Misosophy: hatred of wisdom. A label applied to Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Papists, Positivists, and Calvinists

Misosophy, n. Hatred of wisdom. So says the OED. The earliest use of the word cited by the OED is in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's posthumously published "Notes of Hooker" (in the 1830s).  Coleridge there writes,

There are, and can be, only two schools of philosophy, differing in kind and in source. Differences in degree and in accident, there may be many; but these constitute schools kept by different teachers with different degrees of genius, talent, and learning; — auditories of philosophizers, not different philosophies. Schools of psilology (the love of empty noise) and misosophy are here out of the question.

About forty years before Coleridge's coinage, Bertrand Capmartin de Chaupy wrote a book called  Philosophie des lettres, qui aurait pu tout sauver. Misosophie voltairienne, qui n'a pu que tout perdre, which translates roughly as Philosophy of letters, which could have saved everything. Voltairian misosophy, which could only lose everything. (Paris, chez Mme. Dufresne, au Palais royale, 1790, 2 volumes)

"Misosophy" pops up  in a philosophical dictionary in 1878:

MIS, MISO.-1. (Gr. [...], to hate;) in a number of compounds, as misagathy, hatred of the good; misandry and misanthropy, hatred of men; misarety, hatred of virtue; misogyny, misology, misosophy, misotheism. 2. From the Germanic languages, denoting wrong, failure, defect, as misdeed, mistrust, misuse. (Charles Porterfield Krauth, A Vocabulary of the Philosophical Sciences: [Including the Vocabulary of Philosophy, Mental, Moral and Metaphysical, by William Fleming, from the 2d Ed., 1860: and the 3d, 1876, Ed. by Henry Calderwood, LL. D.], Sheldon & Company, 1878, p. 770)

The word appeared in religious controversies. For instance, here's the barrister Henry Thomas Braithwaite in 1872: "That therefore is misosophy which discourages spoken petitions to the Throne of Grace on the plea that a Spirit cannot hear words." (Esse and Posse: A Comparison of Divine Eternal Laws and Powers [London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1872], p. 252)

In 1880, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne used the term in a dig at Carlyle. I can't resist quoting the whole intriguing passage:

Four principles of thought, we may say, are here impeached and impugned: a double enemy is assailed by the lover of faith and reason, love and hope, in the militant materialism of Papists and Positivists; by the lover of justice and mercy, humanity and freedom, in the Catholic philosophy of de Maistre and the Calvinistic misosophy of Carlyle. And if the sarcasms on theology seem to any reader more keen and violent than the satire on any other form of unbelief or infidelity to the truth as here conceived, he should remember that superstition with a lining of materialism is surely a worse thing than materialism stark naked; and that while it is palpably possible to be a materialist without being a Christian, it is implicitly impossible to be a Christian without being a materialist. ("Victor Hugo: Religions et Religion," Fortnightly Review no. 162 [June 1, 1880], p. 763)

WHEW! A few years later, Henry Hayman slaps the label on German pessimism, especially the thought of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. ("Pessimism," The Churchman No. 62 [November, 1884], pp. 113-125, at p. 124)

In these late 19th-Century cases, the authors take themselves not to be introducing a new word when they use "misosophy," unlike some later authors. For example, the word was re-invented (or reconstructed from the ancient Greek roots) by the Congregationalist theologian Peter Taylor Forsyth in 1915. He wrote, "Its Christianity has at heart always protested against its philosophy, or rather, if one may coin a word, its misosophy." (P. T. Forsyth, "Faith, Metaphysic, and Incarnation," The Methodist Review [September, 1915], p. 701) 

I cannot tell whether Gilbert Ryle thought he was coining a new term when he wrote the following: "A fraternity of persons of kindred credulities could only constitute a school of 'misosophy'." ('Taking Sides in Philosophy,' Philosophy 12 [Jul., 1937]: 317-332, at 318-319) His decision to flag the term with quotation marks suggests that he might have (thanks to Bernard Kobes for this observation).

Seyyed Hossein Nasr attributes the coinage of the word (or of its German equivalent) to Hermann Türck, a 19th-Century critic of Nietzsche. Here's Nasr:

The result has been the creation of philosophies which, from the traditional point of view, could only be called monstrous and which can only be characterized as what the German scholar H. Türck has called 'misosophy', that is, the hatred rather than love of wisdom and which others have considered as 'antiphilosophy'. (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred: Revisioning Academic Accountability, State University of New York Press [19889], p. 43)

Türck did this in applying the term to his opponents (Nietzsche, Stirner, and Ibsen), contrasting these putative egoists with persons of true genius.

In The Way of Phenomenology, (Pegasus [1970], p. 23, n. 4) Richard M. Zaner credits Gabriel Marcel with inventing the word. Zaner cites Marcel's book Man against Mass Society. (Regnery, [1952], trans. G. S. Fraser) Marcel's book (Les hommes contre l'humain) appeared first in French in 1951. (La Colombe) Since the libraries are closed, I cannot find hard copies of Marcel's book (in translation or in the original French), so it is difficult to determine what Marcel wrote. Based on some web searching, Marcel seems to have written (in G. S. Fraser's translation) of a

civilization in which technical progress is tending to emancipate itself more and more from speculative knowledge, and finally to question the traditional rights of speculative knowledge, a civilization which, one may say, finally denies the place of contemplation and shuts out the very possibility of contemplation, such a civilization, I say, sets us inevitably on the road towards a philosophy which is not so much a love of wisdom as a hatred of wisdom: we ought rather to call it a misosophy. (Man Against Mass Society, p. 48)

Finally, there is Gilles Deleuze's remark in his 1968 book Différence et répétition: "Everything begins with misosophy." (Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, [1994])

Thomas Dewar ('Harry') Weldon

In WWII, philosopher T. D. Weldon was Sir Arthur ('Bomber') Harris' assistant in Bomber Command. He helped Harris formulate the arguments and draft the documents that would promote the program of area bombing. Weldon was also a philosophy tutor in Magdalen College at Oxford University.

My interest in Weldon was piqued by C. S. Lewis' description of him. Lewis and Weldon were colleagues at Magdalen. They seem not to have been fond of each other. Here's some of what Lewis has to say about Weldon:

...determined to be a villain. ... a frequent and loud laugher .... carries a great deal of liquor without being drunk. ... He is insolent by custom to servants and to old men .... He has great abilities, but would despise himself if he wasted them on disinterested undertakings. He gives no quarter and would ask none. He believes that he has seen through everything and lives at rock bottom. ... Contempt is his ruling passion: courage his chief virtue. (Lewis, All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927, ed. Walter Hooper [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991], pp. 482-3)

Lewis modeled a fictional character partly on Weldon in two scifi novels, Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength. The character in question is Dick Devine (aka Lord Feverstone), who is supposed to reflect Weldon's atheism and rationalism (in the loose and popular sense).

Before teaching at Oxford, Weldon served on the western front in WWI. He joined the Royal Field Artillery in France in 1915. From humble beginnings, Weldon was promoted to the rank of 'acting captain' ^{('Weldon, Thomas Dewar (1896–1958),' Mark J. Schofield in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Lawrence Goldman [Oxford: OUP, 2004[)}. He was wounded and awarded 'the Military Cross and bar' ^(Ibid.). According to R. W. Johnson, 'Those familiar with the mores of the British Army will recognize that this meant that he was quite insanely brave and clearly on the verge of a Victoria Cross' ^{(Johnson, 'Exploring the Secret Garden', chap. 4 in Look Back in Laughter: Oxford's Postwar Golden Age [Newbury, UK: Threshold Press, 2015])}

Weldon was a philosophy tutor at Magdalen College from 1922 until his death in 1958. He was known to have a good rapport with his students. According to the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was 'not only accessible but also hospitable to his students, rewarding their efforts with a glass of sherry or a tankard of beer.' ^{('Weldon', Schofield, ODNB)} (Weldon was a drinker. Another student, Robert Paul Wolff, recounts a discussion with a 'clearly inebriated' Weldon.) One of Weldon's more well known students was John ('Jack') Frederick Wolfenden, Baron Wolfenden of the Wolfenden Report. Weldon was the godfather of Baron Wolfenden's son, the brilliant, tragic journalist and spy Jeremy Wolfenden. (Incidentally, in his biography of Wolfenden (the younger), Sebastian Faulks says that Weldon took the nickname 'Harry' from a 'music-hall comedian' ^{(Faulks, The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives, [NY: Vintage, 2002], p. 212)}.)

In WWII,  Weldon worked in the civil service from 1939 until 1942, at which time he became Sir Arthur Harris' Personal Staff Officer at Bomber Command. ^{('Weldon', Schofield, ODNB)} Wing Commander Weldon was tasked with defending Bomber Harris' program of bombing German cities. The program had been challenged by a Cabinet Minister and Christian socialist, Sir Stafford Cripps. On Dec. 8, 1944, Cripps gave a lecture at Bomber Command Headquarters, in which he condemned area bombing as a decidedly un-Christian thing to do. Harris wasn't there, but the officers who attended the lecture were quite put out. In response, Harris had Weldon give a lecture the following night in defense of area bombing. ^{(Jonathan Glover, Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001], p. 86)} In his lecture, 'The Ethics of Bombing', Weldon denied that area bombing was terrorism, arguing that its purpose was to save lives by shortening the war. (My information about Weldon's lecture is drawn from Glover's above-cited book and from David I. Hall, '“Black, White and Grey”: Wartime Arguments for and against the Strategic Bomber Offensive', Canadian Military History 7 [1998]: 7-19). Among Weldon's critics at the time was the Rev. John Collins, the Anglican chaplain at Bomber Command who referred to Weldon's talk as the 'bombing of ethics' (and who would later be instrumental in forming the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). (C. S. Lewis also was opposed to Harris' policy.)

It's odd that Weldon should have resorted to such a rationale, for he appears to have been a Kantian. A. J. Ayer characterized him as such. Actually, what Ayer says (in the course of explaining why neither he nor J. L. Austin won the John Locke Prize in 1933) is that Weldon was 'a Fellow of Magdalen, who was later to become an inflexible linguistic philosopher but was then an orthodox Kantian'. ^{(Ayer, Part of My Life [London: Collins, 1977], p. 152)} So, Weldon was an orthodox Kantian in 1933 but might not have been by the time WWII rolled around. Also, while Weldon was in some sense a Kantian, I don't know if he ever endorsed Kantian ethics.

There's a consensus among those who have written about him that Weldon was psychologically maimed by his battle-field experience in WWI. This comes through in C. S. Lewis' characterization of Weldon (as one who had the air of having 'seen through everything and [who] lived at rock bottom') as well as in a note about Weldon by a former student (Canadian-born Anthony King). R. W. Johnson says that Weldon 'was a man of steel who, in both wars, had had to face appalling situations and ultimate questions'. ^{(Johnson, Ibid)} Perhaps, then, Weldon's willingness to advocate area bombing was a case of brutalized (in WWI) and brutalizing (in WWII). Kantian and other alternatives to utilitarianism were fine for discussions at Magdalen College, but in the horrifying world of 20th-century warfare, it's massacre or be massacred.The anger, the drinking, talk of a suicide (though that's disputed)* -- today, Weldon would be in treatment for PTSD. In his day, he was wheeled out as a mouthpiece for the designers of terror bombing.

A few more notes about Weldon:

His Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ^{(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1945)} was enlarged and republished 1958 under a shortened title (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason). R. G. Collingwood (for whom Weldon had been a teaching assistant) appears to have refereed the 1945 version of Weldon's Kant book -- at least, he expressed approval for the text in a letter that he wrote to Clarendon Press in 1939 (Nov. 17), where Collingwood wrote that the book 'tackles the subject in the one and only right way, i.e. as an historical subject'. ^{(R. G. Collingwood: A Research Companion, James Connelly, Peter Johnson, and Stephen Leach [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015], p. 90)}

Weldon was active in the administration of Magdalen. Margaret Simons reports that he 'was, according to his biographers, responsible not only for forming the Modern Greats curriculum, but also for transforming Magdalen from an easygoing place, in which wealth and family position were key selection criteria, to an academic meritocracy'.

On Weldon's death, Ayer says that Gilbert Ryle had intended to drive to Venice with 'his friend Harry Weldon' to attend the 12th International Congress of Philosophy in 1958, but Weldon died, and Ryle invited Ayer 'to take his [Weldon's] place'. ^{(Ayer, More of My Life [London: Collins, 1984], p. 157)}

*The official cause of death was a brain hemorrhage.

Links on Jane Austen's moral philosophy

Thomas Rodham on Austen as a moral philosopher. (Here's Rodham's earlier post on Austen at his blog, Philosopher's Beard.)

Rose Woodhouse responds to Rodham's claim that Austen's insights as a virtue ethicist came 'at the expense of psychological insight'.

Sarah Emsley's book, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, is reviewed by Peter Graham.

Maria Comanescu on 'Aristotelian Happiness in Jane Austen's Novels'.

From Alice MacLachlan's review of E. M. Dadlez' Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume:

Many philosophers, most famously Gilbert Ryle and Alastair MacIntyre, have argued for an Aristotelian reading of Austen: in doing so, they draw on themes of moderation, the importance of habituation, the happiness that comes from practicing virtue with moderate resources, and the role granted to pleasure in the good life. Dadlez grants these Aristotelian elements in Austen, but argues that insofar as they are present in Austen, they are also present in Hume.

From Karen Stohr's 'Practical Wisdom and Moral Imagination in Sense and Sensibility' (pay wall, via Muse): 'I shall use Austen's Sense and Sensibility to examine the skill associated with knowing how to behave rightly in the sense we associate with propriety or decorum. This skill is essential to pleasant social life, and hence, on the Aristotelian view, to human flourishing.' Stohr's paper is in Philosophy and Literature, a search of which turns up several more papers on Austen and philosophy.

Mark Canuel focuses on the character of Fanny in Mansfield Park in 'Jane Austen and the Importance of Being Wrong' (pay wall, via JSTOR).

Philosophy professor Theodore M. Benditt on 'Fanny's Moral Limits'.

Sticking with Mansfield Park, Lorrie Clark follows up Ryle's suggestion (in 'Jane Austen and the Moralists' [pdf]) that Austen's novels take a stance similar to Shaftesbury's moral philosophy: Shaftesbury's Art of "Soliloquy" in Mansfield Park.

In his 'Jane Austen: a Female Aristotelian' (pay wall, via Sage), John Ely says, 'Through her novels, she reforms an Aristotelian ethics. She Christianizes it-again largely following the influence of Shaftesbury.'

On Austen's religious stance, here's a review (to which I liked in an earlier post) of L. M. White's Jane Austen's Anglicanism.

Siris thinks the relevance of Shaftesbury is overestimated.

In his After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre compared Austen with William Cobbett. There's an essay by MacIntyre called 'Jane Austen, William Cobbett, and Jacobin Virtues' in this study guide for Mansfield Park (published by Ignatius Press). I can't identify its provenance.

Sarah Emsley on Mansfield Park.

In 2010, Joyce Kerr Tarpley published (with Catholic University of America Press) Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

Eric Lindstrom in 'Austen and Austin' (pay wall, via T & F): 'Not until [J. L.] Austin's bracingly unconventional lectures were collected as a series of extraordinary books in the mid-twentieth century – a list that also includes his collection Philosophical Papers and the Austen-inspired Sense and Sensibilia – did Jane Austen's novels receive a philosophical counterpart adequate to her works' philosophical energies.'

A new collection on Austen's aesthetics from Rowman & Littlefield:

The essays collected in Jane Austen and the Arts; Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony examine Austen’s understanding of the arts, her aesthetic philosophy, and her role as artist. Together, they explore Austen’s connections with Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Madame de Staël, Joanna Baillie, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, and other writers engaged in debates on the sensuous experience and the intellectual judgment of art.

In 2004, Cambridge University Press published Peter Knox-Shaw's Jane Austen and the Enlightenment, which is the focus of this brief review.

Links to scintillating excogitations, largely Wittgensteinian

Rose Rand, who was born in Lemberg and moved to Austria, where she was a member of the Vienna Circle, and fled to England in 1939 with Susan Stebbing's help.

From the BBC: Raymond Tallis and Ray Monk on Wittgenstein (it starts about 57 seconds into the audio file). From the BBC in 2003, Melvyn Bragg interviews Monk, Barry Smith, and Marie McGinn about Wittgenstein.

Arthur W. Collins reviews Paul Horwich's book Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy.

Andrew Lugg reviews Wittgenstein's Tractatus: History and Interpretation (ed. Sullivan & Potter).

Matthew Frost's notes on his continuing project of translating Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

Duncan Richter's two posts about Tractarian elucidation.

Reshef Agam-Segal on 'thinking and willing subjects in the Tractatus'.

Philip Cartwright on propositional form.

From last March, Lars Hertzberg on talking (non)sense about nonsense (good comment thread), and a follow-up (with further interesting comments).

Duncan Richter's two posts about Wittgenstein on 'good'.

Gavin Kitching on Rupert Read's Wittgenstein Among the Sciences.

'Why on earth is it so difficult to describe the Contents of my Consciousness?'

A. C. Grayling on 'Wittgenstein on Scepticism and Certainty'.

Henrik Lagerlund's 'Science and Reason', Part 1 ('Rationality of Modern Science') and Part 2 ('Pessimism and the Myth of Progress') -- lots on G. H. von Wright.

From Siris -- 'In Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy'.

Last May and June, SOH-Dan put up several posts on Dummett's Frege, McDowell on cog-sci, and Sebastian Rödl on Kant's first analogy.

MWQ quotes a lengthy passage from Steven Tester's new translation of Lichtenberg. The quoted passage focuses on Lichtenberg's philosophy of mind. Here's one of my favourite passages from Lichtenberg; it's about the mind-body relation and seems to anticipate Ryle's 'ghost in the machine':

Long before we could explain the common phenomena of the physical world we ventured to explain them through the agency of spirits. Now [that] we know better how they are linked together we explain one phenomenon by means of another; but we nonetheless have two spirits left to us, a god and a soul. The soul is thus even now, as it were, the ghost that haunts our body’s fragile frame. (G. C. Lichtenberg, c. 1776; trans. R. J. Hollingdale)

The Stanford Encyclopedia finally has entries for Moritz Schlick and Heinrich Rickert. Still no entries for Sir William Hamilton, Wilhelm Windelband (who influenced not only Rickert and Max Weber but also Samuel Beckett), Georg Simmel, Susan Stebbing, Friedrich Waismann, Rudolf Carnap (!), Ruth Barcan Marcus (!), William Dray, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley (though they're of course referred to in other entries). I don't mean this to be any strong criticism of the editors, who have likely already commissioned entries for many of the above-named figures. I know that the editors have launched an initiative to give more coverage to female philosophers.

Philosopher's Zone interviews Simon Blackburn about human nature; and Hubert Dreyfus and David Deutsch on AI. Here's Blackburn's Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture (also available here).
 

Common Sense & Uncommon Sensibility

Gilbert Ryle, whose 'ordinary language' philosophy championed common sense (and whose physician brother invented the Ryle Tube). Peter Smith of Logic Matters has posted Ryle's paper on Jane Austen, 'Jane Austen and the Moralists'

Chris Power on Bruno Schulz's short stories, and John Self on Schulz's Street of Crocodiles

Mr. Waggish on Thomas Bernhard's nihilistic ranting evasions 

Philip Lopate on a new collection of Bernhard's addresses, My Prizes: An Accounting: "No one could be less accepting of the human condition, and so [Bernhard] tells the awards audiences that they are in for a future of endless cold, that life is meaningless and that Austrians are apathetic, megalomaniac, monotonous. Strangely, these speeches did not go over well."

E. M. Cioran 'belongs to the tradition of French and especially German aphorists, like Lichtenberg, Novalis, and finally Nietzsche.' According to the linked article (in The Hindu), Cioran regarded Meister Eckhart as the 'profoundest thinker of the Occident.'

Sean Kelly on 'navigating past nihilism'

A new biography of Romain Gary

Charles Taylor on 'The Meaning of Secularism'

From 2005, 'Schiller's relevance for us and for all times'