Murdoch as Philosopher

 Long ago, in Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net, I read a passage that embarrassed me:

Dave does extramural work for the university, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave's pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to me a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave's pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key should be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave's pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding university vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that.

I found the passage uncomfortable, as depicting too clearly the attitude I then had toward philosophy. The character Dave is Dave Gellman, a philosopher, of which it is also said

Most of our conversations consisted of me saying something and Dave's saying he didn't understand me and my saying it again and Dave's getting very impatient. It took me some time to realize that when Dave said he didn't understand, what he meant was that what I said was nonsense.

At the time, I knew that Murdoch was a philosophy don. I had not read any of her philosophy, though. The other week I found and bought a copy of The Sovereignty of the Good. It is a book of about 100 pages, the first forty-some of which I had to read three times. I thought her arguments in general plausible, though I have the disadvantage of not wholly knowing the case she argued against: she mentions Stuart Hampshire, though the books of his she mentions are some years early than the ones I have read.

 The themes I picked out included: the difficulty of goodness; freedom as the matter of many small acts of attention, rather than as an arbitrary and unmotivated act in an otherwise determined world; art as a paradigm for attention to the world, not least because there is so much more bad art than good; love as another paradigm.

Counter Intelligence

 Most adult Americans have bought a car, or been with someone who has bought one, and know the mystifications practiced by dealerships, so that one is never quite sure what the actual cost is, and by the way did you want floor mats and the underbody sealed? Every new car sold in the US has a sticker on its window stating the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP), which is something. But dealerships do their best to keep one guessing on the real price. One can leave a dealership wondering whether any transaction could be more opaque. We have have found some that can.

We are renovating our kitchen, and have discovered that the price of countertop materials is a secret between the vendors, fabricators, and contractors. It would be something to have at least a rule of thumb ratio, giving the price of Corian compared to the price of granite, etc. Even that does not seem to be available through the vendors. I would not care if a) I suspected the prices to be reasonable, and b) the stores where the unpriced goods are on display were nearer than a thirty minute drive. But neither condition holds.

The whole business of home design and decoration seems to run on the principle that if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Large cities in the US have "design centers", which do not admit civilians unless accompanied by a designer. I gather also that companies can be stiff about sending samples to those who are not designers. Clearly some customers don't have to ask the prices, and the design magazines are full of their residences. Yet there are some not positively rich who want better than "builder grade", and would like to improve their dwellings, within their means, if only they could discover how far those means would go.

My wife considers that the practices of the design centers have dampened sales, and that the bad condition of American design magazines is evidence of this. Comparable English businesses seem to have no such restrictions, and their magazines, she says, continue to flourish.

Books and Covers

 Twenty-five or thirty years ago,  probably at an in-law's, I pulled a copy of The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss from the shelves. I looked into it, evidently at Chapter 2, and put it back on the shelf. The scene of a callow teacher failing to dominate a class of boys simply did not interest me. I wonder now whether the form of the book, a small Modern Library hardback (as I recall it) had some effect.

I wonder this because I bought a paperback copy at Carpe Librum on Friday at lunch time, and finished it yesterday evening. The setting is curiously foreign--set all but entirely in America, among persons speaking recognizably American English--but largely in Episcopalian boarding schools, or among rich families who would send their sons to one. A fair number fall into the category of those one is glad not to have met. The narrator, a man aspiring to and eventually joining the Episcopalian clergy, is not prepossessing. Yet the novel carries one along.

 Auchincloss wrote a memoir, which I read through at least once well before this. In the memoir he states that Frank Prescott, the rector, is based on the judge Learned Hand, not as some might have supposed Endicott Peabody, the founder of Groton. Peabody does make a cameo appearance in the novel, and gets a slighting mention. Clearly Peabody made a great impression on Auchincloss in his school days, but Auchincloss names Hand as the greatest man he had ever known.

 

German

 The last chapter in Gordon Craig's The Germans, "The Awful German Language" begins

In the days when Bismarck was the greatest man in Europe, an American visitor to Berlin, anxious to hear the Chancellor speak, procured two tickets to the visitors' gallery of the Reichstag and hired an interpreter to accompany her there. They were fortunate enough to arrive just before Bismarck intervened in a debate on a matter of social legislation, and the American pressed close to her interpreter's side so as to miss nothing of the translation. But although Bismarck spoke with considerable force and at some length, the interpreter's lips remained closed, and he was unresponsive to his employer's nudges. Unable to contain herself, she finally blurted, "What is he saying?" "Patience, madam," the interpreter answered, "I am waiting for the verb."

Craig of course quotes from the essay of Mark Twain's from which he took the title.  More seriously, he traces the history of the language from the days when Charles V said that German was fit only for speaking to horses and Martin Luther proved him wrong, up through Enlightenment clarity to Hegelian obscurity and beyond.