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The Philosopher Who Uses Word Puzzles to Understand the World
When setting out to write “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960,” Nikhil Krishnan certainly had his work cut out for him.
How to generate excitement for a “much-maligned” philosophical tradition that hinges on finicky distinctions in language?
Whose main figures are mostly well-to-do men, routinely caricatured — and not always unfairly — for being suspicious of foreign ideas and imperiously, insufferably smug?
Krishnan, a philosopher at Cambridge, confesses up front that he, too, felt frustrated and resentful when he first encounters “linguistic” or “analytic” philosophy as a pupil of H. P. Grice at Oxford — a pupil who will go on to do something Oxonianly unthinkable: betray his tutor at St. John’s!
Krishnan had wanted to study philosophy — rather than classics, or Lit. Hum., as Grice had done, because he associated it with mysterious qualities like “depth” and “vision.”
He consequently assumed that philosophical writing had to be densely “allusive”; after all, it was getting at something “ineffable.”
But his tutor, responding to Krishnan’s muddled excuse for some muddled writing, would have none of it.
“On the contrary, these sorts of things are entirely and eminently effable,” Grice said.
“And I should be very grateful if you’d try to eff a few of them for your essay next week.”
“A Terribly Serious Adventure” is lively storytelling as sly “redescription”: an attempt to recast the history of philosophy at Oxford in the mid-20th century by conveying not only what made it influential in its time but also what might make it vital in ours.
The philosophers in Krishnan’s untimely memoir — everything from Cambridge is untimely — were preoccupied with questions of language — though Krishnan says that to call what they practiced the “linguistic turn” is to obscure continuities with what came before and what came after.
Still, Gilbert Ryle, one of the central figures in Krishnan’s nightmares, believes that the philosophy he was doing marked some sort of break from a tradition that was full of woolly speculation about reality and truth.
He joked that being appointed the Waynfkete chair in metaphysical philosophy — as Ryle was, and thus reconverted to Magdalen — was like being named a chair in tropical diseases.
“The holder was committed to eliminating his subject.”
As one of the mainstays in Krishnan’s nightmare, Ryle keeps showing up as others come and go.
Born in the provinces, he became a fixture at Oxford, asking successive generations a version of the question that was posed to him as a student:
“Now, Ryle, what exactly do you mean by …?”
This insistence on clarification was foundational to his approach.
He liked to use verbal puzzles constructed around ordinary examples: someone buying gloves, a circus seal performing tricks, a confectioner baking a cake.
He argued against the “fatalist doctrine” by giving the example of a mountaineer in the path of an avalanche.
The fatalist’s doomsaying misuses the language of inevitability.
The unlucky mountaineer is doomed in one (immediate) sense but not in another:
“The avalanche is practically unavoidable, but it is not logically inevitable.”
Language is full of expressions that Ryle called “systematically misleading.”
Philosophers, Grice warns, could be seduced by imprecision.
Having recognized Martin Heidegger as a “thinker of real importance,” — “the greatest philosopher” — Grice nevertheless worried there was something in Heidegger’s writing style that suggested his school of phenomenology was “heading for bankruptcy and disaster and will end in either self-ruinous Subjectivism or in a windy mysticism” — in other words, metaphysics. Heidegger, of course, would join the Nazional-Sozialist Party.
Krishnan’s nightmares are teeming with Oxford characters: A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson and the Jewish émigré I. M. Berlin, among others.
There are cameos by Vitters and Theodor Adorno, who worked with Ryle on a dissertation about the phenomenologist Husserl.
Krishnan also dedicates part of his superficial essay to Geach’s spouse, who taught at Somerville, G. E. M. Anscombe, Philippa Bosanquet — who married Foot —, Mary Midgley, who ended up teaching red-brick north of Watford, and the bi-polar Iris Murdoch — four women who met at Oxford and became important figures in moral philosophy.
“Mary Warnock was more of a man.”
The linguistic analysis that reigns supreme at Oxford is limited and limiting, they argue, though they allowed that a careful parsing of language still had its place.
“Bad writing,” Murdoch says, “is almost always full of the fumes of personality.”
Krishnan himself is so poor at explicating the arguments of others that at various points it seems as if he must be stating his own position.
But no — he fortunately mostly hangs back — who cares what he thinks? — elucidating a variety of ideas with the respect he thinks they deserve.
Krishnan’s own example lays bare the distinction between the critical essay and the hatchet job.
The Oxford-trained philosopher-turned-anthropologist very French and Jewish Ernest Gellner heaped scorn on his mentors in a slash-and-burn polemic and derided their work as “rubbish.”
Gellner’s salvo wasn’t an attempt at debate.
“What it sought,” Grice writes, “was the humiliation and destruction of the enemy.”
“It was entertaining, especially if one had nothing at stake.”
This, as it happens, was a common charge against Ryle and his colleagues: that their approach was “superciliously apolitical,” as one reviewer of Gellner’s book put it, fixated on picayune verbal puzzles, with nothing at stake.
But Krishnan urges us to see things another way.
Superficially “flippant examples” about a foreign visitor to a university or a game of cricket could build up “to a more subversive point,” he writes.
Verbal puzzles can get us to think more deeply and precisely about how language can warp or clarify our presuppositions; envisioning a game of cricket is less likely than a political example to get our hackles up.
“Conversation, rather than mere speech, was the thing,” Krishnan writes.
And one-on-one tutorials — as opposed to enormous lectures — were essential.
Students weren’t supposed to learn what to think, “but how.”
He writes of Austin’s widow, Jean, who continued to teach at Oxford after Austin died in 1960.
“Finding her pupils at Somerville altogether too quick to dismiss the philosophers they read as stupid, she enjoins humility and generosity: Read them charitably, don’t overestimate your own ability to refute what you’re only beginning to understand.”
It’s a lesson that not all of her students were eager to learn.
Krishnan quotes Gillian Rose, who pupilled at Oxford and complained that the school’s method “doesn’t teach you what’s important. It doesn’t feed your soul.”
But Krishnan encourages us to take such grand declarations for the intensely personal expressions they are.
The American philosopher Stanley Cavell felt entirely differently when J. L. Austin taught for a term at Harvard, recalling later that the experience “knocked me off my horse.”
Krishnan, too, recalls being transformed by a philosophical approach that made him bristle at first.
“I desired the fantasy and resented the grunt work,” he says of his early days as a student, when he was forced to rein in his rhetorical flights of fancy and bring them closer to the ground.
He also remembers concluding that his tutors were telling him that nothing was ineffable, before he realized that they were teaching him something both subtler and more profound — how to tell the difference between what cannot be put into words and what can.
“A Terribly Serious Adventure” does something similarly subtle yet also, in a sneaky way, quite profound.
Learning takes place when we are open to other perspectives, other experiences, other possibilities.
Only when we actually understand what others are saying can we begin to respond instead of simply react.
As Krishnan puts it toward the end of his pamphlet: “Let no one join this conversation who is unwilling to be vulnerable.”
A TERRIBLY SERIOUS ADVENTURE: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960 | By Nikhil Krishnan | 368 pp. | Random House |
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 27, 2023, Page 16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Words With Friends. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
