J. L. Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy
THE PHILOSOPHICAL TREND which afterwards came to be called ‘Oxford Philosophy’ originated principally in weekly discussions by a small group of young Oxford philosophers – the oldest was twenty-seven – which began some time in 1936–7. They were suggested by J. L. Austin, who remained their leading spirit until the war brought them to an end. Austin was elected to a fellowship at All Souls in the autumn of 1933. He had not then fully decided on a philosophical career. He was convinced, so he used to say, that philosophy, as taught in Oxford, was an excellent training for young men; there was no better way of making them rational – in those days his highest term of praise – if only because it generated in them a critical, indeed a sceptical, attitude, the only antidote, in his view, to what he called ‘being chuckle-headed’. He was to modify his view later: even philosophy as he taught it proved, in his view, helpless against the traditional pieties and naive beliefs of some of his most gifted pupils. He complained that, so far from undermining their conventional opinions, all his efforts left the majority of them incurably respectable and dully virtuous.
He knew that he possessed exceptional capacities as a teacher, but he also had a strong desire to do something more concrete and more practical, a job of work, something for which, at the end of the day, there was more to show. He used to tell me that he regretted that he had spent so much time on the classics instead of learning to be an engineer, or an architect. However, it was now too late for that: he was resigned to remaining a theorist. He had a passion for accurate, factual information, rigorous analysis, testable conclusions, the ability to put things together and to take them to pieces again, and detested vagueness, obscurity, abstraction, evasion of issues by escape into metaphor or rhetoric or jargon or metaphysical fantasy. He was from the beginning determined to try to reduce whatever could be so reduced to plain prose.
Despite his admiration for practical experts, he was, in fact, himself preoccupied by purely philosophical questions, and, when he first came to All Souls, appeared to think about little else. The two living philosophers whom he most admired were Russell and Prichard, the first for his original genius, independence of mind, and powers of exposition; the second because he seemed to him the most rigorous and minute thinker to be found in Oxford at that time. Austin accepted neither Prichard’s premisses nor his conclusions, but he admired the single-mindedness and tautness of his arguments, and the ferocity and the total lack of respect for great names with which Prichard rejected obscurity and lack of consistency in philosophy, ancient and modern. His own doctrine of the performative function of words seems to me to owe a good deal to Prichard’s painful self-questionings, about, for example, the logical character of promises. ‘People say that if I say “I agree” to this or that I create rights that were not there before,’ Prichard would say. ‘Create rights? What does this mean? Blowed if I know.’ Austin did not think this, or Prichard’s discussion of the nature of moral obligation, to be either unimportant or illformulated, and talked about it (to me) a great deal in 1933–5.
Our conversations usually began after breakfast in the smoking room at All Souls. When I had pupils to teach I left him by 11 a.m.; but on other mornings I seem to recollect that we often talked until lunchtime. He had at that time no settled philosophical position, no doctrine to impart. He would simply seize on some current topic of the day, some proposition uttered by a writer or a lecturer, and cut it into smaller and smaller pieces with a degree of skill and intellectual concentration which I met in no one else until I listened to G. E. Moore. The most admired philosopher of the 1930s in Oxford was, I should say, Henry Price, whose lucid, ingenious and beautifully elegant lectures fascinated his audiences, and were largely responsible for putting problems of perception in the centre of Oxford philosophical attention at this time. The counter-influence, so far as the young philosophers were concerned, was the mounting revolt against the entire traditional conception of philosophy as a source of knowledge about the universe. It was led by A. J. Ayer, whose paper on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, read, I think, in the spring of 1932, was the opening shot in the great positivist campaign.1 Language, Truth and Logic had not yet been published; nor had Ryle’s views yet advanced, publicly at any rate, beyond ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’.2 Nevertheless the positivist attack, especially in the form of the early articles by John Wisdom at that time appearing in Mind, became a source of illumination and excitement to the younger philosophers, and of considerable scandal to their elders. A sweeping anti-metaphysical empiricism was gaining converts rapidly. Price alone, at this time, while in some respects an Oxford realist, showed understanding and sympathy for the new movement, and was regarded by its members as something of an ally in the adversary’s camp.
The movement grew apace. It had invaded the pages of Mind, and had its own house journal in Analysis. This was a source of deep distress and indeed despair to the most influential among the older Oxford philosophers – Prichard, Joseph, Joachim. They reacted very differently. Joachim, who was one of the last and most scrupulous and civilised representatives of moderate Continental Idealism, and lived in a world inhabited by Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and Bradley, ignored this wave as an aberration, a temporary recession to a crude barbarism and irrationality – a view expressed in their different fashions and more passionately by Collingwood and Mure, although Collingwood thought Ayer a much worthier and indeed more dangerous opponent than Joseph, Prichard and their disciples. As for Prichard, he evidently felt contempt for and lack of interest in what appeared to him to be the recurrence of fallacies long exposed, something that belonged to a far cruder order of thought than that of the great sophists who opposed the realist philosophy when he was a young man – Bradley and Bosanquet. But he was so intensely preoccupied by his own continuous effort to ‘worry things out’, as he called it, and so painfully conscious of his own inability to arrive at adequate formulations of the answers to the questions that tormented him, both epistemological and ethical – the former derived from Cook Wilson, the latter from Kant and the Protestant tradition – that he had no time for dealing with the confusions and errors of his juniors, most of whom he suspected of wasting their time, and in none of whom he was much interested.
The man who suffered most deeply was probably Joseph. He had a very acute sense of the true tradition which he felt it his duty to defend – a tradition which he received at the hands of his deeply admired master Cook Wilson, whose name and fame, despite all his disciples’ efforts, are still confined – so far as they survive at all – to Oxford. Plato, Aristotle, to some degree the rationalists, and again Cook Wilson – these Joseph defended to the end of his days. The deadliest enemies of this kind of realist metaphysics were no longer the Idealists, whose day, he agreed with his pupil Prichard, was done, but the empiricists and sceptics headed by the father of fallacies, Hume, followed by Mill, William James, Russell and other intellectually and morally subversive writers whose doctrines he conceived it as his duty to refute and root out. All his life he had been engaged on the great task of weeding the garden of philosophy; and I believe that there were times when he thought that the great task to which he had been called, of restoring the ancient truths, was at last being achieved, at least in the English-speaking world. But as the 1920s wore on, and the 1930s began, he saw with horror that rank weeds were springing up again, and not least in Oxford itself, mainly from seeds wafted across from Cambridge – blatant fallacies propagated by Ramsey, Braithwaite, Ayer and their allies, aided and abetted by various pragmatists in the United States. All these ancient heresies were abroad once more, and evidently influenced the young, as if their shallowness and speciousness had not been exposed over and over again by the faithful band of Cook Wilson’s disciples. His last lecture, held in New College garden, was a tremendous onslaught on Russell and Co. He died, I suspect, in a state of intellectual despair – the truth was drowning in a sea of falsehoods, a disaster which he was never able to explain to himself.
Austin was himself one of these dangerous empiricists, although he was not a militant controversialist at this stage; nor was his empiricism inhibited by fidelity to any particular tradition. He was not doctrinaire. He did not hold with programmes. He did not wish to destroy one establishment in the interests of another. He treated problems piecemeal as they came, not as part of a systematic reinterpretation. That effort, in so far as it was made (and of course he did try to develop a coherent doctrine of philosophical method), took place much later. I do not think that I ever heard him say anything during this period, that is, before the beginning of the war, which sprang from, or was clearly intended to support, any kind of systematic view. I do not know whether his pupils in Magdalen will bear me out, but it seems to me that he addressed himself to the topics which were part of the then normal curriculum in Oxford with no conscious revolutionary intent. But, of course, he had a very clear, acute and original intellect, and because, when he spoke, there appeared to be nothing between him and the subject of his criticism or exposition – no accumulation of traditional commentary, no spectacles provided by a particular doctrine – he often produced the feeling that the question was being posed clearly for the first time: that what had seemed blurred, or trite, or a play of conventional formulae in the books had suddenly been washed away; the problem stood out in sharp relief, clear, unanswered and important, and the methods used to analyse it had a surgical sharpness, and were used with fascinating assurance and apparently effortless skill.
He always, in those days at any rate, answered one in one’s own terminology when he understood what was said to him; he did not pretend that it was not clear until it had been translated into his own language, some special set of terms of his own. In private he used no rhetorical tricks of any kind, and displayed an extraordinary power of distinguishing what was genuine or interesting in what his collocutor said from what was not – from ideological patter, or nervous confusion, or the like. This was not always so in public: opposition made him combative, and in classes or meetings of societies he plainly wished to emerge victorious. But this did not happen, so far as my own experience goes, in private conversation, at any rate not in the presence of those with whom he felt comfortable and unthreatened. I do not mean to say that he was not by temperament dogmatic: he was. But he argued patiently and courteously, and if he failed to convince one, returned to the topic over and over again, with new and highly imaginative examples and first-hand arguments which were intellectually exhilarating whether they produced conviction or not.
He still remained throughout this time sceptical about the value of philosophy, except as an educational instrument; but he could not break himself from it: whenever we met during the 1930s he invariably found opportunity of raising some philosophical question, and left one not so much with a set of firm and well-argued positions as with a series of philosophical question-marks strewn along the path, which stopped those who listened to him from resting in the comfortable beds of accepted opinion. I think he was much more authoritarian after the war, and did not, at any rate in public, move his pieces until the entire plan of campaign had been thoroughly thought out, and he felt secure against any possible refutation. One of the criticisms made of him – I think a just one – was that he refused to advance rather than face the smallest possible risk of successful counter-argument. Even so, this did not hold so much in private (I speak only for myself); in the 1930s his pride and his sense of his own position were not so evidently in play, nor did he conceive philosophy as a set of doctrines and a method to which it was his mission to convert the ignorant and the mistaken. It was not until a later period that his philosophical activity became a consciously planned campaign for the dissemination of the truth.
When Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic was published in 1936, Austin expressed great admiration for it, and then proceeded to criticise it, during our afternoon walks, page by page and sentence by sentence, without wishing to score points (he did not get far beyond the first chapter, so far as I can remember). Certainly his later polemical ferocity was less in evidence, at any rate so far as the works of his contemporaries – the articles in Mind or in Analysis on which we fed – were concerned. In 1936, after he had been at Magdalen for about a year he came to my rooms in All Souls one evening and asked me what I had been reading. Had I been reading any Soviet philosophy, and was any of it worth reading? He had visited the Soviet Union as a tourist and had been impressed by his experience. He was attracted by the austerity and sternness and dedication of the grey, impersonal-looking men and women whom he had seen there, had detected the growth of nationalism (of which he did not disapprove) and of admiration (which he shared) for the great men who had worked against gigantic odds, Marx and Lenin for example. His admiration for the founders of Communism was, I think, short-lived.
His favourite examples of intellectual virtue in later years were Darwin and Freud, not because he particularly admired their views, but because he believed that once a man had assured himself that his hypothesis was worth pursuing at all, he should pursue it to its logical end, whatever the consequences, and not be deterred by fear of seeming eccentric or fanatical, or by the control of philistine common sense. If the logical consequences were in fact untenable, one would be able to withdraw or modify them in the light of the undeniable evidence; but if one failed to explore a hypothesis to its full logical conclusions, the truth would for ever be defeated by timid respectability. He said that a fearless thinker, pursuing a chosen path unswervingly against mutterings and warnings and criticism, was the proper object of admiration and emulation; fanaticism was preferable to cowardice, and imagination to dreary good sense.
What about Soviet thought? I replied that I had not read anything by any contemporary Communist philosopher which I could genuinely recommend to him – nothing since Ralph Fox, the only English Marxist Austin had read or thought worth reading. But I had, a year or two before, read an interesting book on philosophy called Mind and the World-Order by C. I. Lewis, a professor at Harvard of whom I had not previously heard. It says much for the philosophical insulation and self-centredness of Oxford (and other English universities at that time) that so little about American philosophy should have been known to my colleagues and myself. I had come across this book by pure chance on a table in Blackwell’s bookshop, had opened it and thought that it looked interesting. I bought it, read it, and thought that its pragmatist transformation of Kantian categories was original and fruitful. I lent it to Austin, who left me almost immediately. He told me that instead of playing his violin – he used to go through unaccompanied Bach partitas evening by evening – he began reading it at once. Three days later he suggested to me that we should hold a class on this book, which had also impressed him.
I may be mistaken about this, but I think that this was the first class or seminar on a contemporary thinker ever held in Oxford. Austin’s reputation as a teacher was by this time considerable, and a relatively large number of undergraduates came once a week to our class in All Souls. I had no notion how joint classes were held, and assumed that their holders would begin by a dialogue on points provided by the text, in which they would show each other the almost exaggerated respect which was then common form at philosophical debates among dons. Austin opened by inviting me to expound a thesis. I selected Lewis’s doctrine of specific, sensible characteristics – what Lewis called qualia – and said what I thought. Austin glared at me sternly and said, ‘Would you mind saying that again.’ I did so. ‘It seems to me’, said Austin, speaking slowly, ‘that what you have just said is complete nonsense.’ I then realised that this was to be no polite shadow-fencing, but war to the death – my death, that is. There is no doubt that Austin’s performance at our class had a profound and lasting effect upon some, at any rate, of those who attended it. Some of them later became eminent professional philosophers and have testified to the extraordinary force and fertility of Austin’s performance. For a performance it undoubtedly was: as much so as Moore’s annual classes held at the joint meetings of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association. Slow, formidable and relentless, Austin dealt firmly with criticism and opposition of the intelligent and stupid alike, and, in the course of this, left the genuine philosophers in our class not crushed or frustrated, but stimulated and indeed excited by the simplicity and lucidity of the nominalist thesis which he defended against Lewis. ‘If there are three vermilion patches on this piece of paper how many vermilions are there?’ ‘One,’ said I. ‘I say there are three,’ said Austin, and we spent the rest of the term on this issue.
Austin conducted the class like a formidable professor at the Harvard Law School. He put questions to the class. If, petrified by terror, everyone remained silent, he would extend a long, thin finger, and after oscillating it slowly to and fro for a minute, like the muzzle of a pistol, would suddenly shoot it forward, pointing at some man, chosen at random, and say in a loud, nervous voice: ‘You answer!’ The victim would, at times, be too terrorised to utter. Austin would realise this, answer himself, and return to our normal conditions of discussion. Despite these somewhat terrifying moments, the class remained undiminished in numbers and intensity of interest. We spent the term on nominalism. It was the best class that I have ever attended, and seems to me to mark the true beginning of Austin’s career as an independent thinker.
At the end of the summer of 1936 Austin suggested that we hold regular philosophical discussions about topics which interested us and our contemporaries among Oxford philosophers. He wished the group to meet informally, without any thought of publishing our ‘results’ (if we ever obtained any), or any purpose but that of clearing our minds and pursuing the truth. We agreed to invite Ayer, Macnabb and Woozley, all of whom were at that time teaching philosophy at Oxford; to these Stuart Hampshire, who had been elected to All Souls, and Donald MacKinnon, who had become a fellow of Keble, were added. The meetings began some time in 1936–7 (I think in the spring of 1937). They took place on Thursdays in my rooms in All Souls after dinner, and continued, with a few intervals, until the summer of 1939. In retrospect they seem to me the most fruitful discussions of philosophy at which I was ever present. The topics were not carefully prepared, nor necessarily announced beforehand, although I think we knew from week to week what we were likely to talk about. The principal topics were four in number: perception – theories of sense data as Price and Broad discussed them; a priori truths, that is, propositions which appeared necessarily true or false, and yet did not appear reducible to rules or definitions and what these entailed; the verification and logical character of counter-factual statements, which I think, in those days, we called unfulfilled hypotheticals or contrafactuals; and the nature and criteria of personal identity, and the related topic of our knowledge of other minds.
When I mentioned perception as one of our subjects, I should have said that what we talked about was principally phenomenalism and the theory of verification with which it was closely bound up, topics on which Ayer held strong, characteristically clear, and well-known opinions. Austin attacked the entire sense-datum terminology, and asked what the criteria of identity of a sense datum were: if one’s field of vision contained seven yellow and black stripes like a tiger-skin, did it contain, or consist of, let us say, seven black data and seven yellow ones, or one continuous striped datum? What was the average size of a datum, and what was its average life-span? When could it be said that a single datum changed colour or faded or vanished, or were there as many data as there were hues or saturations of colours or timbres or pitches of sounds? How did one count them? Were there minima sensibilia1 and did they vary from observer to observer? All this apart from the by that time familiar question of how the concept of the observer was itself to be analysed.
Ayer defended positivism and wished to know, if phenomenalism were abandoned, what was to be put in its place. Did Austin suppose that there existed impalpable substrata either in the old, crude Lockean sense, or in the sense in which some modern scientists and philosophers, who were no less confused and much less consistent or honest than Locke, maintained or presupposed the existence of equally unverifiable and metaphysical entities? I cannot remember that Austin ever tried to furnish any positive answers to these questions, or, to begin with at any rate, to formulate any doctrine of his own; he preferred, undoubtedly, to drill holes into solutions provided by others. It was, I think, in the course of one of these sceptical onslaughts, after four or five formulations of the reductionist thesis of pure phenomenalism had been shot down by Austin, that Ayer exclaimed: ‘You are like a greyhound who doesn’t want to run himself, and bites the other greyhounds so that they cannot run either.’1
There was certainly something of this about Austin. I do not remember that he did altogether, before the war, come out of the wood on phenomenalism; but he did begin saying even then that he could not see that there was all that much wrong with ordinary language as used about the external world. The problems raised by, for example, optical illusions – double images, sticks bent in water, tricks of perspective and the like – were due to the ambiguities of language, mistakenly analysed by philosophers, and not to implausible non-empirical beliefs. Berkeley, whom he admired as against Locke and Hume, was, in his view, right about this. A stick that was ‘really’ bent was of course something quite different from a stick ‘bent in water’, and once the laws of the refraction of light were discovered, no confusion need occur: being bent was one thing, and looking bent was another; if a stick were plunged in water and did not look bent, then indeed there would be occasion for surprise. The sense-datum language was a sub-language, used for specific purposes to describe the works of impressionist painters, or called for by physicians who asked their patients to describe their symptoms – an artificial usage carved out of ordinary language – language which was sufficient for most everyday purposes and did not itself tend to mislead.
As may be imagined, Ayer, and perhaps others amongst us, stoutly resisted this frontal attack upon the views of Moore and Russell, Broad and Price, and the rejection of the entire apparatus and terminology of the English school of the theory of perception. These discussions led to the emergence of ‘Oxford Analysis’, not so much as a consequence of Austin’s specific theses, as from the appeal to common linguistic usage which was made by us all, without, so far as I recollect, any conscious reference at the time to Wittgenstein’s later doctrines, even though the ‘Blue Book’ was already in circulation in Cambridge, and had, I think, by 1937 or so, arrived in Oxford.
Similar methods were used in discussing counter-factual statements – their extension and their relation to the verification principle1 – as well as the problems of personal identity and its relation to memory. If I remember rightly, the principal example of the latter that we chose was the hero of Kafka’s story Metamorphosis, a commercial traveller called Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find that he has been transformed into a monstrous cockroach, although he retains clear memories of his life as an ordinary human being. Are we to speak of him as a man with the body of a cockroach, or as a cockroach with the memories and consciousness of a man? ‘Neither,’ Austin declared. ‘In such cases we should not know what to say. This is when we say “Words fail us” and mean this literally. We should need new words. The old ones just would not fit. They aren’t meant to cover this kind of case.’ From this we wandered to the asymmetry, or apparent asymmetry, between the analysis of propositions made by the speaker about himself and those made by him about others; this was treated from correspondingly differing standpoints by Austin and Ayer, who gradually became the protagonists of two irreconcilable points of view. Austin’s particular philosophical position was developed, it seems to me, during those Thursday evenings, in continuous contrast with, and opposition to, the positivism and reductionism of Ayer and his supporters. I do not mean to imply that Austin and Ayer entirely dominated the discussions, and that the rest of us were scarcely more than listeners. We all talked a great deal,1 although if I asked myself what I myself said or believed, apart from criticising the verification principle, and pure Carnapian logical positivism, I should find it hard to say. All I can recollect is that there was no crystallisation into permanent factions: views changed from week to week, save that Ayer and Austin were seldom, if ever, in agreement about anything.
The discussion of what, for short, I shall call a priori statements arose out of a paper read by Russell in 1935 to the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, which Austin and I attended, on ‘The Limits of Empiricism’.2 The thesis was that while such propositions as ‘The same object [or surface, or portion of my visual field, or whatever was substituted for this] cannot be red and green at the same time in the same place’ appeared to be incontrovertibly true beyond the possibility of falsification, their contradictories did not seem to be self-contradictory. This was so because their truth did not appear to follow from verbal definitions, but from the meaning of colour words, the use of which was learnt or explained by acts of pointing – was fixed by means of what, in those days, used to be called ‘ostensive definitions’. The contradictories of such propositions, therefore, seemed better described as absurd or meaningless or unintelligible, and not as contradictions in terms. This stimulated long discussions about verbal and non-verbal definitions, the relation of Carnap’s syntactical properties to semantic ones, the difference between the relations of words to words and the relations of words to things, and so on.
The dissimilarity of approach between Austin and Ayer once more showed itself very clearly. Ayer, if he perceived that a given theory entailed consequences which, he was certain, were false or absurd – for example, the existence of impalpable entities or some other gross breach of the verification principle, even in its so-called ‘weak’ form – felt that the whole argument must be proceeding on fallacious lines, and was prepared to reject the premisses, and try to think of new ones from which these undesirable consequences would not follow. Austin looked at whatever was placed before him, and was ready to follow the argument wherever it led.
It was later maintained by some of his critics (at least in conversation) that this philosophical spontaneity and apparent freedom from preconceived doctrine were not altogether genuine: that in fact they were elaborate Socratic devices which concealed a fully worked-out positive doctrine which he was not yet ready to reveal. I believe this to be false. In 1936–9 he had a philosophically open mind. Indeed, at that time he was full of suspicion of any cut and dried doctrine; if anything, he seemed to take active pleasure in advancing propositions which appeared to him true or at any rate plausible, whatever havoc they might wreak with the systematic ideas of writers in, say, Erkenntnis or Analysis. He was certainly not free from a certain degree of malicious pleasure in blowing up carefully constructed philosophical edifices – he did like stopping the other greyhounds – but his main purpose seemed to me, then and afterwards, to be the establishing of particular truths with a view to generalising from them, or eliciting principles at a later stage. He certainly wished to ‘save the appearances’, and in this sense was a follower of Aristotle and not of Plato, of Berkeley and not of Hume.
He disliked clear-cut dichotomies – between, for instance, universals and particulars (as distinguished in C. I. Lewis’s book), or descriptive and emotive language, or empirical and logical truths, or verifiable and unverifiable, corrigible and incorrigible expressions – all such claims to clear and exhaustive contrasts seeming to him incapable of doing the job they were expected to do, namely to classify the normal use of words. It seemed to him then, as it did later, that types and distinctions of meaning were often reflected in ordinary language. Ordinary language was not an infallible guide; it was at best a pointer to distinctions in the subject matter which language was used to describe, or express, or to which it was related in some other fashion; and these important distinctions tended to be obliterated by the clear-cut dichotomies advanced by the all-or-nothing philosophies, which in their turn led to unacceptable doctrines about what there was, and what men meant. Hence when Russell or others gave examples of propositions asserting irreducible incompatibilities between Lewis’s qualia – colours, sounds, tastes and the like – propositions which did not seem either analytic or empirical; or when, to take another example, it was maintained that singular counter-factual statements could be not only understood, but actually believed, even though it was difficult to see how they could be verified, even in principle – Austin seized on these examples and developed them with great force and brilliance, partly, I suspect, from a desire to discover negative instances which would blow up general propositions that had been brought to bear too easily, like distorting moulds, on the complex and recalcitrant nature of things.
He had an immense respect for the natural sciences, but he believed that the only reliable method of learning about types of action, knowledge, belief, experience consisted in the patient accumulation of data about actual usage. Usage was certainly not regarded by him as sacrosanct, in the sense of reflecting reality in some infallible fashion, or of being a guaranteed nostrum against confusions and fallacies. But it was neglected at our peril: Austin did have a Burkean belief that differences of usage did, as a rule, reflect differences of meaning, and conceptual differences too, and thus offered a valuable and relatively neglected path towards establishing distinctions of meaning, of concepts, of possible states of affairs, and in this way did help to clear away muddles and remove obstacles to the discovery of truth. Above all, philosophy was not a set of mechanisms into which untutored expressions had to be fed, and from which they would emerge classified, clarified, straightened out, and cleansed of their delusive properties.
In this sense Austin did not much believe in a specifically philosophical technology – the proliferation of gadgets to deal with difficulties. No doubt his insatiable interest in language and philology as such had something to do with this, and his superb classical scholarship fed his inordinate collector’s curiosity, at times at the expense of genuinely philosophical issues. Nevertheless, his implicit rejection of the doctrine of a logically perfect language, which was capable of reflecting the structure of reality, sprang from a philosophical vision not dissimilar to that of Wittgenstein, whose then unpublished but illicitly circulated views he might possibly have looked at, though he did not, I think, pay serious attention to them before the war. Certainly his first published contribution to philosophy – the paper on a priori concepts in which a good deal of his positive doctrine is embodied1 – owes, so far as I know, nothing to any acquaintance with Wittgenstein’s views, unless perhaps, very indirectly, via John Wisdom’s articles, which he certainly read.
Occasionally those who met on Thursday evenings talked about moral problems, but this was regarded as an escape, not to be repeated too often, from the sterner demands of the subject. We certainly discussed freedom of the will, in the course of which Austin said to me, sotto voce, so as not to provoke Freddie Ayer, who was at that time a convinced determinist, ‘They all talk about determinism and say they believe in it. I’ve never met a determinist in my life, I mean a man who really did believe in it as you and I believe that men are mortal. Have you?’ This endeared him to me greatly. So did his answer to a question that I once put to him during a walk. I asked: ‘Supposing a child were to express a wish to meet Napoleon as he was at the battle of Austerlitz, and I said “It cannot be done”, and the child said “Why not?”, and I said “Because it happened in the past, and you cannot be alive now and also a hundred and thirty years ago and remain at the same age”, or something of the kind; and the child went on pressing and said “Why not?”, and I said “Because it does not make sense, as we use words, to say that you can be in two places at once or ‘go back’ into the past”, and so on; and this highly sophisticated child said “If it is only a question of words, then can’t we simply alter our verbal usage? Would that enable me to see Napoleon at the battle of Austerlitz, and also, of course, stay as I am now, in place and time?” – What’, I asked Austin, ‘should one say to the child? Simply that it has confused the material and formal modes, so to speak?’ Austin replied: ‘Do not speak so. Tell the child to try and go back into the past. Tell it there is no law against it. Let it try. Let it try, and see what happens then.’ It seems to me now, as it seemed to me before the last war, that Austin understood the nature of philosophy, even if he was overpedantic and over-cautious, and insisted on making over-sure of his defences before plunging into the arena – understood, better than most, what philosophy was.
These discussions were fruitful for several reasons: because the number of those who took part in them was small (it never rose above seven and was usually smaller than that); because the participants knew each other well, talked very freely, and were in no sense on show; they were totally spontaneous, and knew that if they went down some false path which led to a precipice or a marsh it did not matter, for they could retrace their steps, whenever they pleased, in the weeks to come. Moreover the intellectual freshness and force, both of Austin and of Ayer, were such that although they were in a state of almost continuous collision – Ayer like an irresistible missile, Austin like an immovable obstacle – the result was not a stalemate, but the most interesting, free and lively discussions of philosophy that I have ever known.
One of the shortcomings of these meetings is something that seems to me to apply to Oxford philosophy in general, at least in those days. We were excessively self-centred. The only persons whom we wished to convince were our own admired colleagues. There was no pressure upon us to publish. Consequently, when we succeeded in gaining from one of our philosophical peers acceptance or even understanding of some point which we regarded as original and important, whether rightly or, as was more often the case at any rate with me, in a state of happy delusion, this satisfied us completely, too completely. We felt no need to publish our ideas, for the only audience which was worth satisfying was the handful of our contemporaries who lived near us, and whom we met with agreeable regularity. I don’t think that, like Moore’s disciples at the beginning of the century, of whom Keynes speaks in a memoir on his early ideas,1 any of us thought that no one before us had discovered the truth about the nature of knowledge or anything else; but, like them, we did think that no one outside the magic circle – in our case Oxford, Cambridge, Vienna – had much to teach us. This was vain and foolish and, I have no doubt, irritating to others. But I suspect that those who have never been under the spell of this kind of illusion, even for a short while, have not known true intellectual happiness.
1 This paper, read to the Jowett Society in Trinity Term 1932, has not survived.
2 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 32 (1931–2), 139–70; reprinted in Ryle’s Collected Papers (London, 1971) ii.
1 [‘The smallest things that can be sensed.’]
1 This may have been stimulated by a remark made by Donald Macnabb to the effect that our discussions reminded him of nothing so much as a pack of hounds in full cry (after, presumably, the truth).
1 As an example, I might say ‘If a horse called Sylvia runs in this race it will undoubtedly win.’ Suppose no such horse ran or even existed, and I am subsequently asked why I thought that it would win. If I answer that I believed this although – or even because – it was an irrational proposition, that I felt inclined to gamble on its truth because I like gambling, that I had not the slightest desire to know whether there was, or could be, any evidence for the proposition, it seems to follow that the meaning of the counter-factual is detached from ‘the means of its verification’ in however ‘weak’ a sense, even if the question of its truth is not.
1 And interrupted each other unceremoniously; so much so that Austin, with his passion for order, proposed that we acquire a ‘buzzer’ to introduce discipline. The suggestion was not taken up. [Austin wrote to IB on 18 January 1937 enclosing a proposed set of ‘rules of procedure’. The group would be called the ‘Steam Intellect Society’, and rule 3.43 provided that ‘Any member wishing to interpolate in a discussion between the protagonist & another member to press a buzzer’.]
2 The paper was read on 28 November 1935, and published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 36 (1935–6), 131–50.
1 ‘Are there a priori concepts?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society supplementary vol. 18 (1939), 83–105; reprinted in Austin’s Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1961; 3rd ed., 1979).
1 ‘My Early Beliefs’, in John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs (London, 1949); reprinted in D. E. Moggridge and Elizabeth S. Johnson (eds), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (London and Basingstoke/New York, 1971–89) x, Essays in Biography.