Abstract and Keywords
The fact of religious diversity provides problems for a variety of approaches to the study of religion. In the philosophical study of religion, there are at least four main areas in which issues are raised by the fact of religious diversity: the epistemology of religious belief, the production of theories of religion, reflection on concepts of God and the Ultimate, and discussion of the relationship between religion and the human good. For the purposes of this article, J. L. Schellenberg's definition of religion in terms of “ultimism” is considered. There are at least four responses to the epistemological problems arising out of religious diversity that are worth discussing: apologetic investment, atheism, agnosticism, and anti-evidentialism. The epistemological reflections on religious diversity are thus vital to the interpretation of religion. There are three main types of theory of religion that arise from or bear upon the fact of religious diversity: naturalism, confessionalism, and pluralism.
Keywords: God, the Ultimate, epistemology, religion, religious belief, human good, naturalism, confessionalism, pluralism, atheism
The fact of religious diversity provides problems for a variety of approaches to the study of religion. In the philosophical study of religion, there are at least four main areas in which issues are raised by the fact of religious diversity: the epistemology of religious belief, the production of theories of religion, reflection on concepts of God and the Ultimate, and discussion of the relationship between religion and the human good.
The Epistemology of Religious Belief
For the purposes of this chapter, I follow J. L. Schellenberg’s definition of religion in terms of “ultimism.” A religion is a set of symbols, beliefs, and practices centered on the affirmation “that there is a reality metaphysically and axiologically ultimate (representing the deepest fact about the nature of things and also unsurpassably great), in relation to which an ultimate good can be attained. Otherwise put, religious claims are those entailing that there is an ultimate and salvific reality” (Schellenberg 2007, 3; see also Byrne 1999).
(p. 30) The fact of religious diversity means that different religions contain competing accounts of the nature of the metaphysically and axiologically ultimate reality and competing accounts of the character of the ultimate good human beings can attain through relation to this reality. Religions are not wholly, or perhaps even primarily, theories, but each contains or implies a theory about the character of the ultimate reality and about the nature of the ultimate good for humans. Even where there is considerable overlap in the accounts of the transcendent, sacred reality and of salvation offered by more than one religion (as with, for example, Christianity and Islam), there will be deep incompatibilities among the theories embedded in them. Moreover, within what we conventionally label as unitary religions, there are similar incompatibilities between one sect’s detailed account of the transcendent, sacred reality and salvation and another’s. Diversity thus throws up “epistemic peer conflict” (Basinger 2002, 1). Religious epistemic peer conflict consists in the fact that different people, by virtue of adhering to different religions or to different forms of the same religion, hold conflicting opinions on important religious questions while being equally sincere and equally knowledgeable about nonreligious matters.
Religious epistemic peer conflict (hereafter “peer conflict” for short) goes deeper than disagreements over questions of truth. Peer conflict over the truth of religious propositions implies, although it does not entail, that there will be conflict about which religious believers have genuine religious experience and which believers are on a genuine path to salvation. These implications—of competition for genuine religious experience and genuine salvific effectiveness—can be avoided only if we can detach success in these two dimensions of religion from the truth of doctrines.
Peer conflict could be denied if it were plausible to assert that we cannot find equally sincere and knowledgeable people in different religions, but this seems a hopeless strategy (but note that reformed epistemology, discussed below, in the end denies the fact of peer conflict). Given peer conflict, then, we have a serious problem about judging which, if any, religion possesses true theories about the Ultimate and which, if any, religious believers have warrant for their beliefs about the Ultimate. By warrant I mean substantive truth-indicative grounds for religious beliefs. Warrant is important because the fact of peer conflict seems too easy to reconcile with the concession that epistemic peers across different religions are all entitled to their religious convictions, where entitlement is a matter of having broken no epistemic obligations in the forming and maintaining of one’s beliefs. In this minimal sense, atheists might indeed concede that many religious believers are entitled to their beliefs even though they are false—just as pre-Copernican astronomers in Europe were entitled to believe that the earth was the stationary center of a concentric universe. But warrant, as defined, is a different matter. If “substantive truth-indicative grounds” means “grounds that make a belief more probable than not,” then it is flatly impossible for two incompatible beliefs to be both warranted.
There are at least four responses to the epistemological problems arising out of religious diversity that are worth discussing: apologetic investment, atheism, agnosticism, and antievidentialism.
(p. 31) Apologetic Investment
Writers such as Griffiths (1991) and Swinburne contend that the appropriate response to peer conflict consists in the search for and presentation of, arguments that will pick out one religion as true over and against the rest. Across seven books, Swinburne presents such a strategy in favor of the truth of Christian theism, that is, for a form of theism that is more than the assertion of the existence of a creator God but includes the fundamental items in the creeds common to Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and the main Protestant denominations. Swinburne takes the implicit demands of peer conflict seriously. Starting from facts and moral intuitions common to educated people in the contemporary world, he moves to a demonstration of the coherence of a core belief in a personal creator (Swinburne 1993). Next, by reference to such facts and to agreed, accepted standards of inductive arguments (vouched for in the natural sciences), a cumulative, inductive case for the truth of that theism is developed (Swinburne 2004). This cumulative case shows that it is more probable than not that such a God exists. Faith and trust in this God is then shown to be reasonable (Swinburne 2007a). From this minimal theism, four books (Swinburne 1989, 2007b, 1994, 1998) extend the apologetic case to distinctly Christian beliefs. These seven works are backed up by a separate study of the probability of the resurrection of Jesus (Swinburne 2003). By reference to further facts and moral intuitions, these books provide warrant for the account of God, atonement, and providence contained in agreed Christian creeds.
Note what the strategy of apologetic investment implies about peer conflict. Peer conflict exists, but it can be overcome by fuller investigation and reflection. Peers in “other religions” are not stupid or ignorant in general. Once religious peers confront the fact of diversity—and included in that is the fact that some epistemic peers reject religion altogether—they have a duty to engage in the processes of critical rationality that, when conducted correctly, lead to the discovery of apologetic arguments that settle the incompatibilities among religious beliefs in favor of one existing religion.
Atheism
Atheism in this context means more than denial of the existence of a theistic God—in that sense, Buddhists are atheists. I use the term to mean rejection of the indeterminate claim about sacred, transcendent reality within Schellenberg’s definition of religion. Atheists agree with apologetic investors on one main point: diversity entails that religious individuals are under an obligation to reflect critically on their beliefs and come up with substantive, truth-indicative grounds for those beliefs. (Let us call this the apologetic obligation.) If such grounds cannot be produced, upon reflection, then the appropriate conclusion is that there are no such grounds. That means that at best, religious peers are entitled to their religious beliefs, but if they have undergone the reflection and examination demanded by the fact of peer conflict, then they are no longer entitled to them. Atheism affirms that the reasonable (p. 32) conclusion from the failure of apologetic investment is that no religion is true. There is no sacred, transcendent reality.
Atheists affirm that there is no successful apologetic showing one religion to be true and the others false. Leaving aside critiques of particular apologetic strategies, there are general grounds for lack of confidence in apologetic investment. These include the persistence and extent of religious disagreements. If there is an apologetic tiebreaker, why has it not been produced before? The profundity of religious disagreements suggests that there will be problems in appealing to agreed moral intuitions to break the tie: the moral universe of one religious believer might not be that of another. Religious disagreements also involve matters of metaphysics and of ancient history that are notably difficult to resolve intersubjectively.
Agnosticism
One obvious response to persistent peer conflict is that after balancing what can be said for the truth of each religion, there seem to be no strong, truth-indicative grounds for any religious beliefs. The appropriate stance is to remain agnostic about all of them. We can reach this conclusion by going down the same route that took us toward atheism. Agnostics affirm the apologetic obligation. They conclude with atheists that it has not been met and is not likely to be so. Agnostics will deny that this must take us to atheism. They will contend that atheism is bound up in peer conflict as much as any substantive religious position. It, too, must meet the apologetic obligation. According to agnostics, atheists must provide positive, neutrally based proofs of claims of the form “The empirical universe is all there is; no sacred, transcendent reality exists.” Agnostics will claim that proofs of atheism are as hard to come by as proofs of the truth of Buddhism or Judaism. They will thus deny that we can, in the religious case, apply the inference schema “In the absence of cogent evidence for X, it is safe to conclude that there is no X.” In sum, agnostics will deny that there should be a presumption of atheism (contra Flew 2005). An agnostic stance of this kind is worked out in great detail in Schellenberg (2007). It draws on the fact of diversity at a number of points.
Antievidentialism
The key to the response to peer conflict that I call antievidentialism is the denial of the apologetic obligation. According to this approach, religious individuals who are faced with peer conflict arising from religious diversity are under no obligation, after reflecting on their beliefs, to come up with substantive, truth-indicative grounds for those beliefs. Antievidentialism is an appropriate label for this stance insofar as it denies an important implication of the apologetic obligation: that we should search for evidence (of a neutral kind) for religious beliefs. Religious individuals can be aware of peer conflict but remain assured of their particular beliefs in the absence of any attempt, let alone any successful attempt, to secure apologetic evidence for them and against those of their peers.
(p. 33) Antievidentialism is typical of the stance toward religious epistemology and toward the epistemology of religious diversity found in reformed epistemology. A developed example can be found in Plantinga (2000). Central to the Plantinga approach to the epistemic problems created by religious diversity is a denial of two elements bound up with the apologetic imperative urged on us by the likes of Griffiths and Swinburne. These elements are evidentialism and internalism. As applied to religion, evidentialism is the doctrine that the truth-indicative grounds for religious beliefs must include other beliefs that imply them. Religious beliefs cannot be wholly truth-indicatively grounded in the way my belief that there is a goldfinch in my garden is grounded when I just see the goldfinch before me. I need propositional evidence for religious beliefs. Internalism is the doctrine that truth-indicative reasons for beliefs cannot make them truly warranted unless the subject is aware, or could readily be aware, of them. Thus, religious individuals faced with peer conflict have a duty to resort to apologetics. Plantinga denies the application of evidentialism to religious beliefs by claiming that they are, or might be, such that they are grounded nonevidentially, as is my belief regarding the goldfinch. They are, or might be, properly basic, that is, rightly affirmed with confidence even though they are not inferred from other warranted beliefs. In general, he favors an externalist epistemology. According to externalism, beliefs can be warrantedly held if they are the product of cognitive mechanisms that function to produce true beliefs for the most part. Then they are based on truth-indicative grounds, but the subject need not know what these grounds are to hold the beliefs properly.
Plantinga postulates that it is plausible to suppose that Christian beliefs (he is a Christian exclusivist; see below) are the products of cognitive mechanisms of a distinctive sort: a sensus divinitatis and the Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit (IIHS). The former allows for the proper formation of core theistic beliefs once this “sense of the divine” is appropriately stimulated by, say, awareness of beauty in nature. The latter allows for the proper formation of distinctively Christian beliefs once, say, the words of Christian scripture are read and understood.
Armed with this externalist account of warranted belief, Plantinga contends that religious believers who are aware of the fact of peer conflict can justifiably sit tight and not let diversity produce any diminution of confidence in their beliefs. Plantinga’s externalism entails that the de jure question of the right of believers to hold their beliefs cannot be separated from the de facto question of whether those beliefs might be true (see Plantinga 2000, vi–ix). If standard Christian claims are true, then de facto Christian believers are in a different epistemic position from their apparent epistemic peers in other religions. Even if Christians do not have an evidential case to hand that is superior to that of non-Christian believers, they might well have a functioning sensus divinitatis and IIHS. Thus, if Christian beliefs are true, they might be warranted. This means that Plantinga has the means to hand for turning the force of the fact of peer conflict. It can no longer be shown that believers have no right to be certain of beliefs that are denied by their epistemic peers. A version of one of Plantinga’s own examples shows how this result can be (p. 34) accomplished (see Plantinga 2000, 450–451). I am hauled before the police. They accuse me of committing a crime. All manner of witnesses are produced who saw me at the scene. But I know that at the time of my alleged offense, I was elsewhere. I have a distinct memory of being fifty miles away. Here the fact of peer conflict is very strange, but I could not be wrong over a deliverance of my memory of this clarity. I stick to my belief that I did not commit the crime, not because I have evidence for it or because I can produce evidence that rebuts those who say I did it. I am just confident through memory that I am not the one who committed the crime and that, in some way, these witnesses have it wrong. My simple memory belief means that they are not my epistemic peers after all.
In denying the apologetic obligation, reformed epistemology denies a premise shared by apologetic investment, atheism, and agnosticism. Those three approaches accept that peer conflict means that the surety of religious claims must diminish unless the apologetic obligation can be met. Much depends, then, on the adequacy of the externalist account of warrant that Plantinga brings to bear on the epistemological problems raised by religious diversity.
Theories of Religion
Philosophers, and others, produce theories of religion. Such theories endeavor to plot the place of religion in human life and culture, providing answers to such questions as “What is the meaning of human religiousness?” or “Is religion an enterprise that can be explained in wholly human terms, or is it something that is only comprehensible as the outcome of human interaction with some ultimate reality?” Religious diversity is a very important factor in the formulation and appraisal of theories of religion. This is in large measure because of the interaction between the epistemological issues discussed above and questions about the interpretation and explanation of religion.
How do the epistemology and the interpretation of religion interact? At first glance, it might seem as if they are wholly separate concerns. We might think that the question of whether religious beliefs are true and capable of being warranted is quite distinct from the question of what moves people to embrace them. Questions about the origin and maintenance of religion are different from questions about its truth. Thus, even if it were the case, as many skeptical interpreters of religion contend, that religion is everywhere the product of wish fulfillment and other nonrational factors, it might still be the case that the beliefs of one or more religion were true. A second look, however, will show that epistemological questions and explanatory questions cannot be sharply divorced. While a belief might be true and yet be the outcome of nonrational factors in the minds of those who hold it, further questions must be considered. An important epistemological question concerning religion is “Do/can any religious beliefs amount to knowledge?” It (p. 35) is not sufficient that a belief happens to be true for it to count as knowledge. It must be warranted as well. And that implies something about the belief’s causation. It is so caused that it is no accident that it is true. If a subject’s belief that p amounts to knowledge that p, then this implies something about how the belief that p is generated. Awareness of the fact that p must be a causally necessary condition of the knowing subject’s coming to hold that p. If the dogmas of a particular religion just happened to be true of a sacred, transcendent reality, then those beliefs would not arise from cognitive contact with that reality. That reality’s existence and character could have been quite other than they are, and yet the dogmas would still have the content that they have. But then those dogmas could not count as knowledge. In religions, there is the tacit claim that their beliefs, moral systems, and traditions of spirituality arise out of contact with the Ultimate. This means that they are not wholly human products, for all that they are rooted in human history and culture.
The epistemological reflections on religious diversity are thus vital to the interpretation of religion. There are three main types of theory of religion that arise from or bear upon the fact of religious diversity: naturalism, confessionalism, and pluralism.1
Naturalism
Naturalism is linked to atheism in the epistemology of religious diversity. Atheism is the denial that any sacred, transcendent reality exists. Naturalism in the theory of religion is the name for theories of religion that explain it in wholly human, natural terms. We get from atheism to naturalism in the following way. If atheism is the best bet given diversity, then we must assume that there is no ultimate reality. Causal, cognitive contact with such a reality has not, then, been a moving force in the development of religions. No religious experiences are veridical. Religion is then best seen as wholly naturally caused. Reductive, nonrealist explanations of religion now look plausible. So, diversity gives rise to atheism (as defined earlier in this chapter), and atheism gives rise to naturalism. Moreover, diversity might seem to be best explained by a typical offshoot of atheism: the assertion that religion is everywhere the product of the human imagination fed by desires and needs in the context of different strands of human culture. In contrast, if we supposed that religion, in at least some of its forms, put us in touch with a human-transcending truth, then we would expect that it is not simply the product of the human imagination.
According to the naturalist, a nonrealist interpretation of religion looks likely in the light of diversity. Religions come and go. There is a seemingly endless birth and death of sects in the history of religion. There is no accumulation of reliable belief and no convergence in religion. The overwhelmingly plausible explanation of the manifold forms of human religiousness is the naturalist’s appeal to the imagination and its historical and cultural setting. Religion is not truth-oriented, does not track the truth, and is a fiction.2
(p. 36) Confessionalism
Within each of the main, long-established religions of the world, dogmatic structures have developed to take account of and explain “other religions.” It is possible to interpret religious diversity from the standpoint provided by one of the extant religious confessions. There are thus (varieties of) Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, and other interpretations of the fact that the world contains diverse forms of belief and practice. It is of the essence of a confessionalist interpretation of religion that it is nonegalitarian. For naturalism, in contrast, all religions are works of fiction. The confessionalist is nonegalitarian about the cognitive successes claimed by religions, such as truth, warrant, soteriological effectiveness, veridical religious experiences, and perhaps sound morality. In these things, the confessionalist’s favored religion is superior to “other religions.” The superiority can be a matter of black and white, or it can manifest in shades of gray. For the confessional exclusivist, the successes of the favored religion exclude success in other religions. If the favored religion is true, the others are false. If it offers a means of salvation, the others do not. There is no route to the Ultimate but via the one, true faith.3
However, for the inclusivist, success of the favored religion in some or other of these important dimensions does not altogether exclude success in other religions. Thus, the inclusivist might claim that although the favored religion has the definitive account of truth about the Ultimate and about the human condition, people in other religions have some apprehension of the sacred. This apprehension is not free from error, but it might be enough to allow, for example, adherents of the other religions to act rightly and thus gain salvation. For example, it is common in Orthodox Judaism to contend that while Judaism has the truth about the Almighty, people in other faiths can still be saved. They can be if they know of and adhere to the seven Noachide laws (a set of fundamental socioethical norms). Other religions might be of use and value if they preach the Noachide laws, even though the truth about God is in Judaism.4
In committing themselves to these nonegalitarian perspectives on religion, it is essential for confessionalists to take a particular stand on the epistemological issues raised by religious diversity discussed earlier in this chapter. They must assume that peer conflict does not significantly dent their well-grounded confidence in the truth of their confession’s beliefs. Either the apologetic obligation can be met by, and on behalf of, their confession, or it can be successfully sidestepped (as, for example, per Plantinga).
Pluralism
Pluralism is a return to an egalitarian view of the cognitive successes and failures of human religions. Pluralism can flow from a form of agnosticism. Suppose we accept the validity of the apologetic obligation, judge it not to be met, but conclude that there is enough to be said in favor of the generic belief in a sacred, transcendent reality to avoid atheism.5
(p. 37) Pluralism views all, or at least the major, religions as partial successes or as mitigated failures. It can be summed up in three propositions: (1) All major forms of religion are equal in respect of making common reference to a single, transcendent sacred reality; (2) they are likewise equal in respect of offering some means or other to human salvation; And (3) all religious traditions are to be seen as containing revisable, limited accounts of the nature of the Ultimate; none is certain enough in its specific dogmatic formulations to provide the means of interpreting the others.
Pluralism is a kind of quasi-realist interpretation of religion. Yes, religions are in large measure the product of the human imagination set in unique cultures, but they are not wholly so. There is some accumulation and overlap among them. By far the most widely discussed version of a pluralist theory of religion is that of Hick (2004).
Concepts of Ultimate Reality
Philosophers reflect on and develop conceptions of God, or the Ultimate. The fact of religious diversity provides a particular input to such reflection and development. It does so more especially for those who respond to diversity in a pluralist or inclusivist spirit. Thinkers in both of these camps will maintain that believers in many different faiths succeed in establishing cognitive contact with the sacred, transcendent reality postulated by religion. The contact will be in one or more of these dimensions: experience of the divine; descriptions of the divine that have some verisimilitude; ethical and religious practices that provide right orientation toward the divine; worship, contemplation, or prayer that contains a successful reference to the divine. The general problem that this claim to panreligious success raises can be stated thus: How can such success be possible given that there are deep incompatibilities among (and within) religions on the matter of what the Ultimate is like? Crudely, we can ask, how can incompatible accounts of the Ultimate all have some measure of truth when they contradict one another?
Hick’s version of pluralism produces a radical, and much debated, solution to the above nest of problems. He distinguishes between the Ultimate (which he calls “the Real”) as it is in itself and as it appears to human beings through the lens of the particular religious traditions to which human beings belong. The distinction recalls Kant’s distinction between the world as it is in itself and as it appears to human beings. Hick’s distinction is based on the Kantian thought that human modes of cognition (in this instance, the conceptual structure supplied by a religious tradition) shape our awareness of reality. Since we cannot but cognize the Ultimate via the concepts furnished by a given human tradition, we cannot have an unmediated apprehension of it. Hick calls this postulate of a distinction between the Ultimate in itself and as it appears to us “the Pluralist Hypothesis” (see Hick (p. 38) 2004, chaps. 14–15). With it there goes a reinterpretation of truth in religion. At one level, different religions have pictures of the divine that are true of different manifestations of the Real, for there are many ways in which the Real appears to human beings in history, and the different religions contain true accounts of those different phenomenal manifestations. At another level, different religions contain metaphorically true accounts of the Ultimate as it is in itself, and for that metaphorical truth, incompatibilities among their accounts literally interpreted do not matter. This is because metaphorical truth in this context is, for Hick, a form of pragmatic truth. A religion is true of the Real in itself insofar as its concepts and practices provide a successful way of orienting its followers in behavior; that is, it puts believers on a path toward genuine moral and spiritual transformation. Hick calls this theory of religious language and truth a “mythological” reading of them (Hick 2004, chap. 19).
There are other paths that pluralists who are not impressed by Hick’s mythological theory can tread. A less radical move than Hick’s “appearance versus reality in itself” distinction consists in viewing the divine as similar to a natural kind. A natural kind, such as water, has a real essence (its molecular structure) that is invariant, but it manifests different, and incompatible, sensible qualities in different environments. In one set of circumstances, it is a solid (ice); in another, it is a liquid (normal water); and in a third, it is a gas (water vapor). In a corresponding fashion, the Ultimate might be one while manifesting itself to human beings now as personal God or now as an impersonal absolute. This is the notion that the one transcendent, sacred reality is one but has many aspects. Different religions provide pictures of different aspects. This multiaspectual view of the Ultimate is explored by Byrne (1995), McKim (1988), and Ward (1987).
The reflections on the nature of the Ultimate summarized thus far best fit pluralist responses to diversity, for they entail that the accounts of the Ultimate in existing religions are quite radically incomplete or limited. Confessional inclusivists need not go so far. One way of securing the aims of inclusivism in the face of the fact that the other religions contain accounts of the divine that seriously conflict with that found in the favored confession consists in separating reference from truth. What matters to the inclusivist may be that the faithful in other religions use concepts and symbols that refer to the divine. By this means, they can be said to worship it and pray to it and perhaps experience it (although the experiences are not wholly veridical). It is possible to argue that in many nonreligious cases, successful reference can be made to an entity through false descriptions. Reference can be established through contextual factors in the absence of descriptive adequacy. This point can then be applied to the religious case. Thus, it is possible for the Christian inclusivist to conclude that the faithful Muslim refers to the one true God in his or her prayers and worship, although his or her account of that being’s nature contains many errors, judged from the Christian standpoint.6 This is another method whereby descriptive adequacy and truth in the theologies of the different religions can be downplayed in order to maintain some convergence among faiths despite theoretical conflicts among them.
(p. 39) Religion and the Human Good
In the pursuit of affirming convergence among faiths despite theoretical conflicts among them, both inclusivists and pluralists will typically maintain that people in different religions can be on a path to salvation/liberation. Once this last commitment is made, it almost inevitably brings with it another one: the claim that there is a wide measure of agreement on matters of moral good and right across the major religions. This alleged moral consensus is something that allows for the affirmation of a degree of convergence among the religions despite the many things that divide them. Hick affirms the moral convergence of the faiths as part of his pluralism, telling us that there is a range of moral values that all of the major religions agree on (Hick 2004, chap. 18). They agree that a life of generous goodwill, love, and compassion is the constitutive means of attaining both the human good and a life lived in authentic relation to the Ultimate.7
Although this commitment to moral convergence beneath doctrinal differences is widespread among pluralist and inclusivist interpreters of religion, it is not without its critics. D’Costa is one who has argued that the commitment is based on a superficial reading of the moral teachings of the great world religions (see D’Costa 1993). The commitment fails to appreciate that it is only when viewed at a misleading level of generality that the moral values of the different religions can be seen as the same. To illustrate, while we might say that both Christianity and Theravada Buddhism are committed to a life of self-renunciation as the best and the most liberating, on close examination, we find divergence. For the Christian, the life of self-renunciation is one of loving God through loving the other self that is one’s neighbor, while for the Buddhist, self-renunciation is a matter of seeing through the illusion behind the “fact” of enduring, separate selves (see D’Costa 1993, 94).
The difference of opinion noted above is part and parcel of a larger debate in ethical theory between what might be called universalists and particularists. The former affirm that there are substantive moral values (rules and principles) that transcend different moral traditions; there is a common moral sense among humankind. The latter insist that moral values are constituted in their definite meaning only against the backdrop of tradition-bound forms of awareness and thought. The writings of Alasdair McIntyre have been influential in shaping such particularism.8
However we judge the truth between universalists and particularists, it is evident that moral universalism is an important component of a typical pluralist and inclusivist outlook. Without it, it is very hard to see convergence within the diversity of faiths.
References
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Basinger, David. 2002. Religious Diversity: A Philosophical Assessment. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate.
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Swinburne, Richard. 2004. The Existence of God, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon.
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(p. 41) Ward, Keith. 1987. Images of Eternity. London: Darton, Longman and Todd.
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For Further Reading
DiNoia, Joseph. 1992. The Diversity of Religions. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America.
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Gellman, Jerome. 2000. “In Defence of a Contented Religious Exclusivism.” Religious Studies 36: 401–417.
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Kraft, James. 2007. “Religious Disagreement, Externalism and the Epistemology of Disagreement: Listening to Our Grandmothers.” Religious Studies 43: 417–432.
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McKim, Robert. 2001. Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Netland, Harold. 1991. Dissonant Voices. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans.
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Quinn, Phillip. 1995. “Toward Thinner Theologies: Hick and Alston on Religious Diversity.” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 38: 145–164.
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Quinn, Phillip, and Kevin Meeker, eds. 2000. The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Runzo, Joseph. 1993. World Views and Perceiving God. Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan.
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Notes:
(1.) For a fuller and more detailed list, see Byrne 1995, 2–16.
(2.) For a contemporary defense of these assertions, see Zamulinski 2003.
(3.) See Craig 1989 for a contemporary Christian form of exclusivism.
(4.) See Solomon 1993.
(5.) What might be said in favor of this generic belief is John Hick’s argument that moral transformation in the major world faiths is evidence of human interaction with ultimate reality; for Hick’s epistemic strategy, see the overview in Twiss 1990.
(6.) See Alston 1989 and Miller 1986 for versions of this theory.
(7.) Compare Solomon’s Jewish inclusivism, described above.
(8.) See McIntyre 1988; surveys of aspects of the debate can be found in Kent 1994 and Byrne 1995, 103–105.
Peter Byrne
Peter Byrne is Professor of Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion at King’s College, London.
quarta-feira, 13 de maio de 2015
domingo, 23 de março de 2014
Douglas Walton - Informal Logic
6.4 NON-FALLACIOUS AD HOMINEM ARGUMENTS
The previous examples have indicated that there are many ways in which criticism directed against the person can go wrong and be fallacious. However, the last examples have suggested that in some cases, and to some extent, a personal attack against an opponent’s circumstances or position may be not altogether unreasonable. Does this mean that in some cases arguments against the person could be reasonable? In section 6.1, it has already been suggested that this is indeed the case. And if it is true, it means that we must not reject an argument against the person without giving good reasons.
We saw that example 6.4, from one point of view, could be interpreted as a weak but basically reasonable criticism to raise. Another example will serve to illustrate a reasonable use of the circumstantial argument against the person as a move in argument. Consider the following dialogue.
Example 6.10
George: The notorious problems we have been having with postal strikes means that there is no longer reliable mail service provided by the government.
I think we ought to allow private, for-profit mail-delivery companies to compete on an equal footing with the Post Office.
Bob: But George, you are a communist.
Let us suppose that in this case George is an avowed communist, and has based his previous arguments on many standard communist principles and positions. Now in many cases, calling your opponent in an argument a communist could be a fallacious type of ad hominem attack. However, in this instance, Bob seems to have a reasonable point. If George is an avowed communist, and communists are for state control and against private enterprise, then how can George consistently argue for a for-profit mail service run by private enterprise? It seems like a legitimate question. Of course, George may be able to resolve the ostensible inconsistency in subsequent dialogue. Surely Bob is justified in challenging the consistency of George’s position at this point in the dialogue. If so, then in this case, Bob’s circumstantial argument is not fallacious. It is a reasonable use of the ad hominem argument to challenge George’s position.
If arguments against the person can sometimes be reasonable, we must carefully analyze this type of argument to set out criteria that will enable us to distinguish between the incorrect (fallacious) and reasonable instances of ad hominem argumentation. First, let us address the reasonable type of person-directed criticism in argument.
A personal attack can be a reasonable criticism of an arguer’s position by showing that the concessions or commitments of that arguer are inconsistent with the propositions asserted in his argument. Some might say that such an attack is, or can be, specious because it misses the real point of looking to the external evidence and instead, concentrates on the internal relationships within the arguer’s position. For instance, in example 6.10, some commentators might say that Bob would be better off to evaluate George’s proposal of private mail service on its own merits, rather than raising the internal question of whether the proposal is internally consistent with George’s own political position. What does George’s own internal position matter to anyone else, compared with the very important issue of whether mail service should be public or private?
This point of view has some justification. For external evidence should very often have priority, and ifwe are distracted from that external evidence by purely personal (internal) considerations, that is the very climate in which the personal attack creates the most mischief in argument.
However, internal matters of an arguer’s position can sometimes be important too. If George really is inconsistent in his position and confused -a communist who advocates free enterprise — then it is very important to George to sort out his own position. For one thing, if George’s position does truly contain a logical inconsistency, then it cannot be right. Second, there may be many other readers or listeners affected by George’s argument who may be somewhat sympathetic to some forms of communism, and who may be very irritated and concerned about postal strikes and reliable mail services. For these people, it may be very important to think through the whole issue in much the same way that George is trying to think it through. Even those who strongly reject any communistic political ideals may be concerned to see how a communist could deal with the problems posed by mail strikes. So the internal question ofthe consistency of George’s position on this issue may be very important for George and many others as well.
A third factor is that internal evidence can be enough to swing the balance of acceptance to one side of an argument or the other where external evidence is lacking or cannot be brought to bear on an issue. On a complex and controversial moral or political issue like state control of services, there may be no clear external, factual, or scientific evidence that would definitely resolve the controversy one way or the other. Although internal evidence derived from an arguer’s position may always be weaker than external evidence, sometimes, where it is hard to decide on a controversial topic, weak evidence may be enough to shift the burden of proof.
In such a case, if an arguer adopts a position that is open to a criticism of inconsistency, that may be enough to shift the burden of proof against his case. Such an arguer will be put on the defensive, and his credibility as an advocate of his side of the argument may then be questioned.
A fourth factor is that in some cases a successful argument against the person can render an arguer’s impartiality, sincerity, or trustworthiness open to question. This may be a weak form of argument, but it may be enough to alter the burden ofproofon a controversial issue. And therefore it can be a reasonable criticism.
On controversial issues, hard evidence that can be directly brought to bear on a disputed proposition may be lacking. In such a case, reasonable dialogue may be the only available way of deciding to accept a conclusion or not, short ofdeciding by random choice, or by following one’s dogmatic inclinations. Here, understanding the arguer’s positions both pro and con may help one to arrive at a more intelligent or reasoned decision on how to make a commitment, if a decision must be made. If an arguer’s position is open to fair criticism of internal inconsistency, that could be a good reason for anyone to withhold acceptance of the arguer’s conclusion.
In short, sometimes arguing against an opponent in argument by using his own concessions against his argument can be fair and reasonable, within limits. Such an argument may show that the arguer’s position is inconsistent, and may thereby show that the arguer is not a credible advocate of the conclusion he purports to advance. However, an argument against the person does not show that his conclusion is necessarily false, in itself. At best, it shows that the position backing up the argument is open to challenge. In example 6.10, George’s conclusion that private companies should be allowed to compete with the Post Office might, for all we know, be true. George may even be able to give some good reasons for it that anyone, even an anti-communist, would wish to take into account. Even so, Bob’s criticism is a reasonable argument against the person in reply if it shows that this conclusion does not square with George’s own political philosophy. That may be a good criticism, but of course it does not necessarily imply that George’s conclusion is false. To so argue would be an incorrect use of the argument against the person. In short then, an argument against the person can sometimes be a reasonable criticism, but only within carefully drawn limits.
Traditionally, the argument against the person, or so-called ad hominem argument has been called a fallacy in many textbooks.1 However, it is more useful to make the following distinctions which allow for the argument against the person to be a reasonable criticism in some cases and an inadequately reasoned or supported criticism in other cases.2 A personal attack (personal allegation) is said to have been advanced in argument where one arguer uses some personal allegations relative to the motives, personal circumstances, personal actions, and so forth, as a basis to criticize an opponent’s argument. This form ofattack can have three forms, the direct (abusive) personal attack, the circumstantial personal attack, and the attack on an arguer’s impartiality. Such an attack becomes a personal criticism of an argument where evidence is given by the arguer to back up his personal attack on the argument criticized.
The evidence required for this criticism must fulfill various requirements if the criticism is to be reasonable in a given case. The more subtle and complex type of personal attack is the circumstantial type of instance, where care is needed to identify the nature of the alleged circumstantial inconsistency.
A circumstantial attack against the person occurs where an arguer questions the consistency of another arguer’s position. A circumstantial criticism is advanced where the questioning arguer (1) pins down a specific set of propositions and gives some evidence that the other arguer is committed to these propositions as part ofhis argument or position, and (2) gives some reason to show that there is a danger ofinconsistency, either circumstantial or logical, in these propositions. A circumstantial refutation occurs where a circumstantial criticism is successfully backed up by showing that the set of propositions in question is part of the other arguer’s set of commitments, and does imply a logical contradiction by valid arguments. Various forms of error occur in a personal attack when the direct personal attack or circumstantial criticism is inadequately supported, and therefore fails either as a reasonable criticism or as a successful refutation of the argument in question. There are several specific types of failures, and we turn to these different types of error and shortcoming in the next section.
As a form of criticism, argument against the person has the effect of challenging an arguer’s position and thereby putting that arguer’s case on the defensive. All controversial argument is really a dialogue, and there are always two sides to a dialogue. The effect of an ad hominem reply in dialogue is to bounce the ball back into your opponent’s court. However, the ultimate resolution ofan argument against the person as a criticism that is successful, or itself open to criticism, is often highly dependent on the subsequent dialogue that takes place between the critic and the defender of the argument. Thus a good personal criticism may be successful if it opens up the channels ofdialogue in articulating or exploring two opposed positions on a controversial issue.
Some arguments are more open to personal criticism than others. Consider the following argument.
Example 6.11
Skeptic: All arguments are relative to beliefs that can be challenged. Hence no argument is reliable.
This argument is open to the following personal, circumstantial reply to Skeptic: “What about your own argument (example 6.11) above, Skeptic? Is it reliable?” If Skeptic tries to insist that his argument is reliable, he is clearly in danger of personal inconsistency. For he has just maintained that no argument is reliable. How can he consistently make an exception for his own argument without being illogical? On the other hand, if Skeptic concedes that his own argument in example 6.11 is indeed unreliable, he is also in trouble on grounds of circumstantial inconsistency. For can he really be a sincere and competent participant in reasonable dialogue if he is advocating an argument which he knows to be unreliable? Either way, Skeptic is hoist by his own petard.
So some arguments, like example 6.11, are especially vulnerable to the circumstantial argument against the person as a form of criticism. In such cases, the argument against the person is the most reasonable and appropriate type ofcriticism to bring forward. In these cases, the argument against the person can successfully refute the argument. However, in many cases the argument against the person is inherently weaker. It is not a refutation in such cases, but nevertheless it can often be a reasonable form of challenge to an argument, and can successfully shift the burden of proof against it.
1
See Govier (1983) and Walton (1985b).
2
A deeply and carefully reasoned defence of the argument against the person as a kind of criticism that can be reasonable in some contexts of dialogue is given by Johnstone (1978).
The previous examples have indicated that there are many ways in which criticism directed against the person can go wrong and be fallacious. However, the last examples have suggested that in some cases, and to some extent, a personal attack against an opponent’s circumstances or position may be not altogether unreasonable. Does this mean that in some cases arguments against the person could be reasonable? In section 6.1, it has already been suggested that this is indeed the case. And if it is true, it means that we must not reject an argument against the person without giving good reasons.
We saw that example 6.4, from one point of view, could be interpreted as a weak but basically reasonable criticism to raise. Another example will serve to illustrate a reasonable use of the circumstantial argument against the person as a move in argument. Consider the following dialogue.
Example 6.10
George: The notorious problems we have been having with postal strikes means that there is no longer reliable mail service provided by the government.
I think we ought to allow private, for-profit mail-delivery companies to compete on an equal footing with the Post Office.
Bob: But George, you are a communist.
Let us suppose that in this case George is an avowed communist, and has based his previous arguments on many standard communist principles and positions. Now in many cases, calling your opponent in an argument a communist could be a fallacious type of ad hominem attack. However, in this instance, Bob seems to have a reasonable point. If George is an avowed communist, and communists are for state control and against private enterprise, then how can George consistently argue for a for-profit mail service run by private enterprise? It seems like a legitimate question. Of course, George may be able to resolve the ostensible inconsistency in subsequent dialogue. Surely Bob is justified in challenging the consistency of George’s position at this point in the dialogue. If so, then in this case, Bob’s circumstantial argument is not fallacious. It is a reasonable use of the ad hominem argument to challenge George’s position.
If arguments against the person can sometimes be reasonable, we must carefully analyze this type of argument to set out criteria that will enable us to distinguish between the incorrect (fallacious) and reasonable instances of ad hominem argumentation. First, let us address the reasonable type of person-directed criticism in argument.
A personal attack can be a reasonable criticism of an arguer’s position by showing that the concessions or commitments of that arguer are inconsistent with the propositions asserted in his argument. Some might say that such an attack is, or can be, specious because it misses the real point of looking to the external evidence and instead, concentrates on the internal relationships within the arguer’s position. For instance, in example 6.10, some commentators might say that Bob would be better off to evaluate George’s proposal of private mail service on its own merits, rather than raising the internal question of whether the proposal is internally consistent with George’s own political position. What does George’s own internal position matter to anyone else, compared with the very important issue of whether mail service should be public or private?
This point of view has some justification. For external evidence should very often have priority, and ifwe are distracted from that external evidence by purely personal (internal) considerations, that is the very climate in which the personal attack creates the most mischief in argument.
However, internal matters of an arguer’s position can sometimes be important too. If George really is inconsistent in his position and confused -a communist who advocates free enterprise — then it is very important to George to sort out his own position. For one thing, if George’s position does truly contain a logical inconsistency, then it cannot be right. Second, there may be many other readers or listeners affected by George’s argument who may be somewhat sympathetic to some forms of communism, and who may be very irritated and concerned about postal strikes and reliable mail services. For these people, it may be very important to think through the whole issue in much the same way that George is trying to think it through. Even those who strongly reject any communistic political ideals may be concerned to see how a communist could deal with the problems posed by mail strikes. So the internal question ofthe consistency of George’s position on this issue may be very important for George and many others as well.
A third factor is that internal evidence can be enough to swing the balance of acceptance to one side of an argument or the other where external evidence is lacking or cannot be brought to bear on an issue. On a complex and controversial moral or political issue like state control of services, there may be no clear external, factual, or scientific evidence that would definitely resolve the controversy one way or the other. Although internal evidence derived from an arguer’s position may always be weaker than external evidence, sometimes, where it is hard to decide on a controversial topic, weak evidence may be enough to shift the burden of proof.
In such a case, if an arguer adopts a position that is open to a criticism of inconsistency, that may be enough to shift the burden of proof against his case. Such an arguer will be put on the defensive, and his credibility as an advocate of his side of the argument may then be questioned.
A fourth factor is that in some cases a successful argument against the person can render an arguer’s impartiality, sincerity, or trustworthiness open to question. This may be a weak form of argument, but it may be enough to alter the burden ofproofon a controversial issue. And therefore it can be a reasonable criticism.
On controversial issues, hard evidence that can be directly brought to bear on a disputed proposition may be lacking. In such a case, reasonable dialogue may be the only available way of deciding to accept a conclusion or not, short ofdeciding by random choice, or by following one’s dogmatic inclinations. Here, understanding the arguer’s positions both pro and con may help one to arrive at a more intelligent or reasoned decision on how to make a commitment, if a decision must be made. If an arguer’s position is open to fair criticism of internal inconsistency, that could be a good reason for anyone to withhold acceptance of the arguer’s conclusion.
In short, sometimes arguing against an opponent in argument by using his own concessions against his argument can be fair and reasonable, within limits. Such an argument may show that the arguer’s position is inconsistent, and may thereby show that the arguer is not a credible advocate of the conclusion he purports to advance. However, an argument against the person does not show that his conclusion is necessarily false, in itself. At best, it shows that the position backing up the argument is open to challenge. In example 6.10, George’s conclusion that private companies should be allowed to compete with the Post Office might, for all we know, be true. George may even be able to give some good reasons for it that anyone, even an anti-communist, would wish to take into account. Even so, Bob’s criticism is a reasonable argument against the person in reply if it shows that this conclusion does not square with George’s own political philosophy. That may be a good criticism, but of course it does not necessarily imply that George’s conclusion is false. To so argue would be an incorrect use of the argument against the person. In short then, an argument against the person can sometimes be a reasonable criticism, but only within carefully drawn limits.
Traditionally, the argument against the person, or so-called ad hominem argument has been called a fallacy in many textbooks.1 However, it is more useful to make the following distinctions which allow for the argument against the person to be a reasonable criticism in some cases and an inadequately reasoned or supported criticism in other cases.2 A personal attack (personal allegation) is said to have been advanced in argument where one arguer uses some personal allegations relative to the motives, personal circumstances, personal actions, and so forth, as a basis to criticize an opponent’s argument. This form ofattack can have three forms, the direct (abusive) personal attack, the circumstantial personal attack, and the attack on an arguer’s impartiality. Such an attack becomes a personal criticism of an argument where evidence is given by the arguer to back up his personal attack on the argument criticized.
The evidence required for this criticism must fulfill various requirements if the criticism is to be reasonable in a given case. The more subtle and complex type of personal attack is the circumstantial type of instance, where care is needed to identify the nature of the alleged circumstantial inconsistency.
A circumstantial attack against the person occurs where an arguer questions the consistency of another arguer’s position. A circumstantial criticism is advanced where the questioning arguer (1) pins down a specific set of propositions and gives some evidence that the other arguer is committed to these propositions as part ofhis argument or position, and (2) gives some reason to show that there is a danger ofinconsistency, either circumstantial or logical, in these propositions. A circumstantial refutation occurs where a circumstantial criticism is successfully backed up by showing that the set of propositions in question is part of the other arguer’s set of commitments, and does imply a logical contradiction by valid arguments. Various forms of error occur in a personal attack when the direct personal attack or circumstantial criticism is inadequately supported, and therefore fails either as a reasonable criticism or as a successful refutation of the argument in question. There are several specific types of failures, and we turn to these different types of error and shortcoming in the next section.
As a form of criticism, argument against the person has the effect of challenging an arguer’s position and thereby putting that arguer’s case on the defensive. All controversial argument is really a dialogue, and there are always two sides to a dialogue. The effect of an ad hominem reply in dialogue is to bounce the ball back into your opponent’s court. However, the ultimate resolution ofan argument against the person as a criticism that is successful, or itself open to criticism, is often highly dependent on the subsequent dialogue that takes place between the critic and the defender of the argument. Thus a good personal criticism may be successful if it opens up the channels ofdialogue in articulating or exploring two opposed positions on a controversial issue.
Some arguments are more open to personal criticism than others. Consider the following argument.
Example 6.11
Skeptic: All arguments are relative to beliefs that can be challenged. Hence no argument is reliable.
This argument is open to the following personal, circumstantial reply to Skeptic: “What about your own argument (example 6.11) above, Skeptic? Is it reliable?” If Skeptic tries to insist that his argument is reliable, he is clearly in danger of personal inconsistency. For he has just maintained that no argument is reliable. How can he consistently make an exception for his own argument without being illogical? On the other hand, if Skeptic concedes that his own argument in example 6.11 is indeed unreliable, he is also in trouble on grounds of circumstantial inconsistency. For can he really be a sincere and competent participant in reasonable dialogue if he is advocating an argument which he knows to be unreliable? Either way, Skeptic is hoist by his own petard.
So some arguments, like example 6.11, are especially vulnerable to the circumstantial argument against the person as a form of criticism. In such cases, the argument against the person is the most reasonable and appropriate type ofcriticism to bring forward. In these cases, the argument against the person can successfully refute the argument. However, in many cases the argument against the person is inherently weaker. It is not a refutation in such cases, but nevertheless it can often be a reasonable form of challenge to an argument, and can successfully shift the burden of proof against it.
1
See Govier (1983) and Walton (1985b).
2
A deeply and carefully reasoned defence of the argument against the person as a kind of criticism that can be reasonable in some contexts of dialogue is given by Johnstone (1978).
segunda-feira, 17 de março de 2014
Capítulo XXXVII
CAPÍTULO XXXVII
Spandrell insistiu muitíssimo para que eles fossem à sua casa sem demora. O Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart[88] simplesmente não podia deixar de ser ouvido.
— Não se pode compreender coisa alguma antes de o ter ouvido — declarou Maurice. — Ele prova todas as espécies de coisas; Deus, a alma, a bondade, e de maneira irrefutável. É a única prova verdadeira que existe; a única, porque Beethoven foi o único homem que soube dar expressão ao seu conhecimento. Vocês têm mesmo de ir.
— De muito boa vontade — disse Rampion —, mas...
Spandrell lhe cortou a palavra.
— Ouvi dizer ontem, por acaso, que o Quarteto em Lá Menor existia em gravação. Fui correndo comprar um aparelho e os discos, expressamente para você.
— Para mim? Mas por que essa generosidade?
— Não é generosidade — respondeu Spandrell rindo. — É egoísmo. Quero que vocês ouçam, e que confirmem a minha opinião.
— Mas porquê?
— Porque tenho confiança em vocês e, se vocês confirmarem, hei de ter confiança em mim mesmo.
— Que homem! — zombou Rampion. — Tu devias entrar na Igreja de Roma e tomar um confessor.
— Mas vocês não podem deixar de ir!
Spandrell falava com um ardor sério.
— Mas não agora — disse Mary.
— Não hoje — repetiu o marido, perguntando a si mesmo, enquanto falava, por que Spandrell mostrava uma insistência tão estranha. Que havia, pois? Aquela maneira de se mover e de falar, aquele olhar, aquela excitação... — Tenho inúmeras coisas a fazer esta tarde.
— Amanhã, então.
"Parece que está embriagado", pensava Rampion.
— Por que não depois de amanhã? — disse depois, em voz alta. — Seria muito mais fácil para mim. E a máquina não baterá asas até lá...
Spandrell emitiu o seu riso afónico.
— A máquina não... Mas eu sim... Talvez já me tenha ido depois de amanhã...
— Mas não nos disseste que ias viajar — estranhou Mary. — Aonde?
— Quem sabe? — respondeu Spandrell, rindo de novo. — Eu só sei que não estarei mais aqui...
— Está bem — disse Rampion, que o havia observado com curiosidade. — Eu vou amanhã. E continuou a pensar: "Por que estará ele tão teatral?"
Spandrell abalou.
— Que haver de anormal com ele? — perguntou Rampion quando o outro desapareceu.
— Não lhe notei nada de particularmente anormal — respondeu Mary.
Rampion teve um gesto de impaciência.
— Ora, tu... tu não darias nem pelo Juízo Final! Não viste que Spandrell estava excitado e fazia o possível para se conter? Como quem segura a tampa de uma panela de água em ebulição... E aquela maneira melodramática de rir! Tal qual o cínico consciente das peças de teatro...
— Mas ele estava representando? — inquiriu Mary. — Estava a fazer-se de bobo para nos divertir?
— Não, não. Fazia tudo aquilo com absoluta sinceridade. Mas, quando nos achamos na situação autêntica do vilão consciente dum melodrama, acabamos inevitavelmente por nos portar como vilões conscientes. Representamos um papel, a despeito de nós mesmos.
— Mas por que fazia ele esse papel?
— Como diabo queres tu que eu saiba? — disse Rampion com impaciência. Mary esperava sempre que o marido soubesse tudo, por alguma intuição misteriosa e mágica. Aquela fé que ela tinha em Mark o divertia e o lisonjeava por vezes, mas noutros momentos também o irritava. — Tu me tomas pelo padre confessor de Spandrell?
— Não há razão para te zangares...
— Pelo contrário, não há quase nada que não possa dar motivo à cólera. Se nos contemos é porque a metade do tempo vivemos de olhos fechados, meio adormecidos. Se estivéssemos sempre acordados, meu Deus! Não ficaria muita louça intata! — E, dizendo isso, se foi com dignidade para o seu estúdio.
Deixando Chelsea, Spandrell rumou a pé para o lado de leste, ao longo do Tâmisa, caminhando devagar e assobiando para si mesmo, de quando em quando, as primeiras frases da melodia lídia do Heilige Dankgesang. E continuava a assobiar mais e mais... O rio se estendia a perder de vista, fundindo-se, longe, na bruma seca. A música era como água numa terra ressequida. Depois de tantos dias de estiagem, uma fonte, uma vertente! Um carro de irrigação passou estrondeando, arrastando a cauda de seu aguaceiro artificial. Sentiu-se um cheiro de terra molhada. Aquela música era uma prova, como ele havia dito a Rampion. Na sarjeta, uma pequena torrente impelia rápido para o esgoto, um invólucro de cigarros todo amarrotado e um pedaço de casca de laranja. Spandrell parou de assobiar. O horror essencial... O mesmo que carregar lixo; era o que aquilo tinha sido. Uma coisa simplesmente suja e desagradável — como limpar uma latrina.
Uma coisa que não chegava a ser tão terrível quanto era estúpida, indescritivelmente estúpida. A música era uma prova, Deus existia. Mas somente enquanto os violinos estavam tocando. Uma vez suspensos os arcos das cordas — que acontecia?
O lixo, a estupidez, a aridez impiedosa!
Em Vauxhall Bridge Road Spandrell comprou por 1 xelim um maço de papéis de cartas e envelopes. Pelo preço duma taça de café e dum brioche, alugou uma mesa numa casa de chá. Escreveu com um toco de lápis: "Ao Secretário Geral da Confraria dos Ingleses Livres. — Senhor, amanhã, quarta-feira, às 5 horas da tarde, o assassino de Everard Webley se encontrar no número 37 da Catskill Street, S.W. 7. O apartamento fica no segundo andar. O homem provavelmente vir abrir a porta em pessoa. Estará armado e disposto a tudo".
Releu a carta; esta lhe lembrou as comunicações (escritas com tinta vermelha, para simular sangue, e sob a influência das histórias em séries dos semanários infantis, Chums e B.O.P.) com as quais, em colaboração com o Pokinghorne Caçula, ele esperara, à idade de nove anos, causar sobressalto e terror à Srta. Veal, a matrona da escola preparatória que ambos freqüentavam então. Tinham sido descobertos e denunciados ao diretor. O velho Nariguete deu em cada um deles três varadas nas nádegas. "Ele está armado e disposto a tudo." Aquilo era puro Pokinghorne. Mas, se ele não se expressasse assim, os homens de Webley não trariam revólveres. E, então, a coisa não aconteceria. Nada aconteceria. Que o bilhete fosse assim mesmo... Spandrell dobrou o papel e pô-lo dentro dum envelope. Havia uma tolice essencial, bem como uma vilania e uma estupidez essenciais. Rabiscou o endereço.
* * *
— Bem, cá estamos — disse Rampion, quando Spandrell abriu a porta para o casal na tarde do dia seguinte. — Onde está Beethoven? Onde está a famosa prova da existência de Deus e da superioridade da moral de Jesus?
— Por aqui... — Spandrell guiou-os até a sala de estar. O gramofone se achava sobre a mesa. Quatro ou cinco discos estavam espalhados ao lado dele. — Aqui está o início do movimento lento — continuou Spandrelt, apanhando um deles. — Não quero aborrecer vocês com o resto do quarteto. É magnífico. Mas o Heilige Dankgesang é a parte decisiva.. — Pôs a máquina em movimento, o disco girou; Spandrell abaixou a agulha sobre a superfície estriada. Um violino isolado emitiu uma nota longa, depois mais outra, uma sexta acima; caiu para a quinta (enquanto o segundo violino começava onde tinha partido o primeiro), depois saltou para a oitava, e ficou pendurado nela, suspenso durante dois longos compassos.
Mais de cem anos atrás, Beethoven, surdo como uma porta, tinha ouvido a música imaginária de instrumentos de corda que exprimiam os seus pensamentos e sentimentos mais íntimos. Traçara sinais com tinta em papel pautado. Um século mais tarde quatro húngaros haviam tocado, diante da reprodução impressa das garatujas de Beethoven, aquela música que Beethoven nunca ouvira a não ser em imaginação. Ranhuras em espiral sobre uma superficie de goma-laca se lembravam agora do que eles haviam tocado. Aquela memória artificial girava, uma agulha viajava pelas ranhuras e, por entre o chiado leve e os roncos abafados que imitavam os ruídos da surdez mesma de Beethoven, os símbolos perceptíveis das convicções e emoções de Beethoven vibravam no ar. Lentamente, lentamente, a melodia se desenrolou. As arcaicas harmonias lídias ficaram suspensas no ar. Era uma música sem paixão, transparente, pura e cristalina, como um mar tropical, como um lago alpino. Água sobre a água, calma — deslizando sobre calma; um acordo de horizontes unidos e de espaços sem ondulações; um contraponto de serenidade. E tudo era claro e brilhante; nada de brumas, nada de crepúsculos vagos. Era a calma da contemplação tranqüila e extática, e não do torpor e do sono. Era a serenidade do convalescente que acorda da sua febre e se descobre a renascer num reino de beleza. Mas a febre era "aquela febre que se chama vida", e o renascimento não ocorria dentro deste mundo; aquela beleza era extraterrena; a serenidade convalescente era a paz de Deus. O entrelaçamento de melodias lídias era o céu.
Trinta compassos lentos tinham construido o céu, quando o caráter da música se modificou de súbito. Depois de ter sido remotamente arcaica, tornou-se moderna. As harmonias lídias foram substituídas pelas do tom maior correspondente. O ritmo se fez mais rápido. Uma nova melodia pulou, saltou — mas por cima das montanhas terrestres, não no meio das montanhas do paraíso.
— "Neue Kraft fuehlend"[89] — cochichou Spandrell, lendo a partitura. — Ele está se sentindo mais forte; mas não é já tão celestial.
A nova melodia continuou a saltar durante uns cinqüenta compassos e expirou num chiado. Spandrell ergueu a agulha e fez parar o prato do aparelho.
— O motivo lídio começa de novo no outro lado — explicou ele, enquanto dava mais corda ao gramofone. — E depois há um retomo da maneira mais viva em lá maior. A partir daí, a coisa segue no modo lídio até o fim, e vai ficando cada vez mais e mais bonita. Não achas isto maravilhoso? — Spandrell voltou-separa Rampion. — Não é uma prova?
O outro meneou a cabeça.
— Maravilhoso. Mas a única coisa que isso prova, pelo menos segundo percebo, é que os doentes costumam ficar muito fracos. É a arte dum homem que perdeu o corpo.
— Mas que descobriu a alma.
— Oh! eu te garanto que os homens doentes são muito espiritualistas. Mas isso é porque eles não são integralmente homens. Os eunucos são amantes muito espirituais pela mesma razão.
— Mas Beethoven não era um eunuco.
— Eu sei. Mas por que então procurou ser eunuco? Por que fez da castração e da ausência do corpo o seu ideal? Que é esta música? Apenas um hino de louvor ao eunuquismo. Muito bela, reconheço. Mas ele não teria podido escolher alguma coisa mais humana do que a castração para celebrar no seu canto?
Spandrell suspirou.
— Para mim é a visão da beatitude, é o céu.
— Não é da terra. Eis precisamente de que me queixo.
— Mas um homem não pode então imaginar o céu, se isso lhe apraz? — perguntou Mary.
— Certamente, desde que não pretenda que sua imaginação seja a última palavra da verdade, da beleza, da sabedoria, da virtude e de todo o resto... Spandrell quer fazer-nos aceitar o eunuquismo incorpóreo como última palavra. Não vou nisso. Absolutamente, não vou nisso.
— Escuta então o movimento antes de julgar.
Spandrell fez girar o disco e abaixou a agulha. O céu claro da música lídia vibrou no ar.
— Lindo, lindo! — disse Rampion, quando o disco findou. — Tu tens razão. É realmente o céu; é bem a vida da alma. É a mais perfeita abstração da realidade que já encontrei. Mas por que quis ele fazer essa abstração? Por que não se contentou com ser um homem e não uma alma abstrata? Por que, por quê? — Pôs-se a caminhar dum lado para outro no quarto. — Essa maldita alma — continuou ele —, essa maldita alma abstrata, dir-se-ia uma espécie de cancro que devora a realidade verdadeira, humana, natural, um cancro que se alastra sempre e sempre à custa dela. Por que não se pôde contentar com a realidade, esse velho imbecil do teu Beethoven? Por que sentiu a necessidade de substituir a coisa verdadeira, quente, natural, por esse cancro abstrato da alma? Pode ser que o cancro tenha uma forma muito bonita, mas, no fim das contas, com mil demônios!, o corpo é mais belo! Não quero saber do teu cancro espiritual.
— Não discutirei contigo — disse Spandrell. Sentiu-se de repente extraordinariamente cansado e deprimido. Sua tentativa falhara. Rampion recusara deixar-se convencer. A prova não era então uma prova, no fim de contas? Aquela música não se referia então a nada, a nada que estivesse fora dela mesma e das idiossincrasias de seu inventor? Spandrell olhou para o relógio; eram quase 5 horas. — Escuta pelo menos o fim do movimento — pediu ele. — É a parte melhor. — Deu corda ao gramofone. "Mesmo que isto seja desprovido de significação", pensou ele. "é bonito enquanto dura. E talvez não seja destituído de sentido. No fim. De contas, Rampion não é infalível." — Escutem...
A música recomeçou. Mas qualquer coisa de novo e de maravilhoso se havia passado no céu lídio. Redobrara a rapidez da melodia lenta; os contornos se lhe tinham tornado mais nítidos e mais definidos; uma parte interna voltava a repisar com insistência uma frase palpitante. Dir-se-ia que o céu se tornara subitamente, impossivelmente mais celeste, passando da perfeição realizada para uma perfeição ainda mais profunda e mais absoluta. A paz inefável persistia; mas não era a paz da convalescença e da passividade. Ela vibrava, era viva, parecia crescer e intensificar-se, transformava-se numa calma ativa, numa serenidade quase apaixonada. O paradoxo milagroso da vida exterior e do repouso eterno estava musicalmente realizado.
Eles escutavam, retendo quase a respiração. Spandrell contemplou o seu convidado com um ar de triunfo. Suas dúvidas se haviam dissipado. Como se podia deixar de crer numa coisa que existia, que existia manifestamente? Mark Rampion inclinou a cabeça.
— Sim, quase chegas a me convencer — murmurou ele. — Mas isto é bom demais...
— Como pode uma coisa ser boa demais?
— Quando não é humana. Se ela durasse... cessaríamos de ser homens.
— Morreríamos.
Calaram-se de novo. A música continuava, levando dum céu para outro, da felicidade para a felicidade mais profunda. Spandrell suspirou e fechou os olhos.
Seu rosto estava grave e sereno, como se tivesse sido alisado pelo sono ou pela morte. "Sim, morto", pensou Rampion, olhando para ele. "Spandrell se recusa a ser homem. Não é um homem, mas sim um demônio ou um anjo morto. Agora está morto." Uma suspeita de dissonância nas harmonias lídias deu à beatitude uma nota pungente, quase insuportável. Spandrell suspirou de novo. Bateram à porta.
Ele ergueu os olhos. As rugas de escárnio lhe voltaram ao rosto, as comissuras de seus lábios mais uma vez se tornaram irônicas.
"Pronto, voltou o demônio", pensou Rampion. "Spandrell voltou à vida, e é o demônio."
— Aí estão eles! — exclamou Maurice; e, sem responder à pergunta de Mary, "Quem?", saiu do compartimento.
Rampion e a mulher ficaram ao lado do gramofone, escutando a revelação do céu... Uma explosão ensurdecedora, um grito, outra explosão e mais outra fizeram subitamente em pedaços o paraíso de som. Ambos se ergueram num pincho e se precipitaram para a porta. No corredor, três homens vestidos com o uniforme verde dos Ingleses Livres contemplavam o corpo de Spandrell que jazia por terra. Cada um deles tinha um revólver na mão. Um quarto revólver se achava sobre o soalho, ao lado do moribundo. Via-se um buraco no lado do crânio de Spandrell e uma mancha de sangue na camisa. Suas mãos abriam-se e fechavam-se, abriam-se e fechavam-se de novo, arranhando as tábuas do soalho.
— Que foi que... — começou Rampion.
— Foi ele que atirou primeiro — interrompeu-o um dos homens.
Houve um pequeno silêncio. Pela porta aberta chegava o som da música. A paixão tinha começado a se evaporar da melodia celestial. O céu, naquelas notas prolongadas e puras, voltou a ser o lugar do repouso absoluto, da convalescença calma e feliz. Notas longas, um acorde, repetido, prolongado, brilhante e puro, suspenso, flutuante, voando sem esforço, alto, muito alto, infinitamente... Depois, de súbito, se acabou a música; ficou apenas o arranhar da agulha sobre o disco que girava.
Spandrell insistiu muitíssimo para que eles fossem à sua casa sem demora. O Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart[88] simplesmente não podia deixar de ser ouvido.
— Não se pode compreender coisa alguma antes de o ter ouvido — declarou Maurice. — Ele prova todas as espécies de coisas; Deus, a alma, a bondade, e de maneira irrefutável. É a única prova verdadeira que existe; a única, porque Beethoven foi o único homem que soube dar expressão ao seu conhecimento. Vocês têm mesmo de ir.
— De muito boa vontade — disse Rampion —, mas...
Spandrell lhe cortou a palavra.
— Ouvi dizer ontem, por acaso, que o Quarteto em Lá Menor existia em gravação. Fui correndo comprar um aparelho e os discos, expressamente para você.
— Para mim? Mas por que essa generosidade?
— Não é generosidade — respondeu Spandrell rindo. — É egoísmo. Quero que vocês ouçam, e que confirmem a minha opinião.
— Mas porquê?
— Porque tenho confiança em vocês e, se vocês confirmarem, hei de ter confiança em mim mesmo.
— Que homem! — zombou Rampion. — Tu devias entrar na Igreja de Roma e tomar um confessor.
— Mas vocês não podem deixar de ir!
Spandrell falava com um ardor sério.
— Mas não agora — disse Mary.
— Não hoje — repetiu o marido, perguntando a si mesmo, enquanto falava, por que Spandrell mostrava uma insistência tão estranha. Que havia, pois? Aquela maneira de se mover e de falar, aquele olhar, aquela excitação... — Tenho inúmeras coisas a fazer esta tarde.
— Amanhã, então.
"Parece que está embriagado", pensava Rampion.
— Por que não depois de amanhã? — disse depois, em voz alta. — Seria muito mais fácil para mim. E a máquina não baterá asas até lá...
Spandrell emitiu o seu riso afónico.
— A máquina não... Mas eu sim... Talvez já me tenha ido depois de amanhã...
— Mas não nos disseste que ias viajar — estranhou Mary. — Aonde?
— Quem sabe? — respondeu Spandrell, rindo de novo. — Eu só sei que não estarei mais aqui...
— Está bem — disse Rampion, que o havia observado com curiosidade. — Eu vou amanhã. E continuou a pensar: "Por que estará ele tão teatral?"
Spandrell abalou.
— Que haver de anormal com ele? — perguntou Rampion quando o outro desapareceu.
— Não lhe notei nada de particularmente anormal — respondeu Mary.
Rampion teve um gesto de impaciência.
— Ora, tu... tu não darias nem pelo Juízo Final! Não viste que Spandrell estava excitado e fazia o possível para se conter? Como quem segura a tampa de uma panela de água em ebulição... E aquela maneira melodramática de rir! Tal qual o cínico consciente das peças de teatro...
— Mas ele estava representando? — inquiriu Mary. — Estava a fazer-se de bobo para nos divertir?
— Não, não. Fazia tudo aquilo com absoluta sinceridade. Mas, quando nos achamos na situação autêntica do vilão consciente dum melodrama, acabamos inevitavelmente por nos portar como vilões conscientes. Representamos um papel, a despeito de nós mesmos.
— Mas por que fazia ele esse papel?
— Como diabo queres tu que eu saiba? — disse Rampion com impaciência. Mary esperava sempre que o marido soubesse tudo, por alguma intuição misteriosa e mágica. Aquela fé que ela tinha em Mark o divertia e o lisonjeava por vezes, mas noutros momentos também o irritava. — Tu me tomas pelo padre confessor de Spandrell?
— Não há razão para te zangares...
— Pelo contrário, não há quase nada que não possa dar motivo à cólera. Se nos contemos é porque a metade do tempo vivemos de olhos fechados, meio adormecidos. Se estivéssemos sempre acordados, meu Deus! Não ficaria muita louça intata! — E, dizendo isso, se foi com dignidade para o seu estúdio.
Deixando Chelsea, Spandrell rumou a pé para o lado de leste, ao longo do Tâmisa, caminhando devagar e assobiando para si mesmo, de quando em quando, as primeiras frases da melodia lídia do Heilige Dankgesang. E continuava a assobiar mais e mais... O rio se estendia a perder de vista, fundindo-se, longe, na bruma seca. A música era como água numa terra ressequida. Depois de tantos dias de estiagem, uma fonte, uma vertente! Um carro de irrigação passou estrondeando, arrastando a cauda de seu aguaceiro artificial. Sentiu-se um cheiro de terra molhada. Aquela música era uma prova, como ele havia dito a Rampion. Na sarjeta, uma pequena torrente impelia rápido para o esgoto, um invólucro de cigarros todo amarrotado e um pedaço de casca de laranja. Spandrell parou de assobiar. O horror essencial... O mesmo que carregar lixo; era o que aquilo tinha sido. Uma coisa simplesmente suja e desagradável — como limpar uma latrina.
Uma coisa que não chegava a ser tão terrível quanto era estúpida, indescritivelmente estúpida. A música era uma prova, Deus existia. Mas somente enquanto os violinos estavam tocando. Uma vez suspensos os arcos das cordas — que acontecia?
O lixo, a estupidez, a aridez impiedosa!
Em Vauxhall Bridge Road Spandrell comprou por 1 xelim um maço de papéis de cartas e envelopes. Pelo preço duma taça de café e dum brioche, alugou uma mesa numa casa de chá. Escreveu com um toco de lápis: "Ao Secretário Geral da Confraria dos Ingleses Livres. — Senhor, amanhã, quarta-feira, às 5 horas da tarde, o assassino de Everard Webley se encontrar no número 37 da Catskill Street, S.W. 7. O apartamento fica no segundo andar. O homem provavelmente vir abrir a porta em pessoa. Estará armado e disposto a tudo".
Releu a carta; esta lhe lembrou as comunicações (escritas com tinta vermelha, para simular sangue, e sob a influência das histórias em séries dos semanários infantis, Chums e B.O.P.) com as quais, em colaboração com o Pokinghorne Caçula, ele esperara, à idade de nove anos, causar sobressalto e terror à Srta. Veal, a matrona da escola preparatória que ambos freqüentavam então. Tinham sido descobertos e denunciados ao diretor. O velho Nariguete deu em cada um deles três varadas nas nádegas. "Ele está armado e disposto a tudo." Aquilo era puro Pokinghorne. Mas, se ele não se expressasse assim, os homens de Webley não trariam revólveres. E, então, a coisa não aconteceria. Nada aconteceria. Que o bilhete fosse assim mesmo... Spandrell dobrou o papel e pô-lo dentro dum envelope. Havia uma tolice essencial, bem como uma vilania e uma estupidez essenciais. Rabiscou o endereço.
* * *
— Bem, cá estamos — disse Rampion, quando Spandrell abriu a porta para o casal na tarde do dia seguinte. — Onde está Beethoven? Onde está a famosa prova da existência de Deus e da superioridade da moral de Jesus?
— Por aqui... — Spandrell guiou-os até a sala de estar. O gramofone se achava sobre a mesa. Quatro ou cinco discos estavam espalhados ao lado dele. — Aqui está o início do movimento lento — continuou Spandrelt, apanhando um deles. — Não quero aborrecer vocês com o resto do quarteto. É magnífico. Mas o Heilige Dankgesang é a parte decisiva.. — Pôs a máquina em movimento, o disco girou; Spandrell abaixou a agulha sobre a superfície estriada. Um violino isolado emitiu uma nota longa, depois mais outra, uma sexta acima; caiu para a quinta (enquanto o segundo violino começava onde tinha partido o primeiro), depois saltou para a oitava, e ficou pendurado nela, suspenso durante dois longos compassos.
Mais de cem anos atrás, Beethoven, surdo como uma porta, tinha ouvido a música imaginária de instrumentos de corda que exprimiam os seus pensamentos e sentimentos mais íntimos. Traçara sinais com tinta em papel pautado. Um século mais tarde quatro húngaros haviam tocado, diante da reprodução impressa das garatujas de Beethoven, aquela música que Beethoven nunca ouvira a não ser em imaginação. Ranhuras em espiral sobre uma superficie de goma-laca se lembravam agora do que eles haviam tocado. Aquela memória artificial girava, uma agulha viajava pelas ranhuras e, por entre o chiado leve e os roncos abafados que imitavam os ruídos da surdez mesma de Beethoven, os símbolos perceptíveis das convicções e emoções de Beethoven vibravam no ar. Lentamente, lentamente, a melodia se desenrolou. As arcaicas harmonias lídias ficaram suspensas no ar. Era uma música sem paixão, transparente, pura e cristalina, como um mar tropical, como um lago alpino. Água sobre a água, calma — deslizando sobre calma; um acordo de horizontes unidos e de espaços sem ondulações; um contraponto de serenidade. E tudo era claro e brilhante; nada de brumas, nada de crepúsculos vagos. Era a calma da contemplação tranqüila e extática, e não do torpor e do sono. Era a serenidade do convalescente que acorda da sua febre e se descobre a renascer num reino de beleza. Mas a febre era "aquela febre que se chama vida", e o renascimento não ocorria dentro deste mundo; aquela beleza era extraterrena; a serenidade convalescente era a paz de Deus. O entrelaçamento de melodias lídias era o céu.
Trinta compassos lentos tinham construido o céu, quando o caráter da música se modificou de súbito. Depois de ter sido remotamente arcaica, tornou-se moderna. As harmonias lídias foram substituídas pelas do tom maior correspondente. O ritmo se fez mais rápido. Uma nova melodia pulou, saltou — mas por cima das montanhas terrestres, não no meio das montanhas do paraíso.
— "Neue Kraft fuehlend"[89] — cochichou Spandrell, lendo a partitura. — Ele está se sentindo mais forte; mas não é já tão celestial.
A nova melodia continuou a saltar durante uns cinqüenta compassos e expirou num chiado. Spandrell ergueu a agulha e fez parar o prato do aparelho.
— O motivo lídio começa de novo no outro lado — explicou ele, enquanto dava mais corda ao gramofone. — E depois há um retomo da maneira mais viva em lá maior. A partir daí, a coisa segue no modo lídio até o fim, e vai ficando cada vez mais e mais bonita. Não achas isto maravilhoso? — Spandrell voltou-separa Rampion. — Não é uma prova?
O outro meneou a cabeça.
— Maravilhoso. Mas a única coisa que isso prova, pelo menos segundo percebo, é que os doentes costumam ficar muito fracos. É a arte dum homem que perdeu o corpo.
— Mas que descobriu a alma.
— Oh! eu te garanto que os homens doentes são muito espiritualistas. Mas isso é porque eles não são integralmente homens. Os eunucos são amantes muito espirituais pela mesma razão.
— Mas Beethoven não era um eunuco.
— Eu sei. Mas por que então procurou ser eunuco? Por que fez da castração e da ausência do corpo o seu ideal? Que é esta música? Apenas um hino de louvor ao eunuquismo. Muito bela, reconheço. Mas ele não teria podido escolher alguma coisa mais humana do que a castração para celebrar no seu canto?
Spandrell suspirou.
— Para mim é a visão da beatitude, é o céu.
— Não é da terra. Eis precisamente de que me queixo.
— Mas um homem não pode então imaginar o céu, se isso lhe apraz? — perguntou Mary.
— Certamente, desde que não pretenda que sua imaginação seja a última palavra da verdade, da beleza, da sabedoria, da virtude e de todo o resto... Spandrell quer fazer-nos aceitar o eunuquismo incorpóreo como última palavra. Não vou nisso. Absolutamente, não vou nisso.
— Escuta então o movimento antes de julgar.
Spandrell fez girar o disco e abaixou a agulha. O céu claro da música lídia vibrou no ar.
— Lindo, lindo! — disse Rampion, quando o disco findou. — Tu tens razão. É realmente o céu; é bem a vida da alma. É a mais perfeita abstração da realidade que já encontrei. Mas por que quis ele fazer essa abstração? Por que não se contentou com ser um homem e não uma alma abstrata? Por que, por quê? — Pôs-se a caminhar dum lado para outro no quarto. — Essa maldita alma — continuou ele —, essa maldita alma abstrata, dir-se-ia uma espécie de cancro que devora a realidade verdadeira, humana, natural, um cancro que se alastra sempre e sempre à custa dela. Por que não se pôde contentar com a realidade, esse velho imbecil do teu Beethoven? Por que sentiu a necessidade de substituir a coisa verdadeira, quente, natural, por esse cancro abstrato da alma? Pode ser que o cancro tenha uma forma muito bonita, mas, no fim das contas, com mil demônios!, o corpo é mais belo! Não quero saber do teu cancro espiritual.
— Não discutirei contigo — disse Spandrell. Sentiu-se de repente extraordinariamente cansado e deprimido. Sua tentativa falhara. Rampion recusara deixar-se convencer. A prova não era então uma prova, no fim de contas? Aquela música não se referia então a nada, a nada que estivesse fora dela mesma e das idiossincrasias de seu inventor? Spandrell olhou para o relógio; eram quase 5 horas. — Escuta pelo menos o fim do movimento — pediu ele. — É a parte melhor. — Deu corda ao gramofone. "Mesmo que isto seja desprovido de significação", pensou ele. "é bonito enquanto dura. E talvez não seja destituído de sentido. No fim. De contas, Rampion não é infalível." — Escutem...
A música recomeçou. Mas qualquer coisa de novo e de maravilhoso se havia passado no céu lídio. Redobrara a rapidez da melodia lenta; os contornos se lhe tinham tornado mais nítidos e mais definidos; uma parte interna voltava a repisar com insistência uma frase palpitante. Dir-se-ia que o céu se tornara subitamente, impossivelmente mais celeste, passando da perfeição realizada para uma perfeição ainda mais profunda e mais absoluta. A paz inefável persistia; mas não era a paz da convalescença e da passividade. Ela vibrava, era viva, parecia crescer e intensificar-se, transformava-se numa calma ativa, numa serenidade quase apaixonada. O paradoxo milagroso da vida exterior e do repouso eterno estava musicalmente realizado.
Eles escutavam, retendo quase a respiração. Spandrell contemplou o seu convidado com um ar de triunfo. Suas dúvidas se haviam dissipado. Como se podia deixar de crer numa coisa que existia, que existia manifestamente? Mark Rampion inclinou a cabeça.
— Sim, quase chegas a me convencer — murmurou ele. — Mas isto é bom demais...
— Como pode uma coisa ser boa demais?
— Quando não é humana. Se ela durasse... cessaríamos de ser homens.
— Morreríamos.
Calaram-se de novo. A música continuava, levando dum céu para outro, da felicidade para a felicidade mais profunda. Spandrell suspirou e fechou os olhos.
Seu rosto estava grave e sereno, como se tivesse sido alisado pelo sono ou pela morte. "Sim, morto", pensou Rampion, olhando para ele. "Spandrell se recusa a ser homem. Não é um homem, mas sim um demônio ou um anjo morto. Agora está morto." Uma suspeita de dissonância nas harmonias lídias deu à beatitude uma nota pungente, quase insuportável. Spandrell suspirou de novo. Bateram à porta.
Ele ergueu os olhos. As rugas de escárnio lhe voltaram ao rosto, as comissuras de seus lábios mais uma vez se tornaram irônicas.
"Pronto, voltou o demônio", pensou Rampion. "Spandrell voltou à vida, e é o demônio."
— Aí estão eles! — exclamou Maurice; e, sem responder à pergunta de Mary, "Quem?", saiu do compartimento.
Rampion e a mulher ficaram ao lado do gramofone, escutando a revelação do céu... Uma explosão ensurdecedora, um grito, outra explosão e mais outra fizeram subitamente em pedaços o paraíso de som. Ambos se ergueram num pincho e se precipitaram para a porta. No corredor, três homens vestidos com o uniforme verde dos Ingleses Livres contemplavam o corpo de Spandrell que jazia por terra. Cada um deles tinha um revólver na mão. Um quarto revólver se achava sobre o soalho, ao lado do moribundo. Via-se um buraco no lado do crânio de Spandrell e uma mancha de sangue na camisa. Suas mãos abriam-se e fechavam-se, abriam-se e fechavam-se de novo, arranhando as tábuas do soalho.
— Que foi que... — começou Rampion.
— Foi ele que atirou primeiro — interrompeu-o um dos homens.
Houve um pequeno silêncio. Pela porta aberta chegava o som da música. A paixão tinha começado a se evaporar da melodia celestial. O céu, naquelas notas prolongadas e puras, voltou a ser o lugar do repouso absoluto, da convalescença calma e feliz. Notas longas, um acorde, repetido, prolongado, brilhante e puro, suspenso, flutuante, voando sem esforço, alto, muito alto, infinitamente... Depois, de súbito, se acabou a música; ficou apenas o arranhar da agulha sobre o disco que girava.
quinta-feira, 6 de fevereiro de 2014
Ayer’s Place in the History of Philosophy
Anthony Quinton
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199694556.003.0014
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines A. J. Ayer's place in the history of philosophy. Ayer thought of himself as the main representative in his own time of the British empirical tradition, running from Hume through John Stuart Mill to Russell. It is a natural and intelligible point of view. His interpretation of the leading ideas of that tradition, in the sharpened form given to them by the Vienna Circle, undoubtedly gave it a new lease of life. In the first post-war decades, philosophy in Britain was dominated by Wittgenstein and Austin, one a genius, the other enormously gifted, but both execrable examples in many ways. Confronted by dire imitations of their respective styles of writing and reasoning Ayer stood out as a marvellous champion of the best traditions of rational discourse.
Keywords: A. J. Ayer, philosophers, philosophy, empirical tradition, rational discourse
When A. J. Ayer arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 1929 he had no thought of becoming a professional philosopher. He intended to go to the Bar, but, in the manner of an Etonian, by way of Literae Humaniores rather than the study of law. He had read a couple of philosophical books. The first of them was Russell’s Sceptical Essays, which he bought on its first appearance in 1928. The other was Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), to which he had been led by a reverent aside in Clive Bell’s Art (1914). These choices were significant. Ayer always thought of himself as Russell’s successor. He modelled his thought on that of Russell, both in its content and in its unguarded expression, and also, to some extent, his manner of life, both political and amorous. What he got from Moore is less obvious, although his respect for Moore is evident, as is shown by the preface to Language, Truth and Logic and by his devoting a book to a close examination of his ideas, along with those of Russell. An important likeness is that both Moore and Ayer were provoked to philosophize by the assertions of other philosophers, not by problems arising outside philosophy in mathematics or the sciences, in history or everyday life.
Ayer avoided the full rigour of an Oxford training in the classics, devoting one term only to the acquisition of a minimal requirement in them. So, at the beginning of 1930, he started on the formal study of philosophy. The philosophical scene in Oxford at that moment was, for the most part, drab and wintry. Adherents of Cook Wilson, who had died in 1915, exercised a fairly oppressive intellectual authority: H. A. Prichard from the chair of moral philosophy, H. W. B. Joseph as an overwhelmingly energetic college tutor. (For what it is worth, at least as an index of their subsequent reputations, neither is honoured with an article in Edwards’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) and Joseph does not even secure a mention.) British Hegelianism, in opposition to which the school of Cook Wilson originally defined itself, was represented by H. H. Joachim. He, like most Oxford philosophers of that time, had given himself over to the historical study of the subject. There was also the wayward and defiantly isolated R. G. Collingwood. The only notable books published by Oxford philosophers in the 1920s were Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis, of which nobody took any notice, in 1924 and, in 1926, Statement and Inference, the posthumous compilation derived from the lectures of Cook Wilson and used by his followers as a kind of textbook.
(p.138) By the 1920s orthodox idealism was more or less extinct outside Scotland. The Cook Wilsonians had turned their antiquated artillery on to what they saw as the even worse errors of the Cambridge philosophers, who had done so much more than they had to undermine it. Prichard had vehemently criticized Russell’s theory of knowledge in an article in Mind in 1915 and he and Joseph were persistently hostile to Russell’s logic. Moore, as an ethical consequentialist, was one of those who, in Prichard’s view, had committed a fundamental mistake in moral philosophy. The only book Prichard published in his lifetime, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, had come out in 1909: Joseph’s main work, his Introduction to Logic, as long ago as 1906.
There were, however, signs of renewed life. H. H. Price, Prichard’s favourite pupil, in a disconcerting betrayal, had been converted to the theory of sense-data advanced by Russell and Moore. Ayer, as an undergraduate, attended the lectures that were to be published by Price in 1932 as Perception. The more influential of Ayer’s philosophy tutors was Gilbert Ryle. After an early interest in the phenomenological movement, revealed in a respectful, if finally suspicious, review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1929), Ryle was, by the beginning of the 1930s, showing marked Russellian tendencies. ‘Are there Propositions?’ of 1930 presents a reductionist account of propositions that was to be echoed in the second chapter of Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge ten years later and in his London inaugural of 1946: Thinking and Meaning. Ryle then laid out a comprehensive programme of analysis on Russellian lines in 1932 in his ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’.
Cambridge was unquestionably livelier as a philosophical centre, in spite of its comparatively minute population of philosophers. From 1922 it had Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to discuss and, until 1927, Ramsey to discuss it with. Also in 1922, Moore’s Philosophical Studies had brought together a number of influential essays. C. D. Broad published his Scientific Thought a year later and in 1925 The Mind and its Place in Nature. At a geographical distance, but not at a very large spiritual one, Russell brought out his Analysis of Mind in 1921 and Analysis of Matter in 1926.
Not much was going on in other British philosophy departments. The most imposing product came from Manchester: Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity in 1920. Exported fruitfully to Australia by John Anderson, it was respectfully ignored in its country of origin. Kemp Smith’s Prolegomena to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge (1924) and some elegantly written works by Laird were all that Scotland had to offer. The United States supplied little in the way of exact or minute philosophy in the 1920s. It was an era of massive constructions: Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1929), and The Quest for Certainty, the first volume of Santayana’s Realms of Being (1928).
The disparaging tone of these judgements of the philosophy of the English-speaking world in the 1920s calls for justification. The decade surely does look weak when it is compared with the effectively preceding period from 1900 to 1914. That roughly Edwardian epoch had contained the early and best works of Russell and Moore. Wittgenstein had come to Cambridge and electrified it. McTaggart’s Hegelian Cosmology (p.139) (1901) and Some Dogmas of Religion (1906) had provided exemplary displays of argumentative rigour. In Oxford idealism was still quite lively with Joachim’s The Nature of Truth in 1906 and Bradley’s Essays on Truth and Reality in 1914. Prichard and Joseph, as has been mentioned, published their most substantial work at that time. In the United States William James was copiously productive up to his death in 1910. The early, less amorphous, Dewey was at work. Santayana’s five-volume Life of Reason (1905) belongs to this period, as do Royce’s The World and the Individual (1900) and the collective volume The New Realism.
The large and altogether more adventurous philosophical activity of the Edwardian age as compared with the 1920s is to be explained—to the extent that it can be or needs to be explained—by the general spiritual devastation of the First World War. That suggestion is confirmed if one looks further afield to continental Europe. It was in the Edwardian era that the main and characteristic works of Croce and Bergson were published, as were the earlier and better works of Husserl, Vaihinger’s Als-Ob (1911), Cohen’s System der Philosophie (1915), and Cassirer’s Erkenntnisproblem (1906). By the 1920s Croce and Bergson had moved to the margins of the subject and the orthodox academic philosophers of importance were Husserl, Cassirer, and, perhaps, Nicolai Hartmann. Only near the end of the decade did Heidegger sound a new, arresting note.
From an Anglo-Saxon point of view a more promising publication than Sein und Zeit came a year later in 1928 with Carnap’s Logische Aufbau der Welt. In the United States a sign of a livelier period to come was C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order in 1929. These two books coincide approximately with the return of Wittgenstein to philosophy, and Cambridge, and the emergence of Price and Ryle in Oxford. Ayer’s philosophical career, then, began after a period of comparative sterility, but at a moment when, in Britain, the United States, and Europe, the first indications of renewal are to be discerned.
It might also be said that not only had the recent philosophical past been comparatively sterile, but the immediate philosophical present was, to vary the image, a bit of a vacuum. Russell’s best work was behind him and, so far as philosophy is concerned, he was a spent force. Readers of Raymond Chandler will remember Big Willie Magoon, head of the vice squad of the Bay City police. He failed to come across with something for which he had been paid and was seriously worked over by some heavies. As a result he was never much use afterwards. Something of the same kind happened to Russell when Wittgenstein demolished the ideas in his large and ambitious manuscript of 1913 on the theory of knowledge, in the course of a series of painful conversations in May and June of that year. ‘I saw’, Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell three years later, ‘that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.’ Moore had little new to say, however emphatically and persuasively he said it, as was shown by the publication in 1953 of lectures he had given as far back as 1910 and 1911. Broad confined himself to elaboration and criticism of the ideas of Russell, Moore, and, in the 1930s, McTaggart. Wittgenstein had been invisible for more than a decade. Ramsey was dead. The Vienna Circle had only just come into being. The field was wide open.
(p.140) Ayer’s account of his philosophical education in the first volume of his autobiography is rather sketchy. He recalls being introduced to the Tractatus by Ryle. He read Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and The Analysis of Mind (1921). The origins can be discerned in these three books of his later central doctrines about necessity, perception, and the mind. He also read Ramsey and Broad, James’s Pragmatism (1907), Poincaré and Nicod. He does not say what problems preoccupied him. Nor does he say anything much about the development of his thinking up to the point in 1936 of its first, strikingly finished and comprehensive expression.
There is little echo in his writings of any influence of the thought of Prichard and Joseph, apart from two negative reactions. The first of these is his repeated insistence that, as he puts it in The Problem of Knowledge (p. 15), ‘from the fact that someone is convinced that something is true, however firm his conviction may be, it never follows logically that it is true’. That is hardly consistent with his conclusion in the following chapter that statements in the present tense about one’s own immediate experience are incorrigible. For that is to say that, if I genuinely believe I am in pain or aware of a red patch, it follows that I am. The original thesis seems to be aimed at the Cook Wilsonian doctrine that knowledge is something unique and indefinable and such that we must know when we have it. Another echo is to be heard in Ayer’s treatment of the doctrine of internal relations. In The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge it is examined in connection with an argument quoted from Joseph (pp. 200–2).
In November 1932 Ayer went to Vienna and was courteously invited to attend meetings of the Vienna Circle. It was what he learnt there and from the pages of Erkenntnis, which had started publication, under the editorship of Carnap and Reichenbach, in 1930, that he was inspired to the extraordinary tour de force of Language, Truth and Logic. A good way of bringing out the depth of Ayer’s involvement is to compare the impact of a similar visit by an American contemporary at much the same time.1 Ernest Nagel, a few years older than Ayer, spent the academic year 1934–5 in Europe, his principal stops being Cambridge, Vienna, and Warsaw. News of the existence of logical positivism had already been brought to American philosophers by an article about it in the Journal of Philosophy in 1931 by Albert Blumberg and Herbert Feigl. Nagel’s report of his intellectual expedition is, as one might expect, thorough, serious, and reliable. He became a recognized associate of the Circle, but more as a fellow-traveller than as a fully committed zealot. He had contributed a boiled-down version of his doctoral thesis on the logic of measurement to Erkenntnis three years earlier and also an article on reduction in the sciences around the time of his European trip. Perhaps he was already, in his mid-thirties, too much involved with American naturalism to undergo a major conversion.
Ayer, on the other hand, completely ingested the four main doctrines subscribed to by the Vienna Circle: the identification of meaning with verifiability; the reductionism (p.141) which that implies if subjective experience is taken to be the basis of knowledge; the theory that necessity is analytic, a matter of linguistic convention; and a radically non-cognitive account of judgements of value. In taking on these views he was not content simply to report them. He had even in his mid-twenties an established intellectual allegiance to the philosophical analysis of Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey. The special achievement of Language, Truth and Logic was the remarkable, almost seamless unification of his initial philosophical inheritance with the whole range of the main ideas of the Vienna Circle. Where he differed with the orthodoxy of Carnap, Neurath, and Hempel, rejecting what he labelled as its ‘formalism’, it was with ideas developed by Schlick. Where Carnap and his allies denied that statements can be compared with extra-linguistic fact and so took basic statements to be adopted by convention, Schlick saw them as direct reports of the facts of experience.
A survey of the contents of Language, Truth and Logic will show how comprehensive Ayer’s reliance was on the doctrines of the Vienna Circle. The title of the first chapter is ‘the elimination of metaphysics’. That phrase is a translation of the first words of an article by Carnap in Erkenntnis: Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache (1932). There Carnap identifies the meaning of a sentence, first, following Wittgenstein, with its truth-conditions, and then with its method of verification or, in the case of a word, with the criteria of its application. He goes on to say ‘in the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless’.2 That and a few other references to value in Carnap were developed, with the aid of some apparatus from Moore, into the notorious sixth chapter of Language, Truth and Logic: ‘Critique of Ethics and Theology’.
In his Überwindung Carnap admits that the problem of the given, of the empirical basis of knowledge or, as he would prefer to put it, of the nature of protocol statements, is not yet solved. He soon went on to opt for the conventionalist view that they are statements about what is observed that are agreed upon by that shadowy, but quite cosy-sounding group, the ‘scientists of our culture-circle’. In 1934 in ‘Über das Fundament der Erkenntnis’, Schlick effectively criticized that position.
Although Ayer agreed with Schlick that basic statements are to be verified by the experiences to which they demonstratively refer, he denied that they are absolutely certain and incorrigible. His reason was ‘that a sentence cannot merely name a situation, it must say something about it. And in describing a situation one is not merely “registering” a sense-content: one is classifying it in some way or other, and this means going beyond what is immediately given.’ He goes on to say that to apply a word such as ‘white’ to an element of one’s experience is to say that it is similar to other contents of experience: ‘those which I should call, or actually have called white’ (Language, Truth and Logic, 126, 128–9). He did not support this view for very long. In ‘Verification and Experience’, (p.142) within a year of Language, Truth and Logic, he was expressing doubts about it and in the second chapter of Foundations of Empirical Knowledge in 1940 and in the introduction to the second edition of Language, Truth and Logic in 1946 he explicitly rejected it.
In claiming that all necessity is analytic Ayer depends as much on the Tractatus as on the Vienna Circle. But like Carnap, and unlike Wittgenstein, he took the truths of mathematics as well as those of logic to be tautologies. He wisely did not follow Carnap in defining ‘tautology’ in a narrowly truth-tabular way. The idea that logic and mathematics are useful because we, as finite intelligences, cannot trace all the implications of our thoughts was, as a footnote shows, derived from Hans Hahn’s Logik, Mathematik and Naturerkennen of 1933. Ayer’s refutation of Mill’s account of mathematical truths as empirical generalizations of the widest possible scope was not dependent on Frege, whom, by 1936, he does not appear to have encountered. He unfortunately ascribes to Mill the view that the truths of logic, as well as those of mathematics, are empirical, fixing that mistake firmly in the heads of several generations of students. Mill, in fact, acknowledged what he called ‘propositions merely verbal’; held that all essential propositions are identical propositions; and that deduction gives no new knowledge, says no more in its conclusions than is already contained in its premisses.
Ayer’s fifth chapter, on truth and probability, follows Ramsey on truth. It advances the theory about the corrigibility of all empirical statements whatever which he soon came to doubt and eventually to drop altogether. In a few concluding pages he had some suggestive things to say about probability. He defines it as the degree of confidence with which it is rational to entertain a hypothesis. He does not specify criteria of rationality, but says they are conventional and vary through time. That is to embrace the kind of conventionalism he rejected in the case of basic statements. Our old friends, the scientists of our culture circle, whose practice determines for Ayer what rationality currently is, are called back from epistemological retirement. The conception of probability as an intrinsic property of a hypothesis and Keynes’s view of it as an unanalysable logical relation between hypothesis and the evidence for it are dismissed without argument. The frequency theory is not mentioned.
The significance of his brisk aside about probability is that it sustains the only solution he admits to the problem of induction. It is rational, he says, to be guided by the past in forming expectations about the future because that is what rationality is, by definition. No doubt the current practice of those we should ordinarily describe as scientists is rational in that sense. But (as Ayer would surely have insisted) we can guarantee their rationality only by defining ‘scientist’ so that no one who deviates from being guided by the past counts as one.
His dealings with God and the immortal soul in chapter 6 derive fairly directly from Carnap’s Überwindung. But the insistence that neither metaphysical sentences nor their negations can be asserted since both are equally devoid of sense is Ayer’s own. It has, as he saw, the consequence that neither atheism nor even agnosticism is any better off than theism, a concession that was not much appreciated by its adherents.
(p.143) The main business of chapter 6 is the thesis that judgements of value are expressions of feeling and not statements of fact, natural or non-natural. Ayer relies heavily on Moore to dismiss naturalism, although he rephrases Moore’s argument. The intuitive non-contradictoriness of ‘this is pleasant but not good’ is appealed to instead of the intuitive substantiality of the question ‘is this pleasant thing good?’ The verification principle is invoked to deal with Moore’s positive view about the nature of goodness.
Ayer’s own positive account of the matter is a sharper edged version of Carnap’s Überwindung (1932) contention that metaphysics (including value judgements) ‘serves for the general expression of the attitude of a person towards life’.3 In his Philosophy and Logical Syntax of 1934 Carnap interprets moral affirmations as imperatives, a more plausible view than Ayer’s, as subsequent developments in moral philosophy have shown. It seems probable that the main source here was the celebrated distinction of scientific from emotive language in The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards of 1923. They say, in terms Ayer takes over almost word for word, ‘ “(this) is good” serves only as an emotive sign expressing our attitude to this and perhaps evoking similar attitudes in other persons, or inciting them to action of one kind or another’ (p. 125). Ayer’s account of moral disagreement is taken from W. H. F. Barnes’s ‘Suggestion about Value’ of 1933.
In the four chapters so far considered the main borrowings have been from the Vienna Circle. The balance tilts towards Ayer’s British, predominantly Cambridge predecessors, in chapters 2 and 3, where a conception of the nature of philosophy is set out, and in the two final chapters which are about mind, matter, and the self and three ‘outstanding philosophical disputes’.
The idea that philosophy should be a business of analysis was affirmed at some length in the last chapter of Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and it was consistently practised as analysis, with a slightly different inflection, in the writings of Moore. In his neutral monist period from about 1918 onwards, Russell tried to analyse material objects and minds into what he called ‘events’. He took material objects to be constructions out of sensations and sensibilia, these being gently reified equivalents of Mill’s ‘permanent possibilities of sensation’. Minds and their states were seen as constructions out of sensations and images, eked out with bodily behaviour where that seemed desirable.
Ayer drew on Price’s Perception (1950) in his firmly phenomenalist account of our knowledge of material objects in chapter 3. But he restates Price’s theory of objects as ‘families’ of actual and possible sense-data in linguistic form: sentences about objects are translatable into sets of sentences, categorical and hypothetical, about sense-data. No place is found for Price’s ‘physical occupant’, that ghostly vestige of the substratum of Locke.
(p.144) He follows Russell in holding that sense-data are neither physical nor mental, these being properties of logical constructions. But for the detail of his account of mind he draws, not on Russell, but on Carnap and Hume. In his Aufbau Carnap had distinguished the eigenpsychisch from the fremdpsychisch, the mental states I experience directly from those I ascribe to others on the basis of their bodily behaviour. Ayer was driven to this by his belief that the argument from analogy is unacceptably metaphysical. He was to question that four years later in Foundations of Empirical Knowledge and abandon it altogether in 1953. The argument from analogy was rehabilitated by the consideration that, since it is only a contingent fact that I have the experiences I do, there is no logical or necessary obstacle to the possibility that the experiences of others might have been mine. The way out he followed was suggested to him by Ryle’s article of 1936 ‘Unverifiability by me’.
Ayer’s Humean view of the self as a series of experiences contained one wholly original element. Hume had been baffled in his attempt to find a relation which could connect a series of experiences into a self. Ayer’s suggestion was that the experience of oneself must all ‘contain organic sense-contents which are elements of the same body’ (Language, Truth and Logic, 194). That, as he saw, rules out the possibility of the survival by the self of bodily dissolution. It also ensures that no experience can belong to more than oneself, which the resemblance and continuity which Hume was inclined to favour failed to do. It makes my identification of my body (under some other description, of course) prior to my identification of myself, which is not too bad. But it also requires that every total momentary experience of mine should contain a veridical organic sensation of my body. That is a very questionable proposal, but I shall not pursue the matter here. It may be noted that later theorists of personal identity—Bernard Williams and Sidney Shoemaker, for example—who have claimed that it entails bodily identity have not done so in Ayer’s way.
A final thesis of Language, Truth and Logic which was soon dropped was also borrowed. From C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order Ayer took the thesis that statements about the past are really hypotheses about future experience, on which we shall have to rely on in order to verify them. It implies, I suppose, that our memories are really thoughts about the future. It can be circumvented by the consideration that it is a contingent fact that my experiences occur at the time that they do.
Language, Truth and Logic, then, is almost wholly composed of pre-existing material. It was brilliantly presented, with astounding concision, and its content fitted very well together, despite the geographical remoteness of its two main sources. That is not surprising when one reflects that the philosophers of Cambridge and Vienna continuously interacted. Russell and Wittgenstein were, in a turbulent way, teachers and pupils of each other. The Vienna Circle studied them both and as intently as they studied anyone.
A special virtue of the book, over and above its excellences of style, its force, lucidity, and euphony, is its intellectual order. The elements may be borrowed but they are admirably arranged. After Our Knowledge of the External World Russell’s books became (p.145) increasingly loose and casual in construction. That can presumably be attributed to the loss of self-confidence caused by Wittgenstein’s ruthless criticism. Moore’s laborious repetitiveness and his confinement to a minute range of topics, however strategically important, was unsatisfying in a different way. The Tractatus, with pretty well all the argument left out, hovers about on either side of the frontier of intelligibility. Ramsey’s small, brilliant Nachlass was, in its more philosophically interesting parts, largely rough notes. Broad and Price were admirably lucid and thorough and Price’s writing had a particular kind of charm. But they were not, as Ayer unquestionably was, exciting.
Presenting the ideas of Vienna Circle in British costume he extricated them from the lavish use of symbolism, the off-putting technical terms, and the computer-like detachment of Carnap’s writing. More in the manner of Schlick he conceived the philosopher to be, however doctrinally subversive, a citizen of the republic of letters. Also like Schlick, who wrote an article on the Vienna Circle and traditional philosophy, he drew attention to the many anticipations in the philosophy of the past of the ideas he was expounding. Berkeley was invoked for his phenomenalism, so long as its theistic attachments were removed. Ayer was also in sympathy with his slogan: ‘Mem, To be eternally … recalling men to Common Sense’ (Life and Letters of George Berkeley, Clarendon, 1871, p. 455). The task of philosophy is not to justify our beliefs but to analyse them. In fact, Ayer probably absorbed that idea from Moore. He saw Hume as right in what he said about meaning, the two kinds of significant proposition, causation and, broadly speaking, the self, even if his thoughts were couched in too psychologistic an idiom. But Ayer’s attention to the philosophy of the past faltered when he came to consider examples of metaphysical illusion. Carnap in his Überwindung had illustrated his thesis with a short passage from Heidegger and a single sentence from Hegel. Ayer made do with a single sentence from Bradley.
It was the fact that Ayer’s revolutionary message was expressed in the literary form of a discursive essay and not in the manner of a scientific textbook, together with its elegance and brevity, that gave it such an impact. It was addressed to intelligent readers in general, from the then radical publishing house of Gollancz, and in an attractively up-to-date physical form: dumpy in shape with wide margins and a wholly non-Victorian typeface: Aufbau by Bauhaus. (The move to Macmillan for his next book in 1940—they were to be his publishers for the next thirty-two years—was a turn towards academic respectability and exclusiveness.) Many of the intelligent readers aimed at took it up. No British philosophical book since Russell’s Problem of Philosophy (1912) a quarter of a century earlier can have been as widely read.
Ayer’s later books—Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Problems of Philosophy, and Central Questions of Philosophy—and his five essay collections are, by and large, confined to the topics treated in Language, Truth and Logic. That is as much a tribute to the superb economy with which they were treated there as a criticism. The book’s philosophical agenda covered a wide enough range for anyone’s philosophical career. And there are new thoughts presented and new fields explored in the later works. But he did not move far from his starting point.
(p.146) The main novelty of Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, apart from the limited changes of mind about incorrigibility and the argument from analogy already mentioned, is the contention that theories of perception are not competing substantive doctrines but, rather, proposals of ‘alternative languages’. It is not very clear what that amounts to. Does someone who rejects the sense-datum language have to say that some material objects exist only for one person, or intermittently, or have different properties for different people? The arguments used to show that only sense-data are directly perceived could then be mobilized to show that all direct perception is of private material objects and that public material objects, spatiotemporally and causally interconnected in a common world, must somehow be constructed out of them. In that case the alternative offered is of the most trivial, merely typographical kind. What is clear is that nobody seems to have paid much attention to it until J. L. Austin criticized it in Sense and Sensibilia (1962). By that time Ayer had explicitly, if quietly, dropped the whole idea. In his essay of 1945 on the terminology of sense-data he accepts the criticism of it by H. H. Price.4
Thinking and Meaning, Ayer’s London inaugural of 1947, is very properly dedicated to Ryle. For it is a thoroughgoing exercise in dereification, in which the thinking self, the instrument with which it thinks, the process of its thought, conceived as a sequence of mental acts, and the object of thought, its reference or meaning, are all resolved into the expression of thought in significant sentences. Particularly Rylean is the insistence that what have usually been conceived to be mental acts, such as believing and doubting, are really dispositions to come out with certain sentences or to act in certain ways. There is also a distinct echo of Ryle’s ‘systematically misleading expressions’ in the assertion that for an expression to have a meaning there does not have to exist a thing which is its meaning.
Ayer’s remarks about meaning in this lecture indicate a much closer attention on his part to philosophical logic. In his Philosophical Essays of 1954 it is the topic of the first three items: on individuals, the identity of indiscernibles, and negation. Then four epistemological items rehearse, with minor modifications, the familiar topics of sense-data, basic propositions, phenomenalism, and our knowledge of other minds. Finally Quine’s ontology is considered, Ayer’s ethical theory is presented with greater suavity but without substantial alteration, Bentham’s principle of utility is sympathetically explored, and the view that freedom and determinism are compatible, affirmed in pellet form in the footnote of Language, Truth and Logic, is defended and modified. In its 1946 version, as reprinted in Philosophical Essays, freedom is defined as absence of constraint, not as having no cause at all. A group of factors is brought together as constraining causes and thus as cancelling responsibility, but no account is given of what principle links them together and distinguishes them from other, non-exculpating causes of action.
The essay on individuals tentatively puts forward arguments for the eliminability of singular terms and the possibility of a purely predicative language implied by Quine’s (p.147) extension of the theory of descriptions to all referring expressions. The issue is taken up again in an essay on names and descriptions in The Concept of a Person, but now what was earlier suggested is categorically affirmed.
Quine’s use of his regimented language, in which all reference is carried out by quantifiers, to reinstate ontology in a new, logically respectable form, set Ayer thinking generally about what there is. In his study of William James ( in The Origins of Pragmatism) and again in an essay ‘What there Must Be’ in his Metaphysics and Common Sense of 1969, Ayer turns to the question. Against Quine and Russell he concludes that reducibility does not imply some kind of inferior existential status, as ‘mere constructions’ or fictions, in the items to which it applies as contrasted with the unassailably real existence of the elements from which they are constructed. Analysis may eliminate singular terms. It does not fictionalize material things. Here again I think there is a distinct echo of the Vienna Circle, particularly of Carnap’s Scheinprobleme (1928) and Schlick’s ‘Positivismus und Realismus’ (1933).
They had maintained that the reducibility of material things to sense-experiences casts no shadow whatever on the reality of the material world. It simply makes clear what the empirical reality of material things consists in. For such things to exist the course of sense-experience must exhibit certain kinds of regularity. If it does there is no further question about the real existence of the material things defined in terms of these regularities. To infer that, as Schlick puts it, ‘only the given exists’ (Es gibt nur das Gegebene) is to fall into unacceptable metaphysics.
In his positive views about ontology Ayer takes an exactly opposite position to Russell. Sense-experiences are not ontologically prior to material things since their occurrence is absorbed into a comprehensive theory of a material world. There they occupy a very modest place, as parts of the histories of sentient organic bodies. Priority for knowledge is one thing: priority of existence another. Ayer takes ordinary material things and the theoretical entities of sciences as competing for the status of being the real components of the material world. He vacillates between the two claimants—intellect urging electrons, sentiment pressing for tables—and concludes that it is a matter for choice and not very important anyway.
The Problem of Knowledge of 1956 has an excellent chapter on memory. It dispels the influence of a radically misguided chapter of Russell’s Analysis of Mind (1921) on the subject. Memory is having beliefs about the past that do not depend on inference or testimony. It is not images accompanied by feelings of familiarity and pastness, whatever they may be. Some interesting points are raised in the final chapter on myself and others. If a person is simply a contingently related series of experiences, why should an experience not occur on its own, unrelated in a person-constituting way to other experiences? Why, in other words, should there not be unowned experiences? Personal identity is addressed once more, in a guarded, hesitant way. Perhaps Hume’s accusation of a circularity in the definition of personal identity in terms of memory can be circumvented. Survival of bodily dissolution seems conceivable. Yet purely psychological criteria of identity seem insufficient.
(p.148) There are three substantial novelties in the book. First, there is the neat account of what is needed to turn true belief into knowledge as the ‘right to be sure’. The question has not been pressed as to why Ayer does not take the ethics of belief to be as non-cognitive as the ethics of conduct, as he did by implication in his account of rationality in Language, Truth and Logic.
Secondly, there is the helpful schematization of problems in the theory of knowledge, about perception, other minds, the past, induction and so on as arising from the scepticism generated by a gap between certain kinds of belief—about material things, past events, the minds of others, the laws of nature—and the only evidence that is available for them—sense-data, memories and traces, behaviour and observed regularities. That was not new. It was present in the pre-war writings of John Wisdom and set out clearly in an article about Wisdom by Douglas Gasking in 1954. Something along the same lines had also been worked out by Friedrich Waismann. These sources make one wonder if it was not something casually let fall in conversation by Wittgenstein.
Ayer, like the other exponents of the scheme, recognized four standard ways of dealing with the gaps. First, intuition, which claimed direct access to the other side of it. Secondly, the theory of a general principle which could serve as a bridge across it. Thirdly, reductionism, which closed the gap by defining the things concluded to in terms of the evidence for them. Fourthly, the melancholy option of scepticism. Ayer conjured up a fifth contender, grandly called ‘the method of descriptive analysis’, which seemed to be a matter of admitting the gap and then blithely doing nothing about it.
In fact, once more confronting the question of our knowledge of material objects, he does something rather different, and offers a kind of watered down reductionism. Our beliefs about the material world are not translatable into statements about sense-data. They should be understood as a theory which draws all its support from the evidence of sense-data. There is an air here of trying to settle an overdraft with a cheque drawn on the same account. It shifts the problem to that of the relation of a theory to the evidence for it: is it like the detective’s theory that the injury to the deceased was caused by a blunt instrument (later found in the shrubbery) or like Newton’s theory that the fall of apples and the orbiting of the sun by the planets are manifestations of the same gravitational force? For better or worse, Ayer stuck to this position until his final treatment of the topic in Central Questions of Philosophy in 1973.
By carrying out the ungracious task of tracing most of Ayer’s original ideas, and many of those he came to express later, to external sources, I am not suggesting that there is no more to his achievement than the communication of these borrowings. He wrote some lively pieces of philosophical polemic: defending the sense-datum theory against Austin’s often captious objections, setting ferociously about Malcolm’s view that dreams are stories we are disposed to tell when we wake up, and arguing against Wittgenstein’s view that a private language is impossible. He expounded Peirce and James, Russell and Moore, with thoroughness and distinction. His special kind of clear-headedness proved valuable in his work on probability, a subject often liable to be swamped by fruitless technicalities.
(p.149) An unstated assumption behind this excavation of Ayer’s intellectual borrowings is that a thinker’s place in the history of philosophy is determined by the originality of the interesting or influential things that he says. I do, indeed, believe that assumption to be broadly correct. No doubt the more one learns of the history of philosophy the more one realizes that what one had supposed to be the proprietary great thoughts of those commonly reckoned to be great philosophers had often been thought by someone else first. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, one learns, is an echo of Augustine’s si fallor sum. Locke drew heavily on Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle. Nevertheless Descartes put his cognito to uses of which Augustine had no conception and, although there are identifiable fragments of other men’s ideas in Locke’s encyclopedic Essay (1690), the plan and basis of the whole great undertaking were his own. The special greatness of Kant is surely for the most part due to the novelty of his ideas.
Rather than considering the question in general terms it will be better to try to fix Ayer’s place in the scheme of things by comparing his achievements with those of his contemporaries who qualify for such a comparison. Broad and Price were lucid and persevering exponents of ideas put into circulation in the first years of the century by Russell and Broad. Broad had the advantage of knowing a good deal about natural science and about the history of philosophy. Price’s great merit was his cautious deliberation, his extremely high standard of what the clear understanding of a problem and its proposed solutions consists in. Their main service was to domesticate the inchoate innovations of others. That is something that Ayer accomplished with greater force and comparable distinction.
Two more obviously appropriate comparisons are with Ryle, ten years his senior, and Austin, his near-contemporary. Ryle, too, was an extensive borrower. His philosophical logic derives from Russell and the Tractatus, his philosophy of mind from intimations that had come to him of the thinking of the later Wittgenstein. But he put his own stamp very markedly on what he took. That is in part a matter of his breezy, epigrammatic, resolutely non-technical style. That style was in tune with a mode of proceeding that relied heavily on analogy and, in general, avoided the laborious protection of these from all possible objections. Oddly, in the light of their respective ways of life—collegiate in Ryle’s case, metropolitan in Ayer’s—it is Ryle who is the less academically respectable and conformist. He steered clear of all the standard etiquette of philosophical writing: the identification of aims, the footnotes, the polite references to Professor This and Doctor That. In the end I think I should accord him a larger place on the philosophical map than Broad, Price, or Ayer, but I admit that it is a close-run thing.
The main reason for it is that, whether by accident or design, his own versions of late Wittgensteinian doctrine are really very different from the original. The distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that was an insight of great value, however easy it is to take it for granted once it has been pointed out. The boldness with which he dismissed Cartesian dualism, by interpreting all mental life in terms of dispositions to behaviour, has the merit of providing something definite to discuss, rather than endlessly puzzle over.
(p.150) Austin was the critic who got furthest under Ayer’s skin as is clear from the indignant tone of Ayer’s response to his criticism of the sense-datum theory. Like Prichard and Moore he was a rigorously minute philosopher whose scrupulous pursuit of exactness gave him an extraordinary personal command over his contemporaries. He went further in that direction than his acknowledged master, Prichard, because of his greater intelligence and general mental agility. But his reputation has not survived him. A later generation finds it difficult to understand. Apart from ‘speech acts’ his innovations in the philosophical vocabulary are seldom heard.
The two philosophers with whom Ayer is most appropriately to be compared are Quine and Popper. Both, like Ayer, are intellectual by-products of the Vienna Circle; in Quine’s case gratefully (Word and Object (1960), after all, is dedicated to Carnap), in Popper’s with a constant determination to emphasize his differences from it. I think it is fair to say that there is no new idea in Ayer that deserves to receive or has received the kind of attention that has been given to the innovations of Quine and Popper.
Quine’s multifarious assaults on the notion of meaning as the chief instrument of philosophical explanation, on the analytic–synthetic distinction, on modal and intentional discourse, on assumptions about translatability, his revival of ontology, and his naturalistic account of the theory of knowledge, add up to a major change of direction in philosophy. Not all that many have chosen to follow him very far down the path he has pointed out but his ideas have proved to be inexhaustibly discussable.
Popper’s fundamental idea that science progresses by adventurous conjectures, controlled by attempts to overthrow them, is not without forerunners. Something like it is crucial in the philosophy of science of Whewell and it plays a part, if not such a commanding one as for Popper, in the brilliant chaos of the writings of Peirce. But there is no reason to suppose that Popper had the least familiarity with either of them at the time in the early 1930s when he was writing his Logik der Forschung (1935). Whewell had been obliterated by Mill in the English-speaking world and was quite unknown anywhere else. As for Peirce, M. R. Cohen’s pioneering selection, Chance, Love and Logic had come out in 1923 but it did not contain any of Peirce’s more Popperian pieces and was anyhow almost certainly unknown to him.
Secondly, and more to the point, Popper’s very various developments of his fundamental thought go in directions altogether unexplored by Whewell and only partially by Peirce. Peirce, like Popper, adopts a comprehensively fallibilistic theory of knowledge and rejects determinism. Of Popper’s own invention are his attack on the view that there are general laws of historical change, his account of probability as objective propensity, his defence of science as an account of the real nature of things against instrumentalism and essentialism, his application of evolutionary ideas to the theory of knowledge, and the connected doctrine of ‘World 3’, over and above the realms of matter and consciousness.
Quine and Popper arrived at their main new ideas early on: Quine by 1936 in ‘Truth by Convention’ and 1939 in ‘Designation and Existence’, Popper by the date of his first book, 1935. Holding firmly on to them ever since, they have established their fertility by (p.151) the substantial and interesting body of extensions and applications they have made of them. Ayer, on the other hand, tended to circle round a number of topics, varying his attitude towards them, sometimes opting for one view or another, sometimes concluding that it is a matter for decision, sometimes simply confessing doubt as to what the right answer is. The one thing he never questioned is the primacy of sense-experience, even if, with his later replacement of sense-data by ‘qualia’, he tried to mitigate the subjectivity of his preferred foundations for knowledge. For all the bold iconoclasm of Language, Truth and Logic the abiding impression is one of doctrinal indefiniteness. (It is interesting that he never responded to Quine’s rejection of analyticity except in a couple of non-combative pages of Central Questions of Philosophy.)
It is that, I think, that must explain the fact that his influence has been so much less than that of the two major contemporaries with whom I have been comparing him. I speak here of influence on philosophers, since Quine is unknown to the part of the general reading public which thinks it would like to know something about philosophy. As every teacher of the subject knows, Ayer has enormously influenced beginning students of philosophy. Since most of them do not go far with the subject, that influence must be, with many, a persisting one. As a paradigm of a philosopher for educated people he is surely exemplary for his unswerving dedication to argument, to explicit reasoning concisely expressed in the clearest language.
It is noticeable that his influence has been comparatively small in the United States. In the post-war years when this country was a net importer of visiting philosophers they crossed the Atlantic to learn about Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin. That must be partly due to the fact that, from the late 1930s on, the Americans did not need an intermediary to convey the message of the Vienna Circle, since most of its leading exponents were coming to be installed there in university posts. Furthermore Ayer’s ideas about necessary truth and phenomenalism had been anticipated in the United States, seven years before Language, Truth and Logic, in C. I. Lewis’s more substantial, if less exciting, Mind and the World-Order.
Another possible factor is that philosophers in the United States, as in Cambridge in its greatest days, typically know more mathematics and natural science than philosophers in Oxford. Ayer was always an enthusiast for science, but the enthusiasm was of a generalized, rather ideological kind. I believe it was essentially secondary to his animus against religion. The sensationalism to which he always remained faithful was something he shared with the great generation of late nineteenth-century unbelieving philosophers of science: Mach, W. K. Clifford, Karl Pearson. Present-day philosophers of science—Popper, J. J. C. Smart, the Reichenbach of Experience and Prediction (1938), even Carnap after the mid-1930s—take for granted the objectivity of the basis of empirical knowledge. Ayer’s distaste for religion seems to be the central vision and object of emotional commitment which it is the office of the brilliantly deployed dialectical manoeuvres to protect, rather as a conviction of the immortality of human souls, related by spiritual love, is the soft centre in need of fascinating ingenuities of argumentative defence in the case of McTaggart.
(p.152) Ayer thought of himself as the main representative in his own time of the British empirical tradition, running from Hume through John Stuart Mill to Russell. It is a natural and intelligible point of view. His interpretation of the leading ideas of that tradition, in the sharpened form given to them by the Vienna Circle, undoubtedly gave it a new lease of life. But in its most vigorous form at the present time that tradition has moved beyond the doctrinal constraints he accepted from it about necessity, perception, and the nature of science.
Although I have come to think his place in the history of philosophy is not as large as I had thought before settling down to write this essay, I think I understand why I should have thought I did. In the first post-war decades philosophy in Britain was dominated by Wittgenstein and Austin, one a genius, the other enormously gifted, but both execrable examples in many ways. Confronted by dire imitations of their respective styles of writing and reasoning Ayer stood out as a marvellous champion of the best traditions of rational discourse.
Notes:
(1) Ernest Nagel, ‘Impressions and Appraisals of European Philosophy’ (first published 1936), in Nagel, Logic Without Metaphysics (1956).
(2) Translated in Ayer, Logical Positivism, 60–1.
(3) Carnap in Ayer, Logical Positivism, 78.
(4) A. J. Ayer, ‘The Terminology of Sense-Data’, in Philosophical Essays, 103–4.
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199694556.003.0014
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines A. J. Ayer's place in the history of philosophy. Ayer thought of himself as the main representative in his own time of the British empirical tradition, running from Hume through John Stuart Mill to Russell. It is a natural and intelligible point of view. His interpretation of the leading ideas of that tradition, in the sharpened form given to them by the Vienna Circle, undoubtedly gave it a new lease of life. In the first post-war decades, philosophy in Britain was dominated by Wittgenstein and Austin, one a genius, the other enormously gifted, but both execrable examples in many ways. Confronted by dire imitations of their respective styles of writing and reasoning Ayer stood out as a marvellous champion of the best traditions of rational discourse.
Keywords: A. J. Ayer, philosophers, philosophy, empirical tradition, rational discourse
When A. J. Ayer arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 1929 he had no thought of becoming a professional philosopher. He intended to go to the Bar, but, in the manner of an Etonian, by way of Literae Humaniores rather than the study of law. He had read a couple of philosophical books. The first of them was Russell’s Sceptical Essays, which he bought on its first appearance in 1928. The other was Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), to which he had been led by a reverent aside in Clive Bell’s Art (1914). These choices were significant. Ayer always thought of himself as Russell’s successor. He modelled his thought on that of Russell, both in its content and in its unguarded expression, and also, to some extent, his manner of life, both political and amorous. What he got from Moore is less obvious, although his respect for Moore is evident, as is shown by the preface to Language, Truth and Logic and by his devoting a book to a close examination of his ideas, along with those of Russell. An important likeness is that both Moore and Ayer were provoked to philosophize by the assertions of other philosophers, not by problems arising outside philosophy in mathematics or the sciences, in history or everyday life.
Ayer avoided the full rigour of an Oxford training in the classics, devoting one term only to the acquisition of a minimal requirement in them. So, at the beginning of 1930, he started on the formal study of philosophy. The philosophical scene in Oxford at that moment was, for the most part, drab and wintry. Adherents of Cook Wilson, who had died in 1915, exercised a fairly oppressive intellectual authority: H. A. Prichard from the chair of moral philosophy, H. W. B. Joseph as an overwhelmingly energetic college tutor. (For what it is worth, at least as an index of their subsequent reputations, neither is honoured with an article in Edwards’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) and Joseph does not even secure a mention.) British Hegelianism, in opposition to which the school of Cook Wilson originally defined itself, was represented by H. H. Joachim. He, like most Oxford philosophers of that time, had given himself over to the historical study of the subject. There was also the wayward and defiantly isolated R. G. Collingwood. The only notable books published by Oxford philosophers in the 1920s were Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis, of which nobody took any notice, in 1924 and, in 1926, Statement and Inference, the posthumous compilation derived from the lectures of Cook Wilson and used by his followers as a kind of textbook.
(p.138) By the 1920s orthodox idealism was more or less extinct outside Scotland. The Cook Wilsonians had turned their antiquated artillery on to what they saw as the even worse errors of the Cambridge philosophers, who had done so much more than they had to undermine it. Prichard had vehemently criticized Russell’s theory of knowledge in an article in Mind in 1915 and he and Joseph were persistently hostile to Russell’s logic. Moore, as an ethical consequentialist, was one of those who, in Prichard’s view, had committed a fundamental mistake in moral philosophy. The only book Prichard published in his lifetime, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, had come out in 1909: Joseph’s main work, his Introduction to Logic, as long ago as 1906.
There were, however, signs of renewed life. H. H. Price, Prichard’s favourite pupil, in a disconcerting betrayal, had been converted to the theory of sense-data advanced by Russell and Moore. Ayer, as an undergraduate, attended the lectures that were to be published by Price in 1932 as Perception. The more influential of Ayer’s philosophy tutors was Gilbert Ryle. After an early interest in the phenomenological movement, revealed in a respectful, if finally suspicious, review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1929), Ryle was, by the beginning of the 1930s, showing marked Russellian tendencies. ‘Are there Propositions?’ of 1930 presents a reductionist account of propositions that was to be echoed in the second chapter of Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge ten years later and in his London inaugural of 1946: Thinking and Meaning. Ryle then laid out a comprehensive programme of analysis on Russellian lines in 1932 in his ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’.
Cambridge was unquestionably livelier as a philosophical centre, in spite of its comparatively minute population of philosophers. From 1922 it had Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to discuss and, until 1927, Ramsey to discuss it with. Also in 1922, Moore’s Philosophical Studies had brought together a number of influential essays. C. D. Broad published his Scientific Thought a year later and in 1925 The Mind and its Place in Nature. At a geographical distance, but not at a very large spiritual one, Russell brought out his Analysis of Mind in 1921 and Analysis of Matter in 1926.
Not much was going on in other British philosophy departments. The most imposing product came from Manchester: Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity in 1920. Exported fruitfully to Australia by John Anderson, it was respectfully ignored in its country of origin. Kemp Smith’s Prolegomena to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge (1924) and some elegantly written works by Laird were all that Scotland had to offer. The United States supplied little in the way of exact or minute philosophy in the 1920s. It was an era of massive constructions: Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1929), and The Quest for Certainty, the first volume of Santayana’s Realms of Being (1928).
The disparaging tone of these judgements of the philosophy of the English-speaking world in the 1920s calls for justification. The decade surely does look weak when it is compared with the effectively preceding period from 1900 to 1914. That roughly Edwardian epoch had contained the early and best works of Russell and Moore. Wittgenstein had come to Cambridge and electrified it. McTaggart’s Hegelian Cosmology (p.139) (1901) and Some Dogmas of Religion (1906) had provided exemplary displays of argumentative rigour. In Oxford idealism was still quite lively with Joachim’s The Nature of Truth in 1906 and Bradley’s Essays on Truth and Reality in 1914. Prichard and Joseph, as has been mentioned, published their most substantial work at that time. In the United States William James was copiously productive up to his death in 1910. The early, less amorphous, Dewey was at work. Santayana’s five-volume Life of Reason (1905) belongs to this period, as do Royce’s The World and the Individual (1900) and the collective volume The New Realism.
The large and altogether more adventurous philosophical activity of the Edwardian age as compared with the 1920s is to be explained—to the extent that it can be or needs to be explained—by the general spiritual devastation of the First World War. That suggestion is confirmed if one looks further afield to continental Europe. It was in the Edwardian era that the main and characteristic works of Croce and Bergson were published, as were the earlier and better works of Husserl, Vaihinger’s Als-Ob (1911), Cohen’s System der Philosophie (1915), and Cassirer’s Erkenntnisproblem (1906). By the 1920s Croce and Bergson had moved to the margins of the subject and the orthodox academic philosophers of importance were Husserl, Cassirer, and, perhaps, Nicolai Hartmann. Only near the end of the decade did Heidegger sound a new, arresting note.
From an Anglo-Saxon point of view a more promising publication than Sein und Zeit came a year later in 1928 with Carnap’s Logische Aufbau der Welt. In the United States a sign of a livelier period to come was C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order in 1929. These two books coincide approximately with the return of Wittgenstein to philosophy, and Cambridge, and the emergence of Price and Ryle in Oxford. Ayer’s philosophical career, then, began after a period of comparative sterility, but at a moment when, in Britain, the United States, and Europe, the first indications of renewal are to be discerned.
It might also be said that not only had the recent philosophical past been comparatively sterile, but the immediate philosophical present was, to vary the image, a bit of a vacuum. Russell’s best work was behind him and, so far as philosophy is concerned, he was a spent force. Readers of Raymond Chandler will remember Big Willie Magoon, head of the vice squad of the Bay City police. He failed to come across with something for which he had been paid and was seriously worked over by some heavies. As a result he was never much use afterwards. Something of the same kind happened to Russell when Wittgenstein demolished the ideas in his large and ambitious manuscript of 1913 on the theory of knowledge, in the course of a series of painful conversations in May and June of that year. ‘I saw’, Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell three years later, ‘that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.’ Moore had little new to say, however emphatically and persuasively he said it, as was shown by the publication in 1953 of lectures he had given as far back as 1910 and 1911. Broad confined himself to elaboration and criticism of the ideas of Russell, Moore, and, in the 1930s, McTaggart. Wittgenstein had been invisible for more than a decade. Ramsey was dead. The Vienna Circle had only just come into being. The field was wide open.
(p.140) Ayer’s account of his philosophical education in the first volume of his autobiography is rather sketchy. He recalls being introduced to the Tractatus by Ryle. He read Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and The Analysis of Mind (1921). The origins can be discerned in these three books of his later central doctrines about necessity, perception, and the mind. He also read Ramsey and Broad, James’s Pragmatism (1907), Poincaré and Nicod. He does not say what problems preoccupied him. Nor does he say anything much about the development of his thinking up to the point in 1936 of its first, strikingly finished and comprehensive expression.
There is little echo in his writings of any influence of the thought of Prichard and Joseph, apart from two negative reactions. The first of these is his repeated insistence that, as he puts it in The Problem of Knowledge (p. 15), ‘from the fact that someone is convinced that something is true, however firm his conviction may be, it never follows logically that it is true’. That is hardly consistent with his conclusion in the following chapter that statements in the present tense about one’s own immediate experience are incorrigible. For that is to say that, if I genuinely believe I am in pain or aware of a red patch, it follows that I am. The original thesis seems to be aimed at the Cook Wilsonian doctrine that knowledge is something unique and indefinable and such that we must know when we have it. Another echo is to be heard in Ayer’s treatment of the doctrine of internal relations. In The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge it is examined in connection with an argument quoted from Joseph (pp. 200–2).
In November 1932 Ayer went to Vienna and was courteously invited to attend meetings of the Vienna Circle. It was what he learnt there and from the pages of Erkenntnis, which had started publication, under the editorship of Carnap and Reichenbach, in 1930, that he was inspired to the extraordinary tour de force of Language, Truth and Logic. A good way of bringing out the depth of Ayer’s involvement is to compare the impact of a similar visit by an American contemporary at much the same time.1 Ernest Nagel, a few years older than Ayer, spent the academic year 1934–5 in Europe, his principal stops being Cambridge, Vienna, and Warsaw. News of the existence of logical positivism had already been brought to American philosophers by an article about it in the Journal of Philosophy in 1931 by Albert Blumberg and Herbert Feigl. Nagel’s report of his intellectual expedition is, as one might expect, thorough, serious, and reliable. He became a recognized associate of the Circle, but more as a fellow-traveller than as a fully committed zealot. He had contributed a boiled-down version of his doctoral thesis on the logic of measurement to Erkenntnis three years earlier and also an article on reduction in the sciences around the time of his European trip. Perhaps he was already, in his mid-thirties, too much involved with American naturalism to undergo a major conversion.
Ayer, on the other hand, completely ingested the four main doctrines subscribed to by the Vienna Circle: the identification of meaning with verifiability; the reductionism (p.141) which that implies if subjective experience is taken to be the basis of knowledge; the theory that necessity is analytic, a matter of linguistic convention; and a radically non-cognitive account of judgements of value. In taking on these views he was not content simply to report them. He had even in his mid-twenties an established intellectual allegiance to the philosophical analysis of Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey. The special achievement of Language, Truth and Logic was the remarkable, almost seamless unification of his initial philosophical inheritance with the whole range of the main ideas of the Vienna Circle. Where he differed with the orthodoxy of Carnap, Neurath, and Hempel, rejecting what he labelled as its ‘formalism’, it was with ideas developed by Schlick. Where Carnap and his allies denied that statements can be compared with extra-linguistic fact and so took basic statements to be adopted by convention, Schlick saw them as direct reports of the facts of experience.
A survey of the contents of Language, Truth and Logic will show how comprehensive Ayer’s reliance was on the doctrines of the Vienna Circle. The title of the first chapter is ‘the elimination of metaphysics’. That phrase is a translation of the first words of an article by Carnap in Erkenntnis: Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache (1932). There Carnap identifies the meaning of a sentence, first, following Wittgenstein, with its truth-conditions, and then with its method of verification or, in the case of a word, with the criteria of its application. He goes on to say ‘in the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless’.2 That and a few other references to value in Carnap were developed, with the aid of some apparatus from Moore, into the notorious sixth chapter of Language, Truth and Logic: ‘Critique of Ethics and Theology’.
In his Überwindung Carnap admits that the problem of the given, of the empirical basis of knowledge or, as he would prefer to put it, of the nature of protocol statements, is not yet solved. He soon went on to opt for the conventionalist view that they are statements about what is observed that are agreed upon by that shadowy, but quite cosy-sounding group, the ‘scientists of our culture-circle’. In 1934 in ‘Über das Fundament der Erkenntnis’, Schlick effectively criticized that position.
Although Ayer agreed with Schlick that basic statements are to be verified by the experiences to which they demonstratively refer, he denied that they are absolutely certain and incorrigible. His reason was ‘that a sentence cannot merely name a situation, it must say something about it. And in describing a situation one is not merely “registering” a sense-content: one is classifying it in some way or other, and this means going beyond what is immediately given.’ He goes on to say that to apply a word such as ‘white’ to an element of one’s experience is to say that it is similar to other contents of experience: ‘those which I should call, or actually have called white’ (Language, Truth and Logic, 126, 128–9). He did not support this view for very long. In ‘Verification and Experience’, (p.142) within a year of Language, Truth and Logic, he was expressing doubts about it and in the second chapter of Foundations of Empirical Knowledge in 1940 and in the introduction to the second edition of Language, Truth and Logic in 1946 he explicitly rejected it.
In claiming that all necessity is analytic Ayer depends as much on the Tractatus as on the Vienna Circle. But like Carnap, and unlike Wittgenstein, he took the truths of mathematics as well as those of logic to be tautologies. He wisely did not follow Carnap in defining ‘tautology’ in a narrowly truth-tabular way. The idea that logic and mathematics are useful because we, as finite intelligences, cannot trace all the implications of our thoughts was, as a footnote shows, derived from Hans Hahn’s Logik, Mathematik and Naturerkennen of 1933. Ayer’s refutation of Mill’s account of mathematical truths as empirical generalizations of the widest possible scope was not dependent on Frege, whom, by 1936, he does not appear to have encountered. He unfortunately ascribes to Mill the view that the truths of logic, as well as those of mathematics, are empirical, fixing that mistake firmly in the heads of several generations of students. Mill, in fact, acknowledged what he called ‘propositions merely verbal’; held that all essential propositions are identical propositions; and that deduction gives no new knowledge, says no more in its conclusions than is already contained in its premisses.
Ayer’s fifth chapter, on truth and probability, follows Ramsey on truth. It advances the theory about the corrigibility of all empirical statements whatever which he soon came to doubt and eventually to drop altogether. In a few concluding pages he had some suggestive things to say about probability. He defines it as the degree of confidence with which it is rational to entertain a hypothesis. He does not specify criteria of rationality, but says they are conventional and vary through time. That is to embrace the kind of conventionalism he rejected in the case of basic statements. Our old friends, the scientists of our culture circle, whose practice determines for Ayer what rationality currently is, are called back from epistemological retirement. The conception of probability as an intrinsic property of a hypothesis and Keynes’s view of it as an unanalysable logical relation between hypothesis and the evidence for it are dismissed without argument. The frequency theory is not mentioned.
The significance of his brisk aside about probability is that it sustains the only solution he admits to the problem of induction. It is rational, he says, to be guided by the past in forming expectations about the future because that is what rationality is, by definition. No doubt the current practice of those we should ordinarily describe as scientists is rational in that sense. But (as Ayer would surely have insisted) we can guarantee their rationality only by defining ‘scientist’ so that no one who deviates from being guided by the past counts as one.
His dealings with God and the immortal soul in chapter 6 derive fairly directly from Carnap’s Überwindung. But the insistence that neither metaphysical sentences nor their negations can be asserted since both are equally devoid of sense is Ayer’s own. It has, as he saw, the consequence that neither atheism nor even agnosticism is any better off than theism, a concession that was not much appreciated by its adherents.
(p.143) The main business of chapter 6 is the thesis that judgements of value are expressions of feeling and not statements of fact, natural or non-natural. Ayer relies heavily on Moore to dismiss naturalism, although he rephrases Moore’s argument. The intuitive non-contradictoriness of ‘this is pleasant but not good’ is appealed to instead of the intuitive substantiality of the question ‘is this pleasant thing good?’ The verification principle is invoked to deal with Moore’s positive view about the nature of goodness.
Ayer’s own positive account of the matter is a sharper edged version of Carnap’s Überwindung (1932) contention that metaphysics (including value judgements) ‘serves for the general expression of the attitude of a person towards life’.3 In his Philosophy and Logical Syntax of 1934 Carnap interprets moral affirmations as imperatives, a more plausible view than Ayer’s, as subsequent developments in moral philosophy have shown. It seems probable that the main source here was the celebrated distinction of scientific from emotive language in The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards of 1923. They say, in terms Ayer takes over almost word for word, ‘ “(this) is good” serves only as an emotive sign expressing our attitude to this and perhaps evoking similar attitudes in other persons, or inciting them to action of one kind or another’ (p. 125). Ayer’s account of moral disagreement is taken from W. H. F. Barnes’s ‘Suggestion about Value’ of 1933.
In the four chapters so far considered the main borrowings have been from the Vienna Circle. The balance tilts towards Ayer’s British, predominantly Cambridge predecessors, in chapters 2 and 3, where a conception of the nature of philosophy is set out, and in the two final chapters which are about mind, matter, and the self and three ‘outstanding philosophical disputes’.
The idea that philosophy should be a business of analysis was affirmed at some length in the last chapter of Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and it was consistently practised as analysis, with a slightly different inflection, in the writings of Moore. In his neutral monist period from about 1918 onwards, Russell tried to analyse material objects and minds into what he called ‘events’. He took material objects to be constructions out of sensations and sensibilia, these being gently reified equivalents of Mill’s ‘permanent possibilities of sensation’. Minds and their states were seen as constructions out of sensations and images, eked out with bodily behaviour where that seemed desirable.
Ayer drew on Price’s Perception (1950) in his firmly phenomenalist account of our knowledge of material objects in chapter 3. But he restates Price’s theory of objects as ‘families’ of actual and possible sense-data in linguistic form: sentences about objects are translatable into sets of sentences, categorical and hypothetical, about sense-data. No place is found for Price’s ‘physical occupant’, that ghostly vestige of the substratum of Locke.
(p.144) He follows Russell in holding that sense-data are neither physical nor mental, these being properties of logical constructions. But for the detail of his account of mind he draws, not on Russell, but on Carnap and Hume. In his Aufbau Carnap had distinguished the eigenpsychisch from the fremdpsychisch, the mental states I experience directly from those I ascribe to others on the basis of their bodily behaviour. Ayer was driven to this by his belief that the argument from analogy is unacceptably metaphysical. He was to question that four years later in Foundations of Empirical Knowledge and abandon it altogether in 1953. The argument from analogy was rehabilitated by the consideration that, since it is only a contingent fact that I have the experiences I do, there is no logical or necessary obstacle to the possibility that the experiences of others might have been mine. The way out he followed was suggested to him by Ryle’s article of 1936 ‘Unverifiability by me’.
Ayer’s Humean view of the self as a series of experiences contained one wholly original element. Hume had been baffled in his attempt to find a relation which could connect a series of experiences into a self. Ayer’s suggestion was that the experience of oneself must all ‘contain organic sense-contents which are elements of the same body’ (Language, Truth and Logic, 194). That, as he saw, rules out the possibility of the survival by the self of bodily dissolution. It also ensures that no experience can belong to more than oneself, which the resemblance and continuity which Hume was inclined to favour failed to do. It makes my identification of my body (under some other description, of course) prior to my identification of myself, which is not too bad. But it also requires that every total momentary experience of mine should contain a veridical organic sensation of my body. That is a very questionable proposal, but I shall not pursue the matter here. It may be noted that later theorists of personal identity—Bernard Williams and Sidney Shoemaker, for example—who have claimed that it entails bodily identity have not done so in Ayer’s way.
A final thesis of Language, Truth and Logic which was soon dropped was also borrowed. From C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order Ayer took the thesis that statements about the past are really hypotheses about future experience, on which we shall have to rely on in order to verify them. It implies, I suppose, that our memories are really thoughts about the future. It can be circumvented by the consideration that it is a contingent fact that my experiences occur at the time that they do.
Language, Truth and Logic, then, is almost wholly composed of pre-existing material. It was brilliantly presented, with astounding concision, and its content fitted very well together, despite the geographical remoteness of its two main sources. That is not surprising when one reflects that the philosophers of Cambridge and Vienna continuously interacted. Russell and Wittgenstein were, in a turbulent way, teachers and pupils of each other. The Vienna Circle studied them both and as intently as they studied anyone.
A special virtue of the book, over and above its excellences of style, its force, lucidity, and euphony, is its intellectual order. The elements may be borrowed but they are admirably arranged. After Our Knowledge of the External World Russell’s books became (p.145) increasingly loose and casual in construction. That can presumably be attributed to the loss of self-confidence caused by Wittgenstein’s ruthless criticism. Moore’s laborious repetitiveness and his confinement to a minute range of topics, however strategically important, was unsatisfying in a different way. The Tractatus, with pretty well all the argument left out, hovers about on either side of the frontier of intelligibility. Ramsey’s small, brilliant Nachlass was, in its more philosophically interesting parts, largely rough notes. Broad and Price were admirably lucid and thorough and Price’s writing had a particular kind of charm. But they were not, as Ayer unquestionably was, exciting.
Presenting the ideas of Vienna Circle in British costume he extricated them from the lavish use of symbolism, the off-putting technical terms, and the computer-like detachment of Carnap’s writing. More in the manner of Schlick he conceived the philosopher to be, however doctrinally subversive, a citizen of the republic of letters. Also like Schlick, who wrote an article on the Vienna Circle and traditional philosophy, he drew attention to the many anticipations in the philosophy of the past of the ideas he was expounding. Berkeley was invoked for his phenomenalism, so long as its theistic attachments were removed. Ayer was also in sympathy with his slogan: ‘Mem, To be eternally … recalling men to Common Sense’ (Life and Letters of George Berkeley, Clarendon, 1871, p. 455). The task of philosophy is not to justify our beliefs but to analyse them. In fact, Ayer probably absorbed that idea from Moore. He saw Hume as right in what he said about meaning, the two kinds of significant proposition, causation and, broadly speaking, the self, even if his thoughts were couched in too psychologistic an idiom. But Ayer’s attention to the philosophy of the past faltered when he came to consider examples of metaphysical illusion. Carnap in his Überwindung had illustrated his thesis with a short passage from Heidegger and a single sentence from Hegel. Ayer made do with a single sentence from Bradley.
It was the fact that Ayer’s revolutionary message was expressed in the literary form of a discursive essay and not in the manner of a scientific textbook, together with its elegance and brevity, that gave it such an impact. It was addressed to intelligent readers in general, from the then radical publishing house of Gollancz, and in an attractively up-to-date physical form: dumpy in shape with wide margins and a wholly non-Victorian typeface: Aufbau by Bauhaus. (The move to Macmillan for his next book in 1940—they were to be his publishers for the next thirty-two years—was a turn towards academic respectability and exclusiveness.) Many of the intelligent readers aimed at took it up. No British philosophical book since Russell’s Problem of Philosophy (1912) a quarter of a century earlier can have been as widely read.
Ayer’s later books—Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Problems of Philosophy, and Central Questions of Philosophy—and his five essay collections are, by and large, confined to the topics treated in Language, Truth and Logic. That is as much a tribute to the superb economy with which they were treated there as a criticism. The book’s philosophical agenda covered a wide enough range for anyone’s philosophical career. And there are new thoughts presented and new fields explored in the later works. But he did not move far from his starting point.
(p.146) The main novelty of Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, apart from the limited changes of mind about incorrigibility and the argument from analogy already mentioned, is the contention that theories of perception are not competing substantive doctrines but, rather, proposals of ‘alternative languages’. It is not very clear what that amounts to. Does someone who rejects the sense-datum language have to say that some material objects exist only for one person, or intermittently, or have different properties for different people? The arguments used to show that only sense-data are directly perceived could then be mobilized to show that all direct perception is of private material objects and that public material objects, spatiotemporally and causally interconnected in a common world, must somehow be constructed out of them. In that case the alternative offered is of the most trivial, merely typographical kind. What is clear is that nobody seems to have paid much attention to it until J. L. Austin criticized it in Sense and Sensibilia (1962). By that time Ayer had explicitly, if quietly, dropped the whole idea. In his essay of 1945 on the terminology of sense-data he accepts the criticism of it by H. H. Price.4
Thinking and Meaning, Ayer’s London inaugural of 1947, is very properly dedicated to Ryle. For it is a thoroughgoing exercise in dereification, in which the thinking self, the instrument with which it thinks, the process of its thought, conceived as a sequence of mental acts, and the object of thought, its reference or meaning, are all resolved into the expression of thought in significant sentences. Particularly Rylean is the insistence that what have usually been conceived to be mental acts, such as believing and doubting, are really dispositions to come out with certain sentences or to act in certain ways. There is also a distinct echo of Ryle’s ‘systematically misleading expressions’ in the assertion that for an expression to have a meaning there does not have to exist a thing which is its meaning.
Ayer’s remarks about meaning in this lecture indicate a much closer attention on his part to philosophical logic. In his Philosophical Essays of 1954 it is the topic of the first three items: on individuals, the identity of indiscernibles, and negation. Then four epistemological items rehearse, with minor modifications, the familiar topics of sense-data, basic propositions, phenomenalism, and our knowledge of other minds. Finally Quine’s ontology is considered, Ayer’s ethical theory is presented with greater suavity but without substantial alteration, Bentham’s principle of utility is sympathetically explored, and the view that freedom and determinism are compatible, affirmed in pellet form in the footnote of Language, Truth and Logic, is defended and modified. In its 1946 version, as reprinted in Philosophical Essays, freedom is defined as absence of constraint, not as having no cause at all. A group of factors is brought together as constraining causes and thus as cancelling responsibility, but no account is given of what principle links them together and distinguishes them from other, non-exculpating causes of action.
The essay on individuals tentatively puts forward arguments for the eliminability of singular terms and the possibility of a purely predicative language implied by Quine’s (p.147) extension of the theory of descriptions to all referring expressions. The issue is taken up again in an essay on names and descriptions in The Concept of a Person, but now what was earlier suggested is categorically affirmed.
Quine’s use of his regimented language, in which all reference is carried out by quantifiers, to reinstate ontology in a new, logically respectable form, set Ayer thinking generally about what there is. In his study of William James ( in The Origins of Pragmatism) and again in an essay ‘What there Must Be’ in his Metaphysics and Common Sense of 1969, Ayer turns to the question. Against Quine and Russell he concludes that reducibility does not imply some kind of inferior existential status, as ‘mere constructions’ or fictions, in the items to which it applies as contrasted with the unassailably real existence of the elements from which they are constructed. Analysis may eliminate singular terms. It does not fictionalize material things. Here again I think there is a distinct echo of the Vienna Circle, particularly of Carnap’s Scheinprobleme (1928) and Schlick’s ‘Positivismus und Realismus’ (1933).
They had maintained that the reducibility of material things to sense-experiences casts no shadow whatever on the reality of the material world. It simply makes clear what the empirical reality of material things consists in. For such things to exist the course of sense-experience must exhibit certain kinds of regularity. If it does there is no further question about the real existence of the material things defined in terms of these regularities. To infer that, as Schlick puts it, ‘only the given exists’ (Es gibt nur das Gegebene) is to fall into unacceptable metaphysics.
In his positive views about ontology Ayer takes an exactly opposite position to Russell. Sense-experiences are not ontologically prior to material things since their occurrence is absorbed into a comprehensive theory of a material world. There they occupy a very modest place, as parts of the histories of sentient organic bodies. Priority for knowledge is one thing: priority of existence another. Ayer takes ordinary material things and the theoretical entities of sciences as competing for the status of being the real components of the material world. He vacillates between the two claimants—intellect urging electrons, sentiment pressing for tables—and concludes that it is a matter for choice and not very important anyway.
The Problem of Knowledge of 1956 has an excellent chapter on memory. It dispels the influence of a radically misguided chapter of Russell’s Analysis of Mind (1921) on the subject. Memory is having beliefs about the past that do not depend on inference or testimony. It is not images accompanied by feelings of familiarity and pastness, whatever they may be. Some interesting points are raised in the final chapter on myself and others. If a person is simply a contingently related series of experiences, why should an experience not occur on its own, unrelated in a person-constituting way to other experiences? Why, in other words, should there not be unowned experiences? Personal identity is addressed once more, in a guarded, hesitant way. Perhaps Hume’s accusation of a circularity in the definition of personal identity in terms of memory can be circumvented. Survival of bodily dissolution seems conceivable. Yet purely psychological criteria of identity seem insufficient.
(p.148) There are three substantial novelties in the book. First, there is the neat account of what is needed to turn true belief into knowledge as the ‘right to be sure’. The question has not been pressed as to why Ayer does not take the ethics of belief to be as non-cognitive as the ethics of conduct, as he did by implication in his account of rationality in Language, Truth and Logic.
Secondly, there is the helpful schematization of problems in the theory of knowledge, about perception, other minds, the past, induction and so on as arising from the scepticism generated by a gap between certain kinds of belief—about material things, past events, the minds of others, the laws of nature—and the only evidence that is available for them—sense-data, memories and traces, behaviour and observed regularities. That was not new. It was present in the pre-war writings of John Wisdom and set out clearly in an article about Wisdom by Douglas Gasking in 1954. Something along the same lines had also been worked out by Friedrich Waismann. These sources make one wonder if it was not something casually let fall in conversation by Wittgenstein.
Ayer, like the other exponents of the scheme, recognized four standard ways of dealing with the gaps. First, intuition, which claimed direct access to the other side of it. Secondly, the theory of a general principle which could serve as a bridge across it. Thirdly, reductionism, which closed the gap by defining the things concluded to in terms of the evidence for them. Fourthly, the melancholy option of scepticism. Ayer conjured up a fifth contender, grandly called ‘the method of descriptive analysis’, which seemed to be a matter of admitting the gap and then blithely doing nothing about it.
In fact, once more confronting the question of our knowledge of material objects, he does something rather different, and offers a kind of watered down reductionism. Our beliefs about the material world are not translatable into statements about sense-data. They should be understood as a theory which draws all its support from the evidence of sense-data. There is an air here of trying to settle an overdraft with a cheque drawn on the same account. It shifts the problem to that of the relation of a theory to the evidence for it: is it like the detective’s theory that the injury to the deceased was caused by a blunt instrument (later found in the shrubbery) or like Newton’s theory that the fall of apples and the orbiting of the sun by the planets are manifestations of the same gravitational force? For better or worse, Ayer stuck to this position until his final treatment of the topic in Central Questions of Philosophy in 1973.
By carrying out the ungracious task of tracing most of Ayer’s original ideas, and many of those he came to express later, to external sources, I am not suggesting that there is no more to his achievement than the communication of these borrowings. He wrote some lively pieces of philosophical polemic: defending the sense-datum theory against Austin’s often captious objections, setting ferociously about Malcolm’s view that dreams are stories we are disposed to tell when we wake up, and arguing against Wittgenstein’s view that a private language is impossible. He expounded Peirce and James, Russell and Moore, with thoroughness and distinction. His special kind of clear-headedness proved valuable in his work on probability, a subject often liable to be swamped by fruitless technicalities.
(p.149) An unstated assumption behind this excavation of Ayer’s intellectual borrowings is that a thinker’s place in the history of philosophy is determined by the originality of the interesting or influential things that he says. I do, indeed, believe that assumption to be broadly correct. No doubt the more one learns of the history of philosophy the more one realizes that what one had supposed to be the proprietary great thoughts of those commonly reckoned to be great philosophers had often been thought by someone else first. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, one learns, is an echo of Augustine’s si fallor sum. Locke drew heavily on Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle. Nevertheless Descartes put his cognito to uses of which Augustine had no conception and, although there are identifiable fragments of other men’s ideas in Locke’s encyclopedic Essay (1690), the plan and basis of the whole great undertaking were his own. The special greatness of Kant is surely for the most part due to the novelty of his ideas.
Rather than considering the question in general terms it will be better to try to fix Ayer’s place in the scheme of things by comparing his achievements with those of his contemporaries who qualify for such a comparison. Broad and Price were lucid and persevering exponents of ideas put into circulation in the first years of the century by Russell and Broad. Broad had the advantage of knowing a good deal about natural science and about the history of philosophy. Price’s great merit was his cautious deliberation, his extremely high standard of what the clear understanding of a problem and its proposed solutions consists in. Their main service was to domesticate the inchoate innovations of others. That is something that Ayer accomplished with greater force and comparable distinction.
Two more obviously appropriate comparisons are with Ryle, ten years his senior, and Austin, his near-contemporary. Ryle, too, was an extensive borrower. His philosophical logic derives from Russell and the Tractatus, his philosophy of mind from intimations that had come to him of the thinking of the later Wittgenstein. But he put his own stamp very markedly on what he took. That is in part a matter of his breezy, epigrammatic, resolutely non-technical style. That style was in tune with a mode of proceeding that relied heavily on analogy and, in general, avoided the laborious protection of these from all possible objections. Oddly, in the light of their respective ways of life—collegiate in Ryle’s case, metropolitan in Ayer’s—it is Ryle who is the less academically respectable and conformist. He steered clear of all the standard etiquette of philosophical writing: the identification of aims, the footnotes, the polite references to Professor This and Doctor That. In the end I think I should accord him a larger place on the philosophical map than Broad, Price, or Ayer, but I admit that it is a close-run thing.
The main reason for it is that, whether by accident or design, his own versions of late Wittgensteinian doctrine are really very different from the original. The distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that was an insight of great value, however easy it is to take it for granted once it has been pointed out. The boldness with which he dismissed Cartesian dualism, by interpreting all mental life in terms of dispositions to behaviour, has the merit of providing something definite to discuss, rather than endlessly puzzle over.
(p.150) Austin was the critic who got furthest under Ayer’s skin as is clear from the indignant tone of Ayer’s response to his criticism of the sense-datum theory. Like Prichard and Moore he was a rigorously minute philosopher whose scrupulous pursuit of exactness gave him an extraordinary personal command over his contemporaries. He went further in that direction than his acknowledged master, Prichard, because of his greater intelligence and general mental agility. But his reputation has not survived him. A later generation finds it difficult to understand. Apart from ‘speech acts’ his innovations in the philosophical vocabulary are seldom heard.
The two philosophers with whom Ayer is most appropriately to be compared are Quine and Popper. Both, like Ayer, are intellectual by-products of the Vienna Circle; in Quine’s case gratefully (Word and Object (1960), after all, is dedicated to Carnap), in Popper’s with a constant determination to emphasize his differences from it. I think it is fair to say that there is no new idea in Ayer that deserves to receive or has received the kind of attention that has been given to the innovations of Quine and Popper.
Quine’s multifarious assaults on the notion of meaning as the chief instrument of philosophical explanation, on the analytic–synthetic distinction, on modal and intentional discourse, on assumptions about translatability, his revival of ontology, and his naturalistic account of the theory of knowledge, add up to a major change of direction in philosophy. Not all that many have chosen to follow him very far down the path he has pointed out but his ideas have proved to be inexhaustibly discussable.
Popper’s fundamental idea that science progresses by adventurous conjectures, controlled by attempts to overthrow them, is not without forerunners. Something like it is crucial in the philosophy of science of Whewell and it plays a part, if not such a commanding one as for Popper, in the brilliant chaos of the writings of Peirce. But there is no reason to suppose that Popper had the least familiarity with either of them at the time in the early 1930s when he was writing his Logik der Forschung (1935). Whewell had been obliterated by Mill in the English-speaking world and was quite unknown anywhere else. As for Peirce, M. R. Cohen’s pioneering selection, Chance, Love and Logic had come out in 1923 but it did not contain any of Peirce’s more Popperian pieces and was anyhow almost certainly unknown to him.
Secondly, and more to the point, Popper’s very various developments of his fundamental thought go in directions altogether unexplored by Whewell and only partially by Peirce. Peirce, like Popper, adopts a comprehensively fallibilistic theory of knowledge and rejects determinism. Of Popper’s own invention are his attack on the view that there are general laws of historical change, his account of probability as objective propensity, his defence of science as an account of the real nature of things against instrumentalism and essentialism, his application of evolutionary ideas to the theory of knowledge, and the connected doctrine of ‘World 3’, over and above the realms of matter and consciousness.
Quine and Popper arrived at their main new ideas early on: Quine by 1936 in ‘Truth by Convention’ and 1939 in ‘Designation and Existence’, Popper by the date of his first book, 1935. Holding firmly on to them ever since, they have established their fertility by (p.151) the substantial and interesting body of extensions and applications they have made of them. Ayer, on the other hand, tended to circle round a number of topics, varying his attitude towards them, sometimes opting for one view or another, sometimes concluding that it is a matter for decision, sometimes simply confessing doubt as to what the right answer is. The one thing he never questioned is the primacy of sense-experience, even if, with his later replacement of sense-data by ‘qualia’, he tried to mitigate the subjectivity of his preferred foundations for knowledge. For all the bold iconoclasm of Language, Truth and Logic the abiding impression is one of doctrinal indefiniteness. (It is interesting that he never responded to Quine’s rejection of analyticity except in a couple of non-combative pages of Central Questions of Philosophy.)
It is that, I think, that must explain the fact that his influence has been so much less than that of the two major contemporaries with whom I have been comparing him. I speak here of influence on philosophers, since Quine is unknown to the part of the general reading public which thinks it would like to know something about philosophy. As every teacher of the subject knows, Ayer has enormously influenced beginning students of philosophy. Since most of them do not go far with the subject, that influence must be, with many, a persisting one. As a paradigm of a philosopher for educated people he is surely exemplary for his unswerving dedication to argument, to explicit reasoning concisely expressed in the clearest language.
It is noticeable that his influence has been comparatively small in the United States. In the post-war years when this country was a net importer of visiting philosophers they crossed the Atlantic to learn about Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin. That must be partly due to the fact that, from the late 1930s on, the Americans did not need an intermediary to convey the message of the Vienna Circle, since most of its leading exponents were coming to be installed there in university posts. Furthermore Ayer’s ideas about necessary truth and phenomenalism had been anticipated in the United States, seven years before Language, Truth and Logic, in C. I. Lewis’s more substantial, if less exciting, Mind and the World-Order.
Another possible factor is that philosophers in the United States, as in Cambridge in its greatest days, typically know more mathematics and natural science than philosophers in Oxford. Ayer was always an enthusiast for science, but the enthusiasm was of a generalized, rather ideological kind. I believe it was essentially secondary to his animus against religion. The sensationalism to which he always remained faithful was something he shared with the great generation of late nineteenth-century unbelieving philosophers of science: Mach, W. K. Clifford, Karl Pearson. Present-day philosophers of science—Popper, J. J. C. Smart, the Reichenbach of Experience and Prediction (1938), even Carnap after the mid-1930s—take for granted the objectivity of the basis of empirical knowledge. Ayer’s distaste for religion seems to be the central vision and object of emotional commitment which it is the office of the brilliantly deployed dialectical manoeuvres to protect, rather as a conviction of the immortality of human souls, related by spiritual love, is the soft centre in need of fascinating ingenuities of argumentative defence in the case of McTaggart.
(p.152) Ayer thought of himself as the main representative in his own time of the British empirical tradition, running from Hume through John Stuart Mill to Russell. It is a natural and intelligible point of view. His interpretation of the leading ideas of that tradition, in the sharpened form given to them by the Vienna Circle, undoubtedly gave it a new lease of life. But in its most vigorous form at the present time that tradition has moved beyond the doctrinal constraints he accepted from it about necessity, perception, and the nature of science.
Although I have come to think his place in the history of philosophy is not as large as I had thought before settling down to write this essay, I think I understand why I should have thought I did. In the first post-war decades philosophy in Britain was dominated by Wittgenstein and Austin, one a genius, the other enormously gifted, but both execrable examples in many ways. Confronted by dire imitations of their respective styles of writing and reasoning Ayer stood out as a marvellous champion of the best traditions of rational discourse.
Notes:
(1) Ernest Nagel, ‘Impressions and Appraisals of European Philosophy’ (first published 1936), in Nagel, Logic Without Metaphysics (1956).
(2) Translated in Ayer, Logical Positivism, 60–1.
(3) Carnap in Ayer, Logical Positivism, 78.
(4) A. J. Ayer, ‘The Terminology of Sense-Data’, in Philosophical Essays, 103–4.
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