To improve the human condition, why not sock a philosopher on the jaw?
his is a strange war,' Sir John Keegan wrote last week. But all wars are strange. Indeed, what is not strange? With age I have realised the truth of J.B.S.
Haldane's remark, 'My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.' He added, 'And simple things are strange when you look at them carefully.' Consider; on the evening of Friday, 25 October 1946! was walking up the High Street in Oxford with the beautiful Hilary Sarson, then my girlfriend. We were both about to be 18. She persuaded me to take her into the forbidden Oyster Bar at White's. At the end of the bar, slumped over a BOA, was a large, handsome man, Anthony Crosland, whom Hilary recognised. `He's the cleverest man in Oxford,' she whispered. 'A don in. . . in . . . in philosophy.' She meant economics, but both were total mysteries to her. She introduced us. He focused on me, not without difficulty, and a look of amiable malevolence spread over his flushed features. 'I'm a senior member of this university,' he said, `so huger off' In due course he and Hilary were married — disastrously.
Was there a crackling of violence in the air that evening? On the same day, at exactly the same time, in the Gibbs Building at King's, Cambridge, took place the creepy meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club, at which the great philosophers Wittgenstein and Karl Popper had their brief and only encounter. Popper, whose Open Society was the latest battle-cry in the struggle against totalitarianism, had come with a purpose. It was almost exactly a year since Sartre had given his notorious lecture at the Salle des Centraux in Paris (29 October 1945) at which he had launched existentialism as an alternative to the liberalism of the West or the collectivism of the East. But Popper had not come to demolish it. Nobody in Cambridge had then heard of it, and even in Oxford only Iris Murdoch took it seriously. No: Popper's purpose, in league with Bertrand Russell, was to demolish what he regarded as Wittgenstein's trivialisation of philosophy, his belief that it could not tackle real problems, merely verbal puzzles. For ten tense minutes the two great men confronted each other. Popper provocative, Witters 'incandescent with intellectual passion', fencing unconsciously with a poker he picked up from the grate. According to Popper, Witters asked him to give an example of a moral rule, and Popper replied, 'Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.' Whereupon Witters threw down the poker and left, slamming the door. This account has been disputed, and the episode has been exhaustively analysed in the book Wittgenstein's Poker by Edmonds and Eidinow (Faber £9.99). I believe Popper, who had no need to lie as he was on the right side. And he never lied anyway. I learnt more from him than from anyone else, and my proudest possession is a letter of thanks he wrote to me when he read my book Modem Times. I framed it, and hung it in my study (alongside another, hilarious, letter of abuse from George Steiner) until I decided, not long ago, that it was vanity, and put it away. But of course Popper was stranger than he seemed and occasionally struck a note of extremism. When he was living at Penn, and tasked him to lunch with me at my house in Iver, he replied, `Can you give me an absolute guarantee that no one whatsoever has smoked in your dining-room, however briefly, for at least six weeks?' 'No.' 'Then I shan't come to lunch.'
The third of the trio. Russell, was also an extremist, especially in his pacifist phases. Kingsley Martin used to say, 'All the most bellicose people I know are pacifists, and Bertie is the most aggressive of the lot.' Once, in 1968, Russell rang me up in a rage about something I had published, and when I accused him of being illogical, he shouted, 'Logical fiddlesticks!' and slammed down the receiver. What he saw as obtuseness filled him with querulous fury, and he once barely prevented himself from physically attacking Witters during an argument. I saw Witters only once, at a distance, and judged him a comic figure, for anger is more likely to make a man look funny than formidable. I have an image of the trio — Russell, Popper and Witters — together doing a comic dance, 'We philosophers three,/ How angry are we!'
Witters himself put the cap on this vision by exclaiming, 'Let's cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock in the jaw.' This is a characteristic simile, but one I had not come across before. Moreover, it does not work. Philip Marlowe, in The Big Sleep et al., often socks men, and once a woman, on the jaw, and is socked in his turn, but none of these blows is plain; quite the contrary, often with a mysterious subtext, or subsock. If the aggressive Bertie, exasperated by Witters beyond reason, had been unable to restrain himself and had actually socked him on the jaw, that would have been a most complex event, impossible of simple explanation, or perhaps any at all — matter for another book by Edmonds and Eidinow, Bertie 's Sock. Again, if Witters, having dropped the poker, had, instead of leaving the room, stridden across to Popper and socked him on the jaw, the blow would have been of cryptic complexity.
No similes for plainness make sense. George Orwell used to say 'as plain as the nose on your face'. But noses are anything but plain: try drawing one. Those that look easiest are often the most intractable. When I attempt a selfportrait, it is always my nose which baffles me. People talk of 'plain sailing. In fact, it should be `plane sailing; that is, navigating on the assumption that the sea is a flat surface or plane instead of a spheroid. If you navigate thus for long, you will be in egregious difficulties. When I was a boy, adults said 'plain as a pikestaff'. But even then no one knew what a pikestaff was. In fact it could be many things. A mere stick, or staff, with a pointed bit of metal at the bottom. Or a ten-foot spear, pointed at the top, as carried by the Spanish troops in Velazquez's masterly painting 'The Surrender of Breda'. Or the wooden base of a Cromwellian pike with an axe, as well as a point, at the top. Or the barrier of a turnpike, lifted only when you paid the charge. Or many other things. It would be hard to find an implement less plain than a pikestaff. And there is no such thing as a plain woman either. Charles Lamb, describing the actress he loved (in vain), was forced to rake refuge in an oxymoron and refer to 'Fanny Kelly's divine plain face'. The truth is, nothing in the universe is plain. It is all strange, and when three great philosophers meet, things become stranger. not plainer. Our only rational response is to laugh.
That is why I take issue with Professor Ronald Dworkin, another famous philosopher. He recently produced, at London University, a superb paper on 'Interpretation, Morality and Truth'. It was long and meaty, and so was not read but distributed beforehand. My copy is covered with my disagreements, some of which I plan to take up with Dworkin, particularly his disparagement of jokes. He says that our interpretations of jokes are 'eccentric or stretched uses of interpretation'. I see jokes — and explaining them — as central to philosophy, which is neither a means of solving problems (Popper) nor a way to elucidate conceptual tangles (Wittgenstein), but rather a comic activity which alleviates the terrifying sadness of the human condition. More philosophical pokers, then; more metaphysical socks on the jaw!
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