Fly and the Fly-Bottle , livre ebook

Ved Mehta

FLY AND THE FLY-BOTTLE
Encounters with British Intellectual
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
INTRODUCTION: Jasper Griffin
PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION: Ved Mehta
CHAPTER ONE: A Battle Against the Bewitchment of Our Intelligence
CHAPTER TWO: The Open Door
CHAPTER THREE: Argument Without End
CHAPTER FOUR: The Flight of Crook-Taloned Birds
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Copyright Page
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ved Mehta is Indian by birth and American by naturalization. He was educated at Pomona College; at Balliol College, Oxford; and at Harvard. He has held two Guggenheim Fellowships and two extended Ford Foundation grants. In 1982, he was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship. He has contributed articles and stories to many newspapers and magazines-primarily to The New Yorker. He has written books on Christianity ( The New Theologian ), on language ( John Is Easy to Please ), and on India and its leaders ( Walking the Indian Streets, Portrait of India, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, The New India, and A Family Affair ). He is also the author of Delinquent Chacha (a novel), Face to Face (a youthful autobiography), The Photographs of Chachaji (an account of the production of an award-winning television film he helped create), Mamaji and Daddyji (biographies of his parents), and, most recently, Vedi.
For William Shawn
For one day in thy courts is better than a thousand.
-Psalm 84
What is your aim in philosophy?-To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
L UDWIG W ITTGENSTEIN Philosophical Investigations
Introduction
by Jasper Griffin
It is not often that a book is written on academics and their altercations which can be found tremendously exhilarating by the (Manchester) Guardian and magnificently exhilarating by the New York Times. Twenty years have passed since Ved Mehta put the cat among the professorial pigeons; faced with his inimitable blend of innocence and irony, philosophers and historians revealed their reasoning and also their rancor, their devotion to truth and also their all too human attitudes and motives. A. J. Ayer told him that the sine qua non of philosophers was vanity, and his encounters with historians do not discountenance the view that they, too, have their full share of it. Some reviewers were rather shocked by the irreverence they detected beneath the elegant prose, but then people were shocked easily in those distant days; this is by no means a cynical book.
I was one of the people whom Ved Mehta absorbed in his composite John, the pipe-smoking amateur who helps out with the philosophy. Not all readers have warmed to John, who is not exempted from the irony of the author. Living in Oxford, surrounded by philosophers, how does a fraction of John find that Oxford philosophy looks twenty years after?
The prophecy made in 1962 that the Oxford school would soon break up has come true. At the end of the fifties, one could speak of an orthodoxy: an almost universal belief in ordinary language as the real subject of philosophical inquiry, and as the final court of appeal for all philosophical questions. One consequence of that belief was that many philosophers of the past were not interesting, because what they said could not be seen as pursuing that sort of inquiry; and many of the traditional questions were pseudo problems, diseases of language, which cool and scrupulous analysis would eventually cure forever. It was in a whisper that a contemporary put to me in 1959 the subversive suspicion that behind every pseudo problem there may be a real problem. The history of the subject seemed shorter at that time than ever before or since, consisting only of certain works of Plato and Aristotle, Descartes, Berkeley, Locke, Hume, and Kant, then a horrid gap until the renaissance of true philosophy with Russell and Moore, who gave birth, in turn, to Wittgenstein. G. R. Mure was known as the Last of the Hegelians, as picturesque and irrelevant a creature as the Last of the Mohicans. Many of the names conventionally honored in histories of philoso phy evoked from the experts nothing more than a sad smile.
Another consequence was that it seemed harder and harder to make language ordinary enough for truly philosophical discourse. I m afraid I don t understand that was a reply uttered in those days with great self-righteousness, the implication being that what had just been said was deficient in true ordinariness and must be reworded to meet a more exacting standard. It was felt to be a very strong defense, not only intellectually but also morally. ( You are confused or pretentious, or both; my inability to understand is proof of virtue. ) Except in the hands of a master like J. L. Austin, that sort of attitude could be pretty deadening. I am struck, also, by the insularity of the scene at that time. The great philosophers lived in Oxford or nearby; most other countries were philosophically dead, and the function even of English-speaking ones was to produce not masters but pilgrims.
That narrowness has, I think, largely passed. On the list of lectures given in philosophy in Oxford this year I see startling names: Duns Scotus, Heidegger, Derrida, even Topics in Hegel. (The Mohicans are still breeding, after all.) The characteristic juxtaposition of technical and informal language is still to be found: there are lectures on What You Can Do with Partial-Valued Logic and on What a Theory of Meaning Isn t. The star of Wittgenstein has waned a little in England as it has waxed in Germany and Austria; the Austrian village of Trattenbach, where for some years he taught schoolchildren, has laid out a sort of Wittgensteinian Stations of the Cross, with sayings from the Master s works inscribed on the trees to edify the pious tourist. In Oxford, the mathematical logician Frege now interests philosophers at least as much. American names, too - Chomsky, Kripke, Quine, Rawls - could hardly fail to be mentioned in any account of the main controversies in the subject now.
Philosophy has become more technical. Ordinary language gives place to the rigors of generative grammar; new kinds of logic have to be mastered; the philosophy of perception is related more intimately to the study of the physiology of the brain. But this development has been gradual, not abrupt, and most of those who were interviewed for this book are still active in the subject, practicing it in ways not so different from those of twenty years ago.
It might seem that there is a more striking difference: the decline of the really big public row. Even historians, that combative breed, appear to an outsider to go in less nowadays for the full-scale donnybrook, with no holds barred, and opponents comparing each other to Hitler. (See Trevor-Roper on Toynbee.) When we think of quarrelsome historians, we think of the same old stagers whose disobliging comments on their colleagues are one of the pleasures of this book. Specialization has had something to do with it; so, perhaps, has a change in the intellectual atmosphere.
In the thinner, chillier air of the last few years, the universities have been on the defensive. Public money is drying up, and public interest seems to be drying up, too; the swashbuckler is a rarer type, as that unquestioning belief in the supreme importance of one s work and oneself which is vital to the aggressive controversialist becomes harder and harder to retain. Most academics, then, are keeping their heads down and concentrating on intensive cultivation of their own plots of scholarly ground.
The theory is neat; it is sad to find that the facts do not really support it. We have only to turn our attention from philosophy and history to university Departments of English to find the battle in full swing. There dons of different critical persuasions write brutal reviews of each other s books and send letters of infuriated protest and denunciation to the journals in which their own works are brutally reviewed. The correspondence columns of the London Review of Books, fortnight by fortnight, have splendid examples of the Retort Discourteous and the Riposte Resentful. Allegations of prejudice, of charlatanry - even of malpractice - fly about. The well-publicized rumpus at Cambridge in 1981 over the refusal of tenure to a lecturer in English: that would have been a perfect starting point for another chapter by Ved Mehta. It would be delightful to have his lucid and rational guidance among the dreaded bogies of structuralism and hermeneutics and destructuralizing, and his deft vignettes of the men and their passions; but that would be another story.
Very soon after King Ptolemy of Egypt set up the first Western university, at Alexandria, a satirist wrote a poem comparing the scholars whom the King recruited for his great Library to exotic birds, quarrelling in the bird cage of the Muses. Quarrelsomeness is a characteristic that has at most periods attached itself to the learned; as peace breaks out on one academic front, the bullets start to fly on another. Fly and the Fly-Bottle is a report on a particular place and time, piquantly spiced and individual; it is also a chapter in the more general story of the greatness and littleness of men and women in the unending pursuit of knowledge.
The difficulty in writing about academics is to do justice to both those qualities. The life of study and thought is arduous, demanding not only intellectual powers but also moral qualities: tenacity, sincerity, humility. It is easy to admire the great qualities of eminent scholars and to disregard their weaknesses; it is even easier to ignore their greatness and to gloat over their absurdities. The real challenge is to see both sides: vain, fallible, passionate human creatures, nobly striving to understand and explain the world. Ved Mehta approaches them in the only way that leads to understanding: not without irony, but also not without love.
J. G.
Balliol College, Oxford November, 1982
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