Several attempts to correct an alteration in the size of letters and other deformations of this text have not been successful. For some reason there continues to be a war on this essay. I will do my best to cope with continuing attacks on this text.
"Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy."
The death of Stuart Hampshire on June 13, 2004 -- about ten years to the day as I write these words -- marked the end of an era in English language philosophy.
Professor Hampshire's work will be remembered by historians of philosophy and chroniclers of the ideas of the twentieth century (not necessarily the same scholars) as marking the closure of analytical philosophy, as a dominant movement in Western thought and heralding the "Age of Pluralism" in the twenty-first century, or (more likely) widespread confusion, or the final triumph of Continental thought in America and Britain, depending on your point of view. ("Bernard Williams and Identity" and "Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")
The tension between skeptical and/or Socratic and/or analytical approaches to philosophy -- logic-centered and (often) in thrall to the findings of the so-called "hard sciences" and scientific method -- combined with pragmatism and more open-minded, literary as well as meta-literary approaches to philosophical inquiry seems to be the subtext to more than one recent exchange among celebrated theorists. ("John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciouness" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Please compare Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody," and "When She Was Good," in Philosophical Interventions: Reviews 1986-2011 (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2012), pp. 198-223, pp. 259-273 with Bernard Williams, "Thought and Action by Stuart Hamphire," and "Iris Murdoch's The Fire and the Sun," in Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002 (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2014), pp. 8-17, pp. 142-145 also with Christopher Norris, "Supplementarity and Deviant Logics: Derrida Contra Quine," Minding the Gap: Epistemology and Philosophy of Science in the Two Traditions (Amherst: U. of Mass., 2000), pp. 125-148. ("Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, and The Philosophy of Love" and "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
By way of a more methodical comparison between analytical and Continental philosophical approaches, please see Anthony Flew, An Introduction to Western Philosophy: Ideas and Argument From Plato to Popper (London: Hudson & Thames, 1971), pp. 431-490 and A.W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2012), pp. 581-607. ("G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism" and "David Stove and The Intellectual Capacity of Women.")
Stuart Hampshire's writings display most of the tensions of the rival historical and philosophical forces of the era in which he lived. These tensions find expression, often unconsciously, in Professor Hampshire's writings and perhaps more strikingly so than in the works of lesser philosophers.
Stuart Hampshire was the embodiment of the British establishment intellectual: elegant, occasionally acerbic, well-born, Oxford-educated, polite and deferential in his beautiful prose and person, gifted as a scholar, original and even exceptional in his use of logic and analytical method to discuss problems within professional areas of concern touching on agency theory, mind and mentation, freedom and selfhood.
In addition to focusing on the classical rationalism of Spinoza in his academic writings, Hampshire was attracted to the equally radical empiricism of Hume, and was a student as well as a critic of Bishop Berkeley's and F.H. Bradley's forms of idealism, turning quietly in middle age to leisurely essays in literary analysis and appreciations (or commentaries) on favored poets and novelists, like Henry James and Oscar Wilde.
Mr. Hampshire seemed unaware of the revealing nature of his transition to literature and other fine arts that confirmed Iris Murdoch's important criticisms of his youthful philosophical project.
Few of Professor Hampshire's admirers knew that the epitome of the circumspect and consummate professional and scholarly philosopher, Stuart Hampshire, was also an expert on (and indeed wrote extensively about) the perverse, highly erotic texts of the Marquis de Sade and was fascinated by the bizarre, possibly sexual, relationship between Freud and Lou Andreas Salome, also "celebrating" with George Orwell and Lawrence Durrell the most sexually explicit texts of Henry Miller. See especially Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), (1st Ed. 1934).
"Destructive impulses are an original element in love and self-love."
Professor Hampshire comments wistfully:
"Men not only seek pleasure and to preserve themselves, but, at the same time and in relation to the same objects, they seek pain and to destroy themselves. They only distort and smother their 'sensibility,' their capacity for any intense feeling, when they try to hide these facts from themselves. They can be liberated by admitting the facts to full consciousness."
"Sade," in Modern Writers and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), pp. 59-60. ("Can you lie to yourself?")
These are surprising words from a man who admitted to serving in British intelligence during the war as a torturer/interrogator and, probably, after the war when he may have spied upon and informed against university radicals in the counterculture movement for British and American security forces.
These words and sentiments are even more puzzling coming from a philosopher concerned to construct the "liberal subject," as an abstraction, in thinking about the freedom of the individual allegedly resulting from "mastering the passions." As a matter of fact, Hampshire spoke of an erotic pleasure in "cruelty":
"I interrogated some leading Nazis in captivity at the end of the war, including Heydrich's successor as head of the Reichssicherheiptshauptamt, Kaltenbrunner, with whom I talked at length when he was a prisoner with U.S. army headquarters, and whom I brought to London for further interrogation. I learnt how easy it had been to organize the vast enterprises of torture and murder, and to enroll willing workers in this field, once all moral barriers had been removed by the authorities. Unmitigated evil and nastiness are as natural, it seemed, in educated human beings as generosity and sympathy: no more and no less, natural, a fact that was obvious to Shakespeare but not previously evident to me. It became clear that high culture and good education are not significantly correlated with elementary moral decency. [Is this a personal confession by Professor Hampshire?] The massacres in the Soviet Union, continuing for decades after the war, fell into place alongside the work of Hitler and of the SS. They expressed a brutalized and debased Machiavellianism, the political style of the twentieth century."
Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1989), p. 8 (emphasis added).
Professor Hampshire is satirized, deftly, as something of a martinet ("Sir David Hampshire") in Edward St Aubyn's recent send-up of the Booker Award process in Lost For Words (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). Ironically, Mr. St. Aubyn has just won the Whodehouse Prize for best comic novel for this very work that questions the validity of all literary awards and which also may contain a fine recipe or two. Identification of the real-life counterpart of St. Aubyn's character seems to have been lost on reviewers. John Banville missed it in "Overbooked," in The New York Review of Books, June 5, 2014, p. 41 to say nothing of Kate Kalloway's dismissive assessment in The Guardian, May 11, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may11/lost-for-words-review-Edward-St.-Aubyn-review
Professor Hampshire often referred to the "dilemma" of his experiences of torture and forced encounter with absolute evil as leading to despair with all of philosophy's ethical systems, further confirming Murdoch's critique.
This insight about the annoying tendency of the so-called "real world" to escape all conceptual categories and systems is a crucial existentialist contention formally rejected by analytical philosophers in their disdain for merely "literary" Continental theory. ("Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question.")
It is this wisdom and literary attention to the "mystery" of persons that was central to the works of Hampshire's Oxford colleague and the Booker Award-winning novelist, Iris Murdoch, a woman whose mind Mr. Hampshire trivialized and dismissed, politely, but whose achievements are undeniable and overwhelming (in my opinion) when set beside Hampshire's indisputably accomplished works:
"It was his encounter, in the capacity of interrogator, with Nazi officers at the end of the war, especially the Guestapo commander Ernst Kaltenbrunner, that led to his insistence, rare among 20th century philosophers, on the reality of evil."
In her obituary of Hampshire for The Guardian Jane O'Grady discusses a famous "puzzle case" that was not a thought experiment for Professor Hampshire, but a matter of genuine personal experience and reflection:
"He frequently told the story of how, towards the end of the war, he had to interrogate a French traitor (imprisoned by the Free French), who refused to cooperate unless he was allowed to live. Should Hampshire, knowing the man was condemned to die, promise him a reprieve, which he was in no position to give, or truthfully refuse it, thereby jeopardizing the lives of resistance fighters?"
See Morality and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1983), pp. 140-171 then Judith Jarvis Thomson, "The Trolley Problem," in Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1986), pp. 94-117 and Judith Jarvis Thomson, Goodness and Advice (Oxford & Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 3-43 with commentary by Martha Nussbaum, pp. 97-126.
Mr. Hampshire never explained his decision in that case.
A presumed decision to lie to his condemned prisoner may have required Hampshire to go through with an execution after obtaining vital information, under false pretenses, with the result that the loss of life among resistance fighters may well have been exactly the same as if they had granted the prisoner a reprieve in the first place, but a murder may have been committed or facilitated by a philosopher of ethics.
These intractable ethical dilemmas formed a part of Jean-Paul Sartre's literary writings after the war and confirmed the reality and importance of ethics in philosophical thought. Stuart Hampshire was the opposite of a nihilist or "absolute relativist," whatever that may mean. Jean-Paul Sartre's "What is Literature?," in What is Literature and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1988), pp. 21-247.
A concern with the relation between literature and philosophy certainly features in the works of Iris Murdoch as explained in her conversations with Bryan Magee "Literature and Philosophy," in Existentialists and Mystics (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 1-24.
It has been suggested that his war experiences led to a near-schizoid division in Hampshire's psyche between public and private personas, or "secret" and "revealed" versions of the self as "agent in the world." Compare R.D. Laing, "The False Self System," in The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1960), pp. 102-103 with Richard I. Evans, R.D. Laing: The Man and His Ideas (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976), pp. 85-94.
Mr. Hampshire's nasty Oxford High Table put-down of Iris Murdoch strikes the reader today as bizarre or, perhaps, the expression of secret matters between these two thinkers:
"I do not think Murdoch ever fully understood analytical philosophy, or that she was ever able to teach it successfully at St. Anne's College, Oxford, [to women, that is, who were not really Oxford students?] where she was for a few years a tutorial fellow."
Hampshire's "The Pleasures of Iris Murdoch," in The New York Review of Books, November 15, 2001 (available on-line).
These slights -- there were several public dismissals by Hampshire of Murdoch's philosophical works -- are offered against a philosopher, Iris Murdoch, whose early criticisms of analytical philosophy are now widely accepted and whose discoveries and contributions to discussions in English language, logic-centered and pragmatist, along with Continental schools, are required reading for serious students of contemporary thought.
Few philosophers now doubt the continuing importance of Murdoch's original philosophy or that Professor Hampshire is primarily a scholar or historian of the subject: A.E. Denham, "'For every foot its own shoe': Method and Moral Theory in the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch," in Justin Broackes, ed., Iris Murdoch: Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2012), pp. 325-353 and A. Horner & A. Rowe, eds., Living On Paper: Letters From Iris Murdoch (Oxford & Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2015), pp. 166, 188, 211, 235, 447 (letters pertaining to Stuart Hampshire or his writings).
Murdoch synthesizes and expounds existentialist and hermeneutic as well as analytical strands of contemporary thought to create an entirely personal development of philosophy allowing, equally, for literary and logical insights. She unifies Sartre with Derrida, Wittgenstein (with whom she studied as a graduate student at Cambridge University) with John Rawls, Simone Weil with Hans-Georg Gadamer. Iris Murdoch, "Against Dryness," in Existentialists and Mystics, pp. 287-297 and Iris Murdoch, "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts," in The Sovereignty of Good (New York & London: Ark, 1970), pp. 77-105.
"Although considering most Continental philosophy vulgar and fraudulent, and contemptuous of hands-across-the-channel 'British Council philosophy,' as he called it, Hampshire was much influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and thus indirectly by Martin Heidegger. But however much he hated Heidegger's Nazi sympathies, Hampshire insisted, in a Heideggerian way, that philosophy of mind 'has been distorted by philosophers when they think of persons only as possible observers and not as self-willed agents.' ..." O'Grady, "Obituary," The Guardian, June 11, 2004 (available online).
Iris Murdoch met and impressed Merleau-Ponty then discussed his work with Raymond Queneau to whom her first novel was dedicated. She wrote the first English language analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Viking, 1987) is a reissue of the 1953 edition with a new introduction that qualifies as one of the best essays on Sartre's later Critique of Dialectical Reason.
Most of Hampshire's "discoveries" drawing on the phenomenological tradition applied to analytical problems had been made by Iris Murdoch in the fifties. Please see Gregory McCulloch's translation of Sartre's and Murdoch's early thinking into analytical terms: Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to the Early Sartrean Themes (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 52-71.
Adding to the mystery of Hampshire's denigration of Murdoch's thinking is the likely romantic affair between the two philosophers suggested in Peter Conradi's recent biography and analyzed in some "excised" portions of Murdoch's diary. Their intimate "relationship" and later "friendship" was not acknowledged by Professor Hampshire when he came to review Murdoch's biography, in a less than flattering way concluding that her biographer, Conradi, was "overwhelmed by the materials" of Murdoch's life.
Having read Conradi's biography of Iris Murdoch, I do not agree with Hampshire's assessment and neither did Martha Nussbaum or Bernard Williams in their reviews of the book. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 302-304, 403, 414-415, 491, 494-495, 562.
The plot thickens when one considers that Hampshire was "close" to the Cambridge Five, especially to Kim Philby, who was often listed as Hampshire's "closest friend" by British intelligence during the post-war years. The distinguished philosopher came under suspicion as the mysterious "6th man" who was never found by MI-6. Insufficient proof precluded any charges from being filed against Stuart Hampshire in Britain, although the investigation was never officially closed.
It may be suggestive (or revealing) to compare Richard Swinburne's essays "How to determine which is the true theory of personal identity," in G. Gasser & M. Stefan, eds., Personal Identity -- Complex or Simple? (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2012), posted online at Professor Swinburne's site at Oxford University's Faculty Research Online Archive and "The Problem of Evil," in N. Mossner, et als., eds., Richard Swinburne's Christian Philosophy in the Modern World (Berlin: Ontos Verlag, 2008), also available at the Oxford University archive, with Phillip Knightly's, Philby: K.G.B. Masterspy (London: Andre Deutsch, 1988), pp. 86-101.
Stuart Hampshire was showered with honors, including a knighthood, even as he destroyed the marriage of his colleague and admiring friend, A.J. Ayer, by indulging in an affair with Ayer's then wife Renee, [sic.] whom Hampshire eventually married, allegedly only to betray her in favor of his second wife, Nancy Cartwright. [sic.] I am not certain that Professor Hampshire would classify these romantic episodes in his life as examples of his impressive "mastery of the passions."
The scandal surrounding the affair with Renee Ayer leading to Hampshire being named "correspondent" in a divorce suit resulted in his departure from Oxford University to which Hampshire would return in glory after a stint at Princeton and Harvard Universities in the American colonies. Ben Rodgers, A.J. Ayer: A Life (New York: Grove, 1999), p. 260, pp. 148, 149, 167, 207, 216, 223.
It is interesting that Hampshire "reviewed" Ayer's The Problem of Knowledge, also dismissively. Professor Hampshire certainly would have thought very little of this essay by me. Hampshire was kind enough, of course, to recognize Iris Murdoch's talent for "novel-writing" where she "was at her best" as a mere woman.
I will now examine in detail -- using their own words as much as possible -- the single public dialogue between these philosophers concerning freedom and the self, love and imagination in terms of human actions in the world.
It occurs to me that Stuart Hampshire became something of a character by John Le Carre.
Like George Smiley I now place my huge spectacles on the tip of my nose and loosen my tie to uncover the hidden layers of personality and the dark subtexts in a seemingly polite academic exchange between two old friends concerning the liberal subject and the passions. We will be engaged in a philosophical "mole hunt." (I seem to resemble Alec Guiness suddenly and inexplicably.)
The sections of my essay are marked by titles of Le Carre novels that seem "suggestive" for suspicious reasons that Smiley would no doubt discover very quickly.
"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold."
Given Professor Hampshire's professional concern during his years in intelligence work (Smiley's "Circus") with obfuscation and deception as well as his comments about "enjoying deceit" during the war, the following paragraphs provide a useful contrast between his opposed "presentations" on agency and freedom.
The following statements are by Hampshire: the first is from a conversation with Bryan Magee; the second is from Innocence and Experience. In light of the paradox revealed in, or suggested by, these paragraphs, I will set forth Hampshire's position concerning freedom of mind and the liberal subject, moving on to a discussion of what I consider to be Iris Murdoch's definitive criticisms of Hampshire's position and her own far more important contribution to the discussion of these issues in philosophy and literature.
It is not my intention to write a polemical essay on feminist themes, but it is impossible to ignore Ms. Murdoch's exclusion from Bryan Magee's book on "leading British philosophers of our age" and that, until recently, she merited only a footnote in most discussions of "British twentieth-century philosophy."
References to Mary Midgley, Mary Warnock, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot are rare -- if they exist at all -- in these typical books, often these women and their American counterparts are studiously ignored even as the work of far less distinguished male philosophers receive pages of discussion and analysis. ("Philippa Foot On Desire, Agency, and Reason.")
With regard to Murdoch, whose philosophical essays and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals are important forward-looking texts, and whose novels are among the finest in our time, this exclusion or trivialization is bizarre and unforgivable: Compare Bryan Magee, Modern British Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1971), pp. 31-66 and S.G. Shanker, Philosophy in Britain Today (New York: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 154-171 with John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1966), p. 605, p. 608. ("Master and Commander.")
Iris Murdoch is now studied in many countries in the world as one of the foremost philosophers and literary artists of the twentieth century. Several recent academic gatherings at Oxford and the University of London have been devoted to her work (among the most active communities of Murdochians is the "Japan Iris Murdoch Society") and more books appear every year from well-known scholars and writers commenting on Murdoch's large body of fictions and theoretical works. For example, there are new books from A.N. Wilson, Maria Attonacio, Justin Broackes and others examining key aspects of Murdoch's powerful moral philosophy. ("John Rawls and Justice" and "Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")
Hampshire comments on his own analytical philosophical style as defined by Russell and others, deeming that style "exemplary" and "paradigmatic" of the traditional virtues of English philosophy:
"It's a question of not obfuscating -- of leaving no blurred edges, of the duty to be entirely clear, [transparent?] So that one's mistakes can be seen; of never being pompous, or evasive. It's a question of never judging the results, never using rhetoric to fill a gap, never using a phrase which conveniently straddles, as it were, two or three notes and which leaves it ambiguous which one you're hitting. Russell's prose excludes even the possibility of evasion and of half truth" -- this is also Hampshire's assessment of his own "ideal" of clarity -- "and if one goes back to the writing of the eighties or looks back to, say, Mill, I must agree with Karl [Popper's] phrase about professional ethics, even in Mill, who was a very intellectually scrupulous man, one can be worried and perplexed as to which of two things exactly he means, and the fluent style allows him to leave this open, what he says is much more plausible because it's open; while in Russell's writing there's always this extraordinary nakedness of clear assertion. His doctrines and arguments stand out in a hard Greek light which allows no vagueness."
Stuart Hampshire to Bryan Magee in Modern British Philosophy, p. 45.
Reflecting more generally on Hampshire's style of self-presentation -- who he "seemed to be" as against who "he was" -- as a British intelligence officer, intellectual, or just as a person, Hampshire offers this revealing comment (even as he elsewhere discusses the inevitability of ethical conflict given our life-or-death commitment to the core values of our societies and selves), in light of unavoidable tensions between public and private "selves," given the distance between "appearance" and "reality" ambiguity and nuance -- the opposite of transparency -- become essential ingredients of all profound thought. Literature must be transformed into a necessity:
"Deception and concealment in politics, and the complexity of motive that leads to treachery, have always attracted me, both in reading history and occasionally in actual experience during the war. I have difficulty in imagining that purity of intention and undivided purposes can be the normal case in politics."
Can one write political philosophy with transparency and crystal clarity of language, abstractly, without leaving out of one's analysis crucial nuances and subtleties, Professor Hampshire? If such clarity is not possible, then is the "ideal of pristine clarity" in analytical philosophy helpful, or (sometimes) just the opposite of helpful, when seeking to understand human nature and/or malice? Must we leave out a great deal that is important, but unclear, in order to be "crystal clear" about issues and persons that are mysterious or complex, and anything but transparent to themselves or others? ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
"I believe that very many people feel divided between openness and concealment, between innocence and experience; and, outside politics, they often find themselves divided between love and hatred of their own homes and their own habits. The evidence for this belief of mine comes rather from fiction" -- like Iris Murdoch's novel The Sea, The Sea whose central character is an actor, Charles Arrowby, who is something of a fraud? -- "than from moral philosophy, which always presents a tidier picture in the interest of some prevailing epistemology. The evidence comes also from introspection: I am interested in deceit. These conflicts of feeling not only seem natural, they are also often useful. Enjoying the spectacle of duplicity and deceit in secret intelligence during the war, I did not doubt that there is a black hole of duplicity -- and intrigue into which the plans of politicians and intelligence officers may altogether disappear, because they may forget what they are supposed to be doing, lost in the intricacies of manouvre. It's useful to understand the devious calculations which underlie the publicized features of international relations in war and peace; and one cannot easily understand such calculations unless one has at least some degree of sympathy with them, some fascination, however qualified, with the twists and turns of political contrivance."
Innocence and Experience, p. 11 (emphasis added).
I wonder whether clarity and analytical rigor or "transparency" may not, in some circumstances, be used to deceive or falsify the self and/or others?
Perhaps the most effective public lies are communicated in the style of legalistic and governmental prose that poses as disinterested statements of "reality." ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
To suggest that fiction or literature may yield a truer picture of human agency in all of its complexity and contradictoriness, or mixed motives, may undermine the philosophical theory of agency developed over decades by Professor Hampshire and a number of his distinguished colleagues in analytical philosophy. This confirms Iris Murdoch's critique of Hampshire's theory and the undermining of that theory may be only one of her late philosophical achievements.
In a BBC interview Iris Murdoch spoke of the "secrets" in the hearts of men and women and the "terrible things" -- meaning crimes -- that persons live with in guilt or remorse and sometimes delight. Murdoch argued that the philosopher's and novelist's shared task is to discover and explain these "secrets."
Murdoch suggested that, perhaps, this shared mission is a truer statement of the challenge for thinkers who wish to speak in a meaningful way of human agency as it exists in our social world -- especially in coming to terms with such phenomena as evil -- than any concern with absolute rationality and clarity.
The pose of disinterested scholarship, Murdoch suggested, wears thin "after the 'experience' of Hitler." (See Murdoch's essay "The Idea of Perfection.")
Murdoch's comments on such troublesome issues explain her dual commitments to philosophy and literature, but also her own moral practice or "agency" as a woman who saw herself easily falling into foolish romantic entanglements as well as passionate love affairs, and not as good or loyal a friend as she ought to be, far from "ideal" in her style or person. Rather than "mastering" the passions Murdoch often felt compelled to yield to them, especially with regard to the demands of life-long loves: "I would go into the dark if it would mean the light for you." (These were Murdoch's utterly sincere words to a woman who was a lover and friend of many years.)
Imperfection or "muddle," divided motives, the struggle for goodness, her boundless need for love and kindness as well as the blistering effects of evil are found in her novels and life, but these things are also of philosophical importance, Murdoch tells us, because they define what our lives are about, revealing who we are and are not or never will be, the things and persons for which we will suffer or die. Murdoch insists that philosophers are and should be artists as well as logicians. ("Is clarity enough?")
A philosophy that excludes such "messy" or "unclear" and "mysterious" realities is not better for it, but much worse and far less helpful to us in understanding ourselves or our world. For Murdoch, "freedom of mind" and "owning our actions" in the world that must involve others begins with the recognition of inconvenient complexity and uncertainty, doubt and pain, frailty and imperfection. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
The paradoxical nature of the relationship between philosophy and the arts -- especially, poetry or literature -- is as old as Plato's dialogues. Iris Murdoch transformed these old ideas and unique debate into a theory of the subject opposed to, and far richer than, Professor Hampshire's straightjacketed but neat and tidy version of the liberal subject conveyed in a clear analytical language that often seems beside the point or irrelevant to what is at issue. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")
In Murdoch's exchanges with Professor Hampshire, and in published criticisms of Hampshire's texts, one senses a deep frustration and impatience that is rare in her writings and genuine puzzlement.
Before turning to the heart of the Murdoch/Hampshire dialogue and its many subtexts, the issues surrounding literature and philosophy should be emphasized because they have generated a continuing discussion in some of the most important books of recent decades: Richard Rorty, "The Contingency of Selfhood," in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1989), pp. 23-44 and Colin McGinn, "The Evil Character," in Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 62-92. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism" and "Colin McGinn's Naughty Book.")
Novelists have examined the issue from slightly different directions than philosophers: Patrick O'Brian, Testimonies: A Novel (New York: W.W. Norton, 1954) and Ian McEwan, Atonement (New York: Vintage, 2002) and Penelope Lively, The Photograph (London: Viking, 2003) finally, John Banville's The Sea (New York: Vintage International, 2005). ("What is memory?" and "Law and Literature.")
Hampshire insists on "control" of intentionality and the passions in a manner that seems increasingly artificial or implausible to Murdoch as their relationship "evolves."
I focus on two famous essays by Professor Hampshire that, taken together, constitute a summary of his argument: "Freedom of Mind" and "Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom" in Freedom of Mind and Other Essays. The ideas and arguments in these essays are elaborated upon in Thought and Action and Morality and Conflict to which I may refer to supplement my analysis.
Hampshire claims to reject reductivism either in the direction of neurochemistry or toward environmental factors (behaviorism) in understanding the mind. Scientism is also rejected. Freedom and agency cannot be explained by biochemical processes in the brain which may certainly help to account for the "mechanics" of bodily movements. Environmental factors, contrary to the strictures of B.F. Skinner, also cannot entirely explain human "behavior."
"My thesis will be that no matter what experimental knowledge of the previously unknown causes that determine a man's beliefs is accumulated, that which a man believes, and also that which he aims at and sets himself to achieve, will remain up to him to decide in the light of argument."
"Freedom of Mind," p. 3.
Does this overstate the importance of argument and underestimate the emotions or the contexts in which our decisions must be made?
Argument is understood by Professor Hampshire in strict Spinozistic-rationalist terms, apparently, and persuasion is exclusively a matter of evidence and logical cogency in setting forth an argument.
Articulation of argument, as previously noted, must be analytical because it involves a commitment to clarity of exposition that excludes all that cannot be stated with transparency. This raises difficult issues concerning the "transparency" of human motives and the instrumental "purity" of language -- issues that Murdoch will raise against Hampshire. (See my forthcoming review of "The Mountain Between Us.")
"The reflexive knowledge of [and reasons for] the causal mechanism [biology] constitute a change in the effect [actions]. And this is the complexity which makes a place, as Spinoza suggested, for freedom of mind." (Ibid.)
Hampshire says that I am aware of what clouds my judgment; while scientists know the neurochemistry. I can figure out what "motivates" my desire. Thus, I can correct for such extraneous factors as emotions in my objective and neutral weighing of factors, arguments, reasons for action, to decide freely and with logical sophistication what actions to take:
"If once he concentrates his attention on these timeless truths, independent of his own standpoint and perceptions, and argues carefully from them, he cannot help coming to the conclusion that human conduct has to be judged, and his own decisions made, by reference to this single standard, the standard of freedom of mind; and he will unavoidably agree that the distinction between freedom and its opposite is the distinction between active reasoning; internally determined, and the mind's passive reception of ideas impressed upon it from without."
"Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom," pp. 184-185. ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy'.")
Freedom of mind, accordingly, involves abstracting from our "interested particularity" as finite beings ("modes") trapped in time and occupying space to a consideration of things sub species aeternatis -- that is, universally and disinterestedly -- in the terms of Spinoza's "Ethics." ("Derek Parfit's Ethics" and "What is Enlightenment?")
The condition of "unfreedom" or "slavery to the passions" ("Ethics," Bk. IV) is the equivalent in Spinoza of the "heteronomy of the will" in Kant. It is not enslavement of the will that most troubles Hampshire, however, but "captivity of the understanding." Finally,
"Moral argument, that which replaces the traditional free discussion of ends of action, should be an attempt to bring to light, and to recognize, our own motives and their sources, and thereby to make our pursuit of our own safety, and the enjoyment of our own activity, fully self-conscious and therefore fully rational."
Ibid. p. 203.
Murdoch's critique is devastating and accurate, undermining Hampshire's project by invalidating his theory of what freedom of mind means and of how freedom is possible for persons. I urge readers interested in these issues to ponder Rebecca Goldstein's novel The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1989).
For Murdoch, the answer to the puzzle of freedom consists not in flight from what Sartre called "facticity" -- escape from our particularity in time, place, and culture -- but rather from understanding personal history, subconscious motivation, meaning and memory, history and politics allowing for increasingly improved self-appreciations and ever-more conscious or nuanced actions without denying the ambiguities or uncertainties that will always remain an aspect of human actions in the world.
Even with regard to philosophy, Murdoch contends, persuasively, that Hampshire misconstrues Kant and the vital importance of Kant's Critical philosophy in Modernity.
It is necessary to move towards facticity, that is, towards our individuality, or the concrete realities of our situations in the world, even as we participate in rational agency as transcendental egos:
"Kant's combination of this insight [concerning freedom of the will] with his confidence in science produce the dualism" -- or dual-aspect compatibilism -- "which shocks Hampshire. Since we are not just free spirits but also causally determined animals we are not transparent to ourselves and our motivation is both obscure and surprising. (We cannot easily determine beforehand how far idealism may extend our possibilities and how far we may be able to act against our character.) Much modern philosophy (existentialist and analytical) follows Kant here: since value clearly has no place in the empirical (scientific) world it must be given another kind of importance by being attached directly to the operation of the human will."
Iris Murdoch, "The Defense of Practical Reason," in Existentialists and Mystics, pp. 194-195 ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")
Is the heart just a muscle? Or does "the heart have reasons that reason knows nothing of" in the words of Blaise Pascal? Should free will overcome in extreme situations (or crises) the dictates of logic?
Values become a matter of rational necessity, of what our lives with others require, through "feeling" the dilemmas of others, their pains and emotive needs within an appreciation of their equality, leading to a larger sense of justice in society as well as among societies.
Like Henry James and George Eliot, Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy -- novelists with whom Murdoch should be listed -- she is able to see and articulate in purely philosophical discourse and in creative fictions the essential artistic response and insight into the human condition in our dismal times that defends freedom of the will, primarily, in the moment of decision or choice, even in tragedy and suffering, by demanding a "presence" or attention to others rather than escape into an impossible abstraction or ideology. ("Westworld: A Review of the T.V. Series.")
Simone Weil's call to "attend to the reality of others" lingers in Murdoch's memory. Iris Murdoch takes her place between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as Simone de Beauvoir as one of the most important humanistic thinkers of our times. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")
Hampshire contradicts himself because he is incapable of appreciating precisely these tensions in his thinking. He seems unable to detect the conflicts in his own motives due to an imaginative deficiency that Murdoch rightly views as a problem for all analytical philosophy.
It is the novelist's (or artist's) essential task to detect precisely such complexity of motives and purposes -- whatever one thinks of Freud -- once we get beyond the foundational need for Kantian fairness:
"Now it is not easy to see at first sight why Hampshire rejects in toto this pregnant and various 'doctrine of the transcendent will,' since he himself holds, as I shall argue, a view which is a version of this same doctrine. However, I think there is a particular feature of the doctrine which Hampshire finds menacing, and that is that it may portray (this is certainly true of Kant and the existentialists) human motivation as mysterious." (Murdoch, p. 195, emphasis added.)
For the purpose of unraveling the complexities of human motivation, the meaning of memories, the role of others in our private and public dramas, IMAGINATION in interpretation becomes crucial. Murdoch anticipates the insights of hermeneutic thinkers, such as Gadamer and Ricoeur, by falling back on her deepest sources in Shakespeare's poetry and Bradley's dialectics, or Sartre's and de Beauvoir's writings:
"It is significant that Hampshire relegates imagination [Derrida's juissance] to the passive [female] side of the mind, regarding it as an isolated non-responsible faculty which makes potentially valuable discoveries which reason [male] may inspect and adopt. Hampshire certainly regards imagination as a side issue. It is not even mentioned in his main argument. Why?" (Murdoch, p. 198, emphasis added.)
"Imagination" has been classified as a "feminine virtue." ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review" and "David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")
Derrida's concern with "playing" and the "play" of meaning in language use and art, or life, has been dismissed by analytical philosophers as "childish." ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")
Are imagination and play actually trivial factors when considering freedom of mind? Are they not of the very essence of such freedom? Are the artist and child not totally free in the moment of their "creations"?
"A Delicate Truth."
The focus on imagination crystalizes Murdoch's criticisms of analytical philosophy as well as her objections to Hampshire's philosophy. Comparison of the British philosophers' respective positions concerning "fancy" and "play" is revealing.
See, for example, Murdoch's "Against Dryness" and "On God and Good" then Hampshire's "Fallacies in Moral Philosophy," in Stanley Hauerwas & Alasdair McIntyre, eds., Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy (Indiana & London: Notre Dame U. Press, 1983), pp. 43-92.
Murdoch's critique of Hampshire's denigration of imagination is important because that denigration is widespread in America today despite the urgent need for imagination in public life and thought. ("The Return of Metaphysics.")
Murdoch goes on to explain the danger from the point of view of the ostensibly scientific-minded who fail to see all of the imagining that is necessary to understand the bottom-line factual or empirical reality described by science:
"When this activity is thought to be bad it is sometimes called 'fantasy' or 'wishful thinking.' [Self-deception, perhaps?] That we are all constantly engaged in this activity is something which Hampshire chooses to ignore, and he selects his vocabulary accordingly."
Perhaps only a novelist or other artist can fully appreciate Murdoch's observation. The implications of this truth are crucial and should be set forth at length. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
"Is there not also a good constructive imagination which plays an important part in our daily life? [Mary Warnock's book on imagination appeared after Murdoch's essay.] Hampshire would be unwilling to allow this for a rather important reason. He can readily admit imaginings which are unwilled, isolated, passive. But if we admit active imagination as an important faculty it is difficult not to see this as an exercise of will. Imagining is doing, it is a sort of personal exploring. Now Hampshire's picture depends on a divorce between will and reason (he considers the influence of will upon belief at the level of a man forcing himself to believe his leader against his better judgment, that is, it is always improper). Our freedom is said to consist in our ability to remove ourselves into a region where we can assess situations under no pressure from the will."
The assumption that we ever confront a pristine or non-interpretive "reality" that we may apprehend, non-creatively, without active representation is impossible after Kant.
It is fascinating how stubbornly many persons cling to the so-called "empiricist delusion" -- as Linus clings to his security blanket -- of an objective external reality that is reflected "mirror-like" in the mind through the senses. We cannot simply "go and look" to determine what is "real." ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
A century of scholarship in philosophy and the human sciences has done little to displace the assumption from analytical circles that all we need is care in expression or "clarity" to see and say exactly "what is really there." (See the discussion by Wilfrid Sellars of "The Myth of the Given.")
It may be objected that Hampshire expressed doubts or "pessimism" about the capacity of persons to be guided by reason and recognized the ubiquity of evil or moral failure as an aspect of human life in Morality and Conflict.
This recognition merely confirms Murdoch's biting critique of Hampshire's philosophy and indicates a failure on his part to appreciate that the problem had to do with his acceptance of the moral philosophies of Aristotle and Spinoza that, perhaps, were "troubled" by the emotions and failed to take sufficient note of the role of love, empathy, compassion and imaginative sympathy as well as other emotions in understanding "reason" and the requirements of moral judgment for human "being-in-the-world." ("Why philosophy is for everybody.")
It may be necessary to point out, again, that Murdoch's position in this debate and Continental thought in general are not attacks on rationality or science, even as they uphold (rather than denying) the importance of truth, goodness and love as genuine values underlying nearly everything else that we do as persons:
"The world which we confront is not just a world of 'facts' but a world upon which our imagination has, at any given moment, already worked; and although such workings may often be 'fantasy' and may constitute a barrier to our seeing 'what is really there,' this is not necessarily so. Many of the beliefs which are relevant to action are unlike disciplined scientific or scholarly beliefs. They are beliefs in the genesis of which active imagination can and will play a part which is not necessarily sinister."
Please bear this reasoning in mind and return to my arguments in "The Galatea Scenario and the Mind/Body Problem" then "Mind and Machine" and "Consciousness and Computers."
"We have to attend to people, we may have to have faith in them, and here justice and realism may demand the inhibition of certain pictures, the promotion of others. Each of us lives and chooses within a partly private, partly fabricated world, and although any particular belief might be shown to be merely 'fantastic' it is false to suggest that we could, even in principle, 'purge' the world we confront of these personal elements. Nor is there any reason why we should. To be a human being [person] is to know more than we can prove, to conceive of a reality which goes 'beyond the facts' in these familiar and natural ways." (The foregoing quotes are from "The Darkness of Practical Reason," pp. 197-199, emphasis added.)
There is no reality found entirely "apart" from human values that we experience as "persons." This does not undermine our value-laden notions of "objective/subjective" realities. We may still deploy concepts of objectivity and subjectivity, facts and values. We certainly cannot do without notions of truth that are implied even in this very statement of the ubiquity of values and desire. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")
Human freedom can never come from "escaping" emotions or imagination, since the very concept of freedom is the fruit of emotion and imagination.
Freedom can only come from recognizing or achieving some understanding of the role that such mental faculties and other "factors" play in creating the interpretations by which we construct ourselves and our worlds of meaning. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
Our sciences, arts, politics and laws are filled with imaginative energies and these endeavors that we create then "construct" us in return, sometimes tragically, only to be "deconstructed" in turn by us so that the process may begin again. ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "Conversation On a Train" then "Is Western Philosophy Racist?")
Reality (especially when it is said to be fully "objective") is actually saturated with imaginative constructs. (Again: "Judith Butler and Gender Theory" then "What you will ..." and "A Doll's Aria.")
I find my glasses growing larger, thicker, my face has become pudgy and pasty, my gray hair thin in the image I behold in the mirror. George Smiley has found his culprit:
Any self-styled "analytical" philosopher clinging to a bottom-line empiricism that no longer exists is our philosophical "mole." If such a creature is "out there," there is no need to worry, he or she has become extinct with the crumbling of the wall between analytical and Continental philosophical schools and the return to language studies in our universities, but such a "skateboarding philosopher" is merely unaware of the "fact" at this time:
"We are obscure to ourselves because the world we see already contains our values." ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
This includes science's revealed realities and the clarity about such realities admired by linguistically-minded philosophers. None of this deprives us of truth or nuanced notions of objectivity in discourse.
" ... we may not be aware of the slow delicate process of imagination and will which have put those values there. This implies, of course, that at moments of choice we are normally less free than Hampshire pictures us as (potentially) being, and that freedom is a more difficult and complex achievement than Hampshire suggests." (Murdoch, p. 200.)
I will list only a few key works that have informed my thinking concerning Hampshire's and Murdoch's views, except that I cannot avoid suggesting a few Le Carre novels.
Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza (London: Penguin, 1951).
Stuart Hampshire, Freedom of the Individual (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
Stuart Hampshire, Modern Writers and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970).
Stuart Hampshire, Freedom of Mind and Other Essays by Stuart Hampshire (New Jersey: Princeton U. Press, 1971).
Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1983).
Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1989).
Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). (1st Ed. 1959.)
Selected works by, or about, or relevant to Stuart Hampshire:
Stuart Hampshire, "A Special Supplement: A New Philosophy of the Just Society," The New York Review of Books, February 24, 1972, reviewing John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1971).
Alan Ryan, "Voice of Experience," The New York Review of Books, March 1, 1990, review of Innocence and Experience.
Stuart Hampshire, "The Reason Why Not," The New York Review of Books, April 22, 1999, review of T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1989).
Stuart Hampshire, "The Pleasures of Iris Murdoch," The New York Review of Books, November 15, 2001, review of Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
Wolfgang Saxon, "Stuart Hampshire, 89, Moral Philosopher Dies," The New York Times, June 27, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27... (Obituary).
Paul Vitello, "Jerry Roberts, 93, Code Breaker for Britain," The New York Times, April 5, 2014, p. A19. (Hampshire's colleague in the spy business.)
Bernard Williams, "Thought and Action by Stuart Hampshire," in Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002 (Princeton: Oxford U. Press, 2014), p. 8.
John Le Carre, The Honorable Schoolboy (London: Penguin, 1989).
Selected Works by or About Iris Murdoch:
Iris Murdoch, "The Darkness of Practical Reason," in Existentialists and Mystics (New York & London: Penguin, 1999), p. 193. Review of Stuart Hampshire, Freedom of the Individual (London: 1966).
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1992).
Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Viking, 1953).
Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
Maria Attonacio & William Schreiber, eds., Iris Murdoch and the Search For Human Goodness (London & Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1996).
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (London: Viking, 1978).
Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet (London: Viking, 1991).
John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963).
John Le Carre, Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy (London: Penguin, 1974).
John Le Carre, Smiley's People (London: Coronet, 1992).
John Le Carre, A Delicate Truth (London: Penguin, 2013).
