Arthur Aston Luce, Berkeley scholar and WWI vet

One of the philosophers who fought in WWI was A. A. Luce (1882-1977). He lived for most of his life in Ireland, where he taught at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD). Luce was born and raised in Gloucester, England, and served in the British forces in the War. He made his name in philosophy as a leading scholar of Bishop Berkeley's works. He not only interpreted but, also, endorsed Berkeley's idealism.

Here are some of the other main points of Luce's biography. He was ordained into the Anglican (Church of Ireland) clergy in 1908. In WWI, Luce could have served as a chaplain but elected, instead, to enlist as a soldier in the Royal Irish Rifles (1915-18). In a nine-page biography, Luce's son, J. V. Luce, wrote that his father 'saw nearly three years active service in France, rose to the rank of Captain, and won the MC [Military Cross] for his conduct during the battle of Passchendaele in August 1917'. ^{(J. V. Luce, 'Introduction: A Memoir of A. A. Luce', in Fishing and Thinking, A. A. Luce [Shrewsbury, England: Swan Hill Press, 1990])} Passchendaele (aka the 3rd Battle of Ypres) was among the most wretched engagements in the War. So, it is no surprise that Luce suffered from 'shell-shock' ^{(according to  R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb in their Trinity College Dublin 1592-1952: An Academic History [Cambridge University Press, 1982], p. 490)}. It appears that Luce was murdered in 1977. At least, he is said to have died 'a few days after being assaulted ... by a man who had an antipathy towards clergymen'. ^{(Diarmaid Ferriter, 'Luce, Arthur Aston' Dictionary of Irish Biography [Cambridge University Press and Royal Irish Academy, 2016])}

In the 1920s, Luce was Samuel Beckett's tutor. At TCD, a tutor's role in relation to an assigned student was advisory and not directed towards teaching. Other professors at TCD had much more influence on Beckett than Luce did (esp. Thomas Rudmose-Brown). Still, Beckett seems to have been an admirer of Berkeley, and when Beckett applied for a teaching post at the University of Cape Town in 1937, he named 'Captain the Reverend Arthur Aston Luce' as one of his three referees. ^{(Letters of Samuel Beckett, v. I: 1929-1940, ed. Fehsenfeld and Overbeck [Cambridge University Press 2009], p. 523, letter dated July 29, 1937)} Also, interpreters of Beckett's work have focused on its philosophical relevance, particularly in connection with the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Luce published a book on Bergson in 1922.

A revealing source with respect to Luce's character is the anonymously authored obituary in the Times (of London). ^{('Obituary: The Rev. A. A. Luce, Churchman and Philosopher' The Times, June 29, 1977, p. 18)} According to this obituary, Luce had a 'striking and perplexing personality'. ^(Ibid.) He was regarded by his peers at TCD as 'independent, sometimes to the point of perversity' and as a holder of 'unusual' opinions. ^(Ibid.) The obituarist conjectures that 'the strain of these years [1915-18] in the trenches left a deep mark on his opinions and his modes of thought.' ^(Ibid.) Luce 'was seldom on the side of the majority, and, with a courage that never failed him, fought stoutly for many unpopular and indeed outrageous opinions.' ^(Ibid.) He became TCD's Vice-Provost in 1949 but was 'forced' to retire from that position in 1952 (due allegedly to his inflexible resistance to change). Finally, the author attributes to Luce a complex personality, in which 'the Puritan, the man of the world, and the sequestered don, the cold disciplinarian and the courtly and thoughtful host, the reactionary authoritarian and the passionate lover of justice -- all these jostled one another in an unpredictable kaleidoscope.' ^(Ibid.)

I think that the anonymous obituarist might have been R. B. McDowell. McDowell co-authored a history of TCD that contains the following remark, which resembles the just-quoted passage:

Most men contain some qualities which seem inconsistent with each other, but in Luce the opposites were to be seen in conflict almost every day. The courteous host and the frosty disciplinarian; the conscientious and devoted servant of the College and the tenacious fighter for his rights and emoluments; the single-minded seeker after the truth and the master of a repartee based on unfair pseudo-logic; the stern moralist and the very unorthodox churchman; the man of the world and the ill-informed provincial; the stylist in words and the ignoramus in the sphere of fine arts -- what was one to make of such a mixture? ^{(R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin 1592-1952: An Academic History [Cambridge University Press, 1982], p. 490-491)}

McDowell, a historian, contributed the parts of the book that concerned the humanities.

Luce resembled another British philosopher and WWI vet, Mure, in having a reactionary streak (though Luce wasn't nearly as pure a reactionary as Mure seems to have been). Luce resembled Weldon in being a courageous man who had a volatile, unpredictable character and who seemed to enjoy shocking people with his statements.

Here's a clip in which McDowell and J. V. Luce are interviewed about TCD:

Items of interest

Image from Time's Flow Stemmed.

'Paris, Beckett and Me' by John Calder.

Alasdair Gray interviewed in the Scottish Review of Books.

From the Irish Times, Patrick Nugent on Henning Mankell on Wallander.

Lucette Lagnado on Justine, the first part of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. (ht Books, Inq.)

MWQ has posted several extracts from Confederacy of Dunces (which is moving up on my TBR list).

John Gray on a ghost story by Walter de la Mare: 'When he encounters the visitor, the traveller realises that "this being, in human likeness, was not of my kind, nor of my reality". ... [W]hat the traveller has experienced leaves him with the suspicion the world that's normally given us through the senses may itself be an illusion. No assurances are given him regarding any other world.'

Censoring Anton Platonov's Soviet surrealism: '“On the surface, Platonov is the least ‘literary’ of writers," [Robert] Chandler said "His language can seem crude, elemental; it has been described as ‘the language that might be spoken by the roots of trees.’  At the same time, however, this language is extraordinarily subtle, packed with the most delicate of puns and allusions.”'

In this next quotation, Tolstoy's describing a military theorist, but his words seem especially apt for some economists of the not so distant past and perhaps even (gasp!) some philosophers. The quoted passage appears in War and Peace (Book 9, Ch. 10); I've used the words in the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, although the link is to the older on-line trans. by the Mauds).

Pfuel was one of those theorists who so love their theory that they forget the purpose of the theory - its application in practice. In his love for theory, he hated everything practical and did not want to know about it. He was even glad of failure, because failure, proceeding from departures from theory in practice, only proved to him the correctness of his theory.

Is Japan's own version of War and Peace a 6-volume work about the Russo-Japanese War? Here's Hiroaki Sato: 'I asked a Japanese friend how he would characterize Shiba Ryotaro’s famous historical novel, Clouds Above the Hill. I’ve known its immense popularity, but Shiba had started its newspaper serialization after I left Japan in 1968, and the size of the finished work — six volumes in book form — had daunted me, so I’d never read it. My friend’s reply: “The nation’s favorite book.” Now it’s in English translation, in four large volumes — two of them out, the remaining two to come out later this year.'

Eli Kirzner on Ryu Murakami's From the Fatherland (published in English by Pushkin Press).

From Enda O’Doherty's review of Sebald's A Place in the Country:

Sebald’s subjects in this volume, first published in German in 1998 under the title Logis in einem Landhaus, are the dialectal poet, storyteller and pedagogue Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826); Rousseau; poet and novelist Eduard Mörike (1804-1875); novelist and short story writer Gottfried Keller (1819-1890); novelist Robert Walser (1878-1956) and painter Jan Peter Tripp (1945- ).

Terry Pitts' posts on A Place in the Country.

A look at the texts in The Rings of Saturn.

Vertigo has posted a video of Sebald reading from Austerlitz. Here's the clip on YouTube.

Let's introduce a new category: found poetry in novels. I found part of this passage in Blunden's Undertones of War. It has a nice deployment of Heraclitus' image and is taken from 'Night Thoughts' by Edward Young:

Life glides away, Lorenzo, like a brook;

For ever changing, unperceived the change.

In the same brook none ever bathed him twice:

To the same life none ever twice awoke.

We call the brook the same; the same we think

Our life, though still more rapid in its flow; ...

Noga Arikha on Robert Burton's great work: 'Melancholy is an old concept; in ancient Greek, melan means black, and hole is the word for bile. Melancholy literally means black bile: however ancient, we still know what that means.'

Bastille Day was on July 14.

Mireille Mathieu - La Marseillaise by bisonravi1987

Philosopher's Zone is back and other philosophy news

'School of Athens' by Raphael. Epicurus is on our left.

After Alan Saunders' death, the Australian radio show about philosophy, Philosopher's Zone, was on a hiatus. It is back, now hosted by Joe Gelonesi. In  the first new broadcast, Professor Bonnie Honig discusses democracy and public space.

On Melvyn Bragg's BBC show, In Our Time, Bragg discusses Epicurus with Angie Hobbs, David Sedley, and James Warren.

At the Guardian, Peter Thompson of the University of Sheffield has a five-part series on the Frankfurt School. Here they are: one, two, three, four and five.

On YouTube, the presentations from the 2012 Sellars Centenary Conference.

A 'journeyman Barthio-Lutheran theologian' tries his hand at translating the first part of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

On seeing Beckett in terms of analytic philosophy and 'Beckett the Nietzschean hedonist'.

Several posts on Kierkegaard by Barry Stocker.

From Truth Tableaux, 'On Fernando Pessoa’s Philosophical Essays'

On MOOCs, and more. On a 'we've-been-here-before' note, there's this.

Advice sought concerning what logic textbooks to use for a course on symbolic logic.

Help sought in listing novels about philosophers philosophical theories.

I love this couple's YouTube clips. They're from a 60's German TV show, in which Cherry Wainer and Don Storer played during the intermissions. In some clips you can see Cherry working the Hammond organ peddles with her white go-go boots. In others you can see German existentialist dancing. In most clips, you catch a glimpse of the lethargic little dog that sat next to Cherry. One of my favourite clips is this one, but I've opted to include this next clip chiefly because it shows Don in some of his best spontaneous vocal and facial expressions. (Update, Aug. 2, 2013): Dammit! Most of their videos have been pulled. This is the only one still on YouTube.
 

Cheer up, Arty! It's your birthday

I recently read some of Arthur Schopenhauer's work. He was a first-rate aphorist who, unfortunately, diluted his pithy wisdom with mediocre metaphysics (a sentiment shared by Isaiah Berlin).

Here's some of George Carlin's wisdom: 'Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.' No one more clearly epitomizes this truth than Schopenhauer. He was 'cynical' in the everyday sense of that term (as opposed to the technical, philosophical sense). Schopenhauer's cynicism was an aspect of his pessimism. He held out no great hope for humankind, which is one reason why he recommended resignation and renunciation -- resign yourself to our collective failure to advance morally beyond our predecessors, resign yourself to the fact that romantic love is generally a cruel joke, etc. etc. and, accordingly, renounce your worldly hopes. Such world-denying pessimism must be grounded in idealism (Carlin's point), for only against the backdrop of very high, ideal standards can such a sweeping condemnation of worldly endeavour make sense. And Schopenhauer was an idealist with a vengeance. He damned the chilly shadow-land of history as forever farcical and, shunning it, sought the perfect luminescence of Plato's ideal forms. Since he eschewed any divine agent of vengeance, Schopenhauer took its expression upon himself. From his disillusion flew the cutting aphorisms.

Schopenhauer set his idealism in a metaphysical nightmare. He tried to bring together Kant's noumenon, the Platonic forms, and the will ... oops (cue the Beethoven) ... the WILL. A volatile mixture, to be sure -- I just hope he had good insurance. Somehow, the really real is supposed to be noumenal (hence beyond time and plurality) and ideal in Plato's sense (also beyond time but apparently plural despite the Form of the Good's best efforts) and volitional (and thus essentially temporal). Moreover, for Schopenhauer, each person's deeds arise from her character. But character, for Schopenhauer, is noumenal, which puts it beyond the reach of causation and, indeed, beyond any application of the principle of sufficient reason. So how can anything 'arise' from it? Also, being noumenal, it admits of no plurality. But then how can there be several characters, each accounting for our diverse acts? Perhaps the really real was also beyond arithmetic. Ah well, whereof one cannot speak ....

[Update (added Feb. 23): The status of Platonic Ideas in Schopenhauer's system is tricky, to say the least. They're the focus of pp. 232-4 of v. 1 of the World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer there says that the Platonic Ideas are beyond any application of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which, in his system, suggests that they're noumenal. Nevertheless, he also says that that the Ideas are essential to an objectification of the will, which suggests that they're phenomenal. The most thorough investigation of this matter that I know of is in a paper by James and Dale Snow: 'Was Schopenhauer an Idealist?' (Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (4) 1991). They conclude that Schopenhauer's 'Platonic' Ideas are meant to be in time; the Ideas are sempiternal rather than eternal.]

Still, the metaphysical train wreck should not detract so much from Schopenhauer's accomplishment. He advanced good criticisms of Kant's ethics (and anticipated some of G. E. M. Anscombe's points) and developed our notion of the unconscious (along with Fichte and Schelling). No other second-rate philosopher (but first-rate aphorist) has had such a profound influence. Among those whom Schopenhauer influenced the most are Wagner, Wittgenstein, Borges, Burckhardt, Turgenev, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Richard Taylor, and Thomas Mann. (Mann wrote an adulatory piece about Schopenhauer in 1938.) And on and on. Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Huysmans had intense Schopenhauer phases but eventually opted for more life-affirming views. And though he denied it, there has long been a suspicion that Freud must have read Schopenhauer earlier in his life. Finally, here's Albert Einstein in 1933 with one of my favourite Shopenhauer quotations:

I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense…. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humour its due.

Schopenhauer was one of the earlier western philosophers to take seriously an eastern philosophical tradition and he was among the first prominent intellectuals to take seriously the ethical status of animals. These advances, together with the list of luminaries who admired Schopenhauer, lead me to suspect that the above metaphysical objections may well derive from misunderstandings on my part. 

Philosophy links & Beckett's film

Georg Reimers

Here's a podcast in which Robert Zaretsky discusses the friendship and dispute involving Hume and Rousseau.

A review of Ann Thomson's Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment.

Two new entries in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one on Shaftesbury, one on Goethe 

A review of Janice Carlisle's book about John Stuart Mill's 'character and sense of self.'

Jonathan Rée on William James: 'He favoured philosophy too, but not the dreary timidity encouraged by what he called “the PhD Octopus”, nor the stupefying smugness and philistine cleverness propagated by a posh young Englishman called Bertrand Russell.'

Turning from the history of philosophy to the philosophy of history, my library finally has access to the relatively new Journal of the Philosophy of History, a recent issue of which includes Celina María Bragagnolo's paper, 'Secularization, History, and Political Theology: The Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt Debate'.

Re. the history of the philosophy of history: W. H. Walsh wrote one of the standard introductory books on the philosophy of history. Daniel Little has posted a discussion of it, as well as a second item, situating Walsh in the idealist tradition.

A new, open-access journal on Wittgenstein (ht Language Goes on Holiday), and Oxford University Press has made several journal articles on Wittgenstein publicly available, as has the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

David Auerbach posts some quotations that illustrate how Rudolf Carnap viewed his philosophy in the context of contemporary artistic and political movements.

Here's a short film by Samuel Beckett with the following description: 'A twenty-minute, almost totally silent film ... in which Buster Keaton attempts to evade observation by an all-seeing eye. But, as the film is based around Bishop Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi' (to be is to be perceived), Keaton's very existence conspires against his efforts.'



Paul Boghossian argued against moral relativism in a NY Times piece, in which he objected to a 2001 article by Stanley Fish. Fish replied to Boghossian. Now, Boghossian has posted a masterful reply.

In that debate, Fish said that philosophy doesn't much matter outside the classroom. Bookforum's 'Omnivore' has posted a series of links under the heading 'Does philosophy matter?'

'Does Anything Matter?' by Peter Singer.

Mark Oppenheimer on Charles Taylor on 'how the Western liberal can reconcile a preference for liberal democracy with the illiberalism necessary for cultural preservation or self-preservation, which many accept as understandable goals.'

James Wood discourses on Taylor, Virginia Woolf, The Tree of Life, Max Weber, Philip Kitcher, etc. while reviewing The Joy of Secularism.

A podcast of Alan Saunders' interview with Martha Nussbaum.