BOOKS
Philosophical Enlightenment
A• J. Ayer Thoughts and Thinkers Anthony Quinton (Duckworth f28) 14 r Quinton's new book is a collection of 33 essays, all or very nearly all of which have been previously published, about a third of them in the form of reviews. The dates of their original publica- tion range, in the acknowledgements, from 1958 to 1976, being mainly concentrated in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Fourteen of them are grouped under the heading thoughts and the remainder under the heading Thinkers. Only in two instances, that of the essay on the pre-eminent American philosopher, W. V. Quine, which first appeared in the New York Review of Books in 1966, and the one on Polish Philosophy, which first appeared in the same periodical in 1968, has the lapse of time made their content at all seriously in- complete. In his preface to the collection Mr Quin- ton claims that the essays 'reflect some per- sistent and related interests of mine, two of which have been particularly influential: an interest in the connections between Philosophy and the other activities of the mind and an interest in the history of philosophy'. I think that this claim is very largely justified. Two of the essays in the lirst Part of the book, on `Social Objects', and on `Spaces and Times' respectively, and to a lesser extent the essay on `Authori- ty and Autonomy in Knowledge' make their main appeal to professional philosophers; the remainder bring philosophical acumen 1° bear on social, moral and literary topics. 1n the second part, the history of Philosophy, mainly since the beginning of the 19th century, is illuminated with a breadth of learning which is made all the
More impressive by the adroitness with which it is presented. In particular, the
understanding which Mr Quinton shows of Lcl°ctrines, like Absolute Idealism, to which he is not personally sympathetic, is very welcome. It puts the parochialism of many contemporary philosophers to shame. Being himself a materialist, Mr Quinton Is respectful of Thomas Hobbes. He allies himself, I think rightly, with those who value Hobbes not only as a political theorist but, rather, discover a basis for his political theory in his nominalism, his deterministic materialism and his egoistic psychology. I an) glad also to come upon a friendly ac- count of the career of the American Pragmatist C. I. Lewis, now unduly neglected, and more gratified still for the generous tribute which Mr Quinton pays to Bertrand Russell in his review of Russell's YY Philosophical Development. This essay Is all the more praiseworthy for having ap-
peared in 1960, at a time when Russell's philosophical achievements were grossly under-valued by comparison with those of Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore.
Mr Quinton pays considerable attention to Hegel, whom he handles politely, without claiming to have solved what he calls the cryptogram of Hegel's metaphysics. He has a plausible explanation of the fact that a local version of Hegelianism was the dominant philosophy in Britain from the 1870's till the end of the century, though Hegel had very largely ceased to be a prophet in his own country by the 1840's. His explanation is that it met two ideological needs: first the defence of Christianity against geology and Dar- winism, and secondly the substitution of `a politics of social responsibility' for the prevailing laissez faire. Quinton thinks that Hegelianism was probably brought to England by Jowett, who visited Germany in 1844, and was transmitted by Jowett to his pupils T. H. Green and Caird, whose work bears out Quinton's thesis. On the other hand, Quinton has to admit that the thesis is not satisfied by the two most gifted British neo-Hegelians, Bradley and McTag- gart, neither of whom believed in a personal God or was much concerned with social responsibility.
The politeness which Quinton shows towards Hegel does not extend to Hegel's modern expositors. He complains rather of the `excessive tolerance towards Hegel's in- tellectual extravagancies that is a widespread feature of writings about him'. `Everybody', he continues, `knows rather demure and censorious people who number among their friends some drunken and lecherous rascal whose outrages of conduct are genially indulged. He can get away with throwing up at the dinner table, while others are ruthlessly condemned for minor infractions of propriety. Historians of philosophy tend to treat Hegel with an un- critical benevolence that they would never extend to Locke or Mill'. Quinton has a soft spot for John Stuart Mill with whom he shares approval of an elitism, based on intellectual ability rather than wealth. He quotes Mill as saying that `to be protected against competition is to be protected in idleness, in mental dullness, to be saved the necessity of being as active and intelligent as other people'.
The whole book is adorned with felicitous quotations I had not previously known, for example, that Jeremy Bentham had defined arithmetic as `gnostosymbolic
alegomorphic prososcopic somatic coenoscopic ontology' nor had I come across Heidegger's Hegel's Concept of Ex- perience where a passage from Hegel's Phenomenology is printed on the left-hand pages with a commentary by Heidegger on the right. `Those hungry for enlightenment', says Mr Quinton, `are met with such observations as this: "the ab- soluteness of the Absolute — an absolution that being absolvent absolves itself — is the labour of unconditional self-certainty grasping itself" '. This is not an unusual specimen of Heidegger's style and I wonder what his many admirers make of it.
Neither Lou Andreas Salome, the Egeria of Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud, nor the Von Richtofen sisters, one of whom married D. H. Lawrence while the other had a 'fair- ly spiritual' affair with Max Weber, were prominent as thinkers, in their own right, but Mr Quinton's reviews of books about, them were worth reprinting for their wit. Admittedly, the attempt of the American Professor Binion to explain every detail of Frau Lou's behaviour in psycho-analytic terms provided an easy target, but Quinton's comments on his crediting Lou's father, General Salome, with `that odd piece of Freudian anatomy, a bowel-womb' and on his suggestion `that the baby Lou was animated at the outset of her emotional pilgrimage by a desire to get her penis back from her father' made me laugh aloud. Mr Quinton writes temperately about Freud but seems disposed to agree with Popper that Freud's theories do not meet the scien- tific test of falsifiability. About Popper himself he is mainly eulogistic, though he has some well-founded criticisms both of Popper's belief in a third world of objective knowledge and of some parts of his political theory.
I have not done justice to the range of Mr Quinton's interests nor given his more strictly philosophical essays the attention they deserve. I particularly enjoyed his sug- gestion in `Space and Times' that one's waking life might be parallelled by an equally coherent dream-life conducted in a space of its own. In denying the possibility of a similar multiplicity of times he ignores the physical theory of relativity, but I sup- pose that he is right in claiming that the ex- periences of any given person must fall into a single temporal order.
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