Essays and Reviews: 1959–2002

Essays and Reviews

A Selection of Books by Bernard Williams

Morality: An Introduction to Ethics

Utilitarianism: For and Against (with J.J.C. Smart)

Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry

Moral Luck

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Shame and Necessity

Plato: The Invention of Philosophy

Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy

…

Collections of Essays Published Posthumously

On Opera

In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument

The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy

Essays and Reviews

1959–2002

Bernard Williams

Foreword by Michael Wood

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Williams, Bernard, 1929-2003.

Essays and reviews, 1959-2002 / Bernard Williams ; foreword by Michael Wood.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15985-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Philosophy, English—20th century. 2. Philosophy, British—20th century. I. Title.

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Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Foreword

In the first of the reviews reprinted in the present volume, Bernard Williams recalls and dismisses what he trusts is an outdated estimation of Plato, sharply expressing his ironic surprise that anyone should ever have offered or accepted it. Far from seeing the Republic as one of the noblest monuments of Western liberalism and enlightenment, Williams finds in it only an extraordinary tissue of historical falsehood and philosophical misunderstanding, and support for a political system … based on oligarchic deceit and a contempt for much legitimate aspiration and human diversity. Plato represents as a system of consent what must actually be, on his own premises, a system of coercion. This is fine, fiery writing and leaves us in no doubt about Williams’s own political and moral position. Or about his interest in the chances and importance of independence of mind. The same review includes a characteristic use and definition of the word provocative. The book under consideration, a reissue of Plato Today, by Richard Crossman, a Member of Parliament and distinguished Labour Party intellectual, is said to be provocative in the best sense—provocative of thought.

Williams had a distinguished career as an academic philosopher—he won a prize fellowship at All Souls, Oxford as soon as he had finished his first degree, and was appointed to a chair of philosophy in London at the age of thirty-four. Later he held chairs in Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley, and from 1979 to 1987 he was provost of King’s College, Cambridge. He chaired a government Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship; he commented frequently and lucidly on many public issues, ranging from religion and law to science and abortion and the future of universities. Much of this work is reflected in this volume, but the essays themselves suggest an intellectual scope and a variety that go beyond even these diverse activities, a life of the mind that only an adventurous mind could live.

Although he was not explicitly or exclusively addressing his professional colleagues in the pieces collected here, Williams always wrote as a philosopher in his own ample sense, insisting that philosophy is doing its job wherever curiosity and thinking come together in any serious or cogent way. Such a position allowed him to pay handsome tribute to the disciplines in which he was trained, both classics and philosophy. Analytical philosophy, he said, offers certain virtues of civilized thought: because it gives reasons and sets out arguments in a way that can be explicitly followed and considered; and because it makes questions clearer and sorts out what is muddled. At the same time Williams was concerned that English (and to some extent American) philosophy had become far too pleased with its aloofness from French and German schools of thought, to the point of regarding them not as philosophical traditions at all but as a form of intellectual circus.

While the influence of Hegel radically changed the rest of European thought, and continues to work in it, the sceptical caution of British philosophy left it spectacularly immune to it—splendidly, but to its undoubted loss.

Spectacularly, splendidly. The note of tribute remains, but the charge of complacency could hardly be clearer. There is a point, we may think, where sceptical caution threatens to outlaw curiosity, and even the notion of inquiry. The point was identified long ago by Descartes, and before him by Montaigne, and Williams comments very astutely on the former’s philosophical irony, the dry joke that opens the Discourse on Method. Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, Descartes says, Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée. We think of ourselves as so abundantly provided with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters do not commonly desire more of it than they already possess. This stealthy (and very funny) proposition allows for all kinds of readings, including the contradictory claims that good sense may be indistinguishable from self-congratulation and that even sensible people don’t want to be more sensible than they have to be. It certainly implies, in our context, that it is difficult for us to see the good sense of others when it doesn’t look like ours.

Williams’s style develops in all kinds of ways over the years, but its energy and clarity never fade, and his central concerns, even across a very wide range of topics, are remarkably consistent. The conjunction of history and philosophy in the remarks on Plato is significant too, and the same pairing appears all the way through these essays and reviews, from the early praise of Stuart Hampshire’s Thought and Action (he regards historical understanding as essential to grasping all but the absolutely basic characteristics of the human mind) right to the very latest entry, entitled Why Philosophy Needs History, an essay closely related to Williams’s work for his edition of The Gay Science (2001) and to his final book, Truth and Truthfulness (2002).

Williams cites Nietzsche on the lack of a historical sense as the hereditary defect of philosophers, and goes on to say that the claim, made in 1878, may seem even truer in the first years of the twenty-first century: a lot of philosophy is more blankly non-historical now than it has ever been. However, the point is not that philosophers should become historians of philosophy:

What matters more is their neglect of another history—the history of the concepts which philosophy is trying to understand. The starting point of philosophy is that we do not understand ourselves well enough. We do not understand ourselves well enough ethically (how or why we should be concerned, positively or negatively, with some human dispositions and practices rather than others); we do not fully understand our political ideals; and we do not understand how we come to have ideas and experiences … Philosophy’s methods of helping us to understand ourselves involve reflecting on the concepts we use, the modes in which we think about these various things; and sometimes it proposes better ways of doing this.

The historical falsehood named in the Plato review arises from a refusal to consult the available record, and the philosophical misunderstanding stems from shabby or sentimental logic. Ignoring realities and misconstruing them, not attending or attending badly: these are our favorite, hallowed methods for error, into which we all fall some of the time.

In such modes we fail variously to get it right, to borrow a phrase Williams uses repeatedly in these pieces. It’s worth saying that there is nothing narrowly positivist or hairsplitting about this demand for a capacious set of accuracies. Williams does not dismiss perspectivism along with relativism, and the suggestion that Alasdair MacIntyre for example, should be more realistic does not imply that the philosopher should lower his expectations of anyone’s paying heed to his brilliant but nostalgic reconstructions of moral history. It implies that he should think more about the way things are and not as they are colored by anyone’s desire and dream. Of one book under review here Williams remarks that it is sometimes inattentive to everyday truths, and it cannot afford to be: no inquiry that is going to help us understand ourselves can do without that kind of truthfulness, an acute and wary sense of the ordinary. The ordinary, we note, and not the so-often mystified ordinary language. When we see the way things are, as Wittgenstein remarked in another context, there is a good deal that we shall not say.

Williams believes then, as many philosophers do not, at least when they are doing philosophy, in concrete historical context, what words and actions mean in their place and time—according to some actual authority in some actual social circumstances, as he says at one point in this book. All our ways of thinking about the world are conditioned by a given historical context of conventions, manners, and interests. For this reason (among others) he recommends the practice of what he calls partial scepticism.

The overall sceptical argument that we know nothing at all about other people’s minds, for instance, is painless, because it is totally theoretical; it is more disturbing to consider that perhaps we know something about other people, but a lot less than we suppose.

This is to say that a great deal of our knowledge and ignorance is not totally theoretical, or indeed theoretical at all, and the idea of painless skepticism recalls Williams’s remark elsewhere about Bertrand Russell’s costless heroics. We might assert, as Henry James did of what he called the real, that the way things are is what we cannot not know. We might, but then we would need also to remember that not knowing what we know is one of our favorite forms of evasion and self-protection.

Williams is also unusual among analytic philosophers in (at least) two other ways: he believes in style, and he thinks it is sometimes worth trying to say what can’t be said. He describes Descartes, whom we have already seen in action, as a philosophical stylist of genius. But then Moore’s famous care and precision, Williams says, are virtues to which he raised an ugly monument in his grinding style, developing a kind of emphatic vagueness which curiously co-exists with the marks of solicitor-like caution. Heidegger’s style is marked by its lack of light and its dire assertiveness, and his thought cannot escape this marking. Style indeed for Williams is an aspect of thought, a convergence literary historians are as likely to miss or refuse as philosophers are. To their serious disadvantage:

for how is one to chart the misunderstandings [of a philosopher], without philosophical understanding of what the philosopher really meant? … philosophical insight is not something separate from the literary understanding of philosophical writing, because it is not separate from understanding philosophical writing at all.

Williams also uses the word style more broadly to signify a way of doing philosophy. Thus he can suggest that Nietzsche, in his inflammatory way, was aiming for his own version of accuracy and truthfulness, and that indeed Nietzsche’s writing offers a valuable general lesson in this respect: that there is no one style in philosophy that displays the need to get it right.

Williams has no time for murky or casual thought. Contradictions in themselves do not make life more abundant. They do not even, much of the time, make it more interesting. Chomsky, we learn, moves with dangerous speed and simplicity between his theoretical preoccupations and the political ideals for which he has so conspicuously stood up. There is real regret in Williams’s noting of a distinguished senior colleague that there is probably a truth lurking in what Ryle says, but his considerations do not bring it to light.

Yet Williams is allowing for a probability of truth even in this case, and he repeatedly shows what must be seen as a form of wisdom or kindness of thought in relation to human need. We might say of many things, as Williams says of religion, that it will be hard to give it up even if it is an illusion. He also reminds us that it is only if religion is true that the most interesting question about it is its truth. If it is false, the most interesting question about it is … the content of what it actually tells us about humanity. Williams finds even much of the most original and thoughtful work in modern philosophy—that of John Rawls and Derek Parfit, for example—just a little airless, not quite attentive enough to the violent and enthusiastic unreasonableness out there in the historical world.

There is one form of alluring falsehood that tests Williams’s kindness to its limits. This is the fancy skepticism found in some deconstructive writing, especially in literary criticism and theory, and sometimes in the arguments of Richard Rorty, which holds that words are all there is or all we can talk about. The rest is silence, or ought to be—a dizzy, literary exacerbation of the last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. As Williams says more than once in this book, citing a colleague at Berkeley, Tell that to the Veterans of Foreign Texts. The glance—I’ve heard this saying too from members of the Berkeley community—is toward a notorious sentence in Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight: the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars and revolutions. If this sentence means, as de Man may well have thought it did, that wars are nothing but texts, then it is heartless as well as untrue. But is this what it means?

Williams’s own generosity of mind helps us to see what is happening. We can ask what needs such claims are supposed to meet, what they tell us about ourselves and others. Manifestly there are many critics and others who have loved the idea of the world as text, to the exclusion of all fleshly pain and sorrow. Equally clearly there are others, and perhaps this set contains even more than the first, who wish to see all talk of text and interpretation as mere obfuscation of the facts we all know. But then we wonder why we or anyone would cherish these simplified, totalizing visions, and our curiosity must wait perhaps on another question, a version of the one Williams takes from Nietzsche and uses to close his eloquent introduction to The Gay Science: "it is a question which he wanted his readers to ask themselves not just at the end of this book, but throughout it and indeed throughout all his books—‘Is that what you want?’ "

Reviewing a book on intellectuals, Williams asked and answered in a short space the difficult question the author, Paul Johnson, had spent over three hundred easy pages avoiding. Although the author’s argument seemed to be that intellectuals are merely celebrated scoundrels, Williams charitably supposed that Johnson really had a better doubt in mind, namely, why should the intellectuals have any authority? Why should anyone take any notice of them—especially if they show no evidence of greater moral reliability or good judgment than anyone else? Williams’s answer was that if a philosopher like Sartre was respected, it was not because he told some luminous truth about humanity, in Johnson’s sneering phrase, but because he understood

that politics necessarily involves ideas, and particularly so when it denies this; that political ideas need the surroundings, the criticism, and the life provided by other ideas; and that some people are able to bring those ideas imaginatively into the thoughts of those who are going to live under that politics.

The last words of this review take us back to Williams’s early thoughts on Plato’s illiberal, coercive vision: the authority of the intellectual … depends on the uncommanded response of those it affects.

A great deal of Williams’s thought comes together in these lines: the life of ideas, even when it is unrecognized, the need for imagination in relation to this life—Williams said of Margaret Thatcher and her supporters, It is not that they have no ideas, but that they lack imagination—and the sense that the best we can do for others in realms of the mind is think with them rather than for them. We can’t command them, and we shouldn’t try to improve them. One of Williams’s most withering remarks concerns his fear that a book under review is trying to do a dreadful thing: to lead philosophy back to an aspiration from which the work of this century has done so much to release it, the aspiration to be edifying.

But we can help without seeking to edify—without even seeking to help—and Williams offers a strong suggestion that is invaluable for all serious thinking about thought. Here even Plato gets a kindly nod: at least he went in for provocation.

As Plato knew, the road to something helpful is not only hard, but unpredictable, and the motives that keep people moving down it don’t necessarily have to do with the desire to help. They include that other motive of philosophy, curiosity. In fact, the two motives cannot really be taken apart; the philosophy that is concerned to be helpful cannot be separated from philosophy that aims to help us to understand.

This is a very intricate claim. Philosophy often wants to help—the starting point of philosophy is that we do not understand ourselves well enough, as I have already quoted Williams as saying—but philosophers themselves may have nothing in mind but their own puzzlement. They may be none the less helpful for that, just as those who advertise their eagerness to help us—think of all those manuals on how to improve our thinking—may do nothing but dump us deeper into our preferred confusion. This is the complex power of Williams’s suggestion. The road is hard and unpredictable, but it is a road. It is our road. We are better off for sharing it, and much worse off whenever we pretend it’s soft or smooth or give up the idea of help altogether.

Michael Wood

Essays and Reviews

1

Plato Today, by R.H.S. Crossman

Twenty-five years ago Plato’s Republic was generally viewed as one of the noblest monuments of Western liberalism and enlightenment. Together with the funeral speech which Thucydides in his history put into the mouth of Pericles, it was thought to represent the summit of Greek political wisdom and moral aspiration, and thus to be a primer and inspiration for the rulers and chief administrators who drew their education from the classics. This view of Plato’s politics has not entirely disappeared, and no doubt still gets an occasional airing at public-school speech days; but effectively it has gone, shown up for the extraordinary tissue of historical falsehood and philosophical misunderstanding that it always was. Its disappearance from serious discussion is in this country chiefly associated with Professor Popper’s massive engine of destruction, The Open Society and Its Enemies; but already in 1937 it had suffered a good deal of damage from the lighter, but still telling, weapons which Mr. Crossman deployed in his Plato Today.¹ This ingenious and stimulating book has now happily been re-issued, with a few changes and a brief new introduction in which Crossman disarmingly gives his reasons for not changing more.

The oddest thing about the once popular view of Plato is that anyone should have believed it. It needed less knowledge of Greek history than was possessed by Plato’s admirers to realise that Platonic political theory represents not the finest philosophical expression of Athenian ideals, but a violent reaction against Athenian democracy and Pericles. Moreover, it needed only a reading of the Republic itself, or so one would have thought, to recognise the political system recommended there as a sclerotic monstrosity, high-principled in intent, but ultimately—and explicitly—based on oligarchic deceit and a contempt for much legitimate aspiration and human diversity. That well-informed and humane persons should have mistaken this either for an ideal embodiment of the principles of the Periclean Funeral Speech, or for a decent form of human life, is surprising.

The first, historical, mistake is chiefly explained, as Crossman remarks, by the refusal to think historically about Plato’s political ideas at all. Part of Crossman’s book is concerned with filling in the historical background, particularly of Plato’s life. It is vividly done; scholarly eyebrows will be raised over some of it, but the main points are firmly made, and one comes out with a genuine understanding of Greek politics. More general doubts may be felt about Crossman’s treatment of Socrates. He anticipates the line taken by Popper: that Socrates, unlike Plato, was a genuine ‘democrat’, an anti-authoritarian questioner who was executed for making a nuisance of himself to the tyrannically complacent. This may be true, but it is harder to prove historically than Crossman or Popper allows. We know that Socrates was associated with an anti-democratic clique, and that his execution was connected with this. Admitting as much, Crossman argues both that Socrates was a democrat and, indeed, a saint, and that the democratic faction which executed him was politically justified in doing so. This curious piece of jugglery seems indicative of more than merely historical uncertainty.

On the question of Plato’s political reputation—why his system should have been thought admirable by people who ought to have known better—Crossman has interesting things to say, both directly and indirectly. Directly, he suggests that a lot of people shrugged off Plato’s more repellent proposals by saying that they were the solutions of an idealist who did not consider the weaknesses of human nature; whereas, as Crossman admirably shows, Plato was obsessively aware of the weaknesses of human nature, and devised his rigid hierarchical structure precisely because he thought there was no other way of disciplining them. Crossman does not underestimate the power and subtlety of Plato’s pessimistic vision. It would have been interesting if he had gone on to discuss Plato’s theory of human nature, and to say something about the complex ways in which this theory allows Plato to represent as a system of consent what must actually be, on his own premises, a system of coercion.

Indirectly, Crossman points to other roots of the traditional admiration for the Republic when, in the non-historical part of his book, he imaginatively presents Plato’s views on such subjects as British democracy and British education, and suggests that these institutions are more Platonic in inspiration than may appear on the surface. He might profitably have added a Platonic estimate of Britain’s mission in the colonies. These parts of the book, in which ‘Plato’ is made to comment on twentieth-century problems, have lost little of their sparkle in twenty years. Some of it is fairly brittle, and Crossman is inclined to subscribe to what might be called the Gallic fallacy, of supposing that political institutions do not stand up to ‘rigorous logic’, when all that has been shown is that they do not stand up to rigorous logic proceeding from inadequate premises. But it is all provocative in the best sense—provocative of thought.

The book ends with an epilogue in which Crossman gives his own views on the Platonic issues of democracy and authority. It is brief and ultimately elusive; it combines in a dizzying way a virtually anarchical radicalism with a fascinated respect for the facts of power. There is an unresolved tension here—the same, surely, as broke out in the convoluted estimate of Socrates’ death. One wonders whether this book, which has in no way dated, shows us not only Plato, but Crossman today.²

Notes

1. Plato Today, by R.H.S. Crossman, MP, rev. ed. (Allen and Unwin, 1959).

2. This review originally appeared as Disbanding the Republic, Spectator, July 31, 1959.

Richard Crossman was a prominent British Labour Party politician, writer, and editor who served in Harold Wilson’s government from 1968 to 1970.

2

English Philosophy since 1900, by G. J. Warnock

It is only in its title that this notably unpretentious book promises more than it gives.¹ It is not a general account of English philosophy since 1900, as it omits moral and political philosophy altogether, and in other fields deals with the work of comparatively few philosophers, and that selectively. These limitations, however, are clearly stated by Mr. Warnock, who explains that his aim has been to make as clear as possible the general character of the philosophical landscape, and that he has deliberately given brief treatment to subjects, such as Logical Atomism, which have been studied recently in other works. The result of these various restrictions is a spare, elegant little book, admirably clear and very well written.

Its simplicity and clarity, however, are not the products only of restricted concerns and expository skill. It has the basic straightforwardness of a moral tale. At the start we are presented with the macabre picture of British Idealism, intellectually corrupt, fraudulent, staggering to its end in delusions of grandeur. Coming from foreign places, its rule was never more than the tyranny of occupation; and the rise of the hero, Moore, to drive it out is an affirmation not only of the light against the dark but of the native against the exotic. In the ensuing struggles, Moore has his allies, not always reliable: Russell, brave but unsteady; Positivism, secretly in love with the metaphysical enemy. The epic of Wittgenstein is also told, not without a slight sense of strain at having to take so extravagant a figure so seriously. With Ryle, victorious peace is almost achieved; and the story ends with Common Sense again on the throne, and the citizens of Oxford, calm but not idle, earning the unambitious rewards of honest toil.

It should be said that Mr. Warnock’s account is not quite as simple as this, and certainly the main divergences between the philosophers he considers are sharply observed and clearly set down. Yet, as he warns us, his preferences are not concealed; it is Moore, and Moore as the defender of Common Sense, who emerges as the most original and important contributor to recent philosophy, and it is in terms of this judgment that the whole account is given. The presuppositions behind this judgment also emerge very distinctly, and it is perhaps the nature of these, and the frankness with which they are revealed, that give the book its undoubted interest and, in a sense, appeal.

The basic presupposition is that metaphysical theses, and even metaphysical perplexity, are always the products, direct or indirect, of theorists, either philosophical or scientific. In a natural state, unharried by theorists, we all hold the Common Sense view of the world, which is (as Mr. Warnock says Moore found it to be) perfectly unsurprising, undistressing, quite certainly true (p. 55). Indeed, it seems that even the activities of theorists can never more than momentarily upset this view of the world: It appears to me most evidently true that, in its simple foundations, our ordinary ‘way of seeing’ the world is absolutely stable and obstinately unshakeable … It is doubtful how far even Berkeley was able to retain the full sense of his vision for more than an occasional moment; one cannot so easily shake off what is natural to one’s species (p. 142). One result of this is that persons who claim seriously to be metaphysically disturbed are likely to be either in an unbalanced state or, quite possibly, insincere; those who are not will be relieved to learn that to practise philosophy in the manner of Moore, it is not necessary to have (as most of us doubtless have not) nor to pretend to have (as some at least would be unwilling to do) large-scale metaphysical anxieties (p. 55). This view of the origin and nature of metaphysical disturbance is a parallel—one might almost say, a recurrence—of a Rousseauesque view of the natural man corrupted by the machinations of priests and kings.

Now one might admit that in the matter of metaphysical scepticism about such things as the existence of the external world, there is something in the Moorean claim that no sane person seriously doubts the truth of common-sense beliefs. But even in this sort of case, it is most implausible to suggest that the origin of metaphysical doubts lies in the activities of theorists. For instance, Mr. Warnock considers the metaphysical view of the mind (closely related to scepticism about the external world) as a man inside. He mentions, and rejects, the idea that the roots of this view lie already in the structure of our ordinary language about the mind, and finds a ready diagnosis of the trouble in a misunderstanding of the findings of neurophysiology and a tendency to assimilate the workings of the nervous system to the familiar workings of a telephone exchange. This diagnosis is absurd. For the man inside is already there with Descartes, and (though he was not worried by solipsism) as good as there with Plato—neither of whom—not even Descartes—was driven to the picture by reflections on neurophysiology, nor, one supposes, the telephone exchange. Of course, both were theorists; but the naturalness of such a picture for Plato, and the apparent cogency of Descartes’ meditations, might suggest that the man inside is something which they found as theorists rather than invented. It is surely not irrelevant in this connection that the belief in some sort of human soul, possibly separable from the body, seems to be about as old as the human race, and so, presumably, not younger than common sense. The idea, however, that there is naturally a problem about consciousness, and that the man inside is a picture naturally associated with this problem and lurking even in common sense, is not sympathetic to Mr. Warnock.

It is not clear how far Mr. Warnock confines the priests and kings thesis to such matters as the existence of the external world. At some points he seems to suggest that any form of large-scale metaphysical anxiety is gratuitous; elsewhere he admits that there are periods when at least some forms of metaphysical anxiety would be at least not patently insincere. The present time, however, is not one of them. In a chapter where he considers and seeks to justify a lack of metaphysical disturbance among present Oxford-style philosophers, he mentions the previous associations of metaphysics and religion, and goes on to say: (metaphysics) could be expected to show some decline when very many people neither have, nor appear to be much oppressed by the want of, any serious religious convictions … Metaphysics, like religion, ought not to be manufactured in deference to any supposed requirements of intellectual decorum, or in the pursuit of some once genuine fervour which, in present conditions, would be synthetic or simulated (p. 145). These are honourable remarks, inasmuch as, if there is nothing to be worried about, it is certainly dishonourable to simulate worry. Their suggestion, however, seems to be that there is at present nothing to be metaphysically worried about: if this were not the suggestion, the statement that many people are not worried would be merely irrelevant, and no justification of metaphysical inactivity would have been given. And this suggestion is downright astonishing. In fact the whole underlying thesis of this book is astonishing; all the more so for the air with which Mr. Warnock presents it, as one soberly recognizing obvious truths which incomprehensibly escape the notice of others.

It is unhappily probable that some readers, particularly among the unprofessional audience for whom the book is chiefly intended, may be tempted, in their puzzlement at this attitude, to diagnose it merely as a certain parochial and academic complacency. This uncharitable reaction would be over-hasty: the sensitivity with which the book is written, the acuteness of its reasoning, and its moral overtones, all demand some deeper characterization of its implausibility. Such a characterization really awaits a proper study of the concept of common sense and of the peculiar role it plays in some contemporary philosophy. However, one might say in general that what the attitude of Mr. Warnock’s book is most like is that of a work of metaphysics; there is much the same difference between this attitude and complacency as there is between Leibniz and Pangloss. As in some works of metaphysics, notable intelligence is deployed in distorting the facts of human experience to fit an extremely simple view of human nature, science, and philosophy. It would be unfair not to add that, like such works, the present book derives from this activity a genuine unity and even a certain fascination.²

Notes

1. English Philosophy since 1900, by G. J. Warnock (Oxford University Press, 1958).

2. Originally published in Philosophy, 1959, © Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission.

3

Thought and Action, by Stuart Hampshire

The chief and persistent influence on British philosophical thought about the human mind has been Descartes. To say this may seem a paradox, since there is no more hallowed contrast in the history of philosophy than that between on the one hand the rationalism of Descartes, with its far-reaching trust in the powers of pure theoretical reason to discover the ultimate structure of reality, and on the other hand the profound empiricist strain of British thought, which has again and again returned to the view that nothing substantial can be learned about the world save through the laborious, tentative, and always corrigible process of generalising from sense-experience and empirical observation.

Nor is this hallowed contrast confined to abstract philosophical opinions about the nature of science. It is equally a platitude—though a much vaguer one—to contrast a certain abstract and theoretical spirit more generally present in French thought with the more cautious, down-to-earth, and perhaps pedestrian temper of English intellectual activities. These contrasts are of course very rough and ready, and, in their more general form, a great deal of rubbish has been talked about them by both the contrasted parties. For all that, there is something in this platitudinous distinction; how then can it be that the prevailing influence on British philosophy of mind is nevertheless Descartes?

There are three main ways, I think, in which it is so. First, British philosophers have constantly returned to Descartes’ fundamental belief, that the mind is in some fundamental sense distinct from the body, and that knowledge of the mind, its contents and activities, is more direct than, and is not reached through, our knowledge of the external world, where included in the external world are our bodies. This belief, in different forms, is to be found in the three pillars of British empiricism, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and once more in the logical positivism famously expounded in A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic. It is only recently that this belief has been fundamentally challenged, in, for instance, Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind and the later work of Wittgenstein.

The second point of contact between the British tradition and Descartes is rather different. It lies in their common neglect of, indeed contempt for, history as a form of human knowledge, and of historical understanding as a vital part of man’s understanding of his world. Although the British tradition differed from Descartes about the nature and methods of natural science, it shared his belief that natural science was the paradigm of human knowledge. Natural science seeks, and seems able to attain, knowledge of universal truths about the world, which hold irrespective of time and place; compared with this, historical study, immersed in the unsystematically particular, may seem a poor thing.

The third point of contact is to be found in a comparable neglect of æsthetics. For Descartes, our experience of art could scarcely appear as a form of knowledge or rational activity at all, and he accordingly has nothing to say of it. The poverty of British æsthetics, at least among philosophers, is notorious. This point is certainly connected with the last, and it is significant that the two British thinkers who are outstanding exceptions to the prevailing neglect of history—Burke and Collingwood—are exceptional also in having serious views about the nature of art. Of course, there is an important difference between the neglect of these things by Descartes, and their continuing neglect by the British tradition: the latter needs explanation, while the former scarcely does. Descartes, a scientist and mathematician in the 17th century, was almost bound to take such a view; what is odd is that in Britain it should persist so indomitably to the present day. I suspect that the explanation constitutes a rather engaging paradox of the history of ideas: it is precisely the empirical and cautious temper of British philosophers that has left them in this curious, perhaps not entirely recognised, alliance with the rationalist Descartes. The elevation of historical understanding and æsthetic experience to central places in the picture of man’s consciousness took place, after all, amid the deep metaphysical thunder of 19th-century Germany, above all in Hegel. While the influence of Hegel radically changed the rest of European thought, and continues to work in it, the sceptical caution of British philosophy left it spectacularly immune to it—splendidly, but to its undoubted loss.

It is necessary, I think, to bear in mind these continuing Cartesian characteristics of the British philosophy of mind to appreciate fully the originality of Stuart Hampshire’s book.¹ It is not just that he adopts an anti-Cartesian view of mind and body: this has been seen recently, in the work of Wittgenstein and elsewhere (although Hampshire’s own views take an importantly different direction from most of what has appeared). More immediately remarkable, at least, is the way in which his book runs against the other two traditions. Throughout the book Hampshire shows that he regards historical understanding as essential to grasping all but the absolutely basic characteristics of the human mind. There are some features of human thought that are basic and essential, those that follow from man’s nature as a bodily creature in a world of solid objects, who can move and act in this world, and communicate with others of his kind with whom he lives in society. Beyond this minimum, however (and one of Hampshire’s chief concerns is to determine what this minimum is), the forms that human thought takes, the structure of language, the content of morality, the styles of art, are to be understood historically. All our ways of thinking about the world are conditioned by a given historical context of conventions, manners, and interests; hence also they inevitably change. Thus in anything that concerns human thought and achievement, there are, if any, very few final truths. Hampshire is prepared, indeed, to take the step, not common with philosophers, of applying this conclusion to his own theories: all determinations of the powers of the mind, any theoretical picture of the nature and interdependence of human capabilities and characteristics, must be provisional, his own not excepted.

This concern for the historical dimension runs, though not always obviously, all through the book. His concern for æsthetics is equally deep, but shows itself only towards the end of the book, where he makes it clear that in his view no philosophical theory of mind can be complete unless it gives some account of the universal human desire to produce and appreciate works of art.

Thought and Action covers a large range of topics, from the nature of language and linguistic reference, via the nature of intention and intentional action, to the freedom of the will and morality. In this, too, it is distinguished from much contemporary British work. Hampshire writes in his introduction:

It has been the discipline of this time to answer separable questions separately, to analyse complex difficulties into elementary difficulties. The rewards of this discipline have been very great: accuracy, clarity, and sometimes even conclusiveness. But it is possible that there are purposes and interests which require that accurate and step-by-step analysis should not always be preferred to a more general survey and more tentative opinions, even in philosophy.

Such a general survey he attempts, and the result is a book of extraordinary sweep, often sketchy and tentative in the connections of its argument, but rich in the variety and novelty of the considerations it assembles.

The free and diverse moment of its thought makes this an exciting and stimulating book; it does not, however, make a book notably easy to digest or summarise. Nor is it made any easier in these respects by the way in which the exposition is put together. The style is extremely graceful, but its literary merits go with a refusal to use the more ponderous devices of footnote and reference which, like metal spikes in mountain-climbing, may be inelegant but do help one over the steep places. In the first chapter, for instance, a number of pages are devoted to arguments which are in fact objections to views held about perception by the logical positivists and similar thinkers, but there is nothing in the text to tell one this. It would also have been helpful, I think, to get us to see the direction of his views, had Hampshire made references to writers whose opinions on various topics he either shares or has been interestingly influenced by. Some of what he says about action and self-knowledge, for instance, bears important relations to some French writing which has not previously had much effect in this country: to Sartre and, in particular, Merleau-Ponty, among contemporaries, and to an earlier tradition going back to Maine de Biran.

Hampshire’s austerity in such matters extends also to the devices of cross-reference, sub-heading, and so on; the book is a painting rather than a blue-print, a plant and not an engine. The argument grows, winds, doubles back; and, like a tendril, it tends to proceed spirally, returning to a side of the question it has visited before, but now a little further on. Its direction is not always easily followed, but it has a direction.

The general direction is, very roughly put, something like this. Hampshire starts from the question of what it is for us to be able to talk about the world, and finds as necessary for this our ability to pick out and refer to enduring objects in our environment. What sorts of distinctions we make, and what sorts of similarities we perceive, between features of the environment will to a great extent be a product of society, convention, and history; but that we do identify and refer to enduring objects is a necessary part of our having a language at all. In all these opening sections in particular, Hampshire’s argument can be seen as revolving round the old distinction between what is natural and what is conventional; the possibility of language has a natural basis in the activity of pointing, but so long as this basic pointing function is preserved, the forms of a particular language will be conventional.

Hampshire then goes on to argue, in a number of interestingly different ways, that the possibility of language, and so of any conscious thought, presupposes that the beings who use the language should be able to move and act in the world. Here he rejects an important Cartesian idea, that we could image a conscious being whose experience was purely passive, who was a mere recipient of experiences. Such a being, for Hampshire, could not think about or have any concept of his experiences, for mere experiences could not satisfy the conditions of reference and identification necessary for conscious thought. (Here it is that Hampshire argues against the logical positivists; some of his arguments are similar to later views of Wittgenstein.²) In order to be able to identify and refer, we must be able to perceive enduring objects distinct from ourselves; the notion of perceiving presupposes that of being able to perceive things from different points of view—for it is precisely this that distinguishes genuine perception from illusion. The notion of perceiving things from different points of view presupposes, in turn, the idea that I can move about in the world, and orientate myself, as a bodily object, in relation to other objects.

The idea of moving myself is then taken up and connected with the notions of action and intention. These notions are, in Hampshire’s view—here again a radical departure from Cartesianism—connected with my ability to have direct knowledge of what I am doing or trying to do: it is essential to the idea of an action, he writes, that a person’s knowledge that an action of his is his own action is not the conclusion of an inference. This knowledge that I have of what I am doing, though in certain cases it may indeed be minimal, is always with me when I am conscious. If someone is conscious, then there is always an answer to the question what is he doing?; and a man’s own knowledge of what he is doing, not merely in some instantaneous sense, but in the sense of a project in which he is engaged which reaches out beyond the present moment, is the foundation of a man’s consciousness of his own identity. (Here Hampshire comes particularly close to phenomenological thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty.)

From this point, two lines of thought in particular are taken up. First, some connections are explored between the idea of action and that of thinking or more generally having conscious psychological experiences. So far from the latter being contrasted with action, as it always has been in the Cartesian tradition, Hampshire finds the two to be intimately connected. So far from an emotion, for instance, being a merely passive experience which may, as a matter of fact, lead to or cause overt action, it is rather, according to Hampshire, a kind of inhibited action; the emotion of anger, for instance, is to be understood as a by-product of the activity, itself rather sophisticated, of stopping myself lashing out or something similar. Similarly, the psychological state of belief is to be understood as a kind of inhibited assertion. (These somewhat paradoxical statements may be an oversimplification of Hampshire’s view. I suspect, however, that the view as it stands is in any case rather paradoxical.)

The second line of thought pursued from here is an exploration of the notion of practical knowledge and its connections with intention. Hampshire holds, if I understand him, that there are two sorts of such knowledge. One is a certain non-propositional knowledge, which a man has when he knows what he is going to do or, more particularly, how he is going to do something, but has no words in which he could describe this. Thus an actor, for instance, may know how he means to play his part in the sense that he can show you how he does it, and can recognise if it has failed to come off, but could not describe how he was going to do it. The other sort is propositional: a man can tell you what he is going to do, in the form of a definite statement of intention.

Statements of intention are contrasted with predictions of what a man will do, and it is argued that there is a sense in which the two cannot be combined: a man cannot intend to do a certain thing if he knows on independent grounds, say some considerations of psychology, that he is going to do the thing anyway. This consideration introduces a doctrine of freedom. I am free, roughly speaking, in so far as my actual actions match my genuine intentions and projects. In particular, the neurotic is not free, since he is constantly frustrated in what he is consciously trying to bring about. In his case, this is because there is something else which in a rather different, subconscious sense, he is trying to do; the way to liberation is through an increased self-consciousness which it is the aim of psycho-analysis to bring about. Here Hampshire (like Spinoza, on whom he earlier wrote a book³) connects the idea of freedom with that of self-knowledge, and, by connecting this notion with the doctrines of Freud, tries to give an interpretation of free and responsible action which will avoid the difficulties and obscurities of the bare notion of the freedom of the will, as it has been inherited from Kant and the Christian tradition.

Finally, these notions of freedom and responsibility are applied, rather briefly, to an account of morality and the relations of morality and art. In Hampshire’s view, the central notion of morality is not, for instance, that of obligation or duty, but that of a good man. He shares with Aristotle the idea that to say of a man that he is good is to say that he is perfect, fully-developed, as a man; almost, that he is an excellent specimen of the type man. Every morality, accordingly, must contain as its central notion an idea of what a man should be, some doctrine of what is essentially human excellence. Such a notion Hampshire himself seeks to develop in outline from what he has said about the nature of man; in particular, the perfect man must be one who is to the fullest extent free, whose projects are based on a rational understanding of his own dispositions and capabilities, and which accordingly are not destroyed or frustrated by features of himself for which he has not allowed.

Merely from this summary (and I have left a lot out) it will be seen that the book contains a multitude of ideas variously and suggestively connected together. There is a good deal in the book that will certainly provoke doubt and disagreement. In particular, it is unclear that Hampshire has made his case about pointing as the natural foundation of linguistic reference; it may well be that pointing itself, in the sense that is required, is something that presupposes a linguistic context. On the relation between different sorts of intention, again, Hampshire’s thesis is obscure, both in respect of the non-propositional sort of knowledge of my intentions, and in the relations between the doctrine that to act intentionally involves having a certain sort of knowledge of what I am doing, and the assertion, which Hampshire thinks appropriate to neurotic behaviour, that a man may act in ignorance of his real intentions. The account of morality, further, is markedly schematic and incomplete, and some well-known difficulties in the Aristotelian notion that to be a good man is, roughly, to be good at being a man, are not really answered. More general criticism of the chapter on morality will also occur to the reader; whether, for instance, the rough picture of the good life (remarkably like Spinoza’s in its tone of anti-romantic heroism) could serve for other than a rather special sort of life attainable only in favourable circumstances, and whether allowance has been made for the somewhat unsympathetic consequences of this; and whether Hampshire has not incorporated into the notion of morality itself considerations that unduly narrow the concept, so that certain sorts of morality—religious morality, for instance—become on his view well-nigh incomprehensible.

It will be a long, and fruitful, task for anyone interested in human thought and morality to discuss the difficulties of Hampshire’s book. I should like to end by raising just one, more general, sort of criticism. It is my impression that Hampshire’s account pays insufficient attention to the applications of natural science to human behaviour, and that some of his distinctions and conclusions may well be called in question when one considers the possible advances in these sciences or even, in some cases, their present state. Now Hampshire certainly denies this, and part of his purpose, like that of Spinoza, is indeed to give an account of human action and freedom compatible with scientific enquiry into the mind. His success in this purpose, however, seems much less striking when the scientific advances for which his position is prepared turn out to be those of psycho-analysis—the new positive science of human conduct, as he optimistically terms it. To say that a view of human freedom is compatible with scientific advance because it is compatible with developments in psycho-analysis is much like saying that a material is uninflammable because it doesn’t burst into flames when one shines an electric torch light on it. This is all the more so in Hampshire’s case because he takes a markedly non-deterministic interpretation of psycho-analysis, considering it in effect as a theory of freedom. This is certainly a possible interpretation of psycho-analysis, and it may well be the most illuminating. However, it is only dubiously compatible with a good deal of what Freud, at least, says, and perhaps makes it even less clear than before, if this is possible, in what sense psycho-analysis is a positive science at all.

The really effective enemy against which