Oxford eggheads and numskulls

At university, A N Wilson met brilliant dons – and professors who struggled to define a tomato

Iam a middlebrow who at the age of 20 did not even know what philosophy, as understood by modern philosophers, actually is.

Nevertheless, finding myself at Oxford, I happened to know some of the giants in Nikhil Krishnan’s fascinating A Terribly Serious Adventure.

The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) resembled a large, handsome, unwashed gypsy. Neighbours were frequently ringing up the NSPCC to complain that her ever-expanding brood of kids were being neglected while Mother translated Wittgenstein.

‘More’s playing with razor blades!’ one of them overheard. More was a wittily named son who came to add to the huge tribe.

An observant Catholic, Elizabeth Anscombe was married to philosopher Peter Geach (1916-2013), who bore an uncanny resemblance to Pope John II.

‘I think it’s quite an achievement to have BAGGED your supervisor!’ Anscombe said to me when introduced by my then fiancée, a fellow of Anscombe’s Oxford college.

I remember her telling us one day that, when driving back from Cambridge, where she had become a professor, she’d run over a badger. ‘What did you do with it, Miss Anscombe?’

‘Put it in the boot, of course.’

‘And then what?’

‘What do you think we did? We ATE it.’

Later, when I was masquerading as a junior don, I had dinner most evenings for a couple of years with A J Ayer (1910-89), known for his famous book Language, Truth and Logic. But to me he was just a genial old man who entertained me with talk of our shared passion, detective stories and memories of a stormy friendship with the great Raymond Chandler.

What these giants of the philosophical scene were doing for their day jobs was a closed book to me – quite literally. I came to know about the philosophical scene only through my friendship with Iris Murdoch, who told me about Simone Weil (1909-43). Weil instantly became my heroine – and still is.

For reasons unknown, Weil is described in this book as a nun. This unbaptised, vodka-drinking, Christenraptured, chain-smoking Jewish genius – she refused baptism because it would alienate her from the unchristened Homer – would have been surprised by this. She was a greater figure than anyone mentioned in this book – but that is another story.

Last year, there were two fascinating books about groups of Oxford academics – Daisy Dunn’s Not Far from Brideshead, about Maurice Bowra, Eric Dodds and Gilbert Murray. A book that appeared to be about who became the next Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford turned out to be a story with much wider ramifications.

Then there was Metaphysical Animals, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman – a really gripping account of four philosophers, all women, all educated at Somerville –and the stand they took against the blokes who were peddling ‘analytical’ philosophy – Ryle, Ayer, Austin and co.

You’d think this was parish-pump stuff, of interest only to nerds like me who happen to have been at Oxford and even known some of these legends personally, but in fact both books turned out to be about big and exciting things. Like how to be good. What would constitute a good society or a good person?

This rather similar round-up of academics from yesteryear tells the same story. Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley were all able to show that the account given of our inner life, and of our capacity to make ethical choices, by so many of their fellow Oxford philosophers – pipe-smoking Oxford chaps – was woefully limited and, in many cases, downright wrong.

But, as the present book shows, there was something noble about the blokes’ attempt to purify the language and make sure that philosophers meant what they said and knew what they meant when they said it – as should the rest of us.

Undoubtedly, much of what the ‘Oxford philosophers’ were saying and writing seems, to the lay person, so esoteric as to belong in the pages of Gulliver’s Travels

‘When I see a tomato, there is much that I can doubt.’

So wrote Henry Price (1899-1984), Wykeham Professor of Logic, pictured. He spent several paragraphs wondering whether what he was seeing was a hallucination, or a plastic tomato. Of one thing one could be certain: ‘There exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape, standing out from a background of other colour patches, and having a certain visual depth, and that this whole field of colour is directly present to my consciousness.’

A J Ayer was among those who believed the only thing we could be sure of was that our sense data informed us that we were seeing a tomato.

He was not reviving the absolute scepticism of Bishop Berkeley, who believed that we could not be sure of the existence of ANYTHING. There are moments in this book when one remembers dear old Dr Johnson, upon mention of Berkeley, stating, ‘I refute him thus!’ and kicking a stone.

Toweringly the oddest pair in the book – and surely the most impressive – are Cambridge-based Ludwig Wittgenstein and his representative on earth, Elizabeth Anscombe. She it was who patiently translated Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

Whereas Wittgenstein thought philosophy leaves everything as it is, Anscombe backed the philosophical justification of the moral life.

It was she who (unsuccessfully) opposed Harry S Truman’s being given an honorary degree at Oxford, because he was a mass murderer (Nagasaki and Hiroshima). The philosophers argued that Truman, by merely signing an order to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, had not actually done the deed himself.

Like Anscombe, her friend Iris Murdoch, who worked for refugees after the war and saw at first hand of the devastating effects of Hitler’s campaign, saw that it was not good enough to say, with Freddie Ayer, that ethical statements had no meaning.

Reading this fair-minded survey of a whole miscellany of modern philosophers, we discover the power of the Anscombe argument: that the reductionism and materialism of the chaps – most of whom, surely, were half barmy, or at least on ‘the spectrum’ –were ultimately ‘corrupt’.

By refusing to recognise ‘metaphysics as a guide to morals’, they appeared to justify much of the moral chaos that engulfed society in their day.

Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-1960 is published by Profile Books (£20)

A N Wilson is author of Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises