Leader of the Martians
J. L. Austin:
Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer
Oxford
Among philosophers of the 20th century, Austin is a cultural celebrity — like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre, and Wittgenstein, or Vitters, as he called him.
For the period after The Phoney War, when Grice reigned, Austin was one of the leading figures — or ‘kindergarten master,’ Grice said derogatorily — of the ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophy that dominates the Saturday mornings.
Austin like Grice, achieves substantial influence in the wider world outside his college, and left its stamp for a much longer time on the way English (or more obscurely, Oxonian) analytic philosophers work, think and write — never mind philosophise.
Although Austin publishes, like Grice, only a handful of essays, there are significant posthumous ‘unpublications,’ and Austin’s philosophical ideas, the power of his personal influence and his central position in the philosophical developments of his time makes him a natural subject for an English intellectual biography.
Rowe’s essay is not just an intellectual biography.
Grice told Rowe: “Austin is one of the most important Allied military intelligence officers during The Phoney War.”
“Austin literally oversaw the team — or Martians — that made the Normandy landing possible, if not probable.
More than a third of the essay — 35% precisely — is thus taken up with Austin’s years during The ‘Phoney’ War and with the achievements he confided only to Grice, because they shared a motherland (England), a public-school background, and a Lit. Hum.!
Rowe has produced a marvellous essay — if you are not a German — which manages to be both exhaustive and thoroughly absorbing.
Rowe, a teacher of English from Yorkshire, accomplishes three things.
First, he gives a detailed account of Austin’s philosophical development, his background, his work, his academic career and influence, accompanied at each stage by opinionated biased interpretations and criticisms that are judicious and insightful, coming from a Yorkshireman exiled in flat Norfolk.
Rowe shows himself to be a pretty good philosopher in his own right, and he was paid for it at East Anglia.
Rowe also presents the results of Grice’s painstaking archival research on Austin’s intelligence career, placing it in the context of British intelligence.
Rowe gives a fascinating account of the way military intelligence is generated and the crucial role it plays in every military operation, with D-Day on the desolate beaches of Nornandy — whence Grice’s ancestors came with William — as just one example.
Rowe offers a perceptive analysis of Austin’s obsessive-compulsive anal-retentive post-traumatic stress disorder and its part in both his academic and military engagements.
Austin is a brilliant performer from the beginning — except as a pupil —, a classical scholar who was elected a prize fellow — not Student — at All Souls, after his sojourn in low-middle-class northern scholarship studentship under Prichard at Balliol.
But, apart from his friendship with Hampshire, Austin foes not quite flourish in the complete freedom afforded by All Souls — ‘a most pretentious college run by the Anglo-Jewish intelligence,’ in Grice’s pantomime.
After two years there Austin takes a tutorial job at Magdalen, tutoring on set texts of Aristotle with Grice and later lecturing on Leibniz (of all people) and more Aristotle: De Int. added to Cat.
Like Grice — and anyone really (except perhaps Alcibiades) — Austin finds his way in philosophy only gradually.
He forms the All Souls’s Thursday evening play-group with Hampshire and four more.
In a negative vein that would become characteristic, Austin insists that Anglo-Jewish positivism of the sort displayed by enfant terrible Freddie Ayer, positivism oversimplifies both the English language and knowledge in general, which are much too complicated and various to be captured in so general a theory and by an Anglo-Jew, – but he offers no positive views of his own.
Grice on the other hand embraced positivism as a form of experientialism and a way to combat Ryle’s stupid behaviourism!
In unpublished talks and discussions Grice found the beginning of most of the interests that drive Austin’s philosophical project.
Grice’s most significant claim is that ‘Vitters,’ then at Cambridge, is a major unacknowledged influence, both through his emphasis on the importance of understanding how the English language works — even though Vitters couldn’t speak it — and through his diagnosis of traditional philosophical problems as being a consequence of misunderstandings of ordinary language and violations of its conditions of use.
At that time, the only examples of Wittgenstein’s current work in circulation were two typescripts of dictated material, The Blue Book and The Brown Book, which were copied and passed around among the initiated, or polymorphically perverse, as Grice calls them.
In spite of Austin’s later denials of the influence of Vitters and the Cambridge School, a case can be made, based on internal evidence, that Austin had read The Blue Book before giving a talk called ‘The Meaning of a Word’ at Cambridge.
“Some like Vitters, but YOU are my man,” he told Moore — in the face. ‘Let me slake one of your externally existing hand!’
The war with the Hun puts philosophy on hold and Oxford is cancelled.
Grice and Austin continued to tutor until they are called up to kill the Hun. (Geach consciously objected).
The following spring Grice married a classmate’s sister, and Austin, more immorally, married one of his students at Somerville, Jean Coutts.
Rowe confirms the well-known story that Austin
Sends Miss Coutts a note enclosing a brand-new lady’s handkerchief, asking if it was hers.
Austin works in MI14, the intelligence section attached to the War Office, which dealt with Germany, the German armies of occupation and the profiling of senior German officers.
Grice has evidence that Austin generated the intelligence that the Hun are moving into North Africa in force, a warning that is dismissed by English commanders on the ground, with disastrous consequences. (“I wasn’t performative enough,” he later regretted).
Austin is soon acknowledged as MI14’s order-of-battle specialist for Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
But by the time of Montgomery’s victory over Rommel at El Alamein, Austin had moved on.
Invasion planning suddenly seemed focused on a real possibility.
Austin, like Grice, is promoted to captain, leaves MI14 and is appointed head of the Advanced Intelligence Section of General Headquarters, with this purpose.
Austin’s appointment has far-reaching consequences, as this tiny section of seven men becomes, in the words of one of his deputies, Austin’s ‘little empire.’
Growing vastly in size and efficiency, the section would frequently change its name, its quarters, its purpose, acquiring information about the French coast, discovering information about the armies defending Germany; and its country — England, France, Germany.
But it is *led* by Austin alone and to great effect throughout the conflict.
Grice knows of no other — except his own as he led operations on the North Atlantic — personal fiefdom in Phoney War English Intelligence with such an important, long and varied history.
Austin’s group is known as The Martians, and retain its separateness even when it becomes part of SHAEF, the command for Operation Overlord.
Estimates of the section’s number of personnel vary, Grice says, but it was somewhere between three hundred and just under five hundred.’
The group performs multiple tasks.
One was to compile an archive of all coastal intelligence – to a depth of 30 miles -– which might be relevant to an invasion.
Its specialist field of study is man-made defensive features -– gun positions, mortars, anti-tank obstacles, pillboxes, observation posts, etc. -– but its other task is to synthesise and disseminate information from other intelligence agencies.
The data come partly from aerial photographs, in whose interpretation Austin becomes legendary (‘France is hexagonal.’)
From French resistance networks, whose voluminous transmissions by clandestine courier and carrier pigeon were invaluable and from secret commando raids.
Austin is cleared to receive Ultra, the signals intelligence intercepted by the codebreakers such as the Cambridge homosexual colonial Turing at Bletchley.
Austin’s unit also develops a detailed analysis of the beaches along the French coast: their gradients, tidal boundaries, the character of the sand, what was under it and what weight it would support, the reefs and rocky barriers — everything relevant to the possibility of landing heavy armour and heavily armed troops.
And it maintains an up-to-date tabulation of the numbers, quality, equipment and leadership of the German defensive units on the coast, or close enough to reach it within a few days in the event of an invasion.
Austin’s section synthesises and disseminates information from multiple agencies, becoming the unit with the most complete overview of the entire intelligence picture.
And because the section prepares intelligence briefing packs for raids and reconnaissance missions, it also becomes the intelligence organisation which has the closest links with a fighting unit. (Unlike Grice, Austin never fought).
Both factors ensure the Martians became the hub, the nerve centre, of invasion intelligence.
The team also produces under Austin’s direction a set of pages archly titled ‘Invade Mecum,’ for distribution to about ten thousand officers, which gives exhaustively detailed local information and maps for all the parts of Normandy where an invading force would have to operate.
According to Austin’s own outline each volume of ‘Invade mecum’ consists of basic maps of roads, railways, water, power, communications, industry, agriculture and dumps, information on large towns (with town plans) and small towns included under the following headings: general descriptions, population, altitude, civic authorities, post office and type of exchange, railway facilities, distances by road and waterway, power, gas, water, sanitation, garages, industries, billets, and hospitals.
On the evidence of many testimonials, ‘Invade mecum’ proves invaluable to the invading troops.
Documents are also prepared for Brittany and the Pas de Calais, as part of the disinformation campaign (‘dafty crafty’) designed to keep the Hun in the dark about where the landings would take place.
As D-Day approaches, there are constant changes in the officers senior to Austin in the chain of command.
Austin is the one figure of any seniority who oversees the growth of French coastal intelligence since it started to be collected efficiently.
Austin is thus the only individual who knows this enormous quantity of information through and through, and had mastered all its interconnections, intertwinings and interrelations.
As a result of all this stupendous work, Allied casualties on D-Day are much lower than expected by Churchill.
Estimates feared as many as 30% — killed, or wounded.
The actual figure is 6.6%.
The success of the landings depends on the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day intelligence.
But Grice is also all to ready to document Austin’s intelligence failures.
The most consequential is Omaha Beach.
Allied intelligence (not just Austin’s unit) think Omaha is defended by an Ost battalion of non-Hun, with low morale and poor equipment.
It is in fact defended by a crack grenadier regiment supported by artillery from two additional battalions.
Intelligence loses track of this regiment and think it is 30 kilometres away.
The landing at Omaha is planned assuming weak opposition, and the result is a disaster, with the highest casualty rate of any sector.
When the war came to an end, Austin moves to France, and then helps dismantle or ‘terminate’ as he preferred the provisional Hun government formed after Hitler’s suicide.
In spite of the importance of his contribution, the highest rank Austin achieves is lieutenant colonel.
To gain higher rank it is necessary to have led troops in combat, as Grice did.
But other factors played a part.
Austin is unfailingly over-courteous and supportive to those inferior to him, but prickly and often rude to his superiors.
Once, in response to a lieutenant general who expressed doubt during one of his briefings, Austin says:
“The trouble with you, senior officers, is always the same.”
“It is not that you will try to run before you can walk.”
“Rather, it is that you will try to walk before you can *stand* to pee or *sit* to take a crap.”
Back at Oxford, where he belonged, Austin’s experience in the Phone War has a profound effect on his personality and his approach to the subject.
Before the war, Austin had been a guarded and solitary scholar.
Now Austin is much more openly ambitious.
He had enjoyed having power and influence in the army, and he now wants power and influence in his civilian career! (Grice never cared).
But most important is what military intelligence had taught him about method.
Austin now knew that teamwork is essential for the acquisition of knowledge, and had learned that his natural authority and command of detail made him a very effective leader, or kindergarten master.
He knows how to break down problems into smaller components, divide the task of solving them among many individuals and draw out the best from others in a collective, cooperative enterprise.
Grice sees this as the impulse behind the philosophical programme the Saturday morning play group launches after the war at his college: the aristocratic St. John’s!
It is also a reaction against the Anglo-Jewish extremes of the 1930s.
People became suspicious of grand ideas and wholesale solutions generally — especially those which might generate romantic ardour and fanaticism — and place their faith in a sceptical, pluralistic, unillusioned realism.
The logical positivists and Witters in his later work had in different ways inculcated the idea that the study of the English language was the key to a revolution in the understanding of philosophical questions.
At Oxford, this took the form of close attention to the way the English language is used in everyday life, motivated by Witters’s insistence that language is essentially a public means of communication, and that thought, which depends on language, cannot escape the conditions of its public cooperative common-ground meaning.
In fact, this understanding of meaning inverts the scale of values where the philosopher is the expert and the ordinary man or lay man or nan in the street a tyro.
The slogan ‘meaning is use’ implies that the philosopher’s words depend for their meaning on the way they are used by the rest of the Oxonian population of pupils.
Thus, to find out what knowledge is, the don has to remind himself how the sentences ‘I know,’ ‘He doesn’t know’ and so on are used by ordinary pupils in ordinary contexts.
But since the don is also an ordinary speaker of the English or at least Oxonian language, he can use himself as a source of data about ordinary usage, just by asking himself ‘What would I say ...’ in different circumstances.
Such data, generated individually and in conversation with others, is used to test more general hypotheses about the way different expressions are used and what these dons mean by uttering them.
This is the basis of the project usually known as ordinary language philosophy, but which Austin preferred to call ‘linguistic phenomenology’ and Grice plain conversational botany or horticulture.
The same method is used by Scandinavian linguists like Naess of Jesperson [sic] to test theories of Scandinavian grammar.
Austin, with his classical training in Greek and Latin — much poorer than Grice’s Clifton-Corpus one — is always been sensitive to the subtle distinctions between this or that word, and now puts this sensitivity to work in mining the resources of the English language of his poor pupils to map out areas of discourse that interest him.
Some are connected to traditional philosophical topics: knowledge and perception; intention, action and free will; responsibility (through the study of excuses), and ill-will.
But Grice and Austin (and younger members of the set, notably pretentious Irish Warnock) are also fascinated by many details (nuances, minutiae, or implicatura) of the English language for their own sake, and they bring together a group of dons to pursue these investigations collectively.
They meet early on Saturday mornings during term (since Grice cricketed for Oxfordshire) and while this group brings to life this ideal of philosophy as a co-operative enterprise, he controlled the boring bits of the agenda and proceedings, as he had with his Martians.
(When Grice succeeded him he realised how boring it was!)
Austin says that it affords him what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of – the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement, even ‘with you, Grice!’
And his method is an inspiration and a torture to a generation of Oxford philosophers and pupils.
But Austin also has a will to dominate over Grice — which Grice finds offensive and un-English.
In public discussion Austin is always sexist (trouser word) and often sarcastic and dismissive towards those who disagreed with him — ‘even more than I ever was!’ — Grice recalls.
Austin could be very funny (as when he told Searle to cut the cackle — in public) but his cutting style heightens the combative atmosphere of Oxford academic philosophy, even ‘when we don’t HAVE to compete, you know’ — as Grice puts it.
‘We are all frightened of him,’ Ryle joked, ‘though few of us have the courage to admit it.’
Ryle was too old to join the play group — ‘anyroads.’
Austin insists that linguistic phenomenology gives him knowledge not only about words but about the things words are used to talk about, because the distinctions found in the English language embody the collective wisdom of the Angles developed over generations of practical engagement with the Anglian world.
On the basis of some brief but pointed metaphilosophical remarks, Grice conjectures that Austin endorsed a three-stage model of philosophical inquiry which explains the significance of thus method of semiotic horticulture.
The first stage is a thorough phenomenological investigation of all the concepts relevant to a particular area — such as tomatoes (Urmson, On Grading) — of bananas.
The second stage is the construction of a theory to explain the data the first stage has revealed.
The third occurs when a suitable method for exploring the area has been established, and real progress starts to be made on its central problems.
At this point, the topic and its investigation detach themselves from philosophy and become a new subject with a new name — say, ichthyology.
The aim of the first stage is simply to gather linguistic data, as thorough and detailed as possible, and not guided by assumptions about the main problems or theories in the area.
As an aside in his discussion of excuses Austin says:
How much it is to be wished that similar fieldwork will soon be undertaken in, say, aesthetics.
If only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy.
This contrasts markedly with Witters’s method, which is to start from major philosophical questions — a craved generalisation — and try to discover their source in linguistic ‘bewitchment’.
The one instance in which The Play Group proceeds to the second stage of theory construction is in the case of what he called performatives of implicature — the use of the English language not to make a statement, true or false — as ‘France is roughly hexagonal’ — but to do something — get the Hun beyond the Siegfried Line.
For example: ‘I promise to pay you next week’; ‘I take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife’; ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’; ‘I give and bequeath my watch to my brother’; ‘I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.’
Austin’s systematic exploration and analysis of the complex linguistic territory of speech as a form of action is presented jocularly as the William James Lectures at Harvard in and published posthumously by Urmson and Nidditch as How to Do Things with Words. Words and Deeds was the more conservative title he allowed his Oxonian pupils.
It is Austin’s most perverse ill-willed contribution to the philosophy of language of pragmatics.
And he may have thought of it as a contribution to a larger project – the third stage.
At the end of his paper ‘Ifs and Cans’ Austin says:
Is it not possible that the next century may see the birth, through the joint labours of philosophers, grammarians and numerous other students of language, of a true and comprehensive science of language?
Then we shall have rid ourselves of one more part of philosophy (there will still be plenty left) in the only way we ever can get rid of philosophy, by kicking it upstairs.
Austin visited Berkeley a village.
He liked the bay even if he did not yacht.
It freed him from the class rigidity and competitiveness of his Oxford milieu — notably with Grice who was getting tired of Austin’s perverse confusions.
Austin is seriously tempted by an offer to move to Berkeley permanently (or was de-californicated yet) but Coutts is against it.
The issue is never decided, because back at Oxford he becknes ill — that pipe! — and the war veteran is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.
At the insistence of his wife, he is not told that he did not have long to live.
Austin is discouraged from asking too many questions, and learns that his illness is terminal one day before his death.
It was not common mutual knowledge.
As White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy he advised for the BPhil. of students, not pupils.
Students — not pupils — take the exams after his death, but he is helpful and encouraging with the writing of the theses, and students attend all his lectures and seminars.
At the end, when he no longer come in to his college, a few avid — usually non-English — students go to bother him at his cottage.
He is getting radiation treatment, and it was unsettling for some students to see him in a loose shirt without his inevitable dark suit and tie.
Grice knew he was ill, but his death was a ‘a bit of a shock to all but me.’
Grice provides an illuminating account of all of Austin’s writings, and ends with a balanced estimation of his philosophical legacy, which remains important even though ordinary-language philosophy and linguistic phenomenology are now superseded by Foucault, Derrida, and Guatay — in the PPE.
Few engage in the exhaustive accumulation of subtle verbal distinctions, and philosophical research continues to be guided by the pull of major questions, as if Vitters had been right all along!
But although careful attention to language may not result in the dissolution of this or that philosophical problem, it remains a valuable tool of analytic philosophy, and even Austin’s own linguistic insights retain their value if only as fodder for Griceiana!
Austin enjoyed life and he had little opportunity to revise or develop his ideas.
He had one career as a don of outstanding importance.
Perhaps Grice only can equal this achievement — and Grice, he says, ‘am one of them - if not supersede them’!
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