[lit-ideas] Stuart Hampshire
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 12:04:36 EDT
From the Daily Telegraph
June 29 2004.
Professor Sir Stuart Hampshire
Sir Stuart Hampshire, the philosopher who died on Sunday [June 13 2004] aged
89, was one of the anti-rationalist Oxford thinkers, others being Isaiah
Berlin and Bernard Williams, who gave a new direction to moral and political
thought in the post-war era.
Inspired by his study of the philosophy of Spinoza, Hampshire developed a
description of the conditions necessary for human action, suggesting that
human
freedom can best be understood by examining the distinction between the
declaration of what one intends to do and a prediction of what one is likely
to
do given one's genetic and social conditioning.
In his Ethics, Spinoza had argued that the individual could not be
considered "free" if he was motivated only by causes of which he remained
unaware.
Genuine freedom, Spinoza suggested, comes only when we learn self-consciously
to
recognise the influence of our baser passions over our natures. Only then
can we strive for the peace of mind that comes through an impartial attachment
to reason.
Developing Spinoza's ideas, Hampshire argued that concepts in moral
philosophy could not be separated logically from human capacity for
self-conscious
introspective thought. Although he accepted the behaviourist position that a
person's inclinations are the result of experiences in early childhood, and
are
thus partly historically and genetically conditioned, he argued that a
degree of control over those inclinations - and therefore freedom of action -
could be obtained through an understanding of that conditioning. Any theory of
ethics, he argued, must take account of the possibility of a self-conscious
decision not to follow the course ordained. Such ideas, implicitly rejecting
Marxist determinism, might have seemed odd coming from someone who described
himself as a socialist; and while he borrowed some of Spinoza's psychological
insight, he implicitly rejected his faith in the power of reason.
Hampshire had a horror of the moral certainties of Left and Right from his
time in British intelligence during the Second World War. He valued freedom
over equality and rejected the classical philosophical tradition that set up
reason as an absolute arbiter of disputes. Nor did he believe that liberal or
socialist values had any special moral or historical significance, regarding
all claims to moral universality as bogus.
His distrust of those who believe that they alone have a monopoly on truth
led him to examine, in his later years, how justice could be done and seen to
be done in a pluralist society. In Justice is Conflict (1999), Hampshire
acknowledged that it is inevitable that people should hold irreconcilable views
-
on, say, the morality of warfare or abortion or even whether a motorway
should be built through a beautiful valley. The popular idea that politicians
should aim to find consensus on such issues, he suggested, was not only
misguided
but wrong. Conflict presumes the right to question authority and is a
fundamental safeguard against tyranny.
Instead of consensus, Hampshire argued, a free society should aim to perfect
the intermediate institutions that arbitrate between contending parties so
that all sides feel, whatever the eventual outcome, that they have been given
a fair hearing.
Stuart Newton Hampshire was born on October 1 1914 and was educated at
Repton and at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a First in
Greats in 1936. Elected to a fellowship at All Soul's the same year, he became
a
lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford before serving in Army Intelligence during
the Second World War.
In late 1942, working in the Radio Security Service which monitored the
radio links of Nazi spies, Hampshire was said to be one of the authors of a
study
suggesting a growing rift between the German General Staff and the Nazi
regime. Its central premise was that the war in Europe could be ended if the
British government gave the German General Staff an incentive to launch a
coup.
The report, endorsed by all the junior officials who read it, including Hugh
Trevor-Roper (the historian Lord Dacre), was submitted for security
clearance to Section-5 Deputy Chief Kim Philby who forbade its circulation,
insisting
that it was "mere speculation". Trevor-Roper later recalled that he and his
colleagues were baffled by Philby's intransigence, though in retrospect he
surmised that it was not in the Russian interest for the Western Allies to
support the German opposition to Hitler while the Red Army was still too far
away
to gain a foothold.
Given his role in this affair, it was somewhat ironic that, during the
1980s, Hampshire himself, who had experience of both MI 5 and MI 6, was
revealed
to have been investigated as a possible Soviet agent, having been interviewed
in 1965. He had been a friend of Guy Burgess, with whom he had worked in the
private office of Hector McNeil when McNeil was under-secretary at the
Foreign Office in 1945, and in the early 1960s was named as an alleged spy by
Goronwy Rees, a member of the Blunt-Burgess circle and himself under
suspicion.
Embarrassingly for MI 5, when Rees made his allegation, Hampshire was busy
conducting an in-depth review of the GCHQ eavesdropping network at Cheltenham.
Although, in the end, he was cleared of all suspicion, there was embarrassment
when it later emerged that MI 5 had allowed him to complete his work at GCHQ
with a question mark still hanging over him.
Hampshire later recalled that in 1938 Burgess had made what seemed, with
hindsight, to be a half-hearted attempt to recruit him: "He might have said
something about working for peace," Hampshire said. "I thought it was just Guy
going on. It was only in retrospect that I thought it might have been
something
more sinister."
Certainly Hampshire never showed any sympathy for Soviet Communism. In 1980
he became the founder chairman of the Jan Hus Educational Trust, a charitable
foundation named after the Czech hero and martyr who in 1415 founded a
movement within the Roman Catholic Church against its corruption and tyranny.
Set
up to "help the flow of information and the development of culture in
Czechoslovakia", the trust did much to keep the spirit of independent thought
alive
in that country before the fall of Communism. After the war, Hampshire
returned to his studies as a tutor and lecturer in philosophy at Oxford, where
he
spent five years as domestic bursar and research fellow at All Souls, and at
University College, London, where he became Grote Professor in 1959, succeeding
A J Ayer.
In 1963 he went to Princeton University and in 1964 became chairman of the
philosophy department. In 1970 he was elected Warden of Wadham College,
Oxford, succeeding Sir Maurice Bowra, and from 1984 to 1990 was professor of
philosophy at Stanford University.
In 1951, Hampshire published his detailed study of Spinoza, whose influence
is apparent in his subsequent philosophical works Thought and Action (1959);
Freedom of the Individual (1965); and Freedom of Mind and Other Essays
(1971).
His growing interest in the distinction between the public and private
realms is seen in Public and Private Morality, which he edited in 1978, and in
which philosophers discussed the question, posed most strikingly by
Machiavelli,
of how far the same principles can be applied to public and private
morality.
He returned to the theme in Morality and Conflict (1983); Innocence and
Experience (1989), in which he examined the possibility of a universal ethics
based on a minimal conception of justice; and Justice is Conflict (1999).
Stuart Hampshire was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1960 and
knighted in 1979.
He married, first in 1961, Renee Ayer, the former wife of the philosopher A
J Ayer. She died in 1980, and he married secondly, in 1985, Nancy Cartwright,
Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the LSE, with whom
he had two daughters.
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