224 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIEs

play did not any longer correspond to his more mature thinking. At the time that he received the Nobel prize he had declared to a journalist his intention of writing a trilogy on love. What is this love that he had in mind? We do not know. In l'Exil et Ie Royaume solidarity with man fills his heart once more with joy,but at the same time there is hovering over these stories the veiled presence of sadness. The title itself means that the world is at the same time man's kingdom and the country of his exile. Camus comes to understand that love is useless, that often the outcome of love is hatred and persecution, as is clearly shown in the instance of Daru's disillusionment. In exchange for his love he receives hatred:' dans ce pays qu'il avait tant aime, il etait seul '. The answer to this dilemma was to be given by Camus in a novel, a play and the essay Le My the de Nemesis. He was working at this trilogy when the drama of Villeblevin brought the plan to a tragic conclusion.

l' Universite de Louvain J. KEUNEN

2. Thought and Action. By STUART HAMPSHIRE. London: Chatto and Windus, 1959. Pp. 276. 25s.

There have in recent years been various indications of dissatis-faction with certain trends in current Oxford and Cambridge philosophy. There has been a feeling that detailed analyses of minute particulars has led to neglect of some broader and more pervasive issues. It has been realised that certain problems are distorted when isolated for analytic purposes from their living context. Thus, the problem of the self has been treated exclusively as a logical, linguistic or epistemological problem, without reference to the awareness of self in moral experience. The problems of self-consciousness, of personal identity and of memory have been treated as cognitive problems, without reference to action, intention or project as modes of experience of self-continuity through time. tn general, philosophy of mind has been separated from philosophy of morals. In tum, philosophy of morals has been developed as if it had to do with 'stands' or decisions not with reasoning; or as if it concerned the meaning of sentences, not the meaning of human life .

. Among recent expressions of reaction against these trends one could name Professor John Macmurray's 1953 Gifford Lectures, The Self as Agent; Professor C. A. Campbell's 1953-'54 and 1954-'55 P.ifford Lectures, On Selfhood and Godhood; Professor Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge. These studies, however, come from traditions earlier than or other than the philosophy of linguistic analysis. When a distinguished member of the group of younger Oxford philosophers writes in a somewhat similar strain, this is

STUART HAMPSHIRE: Thought and Action 225

more of a phenomenon and is likely, given the demography of present-day British philosophy, to have a greater effect. Mr. Hampshire has indeed always been a non-conformist 'Oxford philosopher'. In Ii. remarkable symposium on 'Philosophy and Beliefs' published in The Twentieth Century in June 1955, inwhlch he was joined by Miss Iris Murdoch, Professor Isaiah Berlin and Mr. Anthony Quinton, Mr. Hampshire made the following remarks, which excellently illustrate his unconventional point of view.

It is not just words that the analytic philosopher is properly concerned with the more or less contingent facts of language, but with concepts. And not just with any concept, but with those most general concepts or notions on which all thought and language depends. As philosophers, we are interested in the most general features of the whole apparatus of concepts, in the different cate-gories of thought and knowledge. . .. It seems to me that the French existentialists have been right to bring questions of ethics into the centre of the so-called theory of knowledge, and to consider questions of personality, and of our knowledge of other minds and of self-knowledge as a whole, as being problems of action as much as of knowledge in the contemplative or speculative sense. . .. I suspect that it is particularly the more rationalist philosophers--Aristotle, Leibniz, Frege, with their more formal arguments about existence and identity, who will seem least irrelevant or superseded in the near future; while the theory of knowledge coming from British empiricism-from Locke, Berkeley,Humt}-will seem comparatively irrelevant, at least to contemporary interests.

In one of the more remarkable books to emanate from Oxfor.d philosophical circles recently, his book on Spinoza (Pelican ,Philo-sophy series, 1951), Mr. Hampshire had shown a critical respect for metaphysical thinking, at least as interrogation, if not as answer.

It is a plain fact (he wrote) that certain large metaphysical ques" tions naturally present themselves to reflective people in alm.oSL;tll periods as being problems that require ananswer... Th,ey are called metaphysical questions first because they seem to be forever beyond the scope of any of the special sciences; they seem always to lie on the frontiers of organised knowledge,however far these frontiers may be extended. . .. Why should it be assumed'that all genuine questions Inust be scientific questions? (p. 213). . ; . Our patterns of thought and forms of language are constantly changing, in response to new needs and new interests; we cannot therefore,lay down, once and for all, the limits of intelligible diS~ ,course in such, a way as to exclude the asking of questions which are not scientific but metaphysical; wherever we try from time to time to draw the frontier of scientific enquiry, metaphysical questions will always arise precisely on this frontier (p. 223). But, perhaps, in the last resort, no one will fully understand and enjoy Spinoza who has never to some degree shared the metaphysical temper, which is the desire to have a unitary view of the wodd and of mart's place in it (p. 225). "

226 PHILOSOpmCAL STUDIES

There is no need to say, therefore, how eagerly' people who 'shared the metaphysical temper' and were dissatisfied with contemporary Oxford moral philosophy, looked forward to the appearance of Mr. Hampshire's book, Thought and Action. The author announces his intention in the preface as being 'to bring moral argument nearer to the philosophy of mind and the philo-sophy of mind nearer to moral argument '. He remarks that ' there are purposes and interests which require that accurate and step-by-step analysis should not always be preferred to a more general survey and more tentative opinions, even in philosophy'. We have expressed below, while reviewing Dr. Ewing's book, our sense of the need for a 'metaphysics of moral man'. Another young Oxford-trained philosopher, Mr. Bernard Mayo, in his book Ethics and the Moral Life (1958), reviewed here two years ago, made some moves in this direction, stressing the moral importance of 'the old-fashioned but perennial question: "What is the nature of man

~nd what is man's place in the universe?'" . Mr. Hampshire's book promised to be an important contribution to this new sort of thinking. In many ways it is indeed an important contribution. In other respects it is seriously disappointing. But on any reckon-ing it is the work of a highly intelligent and responsible mind, and deserves serious consideration. 'ltis a difficult book. The style gives an appearance of clarity

which is deceptive. In short runs, the reasoning is clear and simple; but it is perplexingly difficult to get a firm grasp of the argument of a chapter, or of the plan of the book as a whol~. Indeed one must pronounce the book as badly composed. There are many repetitions. Austere in words, severely elegant (as Mr. Quinton called it) in style, the book is nevertheless discursive in argument and (to quote Mr. Quinton again) elusive in organ-isation. '

One of the striking themes of Mr. Hampshire's book is the firm and'rel;lsonCd rejection of Humean empiricism. It could Seem plausible, he argues, to represent the self as 'merely a SUccession of sensations' only if one absurdly, thought of the self as a recipient of, impressions and not also as a former of intentions, a doer of actions (pp. 94, 126). The empiricist tradition has falsely repre-

. sented hum:an beings 'as passive. observers receiving impressions nOm .. outside" the mind, where the "outside" intludestheir 6WitPO-dies '(P;47).{lf is worth remarkingt}tat Commentators on'Moore;s celebrated' Proof of an External World' do not Seem to'fud it incongruous that Moore should have regarded his own tWo. hands as objects in the external world!) This had led to such j~~u ... dO:'proble. ms as that of whether or how an.external world can bcknown; how the continuity of the self . can be proved; how other minds can be known. The way of escape from these unreal

STUART HAMPSHIRE: Thought and Action 227

problems is to see the self as situated from the beginning among objects on which it acts, towards which it has intentions. The self is a situated self, not an acosmic observer. The existence of an external world' of persisting objects is a logical necessity and not a contingent matter of fact' (p. 40). He elsewhere spoke of it as a 'necessity of discourse '. The pseudo-problem of how the past can be known has arisen from the empiricist error of privileging the present sense impression; it vanishes when we see the self as engaged in continuous processes, guided by intentions which link the future with the past (pp. 71-2, 126).

The flow of intention into action, the intention governing and directing action, requires a continuity of self-consciousness that may be forgotten if philosophers concentrate solely on our knowledge of the external world through the senses. . .. The notion of a perceiving subject is also the notion of a continuing, embodied and intentional agent, who displaces or is displaced by the things around him (p.85).

Mr. Hampshire stresses the importance of verbs and their persons and tenses in language and experience. The real Cogito for him is not ' I think, therefore, I am, whether there be a world or not'; but 'I act (on, or with a view to ... ), therefore I am in the world' (cfr. pp. 71-89). This seems obvious enough; but as Wittgenstein was always stressing, the occupational disease of philosophers is precisely the forgetting of the obvious. One recalls Russell's outburst, that the 'occurrence of tense in verbs is an exceedingly annoying vulgarity due to our preoccupation with practical affairs '.

Important and valid though all this be, Mr. Hampshire's concept of being-in-situation is nevertheless curiously jejune and even in a certain sense behaviouristic. A privileged role is given to the act of pointing in the building up of experience. An external world is declared to be ' a logical necessity' because ' below the level of communication in language and the making of statements, there is the act of intentional pointing, away from oneself and towards an object '. This act of pointing' is performed from a point of view and standpoint, which is the present situation of myself, as a persistent object placed among other objects' (pp. 40-1). Surely ,one must have the same reaction to this as one has to Moore's hands-up argument: there is something wrong with talking about myself as an ' object among other objects '.

Mr. Hampshire thinks it important that ' the etymology of the word "intention" suggests that the gesture of pointing from a place to a place is the natural and concrete expression of intention' (pp. 54-5, 82). But is not this way of talking open to the same criticisms as those which have demolished Russell's theory of meaning and Wittgenstein's (Tractatus) picture theory of language?

228 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES Mr. Strawson,' Miss Daitz,Miss Anscombe, Mr. Geach have shown how little is understood of language or intention when thought of in terms of pointing. Indeed Mr. Hampshire himself showsaware~ ness of this on a later page when, introducing a critique of Russell's Theory of Descriptions, he remarks:

Philosophers h!\.ve in the last twenty years carefully studied the use of referring expressions. . .. But they have been inclined to isolate the act of making a reference to something in words from a more general account of intentional attitudes, of which this linguistic act is only one example. They have concentrated attention upon linguistic behavio)ll". . .. The actual use ,on a certain .particular occasion of certain words, and the gesture of pointing that may perhaps accompany the words, have sometimes been. taken to be all that is involved in the notion of referring to a particular thing. This is . a mistake (p. 200).

But this, to our mind, could stand as criticism of much of Mr. Hampshire's own way of speaking in his Chapter I, on 'Persons and their Situation'.

It is surprising that almost nothing is said in this book about inter-personal 'situation'. Mr. Hampshire's concept of 'being-in-situation' has undoubted affinities with .those of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; it is notably different fromthat of Gabriel Marcel, for whom being for man is essentially being in relation with other men in a world of objects charged with possibilities of human fulfilment. Professor Macmurray, whose analyses are sometimes paralleled in Mr. Hampshire, would probably feel that the world of Thought and Action is still too much a world of ' events', or at least a world' of atomic selves acting beneath the level of personal relations at which the religious question becomes inescapable. The most serious defect of Mr; Hampshire's analysis of the human situation. is precisely, as we shall see j its total ignoring of the religic:)Us question.

A 'second and connected element -in Mr. Hampshire's antidote t~ empiribism;' is the appeal to language-iti-use, to language forms as part of the natUral history of human societies. Several pseudo-problems disappear, he 'holds, when we take the view..ipoint of language. Language as such is social, and solipsism is unstateable in it (pp.'67, 89)~ Language is determined by our "practi0al interests: as' social beings!'; and in tum the' resources of' our language limit provisionally our practical interests and goals of action. There; is a reciprocal interaction' between language' and action, we might say, between description or analysis and intention or evaluation. ,-Therefore one must in philosophy consider human beings simultaneously as observers and as agents and as language-users. If one considers the theory of mind and ethics separately, both are apt to be falsified ' (p. 67);

STUART HAMPSHIRE: Thought and Action 229

But the appeal to language as what Wittgenstein called' part of our natural history' is often thought to involve the impossibility of any sort of absolute, unchanging truth. Mr. Hampshire, like many Wittgensteinians, seems committed to a form of linguistic relativism. This tendency is perhaps reinforced in him by the historicism of Collingwood by which he has been greatly influenced. It is indeed a delicate task to do justice to the 'historically-situated' character of human thought, without falling into an historicist relativism which would merge philosophy and theology into history and substitute the description of opinions for an enquiry into their truth. Mr. Hampshire himself, in his paper in Contemporary British Philosophy (1956) warned of ' the new form of scepticism' found among linguistic philosophers, for whom , philosophy should be descriptive only and not constructive'. But he does not entirely escape from that pitfall himself.

This is particularly the case in his discussion of Descartes' Cogito. If we reformulate this in terms of linguistic analysis, we shall see, he argues, that' I ' is not the' god-like' 'transcendent observer " the' detached mind' of Descartes (pp. 67-8, 83); but' a reference to something that indubitably points to itself and away from itself, and that directs its attention in one direction rather than another .... The first person singular is the nucleus on which all the other referential devices depend' (p. 87). This cogito of action disquali-fies all body-mind dualism.

We have no reason to look for some criterion of personal identity that is distinct from the identity of our bodies as persisting physical objects (p. 75). It is.a necessary, and not a contingent truth that my body has not been removed, physically separated from me (p. 81).

From his anti-absolutist linguistic starting point Mr. Hampshire has thus arrived at the remarkably absolute conclusion: 'I do not know how I would identify myself as a disembodied being and I do not know what this hypothesis means' (p. 50).

This is in plain contradiction with what he said in Spinoza (p. 109): , In fact our ordinary language is fundamentally Cartesian, at least in the sense that it allows us to conceive of the powers of the mind as logically independent of the body, however constantly they may in fact be found to be casually connected'. (This, incidentally is an interesting example of how indecisive and ambiguous is the appeal to ' ordinary language' in philosophy). In the same book (p. 176), he much more cautiously and modestly concluded: 'It would be the work of a much longer study to show exactly where the limits of understanding may be expected to fall when we try to talk of the eternity of the human mind.' In Thought and Action itself he recognises one type of experience which seems to escape in part from the' cQrpocentric predicament' (if the term may be allowed), namely aesthetic experience.

230 PHILOSOPIDCAL STUDIES The recognised value of aesthetic experieQce is partly a sense of

rest from intention, of not needing to look through this particular object to its possible uses. This type of ' pure' experience, when it exceptionally occurs, does in fact give a sense of timelessness, just because it is contemplation which is as far as possible divorced from the possibility of action (p. 119).

This is the only kind of 'transcendent' experience which Mr. Hampshire recognises. We object to his critique of Descartes, not because it sees the problem as a linguistic problem, but because it so miserably narrows the field of our language about the self. We contcmd, paradoxically though this may sound, that much of Descartell' reasoning may fairly be represented as being an analysis of our language of self-reflection; but that Descartes commanded a wider ~md clearer view of the range of that language than do his modern Uritish critics. Descartes poses the problem of the ' I who doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, imagines, perceives'; he reflects 'on the circumstance that I doubted and that coruequently my being was not wholly perfect'; he enquires 'whence I had learned to think of something more perfect than myself'; he asks, ' how could I know that I doubt, desire, or that something is wanting to me and that I am not wholly perfect, if I possessed no idea of a being more perfect than myself, by com-parison of which I knew the deficiencies of my own nature.' With this we may compare the following from Mr. Hampshire:

When on reflection I find my own existence indubitable, I am finding the existence of one enduring thing of a particular kind indubitable, the thing to which I am referring by the word 'I', and which can be distinguished from other things of the same kind by its position, the position that I suggest when I point to myself and away from myself to other things (p. 88).

Descartes' procedure differs from Mr. Hampshire's, not essentially as an aprioristic contrasted with a linguistic method, but as a more adequate compared with an inadequate survey of self-reflective language. We are justified in borrowing a phrase from Wittgenstein and saying that Descartes 'assembles more reminders' of the varieties of the experience of selfhood.

Mr. Hampshire's alternative to Cartesian dualism is a monism of intentional behaviour which would seem difficult to distinguish from Professor Ryle's ' dispositional behaviourism' or indeed from behaviourism tout court.

We have no reason to look for some criterion of personal identity that is distinct from the identity of our bodies as persisting physical objects (p. 75-he claims that this is a liberation.) As soon as one realises that the using of language, both in the practical calculation that may accompany physical actions and in the making of state-ments, is itself a kind of behaviour interwoven with other kinds, one is free to consider the range of essential human interests afresh and without prejudice (p.91).

STUART HAMPSHIRE: Thought and Action 231

Liberation indeed it could be, provided the 'behaviour' of the person were surveyed in its totality. But unfortunately, modern anti-cartesians have only exchanged one 'mental cramp' for another, the' cramp' of naturalistic monism for that of exaggerated dualism. One may deny that man is an angel using a body-machine, without having to define him as 'an object placed among other objects'. The book remains to be written by an Oxford philosopher which would adequately explicitate Professor Ryle's 'tautology which is sometimes worth remembering '-that men are men.

Mr. Hampshire thinks that linguistic philosophy excludes finality or absoluteness of truth in any sphere.

When the division of human powers, of perception, thought, and feeling, was deduced from a metaphysics that showed man's neces-sary place in the scheme of reality, as in the philosophy of Spinoza, it was not unreasonable to claim some finality for the principles of division. But if the philosophical enquiry starts from the institution of language, as it has existed in all the variety of its forms, no finality can be claimed for any system of distinction (p.234).

This is a characteristic contemporary attitude. We shall meet it, and examine it more fully, in connection with moral principles later on. It rests on a confusion concerning the term 'finality'. If a philosophical system or proposition claims finality in the sense of offering a ' clear analysis' which' removes mystery' and ensures that problems (such as ' the relations of mind and matter') 'need puzzle people no longer', then we have a closed metaphysics which puts an end to wonder and enquiry and thus to the life of thought. But these quotations are from Lord Russell. If a method of philo-sophical analysis promises us that questions about how we under-stand the minds of others 'offer no mysteries' being simply , methodological questions' about ' how we establish and how we apply certain sorts of law-like propositions about the overt and the silent behaviour of persons " then again we have closed metaphysics which trivialises human relations, offering to others the supreme insult of claiming to see through them. But these quotations are from Professor Ryle.

It is the metaphysics which expresses the 'final truth' about man in terms of ' soul', 'spirit', 'desire for God', which alone is ' open' to indefinite enquiry, reflection, rediscovery. These terms are not ' clear and distinct' and ' closed' ideas which end puzzle-ment, but 'open' ideas, to possess which is to be depossessed of the limitations of one's ' particular standpoint', and to be liberated for the life-long pilgrimage of reason into truth. This is the libera-tion that Mr. Hampshire seeks. He writes:

No description of things around me can be complete and final; no communication of feelings, or insight into the feelings of another,

232 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES can be ideally complete and ideally adequate. . .. We look for knowledge that is more and more objective and less and less limited by our particular standpoint. . . . (p. 68).

He will find this language echoed, not by fellow linguistic philo-sophers, but by Christian philosophers, by neo-thomists, by Chris-tian existentialists.

Mr. Hampshire declares the principal purpose of his book to be 'to show the connection between knowledge of. various degrees and freedom of various degrees' (p. 133). He has excellent things to say on the problem of free will and determinism. His central affirmation is that knowledge makes men free; the increase of scientific knowledge of and scientific prediction about human behaviour increases rather than diminishes the sphere of human liberty. This is substantially different from the thought of Spinoza where Mr. Hampshire seemed to have considerable sympathy for the Spinozist and naturalistic view that 'in proportion as our scientific knowledge, or knowledge of causes, increases, we neces-sarily abandon the primitive conception of human beings as free and self-determining in their choices'; and that 'as psychology progresses, the sins and wickedness of free agents come to be regarded as the diseases of patients' (pp. 157-2). In the present work, he uses language whose closest parallel would be found in any. manual of scholastic ethics.

It seems that it is through the various degrees of self-consciousness in action, through more and more clear and explicit knowledge of what I am doing, that in the first place I become comparatively free, free in the sense that my achievements either directly correspond to my intentions or are attributable to my incompetence or power-lessness in execution, which mayor may not be venial. Whether and under what conditions the powerlessness is blameworthy is a separate, moral question, or rather set of questions. . .. It plainly depends on the type of incompetence or powerlessness, the type of blame envisaged or the social purposes that the verdict is designed to serve and on the particular circumstances of the case (p. 177).

On the question of predictability and freedom, he writes: It is not by itself a threat to the reality of human freedom that

some close observers are able to predict accurately and with confi-dence, that which a man is going to do before he actually does it. . . . He is a free agent in so far as his behaviour is constantly correlated with his evident or declared thoughts and intentions at the time of action rather than with antecedent conditions of some other kind (p. 178).

In common with the existentialists, Mr. Hampshire suggests that some forms of determinism may be evasions of responsibility, what Sartre calls 'bad faith'.

Every man has a responsibility to look at all times for the best action of which he is capable at that time, and not to acquiesce in his natural and socially conditioned limitations of thought without

STUART HAMPSHIRE: Thought and Action 233 having tried to overcome them. . .. 'I am not the kind of man who would ever have thought of trying to do that, and I cannot be expected to '-this is an incomplete form of excuse, as it stands. The question would immediately arise-' Is there anything that prevents you and that makes it impossible for you?' (pp.186-7). How do we tell the difference between merely not resisting the impulse and finding it irresistible, between not overcoming a felt resistance and finding it insuperable? (p. 192).

There is a Christian as well as an existentialist ring about this affirmation of the inescapability of moral responsibility. 'I cannot escape the burden of intention, and therefore of responsibility, which is bestowed upon me by knowledge of what I am doing ... the knowledge becomes decision' (p. 175).

Mr. Hampshire admirably formulates what we have been main-taining in these reviews to be the basic problem for moral philo-sophy, the problem of the nature of man. 'The natural starting point', he writes, 'is the concept of man itself' (p.231). In Spinoza, he had seemed to sympathise with the view that this is a question for natural science: 'Man is part of nature, and there-fore the moralist must be a naturalist' (p. 121). He has since become conscious that morality precisely differentiates man from the rest of nature. The question 'What is man?' becomes the question, 'What constitutes being a good man?' and this is a request for a statement of 'the distinctive powers of humanity' (p. 231). Hence

it is possible to characterise philosophy itself as a search for a , definition of man', and to interpret the great philosophers of the past as each providing a different account of the powers essential to men. . .. Each philosophy of mind provides a different ground for a stated or implied definition of the essential virtues of men (p.232).

But' the great philosophers of the past' erred in their approach to a definition of man. Plato, for example, defined man through his relation to ' supersensible and timeless realities', thus making his mundane life seem unimportant and unreal (p. 257). But this is to define away what makes man precisely human, his temporal existence. Aristotle too defines man away, by assigning to him an 'in1mutable essence' and thus denying his mutability and contingence.

Aristotle believed that the nature of man was something finally ascertainable, fixed and certain, because he held that correct defini-tions and classifications of things corresponded to some single eternal scheme of reality. No critical philosopher can now believe that an enquiry into the concept of man, and therefore into what constitutes a good man, is the search for an immutable essence. He will rather think of any definition or elucidation of the concept as a reasoned proposal that different types of appraisal should be distinguished from each other in accordance with disputable principles derived

234 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES from a disputable philosophy of mind. He will admit that this is the domain of philosophical opinion and not of demonstration (p.233).

The comparison is obvious with Sartre's doctrine that' man's act is always beyond his essence' or that 'his existence precedes his essence'.

To take the exegetical points first, we suggest that the whole meaning of Plato's ' definition of man' is that naturalistic factors do not ' add up to ' the totality of the ' mundane life of men'. It is precisely his 'relation to supersensible and timeless realities' which, for Plato, gives to man's temporal existence the qualities of dissatisfaction, disquiet, restlessness, enquiry, discussion, aspira-tion. And these are the qualities which Mr. Hampshire seeks in a definition of man. Aristotle similarly feels obliged to give man an ' eternal essence' precisely in order to account for the qualities which distinguish man alike from 'eternal objects' and from physical objects. Man's essence is imparted by his soul; but man's soul for Aristotle is never' finally ascertainable, fixed and certain', is never fully knowable, because it is an endless and insatiable capacity, a perpetual becoming; Aristotle's' intellect' is ' somehow all things'.

Mr. Hampshire quite rightly says that if we have no final insight into the essence of man and of the mind, we have no final insight into the essence of philosophy (p. 243). Philosophical enquiry is interminable and ... is necessary at every stage of thought (p.272). This philosophical enquiry, always resumed. is itself a necessary part of extending men's freedom of thought (p. 273).

This sentence is the last word of Mr. Hampshire's book. But again we ask, how many philosophers endorse this view to-day apart from the neo-thomists, the French spiritualists, the theistic existentialists? It is the metaphysics of the human spirit which asserts the essential incompleteness and perfectibility of philosophy against all the closed, reductionist metaphysics of empiricism, positivism or linguisticism. The medieval scholastics used to say opus rationis semper perfectibile. St. Thomas did not say that reason was system, but that reason was life. A Thomist writer, Father Jolivet, has recently defined philosophy as ' experience put to question by wonder'. Mr. Hampshire says 'it is not so much the dogmatism as the abstractness of traditional metaphysics that makes it now seem useless'; and that both linguistic analysis and phenomenology are now agreed that metaphysics must be replaced by description. But Plato, Aquinas, Gabriel Marcel have this in common that they each begin by essaying a concrete description of integral human experience, and then ask what are the implica-tions of this description. Their answer is in each case a refusal of ' explanation' in the sense in which explanation is understood

STUART HAMPSHIRE: Thought and Action 235

in science or in mathematics. The inadequacy of naturalistic description and of scientific explanation is in large part what they mean by metaphysics.

Mr. Hampshire lays great stress upon the corrigible, disputable character of all assertions about the nature of man and about morals.

There are some concepts that are permanently and essentially subject to question and revision in the sense that the criteria of their application are always in dispute and are recognised to be at all times questionable. They are essentially questionable and corri-gible concepts. . .. Prominent among these perpetually disputed concepts are the concepts of morality, of art and of politics (p. 231).

We suggest, however, that there is ambiguity in the terms , questionable' and ' disputable'. If the questioning has no criteria for a valid answer, then it must break down in mere scepticism. If dispute is of interest merely as dispute, and not as a means of advancing towards truth, then we must abandon moral philosophy, and substitute for it the history of moral opinions. In one passage, Mr. Hampshire comes very near to granting this. He writes :

Since the concept of mind is . . necessarily an open and always disputable concept, men can only learn, in their own experience and in the history of art, morality and custom, all that has reasonably been included among the specific forms of human virtue (p. 247).

But Mr. Hampshire does not want to be merely historicist. Even in this passage, the inclusion of the word reasonably shows this. The history of moral opinions has nothing to do with their reasonableness. Mr. Hampshire's is a moral enquiry. 'The only critical ethics " he says in the same chapter, 'is a story of ideals of human excellence that at the same time points the way to the future of these ideals' (p. 239). But we submit that he, and many contemporary philosophers who share these views, have not perhaps reflected enough on the ways in which alternative or conflicting ideals are related to one another. Systems of moral ideals are not just alternative and parallel 'ways of life'; they each claim to be right ways of life for the whole man and for all men. They must be compared in respect of their adequacy to the human situation; the capacity of each to include and to surpass the positive values enshrined in the others; their respective power to permit and to prescribe the full development of the whole human person.

Also, ' ideals of human excellence' can and must be compared with one another in the light of common principles and ideals and definitions of man which they can be seen more and less adequately to embody. Comparison ofthem with one another implies common standards to which they in varying degrees approximate. In the history of morals there are discerned movements of moral progress, movements of moral degeneracy; and progress and regression are meaningless without fixed goals. Mr. Hampshire's own words, such as 'corrigible' and 'disputable', require agreed norms and

236 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

principles. To correct a defective concept is to appeal to a valid one; to revise an unsatisfactory concept is to invoke an adequate one. To engage in moral dispute is to presuppose the possibility of moral agreement. To question moral principles is to believe in the possibility of moral answers. As David Pole said in his book on Wittgenstein: 'It is what we may call the postulate of rationality that ideally agreement is possible'.

Furthermore, sets of moral ideals cannot be surveyed in a spirit of mere detached questioning. They assert a claim on me; they purport to give, not just a description of what men have been, not just an optional proposal of what men can be; but they state a definition of the sort of man I ought to become. As Mr. Hare put it: 'We cannot get out of being men, and therefore moral principles, which are principles for the conduct of men as men ... cannot be accepted without having a potential bearing upon the way we conduct ourselves '. What Mr. Hampshire has said earlier about the inescapability of moral responsibility applies here too. I cannot 'escape the burden ' of feeling myself judged by moral standards when I act with knowledge. I cannot question my moral standards at the same time as I acknowledge them to be moral. When I do question a moral principle, this can only be in the name of a further moral principle, itself unquestioned. Mr. Hampshire seems to forget here that my standards judge me rather than are judged by me.

He is concerned to allow for moral progress. He rightly main-tains that the modern analysis of moral judgments in terms of commands or imperatives must be rejected because it does not allow for development of moral insight.

No place is allowed for moral enquiry, for the practical thought that explores new possibilities, that attempts new discriminations. No place is allowed for a search for an enlarged freedom of thought. . . . (p. 209).

But again, we suggest that all these terms presuppose absolute standards. One cannot even speak of progress unless there is a known direction. Moral possibilities are meaningless except there are values for them to realise. In fact moral progress in human history seems to have had two main sources. First there have been the great philosophical and especially the great religious teachers who affirmed the absolute value of man as the child of God, and consequently the absolute duty of love, respect and justice which we owe to our fellow-men. Then there has been the progress in non-moral knowledge, and, in modern times particularly the progress in scientific knowledge, which has created 'new possi-bilities' of respecting man's absolute value and new and better ways of fulfilling our absolute duties of charity and justice towards him. But unless the belief in man's absolute dignity and the absoluteness

STUART HAMPSHIRE: Thought and Action 237

.of the moral law is present, then the same scientific knowledge will only create new possibilities for evil.

Mr. Hampshire has two main reasons for rejecting absolute or trans~ndental moral principles. One is that the categories and concepts of 'transcendental philosophy' are in fact derived from -'the distinctions recognised by men', from 'limiting human interests,' from 'the characteristics of the most excellent human knowledge '.

To attach value to any natural or supernatural entity is neces-sarily also to single out a human virtue which consists in the habit of recognising these entities and in some form of active respect for them (pp. 258-9).

The reasoning is familiar from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It will not do at all. To be sure human thought is human thought; but it. does not follow that it can think only human things. The whole question is whether our human experience of ourselves, of the world, of human relations, of values, can be fully comprehended in human concepts, fully described in human language. If it cannot, then our own 'distinctions', our 'human interests " the 'charac-teristics of our knowledge' compel us to acknowledge the existence, within and beyond our experience, of a transcendental or ' super-natural' reality which we know at least through our inability to ,comprehend it fully or describe it adequately. To say that recogni-sing and respecting reality is nothing but a human act of recognition or respect, is a curious aberration on Mr. Hampshire's part. It has surely been often enough argued in modern British philosophy since Wittgenstein, that no act of knowledge is only an 'act of knowledge'. Concluding Part I of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote:

Nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity! Unless, that is, one is setting out to produce confusion.

'In Mr. Hampshire, this is a particularly unexpected sort of error; for it is sheer ethical naturalism. Reviewing the book in The Observer, Mr. Anthony Quinton acutely spoke of 'that coping-istone of naturalist ethics: the principle that values are dependent on human interests'.

Mr. Hampshire's second reason for excluding moral absolutes is, again, one that he shares with most of the Oxford Moral philo-sophers as well as with the atheistic existentialists. It may be called the coping-stone of modern liberalism. It is the view that belief in absolute moral truths entails intolerance, fanaticism, smugness and hypocrisy, opposition to progress. .

For a man following a code of explicit and exhaustive instnictions, moral issues would be matters of casuistry. He would be the type of a fanatic because only certain already listed features of any situation would be worthy of serious thought before action. He would be governed by words, fitting words to facts, as lawyers must (p.216).

238 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

The adherent of a religious moral code is in this danger. He may feel he is ' following explicit instructions which he believes to be God's instructions' (p. 215). His code may seem to him an ' estab-lished morality that is already complete' (p. 222). Such a man has no place left for ' morality as exploratory thinking, as an unresting awareness of that which he is neglecting in his intentions '. Satisfied with his code, satisfied with himself, he has

a morality without perpetual regret, because it is without any sense of the many possibilities lost, unnoticed. This is the unreflecting state of a morality left to itself .. " Intellectually and philosophi-cally, it often rests on a naive confidence in established classifications of specific situations, actions and mental processes as being the permanently obvious and self-justifying classifications (p. 242).

Such a morality is ' abstract', 'unreflecting', ' sheltered'. We are by now prepared for the key word which British philosophers since Karl Popper have borrowed from Bergson but have not hesitated to use in a sense precisely opposite to Bergson's: an absolute morality is a 'closed morality' (p. 246). Contrasted with it is the , critical morality' of' changing ideals' (p. 237-8); the historically progressive morality of 'open and always disputable' concepts (p.247).

It is really not easy to decide what Oxford moralists have in mind when they speak in this way of absolute and religious morality. If it is Christian morality, they would not seem to have reflected deeply on its nature and precepts. Consider the Ten Command-ments; the Sermon on the Mount; the' new commandment'. , Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself ... Love one another as I have loved you'. Take the parable of the Good Samaritan; take the sentence of the Judge at the Last Judgment:

As long as you gave not . . . food and drink, housing and clothing, nursing and respect and love . . . to one of these least, neither did you do it to Me.

Can anyone seriously pretend that living by this absolute moral code is to confine oneself to ' only certain already listed features of any situation'? That this morality can be lived out by routine, unreflectingly? That one is 'sheltered' by it from 'unresting awareness' of one's moral unworthiness, from ' perpetual regret .? That this morality, if really believed to be absolute, can ever be a , morality left to itself' or will ever give us respite or simply leave us in peace? Mr. Hare speaks disparagingly of those for whom, , " Good" ... means simply "doing what it says in the Sermon on the Mount" ... .' One hopes that when he wrote that he had really forgotten 'what it says in the Sermon on the Mount' He says that such people' act always by the book '. If we substitute' New Testament' for 'book', we shall see at once how thoughtless a thing Mr. Hare has said.

R. J. HIRST: The Problems of Perception 239 The only safeguard Mr. Hampshire recognises against 'closed

morality' is, we learn with some surprise, 'strong aesthetic experience' .

A morality 'left to itself' will survive unquestioned only if it is insulated from any serious experience of art: this is indeed part of the significance of the phrase ' a morality left to itself' (p. 244).

One should have thought that the experience of religion, of sanctity, had some role here. There is no use, however, in administering rebukes about this. Let us rather make the sad but salutary. admission that religion and theology are absent from the intellectual world that these philosophers inhabit. And let us assume our part of responsibility for the fact that these philosophers can, apparently sincerely, so disparage the moral lives of religious people; and can, with apparent good faith, find religious thinking irrelevant to their philosophical tasks.

The Queen's University, Belfast C. B. DALY

3. The Problems of Perception. By R. J. HIRST. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1959. Pp. 330. Price 30s.

Psychologists, physiologists, and philosophers find different problems in perception, and the interested layman is often puzzled when he comes to realize how little scientific and philosophic theories of perception have in common. The approach of this book is synoptic, in that the author believes that evidence from scientific theories of perception can be brought to bear upon the solution of problems traditionally left to the philosopher. Among problems which Hirst attempts to unravel with the help of physiology and psychology are those regarding the physical causa-tion of mental events, the status of primary and secondary qualities, and the pUblicity of perceptual objects.

Hirst begins with an impressive critical survey, in the course of which he clears the ground of sense-data, linguistic analysis, idealism (Blanshard's), and parapsychology. This criticism is often insightful, although not always directed against the most well-developed statement of the opposite view. Price (Perception, 1932), for example, is made to defend sense-data almost singlehandedly, and might have fared better with the aid of Firth and Warnock who have written on the subject more recently. Lewis's extensive contributions to theory of perception are never mentioned, although the turn of discussion often makes them relevant. In fact there is a conspicuous absence throughout the book of reference to relevant contributions by English-speaking philosophers outside the Commonwealth. Thus when Hirst begins to erect his own structure in the second half of the book, the ground may not be as clear as he supposes: Nonetheless, the extent of his preliminary criticism