238. First Gentleman, THEN Philosopher

 

Prof. R. M. Hare points to a word in a student's essay and asks, "What do you mean by this?"  I underline a word in a student's essay and in the margin ask the same question.  Hare teaches philosophy.  I teach English composition.  What's the difference?

I see only a superficial difference.  Hare is speaking directly to a British student, I am writing to an American student, who after class may be spoken to directly when he comes to my office. There may be an ocean between us, culturally as well as physically, but Hare and I live in the same teaching world, the small world where two people face each other, one trying to help the other.  (A class I take to be simply an aggregate of worlds of two people.)

Hare and I are both trying to get the student to use words that his reader will understand and can respond to.  For Hare's student that reader would, I think, be the liberally educated Oxbridge graduate of the mid-twentieth century, successor to the British gentlemen the students of G. E. Moore (and other tutors, in a line that went way back) had to write for in the early twentieth century.  For my student the reader would be some transatlantic equivalent of that.  In any case, not a specially educated reader.

The interesting thing about Hare is that he makes satisfying that general reader, that British gentleman or gentleman-successor (an Oxbridge-educated woman), that amateur, a condition of becoming a philosopher.  In 1961, when Hare explained the difference between British philosophers and continental philosophers to a New Yorker reporter, British (analytic) philosophers were the lords of Anglophone philosophy departments.  How did they get to be such lords?  By being forced to make themselves clear to common people, rank amateurs, you and me after we had gotten our degrees.  "Here you read a thing to your tutor and he says to you, 'What do you mean by that?' and then you have to tell him."  The tutor will check to see if what you supply will make sense to the British gentleman for whom he stands in.

In Post #209 I explained why Hannah Arendt, in her philosophical mode, would never have made it out of my office.  She wouldn't have made it out of Hare's office either, and the explanation is the same: she had been taught to write by the continental philosopher Martin Heidegger and was following his model, a model that put the philosopher far above the ordinary, educated reader.  To Heidegger this lordly position came by intellectual inheritance, a portion from the special reserve of philosophical studies (like phenomenology).  To Hare and his fellows lordliness had to be earned, and there was no special reserve.  Any reader of the Spectator, or The Rambler, or The New Yorker, any sitter at a Paris salon, could challenge you.  You couldn't be a philosopher unless you met the test of their company.

Everybody in American and British philosophy departments knows how great that is for philosophers but I'm not sure everybody there knows how great that is for those who listen to them in a supervised salon or read them in a well-edited journal — you know, a journal with editors doing the R. M. Hare, English-comp job.  How great it is to have somebody at the gate keeping not just philosophers but all scholars out until they write like gentlemen!  Bless the New York Review, bless Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, for doing that.  Bless the teachers and tutors who prepare scholars to crack the NYR by making them write for gentlemen (in the unisex generic sense).

Do I hear scholars blessing them too?  Led by philosophers?  You bet your life I do.  For the shaping of ideas for the non-scholar is not just a test of the scholar, it's a test of the ideas themselves.  What did Socrates do when he had a good idea?  Checked it out with his circle of friends.  "Is that not true?  Do we not say...?"  And who were those friends?  Experts?  Cognoscenti?  No, they were just gentlemen, educated Greek gentlemen.  Get it past them, produce a shapely idea, and you were as close to truth as you could get.  Maybe we lower it with the word "style."  It both shapes and tests thought.

And, I hear from a saloniste, that I am close to romanticizing the ancient past.  Life is too complicated now.  Too many subjects, understandable only in a technical vocabulary, demand philosophical attention.  Language of the grove or salon won't do.

So, are we going to keep the liberally educated "gentleman" out of today's upper rooms? 

Certainly today's technical vocabularies are going to be difficult for that gentleman.  But difficulty is not the same as obscurity.  We English teachers often say to students that John Donne's poems are "difficult but not obscure."  We mean that if a reader takes the time to work out the intricate logic and multiple connections in a Donne poem the meaning will become clear.  Words like "soul," for example, words that might, in a poet like Blake, be mystical and obscure, turn out to be referential and perspicuous.  Donne's souls, you discover, are things with recognizable features.  They can come out of bodies and talk to each other.  "Got it!" says the student.

That's the way it will be with technical terms in modern systems.  Donne's "soul" is just a technical term in an older system.  Like all such terms it looks unsharable, something like what a mystic sees, until you work it out.  Proceed step by step until you reach the familiar referential words you already know.  Then you'll see that it's sharable.

For obscurity there's no better example than Heidegger's "Being."  He says it's "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood."  It's what "underlies" them.  But "the being of beings is not itself a being." Others, to whom we turn for help, say that Being (Sein) is known by "being-in-the-world (Dasein)."  They add more and more hyphens, trying to nail it.  Surely there's something you can build on and hook up and take to something you can share. But no go.  There is not a chance in hell that any gentleman, British or American, will ever understand "Being."

Now that would tell a student opposite Hare or me that Being is a bad idea.  "If you've got an idea you can't put into words for me," reads the invisible sign behind us, "maybe you'd better reconsider the idea."  The student goes home with his draft and thinks, "Hmm,  maybe I haven't got a good grip on this idea.  Maybe it's impossible to grip.  Am I grabbing air?"  I think we've got a budding philosopher there.