
biggest university press in the world. He occupied the post with an enveloping
halo, and his terrifying efficiency raised him above all past and future chairmen.
. . . Elizabeth Ans- combe, in some ways, is like Wittgenstein — she even has
his mannerisms. Her classes, like the Master's, are brooding seances. She wrote
a series of letters to the Listener in which she opposed awarding former Presi-
dent Truman an honorary degree, because of his responsibility for dropping the
atom bomb. She made an extraor- dinary speech at the concilium, saying, 'If you
honor Truman now, what Neros, what Genghis Khans, what Hitlers, what Stalins
will you honor next?' . . . Hare is a little puritanical in his views. . . .
Miss Murdoch is elusive. . . . Warnock talks slowly — a thin sheath over his sharp
mind for those who've only met him once. . . . Strawson, very exciting. Though
sometimes may build a spiral staircase for his thought out of hairsplitting
distinctions. . . . Ayer, like Russell, well known as a philosopher, brilliant
performer on television, who, among all his other achievements, can simplify. .
. . Gellner's charge that these philosophers have things in common will not bear
examination. Sociology can be bad history. Sometimes classifies its subjects of
study indiscriminately. Gellner may be a victim of his own art. Good with the
Berbers." After saying goodbye to Hampshire, I returned to John's rooms
and 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
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment