The phoney revolution

Ernest Gellner

Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays?' F. Strawson (Methuen £3.20) This is a collection of eleven essays 17,; Professor Strawson, most of which had bee", previously published in philosophical journalt', Roughly, this is the residue of his articles, le over after the previous publication of thos", which deal with technical logic. Strawson rightly held in high esteem in the world 0' professional philosophy. The essays are WI!' ten in the idiom and style customary the profession at present. They are unlikelY!,, give much entertainment or illumination " the layman, but one can with equal are fidence predict that they will be of much us within the trade, being a step in the re-cyclinge of those ideas which have been making th rounds during recent decades. The collection includes Strawson's reviegi of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Inves; tigations, and this essay is perhaps the useful single item in the volume. This revieo first appeared in 1954, and at the time, eons:, tituted a remarkable achievement; even tothoe it can be read with much profit. To appreciatt what that achievement was, one aftise remember two facts: first, it was at the tn11,,e widely agreed amongst philosophers of dominant trend that Wittgensteind posthumous book, then new, was a great 5n„5 definitive Revelation, and, secondly, it W'f very hard to tell from that collection Delphic utterances what the devil WittgeP:1 stein was trying to say. (Another, less patierl.; and reverent reviewer, confessed in 11,10 review that he was constantly tempted `e scribble "so what?" in response to the barrags, of cryptic observations, of portentiously 013

cure relevance, contained in that book). Strawson was much more polite, and his courtesy was, I fear, free or irony:

This book ... presents ... an intricate problem: that of seeing clearly what the author's views are ... and 110w these views are connected.

Well, yes. Now, some two decades later, exegeses abound, but the obscurity at the fountainhead of this wisdom ensures that the various competing expositors can remain secure in the conviction that their rivals, not tO mention those who actually doubt the Wisdom, have quite misread the message. Some even supposed that travesty could only be avoided by sticking to the Master's own Style , as Strawson observes:

It might even be thought that there were good reasons why no attempt at all should be made to present his views in a more conventional form.

Strawson will not have this, and in fact the thirty-five pages in which he deals with Philosophical Investigations were and are very good value and a model of orderly presentation of what, in its original form, was wilfully and pretentiously chaotic. Strawson himself however was evidently a bit appalled by the tenerity of his own lese majeste, and aPologised: • • I try to trace and connect the main lines of his thought; conscious that, at best, the result must Involve a great impoverishment of his rich and Complex thinking .. .

The conclusion of the review is:

• • . the value of the book as a model of philosophical method is greater still. (Here I do not refer to the Idiosyncrasies of style and form.) It will consolidate the Philosophical revolution for which more than anyone else, its author was responsible.

Was the style and form really so separable from the content, and did it not play an essntial role in endowing that content with its air of depth and authority? One wonders how 1t1ng Strawson went on believing that a revolution had occurred, or that what it had brought was of any merit. A few pages later in this volume, at the end of an essay first Published in 1966, we get a different vision of the history of philosophy, no longer so tevolutionary or eschatological: The progress of philosophy, at least, is dialectical: We return to old insights in new and, we hope, IMProved forms.

The real and decisive weakness of the alleged Wittgensteinian revolution was in fact lts blindness to history and to the historic role of thought, to the urgency of the real intellectual issues which men have faced. In substance, the Master taught that philosophic questions were illusions arising from our failure to understand the complex and lifeembedded nature of our language (and I do riot apologise for travestying the richness of 015 thought, for there is no travesty). Once N.'ou attend to this, the problems dissolve (this is nonsense), and the residue of our beliefs stands in no further need of defence or justification (this is nonsense on stilts). One can Only believe this if one lives either in the stratosphere of totally abstract logical conCePts, or is lost in the all-too-human minutiae Of verbal behaviour here/now, or surrenders 19 the most self-indulgent mysticism. These did appear to be the limits of Wittgenstein's World, but, contrary to one of his own earlier a,?horisms, the limits of his vision are not the limits of the world.

There is nothing to indicate that Strawson ever really accepted this a-historical vision, and a fair amount to indicate that he is quite aware of points which are incompatible with It, for instance, in the two opening papers of trus volume, which are on moral and political topics. On the other hand, there is also 1,10thing to indicate a clear awareness of the Incompatibility of any sense of reality, and the Premisses of this philosophic 'revolution.'

Thus, though sceptical of the possibility that our view of ourselves might be radically changed by the advance of the psycho-social sciences, he is careful not to exclude this possibility, and notes that it might constitute a kind of confirmation of the views of certain (determinist) philosophers. Or again, he sketches a political philosophy for us, rather similar to that of Professor Popper, Gallie, Crick or Berlin, but rather coyly refrains from endorsing it unambiguously:

... I do not think there is any very definite invitation to moral or political commitment implicit in what I have said. But ... what will be the attitude of one who experiences sympathy with a variety of conflicting ideals ...? ... he will.be most at home in a liberal society . . . he will note that he is the natural, though perhaps the sympathetic, enemy of all those whose single intense vision ... drives them to try to make ... the ideal coextensive with those of common social morality.

One would not wish to see Professor Strawson budge from this admirable liberalism, though one can think of less prim and more blood-warming formulations of it. But I cannot help feeling how much more lively and interesting he might have been about the intellectual and social problems facing such liberalism, if only he had not taken that alleged revolution in philosophy so seriously.

Ernest Gellner is Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics.