Joad and Stebbing

I know of two books devoted to Joad. There's Cyril Joad by Geoffrey Thomas (1992) and Radio Philosopher: The Radical Life of Cyril Joad by Tony Judge (2012).

Judge says that Joad and L. Susan Stebbing were friends who lived near each other in Hampstead.  Stebbing was an analytic philosopher who published an influential logic text and a critique of James Jeans and Arthur Eddington (Philosophy and the Physicists).  Her name should (but doesn't) appear in the Projected Table of Contents for the SEP.  Palgrave Macmillan will be publishing a book about Stebbing (by Siobhan Chapman).

Her friendship with Joad must have been interesting.  In my other posts about Joad, I've linked to several of his on-line bio's, from which it's evident that he was a sexist whose views of women were generally disapproved of even in his own day.  And now here's Susan Stebbing, a woman who was smarter than him and who didn't hesitate to let him know it.  She was quite scathing in print about Joad's works.  For instance, in 1926, Stebbing had this to say of Joad's Thrasymachus, or The Future of Morals:

It is an extremely clever and extremely superficial speech, as its title would suggest. Mr. Joad mistakes diatribe for argument, and appeals throughout to the herd's love of abuse of the forces that are. It is full of an inverted sentimentality that makes clear thinking impossible, and of jokes that merely obscure the issue. (Susan Stebbing, 'English Books', Philosophy [then called the Journal of Philosophical Studies], v. 1 [1926]: pp. 90-93)

In my previous post, I noted that Joad's reviewers tended to be quite complimentary of his prose.  Not Stebbing.  In a symposium at the Aristotelian Society in 1929, Stebbing said of Joad: 'As we shall see, his use of language is very inexact; hence, his statements are confused in the extreme.'

Joad felt the sting of these remarks, as is evident from his review of a volume that had been published in memory of Stebbing about five years after her death.  The review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of February 26, 1949 (on p. 141).  At that time, the authors of reviews in the TLS were generally not named, but in the TLS's archives Joad is identified as the author of the review.  In it, he says,

Professor Stebbing had an acid manner and a biting tongue. She possessed in an outstanding degree the power to make a person both look and feel foolish ... An undue tartness was the defect of Professor Stebbing's controversial method, but if it was a fault, it was a fault on the right side, and it was more than counterbalanced by her intellectual virtues.

He felt the sting but still expressed respect for her intellect.

Joad as philosophical journalist and entertainer

The Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand devotes a chapter to Joad in Conversations in Bloomsbury, a collection of Anand's reminiscences about his student days in London (which includes four chapters on T. S. Eliot).  Anand met Joad in a class at Birkbeck College, after which the two had lunch together.  Impressed by the ensuing philosophical conversation, Anand reports that one of his friend's, Nikhil Sen, dismissed Joad as a  'good philosophical journalist' who 'says nothing very original.' (pp. 57-8).

This seems to have been the consensus reached by many of Joad's contemporaries.  Indeed, in his obituary in the Times of London (April 10, 1953), we are told that Joad 'had no interesting contribution to make as a philosopher.'  He is then characterized as an 'author, university teacher, controversialist, and entertainer'.

His lack of originality is borne out by the two main on-line encyclopedias of philosophy (the SEP and the IEP), in which the only discussion of Joad's views appears in Paisley Livingston's entry on the 'History of the Ontology of Art'.  (Joad's works are cited, though, in a number of entries.)

Joad does seem to have excelled as a philosophical journalist.  His expository gifts were noted by reviewers as diverse as Michael Oakeshott, Cyril Connolly, W. R. Inge, A. C. Ewing, Evelyn Underhill, H. L. Mencken, and even Bertrand Russell (who otherwise had only contempt for Joad).

One of Joad's virtues was his interest in non-western philosophy, especially Indian philosophy, about which he wrote a popular book.  According to one bio, 

Joad looked to eastern philosophy as an antidote to western modernity. He attended a number of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s lectures and wrote on his philosophy (Counter Attack from the East, 1933). He also wrote a book on Indian civilization (1936) assisted by Girija Mookerjee.

So, as a philosophical journalist Joad covered more than just his own home turf.  He opened Britons' eyes to another philosophical tradition.  And, at a time when Churchill was expressing his wretched views about Mahatma Gandhi, Joad published 'The Authority of Detachment and Moral Force: Mohandas Gandhi'.  This paper was included in a volume that Radharkrishnan edited in 1939, Mahatma Gandhi: Essays and Reflections on His Life and Work.

Joad's coverage of philosophy was certainly biased -- he was a Platonist about pretty much everything -- but it helped some very bright individuals to find their way into philosophy.  In his autobiography, Antony Flew (e.g.) credits Joad's books as having spurred his philosophical development.  Also, in his 'Intellectual Autobiography', P. F. Strawson says that he first experienced the 'intellectual pull' of philosophy partly by way of 'some popular books on philosophy (notably by the not contemptible C. E. M. Joad)' (Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, p. xvii).

Joad and the law

I gave a rough outline of Joad's life but didn't know that one of his books, Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics, was quoted in the 1988 Supreme Court case that removed Canada's old abortion law (R v. Morgentaler). Siris drew attention to this connection.

Joad himself was in court more than once. His public downfall eventuated from his fare evasion on a train. In that case, Joad initially entered a plea of 'guilty' but then tried to defend his action by explaining how the 'fare evasion' was the result of an honest mistake. The magistrate declared that Joad's explanation had the effect of changing his plea to 'not guilty'. This prompted another hearing at which Joad supplied more half-hearted rationales, culminating in his conviction.

I learned some of these details from the excellent Times of London archive (which is behind a paywall). From the same source I discovered that Joad was once taken to court for libel. The defamatory statements appeared in Joad's Guide to Modern Wickedness (1st ed., 1939) -- given the above caricature of Joad, I wonder if the Guide was a how-to. According to the Times edition of July 29, 1939 (p. 3), Rev. E. L. Macassey, vicar of Mapledurham, went to court for damages from Joad and his publisher, Faber & Faber (and from the printers). The vicar's ire had been raised by material in Chapter 3 ('Religion'), in which Joad supposedly quoted from a sermon that had been preached at 'his local church'. In the book, Joad named neither the vicar nor the church but did provide enough information for people in the Mapledurham area to identify the vicar. According to the Times' record of the case, the defamatory passages included 'extremely objectionable references to the vicar ..., references that no clergyman could allow to pass unchallenged.' No further specification of the libelous statements is given. Joad and Faber agreed to apologize to the vicar and pay him £250 (which the vicar gave to charity). Also, they agreed to withdraw unsold copies of the book and remove the offending passages before the book was reprinted. It was reprinted in the early 1940's.

Unfortunately, none of the editions of his Guide to Modern Wickedness appear to be on-line. Some of Joad's other works are in the wonderful Internet Archive.

Joe Strummer would have been 60 on Aug. 21.

Joad of Joad Hall

Last Friday, Nigeness posted on Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (1891-1953), an Englishman who taught philosophy at Birkbeck College in the University of London.  Nigeness paints an unflattering picture of Joad.  I decided to dig up some more info on the man.

Joad finished his education at Oxford in 1914 -- he was a John Locke Scholar in Mental Philosophy at Oxford in that year -- after which he worked as a civil servant until 1930.  According to Jason Tomes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Joad was exempt from military service in WWI due to his position as a senior civil servant.  In 1930, he became the head of the philosophy department at Birkbeck College in the University of London "and ran it for or 23 years -- but he was never made a professor." (H/t to Man Without Qualities for that last link.)  A. J. Ayer put this point in stronger terms in his autobiography (Part of my Life, p. 302):  'He [Joad] taught philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, where they refused to make him a professor, though he allowed himself to be called so' (emphasis added).  In fact, Joad was 'called so' more than pretty much anybody else of his time.  The title 'Professor' came to be so indissolubly fused to his surname that Peter Clarke once wrote, 'Like Dr Johnson, Colonel House, or Professor Joad, he [Gladstone] has laid peculiar claim from beyond the grave to a conventional style of address' (London Review of Books [April 17, 1980]).  Joad's actual title at Birkbeck was 'Reader in Philosophy'; according to Tomes, 'the University gave him a DLitt degree in 1936 and promoted him to reader in 1945.'

Joad was praised mainly as a great teacher and popularizer rather than as an original philosopher or scholar.  He rose to fame in the UK as a founding member of the The Brains Trust, a radio program on the BBC. Here's a clip from the BBC archives (April 28, 1942) in which Joad, Julian Huxley and others discuss the establishment of a public, national health service (and the meaning of 'allergy'). Joad begins speaking at 1.46 and again at 5.06 and at 6.31. On this show he became famous for prefacing his comments with the phrase, 'It all depends on what you mean by ....'

Before achieving his fame on the radio, Joad achieved infamy.  He was vilified by many of his contemporaries for his opposition to conscription in WWI and, later, for his role in the infamous Oxford Union debate on February 9, 1933, where -- about ten days after Hitler had become the German Chancellor -- Joad defended the proposition, 'That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.'  His role in the debate (as a guest speaker) earned him the enmity of Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill referred to the 1933 resolution twice in The Second World War, Volume 1: The Gathering Storm.  On p. 77, Churchill wrote, 'In 1933 the students of the Oxford Union, under the inspiration of a Mr. Joad, passed their ever-shameful resolution, "That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country."'  'Mr. Joad' -- he was no professor in Churchill's eyes.  Indeed, according to Churchill, Joad's resolution influenced Great Britain's enemies:

Mussolini, like Hitler, regarded Britannia as a frightened, flabby old woman .... Lord Lloyd, who was on friendly terms with him [Mussolini], noted how he had been struck by the Joad resolution of the Oxford undergraduates in 1933. (p. 150)

The Daily Express characterized the debate's outcome in these ridiculous terms:  'There is no question but that the woozy-minded Communists, the practical jokers, and the sexual indeterminates of Oxford have scored a great success in the publicity that has followed this victory.'

Joad had held pacifist views since before WWI.  Under the influence of H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw (among others), he joined the Fabian Society in 1912.  Like Shaw and Bertrand Russell, Joad opposed the UK's involvement in WWI.

Certainly Joad was not afraid to adopt unpopular positions (he wrote some stinging critiques of Christianity).  According to the Spartacus bio at the previous link, he supported the suffragists.  Unfortunately, as is noted in that same bio, he became a horrible sexist.  The Spartacus bio contains the following quotation from  Joad's 1932 autobiography:

I started my adult life, as I have recounted, with such high hopes of women, that the process of disillusionment has left a bitterness behind. If I was never sentimental enough to expect women to be soul mates, at least I thought to treat them as intellectual equals. It was a shock to find that the equality had been imposed by myself upon unequals who resented it. If only women could have remained at the silent-film stage, all would have been well; but the invention of talking has been as disastrous in women as it has in the cinema.

That's what a supposedly progressive public figure wrote in 1932.  Not surprisingly, Joad doesn't seem to have established any stable relationships with women.  He married in 1915 and left his wife in 1921.  He had three children from that marriage (two daughters and a son) but wasn't on speaking terms with any of them later in life.

Joad garnered little respect from the most prominent British philosophers of the day. Bertrand Russell disliked Joad and accused him of plagiarism.  I'm not sure of the details connected with this charge, but according to an anecdote that Ayer recounts (Part of my Life, p. 302), when Russell was asked to review a book by Joad, Russell replied, 'Modesty forbids.'

Joad had some contact with the Inklings in the early 1940's.  He attended an Inklings meeting in 1943.  He shows up in two of J. R. R. Tolkien's letters from that year.  In a letter to his son, Christopher, dated October 25, Tolkien said, 'Tomorrow night I am going to hobnob, chez Lewis, with Joad of Joad Hall.'  I was thinking of starting that joke ('Joad Hall') until I saw that Tolkien beat me to it.  (Actually, Tolkien attributes the joke to an unidentified author.)  Tolkien elaborated on the joke in a subsequent letter (Oct. 27) to Christopher, which is summarized at the Tolkien Gateway as follows:

Tolkien said that except for his face Joad was very like a toad, and in character closely resembled Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. He found him intelligent, kindly, and they agreed on many fundamental points. Joad had been in Russia and loathed it.

Perhaps it was Joad's trip to the Soviet Union in 1930 that initiated the long process in which he dropped many of his earlier beliefs.  While he strongly opposed Hitler and Mussolini, Joad was still a pacifist at the start of WWII.  However, according to Tomes in the ODNB (linked above), Joad had abandoned his pacifism by May, 1940, by which time he had concluded that war was necessary in order to save civilization.

Another major change in Joad's beliefs concerned religion.  By the time he debated C. S. Lewis at the Oxford Socratic Club on January 24, 1944, Joad had become a theist but not a Christian.  He seems to have been influenced by Lewis, though, as is evident from a paper by Joel D. Heck (here's the pdf), to the point where Joad joined the Church of England near the end of his life.  In 1952, he published his last book, The Recovery of Belief: A Restatement of Christian Philosophy.

Joad was known for his passionate debates.  His exchange with Lewis in 1944 attracted more than twice as many spectators as the average Socratic Club debate.  According to Joad's New York Times obituary (April 10, 1953), he returned to the Oxford Union for a debate with Randolph Churchill in 1950.  Here's the resolution that Joad defended: 'That this House regrets the influence exercised by the US, as the dominant power among the democratic nations.'  In this debate, Joad said (I quote from the NY Times obit), 'Britain is tied to the wheels of the American chariot -- a chariot leading us to Hell.'  According to Time Magazine's coverage, Joad added, 'Money is the sole American standard of value.'  Joad had visited the United States exactly once.  It was at this debate that R. Churchill referred to Joad as 'a third-class Socrates.'

Joad's indiscretions caught up with him after WWII.  He boasted publicly that he regularly rode trains without paying for his tickets.  He was caught doing so in 1948.  The BBC responded by firing him.  No more Brains Trust for Joad.  He returned to infamy.

What a strange character.  He could easily have afforded to pay for his rail trips.  His habit of not doing so reminds me of rich people who shoplift, except that they tend not to make public declarations of their kleptomania.  It's as if Joad wanted to be caught and discredited.  Why? Did he feel guilty about something?

(More about Joad in a subsequent post.)

RIP Alan Saunders

Alan Saunders died last June. He hosted The Philosopher's Zone, a philosophy radio show in Australia. A philosophy radio show? I had never heard of such a thing. Here in Canada, the very idea of a radio broadcast devoted to philosophy is, well, merely an idea. I was avid follower of Mr. Saunders' broadcasts.

He was born in London in 1954. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, 'Saunders studied philosophy at the University of Leicester, and went on to achieve a master's of science in logic and scientific method from the London School of Economics. He came to Australia in 1981 to research at the history of ideas unit at the Australian National University. In 1989, he was awarded a PhD for a thesis on the 18th century scientist Joseph Priestley.' Here is his obituary in the The Independent.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation hosted a tribute to Alan Saunders on 24 June, and they're replaying some of his shows, including his interview with Martha Nussbaum, 'The Therapy of Desire: Epicureans and Stoics on the good life' and an interview with William A. Drumin called 'A rear view of Alfred Hitchcock.' Here's Saunders hosting a broadcast about Melbourne trams: