[lit-ideas] Welcome to "Ivory Towers, Ltd.": Summer School in Indochina
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 07:58:05 EST
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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