Of is and Of Ought

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 435, 24 October 1947, Page 14

Of is and Of Ought

THE MORAL SENSE. By D. _ Daiches Raphael. Geoffrey Cumberlege: Oxford University _ Press. HIS is a_ brilliant book. Although it consists primarily of exegesis and criticism, Dr. Raphael’s originality should not on that account be under-esti-mated. He jumps with exhilarating grace and assurance through all the fiery hoops which: philosophers delight to set up for themselves. Does that strike you as a discordant metaphor? I do not think it is. It would be inappropriate and tiresome to discuss here the problems of philosophy and reality and the relationship of ethics to life. These, like the topic of Dr. Raphael’s book, what certain men thought of right and of wrong, duty or obligation, are high matters. But even so lame a dog as I am, singed by the shortest leaps through hoops held at puppy level, knows the smell of a bone. The weakness of professional philosophy is its preoccupation with problems of method, of epistemology, of exposition, at the expense of an urgent, personal interpretation of life. "But," it may be protested, "it is not a philosopher’s business to help men to live, but only to a ae and to define." The rude answer to that is, "I wish he would explain his explanation." I would not wish to place all philosophers with Milton’s fallen angels in Hell, who . » reasoned high Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and FateFixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. Of good and evil much they wont then, -Of happiness and final misery . . It is presumption for me to criticise Dr. Raphael, but in fact my impudence is boundless, for it is not him I peevishly assail, but the tradition in which he stands-the noble, scholarly, and disinterested pursuit of truth. No truth is disinterested. Truth is so old a strumpet that to sit down in some ancient cloisters and discuss the quality and glory of her virginity is to make the gods laugh once again at the irony of human endeavour and human idealism. I have a private quarrel of long standing with philosophy. It concerns the use of words. I must say that in this book Dr. Raphael offends me very little. He is lucid, vigorous, and direct. (But even he can fall from grace: "in stantiate," "intuit," and "probabilified" are not happy enrichments of the langu-age-though only the last is his.) Like most philosophers, however, he is willing to allow himself the privilege of technical language. This has the most respectable of origins; if one does not define one’s terms, how can one discuss anything? In the result philosophers have strayed further and further from the ordinary speech of ordinary men. Things were better in the 17th and even the 18th Century. I look back to the homely phraseology of Locke, who could head a chapter "Of Bottoming" with equal dignity and clarity, amd agree with Hume that "language ... must be public to be of any use." Philosophy to-day is largely written in private language, a dialect almost as private as

that of science whose analogy here is wholly pernicious; The scientist’s resort to mathematics in all contexts I personally regard as the abdication of the pretention of writing at all. Samuel Butler held that "there is no thought save in the expression." To-day it is possible, indeed applauded, to talk of almost any topic, from juvenile delinquency to ethics, in terms of algebra. Dr. Raphael camnot resist some tentative essays in this sophisticated mode in

his first chapter but perhaps only to show what he could do if he were put to it. Admittedly, both poetry and painting to-day also tend towards a private language which only the initiates comprehend. But philosophy, least of all, can afford to be a mystery; what is "caviare to the general" had better be simply served. Dr. Raphael’s discussion of Hutcheson and Hume is stimulating, and the opposing, or moderating faction, Price and Reid, is marshalled and. deployed with military precision and judgment. It is to be regretted that it was not possible to publish the whole of his book. Graceful and acute as he is when he writes of the work of others, I rather prefer him when he speaks with his own voice, especially in the first and last chapters and in the numerous asides and comments throughout the text. The most agonising of moral questions he just glances at at the end: the conflict of obligations. In ordering the affairs of ordinary life that is the great problem; duty is rarely clear cut, even for those who mould themselves in some strong existing tradition of ethics or belief. Each day is a precarious watershed of choice, presenting us with The awful dowry to accept: arbitrament, doom, glory. : The fulfilment of one duty at the expense of another, the choice of this rather than of that, is the origin of nearly all unhappiness. Perhaps that is too naive a view. Qui veut voir parfaitement clair avant de se déterminer ne (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) se détermine jamais.’ Qui n’accepte pas le regret n’accept pas la vie. But I do wish Dr, Raphael could have left the shelter of Hume and of Hutcheson, of Moore and of Ross, to have grappled with this problem directly, especially as it is evidently one which has appealed to him. His book is straightforward and workmanlike in the great tradition in which it was born. It is solid and without shades of perversity. Within its scope it is an entire success. If it has a moral, it is the involuntary one that truth (if I may change my metaphor) is an island, an island of a special sort: spawned out of the sea in some obscure eruption, for 20 years it stands firm, if somewhat arid and cindery, a mark for mariners, a thing to thank God on; next year it _is gone. Truth is of time and of place.