[lit-ideas] Welcome to "Ivory Towers, Ltd.": Summer School in Indochina

REAL ESTATE NOVELTY IN THE MIDDLE OF TOKYO
 
 
The Ivory Towers and the Sex Going On _Inside_
 
Ivy League?
 
Walls of Stone, not Redbrick
 
McCreery:
 
>when I write about the ivory tower, 
 
he is thinking of 'vendimia' in Toscana -- and the way they make wine  there, 
or something.
 
>the life from which I offer my interjections, hoping to learn something 
>from the way our philosophers respond to them. 
 
I've never been to an ivory tower. Personally I'd feel the vertigo:
 
 
            1)  first, Anglo-Saxons never liked towers, and recall I'm an 
Anglican.
            2) I  find 'ivory' tacky.
 
Grice once said,
 
"Problem is people envy that we went to the right schools and learned the  
right languages: Greek and Latin; so, unlike Shakespeare, *we* _can_ make the  
right distinctions worth making. Trust the fact that our garrison is walls of  
stone, not redbrick, will stimulate in the wrong sense of stimulate people 
like  GELLNER!"
 
(In 'The Life of Opinions of H. P. Grice", in _GRICE_ (Clarendon Press). 
 
GELLNER was this French Jewish emigre who had written against 'Oxford'. The  
only _prestige_ or prerrogative the Oxonians are claiming for theirselves 
[sic]  is that they've been through 6 years in the 'public' school with parsing 
and  grammatical categorising in good ole Latin, have examined with the ease of 
the  gentle classes the meaningful distinctions between different expressions 
used by  Demosthenes and Cicero, and now feel VERY irritated when they hear an 
English  translation of Heidegger! (Have you noticed that some translations 
are so BAD  they don't even now care to say who the Translator Is? (c) 
Harcourt-Brace,  say.
 
That talent for linguistic 'botanizing' _may_ be an 'acquired' taste.  Either 
you acquire it in the public school or ... Anthony Kenny!
 
It also means a particular generation who found the garrison of the  
stone-wall stupidly closed during the Phoney War. What did they want to making  
Grice 
a Captain of the Royal Navy?! The days of Achilles were over; and he would  
rather be playing cricket for Oxfordshire! Still, war is war, and Every  
Englishman must do his duty. So for _five_ years the stone-walled garrison was  
_closed_.
 
This meant they had to start listening to the 'chattering' classes and read  
the Daily Telegraph and other silly things to see if, well, there was a blitz 
in  Berkeley Square! I gather than _without the Phoney War_ there would have 
been no  "linguistic revolution in Oxford philosophy", because the previous 
generation,  Ryle, were thought to _old_ to combat, and they did stay in the 
cottages till  the stone-walls opened their gates again for them.
 
When Grice was demobilized in 1946, he had been immersed in the language or  
propaganda, the overrhetorical speeches of Churchill ("We know we shall win")  
and the demolition of privilege. He himself had been a 'scholarship boy' from 
 the provinces -- and thus had been given in the pre-war years the expected 
place  for a 'province scholarship boy' from the Midland provinces: Corpus 
Christi --  not Chirst Church, or Magdalen, or All Souls. Hence he was not in 
the 
stone-wall  right building in the pre-war years (where Isaiah Berlin was 
discussing  positivism with Austin, Ayer, Hart, and Hampshire).
 
"Grice? I never saw him at All Souls!", Hampshire would say.
 
After the war, these 'tutors' felt the responsibility of tutoring slightly  
older tutees that had been mobilized also, and it's natural that they stuck to  
the field where they felt familiar with: distinctions in use, shades of 
meaning  ('nice shades of meaning' even), 'fine distinctions' -- BUT WITH THE 
DEMOTIC  idea that it applies to 'ordinary' (i.e. Mrs. Branwell's) use of 
English.
 
For surely Mrs Branwell will not say, "I am convinced the postman will  come, 
but then p'rhaps he shan't"
 
Philosophical explanation: Mrs Branwell is willing to assent to the  
prediction that the postman will come, which is a statement of fact she has 
more  than 
0.5 of subjective probability attached to it, and she feels disgraced  enough 
by the previous question, "Did you get the parcel yet?", that she can use  
'convince'. Then he realises good old Prichard (the postman) may be visiting 
his 
 farming parents, and decide otherwise -- seeing that his father is dying in  
Shropshire.
 
When Grice left Oxford -- and that was the death of Oxford ordinary  language 
philosophy -- and arrived in the New World, he started to  'overpopulate' his 
world of examples with other types: not the ordinary Mrs  Branwell of 
metroland, but butlers and lords, and mountain climbers, and  cricketers, and 
more 
butlers and some more lords and a few more sportsmen. He  felt the New World 
liberating in that he could come back to the pre-war years of  class and 
distinction where the 'ordinary language' was still unimpaired or  unvitiated 
by the 
state-protectionist, populist crowds which brought to demise  the prestige of 
the corridors of stone-wall powers of Anglo-Saxon 'liberal'  (i.e. 
conservative) England. But Berkeley opened for him like "the way the  Empire 
makes its 
way", and he was happy about it -- as he should.
 
Cheers,
 
J. L. Speranza
   Buenos Aires, Argentina.
 
              



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