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Rumpledsilkskin (www.theasif.info) Who is?
Ted
Honderich, who once helped me to a teaching post in philosophy, has written a
book, over 400 pages long, on... “a kind
of life”... being the philosopher Ted Honderich. But in virtual space I will be
much briefer. Briefer about my own monadic act within the variety. No doubt “being a philosopher”, in this
hopelessly abstract sense, is not fully a kind of life, instead, a way of
seeming to avoid living, at least at the sharp end. But this is what theasif.info web site is about, so
that’s alright.
My
“kind of life” in philosophy began, although I did not know it at the time,
sitting, as a child, in the outside lavatory - “lavatory” was the word we used -
of our home, a council house, in Bristol, just after the 2nd World War, during
the imminence of a 1st Labour government - I am a person of the State -. I remember now a total disbelief and
incredulity about the accidental nature of my existence as consciousness...
everything so rooted, set, except the viewpoint, the inter-active
epicentre. I don’t know how I would have
been able to describe this at the time, or rather I know that I would not have
been able to describe it, - “whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be
silent” said Wittgenstein! -.
The
lavatory was a tight space, cell-like, with distempered, flaking walls. There
was a high, rusting, cast-iron cistern with a chain; there was no heating: in winter the irregular pipes would freeze
and later burst. In this lavatory I
contemplated alternative worlds as suggested by the variations of flaked and
brush-stroked distemper of the walls.
Years later Richard Wollheim tried to encourage some improvement of my
philosophical writing by asking for greater “richness”. I rejected this,
thinking that “richness” was a value alien to my beginnings... my class.
Council houses were boxes, well-designed boxes. There were no cornices, no
artifice, no stained glass, no self-congratulatory, bourgeois discernment...
although a few beautiful marbles passed through my hands... secular mandalas
for games of the gutters and manhole covers.
The lavatory was a private space, and it encouraged a fantasy of
solipsism and its impossibility.
My
life in philosophy was first announced in a career’s lesson taken by a wooden
headmaster at a redbrick, grammar school.
We had to prepare for this lesson... the only time we would come face to
face with the head, unless it was for caning or receiving a book prize - both
of which I qualified for as well -. The
question asked was vocational: - what did we want to be? Really I wanted to be the world-middleweight
champion, like Randolph Turpin, but it never occurred to me to say this,
although what eventually I said was, in a way, more improbable. Perhaps the
word “vocational” was used, I can’t remember, and, if so, perhaps my reading of
it was too spare, literal, impoverished, that is, without “richness”, certainly
without an eye to the material future.
Anyway, I went to Mee’s encyclopaedias for an answer - a set purchased
on the never- never, my parents having been persuaded by a salesman that a
working-class child needed a set to achieve the easier life - and recall fixing
with some certainty on a chapter about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. When it was my turn I announced to the
headmaster and a bored class that I wanted to be a philosopher. There was no
consternation, in fact no response at all; possibly none of them knew what it
was that I said I wanted to be. Being ignored compelled me to confirm my
announced intention, and I concentrated on writing up a notebook about what I
called the nature of the soul, which, as I now recall, followed through a
number of increasingly preposterous ideas trying to make sense of something which
did not seem to me to make sense: a reductio ad absurdum, the formal concept of
which I was, at the time, ignorant. This
small notebook I carried on my person and began reading from it to classmates,
who were, surprisingly, quite interested or amused.
From
then on philosophy dogged my identity. I
declaimed some idiosyncratic, general principles of socialism in what seemed to
me to be an acceptable, circular or revolutionary and foolproof argument, and,
although I cannot now believe it, announced the same outside my local polling
station at election times. More Lenin than Attlee, although Attlee I knew of
and Lenin I did not. I was chided in English literature for my abstract,
argumentative style, described as like wrestling with a blanket. Not a brilliant student, initially I was
selected for the D-stream - the lowest of the grammar school low - yet
astonished by getting an A at S level for a quasi-philosophical essay, which
was not even asked for, about literature and class. This proved a mixed achievement,
my English teacher making me feel uncomfortable telling me with a cynical smile
that I had been labelled “Marxist” at the examiners’ meeting as a result of
this essay. Despite the grade, this felt like an act of name-calling and it
served to increase my scepticism of authority, as the ideas I had expressed I
had made up, and I had read nothing of Marx not even the Manifesto, although my
Dad talked about Shaw’s prefaces. No doubt some of this sowed a seed for my
later attacks on the empiricist-creation theory and the connecting centrality
of indeterminism in my work.
My
education in philosophy began properly in Hull, at the university. My student
life flirted with the radical Left, but, more transformative, I came for the
first time under a direct and identifiable, philosophical influence, which
temporarily erased some of my idiosyncrasy.
The spell was cast by Alan White, who during my time at Hull was
promoted to the chair in philosophy.
Compared with professional philosophers I met later, Alan White had
little élan or style but more than made up for this by winning all arguments,
not difficult to do with students but much more impressive with visiting
faculty coming to give their papers an airing at the philosophy society. I remember one visiting academic claiming his
life’s work had been ruined by White’s objections. This was more like
world-championship boxing. These victories were the victories of a
methodology. It was the methodology and
not White’s leprechaun manner I started copying. Out of the traditions of
empiricism had grown a conception of philosophy as conceptual analysis, a
second-order discipline sensitive to the nuances of ordinary language. So the
centre of my philosophical education was occupied by Russell, Moore,
Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle etc., and not obscurantist metaphysicians. Moreover,
I developed a real feel for the niceties of language analysis which,
entertainingly, helped flies out of bottles full of theory and
abstraction. For several years
thereafter I could well have been the inspiration for the academic in Tom
Stoppard’s Professional Foul who lectures on the meanings of “eating
well”. I suppose this might have turned
out to be a straight and narrow corridor in which I was to spend the remainder
of my intellectual life, had it not been for my left-wing, theoretical tendency
and, differently, initially, the idiosyncratic idea of using my newly acquired
methodological and philosophical skills on the concepts of literary
criticism. Alan White was writing about
psychological concepts, subjecting them to the exactitude of the philosophical
manner of analysis, and he became supportive and interested in my literary
project after hearing a paper I had written on imagery - an interest in
seemings - and I.A Richards - a paper that had no direct bearing on anything I
was to be examined in -.
Subsequently,
he wrote to Stuart Hampshire, then professor of philosophy at UCL, asking that
I be taken on as a DPhil student in aesthetics. Accepted at UCL for this
degree, I left Hull fairly-firmly entrenched in official philosophy, although,
more subversively, I continued to make, as I had for some years past, paintings
and drawings recreating the experience of the lavatory wall. To some extent I had mastered some of the
techniques of philosophical analysis as they were recognised
professionally. Also, I had acquired
from the university some recognition of myself as a philosopher, having won the
Collingwood Prize, as well as the Departmental Prize in philosophy. I had a
little substance, something to enable me to take myself seriously.
UCL
cast spells of a different order. In his
book, Honderich, still under its spell, spells out the magic.... “the place of
most renown in my life”, “It had past and present”, “a place of settled
distinction”, joining was joining “the elect”, and Hampshire.... “the very
figure of a public schoolboy, with the head of an eagle. Greyfriars made flesh
and come into maturity”, “patrician and certainly effortless”, “languid”,
“elevated”.
I
had not come looking for the centre of the intellectual universe but without my
knowing it this was the deception, the mirage which immaterialised before me.
Soon I was smoking expensive Passing Cloud cigarettes instead of Woodbines,
cultivating a sonorous voice, meant as full of ease and confidence. I became
intoxicated with the display of taste, and the intolerance of vulgarity. This was a fading echo of an old aristocratic
order, the haute bourgeoisie, but it was disguised by a percussive, glittering
logic and a counterpoint of liberalism manifesting itself in places as the
deeper discord of socialism.
Person
to person, the gap between myself and my “vulgar” origins became wider and
wider. I don’t think I became a full
class traitor, quite. I did not have the money. My Passing Cloud cigarettes,
which I kept not in the fag packet but what from a distance might have seemed a
fine cigarette case, and which I smoked as languidly and elevatedly as I could
in my tutorials with Hampshire while he drew elegantly smoke from his cigarettes
through a small holder, lay in my case in a disarray of chipped dog-ends.
Smoking the high life was severely rationed by lack of cash. I lived in one
room with a dog, a baby and a wife. We had no sink. A tap stuck out the wall
and all wastewater had to be pailed down the toilet. No bank would lend us any money. These were
the days when university students generally had moneyed backgrounds and were
not encouraged to join a credit society. I became a sort of displaced person,
fairly solitary, very intense, my life at UCL confined to tutorials and
post-graduate seminars.
Philosophically
I developed increased powers of concentration...obsessional at times. At the
outset Hampshire asked me to study Kant’s Critique of Judgement. This may have been playing to his strength.
It may have been set to get the measure of a working class graduate from
Hull. My acceptance may have been a
slightly risqué judgement on Hampshire’s part. Working-class intellectuals from
the North were at the time at the cutting edge of what was or was not
acceptable. You may have gained kudos in certain circles from the
association. A new cultural mix was
beginning to form and much was still not yet apparent to esteemed cognoscenti.
I remember it was I who introduced Hampshire to the writing of David Mercer....
the world of Wakefield and the North. The Critique of Judgement and TV were
much more two cultures than what Baron Snow of Leicester was discussing.
The
Kant test was a test I must have passed as I was then allowed to proceed with
my DPhil proposal. The title agreed between myself and Stuart gives some idea
of what was very acceptable at the time in philosophy: - “An analysis of some
concepts involved in some theories of art and aesthetic appreciation.” However, boiling up beneath this still
surface of non-committal, modernist analysis was something else, entirely
different and fantastical.
I have mentioned obsession. One night, walking my dog in Golders Green,
after a very long day of philosophy I experienced a sort of vision that was
neither religious nor supernatural, not Blake-ian in any way. It was a vision of a philosophical programme,
which I experienced as taking my whole life to complete.
Suddenly
I thought I saw through what university was doing to me. Before university I
lived in the fantasies of childhood, superimposing on the maps of knowledge
being offered the figures I found in the flaked distemper. Getting by, just, by
making up the world from scratch, much as in my S’level essay. I was not good
at accommodating existing systems of knowledge; I copied - an important skill -
badly. An idea of philosophy on the other hand appealed, it somehow fitted who
I was, the Socratic idea of superior ignorance, of not knowing but knowing that
others did not know either, although they pretended or deceived themselves into
thinking otherwise. So I had made an
effort to acquire a skill, it served my life purpose to be able to do
philosophical analysis. However, what developed alongside this was a social way
of being. At Hull, the life of a narrow meritocracy, the professional
philosopher of Stoppard’s play and at UCL the decaying life of an upper
bourgeoisie clinging to a belief in abstract, aesthetic values amidst a torrent
of levelling philistinism. All a denial of what I had come from. This then was
the meaning of education. The Critique of Judgement was symbolic of the club
for whose membership I was being tested, but for some reason I was already too
drawn to Mercer’s “The Birth of a Private Man” to be able to enter. My vision
was purely abstract but in concrete terms I suppose it amounted to defending my
Dad’s pleasure in Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust - available in electronic space -
as he rested in one of his own upholstered chairs, and attacking the presumed
superiority of Greenberg’s businessman, sitting in his armchair - made for him
- contemplating his Matisse - made for him - in rarefied rapture. Abstractly
the vision was to attack all notions of abstract, absolute value as socially
induced mind invaders and to reduce art - one aspect of absolute value - to its
meaningful, non-mystifying function...as ifness, and then argue for the
universality of this dimension beyond art.
But this was only the beginning of the vision. As ifness - those
alternative worlds in the distemper... the falling down a rabbit-hole syndrome
- raised questions about what it was to be a person and the limits of forms of
life. What did it say about us that we made things in our minds before we made
them in reality? Sitting on the lavatory
I was biology but I also seemed to depart the natural order. Huge new clouds of
mechanism were emerging on the horizon, brewed from developments in brain
science, genetics and artificial intelligence. More ominously the behavioural
sciences were on the verge of taking over the workspace and the mechanisms of
multi-national capitalism increasingly shaped the form of social space. Heroically, perhaps, philosophy really could
show the fly the way out of the fly bottle, but not if the obscurantism of
European ideology was allowed once again to take over the philosophical space
in the name of radicalism. Quite simply my vision was of escape, not
revolution, not real change, just the abstract form of escape, the autonomy
that a hole in the wall made possible. And all of this connected loosely with
Colin in The Birth of A Private Man blundering about the Berlin wall, saying….
“I’m always waiting for that last
hemisphere of blinding light. Not assuming myself to be out of the ordinary, I
can’t understand where my feelings have gone in others. Oedipus put out his
eyes and wandered. All I can do is close mine and let the visions whirl.”
My
Golders Green vision has been the thread which has held my kind of life together,
along with the weft of my life, my Marlyannova, my
wife, my proletarian grounding . In its own right this vision has given rise to
philosophy books and articles plus various illustrative fictions, paintings and
some music. It has secured for itself a tiny niche in the history of
aesthetics, usually referred to as the social theory of art.
This
philosophical journey begun a long time ago, whenever it was that it began, can
now be continued in virtual space. There was no way for me to have envisaged
this at the outset. But as its
destination is virtuality, class and underclass and escape, electronic existence
is a good fit. The possibilities of
virtuality have multiplied incredibly since I started my kind of life and in a
far-fetched way perhaps the two, along with many other things, are
deterministically symptoms of the working out of some buried code in the
species programme, but, more likely, and this is what I argue, they are all
part and parcel of the aspirations of self-consciousness and autonomy. And so, my kind of life continues by
revisiting and reflecting on various stopping points on the journey as well as
striking out across a vast territory still uncrossed. Following will not be
easy, it will not be an instant thing, and the subject matter is irreducibly
difficult. For escape the web site is not necessary, for the defence of escape,
as I mean it, it may well be, certainly nothing “out there” goes half far
enough.
Colin: Not a concept. Not a free man or an
unfree man. Just a ...what?
Colin: A man, damn you all. Damn you on both sides.
Your statesmanship.... your deceit.... your contempt -
(A search-light comes on.
There is wild firing across the wall now, in which Colin is trapped. He shouts
again above the gunfire)
Colin: We refuse.... refuse.... refuse-
(Colin staggers in a hail of
bullets from both sides. Feels his body. Stands with his arms raised. The
bullets hammer into him. His shadow is
thrown large on an opposite wall, as with arms spread-eagled he slowly curves
forward and down the wire. Now he is hanging in the wire, blood spurting from
his mouth.)
Colin:
Only a man.... a thing.... a human thing -
from “The Birth of a
Private Man” by the late David Mercer.
For
new content go to Crops and
Cultivation:-
Links:
David Mercer
(see Encyclopaedia of Television, under M)
Virtuality (the philosophy of)
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theasif.info 2008