Alan Donagan and Melbourne Philosophy Stephen Toulmin Ethics, Vol. 104, No. 1. (Oct., 1993), pp. 143-147. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0014-1704%28199310%29104%3A1%3C143%3AADAMP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4 Ethics is currently published by The University of Chicago Press.
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Alan Donagan and Melbourne Philosophy Stephen Toulmin Throughout his career, Alan Donagan was his own person-never ready to take up a philosophical position for partisan reasons, always determined to test new ideas and doctrines on his own pulse. So his friends and readers never found his views easy to label. He hung out in youth with people much influenced by Wittgenstein, yet his sympathetic reading of Wittgenstein was too measured to make him a Wittgensteinian; he had a far more solidly based understanding than most of his contemporaries of the merits of Collingwood, yet he was no Collingwoodian; his careful reading of Aquinas gave him an appreciation for Thomas's analysis of moral and theological issues, yet Alan was too little seduced by the charms of "system" ever to be a full-scale Thomist; nor can we even call him a Kantian without laying him open to misinterpretation. All the same, he was introduced to academic philosophy at a lucky place and time. Through a coincidence of two distinct historical accidents, the Philosophy Department at the University of Melbourne, in the 1940s, was the focus of a vigorous conversation and a great place to be drawn into the traditions of philosophical literature and debate. This conversation began early in World War 11, with the arrival from Cambridge of a newly appointed lecturer in philosophy. This was George Paul, who was at Ludwig Wittgenstein's classes in the late 1930s, married the sister of the late Frank Ramsey, and took a job at Melbourne while aspiring to win a research fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. But it developed a full head of steam a couple of years later, when George Paul was confronted by a lively group of immigrants from Central Europe-not least, from Vienna-several of whom were already well along in their study of law or the natural sciences, as well as philosophy. George Paul himself was a fine teacher-though others, notably Kurt Baier, can speak about this from a first-hand knowledge I do not claim. Traveling on the ship to Melbourne, he spent his time putting the last touches on a fellowship dissertation that he planned to send Ethics 104 (October 1993): 143- 147 O 1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/94/0401-0224$01.OO
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to Cambridge on arrival; but, by late 1939, the war was well under way, and the Australian Post Office no longer accepted civilian packages for Britain. So he spent the war and the years immediately after teaching a lively group of students, to whom he conveyed something of his feeling for Wittgenstein's way of "dissolving" problems in philosophy-the feeling we can recapture by reading the paper, "Is There a Problem about Sense-Data?" as reprinted in Antony Flew's first volume of Essays on Logic and Langxage ([Oxford: Blackwell, 19511, pp. 101-16). (Paul's later career as a philosophy tutor at University College, Oxford, and his tragically early death, are another story.) Who were George Paul's students at Melbourne? Many of them were the cream of the undergraduate crop from Victoria itself: at this time, the University of Melbourne was the sole state university. But, at the core, was a group of Germans and Austrians who had chanced to go to Australia at the height of the war, having been first interned in Britain as a "threat to national security" and later deported to get them out of the way. The fact that many of them were from Jewish families and had well-established records as anti-Nazis, was not enough to save them from being deported-or, as we might say with greater historical resonance, "transported." In the early years of World War 11, it did no one in Britain any good to be prematurely anti-Fascist. The political and social divisions generated by the events of the Spanish Civil War were still influential, and even Winston Churchill-as a Conservative Prime Minister-could afford to take no chances. Reaching Australia, the internees were initially taken to a camp far inland, at Hay, in Western New South Wales. But, after a while, it was so clear that they could do no harm that they were allowed to move to Melbourne and resume normal civilian lives. There-among others from Europe-Kurt Baier and Gerd Buchdahl, Peter Herbst and David Falk found themselves working in the Melbourne philosophy department along with such Australian-born students as Camo Jackson, Don Gunner, Bruce Benjamin, Michael Scriven, and Alan Donagan. They were exposed to the impact of "analytical" philosophy in its most vigorous, original and creative stage. Cambridge, not Oxford, was the nursery of this movement, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell its two very different patrons. The freewheeling style of Cambridge thought, exemplified at its best in Alan Turing, was the seedbed in which analytical philosophy developed: its ideas and methods were, for the most part, taken up in the scholastic milieu of Oxford only after 1945. (John Wisdom, the last of the prewar Cambridge generation, has never been justly appreciated by more stereotyped philosophical analysts.) When Moore reached retirement, all the obvious local candidates to succeed him in the Philosophy Chair at Cambridge offered to with-
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draw in favor of Wittgenstein, who was duly appointed. There ensued a classic intellectual battle, between survivors of the period between the wars, such as C. D. Broad and A. C. Ewing-who continued to pose philosophical questions in the hope of finding analytical answers in the style of Russell or early Moore-and Wittgenstein's own circle, among whom the very asking of philosophical questions was renounced, as symptomatic of fundamental confusions about language and philosophy. Returning to Cambridge in January 1946, I recall us being partly amazed, partly mystified, by Wittgenstein's approach. It struck us as an idiosyncratic product of true genius, which we had the unique chance to master and emulate, in all its unprecedented particularity. Forty years on, we see more clearly that this belief in the unprecedented originality of Wittgenstein's approach was an illusion: a product of historical myopia. True, from the time of RenC Descartes in the 1630s, the classical skepticism of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus in late Antiquity, and Michel de Montaigne as late as the 1580s, gave way to the "modern" skepticism of Descartes's Systematic Doubt-a position that earlier philosophers would have seen as "negative dogmatism" more than as any form of skepticism, properly so-called. Wittgenstein was a skeptic from the older, classical mold: for him, the philosopher's prime task was to help emancipate his hearers from the temptation to ask-let alone answer-philosophical questions. As is well known, Wittgenstein was happy to see his students give up any hope to make a career in philosophy, in favor of "useful" occupations like being a physician. This preference for the "humanly useful" he learned from Leo Tolstoy, who had shared Wittgenstein's misfortune of having been born into an excessively wealthy family, and it shaped his attitudes to the end. One day in late 1946, I met Dorothy Moore, the wife of G. E. Moore. She was walking her bicycle down Castle Hill in Cambridge and told me laughingly that she had just met Wittgenstein, who asked what she was doing, and he was overjoyed when she said that she-the wife of England's leading philosopher-was working in a local jam factory. (All was not lost in Bloomsbury!) If philosophers like George Paul or Camo Jackson-who like me sat in on Wittgenstein's last classes-never wrote at length about philosophy, they were thus more faithful to his teachings than I myself. Yet there is another feature of Wittgenstein's skepticism that helps us recognize why Alan Donagan was never as much of a convert to classical skepticism as Camo Jackson. Wittgenstein's Pyrrhonism covered only the theoretical aspect of philosophy: the systematic misunderstanding of language that in his view fuels our inclination to pursue answers to philosophical questions instead of renouncing the very temptation to ask them, keeps us trapped in the web of Cartesian
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foundationalism and other modes of abstract thought. ("Poor Broad," Wittgenstein remarked in a class in 1946-47, "thinks that Philosophy is the Physics of the Abstract.") So Wittgenstein's formal classes had little to do with ethics, or other branches of what earlier times had known as practical philosophy. True, Wittgenstein had as personal an attitude to moral as to philosophical issues; but this was closer to the attitude of Blaise Pascal than to that of Michel de Montaigne. Like Pascal, he would be happy to retire to Port Royal des Champs to repent of his sins-the sins of intellectual pride as much as any acts of moral omission or commission. He shared the anti-intellectualism of (say) Leo Tolstoy's approach to ethics, but he married it to a self-reproach that went even beyond Tolstoy's own. Yet there is no evidence that he ever reflected at length, in the practical context, on the specific moral problems that arise in the course of, for example, clinical medicine. He worked in hospitals in World War I1 and devised an ingenious new manometer, or instrument for measuring the pressures of bodily fluids, but his moral views remained, in the last resort, intuitive: closer to Kierkegaard's than to those of Tolstoy. As to the idea of a theory of ethics, he had no use for anything of that sort. His few writings on the subject are critical of G. E. Moore, as they might have been of moral philosophers from Henry More and Cudworth up to Sidgwick and his twentieth-century successors. All these writers had Platonist ("theoretical") ambitions for ethics; and, for Wittgenstein, it was enough to ridicule those ambitions. T o move into the field of substantive moral problems and decisions was, for Wittgenstein, to leave philosophy for a more personal field. So he remained ignorant of the Aristotelian tradition of "practical philosophy" that had been set aside after 1630. Coming to philosophy from law, by contrast, Alan Donagan had a deep feeling for the practical aspects of our intellectual tradition, not in jurisprudence only, but also in what we might (inelegantly) call morisprudence: conceptual issues that arise out of practical reflection on moral, as much as juridical, issues. As is clear from the terms themselves, both sets of issues belong to the broad field of phronesis-what Cicero calls prudentia or "prudencem-not to episteme-or "theory." As such, they avoid the whole dialectic of "theoretical" philosophy that began in Descartes and achieved its skeptical resolution in Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Rorty. In the light of this contrast between theory and practice, Alan Donagan's interest in the work of R. G. Collingwood hardly needs explaining. Notoriously, the boundary within which Wittgenstein confined philosophy left out all serious concern for history. ("What is History to me?" he inquires, "Mine is the first and only World!" [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914-1 916 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), p. 82el) Thinkers less inclined to solipsism are readier to take seriously the possibility that-aside from all the conceptual problems that afflict
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us at particular times-human thought and reasoning have a history that is not just a matter of happenstance but can also give us material for philosophical reflection. This concern with the philosophy of history, and Collingwood, I share with Alan in retrospect. He also gave me the courage to trust my belief that a history of common morality could be a legitimate object of philosophical analysis, as much as the history of common law. So, for all George Paul's influence on the students at Melbourne, Alan's commitments to the history of law and ethics meant that he could never be a Compleat Wittgensteinian. I n this too he stayed close to, and true to, the deepest roots of his own thought and his own self.
