224

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIEs

play did not any longer correspond to his more mature thinking.
At the time that he received the Nobel prize he had declared to a
journalist his intention of writing a trilogy on love. What is this
love that he had in mind? We do not know. In l'Exil et Ie Royaume
solidarity with man fills his heart once more with joy,but at the
same time there is hovering over these stories the veiled presence
of sadness. The title itself means that the world is at the same time
man's kingdom and the country of his exile. Camus comes to
understand that love is useless, that often the outcome of love is
hatred and persecution, as is clearly shown in the instance of Daru's
disillusionment. In exchange for his love he receives hatred:' dans
ce pays qu'il avait tant aime, il etait seul '. The answer to this
dilemma was to be given by Camus in a novel, a play and the essay
Le My the de Nemesis. He was working at this trilogy when the
drama of Villeblevin brought the plan to a tragic conclusion.
l' Universite de Louvain
2.

J. KEUNEN

Thought and Action. By STUART HAMPSHIRE. London: Chatto

and Windus, 1959. Pp. 276. 25s.
There have in recent years been various indications of dissatisfaction with certain trends in current Oxford and Cambridge
philosophy. There has been a feeling that detailed analyses of
minute particulars has led to neglect of some broader and more
pervasive issues. It has been realised that certain problems are
distorted when isolated for analytic purposes from their living
context. Thus, the problem of the self has been treated exclusively
as a logical, linguistic or epistemological problem, without reference
to the awareness of self in moral experience. The problems of
self-consciousness, of personal identity and of memory have been
treated as cognitive problems, without reference to action, intention
or project as modes of experience of self-continuity through time.
tn general, philosophy of mind has been separated from philosophy
of morals. In tum, philosophy of morals has been developed as
if it had to do with 'stands' or decisions not with reasoning; or
as if it concerned the meaning of sentences, not the meaning of
human life .
.Among recent expressions of reaction against these trends one
could name Professor John Macmurray's 1953 Gifford Lectures,
The Self as Agent; Professor C. A. Campbell's 1953-'54 and 1954-'55
P.ifford Lectures, On Selfhood and Godhood; Professor Michael
Polanyi's Personal Knowledge. These studies, however, come from
traditions earlier than or other than the philosophy of linguistic
analysis. When a distinguished member of the group of younger
Oxford philosophers writes in a somewhat similar strain, this is

STUART HAMPSHIRE:

Thought and Action

225

more of a phenomenon and is likely, given the demography of

present-day British philosophy, to have a greater effect. Mr.
Hampshire has indeed always been a non-conformist 'Oxford
philosopher'. In Ii. remarkable symposium on 'Philosophy and
Beliefs' published in The Twentieth Century in June 1955, inwhlch
he was joined by Miss Iris Murdoch, Professor Isaiah Berlin and
Mr. Anthony Quinton, Mr. Hampshire made the following remarks,
which excellently illustrate his unconventional point of view.
It is not just words that the analytic philosopher is properly
concerned with the more or less contingent facts of language, but
with concepts. And not just with any concept, but with those most
general concepts or notions on which all thought and language
depends. As philosophers, we are interested in the most general
features of the whole apparatus of concepts, in the different categories of thought and knowledge. . .. It seems to me that the
French existentialists have been right to bring questions of ethics
into the centre of the so-called theory of knowledge, and to consider
questions of personality, and of our knowledge of other minds and
of self-knowledge as a whole, as being problems of action as much
as of knowledge in the contemplative or speculative sense. . .. I
suspect that it is particularly the more rationalist philosophers-Aristotle, Leibniz, Frege, with their more formal arguments about
existence and identity, who will seem least irrelevant or superseded
in the near future; while the theory of knowledge coming from British
empiricism-from Locke, Berkeley,Humt}-will seem comparatively
irrelevant, at least to contemporary interests.
In one of the more remarkable books to emanate from Oxfor.d
philosophical circles recently, his book on Spinoza (Pelican ,Philosophy series, 1951), Mr. Hampshire had shown a critical respect
for metaphysical thinking, at least as interrogation, if not as answer.
It is a plain fact (he wrote) that certain large metaphysical ques"
tions naturally present themselves to reflective people in alm.oSL;tll
periods as being problems that require ananswer... Th,ey are
called metaphysical questions first because they seem to be forever
beyond the scope of any of the special sciences; they seem always
to lie on the frontiers of organised knowledge,however far these
frontiers may be extended. . .. Why should it be assumed'that
all genuine questions Inust be scientific questions? (p. 213). . ; .
Our patterns of thought and forms of language are constantly
changing, in response to new needs and new interests; we cannot
therefore,lay down, once and for all, the limits of intelligible diS~
,course in such, a way as to exclude the asking of questions which
are not scientific but metaphysical; wherever we try from time to
time to draw the frontier of scientific enquiry, metaphysical questions
will always arise precisely on this frontier (p. 223). But, perhaps,
in the last resort, no one will fully understand and enjoy Spinoza
who has never to some degree shared the metaphysical temper,
which is the desire to have a unitary view of the wodd and of mart's
place in it (p. 225).
"

226

PHILOSOpmCAL STUDIES

There is no need to say, therefore, how eagerly' people who

'shared the metaphysical temper' and were dissatisfied with
contemporary Oxford moral philosophy, looked forward to the
appearance of Mr. Hampshire's book, Thought and Action. The
author announces his intention in the preface as being 'to bring
moral argument nearer to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of mind nearer to moral argument '. He remarks that ' there
are purposes and interests which require that accurate and stepby-step analysis should not always be preferred to a more general
survey and more tentative opinions, even in philosophy'. We have
expressed below, while reviewing Dr. Ewing's book, our sense of
the need for a 'metaphysics of moral man'. Another young
Oxford-trained philosopher, Mr. Bernard Mayo, in his book Ethics
and the Moral Life (1958), reviewed here two years ago, made some
moves in this direction, stressing the moral importance of 'the
old-fashioned but perennial question: "What is the nature of man
~nd what is man's place in the universe?'"
. Mr. Hampshire's
book promised to be an important contribution to this new sort
of thinking. In many ways it is indeed an important contribution.
In other respects it is seriously disappointing. But on any reckoning it is the work of a highly intelligent and responsible mind, and
deserves serious consideration.
'ltis a difficult book. The style gives an appearance of clarity
which is deceptive. In short runs, the reasoning is clear and
simple; but it is perplexingly difficult to get a firm grasp of the
argument of a chapter, or of the plan of the book as a whol~.
Indeed one must pronounce the book as badly composed. There
are many repetitions. Austere in words, severely elegant (as Mr.
Quinton called it) in style, the book is nevertheless discursive in
argument and (to quote Mr. Quinton again) elusive in organisation.
'
One of the striking themes of Mr. Hampshire's book is the firm
and'rel;lsonCd rejection of Humean empiricism. It could Seem
plausible, he argues, to represent the self as 'merely a SUccession
of sensations' only if one absurdly, thought of the self as a recipient
of, impressions and not also as a former of intentions, a doer of
actions (pp. 94, 126). The empiricist tradition has falsely repre.sented hum:an beings 'as passive. observers receiving impressions
nOm .. outside" the mind, where the "outside" intludestheir
6WitPO-dies '(P;47).{lf is worth remarkingt}tat Commentators
on'Moore;s celebrated' Proof of an External World' do not Seem
to'fud it incongruous that Moore should have regarded his own
tWo. hands as objects in the external world!) This had led to such
j~~u
. . dO:'proble.ms as that of whether or how an.external world can
bcknown; how the continuity of the self .can be proved; how
other minds can be known. The way of escape from these unreal

STUART HAMPSHIRE:

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227

problems is to see the self as situated from the beginning among

objects on which it acts, towards which it has intentions. The self
is a situated self, not an acosmic observer. The existence of an
external world' of persisting objects is a logical necessity and not
a contingent matter of fact' (p. 40). He elsewhere spoke of it as
a 'necessity of discourse '. The pseudo-problem of how the past
can be known has arisen from the empiricist error of privileging
the present sense impression; it vanishes when we see the self as
engaged in continuous processes, guided by intentions which link
the future with the past (pp. 71-2, 126).
The flow of intention into action, the intention governing and
directing action, requires a continuity of self-consciousness that may
be forgotten if philosophers concentrate solely on our knowledge
of the external world through the senses. . .. The notion of a
perceiving subject is also the notion of a continuing, embodied and
intentional agent, who displaces or is displaced by the things around
him (p.85).

Mr. Hampshire stresses the importance of verbs and their persons

and tenses in language and experience. The real Cogito for him
is not ' I think, therefore, I am, whether there be a world or not';
but 'I act (on, or with a view to . . .), therefore I am in the
world' (cfr. pp. 71-89). This seems obvious enough; but as
Wittgenstein was always stressing, the occupational disease of
philosophers is precisely the forgetting of the obvious. One recalls
Russell's outburst, that the 'occurrence of tense in verbs is an
exceedingly annoying vulgarity due to our preoccupation with
practical affairs '.
Important and valid though all this be, Mr. Hampshire's concept
of being-in-situation is nevertheless curiously jejune and even in a
certain sense behaviouristic. A privileged role is given to the act
of pointing in the building up of experience. An external world
is declared to be ' a logical necessity' because ' below the level of
communication in language and the making of statements, there
is the act of intentional pointing, away from oneself and towards
an object '. This act of pointing' is performed from a point of
view and standpoint, which is the present situation of myself, as
a persistent object placed among other objects' (pp. 40-1). Surely
,one must have the same reaction to this as one has to Moore's
hands-up argument: there is something wrong with talking about
myself as an ' object among other objects '.
Mr. Hampshire thinks it important that ' the etymology of the
word "intention" suggests that the gesture of pointing from a
place to a place is the natural and concrete expression of intention'
(pp. 54-5, 82). But is not this way of talking open to the same
criticisms as those which have demolished Russell's theory of
meaning and Wittgenstein's (Tractatus) picture theory of language?

228

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

Mr. Strawson,' Miss Daitz,Miss Anscombe, Mr. Geach have shown

how little is understood of language or intention when thought of
in terms of pointing. Indeed Mr. Hampshire himself showsaware~
ness of this on a later page when, introducing a critique of Russell's
Theory of Descriptions, he remarks:
Philosophers h!\.ve in the last twenty years carefully studied the
use of referring expressions. . .. But they have been inclined to
isolate the act of making a reference to something in words from a
more general account of intentional attitudes, of which this linguistic
act is only one example. They have concentrated attention upon
linguistic behavio)ll". . .. The actual use ,on a certain .particular
occasion of certain words, and the gesture of pointing that may
perhaps accompany the words, have sometimes been. taken to be all
that is involved in the notion of referring to a particular thing. This
is .a mistake (p. 200).
But this, to our mind, could stand as criticism of much of Mr.
Hampshire's own way of speaking in his Chapter I, on 'Persons
and their Situation'.
It is surprising that almost nothing is said in this book about
inter-personal 'situation'. Mr. Hampshire's concept of 'beingin-situation' has undoubted affinities with .those of Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty; it is notably different fromthat of Gabriel Marcel,
for whom being for man is essentially being in relation with other
men in a world of objects charged with possibilities of human
fulfilment. Professor Macmurray, whose analyses are sometimes
paralleled in Mr. Hampshire, would probably feel that the world
of Thought and Action is still too much a world of ' events', or at
least a world' of atomic selves acting beneath the level of personal
relations at which the religious question becomes inescapable. The
most serious defect of Mr; Hampshire's analysis of the human
situation. is precisely, as we shall see j its total ignoring of the
religic:)Us question.
A 'second and connected element -in Mr. Hampshire's antidote
t~ empiribism;' is the appeal to language-iti-use, to language forms
as part of the natUral history of human societies. Several pseudoproblems disappear, he 'holds, when we take the view..ipoint of
language. Language as such is social, and solipsism is unstateable
in it (pp.'67, 89)~ Language is determined by our "practi0al
interests: as' social beings!'; and in tum the' resources of' our
language limit provisionally our practical interests and goals of
action. There; is a reciprocal interaction' between language' and
action, we might say, between description or analysis and intention
or evaluation. ,-Therefore one must in philosophy consider human
beings simultaneously as observers and as agents and as languageusers. If one considers the theory of mind and ethics separately, both
are apt to be falsified ' (p. 67);

STUART HAMPSHIRE:

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229

But the appeal to language as what Wittgenstein called' part of

our natural history' is often thought to involve the impossibility
of any sort of absolute, unchanging truth. Mr. Hampshire, like
many Wittgensteinians, seems committed to a form of linguistic
relativism. This tendency is perhaps reinforced in him by the
historicism of Collingwood by which he has been greatly influenced.
It is indeed a delicate task to do justice to the 'historicallysituated' character of human thought, without falling into an
historicist relativism which would merge philosophy and theology
into history and substitute the description of opinions for an
enquiry into their truth. Mr. Hampshire himself, in his paper in
Contemporary British Philosophy (1956) warned of ' the new form
of scepticism' found among linguistic philosophers, for whom
, philosophy should be descriptive only and not constructive'. But
he does not entirely escape from that pitfall himself.
This is particularly the case in his discussion of Descartes' Cogito.
If we reformulate this in terms of linguistic analysis, we shall see,
he argues, that' I ' is not the' god-like' 'transcendent observer "
the' detached mind' of Descartes (pp. 67-8, 83); but' a reference
to something that indubitably points to itself and away from itself,
and that directs its attention in one direction rather than another....
The first person singular is the nucleus on which all the other
referential devices depend' (p. 87). This cogito of action disqualifies all body-mind dualism.
We have no reason to look for some criterion of personal identity
that is distinct from the identity of our bodies as persisting physical
objects (p. 75). It is.a necessary, and not a contingent truth that
my body has not been removed, physically separated from me (p. 81).
From his anti-absolutist linguistic starting point Mr. Hampshire
has thus arrived at the remarkably absolute conclusion: 'I do not
know how I would identify myself as a disembodied being and I
do not know what this hypothesis means' (p. 50).
This is in plain contradiction with what he said in Spinoza (p. 109):
, In fact our ordinary language is fundamentally Cartesian, at least
in the sense that it allows us to conceive of the powers of the mind
as logically independent of the body, however constantly they may
in fact be found to be casually connected'. (This, incidentally is an
interesting example of how indecisive and ambiguous is the appeal
to ' ordinary language' in philosophy). In the same book (p. 176),
he much more cautiously and modestly concluded: 'It would be
the work of a much longer study to show exactly where the limits
of understanding may be expected to fall when we try to talk of
the eternity of the human mind.' In Thought and Action itself he
recognises one type of experience which seems to escape in part
from the' cQrpocentric predicament' (if the term may be allowed),
namely aesthetic experience.

230

PHILOSOPIDCAL STUDIES

The recognised value of aesthetic experieQce is partly a sense of

rest from intention, of not needing to look through this particular
object to its possible uses. This type of ' pure' experience, when
it exceptionally occurs, does in fact give a sense of timelessness, just
because it is contemplation which is as far as possible divorced
from the possibility of action (p. 119).
This is the only kind of 'transcendent' experience which Mr.
Hampshire recognises. We object to his critique of Descartes, not
because it sees the problem as a linguistic problem, but because it
so miserably narrows the field of our language about the self.
We contcmd, paradoxically though this may sound, that much of
Descartell' reasoning may fairly be represented as being an analysis
of our language of self-reflection; but that Descartes commanded
a wider ~md clearer view of the range of that language than do his
modern Uritish critics. Descartes poses the problem of the ' I who
doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, imagines,
perceives'; he reflects 'on the circumstance that I doubted and
that coruequently my being was not wholly perfect'; he enquires
'whence I had learned to think of something more perfect than
myself'; he asks, ' how could I know that I doubt, desire, or that
something is wanting to me and that I am not wholly perfect, if
I possessed no idea of a being more perfect than myself, by comparison of which I knew the deficiencies of my own nature.' With
this we may compare the following from Mr. Hampshire:
When on reflection I find my own existence indubitable, I am
finding the existence of one enduring thing of a particular kind
indubitable, the thing to which I am referring by the word 'I',
and which can be distinguished from other things of the same kind
by its position, the position that I suggest when I point to myself
and away from myself to other things (p. 88).
Descartes' procedure differs from Mr. Hampshire's, not essentially
as an aprioristic contrasted with a linguistic method, but as a more
adequate compared with an inadequate survey of self-reflective
language. We are justified in borrowing a phrase from Wittgenstein
and saying that Descartes 'assembles more reminders' of the
varieties of the experience of selfhood.
Mr. Hampshire's alternative to Cartesian dualism is a monism
of intentional behaviour which would seem difficult to distinguish
from Professor Ryle's ' dispositional behaviourism' or indeed from
behaviourism tout court.
We have no reason to look for some criterion of personal identity
that is distinct from the identity of our bodies as persisting physical
objects (p. 75-he claims that this is a liberation.) As soon as one
realises that the using of language, both in the practical calculation
that may accompany physical actions and in the making of statements, is itself a kind of behaviour interwoven with other kinds,
one is free to consider the range of essential human interests afresh
and without prejudice (p.91).

STUART HAMPSHIRE:

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231

Liberation indeed it could be, provided the 'behaviour' of the

person were surveyed in its totality. But unfortunately, modern
anti-cartesians have only exchanged one 'mental cramp' for
another, the' cramp' of naturalistic monism for that of exaggerated
dualism. One may deny that man is an angel using a body-machine,
without having to define him as 'an object placed among other
objects'. The book remains to be written by an Oxford philosopher
which would adequately explicitate Professor Ryle's 'tautology
which is sometimes worth remembering '-that men are men.
Mr. Hampshire thinks that linguistic philosophy excludes finality
or absoluteness of truth in any sphere.
When the division of human powers, of perception, thought, and
feeling, was deduced from a metaphysics that showed man's necessary place in the scheme of reality, as in the philosophy of Spinoza,
it was not unreasonable to claim some finality for the principles
of division. But if the philosophical enquiry starts from the
institution of language, as it has existed in all the variety of its
forms, no finality can be claimed for any system of distinction
(p.234).

This is a characteristic contemporary attitude. We shall meet it,

and examine it more fully, in connection with moral principles
later on. It rests on a confusion concerning the term 'finality'.
If a philosophical system or proposition claims finality in the sense
of offering a ' clear analysis' which' removes mystery' and ensures
that problems (such as ' the relations of mind and matter') 'need
puzzle people no longer', then we have a closed metaphysics which
puts an end to wonder and enquiry and thus to the life of thought.
But these quotations are from Lord Russell. If a method of philosophical analysis promises us that questions about how we understand the minds of others 'offer no mysteries' being simply
, methodological questions' about ' how we establish and how we
apply certain sorts of law-like propositions about the overt and the
silent behaviour of persons " then again we have closed metaphysics
which trivialises human relations, offering to others the supreme
insult of claiming to see through them. But these quotations are
from Professor Ryle.
It is the metaphysics which expresses the 'final truth' about
man in terms of ' soul', 'spirit', 'desire for God', which alone
is ' open' to indefinite enquiry, reflection, rediscovery. These terms
are not ' clear and distinct' and ' closed' ideas which end puzzlement, but 'open' ideas, to possess which is to be depossessed of
the limitations of one's ' particular standpoint', and to be liberated
for the life-long pilgrimage of reason into truth. This is the liberation that Mr. Hampshire seeks. He writes:
No description of things around me can be complete and final;
no communication of feelings, or insight into the feelings of another,

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PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

can be ideally complete and ideally adequate. . .. We look for

knowledge that is more and more objective and less and less limited
by our particular standpoint. . . . (p. 68).
He will find this language echoed, not by fellow linguistic philosophers, but by Christian philosophers, by neo-thomists, by Christian existentialists.
Mr. Hampshire declares the principal purpose of his book to be
'to show the connection between knowledge of. various degrees
and freedom of various degrees' (p. 133). He has excellent things
to say on the problem of free will and determinism. His central
affirmation is that knowledge makes men free; the increase of
scientific knowledge of and scientific prediction about human
behaviour increases rather than diminishes the sphere of human
liberty. This is substantially different from the thought of Spinoza
where Mr. Hampshire seemed to have considerable sympathy for
the Spinozist and naturalistic view that 'in proportion as our
scientific knowledge, or knowledge of causes, increases, we necessarily abandon the primitive conception of human beings as free
and self-determining in their choices'; and that 'as psychology
progresses, the sins and wickedness of free agents come to be
regarded as the diseases of patients' (pp. 157-2). In the present
work, he uses language whose closest parallel would be found in
any. manual of scholastic ethics.
It seems that it is through the various degrees of self-consciousness
in action, through more and more clear and explicit knowledge of
what I am doing, that in the first place I become comparatively
free, free in the sense that my achievements either directly correspond
to my intentions or are attributable to my incompetence or powerlessness in execution, which mayor may not be venial. Whether
and under what conditions the powerlessness is blameworthy is a
separate, moral question, or rather set of questions. . .. It plainly
depends on the type of incompetence or powerlessness, the type of
blame envisaged or the social purposes that the verdict is designed
to serve and on the particular circumstances of the case (p. 177).
On the question of predictability and freedom, he writes:
It is not by itself a threat to the reality of human freedom that
some close observers are able to predict accurately and with confidence, that which a man is going to do before he actually does it.
. . . He is a free agent in so far as his behaviour is constantly
correlated with his evident or declared thoughts and intentions at
the time of action rather than with antecedent conditions of some
other kind (p. 178).
In common with the existentialists, Mr. Hampshire suggests that
some forms of determinism may be evasions of responsibility, what
Sartre calls 'bad faith'.
Every man has a responsibility to look at all times for the best
action of which he is capable at that time, and not to acquiesce in
his natural and socially conditioned limitations of thought without

STUART HAMPSHIRE:

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233

having tried to overcome them. . .. 'I am not the kind of man

who would ever have thought of trying to do that, and I cannot be
expected to '-this is an incomplete form of excuse, as it stands.
The question would immediately arise-' Is there anything that
prevents you and that makes it impossible for you?' (pp.186-7).
How do we tell the difference between merely not resisting the
impulse and finding it irresistible, between not overcoming a felt
resistance and finding it insuperable? (p. 192).
There is a Christian as well as an existentialist ring about this
affirmation of the inescapability of moral responsibility. 'I cannot
escape the burden of intention, and therefore of responsibility,
which is bestowed upon me by knowledge of what I am doing ...
the knowledge becomes decision' (p. 175).
Mr. Hampshire admirably formulates what we have been maintaining in these reviews to be the basic problem for moral philosophy, the problem of the nature of man. 'The natural starting
point', he writes, 'is the concept of man itself' (p.231). In
Spinoza, he had seemed to sympathise with the view that this is
a question for natural science: 'Man is part of nature, and therefore the moralist must be a naturalist' (p. 121). He has since
become conscious that morality precisely differentiates man from
the rest of nature. The question 'What is man?' becomes the
question, 'What constitutes being a good man?' and this is a
request for a statement of 'the distinctive powers of humanity'
(p. 231). Hence
it is possible to characterise philosophy itself as a search for a
, definition of man', and to interpret the great philosophers of the

past as each providing a different account of the powers essential

to men. . .. Each philosophy of mind provides a different ground
for a stated or implied definition of the essential virtues of men
(p.232).
But' the great philosophers of the past' erred in their approach
to a definition of man. Plato, for example, defined man through
his relation to ' supersensible and timeless realities', thus making
his mundane life seem unimportant and unreal (p. 257). But this
is to define away what makes man precisely human, his temporal
existence. Aristotle too defines man away, by assigning to him
an 'in1mutable essence' and thus denying his mutability and
contingence.
Aristotle believed that the nature of man was something finally
ascertainable, fixed and certain, because he held that correct definitions and classifications of things corresponded to some single eternal
scheme of reality. No critical philosopher can now believe that an
enquiry into the concept of man, and therefore into what constitutes
a good man, is the search for an immutable essence. He will rather
think of any definition or elucidation of the concept as a reasoned
proposal that different types of appraisal should be distinguished
from each other in accordance with disputable principles derived

234

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

from a disputable philosophy of mind. He will admit that this is

the domain of philosophical opinion and not of demonstration
(p.233).
The comparison is obvious with Sartre's doctrine that' man's act
is always beyond his essence' or that 'his existence precedes his
essence'.
To take the exegetical points first, we suggest that the whole
meaning of Plato's ' definition of man' is that naturalistic factors
do not ' add up to ' the totality of the ' mundane life of men'. It
is precisely his 'relation to supersensible and timeless realities'
which, for Plato, gives to man's temporal existence the qualities
of dissatisfaction, disquiet, restlessness, enquiry, discussion, aspiration. And these are the qualities which Mr. Hampshire seeks in
a definition of man. Aristotle similarly feels obliged to give man
an ' eternal essence' precisely in order to account for the qualities
which distinguish man alike from 'eternal objects' and from
physical objects. Man's essence is imparted by his soul; but man's
soul for Aristotle is never' finally ascertainable, fixed and certain',
is never fully knowable, because it is an endless and insatiable
capacity, a perpetual becoming; Aristotle's' intellect' is ' somehow
all things'.
Mr. Hampshire quite rightly says that
if we have no final insight into the essence of man and of the mind,
we have no final insight into the essence of philosophy (p. 243).
Philosophical enquiry is interminable and ... is necessary at every
stage of thought (p.272). This philosophical enquiry, always
resumed. is itself a necessary part of extending men's freedom of
thought (p. 273).
This sentence is the last word of Mr. Hampshire's book. But
again we ask, how many philosophers endorse this view to-day
apart from the neo-thomists, the French spiritualists, the theistic
existentialists? It is the metaphysics of the human spirit which
asserts the essential incompleteness and perfectibility of philosophy
against all the closed, reductionist metaphysics of empiricism,
positivism or linguisticism. The medieval scholastics used to say
opus rationis semper perfectibile. St. Thomas did not say that
reason was system, but that reason was life. A Thomist writer,
Father Jolivet, has recently defined philosophy as ' experience put
to question by wonder'. Mr. Hampshire says 'it is not so much
the dogmatism as the abstractness of traditional metaphysics that
makes it now seem useless'; and that both linguistic analysis and
phenomenology are now agreed that metaphysics must be replaced
by description. But Plato, Aquinas, Gabriel Marcel have this in
common that they each begin by essaying a concrete description
of integral human experience, and then ask what are the implications of this description. Their answer is in each case a refusal
of ' explanation' in the sense in which explanation is understood

STUART HAMPSHIRE: Thought and Action

235

in science or in mathematics. The inadequacy of naturalistic

description and of scientific explanation is in large part what they
mean by metaphysics.
Mr. Hampshire lays great stress upon the corrigible, disputable
character of all assertions about the nature of man and about morals.
There are some concepts that are permanently and essentially
subject to question and revision in the sense that the criteria of
their application are always in dispute and are recognised to be at
all times questionable. They are essentially questionable and corrigible concepts. . .. Prominent among these perpetually disputed
concepts are the concepts of morality, of art and of politics (p. 231).
We suggest, however, that there is ambiguity in the terms
, questionable' and ' disputable'. If the questioning has no criteria
for a valid answer, then it must break down in mere scepticism.
If dispute is of interest merely as dispute, and not as a means of
advancing towards truth, then we must abandon moral philosophy,
and substitute for it the history of moral opinions. In one passage,
Mr. Hampshire comes very near to granting this. He writes :
Since the concept of mind is . . necessarily an open and always
disputable concept, men can only learn, in their own experience
and in the history of art, morality and custom, all that has reasonably
been included among the specific forms of human virtue (p. 247).
But Mr. Hampshire does not want to be merely historicist. Even
in this passage, the inclusion of the word reasonably shows this.
The history of moral opinions has nothing to do with their
reasonableness. Mr. Hampshire's is a moral enquiry. 'The only
critical ethics " he says in the same chapter, 'is a story of ideals
of human excellence that at the same time points the way to the
future of these ideals' (p. 239). But we submit that he, and many
contemporary philosophers who share these views, have not perhaps
reflected enough on the ways in which alternative or conflicting
ideals are related to one another. Systems of moral ideals are not
just alternative and parallel 'ways of life'; they each claim to be
right ways of life for the whole man and for all men. They must
be compared in respect of their adequacy to the human situation;
the capacity of each to include and to surpass the positive values
enshrined in the others; their respective power to permit and to
prescribe the full development of the whole human person.
Also, ' ideals of human excellence' can and must be compared
with one another in the light of common principles and ideals and
definitions of man which they can be seen more and less adequately
to embody. Comparison ofthem with one another implies common
standards to which they in varying degrees approximate. In the
history of morals there are discerned movements of moral progress,
movements of moral degeneracy; and progress and regression are
meaningless without fixed goals. Mr. Hampshire's own words,
such as 'corrigible' and 'disputable', require agreed norms and

236

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

principles. To correct a defective concept is to appeal to a valid

one; to revise an unsatisfactory concept is to invoke an adequate
one. To engage in moral dispute is to presuppose the possibility
of moral agreement. To question moral principles is to believe
in the possibility of moral answers. As David Pole said in his book
on Wittgenstein: 'It is what we may call the postulate of rationality
that ideally agreement is possible'.
Furthermore, sets of moral ideals cannot be surveyed in a spirit
of mere detached questioning. They assert a claim on me; they
purport to give, not just a description of what men have been, not
just an optional proposal of what men can be; but they state a
definition of the sort of man I ought to become. As Mr. Hare
put it: 'We cannot get out of being men, and therefore moral
principles, which are principles for the conduct of men as men ...
cannot be accepted without having a potential bearing upon the
way we conduct ourselves '. What Mr. Hampshire has said earlier
about the inescapability of moral responsibility applies here too.
I cannot 'escape the burden ' of feeling myself judged by moral
standards when I act with knowledge. I cannot question my moral
standards at the same time as I acknowledge them to be moral.
When I do question a moral principle, this can only be in the name
of a further moral principle, itself unquestioned. Mr. Hampshire
seems to forget here that my standards judge me rather than are
judged by me.
He is concerned to allow for moral progress. He rightly maintains that the modern analysis of moral judgments in terms of
commands or imperatives must be rejected because it does not
allow for development of moral insight.
No place is allowed for moral enquiry, for the practical thought
that explores new possibilities, that attempts new discriminations.
No place is allowed for a search for an enlarged freedom of
thought. . . . (p. 209).
But again, we suggest that all these terms presuppose absolute
standards. One cannot even speak of progress unless there is a
known direction. Moral possibilities are meaningless except there
are values for them to realise. In fact moral progress in human
history seems to have had two main sources. First there have been
the great philosophical and especially the great religious teachers
who affirmed the absolute value of man as the child of God, and
consequently the absolute duty of love, respect and justice which
we owe to our fellow-men. Then there has been the progress in
non-moral knowledge, and, in modern times particularly the
progress in scientific knowledge, which has created 'new possibilities' of respecting man's absolute value and new and better ways
of fulfilling our absolute duties of charity and justice towards him.
But unless the belief in man's absolute dignity and the absoluteness

STUART HAMPSHIRE:

Thought and Action

237

.of the moral law is present, then the same scientific knowledge will
only create new possibilities for evil.
Mr. Hampshire has two main reasons for rejecting absolute or
trans~ndental moral principles. One is that the categories and
concepts of 'transcendental philosophy' are in fact derived from
-'the distinctions recognised by men', from 'limiting human interests,'
from 'the characteristics of the most excellent human knowledge '.
To attach value to any natural or supernatural entity is necessarily also to single out a human virtue which consists in the habit
of recognising these entities and in some form of active respect
for them (pp. 258-9).
The reasoning is familiar from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It will
not do at all. To be sure human thought is human thought; but
it. does not follow that it can think only human things. The whole
question is whether our human experience of ourselves, of the
world, of human relations, of values, can be fully comprehended
in human concepts, fully described in human language. If it cannot,
then our own 'distinctions', our 'human interests " the 'characteristics of our knowledge' compel us to acknowledge the existence,
within and beyond our experience, of a transcendental or ' supernatural' reality which we know at least through our inability to
,comprehend it fully or describe it adequately. To say that recognising and respecting reality is nothing but a human act of recognition
or respect, is a curious aberration on Mr. Hampshire's part. It has
surely been often enough argued in modern British philosophy
since Wittgenstein, that no act of knowledge is only an 'act of
knowledge'. Concluding Part I of the Philosophical Investigations,
Wittgenstein wrote:
Nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental
activity! Unless, that is, one is setting out to produce confusion.
'In Mr. Hampshire, this is a particularly unexpected sort of error;
for it is sheer ethical naturalism. Reviewing the book in The
Observer, Mr. Anthony Quinton acutely spoke of 'that copingistone of naturalist ethics: the principle that values are dependent
on human interests'.
Mr. Hampshire's second reason for excluding moral absolutes
is, again, one that he shares with most of the Oxford Moral philosophers as well as with the atheistic existentialists. It may be called
the coping-stone of modern liberalism. It is the view that belief
in absolute moral truths entails intolerance, fanaticism, smugness
and hypocrisy, opposition to progress.
.
For a man following a code of explicit and exhaustive instnictions,
moral issues would be matters of casuistry. He would be the type
of a fanatic because only certain already listed features of any
situation would be worthy of serious thought before action. He
would be governed by words, fitting words to facts, as lawyers
must (p.216).

238

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

The adherent of a religious moral code is in this danger. He may

feel he is ' following explicit instructions which he believes to be
God's instructions' (p. 215). His code may seem to him an ' established morality that is already complete' (p. 222). Such a man has
no place left for ' morality as exploratory thinking, as an unresting
awareness of that which he is neglecting in his intentions '. Satisfied
with his code, satisfied with himself, he has
a morality without perpetual regret, because it is without any sense
of the many possibilities lost, unnoticed. This is the unreflecting
state of a morality left to itself.. " Intellectually and philosophically, it often rests on a naive confidence in established classifications
of specific situations, actions and mental processes as being the
permanently obvious and self-justifying classifications (p. 242).
Such a morality is ' abstract', 'unreflecting', ' sheltered'. We are
by now prepared for the key word which British philosophers since
Karl Popper have borrowed from Bergson but have not hesitated
to use in a sense precisely opposite to Bergson's: an absolute
morality is a 'closed morality' (p. 246). Contrasted with it is the
, critical morality' of' changing ideals' (p. 237-8); the historically
progressive morality of 'open and always disputable' concepts
(p.247).
It is really not easy to decide what Oxford moralists have in mind
when they speak in this way of absolute and religious morality. If
it is Christian morality, they would not seem to have reflected
deeply on its nature and precepts. Consider the Ten Commandments; the Sermon on the Mount; the' new commandment'.
, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself ... Love one another as
I have loved you'. Take the parable of the Good Samaritan; take
the sentence of the Judge at the Last Judgment:
As long as you gave not . . . food and drink, housing and
clothing, nursing and respect and love . . . to one of these least,
neither did you do it to Me.
Can anyone seriously pretend that living by this absolute moral
code is to confine oneself to ' only certain already listed features of
any situation'? That this morality can be lived out by routine,
unreflectingly? That one is 'sheltered' by it from 'unresting
awareness' of one's moral unworthiness, from ' perpetual regret .?
That this morality, if really believed to be absolute, can ever be a
, morality left to itself' or will ever give us respite or simply leave
us in peace? Mr. Hare speaks disparagingly of those for whom,
, " Good" ... means simply "doing what it says in the Sermon on
the Mount" ... .' One hopes that when he wrote that he had really
forgotten 'what it says in the Sermon on the Mount' He says
that such people' act always by the book '. If we substitute' New
Testament' for 'book', we shall see at once how thoughtless a
thing Mr. Hare has said.

R.

J.

HIRST: The Problems of Perception

239

The only safeguard Mr. Hampshire recognises against 'closed

morality' is, we learn with some surprise, 'strong aesthetic
experience' .
A morality 'left to itself' will survive unquestioned only if it is
insulated from any serious experience of art: this is indeed part of
the significance of the phrase ' a morality left to itself' (p. 244).
One should have thought that the experience of religion, of sanctity,
had some role here. There is no use, however, in administering
rebukes about this. Let us rather make the sad but salutary.
admission that religion and theology are absent from the intellectual
world that these philosophers inhabit. And let us assume our part
of responsibility for the fact that these philosophers can, apparently
sincerely, so disparage the moral lives of religious people; and
can, with apparent good faith, find religious thinking irrelevant to
their philosophical tasks.

The Queen's University, Belfast

C. B.

DALY

3. The Problems of Perception. By R. J. HIRST. London: George

Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1959. Pp. 330. Price 30s.
Psychologists, physiologists, and philosophers find different
problems in perception, and the interested layman is often puzzled
when he comes to realize how little scientific and philosophic
theories of perception have in common. The approach of this
book is synoptic, in that the author believes that evidence from
scientific theories of perception can be brought to bear upon the
solution of problems traditionally left to the philosopher. Among
problems which Hirst attempts to unravel with the help of
physiology and psychology are those regarding the physical causation of mental events, the status of primary and secondary qualities,
and the pUblicity of perceptual objects.
Hirst begins with an impressive critical survey, in the course of
which he clears the ground of sense-data, linguistic analysis,
idealism (Blanshard's), and parapsychology. This criticism is often
insightful, although not always directed against the most welldeveloped statement of the opposite view. Price (Perception, 1932),
for example, is made to defend sense-data almost singlehandedly,
and might have fared better with the aid of Firth and Warnock
who have written on the subject more recently. Lewis's extensive
contributions to theory of perception are never mentioned, although
the turn of discussion often makes them relevant. In fact there is
a conspicuous absence throughout the book of reference to relevant
contributions by English-speaking philosophers outside the
Commonwealth. Thus when Hirst begins to erect his own structure
in the second half of the book, the ground may not be as clear as
he supposes: Nonetheless, the extent of his preliminary criticism