HOW CHARMING IS THE PHILOSOPHER
Philosopher's Holiday. By Irwin Edman. (Constable. ros.) Fort once a wholly delightful book, witty, urbane, amusing and at the same time cultivated, learned, wise. Dr. Edman is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. In form, an apology for not writing his autobiography, the book is in fact a series of essays. The subjects are commonplace enough and are for the most part little more than the stock items on the round of the American's pious pilgrimage. We hear of music, of philosophy, of the temples at Agrigento and Salinunte, of the sanity of the English, of the excellence of Dr. Edman's cook, of encounters with Nazis, of friends, colleagues and students.
All this follows familiar lines ; but Dr. Edman's is distin- guished from similar books by three characteristics. He is a philosopher ; he has a peculiarly felicitous and agreeable style, and he is, it is obvious, an exceptionally pleasant and agreeable person. As a stylist, Dr. Edman must speak for himself in the one or two quotations that follow. As a philosopher, he belongs to the humanitarian rather than to the metaphysical tradition ; his interest, that is to say, lies in this world rather than in any other. He quotes with approval the dictum of a distinguished philosopher, " remember, a pro- fessor of philosophy studies philosophy ; a philosopher studies life," and does not, but might well have supplemented it with the inevitable quotation from Terence. A follower of Santa- yana and William James, his interest lies in the market-place rather than in the clouds, an " imp or angel of common sense " always, it appears, coming to his rescue when he is confronted with a more than usually high-falutin' brand of mysticism, and warning him, even as a child, " as it articu- lately does now, to distrust all such high breathlessness in thought." In a charming essay on Intimations of Philosophy in Early Childhood he dilates on the pleasure and interest in philosophy which God has implanted in the young for subse- quent education to uproot, and puts in a plea for the earlier study of philosophy at schools and colleges.
As to his niceness, I have rarely read a book which has so much of wit and so little of malice. Dr. Edman, in fact, has performed the difficult feat of making righteousness readable.
He is as nice to the English as he is to everybody else. If he were not so belligerently anti-Kantian, I would suggest to him that the rosy glow which suffuses his account of us is a character of his cognising rather than an independently real characteristic of the object cognised. He finds us to be dis- tinguished by good sense and good taste. On arriving in London, he writes, " one seemed to have stepped by miracle into a world of moderation, of good sense, of unobtrusive good manners, of peace." One thinks of . . . But I had better leave the reader to think and fill in the dots for himself.
He comments upon and praises our self-deprecatory culture, and seems at times to labour under the impression that England is filled with men who care for the things of the mind and the spirit, who, in his own agreeable phrase, culti- vate an " unself-conscious citizenship of a world of beauty in which they imaginatively live." Or if England is not filled with them, " an accident of destiny has brought an unusually large number of them into my orbit." Many of us could wish that our destiny had been equally kind. It would be wrong to attempt to disillusion Dr. Edman, but where he records " the easy browsing among delightful pastures of the mind by the merchants and civil servants of England," others have found only a nation of Philistines who, loving not the highest when they see it, greet it with at best a bored indifference ; at worst a guffaw or a sneer. The fact of the matter is, I suppose, that the English are, in their attitude to the matters which concern Dr. Edman, more Janus-like than any other people. There is a small, highly cultivated minority, to be found at Oxford, at Cambridge, in Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Hampstead, and scattered in country cottages in the Home Counties, and there are the rest ; the rest, who are cheerfully and incurably Philistine, prefer jazz to Bach, are blind to beauty, or, if they see it, are ashamed of their vision, and dislike so intensely the processes of the intellect that, when they are by main force brought to the brink of the dark river of thought, instead of taking the plunge seize the first oppor- tunity of scuttling away to the warm shelter of the tangible and the concrete. Dr. Edman having passed his time mainly in the Oxford common-rooms and country houses, thinks that we are all more or less like the people that he found there. Yet having said so much, I see that I have charged him with a rather simple mistake. This is unjust ; Dr. Edman makes few mistakes, and none of them is simple. There are plenty of passages in which he gives us our due, pointing out that our inhibitions make us dull, our addiction to good form trivial, and the narrowness of our outlook inhumanly callous to that which lies outside the circle of our accepted concerns. Thus he notes that we are kind to dogs but not to foxes, and are totally indifferent to the conditions in which the stewards who serve us on our liners live and have their being. Yet when all is said and done, Dr. Edman does think that the English are nicer than do most Englishmen. Here, again, I suspect the operations of the Kantian epistemology, for he is obviously such a nice chap himself.
What are the matters which " concern " Dr. Edman? Philo- sophy, speculation, music, the arts, discussion, and good food_ In one of the earlier essays we are introduced to M. Platon, the doctor of a French provincial town, who expounds the doctrine of itinerant humanism which Dr. Edman subsequently develops. Itinerant humanists are members of the country of the mind. Unfortunately, they do not know one another. " There is only one country," says M. Platon—" it is that of people of intelligence. Its citizens are few ; they should be acquainted." Hence the citizens should bear a badge of membership so that, as they travel about the world, they may recognise one another, foregather for discussion, and pursue in company their common concerns. For of the discussions of the mind alone can it be said that the more they divide, the more they unite. The same is true of the possessions of the mind. If I own land or a car, you do not ; but if I enjoy a concert, it will not prevent your enjoyment (at least, I hope not); it may even enhance it. " Our quarrel over taste divided but educated rather than destroyed us. The same is hardly true of the quarrels of men over politics and morals. The only peaceful societies are the societies of the mind, for in such societies alone one gains by sharing and communication
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