BY SEAN WALSH
First in a series of personal reflections on batshit philosophers.
Of all the philosophers I’ve worked with, known or met Elizabeth Anscombe was by far the most insane. Her husband, Peter Geach, takes silver. They were, by most accounts, an unusual conjunction. I do not know if they fell out over where to go on holiday or whose turn it was to take out the bins, but they did have a documented exegetical, and fierce, dispute regarding Aquinas’ concept of “connaturality”1. It is nowhere recorded if this put any strain on their eccentric but durable marriage.
Miss Anscombe, as she was invariably styled (even by Professor Geach), was born in Ireland in 1919 and is now dead. As is he, come to think of it.
She had studied Greats yet found her way into the Cambridge school of analytical philosophy. She became a favourite student of Ludwig Wittgenstein (she was his literary executor). Despite his influence, she certainly believed that philosophy was more than the “bewitchment of the intelligence by language”. This strange obsession to reduce metaphysics to a sort of conceptual crossword puzzle was, like spies and sodomy, very much a Cambridge thing back then2.
Her work took in themes in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, action theory and ethics. She was, and remains, influential in redeploying and restoring the concept of virtue in discussion of the moral life, which idea had become a victim of the post-Enlightenment taste for “numbers in all things” and the consequent, vulgar valorisation of the utilitarian approach. And other secular nonsenses.
For Anscombe a philosophy of the human character, a moral psychology if you like, is logically prior to a theory of what morality is or what makes this action good and that one bad. And because she was a Catholic (“militant” in some people’s eyes, “observant” in mine) this required attention to what theologians call the “natural law”, the divinely constructed conscience woven into every human being, whose instructions are often drowned out by distractions made possible by the Fall.
It is a strange thing, the truly Catholic mind, with its affection for supernaturalism and habit of sacralising the most seemingly normal of things. We seek the transcendent which lingers in the boring and mundane. You combine that with a talent for analytical philosophy, and its relentless movement from premise to syllogistically sound conclusion and that right there is a combustible admixture.
Perhaps for this reason, her academic writings (which were pretty dry truth be told) were constructed within an ambient framework of Catholic theology – more implied than stated. And perhaps also why her public life included well-reasoned dust-ups with police officers and religiously insensitive social workers.
I only spent a few hours in her company. It was in the early nineties, in Durham, at the annual Aristotelian Society weekend conference. I was there to give a paper to the graduate session (I think it was on the absurdity of Daniel Dennett’s recently published Consciousness Explained, an unaccountably revered waste of trees, referred to by some anti-reductionist wag as Consciousness Ignored but I digress). She was there just to be Miss Anscombe. Professor Geach was there, it seemed, to rage drunkenly in the student bar at some invisible (to us) interlocutor over some technical point in philosophical logic. Thinking back, it was possible he was picking a fight with his own guardian angel.
For some reason, chance probably, I was seated next to Miss Anscombe during the lunch break on the Saturday. Prior to the meal she berated the waitress over the sign on the table which just said “Aristotelians” (another quite separate delegation was lunching at the same time, a parallel conference). She was, she insisted with more stridency than was necessary, most emphatically not an Aristotelian and objected to the misrepresentation. Which was baffling straight off, because she arguably very much was one.
During the meal, when I chose to ask her views on Saul Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s “private language argument”3 she decided to answer with an uncomfortably detailed description of a gastric event from the previous evening. This was not your run-of-the-mill High Table engagement, it occurred to me.
She then changed gear (up or down, your call) to animadvert about the global Ponzi scheme and when (not whether) the credit crunch would come; the quiet ascendancy of China as a superpower; van Balthasar’s views on the possibility of universal salvation4 ; and miscellaneous Girton College scuttlebutt.
All the time reminding me of Beryl Reid’s Circus chief researcher, Connie Sacks.
At no time in those three hours did she say anything remotely sane, or indeed boring. And it occurred to me that she was doubtless as nuts with Wittgenstein as she had been with this upstart emissary from the first red brick university.
1 A form of knowledge achieved not on the basis of pure reason but through charitable or sympathetic engagement with its object.
2 And not just at Cambridge to be fair. Fetishism in sexual matters, political subversion, and philosophy was vogueish also at Oxford at about the same time.
3 In essence, Wittgenstein denies that if there are purely private mental states we would have no way of talking about them. Kripke’s treatment of the argument remains controversial.
4 The “possibility” in question being logical. She thought it involved a contradiction.