The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry 9781474256360, 9781350091542, 9781474256391, 9781474256384

Citation preview

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Maurice O’Connor Drury, photographed by Wittgenstein in 1936 when he visited Drury in Dublin together with Francis Skinner. The next day we were in Woolworth’s for some purchases. Wittgenstein noticed some cheap little cameras: ‘What fun it would be to take some snaps of each other’. So he insisted on buying three cameras one for each of us. (Cons., p. 110) Wittgenstein kept this photo of Drury together with a great number of other photos he had taken which were given to Ben Richards after Wittgenstein’s death by Elizabeth Anscombe. This image is now part and copyright of the Wittgenstein Archive Cambridge, reprinted here with their kind permission. Source: Michael Nedo

Also available from Bloomsbury: Applying Wittgenstein Rupert Read (edited by Laura Cook) Beauty and the End of Art: Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception Sonia Sedivy Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips Mikel Burley Portraits of Wittgenstein edited by F. A. Flowers III and Ian Ground

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

ON WITTGENSTEIN, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION AND PSYCHIATRY Maurice O’Connor Drury Edited and introduced by John Hayes

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2017 This edition published 2019 Copyright © Estate of Maurice O’Connor Drury, 2017, 2019 The estate of Maurice O’Connor Drury has asserted its right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Editorial content and Introduction © John Hayes, 2017, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. John Hayes has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editor of this work. Cover design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Luke O’Connor Drury All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Drury, M. O’C. (Maurice O’Connor), author. | Hayes, John (Professor of Philosophy), editor. Title: The selected writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: on Wittgenstein, philosophy, religion, and psychiatry / Maurice O’Connor Drury; edited and introduced by John Hayes. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017010884| ISBN 9781474256360 (hb) | ISBN 9781474256384 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. | Psychiatry. | Science–Philosophy. | Religion and science. Classification: LCC RC458 .D79 2017 | DDC 616.89–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010884 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5636-0  PB: 978-1-3500-9154-2  ePDF: 978-1-4742-5638-4 ePub: 978-1-4742-5637-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Paul Drury (1957-2015) for deepening understanding and enabling action. Ar dheis lámh Dé go raibh a anam dílis In poverty…and in the other misfortunes men think friends are the only refuge. Moreover, the young need it to keep them from error. The old need it to care for them and support the actions that fail because of weakness. And those in their prime need it, to do fine action; for “when two go together”, they are more capable of understanding and acting. (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1155a, 11-16. Terence Irwin, trans. (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett, 1985))

vi

CONTENTS

Foreword, by Ray Monk Preface

xiii

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Part I

ix xix xxiii

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls by John Hayes 1

Part II Drury’s Recollections of Wittgenstein Contribution to a BBC Symposium Conversations with Wittgenstein Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein Part III Drury’s Philosophical Writings The Method of Philosophy Letters to a Student of Philosophy Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees 02 March 1959 28 March 1959 Spring 1966 21 June 1966 17 October 1967 08 November 1967 University College Dublin Lecture: 1967 Letter to Rush Rhees 16 October 1966 Part IV Drury on Religion Letters to Rhees 22 May 1958 09 June 1958 09 March 1964 22 April 1967 15 May 1967 12 June 1968 02 October 1968

87 89 93 149 165 171 178 208 208 209 212 220 221 222 224 232 232 235 238 238 238 239 240 241 242 242

viii Contents

11 September 1969 06 October 1970 31 May 1971 15 June 1971 23 April 1974 Undated Letter Extract Letter to D.Z. Phillips: 23 July 1964 Part V Drury on Medicine, Psychiatry and Psychology

243 245 246 247 248 250 251 253

The Danger of Words 255 Review of Danger of Words by Ilham Dilman 330 Correspondence and Comment 351 Letters to Rhees 354 22 September 1959 354 10 May 1969 354 24 January 1970 355 18 June 1970 356 30 July 1970 357 Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis 358 Counsel to Townsend 404 Part VI Biographical and Historical Notes

407

Index

435

FOREWORD BY RAY MONK

Maurice Drury’s two articles, ‘Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein’ and ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’ (both included in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, edited by Rush Rhees) made such a strong impression on me that I remember exactly where and when I first read them. It was in the autumn of 1982 and I was on a bus from London to Oxford, returning from a weekend of seeing friends and book shopping. I was then a postgraduate student of philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford, and had started work on a dissertation on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics. I had been fascinated with Wittgenstein since I was a teenager, when I first read Norman Malcolm’s memoir of him, and during my undergraduate days my interests had become focussed on logic and the philosophy of mathematics, and in particular Wittgenstein’s work on those subjects. Curiously, my work on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics had taken me in the direction of biography, because I had become more and more conscious of the fact that the Wittgenstein that emerges from the enormous secondary literature on him, especially the commentary on his philosophy of mathematics, was not the man whose intense and charismatic personality leaps off the pages of Malcolm’s book. The tempestuous, tortured genius Malcolm describes had somehow been transformed into an Oxford don, the biting wit, startling metaphors and burning passion of his prose somehow translated into the discrete, moderate muted tone of a typical academic article. This, I thought, was not the man who had originally aroused my interest. I was therefore captivated to be told in the preface to Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections that Drury had begun an earlier draft of his longer article with this statement: The number of introductions to and commentaries on Wittgenstein’s philosophy is steadily increasing. Yet to one of his former pupils something that was central in his thinking is not being said. Kierkegaard told a bitter parable about the effects of his writings. He said he felt like the theatre manager who runs on the stage to warn the audience of a fire. But they take his appearance as all part of the farce they are enjoying, and the louder he shouts the more they applaud. Forty years ago Wittgenstein’s teaching came to me as a warning against certain intellectual and spiritual dangers by which I was strongly tempted. These dangers still surround us. It would be a tragedy if well meaning commentators

x Foreword

should make it appear that his writings were now easily assimilable into the very intellectual milieu they were largely a warning against. (Rush Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein, Oxford: University Press, 1984, p. ix). These words resonated very loudly with me, as did almost everything Drury had to say. His Wittgenstein, I felt, was quite emphatically my Wittgenstein, and, by the time my bus reached Oxford, I had read carefully every word of Drury’s two articles and was beginning to imagine a biography of Wittgenstein that would attempt to present this Wittgenstein, not only to academic philosophers but also to the many artists, writers, film-makers and members of the general public who had become captivated by him and who felt, as I and Drury did, that, in some crucial aspects, the Wittgenstein that was being studied and taught at university was a pale shadow of the real thing. One of the things Drury emphasizes is Wittgenstein’s ambivalent attitude to the profession of academic philosophy and the importance of the attempts he made throughout his life to give it up for other things. ‘I am certain we will not understand Wittgenstein,’ Drury writes in ‘Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein’, ‘unless we feel some sympathy and comprehension for this persistent intention to change his whole manner of life’ (Notes, p. 149). Related to this, Drury goes on to mention other aspects of Wittgenstein’s personality and spiritual life, the importance of which, he clearly felt, was neglected by those ‘well meaning commentators’ he mentioned earlier. These include Wittgenstein’s determination to overcome vanity (both personal and intellectual), his deep love of music and the sense in which he had a religious attitude. With regard to these last two, Drury’s notes on his Conversations with Wittgenstein include three remarks that are, in my view, indispensable for a correct understanding of him: It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?(Cons., p. 136). I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view (Notes, p. 151). Music came to a full stop with Brahms; and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the sound of machinery (Cons., p. 103). The inclusion of these remarks alone justifies the publication of Drury’s notes, but of course there is much more. Indeed, I always recommend Drury’s notes to anyone who expresses a wish to understand Wittgenstein himself and, therefore, the spirit in which he wrote. Drury and Wittgenstein met in 1929, the first year of Wittgenstein’s second period at Cambridge (the first being before the First World War when he had studied with Bertrand Russell). Drury had gone to Cambridge with the intention of training to become an Anglican priest after graduation. As John Hayes makes clear in this book, this sense of having a religious vocation made Drury, in some respects, the ideal conversational partner for Wittgenstein, allowing him to discuss something he discussed with very few people, namely his inclination to see every problem from a religious point of view. Before they got onto the subject of religion, however, there must have been something about Drury that inspired Wittgenstein’s confidence. On only their second

Foreword

xi

meeting, Wittgenstein was confiding in Drury about his childhood fears, telling him that in the lavatory of his home some plaster had fallen from the wall and he always saw this pattern as a duck,1 not an ordinary duck, though, rather something that had the appearance of the monsters that Hieronymus Bosch painted in his ‘Temptations of St. Anthony’. He went on to talk about other morbid fears he had suffered during his life and told Drury: ‘You will think I have gone mad when I tell you that only religious feelings are a cure for such things.’ (Cons., p. 95) It is striking that Wittgenstein here speaks of religious feelings rather than of beliefs. It was to be a recurring theme of these early conversations between the two. ‘All religions are wonderful,’ Drury records Wittgenstein as once saying, ‘even those of the most primitive tribes. The ways in which people express their religious feelings differ enormously.’ It is clear in these conversations that, for Wittgenstein, the important thing about religions was not anything to do with beliefs. It was nothing to do with truth or falsity. ‘It would make no difference,’ he said, ‘if there had never been an historical person as Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels’ (Cons., p. 96). When Drury told Wittgenstein his intention of ordaining as a priest, Wittgenstein told him: ‘Don’t think I ridicule this for one minute, but I can’t approve; no, I can’t approve. I would be afraid that one day the collar would choke you’ (Cons., p. 95). What he meant by this is perhaps clarified by his subsequent remark: ‘Just think, Drury, what it would mean to have to preach a sermon every week; you couldn’t do it.’ And later: I would be afraid that you would try and give some sort of philosophical justification for Christian beliefs, as if some sort of proof was needed. You have intelligence; it is not the best thing about you, but it is something you mustn’t ignore. – The symbolisms of Catholicism are wonderful beyond words. But any attempt to make it into a philosophical system is offensive. Despite his love of the symbolism of Catholicism, Wittgenstein made it clear that he did not consider himself a Catholic: ‘It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic’ (Cons., p. 96). In recording these remarks, Drury did a great service to those of us who want to understand the important but elusive sense in which Wittgenstein was religious. His attitude is expressed more clearly in his conversations with Drury than in any other source I know. Towards the end of his life, Drury published the shorter of his two articles on his conversations with Wittgenstein in Essays in Honour of G. H. von Wright. The longer one was left unpublished at the time of his death in 1976. In 1973, however, he published the collection of essays, The Danger of Words, to which I was drawn after reading his contributions to Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, and which I describe in my biography of Wittgenstein as ‘perhaps, in its tone and its concerns, the most truly Wittgensteinian work published by any of Wittgenstein’s students’ (Monk, p. 264). In the book’s preface, Drury asks ‘Why do I now bring these papers together?’ and answers: For one reason only. The author of these writings was at one time a pupil of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Now it is well known that Wittgenstein encouraged his

xii Foreword

pupils (those at least whom he considered had no great originality in philosophical ability) to turn from academic philosophy to the active study and practice of some particular avocation. In my own case he urged me to turn to the study of medicine, not that I should make no use of what he had taught me, but rather that on no account should I ‘give up thinking’. I therefore hesitantly put these essays forward as an illustration of the influence that Wittgenstein had on the thought of one who was confronted by problems which had both an immediate practical difficulty to contend with as well as a deeper philosophical perplexity to ponder over (See, DoW, p. 255). All the essays collected in The Danger of Words are available in the present book. They are all worth reading, but one of them, ‘Madness and Religion’ is especially interesting, reflecting as it does, not only what he had learnt from Wittgenstein, but also his practical experience as a psychiatrist, as well as his deep interest in religion. It is a remarkable piece of work. In editing this collection so carefully and so scrupulously, John Hayes has provided an important service to those of us who have become admirers of Drury. His account of Drury’s life, and, especially, of Drury’s relationship with Wittgenstein, is rich in insight, detail and fresh information. The pieces by Drury that have previously been published – his articles about his conversations with Wittgenstein and the papers that made up The Danger of Words – are published here in a way that allows the readers to better understand the context in which they were written. And then there is the new material – the letters to Rush Rhees about philosophy and religion, the BBC broadcast about Wittgenstein and the lecture on philosophy that Drury gave at University College Dublin – all of which is collected here together with extraordinarily complete annotations. Maurice Drury deserves to be better known and to be more widely read. First and foremost, his writings serve as an effective rejoinder to those ‘well meaning commentators’ who make it appear that Wittgenstein’s writings ‘were now easily assimilable into the very intellectual milieu they were largely a warning against’. Secondly, he provides us with a perfect example of how Wittgenstein’s later philosophy can inform the life and work of someone who though not a philosopher was nevertheless devoted to the twin tasks that Wittgenstein himself made central to his life: thinking clearly and striving to be a decent human being. In that respect, Drury provides a model for all of us to follow.

NOTE 1. For those who know Philosophical Investigations, the notion of seeing a pattern ‘as a duck’ will bring to mind the famous ambiguous figure of a duck-rabbit, which can be seen as a duck or as a rabbit, and Wittgenstein’s extended discussion of the phenomenon he calls ‘seeing-as’.

PREFACE

This aim of this volume is to make more accessible the writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury, who modestly referred to himself as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘pupil’ [DoW, p. 255]. These writings include previously published articles and a book – as well as selected unpublished scripts from his archive. In pursuit of this objective, the volume is articulated in six sections: First, there is an introductory section that focuses on Drury’s relationship with Wittgenstein and its aftermath. The title ‘Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls’ is derived from Wittgenstein’s statement to Rush Rhees: ‘You cannot talk to Moore’s soul. It is like talking to a horse. Although a very remarkable horse. It is entirely different when you are talking with Drury, for instance. You can talk to Drury’s soul.’1 This monograph is a belated attempt to address a need expressed to Drury’s wife, Eileen, by Wittgenstein’s biographer, Ray Monk, ‘for a full account of [Wittgenstein’s] friendship with Dr Drury’. Monk expected that such an account would show, as her ‘husband’s essays’ had already done (and as he hoped his projected biography would too) ‘the deep spiritual seriousness that informs Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, and which is often ignored in much of the academic secondary literature’. What Monk thought ‘was missing was not a knowledge of what [Wittgenstein] wrote but an understanding of why he wrote’ (Monk to Mrs Eileen Drury, Arc., 14 March, 1986). The second section reprints Drury’s recollections of Wittgenstein. These took three forms in the following chronological order: the record of his contribution to a BBC Third Programme broadcast on 12 January, 1960 (BBC); the thematically arranged ‘Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein’ (Notes) and an account in journal form entitled: ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’ (Cons.). The third section gives samples of Drury’s philosophical writings. Among these are a paper read in Trinity College, Dublin in 1935 on the ‘Method of Philosophy’, a document entitled ‘Letters to a Student of Philosophy’ written in 1954 (Letters), and a lecture given in University College Dublin in 1967 (UCD). The first of these expressed views held shortly after he had completed his academic training in philosophy – views that he later modified. The second takes the form of an attempt by Drury to address the difficulties experienced by a young undergraduate student who has elected to take philosophy. These letters were addressed very prematurely to his then two-year-old son, Luke. They give an indication as to how Drury had developed philosophically in the years after he left Cambridge. The UCD lecture aimed to correct what he considered were misinterpretations of Wittgenstein that were then circulating in influential English philosophical circles.

xiv Preface

Apart from his extensive reading, Drury’s principal contact with philosophy for the last twenty-five years of his life was through Rush Rhees, a lecturer at the University of Swansea, with whom he conducted a copious philosophical correspondence from Dublin. Samples of Drury’s letters to Rhees that pertain to his understanding of the purpose of philosophy – ‘to say no more than we really know’ (Arc., Spring 1966, p. 212 ) – are reproduced in this section and published for the first time. In these letters and in other writings it is clear that, as his thought developed, he was particularly concerned to preserve at least the drive that he believed gave rise to the traditional philosophical discipline, metaphysics. This subject had waned in Anglophone circles from the beginning of the century and was the object of a frontal assault in the 1930s by a group of Viennese philosophers, who traced their inspiration to Wittgenstein. At first, Drury was deeply influenced by this movement; he rejected metaphysics as ‘meaningless’ in his 1935 paper. Later, however, he came to question whether he and many others, including the Vienna Circle, had correctly understood Wittgenstein on the matter. The fourth section consists of selected letters of Drury to Rhees on the topic of religion. Rhees believed that Wittgenstein spoke to Drury about religion more than he did to anybody else. In a letter to Rhees of 5 February 1967, Drury wrote: I have been thinking that the next few Sunday evenings I would try and put in order the notes I have on remarks that Wittgenstein made to me about religion. It seems to me that the last section in the little book about aesthetics is not very representative. Whether I should attempt to publish these would have to be decided after I saw how they looked when put together. Would you feel like making a similar collection?2 No trace of such an attempt survives in the Drury archive. Instead, the editor has devoted this section to as much of the correspondence with Rhees as seems relevant to the topic and helpful to scholars. The hope is that the material (published here for the first time) may provide insight into the ramifications of Wittgenstein’s remark to Drury ubiquitously quoted in the scholarly literature: ‘I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view’ (Notes, p. 151) – especially given that in Drury’s earliest recording of the remark Wittgenstein added that he would like his ‘work to be understood in this way’ (Letters, p. 206). The fifth section contains Drury’s writings on medicine, psychiatry and, what he referred to as, ‘normal psychology’. He lectured on this latter subject to successive classes of students of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin until he ‘began to have serious doubts about the truth of what’ he has saying (Drury to Rhees, Arc., 10 July 1968) and withdrew from teaching. His writings on medicine and psychiatry, from a perspective informed by what was then referred to as ‘philosophical psychology’, were first prepared as papers read mainly to medical study group/s in Dublin. This material reappeared in The Danger of Words. Drury’s philosophical training and reading familiarized him with the various psychologies that had influenced thinking about the human subject for millennia. Among these were the Platonic picture of the soul imprisoned in the body, the Hebraic-Christian view of spirit embodied in flesh, the Cartesian separation of

Preface

xv

mind from body and the reflections to be found in Baruch Spinoza, as well as the British tradition of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume and Thomas Reid (see DoW, p. 275). Drury’s psychiatric practice was conducted for the most part in St Edmondsbury’s, Lucan, described on contemporary letterheads as ‘a branch hospital and farm’ under the auspices of St Patrick’s Hospital, James’s St., Dublin. Drury lived there with his family from 1951–69. This was a period when many innovations in psychology and psychiatry appeared that challenged classical philosophical psychologies. For his part, Drury was greatly impressed by the effectiveness of new pharmaceutical treatments in curing mental disturbance. He sought in The Danger of Words to recalibrate the competing pictures of the human psycho-soma in order to allow for the welcome effectiveness of physical intervention without abandoning older insights that he thought still had value. Indeed, he strongly believed that the aspiration to separate psychology from its traditional home in philosophy in the pursuit of what Wittgenstein proposed (at the end of his Philosophical Investigations) was an unachievable ‘scientific status’ would deprive it of the insight so necessary to address human distress. This thesis challenged conventional wisdom – a perennial and primordial task of Philosophy that, Drury suggested, served to clear the ground for new thinking if carried through rigorously. Arguing that dualist Cartesian psychologies had had their day, Wittgenstein, for his part, devoted much philosophical investigation also to a critique of the behaviourist, or in the alternative, materialist accounts that replaced them in twentieth-century philosophy and psychology. His aim was to provide a better picture of the subject of empirical psychological inquiry – a bodily human being. This included startling statements profoundly challenging scientistic assumptions about how such inquiry must be conducted. For example, ‘It is perfectly possible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be identified physiologically, because physiologically nothing corresponds to them. Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concepts of causality, then it is high time they were upset.’3 Drury took this to mean that investigation of the human subject need not be confined to what is available by applying the ‘laws’ of causality, conventionally understood – and nowhere more so than in the field of his own specialism, psychiatry. Drury was aware of emerging ‘talking therapies’, of which psychoanalysis was the most prominent example – although he did not claim to have more than a ‘second-hand’ acquaintance with that practice. Wittgenstein had some knowledge of psychoanalysis, albeit also second-hand. A nephew, his friend and collaborator, Frank Ramsey, and his sister, Gretl (who had a hand in facilitating Freud’s forced migration to England in 1938) were each psychoanalysed. After an initial attraction and a period of favourable assessment – so much so that he gave a copy of the Interpretation of Dreams as a birthday gift to Drury – by the time Wittgenstein had discussions about Freud with Rhees in the 1940s, his view was that psychoanalysis ‘was likely to do harm’. This was based not only on his personal knowledge of those listed above but in light of his final judgement that the ‘scientific’ aspirations of Freud

xvi Preface

rested on a characteristically scientistic inducement: ‘Yes, of course, it must be like that.’ Hence, psychoanalytic theory, which he considered in some detail, was no more than ‘a powerful mythology’.4 The Danger of Words attracted several reviews but none so extensive or insightful as the one by Ilham Dilman of the philosophy department at the University of Wales, Swansea, in the journal, The Human World. Drury replied to some criticisms Dilman had raised as he agreed that ‘the epistemology I there hinted at was too briefly expressed and lacked adequate examples to avoid misinterpretation’ (See: p. 351). Both Dilman’s review (which he had sent to Drury in typescript form before publishing it) and Drury’s reply are given here after the text of the book itself. The success of The Danger of Words led to an interest by its editor in publishing more of Drury’s writings. Drury had long used hypnosis as part of his practice of psychiatry and was convinced about its efficacy. He prepared a manuscript entitled Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis but in the event it was not published – possibly because of adverse comment by a referee. However, in the absence of other material, this writing has the merit of giving a sense of Drury’s approach to lecturing medical students and describes and suggests the limits of a therapy analogous to contemporary “mindfulness” techniques. The editor can say he met with one of Drury’s patients who gave an impressive account of the long-term benefits of being treated by Drury for post-partum depression using the method described in these lectures. This section concludes with letters by Drury that bear on its subject matter. The sixth and final section consists of biographical and historical notes that put Drury’s life, times and work – literary and medical – in context. There are notes on persons in the Drury-Wittgenstein circle, mainly first met by Drury while he was in Cambridge. There is also information unearthed by his son, Paul, on the Drury family background. In addition, there are details of Drury’s involvement in some of the controversies that occurred after Wittgenstein’s death. Drury was constantly aware of the relative unimportance of such information as is given in the final section. He thought specifically that ‘there is a real danger now of people reading books about Wittgenstein, and not reading the writings themselves; in a sense the published works from the Notebooks through to the Investigations are a real biography of Wittgenstein’s life, the outward circumstances are not of importance. At least that is how I see it’ (Drury to Rhees, Arc., 28 July 1966). Presumably then, he would allow that the same weighting should apply to his own writing. Thus, one can find in this book all of his published, and a generous selection of his unpublished, writings. Despite the caution given in the letter to Rhees, it is the case that Drury provided us with perhaps the most intimate portrait of Wittgenstein published. This provision would seem to license giving here biographical details pertaining to Drury, the portraitist of Wittgenstein. More important, in focusing on the friendship between the two men – made possible by Drury’s ‘Conversations’, essays and lectures – one can learn a key lesson for those, like Drury, who came to philosophy seeking a well-based direction in their lives. Classical Greek philosophy in the persons of Socrates and Plato offers a paradigm case: Philosophical enquiry about fundamental questions that give meaning to life is, following that example, a matter of interpersonal, dialogical interchange, one to one – or more often, one to more than one. In this setting, friends (sometimes

Preface

xvii

led by an older, more experienced person) activate their human potential not only for understanding but even love of a kind, as Augustine’s Confessions put it, where ‘heart speaks to heart’. As their friendship unfolded, Wittgenstein supported Drury in his first foray into adult life outside academe. This was volunteer work with victims of one of the most devastating economic recessions in the developed world in the twentieth century. In a similar fashion, Wittgenstein had, after army service and completing his work (as he thought at the time) in philosophy, trained for and then served as a teacher of farm children in Austria. Solidarity with the wretched of the earth taught both friends lessons not readily available to persons of their privileged backgrounds. Wittgenstein had previously encouraged Drury to reach beyond his Anglican upbringing, which he thought too narrow, to explore the various traditions of Christianity (especially Wittgenstein’s favoured Eastern Orthodoxy) and beyond. He had primed Drury by recommending him to read William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). As it happened, this book not only highlighted religious diversity, but also acknowledged both religious genius and religious pathology – a distinction that was to play a pivotal role in Drury’s own writing. Drury also had the experience of reading some of James Fraser’s Golden Bough aloud to Wittgenstein and being interrupted by comments critical of Fraser’s patronizing stance towards alien religious rites and of his allied reflections on magic and superstition. Delivered though he was from the cultural and social constrictions Wittgenstein identified in him, Drury nevertheless persisted throughout his life in the Christian affiliation he had been immersed in since childhood. At the same time, he found in the Bhagavad Gita ‘verses…which could be in the fourth gospel without seeming any way out of place’ (Drury to Rhees, Arc., 11 September 1969). Even though his engagement with Christianity was nuanced and not without intellectual struggle, ‘a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed’, as just noted, remained fundamental for Drury. Wittgenstein too was drawn to that dream, recorded in ‘the secret Scripture of the poor’5 – in his case, Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief. The soulfriends duly found in this Scripture – authentic versions of which can be discerned in several religious traditions – a light to illuminate their lives’ journey and an answer to an ancient philosophical question: What is so valuable that it is worth dying for? A question the war veteran Wittgenstein discussed with Drury just before the latter embarked with his army unit for Normandy in 1944 (See: Cons., p. 129).

NOTES 1. Rhees Archive, University of Swansea. Record made on 10 August 1988. 2. Cyril Barrett edited a series of notes taken down by students at Wittgenstein’s lectures in 1938 together with a record of conversations Wittgenstein had with Rush Rhees in 1942, 1943 and 1946. This volume appeared in 1967 under the title Ludwig Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell). The lectures on Aesthetics were attended by Drury; the notes on religion were taken down by Yorick Smythies (see BHN). 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, eds. G.E.M. Anscombe (also translator) and G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), §903.

xviii Preface

4. Barrett, above, p. 52. 5. These are words taken from a sonnet by the Irish war poet, Tom Kettle (b 1880, former MP for East Tyrone and latterly Professor of National Economy at University College Dublin), entitled ‘To my daughter, Betty: The Gift of God’. Kettle composed the poem to explain his motivation in volunteering to serve in the British Army during the First World War for the benefit of his then three-year-old daughter when she came to maturity. As he had anticipated in writing the poem, Kettle perished, aged 36, on 9 September 1916 at Ginchy in France during one of the many battles of the Somme. He was by then aware that in light of the events in Dublin during Easter week 1916, his service in the British army was unlikely to be remembered in his homeland as an instance of ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editor, John Hayes, wishes to acknowledge the generosity of the Drury estate in entrusting the papers of Maurice O’Connor Drury first to him and then to Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, where they are now available to scholars. I also wish to thank Prof Luke O’Connor Drury for agreeing to the use of his father’s papers in this book. This was in the immediate aftermath of his brother Paul’s death – a most inopportune time to have to deal with such a request. The editor wants to note the assistance of Paul’s son, Eanna, for apposite comments and Luke’s wife, Anna, in sourcing family photographs. I am mindful, however, of Drury’s recollection that when ‘a Polish girl had attended Wittgenstein’s lectures for one year’ she wrote to Drury after returning to Warsaw to advise that ‘she was preparing for publication a short book on “Cambridge Philosophers”’ and requested him to obtain a photo of Wittgenstein to include in it. On being told of this request, Wittgenstein replied ‘tell her my bloody face is my own’ (Drury to Rhees: Archive; henceforth Arc., 28 July, 1966). The doyen of Wittgenstein studies, Brian McGuinness, inspected the Drury archive before its transfer to Mary Immaculate College (his mother’s alma mater) and thereafter encouraged the project. He introduced me to Tamar McIver who generously allowed the use of her father’s diary covering his four-month sojourn as an Oxford student in Cambridge from October 1929 to March 1930. Drury is frequently referred to in this diary and appears in a quite different light from the diffident self he was often taken – and saw himself – to be.1 Luke Gormally and his wife, Dr. Mary Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe’s daughter and literary executor, also provided pertinent information. During a visit to the University of Swansea, the then proposed editors, Paul Drury and John Hayes, were kindly received by Dr Mario von der Ruhr, who facilitated access to the papers of Rush Rhees. The ownership of these papers by the University is duly acknowledged here. I acknowledge also with gratitude the ready permission granted by Ian Robinson on behalf of the Brynmill Press Ltd., copyright holders, to reproduce the article by Ilham Dilman, ‘Philosophy and Psychiatry’, which appeared originally in The Human World 13, February 1974, pp. 42–65. This article may not be further reproduced without the permission of the Brynmill Press. In general, every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce material quoted in this collection. Please do get in touch with any enquiries or any information relating to quotations or the rights holder, if inadvertently unacknowledged. A special word of thanks is due to Dr John Dale, a friend of Drury’s, who came from Canada to visit the archive and subsequently shared copies of his correspondence with Drury.

xx Acknowledgements

Paul Drury and John Hayes were most hospitably received by the director of St Patrick’s Hospital Dublin, Prof Jim Lucey, at St Edmundsbury’s, Lucan, Co. Dublin. He introduced us to some staff who had served with Con Drury there. Berry Flowers III, another visitor to the archive, made a singular contribution to the project by a meticulous review of the editor’s drafts of ‘Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls’ and ‘Biographical and Historical Notes’ in this book. As editor, I would like to acknowledge a previous compilation of Drury’s published writings: The Danger of Words and Writings on Wittgenstein in which I collaborated with Profs David Berman and Michael Fitzgerald of Trinity College Dublin. This book was first published in 1996 by Thoemmes Press (now subsumed by Bloomsbury) and has long been out of print. Among the researchers who have already tilled this general field, I would like to single out the Dominican theologian Fergus Kerr and his books.2 While, as will be noted in the texts given below, I do not agree with Kerr on some points, he has certainly highlighted the role of Drury in the Wittgenstein story. This is true also of Ranjit Chatterjee, who rests his account of Wittgenstein’s religious sensibility on a remark recorded by Drury that he, Wittgenstein, was ‘one hundred percent Hebraic’. Chatterjee takes Kerr to task for suggesting that Wittgenstein’s selfdescription ‘may in any case have been a joke’ or, in the alternative that it was ‘no more than a conventional view about the Hellenisation of Christianity’.3 I hope that more scholarly debate of this kind will arise from the increased accessibility of Drury’s writings facilitated by the production of this book. Special thanks is due to Jacqui Hayes, Limerick regional archivist, for setting up the Drury Archive and to successive administrations of Mary Immaculate College for accommodating it – the college librarian, Gerardine Moloney, and presidents, Peadar Cremin and Michael Hayes each now sadly deceased. I also want to express my appreciation to members of the Arts Faculty Office: Barbara McCarthy, Mary O’Loughlin, Maureen Kelly, Eileen Daly, Brid Hennessy, Padraig Horgan, and its administrator, Rachel Coleman, for onerous transcription services in respect of manuscript material. Very considerable library assistance was afforded me by Aine Finucane (who also did valuable editorial work), Mary Brassil and Elizabeth Brosnahan. In addition, they have facilitated several postgraduate student visitors to the archive. The head of the IT department, Kieran Pearse, solved all problems that arose relevant to that area. I would also like to thank Drs David Blake, Catherine Kavanagh, Chris Lawn and Stephen Thornton for their colleagueship throughout my headship of the Department of Philosophy at the college. On a more personal level I acknowledge some friends who have been supportive in various ways over the years: Muiris Mac Conghail (expert on George Thomson), John Cooney, David Quin and Tom O’Mahony – all journalists – and Dr Margaret O’Connell. I am particularly indebted to Bernard Treacy, who as editor of Doctrine and Life, has published pertinent articles by me – as have editors of issues of the Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society. Two very well-known playwrights have played a role in my writing life. When clearing my parents’ (William and Nellie) home after my mother’s death with my siblings (Bernadette, Rosario, Anne and Conor), I came across a letter, dated 8 February 1960, from 37 William St, Listowel, Co Kerry. In it, John Brendan Keane (best known

Acknowledgements

xxi

for The Field), to whom I had written a fan letter, urged me to write a critique of his play, Sharon’s Grave, for the Kerryman newspaper in the following terms: ‘There is in your writing, if you don’t get a big head, a certain command of character and expression. … Do it now as the old lady said to the Pekinese.’ Unfortunately, meanwhile, the Kerryman had carried a critique of the play by an established writer but it did not dim my determination to develop the facility so generously encouraged. Authorial vicissitudes involving a playwright continued to beset me. On 1 April, maybe 1994, I received a phone call from a person who identified himself as Brian Friel (author of Dancing at Lughnasa), requesting that I send him a copy of my article ‘Wittgenstein, Religion, Freud and Ireland’ which he had been told had been published in, as he put it, an obscure Belfast magazine – in fact, The Irish Philosophical Journal edited by Prof Bernard Cullen of the Queen’s University. Friel disclosed that he had in mind to write a play about Wittgenstein and another continental European high-flyer, Antonin Artaud, who had each been blown off course and alighted on what is now designated ‘the Wild Atlantic Way’. I obliged Friel, who thereafter dubbed me his ‘philosopher and friend’. When I was invited to the premiere performance of Give Me Your Answer, Do! on 12 March 1997 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, I anticipated that my fifteen minutes of fame was imminent. However, it turned out that the play was about a playwright who found he could not write ‘a bloody play’ about ‘some amazing stuff’ when Wittgenstein ‘was here’. Given the uncertainties, just illustrated, attaching to a writer’s life, it is especially appropriate that I acknowledge Ray Monk for his ready agreement, tentatively sought, to write the foreword to this book. I would particularly like to acknowledge the continuing friendship of Prof Harmon Smith and the guidance of Prof William Hardman Poteat, each of Duke University, North Carolina. Poteat4 was the leading American exponent of Michael Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy and directed my PhD thesis. On the successful completion of same, he gave me a copy of Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna5 and inscribed it: ‘For John Hayes – a token of thanks for our shared studentship’ (May 9 1973). During the fraught times when I was completing this thesis, I was beneficiary of the friendship of Profs Charles Curran and Joseph Albert Broderick of the Catholic University of America. I also enjoyed at that time the hospitality of the homes of Judge Vincent and Sally Broderick in Pelham Manor, New York and John and Katharine Daly in Franklin, New Hampshire. Sincere thanks is due to the Bloomsbury team, especially its academic editor, Colleen Coalter, for her courtesy, helpfulness, efficiency and affirmative support and James Tupper, whose responsibilities extended to liaison with Grishma Fredric of Deanta publishing services. Most of all, I wish to express my gratitude for the emotional and practical support of my wife, Roisin, and my daughter Alicia during the lengthy course of this project. I believe, however, that now that I am in my 75th year, they each hope I will find a less exacting occupation than scholarly production in the time that remains to me. Prof John Hayes, 15 May 2017.

xxii Acknowledgements

NOTES 1. This section of his diary has since been published. See Brian McGuinness (ed.), ‘Arthur MacIver’s Diary: Cambridge (October 1929–March 1930)’, WittgensteinStudien, vol. 7, issue 1, pp. 201–256. 2. Theology after Wittgenstein published first by Blackwell in 1986 and by SPCK in 1997 and Work on Oneself: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Psychology (Arlington, VA, The Institute for the Psychological Sciences Press, 2008). 3. Wittgenstein and Judaism: A Triumph of Concealment (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), p. 169. 4. Another student of Poteat’s, Kai Nielsen, rather set the cat among the pigeons with his article ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’, Philosophy, vol. 42, no. 161 (July 1967), pp. 191–209 – a characterization conveyed in the title that has since been widely accepted by philosophers of religion. Kerr in Theology after Wittgenstein, above, pp. 28–9, agrees that Nielsen’s characterization of religion as a (hermetic) ‘form of life’ would be a fideism but that that was not how Wittgenstein explained the term in the Philosophical Investigations I, 19. 5. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.

ABBREVIATIONS

Arc.

D  rury Archive, Library, Mary Immaculate College, South Circular Rd., Limerick.

BBC ‘A Symposium: Assessments of the Man and the Philosopher’. The Listener, vol 63, nos 1609 (28 January 1960), pp 163–5 and 1610 (4 February 1960), pp 207–9. Cons. ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, ed. Rush Rhees Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 97–171. Permission for the use of Rhees’s notes to these conversations has been sought from the Oxford University Press. DoW.  The Danger of Words (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). Letters ‘Letters to a Student of Philosophy’ ed. Desmond Lee, Philosophical Investigations, vol. 6 (1983), pp. 76–102 and 159–74. Notes ‘Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein’, Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 28 (1976), pp. 22–40. The rights of the Finnish Philosophical Society arising from its publication of these notes are noted. UCD ‘1967 Dublin Lecture on Wittgenstein’ The Danger of Words and writings on Wittgenstein, eds. David Berman and Michael Fitzgerald (Bristol Thoemmes, 1996), p. 14. Note: Excepting the references above to original sources, pagination given with abbreviations pertinent to Drury writings are to where they are reproduced in this book. In addition, use is made of the following abbreviations: BHS ‘Biographical and Historical Notes’ in this book. Cam. Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-51, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). Monk Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1990). Portraits Portraits of Wittgenstein, 2nd edition, eds. F.A. Flowers III and Ian Ground (London: Bloomsbury Academic 2016).

xxiv

PART I

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls It is unlikely that a collection of the writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury would now attract a readership were it not for his long and deep friendship with Ludwig Wittgenstein. This began in Con1 Drury’s third academic year as a Cambridge undergraduate (1928–9), when Wittgenstein intervened to speak at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club that Drury was also attending. Wittgenstein had in January 1929 returned to the university where he had first come to study philosophy in 1911 under Bertrand Russell, having discontinued researches in aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester. Wittgenstein first came to Cambridge on the advice of Gottlob Frege2 of the University of Jena; Frege’s work on the foundations of arithmetic had preceded a similar project by Russell.3 These inquiries had, in turn, a provenance in the appearance within mathematics of such exotic concepts as imaginary numbers, which Leibniz has been quoted as describing as ‘almost amphibian between being and nonbeing’. The exoticism evoked philosophical doubt about the epistemological security of mathematics – a doubt, however, not shared by the vast majority of mathematical practitioners who proceeded with their work, regardless of these extra-disciplinary reservations.4 By the end of the 1920s Wittgenstein was already well known to European intellectuals for his book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in German in 1921 (under the title Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung) and English in 1922 as part of a series edited by C. K. Ogden and published by Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein had worked on the Tractatus during service in the Austrian army during the First World War and completed a version5 while on extended leave from July to August, 1918. Wittgenstein declared that he had solved, in principle, all outstanding philosophical problems by postulating via the notion of ‘Logical Form’, a one-to-one co-ordination between what is known and what can be expressed by the knower in language. The remainder of linguistic ‘expressions’ are either meaningless or tautological – but point, nevertheless, to what is relatively more important for the conduct of life than what can be expressed. Consistent with his declaration of a final solution, Wittgenstein spent the next decade in his native Austria engaged in such non-philosophical activities as tending

2

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

to a monastic garden,6 teacher-training followed by elementary school-teaching in remote villages in the Wechsel mountains in the Austrian Alps (until April 1926) and, finally, architecture (on a house in Vienna’s Third District for his sister). His return to Cambridge, from where he had departed at the outbreak of war in 1914, was announced on 18 January 1929 by his sponsor, Maynard Keynes, in a letter to Lydia Lopokova, the economist’s future wife, in the following terms: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train’. Keynes, along with a brilliant Cambridge mathematician, Frank Plumpton Ramsey,7 had ‘plotted’ (as Ramsey’s sister put it) over most of the 1920s to entice Wittgenstein back to academic life in Cambridge. It seems that what Keynes and Ramsey had in mind was to enlist Wittgenstein in a renewed attempt on Russell’s project to reduce mathematics to logic via a simple ‘theory of types’. The Theory of Types was developed by Russell in response to what at first appeared to be a minor flaw he had discovered in 1902 in an axiom used by Frege to reduce arithmetic to logic in Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (1892). This reduction was founded on the principles that firstly, all mathematical relations involve the natural numbers (1, 2, 3 … ) and secondly, that these numbers can be expressed logically using the concept of ‘class’ (thus, for example, ‘2’ belongs to the class of couples). Russell, however, identified a paradox inherent in the concept of ‘class’ – whether or not the class of all classes that is not a member of itself is a ‘class’? It was soon clear that this was a fundamental rather than a minor flaw and that, moreover, it applied to Russell’s own work. In an attempted repair, Russell proposed more and more ramified versions of his Theory of Types but his results were not persuasive to many and needed simplification if there was to be hope of acceptance. Ramsey proposed to re-vivify this project with the assistance of Wittgenstein, who had already offered a solution to the mathematician, Philip Jourdain in April 1909, according to Monk, which was rejected after consultation with Russell. The confidence of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge sponsors in Wittgenstein’s logical talent was, however, well justified. He had, for example, made important and enduring advances on Frege’s and Russell’s work in formal logic by the use in the Tractatus of ‘truth tables’ that lay out all the possible inferences, true and false, derivable from any particular proposition. Wittgenstein was not, however, to engage himself in a re-casting of the ‘Theory of Types’. That project lost its driver when Ramsey died following an operation on his liver at the age of twenty-six, almost exactly one year (18 January 1930) after Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge.8 The work on logic that Wittgenstein now took up diverged from that of Frege and Russell in decisive ways but, like them, he worked on systematizing and extending the reach of the syllogistic logic that had dominated the subject in Western thought since its formulation by Aristotle. Wittgenstein’s focus was on the shortcomings of formal logic in respect of analysing language as it is routinely used – even given the increased precision of innovative mathematical notations to aid the analysis. Retrospective evaluation has ranked Wittgenstein among the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century. Such evaluations, however, have not been unambiguous. A relatively recent estimate of how he stood has been offered by Jeff McMahan in the following nuanced terms: ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein is generally

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

3

regarded as the greatest philosopher, and certainly the greatest philosophical iconoclast, of the twentieth century. Twice in one lifetime he revolutionized the way that philosophers conceived of their work.’9 One of the significant interests of Drury’s writings for Wittgenstein scholars is Drury’s close and intelligent witness to the beginnings of what Ray Monk, Wittgenstein’s biographer, described as his subject’s ‘second coming’ (Monk, p. 255). This may have a bearing on the question whether Wittgenstein’s first revolution, initiated by the Tractatus, was repudiated,10 or rather as some (including Drury) thought, developed, when Wittgenstein began to re-engage full-time with philosophy in the latter part of the 1920s. The Drury writings, his records of his interaction with his teacher in particular, shed light on how Wittgenstein practised philosophy about that time – and more generally how, during the course of their association, Wittgenstein clarified the role of philosophy vis-à-vis such other human activities as scientific investigation, aesthetic composition and appreciation, prayer and religious experience – and for him, most important of all, ‘decent’ interpersonal behaviour. The interaction between Drury and his tutor and mentor readily evokes the prototypical philosophical exchange between master and student practised by Socrates and recorded by the latter’s student Plato. One estimate of the depth and significance of Drury’s friendship with his teacher was provided by another of that first cohort of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge students, John E. King (1909–1997). In 1980 King wrote to Drury’s wife, Eileen, that ‘no one knew the man better or understood what he was really getting at (not just his philosophy) than Con’ (Arc., 24 March 1980). John King’s view finds an echo in Ray Monk’s biography, published in 1990. Monk wrote that Drury’s book, The Danger of Words, ‘though much neglected … is perhaps, in its tone and its concerns, the most truly Wittgensteinian work published by any of Wittgenstein’s students’ (Monk, p. 264). To focus on Drury’s friendship with Wittgenstein as a background to Drury’s writings is to study the emergence of a young man under the sometimes oppressive pupillage of an older one, and to observe the evolving rebalancing of their interdependencies over the years until Wittgenstein’s death in 1951. There then followed Drury’s publication of his memories of his teacher-friend and the coming to fruition of Drury’s own potential, whose written expression, Monk wrote, has been ‘neglected’. Contributory to this neglect, was in the words of an obituarist,11 the fact that Drury ‘disliked all forms of ostentation [and] shunned the limelight’, a tendency that Drury himself was conscious of.12

DRURY’S EARLY YEARS The self-effacing young man with whom Wittgenstein formed one of the closest, most accessible and instructive of the many friendships he made was born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, on 3 July 1907. He was the youngest of four children of Anne Elizabeth (neé Reilly) and Henry D’Olier Drury (b. 1849). Their marriage was registered in Banbridge, Co. Down in 1902. Anne Elizabeth (b. 1868) was from Scarvagh (sometimes, ‘Scarva’) in the same county (see BHN: Con Drury’s mother’s family). Her husband, almost twenty years her senior, was from Dublin. He was one

4

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

of twelve sons of William Barker Drury, Chief Registrar of the Court of Chancery in Ireland, and Ellen Taylor.13 In 1866, Drury’s father commenced his university education at Queens College, Galway. A record held by its successor institution, the National University of Ireland Galway, notes that he was awarded a junior scholarship as a third-year student of the Faculty of Arts (Science Division) in the 1868–9 session. He transferred to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1869 to study mathematics. He was conferred with a BA degree in 1873 and an MA in 1876. He taught that subject at Marlborough College, where he held the post of ‘Assistant Master’ from 1873 until 1909. On retirement, the family moved to 3, Colleton Crescent, Exeter. Con attended the Exeter Grammar School. Academically able, Drury was an ‘all-rounder’; he won the ‘Open Mile’ at the annual sports day in his last year at the school (1926). The family’s Irish connections were fostered by vacations in Galway where they had relatives both in the city and county. In 1927, Con’s elder brother, Henry Myles Reilly Drury, acquired a thatched cottage (formerly a coastguard dwelling) in the hamlet of Rosroe (sometimes spelt ‘Rosro’). Rosroe then consisted of five or six cottages on a spit of land on the Co. Galway14 side of the mouth of a fjord, Killary Harbour, and bordered on its southern side by an inlet known as ‘Little Killary’. Until 1935, when the Galway-Clifden line was closed, the cottage could be reached partly by rail. After alighting at Recess (35½ miles from Galway) there was still a seventeen-mile journey by road to Rosroe, from where the nearest shop was then nine miles away. From Rosroe, Con was able to pursue interests in geology (see Letters, p. 196) and botany (carrying with him on his field trips a copy of the fifth edition of Illustrations of British Flora). The cottage was to be occupied by Wittgenstein for several months in 1948. As he recalled, Drury enjoyed ‘a cultured and kindly’ upbringing in a markedly religious family; his ‘mother knew the Bible through and through and as children the day always began with reading a chapter of the Bible by my father’ (Arc., Drury to Rush Rhees, 13 July 1969). That he valued this religious immersion in later life is obvious from an added interrogative: ‘What has happened to this generation? Have we lost something very precious, or are we wiser?’ (Arc., Drury to Rhees, 6 October 1970).15 The foregoing reference aside, Drury does not mention his elderly father at all in his extant writings. The closest we can get now to understanding his relationship with his parents is an extract he took the trouble to copy by hand from a novel, Portrait in a Mirror, written of one of his favourite authors, Charles Morgan: ‘I loved my father and mother, not because they were spiritual companions of mine, but because love for a younger son, whom it must have been hard for them to love, was the foundation of my life’ (Arc., Item 223). Drury made his first attempt to read a philosophical work while still a schoolboy. He had come across (in the Exeter public library) Space, Time and Deity (1920) by the professor of philosophy at Manchester, Samuel Alexander. Drury’s interest was so engaged by the title that he purchased the two-volume work. This was the beginning of a lifetime habit that resulted in a remarkably extensive collection of books on philosophy. However, he found himself unable to ‘understand a word’ (Cons., p. 94) of what was to be the last attempt in twentieth-century British philosophy

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

5

to articulate a full-scale speculative metaphysics. Alexander’s master framework was the theory of emergent evolution. Drawing also on contemporary theory in physics, he proposed that space-time – the one inconceivable without the other – is the ‘stuff’ of which all things are made, giving rise to matter. When physiological processes became sufficiently complex, consciousness emerged. Consciousness is the inner experience of what can simultaneously be viewed as neural occurrences. Alexander thought it was probable that the next stage of emergence was that of a deity. Acclaimed when it first appeared, Space, Time and Deity is now rarely cited by philosophers.16 Drury did not fare much better when he turned to John Stuart Mill’s first published work, A System of Logic (1843) in six volumes. This work was an attempt to establish what constitutes proof or evidence and was inspired by Mill’s desire to ‘present a nineteenth century update of the British empirical tradition’17 using elements of theories originally proposed by George Berkeley and David Hume. However, his influence was to be delayed until the early part of the twentieth century because, meanwhile, British philosophy was to be dominated by an idealism derived from G. W. F. Hegel. In reverse chronological order, Drury was to be impressed from the mid-1940s by the monistic metaphysics of one of the leading British exponents of Hegel, F. H. Bradley, whereas, as we shall see, he was to be taught as a student by a key opponent of what Bradley represented, G. E. Moore. Drury’s studentship at Cambridge University was undertaken so that, as he later explained, he might be able to understand the ‘sort of writing’ he had met in Alexander and Mill (Cons., p. 94) and more deeply, ‘find in some book or some teacher a certainty as to the meaning of life and the way I should go’ (Arc., Drury to Rhees, May 1966). Hence, Drury chose after matriculation in 1926, to study philosophy in the form of what was then called the ‘Moral Sciences Tripos’ at Trinity College, Cambridge. His long-term plan was to enrol upon graduation in a theological college to prepare himself to take Anglican orders. Already as a boy he had been ‘greatly influenced by the seriousness and deep piety’ (Cons, p. 96) of the rector of St Olave’s Church in Exeter, Fr E. C. Long, with whom Drury was to have enduring contact. Influenced by Long, Drury envisaged himself as a parish clergyman leading a liturgical cycle that had its ancient and venerable origins in the early Latin rites.

CAMBRIDGE UNDERGRADUATE The first three years of Drury’s undergraduate education at Cambridge was in the care of W. E. Johnson (1858–1930), C. D. Broad (1887–1971) and the already mentioned G. E. Moore (1873–1958). As characterized by Richard Braithwaite, both Johnson and Moore devoted ‘detailed commentary and criticism’ in their lectures to the ‘ever-changing philosophy’18 of Bertrand Russell, who had aligned himself with Moore before departing Cambridge when he became unwelcome there because of the pacifist convictions which had led to his imprisonment during the First World War. He had nevertheless changed the direction of philosophy at the university by pre-war logical explorations and technical innovations (including the replacement

6

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

of Frege’s logical notations), developed with Alfred North Whitehead, and labelled ‘Mathematical Philosophy’.19 Drury found that his other teachers were to pale in comparison with Wittgenstein. As already mentioned, Drury first became aware of him at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club,20 held in Broad’s rooms, which Wittgenstein attended. The invited speaker, Harold A. Prichard, White’s professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, read a paper on ‘Ethics’. Wittgenstein stimulated much discussion that evening by arguing that ethics is not a science – a theme that he was to return to. Drury later spoke to Johnson about Wittgenstein and Johnson observed: ‘I consider it a disaster for Cambridge that Wittgenstein has returned. A man who is quite incapable of carrying on a discussion. If I say that a sentence has meaning for me no one has a right to say it is senseless.’ Drury was therefore understandably surprised, when on attending a tea party at Johnson’s home on the following Sunday, he observed ‘very cordial relations between Johnson and Wittgenstein’. The cordiality was not, however, based on a shared understanding of their common philosophical specialty – Logic.21 Wittgenstein had long considered that Johnson, unsympathetic to Russell’s innovations, was ‘fundamentally wrong’ about that subject.22 For that reason, he did not discuss philosophical matters with Johnson – although the latter surmised that it was because Wittgenstein was incapable of doing so. However, in Wittgenstein’s eyes, Johnson had the saving grace of being a ‘man of real culture’. This was especially manifest in Johnson’s interest in music.23 On the occasion in question Johnson played on his Broadwood grand piano ‘some of Bach’s … Preludes and Fugues’ (Cons., p. 97). Later on, as Norman Malcolm records, ‘when Johnson’s health began to deteriorate … [Wittgenstein] … went frequently to Johnson’s home to play chess with him, and often was the audience while Johnson played Bach on the piano, since Wittgenstein knew that Johnson would not play unless he had a listener’.24 The case was different with Charles Broad (1887–1971), former student of Johnson’s – and of Russell and Moore as well – and now Sidgwick Lecturer in Moral Science. Drury described him as ‘a chubby little man with no air of profundity’ (Cons., p. 102). Consistent with this persona, Broad was self-deprecatory about the nature of his commitment to philosophy. Contrasting himself with Wittgenstein in particular, he observed: ‘One for whom philosophy is a way of life will find it difficult to associate on easy terms with those (like myself) for whom it is primarily a means of livelihood.’25 Drury quickly learnt that there was indeed an element of, at least, reserve on Broad’s part in his relationship with Wittgenstein. So, for example, Wittgenstein told Drury that when he commented to Broad that Prichard’s paper26 had been ‘very poor’, he was ‘received … very coldly’ (Cons., p. 95). Broad had in fact raised obstacles to the plan that would enable Wittgenstein to return to work at Cambridge. One requirement was that Wittgenstein should acquire a relevant qualification but the regulations prevented him from completing the bachelor’s degree he had commenced before the war. Instead, it was proposed that he should present the Tractatus, although already published, as a dissertation for the purposes of awarding a doctoral degree. In the spring of 1929, however, Frank Ramsey wrote to Wittgenstein that he had been told by Richard Braithwaite, then

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

7

secretary of the Faculty Board of Moral Sciences, that ‘Broad was doubtful’ (Cam., p. 166) and needed to think the proposal over. It is unclear whether Broad’s hesitation arose from the distinctly unusual procedure of awarding a degree for a previously published work or because he had found the Tractatus ‘highly syncopated’ on first reading it – a line of criticism Wittgenstein later told Drury he accepted as correct.27 In any case, Wittgenstein was awarded the doctoral degree, reputedly assuring his examiners at the end of the viva: ‘Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.’28 Wittgenstein was appointed lecturer on 1 October 1930 and this was followed by a fellowship under Title B on 5 December 1930 – again despite Broad’s view that ‘a major prophet may be an excellent fellow, but he will hardly make an excellent Fellow’.29 Thereafter, Broad continued to watch from the sidelines ‘with a fatherly eye the philosophical gambols of my younger friends as they dance to the highly syncopated pipings of Herr Wittgenstein’s flute’30 – a stance he had already adopted in 1925. Broad wrote also in that year ‘I have nothing worth calling a system of philosophy of my own and there is no philosopher of whom I should be willing to reckon myself a faithful follower.’31 He did, however, subscribe to a version of the emergence of mind from matter that was, as we have seen, a feature of Alexander’s work. And, as with Alexander, he accepted that part of philosophy’s role was to attempt to understand reality as a whole via a ‘theory of everything’ traditionally initiated with the question: ‘Why is there something, and not nothing?’ A preliminary to this synoptic task was to assemble, with a view to comparison and contrast, the broad categories of human activity: science, politics, ethics, aesthetics, religion, etc. He did not, however, carry through this project to fulfilment and concentrated rather on what he saw as another philosophical function, the analysis of unanalysed general concepts (e.g. number, thing, quality, change, etc.) and of unexamined assumptions (e.g. causality) widely employed not only in science but also in everyday life. There is a document, possibly drafted by Drury,32 of a number of objections to philosophy identified in Broad’s lecture course, ‘Elements of Philosophy’, together with Wittgenstein’s comments on them. These objections gathered force as philosophers more and more eschewed the traditional metaphysical role of providing an all-embracing theory.33 In summary, Broad noted four such objections: [1] philosophy is thought to reach ‘no conclusion … [2] its methods are wrong … [3] it is taught historically (“and why go on retailing the opinions of back-numbers?”), and … [4] its territory is gradually being taken over by the sciences.’ Wittgenstein, for his part, believed firstly, that philosophy could reach conclusions – provided it used appropriate methods, which he saw it as his mission to devise. He admitted, secondly, that some widely used methods were wrong – for example, the deductive approach of Descartes (who tried to derive a system from one proposition, ‘Cogito, ergo sum’, that was purportedly immune to doubt). In Wittgenstein’s view, Kant (in contrast), had proceeded in the right way. He had ‘started with what we know … and went on to examine the validity [of that]’. Thirdly, Wittgenstein agreed that philosophy should not be taught historically – although it was a well-established feature of Cambridge teaching at the time. In that regard, he told his students that ‘if philosophy were a matter of a choice between rival theories, then it would be

8

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

sound to teach it historically. But if it is not, then it is a fault to teach it historically, because it is quite unnecessary; we can tackle the subject direct, without any need to consider history.’ Wittgenstein’s rejection of ‘theories’, historical or contemporary, the careful exposition and critical evaluation of which was a dominant feature of Broad’s own teaching,34 was based fundamentally on what Wittgenstein saw as the inability of theory to encompass the varied nuances of everyday language, to which he more and more gave epistemic priority. Thus, he was particularly critical of Broad’s defence of the use by philosophers of such words as ‘matter’ and ‘self’ in a highly technical sense, divorced from their everyday meaning. Drury referred to such usage as ‘Pickwickian’.35 Wittgenstein did not object to Broad’s emphasis on the analysis of concepts and assumptions – provided attention was paid to how they were used in a ‘stream of life’ not in an academic isolation ward. He told his class that ‘this is the very last thing philosophy should do … it is shocking to use words with a meaning they never have in normal life and is the source of much confusion’. Fourthly, as for science, Wittgenstein was in the 1930s to warn increasingly against the overvaluation of scientific innovation, singly or collectively. This tendency was accompanied by the assurance that such innovation invariably represented ‘progress’. However, as he told his student Rush Rhees, ‘a historical change may be progress and also a ruin’.36 Further, vaunted examples of ‘progress’, he noted, invariably turn out to be less significant than they originally appeared to be.37 Wittgenstein criticized Broad, in particular, for conducting ‘psychic research’ as a ‘scientific’ enterprise. He attributed Broad’s interest in such phenomena to middle age ennui and remarked to Drury that ‘Broad pretends that his interest is purely scientific, but it is obvious that he is thrilled to death by speculating and experimenting on these things in this way’ (Cons., p. 107).38 In judging thus, Wittgenstein may have been harsh. Broad had himself switched to philosophy from science and mathematics having come to the belief that he would not develop into a first-rate scientist. He was notably objective in all his writings, including those on psychic phenomena. If Broad and Johnson were apprehensive of Wittgenstein’s influence in the Moral Sciences faculty, the same was not true of Moore, the professor of philosophy at Cambridge. During the period of Wittgenstein’s pre-war studentship at Cambridge, Moore had been much engaged in service to him as ready conversationalist, a travelling companion and even amanuensis.39 Of those bygone days, Wittgenstein informed Drury that Moore and he had once ‘tried to read the Epistle to the Romans together, but we didn’t get very far with it and gave it up’ (Cons., p. 108). Moore, at least, did not persist in whatever interest in religion this episode can be taken to reveal when Drury attended his classes.40 Indeed, he informed his students he would not lecture on one of the topics advertised in the university calendar – the philosophy of religion – because he had nothing to say about it. Drury, who confessed he was ‘still far too callow to appreciate Moore’s peculiar genius’, reported Moore’s remark to Wittgenstein with some indignation, saying equivalently, that ‘no philosopher had the right to dodge the main issue in this way’. In response, Wittgenstein said nothing for a few minutes. Many years later, Drury recalled ‘even to this day I can remember that pause’ (Arc., Drury to Rush Rhees,

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

9

16 October 1966). Finally, Wittgenstein asked Drury if he had a copy of Augustine’s Confessions and Drury produced the Loeb edition. Wittgenstein immediately found the quotation he was looking for: ‘et vae tacentibus de Te, quonian loquaces muti sunt’ [I, 4]. However, Wittgenstein disputed the English translation given in Loeb, which ran as follows: ‘and woe to those who say nothing concerning Thee, seeing that those who say most are dumb.’ Wittgenstein thought the translation was ‘a complete misunderstanding of Augustine’s meaning’. Wittgenstein took the Latin version to mean ‘and woe to those who say nothing about Thee’, giving as their excuse the fact that ‘chatterboxes [his translation of “loquaces”] talk a lot of nonsense [his translation of “muti”]’. However, this rendition is now accepted to be in error.41 In any case, according to Drury, Wittgenstein went on to assert that he would not resort to excuses: ‘I won’t refuse to talk to you about God or about religion’ (Notes., p. 158). This assurance was hardly what Drury might have expected in light of the remarks in the Tractatus concerning ‘the mystical’ (6.44 and 6.522), ‘whereof one cannot speak’ and ‘thereof one must be silent’ (7);42 the thrust of which were more vividly put in a remark by Broad that Wittgenstein sometimes quoted: ‘You can’t argue with someone who has created a hippopotamus.’ Nevertheless, the promise to Drury was honoured to the extent that Rush Rhees wrote that ‘Wittgenstein spoke to you about religion perhaps more than to anyone else’ (Arc., 10 July 1971).43 In doing so, it seems from the incident just recounted, that Wittgenstein took a new tack at variance with his previous prohibition regarding ‘God-talk’. Drury had difficulty in following Moore’s lectures44 and complained to Wittgenstein that he seemed to have lost ‘sight of what he is trying to do’. Wittgenstein, in contrast – although he too was not observant of the syllabuses in the university calendar45 – confirmed to Drury that he had ‘reached a real resting place’ and affirmed: ‘I know my method is right’.46 He explained that after the manner of his father, an extremely successful businessman, he wanted his philosophical investigations ‘to be businesslike, to get something done, to get something settled’ (BBC, p. 91). As Drury saw it, Moore’s failure ‘to come to any conclusion’47 arose from his conviction that ‘if certain problems in epistemology were solved, everything else would fall into place. As if there was one central problem in philosophy’.48 Wittgenstein agreed with Drury that Moore’s search was wrongly focussed: ‘There is no one central problem in philosophy, but countless different problems. Each has to be dealt with on its own’ (Cons, p. 102). This was reiterated in the Philosophical Investigations, I, 133: ‘Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem’. Indeed, if any one phrase can describe what Drury learnt from Wittgenstein it is one found in King Lear: ‘I will teach you differences’ (Earl of Kent, Act I, Scene 4).49 The contrast in approach between Moore and Wittgenstein extended not only to objective and method50 but also to the source of philosophical perplexity. Moore wrote in his ‘Autobiography’: ‘I do not think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world or about natural science.’51 Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was not greatly concerned with, and in some striking cases was ignorant of, the views of other

10

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

philosophers,52 which the Cambridge curriculum,53 as a comprehensive ‘reading’ of the subject, had been designed to impart. For some reason, there seems to have been a tension between Drury and Moore. When Drury read a paper entitled ‘Are there degrees of clarity?’ to a meeting of the Moral Science Club, Moore ‘wiped the floor’ (Cons., p. 105) with him. Moore’s attack left Drury feeling that he had put up a poor defence of his thesis but Wittgenstein assured him that he had displayed awareness of the nuances of everyday language usage to which Wittgenstein had sensitized him. Perhaps there was more to this unhappy exchange than robust academic criticism. It is conceivable that Moore – whom another student, John King, recalled Wittgenstein had treated ‘with humility and deference’ (such that he would appeal to Moore ‘in [classroom] discussion in an almost childlike way’54) – sensed a threat to Wittgenstein’s dependence on him because of the relationship being formed with Drury. At any rate, as already noted in the author’s preface, Wittgenstein confided to Rush Rhees: ‘You cannot talk to Moore’s soul. It is like talking to a horse. Although a very remarkable horse.– It is entirely different when you are talking with Drury, for instance. You can talk to Drury’s soul.’55

KINDRED SOULS This happy outcome was not, however, easily achieved. Drury had made the first overture towards greater intimacy in the form of an invitation to Wittgenstein to lunch with Drury and a friend, Donaldson. As it happened, Wittgenstein arrived so late that the two students had proceeded to eat and Donaldson had to leave shortly after Wittgenstein’s delayed appearance. Alone, face-to-face, Drury noted: ‘Conversation very difficult, Wittgenstein saying little and obviously ill at ease.’ Drury realized quickly that Wittgenstein ‘disliked being “lionized”’. On the other hand, he was not ‘the sort of person who could join in the ordinary chit-chat of a Cambridge luncheon’ (Cons., p. 94). Drury told Wittgenstein that notwithstanding his disappointing experiences reading Alexander and Mill, Drury still hoped to find what he was looking for from philosophy – the meaning of life to enlighten his own life-choices – in books. Wittgenstein advised Drury that what he might reasonably expect from his undergraduate studies was to learn ‘how to think’ but that no book would teach him that. Soon after this rather stilted first meeting, Drury accepted an invitation to take a walk with Wittgenstein. During this stroll, the two men found that they had both played the same game as children of ‘inventing an imaginary country and writing its history in a private code’. This led to the disclosure by Wittgenstein that as a child ‘he suffered greatly from morbid fears’ – a condition that persisted even into his early twenties when he was a student in Manchester. Eventually, he had found that ‘only religious feelings are a cure for such fears’ – a confidence that Wittgenstein feared might make Drury think him ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’. Drury assured him that ‘coming from Ireland’ he ‘knew something of the power of religion’. This assurance was met with a sharp rejoinder56 from Wittgenstein that what he was speaking about was ‘real religious feeling’,57 not ‘superstition’ (Cons., p. 95).

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

11

Aware by now of Wittgenstein’s capacity to deliver sharp comment, Drury nevertheless continued to take walks with him. In addition, they visited ecclesiastical buildings (e.g. Ely Cathedral),58 attended concerts and listened to gramophone records of Western art music, read books together aloud,59 went to the cinema – mainly one on Mill Road that specialized in Wittgenstein’s favourite American ‘flicks’ (never English60 or Continental films) – and shared tea, which Wittgenstein liked very lightly drawn, or coffee (of normal strength). Nevertheless, Wittgenstein told Drury: ‘You are not an easy person to get to know’ (Cons., p. 97). Wittgenstein encouraged Drury to find a fellow student with whom he could engage in philosophical discussion on the premise that ‘a philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring’ (Cons., p. 106). When Drury protested that he found it ‘very hard to start a real philosophical discussion with a stranger’, Wittgenstein admitted it would be hard: ‘You will have to spend a long time before you can begin to understand each other. You will be lucky if during your life you find even one person with whom you can have really valuable discussions’ (Cons., p. 97). Wittgenstein suggested that Drury’s contemporary, Desmond Lee (see BHN), whom he considered ‘by far the ablest of our present discussion group’, as a suitable interlocutor. Drury’s continuing conversations with Wittgenstein were very wide-ranging and covered – as already mentioned – not only philosophy, music and anthropology, but also theatre,61 art62 and science. In addition, Wittgenstein recommended books to Drury. One example was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which Wittgenstein believed might teach Drury ‘something about the age we were now living in’ and act as ‘an antidote for his “incurable romanticism”’ (Cons., p. 104).63 The perennial topic, however, was religion. Wittgenstein counselled his student friend against seeking a philosophical justification for his religious beliefs citing the Hulsean Preacher at Cambridge, F. R. Tennant, who in his Philosophical Theology proposed a version of the argument from design that concluded that the existence of God was probable. He remarked to Drury: ‘Can you imagine St. Augustine saying that the existence of God was “highly probable”’ (Notes, p. 151). 64 Again, Wittgenstein was strongly opposed to relying on historical evidence for Christian belief.65 Thus, ‘the only value’ books such as Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus had was to show ‘how many, many different ways people can interpret the Gospel story (Cons., p. 99).66 What Wittgenstein wanted Drury to concentrate on instead was the symbolic character of religion as exhibited in various liturgies. ‘Modernists’,67 who concentrated on the philosophical and historical foundations for religion were ‘the most deceived of all’ (Cons., p. 100). Convinced that ‘all religions are wonderful, even those of the most primitive tribes’, and that Drury suffered from ‘narrowness’ (Cons., p. 96). Wittgenstein wanted Drury to learn both from the history of religions (as in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience) and from other Christian traditions, Eastern Orthodoxy in particular. Wittgenstein himself had been much influenced during the war by Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief (although, as Rhees wrote to Drury, when he later studied the Gospels ‘he was shocked to discover what immensely important things Tolstoy’s “Presentation” just leaves out’ (Arc., 10 July, 1971)).

12

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Wittgenstein also recommended to Drury Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, mentioning that while teaching school in Austria he read it aloud to the village priest and Crime and Punishment. Wittgenstein observed that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were ‘the only two European writers in recent times who really had something important to say about religion’ (Notes, p. 155). In the last analysis, however, as Wittgenstein advised Drury: Christianity is not a matter of saying a lot of prayers … If you and I are to live religious lives, it musn’t be that we talk a lot about religion [though they did], but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you, in the end, find your way to God. (Cons., p. 105)68 A Wittgenstein text that Drury quoted liberally when he attempted to convey his understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy was the record of the only lecture Wittgenstein ever delivered to a general audience. This took place on Sunday, 17 November 1929, and was sponsored by ‘The Heretics’, a university society of ‘free thinkers’. They met in the Conservative Club, presided over by a terracotta bust of Benjamin Disraeli on the mantelpiece. Wittgenstein’s topic was nominally the same as Prichard’s paper delivered earlier in the year to the Moral Sciences Club, ‘Ethics’.69 In his biography of Wittgenstein, Ray Monk made the point that in the lecture Wittgenstein took ‘the opportunity to try and correct the most prevalent and serious misunderstanding of the Tractatus: the idea that it is a work written in a positivist, anti-metaphysical spirit’ (Monk, p. 277). This observation matches Drury’s mature understanding precisely. Wittgenstein highlighted in the lecture that ‘words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning’. Hence, as Wittgenstein put it: ‘Not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value [which Wittgenstein had earlier delineated as the putative subject of ethics] but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance’ (Cited in Notes, p. 153). Wittgenstein went on to admit that this leaves anybody who ‘ever tried to write or talk about Ethics or Religion’ meeting the ‘boundaries of language’. It is to run ‘against the wall of our cage’ and is ‘perfectly, absolutely hopeless’. Drury’s understanding was, firstly, that Wittgenstein’s method was designed precisely to bring philosophers to a sense of the hopelessness of their endeavours – but only if they persisted in thinking that their task was scientific. Secondly, however, if they came (through the exercise of a rigorous philosophical asceticism) to accept their limitations as language animals, ‘a feeling of spiritual claustrophobia’ would arouse (indirectly) ‘a desire for the absolute good’, an idea probably derived from Kierkegaard. This seems akin to Augustine’s post-conversion guiding principle: ‘quia fecisti nos ad Te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in Te’ (‘because you have made us for yourself our hearts are restless until they rest in you’). Drury associated Wittgenstein closely with Augustine70 and his own philosophical writing has a strong Augustinian inflection. The difficulty persisted, however, as to how Wittgenstein could consistently (and persistently with Drury and some others) talk about religion. Indeed, it is still disputed what his solution to the problem of consistency was.71

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

13

It is important to bear in mind that Drury’s published ‘day-book’ consists of remarks by Wittgenstein which Drury ‘wished to remember’ (Cons., p. 93). However, it is unlikely that they were recorded contemporaneously. In a letter to Rhees dated 15 February 1965 Drury wrote: ‘I have by the way already obeyed your excellent advice and started to keep a file of these incidents as they occur to me.’72 The retrospective focus on one teacher not only tends to give a less than rounded impression of the influence of the others who taught Drury. In addition, we get a toned-down version of Drury’s own role in the Cambridge philosophical proceedings of his time. We know, however, from other sources – particularly the diary kept by Arthur MacIver73 – that Drury was a prominent and active participant in these proceedings. For example, in the four-month period covered by MacIver, Drury is recorded as hosting a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club in his rooms (25 October 1929) and delivering a paper to the club entitled ‘Dr Tennant on the Data and Methods of Philosophy’.74 At another meeting of the club, Wittgenstein ‘argued with Drury for the whole evening’. The argument continued even after the meeting was adjourned at 11.00 pm and went on for another three-quarters of an hour – although ‘Drury, tired out’, did not stay until the end and went to bed; presumably others took up the cudgels. The argument (which centred on Wittgenstein’s thesis that ‘statements about other people’s feelings only have meaning as statements about their behaviour’) was further prolonged in Moore’s ‘Conversation Class’, which Wittgenstein attended the following day. MacIver notes that ‘the last thing that I heard as we came away [from the class] was Drury and Wittgenstein arranging a meeting place in which to continue the argument’ (9 November 1929). This meeting was to be held in Drury’s rooms the following week, but since Wittgenstein could not in fact attend, it had to be postponed. This strenuous joust contrasts markedly with Drury’s self-deprecatory introductory remarks to his ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’. These begin: ‘I am disgusted by my frequent dumbness’ in the discussions and proceeds: If only I had been able to stand up to him and insist on further elucidation, how much more interesting these conversations might have been! But to argue with Wittgenstein required an alacrity of mind and speech, and a certain obstinate courage, and these were virtues I did not possess. (Cons., p. 93) MacIver records that a resolution to the problem about ‘statements about other people’s feelings’ that had so exercised Wittgenstein and Drury eventually took place at a meeting of the ‘Wittgenstein Society’ in Drury’s rooms later in the month. Although there were ten persons present, this again turned out to be a ‘duologue between Wittgenstein and Drury’. Perhaps worn down, Drury ‘declared himself at last convinced of the truth of Wittgenstein’s main doctrine’ (21 November 1929). In several of MacIver’s diary entries, Drury is portrayed as the initiator of philosophical discussion when no one else could think of an issue to raise. For example, at a meeting in Lee’s rooms, Drury started the ball rolling with how ‘on Wittgenstein’s principles it has significance to say that an orange has pips in it if we do not cut the orange at the moment when we make the statement?’ By a process which it would now be well-nigh impossible to reconstruct this ‘led Wittgenstein to

14

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

talk about hypotheses, which brought him onto the conception of a line as an infinite set of points’. On this occasion, MacIver found ‘Drury’s honest unoriginality … very funny to see’ (25 February 1930). However, when, as MacIver put it, he had previously ‘tried to take Drury’s place and start things going’, he ‘failed, my point leading to nothing’ (25 January 1930). Drury’s took his final degree examinations in 1930 and, having studied the writings of Gottfried Leibniz and struggled with those of Hermann Lotze, whom he found ‘very heavy going, very dull’ (Cons., p. 99) he graduated with a starred first.75 A reference Broad provided when Drury applied for a post in philosophy two years later can serve to summarize Drury’s undergraduate achievement: Mr. M. O’C Drury was my pupil during the whole of the period during which he was working at Cambridge for the Moral Sciences Tripos, Parts I & II. … I have had much philosophical discussion with him. He is keenly interested in fundamental metaphysical problems. … Since taking the Tripos he has had the advantage of continuing his philosophical studies with Dr. Wittgenstein, and thus gaining a first-hand acquaintance with the work of a very thorough and original thinker whose theories and methods are likely to have a profound influence on the course of philosophy in the near future. … Mr. Drury made a special study of Theology, and even in the Tripos itself he made very good use of his knowledge of such theologians as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure. There is no doubt that Mr. Drury possesses in a high degree the learning, the interests, and the intellectual capacities to be an excellent philosophical lecturer. I have therefore no hesitation in recommending Mr. Drury to the very serious attention of the electors to the vacant Lectureship. (5 July 1932) One unexpected item of information in Broad’s reference is his citing Drury’s acquaintance with the medieval scholastic thinkers, Bonaventure and Aquinas.76 In a letter to Rhees, Drury recalled Wittgenstein saying of Aquinas: ‘When he starts to draw distinctions he is really wonderful’ (Arc. 2 October,?1968). Undergraduate days over, Drury now faced the question as to what to do next. Wittgenstein pressed his conviction that Drury should desist from his plan to be ordained: ‘I can’t approve; no, I can’t approve. I am afraid that one day that collar would choke you’ (Cons, p. 95). He deployed a Tolstoyan argument by suggesting that ‘for all you and I can tell, the religion of the future will be without any priests or ministers. I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church’.77 Nevertheless, Drury enrolled in the Cambridge theological college, Westcott House, whose principal then was Canon B. K. Cunningham. Although Drury does not mention the event in his journal, his father, Henry D’Olier Drury, was to die on 26 January 1931, aged eighty-one, shortly after his son had become established in Westcott.

WESTCOTT HOUSE Drury continued to attend Wittgenstein’s lectures and discussions while still at Westcott House. As previously mentioned, Drury has been suggested by John King

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

15

as a probable source of some material that was included in the student notes that comprise Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge 1930-1932. Whether that is the case, or not, this volume gives a fair impression of the philosophical questions he was exposed to at that time by Wittgenstein. Central to these puzzles was how language relates to reality. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had concluded that assertoric propositions (alone) connect us with reality in the way a picture does its subject or a score its music. Arising from that conclusion, the problem of how mathematical propositions relate to reality received renewed attention in the 1930s, and Wittgenstein took it up with a class that included both philosophers and mathematicians. The direction his thought now took was that just as we do not need ‘Moore’s analysis to use our ordinary language’ we do not need ‘Frege’s and Russell’s logic to use mathematics with confidence’ (Monk, p. 307). How much of the detail of these classes Drury retained is not clear. He later quoted Wittgenstein to the effect that ‘the mind has its own excretory organ just as the body has; and that is a good thing too’ (Cons., p. 134). While it is apparent from his philosophical essays and letters that Drury was more secure with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus than his teacher’s later writings, he was certainly influenced by Wittgenstein’s new focus on ordinary language usage. O. K. Bouwsma characterized how this affected his own philosophical practice: ‘I used to study books, now I study sentences’78 and the effect long-term on Drury was analogous. And if one were to ask Drury in later life why he should halt enquiry at any particular point – in this case, everyday language, he might have adduced an anecdote recounted in the Preface to The Danger of Words. In the course of his final oral medical examinations, he was asked whether he thought there was any physiological significance attaching to the fact that the spleen drained into the portal system. Drury replied that he could not think of any significance. The examiner then asked whether he thought ‘there must be a significance, an explanation?’ adding that, as he saw it, ‘there are two sorts of people, one man sees a bird sitting on a telegraph wire and says to himself “why is that bird sitting just there?”, the other man replies “Damn it all, the bird has to sit somewhere”’. This anecdote pleased Wittgenstein when Drury related to him as it neatly illustrated the distinction between a scientific clarification, which goes on indefinitely, and a philosophical one that ‘puts a full stop to our enquiry and restlessness by showing that our quest is in one sense mistaken’ (DoW, p. 257). Still one may ask, why ‘ordinary language’ as the halting place? Many later postmodernist philosophers in contrast deploy a great variety of rhetorical devices with abandon. The result conjures up a hall of reflecting mirrors79 with an infinite variety of possible angles of vision – a metaphor that suggests no place between mind, world and language where meaning can reside. In the last months of his life, in the reflections recorded in On Certainty, Wittgenstein acknowledged the fluidity and variety of language use but also repeated what had been there from the beginnings of his investigations – a distinction between what is said and what makes that saying possible and coherent. The relatively stable direction of the flow of the river of language is assured by the river-bed. That bed itself has been formed by the flow of the waters and it incarnates the history of that flow, for example, in the configuration

16

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

of a river’s banks and its channel. Anthony Kenny uses a similar metaphor to describe Wittgenstein’s thought: There are fossilized empirical propositions that form channels for the ordinary, fluid propositions. They are propositions that make up our world-picture, and a world picture is not learnt by experience; it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false. Children do not learn them; they as it were swallow them down with what they do learn. (On Certainty 94, 476)80 In a letter to Rhees, for example Arc., 2 March 1959 and reflected in other correspondence given in this book, Drury asserted that ‘in every generation people are thinking with certain assumptions in the background. These are not formulated or criticised, but they exercise a profound influence on the thought and life of that generation’. However, his addendum that these assumptions are ‘a source of human bondage’ and hence have to be examined anew by each generation may have to be qualified. Such assumptions may also prove on examination to be sound and moreover continuous with philosophical discoveries made well outside the two hundred year-time frame Drury allows before they lose purchase and become enslaving or simply empty of meaning. After all, he himself still found much in Plato, for example, to draw nourishment from. What had influenced Wittgenstein in the new direction of ordinary language was an Italian economist colleague, Piero Sraffa. By using a typical Neopolitan hand-on-chin gesture and asking Wittgenstein what its ‘Logical Form’ was, Strafa convinced him that the tractarian reliance on ‘Logical Form’ – the linguistic commonality connecting mind and world – was far too inherently limiting of the possibilities of human communication. Further, on happening to pass a game of football, Wittgenstein had the inspiration that instead of comparing language use to picturing, it might be better compared to the rule-following that is characteristic of games. Ordinary language usage operates quite reliably within a multiplicity of ‘language games’. The particular difficulty with philosophical discourse is that in pursuit of a meaning that covers all cases, words are abstracted from the ordinary flow of life and language; they become ‘Pickwickian’. There are multiple languagegames and they are not reducible to the singular one privileged in the Tractatus. The task for philosophers is to restore philosophical abstractions to their regular quotidian language homes. By this means, philosophical problems would not so much be ‘solved’ as ‘dissolved’. Drury records – but was uncertain whether the date 1931 was correct81 – that Wittgenstein stayed in a ‘hutt’ he had had built in Norway in 1914 overlooking a remote lake north-east of Bergen, connected to Norway’s longest fjord. On his return to Cambridge, he told Drury ‘he had done no writing there but had spent his time in prayer’. Further, he had felt it necessary to write out a confession of the behaviour in his past life since he first came to Cambridge of which he was now most ashamed and ‘insisted on my reading this’. Wittgenstein had already shared his confession with Moore, who was very distressed by having to listen to Wittgenstein reading aloud what he had written. Drury did not then reveal what the contents of Wittgenstein’s confession were – except to say that it ‘it contained nothing about the

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

17

sexual behaviour ascribed to him in recent writing’ (Cons., p. 109). However, he did provide a little more information (even though to the same effect) when William Warren Bartley published Wittgenstein (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973) dealing in part with Wittgenstein’s sexual orientation and practice. Drury now felt ‘forced’ to reveal that Wittgenstein’s confession concerned what he ‘called his vanity, and occasions when he told deliberate lies to protect his vanity’ but ‘there was no mention of the behaviour Mr Bartley attributes to him.’ (see entry for Francis Skinner in BHN). From a remark Drury later made to Rush Rhees, the latter inferred that the burden of the information Wittgenstein shared with Drury was that he had hit a child he was teaching in Lower Austria and had denied that he had done so to his headmaster.82 Wittgenstein at first failed in his mission to dissuade Drury from theological studies. However, after some time at Westcott House, Drury felt that his life ‘hitherto had been superficial and aesthetic’, presumably in the Kierkegaardian sense, and that a ‘much more costly’ commitment was required of him: ‘I began for the first time to have serious doubts about continuing my plan to be ordained in the Anglican Church’ (Cons., p. 109). Drury seems also to have been influenced by Wittgenstein’s impression, on visiting Westcott House, of over-familiarity with holy things. Remarkably, a crucifix over Drury’s bed evoked his teacher’s distaste – as did his discovery of a piano in the college chapel loft.83

SOCIAL SERVICE Drury’s doubts led to a decision to leave Westcott House.84 On learning of this, Wittgenstein urged Drury to get a job ‘among ordinary people of a type you at present know nothing about’ for ‘there is no oxygen in Cambridge for you. It doesn’t matter for me, as I manufacture my own oxygen’. In March 1932, Drury accepted an invitation from the Archdeacon of Newcastle, Leslie Hunter, to work as a volunteer with a group of unemployed ship-workers in Newcastle-upon-Tyne who were engaged in various projects to improve their parlous situation. Wittgenstein visited him there and suggested that the only way to deal with such dereliction was to ‘get all those people running in one direction’ (Cons., p. 110).85 Once the success of the Newcastle venture was assured, Drury had to move on and secure paid employment. Already experienced as a supervisor of three women students of Newnham College, Cambridge,86 Drury applied for a lectureship in philosophy at the local Armstrong College (later Newcastle University). He solicited testimonials from Broad (given above), Moore87 and a decidedly unenthusiastic Wittgenstein, who expressed his fixed view that teaching philosophy was a ridiculous profession and was ill-disposed to expose Drury to it. In the event, the post was given to Dorothy Emmet.88 Wittgenstein was pleased with Emmet’s appointment. As Drury remarked: ‘On several occasions in later years he used to say to me that I owed a great debt to Miss Emmet, in that she had saved me from becoming a professional philosopher’ (Cons., p. 111). This view did not change. In 1949, Wittgenstein told O. K. Bouwsma that ‘those students of his for whom he is now fairly certain he did some good, are not philosophers at all. One is a doctor, Dr Drury in Dublin, and several

18

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

are mathematicians. … In this way, philosophy, studying it, is simply a course in thinking – clearing away confusions. Once these are cleared away, one is prepared for other work.’89 Later in 1932 Drury accepted an invitation from a friend to live in a settlement in Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales and help run a market garden for the benefit of unemployed miners. Wittgenstein came to visit him there just before the Easter vacation in 1933 and reported to William H. Watson that Drury was ‘working very hard and at a thankless job’ (Cam., 26 April 1933, p. 208). Sometime later, a friend of Drury’s fell mentally ill. This experience prompted Drury to consider taking up a career as psychiatric nurse. To that end he arranged for an interview with the medical superintendent of the hospital where his friend was being cared for. The superintendent urged that, given his strong educational qualifications, Drury could make a greater contribution if he would train as a doctor. When Drury wrote to Wittgenstein informing him of what had transpired, Wittgenstein summoned him to Cambridge and on his arrival there announced that he had arranged a financial subvention from ‘two wealthy friends’ (Cons., p. 111) to help him commence medical studies. Together they decided that Drury would apply to Trinity College Dublin [TCD] – apparently because a medical training there would be less expensive than in England. Wittgenstein made it clear, however, that he would no longer discuss philosophy with Drury – a decision that was only partially adhered to thereafter. From a letter Wittgenstein wrote in 1933 to his close friend, Gilbert Pattison, a chartered accountant in London, it is possible to reconstruct the financial resources made available to Drury to fund his medical education. His mother had agreed to an allowance to cover Drury’s living expenses; her husband’s estate had been valued on his death in 1931 at £7,490 15s 5d. Drury had ascertained that his university fees would amount to £170 and Maynard Keynes agreed to pay £150 towards these. Drury’s sister, Mary, whom Wittgenstein correctly stated was ‘very poor’, pledged the balance. However, Wittgenstein felt that this provision was insufficient to cover other likely expenses and asked Pattison if he would loan a further £100, in case it was required. This apparently Pattison agreed to do. As it turned out, Drury won a School of Physic Medical Scholarship for his achievements in anatomy and physiology. This came to £20 per annum for two years beginning with the academic year 1936–7. In the 1938–9 session he was awarded the FitzPatrick Scholarship which amounted to the annual interest on an investment of £1000. This scholarship was awarded annually to the student who obtained ‘the highest aggregate marks at Part II of the Intermediate and Parts I and II of the Final Examinations’.

MEDICAL STUDIES AND VACATIONS Drury’s first year of medical study centred on anatomy and he won a set of dissecting tools as a prize in recognition of his achievement in that subject.90 Over the remaining years of Drury’s medical education, Wittgenstein took holidays with Drury either in Ireland or in England. Thus, as already mentioned, Wittgenstein and Skinner joined him in Connemara in 1934 (14 September to 1 October), where Drury spent the

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

19

summer. Wittgenstein was amused by the ‘antiquated’ train with its Victorian rolling stock that conveyed them from Galway. On arrival at Recess station, Wittgenstein met Drury’s mother, who was taking the train back to Galway; she had taken the car to Recess which would convey the visitors back to Rosroe. On the basis of twenty minutes conversation with Wittgenstein, Drury’s mother later wrote to her son that she was now ‘much happier’ about his being ‘guided by’ his former teacher. By way of welcome, Drury prepared ‘a rather elaborate meal’ for his guests but Wittgenstein ordained that henceforth they must have ‘a plate of porridge for breakfast, vegetables from the garden for lunch, and a boiled egg in the evening’ (Cons., p. 112). Wittgenstein was struck by the poverty of the district manifest in the dwellings of the cottiers and remarked: ‘I thought I had struck rock-bottom in Poland91 – but this is even more primitive’ (Cons., p. 113). Wittgenstein was also taken by the beauty of the landscape, particularly its colours. When possible, they took long walks outdoors but Wittgenstein had them turn back when they encountered a family, the Mortimers, making hay on their small holding. Wittgenstein did not wish to holiday in front of them. The Mortimers were both farmers and fishermen; they netted salmon during a season that lasted from April until August, Saturdays and Sundays excepted. Drury mentions an occasion when they landed ‘a large catch of mackerel’ (Cons., p. 115).92 There were several days of almost continuous downpour during which time, at Wittgenstein’s suggestion, Drury read aloud from William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. Wittgenstein found in Prescott a condescending attitude to the aborigines about whom he was writing. Wittgenstein remarked on the incongruity of an American (Prescott) adopting such an attitude writing at a time when slavery was still extant in the American South. This was perhaps a little harsh about a writer who was not a southerner but a native Bostonian. Wittgenstein found something Platonic (presumably in the sense of the philosopher-king) in the idea of an Aztec emperor writing poetry – a poetry that conveyed what he thought to be a universal nugget of wisdom shared by every culture to the effect: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’ (Cons., pp. 114). Perhaps in 1935 – Drury was again unsure of the date – Wittgenstein joined the Drury family for an Easter holiday in Woolacombe in North Devon. On this occasion, Drury confided to Wittgenstein that the Holy Week and Easter ceremonies that had previously meant so much to him now left him with ‘a sense of emptiness’. Wittgenstein, concerned that his opposition to Drury’s becoming a parson might have had the effect of having him shun all church services, suggested to him that because the ceremonies ‘haven’t the importance you once attached to them … doesn’t mean they have no importance’ and, furthermore, that ‘as one develops, a man’s expression of his religion becomes much drier’ (Cons., p. 115). There are typescripts of two papers written by Drury, probably in 1935. The first is entitled ‘The Method of Philosophy’ and describes a technique for demonstrating nonsense which would free one from philosophical and metaphysical problems by disclosing that ‘they are attempts to answer meaningless questions’ – an approach that he was to modify considerably in later years. The second paper is entitled ‘What is Philosophy?’ and shows how ‘some typical definitions’ are hopelessly obscure.

20

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

In 1936, Wittgenstein again stayed at the Drury home in Exeter for a holiday.93 Prompted by a portrait of Pio Nono [Pope Pius IX] which (surprisingly for an Anglican home) hung on the wall of the Drury dining room, the two men discussed the Roman Catholic doctrine of Papal Infallibility, whose meaning, Wittgenstein professed, eluded him. Wittgenstein did admire the sincerity of John Henry Newman’s Apologia. However, he thought, Newman’s farewell sermon to his Anglican friends on his conversion to Catholicism was incongruous because of the manner in which he addressed those friends; he was to return to the topic of Newman in conversations he had with O. K. Bouwsma in Syracuse, New York, in August, 1949. In the context of a discussion of the detective story genre, which he thought the English had a talent for (as exhibited by Agatha Christie in particular), when one of their company suggested that he read G. K. Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ stories, Wittgenstein grimaced and said: ‘I couldn’t stand the idea of a Roman Catholic priest playing the part of a detective’ (Cons., p. 118). His reading94 at the time included James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which he found remarkable especially for its account of a schoolboy religious retreat. Passing the statue of Richard Hooker in the cathedral close, Drury explained to Wittgenstein that Hooker had tried to steer a middle course between Catholicism and Calvinism. On reflection, Wittgenstein considered that only ‘a thoroughly bourgeois culture might want some such compromise’ (Cons., p. 119) between what he considered to be two divergent doctrines. Wittgenstein’s reaction to those making choices between Christian communions was that the seeking of truth was preferable to its possession – a sentiment he found expressed in Gotthold Lessing,95 who asserted that the possession of truth was God’s prerogative. On a more mundane level, Wittgenstein was sensitive to, and critical of, the architecture of modern houses in Exeter. In June of 1936, Wittgenstein and Skinner came to Dublin. On this visit, Drury took his visitors to various Dublin sights. First, Trinity College, which Wittgenstein thought fortresslike. The fortress had been constructed, he conjectured, to protect the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’.96 Wittgenstein was ambivalent about the much admired five Georgian squares. These were built during the reigns of the four successive British monarchs called George between 1714 and 1820. Wittgenstein thought they had been built (in a Palladian style) by people with ‘good taste’ who had ‘nothing very important to say’ but had the good sense not to ‘attempt to express anything’. However, by the 1930s many of the houses on these squares were in an extreme state of disrepair. The trio walked along the quays towards Kingsbridge Railway Station.97 In the distance, and in evening light, the station looked more impressive than it proved to be when examined more closely. In a Woolworth’s store, Wittgenstein noticed some cheap cameras and bought three of them. The trio took what turned out to be very poor photographs of one another. They climbed to the top of Nelson’s Pillar (later demolished after an IRA bombing) on O’Connell St to obtain a panoramic view of the city. Wittgenstein remarked on the bilingual street signs and took the view that the government’s attempt to reinstate Gaelic as the national language, of which this signage practice was a part, was futile as the language was dead. On the other hand, the Gaelic signs made him realize that ‘one

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

21

is in a foreign country. Dublin is not just another English provincial town; it has the air of a real capital city’ (Cons., pp. 121). While in Dublin, Wittgenstein learnt of the death in Vienna of Moritz Schlick, who was shot by a mentally ill student on 22 June 1936. Schlick was a leading light of a circle of Viennese philosophers who had sought to engage Wittgenstein in its activities. Some years previously, while Drury was still a student at Cambridge, Schlick was scheduled to give a lecture there, which Wittgenstein suggested to Drury he ought to attend. Wittgenstein himself, however, did not do so; his association with the Vienna Circle, once so pregnant with expectations of fruitfulness by members of that circle, was to cease entirely with Schlick’s death.98 In 1934, Wittgenstein disclosed to Drury that he and Skinner had formed a plan of going to live and work in Russia. Wittgenstein was assisted in this venture by Keynes, who had written a letter of introduction to his friend, Ivan Maisky, the Russian ambassador (of Polish Jewish background) to Britain. Wittgenstein duly met the diplomat in July 1935. The interview went well and Wittgenstein was left with the impression, as he later wrote Keynes, that ‘he did not seem to think that it was utterly hopeless for me to try to get permission to settle in Russia though he too didn’t think it was likely’ (Cam., p. 247). Wittgenstein’s friends were unclear what he and Skinner proposed to do in Russia: Ray Monk comments: ‘The impression they received was that Wittgenstein wanted “to abandon philosophy” and “settle in Russia as a manual worker, or possibly to take up medicine”’. According to Monk, this latter was an option Wittgenstein had long considered to the extent of securing a commitment to support him financially in the venture from Keynes (see: Monk, pp. 347 and 350). The plan to study medicine was entertained in full knowledge of the drudgery involved in ‘memorizing all the details of human anatomy’ (Cons., p. 120) about which Drury had previously informed Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein visited Russia on his own in September 1935; Skinner was too ill to travel. While there, he was offered a choice of two teaching posts in philosophy – at Moscow University and a chair at the University of Kazan. Apparently, he decided quickly to abandon thoughts of a future in Russia but persisted, so Drury informs us, in the idea of taking up the study of medicine99 Drury learnt by letter from Wittgenstein that he and Skinner were ‘seriously thinking of coming to Dublin and joining’ Drury ‘in studying medicine’. Wittgenstein asked Drury to ‘make enquiries about the possibility of them entering the [Trinity College] medical school’. Not surprisingly, when Drury briefed his TCD tutor of what Wittgenstein was contemplating he was met with astonishment.100 Nevertheless, Wittgenstein pursued the matter in a later letter in which he suggested that if he did qualify as a doctor, he and Drury ‘might practise together as psychiatrists. He felt that he might have a special talent for this branch of medicine’ (Cons., p. 120). While Wittgenstein did not in the end enrol in a medical programme, his interest in psychiatry persisted. When he came to stay with Drury in Dublin in 1938 for a period of five weeks (8 February to 14 March), he asked Drury if he could arrange for him to have discussions with seriously mentally ill patients. Wittgenstein’s approach to these meetings was likely guided by what he described in his notebook for that year

22

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

as ‘Freud’s idea’, namely that ‘in madness the lock is not destroyed, only altered; the old key can no longer unlock it, but it could be opened by a differently constructed key’.101 Drury arranged an interview for Wittgenstein with Dr Richard R. Leeper, the long-time reforming medical superintendent of St Patrick’s Hospital – an institution with which Drury was to become associated for much of his professional life. When Leeper took over the hospital 150 years after it was founded,102 he considered it had narrowed its objectives to ‘mere housing, feeding and protection’ and discharged even these very poorly.103 Leeper agreed to give Wittgenstein access to patients twice or three times a week. Wittgenstein chose to visit long-stay patients who had few visitors. He became particularly engaged with one elderly man whom he considered to be ‘much more intelligent than his doctors’. The patient had a deep knowledge of music and hoping that Drury would continue to visit him when Wittgenstein left Dublin, Wittgenstein introduced the patient to him. Drury was struck by how gentle and helpful Wittgenstein was to the man in their discussion – on Herbert Spencer’s philosophy that particular day – but when Drury intervened with some, no doubt, well-informed remark, Wittgenstein told him to ‘shut up’. This injunction was later explained: ‘When you are playing ping-pong you mustn’t use a tennis racket’ (Cons., p. 123). By that time, Drury was a medical resident in the Royal City of Dublin Hospital in Upper Baggot St and was not in need of Wittgenstein’s sharp rebuke as he was experiencing great difficulty in discharging to his own satisfaction the demands made on him in the Casualty Department. He was so disturbed by his ‘clumsiness’104 in executing routine procedures, such as suturing a wound, that he ‘developed a disabling tremor’ in his hands. He feared that the opinion given by the principal of Westcott House, Canon Cunningham, when he disclosed to him that he wished to become a doctor, was accurate: ‘You have enough brains to become a doctor, but I very much doubt whether you have the right temperament.’ Drury confided these fears to Wittgenstein while they took a Sunday walk in the Phoenix Park in Dublin and at first, Wittgenstein simply remarked: ‘You lack the necessary experience: that is all that is wrong at present’ (Cons., p. 122). The following day Drury received a letter from Wittgenstein, which is a model of good sense, assuring Drury that there had been no mistake in his choice of profession: You didn’t make a mistake because there was nothing at the time you knew or ought to have known that you overlooked … the thing now is to live in the world in which you are, not to think or dream about the world you would like to be in. Look at peoples’ sufferings, physical and mental, you have them close at hand, and this ought to be a good remedy for your troubles. … I think in some sense you don’t look at people’s faces closely enough. … I wish you good thoughts but chiefly good feelings.105 Insofar as any explanation was given by Wittgenstein as to why he had decided not to pursue medical studies it was the misapprehension (certainly insofar as it pertained to British and a fortiori Irish practice) that training in psychiatry would involve a Freudian ‘training analysis’ and that that would be unacceptable to him.

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

23

Nevertheless, Wittgenstein was shortly to become involved in medicine, first in a paramedical and then a research role. The remote cause of this development were events in his native country that brought his spring visit to Dublin in 1938 to a precipitate close. Drury told Wittgenstein on 11 March that all the newspapers were reporting that Hitler was poised to invade Austria. Drury recorded Wittgenstein’s reaction as ‘this is a ridiculous rumour. Hitler doesn’t want Austria. Austria would be no use to him at all’ (Cons., p. 122). When, on the following day, the annexation of Austria did take place, Drury recounts, ‘he did not refer to his remark of the previous evening, and, to my surprise, did not seem unduly disturbed’. Drury asked Wittgenstein if his sisters, Hermine and Helene, who lived in Vienna, were in any danger. This was an understandable question in view of Wittgenstein’s previous disclosure to him of his Jewishness and his remark when the Nazis took control of Germany: ‘Just think what it must mean, when the government of a country is taken over by a set of gangsters’ (Cons., p. 121). Nevertheless, Wittgenstein replied: ‘They are too much respected, no one would dare to touch them’ (Cons., p. 122). It has to be said that Drury’s account of these exchanges merits Ray Monk’s comment that it is, ‘to say that least, somewhat strange’ (Monk, 390). This is because it is clear from Wittgenstein’s contemporary diary entries and from a letter to Sraffa (Cam., 12 March 1938, pp. 267–8) that he was aware that the Anschluss would cause difficulties for his sisters and that, if he were to visit them, he was at risk of being forbidden to leave Austria again – although Wittgenstein seemed to think that the fact that he was employed abroad would protect him. He raised with Sraffa (who was himself a political refugee from Mussolini’s Italy) the option of changing his citizenship – either to British or (perhaps) Irish. On 14 March, Sraffa wrote to Wittgenstein advising strongly that he should not visit Vienna at that time. Even if he could claim employment status abroad there was no certainty he would be allowed to exit Austria afterwards. Sraffa also dealt with matters pertinent to the acquisition of another citizenship. On receipt of this letter, Wittgenstein departed Dublin immediately for Cambridge, perhaps because he was aware that Sraffa was leaving for Italy at the end of that week. As regards his remarks to Drury, it may be that Wittgenstein wished to spare an already pressured Drury the difficulties, personal and familial, that now faced him.106 Wittgenstein applied for British citizenship in 1939. He made this application reluctantly because, as he explained to Sraffa, living in England with a British passport would make him a ‘sham-englishman’ whereas if he were to succeed in acquiring an Irish passport he would simply be a refugee (Cam. 14 March 1938, p. 269).107 He asked Drury to request his mother to provide a reference in support of his application. This she consented to do (Cons., p. 123). Wittgenstein was naturalized as a British citizen on 5 April 1939. In 1938, Drury took his final medical examinations. Notwithstanding this onerous commitment, he wrote to his friend Raymond Townsend on 22 May 1938 that he was ‘reading again “the Desert Fathers,” very slowly just one section at a time each evening. It is wonderful, and brings me back continually from so many foolish ambitions to the only object of life.’ His post-examination plans included meeting with Fr Long, his former rector in Exeter, in Dublin in early August and with Townsend in London later that month. Wittgenstein visited Drury in Dublin

24

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

in late September 1938108 but departed sooner than intended for a reason he wrote to Rhees he would disclose when they next met. Drury took the midwifery and gynaecology finals on 14 October and wrote to Townsend that he felt ‘very shaky about them but I suppose it will be all right in the end’, which indeed it was. In fact, he took first place and first prize in his final medical examinations in anatomy, physiology, histology, Materia Medica, bacteriology, pathology, medicine, gynaecology and obstetrics. He was awarded the conventional medical degrees, M. B. and B. Ch. (Stip. Cond.)109 together with the B. A.O. (in obstetrics) in the Spring Session, 1939. Overall, he achieved First Class Honours in medicine and obstetrics and Second Class Honours in surgery. Drury was registered with the Irish General Medical Council to practise as a doctor on 16 March 1939.

ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS In common with many Irish110 medical graduates at a time when dispensary posts in the country did not often become vacant, Drury took up a position in Wales assisting in a general practice in the Rhondda Valley where the patients were mainly miners. As 1939 unfolded, it was at length realized by what Wittgenstein characterized as the ‘wealthy old men’ (Cons., p. 125) who formed the British Cabinet, that war was imminent. Drury was accordingly advised to make himself available for service in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) at a moment’s notice. Aware of this eventuality, Wittgenstein and Skinner visited him in Wales in early September and stayed at the New Inn Hotel, Pontypridd. They were there on Sunday, 3 September 1939, the day war was declared on Germany. Quite unnecessarily, the manager of the hotel had enforced a blackout on the evening before the declaration of war. When Drury made a jocular comment about this, the manager reported the presence of a guest with a foreign sounding name to the police. The matter was resolved to the satisfaction of the police but Wittgenstein was shaken by the incident. Drury then decided to go to his home in Exeter for a few days’ vacation and Wittgenstein and Skinner accompanied him there. They spent the days together discussing the appropriateness of the inclusion of certain books, for example, the Second Epistle of Peter, in the biblical canon. More relevant to the events unfolding around them, they also discussed Wittgenstein’s well-justified apprehension that England and France together would be unable to defeat Germany and, more personally, how he and Skinner might be able to contribute to the war effort by serving in an ambulance brigade. On 20 September, Drury reported to a reception station in Devonport, Plymouth and received an emergency commission as Lieutenant. On 27 February 1940 he was transferred to Houndstone Camp in Yeovil and remained there until November. In that period, as Drury put it, ‘France had collapsed before the German blitzkreig.’ Then, the ‘British Army had at the last minute [in May] been ferried to England from Dunkirk’. However, a ‘spirit of unity and determination had grown during [“that wonderful Summer”] to resist, whatever the cost, a German attempt at invasion’. While visiting Drury in Yeovil, Wittgenstein, who had often confided a ‘dislike of many features of English life’, now realized ‘how fond I am of her; how I would

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

25

hate to see her destroyed. I have often said to myself that William the Conqueror got himself a very good bargain’. Drury complained about his senior medical officer ‘who in my opinion had forgotten what medicine he ever knew. He kept wanting to dispute my diagnoses and treatment, and of course could overrule me by his seniority’. He received no sympathy from Wittgenstein, the veteran soldier, who gave him ‘a lecture on the importance in an army of discipline and obedience to superiors, especially in a time of crisis like this’ (Cons., p. 126). On 4 November, Drury received a welcome transfer to Blandford Camp, the longtime base of the Royal Corps of Signals. He was attached to the 209th Heavy AntiAircraft, Ty Regiment. On 9 December, he was sent to Beckett Pk., Leeds, preliminary to being assigned to the Middle East. On the same day he commenced a short course of instruction at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, which he completed on 21 December. Wittgenstein and Skinner came to Liverpool (which had been subject to a heavy air raid two days prior to their arrival), to make their farewells. Wittgenstein presented Drury with a silver drinking cup. It is possible that Wittgenstein was aware of the anti-bacterial properties of silver but what he said to Drury was ‘water tastes so much nicer out of silver. There is only one condition attached to this gift: you are not to worry if it gets lost’ (Cons., p. 126) – which apparently it was. On 4 January 1941, Drury travelled to Gourock on the Clyde in Scotland and prepared to embark for service in Egypt accessing it via the Cape of Good Hope. On 28 February, now Capt Drury, RAMC, wrote to his friend Raymond Townsend ‘in the Red Sea’ that we are nearly at the end of our long voyage, we have been 8 weeks on board ship and you know what that feels like! But I can honestly say I have enjoyed the voyage; we have had wonderful weather and I have never been sea-sick, and then the beauty of the sea and sky and the few sights of land we have had have fascinated me. But best of all I have had a long period of real leisure to walk up and down the decks and look into myself and think things over. And I soon found it was high time this was done, for as perhaps you noticed I was inclined to forget things which I once knew well. Drury arrived in Egypt on 11 March. He was assigned to No. 6 General Hospital, located at the army barracks at Abbassia, outside Cairo.111 The barracks was a selfcontained compound with shops, a cinema and service clubs. Egypt was soon to be the centre of what was to prove one of the most significant zones of conflict from a British point of view. In the previous months, British and Commonwealth troops under the field command of Lt. General Richard Nugent O’Connor had so routed the Italian forces that an Axis presence in North Africa had been all but extinguished. In reaction, Hitler ordered Erwin Rommel to rescue the situation. Rommel, as head of the Deutsches Afrikakorps, initiated a counteroffensive in February 1941. Within a few weeks he had pushed the British forces, weakened by Churchill’s withdrawal of troops to defend Greece, back into Egypt. It took until November 1942 for the situation to be resolved with the defeat of the Germans at the second battle of El Alamein by the newly arrived Lt. General Bernard Law Montgomery.112 Churchill now sensed that a tide-turning victory had been achieved,

26

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

as is clear from his reverberant remark: ‘Now this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ Meanwhile, Drury kept in touch with Wittgenstein through short letters. These letters, however, have not survived, so far as is known. Neither, certainly, have his former teacher’s replies. Drury did not retain them – to his later regret. One important incident in Wittgenstein’s life in 1941 was the sudden death of Francis Skinner on 11 October. Drury appreciated how upsetting this was for Wittgenstein and shared in his grief. Very shortly afterwards, Wittgenstein, who had been rejected for service in the RAMC on the ground that he was of ‘former enemy alien nationality’,113 secured a post as a dispensary porter at Guy’s Hospital in London.114 Meanwhile, Drury advised Wittgenstein from Egypt by letter that he had been ‘anxious to read something in philosophy’. He had managed to get hold of a copy of [F.H.] Bradley’s Essays on Truth and Reality in a shop in Cairo’ and to his surprise he ‘found them very stimulating’. These essays were later to influence his thinking (Cons., p. 127).115 A revealing piece of information pertinent to Drury’s stay in Cairo116 (which lasted until 11 December 1943) concerns the shock and surprise he felt when he found in one of the temples at Luxor a bas-relief on the wall of ‘the God Horus with an erect phallus in the act of ejaculation and collecting the semen in a bowl!’ He told Wittgenstein of this response upon his return to England. Wittgenstein’s untroubled reply was: Why in the world shouldn’t they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated? Not every religion has to have St. Augustine’s attitude to sex. Why, even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn’t prevent it being a religious ceremony. (Cons., p. 128) These visits to a bookshop and a cultural site meanwhile suggest a more relaxed period in post-El Alamein Cairo, which became a centre for ‘rest and recreation’117 – although it remained an important centre for strategic command and control in the Mediterranean. Drury was recalled to England in late 1943 and arrived home on 5 January 1944. He was given some leave and after visiting his family in Exeter, went to see Wittgenstein who was by that time in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. While still at Guy’s Hospital,118 Wittgenstein had been invited to join a medical research council unit based in the hospital. The unit was directed by Dr R. T. Grant; its object was to investigate the physiology of what was popularly called ‘wound shock’.119 Grant found subjects for research among injured victims of air raids in London. When these raids abated, the clinical research unit, to which Wittgenstein was attached as a ‘laboratory assistant’, was transferred to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, where subjects could more readily be found among those who suffered industrial accidents. In Newcastle, Grant asked Wittgenstein to construct an apparatus that would record the relationship between breathing and pulse. The device he made enabled Wittgenstein to act as his own subject and record the results on a rotating drum.120 This he demonstrated to Drury. The period apart seems to have introduced

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

27

a strain on the relationship between the two men, but after taking the train to Durham and a walk by the River Wear, the old ease in conversation came back on the return journey. Drury was next assigned to Swansea and then to No. 6 General Hospital in Llandilo, South Wales. Wittgenstein was now also staying in Swansea with Rush Rhees and Drury and he met occasionally. Aware that an attempt would soon be made to land an invading force in Normandy and that it was planned that Drury would be assigned to a landing craft as medical officer, Drury came to say goodbye to Wittgenstein, who advised him ‘If it ever happens you get mixed up in hand-to-hand fighting, you must just stand aside and let yourself be massacred’ (Cons., p. 129). Drury surmised that this counsel had been derived from Wittgenstein’s own experience in the First World War. Unlikely, as it may seem, Drury later wrote to Rhees: ‘I knew he was right, that if I killed a man face to face my future life would not be worth anything to me because of this memory’ (Arc., 13 July 1969). Now classified as a ‘graded physician’, on 19 July 1944, Drury embarked with his unit for the north-west Europe sector. Montgomery, by now Field Marshal, had taken the city of Caen on 9 July and next commenced on ‘Operation Goodwood’ to take the ‘Falaise Pocket’. Drury was based at a camp near Bayeux. While there, Wittgenstein sent him a copy of Plato’s Theaetetus, with the recommendation that he read it and giving the information that ‘Plato in this dialogue is occupied with the same problems that I am writing about’ (Cons., p. 129) – presumably on the nature of knowledge. Perhaps this latter comment may be interpreted as a mitigation of the injunction made at the time Drury took up medicine that Wittgenstein would no longer discuss philosophy with him. Drury found reading Plato challenging under the conditions prevailing in the camp; No. 6 General Hospital was a tented unit121 at that stage. However, the difficulties arising from this situation elicited no sympathy from Wittgenstein when Drury disclosed them to him.122 The British drive through Normandy was very difficult. The battle of the Falaise Pocket in August presented Drury’s unit with a particularly obtuse set of challenges. Large numbers of German soldiers were captured, including several thousand who were wounded. Some of these suffered gas gangrene and there was ‘an epidemic of enteritis and the threat of typhus’. Infection had been spread by ‘a plague of mosquitoes’ from ‘dead horses and German corpses … covered in flies’.123 Drury later told his family that that there was an order not to administer penicillin to Germans – presumably because it was in scarce supply. In one case, however, he disobeyed this order. Although Drury rarely spoke later about his experience in Normandy, on an occasion when he brought his son, Luke, to see the film depicting the D-Day landings, The Longest Day (1962), he did mention that ‘the scenes of French farmers welcoming the invasion were not accurate – many farmers had been doing quite well selling produce to the Germans and did not want to be liberated!’ Another negative factor from the native population point of view may have been that much destruction of their home and villages accompanied the invasion. Drury was amused to come across a sign displayed by German soldiers reading ‘being a soldier is a wonderful thing’ and of drinking coffee with a colleague in a village only

28

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

to realize that across the road were two German officers doing likewise. In the latter case, there was a mutual decision not to personalize the conflict and the opposing combatants beat a hasty retreat. Eventually the Allies crossed the Seine on 19 August 1944, opening the way to Paris. Brussels was taken on 3 September. Operation ‘Market Garden’, aimed at liberating the Netherlands, followed. After the Battle of the Bulge, the Allies crossed the Rhine on 23 March 1945. A particularly trying period ensued further to a decision to direct the forces under Montgomery towards the Baltic. The intervening north-west German plain was successfully negotiated and on 29 April 1945, Hamburg was taken. The German surrender was celebrated on 8 May. There is a reference in a letter from Wittgenstein to Rush Rhees on 13 June 1945 (cf. Cam., p. 377) locating Drury in Ghent in Belgium. Wittgenstein went on to write that Drury would ‘probably go to the Ruhrgebiet soon’ – and ‘I have an idea that what he’ll see there will shock him’. On 22 June 1945, Drury was assigned to a British casualty clearing station. These stations had evolved in the course of the campaign and proved their worth in differentiating the seriousness of the medical condition of wounded personnel – a differentiation which, as have noted, Wittgenstein had attempted to assist with his ‘rule of fist’ to measure blood loss. A remark in Drury’s obituary in the Irish Times (Friday, January 5 1977) seems to suggest that irrespective of Wittgenstein’s apprehension about what Drury might face in Germany with its starving, displaced civilian population, bedraggled prisoners of war, and the revelation of the horrors of the concentration camps, he was already discomfited by what he had seen in France: The obituarist, Professor Norman Moore, wrote: ‘France was a testing experience for one of his sensitive and idealistic temperament.’ Drury was demobilized on 13 September 1945 having spent four years, three months, and twelve days on active service abroad in the RAMC.124

DEMOBILIZATION The first group of British service personnel were discharged on 13 June 1945 and in the next months very large numbers followed. Demobilization entitlements for the British forces after the Second World War were generous. Class A servicemen (those who had enlisted earliest) were given eight weeks paid leave, civilian clothing to the value of £12, and other allowances. This gave the demobilized some respite while they tried to establish themselves in a peace-time occupation. However, material provision did not address the emotional aspects of the experience of war. As one historian of Irish ex-servicemen has written, ‘For many the transition to civilian life was very difficult indeed’ after ‘the stress, exhilaration and danger of life in uniform’. This difficulty ‘was exacerbated by the fact that many had suffered severely traumatic experiences during the war’125 – experiences which in many cases led to mental health difficulties later on. In early 1946, Drury was appointed a house physician in the Taunton and Somerset Hospital, first established during the war by the American army. Wittgenstein came to visit on 26 April. This was Wittgenstein’s birthday and to mark the occasion

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

29

Drury gave his former teacher, mentor and friend, a French travelling clock.126 The gift was much appreciated by Wittgenstein, although, as a rule, he kept his personal possessions to a minimum, no more than would fit in his haversack. This ascetic disposition was evident even as their conversation turned to the subject of English literature. Wittgenstein thought it ‘largely aristocratic in style’ as, of course, French travelling clocks were at least in origin being associated with the ‘Grand Tour’. His own preference was exemplified rather in ‘Russian poetry, which sprang [he believed] from a peasant tradition’ (Cons., p. 130). Wittgenstein liked Cowper and Blake, and quoted the latter from memory, including the following from ‘The Everlasting Gospel’: ‘I am sure This Jesus will not do/Either for Englishman or Jew.’ This seems to address their respective religious backgrounds – Anglican and converso – and perhaps his wish that he and his friend would transcend them.127 Drury was not spared the common emotional reaction to demobilization – an experience Wittgenstein had also endured in August 1919. Drury wrote: ‘It was a time of considerable emotional turmoil and indecision for me – finding it difficult to settle down after the experiences of war.’ And, in what may have been a delayed reaction to Wittgenstein’s role in his life, Drury ‘felt for the first time that I did not want to discuss my problems with him, dreading the powerful influence he exercised over me and wanting to make my own decisions’ (Cons., p. 130). What these problems were emerges from a letter sent to Raymond Townsend in 1946. On 13 October Drury wrote from 143 Sandymount, Dublin: ‘Since we last met great fear came over me, this wasn’t just that I couldn’t decide what to do, but that all my life seemed empty and my thinking quite vain. I felt that I would be glad to die, but not in such a way that I thought of suicide’ (Arc.). This letter was written after the crisis had passed and after Drury had taken two important decisions during his separation from Wittgenstein – a period alleviated only by the exchange of occasional postcards. First, as is clear from the address, he had decided, at least temporarily, to return to the impoverished – although relatively well endowed with food – homeland of his parents and to the city where he had studied medicine, Dublin. The Irish Free State had remained formally neutral during the recent war albeit with many concessions to the Allied side. However, underlying trends of hostility to the UK were active in some quarters. So, for example, celebrations to mark Victory in Europe day in the Anglo-Irish stronghold of TCD had led to widespread rioting in the city. In general, however, the populace was ‘largely indifferent to Irish ex-servicemen’,128 such as Drury now was.129 Second, Drury mentioned to Townsend in parenthesis that he was ‘trying to work for my exams’. This was for the MD degree at TCD. This also entailed writing a thesis. The university calendar records the title of Drury’s thesis as ‘The Significance of Posture in the Aetiology and Treatment of Chronic Disease’. Drury’s letter of 13 October 1946 to Townsend also mentions that he had addressed spiritual matters: I hadn’t been over here more than a few days … when I had suddenly to go and make a full confession to the priest at St. John’s [Church of Ireland, Clondalkin, Dublin], the first I had made in 15 years. Since then I have been much more at

30

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

peace and able to rejoice and thank God for the fear he sent me. It seems to me that I had never really believed in God before, but that now I do. The final foundation stone in the edifice of the rest of his life was to take up the medical specialty Wittgenstein had suggested to him in 1938, psychiatry. By now, however, Drury had satisfied himself that the choice was his own. Not long afterwards, Drury and Wittgenstein resumed their suspended intimacy. In a letter to Rush Rhees on 30 April 1947 (Cam., p. 410), Wittgenstein refers to an ‘illness’ Drury had suffered the previous year and which the latter had discussed with him ‘with great intelligence’. Wittgenstein speculated, however, whether Drury’s ‘former [ill] state’ would ‘return’ – a contingency about which he did not feel ‘in the least sanguine’. Apart from Wittgenstein’s rather general reference, and the information given in the letter to Townsend, there is no further evidence to hand that might help establish with greater certainty the nature of Drury’s ‘illness’, if that is an informative description. It seems probable, however, that it was emotional in origin – possibly what is now referred to as a post-traumatic stress syndrome. In any event, Drury appeared to be ‘perfectly normal’ at the time of the discussion to which Wittgenstein refers. Indeed, he had secured a temporary post as assistant medical officer in St Patrick’s Hospital, James’s St, Dublin and was determined on staying there until Christmas after which Wittgenstein assumed he would return to England (see Cam. Wittgenstein to Rhees, 15 October, 1946). As it turned out, however, Drury was to be employed by St Patrick’s for the remainder of his working life.

ST PATRICK’S HOSPITAL, DUBLIN The hospital in which Drury was now a staff member was considerably changed from the institution with which he had been familiar as a medical student (and Wittgenstein as a visitor in 1938). A new medical superintendent, Dr John Norman Parker Moore (1911–96),130 fellow medical student of Drury’s, had taken over in 1946 after a difficult period following Dr Leeper’s death in 1941 – and was to hold the position for over thirty years. An intimation of what was to change in psychiatry had come already during the interim period (1941–6). Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was employed for the first time – mainly for depressive disorders (referred to then by the term ‘involutional melancholia’). Also, investigations were authorized by the board of governors into the technique of pre-frontal leucotomy pioneered by a Portuguese neurosurgeon, António Egas Moniz, in the early 1930s, for certain psychotic conditions, generally referred to as schizophrenia.131 Moore may have been first attracted to psychiatry as a result of the experience of contracting pulmonary tuberculosis as a schoolboy and suffering a relapse shortly after completing his medical degree at Trinity College Dublin. He later wrote that he had thereby gleaned ‘a new understanding of the way people feel when they fall victim to a serious and socially isolating illness’.132 On recovery, he was appointed a junior assistant medical officer (1938–41) in St Patrick’s and then secured a post in the Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries, Scotland, and rose to the rank of deputy medical director. The Crichton Royal had hosted several émigré German

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

31

and Austrian psychiatrists during the war – most notably in Moore’s view, Professor Willy Mayer-Gross (1889–961), who was director of clinical research. Mayer-Gross investigated the possible therapeutic benefits of mescaline and Lysergic acid and administered insulin coma treatment for schizophrenia.133 He had been a student of Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg University and was thereby heir to the German tradition of interaction between medicine and philosophy,134 of which Jaspers was such a notable (and fruitful) example in the field of psychiatry. Jaspers subscribed to the thesis held by members of the late-nineteenth-century phenomenological movement (whose leaders included his teacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, as well as Franz Brentano and Max Weber) that human thought, perception, emotion and action could not be ‘explained’ (Erklärung) by the methods that were proving so successful in the physical sciences but could be ‘understood’ (verstehen) with the aid of empathy. In his doctoral dissertation, under Jaspers’ direction, Mayer-Gross deployed this insight to explore ‘ecstasy and abnormal happiness’ – one phase of bipolar depression. Norman Moore’s appointment to St Patrick’s came in the year following the passing the Mental Treatment Act (1945), which reinvigorated psychiatric services in Ireland. At St Patrick’s, several other new staff appointments contributed to a fresh start. One significant appointee was Robert McCullagh (1905–2001), formerly an executive with the Great Northern Railways. As secretary-manager, he modernized administrative procedures. New appointments were also made to the nursing staff – most significantly that of matron; the post went to Eileen Herbert (see entry in BHN), who took up duty on 6 October 1947. Apart from use of the therapies mentioned above – ECT (and later electronarcosis), leucotomy and insulin shock therapy – that were in vogue, ECT excepted, only for a time, various biochemical remedies with tranquillizing or anti-depressant effects were prescribed at St Patrick’s. These latter were added to the barbiturates, bromides, paraldehyde, and a morphine and hyoscine mix that had comprised the pharmacopoeia for psychiatry in the 1940s. In 1954, Moore appointed Dr Desmond McGrath135 as the first Physician in Charge of Clinical Research at St Patrick’s. This was just about the time that new drugs (anti-psychotics – also called ‘neuroleptics’ – and anti-depressants) were becoming available and McGrath commenced his research by investigating the uses of chlorpromazine (a tranquillizer of the group ‘phenothiazine’ developed in France to control psychosis) and reserpine. These drugs marked the beginnings of a new era in psychopharmacology, in which Drury engaged gratefully, but without exaggerated expectation.

PROFESSOR WITTGENSTEIN RESIGNS On 27 July 1947 Wittgenstein wrote to Yorick Smythies from Swansea to convey that in the previous month he had applied for, and been granted, sabbatical leave for the coming Michaelmas term to do research. He added, however, that one academic term would be insufficient ‘to get a part of my book ready for publication (if this can be done at all)’ (Cam., p. 413). Indeed, he informed Smythies, he had not decided where he would spend his sabbatical term and wondered if he should resign his professorship altogether. He advised Smythies of his intention to go to Ireland to

32

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

visit Drury for two weeks in August (6th–19th) and to go to Vienna for three weeks in September. By 27 August he wrote to G. H. von Wright136 that he believed he would resign his post on his return from Vienna and ‘go somewhere where I can be alone for a longish time in order to think and, if possible, to finish a part of my book. I thought of going to Norway for that purpose but may go to Ireland instead. I’m not sure … . My mind just now is in great disorder’ (Cam., p. 415). Wittgenstein informed Drury of his plan to resign in order to work on his book. As Drury recalled, it was he who suggested that Wittgenstein come to Ireland – Dublin, or its environs, in particular. This was because Wittgenstein had previously expressed a liking for Ireland. In the event, Wittgenstein resigned his professorship in October 1947, effective 31 December, and wrote von Wright, ‘as soon as I had resigned I felt that it was the natural thing to have done’. The visit to Vienna was Wittgenstein’s first since 1939. The city was still under Russian occupation – a regime much resented by its citizens. Wittgenstein found that life there well justified the apprehension which had beset him when planning the visit. On his return from his native city, he spent a month working in Cambridge on what became the first volume of Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Further to Drury’s invitation, Wittgenstein arrived in Ireland at the end of November, accompanied by Raymond Townsend. After one night’s stay in Co. Wicklow,137 he booked into a city hotel, ‘Ross’s’ (now substantially rebuilt as the Ashling Hotel) in Parkgate St, Dublin, intending to use it as a base while he searched for a suitable abode where he could work in peace. Ross’s Hotel was a favoured city base for visiting country parsons, presumably because of its proximity to a railway terminus and to the city’s two Anglican cathedrals. It was a short stroll across the then Kings Bridge (now Sean Heuston bridge) to St Patrick’s Hospital. While there, Wittgenstein commenced Band Q of MS 136 (according to the identification system devised by von Wright).138 Wittgenstein spent most of the next ten days on what was to prove a dispiriting search for more permanent accommodation (see Cam.,Wittgenstein to Rhees: 9 December 1947, p. 419). He was accompanied by Drury whenever the latter was off-duty. There was also time for conversation on Drury’s work in his new medical specialty. A characteristically diffident Drury confessed that he found the presenting symptoms of some of his patients ‘extremely puzzling’ such that he didn’t know ‘what to say to them’. Wittgenstein reassured him that (presumably in light of his philosophical training and religious orientation) that Drury knew the import of Hamlet’s remark that ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’. Wittgenstein went on to say: ‘You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common-sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded’ (Cons., p. 131). Drury repeats this quotation in Danger of Words, and adds the following gloss: I think I understand what he meant, and I think he was referring to an attitude that it is only too easy for those dealing daily with mental illness to fall into. I believe that we must let our psychiatric patients see that we understand that they

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

33

are in a state of affliction which is not comparable to any bodily pain however severe. To communicate such an understanding is not easy. (DoW, p. 304) It is plausible to see this remark in the light of another written in Wittgenstein’s notebook the previous year that ‘madness need not be regarded as an illness. Why shouldn’t it be seen as a sudden – more or less sudden – change of character’. This was in the context of a belief that it was ‘high time for us to compare these phenomena [“mental illnesses”] with something different’.139 This may be read as an invitation to think differently from what is now referred to as the ‘medical model’ in the treatment of mental difficulties. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein was open to the new methods of treatment – as described in William Sargant and Eliot Slater’s Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry – in the sense of counselling a ‘wait and see’ approach to them. However, Wittgenstein’s view was that none of these initiatives should lead one to think that ‘all human problems can be solved in this way’ (Cons., p. 131) – a constriction with which Drury agreed. Wittgenstein was at this point still hesitant about Drury’s ability to practise psychiatry: ‘I sometimes wonder whether you will have the right sense of humour for this work. You are too easily shocked when things don’t go according to plan.’ As Wittgenstein saw it, Drury’s tendency to rigidity had reasserted itself. During this period Wittgenstein was exposed – while taking meals in the doctors’ mess at St Patrick’s with Drury – to the ‘continual whirl of activity’ that ‘being resident in a busy hospital necessitated’ (Cons., p. 132). On one occasion, he felt he was in Drury’s way and left the table seeing how many calls for his services came even while his friend was eating. Wittgenstein later tried to get Drury to rest, which proved very difficult advice to follow in the prevailing circumstances. Fortunately for Wittgenstein, the secretary-manager of the Hospital, Bob McCullagh,140 gave Drury a lead as to where his friend might find suitable accommodation. McCullagh and his family had recently stayed in a farmhouse, Kilpatrick House, Red Cross, Co. Wicklow, close to Brittas Bay, as guests of Jenny (neé Elizabeth Jane Heavener) and Richard Vickery Kingston. McCullagh suggested that the Kingstons might be willing to welcome Wittgenstein in their home. Deciding, as he put it in his favoured American slang, to ‘case the joint’, Wittgenstein took the bus from Dublin to Arklow. This was just a fifty-mile journey but took close to three hours – presumably, in part, because of frequent stops. He probably got to the guesthouse by hackney from Arklow. The Kingstons, who normally did not take guests in winter, agreed to accept Wittgenstein.

WITTGENSTEIN IN WICKLOW Richard Kingston was from a Protestant family in Clonakilty, Co. Cork. Feeling intimidated (according to his daughter, Maud) by Irish Republican Army activity in West Cork in the early 1920s, Richard moved to Co. Wicklow and bought a farm in Newcastle, which he later sold. He then purchased a replacement 200-acre farm in Red Cross, which he ran predominantly as a dairy enterprise. The farm came with an eighteenth-century Queen Anne-style house built for one of three

34

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

agents (rent-collectors) by Lord Wicklow, former owner of vast tracts of the county. Nevertheless, in a letter to Rush Rhees on the day of his arrival, Wittgenstein described the substantial residence as ‘a little guesthouse’, which is maybe what it seemed in comparison to his childhood home, the ‘Palais Wittgenstein’ in Vienna and his father’s two seasonal residences. It appears from a letter on Monday, 22 December to von Wright that ‘he felt a good deal better here than in Cambridge’. Although Wittgenstein found the Kingston family141 initially ‘very quiet’, he felt he ‘could do with greater loneliness’. He advised his correspondent that he intended to ‘exchange this place for a more lonely one later in the year’. In the same letter, Wittgenstein told von Wright that he had ‘a close friend in Dublin … whom I can see about once a month’ (Cam., p. 420). This was Drury and he seems to have been the only regular friendly contact Wittgenstein had. As for the Kingston family, Wittgenstein kept them at a distance. Quite a lot is known about Wittgenstein’s stay in Kilpatrick, courtesy of various members of the hospitable and generous Kingston family. Wittgenstein occupied a room on the first floor which was heated by an open fire. He took his meals alone. They were brought to his room by Jenny Kingston, who was the main link between the family and the lodger. Maud Kingston recalled that he rarely acknowledged this service and that often he did not eat the food. He suffered chronically from indigestion for which his chosen remedy was Bragg’s charcoal biscuits. Maud was deputized to source these biscuits and was unsure, when interviewed, whether she did so in Dublin or bought them in Arklow. As ‘the winter was very mild and not so wet’ Wittgenstein could ‘go for a walk almost every day’ (Cam., Wittgenstein to Rhees, 5 February 1948, p. 421). There are copies available of many of the letters he wrote at this time. Apart from those to von Wright and Rhees, just mentioned, Wittgenstein wrote to Norman Malcolm (1911–90) and his wife, Lee. Malcolm, a former student, was now living and working in his native United States. Wittgenstein wrote to Lee Malcolm that he had spent Christmas Day in Kilpatrick and was joined by two friends on the 26th who came and stayed a few days; there are no signatures in the Kingston guestbook for that date that would enable an identification of the ‘friends’. Malcolm kept Wittgenstein supplied with detective short stories.142 Otherwise, Wittgenstein did not care to read much – especially not philosophy – but he does mention to Malcolm reading, probably re-reading, Grimm’s fairy tales143 and Otto von Bismarck’s Gedanken and Erinnerungen.144 He continued to correspond with von Wright, who during this period declared an interest in succeeding him as professor in Cambridge. Wittgenstein warned von Wright that, if successful, he might become ‘superficial’ and ‘smooth’ – and, if he didn’t acquire those qualities, ‘he would suffer terribly’ (Cam., 15 March 1948, p. 424). Nevertheless, Wittgenstein was agreeable to writing to the university recommending von Wright for the post.145 Wittgenstein appreciated the scenic setting in Wicklow. On 19 January 1948 he wrote to his sister, Helene (Salzer): ‘The country here would not have so many attractions for me if the colours were not often so wonderful. I think it must be to do with the atmosphere, for not only the grass, but also the sky, the sea and even everything that is brown are all magnificent.’146 On Drury’s first weekend off-duty

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

35

he paid Wittgenstein a visit in Wicklow and noted that he had settled in well, was working hard and pleased with his progress. Wittgenstein expressed the view that he would never have done the work he was now doing while still in Cambridge. On that visit Wittgenstein took Drury on one of his favourite walks,147 probably along the road to the left of the front gate of the property that skirts the farm and ascends to the afforested upper slopes of Ballymoyle. On this walk, Wittgenstein turned the conversation once again to Drury’s current experience as a psychiatrist and advised him to ‘always take a chair and sit down by the patient’s bedside; don’t stand at the end of the bed in a dictatorial attitude. Let the patient feel they have time to talk to you’. In a footnote to Drury’s text, inserted by Rush Rhees, Rhees recalled Wittgenstein telling him that he had observed such ‘dictatorial’ behaviour when he was a patient in Guy’s Hospital in London.148 This discussion led naturally to Wittgenstein’s making some observations about Freud and the compatibility of ‘talking therapy’ with the physical methods of treatment Drury employed. This was at a time when psychoanalysis was not much used by British psychiatrists. Wittgenstein did not see a contradiction between the approaches: ‘If I have a dream it may be due to some physical cause, something I have eaten for supper that has disagreed with me. But what I dream about, the contents of the dream, may have a psychological explanation.’ He went on, however, to make his frequently expressed criticism that not all dreams could (or should) be interpreted as wish-fulfilling: ‘It seems to me that my dreams are always an expression of my fears. … I could build up an interpretation of dreams just as cogent as Freud’s in terms of repressed fears.’ Drury informed him that the distinguished French alienist, Pierre Janet, had ‘said very much the same thing’. In any case, Wittgenstein told Drury that ‘Freud’s work died with him. No one today can do psychoanalysis in the way he did’ (Cons., p. 132). On the same occasion, Wittgenstein mentioned that he would be really interested in reading Freud’s Studien über Hysterie (1895) written with Josef Breuer. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein gives what can be construed as an explanation for this interest: He had always ‘believed without knowing why – that the real germ of psychoanalysis came from Breuer, not Freud. Of course, Breuer’s seed-grain can only have been quite tiny’ (p. 36e). In this he appears to have hit on an aspect of the development of psychoanalysis that some later scholars portray as an understatement by Freud of Breuer’s contribution.149 Using a distinction derived from A. E. Taylor who had posed the question whether Hume was a ‘great philosopher’ or simply a ‘very clever man’,150 Drury later wrote to Rhees: ‘I can only think of one remark of Freud’s that I would call wise and that is where he says that the aim of psychoanalysis is to replace neurotic unhappiness by ordinary unhappiness. This I think was a profound remark compared with the usual idea among psychiatrists that the healthy man is one who has a good time’ (Arc., 22 March 1969). Although Wittgenstein also credited Freud with profundity in regard to the remark identified by Drury and cleverness in elaborating metaphors – which he thought was characteristic of a ‘Jewish mind’, a facility he himself shared in – Wittgenstein eventually came to the conclusion that psychoanalysis was a ‘dangerous practice’ because of its effect on a person he knew, probably his nephew, ‘Tommy’ Stonborough.

36

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Wittgenstein spent most of his day writing in German on a large notebook (resembling, to the eyes of the Kingstons, a ledger then used to record trade transactions) placed on a small mahogany table (still in Kilpatrick House), set against a window in his room overlooking the kitchen garden. He was also observed, on occasion, writing outdoors. According to Monk, ‘he had taken with him both the typescript that is now Philosophical Investigations, Part I, and what is now Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I. From these – together with the remarks he was writing at Red Cross – he hoped to put together a final version of the first part of his book’ (p. 522). The remarks to which Monk refers are preserved as MS 137, Band R, according to von Wright’s system of enumeration. Although Wittgenstein had deliberately sought isolation, he wrote to Malcolm that ‘it would be good to see someone occasionally to whom one could say a really friendly word. I don’t need conversations. What I’d like would be someone to smile at occasionally’ (Cam., 5 February 1948, p. 422). He wrote later to Lee Malcolm that he was to find ‘better company’ in Connemara.151 The Kingstons, for their part, found him ‘aloof and distant’.152 Having spoken with the surviving senior members of the family in August 2010, I believe that the tension in the relationship with him was primarily attributable to Wittgenstein himself. For whatever reason, the initial period of contentment and productivity was not to last. On 5 February 1948, Wittgenstein wrote both to Malcolm and to Rhees in almost identical terms: ‘I am in very good bodily health … my work on the whole, goes fairly well.’ Nevertheless, he complained to both about his ‘nerves’.153 On 15 March, he wrote to Malcolm: ‘My work is progressing very slowly & painfully, but it is progressing. I wish I had more working power & didn’t tire so very easily.’ He went on to convey to Malcolm: ‘My brain feels very stuffy indeed.’154 Two days later, on St Patrick’s Day, he again wrote, this time to von Wright, that his work was progressing very slowly and very painfully and added: ‘I often believe I am on the straight road to insanity: It is difficult for me to imagine that my brain should stand the strain very long. That I dread this end I needn’t say’ (Cam., 17 March 1948, p. 424). It seems from a letter to Rhees, written about a month later, that during March he had fallen into a depression. He described his state as one of ‘great tribulation’ as a result of which his work ‘hardly progressed at all’ (Cam.,15 April 1948, p. 425). Fearing that his body, beset by indigestion and sleeplessness, would outlast his soul,155 as he put it, Wittgenstein sent a telegram to Drury, asking him to meet him in Ross’s Hotel. On arrival there, Wittgenstein complained that he had done no work for the past two weeks and that he couldn’t sleep at night. This he blamed on members of the Kingston family, whom he had initially found, as mentioned above, ‘very quiet’, but now sat up ‘late talking’ in the room underneath his. The ‘continual murmur’ was driving him ‘crazy’. This seems improbable, at least as a regular occurrence, since the senior Kingstons had to be up early to milk their cows.156 Kenneth Kingston recalls an incident when Wittgenstein banged on the wall of his room, adjacent to where he and his friend, George Taylor, were playing boisterously – perhaps not innocent of the likely effect of their play. Evelyn Watson (neé Kingston) recalls being asked on one occasion by Wittgenstein to desist from

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

37

her piano practice because it was distracting him. On hearing of his plan to find the isolation he craved by restoring ‘a ruined cottage [still identifiable] near the [Kingston] farm’, Drury suggested instead that ‘he would be more than welcome to have the use of’ (Cons., p. 133) his brother’s cottage at Rosroe in Connemara, where they had stayed in 1934. He also prescribed sleeping tablets.157 Professor Norman Moore later disclosed that Drury requested him to meet with Wittgenstein with a view to securing ‘another opinion’.158 As Moore recalled, Wittgenstein appeared to be ‘a depressed and sad man’ who spoke ‘slowly’, was ‘down with depressed affect’, ‘slowed down’ and ‘gloomy’. The treatment, at the time, for a depressive illness included the prescription of amphetamine tablets and, beyond that, if judged necessary, electroconvulsive therapy in a residential setting.159 Wittgenstein was not admitted to either St Patrick’s, or its branch hospital and farm, St Edmondsbury [now commonly spelt ‘St Edmundsbury’] in Lucan, Co. Dublin. For the moment, he returned to Wicklow160 but was disposed to accept Drury’s offer of the family cottage in Connemara. Almost immediately on his return to Red Cross, Wittgenstein suffered from a severe episode of influenza, which confined him to bed. He was indisposed for two weeks, as he wrote to Rhees (Cam. 15 April 1948, p.425). On recovery, he determined to go to Connemara. Monday, 26 April was his 59th birthday and he left Kilpatrick on 28 April. His farewell note in the visitors’ book and reads: ‘Thank you for a very good time’, which in light of what had been a difficult period is somewhat surprising. He gave his address as Trinity College, Cambridge. On 30 April 1948 he wrote to Norman Malcolm from Rosroe cottage, Renvyle P.O., Co. Galway: ‘I arrived here 2 days ago’ (Cam., p. 426).

WITTGENSTEIN IN CONNEMARA For the next fifteen weeks, Wittgenstein stayed in Drury’s brother’s cottage in Rosroe. While there, by arrangement with Drury, he was tended to by a local man, Tommy Mulkerrins. Drury was himself unable to visit as leave-time from work did not allow for the lengthy return journey to Dublin. However, Drury was assured in Wittgenstein’s regular letters that ‘the location and the quiet of the place suited him and that he was able to work again’. When Mulkerrins was interviewed about his association with Wittgenstein in August 1975, he gave what seems to be inaccurate information regarding the frequency of Wittgenstein’s visits to the Rosroe cottage. Mullkerrins was reported as saying that Wittgenstein had visited the cottage on three occasions rather than twice (in 1934 and 1948) as is otherwise attested. More significantly, he said that prior to the first visit he had been told by ‘Dr Con Drury’ that Wittgenstein ‘had suffered a nervous breakdown’ and that he had been asked by Drury to ‘help … in whatever way he could’.161 Given that there is no evidence regarding depression in advance of the earlier visit whereas Wittgenstein was afflicted with that condition while in Wicklow, it seems plausible to believe that Drury did make such a remark to Mulkerrins – but in 1948. Mulkerrins saw to Wittgenstein’s domestic needs, for example, for milk and turf – although according to Drury, Wittgenstein ‘was having to do all his own housework, which he disliked

38

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

doing but said it was a good discipline for him’ (Cons., p. 133). Mulkerrins told Ray Monk, when the latter interviewed him in 1986, that one of his duties was to destroy pages of manuscript material; the volume of the destruction was only later fully appreciated by Drury. Wittgenstein wrote to Malcolm that ‘the man who brings me milk every day’ was ‘quite nice & certainly better company than the people I stayed with in Co. Wicklow’ (5 June 1948).162 Wittgenstein kept aloof from the local people, who regarded him as at best eccentric.163 They recalled – which Drury corroborates – that he took an interest in the bird life of the area and fed birds he had tamed out of his hand. Drury sent illustrated books on ornithology that enabled Wittgenstein to identify the birds he came across. Mindful of Wittgenstein’s gift to him of Johnson’s Prayers & Meditations, Drury sent him Boswell’s life of Johnson. In response, Wittgenstein wrote that he felt that Boswell must have been a remarkable man to have attracted Johnson’s close friendship. He particularly admired Boswell’s admission that he may not have quoted his friend’s words exactly – a caution that Drury repeated to readers of his own record of Wittgenstein’s words.164 Other reading material in the form of detective fiction magazines was sent by the Malcolms from America. Wittgenstein himself found a paperback copy in the, no doubt, sparse stock held by a Connemara shop of ‘his favourite detective novel, Rendezvous with Fear by Norbert Davis’ (Monk, p. 528). Wittgenstein had very few visitors. Monk writes of only one: ‘A brief visit from Ben Richards, who spent a couple of weeks there in the summer of 1948’ (p. 526). Richards (1924–2000),165 may have been mistaken by Mulkerrins as the ‘Austrian or German in this [sic] twenties, who visited him twice.’166 Wittgenstein himself wrote to Norman Malcolm that he had had a visit on 4 July from his former student K. J. Shah,167 who stayed in Leenaun (also spelt ‘Leenane’) and visited Rosroe from there. Wittgenstein did not find his conversation with Shah ‘good’ and added, ‘I’m often tired and irritable now, I’m sorry to say’ (Cam., 5 July 1948, p. 431). All in all, however, this period of isolation in Connemara had been a productive one. From his notes – or at least those that survived his frequent culls – it seems Wittgenstein concentrated on the subtle differences in the way the verb ‘to understand’ is employed in regard to different material: a musical passage or a poem or a painting – or simply in seeing the point of a joke. The phenomenon he was studying was informed by psychological studies of what is involved in the basic act of looking at objects. The complexity of this act is manifest in the seeing of the same object quite differently. Wittgenstein’s favourite illustration of this phenomenon was Wolfgang Kohler’s ‘Duck-Rabbit’ – an illustration which can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit. The decision as to which was seen is intimately connected, he thought, with the culture in which one was reared. Wittgenstein was insistent that our science-valuing culture limited the potential of understanding to one view only, sidelining the various kinds of understanding involved in making and appreciating music or poetry or painting or praying. Even more important, the limited science-privileging view also hinders understanding of the meaning of one’s life – a kind of understanding Drury had hoped to find in philosophical reading, until disabused of the efficacy of this method by Wittgenstein.

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

39

TOGETHER IN DUBLIN Wittgenstein left Connemara in August 1948.168 He spent a few days with Drury in Dublin, a week in Oxford, and some time with Ben Richards at his home near London. In September, he went to Vienna to visit his family. The reunion was marred by the fact that his sister Hermine was suffering from cancer. He returned to Cambridge in October and spent two weeks there revising three volumes of manuscripts – 135,136 and 137 – and dictating typescript 232.169 He then returned to Dublin, staying again at Ross’s Hotel.170 His original intention was to return to the cottage in Connemara but after discussing the matter further with Drury, he decided to continue to stay at the hotel. The decisive consideration in this change of plan seems, in retrospect, ominous: ‘We decided that if he got ill in Connemara, there would be no one to look after him and no way of getting medical attention.’ Wittgenstein had, in any case, found the hotel ‘comfortable and friendly’. It was possible to secure a room ‘at the top of the house’ that was quiet. Drury and he met ‘nearly every day’ and when Drury had a day off he ‘spent longer with him’. Drury got the impression that Wittgenstein was ‘writing copiously’. Indeed, when Drury went ‘to his room he was nearly always working and would continue to do so for some time before he went out’. Drury recalled an occasion when they had planned to take lunch together and Wittgenstein said ‘“Just wait a minute until I finish this,” and then continued to write for two hours without saying a word’ (Cons., p. 134). With the onset of cold weather, some of this writing was done in the heated Palm House of the Botanical Gardens at Glasnevin, to which Drury had introduced Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein habitually wrote in a small notebook while seated on a step in the Palm House, commencing Ms 138 on 15 January 1949.171 The Phoenix Park – one of the largest walled city parks in Europe – is close to both Ross’s Hotel and St Patrick’s Hospital. Among its several amenities is a zoo and as Drury was a member of the Royal Zoological Society of Dublin he was in a position to propose Wittgenstein as a member as well. Walking by the pens of animals in what was then referred to as the ‘Zoological Gardens’, Drury remarked on how there had ‘evolved a strange animal that collects other animals and puts them in gardens’. Wittgenstein did not think, however, that this behaviour gave grounds for the belief that ‘at last evolution has produced a species that is able to understand the whole process which gave it birth’. Drury essayed that perhaps this was because it was not in principle allowable to use the concepts of understanding and knowledge in respect of the evolutionary process as they are entirely different categories. To this, Wittgenstein’s laconic response was: ‘Yes, you could put it that way’.172 What Wittgenstein could say was that in light of the ‘immense variety of flowers, shrubs, trees and the similar multiplicity of birds, reptiles and animals’ exhibited in the Gardens, Darwin’s theory of evolution lacked ‘the necessary multiplicity’ (Cons., p. 137).173 Membership of the Zoological Society gave Wittgenstein the right to dine in the members’ room. Drury recalls the ‘sensation’ caused by Wittgenstein among the Ross’s Hotel staff when he invited a ‘lady receptionist’ to dine with him at the Gardens’ restaurant as she had been ‘very attentive’ to his requests. He was also

40

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

appreciative of a waitress in Bewley’s Café in Grafton St, because she did not have to take an order from him when he arrived for lunch; she remembered that it was always an omelette and a cup of coffee. It seems that Wittgenstein took note of guests passing through the hotel’s public rooms. On one occasion sitting in the hall prior to going for a walk, he remarked to Drury that he thought a lady in the foyer was dressed ‘superbly’. He went on to say that ‘she can’t be English, for no English woman would have such good taste. She must be from some Continental country.’ When the woman in question appeared shortly thereafter, it happened that Drury recognized her as a former fellow citizen of Exeter, now married and living in Dublin. When told this, Wittgenstein replied: ‘I find it hard to believe you’, which Drury interpreted as meaning that he was not convinced. This incident illustrated two characteristics of his friend: a) his eye for detail and b) ‘once his mind was made up’ it was ‘hard to persuade him that he had been mistaken’ (Cons., p. 138). Another observation made by Wittgenstein about people he came across in Dublin was ‘when I look at the faces of the clergy here in Dublin, it seems to me that the Protestant ministers look less smug than the Roman priests. I suppose it is because they know they are such a small minority.’ Wittgenstein opined that he ‘would much prefer to see a child educated by a decent Protestant pastor than by a greasy Roman Catholic priest’ (Cons., p. 141); his own early religious education in Vienna had been Roman Catholic under the guidance of a priest who later was appointed a bishop.174 It is clear that he was unimpressed by the appearance of the priests he encountered casually in Dublin. They ministered in a church, whose influence extended to all aspects of Southern Irish society, post-independence, after a very long period of exclusion by the Anglican establishment. As to other features of the ambient environment, Wittgenstein had earlier given his evaluation of Dublin’s grander buildings. Now, he recalled the words of the Poet Laureate Robert Southey as apt for some modern housing as he and Drury passed by: ‘Time will not mellow them; nature will neither clothe nor conceal them; and they will remain always as offensive to the eye as to the mind.’175 What Wittgenstein was referring to was probably the first fruits of a Dublin Corporation masterplan to re-house the occupants of the city’s crumbling Georgian tenements, 60 per cent of which were adjudicated unfit for human occupation in a 1938 survey.176 On walks in the Phoenix Park, the two men resumed discussions about philosophy for the first time since Drury’s Cambridge days. Drury ruefully remarked that he sometimes regretted ‘the amount of time’ he had spent in ‘reading the great historical philosophers, at a time when I couldn’t understand them’ and, moreover, had ‘forgotten so much of what’ he had so laboriously read. Wittgenstein, while not himself given to such reading, did not think Drury had cause for regret and besides that ‘the mind has its own secretory organ just as the body has; and that is a good thing too’ (Cons., p. 134). Wittgenstein gave pithy views on many of the great philosophers. Kant and George Berkeley (the most famous Anglo-Irish philosopher) were ‘very deep thinkers’, while Schopenhauer, who had influenced Wittgenstein as a young man, now seemed to him to be shallow. Kierkegaard, another erstwhile favourite, now seemed ‘long winded’ (Cons., p. 135). He advised Drury, whose sleep had been disturbed when he first read Kierkegaard, not to attempt to read him again.

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

41

Wittgenstein, however, did not think favourably of Hegel, whose leading critic was Kierkegaard, because Hegel seemed to him to be ‘always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same’. This tendency was polar opposite to Wittgenstein’s own search for ‘differences’. Plato’s Parmenides, which Drury could not ‘make head nor tail of’, was in Wittgenstein’s view ‘among the most profound of Plato’s writings’. As for Socrates, as portrayed by Plato, Wittgenstein wondered why he was regarded as ‘a great philosopher’, presumably because Wittgenstein did not favour his relentless (and inconclusive) search for unique definitions – for example, of ‘Justice’ and other ideal objects. A remark by Drury that Kant’s ‘fundamental ideas didn’t come to him till he was middle-aged’ evoked a response from Wittgenstein that was to weigh much with Drury. In contrast to Kant, Wittgenstein affirmed that his own fundamental ideas had come to him ‘very early in life’ (Cons., 135). This is relevant to establishing what, if anything, Drury’s papers can contribute to a persistent debate, previously mentioned, whether Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, represent one continuous or two distinct philosophies.177 It is clear from several remarks in Drury’s exchange of letters with Rush Rhees – presumably on the basis of Wittgenstein’s remark quoted above – that, rightly or wrongly, he believed that the foundations laid by Wittgenstein in the lead up to the Tractatus endured. Thus, in a letter written to Rhees on 1 May 1966, Drury listed a series of five quotations178 from Wittgenstein’s Notebooks 1914-16 that expressed ‘vividly the interpretation’ that he ‘was trying to state’. Further, he found the quotations he had written out for Rhees ‘far more revealing than anything in the Investigations’. He had interpreted that work ‘as a more detailed exposition of just such conceptions’. He added ‘but am I right?’ and wondered whether Wittgenstein’s decision not to discuss his current work with him when Drury committed himself to medicine was ‘because he knew that I could not follow him’. It was at this time that Drury wrote the lengthy paper dated ‘Spring 1966’ given in this book, and shared it with Rhees (See: p. 212 below). Despite the above hesitations, Drury went on in a lecture given at University College Dublin in 1967 (published in this book) to decry current academic interpretations of Wittgenstein as the supposed originator of ‘linguistic philosophy’ (inspired by the Investigations). Drury identified this ‘incorrect attribution’ to Wittgenstein as the work of A. J. Ayer and Gilbert Ryle (who had both been influenced by Wittgenstein) and J. L. Austin (who denied any such influence at least so far as the Investigations were concerned). For Drury: ‘Wittgenstein is no more a linguistic philosopher than Plato was.’ He was not ‘trying to impose a stricter discipline on our conceptual usages’. Rather, ‘he is deeply concerned with the whole mystery of language, not only the language of mathematics and of the natural sciences but the whole realm of communication between one person and another’ (UCD, p. 226). Drury’s key point was that the mottoes chosen by Wittgenstein for the Tractatus and the Investigations amount to the same message that ‘philosophy requires a mental asceticism, a firm resolve to ask constantly “what do I really know?”’. This means that philosophical investigation primarily requires character rather than intelligence – a view that Drury recalled shocked Moore when Wittgenstein said as much to him.

42

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

The Drury archive does not contain informative material on such characteristic Wittgensteinian puzzles as consciousness, thought, and imagination, solipsism, or rule-following. These puzzles fed into his far-reaching and complex argument against the possibility of a private language and thence to the cardinal Wittgensteinian undermining both of the Cartesian ‘I’ and phenomenalist solipsism. Neither is there reference to the debates about the relationship of Wittgenstein’s thought to logical behaviourism or therapeutic positivism. These took place in the 1930s after Drury had taken up medicine and it is not clear how conversant Drury was with his teacher’s strenuous opposition to being associated with either view. However, during this Dublin sojourn, Wittgenstein did discuss some aspects of his later work, hoping that ‘some day’ Drury would be in a position to read what he was currently writing. An example was the phenomenon of ‘seeing as’. He warned Drury that these enquiries were ‘hard as granite’. When Drury quoted (probably sympathetically) the fin de siècle British Idealist philosopher James Ward to the effect that ‘Denken ist schwer’, Wittgenstein assured him that nevertheless he felt capable of handling such hard material – an indication of the confidence he felt while working in Dublin. This did not mean, however, that he expected his results would be readily received: ‘My kind of thinking is not wanted in this present age. I have to swim so strongly against the tide. Perhaps in a hundred years people will really want what I am writing’ (Cons, p. 136). Drury and Wittgenstein discussed a title for his new book. Wittgenstein thought that perhaps ‘Philosophical Remarks’179 would be apt. Drury ill-advisedly suggested simply ‘Philosophy’. This drew on his head the rebuke: ‘Don’t be such an ass – how could I use a word like that which has meant so much in the history of human thought? As if my work was anything more than just a small fragment of philosophy’ (Cons., p. 136). This was in striking contrast to the claims he made at the time of publishing the Tractatus to the effect that he had in principle solved all outstanding philosophical problems. Given Drury’s own view that the point of philosophical investigation is to prevent us being dazzled by what we know, Wittgenstein’s heightened awareness of the limitations of his own later work – in contrast to his exaggerated confidence in the results of his first phase of philosophical enquiry – may be the most significant difference between the two phases if one thinks, as Drury understood his teacher to assert, that modesty about one’s philosophical results is key.

CONVERSATIONS ON RELIGION The limitations readily accepted by Drury regarding his grasp of Wittgenstein’s later thought must be counterbalanced by his record of their discussions about religion. Rush Rhees assured him that Wittgenstein had spoken to him about that topic more than to anyone else.180 If Rhees was correct, it may have been because Wittgenstein found in Drury someone knowledgeable about issues concerning biblical interpretation and the history and theology of the Christian churches, who was to boot a committed believer.181 During a walk in the Phoenix Park in 1949, Wittgenstein asked Drury a question that he had never before entertained: ‘What

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

43

is your favourite Gospel?’ Wittgenstein volunteered that his was St Matthew and that St John’s was his least favoured. This was because it seemed to him that ‘there is a different person … speaking than in the synoptic Gospels’ generally. When he went on to say that the only incident in John about which this was not true was the story of the woman taken in adultery, Drury informed him that ‘that passage is not found in any of the best manuscripts, and most scholars consider it a later addition. In some manuscripts it is found in St Luke’s Gospel’ (Cons., p. 139). Wittgenstein admitted that his difficulty in understanding the Fourth Gospel was ‘as nothing’. For, ‘if you can accept the miracle that God became man’, ‘it is impossible for me to say what form the record of such an event should take’ (Cons., p. 140). Drury was again in a position to give him the welcome information that one of the church fathers, Lactantius (he thought), had expressed a similar view in the fourth century. As Drury later put it in a letter to D. Z. Phillips, the patristic remark he passed on to Wittgenstein was: ‘Novels and plays must indeed be probable but why should this (the scheme of man’s salvation) be probable?’ (Arc. 23 July 64).182 Wittgenstein also confessed that, as with St. John’s Gospel, he had had difficulties with St Paul’s Epistles even at one time thinking that they ‘were a different religion to that of the Gospels’. Now, however he saw clearly that he ‘was wrong’ (Cons., p. 140).183 The conversation turned to an issue that was troubling Drury – that he had ‘not lived a religious life’. Wittgenstein confessed that he too had been troubled, as stated above, that one effect of his friendship with Drury was that he had made him less religious than he would have been had they never met – a thought that Drury admitted had crossed his own mind. Recalling his own experience as a prisoner of war in Italy when he was compelled to go to mass every day, and found he was glad of it, Wittgenstein opined that in matters religious one had to be open to experiment so as to discover what helps and what does not. With that in mind, he suggested that Drury should likewise go to a Roman Catholic mass every day – even though Wittgenstein believed that Drury’s religious sensibility would ‘always take the form of desiring something you haven’t yet found’ (Cons., p. 140). For his part, Drury could see how, for example, a ‘child brought up in the colourful symbolism of the Roman Catholic liturgy would get a stronger and deeper impression of religious awe than one brought up in the plainer Protestant tradition’ (Cons., p. 141) – a surmise with which Wittgenstein emphatically disagreed – Drury did not believe that daily attendance at mass would prove helpful in his own case. He still preferred the English liturgy, with which he ‘had been familiar since childhood’ to ‘inaudible services in Latin’.184 Withal, Wittgenstein tried to convey to Drury the deep seriousness of religious need and conviction, even criticizing a phrase that Drury had first heard from Wittgenstein himself, quoting Lessing to the effect that he would rather choose ‘the striving after truth, rather than the possession of absolute truth’. Now, however, Wittgenstein thought Lessing’s idea was not deep enough. In a somewhat similar vein, when Wittgenstein reflected on R. H. Tawney’s attempt to link Calvin to the rise of bourgeois civilization in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), he considered Tawney too daring in his willingness to criticize ‘a man such as Calvin must have been’ (Cons., p. 141). Even when Drury told him that Calvin had Michael Servetus burnt for heresy on account of his views on the doctrine of the Trinity, this did not dispose

44

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Wittgenstein to modify his estimation of Calvin; he thought Servetus’s action in interrupting Calvin’s preaching in Geneva to press his case as a courting of his own death and Calvin could have done no other than he did in the circumstances! It is noteworthy that, despite the philosophical and religious tenor of their conversations, when occasionally during that winter Wittgenstein asked Drury, as a member of the Royal Dublin Society in Ballsbridge, to borrow books from its library these books were generally on historical topics. From a footnote inserted by Rush Rhees to Drury’s account on this point, it appears that this preference was a wellestablished one (see Note 44 to Cons.). Drury recalled borrowing Livy on one of the Punic Wars,185 Philippe-Paul Ségur’s critical portrait of Napoleon,186 Macaulay’s Critical and Historical Essays (1854), and the erstwhile Liberal chief secretary for Ireland, John Morley’s Oliver Cromwell (1900).

GIFT OF A RADIO Alerted perhaps by Wittgenstein’s remark that it would be impossible for him to say in his book ‘one word about all that music has meant in my life’, when Drury proposed to Wittgenstein that he might present him with a record player, complete with records of his choosing, so that he might rest by listening to music, Wittgenstein nevertheless demurred. It would be like giving him a box of chocolates; he would not know when to stop eating. However, Wittgenstein did feel that Drury himself could benefit from having access to music and had a radio delivered to his room on the following day. In addition to music, the radio enabled them to listen together to a BBC Third Programme debate which Drury records as being between A. J. Ayer and the Jesuit historian of philosophy, Frederick Copleston, on ‘The Existence of God’, dating it to 1948. There was indeed a discussion on that subject on 28 January 1948 from 9.30 to 10.10 pm. However, the participants were not Copleston and Ayer but Copleston and his friend, Bertrand Russell.187 On the other hand, there was a debate between Ayer and Copleston on 13 June 1949, but the subject was ‘Logical Positivism’.188 It seems likely that Drury conflated the two debates – probably arising from his writing the ‘Conversations’ retrospectively. At any rate, Ayer, although having ‘something to say’, was declared by Wittgenstein to be ‘incredibly shallow’. Copleston fared even worse; he ‘contributed nothing at all to the discussion’ (Cons., p. 136). The radio Wittgenstein gave to Drury featured in another anecdote. Drury heard a broadcast of a recording of Pablo Casals playing the cello (unaccompanied). When Drury told Wittgenstein of the broadcast, Wittgenstein told him he had once heard Casals playing in the Albert Hall in London and admired how he filled that ‘huge building with the sound of his cello alone. It was a wonderful performance’. This led to a discussion on how recording technology had improved from their days together in Cambridge with the arrival of long-play records (up to thirty minutes per side as opposed to not much more than four minutes previously). Wittgenstein’s comment was that ‘it is so characteristic that, just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played’; (Cons., p. 138–9) technological development did not amount to ‘progress’ – although it surely might count as progress if artists of Casals stature

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

45

(however few) could be recorded and their work shared with unimaginably larger audiences than could be accommodated in the Albert Hall.

MEDICAL TRAVAILS All was not to be smooth sailing for either Drury or Wittgenstein as the New Year, 1949, unfolded. A female alcoholic patient whom Drury was in the process of admitting to the St Patrick’s was very abusive to the nurses. When Drury tried to sedate her by having her drink a glass of the sedative, paraldehyde, she threw the liquid and vessel into his face. He admitted to completely losing his temper during this incident and had to withdraw and ask a colleague to relieve him, meanwhile apologizing to the nurses. He now felt unsuited to the work expected of him and shared with Wittgenstein a feeling that he should resign his post. Without minimizing the seriousness of what had occurred, Wittgenstein shared his own experience that in life ‘one keeps stumbling and failing … and the only thing to do is to pick oneself up and try to go on again’. He also intimated to Drury that he had worried that ‘if you should make a serious mistake in your work you would suffer terribly’ (Cons., p. 139). Fortunately – no doubt encouraged by the counsel of his friend – Drury weathered the storm. As for Wittgenstein, he wrote to Norman Malcolm from Ross’s Hotel on 28 January 1949: ‘I fell ill with some sort of infection of the intestines about 3 weeks ago & it hasn’t yet cleared up. If it goes on for another week I shall consult a specialist’ (Cam., p. 437). Wittgenstein asked Drury’s advice about whom to consult and Drury obtained his consent to make an appointment for him ‘to see the Professor of Medicine in Trinity College. I had at one time been taught by this doctor and had a high opinion of his diagnostic ability’. The chosen specialist was Professor Thomas Gillman Moorhead, who despite being blinded after falling from a train at Euston Station in London in 1926 that caused a bilateral retinal detachment, was one of the most eminent medical practitioners in Ireland at that time.189 Wittgenstein agreed to Drury’s proposal: ‘Yes, I will go and see this man; only I want you to tell him I am a man of intelligence who likes to be told exactly what is found wrong – to have things explained to me frankly’ (Cons., p. 141). Wittgenstein was impressed by Moorhead when he met him at his consulting rooms at 23 Lower Fitzwilliam St. He noted that Moorhead was not one of those doctors who were so afraid of being considered unscientific that they neglected such simple procedures as first examining the colour of his conjunctiva190 before taking a blood specimen. For his part, it may be that Moorhead was impressed by Wittgenstein’s intelligence enough to invite him to one of the dining sessions he hosted weekly at the Royal Irish Yacht Club (RIYC)191 in Dun Laoghaire (formerly Kingstown), a harbour town proximate to Dublin. Wittgenstein had told Drury he wanted to be told exactly what Moorhead found wrong with him. In mid-May, after Wittgenstein had returned from a visit to Vienna, where his sister Hermine had been operated on for cancer, Moorhead admitted Wittgenstein to the City of Dublin Royal Hospital, Baggot St, for a full examination. Moorhead, who was an expert on pernicious anaemia, had his blood examined again. As Wittgenstein later related the

46

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

diagnosis to Malcolm, ‘they found that I had a severe anaemia of a rather unusual kind’. In addition, although ‘it was suspected that I had a growth in my stomach but the X-ray definitely showed that there is no such thing inside me’ (4 June 1949).

WITTGENSTEIN DEPARTS FOR AMERICA After his release from hospital, Wittgenstein decided to go to visit Malcolm in America. His declared motivation was to find the intellectual stimulation he felt he had lacked in Ireland, even given that he had had visits from his former students Anscombe, Rhees and Smythies (see entries for each in BHN) and others, already mentioned. As for the ever attentive and far from unintelligent Drury, Wittgenstein now judged him ‘unfaithful’ – perhaps, as we shall see, because of another relationship that Drury was cultivating. In any case, Wittgenstein departed Ireland on or about 18 June. He left behind him half a dozen books, including, as Rush Rhees recalled, a second-hand school edition of Livy and memories for just a few people – including his fellow-diners at the RIYC, described by George Hetherington as ‘friends’.192 Wittgenstein enjoyed a period of comparatively good health at the Malcolm home in Ithaca, New York. Wittgenstein did have stimulating philosophical discussion at Cornell University from July to October 1949 with Malcolm and others – including Oets Bouwsma, who was then a visiting professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.193 However, Wittgenstein became very ill and after an unsatisfactory consultation with another physician, placed himself in the care of Dr Louise C. Mooney, whom, to judge from the frequency and tone of enquiry about her in his subsequent letters to Malcolm, he came to greatly esteem. Although it was not until his return to England that a diagnosis of cancer of the prostate was established – in the latter part of November 1949 – Wittgenstein already knew that he was so seriously ill that he would have to leave the United States as soon as possible because, as he told Malcolm, ‘I don’t want to die in America. I am a European – I want to die in Europe.’194 Against expectation, he recovered sufficient strength to make the transatlantic journey in October. He then stayed in London, planning to visit the von Wrights in Cambridge and then return to Ross’s Hotel in Dublin but fell ill. As a result, his visit to Cambridge was delayed until 9 November 1949. The procedures that led to a definitive diagnosis of prostate cancer on 25 November were suggested by Dr Edward V. Bevan, who was recommended to Wittgenstein by Drury; the two doctors had served in the same RAMC unit during the war. Bevan had impressed Drury ‘as the ideal of what a general practitioner should be’ (Cons., p. 142).195 Despite his condition, for which he received hormone treatment, Wittgenstein was able to travel to Vienna for Christmas in 1949. He stayed with his family until his sister Hermine, who had also been suffering from cancer, died on 11 February. During this period in Vienna he began again to take an interest in philosophy – an activity neglected since the previous March. This was stimulated by regular meetings with Elizabeth Anscombe, who was in the city to study German, with a view to translating his writings. On his return to England on 23 March, he stayed first in the London home of Rush Rhees’s wife, Jean, and then again with the von Wrights at their home on the

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

47

Lady Margaret Rd. in Cambridge, beginning on 4 April. From 25 April, he stayed with Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband, Peter Geach, in Oxford; the university he thought a ‘philosophical desert’ (Cam. Wittgenstein to Norman Malcolm, 12 January 1951, p. 472). He continued to work on the theory of colour, begun while in Vienna and stimulated by Goethe’s writing on that topic. While staying with Anscombe, he requested that she put him in touch with a sympathetic priest to discuss pastoral but not philosophical matters. Elizabeth suggested a friend, Conrad Pepler, a Dominican.196 Wittgenstein and the priest met on at least two occasions. Dr Bevan arranged for X-ray treatment at Addenbrooke’s Hospital under the supervision of a Professor Mitchell, a cancer specialist. By May 1950, Wittgenstein reported to Rush Rhees that he was ‘moderately well. Dr Bevan … wrote to a London specialist about me, giving the history of my case up to the present time and the expert replied that I might easily live for five more years’ (Cam., p. 464). And indeed, he was able to go to Norway in October. He planned to return there for Christmas but this proved impracticable. As an alternative, he considered living the life of a ‘familiar’, similar to that of a religious brother, but without a formal commitment, at the Dominican Hawksyard Priory in Armitage, Staffordshire, where the attached retreat house was for many years directed by Pepler. However, with an acceleration in the gravity of Wittgenstein’s illness, this plan too came to nothing. As matters transpired, he made another Christmas visit to Vienna. However, it was clear by January 1951 that he was very unwell. On 29 January he made a new will in Oxford. This appointed Rush Rhees as executor and Rhees, Anscombe and von Wright administrators of his literary estate.197 He began to suffer some ‘bad pain’ and to facilitate further X-ray treatment at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Wittgenstein moved to Cambridge in February. He took up residence in Dr Bevan’s home, 76 Storey’s Way. Wittgenstein had intimated that he had a fear of dying in an English hospital – perhaps on the basis of his experiences in various such institutions as, variously, an employee, patient and researcher. The Bevans treated a demanding, non-paying guest198 with exceptional grace. Mrs Bevan genially fell into the habit of accompanying him to the local pub each evening at 6.00 pm. Wittgenstein always ordered a glass of port and when he thought he was not being observed decanted it into an Aspidistra pot. From 8 February to 27 April, he worked in the Bevan home on various manuscripts, now published as Remarks on Colour (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977) and the latter part of On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969).

DRURY’S MARRIAGE Meanwhile, Drury was otherwise occupied in Dublin – giving substance, in part, to Wittgenstein’s accusation of ‘unfaithfulness’. On 23 October 1950, Drury wrote to tell his friend Raymond Townsend news that he felt would surprise him. He announced that he was engaged to be married to Eileen Herbert, Matron of St Patrick’s, whom he had known for three years. They had ‘grown increasingly fond of each other as time went on’. When he had gone on holiday the previous month he ‘noticed how much he missed her’ and realized that he was ‘really in love with her’. When he found ‘she felt the same way’ (Arc.) about him, they agreed to get married.

48

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

On 28 March 1951, Maurice O’Connor Drury, by then of St Edmondsbury, Lucan, married Eileen at St Andrew’s Church of Ireland, Lucan, Co. Dublin. The marriage ceremony was presided over by the recently appointed rector, the Rev. Robert Grattan Love. The bridesmaid was Eileen’s sister, Nora Simmonds. The groomsman was Richard P. Percival, only a few years previously described by Norman Moore as a ‘recently admitted patient with a long history of alcoholism and personal disaster’.199 In a remarkable development, Percival became a social worker in St Patrick’s with a special brief to assist patients battling with an addiction to alcohol.200 The newly-weds spent their honeymoon in Italy at Lake Como. Drury received a book from Wittgenstein in the month before the wedding. It was Cyril Elgood’s A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate from the earliest times until the year A.D. 1932 (Cambridge: University Press, 1931). Elgood was an honorary physician to the Shah of Persia. Wittgenstein inscribed the book ‘with all good wishes from Ludwig’.201 Drury managed to visit Wittgenstein in Cambridge on his way home from the newly-weds’ honeymoon. The hormone and X-ray treatments had been discontinued as no longer useful and Wittgenstein did not expect to live for more than a few months. Although they talked about Italy – Wittgenstein told Drury about Goethe’s visit to that country – the conversation turned, as it usually did with Drury, to religion. Drury seems to have set the ball rolling by referring to passages in the Old Testament which he found offensive – for example, the Lord sending bears out of the forest to eat some children who had mocked the prophet Elisha’s baldness. Wittgenstein rebuked him: ‘You musn’t pick and choose just what you want in that way’ – referring to the significance Kierkegaard attached to the Old Testament. Reminiscent of a combativeness, manifest in MacIver’s account of the marathon argument, mentioned earlier, Drury persisted in suggesting that such punishment by God for particular acts of wickedness were problematic because it was directly contrary to the New Testament. Drury could think of no response to Wittgenstein’s riposte: ‘You don’t understand, you are quite out of your depth.’ Wittgenstein insisted on accompanying Drury to the railway station on his departure and again referred to their argument: ‘I must write you a letter about that.’ A valiant Drury, having to his detriment disclosed his thoughts, left with Wittgenstein’s last words to him ringing in his ears: ‘Drury, whatever becomes of you, don’t stop thinking’ (Cons., 144). This Drury clearly did.202 However, one has to query how what seems to be an example of the fideism with which Wittgenstein came to be charged can be squared with his valedictory injunction to Drury.203

WITTGENSTEIN’S DEATH Wittgenstein had remarked that day to Drury that he found it curious that although he had not long to live, ‘I never find myself thinking about a “future life.” All my interest is still on this life and the writing I am still able to do.’ His last writing was done on 27 April, a day when he was able to walk in the garden of Peterhouse College with Anscombe. However, he caught a chill. On the 28th, Dr Bevan sent for Wittgenstein’s friends; he told Drury that Wittgenstein was dying. When Joan

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

49

Bevan told him that his friends were coming Wittgenstein replied: ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.’ Wittgenstein was still alive the next morning although only at the edge of consciousness. Dr Ben Richards and Anscombe, on arrival, went to his bedside and held his hands. Yorick Smythies next arrived from Oxford with Conrad Pepler, who was invited to come by Smythies and Anscombe. Finally, Drury arrived from Dublin and, according to his account, was told by Dr Bevan that none of the assembled would decide whether Pepler should say ‘the usual office for the dying and give conditional absolution’. Drury, recalling that ‘Wittgenstein had said he hoped his Catholic friends [Anscombe and Smythies] prayed for him’, immediately interjected that ‘whatever was customary should be done’. The matter thus decided, and on a signal apparently from Dr Bevan, ‘the priest recited the proper prayers’ (Cons., p. 144). Wittgenstein died soon after as Drury and Richards, on either side of the bed, held his hands. Drury noticed that on a table beside Wittgenstein’s bed was a copy of the ‘Collected Works’ of Johann Georg Hamann (Arc., Item 44, Spring 1966).204 Aware of Hamann’s faith, one can get a sense of Drury’s mindset as he consoled his dying friend. He later wrote in The Danger of Words: ‘Every death-bed can be a religious experience both for him who is dying and for those who had loved him and watch beside him’ (p. 328). It had now to be decided whether there should be a religious service at the interment and, if so, of what nature. Drury relates that again ‘no one seemed ready to speak up’. As the friends of the deceased sat in the Bevan’s drawing room pondering this question, Drury felt the others looked to him to take the lead and accordingly he sought to advance their deliberations by disclosing that Wittgenstein had once told him he approved of Tolstoy’s action in having his brother, Sergey Nikoloyevich, buried according to the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church even though Tolstoy himself was a ‘stern critic’ of that communion. According to Drury’s account, his recollection of the Tolstoy example led to agreement all round that in Wittgenstein’s case ‘all the usual Roman Catholic prayers should be said by a priest at the graveside’ (Cons., p. 144). Elizabeth Anscombe, however, later made clear that Drury had not in fact invited her to offer an opinion and if he had she would not have agreed to a plan Drury seemed to assume was unanimous.205 The precise pertinence of the Tolstoy parable needs to be teased out. One can see that Wittgenstein would admire Tolstoy for not allowing the decision regarding the rites appropriate to his brother’s burial to be affected by his own disagreement with a church that had, by then, in fact, excommunicated him for his criticism. In addition, one might surmise that the story provided Drury himself with a kind of locus standi on the matter. As an Anglican, he acted to facilitate the committal of his (separated) brother Christian in accordance with the death and burial rituals of the communion of the deceased’s baptism, a communion not Drury’s own. Nevertheless, it is understandable that Ray Monk expressed doubt that the ‘story about Tolstoy quite fits the occasion’ (p. 580). Monk’s reservation rested on the fact that Wittgenstein had said from time to time, including to Drury, that he could not believe what Catholics believe and besides, he was not a practising Catholic. However, an aspect of the Tolstoy case (of which neither Wittgenstein nor Drury may have been aware) may well address Monk’s difficulty. When Tolstoy had his

50

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

brother buried according to the Orthodox rite in 1904 it was despite the fact, as Tolstoy wrote in his diary (26 August, 1904), that so far as he could judge, ‘effective religious feeling was denied’206 to Sergey. Thus, Tolstoy’s reason for committing his brother to the grave according to the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church was that he had been baptized in it. Thus, by happenstance probably, the Tolstoy precedent was appropriately cited in support of an R.C. burial for Wittgenstein, since he had been baptised in that communion. Moreover, despite the avowals cited by Monk, there was a fact known at least to Elizabeth Anscombe and Pepler: that Wittgenstein had declared himself a Roman Catholic when he had registered as a patient in Guy’s Hospital prior to a gall bladder operation in 1942. This declaration would have the consequence that a Roman Catholic chaplain would have been called to his bedside in case of emergency. Drury concludes his ‘Conversations’ with the sentence: ‘But I have been troubled ever since as to whether what we did then was right.’ (Cons., p. 144) One can understand why he felt troubled. It was Drury who had recorded that Wittgenstein could not make sense of the role of the pope in respect of pronouncing authoritative Catholic dogma207 – at least pending further clarification of ‘ex cathedra’. Drury had noted too that his friend did not subscribe to the Catholic teaching that the existence of God can (in principle) be proved by natural reason. Further, Wittgenstein did not conform to his church’s code of conduct requiring sabbatical attendance at the central cultic event, the Eucharist. This is the chief point of contact with the church community, but Wittgenstein, according to Drury, was not convinced, at least at one time, that there would even be such communities in the future. On the other hand, Drury was aware of his friend’s strong sense especially as a young man of living life under God’s judgement, which Wittgenstein had attributed to his Jewish background. Drury was aware too of his friend’s awe at the huge variety of religious experience and expression by so many peoples throughout history. Among these expressions, Wittgenstein drew inspiration from mainly, but not exclusively, Christian sources, Orthodox and Protestant, as well as Catholic. He had professed to Drury that he was not a ‘religious man’ but, on the other hand, that he could ‘not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view’ (Notes, p. 151).208 While Drury seems to have accepted the negative thrust of this declaration as predominant, there is room for a more positive interpretation. A ‘religious point of view’, in the sense of the phrase given it by Schopenhauer (who may plausibly be claimed to have been Wittgenstein’s source for it), was one of three ways in which the egotistical ‘will to power’, the irrational force driving human behaviour, can be overcome, albeit imperfectly. Remarkably, given his atheism and his view that superstition was the predominant characteristic of religions, Schopenhauer attributed such power, inter alia, to a religious asceticism, which he found in Hindu Advaita Vedanta philosophy, but also in Buddhism and more pertinently in the life of St Francis of Assisi. Schopenhauer himself, however, when he became popular among the German intelligentsia late in life, indulged, counter to his teaching, in the earthly delights this popularity funded. He was to be criticized for this in his own day and later on by Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (above p. 727). Schopenhauer

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

51

defended the evident conflict between what he preached and his own practice by declaring that it would be strange if a moral teacher taught only what he himself managed to practise.209 As portrayed by Drury and others, Wittgenstein would not have had to resort to any such sophistry. An ascetic disposition and practice was one of the most notable features of his lifestyle and it may have been what he was referring to when he said he was constrained to see ‘every problem from a religious point of view’. However, this was not Wittgenstein’s last word on the subject. On August 22 1949 he remarked to Bouwsma, a view long held but now intensified that ‘religion without ceremony, without ritual – this is impossible’.210 In any event, it may not seem wholly inappropriate to bury a man motivated by a religious point of view in life with a religious ritual.211 And if he also declared that he was ‘not a religious man’, his friends might well have taken into account that when it came to religious practice, Wittgenstein’s self-critical standards might fairly be described as akin to those George Orwell applied in his ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ – that ‘saints should be considered guilty until proved innocent’. Further, the remark to Bouswma seems to suggest a renewed openness to ritual. Although the case is necessarily conjectural it may indicate that in the last year of his life, Wittgenstein was moving, for example, through Pepler, to a renewed contact with the communion into which he had been baptized as an infant. If that was the case, there was additional warrant for what Drury did (and facilitated for others) at the time of Wittgenstein’s death. Drury’s counsel in this regard, as already noted, continued to trouble him – but he certainly also continued to assert that his friend’s religious/ascetic sensibility had a bearing on how Wittgenstein would like his work to be understood. Of course, it would be reasonable to expect of a compos mentis person that he leave clear forward instructions about such matters as his wishes regarding his funeral. The consequence of the fact that Wittgenstein did not express his wishes, placed a heavy burden on Drury, a burden he seems to have been more ready to assume than the others present. In any event, and for whatever reason, Conrad Pepler, who had had privileged conversation with Wittgenstein, the details of which he never later divulged, and who, according to Fergus Kerr, a fellow Dominican, ‘would not have behaved as he did if he’d believed Wittgenstein was no longer a Catholic in any sense’212 arranged that the local parish priest preside over a Roman Catholic burial in the former cemetery of St Giles, now known as the ‘Ascension Burial Ground’ in Cambridge on 1 May 1951. Besides the friends who had assembled at his bedside in Dr Bevan’s home, G. E. Moore and von Wright were also there. Wittgenstein’s grave is now marked by a simple slab on which is inscribed only his name and the years of his birth and death.213 Anscombe and her husband were later to be buried in an adjoining plot. Drury was nominated a legatee in Wittgenstein’s will in the following terms: ‘Except as hereinbefore mentioned I give all the remainder of my estate property and possessions of every kind to those who be living at my death of the following persons: Dr M. O’C Drury of St Patrick’s Hospital, James Street, Dublin’ as well as Elizabeth Anscombe and Yorick Smythies ‘in equal shares for their own use and benefit absolutely’.214

52

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

ST EDMONDSBURY In 1949, Drury secured a Diploma in Psychological Medicine (DPM) from the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland. This was the recognized local postgraduate qualification for practice in psychiatry. In the autumn of 1950, he was asked by Norman Moore to take over temporarily as senior assistant medical officer in charge of St Edmondsbury,215 in Lucan, since the incumbent medical officer was ill in hospital. Drury wrote to Townsend that the work there was ‘a good deal easier than in St Patrick’s, and I am enjoying being in the country’ (23 October 1950). St Edmondsbury’s ‘Ladies Hospital’ and ‘Gentlemen’s Villa’ were located on spacious grounds, reputedly 365 acres – between the then main Dublin-Galway road and the river Liffey. The main building had been built in the late eighteenth century as a country residence by one of the most influential politicians of his era, Edmund Sexton Pery. From a leading Limerick family, Pery was speaker of the Irish House of Commons and was given the title viscount upon his resignation in 1785.216 St Patrick’s Hospital purchased St Edmondsbury, then owned by a wealthy American, in May 1898. The background to this purchase was that during the 1890s there had been an increasing level of criticism of St Patrick’s from the inspectors of Lunacy. Short of closing it entirely and moving the hospital to what the inspectors considered a more suitable site, the inspectors accepted that a residence should be acquired out of town to accommodate convalescing patients. This was an attempt to alleviate at least one of the problems identified by the inspectors: overcrowding. Pressure to act was increased by a threat from the Lord Chancellor, with severe financial implications, that he would ‘remove chancery patients from St. Patrick’s unless steps were taken to acquire a convalescent hospital’.217 To begin with, only about ‘fifteen to seventeen female … mainly chancery and high fee-paying patients’218 were cared for at St. Edmondsbury. This scarcely had any impact on the unsatisfactory situation at St Patrick’s. However, with the appointment of Dr Leeper shortly after the purchase of the Lucan estate, very considerable improvements began to be made at St Patrick’s. In 1902, Leeper assumed the superintendentship of St Edmondsbury and energetically implemented a programme of renovation of the physical plant and re-structuring of the medical service – each of which was urgently necessary. The results were soon to be advertised in an illustrated brochure that, among other claims, stated that ‘so different is everything from the traditions of Irish asylums for the insane that one can hardly realise that this delightful place is to be used for such a purpose’.219 In 1905, a dedicated residence for eight male patients was erected on the property. The already extensive estate was augmented in 1910 by the purchase of a 126-acre adjacent farm, ‘Woodville’,220 complete with a Georgian-style country house. Elizabeth Malcolm gives examples of two typical cases of ‘gentlewomen’ admitted to St Edmondsbury in 1919, who had been traumatized by events connected with the Irish War of Independence. The cases given suggest that the residents of the hospital at that time were either Anglo-Irish gentry (many of whose homes had been targeted by incendiaries) or drawn from the Dublin professional and commercial classes. The numbers of patients at St Edmondsbury remained stable in the interval

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

53

between the First and Second World Wars at twenty-five. With the advent of the latter war, patient numbers declined seriously and fees at St Edmondsbury had to be raised to eight guineas a week, and even this level of fee did not completely address the financial deficit. The financial situation improved somewhat towards the end of the war. The bulk of the lands were farmed as a diary enterprise milking 200 cows to supply Dublin’s Voluntary Hospitals. By the time of his marriage in 1951, it had become clear that Drury would be posted in St Edmondsbury indefinitely. He and Eileen moved into a wing of the main house.221 In due course, the Drurys brought up their two boys in that apartment until Drury became indisposed in his middle sixties. As Elizabeth Malcolm describes it: ‘St Edmondsbury had not been designed as a hospital. It was a large, rambling house, which made observation of patients, whether for treatment or security purposes, difficult. Moreover washing and toilet facilities were poor and few patients had their own rooms.’222 The upshot was that Drury had to endure a very stressful working environment. Moreover, he was effectively on duty twenty-four hours a day. In summary, as he explained to R. F. Holland on 10 February 1976, he was for twenty years ‘in sole charge of a fifty bedded hospital and always had ten or so patients on hypnotic therapy’. He also operated ‘an out-patient clinic five evenings a week from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.’ Over the period of Drury’s career, the profile of his patients changed. It is evident from cases discussed in The Danger of Words that this Protestant institution was now taking Roman Catholic patients, probably due to the declining pool of Protestants in the aftermath of independence, and perhaps also to the increasing affluence of their Catholic neighbours.223 The four examples he gave in Chapter 5, ‘Madness and Religion’, of his book were all of that religious persuasion. There was a priest, a priest’s housekeeper, and a policeman who believed ‘he had been chosen by God to drive the English soldiers out of the Province of Ulster’; for this service, he informed the Police Commissioner, ‘he would be a canonised’ (p. 322). Finally, there was a pious retired civil servant whose extreme religious practices were upsetting his wife. It is clear, however, that Drury had no difficulty in treating Roman Catholic patients. Drawing on his command of the history of Christianity, he could find analogues for their sufferings in symptoms presented by a diverse group that included, for example, St Catherine of Genoa, Tolstoy, George Fox, Joan of Arc and Blaise Pascal. Drury did not think that Freud was correct to reduce either historical or contemporary spiritual experiences to neurotic need; the creativity evident in the historical examples suggested otherwise. Neither, however, did he accept Carl Jung’s assertion that religious experience was the apogee of mental health; the matter was more complex than that. Admitting that much destructiveness of the self could take place in an episode of mental illness, he daringly suggested that ‘sometimes those whom God intends to save he first has to make mad’ (DoW, p. 328).224 Less theologically expressed, Drury believed that it was precisely through the ‘terrifying loneliness’ of their experience of mental illness that his patients become ‘more aware of the mysteriousness of our present being’ – and of how to engage with it creatively. Drury’s main recreation was working in a ‘pleasure garden’ with which he augmented the pre-existing orchards and vegetable patches which were enclosed by

54

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

substantial walls. In this garden he cultivated flowers and other plants, exploiting a botanical knowledge accumulated since adolescence. He invited his patients to participate in the work in accord with the long-established therapeutic tenet that advocated ‘moral management’ for those suffering from mental illness. Even while involved in this recreation his thoughts were enriched by philosophy. On 5 February 1967 he wrote to Rhees: ‘When I am working away in the garden I keep thinking of the beauty of all that Simone [Weil] says about the sunlight, all the plants growing and growing upward because of this energy poured down on them gratuitously and equally’ (Arc.).225 He also shared his love of music with his patients. In a letter to Rhees, he wrote: ‘Tonight I am giving the patients a gramophone concert, finishing with the Schubert Octet’ (Arc., 2 March 1959). On Sundays, the family attended church services in St Andrew’s Church in Lucan. As for more lengthy rests, Drury took his family on annual holidays to various part of the west of Ireland (Galway; Sligo) and once to the newly opened Butlin’s Holiday Camp in Mosney, Co. Meath. Short-staffed though the facility was, conditions at St Edmondsbury (echoing those at St Patrick’s) and those at the few other independent mental health institutions in the country226 were vastly superior to those in the public psychiatric hospitals of the time. By 1955, the public institutions held by far the majority of the 21,000 psychiatric in-patients in the state.227 The public hospitals had very large wards (up to 120 patients) and the atmosphere therein was far from therapeutic. The chief purpose of those institutions in the minds of those who had authority over them seemed to have been – apart from securing the physical existence of the inmates – to conceal these troubled souls from public view.228 If the private institutions were relatively better such that they could record a cure rate of up to 50 per cent, it was because of dedicated and talented doctors (like Drury), nurses and ancillary staff – who were among the first to apply new practices in psychiatry, despite straitened circumstances (even for them), imposed by a stagnant Irish economy. Looking back from the perspective of the second half of the 1960s on his decades of practising psychiatry in Ireland, Drury noted ‘a remarkable change’ first in the private and, somewhat later, in the public hospitals: When I was a medical student there was no known form of treatment for what are called the major psychoses, melancholia, mania, schizophrenia, paranoia. Patients suffering from these diseases were admitted to hospital and their physical well-being looked after, but their recovery from the disease itself was a matter that had to be left to time and chance. Even in the more fortunate cases this was usually a matter of months or years. Now for each one of these diseases we have a specific form of therapy: restraint and seclusion are things of the past, and duration of stay in hospital is measured in weeks rather than in months and years. (DoW, p. 318)229 Drury goes on in another chapter, first read as a paper to the Medico-Psychological Society in Swansea (Arc., Rhees to Drury, 25 July 1968), to offer his finest attempt to connect insights gleaned from important influences on his own development – religious and philosophical – to issues in psychiatry. He notes that ‘to most people’s

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

55

surprise’, the specific forms of therapy referred to above had ‘turned out to be physical and chemical in nature’; they had not ‘arisen from any deeper understanding of the psychological processes causing the symptoms manifested’. He further noted that the fact that the administration of ‘a few pills or injections’ or the artificial inducing of convulsions could have such profound and rapid effect on a ‘person’s mood and content of thought’ raised for him important philosophical and ethical questions, which he had not found ‘anywhere adequately discussed’ (DoW, p. 318). Drury believed that these deeper issues had not been discussed for two reasons: First, those at the coal-face of treatment were delighted ‘to be able at last to do something positive and effective for their patients’. They had ‘neither the time nor the training nor the inclination to raise questions about first principles and ultimate objectives’. Second, those who had training to think about such matters (for example, professional philosophers) had ‘little opportunity to see the dramatic way these treatments work’ ((DoW, p. 318). This obviously left the questioning to persons who had had both sets of opportunities and were trained to address the fundamental questions. Drury could, without offending modesty, reckon himself among these few. Despite his very heavy work-schedule as a psychiatrist, Drury was to honour Wittgenstein’s valedictory injunction not to ‘stop thinking’. Increasingly, his thinking was to focus on the issues just described. The record of it forms several distinct writings: The first of these was his ‘Letters to a Student of Philosophy’ referred to above. Another is the very extensive correspondence, mostly philosophical and theological, with Rush Rhees (beginning in 1955 and ending in late 1974 shortly before his death). Many of these are referenced and/or reproduced in this book. A third is his notes for lectures given to medical students of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on ‘Psychology’, whose students he considered more ‘serious’ than those he taught (for a brief period) in the medical school of TCD. The RCSI lectures were given for eight academic years (1956/7–64/5) but his notes to assist him in giving them are too cryptic to be informative. A fourth is his contribution to the study of Wittgenstein’s life and thought – ‘Conversations’ – and the preliminary notes to them, also given here. The ‘Conversations’ were Drury’s main record of his interaction, personal and intellectual, with Wittgenstein. They were of a piece with a determination by Wittgenstein’s former students to present him as they remembered him and to counter what they considered were misguided attempts by other younger men, chiefly professional philosophers, to attribute to Wittgenstein views he never held and would have repudiated. As noted above, some of these supposed offenders are named in a lecture given by Drury at University College Dublin in 1967. Then there was The Danger of Words, where he deployed his philosophical education and years of reflection to enlighten clinical practice. This had sensitized him to the perils of language when deployed in very imprecise classification systems – systems which served to divert attention from the unique experience of each patient; ‘depression’ was a good example. Further, the use of words as labels in these classification systems might easily channel clinical enquiry into preordained outcomes, thus undermining the motivation to pursue research. Drury’s analysis in this regard has obvious debts to Wittgenstein, who had pointed out cognate dangers in the ‘technical’ use of words by philosophers. Hence the need, as Berry

56

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Flowers III put it in a personal communication on this subject to the writer for ‘Drury, like Wittgenstein … [to use] … examples to “jolt” us out of our customary ways of seeing and thinking about things so that we will no longer be “trapped” or “imprisoned” by concepts and classification’ (15 April 2016). Finally, there are the Lectures on Hypnosis, mentioned in a letter to Rhees (23 October 1974). This is a record of lectures given to medical students and based on many years’ experience of employing hypnosis for therapeutic purposes. Drury was confident that he had something to say on the subject but others did not agree.230

DRURY’S RETIREMENT AND DEATH In a letter to Rhees (5 May 1967), Drury quoted George Herbert’s – ‘The Flower’ (1633), which seems to portray a sense of serenity as he entered late middle age: And now in age I bud again After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain And relish versing. Oh! My only light, It cannot be That I am he On whom Thy Tempests fell all night! However, in May of the following year, a complaint about frequent anginal pain, often severe, surfaces for the first time in Drury’s correspondence with Rhees. He had placed himself in the care of doctors based in the Adelaide Hospital, Dublin, in late April, and stayed in that hospital until late May. While there he was given drugs that affected his alertness. However, he later wrote to Rhees that the Adelaide physicians never clarified to him whether they had diagnosed a coronary thrombosis. A specialist consulted in June, whom Drury was refreshed to find ‘quite free of pomposity’, reviewed Drury’s serial cardiograms and was quite clear that he had in fact suffered a thrombosis. The specialist took him off many of the drugs he had been prescribed in the hospital but feared that because Drury still had anginal pain while at rest, another coronary artery was at risk. Hence, more rest was prescribed but, to Drury’s relief, this time at home (St Edmondsbury). Now, as he told Rhees, ‘for the first time in my life I have lots of time on my hands and no outside worries’. While he was ‘still very slowed up’ and got ‘the odd attack of angina’, it was ‘nothing like it was’ and he was able to accompany Eileen on ‘short drives’. He remarked that ‘the familiar country lanes all seem[ed] quite new again’ – no doubt augmented by the fact that the weather was ‘glorious’ (Arc.,12 June 1968). One of these drives, not so short, was to Lough Ennell, near Mullingar, where they shared a picnic. There was another beneficial effect associated with the regimen imposed upon him. He was forbidden to go downstairs from his bedroom and so had no access to his books. He found this deprivation aided his writing. This news delighted Rhees who believed that Drury had ‘a talent … which I have always envied, and I have wished for years that you might find time to put something on paper’. Rhees added ‘if you have got something to say, then it does not matter a damn what other people

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

57

might have been saying’ (Arc. 5 July 1968). It was at this time that Drury began to assemble disparate papers for publication as a single volume under the title The Danger of Words. Later in 1968, Drury was allowed to use the stairs unaided and commenced seeing patients again. He made another happy discovery. As he informed Rhees: ‘My four hours a day with patients is going surprisingly well … I think being ill and being in hospital has done me a lot of good in teaching me the picture from another angle!’ However, ‘once the 4 hours are over I am good for little else in the way of reading or writing’ (Arc.,12 November 1968). Still, when the Irish Times on Saturday, 21 September 1968 published on the same page two reviews of Simone Weil’s On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, ed. Richard Rees (Oxford: University Press, 1968), Drury felt moved to write a letter of counter-criticism to one of the reviewers.231 The tone of the first article by Terence de Vere White, literary editor, can be gleaned from the title: ‘Saint Simone Stylites’. White began: ‘Simone Weil failed signally to impress when she communicated her idea of a women’s war effort to General de Gaulle. He said he thought she must be mad.’232 de Gaulle’s diagnosis was allegedly in response to a proposal she made to the leader of the Free French ‘to organise an unarmed women’s suicide squad (for that is what it amounted to)’. While admitting her academic achievements at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, White mocked her mysticism – in particular the ‘truly angelic radiance’ (as she wrote to her Dominican confidant, Joseph-Marie Perrin) she had perceived on the face of a young English woman while in the chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Assisi. White claimed that he had seen much the same ‘on a Mongolian face in the Brompton Oratory’. In some mitigation of what he had written before, White concluded that ‘she was a spiritual masochist; but when you pull out your Freud to docket her, you will still find something there that defies analysis; and unless it can be proved that goodness is an illusion, it is simply that’. The tone of the second review can also be inferred from its title, ‘Sound and Fury’. White had assigned the nine scientific essays in the book to Professor John L. Synge of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Synge had not previously heard of Weil, although he did know of her brother, André, an eminent mathematician. So far as Synge could see she had nothing to offer the practitioner of science, as he understood the term, and what she had to say was ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. He was amazed at her ‘effrontery’. Drury, who declared himself as ‘an admirer of Simone Weil’, found much to find fault with in White’s review but seemed most concerned to address the charge that she was a spiritual masochist. Pulling rank, he wrote: Masochism is a technical psychiatric term, and as a practising psychiatrist I can state dogmatically that Simone was not a masochistic personality. If you will read the Cahiers and the Connaissance surnaturelle you will find as many wonderful remarks about joy as about affliction. Drury thought that Synge’s reaction must, in part, be attributed to the quality of the English translation and referred him to the French original, which he himself had read. What Drury saw in the book Sur la Science was an exposition of what Wittgenstein had written in the Tractatus that ‘at the basis of the whole modern view

58

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanation of natural phenomena’ [6.371]. Drury’s letter reveals, better than any other text, the passion and conviction which lay beneath his diffident manner and it explains why he (and Rhees) found in Weil both a continuity with Wittgenstein’s project and an exploration of its ramifications for religion, acknowledged cryptically at the end of the Tractatus,233 to which they both attached great importance. In 1969, Drury resigned his position at St Patrick’s and left St Edmondsbury. He and Eileen bought a house, 32 Ailesbury Lawn, Ballinteer Rd., in the Dublin suburb of Dundrum. He had arranged to attend at St Edmondsbury three afternoons a week ‘to see old patients and any new ones referred’ (Arc., 12 November 1968). He also saw patients in his new home and even in the year of his death (1976) he estimated he was conducting about twenty sessions a week. His son Paul recalled that he made weekly trips to the Representative Church Body library in Rathgar and borrowed books on philosophy and theology. He continued to share the problems the books addressed and his reaction to them in regular correspondence with Rhees. He studied Biblical Greek and read a chapter from the Greek New Testament each evening before smoking a cigar while listening to some classical music – Bach being his favourite. He ordered records from Switzers’ department store that were of ‘the style of music I can understand and enjoy’ (Arc., 9 August 1969). Withal there is a certain weariness detectable in a letter to Rhees dated 11 May 1971. In the context of sharing an apprehension about the introduction of the vernacular into the Roman Catholic mass, he wrote: ‘I suppose it is part of growing old, but I sometimes seem to feel as if the end of the world was near, everything seems to be disintegrating.’ Drury died in the late afternoon of Christmas Day, 1976. Two days later his wife, Eileen, still numb, wrote an account for Rhees of what had transpired. Drury ‘looked grey and tired’ when they arrived at their home from the hospital at 4.00 pm on Christmas eve. He went straight to bed but later felt well enough to watch on television a performance of ‘Messiah’ by the Irish Choral Society that was broadcast from the Church of St Ignatius in Rome. He had several bouts of ‘small angina pains’ throughout the night but enjoyed a mid-morning visit from his sons and Luke’s wife, Anna. The morning visit – to exchange gifts – was brief. Occasional bouts of pain persisted through the afternoon and he sent for his two sons but then enjoined them to proceed with their plans for Christmas dinner with Anna. ‘At 5 p.m. he said “I think I will sleep now” and then, quite suddenly, he gave two large sighs and went at 5.15.’ His general practitioner, a Dr Shaw, arranged for an undertaker to take Drury’s body on the following morning. Eileen reported that the ‘boys both said thank goodness they brought an absolutely plain coffin’ as he would have hated anything ornate. Dr Maurice Drury’s passing was announced in the Irish Times on 28 December 1976 in the simplest possible terms with the addendum: ‘No flowers or letters by request.’ On 23 January 1977, Con Drury’s sister, Mary, wrote to her nephew Paul expressing thanks ‘for all that Con was’. She concluded: ‘We have been allowed to see a life brought to complete fulfilment and fruition in this life and it is not many that are allowed to see that’ (Arc.). As was the case with his soul-mate Wittgenstein, Drury had ‘a wonderful life’ of humanitarian service illuminated by glimpses of truth earnestly sought.

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

59

NOTES 1. An abbreviation of ‘O’Connor’ – a surname used in this case as a forename. 2. Drury recalled Wittgenstein telling him that when he first called on Frege to discuss his plans to study logic, the man who opened the door said: ‘I am Professor Frege’ to which Wittgenstein, disconcerted by the appearance of what Wittgenstein assumed was a porter, replied: ‘Impossible!’ (‘Cons.’, p. 102). 3. Russell’s thesis that mathematics and logic were identical was published in The Principles of Mathematics (1903) and given more detailed treatment in a collaborative work with A. N. Whitehead, his former tutor, in Principia Mathematica (1910–13). Wittgenstein read Russell’s Principles while in Manchester, where he also attended the lectures of E. J. Littlewood on the theory of mathematical analysis. The project to reduce mathematics to logic, known as ‘logicism’, was to be shown to be impossible by Kurt Gödel at a conference in 1931 attended by Wittgenstein. 4. In Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974) Wittgenstein notes that these reservations are commonly experienced by children when learning arithmetic only to have them repressed rather than addressed by their educators: ‘I say to these repressed doubts; you are quite correct, go on asking, demand clarification!’ 5. Prototractatus – An Early Version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, eds. B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg and G. H von Wright (London: Routledge, 1971). 6. He worked in the nurseries of the (Augustinian) monastery of Klosterneuburg near Vienna during his summer holidays in 1920 (see his letter to Bertrand Russell of 6 August 1920 in ‘Cam.’, p. 122) and again in 1926 in the Brothers of Charity garden at Hütteldorf, also near Vienna (see G. H. von Wright, ‘Biographical Sketch’ in Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd rev. ed., 1984), p. 10). 7. Ramsey had worked with Ogden on the translation of the Tractatus into English. A visiting Oxford student, Arthur MacIver, who studied at Cambridge for four months in the academic year 1929–30, and had been at school with Ramsey recorded in his diary that he did not recognize Ramsey immediately when he first saw him at Cambridge. He was now ‘an enormous man like a cross between a lighthouse and a balloon – like a Zeppelin set up on end’. Ramsey’s sister, Margaret, described him similarly as ‘a huge, pear-shaped, physically clumsy man’, in Frank Ramsey (1903-1930): A Sister’s Memoir (Huntington: Smith-Gordon, 2012), reprinted in Portraits, p. 417. 8. Wittgenstein sat at Ramsey’s bedside while he was dying. MacIver wrote in his diary that while giving a lecture on the day following Ramsey’s death, Wittgenstein was ‘terribly nervous and I thought at first that he would not spin out the hour’. Drury, ‘a strange, reserved creature’, as MacIver at first found him, ‘seemed to distrust me even for saying that Wittgenstein was nervous yesterday’ (20 January 1930). Apart from the shock of Ramsey’s death, the nervousness might also be attributed to the fact that the two-hour seminar on that Monday marked the beginning of Wittgenstein’s teaching career at Cambridge. 9. Killing in War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), p. 1. The iconoclastic mode is evident in the The Blue Book (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), where Wittgenstein is

60

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

recorded as claiming that his method (of dissolving philosophical problems) is ‘one of the heirs of the subject which used to be called “philosophy”’ (p. 28) and even more emphatically that it is ‘the only legitimate heir of the different activities which had this name in former times’ (p. 62). 10. An eminent interpreter of Wittgenstein, P. M. S. Hacker, wrote in Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) that while the Tractatus brought the ‘high metaphysical tradition of European philosophy to its culmination’ (p. 100), the Philosophical Investigations shattered it – an interpretation that resembles that of Erich Heller, who wrote: ‘The same man, Ludwig Wittgenstein … both perfected the “old system” [the post-Hegelian metaphysics of F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet] in the Tractatus … and initiated its destruction (with Philosophical Investigations)’. [See footnote 1 to ‘Wittgenstein and Nietzsche’ originally published as ‘Wittgenstein: Unphilosophical Notes’, Encounter, vol. 13, no. 3 (September 1959), pp. 40–8 and reprinted in Portraits, p. 1055]. As we shall see, Drury made clear that his understanding of Wittgenstein was tractarian but stressed the continuity of the Wittgensteinian philosophical project right through his life. 11. J. N. P. Moore, Medical Superintendent (1946–77), St Patrick’s Hospital, James’s St, Dublin. 12. In a letter to Raymond Townsend (See BHN in this book) from 143 Strand Rd., Sandymount, Dublin, Drury wrote: ‘You know I am inclined to be too reserved’ (Arc. 13 October 1946). 13. It is likely that Drury was named after an uncle, Major Maurice O’Connor Drury, who died of a ‘gun accident’, aged forty-nine, at Cynghordy, Carmarthenshire on 18 December 1906. A Boer War veteran, he had served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. (See The British Medical Journal, I 92402, January 1907, p. 115). Drury had at least one other paternal uncle (Robert) who was a medical practitioner. 14. Incorrectly amended, without consultation, by editorial fiat to ‘Co. Mayo’ in my entry ‘Wittgenstein in Ireland’, in The Encyclopaedia of Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2003). 15. Among the gifts Con (who had a command of Latin) was to receive from Wittgenstein was a 1931 impression of the second edition of the Clarendon Press vulgate New Testament. It is inscribed ‘To Con from Ludwig’. Wittgenstein told Drury that he preferred ‘the English Authorized Version of the Bible [otherwise known as the King James Bible, 1611] to Luther’s translation into German [1622-34]’ because ‘Luther sometimes twists the sense to suit his own ideas’ (Cons., p. 125) but rated the Latin Vulgate more highly than either of these versions. He commended it to Drury because he would ‘get an entirely new impression’ (Cons., p. 158) of the original text. 16. In A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1968), John Passmore wrote: ‘Space, Time and Deity … has its staunch admirers, some of them prepared to maintain that it is the most important contribution to philosophy our century has known’ (p. 266). Wittgenstein told Drury that during the course of his studies in aeronautical engineering in Manchester from 1908 to 1911, he had thought ‘at one time of going to see Alexander’. However, he ‘decided no good would come of it’ (Cons, p. 95). Nonetheless, in Wittgenstein: A Life: Young Ludwig 1889-1921

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

61

(London: Duckworth, 1988), Brian McGuinness states that at Manchester ‘it can hardly be doubted that there was some consultation with Alexander’ (p. 75). 17. Anthony Kenny, Philosophy in the Modern World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 8. 18. ‘Philosophy’, in H. Wright (ed.), Cambridge Studies (Cambridge: Nicolson & Watson, 1933) p. 1. Richard Braithwaite (1900–90) had been appointed a University Lecturer in Moral Sciences in 1928. In addition to his other (considerable) merits, his name will endure as the owner of the poker reportedly brandished by Wittgenstein while addressing a visiting lecturer, Sir Karl Popper, on 26 October 1946 [See David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker (London: Faber, 2001)]. 19. In the ‘Introduction’ to his popular book, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946) 2nd ed., Russell portrays philosophy as ‘something intermediate between theology and science’. It is like science in appealing to reason rather than religious authority. It shares with theology an interest in questions that ‘so far’ have been ‘unascertainable’ by science including centrally what constitutes noble as opposed to base living – and escavating what such a question presupposes. 20. Among student members of the club while Drury was in Cambridge were Desmond Lee and Lee’s friend, D. G. James. Other members were Max Black, S. K. Bose (an Indian), Maurice Cornforth (a central figure in the Cambridge Communist party), David Guest (who was killed in the Spanish Civil War), John King, A. Shillinglaw and Alister J. D. Watson (a mathematician who later in the decade introduced Wittgenstein to Alan Turing). Others (identified only by their surnames) were Du Val, Irving, Prizer, Webster, Wynne-Wilson (secretary) – and two women from Girton College, Miss Kitty Klugman and a Miss Thomson. 21. Twenty years later, while visiting Norman Malcolm at Cornell University in Syracuse, New York, in the summer of 1949, Wittgenstein had many conversations with Oets Kolk Bouwsma, professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska. Bouwsma records Wittgenstein saying that ‘Johnson always wanted to explain to W. what W. was not interested in. What W. wanted explained, Johnson could not explain. So W. would ask a question, and Johnson would answer a different one, one he could answer. He’d talk about the syllogism’ (22 August). See O. K. Bouwsma, Wittgenstein Conversations 1949-1951 (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1986), eds. J. L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit, p. 36. 22. Arthur MacIver wrote in his diary (6 March 1930) that at a class conducted by Wittgenstein, Drury raised a question ‘with many quotations from Johnson’, which led to a discussion about mathematical proof. A remark by Rhees in a letter to Drury suggests that what Wittgenstein would have wanted to make clear was that ‘“being convinced by a mathematical proof” has a different sense from “being convinced by an experiment”’ (Arc., 14 January 1973). 23. Wittgenstein’s musical tastes had been cultivated by his parents, particularly his mother, who was herself a talented pianist. Drury records Wittgenstein’s views on various composers. See, in particular, his admiration for and identification with Beethoven (Cons., p. 103). 24. ‘Wittgenstein’s Confessions’. A review of Rush Rhees’s Personal Recollections in the London Review of Books, vol. 3, no. 21 (19 November 1981), p. 17.

62

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

25. C. D. Broad, ‘Review of Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958)’ in Universities Quarterly, 13 May 1959, p. 306. However, while it may indeed have been the case that for Wittgenstein philosophy was ‘a way of life’, in time he came to regard teaching the subject as an ‘absurd job’ (Cam., Ludwig Wittgenstein to Norman Malcolm, 20 September 1945, p. 385) and in consequence never seems to have settled in it. Drury thought that this explained why ‘Wittgenstein constantly urged his pupils not to take up an academic post and become teachers of philosophy’ (See BBC p. 90). In any case, Wittgenstein told Drury that ‘a philosopher should enjoy no more prestige than a plumber’ (‘Notes’, p. 150). 26. Prichard seems to have attempted to avenge the insult done him by Wittgenstein when on 14 May 1947 the latter agreed to address the Jowett Society in Oxford – though only to the extent of responding to a paper on whether Descartes’s Cogito ergo Sum was a valid argument by a postgraduate student, Oscar Wood. Prichard repeatedly interrupted Wittgenstein calling on him to address the question whether ‘I think, therefore I am’, is true and having made clear his dissatisfaction with Wittgenstein’s response, left the gathering to general embarrassment (See Mary Warnock ‘A Tremendous Coup’, in Portraits, pp. 752–3). 27. See Cons., p. 136. In 1949, Wittgenstein explained the syncopation thus: ‘Every sentence in the Tractatus should be seen as the heading of a chapter, needing further exposition. My present style is quite different; I am trying to avoid that error.’ 28. Sourced to Ronald W. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 438. 29. Broad, Review of Norman Malcolm, above. 30. See C. D. Broad in Mind and its Place in Nature (London: Kegan Paul, 1925), p. vii. Although, perhaps understandably, there was to be some apprehension that Broad would not support Wittgenstein’s application for a professorship later in the decade (in 1939), in the event, Broad remarked that ‘to refuse the chair to Wittgenstein would be like refusing Einstein a chair of physics’. On hearing of this remark, Wittgenstein told Drury that Broad was ‘a very just man’ and ‘I have been reading [Broad’s] Five Types of Ethical Theory. I thought he wrote that very well’ (Cons., p. 124). According to MacIver, Drury had with him on 13 February 1930, ‘one of the first copies of Broad’s new book … [the same Five Types] … published to-day’. The remainder of this diary entry seems to bear out the idea that Broad was a figure of fun – for Maurice Cornforth and MacIver at any rate. Thus, McIver: ‘Whatever its philosophical value, it seems to have some very amusing things in it, for example a reference to Wynne-Wilson, the secretary of the Moral Science Club, in the preface, where he is said ‘to owe his knowledge of Right and Wrong (under Providence) to his Director of Studies’. 31. ‘Critical and Speculative Philosophy’, in J. H. Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy (1st series) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928), p. 77. 32. There was a difference of opinion as to the source of this record between the editor, Desmond Lee, and John King, who thought that perhaps it should be attributed to Drury even though Lee’s source was King’s own notebook. [See Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge 1930-1932 (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980),

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

63

footnote to Introduction, p. xiii and text, pp. 72–81]. King wrote a letter from 85 Strathearn Place, Edinburgh on 24 March 1980 to Drury’s wife, Eileen, coinciding with the publication of the book edited by Lee. In it he took a stronger line than he had already with Lee: ‘I am pretty certain that in fact they [the notes on Broad] must have stemmed from Con. … The style of these comments was not LW’s. But it seems to show how well Con applied what he had learnt; and these comments seem to me to demonstrate the fact.’ 33. In a letter to Rush Rhees (Arc. 16 October 1966) Drury observed: ‘I would agree with you that today you do not find people talking about eternity in philosophical discussion … you find them talking about sense perception and thought, about proof and necessity, about possibility and chance, etc., etc. But isn’t this a recent change, largely due to Wittgenstein’s influence, and to a lesser extent Moore’s?’ 34. MacIver records that Drury told him Broad’s lectures ‘make such an impression on the beginner that for a long time many people can only think in Broad’s terminology; today he tabulated all the possible kinds of judgement, and he seems to have quite a Wolffian power of systematising’ (7 November 1929). Accordingly, in a later entry, we find: ‘Broad was even more Broadian than usual today, talking of monism, dualism and pluralism and tabulating everything in the process’ (21 January 1930). MacIver thought Broad’s forte was as a taxonomist of philosophical theories. 35. In ‘DoW’, Drury used this nomenclature to characterize how many words were deployed in Psychiatry, with malign consequences. He cited the words ‘alcoholic’, ‘hysteria’, ‘depression’, and ‘drugs’ (p. 270). The term is derived from an incident at a meeting described in Chapter I of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. A fellow-member of the Pickwick Club, Mr Blotton, called Mr Pickwick a humbug. The ensuing disorder was only resolved when the chairman made the suggestion that Blotton’s use of the term ‘humbug’ was purely Pickwickian and devoid of its usual pejorative connotations. 36. See Rhees, ‘Postscript’, Recollections, p. 201. 37. Wittgenstein attached such importance to this point that he chose as a motto for the Philosophical Investigations a remark by Johann Nestroy: ‘Überhaupt bat der Fortschritt das an sich, daB er viel grüBser ausschaut, al ser wirklich ist’ (‘It is in the nature of all progress that it appears greater than it is’). 38. Wittgenstein also alerted Norman Malcolm to this particular danger in reading Freud: ‘He’s extraordinary. – Of course he is full of fishy thinking and his charm and the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled’ (Cam., 4 December 1945). In the setting of lectures on aesthetics, Wittgenstein spoke at some length of Freud, explaining that ‘the picture of people having subconscious thoughts has a charm. The idea of an underworld, a secret cellar. Something hidden, uncanny’ [Cyril Barrett (ed.), Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), p. 24]. 39. It was Moore who suggested the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, echoing Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus to replace the original working title, Logischphilosophische Abhandlung. The development of the crucial distinction found in the Tractatus between what a proposition states and what it cannot state – but only show – can be found in ‘Notes dictated to G. E. Moore in Norway, April 1914’.

64

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

40. Wittgenstein attended at least some of Moore’s ‘Conversation Classes’, informal discussions on Saturday mornings of topics raised in lectures. MacIver records the appearance of ‘a man, thin and with a long neck, wearing a pale blue shirt without collar or tie, a grey flannel suit and an M.A. gown, whom I took to be Wittgenstein and it turned out that I was right’ (19 October 1929). 41. The error lies in the fact that ‘muti’ (silent) is not correctly translated as ‘nonsense’. Desmond Lee recalled another Wittgensteinian exposition of the same quotation when he translated ‘muti’ correctly. As Lee understood Wittgenstein, it was to the effect that ‘it is impossible to find words to praise God, and yet though we say nothing significant we must praise him nonetheless’ (Note given by Lee in his edition of ‘Letters to a Student of Philosophy’, above, p. 173.). 42. In a letter to his friend Ludwig von Ficker, Wittgenstein wrote: ‘I believe that where many others today are just gassing [das Schweƒeln], I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it’ [quoted in Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life: Young Ludwig 1889-1921, above, p. 286]. He seems to have held to this view of religion at least until November 1929 when he declared that ‘we cannot express what we want to express … [in] … our ethical and religious expressions … nonsensicality [is] their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language’ [Wittgenstein, ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, The Philosophical Review, vol. 74 (January 1975), pp. 3–12]. 43. Apart from Drury’s record of Wittgenstein’s views on religion, other important sources include Cyril Barrett (ed.), Lectures and Conversations, 1966; O. K. Bowsma, Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949-51, above; Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (London: Routledge, 1993) and D[ewi] Z[ephaniah] Phillips (ed.), Rush Rhees on Religion and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The latter book contains some of Rhees’s letters to Drury. Commentary on Wittgenstein and religion can be found in Ranjit Chatterjee, Wittgenstein and Judaism; A Triumph of Concealment (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Gordon Graham, Wittgenstein and Natural Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) – second edition: (London: SPCK, 1997) and Tim Labron Wittgenstein and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009). In addition, John A Steffen has graciously shared with me sections of his meticulously researched doctoral dissertation prepared for the University of Louvain: A Cool Temple for the Passions: Wittgenstein’s Catholic Philosophical Ideal (2003). 44. On the other hand, MacIver considered at least one of Moore’s lectures ‘superlatively good’ (9 November 1929). 45. His former student W. H. Watson wrote to Wittgenstein on 6 March 1932: ‘Your lectures and discussions occupy a happy place in my memory because they seemed free from the urge of a programme’ (Cam, p. 198). 46. In his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein clarified that ‘there is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies’ (I, 133). In UCD, Drury compares these methods to learning one’s way about an unfamiliar city, to arranging randomly placed books on a shelf and to opening a combination lock until one has hit on the release setting – images of meticulous activity leading to a ureka moment of orientation, of order and of release.

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

65

47. A good contemporary example can be found in MacIver’s diary: ‘Moore was also very good today discussing the question whether we have any certain knowledge of the future, which a week ago he thought we quite certainly had not but, after reflection, is not so certain now’ (4 February 1930). 48. Moore’s central problem was understanding perception. This arose from his rejection of idealism – a position he had briefly embraced as a young man in a version developed by F. H. Bradley. He considered in depth three alternative positions to explain how sense data interact with physical objects but, aware of the difficulties attached to each position, vacillated between them. 49. In 1948, Wittgenstein told Drury that he was considering this quotation as a motto for his new book – what was later published as the Philosophical Investigations – to underline this philosophical objective. He contrasted his objective with the unifying drive of Friedrich Hegel (See Cons., p. 135). 50. Norman Malcolm records how Wittgenstein contrasted his method with that of Moore: ‘Moore might have given … examples of a use of “I know” in which that expression really functions … in the actual traffic of language … but he doesn’t give such examples: he prefers to gaze at a tree and say “I know there’s a tree there.” And this is because he wants to give himself the experience of knowing.’ (Norman Malcolm, A Memoir, above, p. 73). 51. In Paul Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of G.E. Moore (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1942). 52. For example, Wittgenstein told Drury in 1949 he had never read Aristotle, a staple of all philosophical curricula – ‘Here I am, a one-time professor of philosophy who has never read a word of Aristotle!’ (Cons., p. 135). In explanation, one might note that the classical philosopher of choice at Cambridge was Plato whereas at Oxford it was Aristotle – although, as Anthony Kenny has put it ‘much of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is devoted to philosophical activities [particularly in Philosophy of Mind] that resemble quite closely Wittgenstein’s own method’. Kenny suggests that Wittgenstein practised what he labels ‘dynamic metaphysics’ akin to Aristotle’s approach. Hence, Wittgenstein rejected such practices as the invention of metaphysical substances when we can’t find physical ones, Cartesian dualist metaphysics and the view that ‘exploration of the brain will help us to understand what is going on in our minds when we think and understand’ Philosophy in the Modern World, above, p. 188]. 53. The weighting of the curriculum can be inferred from Drury’s final examination papers in 1930. These comprised two papers on ‘Metaphysical and Ethical Philosophy’ on Thursday, 5 June and two on the ‘History of Modern Philosophy’, 6 June. On 7 June, candidates were required to write an essay from a list of topics. 54. See Rush Rhees (ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: University Press, rev. ed. 1984), p. 74. King’s observation contrasts so sharply with a remark about Moore attributed by F. R. Leavis to Wittgenstein: ‘Moore? – he shows you how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatever’ that one seems forced to choose between them. The contrast is considerably undermined by Leavis’s admission that it was a remark he ‘clearly remember[ed] having been told by someone else’ – a case of hearsay.

66

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

55. Rhees Archive, University of Swansea (Record made 10 August 1988). In another context, Wittgenstein made clear that by soul, he meant ‘heart’ not ‘speculative intelligence … soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood’. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 33e. 56. Drury was not the first Irish friend Wittgenstein made nor the first to have hosted him in Ireland. As part of his study of aeronautical engineering at Manchester University, Wittgenstein spent the summer of 1908 working on experiments at the University’s Upper Atmosphere Research Station in the Peak District. While there he lodged in the same room with an already qualified engineer, four years his senior, William Eccles, who was from Coleraine in now Northern Ireland. Thereafter they met ‘very frequently’ in Eccles’s uncle’s home in Manchester. According to Eccles, ‘Wittgenstein had visited my Coleraine home with me before the 1914–18 war’ [William Eccles, ‘Some Letters of Ludwig Wittgenstein’ in Hermathena, vol. 97 (1963), pp. 57 and 64 respectively]. 57. Perhaps as in Ps. 33.9: ‘I sought the Lord and he answered me; from all my terrors he set me free.’ Much later, Rhees reminded Drury how Wittgenstein saw true, as opposed to bogus religion, as ‘an expression of trust’ (Arc., 18 May 1969). Drury, in reply, commented: ‘One of the good things’ about ‘philosophical thinking is that it delivers one from superstition … prevents one being a bigot’ (Arc., 15 June 1971). 58. Wittgenstein admired the Romanesque chapel in Ely Cathedral – but not the Gothic portions: ‘When the arch becomes pointed I cant [sic] understand’ (Arc.., Drury to Rhees, 25 October 1970). On the return journey that day, Wittgenstein spoke of his admiration for Charles Dickens, mentioning A Christmas Carol and The Uncommercial Traveller (referring in particular to the chapter entitled ‘Bound for the Great Salt Lake’, which he thought illustrated Dickens’s willingness to change his mind) (Cons., p. 98). 59. For example, they read James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which Wittgenstein had long wanted to read. Drury borrowed the first volume from the Union Library and read it aloud to his teacher. Wittgenstein interrupted the reading to make comments, chiefly to correct Fraser’s belief that ‘the primitive rituals [he described] were in the nature of scientific errors’ (Cons., p. 108). In UCD, Drury made the point that the primitive civilisations described by Fraser were, relatively speaking, technically advanced. Many years later in a letter to Rhees Drury recalled: ‘I can remember myself his obvious reverence towards these myths [recounted by Frazer]’; it ‘made a big impression on me’ (Arc., 5 May 1967). 60. ‘A typical American film, naïve and silly, can – for all its silliness and even by means of it – be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing’ (Culture and Value, above, 57e). 61. Wittgenstein was so entranced by a production of King Lear by the Cambridge University amateur dramatic society that he told Drury ‘coming away from the theatre I was so absorbed by what I had heard that in crossing the street I was nearly run over by a taxi’ (Cons., p. 107). 62. Wittgenstein advised Drury, when he proposed to go to London with a friend to see an exhibition of Italian art that ‘if you must go to such an exhibition, there is only

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

67

one way to do it. Walk into a room, select one picture that attracts you, look at it for as long as you want to, then come away and don’t look at anything else. If you try to see everything you will see nothing’ (Cons, p. 108). Courtesy of MacIver, this excursion can be dated to Saturday, 25 January 1930. 63. Drury later wrote to John Dale (See BHN) that Spengler ‘made a great and I now think harmful impression when I was about 22 and first read him. Wittgenstein said of him that “if he had had the courage to write a short book, it would have been something of real importance,” but that he didn’t trust Spengler’s accuracy’ (4 April 1970). 64. According to MacIver, Drury seemed ‘to have a high opinion of … [Tennant’s] work.’ (30 January 1930). Wittgenstein rejected the Roman Catholic teaching that the existence of God was, in principle, provable by natural reason – even though no commitment to any particular argument was enjoined by the church. Wittgenstein rejected this teaching because it postulated that a God that would be ‘another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful’ (Cons., p. 100). 65. Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was baptized a Catholic on 19 May 1889 at Dornbach, near Neuwaldegg, Vienna. While he seemed to cease to subscribe to that confession as a teenager, he nevertheless considered becoming a Catholic priest after demobilization according to Franz Parak, a fellow prisoner of war (See Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, above, p. 274). Wittgenstein told Drury that during the period of internment in Italy as a Prisoner of War, he was content to be obliged to attend mass. He disclosed to friends two examples of religious feelings he had had: First, he had experienced a sense of immunity from harm. A line in a play he attended in Vienna in 1911 ‘Es kann dir nix g’schehn!’ – ‘nothing can happen to you’ because ‘you are part of everything and everything’s part of you’ first aroused this feeling. Secondly, he had a strong sense that there would be a final divine judgement of his actions – a sense which he attributed to the influence of his somewhat remote ancestral Judaism. He approved of this sense because it underlined the seriousness of human action. 66. Drury took a more conservative view than Wittgenstein of the significance of the historicity of the Gospels; both he and Wittgenstein did not, however, doubt that there had been a historical figure called ‘Jesus’. As for the Old Testament books, Drury and Wittgenstein agreed, at least at that point, that the Old Testament was ‘no more than a collection of Hebrew folklore’ (Cons., p. 96); neither man seemed to extend to the Jewish bible the same indulgent understanding shown to the primitive religious rituals described by Fraser. 67. One of the more amusing exchanges Drury had with Wittgenstein concerned a fellow-Austrian, Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925), hereditary baron of the Holy Roman Empire, son of a Scottish mother, spouse to an English wife, who lived in Britain. Wittgenstein had read some of his writings and remarked to Drury that he ‘seems to have been a very pure character, almost a Roman Catholic’ (Cons., p. 99). Drury informed him that von Hügel was not only a Roman Catholic but a modernist, to boot. In a letter to Raymond Townsend in 1941, by now Capt. Drury, Royal Army Medical Corps, wrote that ‘of all the influences in my life the best has been old von Hügel; no one else could have done for me just what he did at that time. You

68

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

remember him saying ‘Religion is Adoration’; that was a revelation to me and is so still’ (Arc., 25 February). 68. As regards prayer – an episodic practice of Wittgenstein’s – he greatly esteemed Samuel Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations and gave Drury a copy of the 3rd new and revised edition (with additional matter). It is inscribed: ‘Dear Drury, This isn’t a nice edition at all but it’s the only one I could get. I hope you will like it never the less.’ This gift was made after Drury had said how impressed he was by ‘the ancient liturgical prayers of the Latin rite and their translation in the Anglican Prayer Book’. Drury notes that Norman Malcolm also received a copy of Prayers and Meditations. Drury believed that its appeal to Wittgenstein reposed in the ‘shortness of the prayers, their deep seriousness, and Johnson’s repeated appeal that he might have grace to amend his life’ (Notes, pp. 161–2). 69. Wittgenstein, ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, above. Drury wrote to Rhees about this lecture that he was ‘more than ever impressed with its depth and simplicity. I despair of ever writing anything so completely free from pomposity’ (Arc., 15 February 1965). MacIver, who was present that evening, wrote of ‘an enormous crowd … Wittgenstein made a magnificent speech – though there was little in it that was not in the “Tractatus” – though it was wasted on the Heretics, who cannot appreciate religious feeling or argue except sophistically’. 70. Drury quotes with approval (See Notes, p. 155) G. H. von Wright, Wittgenstein’s successor as professor in Cambridge for writing ‘Wittgenstein received deeper impressions from some writers in the borderland between philosophy, religion, and poetry, than from the philosophers, in the restricted sense of the word. Among the former are St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The philosophical sections of St. Augustine’s Confessions show a striking resemblance to Wittgenstein’s own way of doing philosophy.’ G. H. von Wright, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Biographical Sketch’ in Malcolm, A Memoir, above, p. 85. 71. Thus, whereas Norman Malcolm believed that for Wittgenstein religious practices, reside in a ‘form of life’, expressed in a ‘language game’ (p. 60), Anthony Kenny wrote in The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays (London: Continuum, 2004), that either there is ‘no religious language game’ (p. 16) or ‘if there is such a thing as a religious language game, it is not a language game in which there is literal truth’ (p. 41). See John Hayes ‘The Inconceivability of God at Oxford’, Doctrine and Life, vol. 54, no. 7 (September 2004), pp. 12–22. 72. This may also explain some of the problems regarding dating the remarks in the ‘Conversations’. Reference is made to several examples in what follows. 73. There are copious references to Drury, Wittgenstein and their associates in MacIver’s diary. These give the information that Drury smoked Edgeworth pipe tobacco, rode a bicycle, possessed a typewriter, and had assembled a library of philosophical books that was twice the size of MacIver’s own collection, of whose size the latter had hitherto been proud. MacIver also noted Drury’s sensitivity to male badinage – a delicacy which seems to have been viewed by his fellow students as prudishness. For example, when MacIver ‘recounted Wittgenstein’s story of the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool – how the only night he was there the manager came and searched his room for a woman’ – Drury ‘disappeared’ from the company. Cornforth then advised

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

69

MacIver that ‘Drury always disappears when women are mentioned’ (21 January 1930). The remark recorded above about his being ‘strange’ and ‘reserved’ aside, MacIver found Drury to be ‘a very nice man’ (25 November 1929) – although capable of losing his temper (14 February 1930). Coming from the very different philosophical world of Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s – before the linguistic turn inspired by Wittgenstein came to dominate that University in the persons of Gilbert Ryle and John Austin – MacIver early realized that his Cambridge fellow students, Drury in particular, had strong loyalties to their ‘masters and pastors’ (7 November 1929). Thus, Drury and Cornforth were ‘shocked’ when MacIver asserted that what Ramsey and Wittgenstein had said at the Moral Sciences Club the previous evening was ‘quite certainly false: I think they regarded such a saying as blasphemy’ (2 November 1929). All the more remarkable then is the positive impression Drury left on MacIver:  I had a much more pleasant time than I had any right to expect, for I doubt whether Oxford would receive a Cambridge man in the same way and I am sure that I would never be so kind to a man who made rude remarks about the school of thought in which I was brought up as Drury, for example, has been to me. (14 March 1930) 74. MacIver, who had attended Tennant’s lectures, wrote that Drury ‘seemed to put it [the doctrine] much better than Tennant ever did, at least in his lectures’ (7 March 1930). 75. The results were published in TheTimes on 17 June 1930. Drury was by then already in Galway. On the following day Broad wrote him from Trinity College, Cambridge: ‘Just a line to congratulate you heartily on getting a comfortable First Class in the Tripos. Both [?Donovan] – and I thought your paper was excellent. We were both particularly struck with your Essay, which was really interesting and a pleasure to read. It is very pleasant that your four years of hard work at Moral Science have ended so satisfactorily, and I hope that you will now have a good holiday.’ The essay titles offered were: ‘The Problem of Transeaunt Action in Spinoza’, ‘The Occasionalists, and Leibniz’, ‘Lotze’s Theism’, ‘The Philosophy of McTaggart’, ‘The spatial and temporal Finitude or Infinity of The World’, ‘The Use of Metaphor in Philosophical Statements’, ‘The Conception of Necessary Being’, ‘Optimism and Pessimism’, or ‘The achievement of perfection could be only the achievement of stagnation’. If one can judge from the tick on Drury’s copy of the question paper, his chosen essay was on ‘The influence of the Science of his time on the Metaphysics of Descartes’. 76. Among Drury’s books are the following works by Aquinas: a Paris Edition of the Summa Theologica (1880); a 1923 edition of the Summa Contra Gentiles, and the Paris edition of the Opuscula Omnia (1927). 77. Drury never had to cope with this eventuality. He was a regular communicant in later life at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, where the dean, T. N. D. C. Salmon, was a friend. 78. As quoted by Craft and Hustwit in Bouwsma, Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949-1951, above, p. xxviii. 79. See Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Truth: A History and Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bantam Press, 1997), pp. 200–1.

70

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

80. Philosophy in the Modern World, above, p. 166. 81. We know from a letter Wittgenstein wrote to William H. Watson 19 August 1931, that he was indeed in Norway for three weeks in July/August 1931 (Cam, p. 192). 82. Wittgenstein engaged in another series of ‘confessions’ in 1938. At that time, Wittgenstein enumerated to Fania Pascal, his teacher of Russian, the moral failing of having been deceitful to his friends regarding the details of his Jewish ancestry – that he had allowed them to assume that he was one-quarter Jewish and three-quarters Aryan, rather than the reverse. 83. This may be better understood against the background of Wittgenstein’s advice to Drury ‘never let yourself become too familiar with holy things’ (Arc, Drury to Rhees, 31 May 1971). 84. Much later, Drury’s sister Mary wrote to Paul Drury ‘it was a great grief to him when after a period at his Theological College he found he had made a mistake. Many a lesser man might have gone through with it, but Con’s integrity was such that he felt he must withdraw. But he suffered intensely, especially as some whose opinion he valued, misunderstood him. Possibly I was the only one who knew just how much he suffered? (Arc., 23 January 1977). 85. Wittgenstein associated with many left-wing intellectuals in the 1930s. Chief among these was Sraffa. He also knew Maurice Dobb and Nicholas Bachtin. Wittgenstein was friendly with George Thomson (See BHN: ‘Addendum: Galway, George Thomson and Wittgenstein’). Thomson summed up Wittgenstein’s attitude to Marxism thus: ‘he was opposed to it in theory, but supported it in practice’ [See ‘Wittgenstein: Some Personal Recollections’, Revolutionary World, vol. 37–39 (1980), pp. 86–8. Reprinted in Portraits, pp. 505–7]. 86. Among the congratulatory messages received by Drury on achieving a First was a letter from Emily Mary (later Lady) Bartlett, director of studies at Newnham, who informed him of the examination results of three Newnham students he had supervised since January 1930 and requested him to continue supervising their work in the coming Michaelmas term. This he did. MacIver records that one of these women, a Miss Davies, was declared by Cornforth and Irving to be a ‘vamp’ – ‘to Drury’s great trouble of mind’ (Thursday, 23 January 1930). 87. Moore wrote on 1 July 1932, from 86 Chesterton Road, Cambridge that he ‘can heartily support the application of Mr M O’C Drury for the vacant Lectureship in Philosophy at Armstrong College. Mr Drury is an able man, with an excellent training in philosophy, and an earnest desire to get to the bottom of philosophical questions. And I should expect him to make a very good teacher. He can put his points simply and impressively; he has a sense of humour; and his own intense interest could not fail, I think, to be stimulating to his pupils.’ 88. Emmett went on to have a long and distinguished career at the University of Manchester, counting among her students the eminent moral philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre and the Dominican theologian, Herbert McCabe. On one occasion during the Second World War, she was invited to return to Newcastle to read a paper in the university of her first appointment only to find, to her surprise, that Wittgenstein was in her audience. As was his wont at the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge, ‘he brushed aside’ her paper and the subsequent discussion ‘centered on him’. See

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

71

her account of the occasion ‘Philosophers and Friends’, reprinted in Portraits, pp. 732–33. 89. See Bouwsma, Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949-51, above, p. 58. 90. Drury later asked an audience of psychiatrists to reflect first on what they had learnt in their anatomy classes about the brain and subsequently about its physiology, biochemistry, genetics, and physics at an atomic level. He surmised that their reaction would be: ‘Merciful heavens, what has happened to that nice solid brain we saw in the anatomy room? (DoW, p. 294). The philosopher in Drury was of the view that whatever has been or will be learnt about the brain by the various sciences he would get no nearer to explaining how consciousness is possible (See entry for John Dale in BHN). 91. During the First World War, Wittgenstein was posted for a time on a gunboat patrolling the river Vistula and spent time in Tarnow, capital of the district of the same name, which was then in Austrian Galicia but passed to Poland after the war. 92. The Mortimers were featured in ‘Salmon Fishers’, Ireland of the Welcomes, vol. 16, no. 6 (March to April 1968), pp. 6–10. 93. During his stay with the Drury family in Exeter, Wittgenstein and Drury lunched each day at a Lyons café in the High Street. He much admired the Lyons chain for its standards of cleanliness and the well-designed uniform of its waitresses. They also attended church together on an occasion when, however, Wittgenstein did not listen to the sermon and was particularly critical of the organist’s performance of a voluntary but found much to meditate on in the preacher’s text (Jn 16.7). 94. Other reading disclosed to Drury included R.C. Sherriff’s play, Journey’s End, concerning the experiences of a British army infantry company in the trenches in France towards the end of the First World War. Wittgenstein did not understand the humour of the play any more than he saw it in Don Quixote or Candide; their appeal was to discarded fashions in humour, he thought. One writer Wittgenstein did find humorous was P. G. Wodehouse as exemplified in the short story, ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’. 95. In his will, Wittgenstein left his ‘volume of Lessing’s religious writings’ to an old friend, Dr Ludwig Hänsel, a teacher in Vienna. 96. Leopold von Ranke, doyen of nineteenth century in historical studies, who visited Dublin (birthplace of his wife, Clarissa Helena Graves) in 1865, described it as ‘the only capital city in the world in which the majority of the population are Catholic, but is ruled by a Protestant minority’ [See Andreas Boldt, ‘Van Ranke in Dublin’, History Ireland, vol. 16, no. 1 (January/February, 2008), p. 28]. A new order of governance was indeed introduced with Irish independence. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein was somewhat premature in declaring Trinity to be already inhabited by the ‘gypsies’, if by that appellation he meant the Catholic majority. [The relevant chapter title ‘Adjustment and Survival 1919-1952’ of J. V. Luce’s Trinity College Dublin: The First 400 Years (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin Press, 1992) conveys succinctly the difficulties encountered by TCD in adjusting to the Irish Free State and later the Republic]. 97. Re-named ‘Heuston’ Station on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 rebellion in honour of a railway employee who was executed for his role in that event.

72

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

98. At Schlick’s initiative, Wittgenstein had agreed to co-operate with Friedrich Waismann in writing a more accessible version of his philosophy to be entitled Logik, Sprache, Philosophie – but the project failed as Wittgenstein’s thought evolved in the 1930s. 99. The practical consideration that may have precipitated these career investigations was that the term of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge fellowship was coming to an end. In the event, on the expiration of the fellowship, Wittgenstein went to live in Norway and stayed there until December 1937. In October 1938, he was elected to the Moral Sciences Faculty at Cambridge and in February 1939 succeeded Moore as professor of philosophy there. 100. According to Monk, Wittgenstein ‘throughout his life harboured a desire to become a doctor, considered the possibility of studying medicine in England with the intention of practising in Russia, and even secured from Keynes a promise to finance his medical training’ (p. 350). 101. Culture and Value, above, p. 33e. 102. Presumably this is the regime that Drury referred to when on 6 April 1970 he recalled for Rhees that he ‘came to psychiatry at a time when locked doors, padded cells, elaborate precautions against suicide (removal of knives and razors, ties, pyjama cords, braces etc. etc.), but that all this has been done away with by the new drugs’. He continued, ‘the young psychiatrist today has no conception of what things were like 20 years ago. Eileen [his wife] tells me that as a probationary nurse in a “disturbed ward” you could not hear yourself speak for the uproar from 3 a.m. onwards’ (Arc.). 103. Leeper was to remain in the post until 1941. He held the predominantly clerical board of governors (of an institution that had been conceived originally as entirely non-denominational) responsible for the unsatisfactory state of the establishment as he found it and set about replacing the divines. He oversaw many changes during his lengthy incumbency; Elizabeth Malcolm in Swift’s Hospital (above) lists, for example, treatments such as short-wave diathermy (electrical treatment reaching deep body tissues) for schizophrenia and general paralysis of the insane, violet radiation for schizophrenia and melancholia and continuous baths for mania (pp. 252–3). Nevertheless a later medical director, Anthony W. Clare, commented, in passing, in an obituary on Leeper’s successor, Norman Moore: ‘St Patrick’s was somewhat stuck in a time-warp of Victorian rigidity. The wards were rigidly segregated. They were for the most part locked. The atmosphere was disciplined but institutional’ ‘Obituary’, Psychiatric Bulletin (1996), vol. 20, p. 771. 104. This problem persisted. In an unpublished letter, Drury confided to John Dale (see BHN): ‘At one time I was attracted by the thought of doing orthopaedics but decided I was too clumsy with my hands’ (4 April 1970). 105. Notes, pp. 162. In this letter Wittgenstein stresses the significance he attached to the conversations, clearly of a mentoring nature, with Drury at the time: ‘It is most important that we should not one day have to tell ourselves that we had wasted the time we were allowed to spend together.’ 106. Members of the Wittgenstein family, including Ludwig, had at that point to engage in financial negotiations to protect Hermine and Helene. This involved him having to visit America for the first time in July 1939.

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

73

107. He repeated the point in a letter on the following day to Gilbert Pattisson. He outlined to Pattisson a scenario that he might seek British citizenship but live in Ireland (if he could secure work). In that case he would be more clearly a refugee. (Cam., 15 March, 1938, p. 271). 108. Drury, in turn, visited Wittgenstein in Cambridge in that year and accepted an invitation to attend a lecture by Wittgenstein on aesthetics. A second-hard record of what is likely to have been this lecture appears in Cyril Barrett, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, above. It seems from a note appended to Drury’s account of the occasion that such records were not approved by Wittgenstein. Drury recalled that Wittgenstein asked ‘one of the students’, who ‘was rapidly writing notes’ to desist from doing so on the grounds that ‘if you write these spontaneous remarks down, someday someone may publish them as my considered opinions. I don’t want that done. For I am talking now freely as my ideas come, but all this will need more thought and better expression’ (Cons., p. 123). Drury himself made very modest claims for his own record of his conversations with Wittgenstein; it was ‘an album of snapshots taken by an amateur photographer with a mediocre camera’ (Cons., p. 94). 109. The ‘Stip. Cond.’ attached to Drury’s degree in surgery apparently refers to the mode of discharging the fee payment. In Drury’s case, it probably refers to his holding a scholarship. 110. Although Drury was born and educated in England, he gave his nationality as ‘Irish’ when he enlisted in the Royal Arm Medical Corps. He declared the ‘Church of England’ as his religious denomination. 111. Apart from his army record, we do not have much information about Drury’s war experiences. In DoW, however, and in the context of a critique of ‘experimental psychology’ in general and Intelligence Testing in particular, he recalls how, when he was ‘a regimental medical officer during the war’, a new recruit was sent to him about whom the area psychiatrist had reported that he had a mental age of twelve and a half and who was accordingly recommended for discharge. Although the lad could not read or write, Drury discovered ‘he was an expert in handling dogs and ferrets, and as we were at that time plagued with rats he was appointed official “rodent operator” to the unit’ (p. 277). Clearly to those like Drury who have sufficient flexibility, there is no such person as ‘a good for nothing’. 112. Like Drury, both Generals O’Connor and Montgomery were of Irish parentage and members of that disproportionately large cohort of soldiers of Irish lineage who, over several centuries, fought in the British army at every rank, including perhaps 50,000 nationals who fought on the Allied side in the Second World War. See Richard Docherty, Ireland’s Generals in the Second World War (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). 113. An entry in Robert Thouless’s diary shown to Brian McGuinness gives this information. See note in Cam., p. 345. Thouless was an educational psychologist at Trinity, Cambridge, and nominated by Wittgenstein as an executor of his will although he was later replaced by Rush Rhees. 114. See J. R. Henderson, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein and Guy’s Hospital’, Guy’s Hospital Reports, vol. 122 (1973), pp. 185–93. Reprinted in Portraits, pp. 705–14. Professor John Ryle, brother of the philosopher, Gilbert, a consultant at Guy’s used his

74

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

influence to secure this post for Wittgenstein. Drury recorded Wittgenstein’s comment on the absence of a garden for psychiatric patients at Guy’s York Clinic: ‘Every mental hospital ought to have a large garden where patients can stroll and rest’ (Cons, p. 142) – a facility Drury took care to restore at St. Edmondsbury. Wittgenstein left the sum of £100 in his will to Roy Fouracre, a friend he made while working together in the hospital dispensary. 115. The surprise arose from the fact that Bradley’s writings represented the apogee of British idealistic metaphysics, which Moore and Russell had undermined. In his first book Appearance and Reality (1893), Bradley argued that every judgement we can make about the world as it appears to us is ‘riddled with contradictions’ and so cannot refer to ‘true Reality’. Drury’s ‘Letters to a Student of Philosophy’ draws on identified chapters in Appearance and Reality to develop a similar theme although the ‘Absolute’ referred to in these ‘letters’ is not Bradley’s neo-Hegelian version and is, in the end, difficult to disentangle from a theological understanding inspired by Augustine. 116. Drury made at least one life-long military friend in Egypt, Henry Martin, who retired to live in Wicklow. 117. According to Antony Beevor, and against expectation for such a socialite and dandy, the photographer Cecil Beaton ‘on returning to Cairo [in 1942] … became sickened again by the luxurious fleshpots and the scheming of idle minds. He described it as a “most tatty capital” … Indolent staff officers at Headquarters Middle East were known as “the gabardine swine”’. [‘Oh, what a lovely war, darlings’ The Sunday Times Magazine (5 August 2012), p. 50]. 118. Wittgenstein not only worked on the staff of Guy’s but also had his gall bladder removed while working there. He later told Drury that he had requested that a mirror be fitted so that he could watch the operation. This request was refused. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein insisted that he be given a local anaesthetic in the spine. As a result he could still observe the surgeon at work in the reflective surface of the lamp placed over the operating table. Wittgenstein told Drury, however, that had he known that a spinal anaesthetic often gave rise to ‘an appalling headache’, he would have agreed to a general one (Cons., p. 142). One might query if this was the same operation to which he referred when in the course of a discussion following a paper given by Dorothy Emmett in Newcastle he recalled, according to Emmett, that on ‘coming to after the operation… “my soul was a black ghost in the corner of the room, and it gradually came nearer and took possession of my body”’ (See Portraits, p. 733). 119. In the introduction to the final report by the Grant team, ‘Observations on the General Effects of Injury in Man’ (HMSO, 1951), a point was made about the unsuitability of the demotic word ‘shock’ for the medical phenomena being studied. When the report was being drafted, Wittgenstein had suggested that this criticism might be met by printing the word ‘shock’ upside down. The word ‘shell shock’ had first come into common usage during the First World War. 120. While in Newcastle, Wittgenstein also developed a ‘rule of fist’ to measure the blood loss of wounded soldiers. Soft-tissue damage, as gauged by the patient’s closed fist, proved to be a reliable ready reckoner of the loss of blood. Thus, for example, a wound the size of three fists suggested that blood loss was c. 30 per cent and of

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

75

four, c. 50 per cent. This enabled triage teams in battlefield conditions to prioritize the need of trauma victims for a blood transfusion on a scale of 1 to 4. Dr Grant ‘ensured that the method was widely disseminated within the RAMC and it proved most useful.’ [Leo Kinlen, ‘Wittgenstein in Newcastle’, Northern Review vol. 13 (2003–4), pp. 1–30. Reprinted in Portraits, pp. 717–29]. 121. The conditions of medical service in these tented hospitals in Normandy 1944 were vividly recorded by a Queen Alexandra nurse, Mary Morris, from Galway: See A Very Private Diary: An Irish Nurse in Wartime, ed. Carol Acton (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014). 122. In D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (London: Penguin, 2012), Antony Beevor describes ‘the screams, the stench of gangrene, the blood, the severed limbs, the terrible burns’ that characterized Field Hospitals behind the lines. He also says of the surgeons who ministered to the wounded that ‘what is astonishingly impressive is how the vast majority stayed the course’ (p. 294). 123. Beevor, p. 478. 124. He finally relinquished his temporary wartime commission as Captain, which had been granted on 20 September 1939 on 15 March 1954. On 16 April 1954, he was accorded the honorary rank of Captain. He was also awarded the War Medal (1939/45), the Africa Star, the 1935/45 Star, and the France and Germany Star. 125. See Bernard Kelly, Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen after the Second World War (Dublin: Merrion, 2012), pp. 69–71. Kelly relates that the Irish authorities feared that the returning ex-servicemen might cause an economic crisis in a country laid low during the war. In fact, a majority settled in the UK. 126. It seems most probable that this was the French Travelling Clock that was bequeathed to Dr Benedict Richards in Wittgenstein’s will along with a ‘fur coat’, a ‘complete edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ and ‘a book “Hernach” by W. Busch’. 127. While passing a Jewish synagogue on his way to the Taughannock Falls State Park, north-west of Ithaca, New York on August 22 1949, Wittgenstein said to his companion Oets Bouwsma that he did not ‘understand modern Judaism’ for the startling reason that ‘he did not see what could be left of it since sacrifice was no longer practised. And now? What was left was too abstract. Prayers and some singing’ (Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949-1951, above. Reprinted in Portraits, p. 1001). It is interesting to read this remark in light of Ray Monk’s excellent account of the successive Jewish migrations to America and their reception and adaptation in the New World, see Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), Part I, 1: ‘Amerika, du hast es besser’. 128. Kelly, Returning Home, above, p. 191. 129. Writing in her diary on 22 January 1946, the Irish nurse, Mary Morris, recorded that ‘Dublin was packed with American and Canadian servicemen in uniform. It still annoys me to see all these people wandering around O’Connell Street while Irishmen serving in the British forces must wear civilian clothes’ (A Very Private Diary, above, p. 230). 130. Moore, BA, MD, DPM, FRCPI, became first clinical professor of psychiatry, TCD, when that post was established. He is commended by Professor Ivor Browne in Music and Madness (Cork: University Press, 2008).

76

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

131. This procedure was first carried out in Ireland in June 1947 in the Richmond Surgical Hospital in Dublin and was indicated primarily for patients who had not responded to either ECT or insulin coma therapy (see below). The operation eventually fell into disfavour but not before being widely administered. See Brendan Kelly, Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland (Newbridge, Co Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2016), pp. 170–8, 132. Quoted in Elizabeth Malcolm, Swift’s Hospital: A History of St Patrick’s Hospital Dublin 1746-1989 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989), pp. 259–60. 133. This therapy was developed by an Austrian psychiatrist, Manfred Sakel, in the early 1930s. The comas that pari passu resulted from the insulin treatment (originally intended to promote weight-gain and reduce nervous excitation) were observed to be associated with remission in schizophrenic episodes and soon thereafter widely used for the latter purpose. 134. See John Hayes, ‘Philosophy and Medical Practice’, Doctrine and Life, vol. 55, no. 7 (September 2005), pp. 10–27 for reflections on this subject. 135. See David Healy, ‘Interview: In Conversation with Desmond McGrath’, Psychiatric Bulletin, vol. 16 (1992), pp. 129–37. 136. Born in Helsinki in 1916, of a Swedish-speaking Finnish family, von Wright first studied in that city with the philosopher and psychologist, Eino Kaila, an associate of the Vienna Circle. An admirer of Russell’s Principia Mathematica and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, he came to Cambridge in 1939 to study under Moore. He attended Wittgenstein’s seminars and succeeded him as professor of philosophy at Cambridge. He resigned the latter position in 1951 to take up a Swedish-language chair of philosophy in Helsinki. He made very significant contributions to the study of formal logic, contributing to C. I. Lewis’s work on modal logic and founding ‘deontic logic’. As one of the literary executors of Wittgenstein’s estate, he took responsibility for the organization of the Nachlass. In later life he greatly broadened his field of interest beyond logic. A particular target for criticism was one of which Wittgenstein would have approved – ‘scientism’, ‘the belief that science and technology by themselves can solve the problems for which their advancement is to a great extent responsible’ [in ‘Science, Reason and Value’]. Greatly esteemed in Finland and Scandinavia generally, von Wright died in 2003. 137. According to Maria Baghramian ‘Ireland in the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein’, Hermathena, vol. 144 (summer 1988), p. 74. Bahramian states that they stayed that night at the Silver Vale Hotel in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow. 138. See G. H von Wright, ‘The Wittgenstein Papers’, Philosophical Review vol. 78, no. 4 (1969), pp. 483–503. Reprinted in von Wright, Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), pp. 37–62. 139. Culture and Value, above, 54e and 55e. 140. McCullagh, a talented tenor, was a well-known figure in Dublin musical circles. He won the most coveted award for singing in Ireland in 1929 – a Feis Ceoil gold medal in the tenor solo competition. 141. Apart from the parents, there were two adult children (Maud, b. 1925 and Evelyn, b. 1927) and one boy, Ken, then ten years old living in Kilpatrick House.

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

77

142. Wittgenstein wrote to Norman Malcolm on 15 March 1948: ‘How people can read Mind [the leading British journal of philosophy] if they could read Street and Smith beats me. If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom there’s certainly not a grain of that in Mind, and quite often a grain in the detective stories’ (Cam., p. 424). Street & Smith was the oldest publisher of pulp fiction in New York City. According to Malcolm, Wittgenstein ‘liked American films and detested English ones … . This was connected with a great distaste he had for English culture and mental habits in general. He was fond of the film stars Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton’ (A Memoir, above, p. 27). 143. A complete edition which Wittgenstein bequeathed to Dr Benedict Richards. 144. 5 February 1948. Gedanken & Erinnerungen can be translated as ‘Thoughts and Reminiscences’. According to Drury, Wittgenstein owned a copy of this book (Cons., p. 138). 145. Correspondence from von Wright, Rhees, the Malcolms, and his sisters aside, we know also of letters from a number of former students. In a letter to Lee Malcolm (4 January 1948, Norman Malcolm, A Memoir, p. 105) Wittgenstein mentions hearing from Kantilal Jethabai Shah (who later visited him in Connemara), Georg Kreisel and Wasfi Hibjab. 146. As quoted in Monk, p. 521. As an adolescent, sometime in the 1880s, Wittgenstein’s teacher, Bertrand Russell, had discovered the delights of Co. Wickow: ‘The beauty of the scenery made a profound impression on me. I remember especially a small lake … called Lug[g]ala’ [Autobiography (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975), p. 35]. 147. So described by George Hetherington, ‘A Sage in Search of a Pool of Darkness’, Irish Times, no. 41, 354 Wednesday, 26 April 1989, p. 12. 148. See, Cons., p. 147, n. 40. 149. See, for example, William J. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986). 150. In a letter to Rhees (5 August 1963) Drury questioned the validity of this distinction but in any case thought ‘surely Hume was a great Philosopher’. However, he found no evidence that Hume suffered ‘the pain of philosophical difficulties’ unless ‘Hume’s thinking caused him more suffering than he allows to offer’. 151. 5 June 1948 in Malcolm, A Memoir, p. 110. 152. Baghramian, ‘Ireland in the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein’, p. 75. Although apparently he did not display it to the Kingstons, Wittgenstein did have a sense of humour. He marked Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Ausgewählte Schriften at the epigram: ‘The question “should one philosophize for oneself” is like the question, “Should one shave oneself?” The answer is, “Yes if one can do it well”’, (see McGuinness’s note, Cam., p. 44). Wittgenstein added a postscript to a letter to Alice Ambrose (17 January 1935) that ‘this signature is worth £100’, (p. 237). He repeated the quip in a letter to Norman Malcolm (6 October 1945): ‘First cut out the leaf with my dedication [on a gift of Samuel Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations]. For when I shall become very famous it’ll become very valuable as an autograph, and your grandchildren may be able to sell it for a lot of “dough”’ (p. 386). His correspondence with Gilbert Pattisson was a trading of ‘nonsense’ (See Monk, p. 266) – as was also the case with W. H. Watson.

78

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

153. To Rhees ‘My nerves, I’m afraid, often misbehave’ and to Malcolm: ‘I have occasional queer states of nervous instability about which I’ll only say that they’re rotten while they last, and teach one to pray.’ 154. 15 March 1948, A Memoir, above, p. 107. 155. This seems similar to the prayer to God that Drury read in Samuel Johnson, on suffering a stroke, that ‘however He would afflict my body He would spare my understanding’ (DoW, p. 304). 156. I am grateful to Andrew Jackson, son-in-law of Kenneth Kingston, for the following information provided by Kenneth: ‘The farm was principally dairy when LW was at Kilpatrick, although there were also about five work horses and a pony (which was stabled in the outhouses), plus a pedigree boar … and a bit of tillage. There would also have been several farm workers at Kilpatrick … although only one … lived on site.’ 157. Barbiturates (for example, Amytal) were the hypnotic of choice at the time. 158. See David Berman and Michael Fitzgerald, Letter, ‘Of Sound Mind’, Nature, [vol. 368 (10 March 1994), p. 92]. Reprinted in Portraits, pp. 962–3. The signatories interviewed Professor Moore with a view to getting his opinion about the appropriateness of a diagnoses of ‘paranoid delusions’ and a ‘speech disorder known as schizophreneze’ suggested respectively by a Canon C. F. Raven and a J. R. Smythies in an exchange of letters in Nature in 1994. Norman Moore had the distinct advantage in that regard of being a psychiatrist who had had conversations with Wittgenstein about the troubling episode that had arisen while staying with the Kingstons in 1948; he emphatically rejected any suggestion that Wittgenstein was schizophrenic. (See Entry, ‘Yorick Smythies’ in BHN). 159. Prof Brendan Kelly in Hearing Voices (above) quotes from an anonymous report in the Journal of Mental Science, 95, 400 (supplement) (July 1949), pp. 8–9, on a meeting of the Irish Division of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association held in the Verville Retreat in Clontarf, Dublin, in April 1949 that ‘Dr M. O’Connor Drury read his “Report on a Series of Cases Treated by the ECT-Pentothal-Curare Technique”’. 160. Easter Sunday was on 28 March 1948 and despite the previous contretemps, Wittgenstein brought back from Dublin what George Hetherington described as ‘a large papier maché egg full of sweets’ for the family. Maud recalled that the oval package was made of plastic – a material to which the Kingstons were so unaccustomed that the container was kept in the house for a long time thereafter. 161. Joseph Mahon, ‘The Great Philosopher Who Came to Ireland’, The Irish Medical Times vol. 20, no. 7 (14 February 1986), p. 32. It appears from a letter to Mulkerrins from Kilpatrick House, reproduced in Richard Wall, Wittgenstein in Ireland (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 81, that Wittgenstein had decided to accept Drury’s offer of the cottage in Rosroe by the date of the letter (10 April 1948) and that he planned to arrive there on 23 April. The delay was most likely caused by his contracting influenza in the interim. 162. According to Monk, in a later conversation with Rhees, Wittgenstein had described Mulkerrins as ‘unreliable’ (p. 525). 163. In one of several anecdotes to be found in a lengthy account of Wittgenstein’s second stay in Rosroe (Monk, pp. 524–35), Ray Monk remarks that the Mortimer family, already referred to above, ‘considered him [Wittgenstein] completely mad,

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

79

and would have nothing to do with him’. According to Monk, Mulkerrins ‘thought Wittgenstein a little odd’ (p. 525). 164. Cons., p. 94. 165. Benedict Richards (1924–2000) was a medical student at King’s College, Cambridge, when Wittgenstein first met him in 1945. He was son of two medical doctors. His mother, Noel Olivier, was one of a group called the ‘Neo-Pagans’, by its leader, Virginia Woolf, and had associations with other members of the Bloomsbury group. [See Stanford P. Rosenbaum, ‘Wittgenstein in Bloomsbury: 1911-1931’, in The British Tradition in 20th Century Philosophy, eds. Jaakko Hintikka and Klaus Puhl (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1995). Reprinted in Portraits, p. 178]. McGuinness remarks that ‘he became the last great attachment of Wittgenstein’s life’ (Cam., p. 413). 166. Mahon, Portraits, p. 876. 167. Shah, a Jain, was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, from January 1945 until June 1947 and later became professor and head of the Department of Philosophy at Karnatak University Dharwad, Karnataka State, India. His lecture notes, along with those of Peter Geach and A. C. Jackson were the source for Geach, ed., of Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946-47 (Hampstead: Harvester, 1988; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 168. A plaque commemorating Wittgenstein’s association with the Rosroe cottage, later transformed into the Killary Harbour Youth Hostel (since closed), was unveiled by Her Excellency Mary Robinson, president of Ireland on 15 July 1993. 169. See Michael Nedo, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Chronology’ revised in 2014 and reprinted in Portraits, p. 63. 170. A plaque in Wittgenstein’s memory was unveiled outside its successor Hotel, the ‘Ashling’, on 16 May 1988. 171. Nedo, Portraits, above, in his Wittgenstein Chronology notes that ‘most of this volume and the second half of Band R, are published as Letzte Schriften űber die Philosophie der Psychologie (Oxford: University Press, 1982), p. 63. 172. The Dublin Zoo was founded in 1830 by a group of medical practitioners, frustrated by laws, still active, against grave-robbing. Their main motivation in establishing the zoo was to gain access to primates, whose proximity on the evolutionary chain was likely to increase their understanding of human anatomy. 173. In a letter to Rhees, Drury remarks: ‘Now I consider that a review of the facts makes both Darwin’s and Lamarck’s theory inadequate as an explanation of the origin of the multiplicity of living forms, but there is evidence that both theories draw attention to some aspects of biology. … What is important is to accept the truth that we do not know anything much about the origin of species’ (Arc., 5 February 1967). 174. In his books, Fergus Kerr, above, makes a case that the version of Catholicism Wittgenstein received (and rejected, particularly in the person of the Jesuit, Charles W. O’Hara, who had come to prominence in England as an apologist in the 1930s) was heavily weighted towards apologetics, stressing the reasonableness of belief, and anti-modernist in tendency, ‘playing down moral arguments, from experience, from conscience, and so on’ (Work on Oneself, above, p. 49).

80

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

175. Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), Vol I, p. 174. 176. See Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-2002 (London: Harper Perennial, 2004). 177. One interesting proposal regarding the transition between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations has been given by Alasdair MacIntyre: ‘The hope that Wittgenstein expressed in the Tractatus was that philosophers, on reading it, would recognize that they did not in fact have the subject matter for their enquiries that they had believed that they had and liberated from their illusions would fall silent. … This did not, of course, happen. What did happen almost immediately was that a few philosophers recognised that … if they could correctly diagnose the errors that had generated its paradoxical conclusions, this itself would be a great advance in philosophy. Foremost among that small number was Wittgenstein himself. Wittgenstein took one of his mistakes in the Tractatus to be that of having supposed that meaningful uses of language are all of one kind. He took a second mistake to be that of having ignored the range of different linguistic and social contexts that are presupposed by our various uses of language’ [God, Philosophy, Universities (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield)], p. 160. Wittgenstein then addressed these perceived mistakes – as well as many other enquiries (notably in philosophical psychology) in the Philosophical Investigations. 178. As translated by Anscombe from the German, these are (1) ‘My work has extended from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world’; (2) ‘Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion – science – and art’; (3) ‘God is, how things stand’ (preceded by the statement: ‘How things stand, is God); (4) ‘But this is really in some sense deeply mysterious! It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed’ (the editors refer the reader to Tractatus, 6.421); ‘You are looking into fog and for that reason persuade yourself that the goal is already close. But the fog disperses and the goal is not yet in sight.’ Notebooks 1914-16, eds. G.H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), Quotation 1–3, p. 79; 4, p. 78; 5, p. 53. 179. The word ‘remarks’ (Bemerkungen) was used in the titles of a number of collections of material published after his death. 180. When Rhees conveyed this view to Drury in a letter of 10 July 1951 he could not have been familiar with the published account, at least, of O.K. Bouwsma’s conversations with Wittgenstein at various times in the period 1949–51, as these did not appear until 1986. Bouwsma conversed with Wittgenstein both in America and later Oxford, and discussed with him perhaps not as extensively as Wittgenstein had with Drury – but perhaps more probingly on the interlocutor’s part – ethical and religious topics. Bouwsma was himself a committed member of the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church founded in the American Midwest by Dutch immigrants. Notable in the Bouwsma record are Wittgenstein’s comments on John Henry Newman and on Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. The issue of conversion also arises in his quoting Wittgenstein as saying that ‘my best friends and the best students I had are converts to Catholicism’, whom Wittgenstein had once compared to ‘tight-rope’ walkers (Cam, p. 363).

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

81

181. A quite different view is expressed by Fergus Kerr who writes: ‘On the strength of such anecdotes [recorded by Drury] neither Drury nor Wittgenstein seems at all a well-informed or sophisticated theologian. Some of the remarks might seem to belong to the genre of late-night conversations between university students, though of course by 1949 Drury was over forty and Wittgenstein aged sixty’ (Work on Oneself, above, p. 39). Maybe so. The conversations (including about religion) began in 1929 when Drury was twenty-two and seemed to me to be remarkably well informed for a student of that age. 182. It will be recalled that the same objection applied to any ‘proofs’ of God’s existence that concluded with a balance of probabilities. 183. See Culture and Value: ‘The spring which flows gently and limpidly in the Gospels seems to have froth on it in Paul’s Epistles … to me it’s as though I saw human passion here, something like pride and anger, which is not in tune with the humility of the Gospels. … In the Gospels – as it seems to me – everything is less pretentious, humbler, simpler. There you find huts; in Paul a church’ (30e). 184. However, when Rhees later expressed his unhappiness at the introduction by the Second Vatican Council of the vernacular Eucharistic liturgy, Drury seemed to take a different tack in his reply: ‘I have been grieved too at the thought of this break with the past and what a wonderful past! … The words of the liturgy seem soaked in centuries of prayer’ (Arc., 31 May 1971). 185. Drury recorded that Wittgenstein had ‘said how interesting it was that Livy could not conceal his admiration for Hannibal. He particularly liked the incident when, after the battle of Cannae, Hannibal had the field of battle searched for the bodies of the two consuls in order that he could show his respect for them’ (Cons., p. 138). 186. In 1812 de Ségur was a young aide-de-camp to Napoleon. His account of the defeat of the Grande Armée in that year is a classic and was an important source for Tolstoy’s War and Peace. 187. A transcript of this debate was published in Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1957). Copleston put forward the view that God, meaning ‘a supreme personal being – distinct from the world and creator of the world’, actually exists and that this can be ‘proved philosophically’ using Leibniz’s argument from the ‘contingency’ of all things of which we have experience, augmented by the principle of sufficient reason, and concluding to the existence of a being that can only be the cause of its own existence. Against this, Russell argued that ‘I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all’. This bears out Drury’s Physiology Lecturer’s observation, quoted above, that there are two kinds of people in the world, one, like Russell, who accept that ‘Damn it all, the bird has to sit somewhere’ and those who, like Copleston want to press the question ‘why’ to an ultimate conclusion. Wittgenstein thought the first approach more appropriate for the philosopher; Copleston’s approach was, he thought, to mimic science. 188. The programme was ‘transmitted from 8.20–9.00 pm and from 9.30–10.10, and in the interlude Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor was played by Robert Collet. The

82

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

discussion had been recorded on 29th March 1949’ (Letter to the writer John Hayes from Caroline Cornish, BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading, 25 May 1990). 189. He was president of the British and Irish Medical Association (then one corporate entity) in 1933. See J. B. Lyons, ‘T.H. Moorhead (1878–1960)’, in Brief Lives of Irish Doctors, 1600–1965 (Dublin: Blackwater, 1978), pp. 140–41. 190. That is, the mucous membrane that covers the eye and the inside of the eyelids. Presumably, Moorhead would have had to have assistance in this particular examination. 191. Patrick Lynch (then a civil servant) recalled dining at the RIYC with Dr Moorhead, Wittgenstein and George O’Brien, professor of political economy at University College Dublin. See John Hayes, ‘Wittgenstein, Religion, Freud, and Ireland’, Irish Philosophical Journal, vol. 6, no. 2 (Autumn 1989), pp. 223–26. This article, also to be found revised in Portraits, pp. 908–57, contains an extended discussion about the dating of this event and that of another occasion when Moorhead received an emergency telephone call to come to Ross’s Hotel while he was dining at the yacht club restaurant and was conveyed there by Lynch. George Hetherington concluded that ‘it seems almost certain that (Moorhead’s) patient was Wittgenstein’, [‘Wittgenstein in Ireland’, Irish University Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (1987), p. 183. Reprinted in Portraits, pp. 876–92]. 192. p. 182. Another name mentioned by Hetherington was a colleague of Drury’s, Dr Tim McCracken, whom he states introduced Wittgenstein to the RIYC (p. 223). 193. Bouwsma had changed his focus from the study of G. E. Moore when he discovered Wittgenstein. It was he who advised his student, Norman Malcolm, to go to Cambridge to work with Wittgenstein. 194. Norman Malcolm, A Memoir, above, p. 77. 195. See, however, McGuinness’s statement that Bevan, ‘doctor to Trinity College’ was ‘introduced to Wittgenstein by von Wright’ (Cam., Note to Letter no. 417, p. 457). 196. C. D. Broad mentions that Wittgenstein ‘liked’ Pepler in his ‘Review of Norman Malcolm’s Memoir and von Wright’s Biographical Sketch in Universities Quarterly’ (13 May 1959), above, pp. 305. Pepler’s father was a close associate of Eric Gill, the artist. 197. Drury believed that Rhees’s thinking was ‘closer to Wittgenstein’s than either Miss Anscombe or von Wright’, and he would trust his ‘judgement about publication sooner than theirs’ (Drury to Rhees, 24 September 1964). Four years later, Drury wrote to Rhees: ‘Wittgenstein said he trusted your judgment completely as his executor, and I do too’ (10 July 1968). 198. Wittgenstein left a gift of £300 in his will to ‘Dr. E.V. Bevan of 3 Trinity Street Cambridge’. 199. As quoted in Elizabeth Malcolm, Swift’s Hospital, above, p. 278. On a visit to the United States in 1946, Dr Norman Moore met again with Dr Willie Mayer-Gross, who commended Alcoholics Anonymous to his former colleague. When Conor F. Flynn an Irish emigrant in America contacted Moore hoping for assistance in setting up the organization in Ireland, Moore put Flynn in touch with Percival and in due course, Flynn and Percival convened the first AA meeting to be held there. 200. Particularly apt for a volume entitled The Danger of Words, Drury wrote: ‘I have for many years tried to get the word “alcoholic” dropped. For if I ask a patient to

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

83

accept this description of himself he thinks of the familiar drunkard of literature and stage. … Now of course we don’t mean this description at all when we diagnose the disease alcoholism’ (p. 270). In the 1920s and 1930s, the treatments for alcohol and drug addiction included hydrotherapy and massage. (See Elizabeth Malcolm, Swift’s Hospital, p. 252.) 201. In addition to this book, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Johnson’s ‘Prayers’ and the edition of the Vulgate mentioned earlier, the only other book given Drury by Wittgenstein was an edition of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Age of Constantine the Great (Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen, 1853). Burckhardt attended von Ranke’s lectures in Berlin, was an intellectual companion of Nietzsche at Basel – and he and Nietzsche shared an admiration for Schopenhauer. Like Wittgenstein, Burckhardt was wary of the rhetoric of so-called ‘Progress’. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, a birthday gift in 1936, has not been located. 202. In a letter to Rhees on 6 October 1970, Drury referred to this last conversation and recalled that Wittgenstein had said that ‘I should remember with what reverence Kierkegaard treated the Old Testament.’ However, Drury reminded Rhees that Kierkegaard directed his considerable capacity for invective against sentiments which Drury could find, for example, in the book of Genesis, such as ‘promises about inheriting the “land,” and “your seed being as many as the sand of the sea”’. 203. Brian McGuinness received a letter from Kanti Shah which may be taken as an answer Wittgenstein might make to this query. Wittgenstein thought it necessary to warn Shah (a Jain) ‘against being dismissive of the beliefs of the Jains … about the afterlife’. Clearly, Wittgenstein did not think that religious belief was immune to reason – but reason might not necessarily endorse what ‘common sense’ might be taken to indicate: ‘“Shah, you think you are the only intelligent person there! And all those people who said these things did not think at all?”’ (Cam., p. 431). 204. In one of the first conversations Drury had with Wittgenstein about religion, Wittgenstein objected to the familiar tone adopted by Hamann in reference to ‘God’s actions following the Fall of Man’ (Cons., p. 100). Nevertheless, Drury was later to be impressed by Hamann’s observation ‘how God the Holy Spirit lowered himself, when he became an historian of the smallest, most despised and insignificant events on earth, in order to reveal the decisions, the mysteries and the ways of the godhead to man in man’s own language.’ (Arc., Drury to Rhees, 9 March 1964) and it seems that Wittgenstein may well later have become similarly impressed by Hamann suffice to adopt him for bedside reading. 205. That this assumption was false undermines the charge that was later made by persons ‘enraged … who complained that the Catholics had laid claim to Wittgenstein when he was too far gone to know what was going on’ (Kerr, Work on Oneself, above, p. 32). 206. Tolstoy’s Diaries, vol. 2, 1895–1910, ed. and trans. by R. F. Christian (London: The Athlone Press, 1985), p. 528. 207. When von Wright suggested a ‘parallelism’ between Wittgenstein and Pascal, Drury made clear that this did not extend to the nature of their religious beliefs, which he characterized in Pascal’s case as that there ‘was only one true religion, Christianity, only one true form of Christianity, Catholicism; only one true expression of Catholicism, Port-Royal’ (Notes, p. 160). Wittgenstein, in contrast, influenced by William James’s

84

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Varieties of Religious Experience, professed that ‘all genuine experiences are wonderful’. Different expressions of religious belief (provided they do not pretend to propound a theory) are to be expected and need not even be construed as contradicting one another. There was still the problem: what is ‘genuine’. The test of time? 208. It is of some significance that in the first report of this remark that Drury gave (in 1954), there was appended to it: ‘I would like my work to be understood in this way’ (See: p. 206) as this makes a ‘religious point of view’ relevant to interpreters of his philosophy as a whole. 209. ‘It is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses.’ Quoted by Bryan Magee in The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: University Press, 1977), p. 211. 210. Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949-51 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), p. 34. Fergus Kerr thinks it is at least arguable that this discovery may be the source of ‘the later Wittgenstein’s characteristic insistence on the priority of action and practice over thought and theory over the whole range of human life’ (Work on Oneself, above, p. 55). Perhaps more plausible it was Wittgenstein’s realization of the importance of action that gave rise to his renewed appreciation of the significance of ritual. 211. I have not come across any evidence that Drury knew of Wittgenstein’s 1937 manuscript (to be found in Culture and Value, above 33e) in which he questions: ‘What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection?’, and goes on ‘if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven … everything will be different and it will be “no wonder” if you can do things that you cannot do now. (A man who is suspended looks the same as one who is standing, but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless quite different, so that he can act quite differently than can a standing man.)’ If this can be taken as an expression of belief, it would seem that his teacher subscribed to what Paul of Tarsus held was the sine qua non of Christian belief – and provide another argument in favour of a Christian burial. 212. Work on Oneself: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Psychology (Arlington, VA: The Institute for the Psychological Sciences Press, 2008), p. 32. 213. All legal matters connected with his death were finalized on 10 July 1951 with the granting of probate in respect of a will made on 29 January 1951. The net value of his estate in Great Britain (excepting ‘any money or other property situated or being in Austria which I own or to which I am entitled’) was given as £3,202 17s 11d. 214. It is possible that it was under the terms of this will that Drury acquired a leather box with the moniker ‘LW’ embossed on it (known in the family as ‘Wittgenstein’s boot box’) and a black lacquered metal deed box with Austrian coins and postcards in it. 215. A happy nominal coincidence in that the English branch of the Drury family originally lived in Bury St Edmunds. 216. His nephew, Edmund Pery, was made first Earl of Limerick in return for his support for the Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Most exceptionally, the Sexton family, like the Reillys, was a Gaelic one; a Catholic ancestor had insinuated himself in the court of Henry VIII and when the king tired of him, he was imposed on Limerick as mayor. (‘Sexton’ is an anglicization of ‘O’Seasnáin’).

Drury and Wittgenstein: Kindred Souls

85

217. Elizabeth Malcolm, Swift’s Hospital, above, p. 197. 218. E. Malcolm, above, p. 228. 219. Quoted in Malcolm, above, p. 233. 220. The Drury boys were invited to an annual Christmas party at ‘Woodville’ (now demolished) and recall a secret door in the library. The house was then occupied by Letitia Hamilton (1878–1964) and her sister. Letitia was one of the most prominent Irish landscape artists of her day and several of her paintings are still in the possession of St Edmondsbury. 221. The Norman Moores lived in ‘Delville’, another residence within the grounds. 222. Elizabeth Malcolm, Swift’s Hospital, above, p. 287. 223. By the 1960s, the Protestant population of the Irish Republic had declined to 5 per cent. This was due to what was experienced as a Protestant ‘exodus’ from the southern state, where half of the membership of the Church of Ireland had lived. The ‘Ne Temere’ decree binding Protestants to promise on marriage to bring up any children in the Roman communion had an impact as well as the anti-Unionist and pro-Catholic Church sentiments of the majority. 224. Drury adapts here a Pagan proverb: ‘quem deus vult perdere prius dementat’ to his own purposes by substituting the original ‘perdere’ (destroy) with ‘salvere’ (save). Augustine’s account of his conversion seems to have involved a similar substitution. In one translation of this account by Michael Paul Gallagher, it is rendered as ‘beside myself with madness that would bring me sanity’ and in another ‘here was I going mad on the way to sanity’. The original Latin runs: ‘sed tantum insaniebam salubriter et moriebar vitaliter, gnarus, quid mali essem, et ignarus, quid boni post paululum futurus essem’ (Confessions, Book VIII, viii (19)). 225. Weil’s writings were to become more and more subject of the Drury-Rhees correspondence as the years progressed. 226. In the Dublin area, besides St Patrick’s, there were three other charitable institutions devoted to mental health: Bloomfield (established by the Religious Society of Friends in 1812 in Donnybrook and still operating in Rathfarnham), St Vincent’s Institution and the Stewart Institution in Palmerstown. There were also eight licensed private establishments with by 1929, 841 patients in all. 227. There is a striking contrast between this number and those imprisoned in the State at this time – 500. See Pauline M. Prior (ed.), Asylums, Mental Health and the Irish 1800-2010 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012). 228. For an excellent account of the long struggle in Ireland to replace the consignment of those judged ‘mentally defective’, whether because of disorder or deficiency, to custodial asylums with offering curative treatments in appropriate therapeutic environments, see Brendan Kelly, Hearing Voice, above, p. 123. 229. Drury’s book, The Danger of Words (1973) was based on lectures given to audiences of medical colleagues. Rhees encouraged him to consider publication and told him that R.F. Holland was editing a series of monographs on the philosophy of psychology – a prospect that ‘excited’ Drury, who previously had felt that there would have been no hope of finding a publisher. Encouraged on learning of this possibility, he informed Rhees: ‘Before I got ill I started on a short paper for our medical club to be given this winter. Then it seemed to grow into something much

86

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

larger. I intend to leave it in the form of a paper written to be read to a society. I can only write if I can visualise a particular type of audience in front of me. I think this particular paper (probably Chapter 3: “Concerning Body and Mind”) will run to about 40 quarto pages; it could then be followed by my previous paper on “Madness and Religion” (Chapter 5) which I think I could now publish without offending professional secrecy. I would like to then go on to a paper on the “the science of psychology”’ (Chapter 2). Characteristically, he added ‘even now I am at times very dubious about what I am trying to do. I would only want to publish it if it was something original and said forcibly, so that it might help someone who was in real philosophical difficulty’ (Drury to Rhees, Arc., 10 July 1968). 230. In early 1976, Drury was corresponding with R. F. Holland, regarding the publication of his Lectures on Hypnosis. On 10 February 1976, Drury wrote to Holland that ‘it is a great relief to me that you felt it worth publishing’ and went on to answer some minor queries Holland had raised. However, this typescript has never been published until now – perhaps because of an unfavourable report by a fellow psychiatrist that declared: ‘If a publisher could identify a market that would like these lectures then he would want to go ahead, but I personally would not think them worth publishing’ (9 December, 1977). Likewise, a paper, ‘Instinct and Learning in Neurotic Behaviour’ that Drury submitted for publication to Behaviour Research and Therapy was turned down by its editorial board for publication because ‘it was felt that although the paper contains several clever ideas, the general argument is too loose and cannot be sustained’ (23 February 1965). 231. Drury explained to Rhees that Sur La Science was ‘reviewed so stupidly in the Irish Times that I wrote a personal letter to the reviewer, and told him he could make any use of it he thought fit. I don’t like “letters to the editor.” However, without my knowledge he transcribed my letter to him into a letter to the editor and published it [on 5 November 1968]. This will explain some of the rather awkward grammar where he has tried to change my “you” into “he”’ (Drury to Rhees, Arc., 12 November, 1968). 232. In his last writings, Wittgenstein’s reflected on the distinction between being mistaken (which would be the province of a book reviewer) and suffering from madness (the province of a psychiatrist). Whereas in the first case judgement, even if incorrect, is involved, in the second there is no judgement and therefore, no arguing with the sufferer. 233. One attempt to explore that dimension is Peter Tyler, The Return to the Mystical: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Teresa of Avila and the Christian Mystical Tradition (London: Continuum, 2011). For a commentary on this exploratory book, see John Hayes, ‘Walking the Tight-Rope: “das Mystische” and the Mystic’, Doctrine and Life, vol. 61, no. 9 (November 2011), pp. 49–62.

PART II

Drury’s Recollections of Wittgenstein Drury shared his recollections of Wittgenstein in three formats. These were firstly as a contribution to a BBC Third Programme symposium broadcast on 12 January 1960 (see The Listener (28 January 1960)). Drury’s comments concludes with a revealing story as to how Wittgenstein would have liked to adopt as a motto for his own work Bach’s inscription on his Orgelbüchlein: ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ However, Wittgenstein felt such a dedication was no longer feasible as it would not be understood. The Enlightenment view that ‘where the end was once the glory of God, it is now the welfare of mankind’ (see Michael Brown, The Irish Enlightenment (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2016)) was now dominant. This broadcast transcript includes many other anecdotes recycled in ‘Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein’ and ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’. Although Notes (1976) was published prior to Cons. (1981), they are printed here in reverse sequence as this may prove to be a more helpful order in which to read them; Cons provides a chronological scaffold for the Notes. However, as is made clear in the introductory section, the chronology of Cons. cannot be relied on uncritically. It appears that although the journal form adopted therein might suggest otherwise, it is unlikely that it was written contemporaneously with the events it describes. 1. A BBC Symposium 2. ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’ 3. ‘Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein’.

88

Contribution to a BBC Symposium Anyone who knew Wittgenstein at all well will appreciate the hesitation I feel in speaking about him. He would have found a panegyric extremely distasteful. But since his death there have grown up so many false legends about him and his teaching that I think it necessary for some of us who knew him well to try to give them their quietus. Some people seem to think that Wittgenstein was a rather cantankerous, arrogant, tormented genius; content to dwell aloof in the profundity of his own speculations. That was not the man at all. During the twenty years or so I knew him he was the most warm-hearted, generous, and loyal friend anyone could wish to have. Friendship meant a great deal to him. Two incidents come to my mind out of a host of similar memories. Wittgenstein looking for a birthday present for a friend and saying: ‘You don’t need a lot of money to give a nice present but you do need a lot of time’. Wittgenstein saying goodbye to me as I boarded a troopship for the Middle East, giving me a silver cup and saying: ‘Water tastes so much nicer out of silver; there is only one condition attached to it—you are not to worry if it gets lost’. He was a delightful companion. His conversation and interests extended over an immense range of topics. After I left Cambridge we seldom discussed specific philosophical problems. He preferred me to tell him about books I was reading or the medical problems I was at present engaged with. He had the ability to make one see a question in an entirely new light. For instance, I was telling him of some psychiatric symptoms that puzzled me greatly. Wittgenstein said: ‘You should never cease to be amazed at symptoms mental patients show. If I became mad the thing I would fear most would be your common-sense attitude. That you would take it all as a matter of course that I should be suffering from delusions.’ Sometimes he liked me to read out loud to him, and he would comment on what we were reading: Frazer’s Golden Bough, Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, Morley’s Life of Cromwell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson (he loved and revered old Dr Johnson). To watch Wittgenstein listening to music was to realize that this was something very central and deep in his life. He told me that this he could not express in his writings, and yet it was so important to him that he felt without it he was sure to be misunderstood. I will never forget the emphasis with which he quoted Schopenhauer’s dictum: ‘Music is a world in itself’. Wittgenstein had a difficult temperament to contend with. No one knew this better than he himself. Nothing that has been said since about him has been half so scathing as his own self-criticism. Once when I was discussing a personal problem with him he said to me: ‘One keeps stumbling and falling, stumbling and falling, and the only thing to do is to pick oneself up and try and go on again. At least that is what have had to do all my life.’ We were discussing the philosopher William James (Wittgenstein had a great admiration for James, and The Varieties of Religious Experience was one of the few

90

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

books he insisted I must read). I said of James that I always enjoyed reading anything by him, he was so human in all he wrote. Wittgenstein replied: ‘That is what makes him a good philosopher. He was a real human being’. And that is the first thing I want to say about Wittgenstein. He was a great philosopher because he was a very human person indeed. I find people writing and talking as if Wittgenstein knew little and cared less about the history of philosophy; as if he regarded his own work as abrogating all that had gone before him, and he confined all previous metaphysics to the limbo of meaningless. This is a misunderstanding. In one of the earliest conversations I had with him he said: ‘Don’t think I despise metaphysics or ridicule it. On the contrary, I regard the great metaphysical writings of the past as among the noblest productions of the human mind’. I told him that what had first attracted me to study philosophy was seeing the title of Alexander’s book, Space, Time and Deity. He understood at once. ‘Of course, that is where the great problems of philosophy lie, space, time and Deity.’ We were discussing a suitable title for the book which later he called Philosophical Investigations. I foolishly suggested he should just call it ‘Philosophy’. He was indignant. ‘How could I take a word like that which has meant so much in the history of mankind; as if my writings were anything more than a small fragment of philosophy?’ I do not think Wittgenstein would ever have spoken of his work as a ‘revolution in philosophy’. It was a way of thinking for which he knew he had a special talent and threw light on all the traditional problems of philosophy. He told me that he thought of using as a motto for the Philosophical Investigations a quotation from King Lear: ‘I’ll teach you differences.’ Wittgenstein constantly urged his pupils not to take up an academic post and become teachers of philosophy. Though later he did admit to me that with regard to a few of his pupils he had been wrong; they had turned out to be excellent teachers. But certainly in my own case and that of many others he was most emphatic that we must earn our livelihood in some other way. This advice of his has been misinterpreted. Wittgenstein never advised anyone to give up philosophy, if by that is meant thinking about first principles and ultimate problems. When I said goodbye to him for the last time at Cambridge and we both knew he had not long to live, he said to me with great seriousness: ‘Drury, whatever becomes of you, don’t stop thinking’. Why, then, did he so strongly discourage pupils from becoming teachers of philosophy? I think it was because Wittgenstein knew from his own experience that in philosophical thinking there are long periods of darkness and confusion when one just has to wait. In philosophy above all things there is a time to speak and a time to keep silent. Wittgenstein had a great horror of what Schopenhauer once described as ‘professorial philosophy by philosophy professors’ [See: On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. eds. D.E. Cartwright; Edward E. Erdmann and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: University Press, 2004), IV, 3, § 21]: people having to go on talking when really they knew in their own heart that they had nothing of value to say.

Contribution to a BBC Symposium

91

When I was at Cambridge a friend of mind was studying for a doctorate in philosophy. After some period of research he decided that had found nothing new to say on his chosen subject, and that the only honest thing to do was not to write a thesis. I remember how Wittgenstein’s face lit up with pleasure when I told him of his decision. ‘For that action alone’ he said, ‘they should give him his Ph.D’. On several occasions Wittgenstein said to me: ‘My father was a businessman and I am a businessman too; I want my philosophy to be businesslike, to get something done, to get something settled.’ Kant said that a great deal of philosophy reminded him of one person holding a sieve while the other tried to milk the he-goat [Critique of Pure Reason]. Wittgenstein wanted above all things to make an end of sieve holding and he-goat milking. I remember, after one particularly fatuous paper at the Moral Sciences Club, Wittgenstein exclaiming: ‘This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business’. Talking about Spinoza, Wittgenstein said to me: ‘Spinoza ground lenses, that must have been a great help to him in his thinking. I wish I had some purely mechanical skill like that by which I could earn my livelihood. Something I could do when I can’t get on with my writing.’ These were the considerations which made him advise his pupils not to become professional philosophers. The final point I want to make about Wittgenstein is the one I find hardest to get across. It is concerned with the idea which for me is central in all his teaching. The idea which for me binds together in one volume the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. Perhaps the best way to put it shortly would be this. Once Wittgenstein said to me of a certain writer that he was by far the great philosopher of the nineteenth century: he meant Soren Kierkegaard. Here are two short extracts from Kierkegaard’s writings that seem to me to state this central idea in the best possible way. The first passage is taken from the Journals: The majority of men in every generation, even those who, as it is described, devote themselves to thinking, live and die under the impression that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more, and that if it were granted to them to live longer, that life would continue to be one long continuous growth in understanding. How many of them ever experience the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical moment when everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood. This is Socratic ignorance and that is what the philosophy of our time requires as a corrective. [Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper, 1959), entry 962]. For me the whole weight of Wittgenstein’s teaching is directed towards this corrective: ‘We show the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable.’ There is, I need hardly say, nothing obscurantist, woolly, or mystical about Wittgenstein’s method. It is as hard and incisive a piece of thinking as is to be found anywhere. But the whole driving force of the investigation is missed if it is not seen continually to point beyond itself.

92

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

The second passage from Kierkegaard is taken from one of the short discourses: It is true as the understanding says that there is nothing to wonder at, but precisely for this reason is wonder secure, because the understanding vouches for it. Let the understanding condemn what is transitory, let it clear the ground, then wonder comes in in the right place, in ground that is cleared in the changed man. Everything appertaining to that first wonder the understanding can consume; let it do so, in order that enigmatically it may help one to wonder [Two Discourses on God and Man, I ‘What it Means to Seek God’] That was the secret of Wittgenstein. He made wonder secure. No one had such power to awaken again that primitive wonder from which all great philosophy begins. No one had such power to shake the pillars of one’s complacency. It was this that made a discussion with Wittgenstein such a refreshment. One evening not long before his death Wittgenstein quoted to me the inscription that Bach wrote on the title page of his Little Organ Book: ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby’. Pointing to his own pile of manuscript, he said ‘That is what I would have liked to have been able to say about my own work’. ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ I think that wish was granted him.

Conversations with Wittgenstein M. O’C. DRURY

During the years I knew Wittgenstein and was having discussions with him, I made entries in my day-book, from time to time, of remarks which I wished to remember – for my own use only. Hence the abrupt nature of these conversations, the lack of any connecting narrative and the absence of precise dates. But I can state that the chronological order of these entries is correct. Would the right thing have been to let these memories die with me? I don’t know. I am certainly not of the opinion that everything Wittgenstein said ought to be recorded. Some of these incidents will seem trivial and of personal interest rather than general. But the fact that, at the time, they impressed me and remained stamped in my memory, has led me to include them. For it seemed to me that it was important that a future generation should see Wittgenstein, not merely as an important name in the history of philosophy, but as a personality – kind, generous, quick-tempered, and with his own eccentricities. The reader will be disappointed that there are no long discussions of specific philosophical problems. The truth is that these did not occur. He allowed me to attend his lectures and to join in discussions with him at the Moral Science Club, but when we were alone he did not want to discuss philosophy with me. Indeed when I became a medical student he expressly told me he would not do so. I think he felt that his own thinking was so much more developed than mine that there was a danger of swamping me and of my becoming nothing but a pale echo of himself. He did constantly exhort me to think for myself. Many of these conversations are concerned with religion. So here it must be said that he frequently warned me that he could only speak from his own level, and that was a low one.1 He sometimes used in this connection a vulgar French proverb which is perhaps too coarse to print here. It will be seen that as the years developed his views on some religious matters changed and deepened, so that some remarks in the earlier part of this essay he would later have repudiated. Once, near the end of his life, I reminded him that in one of our first conversations he had said that there was no such subject as ‘theology’; and he replied, ‘That is just the sort of stupid remark I would have made in those days.’ The reader will be annoyed, as I am disgusted, by my frequent dumbness and stupidity in these discussions. If only I had been able to stand up to him and insist on further elucidation, how much more interesting these conversations might have been! But to argue with Wittgenstein required an alacrity of mind and speech, and a certain obstinate courage, and these were virtues I did not possess. After Wittgenstein’s death I became acquainted with the writings of Simone Weil. These have had as profound an influence on my subsequent thought as Wittgenstein had

94

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

had on my earlier life. So I hope he who now puts together these memoirs is not quite the superficial person who is heard speaking in them. I regret the constant repetition of the word ‘I’ in these conversations. But if I did not give the context of Wittgenstein’s remarks they would lose their significance. In nearly every case his words are associated in my mind with particular places, times, moods. I have included these. Johnson exhorted Boswell not to leave out the details. I have followed his advice. But the memory, even the most recent, is deceitful. We only record what we are able to receive. So that it may well be that I have distorted or misinterpreted what he actually said. The reader must have this rubric in mind throughout the essay. To sum up: This essay is an album of snapshots taken by an amateur photographer with a mediocre camera. If to those who knew Wittgenstein some of these pictures seem out of focus, I should not wish to argue the point with them. It is not a portrait of Wittgenstein – I had not the ability for that.

1929 A meeting of the Moral Science Club in Dr Broad’s rooms. Prichard from Oxford read a paper on ‘Ethics’. The discussion had only just got under way when someone whom I couldn’t see began making very pertinent criticism of the paper. The discussion became much more animated than was usual at these meetings. I asked my neighbour who it was that was raising these objections. He replied that it was Wittgenstein, the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. So far as I could follow it, Wittgenstein’s point was that although two people could always discuss the best means to an agreed end, there could be no argument about what were absolute ends in themselves. Hence there could be no science of ethics. * Invited Wittgenstein to have lunch with me and asked Donaldson to come and meet him. We waited half an hour and when Wittgenstein hadn’t arrived we decided to start. We had nearly finished lunch when he arrived. He said he didn’t want anything to eat. Conversation very difficult, Wittgenstein saying little and obviously ill at ease. Realized that he disliked being ‘lionized’ and that I had made a mistake in thinking that he was the sort of person who could join in the ordinary chit-chat of a Cambridge luncheon. Donaldson had to leave early and after he had gone Wittgenstein and I went and sat down by the fire. He asked me why I was studying philosophy. drury:

When I was still at school I saw in the public library at Exeter the two volumes of Alexander’s book entitled Space, Time, and Deity. This title so aroused my interest that I could hardly wait until I had purchased the books for myself. When I came to read them I couldn’t understand a word. I thought that if I studied philosophy I might be able to understand this sort of writing. wittgenstein:

Oh, I can understand that. If it is right to speak about the ‘great problems’ of philosophy, that is where they lie: space, time, and deity. When I

Conversations with Wittgenstein

95

was a student in Manchester I thought at one time of going to see Alexander, but decided no good would come of it. drury:

Then I went on to read Mill’s Logic, starting it with great excitement, but being bitterly disappointed, when I finished it, at how little I had learnt. wittgenstein:

Of course, if you thought there was a book that would teach you how to think, it would seem the most important book in the world; but that is not how things are. We went on to discuss the recent meeting of the Moral Science Club. He said he thought Prichard’s paper was very poor. He had stayed behind afterwards to talk to Broad and had expressed the same opinion to him. Broad had received him very coldly and had merely replied that he had a very high opinion of Professor Prichard. * Wittgenstein asked me this afternoon to come out for a walk with him. We walked to Madingley and back. He asked me about my childhood. I found we had both had the same game of inventing an imaginary country and writing its history in a private code we had invented. He said he thought that this was very common among children. He then went on to tell me that as a child he had suffered greatly from morbid fears. In the lavatory of his home some plaster had fallen from the wall and he always saw this pattern as a duck, but it terrified him: it had the appearance for him of those monsters that Bosch painted in his Temptations of St Anthony. Even when he was a student at Manchester he suffered at times from morbid fears. To get from his bedroom to his sitting-room he had to cross over a landing, and sometimes he found himself dreading making this crossing. We were at that time walking quite briskly, but he suddenly stopped still and looked at me very seriously. wittgenstein:

You will think I am crazy, you will think I have gone mad, when I tell you that only religious feelings are a cure for such fears. I replied that I didn’t think that was crazy at all; that coming from Ireland I knew something of the power of religion. He seemed displeased with this answer as if I hadn’t understood him. wittgenstein:

I am not talking about superstition but about real religious feeling.

After this we walked on in silence for some time. * In view of our conversation on the way back home from Madingley I thought it necessary to tell Wittgenstein that, after leaving Cambridge, I intended to be ordained as an Anglican priest. wittgenstein:

Don’t think I ridicule this for one minute, but I can’t approve; no, I can’t approve. I would be afraid that one day that collar would choke you.

96

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

We went on to talk about the Bible. I said that for me the Old Testament was no more than a collection of Hebrew folklore and that whether it was true history didn’t matter at all. But I felt quite differently about the New Testament: that lost its significance if it wasn’t an account of what really happened. wittgenstein:

For me too the Old Testament is a collection of Hebrew folklore – yes, I would use that expression. But the New Testament doesn’t have to be proved to be true by historians either. It would make no difference if there had never been a historical person as Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels; though I don’t think any competent authority doubts that there really was such a person. * Today a further discussion with Wittgenstein about my intention to be ordained. wittgenstein:

Just think, Drury, what it would mean to have to preach a sermon every week; you couldn’t do it. I don’t mean that there haven’t been people in the past who were great preachers, but there are no such people today. I told him that as a boy I had been greatly influenced by the seriousness and deep piety of an Anglo-Catholic priest in Exeter (Fr E. C. Long, rector of St Olave’s Church). wittgenstein:

I know how impressive such a person can be. I have only one objection: that there is a certain narrowness about them. There are some subjects you feel you can’t discuss with them. In one point I do agree with Russell: I like to feel free to discuss anything with anyone I am with. [Then, after a pause, he sighed and said:] Russell and the parsons between them have done infinite harm, infinite harm. I was puzzled by his coupling Russell and the parsons in the one condemnation. wittgenstein:

I would be afraid that you would try and give some sort of philosophical justification for Christian beliefs, as if some sort of proof was needed. You have intelligence; it is not the best thing about you, but it is something you mustn’t ignore. The symbolisms of Catholicism are wonderful beyond words. But any attempt to make it into a philosophical system is offensive. All religions are wonderful, even those of the most primitive tribes. The ways in which people express their religious feelings differ enormously. drury:

I think I could be happy working as a priest among people whom I felt shared the same beliefs as I have. wittgenstein:

Oh, don’t depend on circumstances. Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only. After we had talked a little longer he went on to say that there had been only two great religious writers in Europe of recent times, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. We in the West were inclined to forget the existence of the Eastern Orthodox Church with its

Conversations with Wittgenstein

97

millions of members. He advised me to read The Brothers Karamazov. When he was a schoolmaster in Austria he read this book constantly, and at one time read it aloud to the village priest. * I stayed behind after Johnson’s lecture on logic today to talk to Johnson about my work. I told him I was having discussions with Wittgenstein. johnson:

I consider it is a disaster for Cambridge that Wittgenstein has returned. A man who is quite incapable of carrying on a discussion. If I say that a sentence has meaning for me no one has a right to say it is senseless. Later talked to Wittgenstein about Johnson. wittgenstein:

I admire Johnson as a man, he is a man of real culture. His life’s work has been his three volumes on logic. You can’t expect him now to see that there is something fundamentally wrong with what he has written. I wouldn’t try and discuss with Johnson now. The next Sunday Wittgenstein and I went to one of Johnson’s Sunday afternoon tea-parties. I noticed the very cordial relations between Johnson and Wittgenstein. After tea Johnson played some of Bach’s Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues. Wittgenstein told me he admired Johnson’s playing. On the way back to Trinity he told me that at one of these afternoons Johnson had played badly, and he knew it himself, but the audience had applauded loudly. This annoyed Johnson, so by way of revenge he gave as an encore the accompaniment only of a Beethoven violin sonata, which of course was meaningless without the violin part. This gesture seemed to please and amuse Wittgenstein. * Wittgenstein told me that I should try to get to know Lee of Corpus Christi College, who he said was by far the ablest of our present discussion group. drury:

I find it very hard to start a real philosophical discussion with a stranger.

wittgenstein:

Of course you find it hard. You will have to spend a long time before you can begin to understand each other. You will be lucky if during your life you find even one person with whom you can have really valuable discussions. You are not an easy person to get to know. * Invited Lee and Wittgenstein to come with me on a visit to Ely Cathedral, a building I had come to love. Wittgenstein seemed pleased that we should do this together. Arriving at Ely we sat for some time in the Romanesque chapel on the southern side of the west front. Silence. After a time Wittgenstein leaned over and whispered to me, ‘This is real architecture; this is very impressive.’ Later we went further up the nave to the great lantern over the transepts, and to the Lady Chapel with its elaborate tracery in the Decorated style.

98

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY wittgenstein:

Once the arch becomes pointed, I don’t understand it any more.

Outside we looked at a carving over a Norman door, depicting the serpent tempting Eve. wittgenstein:

I can hear Adam saying, ‘The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree.’ Another carving was described in the guidebook as being a humorous scene of two peasants. wittgenstein:

That must be wrong. They would never have meant this to be funny. It is the case that we forget the meaning of certain facial expressions and misinterpret their reproduction. What does it mean to us if a Chinaman smiles? In the train on the way back to Cambridge we talked about Dickens. Wittgenstein said how much he admired A Christmas Carol. Another book of Dickens that was a favourite of his was The Uncommercial Traveller. wittgenstein:

This is a very rare thing – good journalism. The chapter ‘Bound for the Great Salt Lake’ was particularly interesting. Dickens had gone on board the emigrant ship prepared to condemn, but the happiness and good order he found on board made him change his mind. This showed what a real common religious movement could achieve. It was striking that when Dickens tried to draw them out as to what exactly it was they held in common, they became embarrassed and tried to avoid answering.

1930 Wittgenstein came and had tea with me in my rooms today. I noticed that though he enjoyed a normal cup of coffee he would only drink the very weakest tea, so pale as to be little more than milk and hot water. He said that strong tea disagreed with him. He went over to look at my books, and picked up a volume of Spinoza’s letters. wittgenstein:

These letters are most interesting, particularly when he is writing about the beginnings of natural science. Spinoza ground lenses. I think this must have been an enormous help to him when he needed a rest from thinking. I wish I had a similar occupation when I can’t get on with my work. drury:

I have just been reading a chapter in Schopenhauer entitled ‘Man’s Need for Metaphysics’. I think Schopenhauer is saying something very important in that chapter. wittgenstein:

‘Man’s Need for Metaphysics.’ I think I can see very well what Schopenhauer got out of his philosophy. Don’t think I despise metaphysics. I regard some of the great philosophical systems of the past as among the noblest productions of the human mind. For some people it would require a heroic effort to give up this sort of writing. drury:

I have to read as my special authors for the second part of my Tripos, Leibniz and Lotze.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

99

wittgenstein:

Count yourself lucky to have so much time to study such a great man as Leibniz. Make sure you use this time when you still have leisure well. The mind gets stiff long before the body does. drury:

I find Lotze very heavy going, very dull.

wittgenstein:

Probably a man who shouldn’t have been allowed to write philosophy. A book you should read is William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience; that was a book that helped me a lot at one time.2 drury:

Oh yes, I have read that. I always enjoy reading anything of William James. He is such a human person. wittgenstein:

That is what makes him a good philosopher; he was a real human

being. drury:

I was recently at a lecture by A. E. Taylor in which he said that he could never make up his mind whether Hume was a great philosopher or only a very clever man. Alexander said later that he didn’t know which to admire most: the wrongness of Taylor’s statement or the audacity to say it. wittgenstein:

As to Hume I can’t say, never having read him. But the distinction between a philosopher and a very clever man is a real one and of great importance. Another book he noticed on my shelves was Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus. wittgenstein:

The only value of that book is that it shows how many, many different ways people can interpret the Gospel story. * Called at Wittgenstein’s rooms in Whewell’s Court and asked him to come for a walk with me. He had chosen rooms at the top of the staircase so as to have no one overhead. I noticed that he had altered the proportions of the windows by using strips of black paper. wittgenstein:

See what a difference it makes to the appearance of the room when the windows have the right proportion. You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect. When I was building the house for my sister in Vienna I was so completely exhausted at the end of the day that all I could do was go to a ‘flick’ every night. Before going out we sat for a time talking. He had evidently been looking at something of von Hügel’s since our conversation of a few days previously. wittgenstein:

Von Hügel seems to have been a very pure character, almost a Roman Catholic. drury:

But von Hügel was a Roman Catholic. He was closely connected with what was called the modernist movement at the beginning of this century.

100

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

wittgenstein:

People who call themselves modernists are the most deceived of all. I will tell you what modernism is like: in The Brothers Karamazov the old father says that the monks in the nearby monastery believe that the devils have hooks to pull people down into Hell; ‘Now,’ says the old father, ‘I can’t believe in those hooks.’ That is the same sort of mistake that modernists make when they misunderstand the nature of symbolism. We then set off for our walk. wittgenstein:

I have been reading in a German author, a contemporary of Kant’s, Hamann, where he says, commenting on the story of the Fall in Genesis: ‘How like God to wait until the cool of the evening before confronting Adam with his transgression.’ Now I wouldn’t for the life of me dare to say, ‘how like God’. I wouldn’t claim to know how God should act. Do you understand Hamann’s remark? Tell me what you think – I would really like to know. drury:

Perhaps if something terrible had happened to one at a time when one felt strong enough to bear it, then one might say: ‘Thank God this didn’t happen before, when I could not have stood up to it.’ Wittgenstein didn’t seem pleased with this answer. wittgenstein:

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.3

We walked on in silence for a time. Then: wittgenstein:

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him. * Wittgenstein advised me in the coming vacation to read some of the writings both of Tolstoy and of Dostoevsky. When we met again at the beginning of term we had lunch together at the Cambridge Union. Wittgenstein was fond of this ugly old Gothic Revival building and referred to it as ‘a friendly old aunt’. (Years later when the building was completely modernized he wrote to me that ‘the friendly old aunt is no more’.) After lunch I told him the works of Dostoevsky and of Tolstoy I had read, and he asked me what impression I had.4 drury:

I found the character of the Elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov very impressive. wittgenstein:

Yes, there really have been people like that, who could see directly into the souls of other people and advise them. Now what would really have interested me would be to have seen how a character like Smerdyakov could have been saved rather than Alesha. drury:

I thought the incident where a man murders a woman because she has chosen another man for her lover rather farfetched.

Conversations with Wittgenstein wittgenstein:

101

You don’t understand anything at all. You know nothing about

these matters. drury:

I suppose that is just my narrowness.

wittgenstein:

[now much more sympathetically] Narrowness won’t matter as long as you know that you are narrow. * Dawes Hicks read a paper to the Moral Science Club.5 After he had talked for an hour he said, ‘I haven’t finished what I have written yet; do you want me to go on?’ I was in the chair and I did not know how to reply to this. But I thought it only polite to tell him to finish his paper. Wittgenstein then got up and left the room. The next day I discussed this dilemma with Wittgenstein. He said that he realized that any discussion after the paper was going to be impossible and so he left, but he didn’t see what else I could have said. There should be a rule, he said, that no paper to the Club should last longer than twenty minutes. drury:

I mentioned my difficulty to Johnson this morning. He replied that I should have said: ‘I think some of us would now like to ask a few questions.’ wittgenstein:

Good old Johnson, of course that would have been the right thing

to say. * I told Wittgenstein that my friend James, who had been working on his Ph.D. thesis for a year, had decided in the end that he had nothing original to say and would therefore not submit his thesis or obtain his degree. wittgenstein:

For that action alone they should give him his Ph.D. degree.

drury:

Dawes Hicks was very displeased with James about this decision. He told James that when he started to write his book on Kant he had no clear idea what he was going to say. This seems to me an extraordinary, queer attitude. wittgenstein:

No, Dawes Hicks was quite right in one way. It is only the attempt to write down your ideas that enables them to develop. * Wittgenstein is now attending Moore’s Saturday morning discussion class. This leads to a very lively exchange between Moore and Wittgenstein. Today a visiting student from Oxford started quoting from Kant in German. The irrelevance of this so annoyed Wittgenstein that he shouted at him to shut up. Walking back to Trinity after this incident, Wittgenstein regretted what had happened. wittgenstein:

I am no saint and don’t pretend to be, but I shouldn’t lose my temper like that.6 Entering the Great Gate of Trinity we passed Dr Simpson the historian walking along in his usual abstracted manner.

102

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

drury:

The first day I came to Trinity and saw Dr Simpson I said to myself, that must be Dr Broad whom I am to see tomorrow. I got such a shock when I called on Dr Broad, to find a chubby little man with no air of profundity. wittgenstein:

I remember that when I first went to visit Frege I had a very clear idea in my mind as to what he would look like. I rang the bell and a man opened the door; I told him I had come to see Professor Frege. ‘I am Professor Frege,’ the man said. To which I could only reply, ‘impossible!’ At this first meeting with Frege my own ideas were so unclear that he was able to wipe the floor with me. * Walking today across Parker’s Piece I told Wittgenstein that I was not getting much help from Moore’s lectures. drury:

It never seems to me that Moore worries if he doesn’t come to any conclusion. He goes on working away at the same problem until I lose sight of what he is trying to do. Whereas you, Wittgenstein, do seem to me to have reached a real resting-place.* This was one of those occasions where Wittgenstein suddenly stood still and looked at me intently. wittgenstein:

Yes, I have, reached a real resting-place.7 I know that my method is right. My father was a business man, and I am a business man: I want my philosophy to be businesslike, to get something done, to get something settled. drury:

Moore seems to think that if certain problems in epistemology were solved, everything else would fall into place. As if there was one central problem in philosophy. wittgenstein:

There is no one central problem in philosophy, but countless different problems. Each has to be dealt with on its own. Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing; only when everything is in place does the door open. On the way back from the walk we passed a street preacher who was proclaiming in a loud, raucous voice all that Jesus Christ had done for him. Wittgenstein shook his head sadly. wittgenstein:

If he really meant what he was shouting, he wouldn’t be speaking in that tone of voice. This is a kind of vulgarity in which at least you can be sure that the Roman Catholic Church will never indulge. On the other hand, during the war the Germans got Krupps to make a steel, bomb-proof container to convey the consecrated host to the troops in the front line. This was disgusting. It should have had no protection from human hands at all. * * The reader will have perceived already that I was quite incapable at this time of understanding Moore’s true greatness.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

103

We listened this evening in Lee’s rooms to a performance on gramophone records of Brahms’s Third Symphony. Wittgenstein’s complete absorption in the music was most impressive. When it was finished he asked that we might hear it all over again – this, he said, was his favourite of the four symphonies of Brahms. We continued to talk about composers. wittgenstein:

I once wrote that Mozart believed in both heaven and hell, whereas Beethoven only believed in heaven and nothingness. drury:

I have never cared for any of Wagner’s music.

wittgenstein:

Wagner was the first of the great composers who had an unpleasant

character. drury:

I love Mendelssohn’s music. I feel at ease listening to Mendelssohn, whereas I find Beethoven and Schubert at times really frightening. wittgenstein: Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto is remarkable in being the last great

concerto for the violin written. There is a passage in the second movement which is one of the great moments in music. Music came to a full stop with Brahms; and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the sound of machinery. drury:

The Lener String Quartet is coming to Cambridge soon, and I intend to go and hear them. wittgenstein:

[making a face] They play like pigs.

A few days later he came to my rooms looking very distressed. So much so that I asked him what was the matter. wittgenstein:

I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.

1930(?) 8 At our discussion group today someone was inclined to defend Russell’s writings on marriage, sex and ‘free love’. Wittgenstein interposed with: ‘If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no right to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.’ He went on to say how absurd it was to debar Russell from the professorship in New York on ‘moral grounds’. If ever there was anything which could be called an an-aphrodisiac, it was Russell writing about sex. ‘Russell’s books should be bound in two colours: those dealing with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue – and no one should be allowed to read them.’ *

104

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

I had a conversation with Wittgenstein this afternoon, when we were strolling through the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity College. I told him I was reading a book about the ‘Desert Fathers’, the early Christian ascetics of the Egyptian Thebaid. I said something to the effect that they might have made better use of their lives – rather than, for example, the extreme asceticism of St Simeon Stylites. wittgenstein:

That’s just the sort of stupid remark an English parson would make; how can you know what their problems were in those days and what they had to do about them? I know there have been times in history when monks were nothing but a nuisance, but monasticism does correspond to a real need of some human beings . . . But you, Drury, couldn’t be a monk. It would be all wrong for you to wear a monastic habit. * Wittgenstein advised me to read Spengler’s The Decline of the West. It was a book, he said, that might teach me something about the age we were now living in. It might be an antidote for my ‘incurable romanticism’. After I had read the book I said to him, ‘Spengler wants to put history into moulds, and that you can’t do.’ wittgenstein:

Yes, you are right; you can’t put history into moulds. But Spengler does point out certain very interesting comparisons. I don’t trust Spengler about details. He is too often inaccurate. I once wrote that if Spengler had had the courage to write a very short book, it could have been a great one. drury:

I conceived the idea that I might write a book to try and bring out just what was important in Spengler. wittgenstein:

Well, perhaps some day you might do just that.

193? Wittgenstein presented me with a copy of Dr Johnson’s Prayers.9 We talked about the ancient liturgies, particularly the collects in the Latin mass. drury:

Isn’t it important that there should be ordained priests to carry on this tradition? That was my idea in wanting to be ordained. wittgenstein:

At first sight it would seem a wonderful idea that there should be in every village someone who stood for these things. But it hasn’t worked out that way at all. For all you and I can tell, the religion of the future will be without any priests or ministers. I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church. If you feel you must belong to some organization, why don’t you join the Quakers? The very next morning he came to see me, to say that he had been quite wrong to suggest my becoming a Quaker. I was to forget that he ever mentioned it. ‘As if nowadays any one organization was better than another.’

Conversations with Wittgenstein

105

wittgenstein:

Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic; and by that I don’t mean just going without food and drink. I seemed to sense for the first time in my life the idea of an asceticism of the intellect; that this life of reading and discussing in the comfort of Cambridge society, which I so enjoyed, was something I would have to renounce. Wittgenstein saw that I was troubled. wittgenstein:

But remember that Christianity is not a matter of saying a lot of prayers; in fact we are told not to do that. If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn’t be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God. Just as I was leaving he suddenly said, ‘There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians.’

1930(?) Last night a meeting of the Moral Science Club in Broad’s rooms. Before the meeting began, Wittgenstein and I stood talking, looking out. of the window; it was a dull grey evening just getting dark. I told Wittgenstein that I had been listening to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and how impressed I had been by the second movement. wittgenstein:

The chord with which that slow movement opens is the colour of that sky [pointing out of the window]. At the end of the war, when we were retreating before the Italians, I was riding on a gun-carriage and I was whistling to myself that movement. Just at the very end of the movement Beethoven does something which makes one see the theme in an entirely different light. drury:

The slow movement of the Fourth Piano Concerto is one of the greatest things in music. wittgenstein:

There Beethoven is writing not just for his own time or culture but for the whole human race. * I read a paper to the Moral Science Club entitled ‘Are there degrees of clarity?’ My thesis was that a proposition either had meaning or it hadn’t. There was not a gradual approximation from nonsense through partial confusion to perfect clarity. Moore was present at the meeting and attacked what I had written vigorously. I put up a very poor defence. The next day I told Wittgenstein that Moore had ‘wiped the floor with me’. wittgenstein:

Surely you were able to stand up to Moore?10

106

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Then he asked me to read the paper to him. He listened attentively without interruption; and when I had finished: wittgenstein:

You know, I rather like it. You are doing the sort of thing I am working at, trying to see how in actual life we use words. It has puzzled me why Socrates is regarded as a great philosopher. Because when Socrates asks for the meaning of a word and people give him examples of how that word is used, he isn’t satisfied but wants a unique definition. Now if someone shows me how a word is used and its different meanings, that is just the sort of answer I want. drury:

I suppose the fact that Socrates was put to death has something to do with the fact that his memory is held in reverence. wittgenstein:

Yes, I would think that had a lot to do with it.

drury:

It may be significant that those dialogues in which Socrates is looking for precise definitions end, all of them, without any conclusion. The definition he is looking for isn’t reached, but only suggested definitions refuted. This might have been Socrates’s ironical way of showing that there was something wrong in looking for one exact meaning of such general terms. I told Wittgenstein that one of my acquaintances was working on a thesis as to why the League of Nations had failed. wittgenstein:

Tell him to find out first why wolves eat lambs! *

Professor Schlick from Vienna was due to read a paper to the Moral Science Club entitled ‘Phenomenology’. wittgenstein:

You ought to make a point of going to hear this paper, but I shan’t be there. You could say of my work that it is ‘phenomenology’.11 * He showed me a question set in the History Tripos examinations. It read:’ “The Pope showed as little wisdom in his dealings with the Emperor as he had previously done in his dealings with Luther.” Discuss.’ wittgenstein:

Now that is the sort of question that teaches people to be stupid. How could a Cambridge undergraduate in this century possibly know what the Pope could have done about Luther or the Emperor – for instance, whom the Pope had to advise him? * A student who had come from Edinburgh with a reputation of considerable ability never came to Wittgenstein’s discussions and very rarely to the Moral Science Club. wittgenstein:

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring. *

Conversations with Wittgenstein

107

Walked with Wittgenstein to Madingley and back. I mentioned Jeans’s book, The Mysterious Universe.12 wittgenstein:

These books which attempt to popularize science are an abomination. They pander to people’s curiosity to be titillated by the wonders of science without having to do any of the really hard work involved in understanding what science is about. Now a good book is one like Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle.13 Faraday takes a simple phenomenon like a candle burning, and shows how complicated a process it really is. All the time, he demonstrates what he is saying with detailed experiments. There is a tendency nowadays for scientists when they reach middle age to become bored with their real work, and launch out into absurd popular semi-philosophical speculations. Eddington is an example of this. So also is Broad’s interest in psychical research. Broad pretends that his interest is purely scientific, but it is obvious that he is thrilled to death by speculating and experimenting on these things in this way. * After a particularly foolish paper by a visiting professor of philosophy: wittgenstein:

A bad philosopher is like a slum landlord. It is my job to put him out of business. drury:

Joad for example?

wittgenstein:

Everyone picks on Joad, nowadays; but I don’t see that he is any worse than many others.

1930(?) At lunch in the Union today: drury:

I think in your recent lectures you have been directly concerned with Kant’s problem: How are synthetic a priori propositions possible? wittgenstein: Yes, you could say that. I am concerned with the synthetic a priori.14

When you have thought for some time about a problem of your own, you may come to see that it is closely related to what has been discussed before, only you will want to present the problem in a different way. These thoughts which seem so important to you now, will one day seem like a bag of old, rusty nails, no use for anything at all. * There was a performance of King Lear by a Cambridge University amateur dramatic society. wittgenstein:

You should not have missed seeing this; it was a most moving experience. You need young players to perform this play: they can put the necessary passion into it. Coming away from the theatre I was so absorbed by what I had heard that in crossing over the street I was nearly run over by a taxi.

108

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

drury:

I am sorry I missed that play. What I do intend to do is to go with a friend to see the exhibition of Italian art now on in London. wittgenstein:

[making a face] If you must go to such an exhibition, there is only one way to do it. Walk into a room, select one picture that attracts you, look at it for as long as you want to, then come away and don’t look at anything else. If you try to see everything you will see nothing. * We were walking in Cambridge and passed a bookshop. In the window there was a book entitled The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature. wittgenstein:

Now I wouldn’t want to look at that. I don’t want some literary gent to make selections from the Bible for me. drury:

I am at present reading a Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans by a Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. It seems to me a remarkable book. wittgenstein:

Moore and I once tried to read the Epistle to the Romans together; but we didn’t get very far with it and gave it up.15 The next day I asked him if I might read out to him something of Karl Barth’s. I had with me the volume called The Word of God and the Word of Man. I had only been reading for a short time when Wittgenstein told me to stop. wittgenstein:

I don’t want to hear any more. The only impression I get is one of great arrogance.

1931 Wittgenstein told me he had long wanted to read Frazer’s The Golden Bough and asked to get hold of a copy out of the Union library and read it out loud to him. I got the first volume of the full edition and we continued to read from it for some weeks.16 He would stop me from time to time and make comments on Frazer’s remarks. He was particularly emphatic that it was wrong to think, as Frazer seemed to do, that the primitive rituals were in the nature of scientific errors. He pointed out that beside these (ritual) customs primitive peoples had quite advanced techniques: agriculture, metal working, pottery etc. The ceremonies that Frazer described were expressions of deeply felt emotions, of religious awe. Frazer himself showed that he partly understood this, for on the very first page he refers to Turner’s picture of the Wood of Nemi and the feeling of dread that this picture arouses in us when we remember the ritual murder performed there. In reading of these practices we are not amused by a scientific mistake but ourselves feel some trace of the dread which lay behind them. After the reading we often went to a cinema together, a ‘flick’ as he always called it. He insisted on sitting in the very front row and would appear to be completely absorbed in the picture. He would go only to American films, and he expressed a

Conversations with Wittgenstein

109

dislike for all English and Continental ones: in these, the cameraman was always intruding himself as if to say, ‘Look how clever I am.’ I remember him expressing a special delight on the dancing of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

1931(?) Wittgenstein staying in Norway in his hut. I had a postcard from him saying, ‘Nature is wonderful in all her moods.’ When he returned from Norway he told me that he had done no writing there but had spent his time in prayer. He had felt it necessary to write out a confession of those things in his past life of which he was most ashamed. He insisted on my reading this. He had already shown it to Moore, and he said that Moore had seemed very distressed that he had had to read this. I will of course say nothing about the contents of this confession, except to state – if this is necessary – that it contained nothing about the sexual behaviour ascribed to him in a recent writing. He told me that he had got to know some wonderful characters in Norway. A woman who had said to him how fond she was of rats! ‘They had such wonderful eyes.’ This same woman once sat up every night for a month waiting for a sow to farrow, so as to be on hand to help if necessary. This attention to animals seemed to have pleased Wittgenstein especially. On his journey back from Norway, the boat bringing him down the fiord stopped at a jetty. There was a woman standing on the jetty dressed in a trouser suit. wittgenstein:

Usually I dislike seeing women wearing trousers, but this woman looked magnificent.

1931 I had now moved from my rooms in Trinity to the theological college, Westcott House. Wittgenstein came to see me there. Noticing a crucifix over my bed, he looked at me very sternly. wittgenstein: Drury, never allow yourself to become too familiar with holy things.

We then went and sat for a while in the college chapel. There was no organ in the chapel but instead a piano in the loft. While we were sitting in silence, someone else came in and started to play the piano. Wittgenstein jumped up at once and hurried out; I followed. wittgenstein:

Blasphemy! A piano and the cross. Only an organ should be allowed in a church. He was obviously very disturbed. I felt that my life hitherto had been superficial and aesthetic. That something much more costly was required of me. I began for the first time to have serious doubts about continuing my plan to be ordained in the Anglican Church. *

110

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

I went to see Wittgenstein and told him I had decided to leave the theological college. He said, ‘A separation has occurred in your life.’ We discussed what I should do next. wittgenstein:

It is essential that you get away from Cambridge at once. There is no oxygen in Cambridge for you. It doesn’t matter for me, as I manufacture my own oxygen. You need to get among ordinary people of a type that you at present know nothing about. One of my pupils, on my advice, has gone to work in Woolworth’s; now that is the sort of thing you should do. Try and get a job in some large store or firm, where you will meet ordinary people. It is some such experience as this that you need. drury:

There is so much unemployment at present that I would feel guilty in taking a post that perhaps someone else needed more than me. Wouldn’t it be best to use the education I have been given and take a teaching post in a school? wittgenstein:

That isn’t the experience you need. You would still be in the same environment that you are now. drury:

The Archdeacon of Newcastle was recently visiting the College, and said he wanted someone to come as a voluntary worker to help run a club for the numerous unemployed on Tyneside. Accommodation would be provided, but there would be no salary. From my scholarship I have enough in hand to keep myself for a time. wittgenstein:

If you feel you can do that, go there. But it sounds to me like trying to climb Mount Everest.

1932 I spent some months at Newcastle, and together with a group of unemployed shipyard workers we had repaired a derelict building and turned it into a social club for the neighbourhood. We had also started a boot-repairing workshop, a carpenter’s shop and a canteen where cheap meals could be had at cost price. When this was under way, Wittgenstein came up to Newcastle to visit me. I took him down to Jarrow, where there was almost complete unemployment. The shipyard there had been closed for several years. The shops were mostly boarded up, and the whole area had a terrible air of dereliction. wittgenstein:

Sraffa17 is right: the only thing possible in a situation like this is to get all these people running in one direction. I told him that if I was to continue the work I was doing I would soon have to find some way of earning my living. For it had been made clear to me that, now that the club was well under way, I could not have free board and lodging much longer. Also, my own funds were nearly exhausted. I had seen a notice that a lecturer in philosophy was required at Armstrong College,18 and I thought it might be the right thing to apply for it. Wittgenstein said he supposed that under the circumstances it was the only thing to do. I needed three testimonials and so I wrote to Broad, and Moore, and asked Wittgenstein for the third; which he gave me.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

111

Later I told him that Moore, at the end of his testimonial, had said, ‘He has a sense of humour.’ wittgenstein:

Moore is unique: only Moore would have thought of writing that a sense of humour is important in a philosopher. Later I had to write to Wittgenstein and tell him that I had not obtained the post. It was given instead to Miss Dorothy Emmett. On several occasions in later years he used to say to me that I owed a great debt to Miss Emmett, in that she had saved me from becoming a professional philosopher.

1933 I was invited by a friend to come for a year to live in the settlement at Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, where he was acting as warden. The plan was that we should use the large garden there for running a communal market garden for the many unemployed miners in the town. Wittgenstein came down for a night to visit me, and I took him round the garden, which was now producing a good crop of vegetables. He then told me that for short time he had worked as a gardener in a Benedictine monastery near Vienna.19 One day the Abbot had passed him when he was at work and had said, ‘So I see that intelligence counts for something in gardening too.’ We were sitting and talking in my bedroom when he noticed a copy of Thomas à Kempis by my bedside. wittgenstein: drury:

Are you reading this book?

I find it a help when I feel in a despondent mood.

wittgenstein:

It wasn’t written for that purpose. It was written to be remembered

in all moods. * A close friend of mine had become seriously ill and had had to be admitted to a mental hospital. I was very distressed at this, and decided I would apply to be trained as a male nurse in a mental hospital. I arranged an interview with the medical superintendent of the hospital. He tried to dissuade me from my plan, saying that I could do much more useful work with my education if I would train as a doctor. I wrote a letter to Wittgenstein telling him the result of this interview. Immediately I got a telegram in reply: ‘Come to Cambridge at once.’ Wittgenstein and Francis Skinner met me at the station at Cambridge, and I was hardly out of the train – wittgenstein:

Now there is to be no more argument about this: it has all been settled already, you are to start work as a medical student at once. I have arranged with two wealthy friends of mine to help you financially, and I shall be able to help you myself. I was so taken aback by this announcement that I could say nothing until we arrived at Skinner’s rooms in East Road.

112

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

drury:

I think at my age I ought to stand on my own feet and not be sponging on others. wittgenstein:

You are not sponging on others. There is nothing I dislike so much as a sponger. But you never asked for this. It has been given you as a willing gift. To refuse it now would be nothing but an obstinate pride. We then went to the Union to look at various University Calendars, to see which medical school I should try for. After some further discussion, and correspondence, it was decided that I should go to Trinity College, Dublin.

1934 After my first year in the school of anatomy, I spent the summer in my brother’s cottage in Connemara, at the mouth of the Killary harbour, nine miles from a shop and twenty miles from the nearest railway station. Wittgenstein and Francis Skinner came at the end of the summer to stay with me for a couple of weeks. The arrangement was that the car which was to take my mother to Recess station should pick up Wittgenstein and Francis and bring them back to the cottage. Wittgenstein had about twenty minutes talking to my mother while she was waiting for her train to arrive. Up to now, my mother had felt some suspicion of the influence Wittgenstein had over me, and my apparent need to consult him about everything. But after this short meeting she wrote me a letter by the first post saying that she now quite understood what an impressive person he was, and felt much happier about my being guided by him. I was struck once again by the way in which Wittgenstein’s personality could in such a short meeting make a profound impression. When Wittgenstein got out of the car at Rosroe, the first thing he said to me was, ‘You have a beautiful country.’ He and Francis had been amused at the very antiquated train that had brought them from Galway, with its Victorian rollingstock. ‘This’, he said, ‘is a country for horses, not railways.’ Thinking my guests would be hungry after their long journey and night crossing, I had prepared a rather elaborate meal: roast chicken followed by suet pudding and treacle. Wittgenstein rather silent during the meal. When we had finished: wittgenstein:

Now let it be quite clear that while we are here we are not going to live in this style. We will have a plate of porridge for breakfast, vegetables from the garden for lunch, and a boiled egg in the evening. This was then our routine for the rest of his visit. The next day being fine and sunny, we walked over the hill to Tully sands. wittgenstein:

The colours of the landscape here are marvellous. Why even the surface of the road is coloured. When we reached the sands we walked up and down by the sea. wittgenstein:

I can well understand why children love sand.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

113

We discussed the plan that he and Francis were thinking of: that they should go and live and work in Russia. They had both been having lessons in Russian. francis:

I want to do something ‘fiery’.

wittgenstein: drury:

That is a very dangerous way of thinking.

I think Francis means that he doesn’t want to take the treacle with him.

wittgenstein:

Oh, that is an excellent expression: I understand what that means entirely. No, we don’t want to take the treacle with us. Wittgenstein had already20 been to see the Russian ambassador in London, Maisky, in order to get a visa to visit Russia. He told me that this was the only time he had worn a tie instead of his usual open-neck shirt. He did this in case Maisky thought he was putting on an act in coming in unconventional dress. Maisky had asked him if he could speak any Russian and Wittgenstein had replied, ‘Well, try me.’ After they had been talking for some time, Maisky had said, ‘Not bad at all’ – Russian, said Wittgenstein, was a most beautiful language to listen to. We talked for a time about Lenin. wittgenstein:

Lenin’s writings about philosophy are of course absurd, but at least he did want to get something done. A most remarkable face, partly Mongolian in feature. Isn’t it remarkable that, in spite of their professed materialism, the Russians have gone to such trouble to preserve Lenin’s body in perpetuity; and to visit his tomb. You know I don’t think much of modern architecture, but that tomb in the Kremlin is well designed. On the way home from our walk we passed a cottage outside which a small girl, about five years old, was sitting. Wittgenstein suddenly stopped and said, ‘Drury, just look at the expression on that child’s face. You don’t take enough notice of people’s faces; it is a fault you ought to try to correct.’ We commented on the very primitive cottages in the area. wittgenstein:

I thought I had struck rock-bottom in Poland – but this is even more primitive. You know, there is only one thing I dread about going to live in Russia: bedbugs! * Several days of almost continuous rain. Wittgenstein suggested that I should read something out loud to him and Francis. I happened to have with me a copy of Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. Wittgenstein said, ‘That will be just the thing.’ During the reading he would from time to time stop me and exclaim at Prescott’s condescending attitude towards those whom he referred to as ‘the aborigines of the American continent’. Wittgenstein found this superior attitude very offensive, pointing out that at the time Prescott was writing, slavery in the Southern States was still legally enforced.

114

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

When we came to the account of the reign of the Emperor Nezahualcoyotl (Book 1, Chapter 6) I was reading the translation of one of the Emperor’s poems: All things on earth have their term, and, in the most joyous career of their vanity and splendor, their strength fails, and they sink into the dust. All the round world is but a sepulchre; and there is nothing, which lives on its surface, that shall not be hidden and entombed beneath it . . . Yet let us take courage, illustrious nobles and chieftains, true friends and loyal subjects, – let us aspire to that heaven, where all is eternal, and corruption cannot come.21 wittgenstein:

Why, this is remarkable, this is what Plato dreamed of – that a philosopher should be king. It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed ‘Wisdom’. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ When I was getting the vegetables ready for lunch, Francis was washing and preparing the lettuce for a salad. I couldn’t understand why every few minutes he would disappear into the garden. Then I saw that a very small slug or snail which he found in the lettuce was being gently taken back to the garden. This was very typical of Francis’s gentle character. Later, when we were alone, I told Wittgenstein about this. wittgenstein:

Francis is extraordinary. He is a man who is quite incapable of talking nonsense. Sometimes his silence infuriates me and I shout at him, ‘Say something, Francis!’ But Francis isn’t a thinker. You know Rodin’s statue called The Thinker; it struck me the other day that I couldn’t imagine Francis in that attitude. The rain had at last stopped, and it was a warm and sunny day. I suggested rowing Wittgenstein and Francis over to the other shore of the Killary, and that we should walk to the Mayo sands, a fine stretch of sands unapproached by any road and therefore nearly always deserted. We did this, and as we were walking along the side of the mountain a horse suddenly took fright and galloped up the hill. Wittgenstein stood looking at it in amazement. He said how much he loved horses; that when he first went to Cambridge as a student he used to hire a horse and go riding. When at last we came in sight of the sands we saw below us the Mortimer family – the only inhabitants of this isolated district – out making hay in the small area of cultivatable land available to them. As soon as Wittgenstein saw this he turned round. wittgenstein:

We are going back. These people are working, and it is not right that we should be holidaying in front of them. I thought of the many times I had been to these sands and such an obvious thought had never occurred to me. Back in the cottage that evening I continued my reading out loud. The walls of the cottage are of a rough whitewash texture. wittgenstein:

(looking at Francis silhouetted against the wall) What an excellent background this wall would make for a photograph portrait. Professional photographers spoil their work because they will try to use an elaborate background. They won’t see the importance of simplicity.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

115

This morning the local fisherman had landed on the pier a large catch of mackerel. The usual brilliant colouring of fish just out of the sea, some of them still half alive. wittgenstein:

(in a low voice) Why don’t they leave them in the sea! I know fish are caught in the most horrible way, and yet I continue to eat fish.

1935(?) Easter-time at Woolacombe in North Devon. Wittgenstein had come to spend the holiday there with me and the other members of my family. On Easter morning we all presented each other with chocolate eggs and Wittgenstein of course was included in the ceremony. He showed real pleasure at this. Afterwards when we were out walking he told me how much he liked keeping up these old customs. We walked up the hill to Mortehoe and then out along the point. I said to him that in earlier years the ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter had meant a great deal to me; and now I felt a sense of emptiness when I no longer took part in them. wittgenstein:

But Drury, when I wanted to dissuade you from becoming a parson I didn’t mean that you should at the same time cease to attend your church services. That wasn’t the idea at all. Though it may be that you have to learn that these ceremonies haven’t the importance you once attached to them – but that doesn’t mean that they have no importance. Of course it does often happen that, as one develops, a man’s expression of his religion becomes much drier. I had a Protestant aunt, and the only religious observance she kept was to observe every Good Friday in complete silence and complete abstinence.

1936 Wittgenstein on a visit to my home in Exeter. He spent a certain amount of time reading in the library. He read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was, he said, a remarkable piece of writing; and the account of the retreat taken by the Jesuit was particularly well done. He tried to read Sean O’Casey but soon put it aside: ‘No one ever talked this sort of language.’ He then mentioned to me that he had recently read Journey’s End. wittgenstein:

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn’t find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them. I couldn’t understand the humour in Journey’s End. But I wouldn’t want to joke about a situation like that. drury:

It may have been that they had no language in which to express their real feelings. wittgenstein:

Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. That might well be true: no way of saying what they really felt. *

116

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

There was in our dining-room a steel engraving of a portrait of Pope Pius IX. A very striking face. wittgenstein:

(after looking at the picture for some time) The last of the real Popes, I would think. If it was declared that, whenever the Pope sat on a particular chair, what he then pronounced was to be believed and obeyed by all Catholics – then I would understand what the doctrine of infallibility meant. But as long as the words ex cathedra are not defined, the doctrine of infallibility decides nothing. He told me he had been reading Newman’s Apologia and that he admired Newman’s obvious sincerity. But when he came to read the last sermon Newman preached to his friends at Little-more, he thought to himself, ‘I wouldn’t wish to speak to my friends like that.’ * We went every morning to have our lunch together at Lyons, the café in the High Street. Several times he mentioned to me how much he admired the Lyons organization and the cleanliness with which the cafés were run. Pointing out to me the uniform the waitresses wore: wittgenstein:

Usually, in twenty years’ time the old fashions of dress appear ridiculous; but these uniforms are so well designed that they will never look silly. We are still living in times where a good tailor knows within a fraction of an inch how to cut his cloth. But you and I may live to see that art lost too. When people just don’t know what to wear. Just as in modern architecture they don’t know in what style to design a building. I was looking at a portrait of Kierkegaard the other day: the one in which he is depicted as standing at his high desk. A face just like a bird. And do you know, he was dressed as a real dandy. I imagine that he felt if he didn’t do this he would have to become entirely slovenly. drury:

I have never understood why people have set so much value on wearing precious stones: diamonds etc. wittgenstein:

That is because you have probably never met anyone who knew how to wear them. That evening we walked together in the gardens in front of Colleton Crescent.22 It was a warm, still evening, just getting dusk. Wittgenstein was unusually silent and seemed in a very tranquil frame of mind. I had not often felt his company so restful. drury:

Dusk is one of the best times of day.

wittgenstein:

I wish the light was always like this.

This will seem a very trivial incident; but it was one of those inexplicable moments that left a permanent impression on my mind. *

Conversations with Wittgenstein

117

Sunday morning. Wittgenstein and I went for a walk. wittgenstein:

I saw you and your mother coming back through the garden before breakfast this morning. Had you been to church? drury:

Yes, we had been to Holy Communion together.

wittgenstein:

I wish I could have been with you,

That same evening we were walking back through the cathedral close as people were going in to Evensong. wittgenstein:

Let’s go in with them.

We sat at the back of the nave listening to the service. When it came to the sermon the preacher chose as his text: ‘It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you.’23 After a few minutes Wittgenstein leant over and whispered to me, ‘I am not listening to a word he is saying. But think about the text, that is wonderful, that is really wonderful.’ As we walked home after the service he was very critical of the organist’s ability, especially of the voluntary he had tried to play. wittgenstein: Who of us nowadays has any idea of what a Bach fugue really meant

at the time in which it was composed? When people lament the Reformation they must then condemn Bach’s music. Bach’s music is an expression of Lutheranism. Art forms lose their meaning. For instance, why have all Shakespeare’s plays five acts? No one knows. What does the number five signify here? Once when I was listening to the short crowd choruses in Bach’s Passion music, I suddenly realized, ‘This is what the very short scenes in some of Shakespeare’s plays mean.’ The next day we walked down the canal to beyond the Double Locks. When we were out of sight of the city I said to Wittgenstein, pointing, ‘I know that Exeter is in that direction and Topsham in that.’ wittgenstein:

That is an interesting use of ‘know’. Here you are certain of something, but there is nothing in the nature of what might be called a ‘sensedatum’. On the way home we mentioned a student we had both known in Cambridge, who had been killed fighting with the International Brigade in Spain. Some of his friends had said to Wittgenstein, ‘What a relief to know that this was the end of his sufferings and that we don’t have to think of a ‘future life”.’ Wittgenstein said he was shocked at their speaking in this way. I tried to explain to him that for me the only perfect moments in my life were when I had been so absorbed in the object – nature or music – that all self-consciousness was abolished. The ‘I’ had ceased to be. wittgenstein:

And so you think of death as the gateway to a permanent state of mind such as that. drury:

Yes, that is how I think of a future life.

118

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

He seemed disinclined to continue with this conversation; but I had the feeling that he thought what I had said was superficial. * Today at lunch the conversation turned to discussing ‘detective stories’. Wittgenstein said how much he enjoyed the stories of Agatha Christie. Not only were the plots ingenious but the characters were so well drawn that they were real people. He thought it was a particularly English talent to be able to write books like this. One of the company advised him to read Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ stories. He made a grimace. ‘Oh no, I couldn’t stand the idea of a Roman Catholic priest playing the part of a detective. I don’t want that.’ Afterwards, on our walk, we discussed humorous books. I was slightly surprised to find that he appreciated the writings of P. G. Wodehouse. He said that he thought that the short story called ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’ was one of the funniest things he had ever read. We went on to discuss how taste in humour varied from age to age. wittgenstein:

I remember reading in an old book how someone saw a man walking beside a river reading and bursting into fits of laughter. And he said. ‘That man must be reading Don Quixote, only the Don could make a man laugh like that.’ Now I don’t find Don Quixote funny at all. drury:

Voltaire’s Candide was considered a very amusing book, but I couldn’t see anything amusing in it. wittgenstein:

I agree with you about Candide. Now a book I like greatly is Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. That is one of my favourite books. You remember the incident where they are discussing infant prodigies, and after several have mentioned examples, one of the company caps the lot by saying that he knew an infant who produced a work on the day he was born. Whereupon Dr Slop replies that it should have been wiped up and nothing more said about it. Now that you could say about a lot that is written today. They should be wiped up and nothing more said about them. I am particularly fond of the character of Corporal Trim in Tristram Shandy, and especially the sermon he reads out. Our walk had taken us up to Victoria Park Road, where my brother’s house was undergoing extensive alterations. Wittgenstein insisted on climbing up the scaffolding on to the roof to inspect the work being done. He shouted down to me, ‘Don’t try to come up, it is very vertiginous.’ When he came down he had a lot to say about the work being done, and I was impressed by the usual thoroughness with which he went into everything. * We called round at my brother’s architectural office in Bedford Circus. My brother was out on a site, but Wittgenstein spent some time talking to the senior partner, Mr Tonar. They seemed to be having a lively conversation. I was amused afterwards when Mr Tonar said to me in private: ‘That’s a very intelligent young man.’ One of the assistant draughtsmen was designing an altar cross. Wittgenstein became quite

Conversations with Wittgenstein

119

agitated: ‘I couldn’t for the life of me design a cross in this age; I would rather go to hell than try and design a cross.’ We hadn’t left the office for long when he turned back, saying, ‘I shouldn’t have said what I did about designing a cross; that can do no good. We must go back and tell the man not to take the slightest notice of what I said.’ * When we were out walking a few days later, Wittgenstein began to talk to me about Lessing. He quoted with great emphasis Lessing’s remark: ‘If God held closed in his right hand all truth, and in his left the single and untiring striving after truth, adding even that I always and forever make mistakes, and said to me: Choose! I should fall humbly before his left hand and say: Father grant me! the pure truth is for you alone.’24 Then he said he would like to read to me something of Lessing’s. So we turned back and hurried up to the public library to see if we could find anything either in German or in English. We found nothing; and I had to regret that I never heard him selecting what it was he wanted me to know. On the way home through the cathedral close we passed the statue of Richard Hooker. Wittgenstein asked me who he was. drury:

He was an Elizabethan divine who wrote a famous apologia for the Anglican Reformation, a book called Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. In it he tried to steer a middle course between Catholicism and Calvinism. wittgenstein: That sounds to me impossible. How could there be any compromise

between two such completely divergent doctrines? The next day he had obviously thought about this and said to me that he could now see that a thoroughly bourgeois culture might want some such compromise. * Our walk took us through a modern housing estate. wittgenstein:

Look at all these houses. They are grinning at you, as if to say, ‘Look at me, how pretty I am.’ What a silly custom it is to give houses names. When we got back to Colleton Crescent I pointed out to him that at one time all the windows had had wooden shutters; these had become rotten and had had to be removed. This spoilt the appearance of the crescent. wittgenstein:

Yes, like a face that has lost its eyebrows. *

Today he talked to me about his brother Paul Wittgenstein, the pianist. He said that his brother had the most amazing knowledge of music. On one occasion some friends played a few bars of music from any one of a number of composers, from widely different periods, and his brother was able without a mistake to say who the composer was and from which work it was taken.25 On the other hand he did not

120

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

like his brother’s interpretation of music. Once when his brother was practising the piano and Wittgenstein was in another room of the house, the music suddenly stopped and his brother burst into the room saying, ‘I can’t play when you are in the house. I feel your scepticism seeping under the door.’ His mother, he said, had an amazing ability in reading music at sight. You could put any piece in front of her and she would play it at once without a wrong note. They had a friend of the family who was a blind organist. This man could play all Bach’s Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues from memory. This he thought was a remarkable thing to be able to do. Wittgenstein’s father had an organ built as a birthday present for this friend. When Brahms’s Fourth Symphony was first performed, this organist was in the audience and after the performance said to Brahms, ‘That was a daring canon on the thirteenth that you attempted in the last movement’; and Brahms replied, ‘Only you would have noticed that.’ * I was now back in Dublin, preparing for my First MB examination. This involved the immense task of memorizing all the details of human anatomy. I wrote to Wittgenstein mentioning that I found this a tedious drudgery. In a letter replying to this he said, ‘You ought to be glad of this drudgery. It is just the sort of discipline you need.’ In the same letter he went on to say that he and Francis Skinner were seriously thinking of coming to Dublin and joining me in studying medicine, and he asked me to make enquiries about the possibility of the two of them entering the medical school. I went and asked my tutor about this, and he seemed astounded that a Fellow of Trinity Cambridge and a university lecturer should think of giving this up and starting all over again in the medical school! * Another letter from Wittgenstein, in which he suggested that if he did qualify as a doctor he and I might practise together as psychiatrists. He felt that he might have a special talent for this branch of medicine. He sent me as a birthday present a copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. This, he wrote, was the most important of Freud’s writings. When he first read it he said to himself, ‘Here at last is a psychologist who has something to say.’ When we talked about this later, he said he would not want to undergo what was known as a training analysis. He did not think it right to reveal all one’s thoughts to a stranger. Psychoanalysis as presented by Freud was irreligious. ‘It is a very dangerous procedure; I know of a case where it did infinite harm.’26 * Wittgenstein and Francis Skinner had come on a visit to Dublin. I took them to the front square of Trinity College. wittgenstein:

[looking round at the rather severe classical architecture) Now I understand what was meant by the phrase ‘the Protestant Ascendancy’. These buildings have the appearance of a fortress. But now the gypsies inhabit the castle.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

121

He said about the Georgian architecture of the Dublin streets: ‘The people who built these houses had the good taste to know that they had nothing very important to say; and therefore they didn’t attempt to express anything.’ In the evening, walking along the quays, we saw Kingsbridge station outlined against the sky. In the distance it looked impressive. Wittgenstein wanted to go nearer and see it in more detail. But when we came close he shook his head: ‘No, the details are poor: that cornice for example. What have I always said to you? Night is the architect’s friend!’ The next day we were in Woolworth’s for some purchases. Wittgenstein noticed some cheap little cameras: ‘What fun it would be to take some snaps of each other.’ So he insisted on buying three cameras, one for each of us. Then he wanted to climb to the top of Nelson’s Column to view the city from there. We took a lot of photographs but they didn’t turn out very well! * Noticing the street names in Irish, we talked about the efforts being made to revive the language. wittgenstein:

It is always a tragic thing when a language dies. But it doesn’t follow that one can do anything to stop it doing so. It is a tragic thing when the love between a man and wife is dying; but there is nothing one can do. So it is with a dying language. Though one thing is achieved by putting these notices in Irish: it makes one realize that one is in a foreign country. Dublin is not just another English provincial town: it has the air of a real capital city. * The Nazis were now in control of Germany.27 wittgenstein:

Just think what it must mean, when the government of a country is taken over by a set of gangsters. The dark ages are coming again. I wouldn’t be surprised, Drury, if you and I were to live to see such horrors as people being burnt alive as witches. drury:

Do you think Hitler is sincere in what he is saying in his speeches?

wittgenstein:

Is a ballet dancer sincere? *

I told him I had been asked to be godfather at the christening of my nephew. drury:

The godparents have to promise in the child’s name to renounce the devil and all his works, the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh.28 I feel it would be hypocrisy for me to speak those words. It is something that I haven’t done myself. wittgenstein:

To renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. Just think what that would really involve. Who of us today even thinks of doing such

122

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

a thing? We all want to be admired. St Paul said, ‘I die daily.’ Just think what that must have meant!

1938 I was now doing my period of residence in the City of Dublin Hospital. Wittgenstein came to stay in my previous lodgings in Chelmsford Road. Whenever I had time off from my hospital duties I spent the evening with him. The situation in Europe was becoming more and more serious. It struck me that in all the years I had known him I had never seen him reading a newspaper, indeed I could hardly imagine him doing so. But now, when I came in to see him his first question was usually, ‘Any news?’ One evening I told him all the papers reported that Hitler was poised to invade Austria. wittgenstein:

That is a ridiculous rumour. Hitler doesn’t want Austria. Austria would be no use to him at all. The very next evening I had to tell him that Hitler had indeed taken over Austria and seemed to be in complete control, without any fighting. He did not refer to his remark of the previous evening; and, to my surprise, did not seem unduly disturbed. I asked him if his sisters would be in any danger. wittgenstein:

They are too much respected, no one would dare to touch them. *

We walked in Phoenix Park. I told him that my present work entailed periods of duty in the Casualty Department, and that I was disturbed at my clumsiness; also that when I had to carry out some delicate procedure, such as suturing a wound, I developed a disabling tremor in my hands. I reminded him that when I told Canon Cunningham at the theological college that I intended to train as a doctor, he had said to me: ‘You have enough brains to become a doctor, but I very much doubt whether you have the right temperament.’ drury:

I am worried at times whether I have made a mistake, and whether I will be any use as a doctor. Too nervous and hesitant to make the necessary decisions. But perhaps it is wrong even to allow myself to think about that. wittgenstein:

You lack the necessary experience: that is all that is wrong at

present. The next day at the hospital I had a letter from him.29 * During his visit to Dublin Wittgenstein asked me if I could arrange for him to have discussions with patients who were seriously mentally ill. He said this would be a matter of great interest to him. I was acquainted with one of the resident doctors in St Patrick’s Hospital, and I put this request to him – and it was soon

Conversations with Wittgenstein

123

arranged, after the Medical Superintendent, Dr Leper, had had an interview with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein then went two or three days a week and visited some of the long-stay patients who had few to visit them. He became particularly interested in one elderly man, of whom he said: ‘This man is much more intelligent than his doctors.’ wittgenstein:

That elderly patient I was telling you about has a wide knowledge of music. I asked him what was his favourite instrument in the orchestra, and he replied, ‘the big drum’. Now that is an excellent answer; I know exactly what he meant. Before he left Dublin, Wittgenstein wanted me to meet this patient, so that I could continue to visit him; for he had now no relatives who came to see him. When the three of us met and I was introduced, the patient continued a previous discussion he had started with Wittgenstein, about the philosophy of Herbert Spencer. I was fascinated to see how gently and helpfully Wittgenstein was able to discuss with him. When at one point I tried to join in the discussion. Wittgenstein at once told me to ‘shut up’. Afterwards, when we were walking home: wittgenstein:

When you are playing ping-pong you mustn’t use a tennis racket. *

On the way back from Dublin for the vacation I visited Wittgenstein in Cambridge. He told me that that evening he was due to continue a series of lectures and discussions he was having with some students on the subject of ‘Aesthetics’. He asked me if I would like to come, and of course I was delighted to be able once again to listen to Wittgenstein lecturing. If I understood him rightly, on that occasion he was saying that you couldn’t speak of the meaning of a work of art, say a particular piece of music, as if the meaning was something that could be separated from the work itself. ‘Part of the pleasure in hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is hearing the Ninth Symphony.’ During this lecture one of the students was rapidly writing notes. Wittgenstein told him not to do so. ‘If you write these spontaneous remarks down, some day someone may publish them as my considered opinions. I don’t want that done. For I am talking now freely as my ideas come, but all this will need a lot more thought and better expression.’ (This indeed is what was done later in the volume called Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief.)30 * The situation in Europe was becoming increasingly grave. Wittgenstein said to me that in the event of war he would not want to be interned as an alien. He therefore asked me: Would my mother agree for him to use her name as a reference in applying for British nationality? Of course she agreed, and this is what he did. *

124

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

G. E Moore was retiring from the professorship of philosophy at Cambridge. Wittgenstein was debating whether he would apply for the chair. wittgenstein:

I would never be elected. I am now only a ‘has-been’. Nobody wants a ‘has-been’. One of the electors is Collingwood of Oxford. Can you imagine him voting for me? After his election, Wittgenstein told me that Broad had said: ‘To refuse the chair to Wittgenstein would be like refusing Einstein a chair of physics.’ Wittgenstein knew how antipathetic Broad was to anyone of Wittgenstein’s temperament, and he appreciated this tribute. wittgenstein:

Broad is a very just man. I have been reading Five Types of Ethical Theory. I thought he wrote that very well.

1939 It was some time before I saw Wittgenstein again. I had in the meantime qualified as a doctor and was working as an assistant to a general practitioner in the Rhondda Valley. War with Germany seemed certain now, and I had been informed that in the event of war I would be required to join the Royal Army Medical Corps at a moment’s notice. In view of this, Wittgenstein and Francis Skinner came down to South Wales to see me. I got rooms for them in a hotel in Pontypridd. The night they arrived, a total blackout was enforced, although war had not yet been declared. Trying to find our way in the darkness we got lost and bumped into things. wittgenstein:

This blackout is absurd. Nothing will happen here tonight. It is not like the English to get into a panic like this. When we eventually arrived at the hotel he was still grumbling about the blackout, as the manageress showed us up to their rooms. I said partly as a joke; ‘We will be quite accustomed to this in three years’ time.’ At this both Wittgenstein and Francis Skinner laughed heartily; the manageress looked shocked. The next morning war was declared. I went at once to the hotel and found Wittgenstein very agitated: he had been ordered to report at once to the local police station. I guessed that the manageress, noticing his foreign name and our jocularity of the previous evening, had been suspicious of our arrival and reported it to the police. All three of us went round to the police station, and were soon able to identify ourselves and our nationality. But Wittgenstein seemed upset and said that in the future he would have to be very careful. * I decided that I would return to Exeter for a few days before receiving my calling-up papers. Wittgenstein and Francis decided to come with me. During the few days we had together Wittgenstein was concerned about what he should do, now that war was declared. He did not want to remain at Cambridge but thought that possibly he and Francis might be able to join an ambulance brigade.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

125

The day before he was due to leave we had a final walk together, Francis remaining behind. wittgenstein:

I have been reading Luther recently. Luther is like an old gnarled oak, as strong as that. That isn’t just a metaphor. drury:

The little I have read of Luther made a deep impression on me.

wittgenstein:

But don’t mistake me: Luther was no saint. No, indeed, he was no

saint. drury:

Certainly not in the sense that Francis of Assisi was a saint.

wittgenstein:

Francis of Assisi, so far as we can tell, seems to have been pure spirit and nothing else. On the whole I prefer the English Authorized Version of the Bible to Luther’s translation into German. The English translators had such reverence for the text that when they couldn’t make sense of it they were content to leave it unintelligible. But Luther sometimes twists the sense to suit his own ideas. For instance, when Luther comes to translate the salutation of the Angel to Mary, Ave gratia plena, he uses a popular phrase from the market-place which reads something like ‘Mary you little dear’.31 drury:

Luther didn’t hesitate to make his own selection from the canons of Scripture. He considered the Epistle of James, the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation as of little authority. wittgenstein:

Isn’t it strange that such a book as Ecclesiastes was included in the canon? Speaking for myself, I don’t care for the Second Epistle of St Peter. Peter there speaks about ‘our beloved brother Paul’, whereas it is clear that they were constantly in conflict. drury:

It is generally agreed that the Second Epistle of St Peter is a late document, and certainly not written by the apostle. Even Calvin, in spite of his great reverence for the Scriptures, agreed about that. wittgenstein:

Oh, I am glad to hear that.

When I was seeing Wittgenstein and Francis off at the station, we talked for a time about the present war situation. wittgenstein:

England and France between them can’t defeat Germany. But if Hitler does manage to establish a European empire, I don’t believe it will last long. People have accused Stalin of having betrayed the Russian Revolution. But they have no idea of the problems that Stalin had to deal with; and the dangers he saw threatening Russia. I was looking at a picture of the British Cabinet and I thought to myself, ‘a lot of wealthy old men’.

1940 It was that wonderful summer of 1940. France had collapsed before the German blitzkrieg. The British Army had at the last minute been ferried to England from

126

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Dunkirk. There was a spirit of unity and determination in the country to resist, whatever the cost, a German attempt at invasion. I was stationed at a camp near Yeovil. Wittgenstein came down for a few days to visit me. wittgenstein:

You have often heard me speak of my dislike of many features of English life. But now that England is in real danger, I realize how fond I am of her; how I would hate to see her destroyed. I have often said to myself that William the Conqueror got himself a very good bargain. I told him I was having great difficulties with my senior medical officer in the camp, a retired regular colonel, who in my opinion had forgotten what medicine he ever knew. He kept wanting to dispute my diagnoses and treatment, and of course could overrule me by his seniority. Wittgenstein gave me a lecture on the importance in an army of discipline and obedience to superiors, especially in a time of crisis like this. I felt he was speaking of his own experiences in the previous war. wittgenstein:

Remember, Drury, no one joins an army to have a good time.

JANUARY 1941 At Liverpool, doing a course in tropical medicine before being posted to the Middle East. Both Wittgenstein and Francis Skinner came to say goodbye to me and spent a few days in Liverpool. Two days before they came there had been a heavy air raid on the port and town. I was telling them about this. wittgenstein:

I wish you and I could have been together in an air raid. I would have liked that. When the time came for me to say goodbye to them, Wittgenstein presented me with a silver drinking-cup. wittgenstein: Water tastes so much nicer out of silver. There is only one condition

attached to this gift: you are not to worry if it gets lost. * During the years I was in Egypt we kept in touch with regular letters. These were largely what Wittgenstein used to call ‘hullo letters’. Just letting each other know where we were and that we were well. I regret now that I did not keep these letters, but in the uncertainty of those days one became careless about the future. He wrote and told me he was now working in Guy’s Hospital as a dispensary porter. He had made friends with a young man in the dispensary called Roy Fouracre.32 Sometimes Wittgenstein would be rushed or agitated and Roy would say to him, ‘Steady, Prof.’ This he liked. One of his jobs was to prepare Lassar’s paste in quantities for the dermatological department. The sister on the ward said no one had ever produced Lassar’s paste of this quality before. I wrote to Wittgenstein that, being anxious to read something in philosophy, I had managed to get hold of a copy of Bradley’s Essays on Truth and Reality in a

Conversations with Wittgenstein

127

shop in Cairo. To my surprise I had found them very stimulating and they had given me much to think about. In reply Wittgenstein wrote that he was not at all surprised that I found Bradley to my liking. He had once looked into something of Bradley’s (he didn’t say what), expecting to find it very dull, and found him distinctly ‘lively’. In another letter he told me that he had been reading a Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. ‘This writing must have come from a remarkable religious experience.’ In reply I reminded him that years ago at Cambridge I had tried to read something of Barth’s to him, and he had dismissed it as very arrogant. He did not refer to this again.

1941 One morning I received a letter from Wittgenstein telling me that Francis Skinner had died very suddenly from acute poliomyelitis. I could realize what a loss this must have been to him. I too felt the loss of Francis, whom I had come to know so well. [Professor R. L. Goodstein ends the Preface (dated 1949) to his volume Constructive Formalism: Essays on the Foundations of Mathematics (Leicester, 1951): ‘My last word is for my dear friend Francis Skinner, who died at Cambridge in 1941, and left no other record of his work and of his great gifts of heart and mind than lies in the recollections of those who had the good fortune to know him (p. 10). Ed.] * A letter from Wittgenstein33 telling me he was moving to Newcastle. While working at Guy’s Hospital he had been invited to have his meals in the doctors’ mess. There he had become acquainted with Dr R. T. Grant, who was doing some work on the physiology of ‘shock’. Dr Grant had found Wittgenstein’s questions and the suggestions he made so relevant that he invited him to join his team when they moved to Newcastle. I wrote back wishing him luck in his new work, and added the rather foolish remark that I hoped he would make lots of friends. This letter brought the stern reply: ‘It is obvious to me that you are becoming thoughtless and stupid. How could you imagine I would ever have “lots of friends”?’

1943 After the end of the campaign in North Africa I was posted back to England to prepare for the Normandy landing. Having a period of disembarkation leave, I travelled up to Newcastle to spend a few days with Wittgenstein. I journeyed from Exeter on the night train, arriving at Newcastle in time for breakfast. Wittgenstein met me at the station. He seemed very distant and silent when we met, and our breakfast together, which I had been looking forward to, was something of an ordeal. He then took me to his room in the Research Department and showed me the apparatus which he himself had designed for his investigation. Dr Grant had asked him to investigate the relationship between breathing (depth and rate) and pulse (volume and rate). Wittgenstein had so arranged things that he could act as his own subject and obtain

128

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

the necessary tracings on a revolving drum. He had made several improvements in the original apparatus, so much so that Dr Grant had said he wished Wittgenstein had been a physiologist and not a philosopher. In describing to me his results so far he made a characteristic remark: ‘It is all very much more complicated than you would imagine at first sight.’ Suddenly he suggested, ‘Let’s go out and take the train to Durham and walk by the river there.’ This we did; and on the journey our former easy manner of conversation seemed to return. wittgenstein:

You haven’t changed a bit; you are just the same person you always

were.’ I then realized that he had been quite convinced that after four years in the army I would have grown away from our previous friendship, and that was the reason why our first meeting had been so strained. When Wittgenstein had formed a fixed idea in his mind about other people, it took a good deal of evidence to make him change his mind. I think he was inclined to see other people in terms of black and white; though in this connection I must mention that he was fond of quoting the proverb, ‘It takes many sorts to make a world’, adding, ‘That is a very beautiful and kindly saying.’ As we walked by the river at Durham I began to tell him some of my experiences in Egypt. How on one occasion, when I had a period of leave, I had travelled down to see the temples at Luxor. A wonderful experience. drury:

One thing did surprise me and rather shocked me. On going into one of the temples there was on the wall a basrelief of the god Horus with an erect phallus in the act of ejaculation and collecting the semen in a bowl! wittgenstein:

Why in the world shouldn’t they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated? Not every religion has to have St Augustine’s attitude to sex. Why, even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church; everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn’t prevent it being a religious ceremony.

1944 The military hospital to which I was now attached was stationed at Llandeilo in South Wales. Wittgenstein was once again staying at Swansea, and I was able to see him from time to time. On one of these visits he told me that one of his pupils had written to him to say he had become a Roman Catholic.34 wittgenstein:

I seem to be surrounded now by Roman Catholic converts! I don’t know whether they pray for me. I hope they do. * I knew that we were soon to move to our points of embarkation for ‘D-Day’. I was to be one of the medical officers on a landing-craft. I came to say goodbye to Wittgenstein.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

129

wittgenstein:

If it ever happens that you get mixed up in hand-to-hand fighting, you must just stand aside and let yourself be massacred. I felt that this advice was one that he had had to give himself in the previous war. When some time later we met again he asked me about the landing. I told him how wonderful the sound of the big naval guns was when they opened up behind us. wittgenstein:

Oh yes, I remember that well. Heavy artillery is a marvellous sound; there is nothing quite like it. * I was in camp near Bayeux after the Normandy landing. A letter from Wittgenstein telling me he was reading Plato’s Theaetetus: ‘Plato in this dialogue is occupied with the same problems that I am writing about.’ A little later he sent me a copy of a translation of the Theaetetus and I tried to read it under the difficulties of camp life. I had to write back to him saying that I found it ‘cold’. His reply was, ‘It was very far from cold when it was written.’

1945 When the war was nearly over and the Russian armies were closing in on Berlin, I spent a few hours with Wittgenstein in London, on my way back to Germany after a period of leave in England. wittgenstein:

What a terrible position a man like Hitler is in now.

He said this with compassion. I thought it remarkable that at a time when we were all gloating over the fall of Hitler, Wittgenstein, although detesting everything that Hitler had stood for, could at the same time see the suffering involved in such a terrible situation. wittgenstein:

As soon as you moved into Germany the tone of your letters changed at once. I could see that you were not happy.

1946 After demobilization from the army, I took a post as house physician in a hospital at Taunton. Wittgenstein came down to see me from Cambridge where he was now lecturing again. It was his birthday, 26 April. I had remembered that some years previously he had said how much he liked nineteenth-century French travelling clocks – those clocks with brass pedestals and glass panels through which one could see the works. I had been able to obtain one of these clocks and gave it to him as his birthday present. It was a great pleasure to see how much he appreciated this gift and also that I had remembered his casual remark after all this time. (Years after, he mentioned this clock in his will, leaving it to Dr Richards.) Our conversation on this visit turned on the subject of English literature. He said that whereas there had been no very great English musical composers, English

130

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

literature would stand comparison with that of any other nation. He thought that English poetry was largely aristocratic in style – in comparison with Russian poetry, which sprang from a peasant tradition. Two of his favourite English poets were Cowper and Blake. Then he quoted from memory these verses from Blake: They look in every thoughtless nest, Where birds are cover’d warm; They visit caves of every beast. To keep them all from harm, If they see any weeping That should have been sleeping, They pour sleep on their head, And sit down by their bed. And there the lion’s ruddy eyes Shall flow with tears of gold, And pitying the tender cries, And walking round the fold, Saying ‘Wrath, by his meekness, And by his health, sickness Is driven away From our immortal day.’35 When he had finished this he repeated again the lines. If they see any weeping That should have been sleeping, They pour sleep on their head, And sit down by their bed. wittgenstein:

Those are very beautiful lines.

He went on to say that Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’36 contained many profound thoughts. And then suddenly he quoted: I am sure This Jesus will not do Either for Englishman or Jew.37

1947–8 I did not sec Wittgenstein again for over a year. It was a time of considerable emotional turmoil and indecision for me – finding it difficult to settle down after the experiences of the war. I felt for the first time that I did not want to discuss my problems with him, dreading the powerful influence he exercised over me, and wanting to make my own decisions. I think he appreciated what I was undergoing, for he wrote to me not to send him letters, but from time to time let him have a postcard telling him how I was and where to get in touch with me.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

131

Eventually I obtained a post on the staff of St Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin and decided to specialize in psychiatry. After some months in this post I received a letter from Wittgenstein, telling me he had made up his mind to resign his chair of philosophy in Cambridge. He felt that he would never get his writing finished if he still had to lecture. He was undecided where he would live; somewhere where he could find the quiet he needed for his work. In replying to this letter I reminded him that he had often expressed a liking for Ireland and I wondered if he couldn’t find a place in Dublin or near it. So it was that he came over to Ireland, and I booked a room for him in Ross’s Hotel, close to the hospital where I was resident. Wittgenstein questioned me closely about the work I was doing. wittgenstein:

I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if this work in psychiatry turned out to be the right thing for you. You at least know that ‘There are more things in heaven and earth’ etc. drury:

Some of the patients I am seeing present symptoms which I find extremely puzzling. I often don’t know what to say to them. wittgenstein:

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common-sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.38 I sometimes wonder whether you will have the right sense of humour for this work. You are too easily shocked when things don’t go according to plan. I lent him a book which was at the time the basis of our hospital treatment, Sargant and Slater’s Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry (the first edition), wittgenstein:

This is an excellent book. I like the spirit in which it was written. I am going to get Ben to read this book [referring to a medical student who was a friend of his]. I can quite understand that you would adopt the attitude ‘Let’s see now what these methods of treatment will accomplish.’ I don’t want for one moment to underestimate the importance of the work you are doing; but don’t ever let yourself think that all human problems can be solved in this way.

1948 Whenever I was free from hospital duties I went with Wittgenstein to look at possible lodgings which we had seen advertised. He used to laugh as we set out, using a slang American expression, ‘We will go and case the joint.’ Although we looked at many places, he did not find anything he thought would be congenial. One evening when I was on duty at the hospital he came and had a meal with me in the doctors’ mess. During the meal several messages came, saying that as soon as I was ready there were a number of patients needing to be seen that evening. Wittgenstein looked concerned at the amount I had to do, and got up from the table saying, ‘I must go, I am only in your way here.’ The next day when I went to visit him at the hotel, the first thing he said to me was: ‘Drury, remember the sabbath.’

132

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

He meant that I must give myself time to rest and think, and not live in a continual whirl of activity. ‘It would be quite enough for you if you had only one old woman with bronchitis to look after.’ I found it difficult to make him understand just what being resident in a busy hospital necessitated.39 Soon after this, I heard from a friend that a farmhouse at Red Cross, in County Wicklow, was prepared to take a permanent guest. Wittgenstein said he would travel down and inspect it. On his return he said he thought he could work well in that quiet surrounding. wittgenstein:

On my journey down in the bus I kept remarking to myself what a really beautiful country this is. So it was arranged that he would move down to Red Cross. He was too far away for me to see him regularly now; only when I had a weekend free was I able to visit him. * On my first visit to Red Cross it had been arranged that Wittgenstein would meet me at the nearest bus-stop, at Arklow. Even before I got off the bus I could see from the expression on his face that all was going well. He told me at once that the place suited him better than he had anticipated and that he was working hard. wittgenstein:

Sometimes my ideas come so quickly that I feel as if my pen was being guided. I now see clearly that it was the right thing for me to give up the professorship. I could never have got this work done while I was in Cambridge. He was full of praise for the beauty of the Wicklow countryside and took me for one of his favourite walks. As usual he questioned me about my work and wanted me to tell him about the type of cases I was treating. wittgenstein:

Always take a chair and sit down by the patient’s bedside; don’t stand at the end of the bed in a dictatorial attitude.40 Let your patients feel they have time to talk to you. I have been thinking about the physical methods of treatment that you employ. There is no contradiction between this approach and that of Freud. If I have a dream it may be due to some physical cause, something I have eaten for supper that has disagreed with me. But what I dream about, the contents of the dream, may have a psychological explanation. It seems to me that my dreams are always an expression of my fears, not, as Freud thought, my wishes. I could build up an interpretation of dreams just as cogent as Freud’s in terms of repressed fears. drury:

The French psychologist Pierre Janet said very much the same thing.

wittgenstein:

Freud’s work died with him. No one today can do psychoanalysis in the way he did. Now a book that really would interest me would be the one he wrote in collaboration with Breuer.41 *

Conversations with Wittgenstein

133

Wittgenstein went on living at Red Cross for some months still, and I visited him as often as I could. All seemed to be going well. Then one day I got a telegram from him asking me to book a room at Ross’s Hotel and to see him urgently. As soon as he had arrived I went down to see him. He looked distressed and agitated. wittgenstein: drury:

It has come.

I don’t understand; what has happened?

wittgenstein:

What I have always dreaded: that I would no longer be able to work. I have done no work at all for the past two weeks. And I can’t sleep at nights. The people under my room sit up late talking and the continual murmur of voices is driving me crazy. He then went on to tell me that he had found a ruined cottage near the farm which he thought could be cheaply restored, and that might provide the quiet he needed. I reminded him that the cottage at Rosro in Connemara, where he and Francis had stayed with me, was now empty, and that he would be more than welcome to have the use of it for as long as he wanted. This thought seemed to give him some relief, and he said that that might be the solution to his problem. He then returned to Red Cross to think the matter over, and I prescribed some tablets to help him to sleep. I also wrote off to Rosro to have the cottage made ready in case he decided to go there. * Wittgenstein spent several months at Rosro. It was too far away for me to get time off from my work to visit him, but we wrote regularly to each other. I gathered from his letters that the location and the quiet of the place suited him and that he was able to work again. He told me he found great interest in observing the very varied bird life in the area: he had tamed some of the birds by putting out food for them, and some even came and ate out of his hand. I was able to send him several illustrated books on birds which helped him to identify the different species. He was having to do all his own housework, which he disliked doing but said it was a good discipline for him. Remembering how he had often commended Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations to me and had given me a copy, I sent him a copy of Boswell’s famous Life. In reply he said that there must have been something remarkable about Boswell if Johnson was able to feel such a close friendship with him. That in quoting Johnson Boswell would say when he may not have got the exact words right – this Wittgenstein praised especially. (This warning has been in my mind all the time I have been writing these conversations, and the reader must remember that such a warning applies to all I have quoted.) In the following autumn Wittgenstein went to Austria to see his sister, who was seriously ill with cancer. On his way back he decided to spend a few days at Ross’s Hotel before returning to the cottage for the winter. But when we talked the matter over we decided that if he got ill in Connemara, there would be no one to look after him and no way of getting medical attention. He found the hotel comfortable and

134

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

friendly, and he could have a coal fire in his room, which was at the top of the house and, above all things, quiet.

AUTUMN 1948 The hotel where Wittgenstein was now staying was only a short distance from Phoenix Park and the Zoological Gardens. I was a member of the Royal Zoological Society and was able to propose him as a member. This enabled him to have free access to the gardens and to have his meals in the members’ room. He liked this; and we had many walks and meals together there. The young lady receptionist at the hotel was very attentive to Wittgenstein’s requests, and to show his appreciation Wittgenstein invited her on one occasion to have lunch with him in the members’ room. This caused quite a sensation among the hotel staff. On other occasions he would go to Bewley’s Café, in Grafton Street, for his midday meal – always the same: an omelette and a cup of coffee. What pleased him was that when he became well known there the waitress would bring him his omelette and coffee without a word and without his having to order it. ‘An excellent shop: there must be very good management behind this organization.’ I was now able to see Wittgenstein nearly every day, and when I had a day off I spent longer with him. He seemed to me to be writing copiously; when I went up to his room he was nearly always working and would continue to do so for some time before we went out. Indeed I remember on one occasion when we had planned to have lunch together he said to me, ‘Just wait a minute until I finish this’, and then continued to write for two hours without saying a word. When he did finish he seemed quite unaware that it was now long past our lunch time. * I introduced him to the Botanical Gardens at Glasnevin, and he often went there alone. He found the heated Palm House very congenial to work in during the winter, and would often sit on a step there with his small notebook for long periods * Walking in Phoenix Park one afternoon: drury: I sometimes regret the amount of time I spent in reading the great historical

philosophers, at a time when I couldn’t understand them. wittgenstein: drury:

I don’t regret that you did all that reading.

But I have forgotten so much of what I spent so much labour on.

wittgenstein:

The mind has its own secretory organ just as the body has; and that is a good thing too. We talked for a time about the history of philosophy. wittgenstein: drury:

Kant and Berkeley seem to me to be very deep thinkers.

What about Hegel?

Conversations with Wittgenstein

135

wittgenstein:

No, I don’t think I would get on with Hegel. Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: ‘I’ll teach you differences.’ [Then laughing:) The remark ‘You’d be surprised’ wouldn’t be a bad motto either. drury:

At one time reading Kierkegaard so disturbed me that I couldn’t sleep.

wittgenstein:

It may be that you ought not to read Kierkegaard. I couldn’t read him again now. He is too long-winded; he keeps on saying the same thing over and over again. When I read him I always wanted to say, ‘Oh all right, I agree, I agree, but please get on with it.’42 drury:

It is remarkable that Kant’s fundamental ideas didn’t come to him till he was middle-aged. wittgenstein: drury:

My fundamental ideas came to me very early in life.

Schopenhauer?

wittgenstein:

No; I think I see quite clearly what Schopenhauer got out of his philosophy – but when I read Schopenhauer I seem to see to the bottom very easily. He is not deep in the sense that Kant and Berkeley are deep. drury:

I have been trying to read Plato’s Parmenides, and haven’t been able to make head nor tail of it. wittgenstein:

That dialogue seems to me among the most profound of Plato’s

writings. drury:

Did you ever read anything of Aristotle’s?

wittgenstein:

Here I am, a one-time professor of philosophy who has never read a word of Aristotle! * I told Wittgenstein that I would like to give him a record player and some records of his own choice, so that when he wanted a rest from his writing he could listen to music. wittgenstein: That would never do. It would be like giving me a box of chocolates;

I wouldn’t know when to stop eating. But you ought to listen to music when you are tired after your work. And so the very next morning he had delivered at my rooms a wireless set. * I noticed in the paper that there was to be a discussion on the Third Programme between Ayer and Fr Copleston on ‘The Existence of God’. I mentioned this to Wittgenstein. wittgenstein:

[laughing] Oh, we mustn’t miss that – Ayer discussing with a Jesuit, that would be too much to miss.

136

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

So on the evening concerned he came up to my room, and we listened to the talk. Wittgenstein said nothing while the broadcast was continuing, but the changing expression on his face was itself a commentary on what was being said. When it was over: wittgenstein: Ayer has something to say, but he is incredibly shallow. Fr Copleston

contributed nothing at all to the discussion.

1949 For the first time he talked to me about his present writing. He showed me the ‘duck–rabbit’ picture (P II 194). wittgenstein:

Now you try and say what is involved in seeing something as something; it is not easy. These thoughts I am now working at are as hard as granite. drury:

James Ward used to say ‘Denken ist schwer.’

wittgenstein:

Yes, that must have been a frequent remark of his. Moore quoted him as saying that. But I wouldn’t say now ‘Thinking is hard.’ There is I believe a stage in philosophy where a person feels that. This material I am working at is as hard as granite but I know how to go about it. Then we went for a walk in the park. wittgenstein:

Broad was quite right when he said of the Tractatus that it was highly syncopated. Every sentence in the Tractatus should be seen as the heading of a chapter, needing further exposition. My present style is quite different; I am trying to avoid that error. I thought when I gave up my professorship that I had at last got rid of my vanity. Now I find I am vain about the style in which I am able to write my present book. I would like it if some day you were able to read what I am writing now. My type of thinking is not wanted in this present age, I have to swim so strongly against the tide. Perhaps in a hundred years people will really want what I am writing. It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?43 Later on in the walk: wittgenstein:

I have been wondering what title to give my book. I have thought of something like ‘Philosophical Remarks’. drury:

Why not just call it ‘Philosophy’?

wittgenstein:

[angrily] Don’t be such an ass – how could I use a word like that which has meant so much in the history of human thought? As if my work was anything more than just a small fragment of philosophy.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

137

The next day, he told me that he had dictated from his manuscript to a typist in Cambridge. wittgenstein:

What I was dictating to her must have seemed completely incomprehensible; yet she never asked me to explain what it was all about. An excellent trait. * One day, walking in the Zoological Gardens, we admired the immense variety of flowers, shrubs, trees, and the similar multiplicity of birds, reptiles, animals. wittgenstein:

I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn’t account for all this variety of species. It hasn’t the necessary multiplicity. Nowadays some people are fond of saying that at last evolution has produced a species that is able to understand the whole process which gave it birth. Now that you can’t say. drury: You could say that now there has evolved a strange animal that collects other

animals and puts them in gardens. But you can’t bring the concepts of knowledge and understanding into this series. They are different categories entirely. wittgenstein:

Yes, you could put it that way. *

I told Wittgenstein I was reading some of the early Church Fathers, at the moment Tertullian. wittgenstein:

I am glad you are doing that. You should continue to do so.

drury:

I had been reading Origen before. Origen taught that at the end of time there would be a final restitution of all things. That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory. This was a conception that appealed to me – but it was at once condemned as heretical. wittgenstein:

Of course it was rejected. It would make nonsense of everything else. If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with. Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical. Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic. drury:

Yes I do feel that, when, say, Plato talks about the gods, it lacks that sense of awe which you feel throughout the Bible – from Genesis to Revelation.* ‘But who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth?’ wittgenstein:

(standing still and looking at me very intently) I think you have just said something very important. Much more important than you realize. *

* Now that Simone Weil has taught me how to understand Plato, I would bite my tongue out rather than make such a remark.

138

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

During this winter when Wittgenstein was staying in the hotel, he asked me from time to time to borrow books from The Royal Dublin Society’s library, of which I was a member. It interested me to notice that what he generally wanted to read was history. Among the books I remember him reading were: Macaulay’s Critical and Historical Essays, Livy’s account of the (?second)44 Punic War, Morley’s Life of Cromwell, Ségur’s L’Histoire de Napoléon and Bismarck’s Gedanken und Erinnerungen (this latter was his own copy and not borrowed from the library). Once when we were out walking and passed some modern houses he referred to a quotation from Southey’s Colloquies, which Macaulay had ridiculed in his review of the book. wittgenstein:

Southey was quite right. Concerning these houses: ‘Time will not mellow them; nature will neither clothe nor conceal them; and they will remain always as offensive to the eye as to the mind.’ This remark of Southey’s had obviously so impressed him that he could repeat it verbatim. On another occasion he said how interesting it was that Livy could not conceal his admiration for Hannibal. He particularly liked the incident when, after the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal had the field of battle searched for the bodies of the two consuls in order that he could show his respect for them. * An incident which seemed to me to illustrate two traits especially characteristic of Wittgenstein: one, his close observation of details, and second, the ‘finality’, once his mind was made up, which made it hard to persuade him that he had been mistaken. When I arrived at the hotel he was sitting in the hall waiting for me. wittgenstein: There is a woman staying here at the moment who dresses superbly.

She can’t be English, for no English woman would have such good taste. She must be from some Continental country. If we wait here a minute she will be coming down the stairs and I will point her out to you. A few minutes later the lady appeared. drury:

Oh, I know who she is quite well. She used to live in Exeter many years ago and is now married and living near Dublin. She is English. wittgenstein:

[looking very sceptical] I find it hard to believe you.

And indeed I don’t think he was convinced that I was not making a mistake. Then we went out for our walk. drury:

I was listening, on the radio you gave me, to a recording of Pablo Casals playing unaccompanied cello. wittgenstein:

I once heard Casals playing in the Albert Hall; and do you know, he was able to fill that huge building with the sound of his cello alone. It was a wonderful performance.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

139

drury:

The present-day recording on long-playing records is a great improvement on the old recordings we used to listen to in Cambridge. wittgenstein:

It is so characteristic that, just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played. * I went to see Wittgenstein in a state of considerable distress. What had happened was this. I had been admitting to the hospital a female patient for the treatment of chronic alcohol addiction. She was very drunk and on arriving in the ward had become very abusive to the nurses, using particularly obscene language. I tried to get her to drink a draught of paraldehyde to sedate her, but she managed to throw the glass and its contents in my face. I lost my temper completely and had to retire from the ward, apologizing to the nurses and asking one of my colleagues to take over. I described all this to Wittgenstein, and told him I felt I was unsuited to this work and should resign my post. I was grateful that he did not try to minimize the seriousness of what had happened. wittgenstein:

You were right to apologize to the nurses. But you shouldn’t give up your work just because of this incident. One keeps stumbling and falling, stumbling and falling, and the only thing to do is to pick oneself up and try to go on again. At least, that is what I have had to do all my life. It has often worried me that if you should make a serious mistake in your work you would suffer terribly. * Walking in Phoenix Park: wittgenstein: drury:

Drury, what is your favourite Gospel?

I don’t think I have ever asked myself that question.

wittgenstein:

Mine is St Matthew’s. Matthew seems to me to contain everything. Now, I can’t understand the Fourth Gospel. When I read those long discourses, it seems to me as if a different person is speaking than in the synoptic Gospels. The only incident that reminds me of the others is the story of the woman taken in adultery. drury:

That passage is not found in any of the best manuscripts, and most scholars consider it a later addition. In some manuscripts it is found in St Luke’s Gospel. wittgenstein:

When I spoke to S—— about my difficulty in understanding the Fourth Gospel, he looked at me with such a strange smile. I couldn’t describe it to you. S—— is the most religious man I have ever met. I would see nothing wrong in it if he became a Roman Catholic priest — of course I know he can’t now because he is married. We continued to talk for some time about the New Testament.

140

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

wittgenstein:

If you can accept the miracle that God became man, then all these difficulties are as nothing. For then it is impossible for me to say what form the record of such an event should take. drury:

One of the early Church Fathers, Lactantius I think, said something like that. Novels and plays must indeed be probable, but why should this, the scheme of man’s redemption, be probable? wittgenstein:

I am glad to hear that I had the same thought as one of the Church Fathers. At one time I thought that the Epistles of St Paul were a different religion to that of the Gospels.45 But now I see clearly that I was wrong. It is one and the same religion in both the Gospels and the Epistles. * We were walking in the Botanical Gardens, and began to discuss architecture. wittgenstein:

The Cathedral of St Basil in the Kremlin is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. There is a story – I don’t know whether it is true but I hope it is – that when Ivan the Terrible saw the completed cathedral he had the architect blinded so that he would never design anything more beautiful. I was so shocked by Wittgenstein’s hoping that this horrible story was true, that I could make no adequate reply;46 I merely shook my head. * Another day walking in Phoenix Park: wittgenstein:

Drury, you have lived a most remarkable life. First those years in Cambridge studying philosophy; then as a medical student; then the war experiences – and now all this new work in psychiatry. drury:

There is one thing about it that I feel is all wrong with me: I have not lived a religious life. wittgenstein:

It has troubled me that, in some way I never intended, your getting to know me has made you less religious than you would have been had you never met me. drury:

That thought has troubled me too.

wittgenstein:

I believe it is right to try experiments in religion. To find out, by trying, what helps one and what doesn’t. When I was a prisoner of war in Italy, I was very glad when we were compelled to attend mass. Now why don’t you see if starting the day by going to mass each morning doesn’t help you to begin the day in a good frame of mind? I don’t mean for one moment that you should become a Roman Catholic. I think that would be all wrong for you. It seems to me that your religion will always take the form of desiring something you haven’t yet found. drury:

You remember a long time ago when we talked about Lessing – Lessing saying that he would choose the gift in the left hand, the striving after truth, rather than the possession of absolute truth.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

141

wittgenstein:

That might be all right for Lessing to say. But I can see that there is a much deeper state of mind than Lessing expressed there. drury:

I don’t think what you suggest about mass would help me. I still prefer the English liturgy, with which I have been familiar since childhood, to the inaudible service in Latin. wittgenstein:

Yes, I can understand that.

drury:

However, I think a child brought up in the colourful symbolism of the Roman Catholic liturgy would get a stronger and deeper impression of religious awe than one brought up in the plainer Protestant tradition. wittgenstein:

I don’t agree with you at all. I would much prefer to see a child educated by a decent Protestant pastor than by a greasy Roman Catholic priest. When I look at the faces of the clergy here in Dublin, it seems to me that the Protestant ministers look less smug than the Roman priests. I suppose it is because they know that they are such a small minority. Later, on the same walk: wittgenstein:

I am glad that you raised that point about the education of children. I see the matter quite clearly now. I have recently been reading a book in which the author blames Calvin for the rise of our present bourgeois civilization. I can see how easy it would be to make such a thesis plausible; but I, for my part, wouldn’t dare to criticize a man such as Calvin must have been. drury:

But Calvin had Michael Servetus burnt for heresy!

wittgenstein:

Tell me about that.

So I told him at some length the story of Servetus’s heretical book about the Trinity; and how he had deliberately come into the church at Geneva in the middle of Calvin’s sermon. wittgenstein:

Whew! He deliberately courted his own death. What else could Calvin, believing as he did, have done than have Servetus arrested? * It was at this time that Wittgenstein complained to me that he was feeling ill. He complained of a recurrent pain in his right arm and a general feeling of exhaustion. I advised him to let me make an appointment for him to see the Professor of Medicine in Trinity College. I had at one time been taught by this doctor and had a high opinion of his diagnostic ability. Wittgenstein agreed to let me make this appointment. wittgenstein:

Yes, I will go and see this man; only I want you to tell him I am a man of intelligence who likes to be told exactly what is found wrong – to have things explained to me frankly. The upshot of this consultation was that Wittgenstein was admitted to hospital for a full investigation. I went to visit him while he was in hospital. He talked to me about his previous experience, in Guy’s Hospital, when he had his gall-bladder removed.

142

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

wittgenstein:

I insisted that I should be given a spinal anaesthetic, although both the surgeon and the anaesthetist tried to persuade me to have a general anaesthetic. I also wanted them to fit up a mirror so that I could watch what they were doing, but this they absolutely refused to do. However, it didn’t matter in the end, since I could see everything reflected in the lamp over the operating table. For several days after, I had an appalling headache, and was then told that this was often the case after a spinal anaesthetic. Now if only they had had the sense to tell me this beforehand I would have agreed to the general anaesthetic. There was a wonderful night nurse at Guy’s. I used to tell her that if I was asleep when she came round, she was to wake me in order that I could have the pleasure of talking to her. Wasn’t it ridiculous that, when they built the York Clinic at Guy’s for psychiatric patients, they made no provision for a garden in which the patients could walk. Every mental hospital ought to have a large garden where patients can stroll and rest. The only findings made, as a result of the investigation in hospital, were that he had an unexplained anaemia. He was started on the necessary treatment for this, and from time to time had to go back to the laboratory for tests of improvement. wittgenstein:

What does please me is that when I go to have my blood test the doctor first examines the colour of my conjunctiva, before taking a specimen for the biochemical test. Nowadays doctors are so afraid of not being scientific that they neglect such simple procedures. After he had been some time on treatment he expressed himself as feeling much stronger and no longer troubled by the pain in his arm. He told me that he had had an invitation to spend a long visit with a former pupil and friend of his in America, and that he had decided to spend the summer there and return to Ross’s Hotel for the coming winter. I went down, the evening before he was due to leave Dublin, to help him to pack and decide what he would take with him. He was packing up his large pile of notebooks, manuscripts and typescripts. wittgenstein:

I have had a letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. In it he says he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God’s will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God’s will. Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbuchlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work.47 * I had at one time told Wittgenstein that if ever he needed to see a doctor when in Cambridge, he should consult Dr Edward Bevan. I had got to know Dr Bevan when we were in the same unit in the army, and he had impressed me as the ideal of what a general practitioner should be. On his way back from his stay in America.48 Wittgenstein had been taken seriously ill when staying with Professor von Wright in Cambridge, and he went to see Dr Bevan. I then had a telephone message from Dr Bevan to say that he had made a certain diagnosis of carcinoma of the prostate

Conversations with Wittgenstein

143

gland. This is a type of cancer that often responds well to hormone therapy, and life can be prolonged for years.49 Wittgenstein himself wrote to me that he would now not return to Dublin but remain in England, where his treatment could be supervised. He said he had a horror of the idea of dying in an English hospital, but that Dr Bevan had promised that, if it became necessary, he could spend his last days being looked after in Dr Bevan’s own house.

1951 On my way back from my honeymoon in Italy I went up to Cambridge to see Wittgenstein, who was now living in Dr Bevan’s house. He looked very ill, but was as alert and lively as ever. wittgenstein:

It was such a relief to me when the doctors told me that there was now no use continuing the hormone50 and X-ray treatment; and that I could not expect to live more than a few months. You know that all my life I have been inclined to criticize doctors. But now at the end of my life I have had the good fortune to meet three really good doctors. First, the professor you introduced me to in Dublin, then the doctor Malcolm got me to see in America, and now Dr Bevan. Isn’t it curious that, although I know I have not long to live, I never find myself thinking about a ‘future life’. All my interest is still on this life and the writing I am still able to do. We talked for a time about my visit to Italy; and he told me about Goethe’s visit to Italy and the deep impression it had made on him. Somehow – I can’t remember quite how – the conversation came round again to talk about the Bible. drury:

There are some passages in the Old Testament that I find very offensive. For instance, the story where some children mock Elisha for his baldness: ‘Go up, thou bald head.’ And God sends bears out of the forest to eat them. wittgenstein:

[very sternly] You mustn’t pick and choose just what you want in

that way. drury:

But I have never been able to do anything else.

wittgenstein:

Just remember what the Old Testament meant to a man like Kierkegaard. After all, children have been killed by bears. drury:

Yes, but we ought to think that such a tragedy is a direct punishment from God for a particular act of wickedness. In the New Testament we are told the precise opposite – the men on whom the Tower of Siloam fell were not more wicked than anyone else. wittgenstein:

That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. You don’t understand, you are quite out of your depth. I did not know how to reply to this. It seemed to me that the conversation was distasteful to him, and I did not say anything further.

144

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

After a pause we began to talk about more trivial matters. When the time came for me to go to the station, Wittgenstein insisted on coming with me although. I tried to persuade him he should not do anything to tire himself. On the way to the station he suddenly referred to our dispute over the Old Testament. wittgenstein:

I must write you a letter about that.

Just before the train pulled out he said to me, ‘Drury, whatever becomes of you, don’t stop thinking.’ These were the last words I ever had from him. * I had only been back in Dublin a few days when I had a telephone message from Dr Bevan to say that Wittgenstein was dying and had asked me to come. I started at once. When I arrived at the house, Dr Bevan met me at the door, and told me, ‘Miss Anscombe, Richards and Smythies are already here. Smythies has brought with him a Dominican priest whom Wittgenstein already knew. Wittgenstein was already unconscious when they came, and no one will decide whether the priest should say the usual office for the dying and give conditional absolution.’ I remembered the occasion when Wittgenstein had said he hoped his Catholic friends prayed for him, and I said at once that whatever was customary should be done. We then all went up to Wittgenstein’s room, and, kneeling down, the priest recited the proper prayers. Soon after, Dr Bevan pronounced Wittgenstein dead. There was then much hesitation about what arrangements should be made about the funeral. No one seemed ready to speak up. drury:

I remember that Wittgenstein once told me of an incident in Tolstoy’s life. When Tolstoy’s brother died, Tolstoy, who was then a stern critic of the Russian Orthodox Church, sent for the parish priest and had his brother interred according to the Orthodox rite. ‘Now’, said Wittgenstein, ‘that is exactly what I should have done in a similar case.’ When I mentioned this, everyone agreed that all the usual Roman Catholic prayers should be said by a priest at the graveside. This was done the next morning. But I have been troubled ever since as to whether what we did then was right.

NOTES BY RUSH RHEES 1. Cf. a passage written in 1937:  In religion every level of devoutness must have its appropriate form of expression which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at the lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person.    For instance, at my level the Pauline doctrine of predestination is ugly nonsense, irreligiousness. Hence it is not suitable for me, since the only use I could make of the picture I am offered would be a wrong one. If it is a good and godly picture, then it is so for someone at a quite different level, who must use it in his life in a way completely

Conversations with Wittgenstein

145

different from anything that would be possible for me. (C 32): [‘C’ in these notes refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, see full reference above: p. 66., note 55]. 2. In a letter to Russell, dated 22 June 1912, Wittgenstein wrote:  Whenever I have time I now read James’s ‘Varieties of religious experience’. This book does me a lot of good. I don’t mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not sure that it does not improve me a little in a way in which I would like to improve very much: namely I think that it helps me to get rid of the Sorge (in the sense in which Goethe used the word in the 2nd part of Faust). (Cam., p. 34) 3. In a manuscript of 1931 Wittgenstein wrote, with square brackets to separate it from the philosophical questions he was discussing: ‘Within Christianity it’s as though God says to men: Don’t act a tragedy, that’s to say, don’t enact heaven and hell on earth. Heaven and hell are my affair’ [C14]. 4. Cf. pp. 161–2 below. 5. Dawes Hicks was at that time Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in University College, London; he lived in Cambridge after retiring. The Moral Science Club is now called the Philosophical Society. 6. In Swansea, introducing a discussion on free will, I gave as an example: ‘With a little effort I could have controlled myself, and not have spoken to him so sharply.’ In the discussion Wittgenstein said, ‘That is something that happens to me every day.’ And later, ‘And yet, you know that at the time you couldn’t have.’ 7. Years later Wittgenstein said to me: ‘You know I said I can stop doing philosophy when I like. That is a lie! I can’t.’ 8. The question mark is Drury’s. The first remark in quotes was probably in 1930, when Drury was still an undergraduate in Cambridge, anyway. The reference to Russell’s exclusion from a professorship at the City College of New York must have been after the autumn of 1940. 9. Prayers and Meditations composed by Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Third edition. H. R. Allenson, Limited, London: no date (but apparently 1826 or 1827). (The first edition appeared in 1785.) pp. 161–2 below 10. I intended to ask Drury about this sentence when I read it in the draft he showed me. I wondered if Wittgenstein had given a special emphasis to ‘stand up to’: whether these words should be in italics. 11. At the time of this conversation he was writing what is now in Philosophical Remarks. 12. Sir James Jeans, Cambridge, 1930. Wittgenstein’s copy has a few pencilled comments in the margins; the last is on p. 53. 13. A Course of Six Lectures on the Chemical History of a Candle (London, 1861). Faraday gave these lectures for the sons and daughters of the Royal Institution of London in 1860. The lectures were published not by Faraday, who did not write them down, but by a young scientist, William Crookes, from a verbatim transcript made for him by a stenographer (pace the dons of Oxford and the TLS). 14. Later, e.g. in 1937, Wittgenstein said he wanted to avoid this way of speaking, since it led to perplexities and confusion. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Ursache und Wirkung: Intuitives Erfassen’ [‘Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness’], Philosophia 6 (1976), 391–445. 15. Although of course Wittgenstein had read it many times himself, and so had Moore.

146

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

16. Mr Raymond Townsend gave Wittgenstein a copy of the one-volume abridged edition in 1936. 17. Piero Sraffa, economist and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Wittgenstein, in his preface to Philosophical Investigations, speaks of his special indebtedness to conversations with Sraffa. And he valued Sraffa’s judgements of practical affairs more than those of anyone else, I think. 18. Now the University of Newcastle. 19. This was in July and August 1920, at Klosterneuburg and in Hütteldorf; just before Wittgenstein started work as an elementary schoolteacher. See the two letters from Wittgenstein to Engelmann, dated 19 July 1920 and [20 August 1920] [E 34–7], in Paul Engelman, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), pp. 34-7. 20. This was in July 1935; see L 132–7. Drury’s ‘1934’ for this entry must have been a slip. 21. William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (3 vols, London, 1843), vol. 2, pp. 175–6. 22. The home of Drury’s family. 23. John 16:7. 24. In Lessing’s Theologische Streitschriften, ‘Eine Duplik’ (1778). See Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Sämmtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachman, 3rd revised ed. by Franz Muncker, 23 vols (Stuttgart, 1886–95; Leipzig, 1897–1907; Berlin and Leipzig, 1915–24; complete photographic reprint, Berlin, 1968), vol. 13 (Leipzig, 1897), pp. 23–4. Perhaps for the sense of Lessing’s remark I should give the passage immediately preceding the one Drury quotes in translation, together with the original of the latter:  Nicht die Wahrheit, in deren Besitz irgend ein Mensch ist, oder zu sein vermeinet, sondern die aufrichtige Mühe, die er angewandt hat, hinter die Wahrheit zu kommen, macht den Wert des Menschen. Denn nicht durch den Besitz, sondern durch die Nachforschung der Wahrheit erweitern sich seine Kräfte, worin allein seine immer wachsende Vollkommenheit bestehet. Der Besitz macht ruhig, träge, stolz –    Wenn Gott in seiner Rechten alle Wahrheit, und in seiner Linken den einzigen immer regen Trieb nach Wahrheit, obschon mit dem Zusatze, mich immer und ewig zu irren, verschlossen hielte, und spräche zu mir: wähle! Ich fiele ihm mit Demut in seine Linke, und sagte: Vater gieb! die reine Wahrheit ist ja doch nur für dich allein! An English version of the first paragraph might be:  It is not the truth which anyone possesses, or thinks he does, but rather the pains he has taken to get to the bottom of the truth, that makes a man’s worth. For it is not in having the truth but in searching for it that those powers increase in him in which alone lies his ever-growing perfection. The possession makes one placid, lazy, proud. 25. As Wittgenstein told it to me, it was a sort of game which Paul’s friends often played with him. He was incredibly learned, and had a very large library of music scores. While he looked the other way, a friend would take some score from the shelves, open it and cover over all but two or three bars, and show him this bit. Paul Wittgenstein could always say in what work it came. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s comment to me was a gesture and ‘If you are learned, you are learned.’ Although he disliked his brother’s playing, he respected his ‘phenomenal technique’; especially after he lost his right arm, but before then as well.

Conversations with Wittgenstein

147

26. An isolated remark in one of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts: ‘Don’t play with what lies deep in another person!’ [C23]. 27. Obviously this entry should have come earlier. 28. The actual wording in the Prayer Book is ‘renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh’. 29. See: p. 162 below. 30. Edited by Cyril Barrett (Oxford, 1968). The editor emphasizes in his preface that these notes are nothing that Wittgenstein wrote or would have written. 31. Luke 1:28: ‘Und der Engel kam zu ihr hinein, und sprach: Gegrüsset seist du, Holdselige!’ 32. Wittgenstein left a small legacy to Mr Fouracre in his will. 33. This may have been at the end of March or beginning of April 1943. He wrote to me from Guy’s Hospital on I April 1943, and came to Swansea for a week in the middle of April. I think he went to Newcastle soon after that. I visited him there in September 1943. 34. See: p. 156 below. 35. The 3rd and 5th stanzas of ‘Night’, in Songs of Innocence. 36. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 37. From The Everlasting Gospel. 38. Cf. two remarks of 1946: ‘Madness need not be regarded as an illness. Why shouldn’t it be seen as a sudden – more or less sudden – change of character?’ [C 54]; ‘“It is high time for us to compare these phenomena with something different” – one may say. – I am thinking, e.g., of mental illnesses’ [C 55]. 39. I was in Dublin for a few weeks about this time, to see both Wittgenstein and Drury. Wittgenstein was worried for Drury’s health (he had been ill about two years earlier), and he spoke to me about it: the intensity with which Drury kept his gaze fixed on hospital duties, day in day out, as though walking along a road with high walls on each side, and nothing to see ahead but the road.   In January 1949, Wittgenstein wrote in a notebook: ‘The Sabbath is not simply a time for rest, for relaxation. We ought to contemplate our labours from without and not just from within’ [C 80]. 40. Wittgenstein may have been half remembering his own experience as a patient in Guy’s Hospital after an operation for removal of the gall-bladder, in 1942. He spoke to me especially of the unimaginativeness of one young doctor who would ‘make the rounds’ of the ward in the morning: He would come and stand above my bed, and talk to me – a somewhat elderly professor – in a way in which I would never talk to a schoolboy: “Well; how are you?”’ As Wittgenstein imitated the tone of voice, it might have been a quartermaster-sergeant. He could not have imagined any such trait in Drury; at most he may have feared what hospital routine would do to him. 41. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studien über Hysterie (1st ed., Leipzig and Vienna, 1895); in English, Studies on Hysteria, ed. and trans. James and Alix Strachey (London, 1956). In the course of a passage which Wittgenstein wrote in 1939 or 1940, he said: ‘I have always believed – without knowing why – that the real germ of psychoanalysis came from Breuer, not Freud. Of course Breuer’s seed-grain can only have been quite tiny’ [C 36]. 42. See: p. 157 below.

148

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

3. See: p. 150 below. 4 44. The only Livy I found among Wittgenstein’s books is a school edition of Books 21–3. This was a second-hand copy, which Wittgenstein could not have bought before 1929, and I imagine he got it in 1942. He has written German equivalents of some phrases between the lines. I think it was one of a half-dozen books which Wittgenstein left in Dublin.   In the autumn of 1942 he wrote to me that he was doing some reading, ‘and not just detective stories’; that he was reading Cicero – ‘which on the whole bores me’ – and Livy’s account of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy; ‘this interests me immensely’. He was still working in Guy’s Hospital, going to Cambridge each Saturday to give a lecture. In November (1942) he wrote to me that he was lecturing on the foundations of mathematics; and ‘I’m afraid I’ve no time now to read any Latin – not that that worries me.’   In 1944 – I think – he was reading something of Leopold von Ranke’s. He was interested in the way in which Ranke would give a careful account of events leading up to some occurrence, and then say something like: ‘In these circumstances it was inevitable that . . .’, as though no one could have imagined things going in any other way. He was also reading in Eduard Meyer’s Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1921–3) and his Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen (Halle a.S., 1912). 45. Cf. a remark written in 1937: ‘The spring which flows gently and limpidly in the Gospels . . . ‘ [C 30]. 46. At an earlier time Wittgenstein had spoken of this, when Drury and I were both present; and after ‘I hope it is true’ he added with great feeling, almost awe: ‘What a wonderful way of showing his admiration!’ Drury said, ‘A horrible way’, and I think I agreed. I now think this was irrelevant, i.e. that Wittgenstein might have admitted it, without in any way changing the feeling he’d just expressed. And what he felt about Ivan’s move could not be separated from what he (Wittgenstein) felt in seeing and remembering the cathedral. I think that his ‘What a wonderful way of showing his admiration!’ is akin to what he might have said of certain forms of human sacrifice as a gesture of deepest reverence. If we had said ‘But it’s horrible!’ he’d have said this showed we didn’t know what was taking place. 47. See: p. 150 below. 48. His way back to Ross’s Hotel in Dublin. (He had already been seriously ill during his stay with Professor Malcolm in America. Cf. Malcolm’s Memoir, p. 94.) 49. In a letter of 4 December – roughly a fortnight after the diagnosis – Wittgenstein wrote to me: ‘I am getting slowly better and the doctor tells me that after some months I may be well enough to work . . . I am sorry that my life should be prolonged in this way. It was a great shock to me to hear of this possibility.’ Cf. the passage from a similar letter printed in Malcolm’s Memoir, p. 95. Earlier Wittgenstein had written that the cancer was inoperable. Drury told me later that this was because secondary cancerous growths had developed and had entered his spine. 50. About six weeks before his death (five weeks before this visit of Drury’s) Wittgenstein found he was able to do good work again. From the end of November 1949 to, roughly, the end of February 1951, he was, as he wrote to me, ‘letting the hormones do their work’, and more often than not he felt that he could not write anything worth putting down. He recovered his power of mind when he left off the hormones

Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein M. O’C. DRURY

In his Biographical Sketch of Ludwig Wittgenstein Professor G. H. von Wright speaks of the multiplicity of the interpretations that have been put on Wittgenstein’s writings, and that such interpretations have little significance. He ends his Sketch with the thought-provoking sentence: ‘I have sometimes thought that what makes a man’s work classic is often just this multiplicity, which invites and at the same time resists our craving for a clear understanding.’ Now in what I have to say here I will be concerned with this multiplicity, with this resistance to a clear understanding. I am going to suggest that there are dimensions in Wittgenstein’s teaching that are still ignored or ‘watered down’ (to use his own expression). I will begin by drawing attention to two aspects of Wittgenstein’s personality which all who knew him will at once recognize. First then this. Wittgenstein knew that he had an exceptional talent for philosophical discussion. He once said to me: ‘It made an enormous difference to my life when I discovered that there really was a subject for which I had a special ability.’ Yet whilst knowing this, for the greater part of his life he was making plans to forsake this work and to live an entirely different mode of existence to that of an academic philosopher. After the First World War he worked for a time as a village schoolmaster in a remote part of Austria. He worked as an architect building a house for his sister. (On one occasion he said to me: ‘You think philosophy is hard enough, but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulties involved in architecture.’) Later he thought seriously of going to live in Russia, but not to teach philosophy there, and he took the trouble of becoming competent in speaking Russian. Later he considered studying medicine and asked me to make enquiries about the possibility of his entering the medical school here in Dublin. During the Second World War he worked first as a hospital porter in London and then later, when requested to do so, did some independent work in the physiology of shock. Dr Grant, the chief of the team who had requested Wittgenstein to do this research, said to him: ‘What a pity you are a philosopher and not a physiologist.’ Now we may indeed be glad that nothing final came of these various plans, and that he continued to work at his philosophical writings up to a few days before his death. But I am certain that we will not understand Wittgenstein unless we feel some sympathy and comprehension for this persistent intention to change his whole manner of life. These plans of his were not just a transitory impatience but a

150

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

conviction that persisted for years until the time came when he realized that such a change was no longer a possibility. I once got an inkling as to what was behind this intense desire to change his manner of life when he said to me: ‘I thought when I gave up my professorship that I had at last got rid of my vanity. Now I find I am vain about the style in which I am able to write my present book.’ (This remark referred to the style of Part II of the Philosophical Investigations, which Professor von Wright thinks will one day rank among the classic examples of German prose.) Intellectual vanity, whether in himself or in others, was something that Wittgenstein detested. I believe he considered it more important to be free from all trace of vanity than to achieve a great reputation in philosophy. He once said to me: ‘Wounded vanity is the most terrible force in the world. The source of the greatest evil.’ And again on another occasion: ‘A philosopher should enjoy no more prestige than a plumber!’ But then as against this I must record him saying: ‘Don’t think I despise metaphysics. I regard some of the great philosophical systems of the past as among the noblest productions of the human mind.’ At one time when we were out walking together he discussed with me what title he should give to the book he was then writing (the work that was later called Philosophical Investigations). I foolishly suggested that he should call it ‘Philosophy’. wittgenstein:

[angrily] Don’t be such an ass – how could I use a word like that which has meant so much in the history of human thought? As if my work was anything more than just a small fragment of philosophy. * Then secondly this, though closely connected with what I have just said. Throughout his life Wittgenstein was convinced that he could not make himself understood. Thus in a letter to Russell about the manuscript of the Tractatus he wrote: ‘In fact you would not understand it without a previous explanation as it’s written in quite short remarks. (This of course means that nobody will understand it; although I believe, it’s all as clear as crystal . . .)’ (L 68). In the introduction to the Philosophical Remarks he wrote: I would like to say, ‘This book is written to the glory of God’, but nowadays this would be the trick of a cheat, i.e. it would not be correctly understood. It means the book was written in good will, and so far as it was not but was written from vanity etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot make it more free of these impurities than he is himself. [R 7, translated by Rush Rhees] I would dwell on this quotation for a moment. It implies that words which in one age could be correctly used can at a later date be ‘the words of a cheat’; because if these words are constantly used in a superficial way they become so muddied that the road can no longer be trodden. (This metaphor of a road that has become so muddied that it can no longer be trodden was one of Wittgenstein’s own expressions.) When Wittgenstein sent a copy of the typescript of the ‘Blue Book’ to Russell he said in the covering letter: ‘two years ago I held some lectures in Cambridge and dictated some notes to my pupils so that they might have something to carry

Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein

151

home with them, in their hands if not in their brains . . . (I think it’s very difficult to understand them, as so many points are just hinted at . . . )’ (B v). Again the emphasis on the difficulty of making himself understood. Then in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations comes the sentence: ‘It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another – but of course it is not likely’ [P p. x]. These words, ‘of course it is not likely’, must not be taken as the expression of a temporary petulant pessimism. They are the expression of a lifelong conviction concerning all his writing. When he was working on the latter part of the Philosophical Investigations he told me: ‘It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?’ And about the same date:1 ‘My type of thinking is not wanted in this present age, I have to swim so strongly against the tide. Perhaps in a hundred years people will really want what I am writing.’ Again in the same conversation: ‘I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.’ Now these remarks at once raise for me the question as to whether there are not dimensions in Wittgenstein’s thought that are still largely being ignored. Have I seen that the Philosophical Remarks could have been inscribed ‘to the glory of God’? Or that the problems discussed in the Philosophical Investigations are being seen from a religious point of view? In the prolegomena to his ‘Lecture on Ethics’ Wittgenstein says something that enables me to understand why I get lost in the difficulty of his writings. He says: My third and last difficulty is one which, in fact, adheres to most lengthy philosophical lectures and it is this, that the hearer is incapable of seeing both the road he is led and the goal which it leads to. That is to say: he either thinks: ‘I understand all he says, but what on earth is he driving at?, or else he thinks ‘I see what he’s driving at, but how on earth is he going to get there?’ All I can do is again to ask you to be patient and to hope that in the end you may see both the way and where it leads to. (LE 4) Here I think we have a clear pointer to the reason why there have been such a multiplicity of interpretations of Wittgenstein’s thought, and why, as Professor von Wright says, they have been largely without significance. Some interpreters get lost on the road and do not make us see the goal. Others avoid the labour of the road and try to jump ahead to a summary conclusion. There are two words which were frequently used by Wittgenstein; ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’. I remember him saying: ‘Kant and Berkeley seem to me to be very deep thinkers’; and of Schopenhauer: ‘I seem to see to the bottom very quickly.’ On another occasion when we had been listening to a discussion on the Third Programme between Professor Ayer and Fr Copleston he remarked when it was over: ‘Ayer has something to say, but he is incredibly shallow. Fr Copleston contributed nothing at all to the discussion.’ I told Wittgenstein that I had been to a lecture by Professor A. E. Taylor, the subject being ‘Hume’s Essay on Miracles’. Taylor had ended his lecture with the

152

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

remark: ‘I have never been able to make up my mind as to whether Hume was a great philosopher or only a very clever man.’ wittgenstein:

As to Hume I can’t say, never having read him. But the distinction between a philosopher and a very clever man is a real one and of great importance. Here again I would say the categories of ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ are implied. A very clever man can be shallow, but a true philosopher must be a deep thinker. So that if we are to understand the goal of Wittgenstein’s road and not merely a few steps on the way we must be clear as to the meaning of these two categories. For myself if I had to give a brief definition of this distinction I would say that a shallow thinker may be able to say something clearly but that a deep thinker makes us see that there is something that cannot be said (‘all that music has meant in my life’). In one of the earliest conversations I had with Wittgenstein he told me: ‘Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing; only when everything is in place does the door open.’ In the ‘Blue Book’ he compares philosophy to having to arrange a confusion of books in a library (B 44–5); there are numerous little changes to be made before the final arrangement is arrived at. In the Philosophical Investigations he compares his method to that of teaching someone his way about a strange city; numerous journeys have to be made in which the same place is constantly approached by different routes. Only when many journeys have been made can the learner say ‘now I can find my way about’ (P 18, 123, 203; cf. p. vii). Now in all these comparisons there is the constant idea of a long and even tedious process, which at times must seem trivial, in which the final objective is out of sight, but there is a real goal. A goal, however, which cannot be gained without the labour of the route. It is therefore hazardous, ultimately wrong, to even try to point to the goal without the detail of the method. Yet I am going to try to give some indication as to what I have understood for myself as to the ultimate objective. We are now all familiar with the fact that in writing to Ficker Wittgenstein said of the Tractatus: My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the only rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it. [LF 94–5, translated by B. F. McGuinness]2 Now I am going to venture to state that all the subsequent writings continue this fundamental idea. They all point to an ethical dimension. And they do this by a rigorous drawing of the limits of language so that the ethical is put firmly into place. This limitation has to be done from the inside so that whereas nothing is said about the ethical it is shown by the rigour of the thinking. All the sciences, and what is known as common sense, attempt to say more than we really know. (In the ‘Blue Book’ occurs the key sentence, ‘The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know’ (B 45).) This rigorous drawing of the limits of language demands a form of self-denial, an ethical demand, a renunciation of a very strong tendency in our

Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein

153

nature. Once when I was talking to Wittgenstein about McTaggart’s book The Nature of Existence he said to me: ‘I realize that for some people to have to forsake this kind of thinking demands of them an heroic courage.’ I believe that the difficulty that should be found in understanding Wittgenstein’s writing is not merely an intellectual difficulty but an ethical demand. The simple demand that we should at all times and in all places say no more than we really know. What I have just been saying is made clearer for me when I read again the ‘Lecture on Ethics’. This is the only piece of writing we have where Wittgenstein is speaking to a general audience who had no particular interest or training in philosophy. I will quote some of the passages which are particularly relevant to the point I am trying to make. probably many of you come to this lecture with slightly wrong expectations. And to set you right in this point I will say a few words about the reason for choosing the subject I have chosen: When your former secretary honoured me by asking me to read a paper to your society, my first thought was that I would certainly do it, and my second thought was that if I was to have the opportunity to speak to you I should speak about something which I am keen on communicating to you and that I should not misuse this opportunity (by giving) you a lecture about, say, logic. (LE 3–4) Here we have the definite assertion that he is going to say something that he thinks should be understood by all. Now consider what is the central thought and final conclusion of this lecture. Again I quote: we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water (even) if I were to pour out a gallon over it. (LE 7) Then later on near the end of the lecture he says: I at once see clearly, as it were a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, abinitio, on the ground of its significance . . . My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. (LE 11–12) I would draw attention to the fact that he speaks of ‘my tendency’, that is of something in himself which he feels deeply but has to curb and discipline. This drawing of a firm and unbreakable boundary around the sphere of what can be said

154

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

significantly is not done to condemn or ridicule those who have tried to overleap this boundary; on the contrary, it is done to intensify the very impetus and desire to break out of our cage. To give an example of this. That deeply religious and truly wonderful personality, Simone Weil, starts her essay entitled ‘Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations’ with the sentences: There is a reality outside the world, that is to say outside space and time, outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.3 When I first read this it was indeed the case that ‘Os meum aperui, et attraxi spiritum’,4 but suppose someone was to say to me, ‘What in the world do you mean, outside space and time?’ The word “outside” only has a meaning within the categories of space and time.’ This is a perfectly logical objection: the words ‘outside space and time’ have no more meaning than Plato’s beautiful expression ‘the other side of the sky’. Again if someone was to object, ‘I don’t feel any longing for an absolute good which is never appeased by any object in this world’, how could you arouse such a desire? What right have you to make the psychological assertion that such a desire lies at the centre of every human heart? Yet I believe that Simone Weil is right when she goes on to say that we must never assume that any man, whosoever he may be, has been deprived of the power of having this longing come to birth. But how then can this desire for the absolute good be aroused? Only, I believe, by means of an indirect communication. By so limiting the sphere of ‘what can be said’ that we create a feeling of spiritual claustrophobia.* The dialectic must work from the inside, as it were. There is a latent metaphysics underlying all the natural sciences and even the expressions of everyday speech: this must be exposed and done away with. Then, ‘commonplace materialism and commonplace theology vanish like ghosts’. But this vanishing is painful and makes an ethical demand. I suspect many will feel that I am reading an interpretation into Wittgenstein’s writing that is not really to be found there. And in view of my own disagreement with much that has been written about him, perhaps I am. I come back again to what Professor von Wright describes as the ‘multiplicity’ of interpretations. Of course it is obvious that Wittgenstein was interested in many aspects of philosophy: the foundations of mathematics, symbolic logic, the language of psychology, etc. I am only wishing to maintain that alongside of these specific interests there is to be found an ethical demand, if we are to understand the implications of his work to their full extent. It is this watching brief in the interests of the absolute that gives a depth to his work that I do not find in those who have followed after him or tried to simplify the complexity of his thought. * ‘Diese Angst in der Welt ist aber der einzige Beweis unserer Heterogenität’ (‘But this anxiety in the world is the only proof of our being different from it’) (J. G. Hamann).

Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein

155

My conviction that this is so is reinforced for me by the vivid recollections of some of the conversations I once had with him. I emphasize the word ‘recollection’. I do not believe that my memory deceives me in quoting these remarks and I quote them in direct speech to avoid the constant repetition of ‘he said’ etc. But every time I do so quote him the reader should add the rubric ‘if I remember rightly he said something to this effect’. (When I gave Wittgenstein a copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson he particularly commended the way Boswell was careful to guard his quotations with a similar precaution.) To prevent these memories being too much a record of scattered occasions I will try and bring some order into them by making use of a quotation from Professor von Wright’s Biographical Sketch. He writes: Wittgenstein received deeper impressions from some writers in the borderland between philosophy, religion, and poetry, than from the philosophers, in the restricted sense of the word. Among the former are St Augustine, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The philosophical sections of St Augustine’s Confessions show a striking resemblance to Wittgenstein’s own way of doing philosophy. Between Wittgenstein and Pascal there is a trenchant parallelism which deserves closer study. It should also be mentioned that Wittgenstein held the writings of Otto Weininger in high regard. I will, then, take the above-mentioned names as so many pegs to bring together my recollections of conversations which reinforce my belief that the interpretation I have already tried to indicate is not too far from the mark. I will arrange the names in the chronological order that I remember him first mentioning them to me and not in the order given above.

DOSTOEVSKY AND TOLSTOY In the first serious conversation I ever had with Wittgenstein I told him I had come up to Cambridge with the intention of being ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church. wittgenstein:

I don’t ridicule this. Anyone who ridicules these matters is a charlatan and worse. But I can’t approve, no I can’t approve. You have intelligence; it is not the most important thing, but you can’t neglect it. Just imagine trying to preach a sermon every Sunday: you couldn’t do it, you couldn’t possibly do it. I would be afraid that you would try and elaborate a philosophical interpretation or defence of the Christian religion. The symbolism of Christianity is wonderful beyond words, but when people try to make a philosophical system out of it I find it disgusting. At first sight it would seem an excellent idea that in every village there should be one person who stood for these things, but it hasn’t worked out like that. Russell and the parsons between them have done infinite harm, infinite harm. He then went on to say that there had been only two European writers in recent times who really had something important to say about religion, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

156

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

(It is of interest that on this occasion he did not mention Kierkegaard.) He advised me in the coming vacation to read The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and the short stories of Tolstoy collected under the title Twenty-three Tales. We met again after the vacation and he asked me what impression I had got from this reading. wittgenstein:

When I was a village schoolmaster in Austria after the war I read The Brothers Karamazov over and over again. I read it out loud to the village priest. You know there really have been people like the Elder Zosima who could see into people’s hearts and direct them. drury:

I found Dostoevsky more to my liking than Tolstoy.

wittgenstein:

I don’t agree with you. Those short stories of Tolstoy’s will live for ever. They were written for all peoples. Which one of them was your favourite? drury:

The one entitled ‘What Men Live By’.

wittgenstein:

My favourite is the story of the three hermits who could only pray, ‘You are three we are three have mercy upon us.’ It soon was after this conversation that he mentioned to me that when Tolstoy’s brother died, Tolstoy, who by then was very far from being an Orthodox believer, sent for the parish priest and had his brother buried according to the full Orthodox rite. ‘Now’, said Wittgenstein, ‘that is exactly what I should have done in a similar case.’ (Years later, on the evening on which Wittgenstein died, his friends whom he had sent for, Miss Anscombe, Mr Smythies, Dr Richards and myself, had to decide what should be done about Wittgenstein’s burial. No one would speak up. I then mentioned the above conversation and it was unanimously agreed that a Roman Catholic priest should say the usual committal prayers at the grave-side. This later gave rise to false rumours and I have been troubled ever since as to whether what we then did was right.)

KIERKEGAARD During a discussion after a meeting of the Moral Science Club at Cambridge Wittgenstein mentioned the name of Søren Kierkegaard. I had already come across some quotations from this author in the writings of Baron von Hügel. These quotations had so impressed me that I had anxiously searched the catalogues of the University Library to see if anything by Kierkegaard had been translated into English. My search had been fruitless. So the next day when we were alone I asked Wittgenstein to tell me more about Kierkegaard. wittgenstein:

Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint. He then went on to speak of the three categories of life-style that play such a large part in Kierkegaard’s writing: the aesthetic, where the objective is to get the maximum enjoyment out of this life; the ethical, where the concept of duty demands

Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein

157

renunciation; and the religious, where this very renunciation itself becomes a source of joy. wittgenstein:

Concerning this last category I don’t pretend to understand how it is possible. I have never been able to deny myself anything, not even a cup of coffee if I wanted it. Mind you I don’t believe what Kierkegaard believed, but of this I am certain, that we are not here in order to have a good time. When some years later Kierkegaard was translated into English, largely by Walter Lowrie, Wittgenstein was displeased with the poor style of this translator. He completely failed to reproduce the elegance of the original Danish. Again at a later date Wittgenstein told me that one of his pupils had written to him to say that he had become a Roman Catholic, and that he, Wittgenstein, was partly responsible for this conversion because it was he that had advised the reading of Kierkegaard. Wittgenstein told me he had written back to say: ‘If someone tells me he has bought the outfit of a tightrope-walker I am not impressed until I see what is done with it.’ Nearer the end of his life, during his last stay here in Dublin, I remember that during a walk the subject of Kierkegaard’s writing came up again. drury: Kierkegaard seems to me to be always making one aware of new categories. wittgenstein:

You are quite right, that is exactly what Kierkegaard does, he introduces new categories. I couldn’t read him again now. He is too long-winded; he keeps on saying the same thing over and over again. When I read him I always wanted to say, ‘Oh all right, I agree, I agree, but please get on with it.5 I have recently been reading again Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and certain sentences in this book seem to me to be illustrative of that ethical dimension which I have been trying to draw attention to in Wittgenstein’s writings. And so to try to clarify my point I will quote these sentences here, using David Swenson’s translation. The very maximum of what one human being can do for another in relation to that which each man has to do solely for himself, is to inspire him with concern and unrest. To be outstanding in the religious sphere constitutes a step backward, by virtue of the qualitative dialectic which separates the different spheres from one another. Ethically it would be perhaps the highest pathos to renounce the glittering artistic career without saying a single word. It is rather remarkable that one may precisely by talking about something, prove that one does not talk about that thing; for it would seem that this could only be proved by not talking about it. Dialectics itself does not see the absolute, but it leads, as it were, the individual up to it. I feel inclined to add that, although I never discussed this point with him, I do not think that Wittgenstein would have agreed with Kierkegaard’s frequent use of the

158

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

words ‘the paradox’ and ‘the absurd’. Here surely is an attempt to get beyond the barrier of language.

ST AUGUSTINE I had begun to attend Professor Moore’s lectures. At that time I was unable to appreciate what could be learnt from Moore. At the commencement of his first lecture Moore had read out from the University Calendar the subjects that his professorship required him to lecture on; the last of these was ‘the philosophy of religion’. Moore went on to say that he would be talking about all the previous subjects except this last, concerning which he had nothing to say. I told Wittgenstein that I thought a professor of philosophy had no right to keep silent concerning such an important subject. Wittgenstein immediately asked me if I had available a copy of St Augustine’s Confessions. I handed him my Loeb edition. He must have known his way about the book thoroughly for he found the passage he wanted in a few seconds. wittgenstein:

You are saying something like St Augustine says here. ‘Et vae tacentibus de te quoniam loquaces muti sunt.’ But this translation in your edition misses the point entirely. It reads, ‘And woe to those who say nothing concerning thee seeing that those who say most are dumb.’ It should be translated. ‘And woe to those who say nothing concerning thee just because the chatterboxes talk a lot of nonsense.’ ‘Loquaces’ is a term of contempt. I won’t refuse to talk to you about God or about religion. He went on to say that he considered St Augustine’s Confessions possibly ‘the most serious book ever written’. He had tried to read The City of God but had been unable to get on with it. A short time after this I mentioned to Wittgenstein that I was reading Dr Tennant’s book entitled Philosophical Theology, which had just been published. wittgenstein: drury:

A title like that sounds to me as if it would be something indecent.

Tennant tries to revive in a complicated way the ‘argument from design’.

wittgenstein:

You know I am not one to praise this present age, but that does sound to me as being ‘old-fashioned’ in a bad sense. drury:

Tennant is fond of repeating Butler’s aphorism, ‘Probability is the guide

of life.’ wittgenstein:

Can you imagine St Augustine saying that the existence of God was ‘highly probable’! Soon after this conversation he sent me a copy of the Vulgate New Testament, advising me to read the Latin text. He said that in reading the Latin he thought I would get an entirely new impression. He also told me that at one time he and Moore had planned to read St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. But after a very short time they had had to give it up. (Many years later when he was living in Dublin he

Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein

159

told me that at one time he thought the religion of the Gospels was entirely different from that found in St Paul’s Epistles, but that now he saw that he had been wrong, it was the same religion in each.) Before I leave these few remarks about St Augustine I would quote the last few sentences of the Confessions, for here it seems to me is a text on which the ‘Lecture on Ethics’ might be regarded as a commentary. Tu autem bonum nullo indigens bono semper quietus es . . . Et hoc intellegere quis hominum dabit homini? Quis angelus angelo? Quis angelus homini? A te petatur, in te quaeratur, ad te pulsetur: sic, sic accipietur, sic invenietur, sic aperietur.6

OTTO WEININGER Professor von Wright mentions the high regard that Wittgenstein had for the writings of Otto Weininger. I think a certain qualification is called for here. He did advise me to read Weininger’s Sex and Character,7 saying it was the work of a remarkable genius. He pointed out that Weininger at the age of twenty-one had recognized, before anyone else had taken much notice, the future importance of the ideas which Freud was putting forward in his first book, the one in which he had collaborated with Breuer, Studies on Hysteria. When I had read Sex and Character I spoke to Wittgenstein. drury:

Weininger seems to me to be full of prejudices, for instance his extreme adulation of Wagner. wittgenstein:

Yes, he is full of prejudices, only a young man would be so

prejudiced. And then with regard to Weininger’s theme that women and the female element in men was the source of all evil he exclaimed: ‘How wrong he was, my God he was wrong.’ On another occasion he asked me to read out loud to him a passage in Weininger’s book where he quotes from the Renaissance scholar Pico della Mirandola. As it may be that this fine piece of Latin prose is not as well known as it deserves, and as it delineates a view of man’s nature that Wittgenstein found admirable, I will quote it in full. ‘Nec certam sedem, nec propriam faciem, nec munus ullum peculiare tibi dedimus, o Adam, ut quam sedem, quam faciem, quae munera tute optaveris, ea, pro voto, pro tua sententia, habeas et possideas. Definita ceteris natura intra praescriptas a nobis leges coercetur. Tu, nullis angustiis coercitus, pro tuo arbitrio, in cuius manu te posui, tibi illam praefinies. Medium te mundi posui, ut circumspiceres inde commodius quicquid est in mundo. Nec te caelestem neque terrenum, neque mortalem neque immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque plastes et fictor, in quam malueris tute formam effingas. Poteris in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare; poteris in superiora quae sunt divina ex tui animi sententia regenerari.’

160

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

O summam Dei patris liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis felicitatem! cui datum id habere quod optat, id esse quod velit. Bruta simul atque nascuntur id secum afferunt . . . e bulga matris quod possessura sunt. Supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt, quod sunt futuri in perpetuas aeternitates. Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater; quae quisque excoluerit illa adolescent, et fructus suos ferent in illo. Si vegetalia, planta fiet. Si sensualia, obrutescet. Si rationalia, caeleste evadet animal. Si intellectualia, angelus erit et Dei filius, et si nulla creaturarum sorte contentus in unitatis centrum suae se receperit, unus cum Deo spiritus factus, in solitaria Patris calignine qui est super omnia constitutus omnibus antestabit.8 When I had finished reading this to him Wittgenstein exclaimed, ‘That is so fine that I would wish to read more of Pico.’

PASCAL Professor von Wright speaks of a ‘trenchant parallelism’ between the writings of Pascal and those of Wittgenstein. I do not have any recollection of a discussion about Pascal with Wittgenstein. But I think there is something of importance that I can add here. Certainly Pascal’s intensity, his seriousness, his rigorism, these find a parallel in Wittgenstein. It has been well said that Pascal has had ‘the rare privilege never to meet with indifference’ (Laberthionère). The same encomium could be given to Wittgenstein. Pascal is a writer who arouses concern and unrest. Conversations with Wittgenstein were equally disturbing, and if his writings do not produce the same unrest they have been misunderstood. I feel, though, more inclined to point out where I consider there are important differences between Pascal and Wittgenstein. The Philosophical Investigations appear to be a haphazard arrangement of remarks and aphorisms such as Pascal’s Pensées undoubtedly are. It is generally believed that if Pascal had written the book he intended the Pensées would have been arranged in an entirely different order from that in which we now have them. But we know that Wittgenstein was constantly rearranging the material found in his book, that he spent a lot of time and thought in obtaining the precise order we now have. To grasp the significance of the Investigations it is essential to see the order of development of the thoughts. Secondly this. For Pascal there was only one true religion, Christianity; only one true form of Christianity, Catholicism; only one true expression of Catholicism, Port-Royal. Now although Wittgenstein would have respected this narrowness for its very intensity, such exclusiveness was foreign to his way of thinking. He was early influenced by William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. This book he told me had helped him greatly. And if I am not mistaken the category of Varieties continued to play an important part in his thinking. wittgenstein:

The ways in which people have had to express their religious beliefs differ enormously. All genuine expressions of religion are wonderful, even those of the most savage peoples.

Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein

161

In the Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough he writes: Was St Augustine mistaken then, when he called on God on every page of the Confessions? Well – one might say – if he was not mistaken, then the Buddhist holy-man, or some other, whose religion expresses quite different notions, surely was. But none of them was making a mistake except where he was putting forward a theory. [F1] Thirdly and most important this. Pascal has been accused by some of ‘fideism’. And there are places in the Pensées where this accusation might seem justified: ‘Il faut s’abêtir’; ‘Le pyrrhonisme est le vrai.’ Wittgenstein could never have written that. wittgenstein: Drury, never allow yourself to become too familiar with holy things.

Now the essential fault of what has been called ‘fideism’ is that it dodges all difficulties by adopting a too familiar acquaintance with holy things. Kierkegaard spoke of faith as ‘immediacy after reflection’ and I do not think Wittgenstein would have found fault with this expression.

DR SAMUEL JOHNSON I will add one more name to the list I quoted from Professor von Wright’s Biographical Sketch: that of Dr Samuel Johnson. We were talking one day about prayer and I mentioned to Wittgenstein how very impressive I found the ancient liturgical prayers of the Latin rite and their translation in the Anglican Prayer Book. wittgenstein:

Yes, those prayers read as if they had been soaked in centuries of worship. When I was a prisoner of war in Italy we were compelled to attend mass on Sundays. I was very glad of that compulsion. He went on to say that he had at one time begun each day by repeating the Lord’s Prayer, but that he had not done so now for some time. He did not say why he had discontinued this practice. wittgenstein:

It is the most extraordinary prayer ever written. No one ever composed a prayer like it. But remember the Christian religion does not consist in saying a lot of prayers, in fact we are commanded just the opposite. If you and I are to live religious lives it must not just be that we talk a lot about religion, but that in some way our lives are different. A short time later he sent me a copy of Dr Johnson’s little book entitled Prayers and Meditations. I have it before me now. On the flyleaf Wittgenstein has written: ‘Dear Drury, this is not a nice edition at all but it is the only one I could get. I hope you will like it all the same.’ Professor Malcolm in his Memoir mentions that Wittgenstein also gave him a copy of this book. I have an idea that it was a present that he gave others too. I believe the reason why this book appealed to him so strongly was because of the

162

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

shortness of the prayers, their deep seriousness, and Johnson’s repeated appeal that he might have grace to amend his life. * I have been trying to give some indication of the conversations I had with Wittgenstein concerning ethics and religion. I do not think I could end this attempt in a better way than by quoting a letter he once wrote me. It was at a time when I was doing my first period of residence in hospital and was distressed at my own ignorance and clumsiness. When I mentioned this to him he at first dismissed it with the remark that all I lacked was experience, but the next day I received the following letter from him. Dear Drury, I have thought a fair amount about our conversation on Sunday and I would like to say, or rather not to say but write, a few things about these conversations. Mainly I think this: Don’t think about yourself, but think about others, e.g. your patients. You said in the Park yesterday that possibly you had made a mistake in having taken up medicine: you immediately added that probably it was wrong to think such a thing at all. I am sure it is. But not because being a doctor you may not go the wrong way, or go to the dogs, but because if you do, this has nothing to do with your choice of a profession being a mistake. For what human being can say what would have been the right thing if this is the wrong one? You didn’t make a mistake because there was nothing at the time you knew or ought to have known that you overlooked. Only this one could have called making a mistake; and even if you had made a mistake in this sense, this would now have to be regarded as a datum as all the other circumstances inside and outside which you can’t alter (control). The thing now is to live in the world in which you are, not to think or dream about the world you would like to be in. Look at people’s sufferings, physical and mental, you have them close at hand, and this ought to be a good remedy for your troubles. Another way is to take a rest whenever you ought to take one and collect yourself. (Not with me because I wouldn’t rest you). As to religious thoughts I do not think the craving for placidity is religious; I think a religious person regards placidity or peace as a gift from heaven, not as something one ought to hunt after, Look at your patients more closely as human beings in trouble and enjoy more the opportunity you have to say ‘good night’ to so many people. This alone is a gift from heaven which many people would envy you. And this sort of thing ought to heal your frayed soul, I believe. It won’t rest it; but when you are healthily tired you can just take a rest. I think in some sense you don’t look at people’s faces closely enough. In conversations with me don’t so much try to have the conversations which you think would taste well (though you will never get that anyway) but try to have the conversations which will have the pleasantest after-taste. It is most important that we should not one day have to tell ourselves that we had wasted the time we were allowed to spend together. I wish you good thoughts but chiefly good feelings.

Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein

163

NOTES BY RUSH RHEES 1. On p. 136 above the two remarks follow one another in the same conversation. 2. In the German edition this passage appears on p. 35. B. F. McGuinness’s translation appears in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Prototractatus: An Early Version of ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, ed. B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London, 1971), p. 15, note I (the relevant part of this note is on p. 16). 3. Simone Weil, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres (Paris, 1957), p. 74. 4. Psalm 119:131 in the Vulgate. The Authorized Version has ‘I opened my mouth, and panted.’ 5. On pp. 134–5 above Wittgenstein’s reaction to Kierkegaard appears in a different context. 6. In his translation (Harmondsworth, 1961) of the Confessions, R. S. Pine-Coffin renders this passage thus:  But you are Goodness itself and need no good besides yourself . . . What man can teach another to understand this truth? What angel can teach it to an angel? What angel can teach it to a man? We must ask it of you, seek it in you; we must knock at your door. Only then shall we receive what we ask and find what we seek; only then will the door be opened to us. 7. Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Vienna, 1903; photographic reprint, Munich, 1980; English trans., London and New York, 1906). 8. Weininger’s quotation is from Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate, written presumably in 1486 or 1487, first published in a posthumous edition of his works in 1495–6. (The text given here is taken from G. Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, ed. Eugenio Garin (Florence, 1942), pp. 104, 106.) Drury included his own translation of the passage in an earlier draft of ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, but left it untranslated here. It is better to leave it in Pico’s own words. But Drury’s translation is so much better than the one I have beside me that I will include it here.  ‘To you, Adam, we have assigned no fixed place in the scale of created beings; no one determined facial expression will characterize your race; you have no special service to perform. Thus it will be that whatever rank you select, what you want to express, what function you want to perform, by your decision, by your own wish, that you shall both have and keep. All other created beings are bound fast by the laws and ordinances we have laid down for them; but you are not hedged round with any restrictions, in order that by the free choice which is placed in your hands you may determine your own destiny. In the very centre of the universe are you placed, in order that you may survey the more easily whatsoever things there are in nature. You are neither an inhabitant of heaven nor of earth; neither mortal nor immortal have we created you; so that you freely and without reward may make and mould your own image as it seems to you. You can if you so wish it sink to that lower order of being such as animals are, you can also rise by the strength of your desire towards the citizenship of heaven.’

164

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

  Oh the unlimited generosity of God the Father, Oh the boundless good fortune of man: to whom it has been granted that he may have what he chooses and be what he desires. The beasts of the field at the moment of their birth bring with them . . . from their mother’s womb all that they can ever become. The company of heaven, from the first moment of time or soon afterwards, are already that which they will remain through all eternity. But man is born having within himself, by the gift of God, the seed from which any created being may arise. So that whatsoever seed he chooses to cultivate, that for him will grow and bear fruit. If he chooses to lead a purely vegetative existence, then his life will delight in sensuality, then be can become as one of the animal creation. If he chooses the way of understanding, then he can escape from his brutish nature and be turned towards heavenly things. If he becomes a true lover of wisdom, then he is like one of the angels and a child of God. But if every form of separate and individual existence fails to contain his spirit, then in the very centre of his soul is he made one with the Holy Spirit, in the mystery of God’s unity which is the centre of all things and before all things had its being.

PART III

Drury’s Philosophical Writings The earliest philosophical papers by Drury that survive date to 1935. Wittgenstein had by then declared that he would no longer discuss philosophy with his former student as the latter had commenced medical studies. (However, Drury did attend a series of lectures on aesthetics given by Wittgenstein in the summer of 1938 in Cambridge and seems to have resumed what might be described as paraphilosophical conversations with him in the autumn of 1948.) The first paper given below, delivered at Trinity College Dublin in 1935, proposes that philosophy is not concerned with truth or falsity but rather with meaning as opposed to nonsense. He argues that ‘all systems of philosophy and all metaphysical constructions are to be rejected’ – a thesis that Drury modified later. In 1968, Drury corresponded with Rhees about whether the 1935 paper might be published but turned down the plan on the basis that it expressed a view that was unknown to his audience at the time but had become widely known since then. The paper was congruent with themes advanced by the Vienna Circle, predominantly logicians, who claimed inspiration from Wittgenstein. After some involvement with the group, Wittgenstein distanced himself from them. Drury later recalled that as a student he had heard Wittgenstein use the words: ‘The meaning of a proposition is its method of verification’ – a fundamental Vienna Circle principle for which Wittgenstein had some limited use. Drury added that ‘unfortunately some of us, myself included I am sorry to say, took hold of this isolated statement as if it was a magic key to open all the doors of philosophical puzzlement’ (UCD p. 227). Only later, as will appear below, Drury realized that there was no such master key, not to say a magic one. Drury took a different tack in his Letters, completed in 1954. Although circulating in mimeographed form in America for many years, these letters were not published until 1983 in the journal Philosophical Investigations by its editor, Desmond Lee (see BHN), Wittgenstein’s former fellow-student, who introduced the material. (They are given here amended with reference to a typescript version held in the Drury Archive). They show an influence by F. H. Bradley, in whose writings Drury developed an interest when in Cairo during the Second World War. Drury’s filial ‘student of philosophy’ is perplexed by the failure of his teachers to take up a positive position on any matter. They offer only criticism of historical metaphysical theories about such questions as the destiny of man, what is real, and the nature of goodness, truth and beauty. Drury was clear, however, that Wittgenstein should not be counted with such teachers. While Wittgenstein certainly eschewed traditional metaphysics (in its Cartesian and modern realist forms), Drury claimed that he acknowledged the passion (elsewhere,

166

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

using descriptive words from the German thinker, Johann Georg Hamann, the ‘desire’, ‘hunger’, ‘thirst’) that Drury thought had driven traditional metaphysical enquiry. It was not the ‘useless’ passion other philosophers came to depict it as. However, he believed it could not be fulfilled within the defining boundaries of space and time but rather in what he at that point called the ‘absolute’. As Drury saw it, the effect of Wittgenstein’s critique of language was to intensify this passion. A negative pruning of what can be said increases a sense of what cannot be spoken of – but only indirectly. To use a simile derived from Wittgenstein’s friend, Paul Engelmann (in Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 97), the situation is analogous to that of a cartographer who in mapping the outline of an oceanic island, pari passu, indicates the expanse of the sea that surrounds it. Drury claimed Wittgenstein’s authority for this reading but insofar as it is a plausible one, it is traceable to the Tractatus rather than the Philosophical Investigations. The philosophical ‘I’, referred to in the spring 1966 document below, as ‘the limit of the world’ also made its first appearance in the Tractatus and invites more commentary than Drury gave it. However, the Letters invite even more commentary insofar as in the final one (no. 15) he states that they are ‘an attempt to show how I have understood Wittgenstein’s thought as orientated in the direction of the religious’. This was further to Wittgenstein’s statement to him: ‘I am not a religious man but I can’t help seeing every problem from a religious point of view, I would like my work to be understood in this way’ (p. 206) The letters shared with Rhees and given next in this book are some of the most extensive Drury wrote on philosophy but were written in straitened circumstances. He had to give priority to his professional duties in psychiatry and lived largely in intellectual isolation from professional philosophers. In these writings Drury continued to develop the theme that the delineating activity of philosophy, described above, intensifies a ‘deep ache’, ‘an inexplicable uneasiness’ in the philosopher as he becomes more and more aware of the spatio-temporal walls of his cage. It is a feeling akin to claustrophobia. However, the return from using Ockham’s razor is that the philosopher is led to ‘see life steadily and see it whole’, as Matthew Arnold put it. Drury is clear that this gain cannot be delivered by scientific investigation. For him, the task of science is to search out new information about particular aspects of the world. Philosophy, on the other hand, seeks to uncover the assumptions that underlie the conduct of life at any particular time, assumptions that are binding people in ways of which they are unaware. He gives an excellent example in a letter to Rhees of 2 March 1959 of an assumption, widely decipherable in aspiring third level students (presumably unchallenged by their teachers), certainly in Ireland (I speak from personal experience) that all knowledge is ‘in the nature of information. To be collected out of books and memorised’. A further, and even more unquestioned assumption shared by all generations now – and well outside Ireland – determining, for example, third level education funding, is that knowledge must be ‘of some use to mankind’. This view was eloquently put as long ago as the nineteenth century by Thomas Babington Macaulay. He made clear (in an essay on Francis Bacon (see DoW, p. 308–309) that while scientific enquiry delivers on the ‘use’ test, philosophy does not – and eo ipso a philosophy that would dare question his test, as he defined it. Macaulay’s thesis is now so ingrained as to be regarded as mere common sense. Indeed, many twentieth-century philosophers have succumbed to it. As Drury put it,

Drury’s Philosophical Writings

167

they aspire to be no more than ‘a worthy peer and helpful adjutant’ to science. The evasion of the role of challenger by philosophers is symptom of how science, rather scientism, is triumphant and is indeed a deeply rooted unexamined assumption in our times, as Wittgenstein saw it to be. In the letter of 2 March 1959, just referred to, Drury outlined a number of theses summarizing his current position. He now clearly realized that there is ‘no one central problem in philosophy, but countless different problems. Each has to be dealt with on its own’ (Cons., p. 102). In contrast, as we noted, the vaunted ‘principle of verification’ promised a once-for-all, ‘final solution’ to philosophical perplexity. However, the principle fell at the first fence because it failed to pass its own test. Drury acknowledges that a depiction of philosophy as concerned with such very general topics as the relationship of thought to reality, or of the one to the many, or of things to their qualities has some validity. On the other hand, such a depiction does not get us very far. What is far more important to attend to in the history of philosophy are those special moments when problems were identified that pertained to the unproved assumptions (also described as ‘fixed categories’, ‘confusions’ and ‘superstitions’) generally and uncritically held at that time. These held up progress, cramping not only thinking ‘but experiencing and loving as well’. The great philosophers liberated their fellows by bringing to light their fetters and pointing the way forward – a liberation classically portrayed by Plato in his ‘myth of the cave’. However, Drury’s general point would have a better chance of convincing his readers if he had explicated much more fully the examples he gives so cursorily – perhaps, better, had had the chance in a very demanding career, to do so. Drury used a much favoured analogy, which took different forms, to illustrate what was happening at moments of genuine philosophical progress. He pictured the human condition as to live in rooms where the windows are glazed with stained glass. To see what is outside clearly, it would be necessary to remove the coloured panes and replace them with transparent ones. However, the best philosophy can essay is to change the panes and so introduce new colours. This has happened from time to time in the history of philosophy – usually driven (in an interesting suggestion that once more he does not elaborate on) by whatever branch of knowledge is valued at a particular time. Philosophers change the space we inhabit and liberate us from the palette emanating from the established light source. What Drury had experienced at the hands of Wittgenstein was just such a liberation. His ‘old way of thinking’ that ‘there was first “the world” then “my knowledge of the world”’ and then ‘the language in which I expressed this knowledge’ was undermined by the realization that without language, there simply is no knowledge. Language, an inheritance shared with others, and hence inextricably social (there is no ‘private’ language) is the sine qua non of knowledge. It is the primary datum and so ‘the limits of my knowledge are the limits of my world’. Yet he found that his ‘the old way of thinking’ – world/knowledge/language was always tripping him up again (Drury to Rhees, Arc., 21 June 1966). After receiving a critical reply from Rhees to his letter setting out his theses, Drury modified and elaborated on them in a letter of 28 March 1959, hoping to address his correspondent’s criticisms. Further elaboration came in an essay written in the spring of 1966. In it, Drury emphasized that philosophical work is painful. To

168

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

buttress his point, he gave a novel, if not indeed eccentric interpretation of the verb ‘throwing’ used in a well-known metaphor to be found in the Tractatus regarding the disposal of a ladder (standing for strictly speaking meaningless philosophical discourse) that has enabled the thinker to reach the roof of his edifice and so the view from above. For Drury, the verb connoted an energetic, even violent action. Disabusing oneself and one’s society of deeply ingrained beliefs is indeed far from easy; it requires an exacting discipline to arrive at the necessary conceptual clarity. Philosophy is not, as portrayed by Cicero, for example, a suitable occupation for ‘gentlemen’ who would shun being discomfited by it. Neither is it a specialized subject (like, for example, botany) much less an esoteric subject that, as in either of the foregoing examples, one can take or leave. The fact is that ‘everybody who does any thinking is committed to philosophy’. Another fact is that thinking is arduous because it is repetitive. This last is a feature of images of philosophical investigation given by Wittgenstein that had struck Drury – trying to open a safe guarded by a combination lock, ordering a quantity of books randomly placed on shelves or learning one’s way around a new city (as a London taxi driver mastering ‘the knowledge’). To repeat, the upshot of bringing to light and formulating a shared assumption that influences one’s thought and behaviour is that the exhumed assumption loses its aura of necessity and so one is ‘freed from its bondage’. In these circumstances, what role now remains for the philosophical texts sitting on library shelves? These had been grist for Drury’s own philosophical education and perhaps the education he thought his ‘student of philosophy’ was facing. As he matured, and as an implication of the culture-bound nature of philosophical investigation, new problems faced each generation and so, in a sense, every philosopher (and thinker of any kind) starts from scratch. Indeed, Drury felt it was difficult to appreciate precisely why a particular problem troubled philosophers in a given age and he confided to Wittgenstein that he regretted ‘the amount of time he had spent reading the great historical philosophers’, at a time when he ‘couldn’t understand them’ (see: Cons., p. 138). However, despite the particularity of philosophy to its times, he came to acknowledge three enduring benefits from a text-based philosophical education: Reading philosophical texts can ‘wake one from one’s dogmatic slumbers’ and so trigger one’s own thinking. Again, there is the delight to find in such reading echoes that resonate with one’s own thoughts. Finally, the seriousness with which philosophers address their problems is exemplary. The emphasis remained, however, on doing one’s own thinking given the uniqueness of one’s life and times. Drury was clearly interested in problems pertaining to the philosophy of history and this interest crops up in a letter to Rhees on 17 October 1967. There is a comment that may be taken to distance creditable history-making from simply scientific fact-seeking: ‘History … is inextricably inter-woven with my whole way of “seeing the world”.’ It is not just ‘a series of facts’. In this letter and another on 8 November 1967, there is discussion not only of history but also of time. Drury was stimulated here by the writings of Simone Weil, whom he saw as a philosopher with similar concerns to Wittgenstein’s and to whom he and Rhees found themselves attracted.

Drury’s Philosophical Writings

169

Drury became particularly concerned in the 1960s that certain false interpretations of Wittgenstein were gaining currency and in a lecture delivered at University College Dublin in 1967, he sought to correct these interpretations which he said, originated with some prominent contemporary English philosophers. They lacked the authority of personal acquaintance Drury understood himself as privileged to have – a privilege which came with corresponding obligations to make clear the thought of his teacher and friend. Finally, a letter of 16 October 1966 is placed after UCD in that, inter alia, it elaborates a little more on the critical remarks about Gilbert Ryle made in that lecture. Unrelated to UCD, Drury gives a quotation from Simon Weil that shows an awareness of another approach to metaphysics, what Weil calls ‘le point de vue ontologique’, which Drury is quick to disassociate from Wittgenstein’s ‘point de vue critique’. Another philosopher writing in Ireland in the previous decade, Cahal B. Daly, later cardinal archbishop of Armagh, admitted that in ‘Logical Positivism, Metaphysics and Ethics’, Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 23 (1956), pp. 111–50, he had been ‘over-optimistic and inaccurate about Wittgenstein’s readiness to admit metaphysics’ (‘New Light on Wittgenstein’, Part I Philosophical Studies, vol. 10 (1960), p.34). This was partly in light of the fact that Daly’s earlier careful exegesis of Wittgenstein had meanwhile been disputed in certain respects by Elizabeth Anscombe – pertinently the view that for Wittgenstein ‘all mention of God, the Soul or Heaven is mere nonsense’. Her criticism of Daly is supported by Drury’s recalling in the letter of 16 October Wittgenstein’s declaration: ‘I don’t refuse to speak of God. God is a word in my vocabulary.’ This quotation, itself in need of careful exegesis, introduces the subject of the next section where Drury develops the theme that ‘the God of religion means a great deal more than the absolute of philosophy’ (Letters (no. 15)) and certainly more than ‘false absolutes’. Mystical feeling that comes from the contemplation of the world as ‘a limited whole’, ‘sub specie aeterni’ (Tractatus, 6. 45) alone has the power, he believed, to assuage Augustinian ‘restlessness’. There is a caveat to be borne in mind when reading the material given here. Drury once wrote that ‘the essay form is the wrong style in writing about philosophy, for an essay has to have an air of completeness, a beginning and an end. In philosophy the truth is a bright point of light surrounded by darkness. The stars are only seen on a dark night’ (Drury to Rhees, Arc., 21 May 1967). While it is the case, as Kerr writes (in Work on Oneself,above, p. 75) that Drury was a student of Wittgenstein’s ‘who did not become a philosopher’, academic philosophers can judge his competence in that subject from the writings given below. 1. 1935 Lecture: ‘The Method of Philosophy’ 2. ‘Letters to a Student of Philosophy’ 3. Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees: 02 March 1959; 28 March 1959; Spring 1966;

170

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

21 June 1966; 17 October 1967; 08 November 1967. 4. 1967 Lecture at University College Dublin. 5. Letter to Rush Rhees 16 October 1966

The Method of Philosophy When I first began to think about philosophical problems I was greatly troubled by the fact that I could see no method for tackling the perplexities which came crowding in. In mathematics there were methods for dealing with a problem which even if not successful, at least gave one the satisfaction of being up and doing. In natural science there was experiment and observation by which problems could be solved. But what was there that one could do to help oneself in philosophy? What was the method of philosophy. These problems about Space and Time, about our knowledge of the external world, about God, freedom and immortality; there seemed no way to set about solving them or even attempting to solve them. Perhaps some of you feel this helplessness of not knowing where to begin now. I believe a method does exist by which this sense of helplessness and frustration can be altogether removed and by which we can actively tackle the problems of philosophy, and not merely grope and fumble in the dark. I do not believe that I can demonstrate conclusively in one short paper that this is the method of philosophy. The only possible demonstration of this sort is the satisfaction which comes from practice and use of this method yourselves. All I can do here is perhaps to interest you in this method of thinking, to suggest that here is a possible way out of the maze. I know that this was how I myself came slowly to value this method. The difficulty in what I am going to try and talk about is not that of understanding very complicated and profound speculations. Certainly not that. But rather the difficulty of seeing the significance of certain very simple and obvious truths. In this paper I want to bring out the significance of such simple truths and show how they are powerful weapons cutting this way and that way through the perplexities with which we become involved. I hope you will not reject them as mere platitudes which have no bearing on philosophy. Enough now by way of preliminaries, let me state my main thesis. The way to free oneself of philosophical and metaphysical problems is to become an expert in distinguishing sense from nonsense. Notice I do not say an expert in distinguishing truth from falsehood; that is the task of the particular sciences. Philosophy has a different task, it fixes a limit, as it were, to the questions the particular sciences have to solve by determining what questions can sensibly be asked and what are nonsensical questions. Philosophy is concerned with meaning not with truth. But I am sure some of you are thinking that it is itself nonsense to talk of becoming an expert in distinguishing sense from nonsense. How can you talk of becoming an expert in such a clear and easy matter as this? If I do nothing else in this paper I want to show that this is not an easy matter and that one can become expert in it. It is easy of course to see that the question ‘did you hear the clock strike two this afternoon?’ is a sensible question. And it is easy to see that the question ‘where does the light go when it goes out?’ is a nonsensical question, merely a tricky combination of words. But what of the questions ‘was there

172

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

a first moment of time?’, ‘is Space an infinite whole?’, ‘have we direct knowledge of physical objects?’, ‘is there a reality beyond sensation?’ and so on over the whole range of what are generally known as the problems of philosophy. Can you say with absolute certainty, as you could in the other two cases, that these are sensible questions or that they are nonsensical questions? Please distinguish carefully I am not asking do you feel that they are questions. As metaphysicians you probably do feel an interest and a sense of perplexity in these expressions. But let me remind you that there are many people, perhaps the majority of people, who would feel that these are meaningless perplexities and have no interest in them. It is no use our appealing to our feelings in these matters. What is required is an insight into sense and nonsense. A clear perception of what it means for a proposition or a question to have meaning. I remember very well a philosopher [probably W.E. Johnson. See: Cons, p. 97] who became quite angry when told that the problems he was perplexed about were nonsensical problems. He replied with warmth that if he meant something by them there was no appeal from that. Such a person had a very vague and diffuse concept of meaning, one about which he had never really reflected and looked at from every angle. To him everything was sense which was not obvious nonsense. One could not of course become expert in the use of such a vague concept as this. In saying that we must become experts in distinguishing sense from nonsense I wish to introduce a precise, restricted, thought-out, conception of meaning, and to become expert in the use of this conception. I do not mean that this will be a brand new conception of meaning, one about which we had never thought before; on the contrary it is one which every person who has ever had to be very careful and precise in describing anything has made use of; but not one that they have necessarily reflected on or brought clearly before their minds. It is the conception of meaning necessary for all accurate scientific critical investigation that I wish to explain. If philosophy is to be such an accurate, careful study (and what is it if it is not that?) it also must make use of this conception of meaning. Perhaps I can illustrate what I have been saying by an actual example from contemporary literature. Here is a quotation from a much lauded book of which thousands of copies have been sold, and which has everywhere been hailed as a profound and brilliant treatise: The tendency of modern physics is to resolve the whole material universe into waves and nothing but waves. These waves are of two kinds: bottled-up waves and unbottled-up waves, the former we call matter and latter light or radiation. If annihilation of matter occurs, the process is merely that of unbottling imprisoned waves-energy and setting it free to travel through space. These concepts reduce the whole universe to a world of light, potential or existent, so that the whole story of its creation can be told with perfect accuracy and completeness in the six words: God said let there be light. [James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, p. 78] Now I hope you will agree with me that such a paragraph is sheer nonsense. Not untrue, not even as interesting as that, but just a mass of words which sound grand but have no meaning at all. The whole universe is to be reduced to a world of light

The Method of Philosophy

173

we are told. What does ‘reduced’ mean here, and are sounds and tasks and feelings to be reduced to light also. What utter nonsense this is. You will notice that no explanation whatsoever is given of the terms bottled-up light and unbottled-up light and I defy anyone to attach any meaning to them as they stand. I may say that I took this paragraph at random. The whole book is full of such gross nonsense. I have chosen a very crude and obvious example of nonsensical writing, and yet one that in our present chaos of thought has been capable of imposing itself on the general public—imposing itself originally, I would like to point out, as a public lecture to the University of Cambridge. Modern thought and modern literature are full of more subtle and more dangerous and more imposing nonsense than this. There never was a greater need for real philosophers who could with certainty and clarity sweep away such evil. There is an instinct for recognising nonsense and there is a technique for demonstrating nonsense. The first cannot be learnt or taught, the second can. I want very briefly to say how I think this technique can be acquired. First of all I think it wise to stop reading the great historical philosophers. For these writings only add to our present vocabulary, whereas what is wanted is to clarify the vague but already adequate vocabulary that we have. And secondly, I believe it is wise to cease at first tackling the great abstract problems of philosophy directly. For to do so is to assume already that we know at least what questions we can ask, and it is just this assumption that I am calling into question. Leaving these turn your attention to language as it exists in everyday life, in science and in technical directions. There is written and there is spoken language. There are many ways in which facts can be stated by means of maps, diagrams, picture, and other types of symbolism. What is it that is common to all these methods of representation by means of which they can be used to state facts? That which is essential to language, that which enables a written sentence to mean an experienced fact is common to the simplest form of representation, such as are found in simple diagrams and sign languages. For myself it was the consideration of such diagrams and such sign languages that first showed the essence of written and spoken languages, and I propose to follow that method here. I am going to take a very simple example of a sign language and investigate the principles on which it depends thoroughly. Those of you who are familiar with the London Underground System will remember the method by which one is guided from one platform to another through a maze of branching passages. You are told to follow the yellow light for the Piccadilly Railway, for example. This means that whenever the passage branches you are to take that entrance which has a yellow light over it. Now consider how it is that such a simple sign language works. It works because certain combinations of the signs are not used. For instance, it would not work if all the passages had yellow lights over them, or if at any point neither of the passages had a yellow light. It is only by seeing that these combinations are not going to be used that we see how to use this particular sign language. A person who thought that they might occur would clearly not know how to use such a sign language. It is just that fact that certain combinations of the lights are allowed and certain others are not allowed that makes this system of lights into a language. For suppose someone had originally

174

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

put up these lights for the sake of decoration merely and had accidentally obeyed these rules, never putting up two colours the same over two adjoining passages and never omitting to put each colour over one. Then it might suddenly have occurred to someone without any explanation at all that here was a way of guiding people, so long as these rules were obeyed. In other words the existence of these arbitrary rules shows the signs to be a language already without any need of explanation. Written and spoken language depends on precisely the same principle. Words are significant because certain arbitrary rules are laid down which state that certain combinations of words are permitted, are part of the language; and certain others are not permitted, are to be regarded as nonsensical. Let me illustrate this. Consider the two questions we mentioned before. The sensible question, ‘did you hear the clock strike two this afternoon?’ and the nonsensical question, ‘where does the light go when it goes out? How is it that are able to see with certainty the fundamental difference between these two? First of all you will notice that each of them is composed of good straightforward English words to be found in any dictionary. The nonsensical question was not nonsense in the sense that a line of Lewis Carroll’s such as ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe’ [‘Jabberwocky’] is nonsense. And yet for all that the question ‘where does the light go when it goes out?’ is not a real question which demands an answer. Hence it is clear that for a question to have meaning something more is necessary than that the words of which it is composed should themselves be familiar words. What then is this something more that is required? The words hear and strike in my first sentence have a meaning and the words gyre and gimble in the line of Lewis Carroll’s have not got a meaning. This shows that to have a meaning must mean more than to suggest something to the mind, for ‘gyre’ and ‘gimble’ are certainly just as potently suggestive as ‘hear’ and ‘strike’. No, surely the difference is this. I know all sorts of combinations in which the English language allows me to use the word ‘hear’ and ‘strike’ and other combinations in which it does not allow me to use them. I can say ‘I hear the clock striking’, ‘I hear a man speaking’ etc., etc, and I may not say ‘I hear a blue colour’ etc., etc. The words ‘hear’ and ‘strike’ then have a meaning because they are governed by rules in precisely the same way that the yellow lights in our previous sign language were governed by rules. Now ‘gyre’ and ‘gimble’ have no grammar in this sense. I don’t know what is allowed and what is not allowed. Can I say ‘gyre’ and ‘gimble’ quickly or should it be loudly, and can you ‘gyre’ without ‘gimbling?’ You see what I mean. A word to have a meaning must have arbitrary rules of grammar attached to it, which tell us that such and such combinations are allowed and such and such are not allowed. These rules are arbitrary in the sense that there is no compulsion on us to obey them, but if we don’t obey them the word has lost its meaning and fallen to the status of gyre and gimble where anything and everything is allowed. In fact I want to emphasise that it is the rules which are important in determining the meaning and not the particular symbol which we see on the paper or hear spoken. I once saw some people playing chess with a very odd set of chessmen, so odd that I couldn’t identify which were the Kings, Queens, Bishops, etc. but as soon as I saw how a piece moved I knew which it was because I observed the rules it obeyed. So often if we hear a new word being

The Method of Philosophy

175

used we can learn its meaning just by seeing how is used, that is what combinations it occurs in with other words. Now I think we can see why the question ‘where does the light go when it goes out?’ is not a real question but merely a tricky combination of words. Although it is composed of word-symbols which are all to be found in the dictionary, the rules governing those symbols have been broken and the words ‘light’ and ‘go’ have been degraded to the same level as ‘gyre’ and ‘gimble’ in the nonsense verse. The English language does not allow us to talk of light in general going anywhere, and it is only obeying this and other rules that the words light and go have a meaning. I am sure by now some of you are thinking that this all so simple that it can have nothing to do with philosophy at all. I must ask you to be patient for I hope to show that it has a very great deal to do with it. I want now to raise the important question ‘how do we know whether a word is being used in accordance with the rules by which its meaning is given to it?’ Let me say emphatically that this question can be settled at once by everyone without having recourse to a dictionary of English usage. If you take any one clear sentence containing a given word, then all the rules applying to that word can be seen in that sentence. I will take a very obvious example to illustrate what I mean. How is it that you know with absolute certainty that the sentence ‘I hear a blue sound’ is meaningless? It cannot be because you know that such a sentence has never been used, for perhaps it has. No, by merely looking at the sensible sentence ‘I see a blue colour’ you are able to see the rules by which the word blue is governed and to see that the other sentence breaks these rules. The word blue here has a very simple set of rule applying to it, rules with we are all perfectly familiar; and therefore no special ability is required to distinguish when it is being used correctly or incorrectly. But essentially I believe that philosophy consists in this same kind of activity, a clear recognition of the rules by means of which a word is governed and acquires its meaning. There is a complexity here that must be referred to. Because it is the rules that govern a word that give it is meaning, and not the particular written and spoken symbol we use; the same symbol may be used with quite different meanings. The particular occasion showing quite clearly what rules are intended in that case, and therefore determining which of the various meanings is intended. Thus the wordsymbol ‘rose’ is used in two quite different sense. I may say ‘This is a rose’ and ‘He rose from his chair’, both sentences have a meaning although each breaks a rule applying to the other. This sort of ambiguity is much more common than is generally realised. We often do not recognise that we are using the same symbol in different senses, and this is a potent source of philosophical confusion because it makes it hard to disentangle the different sets of mutually contradictory rules. If I say ‘I can count 23 people in this room’ I am using the word count in quite a different sense than when I say ‘I can count 2 people in this room. This is not obvious at first sight but may be shown as follows. I can speak of counting two people at one glance but it means nothing to speak of counting 23 people at one glance; I can only count them 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. And the fact that what has sense in one case has not got sense in the other shows that the two words mean different things. Thus again the second type

176

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

of counting is liable to error, but it is nonsense to speak of error in the first case, this again shows that they are two different words. Philosophical writings and discussions centre round certain abstract terms, such as, space, time, cause, sensation, knowledge, appearance, reality, etc., etc. These word-symbols are all extremely vague and extremely ambiguous. By ambiguous I mean that in ordinary speech we use them in many different senses (that is with many different rules applying to them) and by vague I mean that we have never clearly reflected what rules are. The real method of philosophy consists in distinguishing these ambiguities by demonstrating these rules. Philosophical problems perplex us because we feel that immense importance attaches to their solution and yet we see no way of answering them. But when the ambiguities and the vagueness of the terms employed are demonstrated the questions undergo a transformation. The unsolvable question is seen to consist of a conglomeration of many solvable questions, but the feeling of immense importance is lost. Nothing of real value turns on the solution. I will take one example. You will agree that one of the great problems of philosophy has been concerned with whether space was finite or infinite. Now consider how the word space is used in everyday life. We say ‘the Phoenix Park is a large space’ or again we say ‘there is not much space left in the cupboard’. It is clear from either of these examples that the word space only has a meaning if it is used in conjunction with the notion of certain definite boundaries which limit that space. If I ask you ‘is the seashore a large space?’ you would rightly reject this as a meaningless question because I had fixed no boundaries within which you were to work. You would say what seashore, bounded by what? Thus when philosophers take the word space and spell it with a capital S and ask questions about space in general, as they say; they are taking a symbol from ordinary language, breaking a rule which gives that symbol a meaning, and therefore using a meaningless expression. Of course they could say we are now going to use the word-symbol space in a new sense, but then this would have first to be defined, and this is just what is not done. Thus a clear and thought-out conception of meaning shows that the question ‘is space finite or infinite?’ is a nonsensical question. The word Space can only be used with sense when we are talking about some particular space with definite boundaries. All such particular spaces are finite, that is capable of being measured. It is this truth that has led some people to say that space in general is finite, but such a statement is, as we have seen, nonsense. On the other hand it is also nonsensical to speak of the largest conceivable space; of any given space we can always describe one larger. Such a series of possible spaces, a series which cannot be completed is called an infinite series, and this is why other people have wished to say that ‘space in general’ is infinite. But as have seen neither side of the supposed dilemma is correct because both are meaningless, the rules governing the word space having been broken. Another classical problem of philosophy is the question whether objects cease to exist when there is nobody to perceive them. Consider how the method I have outlined would tackle this. The vague ambiguous words to be scrutinised carefully here is the phrase ‘cease to exist’. It certainly has meaning to say ‘the dodo has ceased to exist’, ‘lions have not ceased to exist’ and it is certainly nonsense to ask

The Method of Philosophy

177

such a question as ‘has the number two ceased to exist’. From these examples it is clear that of anything which can be said to have ceased to exist it has sense to say I have looked for it and not found it. It is nonsense to ask ‘has the number two ceased to exist’ because the number two is not the kind of thing I can speak of looking for. But then certainly it is also nonsense to speak of looking for an object which nobody is perceiving, and therefore the question do objects cease to exist when nobody is perceiving them is a nonsensical question. It is nonsense to say ‘objects cease to exist when nobody is perceiving them’ and it is also nonsense to say ‘objects continue to exist when nobody is perceiving them’. This illustrates a very common cause of controversy in philosophy. Somebody states a proposition ‘p’. This is felt to be incorrect in some respect, and so somebody else states the opposite ‘not-p’. But this also doesn’t sound correct and so the first man says his statement again all the more emphatically, and thus the controversy proceeds. The solution here is always that both are in the wrong because neither ‘p’ or ‘non-p’ are true but rather both are meaningless, and the correct thing is therefore to say neither. I am afraid it will seem most presumptuous after only two examples to claim that all the problems of philosophy can be dealt with in this way. And yet this is what I do wish to claim. If you feel any interest at all in what I have said I would ask you to try this method yourself ‘what do I really mean by this question’. And then go on to practise constructing sensible and nonsensical statements containing the particular abstract philosophical terms about which you are perplexed. In the case of the nonsensical questions enquire what are the rules which have been broken and which have thus resulted in nonsense. In this way you will become expert in distinguishing and demonstrating sense from nonsense. And to do this is to do philosophy. I have spoken of the great problems of philosophy as in the end nonsensical problems. I would like to emphasise that by nonsense here I most certainly do not wish to imply any sense of ridicule, as if they were silly questions. No indeed they are not that, and it is part of human nature to be puzzled by them. But nevertheless they are not real questions demanding an answer. Hence all systems of philosophy and all metaphysical constructions are to be rejected in that they are attempts to answer meaningless questions. But equally all scepticism and all agnosticism is to be rejected, for where there is no question there can be no doubt; and wherever there is a question there is the possibility of an answer. Perhaps some of you feel that to put an end in this way to metaphysical speculation and to limit human speech to the truths of everyday life and science is to empty life of all serious meaning and significance. I can only say that I have not found this to be the case. On the contrary what is valuable in life shines all the clearer when freed from the metaphysical entanglements we put upon it.

Letters to a Student of Philosophy M. O’C. DRURY

LETTER 1 Jan. 6th 1954 Dear Luke, I am glad you wrote to me so frankly about the disappointment and vexation you feel at the end of your second year as a student of philosophy. Believe me I suffered the same perplexities nearly 30 years ago now. You wanted philosophy to give you a firm rock to stand on, to give you some clear and true principles to which you could return constantly for guidance among the bewildering difficulties of thought and action. And it hasn’t done so! You say that where you seem to find your teachers clearest is in their analytical criticism of other writers’ metaphysical theories, but that no one has a positive doctrine of his own. Modern philosophy seems to you to be parasitic on the past: to live by exposing the confusions and inconsistencies of those who at least attempted to construct a positive doctrine. But you are quite wrong if you think Wittgenstein was such a teacher. Indeed he was not. I remember in one of my earliest conversations with him telling him that what had first aroused in me a passion to be in earnest with metaphysics was seeing the title of Alexander’s book Space Time and Deity. He immediately understood this passion. He said. ‘If one can speak of the great problems of philosophy, that is what they are concerned with — Space, Time, and Deity.’ I want in this and perhaps in subsequent letters to try and help your thinking about these matters in the same way that Wittgenstein helped me. First of all however I must remove a serious misunderstanding which your letter showed. You asked me ‘to summarise the essential points in Wittgenstein’s philosophy’. Your request reminded me of a metaphor he used in his lectures a long time ago. He compared philosophy to opening a safe with a patent combination lock. Each little fine adjustment of the knobs seems to achieve nothing, only when they are all in position does the door open. So in philosophy each particular clarification seems to do little, it is the accumulation of them that enables us to ‘see the world rightly’. Never forget that Wittgenstein’s final aim in philosophy is to enable us ‘to see the world rightly’. His thought certainly doesn’t lend itself to being summarised or tabulated. Nevertheless I must make a beginning somewhere and I don’t see any harm in telling you what were for me and still are the essential statements in the Tractatus which led me to my present position. (Needless to say I believe this position to be the truth not because I think it a correct commentary on what Wittgenstein wrote but because I see it as certain and true myself).

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

179

Here we are then, here are the main pillars on which I build. 4.116 4.115 6.522 6.45

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. Philosophy will mean the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable. There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself, it is the mystical. The contemplation of the world ‘sub specie aeterni’ is its contemplation as a limited whole. The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling.

Wittgenstein said to me that each sentence in the Tractatus should be regarded as the heading of a chapter, requiring a detailed exposition; he said he agreed with Broad’s criticism that the book was ‘too syncopated’. I will try and state how the above sentences have developed in my thinking. You, I see, have read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein states that all philosophy is a critique of language. I am certain that the use of the word critique here is a deliberate reference to Kant. (Wittgenstein spoke to me of the great depth to be found in Kant’s writings). Now compare for a moment the Introduction to the Tractatus with the Introduction to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Wittgenstein says — ‘The truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am therefore of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved.’ and Kant says — ‘Metaphysics on the view which we are adopting is the only one of the sciences which dare promise that through a small but concentrated effort it will attain and this in a short time such completion as will leave no task to our successors save that of adopting it—etc.’ Both philosophers speak of a task which can be brought to a definitive conclusion. Wittgenstein’s limitation of the use of language has often been compared to Kant’s limitation of the use of reason; but there is another similarity between the two philosophers to which not enough attention has been drawn. Kant writes in Section 57 of the Prolegomena. ‘Metaphysics is perhaps rooted in us more than any other science in its fundamental features by Nature herself, and can by no means be regarded as the product of a voluntary choice or as a chance extension in the progress of experience.’ And again in another place he writes — The critique of pure reason is a preservation against a malady which has its source in our rational nature. The malady is the opposite of the love of home (homesickness) which binds us to our fatherland. It is a longing to pass out beyond our immediate confines and to relate ourselves to other worlds. And in section 40 of the Prolegomena Kant writes — ‘The absolute totality of all possible experience, though in itself no experience, constitutes for the reason a necessary problem.’ It is to this aspect of Kant’s teaching that I want to draw your attention. This longing to pass out beyond our immediate confines, to achieve an absolute totality.

180

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Now compare the above quotation from Kant with what Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus. He says that we should confine ourselves to stating only the propositions of natural science ‘and then always when someone wished to say something metaphysical, demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other, he would not have the feeling we were teaching him philosophy, but it would be the only correct method.’ (Tractatus 6.53) Notice that word unsatisfying which I have underlined. Nearly all I have to say to you is centred round that unsatisfaction. We have a desire for metaphysics, a desire to go beyond the propositions of natural science, to reach out and find and know the transcendent. The task of philosophy is to curb this desire whenever it falsely thinks for a moment it has achieved its aim and found its satisfaction. When Wittgenstein says that the propositions which attempt to say something metaphysical are nonsense he does not mean to ridicule them. Indeed no. Wittgenstein never ridiculed a serious metaphysician, one who was in earnest with his subject. He said to me that he regarded the great metaphysical and ethical writings of the past as among the noblest endeavours of the human mind. At another time he said chat for some people the giving up of metaphysical speculation required heroic courage. No, my position is this, my interpretation of those sentences I quoted to you from the Tractatus is this: The exposition of the nonsensical nature of metaphysical propositions does not put an end to the desire which led to their creation. Rather this exposition intensifies the desire, this longing to reach out, this passion for the completed whole. That is why Wittgenstein’s teaching is for me much more than just a destructive criticism of other people’s mistakes. The work of philosophy is to show once and for all and conclusively that what at first begins as the desire for a metaphysical theory is really something deeper, something which can only be satisfied by other than speculative constructions. I have been comparing Wittgenstein and Kant. Here is a quotation from Kemp Smith’s Commentary on the Critique which is also applicable to all that I knew of Wittgenstein. The sublimity of the starry heavens and the imperative of the moral law are ever present influences on the life of man; and they need for their apprehension no previous initiation through science or philosophy. The naked eye reveals the former, of the latter all men are immediately aware. In their universal appeal they are of the very substance of human existence. Philosophy may avail to counteract the hindrances which prevent them from exercising their native influence; it cannot be a substitute for the inspiration they alone can yield. Think now about what I have written and let me know when you feel the need of further explanation. Note: This and following notes are by Sir Desmond Lee Kemp-Smith is part quoting, part paraphrasing from the Conclusion to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. The well-known phrase about the starry heavens and the moral law runs in Kant’s original as follows. Two things fill the mind with new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

181

law within. I have not to search for them or simply conjecture about them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in a transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence.

LETTER 2 Jan 13th 1954 Dear Luke, I think your request is a very reasonable one, namely that I should try and state the position elaborated in my first letter in my own words, and not bewilder you with so many quotations. This then is how I would put it. The desire for knowledge has two roots. First there is the need to be able to control the world around us. To be able to mould things to our use and in accordance with our wishes. To know means to be able to do, to understand means to be able to control. In this sense men have known how to make flint arrows, to domesticate animals, to grow crops — and to fly aeroplanes. Then secondly there is the desire not to do but to contemplate. To have before the mind a satisfactory idea of the world as it really is. To overcome by thought the limitations of immediate sense perception. To penetrate behind appearance to the truth. To be able to rest satisfied in a concept of totality. To comprehend the universe not simply piece meal or by fragments but somehow as a whole. To be able to say ‘this is the truth, this is how things really are’. In this sense to know means to possess the absolute in thought, to understand means to see things sub specie aeterni. You will find these two desires present with considerable variations in strength in different people. Some will be almost entirely without the second; they will have no speculative bent and will be quite content with working hypotheses only. All they want is to get on with the work, to get results. Knowledge for them means knowing how to do this that and the other. For them the only value of theory is a means of memorising and teaching certain practical techniques. For other people the second desire dominates their lives. They seem to spend all their time in impractical abstract speculations. I believe that in a philosopher both desires must be powerful and well balanced. Without the passion for the absolute philosophy loses all its driving force. Without the friction of the practical necessities the wheels of philosophy spin idly in meaningless abstraction. Now it is this second desire that I was chiefly speaking about in my first letter. Call it for convenience, the desire for the absolute. It is from this desire that all metaphysics springs. It is this that makes us unsatisfied with merely saying what can be said, the propositions of natural science. It is this desire which it is the work of philosophy to deepen and transform. Philosophy achieves this by the application of a rigorous critical technique. By showing how language works, and that no verbal formulations could in the end satisfy our passion for the absolute. Consider knowledge of the first kind, the achievement of practical techniques. No sceptic has even doubted this kind of knowledge. Those philosophers who have

182

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

denied the reality of space have continued to use a map. Those who denied the reality of time have continued to wind up their clocks. Descartes when he proposed to doubt all he had ever believed did not doubt his ability to write, the printers ability to print, and his readers ability to read. This first kind of knowledge extends a great deal beyond any formulation in words or symbols of how we do such things. I know how to ride a bicycle but I could not describe how it is done so as to teach another by word of mouth. Some of our technical achievements can be so described and taught. For instance I know the way from here to Dublin, I could teach a stranger this practical knowledge by describing the route, or by drawing a map. It is at this point that philosophical confusion begins to arise, namely once practical techniques begin to be taught symbolically. For practical purposes we form certain schemata in our minds which it is convenient not to alter, they are for memorising and teaching practical techniques. These schemata take on an apparent independence of their own, their context in practice is forgotten, and we try to make them satisfy our second desire, the desire for an object of contemplation, the absolute. Philosophy is concerned with overcoming this confusion, with exhibiting the true use of words and symbols. It is itself a specific practical technique that can be learnt and taught. It has to show how words have a meaning only in the context of the practical activities in which we daily use them. That propositions have a meaning only as a method of memorising or teaching something we have learnt how to do. That words and propositions are nothing at all if we try to make them into objects of contemplation. But don’t for one moment forget that this desire for the absolute, this desire to contemplate the truth as distinct from being busy and active, is not in any way got rid of by showing that no formulation of words can satisfy it. To sum the matter up. Language (by which I mean every sort of symbolism) seems at first to be a sort of bridge between the two different types of knowledge we desire. Philosophy consists in showing that it is no such bridge. Language belongs entirely to ‘knowing how to do’. not at all to knowing the absolute. I have tried to state the main outline of my position ‘without quotations’ as you requested. Now I want to conclude this letter with some quotations from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. You should put these alongside the quotations from the Tractatus I gave you in my first letter. (Remember that Wittgenstein wanted the two books published in one volume). Section 38 Section 109 Section 132 Section 199 Section 304

‘Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.’ ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.’ ‘The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.’ ‘To understand a language means to be master of a technique.’ ‘The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts — which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you please.’

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

Section 397 Section 421

183

’— a picture may obtrude itself upon us and be of no use at all.’ ‘Look at the sentence as an instrument and at its sense as its employment.’

LETTER 3 Jan 14th 1954 Dear Luke, After I had posted my letter to you last night I decided to send you a rather lengthy post-script to-day—and more quotations. It occurred to me that I might be able to make the distinction between the two types of knowledge we desire clearer by contrasting two very different philosophers. Turn to Book VII of Plato’s Republic. Socrates has been talking about the use of arithmetic in the arts and sciences (knowing how to do) and he then goes on to say of this same arithmetic ‘But it has never been rightly used. Its true value is its attraction of thought to wards being.’ (523A). Then he goes on to talk about Geometry and again contrasts the two kinds of knowledge. He says— They have no other way of talking than if they were doing something with their hands, and as if all their words had acts in view. For all their talk is of squaring or of putting one thing on another or addition and the like. But in fact this science has nothing but knowledge itself in view—knowledge of that which always is and not of something which at one time comes into existence and then passes away (527A). A little further on Glaucon praises astronomy because it gives ‘quickness in noting the times of the year and the round of the months and years which is very useful, not only in farming and at sea but still more in the military art’ (527D). Socrates rejects this ‘knowing how to do’ as not the true work of a philosopher. He replies— I am amused by the reason you give. You seem to fear that the mass of men may take you to be putting useless sciences forward. It is in fact very hard to see how in every soul there is an instrument of knowledge which may be cleaned and put in order by such sciences, when every day business has broken and blinded it. . . . Those who believe this with you will be very pleased with what we say. But those who have never had any experience of this sort will take us to be talking complete nonsense, for they don’t see any profit to be got from such sciences (ibid). And in another place in the same Book Socrates says— The natural power to learn lives in the soul and is like an eye which might not be turned from the dark to the light without a turning round of the whole body. The instrument of knowledge has to be turned round and with it the whole soul, from the things of becoming to the things of being, till the soul is able by degrees to support the light of true being and can look at the brightest (518C).

184

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

I suppose I could go on all night finding quotations in Plato to illustrate this passion for contemplative knowledge. But now contrast this with a long quotation from Macaulay’s Essay on Francis Bacon. ‘In truth the very admiration we feel for the eminent philosophers of antiquity forces us to adopt the opinion that their powers were systematically misdirected. For how else could it be that such powers should affect so little for mankind? A pedestrian may show as much muscular power on a treadmill as on the highway road. But on the road his vigour will assuredly carry him forward; and on the treadmill he will not advance one inch. The ancient philosophy was a treadmill not a path. The ancient philosophers did not neglect natural science, but they did not cultivate it for the purpose of increasing the power and ameliorating the condition of man ... To sum up the whole we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god. The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to provide man with what he requires while he continues to be a man. The aim of the Plantonic philosophy was to raise us far above vulgar wants. The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to supply our vulgar wants. The former aim was noble but the latter was attainable . . . Suppose that Justinian, when he closed the schools of Athens, had called on the last few sages who haunted the Portico, and lingered round the ancient plane trees, to show their title to veneration: suppose that he had said: ‘A thousand years have elapsed since in this famous city Socrates opposed Protagoras and Hippias; during those thousand years a large proportion of the ablest men of every generation has been employed in constant efforts to bring to perfection the philosophy which you teach; that philosophy has been munificently patronised by the powerful; its professors have been held in the highest esteem by the public; it has drawn to itself almost all the sap and vigour of the human intellect; and what has it effected? What profitable truth has it taught us which we should not have equally known without it? What has it enabled us to do which we should not have been equally able to do without it?’ Such questions we suspect would have puzzled Simplicius and Isidore. Ask a follower of Bacon what the new philosophy, as it was called in the time of Charles the Second, has effected and his answer is ready. It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new security to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendour of the day; it has extended the range of human vision; it has multiplied the power

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

185

of the human muscles; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; it has enabled men to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth; to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run against the wind. These quotations will make clear to you the two different roots of the desire for knowledge. The desire to contemplate and the desire to be able to do. All that I want to say to you about philosophy centres round this distinction. My thesis is this. Language can only teach us the sort of technical achievements Macaulay lauds as the fruit of the Baconian philosophy. It can never yield us that vision of true being which was Plato’s goal. But in demonstrating this by means of the critique of language the desire to contemplate true being is not extinguished and done away or made ridiculous. On the contrary this desire is strengthened and transformed. ‘We signify the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable’ (cf. Tractatus 4.115). Note The quotations from Plato are from the translation by I.A. Richards. The reference to the Tractatus in the last sentence reads more fully, in the Ogden translation. ‘It (philosophy) will mean the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable.’ The Pears-McGuinnes translation reads ‘It will signify what cannot be said by presenting clearly what can be said.’ D’s typescript reads ‘We show—.’ I have avoided the word ‘show’ as it has other rather different implications in W., not relevant here.

LETTER 4 Jan 22nd 1954 Dear Luke, I think you are right, it is time the general principles we have been discussing were given a more particular application. The subject of Primary and Secondary qualities will provide a very good starting point. Notice first of all how immensely fruitful in the mastery of nature this way of thinking has been; it is a way of thinking that has added enormously to what I have described as the first kind of knowledge. Physical science began to advance when its attention was directed to the laws of matter in motion only, when the phenomena of colour, warmth, sound were relegated to the realm of secondary qualities produced by various combinations of moving particles or wave motions in a medium. In chemistry the manifold variety of substances in the world were reduced to combinations of a limited number of primary elements, which were now seen as patterns of electrons and protons. The truth of such hypotheses is manifest in the technical achievements of modern science. The theory of the electron and its orbits has produced an atomic explosion. But underneath this achievement of mastery over nature lies our desire for the second kind of knowledge. Not merely to do but to contemplate. To possess the absolute in thought. The success of our working hypothesis can delude us that we

186

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

have also achieved this ideal. Writers suggest that these moving particles are ‘the real world’. They claim that science has penetrated through the sensuous curtain to the ultimate nature of things. Philosophy while it makes no criticism of the hypotheses themselves must oppose this latter claim as an error. Philosophy, if I may say so, holds a watching brief for the absolute. Its task is to display clearly in what the truth of the hypotheses really consists. They are but working models for co-ordinating all the immense number of facts discovered in the laboratory, for passing on these facts succinctly to others; and for suggesting future experiments. Molecules atoms and electrons are the most wonderful discovery in notation. To say that the formula of water is H2O means that we can perform the familiar experiment of decomposing water into two parts of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and again perform the corresponding synthesis. (Nothing is so valuable here as to read Lavoisier’s original experiments in his own words.) But the formula does not mean that we have in some mysterious way got outside our sensuous apprehension and discovered what water is as a thing in itself. For the true philosopher water is still that wonderful substance that quenches our thirst and delights out eyes in rivers and lakes. There is a saying of Goethe’s I would like to quote here. ‘Do not I beg of you look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson.’ Ridiculous advice to a scientist learning what to do, wisdom to a philosopher learning to contemplate. I remember well trying to explain this point of view to a physicist 25 years ago. He was genuinely shocked and upset at such a heresy. He wanted to cling to the belief that his conceptions of the constitution of matter represented a real penetration into the mystery of the world. This opposition to the phenomenalist interpretation of scientific hypotheses is most interesting. It is due to the desire in all of us for the second kind of knowledge, the desire to have an adequate idea for contemplation of the world as a limited whole (Tractatus 6.45, see above). It is certainly not stupidity which opposes phenomenalism. Philosophy while respecting the source of this opposition must insist on the truth of a phenomenalist interpretation of the formulae. This is not to abolish the desire for the absolute but to develop and strengthen it. ‘We signify the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable’. I found it helpful that after reaching the above philosophical position I had to study chemistry for the first time for my medical degree. It was really difficult to remember my phenomenalist teaching when actually dealing with chemical formulae. Again when I passed on to the study of histology (the microscopic investigation of the body tissues) there was the tendency to think that the world revealed by the microscope was the real world and that my unaided eyes only gave me ‘appearances’. It is of value for a philosopher to be engaged in learning one of the natural sciences. He is then reminded that in mastering a new technique his desire for the second kind of knowledge exerts a continual pressure on him to misinterpret the formulations which aid him to memorise his new achievements. ‘It is doubtless scientific to disregard certain aspects when we work; but to urge that such aspects are not fact and that what we use without regard to them is an independent real thing — this is barbarous metaphysics.’ The quotation is from the first chapter of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. It sums up well what I have been writing about.

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

187

This ‘disregarding of certain aspects’ is not something which occurs only in the study of natural science. It is a technique learnt unconsciously by man long before he became a scientist. Our most highly developed sense is that of sight, hence we tend to think of the visual world as the absolute (remember Bradley’s dog, ‘it smells therefore it is’). Even within the world of sight we, for practical purposes, have to disregard much that is given. If I take my glasses off the world looks quite different, objects are not clear and distinct, I have to look closely to read — but supposing I had been born short-sighted and never had glasses; I would have constructed a different ‘absolute’. Therefore these partial visual worlds are not the absolute. The absolute, let me repeat, is the attempt to think of the world as a whole and not merely piecemeal. A false absolute is deposed by showing that it is a construction by abstraction from the totality of the given, and that the truth of this construction lies in its practical usefulness. The false absolute does not contain inconsistencies or contradictions, and any attempt to show that it does depends on verbal sophistry. The exhibition of its true use, its application, its real meaning, is enough to depose its pretended status. ‘We signify the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable.’

LETTER 5 Feb 1st Dear Luke, I am glad you found the last letter helpful. Remember what we are trying to do. We are taking some branch of human knowledge and demonstrating its real value. Exhibiting it as really knowing how to do something. Showing that the pictures which help us to learn this technique have no meaning apart from their application in practice. But at the same time insisting on the very real desire we have for more than just such activity, the desire to contemplate reality. This desire is not got rid of by our phenomenalistic interpretation of scientific theories, rather it is increased by the rejection of partial satisfactions. Take for the subject of this letter modern astronomical theory. You know the sort of world pictures I mean. Enormous distances measured in ‘light years’; galactic systems receding from us at prodigious speeds; giant suns whose chemical life cycle is investigated; etc., etc. I confess this science has always fascinated me ever since I first looked through an astronomical telescope. There was a time too when with Pascal I could say ‘the silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me’. But now see what our knowledge of these matters really amounts to. About any scientific conception always ask ‘how have we come to form such a picture?’ ‘What are the facts on which such a hypothesis is based?’ They are based on certain delicate observations and the use of particular instruments with which you and I are not familiar. I mean the measurement of parallax, the shift of spectropic lines, the estimation of absolute luminosity, the rate of fluctuation of Cepheid variables. Here is a description of the difficulty involved in determining the spectogram of a nebula (it is taken from G.J. Whitrow The Structure of the Universe).

188

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

First one point of light among thousands of others all around it had to be, kept steadily fixed over the slit of a spectograph attached to the telescope, for perhaps 8 or 10 nights. Then after all this concentrated effort, the resulting picture might be no more than 1/10th of an inch long and 1/30th of an inch wide, containing many closely packed lines. What impresses me nowadays is not the magnitudes in the astronomical hypotheses but the infinitesimals in their observations! We are not familiar with the details of this skilled technique, therefore we get a wrong idea of the meaning of the hypotheses. We never have to use them, we merely stare at the picture presented and feel dumb-founded. The cosmogony of the galaxies is a useful pictorial summary for memorising, unifying, predicting, certain minute observations. In this sense it is a real advance in knowledge. It tells us something we can do; namely for instance ‘if you look at the spectrum of such and such a star you will find there is a shift of the spectroscopic lines to such and such an extent’. Alternatively you can express the same fact by saying that the star is receding from us at such and such a speed. We have the feeling of course that if only we could see the world as God sees it we would see this star of enormous size really travelling at this prodigious speed. It is the desire to see the world as God sees it, to possess the absolute in thought, that forces us to misinterpret the real nature of our knowledge. But the truth is that our observation of the shift of spectroscopic lines tells us absolutely nothing about how the world looks ‘sub specie aeterni’. Astronomy gives us no knowledge of the second kind, it only tells us certain things we can do. There is a saying, I believe of Hegel’s, ‘the stars are only a superficial rash on the surface of the sky’. Quite false of course if taken to deny the observations of modern astronomy; but true if it means that what I see with my naked eyes at night is as real and as wonderful as any picture of immensity conjured up by the astronomers. I will re-enforce what I am saying by taking one particular point. Astronomers and physicists speak about the speed of light. This speed is calculated from various experimental observations. One such observation is a delay in the predicted time of an eclipse of one of Jupiter’s moons. Now to say that light has a speed just means that there is this delay. We who never have to use the idea of light having a speed misinterpret the phrase very easily; we try to picture something actually travelling, as if somehow we could see light in motion, a nonsensical suggestion. It would be possible, though now very laborious, to do away with speaking of the speed of light. All the observations would of course still remain as valid as ever but they could be accounted for without having to speak of the speed of light. The delay in the expected eclipse could be explained by a modification of the law of gravitation in the neighbourhood of Jupiter. Now all along don’t forget that I know full well the resistance we feel at such an interpretation of our knowledge. The anger we feel against phenomenalism and pragmatism as a complete theory of knowledge is fully justified. It is the desire for the absolute that makes us so dissatisfied. The work of philosophy is to increase this desire by denying it satisfaction in astronomical speculation.

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

189

Here is a quotation from Spengler’s Decline of the West which will reinforce my point. The modern idea as to the nature of starry space — or to speak more prudently of an extension indicated by light indices that are communicated by eye and telescope — most certainly do not rest upon such knowledge; for what we see in the telescope are small bright discs of different sizes. The photographic plate yields quite another picture — not a sharper one but a different one — and the construction of a consistent world picture such as we crave depends upon connecting the two by numerous and often very daring hypotheses (e.g. of distances, magnitudes and movements) that we ourselves frame. The style of the picture corresponds to the style of our own soul. In actual fact we do not know how different the light powers of one star and another may be, nor whether they vary in different directions. We do not know whether light is altered, diminished, or extinguished in the immensities of space. We do not know whether our earthly conceptions of the nature of light, and therefore all the theories and laws deduced from them, have a validity beyond the immediate environment of the earth. What we see are merely light indices; what we understand are symbols of ourselves. In these last two letters I have spoken much about ‘the absolute’, but I have not qualified it by one positive attribute. And I never will. I have tried to show that certain false absolutes will not satisfy our need. But in doing that, if I am not mistaken, I have caused your feeling about the world to change. The absolute shows itself more clearly. ‘We signify the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable.’

LETTER 6 Feb 3rd Dear Luke, This letter is by way of being a postscript to the last two. I wanted to send you three minor variations on the same theme. Three examples of the way in which we tend to misinterpret our working hypotheses as really giving us a metaphysical insight into what is ‘above’, ‘below’, ‘behind’, the phenomenal world. (You will remember Kant’s definition of metaphysics in my first letter — ‘a longing to pass out beyond our immediate confines and to relate ourselves to other worlds.’) (1) You are familiar with the conception of the unconscious mind as used in psychology. Certain techniques, ‘free association’, ‘narco-analysis’, ‘intravenous methedrine’, bring to light memories and wishes of which the patient was not previously aware. The hypothesis of the unconscious merely means* that these things can be done. Yet some writers (and I fear many readers) think and speak of the unconscious as some ‘shadowy realm where memories wait in disconsolate exile till association announces resurrection and recall’. We feel as if we have discovered a new world, not just a new technique. I remember Wittgenstein saying that people would try and interpret the unconscious as if it was really another kind of consciousness. Freud himself made this metaphysical error. He wrote —

190

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psyche; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs’ (Interpretation of Dreams) p. 486. Notice these words, ‘real’, ‘inner nature’, ‘external world’, ‘data of consciousness’; each one of them calls for a separate chapter of critical metaphysics. (2) The second illustration is from mathematics. Mathematicians use such symbols as −1 and ‘transcendental’ numbers such as π and ϵ. Of these Leibniz said — ‘The suggestive power of these symbols has always tempted people to impute to them some entirely unmathematical meaning.’ The very names ‘imaginary number’, ‘perfect number’, ‘transcendental number’ suggest a mystical interpretation of their significance. Even such great mathematicians as Euler and Hermite spoke with religious awe of the mysteries surrounding these symbols. Read E.T. Bell Men of Mathematics. Writing about Hermite, Bell says: ‘Mathematicians he thought are permitted now and then to catch glimpses of the super-human harmonies regulating this ethereal realm of numerical existence.’ A philosophy of mathematics would have to show that there is nothing mysterious, nothing transcendental about such numbers as −1, π, ϵ etc. They are very useful symbols in performing certain calculations, that’s all. At the same time the desire that they should be more is the real subject matter of philosophy. There is more truth in Hermite’s error than in Hogben’s clarity. (3) Finally a rather trivial incident, but one that played quite an important part in the development of my thought about these matters. It happened 20 years ago. I was standing on the W. Coast of Ireland, a strong S.E. wind was blowing off the land. I said to my companion, I see from the weather map there is a cyclone approaching from the Atlantic.’ He replied: ‘well this strong off-shore wind should blow it out to sea.’ Of course the statement ‘there is a cyclone approaching’ meant among other things that there was a strong S.E. wind. A cyclone is just a way of describing a certain wind formation, a convenient notation. A cyclone isn’t something over and above the winds which it describes. But you see even in this trivial incident the tendency to take an hypothesis as a description of an entity behind the observed phenomena. Note* ‘Merely means’, as Rush Rhees has pointed out to me, is an oversimplification. The thrust of the argument is contained in the last sentence of the letter: see also note to Letter 8.

LETTER 7 Feb 9th Dear Luke, You say you would like me to write in more detail about the concept of Time, and our knowledge of the past. Memory seems to you to give us a contemplative form of

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

191

knowledge and not just a ‘knowing how to do’. I imagine you repeating those lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet. ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past.’ Here surely you will say is contemplation and not activity. Yet I do not believe that our knowledge of the past is any exception to what I have said so far. Namely that everything that we can express in words derives its meaning and its truth from the fact that it enables us to do something new, that it is a means of teaching someone else a new activity. Only there is an important difference here from any of the examples I have hitherto given of this principle. The techniques which our various temporal pictures enable us to carry out are of a different order from those which our spatial pictures were helpful for. The temporal pictures are largely concerned with teaching those techniques which man can do as a social being, as a member of a community; they are a necessary means of co-operation. Robinson Crusoe found it necessary to make a map of his island, he did not need to bother about punctuality. The thesis I am going to try and illustrate in this letter is this: Man as his social life has become more and more complicated has needed to develop different and more precise conceptions of time; that seen in this way none of our temporal schemata can claim absolute truth, as necessary a priori categories, though again, as with our spatial schemata, the desire for the absolute leads us to think falsely that our conception of time is now complete and perfect. Imagine yourself in pre-historic days and speaking the original Indo-European language. You would, of course, have had no way of measuring time, no clocks or sundials. There would be no name for the days of the week and no names for the months. Certainly there was no fixed point from which to count the years. We can just imagine faintly how vague the conception of time would be with this limitation of speech and therefore of thought. It interested me greatly to read the other day that philologists consider that the original Indo-European language had no tenses in the sense that we find Greek and Latin have. There was no way of expressing clearly the difference between past, present, and future. Originally the tenses only expressed the difference between a completed action — I have made a flint arrow, and an incomplete action — I am making a flint arrow. You can imagine the simplicity of social organisation this limitation of speech imposed. With the development of agriculture, learning how and when to plough and harvest, a more developed way of talking about time was required. But notice again, first a new activity is learned, then a new vocabulary to teach and hand on this new technique, and finally as we shall see later the words of this new vocabulary breaking loose from their context in action and being treated as absolute ideas. ‘Language going on holiday’ (Philosophical Investigations I, 38). The technique of agriculture required a cyclical conception of time — Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. These important seasons were marked by specific religious ceremonies (even to-day this way of thinking about time and measuring it has not lost its use). These ceremonies were not considered as commemorating some event in the distant past but as the real recurrence of the same occasion. Adonis died every

192

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

year. The picture of time was cyclical not linear as we picture it now. From time to time the idea of the great cycle is revived in one form or another, showing how hard it is for an old way of thinking to lose its fascination. At the council of Whitby in A.D. 663 one of the major sources of controversy between the Celtic church and the Roman missionaries was how to fix the date of Easter. When the Roman calendar triumphed the Celtic church never recovered from its defeat and its whole organisation withered away. Nowadays we are inclined to wonder at the importance attached to such a relative matter. But for the Celtic church an absolute was involved, their cycle of festivals seemed to them an absolute conception of time. For us to-day, ‘o’clock time’ seems to be an absolute, we feel that anything in any way real must have its place in this series, its precise date. But as we shall see later this too is only a relative idea, connected as it is with a particular set of activities and social organisation; when its absolute nature is deposed then too our feeling about reality undergoes a profound change. The next great development in the conception of time arose, I believe, with the origin of the epic narrative, the telling of stories round the camp fire. Once again man had developed a new technique, a new activity, to narrate and to listen. This again needed a new vocabulary, a new language game. For in any story there must be a clear temporal sequence, a before and an after. This is the beginning of the linear conception of time and of the past, present and future tenses. Have you ever told a child a story? Woe betide you if you vary the familiar order; first the father bear must eat the porridge, then the mother bear, and only then must the baby bear find that his is all eaten up. The story has its serious side for a child; he knows that with it he is learning something which is going to be of immense value, the idea of a fixed order of events in time. From the epic arose the idea of a tradition, and so the conception of a nation with a history of its own; man learnt to think of himself as a member of a state, of a community which persisted in time. This also was learning to do something new. When two nations with different traditions and different religious festivals came in contact difficulties arose. Treaties, pacts, promises, require a common measure of time and a common origin to measure from. So arose the conception of scientific time, time stripped of all its rich associations with myth and tradition. An immensely powerful new conception, an essential idea for international commerce and politics. My point is this, every new conception of time has arisen as the result of an increasing complexity in social organisation. Philosophical confusions arise when we forget the practical necessities which required these conceptions, and when we begin to think of them as a priori categories which man has always known and used. Here is an example of the sort of confusion I mean. I have been reading a book by Professor Furlong on ‘Memory’. The Professor like so many philosophers before him, is puzzled by ‘how we can have knowledge of the past’. What logical justification can we find for believing that Caesar crossed the Rubicon? Throughout his book Professor Furlong assumes without question that we somehow know beforehand that there must be a fixed order of events in time, a past, present and a future; the only question is how the poor mind entirely shut up in the present can ever get outside itself and fill in the details of this blank a priori category. This is I believe a nonsensical question, but it is typical of what happens when a practical technique is treated as an absolute idea.

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

193

The idea of a fixed abstract scientific time, measured mechanically and expressed numerically, is a necessary practical assumption for the complex social life we lead to-day. A good clock is as necessary for running a railway as a good steam engine. But— ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ, Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line Nor all thy tears wash out one line of it’. A necessary idea, yes, in the law-courts and in the market-place. But true absolutely? Applicable to every realm of experience? An idea which we could not conceive should be otherwise? No and indeed no! If it were not that the world was too much with us we would soon know this thin abstracted time for the cheat it is. Before I finish a further illustration comes to my mind of the type of confusion that arises when scientific time is taken as an absolute category. One day I was walking with Wittgenstein in the Zoological gardens here in Dublin. We discussed as we looked at the various animals the theory of evolution. He said to me that people to-day wanted to say that the long ages of evolution had at last culminated in producing a mind which could trace and understand the whole process that had given it birth. To talk in this way shows a complete confusion of categories. It is taking a valuable hypothesis in biology out of its proper context and making it an absolute idea applicable to every conceptual realm. The mind is not something which ‘has a place in nature’, the concept of nature is nothing but a useful tool of the mind. Note The reference to Professor Furlong is to E.J. Furlong, TCD. A Study of Memory: A Philosophical Essay (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1951).

LETTER 8 Feb 14th Dear Luke, I think I know the mistake you are making. It is one that has held up my own thinking for nearly ten years. It is partly my fault that you have got confused in this way; my fault for using words like ‘phenomenalism’, ‘fact’, and ‘hypothesis’ without making their meaning more precise. This sort of language is inclined to make one think that all knowledge could be divided into parts; the given facts, the data of sense, and the inferences and hypotheses we construct on the basis of this given material. The picture in our mind is analogous to that of a child with a number of given bricks and the various models he can make with the bricks. For a long time I was deluded by this false picture of the ‘given’. I kept thinking that in sense-experience and in memory we were presented with innumerable isolated facts which we could ‘read off’ and put accurately into words; and that all other possible knowledge was but inference and construction from this.

194

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

It was Bradley who woke me from my dogmatic slumber. During the war when I was in Egypt the only book on philosophy I could obtain was Bradley’s Essays on Truth and Reality. His chapters on ‘Truth and copying’, ‘Immediate experience’. ‘Truth and coherence’. ‘Memory and judgement’ are all relevant to what I am going to say now. Long ago I underlined in my copy of Hegel’s Logic this sentence — ‘all thinking is the denial of what is immediately given’. Do you see what he means? It is this. Whenever I make a significant statement I have gone beyond anything which could be given to me with infallibility by immediate experience. Such statements as ‘I see a tree’. ‘I hear a motor’. ‘I smell something burning’ etc. are all liable to error. For this reason some philosophers thought you could get over the difficulty by introducing the concept of ‘sense-data’, that it was possible to devise a language which described only what I immediately experienced. But this device also won’t work. For even such a phrase as ‘I see a red patch’ if it is to have any significance is open to error and liable to correction by further experience. As Bradley says—‘My feeling is I agree not subject to error in the proper sense of that term, but on the other side my feeling does not deliver truth. And the process which gets from it a deliverance as to individual fact is fallible.’ Notice also this important point. The attempt to describe ‘only what is given’ by the introduction of the sense data concept doesn’t do at all what was intended. It looks like an attempt to be more accurate but is not really so. If I say ‘I see a tree’ this describes more accurately what I want to say than if I said ‘I see patches of green and brown in such and such patterns’. This latter would describe what I see when I screw up my eyes as one does sometimes in sketching — quite a different experience. There is no substitute for the phrase ‘I see a tree’, no other way of saying just the same thing. This brings me at once to the distinction between ‘a fact’ and ‘an hypothesis’. The distinction is made within the realm of language. An hypothesis is a new way of using old words; of giving an old word a new meaning. It is a device of notation for getting round the difficulty of a very lengthy exposition. Thus for example if I say ‘light has a velocity’ it might look here as if the word velocity had precisely the same meaning as in the sentence ‘the velocity of this train is 60 miles an hour.’ That this is not so is shown by the fact that the velocity of light is measured in an entirely different way from the velocity of a train. The phrase the velocity of light is merely an expression for summarising succinctly a number of observations viz. ‘the delay in the eclipse of Jupiter’s moons’, ‘the Fizeau experiment’, etc. These experiments can all be described in detail in words whose meaning is familiar, established, forming a fixed part of our current language. By phenomenalism I mean that the significance of any scientific hypothesis is to be found by translating into everyday language the experiments which are said to ‘confirm it’. A hypothetical statement can be developed into a series of statements about facts.* Compare here what Wittgenstein says in of the Philosophical Investigations (I, 422)— What am I believing when I believe men have souls? What am I believing in when I believe that this substance contains two carbon rings? In both cases there is a picture in the foreground but the sense lies far in the background; that is, the application of the picture is not easy to survey.

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

195

And again on II, xi—‘The meaning of the word “length” is learnt among other things by learning what it is to determine length.’ The difference between a fact and a hypothesis is not that of the difference between certainty and probability, of the ‘immediately verifiable’ and ‘the inferential’. The difference is that between something said in language where application is long established and therefore obvious, and something said in a new and unfamiliar way ‘whose application is not easy to survey’. In Wittgenstein’s terms the difference is that between an old ‘language game’ and a ‘new language game’. It is the impossibility of varying the long established language which gives ‘facts’ the appearance of absolute certainty; and the possibility of varying the unestablished language which gives hypotheses an appearance of doubtfulness. But certainty and doubtfulness have nothing to do with the distinction. So far as I can judge my feelings I am as certain of the atomic hypothesis as I am that there is a table in this room. I would be as much surprised if the experiments which the atomic hypothesis describes ‘went wrong’ as I would be if I found that I was hallucinating when I saw this table. But these feelings and surprises have nothing to do with the logic of the matter. The distinction between a fact and a hypothesis depends on the type of language game we are using; old or new, application in the foreground, application afar off. We have wandered a long way from the idea of something given with certainty in immediate sense experience. How often in the past did I say to myself ‘but surely something is given!’ Now I want to return to this puzzle. The wish to dwell only on what is given, to grasp the data alone in their entirety without hypothetical addition, to have that certainty of being which immediate experience alone seems to offer— what is this but our old desire to have a satisfying object for contemplation? To stop doing and to know. The desire for the ‘purely given’ is the same as the desire for the absolute. If we could rest content in the present moment we would already possess the absolute we desire. Thinking prevents us doing this. ‘All thinking is the denial of what is immediately given.’ In 6.4311 of the Tractatus Wittgenstein says—‘If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present moment.’ This desire to live in the present moment is the root of all metaphysics and of our misinterpretation of our practical knowledge. Philosophy does not teach us how to live in the present moment, but by closing false paths strengthens our desire to do so. Philosophy is a via negativa. Note * cf Philosophical Grammar p 219. ‘A hypothesis is a law for forming propositions. You could also say: an hypothesis is a law for forming expectations.’ Both here and in Letter 6 D. perhaps deals too simply with the conception of hypothesis, the meaning of which can vary with the context, as he recognised in later discussion with Rush Rhees. With some of the related questions in the psychological field he dealt in the Danger of Words. See also the review of this by Ilham Dilman in The Human World No 14 Feb 1974 and D’s reply (pp. 330–355).

196

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

LETTER 9 Feb 21st Dear Luke, You find the notion of a proposition ‘whose sense lies far in the background’ hard to grasp. I will try and make this clear as it is an essential point. It all centres round the realisation that knowing the meaning of a proposition is the same as being able to make use of it. Let me illustrate the matter this way. Suppose I have before me a map and know how to read a map. Until I can pin-point my actual present position here and now on the map, and orientate the map with the land-scape before me, I can make no use of it. Once I have done these two things it immediately gives me directions to follow. Similarly if I say to somebody who knows nothing about astronomy that a certain nebula is moving away from us at the rate of 25,000 miles per second, he has a picture before him with which he can do nothing. He can’t apply it to anything he sees before him. But if I then go on to explain to him the use of the spectroscope and the shift of the Fraunhofer lines, he could set up the apparatus for himself and verify my statement. The explanation enables him to ‘get going’. Orientating the map enables us to make use of it, explaining the hypothesis enables us to make use of it. Explanation comes to an end when action can begin. Once when I was looking for fossils in the Silurian rocks of Co Mayo an old countryman got into conversation with me. I foolishly said to him. ‘These are some of the oldest rocks in existence.’ I could see he was dumbfounded. What could it mean, rocks having an age? How could one rock be older than another? Only in the practical activity of geological exploration has the dating of rocks any meaning. The application of the phrase lies a long way in the background. On another occasion when I was coming down from a mountain climb an old man asked me if I had seen the Lake near the top (a fine example of a glacier corrie lake). I said I had. ‘Now’ he said ‘Wasn’t that a queer place to put a lake!’ I could as little use his conception of creation as he could use my geological terms. In conclusion look at this sentence which I find in my note-book: ‘Call her in the middle with a double, before, wrong, and home; repeated once.’ The words are all familiar but the sentence sounds nonsense, it gives us no information, we can do nothing with it. But to a trained bell-ringer it gives precise instructions for ringing a peal of grand-sire triples. He wouldn’t want any further explanation of it but could get his grip on the bell-rope and start pulling. In instructing us in campanology he would expand this short sentence into a much more lengthy statement, then we would understand and be able to join in. We would have learned how to do something new. To know means to be able to do.

LETTER 10 March 1st Dear Luke, I am interested to hear that you have been reading Bradley. Of all English philosophers I have found him the most stimulating. He constantly says things which make me pause and start thinking things out for myself — and that is the only value

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

197

to be obtained from reading any philosopher. Beware of ‘learned historicity’: For a student of philosophy there is no more dangerous ‘bye-pass meadow’ than to get entangled in working out ‘what Kant really meant to say’ etc. (You will remember that in Pilgrim’s Progress bye-pass meadow led to Castle Doubting and Giant Despair). There is of course a great deal in Bradley’s writings I can’t accept. I deny entirely that the absolute we desire can be described by such a sentence as ‘Reality is one, it essentially is experience, and it owns a balance of pleasure’. My fundamental thought is that the absolute we desire is not capable of formulation in any words. That the attempt to do so is to in mistake the nature and purpose of language; language has been developed for quite another purpose namely to communicate to each other the technical achievements we have made. Thus that sentence I quoted above from. Bradley is for me meaningless. The task of a critical philosophy would be to show this. It would do so by taking the words ‘reality’, ‘one’, experience’, and exhibit how we make significant use of them in everyday conversation, the real purpose for which they were coined. If this were done with adequate skill the above mysterious sounding phrase would dissolve away into emptiness. Secondly. I do not agree that concepts such as Substance, cause, change, space, time, the self, etc. should be described as containing contradictions. They are words which we all use and use perfectly — except when ‘language goes on holiday’. There is however another side in Bradley’s writing which is what makes me continue to read him. It is his continued emphasis that metaphysics is a response to a felt want. You will find this constantly repeated in his writings. Here are some quotations— (1) We have on the one hand a demand explicit or otherwise for an object which is complete. On the other hand the object which fails to include immediate experience in its content is by the unrest of that experience condemned as defective. Essays p. 161. (2) The want of an object and still more the search for an object imply in a certain sense the knowledge of that object. Essays p. 16. (3) My object is to get before me what will content a certain felt need, but the way and the means are to be discovered only by trial and error. Essays p. 311. (4) Some in one way and some in others we seem to touch and have communion with what is beyond the visible world. In various manners we find something which both supports and humbles, both chastens and transports us. And with certain persons the intellectual effort to understand the universe is a principal way of thus experiencing the Deity. No one probably who has not felt this, however differently he might describe it, has ever cared much for metaphysics. ‘Appearance and Reality’ Introduction. Bradley is thus for me a magnificent witness to man’s need for metaphysics— the desire deep rooted in our nature to contemplate reality, to reach ultimate truth, to possess the absolute in thought. And then alongside of this is his other conviction — that thinking alone cannot ever reach its own ultimate satisfaction. That in the end philosophy fails in its quest: ‘To understand, as it is given to us, or given to anyone, to understand is not wholly to possess even in apprehension, and still less is it the same at to enjoy and to do’. Essays p. 8.

198

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

LETTER 11 March 10th Dear Luke Your criticism is a very fair one and I will try and answer it as well as I can. You ask me what right have I to use words such as ‘the absolute’, ‘a concept of totality’, ‘to contemplate the world sub specie aeterni’—are not these also words taken out of their context in ordinary use and given some special metaphysical meaning? Does not the critique of language apply to them too? To these questions I could only reply yes. Strictly speaking I should not use these words in this way. I should say only what can be said, but perhaps you would feel I was not really teaching you philosophy (Tractatus, 6.53). If you did not already possess the desire for contemplative knowledge I could not create it in you by describing an object — the absolute. Only because I believed this desire was deep rooted in your nature could I hope to point in its direction by such phrases. The work of philosophy is to make that desire more explicit, to strengthen it, to reject all false satisfactions, and thereby to transform it. I remember Wittgenstein telling me that Frank Ramsey once said to him ‘I still can’t help feeling that there is something mysterious about Time’. And that he, Wittgenstein, replied that there was no mystery there either. Both were right. The ‘mysteriousness’ of Time is just this: to think of the endless succession of the ages, both those which are past and those which are to come, of the endless flux, of the wheel of life. This thought arouses in us the desire for something permanent and abiding, for simultaneity, for the stillness of contemplative knowledge. Yet this questing which the thought of time awakes in us can never be put as a question. If we attempt to do so we take words out of their proper context and use them without meaning. If there were a man to whom time did not feel like a mystery, we could not make it mysterious by asking him sensible questions about time. How strange that so many books have been written to prove that Time was unreal! Written by men whose well-regulated clocks ticked beside them as they wrote. To have learnt to measure time; the seasons of the year, the calendar, the solar year, the siderial day, the clock, the chronometer; these are among the greatest of man’s technical achievements. The whole fabric of our civilisation is built on them. There is no mystery here, nothing that is not true. And yet it is so unsatisfying, so painful to the truly contemplative spirit, this business with time, with ‘universal history’. No wonder that in the passion for the absolute men have denied the reality of Time. Philosophy must expose the grammatical confusions which metaphysicians make when they try to find contradictions and antinomies in our concept of Time, must show that where a question can be asked it can be answered. Yet these confusions about time do not arise because of some perversity in our nature, nor entirely because of our ignorance of grammar; they arise because of a real desire in our deepest being. It is this desire, which ultimately we cannot put into words at all, which is for me the very essence of philosophy.

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

199

The mysteriousness which I at one time felt about Space and Time is no longer a mysteriousness about Space and Time, but it is still a mysteriousness. A deeper and more disturbing mystery. Compare what Wittgenstein says on p. 212 of the Philosophical Investigations (II, xi) - ‘We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough’. The same thought from another aspect. Some philosophers have felt a mystery surrounding the thought of the ‘self’. As if the real key to the riddles of the universe lay in understanding the nature of the ‘I’ which knows. “Intellegendo se, intellegit omnia alia”. And yet the more psychology we read the more we feel that this essential ‘I’ eludes us. We cannot put into words the mystery which we feel in the notion of the self. What we can say and make use of about the self seems trivial and irrelevant. Compare what Wittgenstein says in 5.641 of the Tractatus. — There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk of a nonpsychological I. The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the world is my world. The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body, nor the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit — not a part of the world. Do not misunderstand me. There are not here three mysteries: Space, Time, and the Self. These are but different ways in which the one mystery tries to put itself in the form of a question. Philosophy has to show that none of these questions are real questions, all involve a wrong use of common words. But in getting rid of the questions it does not get rid of the questing, the desire, the unsatisfied longing. Words like ‘the absolute’, ‘the completed whole’, ‘to contemplate the world sub specie aeterni’ these too must go — but that in our nature which made us want to use them, God forbid that that should go.

LETTER 12 March 31st Dear Luke I have left you without a letter for some time. The occasion for this one was a review I read in yesterday’s paper. A review of a book on philosophy in which the critic made the following remark — It is now claimed by the more fashionable thinkers (in England and the United States) that they have established a lasting peace by forcing an unconditional surrender on all the systems of the past which have answered in various ways such questions as the destiny of man, the nature of the real, of goodness, truth, and beauty. It is meaningless to ask if God exists — meaningless even to describe oneself as a sceptic or agnostic. “The right method in philosophy” Wittgenstein has told us in his beautifully composed Tractatus Logice-Philosophicus “would

200

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

be to say nothing but what can be said i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy. The solution of the problem of life lies in the vanishing of the problem”. “The great rival philosophers of the past” says Professor Ayer, “deserve their appellation solely because they were great analysts, and such of those statements as are incapable of being verified in sense experience are either senseless or formal tautologies”. Bertrand Russell would restrict the scope of philosophy to logic, a new type of logic itself restricted to analysis. Well that is the quotation, what do you think of it? I have taken it as typical of a way of writing about Wittgenstein’s work which to me shows a complete misunderstanding of his teaching. He is put in the same school as Professor Ayer, Bertrand Russell, and ‘the more fashionable thinkers, in England and the United States’. I can only say that to anyone who knew Wittgenstein personally such a classification is ludicrous. You will remember that in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein speaks of his results being ‘variously misunderstood, more or less mangled, or watered down’. It is against this misunderstanding and mangling and watering down that all my letters to you have been a protest: I want to put this to you in the most striking way I can. The following incident occurs to my memory. Wittgenstein once said to me that a certain writer was by far the greatest philosopher of the last century. Whom do you think he named? I would like to ask ‘the more fashionable thinkers of England and the United States’ — all in fact who think they understand what the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations are really concerned to teach — this examination question: ‘Whom did Wittgenstein regard as the greatest philosopher of the nineteenth century and why?’ And if they couldn’t answer it I would ask them to keep silent about interpreting Wittgenstein’s books. The answer I had from Wittgenstein’s own lips, said with great seriousness, so that I have never forgotten the occasion, was ‘Sören Kierkegaard’. I have been trying to explain to you what Wittgenstein’s teaching meant and means to me. I have spoken constantly to you of our unsatisfied desire for the absolute. Philosophy must increase and transform this desire. It does so by exposing the real nature of those forms of knowledge which we falsely take to give us the absolute. The critique of language is the technique for doing this. I have given you many quotations from Wittgenstein which I understand in this light. Now I want to give you some quotations from Kierkegaard illustrating the same attitude to philosophy. Here first of all is a quotation from his Philosophical Fragments (p. 35). The paradoxical passion of the Reason thus comes repeatedly into collision with the unknown, which does indeed exist, but is unknown, and in so far does not exist. The Reason cannot advance beyond this point, and yet it cannot refrain in its paradoxicalness from arriving at this limit and occupying itself therewith. It will not serve to dismiss its relation to it simply by asserting that the Unknown does not exist, since this itself involves a relationship. But what then is the Unknown, since the designation of it as God merely signifies for us that it is

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

201

unknown? To say that it is the Unknown because it cannot be known, and even if it were capable of being known it could not be expressed, does not satisfy the demand of passion, though it correctly interprets the Unknown as a limit; but a limit is precisely a torment for passion, though it also serves as an incitement. And yet the reason can come no further, whether it risks an issue via negations or via eminentiae. When I wrote to you about the desire for the absolute I was thinking of this ‘paradoxical passion of the Reason’ about ‘this limit to which the Reason repeatedly comes’. Next about the real nature of scientific knowledge, that it deludes us into thinking we already grasp the absolute in thought, and that philosophy must fight against this in the interests of the absolute, here are three quotations from Kierkegaard’s Journals — 633. Until now people have always expressed themselves in the following way: the knowledge that one does not understand this or the other thing does not satisfy science, the aim of which is to understand. Here is the mistake; people ought to say the very opposite: if human science refuses to understand that there is something which it cannot understand, or better still, that there is something about which it clearly understands that it cannot understand it — then all is confusion. For it is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox. The paradox is not a concession but a category, as ontological definition which expresses the relation between existing cognitive spirit and eternal truth. 962. The majority of men in every generation, even those who, as it is described, devote themselves to thinking (Dons and the like), live and die under the impression that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more, and that if it were granted them to live longer, that life would continue to be one long continuous growth in understanding. How many of them ever experience the maturity of discerning that there comes a critical moment when everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood. That is Socratic ignorance and that is what the philosophy of our time requires as a corrective. . . . It is quite literally true that the law is: increasing profundity in understanding more and more the one cannot understand. And then once again comes in “being like a child” but raised to the second power. The man who is mature in this sense is naive, simple, and he marvels, but in all that essentially humorously, and yet not in such a way that it is humour. And that this life is happy as blessed as it is blessed to adore, more blessed even than for a woman to be in love, well, as to that those who are made happy by their own conceits have no conception what it means.

202

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

1054. ‘Science’ — the existential. ‘Reality’ cannot be conceived. This has already been shown by Johannes Climacus quite simply and correctly. To conceive reality is to reduce it to possibility — but in that case it is impossible to conceive it, because to conceive it is to reduce it to possibility, and consequently not to hold fast to it as reality. Compared with reality to conceive is a step backwards and not progress. Not as though ‘reality’ were not conceivable; not at all, no, the concept which results from reducing it to possibility by conceiving is also in reality, but there is something more — that it is reality. To go from possibility to reality is a progress (except in relation to evil), to go from reality to possibility is a step backwards. But the unhappy confusion is due to the fact that in the modern world reality has been included in logic and thus in distraction it is forgotten that reality in logic is only a reality which is thought i.e. possibility. Art, science, poetry, etc. have only to do with the possible, that means to say not possibility in the sense of an idle hypothesis, but possible in the sense of ideal reality. Is the historical then not reality? Certainly. But what history? The history of the world is certainly reality, but a past reality. For me it is and can only be a reality which is thought, i.e. a possibility. Whether the dead really fulfilled the duties which were set them existentially or not is now decided once and for all, for them there is no longer any existential reality except in the past and that past, once again, only exists for me as idea.’ reality, as reality in thought, as possibility. But people are like madmen as a result of this pantheistic scientific attitude. Never mind me, say the Dons, the few years I live, the mere nothing which I can achieve — is it worth a moment’s consideration? No, Science first, last, and all the time. That is irreligious, it is a lack of religious tact a lack of soberness, it is intoxication, a drunken dream”. This is how ‘the greatest philosopher of the last century’ wrote. Those who equate Wittgenstein with the founder of ‘logical positivism’ (which be certainly was not) must explain what he found to admire here. He admired Kierkegaard for two reasons: for his passion for the absolute and for his clear insight that it is mere delusion to think that the absolute can be reached by scientific discovery and thinking. Tractatus 6.371. ‘At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena’. Notice the word illusion here. The illusion is that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more, whereas the true philosopher understands more and more that there is something that he cannot understand. What I have described to you as the rejection of false absolutes is just this understanding, this Socratic ignorance, and its absence in many who claim to be interpreting Wittgenstein or to be developing a linguistic philosophy of their own, shows that they have not understood him. He clearly understood that there are things that cannot be understood — ‘There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical’ (Tractatus 6.522).

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

203

LETTER 13 April 7th Dear Luke, Reading Kierkegaard again the other evening I came across a passage I had not noticed before. It occurs in his ‘Three discourses on imagined occasions’. I could not send you a better summing up of what Wittgenstein’s philosophy means to me. Here it is — It is true, as the understanding says, that there is nothing to wonder at, but precisely for this reason is wonder secure — because the understanding vouches for it. Let the understanding condemn what is transitory, let it clear the ground, then wonder comes in in the right place, in ground that is cleared, in the changed man. Everything appertaining to the first wonder understanding can consume; let it do so, in order that enigmatically it help one to wonder, for it is indeed enigmatical, since it conflicts with judgement of the understanding concerning itself. In all my letters I have been trying to say one thing to you. That in human knowledge there is nothing to wonder at — and for that reason wonder is secure. Philosophy clearly displays the speakable, takes the wonder out of our pretended absolutes, in order to make the wonder of the inexpressible secure. Kierkegaard talks about clearing the ground so that wonder may come in in the right place. The critique of language is this clearing of the ground, but the aim of the critique, the only reason for doing it, is that wonder may come in in the right place. My criticism of what I have read of modern analytical philosophy is just this: that it seems to me to be done for the wrong reason. It says ‘there is nothing to wonder at’. As Kierkegaard says ‘the understanding is victorious over what was pretty indeed but also childish’. But for me the only value of doing this sort of linguistic analysis is that wonder may come in the right place. As I see it the collapse of the false absolutes only makes the passion for the true absolute more intense. As the various world-pictures are seen in their true meaning (their usefulness for practice) so a change occurs in us, the passion for knowledge as contemplation becomes intensified, wonder comes in in the right place, in the changed man. So in the Tractatus Wittgenstein says. 6.371 ‘At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanation of natural phenomena’. 6.372 ‘So people stop short at natural laws, as did the ancients at God and Fate. And they are both right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, as so far as they recognised one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained’. Here is a particular illustration of the point I am trying to make Recently I read a book by Martin Lean called Sense Perception and Matter. It is an able piece of linguistic analysis directed against some of the paradoxes which Broad elaborated in his Mind and its Place in Nature. With most of this detailed analysis I find myself in agreement. It is the general orientation of the book I find wrong. Wonder does

204

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

not come in the right place. Lean starts off with a quotation from Dostoevsky that ‘he must be a brave man who goes against common sense, aye and a fool too’. Then in the course of his argument he states, quite correctly, that the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems of astronomy are both adequate to describe the Planetary movements and it is a matter of convenience which we choose. But does not this to go against common sense, to go against it flagrantly? Most people believe that either the sun goes round the earth or the earth goes round the sun; they would find it hard to believe that one or other of these statements is not the absolute truth of the matter. Common sense believes in a spatial absolute. One of the tasks of philosophy it to expose the error of this belief — and then wonder comes in in the right place. Wittgenstein once said to me, laughingly, that he thought of taking for the motto of his second book the sentence ‘You’d be surprised’ — a frequent remark of his. Only he wanted surprise to come in in the right place. Another time he thought of using a quotation from King Lear — ‘I’ll teach you differences.* The Philosophical Investigations are concerned with insisting on differences where we want to see similarities. These differences when seen clearly surprise us — and then wonder comes in in the right place, the changed man. Note* Lear Act I Scene iv.

LETTER 14 April 14th Dear Luke, Soon after I had first come to know Wittgenstein and attend his lectures he advised me to read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experiences he said it was a book which had helped him greatly at one time. Wittgenstein had a real admiration for William James. When he was professor at Cambridge he suggested that James should be one of the philosophers selected for special study for Part II of the Moral Science Tripos. He told me his suggestion was not well received. I am mentioning this now as a quotation from William James seemed the best way of introducing the topic of this letter. James was a vigorous opponent of what he called the ‘Monistic idealism’ of Hegel and his English disciples. The quotation I wanted to give you is this — ‘The great claim of the philosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis, but a presupposition implicated in all thinking, and needing only a little effort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity’. A Pluralistic Universe I don’t want you to think for one moment I have been trying to defend such a philosophy of the absolute as is here described. The absolute of which I have been speaking in these letters is not a logical necessary, it is not a presupposition implicated in all thinking. But then neither is it a hypothesis. Let me try and make these two points clear. (1) If a person is quite satisfied with accumulating scientific knowledge, with adding more and more details to his theoretical and practical knowledge there is

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

205

no fact in nature or epistemological inference that can make him dissatisfied. All I have wanted to say is that as a matter of fact I, and you, and many many others are not satisfied by these accumulations. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing. This dissatisfaction shows itself in many different ways. One way is the effort to try and make our accumulated knowledge appear like a complete theory of the universe, in resistance against a purely phenomenological interpretation of scientific theories. This is where the critique of language comes in. It is concerned with exhibiting ‘all that man really knows’. The attempt of Hegel and his followers to prove the absolute as a necessity for thought, that also comes under the artillery of the critique. This is hardly necessary to-day when Hegelians are almost extinct; but it was a piece of critical philosophy that was necessary in James’ time and one that he did well. On the other hand the fact that Hegel and his disciples had such an immense appeal for nearly a hundred years, that surely is not something to be neglected. A philosophy which does not take account of that fact in the history of thought is a narrow piece of work. James understood it. He says — In no philosophy is the fact that a philosopher’s vision, and the technique he uses in proof of it, are two different things, more palpably evident than in Hegel . . . The vision was so intense in Hegel and the tone of authority with which he spoke from out of it was so weighty, that the impression he made has never been effaced. It is Hegel’s passion to grasp the absolute in thought, to have a satisfying contemplative idea of reality, that makes him so impressive. (2) But neither is the absolute an hypothesis. The absolute is not something with might be true. Not something which experience might verify. Not an idea which explains anything. It is a desire which complicates our thinking rather than simplifies it. It is a desire which leads us into confusions, into trying to say something metaphysical. Life and thought would be so much easier were we rid of it — and so much emptier. Is then the absolute only a desire, something we long for and cannot obtain? The error here is in the word only. The desire for the absolute may be only a desire, a vague uneasiness which visits us at rare moments, an ill-defined feeling that something still remains incomplete in our knowledge. Philosophy takes this vague uneasiness seriously and in its hands it develops into a passion which can influence all our thinking, doing, feeling, willing. It develops into a passion by the continuous repetition of its fulfilment, the critique of language. Kierkegaard said of himself that ‘historically he died of a mortal disease but practically died of longing for eternity’. Was this longing then ‘only a desire’? Fichte said that ‘the existence of an absolute our consciousness proves the real existence of this absolute’. This is the ontological argument of Anselm with the absolute substituted for ‘the most perfect being’. Even in Anselm’s time this ‘proof’ was felt to contain an element of sophistry. Gaunilo objected that the idea of the Islands of the Blessed did not necessarily prove their actual existence. But what a strange history this piece of sophistry argumentation has had! Such great minds as Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Lotze believed in it. And the latter three even after Kant’s

206

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

thorough refutation in the Critique of Pure Reason. There is surely a psychological problem here at least. The truth as I see it is this. Once the idea of the absolute arises it begins to develop a power over all our thinking, doing, feeling. This efficacy is its reality. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein speaks of the world waxing and waning as a whole. (Tractatus 6.43). The ontological argument is the psychological fact that under the influence of the idea of the absolute the spatio-temporal world wanes.

LETTER 15 April 26th Dear Luke. ‘Do I mean by the absolute, God’? I have avoided this question of yours too long, and now it must be answered. I have avoided it for two reasons, a good and a bad one. The good reason was that I wanted to clear the preliminary ground first, for what I am going to say now is to be a completion of what I had to say to you about philosophy. My bad reason was a diffidence at saying anything on these matters. I was afraid to say anything. Long ago when I was speaking to Wittgenstein about this diffidence he asked me to hand him my copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions. He pointed to a passage where Augustine says — ‘Et vae tacentibus de te quoniata loquaces muti sunt’, which freely translated means—’And woe to those who keep silence about Thee, giving as their justification the fact that chatter-boxes talk nonsense’. But now I must answer your question. My answer is no. The God of religion means a great deal more than the absolute of philosophy. If ever I was tempted to think otherwise I would remember Pascal’s cry ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not the god of savants and philosophers’. The God of religion means a great deal more than speculative thinking. Nevertheless what I have written about the desire for the absolute, the desire for a satisfying object of contemplative knowledge, the desire to know things as they really are, all this is not a matter indifferent to religion. Near the end of his life Wittgenstein said to me ‘I am not a religious man but I can’t help seeing every problem from a religious point of view, I would like my work to be understood in this way’. My letters to you have been an attempt to show you how I have understood Wittgenstein’s thought as orientated in the direction of the religious. St Augustine says at the beginning of his Confessions ‘Fecisti: nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te’. Thou has made us for thyself and restless are our hearts until they rest in Thee’. The desire for the absolute is one way in which this restlessness begins to manifest itself. Certainly there are and have been and will be many in whom this restlessness demands and produces more heroic acts than a passionate search for absolute truth. Philosophy is not a necessary part of the itinerarium mentis ad deum. It is a by-path on which some people find themselves. But once they are on this path it must be followed through to the end, till one is back on the high-road again. It is something to be completed and then left behind. That is why Wittgenstein is so emphatic at the end of the Tractatus 6.24:

Letters to a Student of Philosophy

207

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognises them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. You said to me once that I seem to belittle scientific speculation about the ultimate nature of things. That is not true. I think many people are drawn to this kind of thinking, and that they must then go through with it to the end. The only way for them to reach the true absolute is by the progressive rejection of the false absolutes. It is the stopping half-way that is deplorable. Intellectual cowardice can also be a besetting sin. I cannot conclude these letters better than by giving you two quotations from St. Augustine. Now that I read them again I wonder whether they alone do not say better what I mean than all these too lengthy epistles of mine. The first is this— At the same time because this blessing is nothing else but the peace which passeth all understanding, even when we are asking for it in our prayers, we know not what to pray for as we ought. For inasmuch as we cannot present it to our minds as it really is, we do not know it, but whatever image of it may be presented to our minds we reject, disown, and condemn. We know it is not that we are seeking, although we do not yet know enough to be able to define what we seek. There is therefore in us a certain learned ignorance, so to speak, an ignorance which we learn from that spirit of God who helps our infirmities. For assuredly if it were utterly unknown it would not be desired; and on the other hand if it were seen it would not have to be desired and sought for with groanings. The second quotation is this—‘Quaerite qued quaeritis, sed ibi non est ubi quaetitis’ ‘Seek what you do seek, but behold it is not there where you seek it’.

Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees St Patrick’s Hospital James’s St Dublin 2 March 1959 My Dear Bob, Many thanks indeed for your letter of Feb. 17th. I have been thinking over what you wrote and feel now I can put my point more clearly. I am going to state my position in the form of a few definite theses, like a medieval schoolman prepared to defend these against all disputants! 1. These are no central problems in philosophy. No fixed problems which have engaged philosophers ‘semper, ubique, et ab omnibus’. 2. The philosophical problems which are absolutely vital for one age can be hardly understood by a later generation. 3. The ‘great philosophers’, and they are great just for this reason, solved completely and definitely the problems which were holding up the development of thought in their time. 4. The confidence and certainty with which the great texts in the history of philosophy are written is not an amiable delusion on the part of the writers, it is fully justified. When Spinoza says ‘I am certain I have discovered the only true philosophy’ and Leibnitz says ‘Spinoza would have been right if it were not for the Monads’, there is no contradiction; both had seen clearly something of the greatest importance for the development of thought in their times. And when Wittgenstein says in the introduction to the Tractatus ‘the problems have finally been solved’ this was not an error later to be corrected by the Investigations. 5. In every generation people are thinking with certain assumptions in the background. These are not formulated or criticised, but they exercise a profound influence on the thought and life of that generation. They are a source of human bondage. 6. The great philosophers formulated clearly the assumptions made in their time. 7. A formulated assumption is seen to lose its necessity, its absolute power. It is seen to be relative, one way of looking at things. Three examples: a) Your class, enquirers, etc, assumed that all knowledge was in the nature of information. To be collected out of books and memorised. Also it must

Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees

209

show that it is of ‘some use to mankind’. But they had never formulated this idea in so many words, they merely acted on it and were under its power. Your task was to point out and formulate this assumption for them, then and only then they could see its limitation and falsity and be free again. b) When I came up to Cambridge I assumed certain ideas about the relation of language to reality. But I had no idea I was making such assumptions. Wittgenstein made me see this, and my thinking then became more free, and my life too. c) In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein acted on certain unformulated assumptions about the nature of language. Sraffa made this clear to him, so that he could go on to the greater freedom of the Investigations. 8. Philosophy proceeds not by the accumulation of information but by the discarding of assumptions. Plato, Republic 533c: ‘Dialectic in fact is the only activity, whose method is to challenge its own assumptions so that is may rest firmly on first principles. Where the eye of the mind gets really bogged down in a morass of ignorance, dialectic gently pulls it out and leads it up’. 9. Unformulated assumptions cramp not only thinking, but experiencing, and living, as well. 10. The philosophers should be able to say “Behold I make all things new”

St Edmondsbury Lucan 28 March 1959 My Dear Bob, Your letter of the 21st deserves a careful answer, and I am going to try and do so. My typing is too slow so I will write in the ordinary way hoping it will be legible. First of all, let me say I feel many of your criticisms of my theses really helpful, only I think you showed me more how carelessly worded they were. My trouble is that having no one to discuss with, I easily fall into the habit of compressing my thoughts into a form where their meaning is far from clear to others. If I can manage to express myself at greater length I don’t think the disagreement between us will be so deep as you think. Let me start at a point where we are agreed. That ‘in philosophy everyone starts from scratch’. This I think is most important and most significant. I know that I have made some advances in philosophy since I was an undergraduate. I know also that I know more about medicine now than I did twenty years ago. But these two ‘advances’ are totally different. In medicine I have accumulated a certain amount of information and experience, and a great deal of it has come from reading good books. I could start tabulating all this and pass it on to a third person. But in philosophy the advance is quite otherwise, there is no sediment of information, nothing I could tabulate and nothing I can readily pass on.

210

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

The other day an Oxford student reading philosophy, wanted to see me here to ask questions about Wittgenstein. I felt there was very little I could do to help him. It would have been otherwise with a medical student. In what then does ‘an advance’ in philosophy consist? Various phrases come to my mind, a freedom from superstitions, an insight into unproved assumptions, a liberty from the tyranny of fixed categories. None of these are very satisfactory expressions. But my point is that an advance in philosophy is a negative matter, the rejection of error rather than the acquisition of information. The metaphor that has always been in my mind for many years is that of a person in a room in which the windows were all stained glass. In order to see the world outside as it really is, it is necessary to remove all the colours, not add anything to it. This brings me to my thesis that there are no central problems in philosophy. If I may continue my metaphor, the pictures on the stained glass differ from one generation to another—though the philosophical technique of removing them is much the same. You justly ask me to illustrate this from the history of philosophy. Here then are some examples. 1. The paradoxes of Zeno seem to me to be interesting and amusing conundrums but not real philosophical puzzles; at one time they were very serious questions. 2. I can’t take the problems discussed in Plato’s Parmenides seriously. There can be no doubt Plato did. 3. The problem ‘how are synthetic a priori propositions possible?’ was central for Kant. Aristotle doesn’t mention it. 4. The problem of the development of thought was central for Hegel. Aquinas has no historical problems. 5. The existence of a ‘third type of knowledge’ was central for Spinoza. Hume knows nothing of it. 6. The problem ‘what it means to follow a rule’ was central for Wittgenstein. The method of mathematics was axiomatic for Spinoza. I have just put down these half dozen examples as they occurred to me. I feel I could add to them ad lib. Again to go back to my metaphor. The pictures on the windows are different in every age; they are due to whatever branch of knowledge that age values most. Philosophy gets rid of these pictures which thrust themselves upon us. I am at a loss to know how Wittgenstein could have said he was discussing the same questions as Plato did. If seems to me so untrue. For one thing Plato is chiefly concerned with ethical questions; Wittgenstein excludes them from philosophy. Can you imagine Wittgenstein asking for a definition of Justice? Or joining in the Symposium? I understand that a good book in philosophy could have to wait a hundred years and then be of use, but not two hundred. Some philosophers have been a hundred years ahead of their time, Spinoza, Vico, Kierkegaard but I think a hundred years is about the limit.

Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees

211

Of course I agree that in a very general sense, so abstract as not to mean very much, you can say that all philosophers are concerned with the relation of thought to reality, with the one and the many, with problems about quality and things. My point was that it is the different problems about these very general topics that are interesting and important. You could say that Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’ Leviathan were both concerned with the theory of the ideal state. That doesn’t tell you much. The interesting thing is the difference between their problems. Plato’s ideal city-state and Hobbes’ renaissance principality. They are not different answers to the same problem. I was inexcusably vague when I said the great philosophers solved the problems which were holding up the thought of their times. You misunderstood me, and I don’t wonder. I didn’t mean the scientific thought at all, and I would agree with all you say about this. What I had in mind was this. Philosophy is no esoteric subject selected by some students for their special subject. You can choose to study Botany if you want to or you can leave it alone; but everyone who does any thinking in any subject is committed to philosophy. You are either a good or a bad metaphysician whether you know it or not. I have to read a good deal of psychology in my work and it always interests me to feel the metaphysical presuppositions behind the writer’s exposition of his subject. For instance Freud and Jung have made valuable contributions to psychology, they are both bad metaphysicians. Janet on the other hand is first rate. In every age there are philosophical confusions, superstitions, assumptions, the pictures on the windows. These are ‘the spirit of the times’. And they influence all the thinking of that age in all subjects. They don’t hold up the development of the sciences, but they do present people from seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The great philosophers show that a particular picture or the window in not necessary. This brings me to the study of the history of philosophy and of the great texts. Like you, I think this is a necessary part of most people’s philosophical education. But there is a great danger in it, as I am sure you know. What I was protesting against was the popular little exposition of what Spinoza, Berkeley, Leibniz, Kant etc., said. The sort of book that seems to claim ‘I know only too well what poor Kant was up to, and when he was wrong.’ I want more humility towards the thinkers of the past, to admit that what they wrote may be unintelligible to us because we don’t know the particular milieu in which it was necessary to say what they did. Why then read them? Well for three reasons. (1) I always try to keep one of the ‘great texts’ on hand because I find this starts me thinking for myself. I need something like this to start me off; some phrases of Kant’s or Hegel’s or Bradley’s gets me going. I can’t think in a vacuum. Wittgenstein didn’t need this sort of stimulus, he had plenty of problems. Once the text has served this purpose it doesn’t matter two pence whether you are interpreting correctly (2) When you have thought out something for yourself it is a great joy to find an echo of it in a great historical writing. I suppose one shouldn’t need this comfort and probably it is sometimes a false assurance based on a misinterpretation, but it is a comfort.

212

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

(3) There is one thing common to all great philosophy, seriousness. This one learns from them even when one doesn’t understand them. [Interpolation: ‘I meant to put in also a remark about Broad’s essay on Spinoza. He says he isn’t going to say anything about “the third kind of knowledge” not because he doesn’t think it immensely important but because he doesn’t understand it’. ‘O, sic semper’!] You ask me ‘how can you call a man a great philosopher if you can’t understand him?’ And you give the example of Indian music. I would reply that my criterion of greatness is based on the above three functions. Any writer who wakes me out of a dogmatic slumber; in whom I find an echo of what is most precious in my own thinking; and who brings me back to the importance of serious thinking, is for me great. I hope what I have written doesn’t give you an impression of ‘misology’, a hatred or a distrust of thinking. I believe that one can really grow in philosophical status if one is prepared to be in earnest with the subject, and that it is one of the most important things in life so to grow. That this growth commits to getting rid of something which is preventing one seeing things as they really are. That what one has to get rid of is rather particular to oneself and to the age in which one lives. That the great philosophers of the past can help one to do this in the three ways indicated above.

Spring 1966 The number of introductions to, and commentaries on, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is steadily increasing. Yet to one of his former pupils something that was central in his thinking is not being said. Kierkegaard told a bitter parable about the effects of his writing. He said he felt like a theatre manager who runs on stage to warn the audience of a fire. But they take his appearance as all part of the farce they are enjoying, and the louder he shouts the more they applaud. Forty years ago Wittgenstein’s teaching came to me as a warning against certain intellectual and spiritual dangers by which I was strongly tempted. These dangers still surround us all. It would be a tragedy if well-meaning commentators should make it appear that these writings were now easily assailable into the very intellectual milieu they were largely a warning against. It seems to me that now is the time to say something about this. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein speaks of the ‘darkness of this present time’, and the hope that his book ‘may bring light into one brain or another’. I do not know of any commentator who has understood fully what Wittgenstein meant by the darkness of the present time. And yet if this hope was his chief object in publishing it is surely a cardinal point to consider. In a letter which Professor Malcolm quotes in his Memoir Wittgenstein writes: ‘you can’t think decently if you don’t want to hurt yourself. I know all about this because I am a shirker’. This was no incidental remark. It was something he said in one way of another to any of his pupils who were close to him. I do not know of

Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees

213

any commentator who has understood fully why philosophy for Wittgenstein was a source of suffering. And yet you could not be intimate with him without knowing that this was so. At the end of the Tractatus occurs the off quoted remarks about throwing away the ladder you have climbed up on. I do not know of any commentator who had understood fully the significance of this conclusion. Indeed it is sometimes treated as an inconsistency that must be explained away. But this statement is not another ‘elucidatory proposition’. The words are in the imperative. ‘Must throw away’. It is a demand for a violent, decisive, irrevocable, action. A little earlier he had spoken about the difference between the ‘task’ and ‘its performance’. What is demanded here is performance. He says quite clearly that unless you do this you will not understand him. And so surely some consideration of the precise action required is demanded. If I am not mistaken these three points are closely connected. To throw away the ladder involves suffering, yet it is through this suffering that light can come into the darkness of the present time. ‘The darkness of the present time’. It is a metaphor of great antiquity. That man is born in darkness and is in need of light. Plato portrays us as prisoners in a cave. We are chained and fettered so as to face away from the light. All we see at first are but shadows and symbols. And when Glaucon objects that this is a strange metaphor and that they are strange prisoners, Socrates replies in words so simple that their seriousness might be overlooked ‘they are like us’. We do not know that we are chained. We do not know that we are in darkness. We do not know that we are preoccupied with shadows. (‘If then the light that is in you be darkness how great is that darkness’ [Matthew 6:23].) This I believe is what Wittgenstein meant by the darkness of this present time: that there is now no clear consciousness or fear of the darkness we are in. No passionate longing for light. There is an anecdote often repeated about Wittgenstein as a young man having conversations with Russell. After a long silence Russell asked: ‘Wittgenstein are you thinking about philosophy or your sins?’ To which Wittgenstein replies ‘Both’. This story is usually told, so it seems to me, in admiration of Russell’s good natured bonhomie, but I ventured to say that if you do not understand the possibility of that ‘both’, then you will fail to understand the deeper significance of the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. We have lived too long with the tradition that philosophy is a purely academic and polite study, requiring for its successful prosecution nothing more than an acute mind and a ready pen. In one of the earliest conversations I had with Wittgenstein I remember him quoting to me a remark of the German writer Hamann; and as he lay dead I noticed on the table beside his bed the ‘Collected Works’ of Hamann. Now there is a sentence of Hamann’s which for me brings out clearly what Wittgenstein meant by the darkness of this present time. Hamann indeed speaks of ‘die Faulniss des laufenten seculi’. The whole passage is as follows. [Drury quotes the German text and then gives the following translation:] This feeling of imprisonment in the world is the only proof of our supernatural origin and destination. For if we lacked nothing we would be no better than

214

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

the pagan and transcendental philosophers, who knowing not God are foolish in thinking that they can find full satisfaction in the world of Nature. No homesickness would then trouble us. This inexplicable uneasiness, this holy hypochondria, is perhaps the fire with which we as sacrificial offerings must be salted and preserved from the corruption of this present time. I do not know how to translate properly the words ‘Diese Angst in der welt.’ But I understand here that the word ‘Angst’ goes back to its original Latin root meaning the fear which comes over one when entrapped and imprisoned in a narrow place. It is the feeling that one is a prisoner in this world that is the only proof of our heterogeneity. The darkness of this present time is the absence of this homesickness, so that ‘like fools we fall in love with this world.’ ‘You can’t think decently if you don’t want to hurt yourself’. Philosophy requires courage as much or more than intelligence. Here Wittgenstein is again true to the Platonic tradition. For listen to what happens to one of the prisoners when he is released from his bonds and cured of his delusions: ‘He is compelled suddenly to stand up, to turn his head, and walk and look towards the light. Each one of these actions is painful, and he is too dazzled to see any longer the objects he used to see as shadows.’ But the passage is too familiar to need repetition. The prisoner does not want to face the suffering involved in escaping from the cave. He has to be forced up the steep and stony path, and the light of the sun is at first hurtful to his eyes. It is certain that for Plato philosophical enlightenment was a painful struggle. ‘You must throw away the ladder’. Notice the words ‘through them, on them, over them’, do not these imply an almost desperate struggle and the fear of falling? What action then is demanded in this throwing away? Plato tells us that those who remain behind in the cave enjoy a certain amount of honour and glory for keen sightedness and for being able to predict the coming and going of the shadows. And in the Theaetetus he again contrasts the efficiency of the unphilosophical with the apparent uselessness of the true philosopher. To the man of the world the philosopher appears both arrogant and stupid. Arrogant because he laughs and makes fun of what the world regards as serious business, and stupid because he seems to be puzzled about what is as clear as day. It is characteristic of our present culture to believe that the progress of natural science and its practical application to human wellbeing is the noblest and most praiseworthy of occupations. There are prizes for those who have this kind of keen-sightedness and can make these sorts of predictions. The temptation of the philosopher is to want to join in the competition. To see philosophy as, if not the queen of the sciences, at least a worthy peer and helpful adjutant. It is this that must be utterly thrown away. Philosophy has to turn the whole man round so that he faces in the other direction and is concerned with other ideals and other values. In the natural sciences there is progress. We stand on the shoulders of our predecessors and hope that our children will stand on ours. In philosophy every generation begins at the beginning.

Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees

215

In the natural sciences there are discoveries and inventions: and those who make them are rightly honoured and remembered. The philosopher makes no discoveries and invents nothing. To him personal prestige and founding of a school is abhorrent. In the natural sciences co-operation is essential and the facilities of academic institutions a necessary prerequisite. The philosopher is alone, and will find his nourishment in the monotony of field and factory rather than in the artificial atmosphere of learned institutions. ‘There is no oxygen in Cambridge’ said Wittgenstein to a pupil of his. And on another occasion after he had conversations with some young persons who had survived the horrors of a concentration camp he said: ‘I was able to make myself understood at once, you see they had been well educated.’ Towards the end of his life Kant wrote these words: I am by disposition an enquirer. I feel the consuming thirst for knowledge, the eager unrest to advance even further, and the delights of discovery. There was a time when I believed that this is what confers real dignity upon human life, and I despised the common people who knew nothing. Rousseau has set me right. This imagined advantage vanishes. I learn to honour men, and could regard myself as of much less use than the common labourer, if I did not believe that my philosophy will restore to all men the common rights of humanity. [Fragemente aus item Nachlasse (Werke (Hartenstein), vii, p. 624. trans. Norman Kemp Smith)]. There speaks one who had both the courage and the humility to throw away the ladder. I want then to say in my own words how certain remarks of Wittgenstein’s have grown in significance during my life. I do not propose to expound his philosophy, and if anyone should object that I misinterpret him, I would not argue the point. The thoughts expressed here I would defend as true. And this certainly would be an attitude I learned from Wittgenstein. Philosophy is too urgent a matter to spend time on dotting the ‘i’s’ and crossing the ‘t’s’ of previous thinkers. Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. (Tractatus, 4.116) If this simple remark is pondered on and acted on it presents a task which must be continued for the whole of one’s life. Always to be looking for perfect clarity of thought expression. To find the ‘drei Worten’ and to work free from ‘bloss rauschen und brausen’. It is so easy to assume that concepts which are long familiar and in common use must have a known and accepted meaning. The great difficulty of the Philosophical Investigations is the simplicity and homely nature of its diction. We are at a loss for the familiar ‘isms’ and ‘-ologies’ of traditional philosophy. In the Blue Book Wittgenstein says that the ‘difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we really know’. This is the criterion of clarity: that we say no more than we know. Clarity of thought and expression is not feeling, much that is profoundly unclear can at first feel clear. To be able to think clearly is a long discipline and the criterion becomes more and more exacting as we submit to its demands. And the opposite is

216

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

true too. We can debauch ourselves with pompous obscurity until the taste of clarity is entirely forgotten. Two popular expositions of natural science illustrate this distinction. The first Wittgenstein admired, Faraday’s Chemical History of a Candle. The second he detested, Jeans’ The Mysterious Universe. Faradays explains every technicality and conclusion with the relevant experiment and evidence. He finds enough to wonder at in the simplest chemical process. Jeans titillates his readers with a suggestion of profundity, he dare not produce the real observations for that would be to expose the hollowness of his conclusions. A spectrograph of a star with a minute shift in the Fraunhofer lines is a beautiful thing to have observed and been able to measure. This is what we really know, and it is enough. To talk about an expanding universe is vanity. If then we love and seek after clarity we will be continually throwing away ladders. Getting rid of much that consoles us, much that flatters us, much that keeps away anxiety. Always trying to say only as much as we really know. To think under this discipline is to hurt oneself repeatedly. We are educated in a tradition which would lead us to assume that our fundamental conceptions are more surely grounded in truth than those of any previous culture. But clarity exposes our poverty. Towards the end of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein writes: I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realising something that we realise – then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him. Compare a concept with a style of painting. For is even our style of painting arbitrary? Can we choose one at pleasure? (The Egyptian for instance) is it a mere question of pleasing or ugly? [II, xii] We Make for Ourselves Pictures of Facts. (Tractatus, 2.1) For me the emphasis here is on the words ‘we’ and ‘for ourselves’. The handing on from one generation to another of a scientific tradition requires the common agreement on certain basic concepts. It would not be possible to master or make progress in modern physics without accepting such ideas as those of the conservation of matter and energy. It would not be possible to master or make any progress in modern chemistry without accepting the ideas of molecular and atomic structure. And similarly in astronomy, the law of gravitation, the velocity of light, the solar and galactic systems, are concepts not to be questioned. In geology Lyell’s principle of uniformity underlies the whole investigation of the series of rock formations. In biology one could not make oneself heard if one did not accept the evolution of species. And so on throughout the natural sciences. We forget that all these basic concepts have had a history. There was a time when they occurred to a particular person. There was a time when they could be and were

Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees

217

hypothetical. They were pictures which were made. The necessity which we feel about them is a conventional necessity, not a necessity in the nature of things. Wittgenstein instructed me to read Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes. He said he did not trust Spengler because of his inaccuracy, but that if only Spengler had the courage to write a short book it could have been a great work. Now what I learned from Spengler was the way in which different cultures differed profoundly in the way they pictured reality. Different myths, different religious symbols, different social structures; different music, architectures and painting; different mathematics and scientific concepts. There is nothing absolute or final about our particular way of seeing the world. The darkness of this present time is the sense of superiority which the achievements of modern science gives to our generation. The belief that all the problems that beset human nature can be solved if only we think scientifically about them. A ‘social scientist’ once told Wittgenstein that he was writing a thesis on ‘Why the League of Nations Failed’. Wittgenstein told him that he had better begin by finding out why wolves eat lambs. It is painful for us, and contrary to the culture we are enveloped in, to accept that there are indeed problems, the ‘great problems’, concerning which there are no experts to appeal to. We stand as naked before them as all our fathers did. At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable. As did the ancients at God and Fate. And they are both right and wrong but the ancients were clearer in so far as they recognised one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained. (Tractatus, 6.371) The whole modern view of the world resting on an illusion … the ancients were clearer. To believe this really, to let it sink in, then we are aliens to nearly everything that is going on around us. You cannot accept this without hurting oneself. This is indeed to turn oneself right around. Once Wittgenstein asked me to read to him part of The Golden Bough. Fraser always treated the myths and customs he had so assiduously collected with a certain condescension. He said we must not despise them for their errors because they represented the first rudimentary thoughts from which later science was to spring. But, as Wittgenstein pointed out, these ancients had indeed already their science – agriculture, irrigation, weapon making, etc – they were able to survive under conditions where we would now perish. No, these myths these customs, had nothing to do with the beginning of science. They were the expression of a belief and a longing for something other than the bread and comforts of daily existence. And in so far as we have now lost these common myths and common customs, so much are we the poorer. The belief that the further progress of scientific discovery and invention will bring us any nearer to the relief of our deepest needs is a superstition worse than anything Fraser cast his pity on. The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (Tractatus, 6.4312)

218

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

But we can’t move ourselves out of space or think ourselves out of time. Yet the longing that both space and time should cease -------- [sic.], once this has arisen neither the knowledge that we are powerless nor the incomprehensible nature of the longing, can free us from this ache. This is ‘Die Angst in der Welte’. We can try and forget it by an unhappy busyness, or feel it with an increasing longing. The darkness of this present time is that there is so much to be busy about, so much to preoccupy us. Our present culture is designed to keep us continually interested in the multitude of things that are in the world of space and time, and our hopes constantly directed towards the future. There is nothing wrong in joining in these activities and plans, indeed it is often a duty to do so. But all the time, everywhere, must be guarded that deep ache, that in none of these things which men can do will be found the solution of the riddle of life. That will come from looking in the opposite direction, from turning right round. The philosophical ‘I’ is not the man, not the human body, or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit, not a part of the world. (Tractatus, 5.641) This is the ‘I’ of the ‘cogito ergo sum’. This is the ‘I’ of which it was said ‘mens sentit experiturque se aeternum esse’. This is the ‘windowless monad’ and the ‘synthetic unity of apperception’. This is the ‘I’ which when it reconstructs the past is as much then as now, and when it contemplates space is as much there as here. This is that impersonal ‘I’ which sees the world not from the perspective of the body and its well-being, or the soul and its prestige, but as that having nothing yet possesses all things. Yet none of these attempts as philosophical expressions will do. If this truth has not shown itself (and it can show itself at every moment of existence) then such expressions as those quoted above will either seem meaningless or else give rise to an endless metaphysical debate. When this truth has shown itself then it becomes clear why those philosophers strove so painfully to find words to teach what they had seen. There is indeed the inexpressible, this shows itself, it is the mystical. (Tractatus, 6.522) Here for me is the very centre of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It was this statement that produced a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in my previous way of thinking. For I had turned to philosophy hoping there to find in some book or some teacher a certainty as to the meaning of life and the way wherein I should go. But Wittgenstein taught me that neither great erudition nor great cleverness would ever bring me to the end of my journey. ‘This shows itself’, it is neither conquered nor achieved, but given. The whole duty of man is to wait, patiently, expectantly, hopefully, and to keep oneself from idols. And there are so many idols to tempt one. The idol of some political creed; the idol of scientific investigation; the idol of being a philosopher; the idol of a dogmatic religion. All those activities which being within our power assuage us from the pain of waiting. It is of course permissible sometimes a duty, to join in politics, science, philosophy, organised religion, but never to use these

Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees

219

as opiates. Never to allow our own busyness to quench the desire, the hunger, the thirst, for that which lies outside of space and time. To believe without any manner of doubt that there is indeed the inexpressible even when it does not show itself. Philosophy will mean the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable. (Tractatus, 4.115) For a long time I was perplexed by a dilemma: philosophy must be an investigation as rigorous and thorough as pure mathematics, hypothesis must be contraband. At the same time, so it seemed to me then, it would not be philosophy if it ended in eliminating ‘the mysteriousness of our present being’. There is a saying of McTaggart’s: ‘all philosophy must be mystical not indeed in its methods but in its conclusions’. This puts the dilemma clearly. How can a purely rational investigation lead to a mystical conclusion? If philosophy is to be conducted ‘in more geometrico’ how can it say anything relevant concerning human bondage and human freedom? Both the greatness and the difficulty of Wittgenstein’s writings lie in the solution of this dilemma. The critique of language is as thorough and exact and certain as any mathematical investigation. But it has to be carried out so as to mean the inexpressible. The external difficulty of philosophy is to combine this method with that objective. Sometime ago I saw a series of books ‘Chemistry made easy’, ‘Calculus made easy’, ‘French made easy’, etc., etc. some of them seemed quite well done. But among them was one ‘Philosophy made easy’, I knew that couldn’t be well done. A philosophy made easy would not be philosophy. ‘Philosophy made difficult’ would not be a bad title for Wittgenstein’s works. Here I think is the source of two common misinterpretations of his writings. There are those who see Wittgenstein inventing a method to evade the traditional great problems of philosophy. These want to forget about him and get back to a theoretical discussion once again of God, Freedom, and Immortality. But I consider that that road is now forever closed. On the other hand there are those who perceiving the possibility of a critique of language, treat such investigations as an end in itself. These are those whom, if I am not mistaken, Wittgenstein referred to as more or less watering down or mangling his results. The critique of language becomes easy and boring if the inexpressible is conveniently forgotten. There would never have been any philosophy if it were not for the longing for an absolute. It is not, it never was, conceptual confusions which gave birth to philosophy, but ‘inquietum est cor nostrum’. The conceptual confusions indeed allowed this impertinent inquietude to appear at times to be comforted, conceptual discipline is merely the way to open the wound again, and to keep it open. ‘If you think decently you have got to hurt yourself. Those who talk about ‘Wittgenstein I’ and ‘Wittgenstein II’ are making the latter mistake. The method of procedure in the Investigations is certainly different to that in the Tractatus. But Wittgenstein’s fundamental orientation towards life and the function of philosophy in life, did not change during the twenty-five years I knew him. The Investigations indeed say nothing about the inexpressible, about the mystical, about what shows itself, the discipline of words is here even more ascetic. Only what can be said is said. And so it seems to some as if it is a book which ‘is not

220

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

really teaching philosophy’, but it is ‘the only strictly correct method’. (The method adopted in this paper is very far from being strictly correct). Wittgenstein admired greatly a quotation he came across from the Renaissance Platonist Pico del la Mirandola. He said it was so impressive that he would like to read more of this author. [The passage follows and Drury gives it in the Latin original together with a translation. It concludes with the following words of the Creator to man, translated by Drury]: You are neither an inhabitant of heaven nor of earth; neither mortal nor immortal have we created you; so that you freely and without reward may make and mould your own image as it seems good to you. You can if you so wish it sink to that lower order of being such as animals are, you can also rise by the strength of your desire towards the citizenship of heaven. See full passage and Drury’s translation in ‘Notes on Conversations’ pp. 159–160] If I have been able to make myself clear then I think it will be obvious why Wittgenstein so valued this quotation; and also why I consider that so many of those who now commentate on him miss something quite essential in his orientation.

St Edmondsbury 21 June 1966 Dear Bob, I have delayed too long in answering your letter of May 17th. I kept hoping that I would get time and insight to write a proper answer. I have read again what you say in ‘Wittgenstein’s Builders’ [Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 60 (1959), pp. 171-186] and also the pages in the Blue Book you referred to. I am sure the difference between “learning to speak” and “learning a new language” is of cardinal importance. As you know psychologists have attempted to explain the origin of language – isn’t this attempt a logical error rather than a very difficult psychological problem. I mean that you cannot explain by language how language began. I seem to remember that Simone Weil says somewhere that language can only be due to a miracle. You can imagine what it would be to lose an arm or a leg or the power to use one’s tongue, but not what it would be to lose one’s language. We are so inclined to think along evolutionary lines, that man is a peculiar animal who has developed the power of speech (and therefore thought). Isn’t there a confusion of categories here? The theory of evolution is one way of thinking and speaking about the world but it can’t explain thinking and speaking themselves. You see a child beginning to speak, first noises, than a few words, then sentences. You can describe in detail what is observed, but these observations have nothing to do with understanding “how is language possible”. What you say in ‘Wittgenstein’s Builders’ seems to me very relevant to my question about ‘das Weren den Welt’. For if you grasp the distinction you make there, then it seems to me there is a ‘Copernican revolution’ in one’s way of seeing

Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees

221

the World. As I was writing, the words ‘In the beginning was the Word’ kept coming into my mind—I don’t mean this as a piece of expression but only that the fact of language is the datum from which philosophy must start and not from any other view of the World. For a long time I was puzzled by the question ‘what is it that is given?’, as if there was a form of knowledge prior to the language with which one then tried to communicate it. Now it seems to me that ‘no language, no knowledge’ is the truth. But the old way of thinking in which there was first ‘the world’ then ‘my knowledge of the world’ and then ‘the language in which I expressed this knowledge’ is always tripping one up again.

St Edmondsbury 17 October 1967 …I am sending you with this a few things I want to say about time. I think they are closely connected with the points you are emphasising. Our present concept of ‘time’ is not the only possible way of thinking about time. Once when I was exploring the Silurian rocks in county Mayo an old peasant came up to see what I was doing. I foolishly said to him that ‘these are among the oldest rocks in existence’. He looked utterly bewildered. For him rocks had no age, they were something that had always been. A geologist might describe this as simple ignorance. I want to say that it represents a different language, and it does not make sense to ask which of us was right. In an ancient Irish hymn possibly written by St. Patrick the words occur: ‘The stable earth, the deep salt sea/ around the old eternal rocks’ [‘St. Patrick’s Breastplate’]. It is important to see the rocks as a symbol of what is unchanging. This I think is an example of what Simone means by ‘lectures’. I believe at the time of the Darwinian controversy some pious people said that the fossils and other geological evidence were the work of the devil to lure people away from the word of God. Given an entirely different style of life (not that of Bishop Wilberforce) I can see this as a possible concept. It would not make sense and might be wicked to argue with such a person. ‘The past’, Time, would be a different concept from the one I use. For a true Benedictine monk the yearly repetition of the great festivals would be a more important feature of time than the steady ‘progress’ which our age is so conscious of. I think it is wonderful when on Christmas morning the antiphon is ‘Hodie Christus natus est.’ ‘Hodie’ [to-day], not two thousand years ago. And again in Advent it is ‘Venite, venite Adoremus’. At the Synod of Whitby there was an intense conflict over the date to observe Easter on, and when the Roman party won, the whole Celtic church seemed to wither away. The idea that certain times are particularly holy is a concept of time that we can’t use now, but we can see its possibility. A whole way of life could and did depend on it. If someone recounts to me an event at which I was present I can compare his account with my memory of what took place. I find myself tempted to carry this analogy over to the remote past, where it doesn’t make sense. I am tempted to

222

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

say that history is a description of ‘the past’ which because of the limitation of my faculties I can’t get to know directly. But for the remote past history is the past and cannot be called a description of something that could be known in any other way. An historian may believe that human beings crossed from the Americas to the South Pacific Islands, or the other way, and he may add: ‘But there is nothing to show how this was done, we can only guess and spin plausible fancies’ ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on. Nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out one line of it’ [Omar Khayyam]. There is something wrong here. It is of course true that if I cut down a tree and then regret it, I can’t restore the tree. And so with many other things that I have said and done. But the past in the sense of history is always changing. We grow into the past as well as into the future. I mean that with deeper understanding we think differently about the past. Compare the change of attitude that Wittgenstein’s writing about ‘The Golden Bough’ has made to one’s understanding of primitive rites; or Simone Weil and one’s attitude to Roman history. The picture that forces itself on my mind, and yet is wrong, is that of a past that somehow still has a shadowy existence but at which I can only get at indirectly. History is not a series of facts but is inextricably inter-woven with my whole way of ‘seeing the world’…

St Edmondsbury 8 November 1967 …I also think two remarks in Zettel are important: ‘We should handle philosophical errors very gently, they contain so much of truth’ and ‘Some philosophical diseases should not be healed too quickly, they should be allowed to run their natural course’. I mention these remarks because I have been reading and thinking over some of the passages in Simone Weil about time. In one place in the Note Books (I have only the English version) she says: ‘The past cannot be verified, it is always a matter of conjecture, and hence subject to lies’. And yet of course when she is actually writing about history, about the Romans, or about the Albigenses, she is no longer worried by this idea of the past being incapable of verification. The feeling that the past cannot be verified is a philosophical error, and is seen as such when for instance Wittgenstein translates it into the more extreme form ‘where is the past now?’ …[illegible]… I also want to say that this desire for a more direct and intimate understanding of the past is one that must be handled very gently. Must be allowed to run its natural course. Perhaps I can explain what I mean in a rather round-about way. Just lately we have had some very clear star light nights; and after work I have been able to spend several hours with my telescope. You will understand me if I say that this for me has something of the same effect as going into a church. Certainly when I am examining star clusters and nebulae I am not thinking at all of them as distant suns or galactic systems. They are wonderful and holy as they are without any need for thought: ‘Not only is this visible world unexceptionally beautiful, but as we proceed to study it scientifically it reveals itself to be an inexhaustible source of beauty’ [Note Books, p. 514]. I think she is here using the word scientifically in the sense in which the

Six Reflections shared with Rush Rhees

223

telescope and the microscope reveal more and more of beauty, not in the sense of explanatory theory. Why then is it so inevitable that men want to pass from the given phenomena to some all-embracing theory which seems to explain phenomena? I believe that the passage from phenomena to theory is a mistake but a necessary mistake, one that has to be allowed to run its natural course. ‘Quid quid appetitur, appetitur sub specie bono’. In trying to build up a perfect theory of the world, the scientist is trying to find the absolute good, trying to see reality as he thinks God must see it, and that would be to be God. ‘The temporal possessing no meaning except by and through the spiritual but not being mixed up with the spiritual, leading to it through nostalgia, through a surpassing of the self. It is viewing the temporal as a bridge, and this was the vocation of Greece and Provence’ [p. 447]. This attempt to find the absolute in a complete scientific theory must when it is worked through end in failure. We get pulled up every time by our imprisonment within language. After the long journey we are back at the starting point, and are left with the phenomena, but now they are changed in that we can contemplate them peacefully, lovingly. Now I want to say the same thing about time and history. The historian wants to see what really happened, to see the past as God sees it. And to achieve this would be to be God. But again the historian finds himself up against an impassable barrier, and this he is tempted to describe by saying that the past cannot be verified. The painfulness of the check to his desire is really that the barrier can’t be described. For, if it could, one would be already on the other side: ‘The past when the imagination does not wallow in it—at the very instant, when some chance encounter causes it to rise up in perfect purity—is time with the hue of eternity upon it. There the feeling of reality is pure; and therein lies pure joy; therein lies beauty’ [p. 423]. When the attempt at a perfect understanding of history is defeated, when it has been worked through, then the materials of history, the legends, the antiquities, the original documents are seen in a new light. Think what use Simone makes of the stories in Herodotus, which I suppose most ‘historians’ would dismiss as ‘unhistorical’. The other evening I was listening once again to the St. Mathew Passion (the denial by Peter) and it came to me that to ask ‘did this really happen?’ was as mistaken as to ask ‘are these stars really very distant suns?’ “Don’t think, look.” I am afraid this is all very badly put, but I hope I have been able to indicate what I am struggling with at the moment.

University College Dublin Lecture: 1967 It would be easy for me to spend a pleasant half hour chatting to you about Wittgenstein, with various anecdotes amusing or otherwise. I am not going to do this. For one of the things I learnt from him was that such journalistic gossip is among the least attractive features of this present age. It was a characteristic remark of Wittgenstein, and one he often repeated that ‘my father was a business man, and I am a business man too. I want my philosophy to be business like, to get something settled, to get something done’. And so this evening I would like to be business-like in talking to you and try and get something done. But what can one do in half an hour? Well I would like to try and get you all looking in a certain direction. To turn your attention away from certain common misunderstandings about the man and his work, and perhaps to help you to see his writings from a new point of view. So let me begin by saying something about these common misunderstandings. It is said that Wittgenstein knew little about the history of philosophy and spoke with some contempt about what had previously been called metaphysics. This is not true. Certainly he would not allow a philosophical discussion to be side tracked by irrelevant references to the statements of previous thinkers. And he thought it dangerous for a student of philosophy to spend a lot of time puzzling over say Kant or Hegel, when he should be thinking about what really puzzles him. Isn’t it a great relief to read a philosophical text such as Wittgenstein’s which is not weighed down by a mass of learned historicity? But that Wittgenstein was in any way arrogant towards the past or thought that he, or any of us, because we lived in the 20th century were therefore more advanced in our thinking that is the very reverse of his belief. He showed always a most remarkable and rare humility towards the past. Soon after I had got to know him I was telling him about a book I was reading concerning the ‘Desert Fathers’. Those heroic ascetics of the Egyptian desert. And with the typical shallowness of those days said something to the effect ‘that I thought they might have made better use of their lives’. Wittgenstein turned on me furiously ‘that is just the sort of stupid remark a bloody English parson would make, how can you know what their problems were in those days and what they had to do about them?’ Again I remember him coming into my room at Cambridge saying just look at this. It was an examination paper set for the current History Tripos. One of the questions set read as follows: ‘Discuss the following statement “The Pope showed as little understanding in his negotiations with the Emperor as he had previously shown in his dealings with Luther”’. ‘That’s the sort of question’, said Wittgenstein, ‘that teaches people to be both stupid and conceited. How can a Cambridge undergraduate know what the Pope could or should have done about either Luther or the Emperor?’

University College Dublin Lecture: 1967

225

Many years later here in Dublin he told me he was reading a book. I imagine it was the well-known one by Tawney, in which the author blamed Calvin for the rise of the bourgeois capitalist culture of Europe. He said he could see the attractiveness of such a thesis, but then added ‘I wouldn’t dare to criticise a man such as Calvin’. No remember please when you are reading Wittgenstein that you are reading a man who never thought of himself as an advanced thinker but was very conscious of the limitations which these present times impose on all of us and on him too. A man who in the right sense of that word was truly humble. That is what I wanted to say to you about Wittgenstein’s attitude to the past. Now something about his relation to the present. There is talk of ‘linguistic philosophy’ which Wittgenstein is supposed to have originated and which has been carried forward by such writers as Professor Ayer, Gilbert Ryle and the late J.L. Austin. I would beseech you to read Wittgenstein with such ideas completely out of your mind. For instance, I find at the end of one of Austin’s lectures the following: ‘Is it not possible that the next century may see the birth of, through the joint labours of philosophers and grammarians, and numerous other students of language, or a true and comprehensive science of language? Then we shall have rid ourselves of one more part of philosophy (there will still be plenty left) in the only way we ever can get rid of philosophy, by kicking it upstairs.’ [ J.L. Austin, ‘Ifs and Cans’ in ed. J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: University Press, 1970), p. 232.] Can you imagine Wittgenstein writing that? He is repeatedly reminding us that he is not building any new science, that he is not putting forward any thesis to be proved, and when he talks of grammar it was nothing to do with what grammarians are properly concerned with. To make this point clearer I would like to quote to you some remarks written in one of his note books in 1930. He was at that time contemplating a book that was never completed. Some of the material that would have formed part of the book has since been edited and published by Mr. Rhees under the title Philosophische Bemerkungen. The following sentences which I am going to read were obviously a rough draft for what would have been the introduction to this book. He writes: This book is written to those who are friendly to the spirit of it. This spirit is different, I think, from that of the great European and American civilisation. Whether a typical scientist understands or admires me is no matter since he will certainly not understand the spirit in which I write. Our civilisation is characterised by the word ‘progress’. Progress is its form: it is not one of its properties that it progresses. It is typical of it that it is building, constructing. Its activity is one of constructing more and more complex structures. And even clarity serves only this end, and is not sought on its own account. For me on the other hand, clarity, lucidity is the goal sought. I am not interested in erecting a building, but rather in having the foundations of all possible buildings clearly before me. So my way of thinking is different from that of the scientists, my way of thinking is other than theirs.

226

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Gilbert Ryle in his introduction to The Concept of Mind says that philosophy is the replacement of category habits by category disciplines. Now compare this with what Wittgenstein writes in the Philosophical Investigations: If the formation of concepts can be explained by facts of nature, should we not be interested, not in grammar, but rather in that in nature which is the basis of grammar? Our interest certainly includes the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature. (Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality.) But our interest does not fall back upon these possible causes of the formation of concepts; we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history, since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes. I am not saying: if such and such facts of nature were different, people would have different concepts (in the sense of an hypothesis). But: if any one believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones means not realising something we realise; then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him. Compare a concept with a style of painting. For is even our style of painting arbitrary? Can we choose one at pleasure? (The Egyptian for instance). Is it a mere question of pleasing or ugly? [trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: University Press, 1967), part 2, xii., p. 230.] Wittgenstein is not trying to impose a stricter discipline on our conceptual usages, but to free us from thinking that our traditional concepts are the only possible ones, that one must see the world in this way. He is always substituting ‘must’ by ‘can’. No, not more discipline but more freedom. Wittgenstein is no more a linguistic philosopher than Plato was. He is deeply concerned with the whole mystery of language, not only the language of mathematics and the natural sciences, but the whole realm of communication between one person and another. The difference between spoken language and written language, the language of gesture and facial expression, of symbol and ritual, of music and poetry. And there’s enough wonderment to keep you thinking for a lifetime. Here perhaps also I should say something about a question which was a very live issue when I was an undergraduate. The relation of Wittgenstein to Logical Positivism and the Vienna circle. I imagine no one calls themselves a ‘logical positivist’ nowadays. But in so far as logical positivism is a tendency in human thought which is as old as Protagoras, and will undoubtedly occur again under some new name, I would say something about it. Especially as in a recently published book Professor [George] Pitcher [of the Princeton University Philosophy Department (1956-81)]1 [The Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964)] seems to imply that the Vienna circle were more ‘tough minded’ and carried the teachers of the Tractatus to their real logical conclusion, and what Wittgenstein because of some mystical trait in him fought shy of doing so. I remember when Moritz Schlick, one of the ablest of the Vienna circle, came to read a paper in Cambridge, Wittgenstein told me that I should go and hear him,

University College Dublin Lecture: 1967

227

and then pointing to the title of Schlick’s paper ‘Phenomenalism’, said to me ‘that of course is what I am doing’. And again I was present at an early lecture where Wittgenstein actually used the words: ‘the meaning of a proposition is its method of verification’. Unfortunately some of us, myself included I am sorry to say, took hold of this isolated statement as if it was a magic key to open all the doors of philosophical puzzlement. Of course we should have known better. For one thing Wittgenstein had made it quite clear already in his lectures there was not, and never would be, one particular doctrine that would suddenly bring understanding. And if we had stopped to think a little more we would have seen how various the meanings of the word verification are. We took it to mean what might be described as direct sensory observation. But obviously we talk of verifying a sum in arithmetic, of a fact of history, of a scientific hypothesis. In what sense are Newton’s laws of motion verified? Or say the principle of the conservation of matter? When it is stated that Fermat’s last theorem has never been verified, what sort of verification are we even thinking of? You see a whole treatise would need to be written on the different uses of the concept of verification. I am sure by now some of you are getting impatient with me. I keep saying that Wittgenstein’s teaching is not to be confused with this, that, and the other, but have said nothing positive about its real content. There is a great and important difficulty here. We are living in an age in which the methods and steady achievements of the natural sciences play an enormous part in our lives. And it is tempting to try and see philosophy as a somewhat similar study. Now in the natural sciences you can have the results of another’s labour without the pains of carrying out the investigation. I can, for instance, look up the proper dose of a drug I want to use in the pharmacopeia, and I don’t have to worry about the experiments by which that dose was determined. So you might say tell us something about Wittgenstein’s conclusions, and if necessary we can check his proofs later. This is a completely wrong analogy. There is no such thing as a vicarious philosophy. Let me make myself clearer by giving you three similes that Wittgenstein used at different times. Philosophy, he once said, is like trying to open a safe with a compound lock: each little adjustment of the various dials seem to achieve nothing, it is only when all these are in the right position that the door opens. Or again. Philosophy is like trying to arrange in order the books in a library. You have to put these two books together and then these three, and later have to move these from their original place to another. Each little movement seems to be insignificant yet when they have all been done, then the library is in order. Thirdly philosophy is like teaching someone their way about a strange town. You take him on many different journeys, from A to B, from C to D, etc, and on many of these journeys you pass the same place. There is no one journey that is of crucial importance. But eventually after much travelling he knows his way about. Now these are only similes. You have a right to ask what sort of procedure is it that correspond to the setting of the dials, the putting together of two books, one of the many journeys. I will try and explain to you how I see it.

228

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

In one of his printed lectures Wittgenstein says that ‘the great difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we really know’. This for me is fundamental. Notice how this fits in with the mottoes he chose for the title pages of the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. For the first: ‘all that man really knows can be said in three words, the rest is nothing but dressing up and over tones’. For the second book he chooses ‘it is in the nature of any new discovery to appear more important than it really is’. Do you get the idea? Philosophy requires a mental asceticism, a firm resolve to ask ‘what do I really know’. Here it is often a matter of the resistance of the will that has to be overcome and not merely of the intelligence. Wittgenstein once shocked Moore by saying that he thought character was more important in philosophy than intelligence. I will try and make myself clearer by doing two fragments of philosophy with you now. But remember these are only two of the many journeys that have to be made. Many years ago Wittgenstein asked me to read out loud to him Frazer’s Golden Bough. Now Frazer did a valuable piece of work in collecting from all over the world the rites and myths of very different cultures. If he could have been content to do just this and no more it would have been a great book. But Frazer has to make out that he understands perfectly well why these rites and ceremonies were carried out. He always refers to these earlier people as savages. He is sure that they carried out these strange proceedings because of erroneous scientific hypotheses. Listen to him for a moment: ‘Therefore in reviewing the opinions and practices of ruder ages and races we shall do well to look with leniency upon the errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and to give them the benefit of that indulgence that we ourselves may one day stand in need of.’ Frazer completely fails to mention that these so called savages, these ruder ages, had alongside their myths and rites already made immense scientific discoveries. They knew something of agriculture, of mental working, of architecture, the use of the wheel, and how to make fire. If they thought it important to carry out an elaborate fertility rite before the Spring ploughing, it is also true they could make a plough and knew the importance of ploughing. In pretending to understand the reason for these rites Frazer is saying more than he really knew. In looking down on them he is indulging his own vanity. He speaks of the Australian aborigines as the rudest savages as to whom we possess information. But could Frazer have made and used, let alone invent a boomerang? Take Professor Frazer out of his college rooms and strand him in the Nullarbor desert, and to these rude savages he would seem a veritable ignoramus. I imagine that if Frazer was being introduced to a stranger he politely shook hands. If he entered the college chapel he removed his hat and lowered his voice. Being a kindly man he probably decorated a tree for the children at Christmas. If asked why he did these things he would rightly say that in our culture they were expressions of friendliness, reverence, and celebration. It would be ridiculous to say they were based on some hypothesis concerning the nature of things. Yet when he finds similar expressive acts in a different culture he has to look down on them as a false and rudimentary science.

University College Dublin Lecture: 1967

229

In Wittgenstein’s notes I find this written: ‘Our language is an embodiment of old myths; and the rite of the old myths was a language’. So now turn to an entirely different field of human knowledge, and again see the importance of saying only so much as we really know. To-day if you go into any book shop you will find several books and magazine articles with some such title as ‘The Nature of the Universe’. You know the sort of thing I mean. Extra galactic nebulae millions of light years away and receding from us at speeds approaching that of light. But what do we really know concerning these things? First turn your attention to those words ‘the Universe’. Where do they come from? Originally they referred to the sphere of the fixed stars, which turned as one, unus versus. That stately and constant movement of the stars that made such a deep impression on the Greek mind. But if you reject Aristotelian cosmology, as we all do, then you can’t just take a term out of that realm of thought and suppose it carries its meaning with it without further definition. And so far as I can find out none of our popular writers on cosmology ever attempt to say what precisely this terms ‘the Universe’ is now meant to denote. Then secondly consider the actual figures of distances and speeds with which we are presented. What do we really know? Where have these figures come from, what is really measured. Let us take for example the statements about the enormous speeds that the distant galaxies are said to be receding from us. Listen for a moment to a serious astronomer saying what is actually done. He writes: ‘First one point of light among thousands of others all around it had to be kept steadily fixed over the slit of a spectrograph attached to the telescope, perhaps for eight or ten nights. Then after all this concentrated effort the resulting picture might be no more than one tenth of an inch long and thirtieth of an inch wide containing many closely packed lines’. As you know the speed of recession of the nebulae is calculated from the fact that these closely packed lines are shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. I am not deriding this work or these hypotheses for one moment. What I do insist on is that nothing in the spectrogram or in nature compels us to make this and only this inference. Many different inferences could be made. More important still no inference need be made. One might just say well this is what things look like when you carry out this complicated procedure. The spectra of some stars just happen to be different from that of others. It used to be a standing joke against Hegel that he gave an explanation of why there were seven planets in the solar system. As a matter of fact Hegel never said anything so silly. But no astronomer considers it necessary to give an explanation of either the number of planets or their respective distances from the sun. It is just one of those things that are. In the same way there would be nothing unscientific or illogical in accepting the differences in stellar spectra as contingent facts not requiring either explanation or inference. I will again quote Wittgenstein, this time from the Tractatus: ‘At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena [6.371].

230

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

These two very abbreviated fragments of philosophical investigation are meant to illustrate what I meant when I said that the difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we really know. Such a pruning and purging has to be carried out over the whole range of knowledge, and that is neither a short nor easy task. When it is done then one knows one’s way about the city, the library is in order, the door of the safe opens. Why is it so important to say no more than we really know? I am going to risk going a step further. And here I must say that I speak without authority. For the expressions I now want to use have formulated themselves in my mind since Wittgenstein’s death. That I owe them to his influence I have no doubt. That he would approve of them I cannot assert. For me from the very beginning, and ever since, and still now, certain statements in the Tractatus seized hold of my attention: They were these: ‘What can be said can be said clearly.’ [4.116] ‘We show what cannot be expressed in words by saying clearly what can be said.’ [4.115] ‘How the world is is completely indifferent to what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.’ [6.432] ‘There is indeed that which cannot be expressed in words. This shows itself; it is what is mystical.’ [6.522] In a lecture on ethics which Wittgenstein gave to a society of undergraduates who were not specifically studying philosophy he made more explicit how the phrase ‘it is what is mystical’ is to be understood. He began the lecture [‘Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics’, Philosophical Review, vol. 74 (1965).] by saying he was going to use the word Ethics in the sense Moore defined it in his book of that name ‘an enquiry into that which is good’. He said he could have used various synonyms instead, such as: an enquiry into what is valuable, or into, what is really important, or an enquiry into what is the meaning of life, or into the right way of living. He then goes on to explain that although we can discuss good in a relative sense, good as a means to something else we cannot make judgment about what has absolute value, what is good in and for itself. His own words are: ‘What I wish to contend is that although all judgements of relative value can be shown to be mere statements of facts, no statement of fact can ever be or imply a judgment of absolute value’ [p. 6] and later on in the same lecture: ‘I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor that if a man could write a book on Ethics, this book would with an explosion destroy all other books in the world.’ [p. 7] and towards the end of the lecture: ‘I see clearly, as it were in a flash of light not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anyone could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the grounds of its significance.’ [p.11] I said earlier on in my paper that Wittgenstein was no more a linguistic philosopher than Plato was. I would ask you now to compare what I just quoted from Wittgenstein with a well-known passage from Plato’s seventh epistle. Plato

University College Dublin Lecture: 1967

231

you will remember is replying to those who have claimed to have written a treatise expounding his teaching and even doing it better. Plato replies: I know indeed that certain others have written about these same subjects, but what manner of men they are not even themselves know. But this much I can certainly declare concerning all these writers, or prospective writers, who claim to know the subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine or other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is impossible, in my judgement at least, that these men should understand anything about his subject. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith. For it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other subjects, but as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith it is brought to birth in the soul of a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself. [341] Alongside of this voice from a very distant past I would to quote this from a contemporary of Wittgenstein’s, but one who certainly has never read anything by him. Simone Weil writes: A mind enclosed in language is in prison. If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison it is living in error. If it has recognised the fact even for the tenth of a second and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. In them intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his larger cell. A man whose mind feels that it is captive, would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood he will not do so. And in that case he will have to suffer a lot. [Selected Essays 1934-1943 (Oxford: University Press, 1962) trans. Richard Rees, ‘Human Personality’, p. 26] One more effort to point in the direction I want to point. You are sitting in a room and it is dusk. Candles have been brought in that you may see to get on with the work in hand. Then you look up and try to see the garden that lies beyond. But all you see is the reflection of the candles in the window. To see the garden the candles must be shaded. Now that is what philosophy does, it prevents us from being dazzled by what we know.

NOTE 1 In a letter to Rhees, Drury wrote: ‘I think Pitcher sometimes “understands what Wittgenstein says” but never sees “what he is driving at”. He doesn’t see the deepest purpose in either book and so doesn’t understand the essential unity of the two’ [15 February 1965].

Letter to Rush Rhees [Address not given] 16 October 1966 I would agree with you that to day you do not find people talking about eternity in philosophical discussions. As you say you find them talking about sense perception and thought, about proof and necessity, about possibility and chance, etc., etc. But isn’t this a recent change, largely due to Wittgenstein’s influence, and to a lesser extent Moore’s? After all it is only a generation ago that works on philosophy had titles such as ‘Space Time and Deity’, ‘The Nature of Existence’, and ‘Appearance and Reality’. One could hardly imagine a serious philosophical work being published to-day with a title of that genre. I remember when Professor Tennant published the results of his life’s work in two huge volumes entitled Philosophical Theology, Wittgenstein said to me: ‘You know the respect I have for the past, but this does seem to me old fashioned in a bad sense’. In the introduction to his Wissenchaft der Logik Hegel says: That which before this period was called Metaphysic, has been so to speak extirpated root and branch and has disappeared from the ranks of the sciences. Where could one now catch an echo, where would any echo venture to linger, of the Ontology, the Rational psychology, the Cosmology, or even the Natural Theology of former times. And this radical change is the method of philosophising Hegel attributes to the influence of Kant’s Critique. It seems to me that a very similar change has come about in our generation. And this change I would attribute in large measure to the influence of the Tractatus and of those who heard and spread what Wittgenstein was teaching in his Cambridge lectures. Only I think there is a growing and serious misunderstanding concerning what Wittgenstein was trying to achieve. At the first lectures I ever attended by Moore, he opened the lecture by reading the syllabus laid down for him in the University calendar. The last subject in this syllabus was ‘the philosophy of religion’. Moore went on to say that he would be talking about all the other departments of philosophy mentioned except this last, concerning this he would have nothing to say. At the time I was still far too callow to appreciate Moore’s peculiar genius, and I reported this remark to Wittgenstein with some indignation, saying, in some such words, that no philosopher had the right to dodge the main issue in this way. Wittgenstein didn’t say anything for a few minutes (even to this day I can remember that pause) then he asked me if I had a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions handy. I produced the Loeb edition. He must have known his way about that book by heart for he found the sentence he wanted in a moment. It was this: ‘et vae tacentibus de Te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt’. The English translation given in the Loeb edition is ‘and woe to those who say nothing concerning Thee, seeing that those who say most are dumb’. Wittgenstein said this

Letter to Rush Rhees

233

was a complete misunderstanding of Augustine’s meaning, it should be translated ‘and woe to those who say nothing about Thee, giving as their excuse the fact that chatterboxes talk a lot of nonsense’. Then he went on to say, (and here unfortunately I am not sure of his precise words) but it was something like this: ‘I don’t refuse to speak about God, God is a word in my vocabulary’. In the Tractatus the word God does occur and is of central importance to the understanding of that book. I think I am right in saying that the word God does not occur in the Investigations (You will correct me if I am wrong in this). But what I want to try and convey is that the God who is spoken of in the Tractatus is also the inspiration of the Investigations. I would of course agree with you that there is a change of method, and that he came to see mistakes in the conception of analysis which is so prominent in the Tractatus. But if I wanted to choose a motto for both books in a combined volume I would choose those words from the early note-books: ‘My work has extended from the foundations of Logic to the nature of the World’. You mention the phrase ‘conceptual analysis’ as one that he used from 1931 onwards. Now Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind also speaks of philosophy as a progress from conceptual confusion to conceptual clarity. I have been asking myself what is the enormous difference between the Investigations and Ryle’s work. And what you said about ‘apprentissage’ in Simone Weil supplied my answer. ‘Le genie n’est – peut –etre – pas autre chose que la capacite de traverser les nuits obscures’. I think Ryle probably had to work really hard and was often in considerable perplexity in working at his book; but he gives me the impression (I don’t know him and I may be wrong about this) of never finding himself in a ‘nuit obscure’. I think he always felt confident that the result would turn out to be something entirely compatible with common sense. It wouldn’t be something that called the whole meaning of his life in question, and leave him with the feeling of being an outcast and a stranger in this present age. I came across this quotation from that pompous old bore Cicero the other evening. (It was in a book of essays by the classical scholar Peter Green): ‘Philosophiae quidem praecepta noscenda; vivendum autem civiliter’. Green translated it like this: ‘One should know what philosophy teaches, but one should live like a gentleman’. In the same book of essays Green quotes another contemporary classical scholar, Professor Guthrie: ‘The characteristic science of our age is the introspective one of analytical psychology, and in philosophy we have seen the dethronement of metaphysics in favour of linguistic analysis’. Green himself speaks of ‘the violent rejection of the ideal as such, a wholesale jettisoning of metaphysics in what might be described as the Vienna clean up’. Here is the misunderstanding of Wittgenstein which I see growing every day. I think we who knew Wittgenstein as a person have a duty to speak out about this: but how is one to make oneself heard? I remember when Wittgenstein was over here and at work on the Investigations, he said to me, “I can’t say a word in my book about the enormous part music has played in my life, how then can I hope to be understood”.

234

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

In contrast to those quotations I have just mentioned, I would say that the following one from Simone Wiel’s Lecons de Philosophie is much closer to the teaching of Wittgenstein: ll n’y a pas d’autre etude philosophique que la metaphysique. Mais is faut bien voir qu’il y a deux manieres de concevoir la recherché metaphysique. Il y a le point de vue ontologique et le pont de vue critique. Science: rapports quantitatifs entre les phenomenes. Point de vue ontologique : on se place du point de vue de Dieu. On suppose qu’on connait les choses en soi, eton les compare a la connaisssnce qu’on en a. Point de vue critique: on essaye de prendre conscience de ce qu’on fait quand on fait de la science, etc. Le point de vue critique essay de comparer la science telle qu’elle est a la methode parfaite que nous avons en nous. Ce point de vue est parfaitment legitime, alors que le point de vue ontologique est absurde At first sight it would seem that the opening sentence of this quotation; ’Il n’y a pas d’autre etude philosophique que la metaphysique’, is plain contrary to what Wittgenstein sometimes said about metaphysics. But he was speaking about the ‘point de vue ontologique’. Those who speak in terms such as the dethronement of metaphysics in favour of linguistic analysis, or of ‘the Vienna clean-up’, have overlooked the ‘point de vue critique’. At the end of the Tractatus comes the words ‘denn seiht er die Welt richtig. The Investigations have the same aim: sieht er die Welt richtig. It is not possible to say of Wittgenstein’s writings. ‘Philosophiae quidem praecepta noscenda, vivendum autem civiliter’.

PART IV

Drury on Religion As described in the account of Wittgenstein’s friendship with Drury that introduces this book, on the last occasion Drury and Wittgenstein met in Cambridge, days before the latter died, their conversation turned to religion. Drury mentioned that he found some extracts from the Old Testament offensive. Wittgenstein cut in to say ‘you musn’t pick and choose in that way’ and went on to mention cases of natural tragedy, the death of children, for example, which presumably just have to be accepted. Drury reminded him that some such cases were interpreted as punishment for sin in the Old Testament. Even more confusing, the New Testament says the opposite. Wittgenstein would have none of this kind of comment and told Drury he was ‘out of his depth’. Out of consideration for his friend’s illness, Drury did not continue the exchange but before parting, Wittgenstein ‘suddenly referred to our dispute’ and promised to write him a letter about it, a letter, of course, he never received. However, this incident is an important key to the correspondence given below. It is clear in Drury’s correspondence that the issue of whether the Old Testament, in particular, was Word of God or had the much lesser status of Hebraic folklore (as Drury was inclined to think) remained with him throughout his life. He had issues too regarding the historicity of the New Testament accounts, particularly regarding miracles, and considered that central aspects of the Gospel message could also be found admirably expressed in the Bhagavad Gita. Yet, he was a devout Christian man, given to daily reading of passages of the New Testament in the original Greek, with a view to getting closer to its meaning. (Indeed, he seems to have found it difficult to accept that friends, in particular those whom he knew to be admirable people yet professed to be atheists could truly hold such a position.) He urged Rhees, who struggled with Christian belief, to concentrate on the much that was good in the Christian religion rather than on the difficulties he himself also had with it. They seem to have come to the view that the best approach was to sit at the back of a church and simply listen. In this regard, Drury felt that the possibility of such silent presence was being undermined by the introduction of the vernacular liturgy in the Roman Church – a church whose spiritual literature Drury had extensive knowledge of. It was also a church that would be difficult for him to ignore, even though he was not a member, because of its dominant presence in the Ireland of his time and also because many of his patients were of that communion. It was moreover a church that Rhees seems to have been attracted to. This was true also of Simone Weil, in whose writings Drury and Rhees came to share an interest in common. As matters turned out, Weil balked at taking the road to Rome – perhaps

236

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

because she retained an attraction to an eternal Greek world, not related to temporal events as Christianity is. The philosopher in Drury was similarly attracted to the Greek world, particularly Plato, but he continued to thread the ‘rough ground’, symbolized by the lowly origins of the Christian saviour. The fact that Wittgenstein had pronounced Irish religious sensibility (significantly influenced by Roman Catholicism) as superstition probably heightened Drury’s concern with understanding how genuine religious experience that they had agreed had the power to cure childhood fears was to be distinguished from it. Drury consulted with Rhees on this matter, making the suggestion that Luther’s remark that ‘where the trust is right the God is right’ was illuminating on the point. Perhaps this can be interpreted to mean that whereas religion engenders trust, superstition thrives on fear. In his letters and other writings, Drury also often refers to James Fraser’s The Golden Bough. He read aloud portions of the first volume (1890) for Wittgenstein over several weeks in 1931. Wittgenstein’s reflections on these reading sessions, edited by Rush Rhees, later appeared as Part I of ‘Bermerkungen über Frazers The Golden Bough’, Synthese, vol. 17 (1967), pp. 233–53. Drury noted not only Wittgenstein’s criticism of Fraser’s narrow understanding of aboriginal society but also his use of the concept of magic, which is allied to superstition. Over time, Drury became disenchanted with Kierkegaard, whose example Wittgenstein had appealed to when guillotining Drury’s exegetical queries at their last meeting; he found evidence that showed Kierkegaard to be bitter and prejudiced. Besides, Wittgenstein himself had, as Drury recalled, queried the compatibility of St. John with the Synoptic Gospels and of the Synoptics with St. Paul. It is clear, nevertheless, that in matters of religion Drury adhered to the last advice given him by Wittgenstein as they parted at the Cambridge railway station: ‘Drury, whatever becomes of you, don’t stop thinking’. The correspondence given below provides multiple examples of this. However, he also tried to gain an insight into what would put a full stop to such ruminations. There is an extract from an undated letter sent from St. Edmondsbury where Drury quotes Wittgenstein in these terms: ‘If God became man I would have no idea what the account of that fact should be like.’ Drury found in Johann Georg Hamann, the eighteenth-century German philosopher, a suggestion as to what this might mean for someone who has turned the hypothesis in this statement into an assertion – the nub of the matter so far as Wittgenstein was concerned. For Hamann, Christianity is a religion for those who suffer to the point of being at the end of their tether. A prime example is those afflicted by mental illness, as Drury made clear in The Danger of Words. Those who have suffered greatly can often see what others cannot. In the words of another German writer, whom Wittgenstein had read, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg – I give here an alternative translation to that given by Drury – ‘A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out’ (Aphorisms, Notebook E, 49). In another letter Drury drove home the point that ‘the Christian religion is for those who have lost confidence in their own power, and despair’. This letter was to D. Z. Phillips, from Swansea who had written to Drury for assistance in interpreting Wittgenstein on religion. Phillips was to become a leading writer on this

Drury on Religion

237

topic, advancing the thesis that Wittgenstein was a fideist who allowed no room for the operation of reason in matters of Christian belief, a position that gets support from the exchange between Drury and Wittgenstein at their last meeting, referred to above. The reader can judge on the basis of this letter whether firstly, Drury accepted such an interpretation of Wittgenstein and secondly, came to accept it as representing his own position. It should be noted that in respect of Drury’s criticism in his letter of Phillips’s proposed title for the book he was then writing that it had no effect. Phillips went on to entitle his book The Concept of Prayer (1965). Drury’s objection seems to have been that while it is possible to philosophize prayerfully, it is not possible to subject prayer to philosophical analysis. However these questions are to be resolved, the insight taken from Lichtenberg – less dramatically phrased in the Scholastic dictum: ‘quidquid recipitur secundum modum recipientis recipitur’ (‘whatever is received, is received according to the capacity of the recipient’) is germane. Drury’s spiritual openness played its part in revealing, what was otherwise not widely appreciated, a corresponding openness in his friend and teacher. Hence, very significantly dependent on Drury’s testimony, a distinguished theologian, Fergus Kerr, could describe Wittgenstein as ‘the last great philosopher in our tradition who cared passionately about the Christian religion’ (Theology after Wittgenstein, 2nd edn, (London: SPCK, 1997), p. 187). Letters to Rhees: 22 May 1958; 09 June 1958; 09 March 1964; 22 April 1967; 15 May 1967; 12 June 1968; 02 October 1968; 11 September 1969; 06 October 1970; 31 May 1971; 15 June 1971; 23 April 1974; Undated letter extract. Letter to D.Z. Phillips: 23 July 1964.

Letters to Rhees St Patrick’s Hospital 22 May 1958 Dear Bob, …Now what you say about concerning yourself, I am going to write quite spontaneously even though this may involve missing the point altogether. You seem to me to dwell too much on the doctrines you don’t understand (and I don’t either). We can’t feed or grow on negatives and puzzles. There is much in the Christian, Catholic, religion you do now understand and I think you should let your mind dwell more peaceably on these things. Certainly many Christians have expressed themselves as if ‘certain great events in the life of Jesus afford the hope of salvation’. I don’t understand this and can’t use this language. But I don’t regard this as the ‘essence of Christianity’. There are many great Christian writers who don’t speak in this way. I am thinking of the Theocentric as distinct from the Christocentric, though not putting one above the other. Some people come to God through Christ; I don’t know that road and can’t speak of it. But others come to Christ through God. Believe in the goodness and love and forgiveness of God first, then Christ’s words and life comes as an everlasting yes and answer to one’s faith. For me the central matter is this, that in spite of all my sins and failures and the mess of my life I begin everyday as a new creation as if I had never done anything wrong at all, that at every moment I am a child of God and an inheritor of the Kingdom of heaven. That whatever I feel like and that whatever happens to me is God’s gift for that day and moment, to be accepted with a Sursum Corda. This seems such a boastful claim that I could not hold fast to it except that there is a book, a teaching, a life lived and a death gone through, all of which commands me to accept this Gospel, this good news. I don’t believe that the sheepfold has only one door, there are as many doors as there are sheep, each finds his way to God. Again I think you are dwelling on texts which don’t nourish you, pass that difficulty by telling God you don’t understand this saying, and then remember that in the same gospel it is said that Christ is the light that lightens everyman in the world, that is those who have never heard of him. Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, the whole world, all men, you and me too, not just a few elect who have lived good Christian lives. That would make Christ another Moses...

St Patrick’s Hospital 9 June 1958 Dear Bob, Many thanks for your letter of the 1st. First of all I don’t want you to feel that you ever irritate me or annoy me in a anything you write, it does me good to hear from you and to know that there is at least one person to whom I can write quite frankly

Letters to Rhees

239

about these matters and who can write in the same spirit to me. So please never hold back for fear of disturbing me, and I won’t fear to write to you either. I have been thinking over what Simone Weil says: ‘The dogmas of religion are not things to be affirmed. They are things to be regarded from a certain distance with attention, respect, and love’. And again: ‘Intellectual adherence is never owed to anything whatsoever. For it is never in any degree a voluntary thing. Attention alone is voluntary. And it alone forms the subject of an obligation’. I find myself in complete agreement with this, do you? And in this respect I find you a believer—for I know no-one of us who is paying so much attention to the Christian teaching. What you say about going to the back of the church and listening seems to me absolutely right, it is all I can do too. The truth is that once one has heard the doctrines of the incarnation and atonement ‘who for us men and for our salvation comes down from heaven’, this supplants, all other conceptions of God, a God who had not done this would not be God, though this doesn’t mean understanding how or what is done for us. You say that to leave questioning and puzzling aside feels like the death of the spirit. Here perhaps I don’t understand you. I don’t mean that I don’t know what it is to be puzzled and often in great doubt and adoration, but light doesn’t come back again by my ever solving anything, seeing anything new or clear, but light comes back again by adoration drowning puzzles. Have you ever read Saint Augustine’s Confessions? Chapter after chapter starts with questioning and puzzles and finishes in a hymn. Can you, when you are puzzled, ask God the questions in Church, not yourself? You don’t offend me at all by saying that you have learned much outside of Christian teaching. I find those who don’t depress me. God is the God of nature as well as of Grace and whatever leads us towards peace and love and adoration is from God...

St Edmondsbury 9 March 1964 Dear Bob, Many thanks for your letter of the 18th. I was most interested in the quotations you gave me from Wittgenstein’s notebooks. Do you know when they were written? I remember when he was here in Dublin his saying to me that at one time he had thought St Paul had spoilt the simplicity of the Gospels, but that now he saw how the Gospels and epistles were one book. Years previously when I first got to know him at Cambridge, I had said that for me the Old Testament was ‘just a collection of Hebrew folklore’, and he had agreed with me; but shortly before his death when I spoke critically of some of the ‘Jehovah ideas’ in the prophets he seemed very shocked and said the Bible wasn’t a book for me to pick and choose in. What really started me wondering about this problem again was something I read in a quotation from Hamann, it was this: How God the Son lowered himself! He became a man, the least among men; he took the form of a servant. How God the Holy Spirit lowered himself, when he

240

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

became an historian of the smallest, most despised and insignificant events on earth, in order to reveal the decisions, the mysteries and the ways of the godhead to man in man’s own language. This idea impressed me. Could it be that what revolts me in the Old Testament is of no more importance than the dirty old stones in the stable at Bethlehem. God’s revelation hidden just where a proud man would be least likely to see it In another place Hamann: ‘I recognised my own crimes in the history of the Jewish people, I read the course of my own life and thanked God for his longsuffering with this his people, since nothing but such an example could justify me in a like hope’. The other day I went up to see one of my patients, an agitated deluded woman; she was reading her Bible with the tears running down her face. I thought she understood this book better than her doctor did. I couldn’t think of any other book she could have read in this way— nothing in Greek or Hindu Philosophy When in Crime and Punishment the prostitute reads St. John’s gospel to Raskolnikov was there any other book she could have read? What you say with reference to Simon Weil and the Greek conception of time, this appeals to me straight away, it is the sort of way I find myself naturally thinking. No chosen people, no revelation confined to a particular moment of time, no progress towards an apocalypse; but also everywhere some intimations of an absolute good outside the changes of space and time. I find it natural to think in this way and it doesn’t raise all the difficulties and problems for me that the quotations from Hamann do—but I feel an uneasiness now that perhaps I have never understand the Christian religion. In a letter to Kant, Hamann writes: ‘Reason is not given to you in order that you may become wise but that you may know your folly and ignorance’. That is where I stumble and draw back.

St Edmondsbury 22 April 1967 ….Now about the Frazer edition, I don’t think my memory deceives me. I think it would have been in 1930 that Wittgenstein said to me that he had always wanted to read Frazer but hadn’t done so, and would I get hold of a copy and read some of it out loud to him. I borrowed from the Union Library the first volume of the multi-volume edition and we only got a little way through this because he talked at considerable length about it, and the next term we didn’t start it again. One point which I think in very characteristic is that he said that Frazer was able to describe the episode of the Priest King of Nemi in highly practical language—showing that even today we could feel something of the awe connected with such a rite; and that such language would be quite out of place in describing a false piece of science, one couldn’t write in this style about say the phlogiston theory of heat. These myths and rites he said were closer to metaphysical errors than to scientific errors.

Letters to Rhees

241

St Edmondsbury 15 May 1967 Dear Bob, I have been reading again the first few chapters of The Golden Bough to see if it would help me to re-call any of the conversations we had about it. This came back to me, it may be already in the notes you have, but it seemed to me important and very characteristic. He said that although Frazer roamed over the whole world in describing magical practices, he never put one of them in their right context. Namely that these practices took place among people who had already got important and difficult scientific achievements to their credit. Making weapons out of refractory material, agriculture, irrigation, etc. The magical practices must be looked at against this background, then they take on a different appearance. Frazer refers to the Australian aborigines as being ‘in the most backward state of human society’ and as ‘the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate information’. But could Frazer make, still less use, a boomerang? Place Frazer in the Australian bush and he would appear to these ‘rude savages’ as a complete ignoramus. If say a Martian came to earth and visited different countries one of the things that would strike him would be that everywhere there were large and imposing buildings, churches, mosques, temples, he would completely misunderstand the use of these buildings if he said ‘these must be some sort of factories where something useful is produced’, for what other needs could these people have except food, clothing, etc. Are there any remarks in the note books about what Wittgenstein meant by ‘superstition’, it was certainly a word he used both in conversation and in the Tractatus. I had only known him for a few weeks but we had taken to going on walks together. One day coming back from Madingley we had somehow or other come to talk about ‘morbid fears’. He told me that as a child he had suffered terribly from such fears. He remembered that in the bathroom of his home there was a crack in the plaster that took on for him the appearance of a duck’s head. It looked to him like one of those malevolent beasts such as Hieronymus Bosch painted in the temptation of St. Antony. Wittgenstein said that he used to be paralysed with fear looking at it. Then he suddenly stood still and looking very intently at me said ‘you will think I’m crazy, you will think I have gone completely nuts when I say that there is only one force that can conquer fears of that nature, and that is religious feeling’. I protested that I certainly did not think that crazy, that I came from Ireland and the Irish were still a religious people. Wittgenstein looked at me rather sceptically and said ‘ I am talking about real religion not superstition’. Unfortunately I didn’t then try and get him to expound the difference. I think it would be valuable if there were notes about this to include them with the remarks about magic. I imagine that he would have agreed with that wonderful saying of Luther’s ‘where the trust is right the God is right’…

242

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

St Edmundsbury 12 June 1968 …..I was certainly impressed when Wittgenstein said ‘I wouldn’t dare to criticise a man such as Calvin’. But at the same time I find a problem here too. As you know Simone does not hesitate to attack vehemently a remark of St. Augustine’s that the virtues of the pagans were not acceptable to Christ. I find myself thanking her for saying this, a thought that I on my own, might not have had the courage to even think. I am sure she is right. I have been reading each day some of the Greek New Testament, this has the great advantage that I have to go very slowly, and think more about the real meaning of what it is too easy to be familiar with. I find myself ‘offended’ by some of the things said and done. For instance, reading the Fourth Gospel the words ‘anti-semitism’ keep thrusting at me. I can’t believe that the Pharisees were as stupid as they are made out to be. And often the answers given to them seem deliberately obscure. For instance, when they ask ‘by what authority do you do these things’ the answer is ‘destroy this temple and in three days I will build it up again’. The answer in the Synoptic gospels to the same question is much easier to understand for there they are asked by what authority John the Baptist baptised. Again, reading the other day in the Acts I felt really indignant with Peter over the incident of Ananias and Sapphira. Surely when Sapphira comes in not knowing that her husband has just died, Peter should have told her and consoled her at once and not started asking her about the money. Should I say ‘this is the revelation of God’, you musn’t pick and choose here. Should I say ‘I dare not criticise the New Testament’. I certainly wouldn’t of course publish remarks like this, but I can’t help thinking them.

St Edmondsbury 2 October 1968 Dear Bob, I should have written before this to thank you for your letter of September 15th in answer to my difficulty about the emphasis placed on the miraculous in the Gospels and in the Acts. I re-read the essay of Lessing’s and the very impressive short dialogue entitled ‘The gospel of John and the testament of John’. They are both in the volume you sent me and from the way they read I should say well translated. But Lessing doesn’t mention one aspect of the matter which to me is the chief stumbling block. Namely that we are now acquainted with a very large body of religious writings in which miracles are emphasised, and that a critical examination can show the growth of such legends. For instance when I was in hospital I read a new book which has just appeared about the life of St. Patrick [probably Ludwig Bieler, St. Patrick and the coming of Christianity (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1967)]. The author shows clearly that in the early and contemporary records St. Patrick is portrayed as a very impressive and ascetic figure, but over the course of the next few centuries he is gradually developed into almost a magician, miracles are ascribed to him which have

Letters to Rhees

243

no place in the early records. Von Hügel in his study of St. Catherine of Genoa is concerned with the same tendency, namely that within a few years of her death her biographers begin to see something miraculous in every event of her life. For instance ‘her whole body became yellow, this was a certain sign that she was being consumed by the fire of divine love’. We would say that she had an attack of jaundice. Am I right in thinking that the Roman church still requires proof of at least one miracle before canonisation? I know of a priest who goes round the Dublin hospitals blessing the sick with a relic of a recently dead and very pious Irishman [probably, Matt Talbot], in the hopes that a miraculous cure will take place and the cause for his canonisation will thereby be promoted. Again every year numerous sick are transported by jet plane (if they can afford it) to Lourdes in the hopes of a miraculous cure. I find all this very revolting. I agree with you that it has nothing to do with the ‘uniformity of nature’, it isn’t that I think miracles are impossible, but the belief in a God who selects certain people for miraculous cures is a degradation of the idea of God. I would say that the ‘uniformity of nature’, the yearly round of the seasons and the stars, was for me the miracle. Am I right in saying that apart from the dictation of the Koran, Mohammedans don’t believe in miracles? But to come back to the Gospels. I would find it much easier now if the Tübingen critics had been right and that the Gospels were written in the second century thus giving time for the miracles to grow as legends. But I think this dating is now impossible and that all the Gospels as we now have them were in existence before the end of the first century. And it would seem that the writer of the Acts was a companion of St. Paul’s and present when some of the miracles were performed by him. Yet in the epistles when St. Paul has to defend his authority he makes no mention of miracles except that of his conversion. And for some reason that I am not clear about, this miracle doesn’t offend me at all. I had not thought about the point you made that the force of the miracles came from the person who performed them. And it is directly said that the Anti-Christ will perform miracles. Again it sometimes seems as if Jesus wanted to keep the miracles a secret: ‘He charged them that they should not speak about it’. But at other times, as in the reply to John the Baptist’s disciples, which you mention, it seems as if the miracles were the proof that he was the Messiah. To-day when I was reading my Greek I came to the passage where the barren fig tree is cursed and withers away. The thought came to me that if this anecdote had been in one of the apocryphal gospels how glad I would have been that is was not canonical! [Handwritten note]: I am sorry these ramblings don’t advance the problem one step, but it does me good to get them written down, don’t feel you have got to reply!

St Edmondsbury 11 September 1969 Dear Bob, I always have some scruples about writing a longish letter to you, in case I should interrupt you in other and more important work that you are engaged on. So please

244

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

don’t think this requires an answer, it is merely that it does me good sometimes to write to you about my thoughts and problems. A kind of poor substitute to having a talk with you. Some years ago now you gave me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. At the time for some reason I didn’t read it in the right spirit. Lately I took it up again, have now read it slowly five or six times. I find it more and more wonderful. There are verses in it which could be in the fourth gospel without seeming any way out of place: ‘But to those who adore me in pure oneness of soul to those who are ever in harmony, I increase what they have and give them what they have not.’ ‘For even if the greatest sinner worship me with all his soul he must be considered righteous because of his righteous will.’ ‘He who offers to me with devotion only a fruit or a flower or a leaf, or even a little water, this I accept from that yearning soul, because with a pure heart it was offered with love.’ ‘He who knows my birth as God and who knows my sacrifice, when he leaves his mortal body, goes no more from death to death, for he in truth comes to me.’ ‘When righteousness is weak and faints and unrighteousness exults in pride, then my Spirit arises on earth.’ But I could go on quoting for pages, and you know the book yourself. The translation is by Juan Mascaró, who is obviously familiar with the writings of the Spanish mystical authors. I hope he has not been too influenced by Christian ideas in his translation. What has interested me particularly was that in reading the Gita the question ‘did this conversation between Krishna and Arjuna really take place?’ would be meaningless. Why then should one become worried as to whether the conversation between Jesus and the woman of Samaria was ‘historical’ or not? Now it seems to me like this. It would be wrong to describe the Gita as poetry, or philosophy, or the work of a ‘religious genius’, the only correct description is that it is inspired by the Holy Spirit. And so with the gospels. Whether the words are a reproduction of what Jesus said or a later inspiration by the Holy Spirit, is of no matter; for they are not two Gods but one God. Now what I also wanted to write to you about was something that has caused me considerable distress. I had never read any of Kierkegaard’s final polemical writings. The other day I saw a paperback edition of his journals for the last two years of his life. I was shocked by the bitterness I found in them. I know he was treated shamefully, but he seems to me to speak as it he was the only person in Europe and particularly in Denmark who had to suffer. I had looked on the second volume of Either/Or as the most perfect expression of the Christian belief about sex and marriage, and now in these last journals he says that Christianity demands celibacy, that a woman can’t be a Christian, that her only object is to trick men; as if he had forgotten all the love and self -sacrifice that bringing up a family imposes on women. Then again I dislike this continual emphasis on ‘the individual’ and his personal relation to God. I find myself much more in agreement with Simone’s writings about

Letters to Rhees

245

the impersonal in everyman and in God. Again it seems to me that Simone suffered as much as Søren (though I suppose it is silly to measure suffering) but she never speaks as if her suffering had singled her out as a special witness for her times. In your book you mention the horrible idea of a Frankenstein without limits, in some places it seems to me that Kierkegaard has this conception of God. Now all this troubles me. For in the past what I had read and been able to understand of his writings: Purity of Heart; Philosophical Fragments; The Unscientific Conclusion, and many places in the earlier Journals (The translation by Dru); all these had played an important part in my thinking about religion and Christianity. And then to find that he ends up (as I can’t help seeing it) by saying at great length ‘Lord I thank thee that I am not as other men are’. Of course I imagine that K. would say that Christianity declares itself as ‘an offence’, and the fact that I am offended by what he says is just what he intended. To this there seems no answer. Except that I would quote to him from the Gita: ‘Who is balanced in blame and in praise, whose soul is silent, who is happy with whatever he has, whose home is not in this world, and who has love, this man is dear to me’.

32 Ailesbury Lawn, Dundrum 6 October 1970 Dear Bob, I felt a great wish tonight, as indeed I often do, to talk to you. So I decided the next best thing to that would be to send you a rambling letter about my present thinking. But don’t feel that this demands an answer now or at any time. It is just that I felt trying to put my thought into words would clarify things for me. I decided a short time ago that as I had never read the Old Testament through from beginning to end, I should now try and do so with an open mind. Well I managed to get through Genesis, and this made such a rebellious frame of mind in me that I gave up the undertaking. I simply cannot understand how so many saintly people could see in this account of the patriarchs a book inspired by God. What disturbs me more is that the New Testament writers are one and all in agreement that the Law and the Prophets are one covenant and to be described as ‘Scriptures’. For instance I have just finished reading the Greek of the first epistle of St. Peter. If this really was written by St. Peter, isn’t it strange that he never quotes a saying or parable of Jesus with whom he spent so much time? But the epistle is full of references to the Old Testament. (He always uses the Septuagint Greek, wouldn’t Peter be more likely to know the Hebrew version?). There are some wonderful things in the epistle, ‘I beseech you brethren as strangers and pilgrims…’, but then he quotes Sarah as an example to the Christian wives! Sarah who twice allowed Abraham to pass her off as his sister. Sarah who had Hagar and her infant sent away to die of thirst in the desert! When I think of the deep impression the Bhagavad Gita made on me, and that I can read that in a religious context, I feel bewildered as to what I should think of the Bible. It is such an extraordinary mixture. And yet I am sure Wittgenstein had something very serious to say to me when he told me: ‘You mustn’t

246

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

pick and choose’. He said he was going to write to me about this, but it was only a week before his death. He said at the same time that I should remember with what reverence Kierkegaard treated the Old Testament. But now when I read Genesis it is full of promises about inheriting the ‘land’, and ‘your seed being as many as the sand of the sea’, now it is just this sort of religion full of ‘milk and honey’ and ‘be fruitful and multiply’ that Kierkegaard directs his invective. I can’t find any commentary that is of the least use in this problem. The Anglican commentaries all talk about ‘the gradual education of the chosen people’. This seems to me bunkum, when I think of the Bhagavad Gita or even of some passages in Plato. Clement of Alexandria stated that all Plato’s deeper intuitions arose from the fact that he was taught by the Hebrew prophets. My mother knew the Bible through and through and as children the day always began with reading a chapter of the Bible by my father. What has happened to this generation? Have we lost something very precious, or are we wiser?

Ailesbury Lawn 31 May 1971 Dear Bob, I am very glad you wrote to me as you did about the Latin Mass. I have been grieved too at the thought of this break with the past, and what a wonderful past! If you had asked me twenty years ago I would have said such a Liturgical change was unbelievable. I remember Wittgenstein saying something to that effect. He had been listening to a Protestant Evangelist preaching in the open air. He said that if Jesus Christ had really meant all that the speaker said he meant to him, he would never be speaking in that tone of voice. Then he went on to say, ‘that is one form of vulgarity that Roman Catholicism will never yield to’. Now it almost seems to me that the vernacular mass is a step towards this vulgarity. Wittgenstein said to me on another occasion ‘never let yourself become too familiar with holy things’. (This was when I was at a theological college and had a crucifix over my bed.) The dignity of the Latin Mass was a safeguard against becoming too familiar with holy things. On another occasion when we were discussing the words of the liturgy he said, ‘they seem soaked in centuries of prayer’. You tell me that even in the present Latin Mass there is no Kyrie. This is terrible, because it is one of the oldest parts of the Liturgy and goes back to the time when Greek was the language used by the early Christians. But what seems to me even more serious than this break with a wonderful past is that the Roman church seems now to have forgotten all the teaching of the mystics on ‘the prayer of quiet’. The use of non-vocal prayer. It always seemed to me that the mass said ‘in secreto’ allowed those to whom non-vocal prayer was the only possible form of adoration to be present at mass and still pray; the Sanctus bell just bringing them back to earth at the proper moment. I believe that there are a great many people for whom this teaching on non-vocal prayer is needed, and now with the congregation taking such an active part in the liturgy this form of prayer is impossible. And in the past those who wanted to follow the actual words of the liturgy could always do so in their prayer books with a translation.

Letters to Rhees

247

I suppose it is part of growing old, but I sometimes seem to feel as if the end of the world was near, everything seems to be disintegrating…

Ailesbury Lawn 15 June 1971 Dear Bob, Many thanks for sending me the Journal which contains your notes and Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer. It is good that these have now been translated and I am able to read them in detail, instead of trying to puzzle out fragments. But now when I read them in toto a whole lot of difficulties come into mind. I hope we will be able to have discussions about these in August. I will just mention the chief points where I find myself wanting to ask a lot more questions. 1. Wittgenstein refers to the entirely different language used by St. Augustine and say a Buddhist holy man. He says, and of course I agree, that there is no question of either being in error. But then I want to go on and point out that neither St. Augustine or the Buddhist would accept this latitudinarism, they would both think that they were in possession of the one and only truth. They were both concerned with making converts. And then the question of error comes very much to the fore. I think it is a mistake to introduce the religions which are essentially doctrinal into the same discussions about very primitive rites and magic. 2. I was reading the other day the account of the Passover ceremonies. Here the children are told to ask the head of the household, “what mean ye by these ceremonies?” and then the father goes on to give the account of the angel of death destroying the first born of the Egyptians, and passing over the house of the Jews. I feel that this question of the meaning of rites must have been frequently raised as a primitive people became more sophisticated. In other words an option, a hypothesis was part of the ceremony on a great many occasions. For a Catholic surely it is an essential part of the mass to believe that the rite was instituted by Christ on Maundy Thursday. And here it seems to me you have ‘opinion’ and ‘hypothesis’, and the possibility of error. 3. One would like to say: ‘this is what took place here; laugh if you can’. No I don’t ever think of laughing, but if he had written ‘be shocked if you can’. Then I would have replied that in many accounts of religious rites I am indeed shocked. ‘Tantum religio potest suadere malorum.’ I am shocked when I read about human sacrifice, even too about the ritual slaughter of animals. And the Covenanters going into battle with the cry ‘Jesus and no quarter’. But I needn’t add to the list for you know what I would go on saying. 4. It seems to me that Wittgenstein should have said something about superstition in these remarks. Superstition is a very real and horrible thing, and one of the good things of philosophical thinking is that it delivers one from superstition. Prevents one being a bigot. I once told Wittgenstein about an Anglican priest I had known as a boy and who had made a profound impression on me, this man

248

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

was a convinced and dogmatic Anglo-Catholic. Wittgenstein said that although he could admire such a man, he felt a certain narrowness which he disliked. When he talked to a man he wanted to be able to discuss anything openly and not feel there were subjects that couldn’t be discussed. (All this took place in the year I first met Wittgenstein and I am not sure that he would have expressed himself in this way in later years.) Well I won’t ramble on any more but you see the sort of things I look forward to talking about when we meet. Quite soon now thank God.

Ailesbury Lawn 23 April 1974 Dear Bob, I have been looking up the etymology of the word ‘ƠΚανδαλισθεσθε’ as used in Mark 14, 27. It is quite interesting. In classical Greek there was a noun σΚανδαληθΡov (origin unknown) which meant the spring of a trap set to catch animals; this was later abbreviated to σΚαvδαλov. There then came into use a metaphor σΚανδαλov which meant to set a trap with words for an adversary. Also the verb σΚανδαλίζω which as far as I can ascertain is a New Testament word conjectured to mean ‘to cause to stumble’, i.e. as if a trap was set for one. It certainly is a very far-fetched interpretation to mean ‘lose faith in’. I think that must be wrong. I see that Jerome in the Vulgate uses ‘scandalizationini’ which is obviously just putting the Greek word into Latin so possibly there was some doubt in his mind as to its meaning. There were adequate Latin words for ‘offended’ or ‘lose faith’. The following are the references for the use of the words σΚανδαλov and σΚανδα λίζω in the New Testament. Romans IX, 33; XI, 9; XIV, 21. St. Matthew XVIII, 7; XVII, 27; XV, 12. St Luke XVII, 1. I Corinthians I, 23; VIII, 13. Galatians V, 11. II Corinthians XI, 29. Also ’σΚανδαλίζεơθά έv Tivi’ (which would mean to stumble because of someone) Matthew XI, 6; XIII, 57; V, 29.;XVIII, 6; XIII, 21. It seems to have been quite a widely used word in New Testament times, more so I think than in Classical Greek. Now about you finding the account of the Passion in St. Mark so much more impressive than in the other three Gospels. It for so long puzzled me how the scene and the words used in Gethsemane were known; for the apostles were asleep. Now I think this. In the Acts, Mark’s parent’s home was the meeting place for the disciples (St. Peter went there when he escaped

Letters to Rhees

249

from prison). It seems to me likely that his home was the site of the upper room of the Last Supper. Perhaps Judas and the soldiers went there first and Mark, not waiting to dress, hurried to Gethsemane to warn Jesus; he would then be the young man who ‘fled away naked’ and who would have been a witness of the scene in the Garden. So we may have in St. Mark’s Gospel an actual eye-witness account and hence its impressiveness. This is all highly speculative but it seems to me to solve a problem. Talking of translations of the Greek New Testament. Some time ago sitting in the Catholic Church near here I noticed there was a pamphlet giving the text of the day’s Gospel and Epistle in English. I was shocked to find that the words “Command these stones that they become bread” were translated “Tell these stones to become a loaf”! I can’t understand the mentality of modern translators who seem to want to use ‘slang’. It is quite true that the Greek of the New Testament was not classical Greek but the language of everyday people. But the New Testament wasn’t ‘slang’, it was and is great literature and must be translated as such. I think the reason why the English Authorised Version is so impressive is that the translators really believed they were handling ‘the Word of God’. I am not sure that modern translators even feel this awe.

Undated Letter Extract Extract from undated letter from St. Edmondsbury: Once when I was talking to Wittgenstein about the difference between St. John’s Gospel and the Synoptic gospels—he agreed about the differences but then said ‘of course if you can accept “et verbum caro factum est” these differences are nothing. If God became man I would have no idea what the account of that fact should be like’ I wonder whether this thought of his doesn’t put an end at one stroke to all ‘the higher criticism of the bible’. I mean something like this. If you start with the assumption that you know beforehand what God’s revelation ought to be like—then you won’t find it in the bible. ‘Such books are mirrors. When an ape looks into them no apostle is seen looking out’. Now is this a fair criticism of Simone Weil’s attitude to the Old Testament?

Letter to D.Z. Phillips: 23 July 1964 St Edmondsbury 23 July 1964 Dear Mr. Phillips, Thanks you for your letter of the 20th [not in the archive]. I hope the postal strike does not delay this answer too long! The incident you refer to did arise in a conversation I once had with Wittgenstein. But I am not sure that your interpretation of it is correct; out of the context of the whole conversation Wittgenstein’s remark might be seriously misunderstood. His point was this: The central thought in the Christian religion is that man’s salvation does not come from philosophical reasoning and speculation but by an act of God in history. A chosen people who in the fullness of time were to be bearers of the eternal Word. If you can accept this, then you must not regard the bible as just another subject for speculation, picking and choosing according to your present likes and dislikes, it is just from this reliance on your own intelligence that you are to be weaned. Have you read the last part of Augustine’s Confessions? where he tries to interpret the first few chapters of Genesis. He is obviously puzzled in lots of places and implores God to open his eyes. But he never feels superior to what he can’t understand, he never says ‘of course to us 4th century civilized intelligentsia this is just a lot of Jewish folklore, we now know better’. Perhaps I can make the point clearer by quoting from another conversation I had with Wittgenstein. We were once discussing the obvious discrepancies between the 4th Gospel and the Synoptic writers. Wittgenstein felt then just as strongly as anyone, he didn’t like the 4th Gospel. But then he said: ‘If you can accept “et verbum caro factum est”’, then all these difficulties disappear before that difficulty; if God really became man then I can’t possibly say what form the account of that even would take’. At this point I quoted to him a remark of one of the Greek fathers, Lactantius: ‘novels and plays must indeed be probable but why should this (the scheme of man’s salvation) be probable?’ He was pleased with this quotation. The real crux of the matter is this. You can’t make the Christian religion intellectually respectable by cutting out a few objectionable chapters in the Bible. So long as you feel confident in picking and choosing, you have not yet reached the point when the Christian religion makes sense. The Christian religion is for those who have lost confidence in their own power, and despair. Now whether in view of all this you can make any sense of the incident you mentioned, I must leave to your decision. But it seems to me that you would have to expand the reference on, and then perhaps it wouldn’t fit in with your argument.

252

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

May I says this? I feel alarmed at your title ‘A philosophical essay on prayer’ I don’t know of course how your treatment goes, but prayer seems to me the natural response of a soul who in despair finds that ‘philosophy’ can no longer solve the problems of his life. Prayer has got to come ‘de profundis’. There can indeed be a prayerful approach to philosophy (St. Augustine) but not a philosophical approach to prayer. Yours sincerely, M. O’C Drury

PART V

Drury on Medicine, Psychiatry and Psychology Drury’s path to medicine was not a typical one in that his medical training was preceded by first a degree in philosophy followed by a year of theological studies. Furthermore he had to defer pursuing a specialism (as it turned out in psychiatry) for the duration of his wartime service in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Whatever the disadvantages of this career path, he was able to bring to psychiatry an unusual richness of background and this is obvious in the extracts from his writings given below. The Danger of Words, the work that brought him to the attention of many readers was prepared during a period of recuperation from a coronary thrombosis. The book received several reviews. There was one in the Times Literary Supplement on 10 August 1973 under the title ‘Science and Therapy’. The Times reviewer made clear that Drury was not a ‘professional philosopher’ but that the book ‘should lead the undogmatic reader to reflect upon the nature of mental science and treatment’. The historian of Irish medicine, John B. Lyons, focussed in another review ‘Beyond the Dream of Science’ on Drury’s highlighting the areas ‘where the scientific method has no mandate’ and concludes that whereas ‘pragmatism rather than philosophy is the watchword of present-day medicine in Ireland, Wittgenstein’s pupil, Dr. M. O’C. Drury, is an exception’. The Danger of Words was subject to a very detailed and lengthy critique by Ilham Dilman. A typewritten version of what Dilman referred to as ‘reflections’ on Drury’s book, entitled ‘Philosophy and Psychiatry’ was found among Drury’s papers and it is this version that is reproduced here. Dilman published his review in the Human World, vol. 14 (1974). In vol. 15–16 of the same journal, Drury took ‘the opportunity to expound in greater detail the theory I now hold’ under the title ‘Fact and Hypothesis’. Dilman’s reflections and Drury’s comment on them are given below. These writings and the letters to Rhees, given below, are in reaction to a feeling that the whole subject of psychiatry was in a ‘fearful muddle’ – although there were ‘methods of treatment which were in some cases inexplicably effective’. Profoundly dissatisfied with ‘the present classification and treatment of “mental disease”’, he wished to bring ‘some order’ into ‘this mass of phenomena’ so that treatments could be ‘better applied’. He found that psychologists, even of the eminence of Wittgenstein’s favoured William James, were of ‘no help’. He was also growing ‘more and more sceptical of psycho-analytical doctrines’. Again, he found a ‘barrenness’ in experimental psychology and even ‘extravagant nonsense’ in some of it. He was somewhat more accepting of those who were coming to psychiatry from physiology – Pavlov, Hull, Mowrer – but doubted they could give a complete account.

254

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Drury was attracted by the ‘behaviourist’ approach, precisely because it oscillated ‘between physiology and psychology’ although its proponents too were confused. In handling these difficulties, Drury was guided by the fundamental insight that Wittgenstein had espoused in his later work on the philosophy of psychology. The human subject is unique in his capacity to propose reasons for action in language. Other animals lack that capacity and so are subject solely to causes over which they do not exercise reflective control. Hence his answer to the question: ‘How far can the behaviour of living creatures be explained without introducing terms like thinking, feeling, intention etc., etc.’ (Drury to Rhees, Arc., 10 May 1969) was, in effect, ‘not very far’. And he noted the irony that while ‘most psychiatrists write as if no one is ever responsible but all is determined either psychologically or neurologically, they all act as if people were responsible’ (Drury to Rhees, Arc., 30 July 1970). Accordingly, in dealing with the mentally ill, a sensitivity to and a fostering of the ethical capacity of the patient to accept responsibility is central. The Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis reflected a significant part of his practice as a psychiatrist. On 23 October 1974, he wrote to Rhees: I have been asked for some time now to write about my experiences with ‘Hypnosis’ in Psychiatry. I think I have, after 20 years and over 700 patients, something of my own to say on this subject and should do so. This is really more my line of country than trying to write about ‘philosophy’. I believe I should stop my present efforts and get on with this. These lectures seem to teach a technique reminiscent of what is now used by ‘mindfulness’ practitioners. They appear to have been accepted for publication by the same editor, R. F. Holland, who had accepted The Danger of Words – but the manuscript has not been published until now. (Wittgenstein had himself hypnotized while in Cambridge in 1913 with a view to improving his concentration to do Logic.) See Monk, p. 77. The letter to his friend Raymond Townsend (22 September 1956) gives a pithy summary of how to take care of oneself in middle age – points previously discussed face-to-face with Townsend. 1. The Danger of Words 2. Review of DoW by Ilham Dilman. 3. ‘Fact and Hypothesis’ 4. Letters to Rhees: 22 September 1959; 10 May 1969; 24 January 1970 18 June 1970; 30 July 1970. 5. Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis 6. Counsel to Townsend

The Danger of Words PREFACE The title of this book will at least indicate the hesitation I have long felt in putting forward these fragments for publication. They were written to be spoken aloud; hence the colloquial style, in many ways unsuitable for reading in the study. They were written for special occasions and with a specific audience in mind; hence the assumption of technical terms which are not otherwise defined. They were written to inaugurate a discussion; hence the incomplete manner in which every topic is left. For I have long held that discussion face to face is the proper medium for philosophy. Wittgenstein used to say that a philosopher who did not join in discussions was like to a boxer who never went into the ring. Why then do I now bring these papers together? For one reason only. The author of these writings was at one time a pupil of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Now it is well known that Wittgenstein encouraged his pupils (those at least whom he considered had no great originality in philosophical ability) to turn from academic philosophy to the active study and practice of some particular avocation. In my own case he urged me to turn to the study of medicine, not that I should make no use of what he had taught me, but rather that on no account should 1 ‘give up thinking’. I therefore hesitatingly put these essays forward as an illustration of the influence that Wittgenstein had on the thought of one who was confronted by problems which had both an immediate practical difficulty to contend with, as well as a deeper philosophical perplexity to ponder over. I do not of course claim Wittgenstein’s authority for a single idea expressed in these papers. So far as I can remember I never discussed any of the topics touched on with him. They were all written in the last few years, that is to say well over a decade after his death. For what is written here I take full responsibility, and write only what seems to me to be the truth, and which I would be prepared to defend in discussion. But that it was the profound influence that Wittgenstein had on me as a student that has developed into these reflections, of that also I am certain. So perhaps then I can bring some unity into what must otherwise appear very fragmentary, if in this Preface I say something concerning the orientation that Wittgenstein gave to my outlook. For me from the very first, and ever since, and still now, certain sentences from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus stuck in my mind like arrows, and have determined the direction of my thinking. They are these: Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly. Philosophy will signify what cannot be said by presenting clearly what can be said.

256

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

There are, indeed, things which cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. This would not be the place, nor would I have the ability, to discuss the differences and developments which can be found between the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations. But this I must place on record. When Wittgenstein was living in Dublin and I was seeing him constantly he was at that time hard at work on the manuscript of the Investigations. One day we discussed the development of his thought and he said to me (I can vouch for the accuracy of the words): ‘My fundamental ideas came to me very early in life.’ Now among these fundamental ideas I would place the sentences I quoted above. I think perhaps the remark that Wittgenstein made, that after his conversations with Sraffa he felt like a tree with all its branches lopped off, has been misinterpreted. Wittgenstein chose his metaphors with great care, and here he says nothing about the roots or the main trunk of the tree, these – his fundamental ideas – remain I believe unchanged. So now I want to say something about the word ‘clarity’ as it was understood by Wittgenstein. I owe it to Mr Rush Rhees that he drew my attention to, and translated for me, a remark that Wittgenstein wrote in his notebook in 1930: Our civilisation is characterised by the word progress. Progress is its form: it is not one of its properties that it progresses. It is typical of it that it is building, constructing. Its activity is one of constructing more and more complex structures. And even clarity serves only this end, and is not sought on its own account. For me on the other hand clarity, lucidity, is the goal sought. In this distinction between the two uses of clarity I see a difference of the very greatest importance. Let me make the point clear by a reminiscence. At one time for a short period Wittgenstein got me to read aloud to him the opening chapters of Frazer’s Golden Bough. Frazer thinks he can make clear the origin of the rites and ceremonies he describes by regarding them as primitive and erroneous scientific beliefs. The words he uses are, ‘We shall do well to look with leniency upon the errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth.’ Now Wittgenstein made it clear to me that on the contrary the people who practised these rites already possessed a considerable scientific achievement: agriculture, metalworking, building, etc., etc.; and the ceremonies existed alongside these sober techniques. They were not mistaken beliefs that produced the rites but the need to express something; the ceremonies were a form of language, a form of life. Thus today if we are introduced to someone we shake hands; if we enter a church we take off our hats and speak in a low voice; at Christmas perhaps we decorate a tree. These are expressions of friendliness, reverence, and of celebration. We do not believe that shaking hands has any mysterious efficacy, or that to keep one’s hat on in church is dangerous! Now this I regard as a good illustration of how I understand clarity as something to be desired as a goal, as distinct from clarity as something to serve a further elaboration. For seeing these rites as a form of language immediately puts an end to all the elaborate theorising concerning ‘primitive mentality’. The clarity

The Danger of Words

257

prevents a condescending misunderstanding, and puts a full-stop to a lot of idle speculation. I would dwell a little longer on the distinction between these two kinds of clarity, for it is a distinction that I hope will make my subsequent papers a little clearer in their intention. At one time I told Wittgenstein of an incident that seemed to interest and please him. It was when I was having my oral examination in physiology. The examiner said to me: ‘Sir Arthur Keith once remarked to me that the reason why the spleen drained into the portal system was of the greatest importance; but he never told me what that importance was, now can you tell me?’ I had to confess that I couldn’t see any anatomical or physiological significance in this fact. The examiner then went on to say: ‘Do you think there must be a significance, an explanation? As I see it there are two sorts of people: one man sees a bird sitting on a telegraph wire and says to himself “Why is that bird sitting just there?”, the other man replies “Damn it all, the bird has to sit somewhere”.’ The reason why this story pleased Wittgenstein was that it made clear the distinction between scientific clarity, and philosophical clarity. Let me explain this by an example of my own. Astronomers are rightly interested in finding an explanation for the remarkable ‘red shift’ in the spectral lines of the very distant nebulae. The generally accepted explanation is that it is a manifestation of the Doppler effect (which is familiar enough to us in the way the pitch of a rapidly moving whistle of a train changes as the train either approaches or recedes from us). So it is thought that these nebulae are receding from us at prodigious speeds. Now this is a possible scientific explanation, and in one sense it makes the phenomena clear. But then we at once want to ask, ‘Why are all these nebulae receding at such speeds?’ And this shows us that ultimately we will have to accept some facts as unexplained, and say, ‘Well that is just how it is’. So then there would be nothing illogical in saying of the shift in the spectral lines, ‘That is just how the spectra of distant nebulae are’, and we are not forced to give any explanation. Philosophical clarity then arises when we see that behind every scientific construction there lies the inexplicable. The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanation of natural phenomena. Scientific explanations lead us on indefinitely from one inexplicable to another, so that the building grows and grows and grows, and we never find a real resting place. Philosophical clarity puts a full-stop to our enquiry and restlessness by showing that our quest is in one sense mistaken. I would just give a few instances of reminiscences of conversations with Wittgenstein where a remark of his introduced sudden philosophical clarity by means of a full-stop. I told him I was reading a book about the ‘Desert Fathers’, those heroic ascetics of the Egyptian Thebaid. And, in the shallowness of those days, said something to the effect that I thought they might have made better use of their lives. Wittgenstein turned on me angrily and said, ‘That’s just the sort of stupid remark an English

258

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

parson would make; how can you know what their problems were in those days and what they had to do about them?’ He told me that he had just finished reading a book in which the author blamed Calvin for the rise of our present bourgeois capitalist culture. He said that he realised how attractive such a thesis could seem, but he for his part ‘wouldn’t dare to criticise a man such as Calvin was’. Someone was inclined to defend Russell’s writings on marriage, sex, and ‘free love’: Wittgenstein interposed by saying: ‘If a person tells me he has been to the worst of places I have no right to judge him, but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know that he is a fraud.’ He went on to say how absurd it was to deprive Russell of his Professorship on ‘moral grounds’. ‘If ever there was such a thing as an an-aphrodisiac it is Russell writing about sex!’ We had a discussion about the difficulty of reconciling the discourses and history in the fourth Gospel with the other three. Then he suddenly said: ‘But if you can accept the miracle that God became man all these difficulties are as nothing, for then I couldn’t possibly say what form the record of such an event would take.’ I have been trying to draw from my memories incidents which illustrate the conception of saying something clearly; bringing what looked like being a long and controversial discussion to a full-stop. It would be a contradiction to go on and say anything about ‘There are indeed things which cannot be put into words’. But I would draw attention to this. In a letter written when he wanted to get the Tractatus published he said that ‘it was really a book about ethics’, and that the most important part is what is not said in it. I find myself thinking about this remark when reading all that he subsequently wrote. When he was hard at work at the manuscript of the Philosophical Investigations he said to me: ‘I am not a religious man, but I can’t help seeing every thing from a religious point of view.’ And on another occasion: ‘It is impossible for me to say one word in my book about all that music has meant in my life; how then can I possibly make myself understood?’ And with regard to music this, which I have mentioned on another occasion: ‘Bach put at the head of his Orgelbuchlein, “To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby”. I would have liked to be able to say this of my work.’ I fear that these papers may be too metaphysical to be of interest to my colleagues occupied with the day-to-day problems of mental illness; and their topic too circumscribed and limited to interest philosophers. They are certainly not intended as in any sense a commentary on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, but with the increasing importance that is now being given to his writings, they may possess a peripheral interest, as an illustration of his influence on one particular pupil. But then it must be added that all his life Wittgenstein was very dubious as to whether his influence on others (and on contemporary philosophy) was not more harmful than beneficial.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The translations of Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms which appear in this book are taken from Dr J. P. Stern’s Lichtenberg, a Doctrine of Scattered Occasions. I wish to thank Dr Stern and his publishers, Thames and Hudson, and Indiana University Press, for permission to use these translations. In the chapter on ‘Hypotheses and Philosophy’ the material for criticising the mutation-selection theory of evolution is deeply indebted to Professor C. P. Martin’s important book entitled Psychology, Evolution and Sex. I am grateful to Professor Martin and to his publisher Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois, for allowing me to use this material and to quote from the book itself. I would like to thank Professor J. C. Eccles and his publishers, the Clarendon Press, for permission to quote from his book The Neuro-Physiological Basis of Mind, and Gallimard for permission to quote Simone Weil’s ‘Lettre à une élève’ from La Condition Ouvvrière. In conclusion I would like to express my gratitude to Professor R. F. Holland for all his valuable help in preparing my manuscript for publication.

Nous savons au moyen de l’intelligence que ce que l’intelligence n’apprehende pas est plus réel que ce qu’elle apprehende. We know by means of our intelligence that what the intelligence does not comprehend is more real than what it does comprehend [Gravity and Grace, Emma Cauford, trans. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952) p. 116.] simone weil

CHAPTER 1

Words and Transgressions I WOULD counsel all young people to put all new words in careful order and arrange them like minerals, in their various class, so that they can be found when asked for or when required for one’s own use. This is called word economy, and is as lucrative to the mind as money economy is to the purse. lichtenberg

In the Proverbs 10:19 it is written: ‘With a multitude of words transgressions are increased.’ And I will make this text an excuse for the substance of this paper. For I want to speak to you about the way words can lead us into confusion, misunderstandings, error. Confusion when we are talking to patients, misunderstandings when we discuss mutual problems with our colleagues, error when in solitude we try to clarify our own thinking. For the purpose of classification I have divided these fallacies under five separate headings. The first I call the fallacy of the alchemists; the second the fallacy of Molière’s physician; the third the fallacy of Van Helmont’s tree; and the fourth the fallacy of the missing hippopotamus; finally, for the fifth, I have chosen the unoriginal title of the fallacy of Pickwickian senses. First then the fallacy of the alchemists. I have chosen this name because of what Lavoisier says in the Introduction to his Treatise on Chemistry. Lavoisier, you will remember, was the first chemist to introduce our modern system of nomenclature into chemistry; a system whereby different substances are named in terms of the elements which go to form them. Sodium chloride, potassium permanganate, calcium carbonate, etc., etc. Prior to this book many of these substances, though well known, had bizarre names which in no way indicated their relationship to each other. These names often going back to the days of the alchemists; sometimes indicative of their original discoverer, sometimes from their place of origin, sometimes to some irrelevant outward appearance. Thus we had ‘Glauber’s salts’, ‘Fuming liquor of Libavius’, ‘Butter of arsenic’, ‘Vitriol of Venus’, and so on. In his Introduction Lavoisier says that he is now introducing a method of naming as distinct from a nomenclature, and he adds the following wise remark about the importance of what he is now doing: If languages really are instruments fashioned by men to make thinking easier, they should be of the best possible kind, and to strive to perfect them is indeed to work for the advancement of science. For those who are beginning the study of a science the perfecting of its language is of high importance.

262

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

And later on in the same Preface he writes: It is therefore not surprising that in the early childhood of chemistry, suppositions instead of conclusions were drawn; that these suppositions transmitted from age to age were changed into presumptions, and that these presumptions were then regarded as fundamental truths by even the ablest minds. Now I think if we are to be honest with ourselves we must admit that the vocabulary of psychiatry today is only too comparable with what Lavoisier has to say about the nomenclature of chemistry in its childhood. We have indeed a nomenclature, but we have no system of naming. Some diseases are named after those famous physicians who first described them; thus we have Korsakov’s psychosis, Alzheimer’s disease, Ganser’s syndrome; some are named in terms of a long discarded pathology, hysteria for example and schizophrenia. Some are named in terms of the most prominent symptom; the word ‘depression’ is used both for a complaint of the patient and the diagnosis of the attending physician; similarly with the words ‘anxiety state’. I would have to agree that having no better terminology at hand we must for the present do the best with what we have. But let us be on our guard against those dangers that Lavoisier warned us against. Let us beware lest from this unsystematic nomenclature suppositions are drawn, which then become presumptions and only too easily pass over into established truths. I would say that the chief danger of an unsystematic nomenclature is the danger of regarding its classifications as mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive. For example it is only too easy to get involved in a controversy as to whether this patient is a schizophrenic or a case of endogenous depression, when for all we know he might be both at the same time; or neither, but some other disease for which we have at present no convenient name. There is a story told of a candidate up for the membership examination who in answer to one of the more difficult questions on the paper could only reply indignantly, ‘This is not mentioned in Tidy’s Synopsis of Medicine.’ It is important for us to bear in mind that there are still many diseases both of mind and body which are not only not mentioned in Tidy’s Synopsis, but are not in any text-book or encyclopaedia of medicine. The science of medicine, and particularly psychiatry, is not yet complete. Janet wrote an interesting essay on the history of the word ‘neurosis’. He showed that in spite of various attempts to define the limits of this term, in practice the word has been used to cover all those clinical conditions which at the time of writing could not be accounted for by any known pathology. Thus the famous Pinel, in whose days the ophthalmoscope had not been invented, classified all cases of blindness in which there was no manifest disease of the external eye, cornea, or lens, as hysterical amaurosis. Trousseau, that prince of clinicians, after giving a masterly description of the symptoms and signs of tabes dorsalis, classifies it as a form of neurosis. For in his day there was no known method of staining nervous tissue and demonstrating the degeneration of the posterior columns of the spinal cord. Other equally able writers have in their time classified Parkinson’s disease, Grave’s disease, hydrophobia, tetanus, eclampsia, as psychogenic in origin.

The Danger of Words

263

Now these things were written for our learning. We are certainly making similar mistakes today. Considering the immense complexity of the anatomy, physiology, and bio-chemistry of the human body, it is certain that there are probably more diseases still to be described than have so far been given a precise description and a name. For example the estimation of the blood sugar is a comparatively recent achievement. In the past, spontaneous hypo-glycaemia certainly occurred, and the mental and behavioural disorder so produced was described as neurotic, psychotic or epileptic, according to the degree and rapidity of the hypo-glycaemia involved. Wisdom demands that we remember constantly our ignorance. This then brings me on to the second danger of words, that which I have called the fallacy of Molière’s physician. In one of his plays Molière has a physician asked this question: ‘How is it that opium is able to put people to sleep?’ The physician replies with great profundity that it is because opium has ‘dormitive properties’, and this answer is found entirely satisfactory by his interlocutors. I think we all have a tendency to deceive ourselves in this way. To use obscure and learned phrases, thinking thereby that we have obtained a deeper insight. I remember as a medical student reading the chapter on fractures in a manual of surgery; it began by stating that by a fracture is meant ‘the dissolution of continuity in a bone’. This struck me as quite as funny as Molière’s joke. It is a wise rule from time to time to force oneself to write down in simple language the precise meaning of any involved circumlocution we have become in the habit of using. If we did this we would find, I think, that such words as ‘hysteria’, ‘psychopathic personality’, ‘character neurosis’, are symbols of our ignorance rather than of any understanding. Let me for a moment give you an example of a more serious error of this type. It was for a time fashionable, and still is, I am told, to produce a dramatic emotional reaction in a patient by getting him or her to inhale a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen; and other chemical means either by inhalation or injection were also used. Such a reaction was given the profound sounding name of ‘abreaction’, and this technical term led people to believe that they understood what was happening; that the patient undergoing this treatment was releasing forces and tendencies which in his previous state were repressed and causing his symptoms, and therefore that such abreaction was certain to be both informative to the psychiatrist and beneficial to the patient. One of my colleagues told me that he saw this treatment being administered to a rather timid little man who was a victim of alcoholism. When the mask through which the carbon-dioxide mixture was administered was firmly held over his face, this little fellow fought back with surprising fury. Ah! said the psychiatrist, now you see that the cause of his addiction is this deeply repressed aggressiveness. On hearing this story I was reminded of Voltaire’s remark: ‘This animal is very dangerous, when it is attacked it defends itself.’ You might reply to me that unless we experiment in this way research in psychiatry and in medicine generally will come to a standstill. And so I must now speak about that most dangerous word in our present medical vocabulary, ‘research’. I am informed that something in the region of a million new scientific papers are published in the journals every year, and that these if they were all to be bound in

264

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

one volume would be equivalent to three complete editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Gentlemen, I do not believe we are living in an age of such colossal originality. Let this be clearly said: research in the proper meaning of the much abused word does not mean collecting facts; there is much too much fact collecting going on. Research means new ideas; new concepts, new ways of looking at old and familiar facts. The important part of research is the thinking done before the experimental verification gets under way. The ability to think in this particular way is, I believe, a comparatively rare talent. A gift for research is not the automatic accompaniment of a grant for research. There is, I suppose, no more honoured name in the history of physiology than that of Claude Bernard. At one time when a prolonged illness prevented him continuing his experiments in the laboratory, Bernard composed a short treatise setting out the principles which had guided him in making his discoveries. This volume, though now over a hundred years old, contains much that needs repeating today. If I may just quote a few short passages from it you will perceive how apposite it is. Bernard writes: Two operations must therefore be considered in any experiment. The first consists in premeditating and bringing to pass the conditions of the experiment; the second consists in noting the results of the experiment. It is impossible to devise an experiment without a pre-conceived idea; devising an experiment, we said, is putting a question; we never conceive a question without an idea which invites an answer. I consider it therefore an absolute principle that experiments must always be devised in view of a preconceived idea, no matter if the idea be not very clear or well defined. As for noting the results of the experiment, which is itself only an induced observation, I posit it similarly as a principle that we must here, as always observe without a preconceived idea. Once in conversation with a friend Bernard put the same important principle in a more aphoristic form. ‘When you go into the laboratory do not forget to leave your imagination in the ante-room with your overcoat; on the other hand never forget to take it away with you when you go home.’ There are two further points I would just touch on concerning which Bernard’s teaching is much needed as a corrective to what often passes under the name of research today. He writes: Misconceived erudition has been, and still is, one of the greatest obstacles to the advancement of experimental science. Now if you pick up any modern scientific journal it seems almost a standard practice for the author to start with a review of the previous literature. Thus often such articles have a hundred or more references at the end, and it is even worse when it comes to the bibliography at the end of some books. I am inclined when I see such a display of erudition to pass on to something more profitable. For I fear that such an author will have his mind so constipated with facts as to be incapable of producing

The Danger of Words

265

anything but wind. If an author really has a contribution of value to make, then let him get on with it at once, there is no need for him to give a display of his homework. The second point that Bernard emphasises is in my opinion even more important for what goes by the name of research in the behavioural sciences today. He writes: In every science we must recognise two classes of phenomena, those whose cause is already defined; next those whose cause is still undefined. With phenomena whose cause is defined statistics have nothing to do; they would even be absurd. As soon as the circumstances of an experiment are well known we stop gathering statistics . . . Only when a phenomenon includes conditions as yet undefined, can we compile statistics; we must learn therefore that we compile statistics only when we cannot possibly help it; for in my opinion statistics can never yield scientific truth, and therefore cannot establish any final scientific method. Statistics can bring to birth only conjectural sciences; they can never produce active experimental sciences, i.e. sciences which regulate phenomena according to definite laws. By statistics we get a conjecture of greater or less probability about a given case, but never any certainty, never any absolute determinism. Of course statistics may guide a physician’s prognosis; to that extent they may be useful. I do not therefore reject the use of statistics in medicine, but I condemn not trying to get beyond them and believing in statistics as the foundation of medical science. I do not think that those wise words need any further comment from me. But perhaps you would bear them in mind next time you find yet one more mass of statistical information in the British Journal of Psychiatry. This gives me the cue to introduce the next fallacy I mentioned, the one I called the fallacy of Van Helmont’s tree. Van Helmont, as you know, was one of the great founders of chemistry. He was the first chemist to realise the importance of the chemical balance; of carefully weighing everything both before and after a chemical reaction. Indeed, it was largely due to his work that the principle of the conservation of matter became an established axiom. Now Van Helmont performed a certain experiment with great care and accuracy, whose result seemed irrefutable and yet at the same time absurd. It was this. He weighed accurately a certain quantity of earth and placing it in a large pot, planted a small ash sapling. Every day he watered the plant with pure distilled water, and in between these waterings he kept the surface of the soil covered so that no foreign extraneous matter should fall on it. In due time the sapling grew to such a size that its weight had increased more than a hundredfold, in fact it had become too big for the pot to hold it. Van Helmont weighed it carefully, and then weighed the original soil he had filled the pot with, finding that this latter had lost nothing. He argued therefore that as the only additions made were those of pure water all the materials in the tree, bark, pith, leaves, etc., were in some way composed of nothing but water. This certainly seemed paradoxical both to him and his contemporaries, but the evidence of the experiment seemed irrefutable. Where did they go wrong? Well

266

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

of course they did not know that a plant is able to extract carbon from the carbon dioxide of the air by the process of photosynthesis; the very existence of such a substance as carbon dioxide or such a process as photosynthesis was then undreamed of. Similarly how could they have guessed that there were minute organisms in the soil that could extract nitrogen from the air and transmit it to the plant? Now the motto of this is that in the early stages of any science when there are still a host of unknown factors at work it can be most misleading to draw conclusions from experiments however accurately performed. The methods employed may be too precise for the data on which they have to work. I am told that today if you wish to get any report on the use of a new method of treatment it is essential that the investigation be carried out on the basis of what is known as a ‘double blind trial’. When I hear this I murmur to myself, ‘Remember Van Helmont’s tree.’ For it seems clear to me that psychiatry is still dealing with too many unknowns for the method of the double blind trial to be either safe or applicable. I speak here only of the logic involved, and say nothing of the ethical aspect of doctors deliberately allowing themselves to be in ignorance of the treatment their patients are receiving. The logical essential for the double blind trial to be in any way convincing is that the experimental group and the control group should be evenly matched. This today means matched as to age, sex, duration of illness, nature of symptoms, previous treatments given. But it may well be that these are not the necessary factors alone. May it not be that there are a host of genetic, bio-chemical, histological factors that also need to be taken into account and of which we are at present totally unaware? Perhaps I can make this point clearer by an imaginary example. In the seventeenth century ‘being sick of a fever’ was a respectable diagnosis for a physician to make. It was not known nor even guessed that the important factor was the micro-organism causing the fever. Quinine had recently been introduced into Europe, and malaria being more common in these parts than it is now, quinine soon proved its usefulness. Now suppose some physicians had in those days said: we must now have a double blind trial to make sure that quinine is not just a placebo. Those whose trial contained many cases of malaria would have statistical proof of its efficiency. Whilst in another group there might be more cases of Relapsing fever on which quinine would show no therapeutic benefit. Thus we would get two properly carried out double blind trials and contradictory results. This seems to me to be happening in the trial of new psycho-tropic drugs today. Statistically adequate trials, but contradictory results. Our psychopathology is not yet adequate to make such elaborate experiments justified. For as Osler said long ago: ‘As is our pathology, so is our therapeutics.’ The example I have given is of course only an imaginary one. So let me further emphasise the possibility of such fallacious argument from apparently irrefutable data by a real example from the history of psychiatry. That disease which we now call G.P.I. was first described and clearly differentiated as a clinical entity by French clinicians in the decade 1820 to 1830. Nearly all the cases first described were old soldiers from Napoleon’s Grand Army. We know only too well why that should have been the case. But to those clinicians it seemed statistically self-evident that the cause of G.P I. was the undermining of the nervous constitution of those who had endured the privations and the horrors of the retreat from Moscow. They knew nothing of a

The Danger of Words

267

minute spirochaete; but the battle of Borodino and the crossing of the Beresina were still vivid memories. So I would sum up the fallacy which I have entitled ‘the fallacy of Van Helmont’s tree’ in these terms. Carefully planned and well executed investigations in the early stages of a science may be completely misleading, just because of our ignorance of the possible factors involved. But what then are we to do? We are daily inundated with information concerning new drugs by those who with the best intentions are yet financially interested in their sale. Surely we must adopt some scientific procedure to sift out the good from the mediocre or even the useless. Yes, indeed, it is necessary that this should be done. But I do not believe the double blind trial is in the present state of our knowledge either scientific or helpful. During the twenty years or so that I have been working in psychiatry I have seen and used many forms of treatment; some I still use, others I have almost forgotten about until looking through some old notes I am reminded that for a short period they seemed to be worth trying. (For instance, a few days ago I had occasion to look up the notes of a patient whom I had not seen for many years, and I saw that when I last treated her I used a drug called ‘Cavodil’; I had to think twice before I remembered that it was one of the M.A.O. group that enjoyed considerable popularity for a year or so.) My experience has been that there is a process of natural selection at work in all forms of treatment, and that there is the survival of the fittest. And that this process of selection takes place without any one person or any particular investigation deciding the matter once and for all. Let me give you an example. When I came into psychiatry ‘insulin coma therapy’ was the best and only treatment we had for schizophrenia. Having worked for three years in an insulin coma clinic I am certain that it was worth doing, that it was better than doing nothing. With the introduction of chlorpromazine the number of cases coming for insulin coma gradually decreased until it became certain that we could dispense with insulin coma altogether. Now this was not one person’s decision, nor was it one deliberately made on a particular occasion; it just happened. If we as clinicians continue to do our work with attention, with courage when it is needed, and with the necessary amount of scepticism, then this natural selection will continue to work for us. I am impressed when I read the works of some of the great clinicians of the last century, by their style of description. They do not hesitate to use such expressions as ‘my experience has been’, ‘I have often noticed’, ‘the following case impressed me’, etc. This would now be rejected by some as ‘merely anecdotal evidence’. At the risk of appearing very old-fashioned I am going to claim that this keen attention to anecdotes is of the first importance. I do not of course mean that we should publish these anecdotes; that would merely add to the confusion. But we should have our eyes and ears open, and our pens ready to note down in our casebooks, every incident or remark that seems in any way novel or strikes our attention. I know for myself the danger for my case history taking to become stereotyped. I wish we all had more time to listen. Again if I can refer back to Claude Bernard’s account of his own discoveries, he describes in detail many particular and unsoughtfor observations, which after reflection and speculation led him to a new hypothesis to be tested by a planned and crucial experiment. One of his pupils describes how

268

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

during an experiment Claude Bernard seemed to have eyes all round his head, he would point out quite evident phenomena which no one else had noticed. Of course such a great hypothesis as ‘the preservation of the constancy of the internal milieu’ was the result of imagination and not of any one particular observation. But it was the ability by means of which this imagination was stirred into speculation by some one particular observation, that constituted him the great scientist that he was. Such minds are rare; it is probable that there are few in any one generation, but then the real contributions to the permanent advancement of science are equally rare. I sometimes wish it was a law that every scientific paper had to be allowed to mature for ten years in bond, like good whisky, before being allowed in print. These reflections bring me directly to a consideration of the fourth type of verbal fallacy, the one I have called ‘the fallacy of the missing hippopotamus’. I chose this rather bizarre name from a discussion which once took place between the two philosophers, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein illustrated the point he wished to make by the following example. Suppose I state ‘There is an hippopotamus in this room at this minute, but no one can see it, no one can hear it, no one can smell it, no one can touch it; have I now with all these added provisos said anything meaningful at all?’ Surely not, for a proposition that can neither be verified nor refuted has no useful place in scientific language. But I think you would be surprised to find how easy it is to make just this sort of logical error. Modern science is full of missing hippopotami. We are inclined to fall in love with an hypothesis, and so when facts begin to tell against it, we invent a subsidiary hypothesis to save the face of the first, and this process continues until without realising it our first hypothesis has become so secure as to be irrefutable. But alas, in doing just this we have at the same time deprived it of all significance. Two examples from our own sphere of science will make my point clearer. Freud had the original and suggestive idea that dreams were really wish fulfilments, and not only that but always sexual with fulfilments. Some dreams obviously are. But others on the face of it were not. So in order to save his beloved hypothesis he had to invent a great many subsidiary hypotheses, those that he described under the name of the dream mechanisms: condensation, displacement of affect, symbolism, etc., etc. He does not seem to me to have observed that in so introducing all these extra hypotheses he has emasculated his original idea of all significance. Let me make this clearer by an incident which Janet relates. Janet was talking to an enthusiastic pupil of Freud: ‘Last night,’ said Janet, ‘I dreamt that I was standing on a railway station: surely that has no sexual significance.’ ‘Oh! indeed it has,’ said the Freudian; ‘a railway station is a place where trains go to and fro, to and fro, and all to and fro movements are highly suggestive. And what about a railway signal; it can be either up or down, need I say more?’ Now as Janet rightly went on to point out, if you allow yourself such a freedom in symbolism, every possible content of any dream whatsoever can be forced into this type of interpretation. The theory has become ‘fact proof’; it just can’t be refuted. But that which cannot be proved wrong by any conceivable experience is without meaning. The object of a statement, of an hypothesis, is to state which of two possible alternatives is in fact the case. If no alternative is allowed, the statement decides nothing about a possible state of affairs.

The Danger of Words

269

One further example of the same verbal fallacy, one more missing hippopotamus. Wolpe put forward the interesting hypothesis that all neurotic behaviour was learnt behaviour, and that therefore such maladaptive behaviour could be ‘cured’ by the application of what certain psychologists have called ‘learning theory’. Now for Wolpe and those who have taken up behaviour therapy with enthusiasm, learning is always a matter of establishing a stimulus-response connection. Therefore the first task of the behaviour therapist must be to ascertain the stimuli which have become unnecessarily linked with anxiety. But then, as Wolpe has to admit, this is not always easy. It is easy enough with a straightforward mono-symptomatic phobia such for example as a phobia for cats. Such mono-symptomatic phobias are not common, and when they do occur, such an aetiology and therapy as Wolpe suggests is probably correct. But what about that much more common syndrome which Freud described under the very suitable name of ‘free floating anxiety’? Here the specific stimulus linked with the anxiety reaction is hard to discern. But Wolpe has become too attached to his all-embracing explanation of anxiety states. Free floating anxiety, he claims, is anxiety linked with such ever present stimuli as Space, Time, and the idea of Self! Now if the word ‘stimulus’ is to be applied to such concepts as these then the whole stimulus-response theory of learning becomes irrefutable and at the same time meaningless. The theory, as is well known, depends on the experimental work with animals carried out originally by Pavlov, Thorndike, Hull, Skinner, and their followers. One only has to ask oneself to imagine these experimenters using Space, Time, or the idea of Self, as a stimulus in any of their experiments to see the enormous extrapolation that Wolpe has here made. It is not possible to refute him because he has said nothing. I cannot refrain from quoting Janet once again. Janet built up a most interesting psychology based on the twin concepts of ‘psychic energy’ and ‘psychic tension’. In the Introduction to one of his books he makes the profound remark that one great advantage of his theory is that time may prove him to be completely wrong. As a matter of fact I think Janet’s hypothesis has not been substantiated, and if he was still alive he would perhaps have replied, ‘Well, what did I tell you’. I think we must all be on the watch that in psychology and psychiatry we take care to formulate hypotheses which are capable of being refuted. No more missing hippopotami please. I come then, finally, to that fallacy which has now the name of the fallacy of ‘Pickwickian senses’. The name was taken from a famous scene which took place one evening at the Pickwick Club. Mr Blotton had the temerity to call Mr Pickwick a humbug. This was the occasion for some heated words between various members, and order was only restored to the meeting when the chairman suggested to Mr Blotton that he had only used the term ‘humbug’ in a purely Pickwickian sense, and not with its usual connotation. Mr Blotton agreed that he had the highest regard for the honourable member Mr Pickwick and only described him as a humbug in a purely Pickwickian sense. After this explanation Mr Pickwick said he was completely satisfied with his friend’s explanation and that he had used certain terms of abuse during the incident in a purely Pickwickian sense also. Peace was restored once more to the meeting. Now I think that in psychiatry today we are inclined to use certain words in ‘a purely Pickwickian sense’ – words which to our patients sound as a reflection on their personality although we mean no such moral criticism. I have for many

270

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

years tried to get the word ‘alcoholic’ dropped. For if we ask a patient to accept this description of himself he thinks of the familiar drunkard of literature and stage. One who is never quite sober, smelling of drink, a large red nose and blood-shot eyes, etc., etc. Now of course we don’t mean this description at all when we diagnose the disease alcoholism. We know that a patient may be addicted to alcohol without ever having been intoxicated, who has had long periods of contented sobriety, who does not experience a constant craving for alcohol, who on examination may show no outward and visible signs of his illness. We mean by an alcoholic one whose pattern of drinking has developed certain sinister signs with which you are all familiar and which I therefore need not elaborate here. But to the patient we are using a term which reflects on his personal integrity. He or she does not realise that psychiatrists today use the term ‘alcoholic’ in a purely Pickwickian sense. We mean a person who either for metabolic or temperamental reasons (it is not yet known exactly which; or possibly both of these explanations apply) should be advised by his doctor to abstain from alcohol entirely. Surely it would be possible for us to find a name for this medical condition which would obviate so many unnecessary arguments. My own experience has been, when I tell a patient that alcoholism is not a scientific term, that therefore I am not calling him an alcoholic but I am advising him that he has shown signs which clearly prognosticate the need for total abstinence in the future, that such an explanation is more readily agreed to, or at least open to an intelligent discussion. A similar state of affairs exists, I believe, with regard to the use of the word ‘hysteria’. If we tell a patient that her symptoms are hysterical in origin, or even if we use this term in writing to her general practitioner, we will be taken to mean that the patient’s condition need not be taken seriously, and that a dose of cold water either literally or metaphorically is all that is required. It is a word that should be dropped from a scientific vocabulary. I know that the word is often used by competent psychiatrists in a purely Pickwickian sense and without meaning to minimise the need for help and therapy. But I am also well aware in my own case of a strong temptation to label as hysterical all those symptoms for which I can find no good cause and where my therapeutic attempts have not met with success. It has been suggested, I know, that the word ‘functional’ should be used instead of ‘hysterical’. This avoids the fallacy of ‘Pickwickian senses’ in that it will not offend the patient; but it is an example of the fallacy of Molière’s physician in that it pretends to explain by a learned circumlocution a condition which to date neither doctors nor patients understand. I am not convinced that in psychiatry an air of omniscience and omnipotence is appreciated by the patient; more often all that is required is a concerned listening and an obvious attempt to do something helpful. I am not sure, but I feel that the word ‘depression’ is beginning to be used in a Pickwickian sense, a sense in which the psychiatrist means one thing and the patient understands another. The development of effective treatment for the oldfashioned melancholia or manic-depressive psychosis has contributed to this state of affairs. For we now find that these treatments are effective in some conditions where ‘depression’ or ‘melancholy’ are not complained of by the patient. Hence if we tell him that he is ‘depressed’ he may well come to the conclusion that we are confused about his condition. There is a danger too that if we begin to talk about

The Danger of Words

271

‘atypical depression’, or ‘masked depression’, we may be committing that fallacy which I called the fallacy of the alchemists. There is a danger that this nomenclature may lead us into accepting as an established truth what at best is only a conjecture. In our present state of knowledge two conjectures are possible. One is that the illnesses which respond to the same treatment are all manifestations of one and the same underlying pathology. The other is that the new forms of chemotherapy are potent against a variety of different diseases. Penicillin can cure both a carbuncle and lobar pneumonia. It may be that the mental conditions which respond to the tri-cyclic thymoleptics are equally disparate. It is important that for future understanding we keep the choice between these two alternatives open. One word more about the confusion that the word ‘depression’ can cause. Patients cannot be expected to understand that by the word ‘depression’ the psychiatrist understands a very different condition from that denoted by the word ‘unhappiness’. It will inevitably happen from time to time that we will be asked and expected to remedy the normal discontents and disappointments that are part of our common human life. Freud showed real profundity when he stated that the aim of psychoanalysis was to replace neurotic unhappiness by normal unhappiness. A psychiatry based on a purely hedonistic ethics, a psychiatry that does not recognise that periods of anxiety and periods of melancholy are a necessary part of every human life, such a psychiatry will never be more than a superficial affair. Our task must be not only to relieve but also to interpret. Another source of considerable confusion between doctors and patients today is in the use of the word drugs. In strict etymology the word ‘drug’ means any measured quantity of medicine. So that a patient who is taking iron for anaemia, Vitamin B for neuritis, or insulin for diabetes, is receiving drug treatment. But of course in the popular mind the word ‘drugs’ has many frightening associations: drug addiction, being under the influence of drugs, the drug traffic, etc. In the popular mind a drug is something that is taken for its immediate soporific or stimulating effect. Now it is one of the happier features of this present age that chemical substances have been discovered which have a profound psycho-tropic effect. Both ‘endogenous depression’ and ‘schizophrenia’ can be treated by the prolonged administration of certain ‘drugs’. But we must explain to our patients that these substances are not given for purely immediate sedative or stimulating effects; they are given over a prolonged time and only show their benefits after several weeks. My own belief is that these substances are more in the nature of replacement therapies, like the iron, the vitamin, the insulin I mentioned above. Hence when we tell a patient that we propose to treat him with drug therapy we must beware of the fallacy of ‘Pickwickian senses’, and explain to him the difference between a necessary chemical and a temporary anodyne. There is much talk nowadays about the spread of drug addiction, and I have known some patients who have given up their necessary medication because of what they have read in the popular press. Of course it is best of all when a patient no longer needs a doctor or his prescriptions, but this is not always possible to achieve. It is written in the Book of Proverbs that ‘with a multitude of words transgressions are increased.’ What an excellent motto that would be for our new Royal College of Psychiatry.

CHAPTER 2

Science and Psychology People do not readily give up false opinions about man once they feel justified in claiming that they derive them from a subtle knowledge of humanity, and that only certain initiates are capable of such insights into the hearts of their fellow men. Consequently there are few branches of human knowledge where a little learning is more harmful than in this. lichtenberg

Ladies and gentlemen, I think I can best introduce the subject of my paper tonight by a series of quotations. Quotations taken from the writings of psychologists, who either in their own day, or at the present time, were and are recognised as authorities in the faculty of psychology. My first quotation is from the justly famous American psychologist William James; the author of the Principles of Psychology, a book which is still well worth reading. But my quotation is this: Psychology is not yet a science but only the hope of a science. That was written in 1890. Thirty years later the eminent French psychologist, Pierre Janet, concluded his two large volumes on psychological healing with the remark: Medical practitioners have suddenly turned to psychology, and have demanded of this science a service which the psychologists were far from being prepared to render. Psychology has not proved equal to the occasion and the failure of the science has thrown discredit upon psychotherapy itself. But this very failure has necessitated entirely new psychological studies, whereby the science of psychology has been regenerated. . . . Some day we may hope that there will be enough knowledge to make it possible to budget the income and expenditure of a mind, just as today we budget the income and expenditure of a commercial concern. Thirty years later again Hebb published his book called The Organisation of Behaviour. This book had no small influence on future psychological thinking, and is still often quoted in the literature. In the Introduction to his book Hebb commences with this statement. It might be argued that the task of the psychologist, the task of understanding behaviour and reducing the vagaries of human thought to a mechanical process of cause and effect, is a more difficult one than that of any other scientist. Certainly

The Danger of Words

273

the problem is enormously complex; and although it could be argued that the progress made by psychology in the century following the death of James Mill, with his crude theory of association, is an achievement scarcely less than that of the physical sciences in the same period, it is never the less true that psychological theory is still in its infancy. There is a long way to go before we can speak of understanding the principles of behaviour to the degree that we understand the principles of chemical reaction. Ten years later O. L. Zangwill in an article on psychology written for the 1950 edition of Chambers’ Encyclopaedia stated: At the present time it must be admitted that psychology falls sadly short of its aim. In view of the complexity of its data and the difficulties confronting crucial experiments in the psychological sphere, the explanations offered by mental science remain at the descriptive level. Hypotheses intending to co-ordinate large bodies of fact, such as the psycho-analytic or the gestalt theory, fall short of the necessary requirements for truly scientific precision. But the prevailing uncertainty of psychological explanation need imply no fault more severe than scientific immaturity. Indeed the contemporary situation in psychology is strikingly parallel to that of physiology in the sixteenth century. The notable development of modern experimental physiology leads one confidently to expect that a coherent science of mind will slowly take shape in the general frame work of the sciences of life. Ten years later again H. J. Eysenck in the Introduction to his big book on Abnormal Psychology writes as follows: Originally I conceived the writing of a book such as this fifteen years ago when the exigencies of war threw me into contact with psychoneurotic patients at the Mill Hill Emergency hospital. Having little knowledge of the field, I naturally turned to the textbooks available on psychiatry and abnormal clinical psychology. The perusal of some fifty of these left me in a state of profound depression, as none of them contained any evidence of properly planned or executed experimental investigations, or even the realisation of the necessity for such. Nor did I find that concise and consistent frame work of theories and hypotheses which usually precede experimental investigations; all was speculation and surmise, laced with reference to clinical experience. Michael Faraday’s words seemed only too apposite: ‘They reason theoretically without demonstrating experimentally, and errors are the result’. . . . It is for this reason that the dedication is to E. Kraepelin, the first person to be trained in the psychological laboratory, and to apply experimental methods to abnormal psychology. It is sobering to consider, if only his outlook had prevailed in psychiatry how much further advanced our knowledge would now be. You will see, I think, from these quotations that there has been over the last eighty years or so a general agreement among psychologists that the really important work, the really significant discoveries, in the science of psychology, belong to the future.

274

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Psychology, they seem to agree, is still a very young science, but one that once it adopts the rigour of experimental science, will bear great fruit. When Galileo performed his first experiments in rolling marbles down an inclined plane, and measured mass, time, and velocity, he made the remark: ‘This is the beginning of a great science.’ And so indeed it was. It was the beginning of physics. And I need not remind you how today the science of physics has changed the whole manner of human life, and of our way of thinking about the nature of the universe we live in. Unless I misunderstand them, the psychologists I have just quoted are encouraged by the hope that their rudimentary experiments – dogs salivating at the sound of a bell, rats learning to run a maze, pigeons learning to do strange tricks in Professor Skinner’s box, human beings day-dreaming over ink-blots – that these experiments are the harbinger of a new science. A science which will place on a sound scientific basis such important subjects as psychiatry, education, sociology, criminology and penology, and even international politics. The hope is that in the future a truly scientific psychology will enable us to control the vagaries of the human mind to the same extent that the physical sciences have given us such power over our material environment. I remember as an undergraduate Dr Tennant stating that the mental sciences still awaited their Sir Isaac Newton. The object of my paper is to show that on purely theoretical grounds this hope is vain. There is indeed a science of experimental psychology, this science will continue to grow. But as to the great expectations that the very word psychology arouses in some minds, these hopes will always remain unfulfilled. The psychological and social sciences will not transform either by power or understanding the great and terrible problems of our present discontents. For here we have to do not merely with ignorance but with the power of evil. Before I proceed to the main arguments in support of my thesis, I would like to call to my support two eminent thinkers. I do not of course claim their authority for what I will try to prove later, but the two following quotations will perhaps not only make my thesis clearer, but also recommend it as not entirely heretical and idiosyncratic. The first quotation is from an eighteenth-century scientist and philosopher, G. C. Lichtenberg. In one of his aphorisms he writes: We must not believe when we make a few discoveries in this field or that, that this process will just go on for ever. The high jumper jumps better than the farm boy, and one high jumper better than another but the height that no human can jump over is very small. Just as people find water wherever they dig, man finds the incomprehensible sooner or later. The second quotation comes from one who can justly be regarded as the most influential thinker of my generation, Wittgenstein. Towards the end of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein makes this remark: The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a young science; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginning. (Rather with certain branches of mathematics, Set Theory.) For in

The Danger of Words

275

psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. (As in the other case conceptual confusion and methods of proof.) The existence of experimental methods makes us think we have means of solving problems which trouble us; though problems and methods pass one another by. I would like, indeed, to define my thesis as a logical exposition of the fact that in psychology the real problems that confront us, and the experimental methods which are being increasingly elaborated, pass each other by. And that although experimental psychology can show us new facts and confirm new hypotheses, yet in this discipline we very soon come up against the incomprehensible. It is true enough that Hebb can ‘jump’ higher than James Mill. But it doesn’t follow from this that a psychologist of the future will be able to jump to infinity! That he will be able, to use Hebb’s own words, ‘Reduce the vagaries of human thought to a mechanical process of cause and effect.’ But now it is high time that we engaged in battle in real earnest. And first a preliminary skirmish before the main thrust at the centre. I am puzzled to find one psychologist after another repeating that psychology is still a young science. For myself I find the psychological concepts which are discussed and defined in Plato’s dialogues, and even more so the myths he devises to bring home to us his fundamental themes, to be a constant source of instruction. I would claim Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’ as the first treatise to deal specifically with psychology as a separate subject. (Only a short time ago I heard a Professor of Psychology in one of our senior Universities describe Plato and Aristotle as ‘superstitious blighters’; and he a believer in the Rorshach test!) Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus wrote a treatise on ‘Characters’, and his delineation is such that we can still recognise the types he describes among our own contemporaries. But to come to something on a more serious level. I would describe St Augustine’s Confessions as perhaps the most profound psychological analysis ever carried out. If it be true, as indeed it is, that ‘Fecisti nos ad Te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in Te’, then any psychology which ignores the persistent inquietude of the human soul is a shallow and superficial affair. Then coming to more recent times. We have Descartes’s Treatise on the Passions of the Soul. The psychological discriminations in Spinoza’s Ethics; Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision; Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature; Reid’s Powers of the Human Mind; I could continue the list but there is surely no need to labour the point. What in heaven’s name possessed Hebb to take as his origin such an unimportant figure in the history of psychology as James Mill! The psychologists I quoted at the commencement of this paper would, I imagine, reply that they were talking of experimental psychology, and in particular the introduction of measurement and mathematical statistics into the study. They would once again refer me to the undoubted fact that physics only got under way when Galileo made it a matter of accurate measurement and the construction of mathematical formulae to explain the phenomena. Similarly chemistry as a precise

276

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

science owed its beginning to the demonstration of Robert Boyle that the volume and pressure of a gas could be measured and related by a mathematical law. Now (says the modern exponent of experimental psychology) that we have begun to introduce measurement and mathematics into the science of psychology, we can indeed speak of a new science with a triumphant future. It began with Binet introducing the conception of an Intelligence Quotient which could be expressed numerically. Then Pavlov was able to measure the strength of a conditioned reflex in terms of the quantity of saliva secreted. Similarly the maze learning of rats could be quantified in terms of errors made, time taken to learn, time taken to run. And motivation could be expressed in terms of the extent of deprivation of food or water. Certainly psychology has in the last seventy years become increasingly mathematical, often requiring an advanced knowledge of statistics to be even understood. It is a big assumption though to assume without discussion that precisely the same method which has proved so powerful in the physical sciences will be applicable to every other investigation. Aristotle, at the commencement of the treatise I referred to a moment ago, makes precisely this point. He warns us: ‘If there is no single common method by which we may discover what a thing is, the treatment of the subject becomes still more difficult; for we will have to find the appropriate method for each subject.’ I believe we should take this warning of Aristotle’s seriously (and not dismiss him as a superstitious blighter). We should ask ourselves first, can psychology make use profitably of the same methods that have been so advantageous in the physical sciences? I emphasise the word ‘profitably’, for I am not calling in question the accuracy of the measurements made, but only questioning their present importance and future promise. Let me put it this way. I have here in my hand a piece of chalk. What interests the physicist and the chemist are the properties that this piece of chalk has in common with every other piece of chalk. Its density, its specific heat, its molecular composition, etc. No doubt this piece of chalk is in some sense unique; no other piece of chalk in the world has exactly the same markings, the same shape, the same size, but these peculiarities are of no interest to science. But what about an individual human being? He no doubt has many properties which he shares with every other human being, and some he shares with a particular group of human beings. But to me, at any rate, what is of supreme interest is just the uniqueness of this very person, the way in which he differs from any that ever came before him or will come after. His individuality, his unpredictability, his uniqueness. In a popular work entitled Sense and Nonsense in Psychology, Eysenck gives a list of people whom he would classify as typical introverts, and a similar list for extroverts. His list of extroverts includes Boswell, Pepys, and Cicero. I don’t imagine Eysenck intended this list as more than a rough indication of what he was wishing to describe, but it will do very well for the point I am trying to bring home. It may be true that Boswell, Pepys, and Cicero all have some common abstract trait in common, but that is not what is psychologically interesting or important. What interests me is that Boswell, in spite of his ludicrous vanity, his gross licentiousness, his petty mindedness, was able to write the greatest biography in literature. As Macaulay well puts it: ‘Many great men have written biographies, Boswell was one of the smallest

The Danger of Words

277

of men and has beaten them all.’ Then again take the picture that Boswell has given us of Dr Johnson; it tells us little to hear that Johnson was a high church Tory, a great Latin scholar, and a learned lexicographer. What does tell us a lot are the details Boswell gives us of his conversation and repartee. Even more psychologically interesting is the deep and lasting friendship that sprang up and endured between these two very diverse characters. I am reminded here of a wonderful remark that Montaigne made when asked for a definition of friendship, ‘Parce que c’est lui, parce que c’est moi.’ Now do I make myself clear? In psychology what interests us, what is of deep significance, are particulars not universals. The physical sciences are interested in the universals and the mathematical relations between them. The two subjects are not comparable. I said a moment ago that I did not question the measurements made by experimental psychologists, I did question their significance. Take for a moment the ascertainment of the Intelligence Quotient by means of one of the properly standardised tests. I do not deny that these measurements do measure some abstract ability of the individual tested, call it intelligence if you wish. But remember a remark of Janet’s: he said that the most important book ever written on psychology was a dictionary. Why a dictionary? Well, because a dictionary reminds us of the enormous vocabulary that mankind has found necessary to express all the different facets of personality. Just consider the word ‘intelligence’ and consider all the cognate words that cluster round it. Wisdom, cleverness, depth, originality, genius, clarity, docility, perseverance, and I could add more. And remember that although these are all separate words in the dictionary they are intimately blended together in the person. If I may quote Lichtenberg again: The qualities we observe in our souls are connected in such a way that it is not easy to establish a boundary between any two of them, but the words by which we express them are not so constituted; and two successive related qualities are expressed by signs which do not reflect this relationship. Let me then give an example from my own experience of taking the Intelligence Quotient too seriously. When I was a regimental medical officer during the war we found that one of our new recruits could neither read nor write. He was sent to the area psychiatrist for an opinion and was returned with the report that his mental age was that of a boy of twelve and a half; he was recommended for discharge. He didn’t want to be discharged and it turned out that he was an expert in handling dogs and ferrets, and as we were at that time plagued with rats he was appointed official ‘rodent operator’ to the unit. But I needn’t labour the point for I think that we are all becoming aware of the limitations of intelligence testing. I would, however, use this story for a brief digression concerning ‘animal psychology’. I have for many years been an avid reader of books describing animal behaviour both in laboratory experiments in learning, and more especially the field observations made by ‘ethologists’. Such a book as Thorpe’s Instinct and Learning in Animals is one I turn to with interest from time to time. But in all these writings I find missing that which for me is the most important fact about animal behaviour; it is that all living creatures from the simplest to the nearest human are just about the most un-understandable things in

278

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

the world. It is this ‘un-understandability’ that makes the patient watching of them such a fascination. The increasing mechanisation and urbanisation of modern times is depriving us of any close contact with the wild things of nature. This is a great psychological impoverishment. There is an aphorism of Wittgenstein’s; ‘That if a lion could speak we would not be able to understand him.’ This one sentence says more to me than all the books that pretend to explain animal behaviour. But it is time to come back to my main thesis. I want to say that the word ‘psychology’ is a Janus-faced word, a word that faces in two opposite directions. And that it is the fact that these are two opposite directions that is of the greatest importance. The first direction, and which I would claim is the original meaning of the word, occurs in phrases such as this. We might say of a great novelist such as Tolstoy, or our own George Eliot, that they show profound psychological insight into the characters they depict. Or again we would say of a historian such as Burckhart that he had great psychological acumen in penetrating the motives behind the facts of history. In general, then, it is the great novelists, dramatists, biographers, historians, that are the real psychologists. For the sake of future clarity I am going to refer to this meaning of the word psychology as ‘psychology A’. Now the other meaning of the word psychology I shall call ‘psychology B’. By psychology B, I refer to those subjects that are studied in a university faculty of psychology and are necessary to obtain a degree in that subject. The copious literature on perception in all its modalities. The numerous experiments and very diverse theories that arc subsumed under the name of ‘learning theory’. The various and conflicting schools of ‘abnormal psychology’. Personality testing, vocational guidance, statistical method, and so on. Quite an undertaking. But here I seem to hear the voice of my former teacher, Wittgenstein, thundering at me. ‘Give examples, give examples, don’t just talk in abstract terms, that is what all these present-day philosophers are doing.’ So now I want to give an example of what I mean by ‘psychology A’. It is a letter written to one of her pupils by Simone Weil. Notice that it contains nothing that one could call learning or cleverness, no attempt to be scientific or dictatorial. Yet it does contain profound psychological insight and not only for the particular individual and her immediate state, but also and perhaps even more so, for us living at the present time thirty-five years after it was written. (I only include that part of the letter which serves to illustrate my conception of psychology A.) I have talked enough about myself, let’s talk about you. Your letter alarms me. If you persist in your intention of experiencing all possible sensations – although as a transitory state of mind that is quite normal at your age – you will never attain too much. I was much happier when you said that you wished to be in contact with all that was real in life. You may think that they both amount to the same thing, on the contrary they are diametrically opposed. There are people who live only for sensations and by means of sensations; André Gide for example. Such people are in reality deceived by life, and as they come to feel this in a confused manner, they have only one refuge, to conceal the truth from themselves by miserable lies. The life which is truly real is not one that consists in experiencing sensations, but in

The Danger of Words

279

activity, I mean activity both in thought and in deed. Those who live for sensations are parasites in the material and moral sense of the word compared with the those who labour and create; these are the true human beings. I would add too that those who do not run after sensations are rewarded in the end by much that is more alive, deeper, truer, less artificial, than anything the sensation seekers experience. To sum up, to seek after sensations implies a selfishness that revolts me, that is my considered opinion. It obviously does not prevent love, but it does imply that those whom one loves are no more than objects of one’s own pleasure or pain, it overlooks completely that they exist as people in their own right. Such a person passes his life among shadows. He is a dreamer, not one who is fully alive. About love itself I have no wisdom to give you, but I have at least a warning to make. Love is such a serious affair, it often means involving for ever your own life and that of another. Indeed it must always involve this, unless one of the two lovers treats the other as a plaything; in that case, one that is only too common, love has changed into something odious. You see, the essential thing about love is that it consists in a vital need that one human being feels for another, a need which may be reciprocated or not, enduring or not, as the case may be. Because of this the problem is to reconcile this need with the equally imperious need for freedom; this is a problem that men have wrestled with since time immemorial. Thus it is that the idea of seeking after love in order to find out what it is like, just to bring a little excitement into a life which was becoming tedious, etc., this seems to me dangerous, and more than that, puerile. I can tell you that when I was your age, and again when I was older, I too felt the temptation to find out what love was like, I turned it aside by telling myself that it was of greater importance for me not to risk involving myself in a way whose eventual outcome I could not possibly foresee, and before too I had attained to any mature idea of what I wanted my life to be and what I hoped for from it. I am not saying all this as a piece of instruction; each one of us has to develop in our own way. But you may find something here to ponder over. I will add that love seems to me to carry with it an even more serious risk than just a blind pledging of one’s own being; it is the risk of becoming the destiny of another person’s life, for that is what happens if the other comes to love you deeply. My conclusion (and I give you this solely as a piece of information) is not that one should shun love, but that one should not go out of one’s way to try and find it, and especially so when you are very young. I believe at that age it is much better not to meet with it. . . . I think you are the sort of person who will have to suffer all through your life. Indeed I am sure of it. You have so much enthusiasm, you are so impetuous, that you will never be able to fit into the social life of our times. But you are not alone in that respect. As to suffering, that is not too serious a matter so long as you also experience the intense joy of being alive. What is important is that you don’t let your life be a waste of time. That means you must exercise self-discipline. I am so sorry that you are not allowed to take part in sports: that is exactly what you need. Try once more to persuade your parents to let you do this. I hope at least that happy days hiking in the mountains is not forbidden. Give those mountains of yours my greetings.

280

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

I regard this letter with its deep personal and individual message, yet also one that has a much wider implication, as a perfect example of what I have called psychology A. You will see that it has nothing whatever to do with the sort of studies that a degree course in academic and experimental psychology provides. So I distinguish this latter by calling it psychology B. Now you may say to me that there is nothing new in this distinction between a psychology which has insight into individual characters, and a psychology which is concerned with the scientific study of universal types. It is a distinction that many competent writers on the subject refer to in the Introduction to their books. I know no better account of just this distinction than what Eysenck has to say in the Introduction to his book on Abnormal Psychology. But my object is not just to refer to the two different meanings of the word psychology, I want to draw attention to what I have called their two different directions. I have the impression that most psychologists think that in time what I have called psychology B will enable them to be much more efficient and scientific in dealing with problems in psychology A. That at least is what I make of all this talk of a young science and its unlimited promise for the future. When Hebb talks of ‘understanding behaviour and reducing the vagaries of human thought to a mechanical process of cause and effect’, or when Eysenck states that the same laws of learning apply ‘to neurotics, college students and rats’, I take them to imply that the day will come when clinical insight and intuitive personal understanding will no longer be necessary, for the science of psychology will replace this primitive way of coping with problems. It certainly has happened in the history of science that a particular and difficult skill has been replaced by a new and more accurate scientific technique. The old physicians used to pride themselves on what they called the ‘tactus eruditus’, the ability to gauge the patient’s temperature by laying their hand on the forehead; nowadays any probationer nurse can make a more accurate reading by the use of the clinical thermometer. Similarly it used to be customary to judge the degree of anaemia by the pallor of the palpebral conjunctiva; now it is possible to estimate the percentage of iron in the blood with accuracy. So why shouldn’t a further progress in the science of psychological testing improve by means of psychology B the rough intuitive guesses of psychology A? Well, I would say that analogy is all wrong. For it is always measurement that is improved by new technique, and the importance of psychology A is that it deals with the immeasurable. It would only be a superficial and puerile estimation of personality that (say) took as its measure the Intelligence Quotient, the amount of dollars earned, the rank held in society, the position held in Eysenck’s normalneurotic and introversion-extroversion dimension. These are capable of being expressed numerically. But remember that most important book the dictionary, and think of all the numerous words that we need to describe all the facets of personality. What are they? Well, here is a venerable list that will do as well as any: Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance – and if any psychologist thinks these are measurable he only shows that he does not understand the qualities the words refer to. It is hidden inwardness that is the rock over which a scientific and objective psychology will always come to grief. The truth

The Danger of Words

281

is that we human beings are not meant to study each other as objects of scientific scrutiny, but to see each one as an individual subject that evolves according to its own laws. So I wish to state emphatically that Psychology B, whatever progress it makes (and I intend to discuss the proper direction of that progress later) will never replace Psychology A, as a more accurate, a more scientific, a more efficient discipline. I would not have considered this paper necessary if the belief that Psychology B would one day take over the work of Psychology A had merely been a pious hope. What does seem to me to be serious is that in some places I find the belief that the dawn has already broken. I will begin by some rather trivial examples and then go on to what I regard as more dangerous errors. If you go into a bookshop today you will find books with some such titles as: How to Win Friends and Influence People, or The Power of Positive Thinking, or one that amused me the other day, How to Help your Husband to be a Success. Well, we all know that such books never helped anyone who was in serious emotional difficulties, still less anyone who was mentally ill. These books are full of harmless platitudes, but the fact that they attract a public to buy them is far from harmless; it shows a thoughtless attitude to the deeper problems of human life. It reflects a widespread error which extends even to educated people, that for every problem there is some particular science and some particular expert who can provide the necessary answer in a book. Not so long ago an intelligent medical student came to see me. He had decided to change from the study of medicine to the faculty of psychology, for he felt that this latter study would not only enable him to cope more efficiently with his own personal problems, but also make him able to advise on the problems that other people had to contend with. I had some difficulty in persuading him that this would be a serious error to make, that he would find academic psychology a barren subject as compared with a knowledge of general medicine. Then again a good many years ago now I was asked to give a course of lectures on ‘normal psychology’ to a class of students in the School of Physiotherapy. I imagine that the idea behind this request was that physiotherapists would in the course of their work have to cope with patients who needed tact and understanding in their handling. Now of course it is important that physiotherapists should have such tact and understanding, but this they will only acquire by experience and by working under one who already has achieved such wisdom. They could learn nothing from a course of lectures on ‘normal psychology’. The lectures were not given. In the medical curriculum today it is obligatory for students to attend and pass an examination in normal psychology. These lectures are usually given just after the student has completed his course in anatomy and physiology. The idea I imagine is that just as a grounding in anatomy and physiology is a necessary prolegomenon to the study of pathology and materia medica, so a course on normal psychology will be the groundwork by means of which the future instruction on psychiatry will be built. But the analogy is all wrong. Normal and abnormal psychology do not stand in this relation to each other. After a time I gave up giving these lectures for I felt they were an unnecessary burden on an already overcrowded curriculum.

282

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

We all from time to time in the course of our clinical work come up against personality problems where we feel out of our depth. (Perhaps we would be better psychiatrists if we felt this more often.) I notice a temptation both in my own case and that of some of my colleagues to think that such problems could be solved for me by resource to a ‘clinical psychologist’. That he by means of some superior science, some highly sophisticated tests, will come up with the right answer. The analogy that one has in mind is the way the clinical pathologist can help with a specialised blood examination, the radiologist with his experience in interpreting the skiagram, or now the extremely specialised interpretation of the electroencephalogram. But if one looks more closely the analogy breaks down completely. For these last mentioned specialities all employ a standard technique, the facts of which I am acquainted with but lack the necessary daily practice of. But if I send a patient to a clinical psychologist I do not know what he may be subjected to. Will he be asked to interpret certain standard formless ink-blots? Will he be subjected to a series of behavioural tests? I would myself have to have enough knowledge of personality testing to know whom to trust. And maybe when I have read some of the literature on these tests and been presented with some of the clinical psychologists’ reports, I will wish no longer to have recourse to this very dubious help. The clinical psychologist may assess a personality in terms of the Intelligence Quotient, the degree of introversion, the adjustment to ‘reality’ (though here I would want to ask what ‘reality’ means). I have even seen the annual earning in dollars used as a measure of ‘success’, but all those aspects of personality which are of deep importance escape out of the net of knowledge. I must add a warning here though. It may well be that a particular clinical psychologist is gifted with that form of insight that I have called Psychology A, and be able to help just because of this gift. All I am protesting against is the supposition that there exists already, or will soon be perfected, a scientific technique which will render the clinical insight gained by long experience an unnecessary acquirement. Here, now, and always, the old rule holds: ‘Cor ad cor loquitur.’ There is, however, one point at the present time where ‘psychology A’ and ‘psychology B’ have already come into conflict. And this I must now discuss. There has grown up in ‘psychology B’ an immense literature concerned with what is called ‘learning theory’. And some psychologists are claiming that the application of ‘the laws of learning’ can provide a scientific treatment for all forms of ‘neurosis’ and possibly some forms of psychotic behaviour as well. Thus remember Eysenck’s statement: The laws of learning theory, to take but one example, apply no less to neurotics than to rats and college students. Hilgard has written a comprehensive book of which the title is: Theories of Learning – notice the plural. For in this book he describes no less than ten different theories of learning. Osgood, in his Theory and Method in Experimental Psychology, has shown that many of the differences between these diverse theories are largely semantic, but in spite of this there is all the difference in the world between classical Pavlovian conditioning, Skinner’s operant conditioning and the field theories of the Gestalt school. So if we are to make use of ‘learning theory’ in therapeutics it would be

The Danger of Words

283

necessary to say which school of thought we support and why. As a matter of fact the Behaviour therapists seem to accept some form of ‘stimulus-response’ theory of learning entirely, without as far as I have been able to discover any reply to the cogent arguments and experimental facts produced by the Gestalt theorists. Still less have they paid any attention to what Freud called ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, for it is a dogma of the behaviour therapist that all neurotic symptoms are learnt in their origin, and can be cured by the application of ‘learning theory’. But it would lead us too far astray to go into the complications involved in the different theories of learning or the place to be attributed to disturbed instincts in neurotic behaviour. I would avoid such a digression by coming right away to what I regard as the central error in the whole attempt of psychology B to establish one unified theory of learning. For the truth is that the word learning has a great many different meanings and there is not one special characteristic common to all forms of learning. It may be true that we human beings sometimes form conditioned reflexes, sometimes make use of the mechanism called operant conditioning: these may lie at the basis of some fundamental habits. But that we learn in many more important ways seems to me obvious. Consider a child learning its native language at the age of three, what an inexplicable wonder is there. Skinner taught his pigeons to do many strange and unexpected things, but he never was rash enough to try to teach them to talk to him. Then later a child begins to think for himself, as the phrase goes, and it is the function of a good teacher to stimulate interest in new subjects and in a general desire for clarity and truth. These become ends in themselves. All the experiments in animal learning depend on primary or secondary reinforcement of the basic animal needs. No animal desires truth for its own sake, and yet surely that is the prime object of human education. I cannot understand how such a clear thinker as Eysenck shows himself to be, could allow himself to state that ‘the laws of learning apply equally to neurotics, college students, and rats.’ Eysenck, I believe, when teaching his students, wants to arouse an interest in psychology for its own sake, and for truth as an end in itself. This enormous difference between what we mean when we talk about human learning and when the experimental psychologist talks about animal learning, becomes very manifest when we consider the great difficulty that all behaviour therapy comes up against when it tries to employ the language of animal learning to the correction of human behaviour. What is reinforcement for a human being? The rat wants its food at the end of the maze; the pigeon gets its grain when it has discovered the necessary lever to peck at; and Köhler’s chimpanzee reaches his banana when he discovers how to join two sticks together. But human beings in the throes of emotional conflict are not rewarded by toys such as these. Punishment is easier, but I find, and agree with the more critical behaviour therapists, that ‘avoidance therapy’ is ethically unpleasant and therapeutically inefficient. Perhaps I can clinch the matter by introducing here a little fragment of ‘psychology A’. Just two lines from the poet Aeschylus: Zeus has opened to mortal man a way of knowledge; he has ordained a sovereign decree – through suffering comes understanding.

284

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

The knowledge that Aeschylus speaks of here, the understanding that comes from having suffered oneself, what has this to do with the theories of learning that the experimental psychologist writes about? And yet surely it is such an understanding that is needed in psychiatry. When I commenced the study of psychology forty-five years ago it was considered then advisable that the student should combine this subject with the study of logic, ethics, and metaphysics. But today there is a tendency to break away from this tradition and for psychology ‘to go it alone’. It is considered desirable for psychology to become one of the experimental sciences and be no more dependent on a general philosophical education than, say, physics or chemistry. Now certainly the physical sciences have progressed and continue to make progress without any need of becoming involved in disputes about first principles or ultimate objectives. But it is my belief that psychology is in a very different position, and that the more ancient tradition rested on a wise understanding. For the great difference between psychology and any other science is that the psychologist is himself part, and a very important part, of the subject matter itself. I do not see how an intelligent student of psychology could help becoming involved in all the logical problems that surround the concept of ‘self’. What gives unity and continuity to his own personality. The ‘I’ which is always subject and never object. The logical difficulties involved in the concepts of ‘inner’ and ‘outer experience’. These puzzlements cannot be resolved by any experimental investigations, they are prior to all experiments, they are the subject matter of logic. If then the student of psychology must become involved in problems of logic, still more so will he come face to face with the great problems of ethics. For the psychologist like any other human being must recognise that a sense of ‘oughtness’, of obligation, forms a fundamental part of what being a person means. The question of what is good in itself as distinct from mere means, what is the ultimate meaning of life, the realm of ends – a psychology which excluded the enormous part that these questions have played and continue to play in the life of the mind would be put a pale abstraction from the real life of the individual. I am not of course saying that it is the function of psychology to answer such questions, I am saying that a student of psychology who does not find his chosen subject leading him away from experimental procedures to thinking about ethics is to me a strangely absent-minded thinker. For whatever we may learn from observing the behaviour of animals, whatever we may learn from experiments on perception, whatever we may learn from the study of ‘individual differences’, the great questions still stand over us, whence? whither? how? If you go back to a previous generation of psychologists (that is to say before behaviourism had come to dominate the scene) you will find that they realised the necessity of a comprehensive psychology saying something about this important aspect of human life. Thus William James came to write his Varieties of Religious Experience; Freud could not rest until he had written Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Moses and Monotheism; Janet too, in his two big volumes De l’Angoisse à l’Extase, is concerned to give an account of the ethical and religious experiences which have played and will continue to play a dominant role in human behaviour.

The Danger of Words

285

It is curious to say the least that a generation which prides itself on the frankness with which sexual problems are handled, should seem almost embarrassed by any reference to guilt, sin, death and judgment. Yet thoughts about these concepts must play a part in the thinking of anyone who is fully alive. It is my belief that many turn to the study of psychology because of the pressure of these great problems, which seem to be part of the phenomena with which the instruction should deal. They will feel a sense of frustration if their teachers have nothing to say on such matters. If they find psychology confining itself to averages and statistics and experiments on rats running in mazes. Then on the other side too I think it is valuable for the student of philosophy to have one of the experimental sciences as part of his curriculum; and experimental psychology is eminently suitable to play this role. Experimental psychology, besides giving good examples of the difficulty of devising crucial experiments, is replete with concepts that arc in urgent need of dialectical development. All in all, then, I regret this tendency for the faculty of psychology to break away from its previous companions and become an independent study. I am afraid I may be giving the impression that I attach very little importance to the study of experimental psychology. If so, I would now like to correct that imputation and say where I think the real importance of these experiments lies. I believe that experimental psychology has made and will continue to make very significant contributions to the study of neuro-physiology. Pavlov always described his work as ‘the physiology of the higher nervous activity’, and he eschewed the claim to be a psychologist. Yet Eysenck has called Pavlov the greatest of experimental psychologists. There is only a verbal difference here. It has interested me to see over the years how Eysenck’s own books have taken on more and more a physiological terminology to replace a previous psychological one. In his first book we had the twin dimensions of extraversion–introversion, and neurotic-normal. Now these dimensions are defined in physiological terms. The extravert is one who finds difficulty in establishing positive conditioned reflexes, and can easily inhibit those already formed; whereas the introvert quickly establishes positive conditioned reflexes but finds the subsequent inhibition of those so formed harder to achieve. The neurotic-normal dimension is defined in terms of the degree of reactivity of the autonomic nervous system. Psychologists may dispute as to whether this theory is yet established, but the direction that the investigation has taken seems to me the correct one. I mentioned earlier that Hebb’s book on the ‘organisation’ of behaviour has had considerable influence. This I believe is due to the fact that Hebb brings out clearly how experiments in psychology have forced an elaboration of previous neurological constructs which are too simple to account for all the facts. For instance Lashley’s search for the engram produced evidence that made all simple ‘stimulusresponse’ connectionship, such as Pavlov, Thorndike, and Lashley himself believed in, impossibly simple. Similarly the perceptual phenomena that the Gestalt school drew attention to have made us revise considerably a too simple theory of sensory representation in the cerebral cortex. Lichtenberg in one of his aphorisms says that ‘Materialism is the asymptote of Psychology’. I am not sure that I understand

286

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

what he meant. But I would certainly say that neuro-physiology is the asymptote of experimental psychology. The more rigorous experimental psychology becomes the more it will need to translate its findings into physiological terminology. Hebb seems to me to make this very point admirably in his book. But then he goes on to say: Modern psychology takes for granted that behaviour and neural function are perfectly correlated, that one is completely caused by the other. There is no separate soul or life force to stick a finger now and then into the brain and make neural cells do what they would not otherwise. Now while I would agree that some forms of behaviour are correlated with neural function and that in this field experimental psychology and neuro-physiology can with profit co-operate, I would most emphatically deny that all behaviour is so correlated. Nor would I conceive it a necessary alternative to believe in a ‘soul or life force sticking its finger into the brain.’ Why should there not be some areas of behaviour which just have no neurological counterpart? Let me put it this way. I feel hungry, and I have good experimental evidence to think that this particular sensation is correlated with a lowered blood glucose level and peristaltic contractions of the stomach. I study the menu and select certain foods; now there is some evidence from experimental psychology that animals deprived of certain necessary dietary elements will instinctively select those foods which will correct their deficiency. It may be true that human beings select their food on such a physiological basis, though this has never been proved, and the evidence of man’s dietary indiscretions are all against it. After the meal I feel a desire to listen to some music; maybe with the further development of the electro-encephalogram this desire may be found to be correlated with some particular pattern of electrical wave formation. But then from my records I select, say, Bach’s fourth Brandenburg Concerto. Now it seems plain nonsense to me to say that this individual selection is physiologically determined. I may or may not be able to give reasons for my choice, but it does not make sense to ask at the same time for the cause of my choice. Hebb, for example, in his book gives the evidence and the reasons which have led him to his particular theories; I imagine he would be justifiably annoyed if we then asked him to give the causes of his beliefs. For if it is not possible for us to choose between truth and error, between right and wrong, then the whole possibility of scientific discussion is reduced to an absurdity. The very possibility of speech, of intelligent discourse, of well reasoned books, depends on the certainty that a very large and important part of mental life is not determined and is not correlated with specific neural function. This certainly does not imply that a finger is thrust into the brain to compel neural cells to do what they otherwise would not. Nothing is compelled because nothing is correlated. You couldn’t carry on a discussion with a tape recorder where everything is correlated and compelled; you can carry on an argument with another human being because he is able to choose. If I may say so, Hebb’s error here is an excellent example of the point I was trying to make about the importance of a student of psychology having an acquaintance with logic. For any modern, student of logic will immediately remember Wittgenstein’s aphorism that ‘Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.’

The Danger of Words

287

Psychology a new science with wonderful promises of future power and mental transformations: psychology determining through the study of animal behaviour the laws of learning which apply equally to ‘neurotics, college students and rats’. So then I would end with this quotation written now nearly 2,500 years ago. At the end of his dialogue, the Philebus, Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates these words, Socrates speaks: Our discussion then has led to this conclusion, that the power of pleasure takes the fifth place. But certainly not the first, even though all the cattle and horses, and every other living creature seem to imply otherwise by their pursuit of enjoyment. Those who appeal to such evidence in asserting that pleasures are the greatest good in this life, are no better than augurs who put their trust in the flight of birds. They imagine that the desires we observe in animals are better evidence than the reflections inspired by a thoughtful philosophy. A new science?

CHAPTER 3

Concerning Body and Mind What an odd situation the soul is in when it reads an investigation about itself, when it looks in a book to find out what itself might be. Rather like the predicament of a dog with a bone tied to its tail – said G.C.L., truly but a little ignobly. lichtenberg

Ladies and gentlemen, When I had completed this paper I had doubts as to whether I should read it to you. For our Society is properly concerned with those particular problems of diagnosis and treatment which are daily met with in our work. And much that I have written here will seem at first to you as so much barren metaphysics. I don’t believe that it is barren metaphysics; indeed I hope to show you before I conclude that the thoughts here developed have important practical consequences, if not for the details of our work, at least for the general ethical background against which our work must be carried out. I do not see how anyone can practice the profession of a physician, still less of a psychiatrist, without soon coming face to face with the deepest philosophical problems as distinct from scientific ones. Problems which by their very nature cannot be answered by any future development of scientific discovery, but require an altogether different method of investigation. And if we do not at some time or other stop to ponder these problems, the very facts with which we come face to face will necessitate some answer in our actions. And so I venture to read this paper. But if to some of you it seems out of place, I can only assure you that I share in your disquietude. Some months ago I was reading a translation of one of Pavlov’s Wednesday morning conferences. Every Wednesday Pavlov used to meet his students and assistants, and other visiting scientists, for a general and informal discussion about any topic connected with his work in neuro-physiology. A stenographer kept a record of these conversations and they have now been translated in part. I have found some of them very interesting reading. On Wednesday 19 September 1934, Pavlov arrived at the conference with his bushy whiskers fairly bristling with indignation. He had been reading a book by the famous English physiologist Sherrington. In this book Sherrington had used the words ‘if nerve activity have relation to mind’. Pavlov was so shocked that any physiologist should doubt the absolute dependence of mind on brain, that he thought he must have read a mis-translation. He got a friend who had a better knowledge

The Danger of Words

289

of English to check the words for him: but there they were in all their scandal – ‘if nerve activity have relation to mind’. How is it possible, said Pavlov, that in these days any scientist, let alone a distinguished neuro-physiologist, could for one moment doubt the complete dependence of the mind on the healthy functioning of the organic nervous system? After some discussion he summed up his conclusion in these words: Gentlemen, can anyone of you who have read this book say anything in defence of the author? I believe this is not a matter of some kind of misunderstanding, thoughtlessness, or mis-judgment. I simply suppose that he is ill, although he is only seventy years of age, that there are distinct signs of senility. For Pavlov, then, after thirty years of studying conditioned reflexes, the complete dependence of mind and brain was axiomatic. Mind dependent on brain. I suppose that we who use daily physical methods of treatment in psychiatry, and too often see the disastrous effects that organic disease of the brain can produce both on intellect and character, would feel inclined to agree with Pavlov. To think of the mind and its activities as in some way the product of that complex tissue we call the brain. But I would also guess that if we were asked we might well find ourselves at a loss to say how exactly we conceived this precise dependence. In the previous century that great biologist T. H. Huxley, lecturing to an audience, told them: ‘The thoughts to which I am giving utterance, and your thoughts regarding them, are the expression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena.’ Is that clear to you? I must say that I can attach no clear meaning to it. Sherrington recalls that as a student in Germany the Professor put one of the Betz cells from the cerebral cortex under the microscope, and labelled it ‘the organ of thought’. A few days later a tumour of the brain was being demonstrated in the pathology department and one of the students asked: ‘And are these cells also engaged in thinking, Herr Professor?’ Now this I think was a really witty remark. For it made a piece of concealed nonsense obvious nonsense. But to come to something written nearer our own time. Professor J. C. Eccles published in 1953 a book entitled The Neuro-physiological Basis of Mind. Professor Eccles is a recognised authority on neurophysiology; let us hear what he has to say. In the Introduction to his book the Professor states his programme as follows: As indicated by the sub-title of this book, ‘The Principles of Neuro-physiology’, the scope may be described as covering the whole field of neuro-physiology. The reactions of the single nerve or muscle fibre, the reactions of the single neurone, the reactions of the simpler synaptic levels of the nervous system, the plastic reactions of the nervous system and the phenomena of learning, the reactions of the cerebral cortex, and finally the relation of the brain to the mind. Broadly speaking it is an attempt to see how far scientific investigation of the nervous system has helped us to understand not only the working of our own brains, but also how liaison between brain and mind could occur. As such it tries to answer as far as is present possible some of the most fundamental questions that

290

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

man can ask. What manner of being are we? Are we really composed of two substances, spirit and matter? What processes are involved in perception and voluntary action? How are conscious states related to events in the brain? How can we account for memory and the continuity of mental experience which gives the self? How is that entity called the self interrelated to that thing called the body? Descartes failed to answer these questions because his science was too primitive, and his dualistic inter-actionist explanation has consequently been discredited. The remarkable advances that have been made possible largely by electronic techniques, now make it worth while to answer these questions in at least some of their aspects. This is surely a most ambitious programme that Professor Eccles has set himself. And if it really is true that recent advances in neuro-physiology aided by electronics can tell us, to use his own words, ‘what manner of being we are’; then surely this subject and these techniques are the most important science that anyone could choose. We would be wise to leave aside all other studies for this. But before we make such a serious decision it might be wiser first to see what conclusions Professor Eccles himself has come to on these weighty matters. To see indeed whether he has in any degree at all been able to fulfil the task he has proposed himself. The first 260 pages of his book are taken up entirely with the early part of his programme. The structure, biochemistry and electrical phenomena of the individual neurons and synaptic junction; and then the more general anatomical organisation and histology of the cerebral cortex. Here as one would expect there is much original work of great interest and ingenuity. It is only in the last twenty-six pages of his book that he passes from positivistic natural science to more speculative matters. He starts his final chapter as follows: We now come to the problem posed at the beginning of this book, which may be covered by the general question: ‘who are we’? The answer to this question is according to Schrodinger ‘not only one of the tasks of science, but the only one that really matters.’ But surely we don’t need a distinguished physicist, or even a Professor of neurophysiology, to tell us how important this question is. Centuries ago a certain unknown Greek wrote over the door of the temple of Apollo at Delphi γνθι σεαυτόν, ‘know thyself’. This injunction ‘know thyself’ did not mean know your own personality and peculiar idiosyncrasies, but know what it means to be a human being, what is the nature of men as such: the very question indeed that Professor Eccles mentioned in his Introduction – ‘what manner of creature are we?’ Let us then look first at what he as a neuro-physiologist has to tell us. He writes: The usual sequence of events is that some stimulus to a receptor organ causes the discharge of impulses along afferent nerve fibres, which after various synaptic relays, eventually evoke specific spatio-temporal patterns of impulses in the cerebral cortex. The transmission from receptor organ to cerebral cortex is by a coded pattern that is quite unlike the original stimulus, and the spatio-temporal

The Danger of Words

291

pattern evoked in the cerebral cortex would again be different. Yet because of this cerebral pattern of activity we experience a sensation (more properly the complex constructs called percepts) which are projected outside the cortex, it may be to the surface of the body or even within it, or as with visual, acoustic and olfactory receptors to the outside world. However the only necessary condition for an observer to see colours, hear sounds, or experience the existence of his own body, is that appropriate patterns of neuronal activity should appear in appropriate regions of his brain, as was first clearly seen by Descartes. It is immaterial whether these events are caused by local stimulation of the cerebral cortex or some part of the afferent nervous pathway; or whether they are, as is usual, generated by afferent impulses discharged by receptor organs. In the first instance then the observer will experience a private perceptual world which is an interpretation of specific events in his brain. This interpretation occurs according to conventions acquired and inherited, that, as it were, are built into the micro-structure of the cerebral cortex, so that all kinds of sensory inputs are co-ordinated and linked together to give some coherent synthesis. What an amazing state of confusion for an intelligent man to have arrived at! Of course something similar has been said many times before. It seems to be a fatal pitfall for anyone who is too preoccupied with the details of sensory perception. Thus Professor Eccles is able to quote such a distinguished neurologist as Sir Russell Brain in support of his conclusion; he quotes Sir Russell as saying: ‘Mental experiences are the events in the universe of which we have the most direct knowledge.’ Now I went to do three things. I want first to bring out clearly the confusions and inconsistencies in such a view as Professor Eccles has here put forward. Secondly to show how easy it is for such a confusion to arise, how easy it is for anyone of us to find ourselves thinking along these lines, and thirdly and most important, how to get this sort of confusion out of our system once and for all. I say that Eccles’s theory is both inconsistent and confused. Throughout all his account he is quite certain of both the meaning and truth of certain statements he makes. His final theory is in fact a conclusion drawn from these data. He starts off by using the phrase ‘the usual sequence of events’; how does he know that this is the usual sequence of events? He mentions stimuli acting on receptor organs. But if, as he states, the observer experiences ‘a private perceptual world’, how is it that he can even begin to talk about external stimuli and receptor organs? Eccles is certain that the coded pattern in the afferent nerves and that evoked by them in the cerebral cortex is quite unlike the original stimulus. But then how does he know what these original stimuli were like? To put it briefly then, if as Eccles asserts, the only necessary condition for an observer to see colours, hear sounds, etc., is that appropriate patterns of neuronal activity should occur in appropriate regions of his brain; then I do not see why or how we should ever come to believe in, or even understand the meaning of, still less logically infer, the existence of a real objective world outside. And if, furthermore, ‘seeing’ is taken to be the same thing as ‘experiencing a private perceptual world’, why should we even believe in neuronal activity in the brain itself?

292

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Eccles is vaguely aware of this difficulty. And in fairness to him, and because it brings out the confusion even more clearly, we should consider his attempted solution. He writes: We report our mental experiences to others and find they have like experiences to report to us. Such procedures serve to assure us that our private experiences are not hallucinations, or more strictly we may say that hallucinatory experiences are discovered by this procedure. We may conclude then that our mental experiences cannot be rejected as hallucinations, nor is solipsism a tenable explanation. Mental experiences are reported by all human beings with whom we take the trouble to communicate at the appropriate level. But here once again Eccles is assuming the very truth he wants to regard as a justifiable inference. For if we really begin by being shut up in our own private perceptual world, how do we ever come to know that there are other observers? How could we have ever come to talk to them and to share a common language? If the only reason for regarding our sensory experiences as not hallucinatory is that we hear other voices, why should not these voices also be hallucinations (after all we know only too well that hearing voices is the most usual form of hallucination). We have seen a very distinguished and competent experimental neuro-physiologist writing a lot of nonsense. But this particular brand of nonsense is very close to all of us. We have no cause to flatter ourselves at his expense. Let us go over the ground again and see how easy it is to get into the same sort of confusion. For only by looking at this problem from every angle will the essential and necessary clarity appear. By accident, say, I touch the top of a hot stove and sustain a painful burn. Now we know that if, for instance, I had such a disease of the spinal cord such as Syringomyelia; I would see both the stove and the blister on my finger but would feel neither the heat nor the pain. And so we make a distinction: the stove, my finger, the blister, these are real external things; but the feeling of heat and pain is subjective and in the mind of the percipient. Or again I come into a room where there is a vase of roses, and I enjoy the perfume from them. But if my nose is stuffed up by a heavy cold, the smell is lost to me. So once again we say that although the bowl and the roses which are before our eyes are real enough, the smell and the pleasure I take in it are somehow in the mind of the observer. And we attribute this smell to minute particles given out by the roses which cause a chemical reaction on the nerve endings of the olfactory nerves in the nose. Here notice we have had to introduce something purely hypothetical, the minute particles. Once more, I am listening to a concert on the radio. I have to leave the room. The radio set we are sure remains there just as it was, and also the sound waves in the air set up by the vibrations of the loud-speaker. But the music and all that it had meant to me, that surely leaves the room when I do. The symphony we would be inclined to say is the effect of the waves of air impinging on my eardrum, moving the ossicles of the middle ear, and transmitting nerve impulses to the auditory cortex via the eighth cranial nerve.

The Danger of Words

293

But now notice what we have been doing all along. We have been drawing a radical distinction between the sense of sight and what it reveals, and all the other sensory organs. At an unreflective and ‘common sense’ level it would appear as if the senses of touch, smell, hearing and taste were all dependent, as Eccles expresses it, on ‘receptor organs’. But to the naive observer the eyes are almost forgotten when in use. We are inclined to think of the eyes as in some sense a pair of windows through which we look out on the external world; not as organs of sensation intervening between us and the world of real things. But if we are to base any conclusions on physiology, the eyes are as much receptor organs as any one of the other senses. There is the transparent cornea, the lens with its possible defect of accommodation and transparency, the highly complicated nervous and photo-chemical structure of the retina, the optic tract with its decussation, the synaptic relay at the level of the geniculate bodies, and finally the radiation to the calcarine fissures of the occipital lobes. No wonder then that the physiologist finds himself in the position of saying that ‘In the first place the observer will experience a private perceptual world which is an interpretation of events in his own brain.’ We are back again at that complete subjectivism which we saw contained so much contradiction. Let us go over the ground once more and see if we can track down this error to its source. We, like Professor Eccles, have been basing our conclusions on the certainty that we know a good deal about the anatomy of the sense organs and the nervous pathways to and in the brain. How did we acquire this knowledge? Well, think back for a moment to that day in the school of anatomy when you first removed the calvarium of the skull, and saw before your own eyes that marvellous structure the human brain. And then at once we had to get down to the laborious task of memorising the names of all those many, many fissures and lobes, of the areas of grey matter and white matter, and the cranial nerves which proceeded from them. But scarcely had we completed this task than the physiologist was upon us. This structure which you see with the naked eye is not, so he told us, the real nervous system; just look here beneath the microscope, see these different nerve cells, Betz cells, Purkinje cells, neuroglia, axions, dendrites, and the multitude of synaptic junctions between them. This immense neuronal network, every brain containing many more cells than there are inhabitants of this earth, this neuronal network is the real nervous system. Not at all says the biochemist and geneticist. The dead and stained specimens on the microscope slide are largely artefacts; we know that the real nervous system is a living, growing, constantly changing thing, the seat of most complex chemical transformations and electrical phenomena which continue both by day and by night. So once again we had to get down to the task of learning the Eberden-Meyerhof process for the anaerobic utilisation of glucose, and the Krebs cycle for the oxidation of pyruvic acid. Do you remember now those benzene rings with their long side chains of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen? And now more recently the geneticists have produced the double helix structure of the fundamental substance D.N.A. and seen in this, so they say, the key to the genetic code. Here, of course, we have passed out of the field of even microscopical vision. The various molecular structures can only be shown to us by drawings on the blackboard. And, if you were like me, I imagine that you could not help thinking that these macroscopic patterns were

294

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

a reproduction of a similar one in the infra-microscopical world. I am sure the geneticist really believes in his double helix. And then as you placed the various atomic symbols in their correct place in the structural formula, you thought of this C representing a real discrete particle of carbon, and this S as representing a real discrete particle of sulphur, and so on. In fact you thought, to use a phrase of the great Sir Isaac Newton, of ‘Little particles of matter so hard as to be indivisible.’ But now if an atomic physicist had come your way he would indeed have laughed at you. ‘Little hard particles of matter? My dear fellow, don’t you know that we exploded that theory long ago; one fine day over Hiroshima.’ The ultimate and real constituents of matter are the fundamental particles, protons, electrons, neutrons, and now the less stable ones that keep coming on, neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, mesons, and pi-mesons, and I don’t know what else. To me it is never clear when these are spoken of as particles what they are particles of; and when these particles are said to pass from one orbit to another without passing through the intervening space then my mind gives up. Merciful heavens, what has happened to that nice solid brain we saw in the anatomy room? Three times now we have found ourselves ending up in a morass of confusion. There must be something radically at fault in our thinking, some original sin that has led us into repeated error. I believe this is so, and I want now to try to show this error to you. But I am in some doubt if I can do so, for the difficulty is not one of explaining something very complicated and profound, but of showing the immense importance of something so simple that it continually escapes our notice. However, let me at least try. You remember Professor Eccles’s original programme. He said he was going to investigate the whole field of the nervous system. Not only the structure and organisation of particular neurones and their synapses, but also ‘the working of our brains’, ‘how liaison between brain and mind could occur’. He was going to investigate ‘the process of perception’, ‘to give an account of memory and of that continuity of experience that gives the self’, and finally ‘decide what manner of creature we really are’. ‘Investigate’. This is indeed a great word. We live in an age of investigation, when everything is investigated, both in the heavens above and the earth beneath and the waters under the earth; often with great interest and to the relief of man’s estate. So what could seem more natural than to investigate perception and memory and the true nature of the self ‘in the same way’. There is no more dangerous phrase in philosophy than that one ‘in the same way’. Are you sure that this same way is still open? Perhaps there is a limit to what can be investigated by Science. One of the main tasks of philosophy is to show the limits of what at first sight seems limitless. So let us enquire more closely into the real nature of scientific investigation. That means taking a concrete example and seeing what we really do when investigating. The patient, say, has a temperature of 102°F., and I say to Sister we must investigate this. And so we go through the routine procedure of inspection, palpation, percussion, and auscultation, and then proceed to certain laboratory and X-ray examinations. But now notice what we are completely dependent on, what we assume as perfectly valid, in such investigations. We depend entirely in every one of these procedures,

The Danger of Words

295

even the most recondite laboratory ones, on perception and memory. Sight, touch, hearing, memory, language, these are the instruments of scientific investigation. Therefore they themselves cannot in turn be investigated. If I may use a crude metaphor; I can look at any object on earth or in the sky through my telescope, except the telescope itself. It therefore does not make sense, it is really a piece of concealed nonsense, when Eccles proposes to investigate perception, memory, the self, and in general the relationship between mind and body. We can indeed investigate in more and more detail the anatomy of the sense organs; but the ‘nature of perception’, ‘the liaison between mind and brain’, ‘the transition from nerve impulse to consciousness’ – investigation makes no sense here. I am not saying that these matters are so complicated that we cannot attain unto them. That would only be a challenge to try harder. Nor am I saying that these things are so commonplace that we can take them for granted. But I am saying that however much we learn concerning the physiology of the eye and optic tract this will never explain how seeing is possible. Perhaps someone would like to interrupt me here by drawing my attention to the vast literature that already is in being concerning the psychology of perception, memory, language. I think here particularly of such books as Vernon’s on Visual Perception, Broadbent’s book entitled Perception and Communication, and Bartlett’s work on Remembering. How then can I state so emphatically that perception, memory, language cannot be investigated? But now notice in these books that the psychologist is largely concerned with experiments on subjects other than himself. He has to take as given the seeing, hearing, remembering, describing, which are his own observations; these form no part of the investigation. It is possible for a psychologist sometimes to act as his own subject; one thinks at once of Ebbinghaus and his laborious work on learning and forgetting strings of nonsense syllables. But here again the same dichotomy occurs. When Ebbinghaus came to write his book, the memory of these self-experiments, the interpretation of his own notes made at the time, these were fundamental data and were not themselves in need of investigation. All I am saying is that in every investigation there will always be that which is not itself investigated; in every experiment there will be data which are not the result of experiment; in every enquiry there will always be that which is not enquired into. This for me is such a simple yet important and far-reaching truth that I would come to the same point by another route. Suppose you showed a clock to one who had never seen such a mechanism before. You could explain in detail to him the working of the mechanism, and the use of the machine. But now imagine one born stone deaf; he could carry out a complete dissection of the outer, middle, and inner ear, and could become a master in the cytology of the auditory cortex; and nothing in all this would ever explain to him what hearing was like. Similarly one born blind could by reading Braille answer correctly all questions concerning the structure of the eye and the optic tract, but would never come to an understanding of what was meant by sight. Then again I could give an account of how I came to learn a foreign language; but who among us could describe how he came to speak his native tongue? I said that these were such simple truths that their importance is too easily overlooked. It was forgetting these truths that led us into all the confusions of

296

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

complete subjectivism. Simple truths, yes, but not platitudes. If we were to lose our sight we would indeed bemoan our fate; should we not then sometimes pause and wonder at the miracle of sight? I want to say that every time you open your eyes a miracle occurs. If we should become deaf, think what we would lose in the way of friendly communication and intelligent discussion. So should we not wonder at, and be grateful for, the miracle of hearing? Every time you wake up in the morning and return to consciousness a miracle occurs. Much speculation is going on as to the nature of the memory trace and how it is to be explained at the physiological level. A perpetuating cycle of activity in a complex of neurones? A facilitation at synaptic junctions? A molecular coding by the complex molecules of R.N.A. or D.N.A.? But whatever comes of these speculations it will still be true that: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past a miracle occurs. It is correct to speak of progress in science and in our scientific understanding of the world. May that progress continue. I hope that nothing that I say in this paper will be taken as an ‘attack on science’. The greater part of my life has been taken up with an attempt to think scientifically about the problems of mental pathology, their cause and their treatment. But I am sure it is an error which is disastrous to our philosophy if we forget this great truth: that however much the realm of what is explained is extended, the realm of the inexplicable is never reduced by one iota. It would seem from much that is written nowadays that perhaps in the far distant future everything will be explained and controlled by scientific understanding. I have been trying to emphasise that this, thank God, will never be the case. Those fundamental data which we use in giving explanations: perception, memory, language, these remain for ever in the realm of the inexplicable. In an age such as this in which technological sophistication increases daily, there is a great danger that we lose the precious gifts of wonder and gratitude for the common and simpler foundations of our being. Eccles, you will remember, spoke of the rudimentary nature of Descartes’s physiology, making it impossible for him to solve the problem of the relation of mind to body. Perhaps you may have thought that in concentrating my criticism on a book published in 1956, I was already a bit out of date; after all there have been remarkable discoveries in neuro-physiology in this last decade. But my choice was deliberate. Professor Eccles was in no better position than Descartes, and we or any subsequent generation will not be in any better position than Professor Eccles, to solve a problem to which the notion of a ‘solution’ does not make sense. I have no need to fear that tomorrow some new discovery will invalidate everything that I have written here. ‘In the idea now is always.’ At the risk of being prolix I am going to give two further examples from other writers of the type of misunderstanding I am concerned to eliminate from our thinking. (1) Suppose you take up such an excellent book as Hanson’s Anatomy of the Nervous System. And suppose you want to learn the sensory pathway from the tips of the fingers to the cerebral cortex. You learn the details of the end organs

The Danger of Words

297

in the fingers, the sensory nerves in the arm, their rearrangement in the brachial plexus, their separation from the motor nerves and entry into the cord through the posterior nerve roots. Then the arrangement of the sensory tracts in the spinal cord, their decussation at the level of the brain-stem, their relay to the various nuclei in the thalamus, and the connections to and from the cortex to the thalamus. All this can be described in positivistic language and we can if needs be verify each statement in the anatomy room. But then you find, even in Ranson, a reference to the question at what point the nerve impulse ‘enters’ consciousness. Notice the complete change of language here; this is no longer descriptive and verifiable, but metaphorical and speculative. In everyday language if we use the word enter we imply a threshold both sides of which can be observed and entering means passing from one side of this threshold to the other. But in this sense, the common everyday sense, of ‘entering’, you cannot speak of anything entering consciousness. For consciousness has no boundary, no threshold which can be observed. If it had then there would have to be a third form of consciousness which was conscious of both what was conscious and what was not yet so. This is obvious nonsense. Consciousness is not just one of the many things we are conscious of: the mind has no particular place in nature. (2) In a book recently published I found the following sentence: Some thoughts we keep to ourselves. But man being a gregarious animal seeking companionship and cooperation with his fellows, naturally wanted to pass on a great many of his thoughts. This led him through countless ages of endeavour to develop a means of communicating thought. Laboriously he built up language. But this is surely nonsense. First thoughts and then the gradual development of words in which to express them! But can any of us think without using words already to ourselves? Thinking and language are not separable in this way. And what does ‘laboriously build up’ mean here? Nowhere in the world, nor in the study of extinct languages, do we find gradations of language, but only different languages. Indeed both primitive and extinct languages are often of the greatest complexity, and ‘progress’ is often in the nature of simplification and reduction in the vocabulary. To talk of countless ages of endeavour is to invoke a ‘deus ex machina’ here that just won’t work. I want to say that the existence of language, and the development of the ability to speak in a child is a miracle, something that the notion of explanation as to how it came, and comes to be, does not make sense. It is something indeed for us to wonder at and be thankful for. If Pavlov had been listening to what I have said so far I am sure his patience would have passed all bounds, and he would have been convinced of my advanced senility. And perhaps your patience is becoming exhausted too. Surely you would say that if our sight is troubling us we go to an ophthalmologist and he by his knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the eye and optic system may be able to correct our vision. Similarly if deafness troubles us we go to an otologist. We would not think much of such specialists if they told us that seeing and hearing were miracles. Surely we must then say that sight and hearing are dependent on the physical structure of the sensory organs and their nervous connections with the brain. Once more, in the

298

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

last two decades the power of physical methods of treatment in psychiatry have been increasingly demonstrated. How then can I dare to criticise one who states that mind is dependent on brain? Now I need hardly say that I accept as much as anyone the physical treatments of the ophthalmologist, the otologist, the psychiatrist, etc. All that I am criticising is the vagueness and the many misleading interpretations which that word ‘dependent on’ can give rise to. I want to fix a more precise meaning to that word, to determine its limits. I have tried to show how much of confusion and error comes into our thinking if we do not fix and determine these limits. But more than that only, I want to make ‘wonder secure’. There is a danger, with the ever increasing development of natural science, its powerful applications, and its inevitable specialisation, that we come to forget the realm of the inexplicable. ‘The mysteriousness of our present being.’ At the common-sense level we found ourselves tempted to speak of an outer world revealed by sight and an inner world of feeling, hearing, remembering, etc. I hope I have been able to make you see the misunderstandings that are contained in this unreflective use of the words ‘outer’ and ‘inner’. The words compelled us to picture a boundary which had to be crossed and yet somehow we were to be conscious of both sides of this boundary. There is no such boundary. Experience is experienced as one continuous whole. What we see, the distant hills and their colouring, the sound of a bird calling, the smell of the pine trees, the feel of the sand beneath our feet, and the memories of previous visits to this place, and the pleasure which accompanies these things, this is all given as one and undivided. For various practical necessities we break up this undivided whole, and attend now to this aspect and then to that. If I am doing anatomy it is sight that must be my guide. But if I am listening to music it may be well to close my eyes. These are matters of expediency and depend on a deliberate shift of attention. Now the advances in natural science have been due to a wise and deliberate selection of certain aspects of the total given whole, and the ignoring of others. The division of qualities into primary and secondary was a great discovery in methodology, not a metaphysical discovery. For instance I use spectacles to overcome my astigmatism, but if I am interested in the physiology of the eye it is these very distortions that interest me. Both the corrected vision and the distorted vision are equal in their ontological status, they both belong to that which is real. Everything that comes to us by way of the senses is part of reality and worthy of attention at times, what aspect we choose to study in detail is a matter of choice. There is a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder. We are all startled by them and make comment. Here surely you would say is an ‘outer experience’. The thunder has made me feel nervous but I manage to conceal this feeling from the others, here surely you would say is an ‘inner experience’. Of course I am not denying such a familiar distinction as this. I am denying nothing. I am pointing out the very real dangers and confusions that those words ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ produce in philosophy. They force on us a picture of reality, of the mind and its place in nature, which is of no use at all. The distinction between seeing the flash of lightning and my feeling of fear is not that the vision lies on one side of a barrier and my feeling on the other. For me there is no barrier between them, they are together. We have learnt by experience

The Danger of Words

299

that if there is lightning others see it too (but remember not always); we have also learnt by a long process of training to conceal our emotions. A small child cannot conceal its terror, such an emotion is as much ‘outer’ as anything seen; it is seen. I sometimes have a high pitched ringing noise in my ears, this I constantly mistake for the telephone ringing; only experience has taught me that I really have ‘Tinnitus aurium’. I know now that the sound is ‘inner’, but at one time it was ‘outer’, and it has not changed its quality. Once we have grasped the necessary limitations that must be imposed on the words ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ when used in epistemology, then the confusion we got into when describing the different conceptions of the brain can be disentangled. The anatomist describes the brain which he sees with his naked eyes. The physiologist describes the stained specimens he sees under the microscope. The biochemist describes those experiments which have led him to postulate such and such a molecular structure. The pure physicist has his own complicated apparatus for investigating the structure and constituents of the atom. But once again I must insist every one of these investigators depends in the last resort on sensory perception, memory, language; these are the tools with which he investigates and whose validity he has to assume. He cannot in turn investigate these. No one of the pictures that these various investigators build up to direct them in their work has any claim to priority over the other. All are necessary for a full knowledge of the subject. A radiologist trying to locate a brain tumour from the appearance of his X-ray will necessarily use the gross terms of the anatomist. The neurologist trying to account for an area of anaesthesia or paresis, will be guided by the knowledge he has of neuronal structure, and will speak in terms of nerve centres and nerve tracts. The expert in mental deficiency is being increasingly helped by the development of the biochemistry and genetics of the brain. And finally it is the pure scientist who has over the past centuries provided us with the microscope, the chemical stains, the X-ray apparatus on which these other investigators depend. At no level of investigation can we say, ‘Ah! now we have reached the real thing in itself; before, all that we were concerned with was mere appearance.’

PART TWO And yet, and yet; when Professor Eccles promised to answer that question ‘what manner of being are we?’, did not this arouse our interest in a deep and serious sense? We have seen, I hope, in the previous section, that this is a problem that no empirical investigation can ever answer. Schrödinger was right in describing this as the most important of questions, but then he went all astray when he added ‘the most important question that science can ask.’ It is not a problem in natural science; neither neuro-physiology, psychology, or any other empirical investigation can help us here. And yet we must both ask and give an answer at once. The fact that we have to live and make decisions demands an answer. It was a Greek who first posed this question in words. Suppose then that for a moment we forget about our present scientific achievements and go back in history to the fifth century b. c., to Athens: one of the greatest centuries in the history of

300

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

human thought. But first we must set the scene aright. The scene is set in prison. Socrates has been condemned by his fellow citizens on a charge of atheism, impiety, and corrupting the young by his sophistry. In a few hours he is to be given poison to drink. He spends these last hours in discussion with his friends over this very problem of the relation of the mind to the body. He tells them a little of the development of his own thoughts on this subject. Let us listen for a moment to him. Socrates speaks: When I was young I had a great desire to know that department of philosophy which is called ‘natural science’. To understand the causes of things. To understand why a thing is, how it is created and how destroyed, this appeared to me a worthy investigation. I was always preoccupied with such questions as these: Is it some form of fermentation which causes heat and cold to bring forth living creatures? Is the blood the essential element without which thinking could not occur, or is it respiration, or the natural heat of the body? Or perhaps none of these but the brain may be the natural seat of our senses of hearing and sight and smell; and from these sensations memory and opinion arise, and then when memory and opinion are firmly established natural science may be built up. Then I went on to consider how these powers are lost, and this led me to consider all phenomena in heaven or on earth. Finally I came to the conclusion that I had no aptitude for these studies, and I will tell you what led me to this conclusion. For I found that my preoccupation with these investigations had so blinded my eyes to things which before had seemed to me and others self-evident. Doesn’t this sound very familiar to you? Pavlov, Eccles, you and I, starting off with the enthusiastic conviction that the investigations of natural science will provide us with answers to the deepest questions. And then as our investigation proceeded we found ourselves bewildered and in doubt over what at first had seemed so certain and well established. This bewilderment and confusion we found at last arose because we were trying to solve a philosophical puzzlement by an irrelevant empirical investigation. Socrates too discovered in good time that these sort of investigations could never answer for him the most important question as to the nature of man and his destiny. I will not here discuss the method of philosophical enquiry that he then developed, but I will proceed to tell you of the conviction he finally came to, and with which he went willingly to his death. Socrates speaks again: So long as we keep to the body and our soul is contaminated with this imperfection, there is no hope of our attaining our object, which we assert to be absolute truth. For the body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake us and impede us in the search after true being: it fills us full of loves and lusts and fears and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in fact, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all. Whence come wars and factions and fighting? Whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? Wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body; and by reason of these impediments we have no time to give to philosophy; and last and worst of all, even if wé are at leisure and betake ourselves to some

The Danger of Words

301

speculation, the body is always breaking in on us causing turmoil and confusion in our enquiries, and so amazing us that we are prevented from seeing the truth. It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body, the soul in herself must behold things in themselves; and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire and of which we say we are lovers. Not while we live but after death. For if while in the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows, either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, only after death. For then and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone. In this present life I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse with the body and are not surfeited with the bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us. And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth. But o, my friend if this be true there is great reason to hope that, going where I go, when I have come to the end of my journey, I shall attain that which has been the pursuit of my life. For Pavlov ‘mind dependent on body’: for Socrates the body a hindrance, a source of distraction and deceit, an imprisonment for the mind. Socrates of course, or maybe Plato speaking in the name of Socrates, is enunciating a conception which already had had a long history in Greek thought. There was indeed a familiar Greek proverb σμα σῆμα, ‘the body a tomb. And it would have been no paradox to his audience when Euripides put into the mouth of his chorus these lines: Who knows if life is not death and death is considered life in the other world. What has interested me though, and what I now want to draw your attention to, is the way this Pythagorean-Socratic-Platonic conception of the relationship of the soul to the body finds perfect expression in the most unexpected places. An Elizabethan actor-dramatist, a man described as knowing little Latin and less Greek; a man living in an age of intense religious controversy who yet nowhere in his many writings gives us so much as a hint as to where his own allegiance lay. And then suddenly this: The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1. Lorenzo and Jessica have come out into the garden, it is a bright starlit Italian night. Lorenzo speaks: Sit, Jessica; look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st But in his motion like an angel sings: Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims; Such harmony is in immortal souls; But while this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close in, we cannot hear it.

302

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Ah! there you see it comes again, ‘This muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close us in. The mind prevented by the body from perceiving the truly real in all its wonder and beauty. And if anyone should reply that Shakespeare is only putting words into the mouth of one of his many characters, listen to this sonnet of his where he is surely speaking for himself. Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, Fool’d by these rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end? Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss, And let that pine to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; Within be fed, without be rich no more: So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead there’s no more dying then. For me though the most impressive and deepest expression of this Socratic-Platonic conception in all literature is found in the most unlikely of places. Victorian England; a dreary Parsonage high up on the Yorkshire moors; the mother long since dead; the father a man of no great ability; the brother already a victim of alcohol; and then three sisters of superlative imagination. Of Emily Brontë her sister said: ‘Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.’ So then hear this, which must surely reflect a personal experience: But first a hush of peace, a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends; Mute music soothes my breast, unuttered harmony That I could never dream till earth was lost to me. Then dawns the invisible, the unseen its truth reveals; My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels: Its wings are almost free, its home its harbour found, Measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound. O dreadful is the check, intense the agony, When the ear begins to hear and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again; The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain! Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less; The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless; And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine If it but herald death, the vision is divine.

The Danger of Words

303

Poetry! Poetry! What am I doing quoting it here? Am I not speaking to a society dedicated to scientific investigation and the sober weighing of experimental evidence? I tried to demonstrate to you in the first part of my paper that the methods of scientific investigation were not and never could be applicable to this great question, the relation between mind and body. And that which seemed so obvious to Pavlov was far from being self-evident, that indeed when rigorously pursued it led us into obvious nonsense. I am certainly not claiming that the conception which Socrates discussed at his death, and which these poets so unexpectedly echoed, is one that can be proved or verified. The very notion of proof or verification is misunderstanding and superficiality here. I can only say that this ‘idea is like an arrow in the mind. Once it has lodged there it cannot be extracted. That is the reason why poetry is its true formulation. Perhaps this is what Goethe meant when he said that he who does not believe in the world to come is already dead in this one. But concerning that which can be neither proved nor verified is not a healthy agnosticism the proper attitude in a scientific age? Yes certainly, a healthy agnosticism concerning that which has not yet been ascertained but may perhaps in the future be known, for instance the possibility of life on other planets. But agnosticism has no meaning when applied to those questions which by their very nature will never be a matter of scientific investigation. These are questions, I say, that the conduct of life demands an answer from us now, at once. To suppose that conduct can be divorced from speculation or that we may do good without caring about truth, is a danger that is always tempting. So now let me draw your attention to certain broad principles in our own field of psychiatry where a decision on this ethical question is urgent and imperative. And yet where neither common sense, nor further information, nor any scientific discovery, can ever come to our aid. Where the will alone must decide the truth it will believe. Some of us have to take care of and do as much as lies in our power for those who either by genetic defect or birth trauma will never develop into maturity. Some indeed who will never learn to speak or even be able to carry out the simplest acts of self-preservation. Now if Pavlov was correct and mind was dependent on brain, we must assume that where there is such gross brain damage, mind is almost nonexistent too. I have lived through an age in which a great and cultured nation deliberately acted as if this were so; and counted it wise and praiseworthy to destroy such apparent monstrosities. Knowing the history of man I see no reason to be optimistic that our children, or our children s children, may not have to fight this same battle over again. But suppose that what Socrates contended for was indeed the truth. That the soul is imprisoned within the body. Then we can say nothing concerning the hidden life of these sufferers; they are shut off from us by barriers that neither we nor they can break; but we do not know yet what they shall be. I state this not as an hypothesis that one day might be proved, nor as anything that some special insight could reveal, but as a decision of the will, a decision of ethics where neither physiology nor any other science can come to our aid. In the practice of psychiatry we are dealing every day with those whose personality has undergone a change. People who have become morose and depressed; people who have become wildly excited and overactive; people who have become withdrawn

304

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

and suspicious; people who have become deluded and even dangerous; and so on through all the range of mental illnesses. We have been discovering these last thirty years to what extent these disorders can be cured by purely physical methods of treatment (methods which require, however, patience and explanation in their application). But I think the very success of these methods are to some degree a danger to those who employ them. Whatever advances are made in the future regarding the treatment of mental illness, however close the work of a psychiatrist becomes to that of a general physician, we should never forget that there is, and always will be, a mystery about mental ill-health which makes it different from any disease of the body. Every mentally ill patient is an individual enigma, and we should always think of him as such. There is something more disturbing and puzzling in a dissolution of the personality than in any bodily disease. I think that great and good man Dr Samuel Johnson spoke for all mankind when he described his own experience: 3 a.m. on the morning of 16 June 1783. I felt a confusion and indistinctness in my head which lasted I suppose about half a minute. I was alarmed and prayed God that however He would afflict my body He would spare my understanding. This prayer that I might try the integrity of my faculties, I made in Latin verse. The lines were not very good, but I knew them not very good: I made them easily and concluded myself to be unimpaired in my faculties. Soon after I perceived that I had suffered a paralytic stroke, and that my speech was taken from me. I had no pain and so little dejection in this dreadful state that I wondered at my own apathy, and considered that death itself when it should come would excite less horror than now seems to attend it. I think Dr Johnson’s relief that only his body was affected and not his reason is something that we who have to treat those who mind is affected should constantly remember. For the patient a mental disease is and always will be, whatever advances in treatment are made, a more terrifying and humiliating experience. I think we should make it clear that although we do not share their pessimism about the outcome, we do appreciate their natural alarm. It was once said to me, ‘What I should fear if I became mad would be your common-sense attitude, that you would seem to take it as a matter of course that I was suffering from delusions.’ I think I understand what he meant, and I think he was referring to an attitude that it is only too easy for those dealing daily with mental illness to fall into. I believe that we must let our psychiatric patients see that we understand that they are in a state of affliction which is not comparable to any bodily pain however severe. To communicate such an understanding is not easy. When I was a medical student, the treatment of mental illness was largely a matter of protective custody, attention to physical health, and a patient hopefulness. You younger psychiatrists of today can hardly imagine the mental hospitals of those days. Now on all sides there are treatments to be got on with and you can feel a genuine optimism concerning the ultimate recovery of most of your patients. There is perhaps a danger that we should take all this too much for granted. Many generations of physicians have desired to see the things that you see and have not seen them. I know that with any scientific discovery in time it must lose its wonder;

The Danger of Words

305

but if what I have been saying concerning the relation of mind and body has carried any conviction to you, then I think these methods of treatment should always be a source of wonder. There is something to wonder at here in the return of sanity; these treatments are on a different plane than any other medical procedure. As time goes on it is probable that we will come to know, and make use of, considerably more about the biochemistry of the central nervous system. The information that the electro-encephalogram can give us is still perhaps only in its infancy. Yet assuming that the steady therapeutic progress of the last thirty years will continue (and remember this is an assumption), there will always be in psychiatry the realm of the inexplicable. An inexplicable which does not exist in any other branch of medicine. There is still, for instance, a great deal to learn about, say, the action of the tri-cyclic drugs on the biochemistry of the brain. But no discovery can ever be made as to how these drugs can relieve melancholia and change nihilistic delusions. This leap from the physical to the mental will remain always in the realm of the inexplicable. Concerning this may I not once again use the word ‘the miracle’? I might mention at this point a matter of less importance, yet which is relevant to what I have been contending for. I am sorry that the word ‘psychiatrist’ has come into general use to denote those physicians who are concerned in the treatment of mental illness. It suggests I think to the general public, and we may even deceive ourselves by it, that we have both more power and understanding than we really possess. None of us are able to ‘heal the soul’ as the word psychiatrist implies. I prefer that old-fashioned word ‘alienist’. We are concerned with those who in some way are alienated from their real selves. We have found in recent years certain ways of treating the body that hastens in many cases the return from alienation, but why this should be so is a matter that will always defy explanation, just because consciousness and personality are matters which the notion of ‘explanation’ is not applicable to. We have been talking about drugs, their known action on the human nervous system, and their inexplicable action on the mind and on personality. There has been talk in recent years of drugs that might provide new and deeper ‘insight’ into the real nature of the world; opening as it were ‘the doors of perception’. There have been those who have advised and attempted to use such drugs as mescaline and lysergic acid to obtain a vision of the world freed from the everyday categories through which we normally perceive it. In so far as I may have seemed to speak of and quote those who longed for some such release – Its wings are almost free, its home its harbour found, Measuring the gulf it stoops, and dares the final bound. – it might seem, I say, as if I would be in favour of such experimentation. I must explain the terrible errors that are present in this way of thinking, which is perhaps also becoming a way of acting. I will leave aside the purely pharmacological aspects of this use of drugs, merely mentioning that at present we have no such drugs whose influence is always beneficial and which carry no risk of addiction. For myself I doubt whether any substance that consistently produced euphoria could be free from the risk of addiction. But suppose in the future a chemical substance was discovered that

306

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

had all the advantages which Aldous Huxley wrongly claimed for mescaline. I will just remind you of these claims by quoting Huxley’s own words: These better things may be experienced (as I experienced them) outside or ‘in here’, or in both worlds, the inner and the outer simultaneously or successively. That they are better seems to be self-evident to all mescalin takers who come to the drug with a sound liver and an untroubled mind. The fact that Huxley’s claim for mescaline is inaccurate is not the most important point here; it is the enormous ethical error that is most in need of exposition. The escape from the body and its limitations that Socrates spoke to his friends about, that Shakespeare and Emily Brontë so impressively expressed in poetry this in its very essence was something that was given, unearned and unexpected. If it was something that we human beings could manipulate, that was ours to achieve as and when we wanted, then it is not that of which these wrote and of which I was speaking. This is that which must be longed for in expectation and patience. All pleasure-seeking is the search for an artificial paradise, an intoxication, but of this freedom it was truly said ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.’ You remember the quotation from Socrates’ speech finished: ‘If no pure knowledge is possible in the company of the body, then it is either totally impossible to acquire knowledge, or it is only possible after death.’ The sonnet of Shakespeare and the poem of Emily Brontë both spoke of death with a certain longing and sense of expectation. An entrance into that state for which they longed. As practitioners of medicine we have to be acquainted with death. It is our duty to fight to the last for the lives of our patients. But we have another duty too, one that is hard to combine with the previous one. And that is to recognise the signature of death when it is inevitable. Did you ever read Macaulay’s account of the death of Charles the second? It is a horrid picture. How the Royal physicians clustered round him like flies; they bled him, they repeatedly purged him, and gave him disgusting emetics, until at last the poor king said wanly, ‘You must pardon me gentlemen, I seem to be an unconscionable time in dying.’ How one would have liked to drive those leeches out of the sick-room and let the poor soul depart in peace. If what I have said concerning the relation of mind and body is the truth (and remember I have made it my principal endeavour to show that nothing in the nature of proof or reasonableness or evidence has any place here. The will must decide). But if this is your decision, then the moment of death is the supreme moment of life. The moment when the prisoner escapes out of the prison house, as it were a bird out of the snare of the fowler. Then I say we, as physicians, must have insight to know when our work is done to the uttermost. When it is our duty to stand aside and interfere no more. I would end this paper with one more quotation from Plato; from the dialogue Phaedrus. I choose this quotation because it expresses for me so profoundly the mystery of mind and body; the mysteriousness of our present being.1 Thus far I have been speaking of the fourth and last kind of madness, which is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is transported with the

The Danger of Words

307

recollection of true beauty; he would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad. And I have shewn this of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest and the offspring of the highest to him who has or shares in it, and that he who loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of it. For, as has been already said, every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive.

NOTE 1. Jowett’s translation.

CHAPTER 4

Hypotheses and Philosophy Do not call it hypothesis, even less theory, but the manner of presenting it to the mind. lichtenberg

Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to begin with a quotation from Macaulay’s essay on Francis Bacon. It is as follows: Suppose that Justinian when he closed the schools of Athens, had asked the last few sages who haunted the Portico, and lingered round the ancient plane trees, to show their title to veneration: suppose that he had said: a thousand years have elapsed since in this famous city Socrates posed Protagoras and Hippias; during those thousand years a large proportion of the ablest men of every generation has been employed in constant efforts to bring to perfection the philosophy which you teach; that philosophy has been munificently patronised by the powerful; its professors have been held in the highest esteem by the public; it has drawn to itself all the sap and vigour of the human intellect; and what has it effected? What profitable truth has it taught us that we should not equally have known without it? What has it enabled us to do which we should not have been equally able to without it? Such questions we suspect would have puzzled Simplicius and Isidore. Ask a follower of Bacon what the new philosophy, as it was called in the time of Charles the second, has effected and his answer is ready. It has lengthened life, it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new security to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendour of the day; it has extended the range of human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human muscles; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; it has enabled men to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth; to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run against the wind. You may well be wondering what this long bit of Victorian rhetoric has to do with the title of my paper, Hypotheses and Philosophy. I have chosen it because it illustrates so superbly the central error I want to discuss with you. The confusion as to what

The Danger of Words

309

the proper function of philosophy is. Why we human beings need it so much, and perhaps particularly in this present age. And why it never hands over a finished result to be transmitted from one generation to another. My main thesis is this. That a philosophy which takes no cognizance of science becomes empty; and a natural science which is not subjected to philosophical criticism becomes blind. I have chosen the modern mutation-selection theory of evolution to illustrate this thesis. Not that the theory of evolution has any special status in this respect. Modern astronomy when it talks about the ultimate nature of the universe, modern physics when it talks about the fundamental constituents of matter, modern psychology when it talks about the scientific study of personality – any one of these would have served my purpose as well. But at the present moment the theory of evolution is particularly in need of a little dose of philosophic doubt. It is one of those recent advances in knowledge which appear to be so much more important than they really are. It is a subject in which it is so difficult to say only just as much as we really know. Perhaps I can make clearer what I want to say if I begin by stating the main line of my argument in rather general terms, and only later fill in the concrete details: as it were formulate the charge against the prisoner at the bar and then proceed to examine the witnesses. The great philosophical danger in every natural science is to confuse an hypothesis with a fact. A new branch of natural science begins because of new observations, new phenomena not noticed before. Often this is due to the discovery of a new instrument, a telescope, a microscope, an electric cell, a Wilson cloud chamber. But always the new data are perceptions. There is nothing in science which was not first in the senses. Now to communicate these new discoveries and to pass them on to the next generation, a new language is required, new words, new concepts but most important of all new schemata: models, pictures, maps. These new models, pictures, maps are scientific hypotheses. They are not given to us as necessities, never dictated by the facts, never forced upon us, but invented by us as ingenious abbreviations to summarise the complexities of the mass of a new factual data. Which of a large number of possible hypotheses we accept is at first a matter of choice. It is determined to a great extent by the spirit of the age in which the new discoveries are made. But then when an hypothesis has become generally accepted and shown its usefulness, it forgets its humble origin. It begins to masquerade in the logical status of a fact. Something we can’t query. Something which is the reality behind phenomena. Something which has enabled us to see behind the curtain of sensation. And so the hypothesis which is our own useful creation, dazzles our view of things. We fail to see much that the hypothesis doesn’t include; we extend the limits of our hypothesis into regions of phantasy. Reality which lies before us at every moment is replaced by the abstract picture we have ourselves created. Reality we are told is nothing but a fortuitous concatenation of atomic particles. Reality we are told is the immense system of extra-galactic nebulae. Reality we are told is that long process of evolution from amoeba to consciousness. In speaking like this we have become dazzled by our picture making.

310

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Now to make this specific charge more precise by considering in detail the modern mutation-selection theory of evolution. I bow to no one in my admiration for Charles Darwin. Where else will you find such close and accurate observation of plants and insects, of birds and mammals, and the constant interrelation in the lives and deaths of all these creatures? What powers of observation he had! I bow to no one in my admiration for Gregor Mendel. Those simple but painstaking experiments with his dwarfed, wrinkled, yellow, tall and short peas. Mendel’s demonstration of how already existing characteristics emerged or failed to emerge in the offspring of a particular union; this was indeed a new field of observation. It shows what a real talent for research can do with the simplest of material, and with no financial endowment. But now on the basis of Darwin’s and Mendel’s work has grown up what is known as the mutation selection theory of evolution. The theory that the development of all the multitude of living forms both in the vegetable and animal world can be explained in terms of genetic mutation and the survival of the fittest. New forms arise by mutation and survive by natural selection. For instance in a recent popular book on the evolution of man, I find it stated that ‘biologists are no longer interested in finding a proof of this theory, it is now only a matter of filling in the details.’ In more scientific language Professor Medawar states, It is the great strength of the Darwinian selection theory that it appeals to the working of no mechanisms which are not severally well understood and demonstrable. Selection does occur, that is the members of a population do make unequal contributions to the ancestry of future generations; new variants do arise by the process of mutation. But Julian Huxley is even more bold; he writes: One of the major achievements of modern biology has been to show that purpose is apparent only, and that adaptation can be accounted for on a scientific basis as the automatic result of mutation and selection operating over many generations. In Darwin’s time natural selection was only a theory, now it is a fact. Thank you, Mr Huxley, for putting so concisely the logico-philosophical error I wish to refute. A theory can never become a fact. An hypothesis remains an hypothesis to all eternity. It always contains an element of choice, one way of looking at things; one way of arranging an arbitrary selection of material into a coherent picture. The danger of forgetting this is that we proceed to overlook the facts that won’t fit into the picture; and we extend the picture to cover aspects of experience to which it has no relevance. Let me illustrate these dangers in the case of the mutationselection theory of evolution. First the facts which won’t fit into the picture. In this part of my paper I am largely borrowing from an important book by Professor C. P. Martin of McGill University. Time will only allow reference to some of the salient points in his work.

The Danger of Words

311

The two most effective ways of producing mutations experimentally are the use of X-rays and of nitrogen-mustard. These are at the same time two of the most powerful protoplasmic poisons known. All mutations produced by these agents, that is all experimentally produced mutations, lower the fertility and viability of the species so changed. I can find no reference to a mutation produced by human interference that is not either lethal or sublethal. For instance it is possible to produce by experimental mutation a tailless variety of mouse. But such a breed cannot be continued for more than one or two generations; not that the loss of a tail is so serious a disability, but because the process of mutation has so undermined the viability of the species. Yet geneticists continue to assert that the millions of variations found in nature arose by mutation; and that these mutations had in certain circumstances increased viability and adaptive value. This is pure guess-work. Fisher, a leading exponent of the mutation-selection theory, really admits as much when he has to write as follows: We may reasonably suppose that other less obvious mutations are occurring which at least in certain surroundings or in certain genetic combinations might prove themselves to be beneficial. Notice those words, ‘suppose’, ‘might’, ‘at least’. How can Huxley claim that the hypothesis has now become a fact? Dobzhansky, another protagonist for the theory I am criticising, goes so far as to say: The genetic theory of evolution would be embarrassed if anyone were to observe the origin of a mutant superior to the ancestral type in the environment in which the latter normally live. I therefore assert that what we really know is that mutation is a pathological process, and we are only guessing when we say that it has ever been otherwise. Now consider the process of natural selection. The survival of the fittest. Undoubtedly at certain times and under certain circumstances such selection has occurred. And the study of the way in which form and function, structure and coloration, adapt an organism to the complexities of its environment is a fascinating study. But that all the immense variety spread out over the whole face of nature; that all this multiformity of shape and pattern and habit; that all this is due entirely to a process of natural selection – this seems to me to be the most far-fetched assumption. Indeed there are many cases where we can see patently that this could not be true. Once again I am borrowing largely from Professor Martin. He devotes a whole chapter to the universal phenomenon of the atrophy of disused organs. Such atrophy proceeds by steps too small for any of them to count as an advantage, and proceeds far beyond the point at which any process of selection could apply. Herbert Spencer was much intrigued by the size of a whale’s femur. Buried deep in the huge carcase of the whale is a tiny bone weighing about two ounces. It is the exact homologue of the femur, the largest bone in the mammalian skeleton. We know nothing about the process by which certain mammals reverted to a purely marine existence. The earliest skeletons of whales are found in the Oligocene formations,

312

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

and differ little from our present species. Before this period the geological record is completely silent. But suppose they are descended from animals that at one time had legs, and that as the legs became an encumbrance in their new aquatic environment, they gradually atrophied. It could surely make no difference to the survival of the whale if its femur weighed twenty ounces instead of two. The atrophy has proceeded far beyond the point where natural selection could apply. Exactly the same line of argument applies to the atrophy of the wings of flightless birds. On isolated oceanic islands flightless birds are found which belong unmistakably to species which elsewhere have the power to fly. If a bare incapacity to fly was what natural selection favoured (and it is difficult to see how such an incapacity could be an advantage) natural selection cannot explain an atrophy which has proceeded far beyond the capability to fly. Such considerations lead one on to consider the vexed question of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The mutation-selection theory seems to consider any such supposition as utterly unscientific. Since the time of Weissman it has been a scientific dogma that all inheritance must be transmitted through the germ cells; and as these are uninfluenced by any experience in the life history of an organism, no acquired characteristic can be inherited. But I can see no reason to believe that all inheritance must be via the germ cells. I see no reason why there should not be psychological factors in inheritance as well as physical. Why certain tendencies, habits, likes and dislikes, should not be directly inherited without being dependent on any material structure for that inheritance. Professor Martin has put this point so well that I would like to quote him. He writes: All living creatures form habits. They develop preferences in all their activities and these preferences are transmitted in a measure from generation to generation to generation. In this way biological races are formed. The distinguishing characteristics of these biological races are not simple modifications, that is individual characteristics, for they do not appear fully in the first generation placed in the environment concerned. They develop progressively in the course of several generations if the race continues to reside in the appropriate environment, and fade out in a similar way if a biological race is transferred to a different environment. What Professor Martin is here saying seems to me to be of the greatest importance. There is much factual evidence that all living creatures can inherit a psychological aptitude to develop with increasing ease a new habit. What is inherited is the ease in acquiring an acquired characteristic. Let me give you an example. For about one hundred years the wild Norway rat has been used in laboratory experiments. It has gradually become easier and easier to tame each new born generation. Richter describes the difference between the wild and laboratory rat in these words: The wild rat is fierce and aggressive, attacks at the least provocation, and is highly suspicious of everything in its environment. The domesticated rat is tame and gentle and will not bite unless actually injured.

The Danger of Words

313

Tameness is an acquired characteristic. But tameability is inherited. A rigid dichotomy of characteristics into those that are either genetically inherited or acquired during the life-time of the individual is inadequate to describe the facts. It is sheer dogmatism to assert that all inheritance must be transmitted through the genes of the germ cells: that psychological traits must be dependent on anatomical structure. Weissman’s theory is nothing but the old fallacy of epiphenomenalism dressed up as a piece of biological science. I would like to say, that the mind has genes of its own that the germ cells know nothing about. I have been illustrating the danger that arises when a scientific hypothesis takes to itself the airs and graces of a fact. It blinds us from seeing much that won’t fit into the hypothesis. But the second danger is more serious. An hypothesis which is taken for a fact easily assumes an ontological status apart from the data which gave it birth. It becomes a hidden reality behind phenomena. And so we get, in the case of our chosen example, Evolution spelt with a capital E. A recent book by a famous palaeontologist illustrates this confusion very well. I refer to De Chardin’s Phenomenon of man. In his Introduction to this book Julian Huxley tells us that De Chardin was delighted with the phrase ‘In modern scientific man evolution is at last becoming conscious of itself.’ The fundamental idea in the book, if I understand it rightly, is that the long centuries of evolution have at last produced a phenomenon ‘consciousness’ which is able to understand the process from which it has arisen. Julian Huxley regards this as such a profound conception that he sees in it the foundation of a new humanistic religion. Evolution having become conscious of itself can now plan its own future. But what a mix up of categories is here. Animal, vegetable, mineral, and – consciousness. Don’t you feel there is something wrong about a classification like this? Go back to first principles. Every scientific hypothesis depends on data. And, whatever instruments we use to obtain these data, they are in the end dependent on the use of our senses. There is nothing in science which was not first in the senses. The data of every natural science are data for consciousness. You cannot then bring consciousness in as one of the items of the hypothesis. The material used in the foundation cannot at the same time form the coping stone of the roof. Consciousness is not just one of the things we are conscious of. Look at it this way. I suppose we have all some time or other been fascinated by looking at one of those pictures of the world as it was, say, in the Carboniferous age, when the coal measures were laid down. Those strange tree-like ferns growing in the swampy deltas of the carboniferous rivers. And as we look at these pictures we almost seem to feel the warmth of those sub-tropical times, and hear the wind rustling that strange foliage, and smell the putrefaction of that marshy land, and to see the play of colours as the sunlight comes streaming down through the matted vegetation. But then at once those old familiar questions come crowding in. Were there any smells there when there was no nose to smell them? And were there any sounds there when there was no ear to hear them? And were there any colours there when there was no eye to see them? And if I now try to take refuge in a theory of primary and secondary qualities, then I am reminded of what I once read in the first chapter of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. For this

314

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

chapter showed me conclusively that such a theory cannot be taken as more than a working hypothesis. It is doubtless scientific to disregard certain aspects when we work; but to urge that such aspects are not fact, and that what we use without regard to them is an independent real thing – this is barbarous metaphysics. A pre-historic world which was only a re-arrangement of electrons and protons would be one that we could scarcely attach much meaning to, and it would have certainly lost all its imaginative compulsiveness. You see, what we picture when we construct in imagination the theory of geological evolution, is how the world would have looked to a mind capable of being a spectator of all time and all existence. So once again you can’t bring consciousness in right at the end and say that it itself is the product of evolution. We have in immediate experience our one sole contact with reality, and everywhere this immediate experience cries aloud that it is incomplete and fragmentary. Then we go on to construct in imagination the conception of an experience which would be more adequate, more satisfying. That is what every scientific hypothesis, apart from its practical usefulness, attempts to be. And in so far as such a process of inference does bring a greater sense of unity into our experience, it is so far legitimate. What is not legitimate is to think that the process of inference is at an end and the ideal is now reached. In the long run I would say that no purely spatial or temporal picture, no picture of the world consisting of a lot of things scattered about in space and time, can satisfy our demand for a final resting place. For every spatial and temporal picture goes to pieces completely at its edges. I keep coming back to the fundamental thought of this paper, the logical status of a scientific hypothesis. That it is always a transitory, incomplete affair. Never finished, final, factual. Every scientific hypothesis is always at the mercy of new evidence and may require indefinite modification in the light of this evidence. Somewhere between Athens and Marathon there is a great outcrop of Jurassic limestone. The surface of these rocks, so I am told, is studded with fossil shells and bones of the mesozoic period: the age of the great reptiles. Aristotle must have passed this place many times. Yet I believe I am correct in saying that nowhere in the biological writing of Aristotle is the existence of this place even mentioned. So much the worse for Aristotle you say. All right, so much the worse for Aristotle. But what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Considering the vast complexity of the matrix of nature, isn’t it certain that there is still much evidence, lying before our eyes and beneath our hands, which we have failed to notice as yet? And may not such evidence in the future transform our idea of nature as much as the new biology has transformed the Aristotelian concepts? The great thinkers of the Middle Ages are often criticised in popular works for their subservience to Aristotle. This of course is a gross historical over-simplification. But in so far as it is true, it represents a universal human tendency to take transitory concepts as final and absolute. Huxley and De Chardin, when they make the idea of evolution the basis of their philosophy, even of their religion, are making just the same error. Hypotheses, as Kant said, are contraband in philosophy.

The Danger of Words

315

I began this paper with Macaulay’s eulogy of natural science. Now at almost the same date that Macaulay was writing this essay a much greater European thinker, Kierkegaard, was writing in his journal this passage: There is no use in going in for natural science. There is no more terrible torture for a thinker than to have to live under the strain of having details constantly uncovered, so that it always looks as though the thought is about to appear, the conclusion. If the natural scientist does not feel that torture, he cannot be a thinker, a thinker is as it were in hell until he has found spiritual certainty. But not only is every scientific hypothesis at the mercy of new data. They all also contain an element of choice. The data we do have can always be interpreted in a number of ways. Consider again the evidence on which the mutation-selection theory of evolution is based: the geological formations and the fossil record. Hegel in his philosophy of nature puts forward the suggestion that the organic forms found in early geological strata never really lived. They are merely anticipations in stone of what was later to be clothed in living flesh and blood. Why do we reject such an hypothesis as foolish and jejune? It is not that we can produce some concrete piece of evidence that refutes it. We do not know that a Brontosaurus ever breathed or a pterodactyl ever flew. Hegel’s hypothesis accounts for all the data. We reject it for two reasons. First because of the way we have been educated. We have been brought up in the Darwinian tradition. Our popular books, our encyclopaedias, our natural history museums, have presented this one hypothesis as a fait accompli. It is an hypothesis that is now so familiar that it is mistaken for a fact. But secondly and more important, there is no doubt that the theory of evolution has an immense appeal to our imagination. This appeal is vividly shown by the fact that Tennyson was able to translate these ideas into poetry. There rolls the deep where grew the tree. Oh earth, what changes has thou seen! There where the long street roars, has been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. .  .  . ‘So careful of the type?’ but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go.’ .  .  . And he, shall he Who loved, who suffered countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just,

316

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills? Spengler claimed that the scientific world view which appeals to the late stages of a culture is closely connected with the architectural forms which inspired the spring time of that culture. The compact, symmetrical, perfectly proportioned Greek temple. And then an historian like Thucydides on the first page of his history saying: ‘Before our time nothing much of importance had happened in the world.’ So I find myself wondering whether the imaginative appeal, the sense of awe, with which some modern scientific hypotheses fascinate us, those infinite astronomical distances, those long corridors of time peopled with strange monsters, whether this fascination may not be related to the fact that not many generations ago our ancestors found their inspiration in Gothic architecture. Those tall spires reaching into the sky. Those long dark interior perspectives fading into obscurity, where the gargoyles peered out from the stones. Be that as it may. What I am in earnest about is this. Every scientific hypothesis is a transitory and to some extent arbitrary affair. It must never be allowed to solidify into a pseudo-fact. But why not? What harm is done? So it is time we got back to Justinian and the question Macaulay puts into his mouth. ‘What profitable truth has philosophy taught us that we should not equally have known without it? What has it taught us to do which we could not have equally done without it?’ I would like to think that Isidore replied in the true spirit of Socrates. Good sir, you mistake our purpose. We add nothing to the sum total of human cleverness and skill. Our function is otherwise. When the Delphic oracle told our father founder that he was the wisest man in Athens, he understood this to mean that he alone knew how little he understood. That still remains our function in society. To insist that people say only just as much as they really know; that when, as happens in every generation, new advances in knowledge are made, they are not taken to be more important than they really are. You ask what is the value of such scepticism, such agnosticism, such carping criticism? One value only. It keeps wonder secure. That sense of wonder that Samuel Johnson wrote of in these words: We all remember a time when nature gave delight which can now be found no longer, when the noise of a torrent, the rustle of a wood, had power to fill the attention and suspend all perception of the course of time. That sense of wonder that Wordsworth wrote of: There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,   The earth and every common sight,    To me did seem   Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream.

The Danger of Words

317

But remember how Wordsworth ends: Turn where so ere I may,   By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more. May I end then with a little parable? It is not really mine; it is taken from one of the novels of Charles Morgan. You are sitting in a room and it is dusk. Candles have been brought in that you may see to get on with the work in hand. Then you try to look up and out to the garden which lies beyond; and all you can see is the reflection of the candles in the window. To see the garden the candles must be shaded. Now that is what philosophy does. It prevents us from being dazzled by what we know. It is a form of thinking which ends by saying, don’t think – look.

CHAPTER 5

Madness and Religion SO what can a man do where he sees so clearly that what lies before him is not the whole plan? Answer: No more than work faithfully and actively on that part of the plan which lies before him. lichtenberg

During the last thirty years a remarkable change has taken place in the practice of psychiatry. When I was a medical student there was no known form of treatment for what are called the major psychoses, melancholia, mania, schizophrenia, paranoia. Patients suffering from these diseases were admitted to hospital and their physical well-being looked after, but their recovery from the disease itself was a matter that had to be left to time and chance. Even in the more fortunate cases this was usually a matter of months or years. Now for each one of these diseases we have a specific form of therapy: restraint and seclusion are things of the past, and duration of stay in hospital is measured in weeks rather than in months and years. To most people’s surprise these treatments have turned out to be physical and chemical in nature, and have not arisen from any deeper understanding of the psychological processes causing the symptoms manifested. The fact that a person’s mood and content of thought can be so profoundly and rapidly altered by the administration of a few pills or injections, or by an artificially induced convulsion, seems to me to raise important questions both in philosophy and ethics. These questions I do not find anywhere adequately discussed. For two reasons I think. Those who are using these treatments are so delighted to be able at last to do something positive and effective for their patients, that they have neither the time nor the training nor the inclination to raise questions about first principles and ultimate objectives. Whereas those who are trained to think dialectically have little opportunity to see the dramatic way these treatments work. I am therefore very grateful to you for giving me the chance to discuss my problems with you. I think the best way to begin would be to tell you in some detail about four case histories which I have taken from the records of the hospital where I work. I would emphasise that there is nothing very unusual about the first three cases. I am sure any busy mental hospital could produce similar ones. The fourth case is unusual but I have included it as it brings out one aspect of my problem very clearly. The first case I want to describe to you is that of a man aged fifty-four, a priest. We will call him Father A. This priest had for some years been directed by his Superior to conduct retreats, a type of work for which he was considered to have great gifts.

The Danger of Words

319

A few months prior to my seeing him he had begun to feel very depressed about his work, that he could not longer put any feeling into what he was preaching; that he was asking people to believe and do things which he himself had lost faith in. It was a great burden for him to say Mass or read his daily office. He felt that he ought never to have been ordained, that he had no vocation. When he visited his brother, a happily married man surrounded by his family, he felt that was the sort of life he was meant for. In addition he began to lose weight and to have very disturbed sleep, he would wake about three in the morning and lie awake till dawn worrying about his spiritual state. He developed a feeling of great tension and discomfort in the pit of his stomach. He could not eat. These symptoms led him to believe that he had cancer, to hope indeed that he had cancer and that he would soon be dead. He consulted a physician who advised admission to a general hospital for investigation. After the usual X-rays and biochemical tests had been done he was told that there was no evidence of any organic disease. But he felt no better for this information. It was at this stage a psychiatrist was called in, who diagnosed an involutional depression, and recommended admission to a mental hospital for treatment. So it was he came under my care. When I first saw him he was resentful and suspicious. His condition was a spiritual one, he stated, and no doctor could aid him. He had brought it on himself and must bear the blame for it. I concentrated on his insomnia and his abdominal pain and asked him to let me treat these symptoms, leaving the whole question of his spiritual state in abeyance for the time being. I gave him a course of what is known as electric convulsive therapy. It consists in giving the patient an anaesthetic and then passing a current of 150 volts for about one second through the frontal lobes of the brain. This causes a generalised epileptic-like convulsion which lasts about two minutes. Within fifteen minutes the patient is awake and fully conscious again. After the first treatment the pain in the abdomen had gone. He began to eat better, he needed less drugs to obtain a full night’s sleep. Within a week he came spontaneously to ask if he could say Mass again. By the time he had seven such treatments he stated he was feeling very well. He was sleeping soundly without any drugs and had gained ten pounds in weight. But this is what is significant: his spiritual problem had disappeared too. He was saying Mass every morning, and could read his daily office again with devotion. He felt ready to return to his work and to conduct retreats as before. This is what he is now doing, though his Superior has been advised to see that he has proper intervals of rest. A straightforward case of involutional melancholia properly treated, most of my colleagues would say. Why do I say that it raises important philosophical and ethical questions? Well, now listen to this piece of autobiography, written nearly a hundred years ago, by a man about the same age as Father A: I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It cannot be said that I wished to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a

320

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life. Behold me then a happy man in good health, hiding the rope in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest I yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun. I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped for something from it. All this took place at a time when so far as all my outward circumstances went I ought to have been completely happy. I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved, good children and a large property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I am sure that you feel with me the similarity between this man’s state of mind and that of Father A. And having seen several hundred such cases recover with the same treatment that I gave Father A, I cannot help concluding that had such treatment been available in those days this man’s two years of suffering could have been terminated in as many weeks. But would it have been right to do so? For the writer of that piece of autobiography was Count Leo Tolstoy. It occurs in a book which he calls My Conversion. The thoughts and convictions which eventually delivered him from this misery were to determine his whole future manner of life and writing. He says expressly that he was in good health, and I am sure that like Father A he would have resented any interference by a doctor. Again going back a little further in history; when I read some of the great spiritual directors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such writers as Fenelon and De Caussade, they seem to me to be writing sometimes to people in just such a state of mind as Father A or Tolstoy. They speak about states of aridity and dryness, of loss of the faith. Here for instance is Father Gratry describing his own experience of such a state: But what was perhaps more dreadful was that every idea of heaven was taken away from me. I could no longer conceive of anything of that sort. Heaven did not seem to me to be worth going to. It was like a vacuum, a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy or pleasure in inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, love, light, affection, all these words were now devoid of sense. Yet these spiritual directors universally teach that such states, these dark nights of the soul, are necessary stages in the growth of spiritual maturity. They are sent by God, and are to be accepted willingly and patiently; they are a proof that the soul has now passed the beginner’s stage of sensible consolation, and is being educated by suffering. But today it would seem a psychiatrist can treat such states of mind not out of the abundance of his spiritual wisdom and experience, but by mechanical and materialistic means: electrical stimuli to the brain, drugs which alter the biochemistry

The Danger of Words

321

of the nervous system. Such treatments can be given by some recently qualified young man to whom the spiritual agony of the patient is something quite outside his comprehension. That is why I say such a case as that of Father A raises for me philosophical and ethical problems. Can we differentiate between madness and religion? Can we say of one such state: ‘This is a mental illness and is the province of the psychiatrist? And of another: ‘This is a spiritual experience sent by God for the advancement of the soul and is the province of a wise director? My second case is that of Miss B, forty-three years of age, living in the west of Ireland and employed as the housekeeper by the parish priest. She was admitted to hospital in a state of elation and excitement. She had had a personal revelation from ‘the little flower’, St Therésè of Lisieux. This had occurred when she was visiting a holy well near her home. She had seen lights in the sky which conveyed a special message to her. She had been ordered to convert all the protestants in Ireland. In the ward she rushed across to preach to two non-catholic patients who are there. Some of the junior nurses wore a pink uniform. This was a sure proof that they were halfcommunists, and she would receive neither food nor medicine from their hands. She denied emphatically that her experiences were in any way due to an illness and resents being in a mental hospital. Her treatment consisted in a short course of electric convulsive therapy followed by the administration of large doses of a comparatively new chemical substance which has been found to control rapidly such states of exaltation. In three weeks’ time her behaviour and conversation were completely normal. She never referred spontaneously to her experiences and only seemed embarrassed when they were mentioned. But she was never willing to admit that it had all been a matter of illness. She was able to go into the city alone and always returned to hospital as requested. And now at the present moment I hope she is cooking Father Murphy’s supper among the quiet hills of County Mayo. Nowadays, seeing this patient’s state of mind, few people would hesitate to describe her as mentally ill. Certainly her parish priest who brought her to hospital had no doubts on the matter. But in previous ages and among simpler folk might she not have been regarded as indeed the recipient of a divine revelation? We were inclined to smile at her delusion about the nurses’ pink uniforms, but now listen to this: It was commanded by the Lord of a sudden to untie my shoes and put them off. I stood still for it was winter, but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me so I put off my shoes, and was commanded to give them to some shepherds who were nearby. The poor shepherds trembled and were astonished. Then I walked about a mile till I came into the town, and as soon as I was got within in the town, the word of the Lord came to me again to cry ‘Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield’. So I went up and down the streets crying with a loud voice, ‘Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield.’ And no man laid hands on me; but as I was thus crying through the streets there seemed to me a channel of blood flowing down the streets and the market place appeared to me like a pool of blood.

322

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

And so at last some friends and friendly people came to me and said, ‘Alack, George, where are thy shoes?’ I told them it was no matter. That was George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends. Madness or religion? My third case is this. Guard C was twenty-seven years of age, a policeman on motor-cycle patrol in the city of Dublin. One day his sergeant was horrified to see Guard C’s motor cycle propped up against some railings and the guard himself kneeling in prayer on the pavement. He was taken to hospital in a car and on arrival there was at first quite mute. He appeared to be listening intently to something coming from one corner of the ceiling. His lips moved silently as if in prayer. Later in the ward he stated that a voice from heaven had told him that he had been chosen by God to drive the English soldiers out of the Province of Ulster. He was to be made a commissioner in the Guards and after his death he would be canonised as a saint. Once again the treatment of this patient consisted in the administration of a powerful chemical substance both by mouth and by injection. Within six weeks he was able to admit that his ideas had been delusions due to illness, and after a proper period of convalescence he was able to return to duty. But in 1429 when Joan of Arc came to Vancouleurs she stated that the voices of St Michael and St Catherine had ordered her to drive the English soldiery from the fair Kingdom of France. Robert de Baudricourt gave her a horse and a suit of armour; and then – but we all know what happened then. My question is this. Supposing Robert de Baudricourt had been able to give Joan a stiff dose of phenothiazine instead of the panoply of a knight at arms, would she have returned in peace to the sheep herding at Domremy? The fourth and final case history is this. It came to my notice over fifteen years ago, when many of the methods of treatment we now have were not known. Mr D was sixty-seven years of age, a retired civil servant, a man of great piety who devoted his retirement to prayer and works of charity. His wife had no sympathy for what she regarded as a morbid religiousness. One morning at Mass he heard read the words of the Gospel: ‘Go and sell all that thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me.’ These words spoke to him like a command. And straightaway he left the church, putting all the money that was on him into the poor-box at the door. He set off to walk the 135 miles to Lough Derg, a famous place of pilgrimage in Ireland since earliest times. When he did not return for his breakfast and the morning passed without news of him, his wife became alarmed and notified the guards. Eventually that evening he was stopped by a policeman in a small village about thirty miles from Dublin. He was seen by a doctor and put on a Temporary Certificate for admission to a mental hospital. He made no protest at entering hospital, told his story clearly, and accepted what had happened as God’s will. I gave this man no treatment other than insisting that he had his breakfast in bed and allowed us to restore a rather emaciated frame. I learnt more from talking to him than he did listening to me. There was at first some difficulty in getting his wife to take him home. She was convinced that he suffered from a condition she called religious mania, but eventually after some weeks she agreed to his discharge.

The Danger of Words

323

But now go back a little over sixteen hundred years and to a church in Alexandria. Another man hears these same words read from the altar. And straightaway he goes out into the desert around Thebes and lives there until his death a life of heroic austerity. Soon thousands are to follow him; to form themselves into communities, to draw up a rule of life. It is the beginning of Christian Monasticism with all that it was to mean for European religion and culture. And so Anthony was canonised and Mr D was certified. Madness or Religion? But why should I be quoting from Fenelon and George Fox, from St Joan and St Anthony? I suppose no psychiatrist can read the Bible without sometimes hearing a disturbing echo of what he has just heard said to him on his ward round. Behold I was shapen in wickedness and in sin did my mother conceive me. Was this written by someone in a state of melancholia, and would a course of electroplexy have given him a more sanguine estimate of man’s estate? Thou makest my feet like hart’s feet and setteth me up on high. He teacheth my hands to fight and mine arms shall break even a bow of steel. I will follow upon mine enemies and overtake them, neither will I turn again until I have destroyed them. Was this written in a state of manic elation and was a sedative called for here? Thou art about my path and about my bed and spiest out all my ways. For lo there is not a word in my mouth but Thou knowest it altogether. Schizophrenics often complain that all their inmost thoughts are being read and controlled by some power outside themselves. The prophet Ezekiel, the most ecstatic and visionary of the prophetic writers, gives an account of a catatonic state with functional aphonia such as could be duplicated by reference to any standard textbook of psychiatry: But thou, son of man, lay thyself on thy left side and I shall lay the guilt of the house of Israel upon thee; the number of days that thou shalt lay upon it shalt thou bear their guilt. And behold I shall lay cords upon thee that thou shalt be unable to turn from one side to the other, till thou hast ended the days of thy boundness. And in three other passages occur the words: In that day shall thy mouth be opened and thou shalt speak and be no more dumb. ‘In the New Testament too the same problem is thrust upon us: And I heard behind me a great voice as of a trumpet speaking, saying: what thou hearest write in a book. Was the author of Revelations hallucinated? ‘Paul, thou art mad,’ said Festus, ‘thy great learning hast made thee mad.’ And did not the Pharisees, those religious experts, say of our Lord, ‘Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil?’

324

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Then there is that strange account in St Mark’s Gospel, which the other Evangelists omit: And when his friends heard of it they sought to lay hands on him, for they said he is beside himself. Most commentators agree that the friends mentioned here refer to his mother and his brethren who had been mentioned in the previous verse. So you see this problem of ours is one that can deceive even the very elect. I am sure that by now all sorts of possible answers to the problem have been coursing through your minds. Let us look at some of these answers and see will they do. One answer cuts the knot straightaway. For Freud there is no problem here. The distinction between the pathological and religious state of mind cannot be made because it does not exist. In his books Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Moses and Monotheism, Freud argues that it is obvious to anyone trained in psycho-analysis, that religious beliefs and practices are a racial neurosis. The conviction with which such beliefs are held without scientific evidence for them, is the same conviction with which a paranoic clings to his systematised delusion in spite of any proof. The strictness with which religious ceremonies are observed, is the same as that with which an obsessional carries out his profitless repetitions. I find this simple solution of Freud’s entirely unacceptable. Freud never comes to grips with the central problem of ethics. It is clear from reading his biography and personal letters that the man himself was more than his theory. He had a strong sense of duty, and a system of absolute values about which he was not prepared to compromise. A passion to find out the truth, a courage to stand against unpopularity and hostility, a love of nature and art, a lifelong devotion to his wife and children. There is an amusing but I think significant story which Ernest Jones records about Freud. At the time when the relations between Freud and Jung were almost at breaking point, Jung was still secretary of the psycho-analytical association. He sent Jones an announcement of the next meeting but made an error in the date, so that if Jones had not had other information he would have missed the meeting entirely. Jones knowing Freud’s interest in these slips of the pen and tongue showed the letter to him. But Freud was neither interested or amused. No gentleman, he said, ought to have an unconscious like that. Ought? Ought? Ought? What is that ought doing there on the lips of a psychoanalyst? Of course, we like Freud all the better for this human touch. You see, however much we may exclude oughtness from our theories, we cannot get it out of our lives. Oughtness is as much an original datum of consciousness as the starry vault above. Both should continue to fill us with constant amazement. Freud’s solution of our central problem is, for me, altogether too one-sided to satisfy. It omits entirely to take into account an essential aspect of life – our sense of duty – an aspect which is the very source of the problem itself. When is it right to treat this man as mad and when to say let be, let his spiritual growth proceed without meddlesome interference?

The Danger of Words

325

I mentioned the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, a moment ago. After his break with Freud, Jung developed a doctrine almost diametrically opposed to that of his former teacher. This is what he says in one of his later books: ‘Among my patients in the second half of life there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook.’ So once again the problem which I raised as to the criterion between madness and religion does not arise for Jung. Madness is religion which has not yet come to an understanding of itself. Madness is the protest of those unconscious needs and forces which the patient has not allowed to find any expression in his life. These unconscious needs are not sexual as Freud taught but religious: all that side of human nature which in the past has found expression in myths and cults and symbols. I must say that as a theoretical solution this appeals to me. My difficulty arises when I try to make use of it in practice. I would like to be able to cure my patients by discussion, advice, wise counsel, and from an understanding of their spiritual needs. But my experience has been that in all the serious disturbances of the mind such as find their way into a mental hospital, the word has lost its power. Take those first three cases I described to you. I do not know how anyone could talk Father A out of his depression; could convince Miss B that her vision was an hallucination; demonstrate to Guard C that his sense of mission was a delusion. Whereas I do know that by means of these physical methods of treatment I can at least restore them to their former equanimity and return them to their gainful occupations. It is precisely the limitations of these methods that I am debating with you. When to say, ‘This man is mad and we must put a stop to his raving,’ and when to say, ‘Touch not mine annointed and do my prophet no harm.’ One solution which for some time seemed to me to offer at least a practical solution of our problem was this. You remember that in the case of Father A there was a disturbance of his physical health. Pain, loss of appetite, loss of weight and insomnia. It was these symptoms that enabled me to get his consent to treatment. May we not say then that where there is an obvious failure of physical well-being then we may diagnose morbidity and not spirituality? But I now find that I must reject this source of distinction. For these bodily disturbances, though common, are not a constant feature in all mental illness. Besides, every psychiatrist knows that these are secondary phenomena. The crux of the matter is the emotional disturbance which has caused them. It is to this that the treatment is directed. Remove the depression, subdue the excitement, get rid of the hallucinations, and sleep and appetite and physical health are restored too. And then looking at this matter from the other side; the lives of the saints are not free from just these same disturbances of physical health. Von Hügel in his great two-volume study of St Catherine of Genoa has to devote a whole chapter to what he calls her psychophysical peculiarities. This is what he has to say: Now as to those temperamental and neural matters to which this chapter shall be devoted, the reader will no doubt have discovered long ago that it is precisely here that not a little of the ‘Life and Teaching’ is faded and withered beyond

326

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

recall, or has even become positively repulsive to us. The constant assumption and frequent explicit assertion on the part of nearly all the contributors, upon the immediate and separate significance, indeed the directly miraculous character of certain psycho-physical states; states which taken thus separately would now be inevitably classed as most explicable neural abnormalities. Thus when we read the views of nearly all her educated attendants that ‘her state was clearly understood to be supernatural when in so short a time a great change was seen and she became yellow all over, a manifest proof that her humanity was being entirely consumed in the fire of divine love’, we are necessarily disgusted. I have quoted Von Hügel at some length to emphasise that someone writing not from a medical but from a theological standpoint, finds this same problem requiring attention. The reason why we, looking back on history, are able to make the distinctions we do is because of what was achieved. After his conversion Tolstoy, both by his manner of life and his writings, exercised a profound influence on all Europe. George Fox was the founder of the Society of Friends and his influence is with us to this day. And Joan of Arc went forward with the royal banners to the crowning of her king at Rheims. So is it not true that by their fruits ye shall know them, and that it is in this that the distinction we have been looking for will be found? But we are surely treading on dangerous ground if we introduce results and success into the religious category, and make this our absolute criterion. What sort of results? What sort of success? Is failure and defeat always to be a condemnation? Let me put this matter quite concretely with a particular example. That great mathematical genius, Blaise Pascal, would almost certainly have preceded Newton and Leibniz in the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus, if it had not been for what happened on the night of Monday 23 November 1654. You remember his own description: From about half past ten to half after midnight,          fire God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and wise. Security, Security. Feeling, Joy, Peace. Forgetfulness of the world and of all save God. O righteous Father, the world has not known Thee, but I have known Thee. And so Pascal turned from his mathematical studies to write his defence of the Gospel. These fragments we now have in his Pensées. Those to whom the Pensées are a source of depth and wonder will see in them a proof of the authenticity of that night of pentecostal fire. But then I take up a recent history of mathematics in which the author bewails what he calls Pascal’s nervous breakdown on that fatal night – leading him to forsake his true genius for what this writer calls meaningless mysticism and platitudinous observations. So an attempt to find the distinction we have been looking for in the results achieved, once again fails us. For who is to be the judge of the results? When in philosophy you keep coming up against a dead end, such as we have so far, in our search for a principle of differentiation between madness and religion,

The Danger of Words

327

it is often because we are looking for the wrong type of answer. And this indeed is what I believe we have been doing in our search. For we were sitting back in a cool hour and attempting to solve this problem as a pure piece of theory. To be the detached, wise, external critic. We did not see ourselves and our own manner of life as intimately involved in the settlement of this question. Now there can indeed be experts and critics in all the arts and sciences, but their writ does not run in the realm of the religious. It is not possible to adopt a detached and purely theoretical attitude in these matters. It is not given to any man to be an honorary member of all religions. I suppose most thoughtful people have realised that sooner or later they may be afflicted with some painful, perhaps mortal, disease, and have considered how they hope to comport themselves under this trial. But to face clearly the possibility of a mental illness – that is both too terrible and too much an unknown to accept. That we, you and I, might one day have to be admitted to a mental hospital in a state of despairing melancholia, or foolish mania, might become deluded or hallucinated – that is a thought not easily to be entertained. We like to think that either our intelligence, or our will-power, or our piety, would save us from such a fate. I heard a sermon some time ago in which the preacher stated that the great increase in mental illness at the present time was due to the decay of faith. Anyone, he said, who had a firm belief in God would never suffer from nerves or a mental breakdown. Alas his premises were false and his conclusion erroneous. For just those qualities of personality in which we trust, which we regard as peculiarly our own for keeps, our intelligence, our will-power, our piety, these are all dependent on the proper functioning of a very complicated and delicate neuro-humoral mechanism over which we have no control. Some slight disturbance of an endocrine secretion, a hardening of some arterial wall, a failure of an enzyme to catalyse an essential chemical reaction, and all in which we have put our trust is gone. Our sanity is at the mercy of a molecule. So now if we really face these facts squarely the whole problem we have been debating changes, we find ourselves closely involved. The problem now is not how as external observers we are to distinguish between madness and religion, but how are we to reconcile the existence of madness, and the ever present threat of madness, with our religious convictions and beliefs. And then the answer is not far to seek. For it has always been a central doctrine in. Christian ethics that the greatest danger to man as a spiritual being does not come from the animal side of his nature, his lusts and passions or even their perversion, but comes precisely from those qualities which distinguish him from the brute creation, his intelligence and efficiency. Pride, self-sufficiency, smugness, ‘Lord I thank Thee that I am not as other men are’, it is these sins that are utterly stultifying and soul destroying. Towards the end of his life Kierkegaard wrote in his Journal these words: Sometimes in moments of despondency it strikes me that Christ was not tried in the suffering of illness, at least not in the most painful of all where the psychological and the physical touch each other dialectically, and consequently as

328

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

though his life was easier in that respect. But then I say to myself: Do you think if you were perfectly healthy, you would easily or more easily become perfect? On the contrary you would give in all the more easily to your passions, to pride if no other, to an enormously heightened self sufficiency. To lead a really spiritual life while physically and psychologically healthy is altogether impossible. One’s sense of well being runs away with one. If one suffers every day, if one is so frail that the thought of death is quite naturally and immediately to hand, then it is just possible to succeed a little; to be conscious that one needs God. Good health, an immediate sense of well being, is a far greater danger than riches, power, and position. Simone Weil had the same thought too. She writes: To acknowledge the reality of affliction means saying to oneself: I may lose at any moment through the play of circumstance over which I have no control anything whatsoever I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself. There is nothing that I might not lose. It could happen at any moment that what I am might be abolished and be replaced by anything whatsoever of the filthiest and most contemptible sort. To be aware of this in the depths of one’s soul is to experience non-being. It is the state of extreme and total humiliation which is also the condition for passing over into truth. It is a common prejudice, and one hard to get free from, that a mental illness in a degradation of the total personality; that it renders the sufferer to some degree subhuman. Thus many people would feel that if Tolstoy really suffered from melancholia his challenge to our whole western way of life would be largely blunted and nullified. And if Joan of Arc was a schizophrenic she could not at the same time be a saint. But these are prejudices. A mental illness may indeed utterly disable the patient for the daily commerce of social life, but the terrifying loneliness of such an experience may make him more aware of the mysteriousness of our present being. A short time ago I was called to see a patient who had just been admitted to hospital for the fifth time. When I came to her she was sitting up in bed reading her Bible with the tears streaming down her face. I thought to myself, this woman understands that book better than I do, or indeed many a learned theologian. ‘They that are whole need not a physician but they that are sick.’ Many years ago Ludwig Wittgenstein asked me if I could arrange for him to have conversations with some mental patients. Of one of them, a certified and chronic inmate of the institution, he observed, ‘I find this man much more intelligent than any of his doctors.’ There was an old pagan saying, ‘Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat.’ Perhaps we should baptise that saying. ‘Sometimes those whom God intends to save he first has to make mad.’ Every death-bed can be a religious experience both for him who is dying and for those who had loved him and watch beside him. Every mental illness can be a religious experience both for him who is afflicted and for those that loved him.

The Danger of Words

329

Conversely every religious belief and practice where it is deep and sincere is madness to those who trust in themselves and despise others. That distinction we spent so much time looking for was nothing but a will-o’-the-wisp. But then what about those mechanical methods of treatment I mentioned at the commencement? Are they not sometimes at least a gross interference with what should be left to the wisdom of God? Are we always right to use them? Of course we are. A doctor who tries to prolong life and ease the pains of the dying in no way detracts from the majesty and significance of death. A doctor who attempts to shorten and relieve the suffering of the mentally ill in no way diminishes the lesson of madness. If we are to take the doctrine of the creed seriously, ‘by whom all things were made’, then we must accept that madness in all its horror is as much part of God’s creation as the tubercle bacillus and the cancer cell. We do not know why these things should be, and if we did they would not be what they are. We are right to fight against them with all the energy and all the weapons that we have. For this energy and these weapons are also part of His creation. But this we must never forget, good physical health, good mental health are not the absolute good for man. These can be lost and yet nothing be lost. The absolute good, the goal and final end of, our being is in heaven and not here; and all earthly things as though they get us but thither. And so to all of us, in sickness or in health, in sanity or in madness, in the vigour of youth or in the decrepitude of senility, God speaks these words which He spoke once to St Augustine. Currite, ego feram, et ego perducam, et ibi ego feram. Run on, I will carry you, I will bring you to the end of your journey and there also will I carry you.

Review of Danger of Words by Ilham Dilman PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHIATRY I offer the following as reflections on Dr Drury’s The Danger of Words, a book which I found both thought provoking and moving. My primary concern is to bring out what I find important in it. There is something inappropriate about trying to put into words what lies at the core of this lucid little book. Drury calls in ‘The Danger of Words’ and in its Preface he says something about the orientation which Wittgenstein gave to his outlook. He mentions Wittgenstein’s words in the Tractatus that ‘there are things which cannot be put into words’ and his comment to Ficker that the point of the Tractatus is an ethical one, its most important part consisting of what is not said in it. This is largely true of Drury’s book as well. The words from Simone Weil on the title page may be translated as follows: ‘We know by means of the intelligence that what cannot be grasped by the intelligence is more real than what can be grasped by it.’ For Drury the most important thing that philosophy does is to prevent us from being dazzled by what we know. (DoW, p. 317) The book is mainly concerned to prevent us from being dazzled by scientific knowledge and to criticize its pretentions. But what does being dazzled mean? As we read the book we see that it means several things: having an exaggerated sense of what we know, being confused about its logical limits, and ethically deluded about its significance. The five lectures that make up the book aim to restore a sense of proportion and to make us aware of the limits beyond which curiosity becomes idle. Drury sees this as the most important task of philosophy. It can do no more for us; we should not be dazzled by its light either. Where philosophical work can show our curiosity to be misplaced and a symptom of confusion it can clear the way for wonder and an attitude of reverence. I say ‘clear the way’ deliberately; for it can neither argue in favour of such an attitude, nor justify it. Here is a limit to philosophy. To draw attention to these limit, is important just because ‘it makes wonder secure’. (pp. 299; 316) It could be said that scientific inquiry tries to satisfy our thirst for knowledge. Philosophical inquiry, on the other hand, exposes confusion and pretentiousness, and clears the way for a response which it cannot beget one which is outside the province of its jurisdiction, though it can ‘make it secure’ through a clear view of the limits of what could erode it. In Drury’s lectures this response finds its clearest and most moving expression in the last four pages of his book. In the subtle way in which he works towards it Drury has helped me to see, batter than I did before, a new dimension to Wittgenstein’s distinction in the Tractatus between what can be said and what can only be shown, a new dimension to the way this distinction operates in his later writings.

REVIEW OF DANGER OF WORDS BY ILHAM DILMAN

331

1. Drury on Wittgenstein. I believe, in fact, that the short Preface to this book is a real contribution to the study of Wittgenstein. For in it, as well as by his example in the rest of the book, Drury shows us something fresh about the spirit in which Wittgenstein approached philosophy and what he hoped from its study. He emphasizes and illustrates three conceptions that go deep with Wittgenstein and are interconnected in his philosophy, three conceptions that link together his philosophical problems and his ethical attitude to life: ‘saying something clearly’, ‘putting a full-stop to a kind of theorizing: and “making wonder secure”’. Drury says something important about all three in the Preface and also puts them to work in the rest of the book. He quotes a remark that Wittgenstein made to him: ‘My fundamental idea came to me very early in life.’ Among these he mentions some from the Tractatus: ‘Philosophy will signify what cannot be said by presenting clearly what can be said.’ He tells us of Wittgenstein’s remark to Sraffa that he felt like a tree with all its branches lopped off and emphasizes that Wittgenstein meant ‘branches’. The roots and the main trunk, that is his fundamental ideas, remained unchanged. He suggests that Philosophical Investigations should be read in the light of these fundamental ideas. He mentions two remarks Wittgenstein made to him at the time when he was working on the manuscript of the Investigations: ‘I am not a religious man, but I can’t help seeing everything from a religious point of view’ and ‘It is impossible for me to say one word in my book about all that music has meant in my life; how then can I possibly make myself understood?’ I don’t think that most people have understood him. Many who discuss problems in the Investigations and who are even influenced by Wittgenstein remain unreceptive to the spirit of his work. In this Drury differs profoundly from them. Philosophy has become a reputed profession whose material as well as instruments consist largely of words, a profession the exercise of which often takes the form of hair-splitting arguments. For one who belongs to such a profession it is easy to misunderstand what Drury means by ‘the danger of words’, difficult to appreciate what Wittgenstein must have meant when he urged Drury to turn to the study of medicine but on no account to ‘give up thinking’. (p. 255) How Wittgenstein hoped Drury to make use in psychiatry of what he had learned from his study of philosophy is well exemplified in this book. One could say that what is in question is not something that philosophy teaches directly. When Drury speaks about ‘the danger of words’ he is not thinking primarily of their slipperiness, their ambiguity, the way they can override distinctions or obscure similarities. An awareness of these dangers is important and part of every philosopher’s trade. (See especially J. L. Austin.) But more important still is the realization that while there is a time and place for words, there is also a time and place for silence. If, in one way or another, we feel pressed to reach out for words where we should be silent, we shall stifle those spiritual qualities in us without which the intellect itself becomes shallow. A philosopher especially has to keep this danger in mind – just because he trades in words. Thus when in the Tractatus Wittgenstein distinguished between what can be said and what can only be shown, he was concerned not only with certain confusions about logical propositions and how they

332

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

run into almost all our philosophical questions, but also with the role of philosophy in clearing the way for an ethical-religious response to life. It is well known that Wittgenstein thought of philosophy as concerned primarily with conceptual confusion, aiming at clarification. It is not always appreciated that the clarity aimed at is not something we once had and lost, but something we cannot have without philosophical criticism. It is equally not always appreciated that the clarity strived for is not a means to anything but an end in itself. ‘If you can see the way ahead clearly, then you will succeed in avoiding its pitfalls’: it is not this way in philosophy. One could say that philosophy has no application; which is not to say that it can bear no fruits in different connections. ‘If you can surmount these difficulties, you will be able to go ahead unhampered’: it is not this way either. For the insight to be obtained in philosophy lies in the struggle with difficulties. We do not overcome these in order to get somewhere. Where we want to go is where we already are, and so where we must stay – with the difficulties. In the Foreword to Philosophische Bemerkungen Wittgenstein puts this in terms of a contrast between the spirit in which his book is written and one that characterizes Western civilization, with its emphasis on progress: This spirit expresses itself in building increasingly big and complicated structures; the other one is striving for clarity and transparency of any structures whatsoever. The one spirit tries to grasp the world through its periphery, in its manifold, the other in its centre, in its essence. Therefore the one adds one product to the other, climbs, as it were, incessantly from step to step, whereas the other stays where it is and always tries to grasp the same. (italics mine) It is well known that Wittgenstein thought of philosophy as concerned to study the logical limits beyond which we cannot go on with our judgments, in the same way, without coming up with nonsense. (see Investigations sec.119) It can thus save us from confusion and even pretentiousness. But it is not as well appreciated that he thought that philosophical reflection can make room for a different kind of response to life than the one that comes most readily to us. For instance, in The Golden Bough Frazer thought of the practices and ceremonies he described as mediated by mistaken scientific beliefs, as the expression of error and superstition; and some recent philosophers have thought of our own religious practices and ideas as equally mistaken and confused. Wittgenstein pointed out that one sees them this way because one is making the wrong kind of comparison, because one is thinking of religious beliefs too much as scientific theories. As such it is quite true that they would be erroneous, if not logically incoherent: ‘If this is religion, then it’s all superstition.’ (Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. by C. Barrett, Blackwell 1966 p.39) There are indeed limits to the scientific response, but it is not true that these constitute a limit to human understanding. Behind the failure to appreciate this lies not only a narrowness of comparison, but also a ‘narrowness of spiritual life’.1 Its roots go deep in the culture of a society like ones dedicated to science. The kind of philosophical work which will broaden our basis of comparison here may thus not only enable us to see something in the religious beliefs and practices we thought were misguided,

REVIEW OF DANGER OF WORDS BY ILHAM DILMAN

333

but also to see in them something worthy of respect – which is not the same thing as becoming a believer oneself. In this way philosophy will have freed in us a deeper response to life – insofar as the behaviour of other human beings is one of the most important aspects of the environment in which we live. It will have made it possible for us to take seriously the questions and perplexities which religious believers face and respond to as individuals. It will thus have played a part in changing our attitude towards the human beings around us and those aspects of their life we had misunderstood and dismissed, so that we can learn from them. This is one way in which philosophy can enrich not only our conception of things but also our lives. Through the kind of criticism peculiar to it philosophy can thus combat not only confusion but also shallowness. In his book Drury combats such shallowness in psychiatry on many fronts. I wish to consider three of these and then finish with some questions. 2. Science and Psychology. In chapter 2 Drury considers what the study of psychology has become in an age obsessed with scientific knowledge and material progress, the shallowness of its hopes and aspirations for the future, and the poverty of the understanding it offers us of ourselves. The questions he discusses and the assumptions he challenges are both logical and ethical. One of these questions is: What is knowledge of human beings and can it be acquired by experimental methods? It is a wide spread assumption among psychologists – and Drury substantiates this with a variety of apt quotations that ‘precisely the same method which has proved so powerful in the physical sciences will be applicable to every other investigation’ (p. 276), and so equally to psychological investigation. This will enable psychologists to replace speculation with precise and testable results. It will make it possible for them to deal more efficiently with the problems of maladjustment difficulties in learning at school, unhappiness in human relationships in the context of the family, courtship, work, etc. In this way it will reduce human misery in these areas of human life. Psychology is a science that is only in its infancy, but it can realize these ambitions in the future by pursuing the ideals of the experimental sciences. The idea is that a great deal of the misery which has plagued human beings until the present is avoidable and is the result of ignorance. Drury points out that this disregards the reality of evil as a positive force in human life – the sense in which anger, hatred, pride, greed, envy, callousness, and the diverse ways in which they work in human affairs in opposition to love, gratitude and generosity, are part of the very tissue of human life. A psychology which ignores this becomes shallow. Freud did not ignore it; he recognized that some human miseries are ‘unavoidable’. (Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, London 1949, p. 320) Drury says that he ‘showed real profundity when he stated that the aim of psycho-analysis was to replace neurotic unhappiness by normal unhappiness’. (p. 271) Intertwined with this idea that most of the evils that beset men come from ignorance is the idea that all problems are amenable to scientific methods and are soluble. This ignores the variety in the kinds of question we ask, the logical diversity among the problems that arise in human life. It is well known that Wittgenstein emphasized these differences. He would have said that we mean many different

334

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

things when we speak of ‘asking a question’ or ‘facing a problem’. If we can see that some problems are insoluble, that some mental and spiritual suffering is unavoidable, we may come free of the shallow optimism engendered in part by the pretentions of science and find a different way of meeting them – bear them with patience and not evade the lesson we can learn from their inevitability. As Simone Weil puts it: If the soul is set in the direction of love, the more we contemplate the necessity, the more closely we press its metallic cold and hardness directly to our very flesh, the nearer we approach to the beauty of the world. That is what Job experienced. (Waiting on God, Fontana books, p. 131) To return to the question of psychological understanding and experimental methods. Drury does not deny that there are questions about human beings and their behaviour, questions which belong to psychology, that are amenable to experimental study. Nor does he belittle their importance. But he denies that psychology is confined to such questions. He also denies that psychologists will eventually succeed in so perfecting their experimental techniques as to answer, by their means, all or even the most important of the questions we ask about human beings. This is the idea that psychology is ‘a young science’. (see Investigations II, xiv). A psychology which confines itself to questions that are amenable to experimentation is ‘barren’, for it steers clear of the questions we are most interested in as human beings, those that are ‘original’ to psychology. (p. 278) One which believes that these latter questions can and will one day become subject to experimental study is ‘confused’ and shows ‘a thoughtless attitude to the deeper problems of life’. (p. 281) To discuss these confusions would require more than a chapter in a book. Drury concentrates on our interest in understanding individual people in their uniqueness. Physics, in contrast, is interested in common properties. As Drury argues, to be told or know the common characteristics of a person is very different from the kind of understanding we can gather from contact and conversation with him. We come to know a person very largely by talking with him, eliciting a response from him in what we say, ask or do, to which we ourselves respond. This, in turn, presupposes an understanding we share with him, a common understanding we have by virtue of the many activities in which we take part, those aspects of the culture of our society to which we both belong. This way of coming to know a person and responding to him is very different from observing something. In any case, there are different kinds of observation, observations mediated by different styles of question. Thus contrast a bird watcher, for instance, the kind of observations he is interested in, what he does with them, or a mother observing her child playing, and a scientist observing what happens during an experiment. An experiment is something you can repeat. The environment in which an experiment is repeated is tightly controlled; it must remain the same if it is to be possible to compare the results. What is included in or excluded from this environment makes a causal difference to the result obtained. But it does not affect how the result is to be characterized. The same result is conceivable in different circumstances even if, as a matter of fact, it proves unobtainable. With what psychology is interested in it

REVIEW OF DANGER OF WORDS BY ILHAM DILMAN

335

is mostly otherwise. The remark that a man utters, for instance, will have a different significance in different circumstances; in different surroundings the same gesture, movement or even action will manifest very different feelings, qualities of mind or character. Here we have a serious logical limit to experimentation in psychology. The logical dependence on the surroundings: this applies to most of what interests us in people. Thus given the restricted conditions necessary for experimental investigation and you have excluded much of this. On the other side of the coin, most of the states and qualities that interest us in human beings have diverse manifestations. Drury asks us to consider ‘the numerous words that we need [and use] to describe all the facets of personality’. (p. 280) Any one of these words, Wittgenstein would say, covers ‘many manifestations of life’ and the phenomena which constitute these manifestations are ‘widely scattered’. (Zettel, sec.110) There is nothing to be abstracted from them all – whether it be the diverse manifestations of love or intelligence – which constitutes the essential nature of these things. If we abstract or construct such an essence in the hope of creating a foothold for introducing scientific methods in the field of psychology we leave out much that is of vital interest to us. Drury illustrates this well in connection with the measurement of intelligence in his story of the man who displayed much native intelligence as ‘rodent operator’ when intelligence tests had shown that ‘his mental age was that of a boy of twelve and a half’. (p. 277) We could say that what we call ‘intelligence’ has many different manifestations, it takes many different forms. In the case of what we mean by ‘learning’ we can, go even further, though we cross no sharp line on the way, and say that we mean many different things by ‘learning’. So Drury criticizes the whole attempt of scientific psychologists ‘to establish one unified theory of learning’. (p. 283) The emotions, feelings, states of mind and qualities of character about which one would expect psychology to have something to say cannot thus be abstracted for scientific treatment from the surroundings of the life which individual people live. Not only are their manifestations very diverse and ‘scattered’, but they are also to some extent subject to the individual’s will. Thus a man may reveal his feelings, or hide from others his thoughts, intentions and states of mind. In this the fact that he speaks a language, can tell us things about himself, as well as lie to us, is of primary importance. It does not seem to me that experimental psychologists have sufficiently pondered on the significance of this fact. Furthermore those qualities of mind and character which go deepest in people’s lives and which we most admire in them are not those which they wear on their sleeves. As Drury puts it: ‘It is hidden inwardness that is the rock over which a scientific and objective psychology will always come to grief.’ (p. 280) You cannot reflect on these or say anything worth while about them without making value judgments. This is beautifully illustrated in Simone Weil’s letter to a pupil from which Drury quotes. (pp. 278–9) What she says there contains ‘profound psychological insight and not only for the particular individual and her immediate state, but also and perhaps even more so, for us living at the present time thirty five years after it was written’. (p. 278) Yet though it has this kind of generality it has not been arrived at by observation

336

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

and generalization. It comes from personal experience, suffering and reflection. The judgment and discernment she shows in her comparison between those who live for sensations and those who labour and create, in the way she connects this with what she says about love – that it is not something to be played with but a ‘serious affair’, something that one should not shun, though ‘one should not go out of one’s way to try and find it, especially so when you are very young’ – could not have been developed in any psychological laboratory. (see Investigations p. 227) There is something wrong-headed and wrong-hearted in the idea of expertise here. For expertise implies special knowledge and skills in operating certain techniques. Besides the knowledge of an expert is something that can be detached from his personality. Whereas the kind of insight and judgment in question demands humility. A brilliant engineer, for instance, could be smug and conceited. But in a psychiatrist these qualities would make for superficiality in understanding. This is not a purely contingent matter. (‘Perhaps we would be better psychiatrists if we felt this more – out of our depth.’ p. 282) The kind of understanding that is central to the psychology which Drury contrasts with academic, experimental psychology, and which he finds in great novelists like Tolstoy and George Eliot, is thus inconceivable without a certain kind of ethical attitude to life and suffering – one which has humility at its centre. This is connected with the earlier point that no deep ‘knowledge of mankind’ can be acquired in the laboratory, by a detached observer, but demands a personal response to life, mediated by suffering and reflection. A psychology which excludes the enormous part which such big ethical questions as those about the meaning of life, human destiny, crime and punishment, have ‘played and continue to play in the life of the mind would be but a pale abstraction from the real life of the individual’. (p. 284) A man who avoids reflecting on these questions, or one who is not interested in them, can only be a superficial psychologist. So Drury thinks that the divorce between psychology and philosophy has impoverished the study of psychology in universities. (p. 284) What he says here about the contribution of philosophy to the study of psychology throws light on Wittgenstein’s advice to Drury to study medicine but on no account to give up thinking. This contribution could be three-fold: (i) To make her alive to the deep conceptual questions about the character of our knowledge of human beings, and to keep her on her guard against attractive but misleading assimilations between different forms of questions and studies. (ii) To make her critical of her own present hopes and aspirations, aware of their roots in the preoccupations and prejudices that make up the intellectual climate of the day. (iii) To interest her in the ‘great questions’ about life which in one way or another formed part of the heritage of philosophy. I should like to add, however, that the forces which threaten to submerge psychology are as much a threat to philosophy and the universities in which it is studied. Philosophy too is in danger of becoming ‘barren’, ‘narrow’, ‘academic’ and an ‘expertise’. It has already lost touch with the ‘great questions’ Drury mentions – at least to some extent. The kind of criticism of the hopes and aspirations that form part of the intellectual climate in which we do our philosophical thinking is regarded by most contemporary philosophers in this country as falling outside the province

REVIEW OF DANGER OF WORDS BY ILHAM DILMAN

337

of philosophy for not being sufficiently neutral and dispassionate. But this needs careful consideration. Drury believes that ‘experimental psychology has made and will continue to make very significant contributions to the study of neuro-physiology’. (p. 285) I do not feel competent to comment on this. But some of the questions he raises at the end of chapter 2, especially the question of whether all human behaviour is physiologically determined, connect with the questions he considers in the next chapter. 3. Medicine and Psychiatry. At the end of chapter 2 he gives a reductio ad absurdum of one form of materialism, namely epiphenomenalism: ‘Why should there not be some areas of behaviour which just have no neurological counterpart?’ A scientist who wants to deny this makes nonsense of everything he wishes to maintain, including this particular view: ‘The very possibility of speech, of intelligent discourse, of well reasoned books, depends on the certainty that a very large and important part of mental life is not determined and is not correlated with specific neural function.’ (p. 286) His opposition in chapter 4 to Weissman’s theory that all inheritance must be transmitted through the genes of the germ cells, so that all psychological traits are dependent on anatomical structure, is part of the same fight: ‘Weissman’s theory is nothing but the old fallacy of epi-phenomenalism dressed up as a piece of biological science.’ (p. 313) Chapter 3 is entitled ‘Concerning Body and Mind’. At the outset Drury states his conviction that a consideration of the philosophical problems he wishes to raise are important for psychiatry. Since here the philosophical prejudices which impinge on the psychiatrist’s thinking will play a part in his approach to psychotherapy, philosophical reflection on those problems will make a difference to his conduct as a psychiatrist. It will or may make a difference (i) to his estimation of the methods of treatment he favours, and (ii) to his ethical attitude to mental illness. If a psychiatrist is inclined to think that all mental disorders are physiologically conditioned, then he will tend to favour physical methods of treatment. Drury’s position on this question is rather complex. While he thinks that psychology has a greater affinity to the arts than to the sciences, he believes that psychopathology falls within the province of medicine. We have seen that in chapter 2 he criticizes the view of psychology as a young science. He nevertheless takes this view of psychiatry. In chapter 1 he makes some comparison between the present state of psychiatry and the early days of chemistry and medicine. It seems to me that behind this lies too sharp a separation between normal and abnormal psychology. I shall return to this in section 5B below. His view seems to be that while the hope that ‘in the future a truly scientific psychology will enable us to control the vagaries of the human mind to the same extent that the physical sciences have given us power over our material environment’ is an illusion (p. 274), a similar hope is not unjustified in the field of psychopathology: ‘We have been discovering these last thirty years to what extent these disorders can be cured by purely physical methods of treatment.’ (p. 304) Still a psychiatrist should be on his guard against this success going to his head: ‘the very success of these methods are to some degree a danger to those who employ them.’ (p. 304) For it may make the psychiatrist forget that those he applies these methods to are human beings. In other words this very success may work against the

338

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

ethical attitude which Drury believes to be so important in the treatment of mental illness. It is this which Drury has in mind when he speaks of the ‘limitations of these methods’. (p. 325) He is not thinking of their effectiveness, or the scope of their application in psychiatry. To return to Drury’s treatment of the question about ‘body and mind’. He argues that the view that all human behaviour and ‘mental phenomena’ are physiologically determined is incoherent and comes from confusion. The mind is not completely dependent on the brain; there is a very large and important part of mental life that is not so dependent.. Drury has in mind the contrast between thinking, reasoning, deciding, talking, seeing, etc., and ‘the disastrous effects that organic disease of the brain can produce both on the intellect and character’. (p. 289) Obviously he doesn’t wish to claim that normal thinking and perception can take place in the absence of the brain and the nervous system: ‘Just those qualities of personality in which we trust, which we regard as peculiarly our own for keeps, our intelligence, our will-power, our piety, these are all dependent on the proper functioning of a very complicated and delicate neuro-humoral mechanism over which we have no control.’ (p. 327) Dependent on, yes, but not determined by. What he wishes to deny is that these things can be causally explained in terms of processes in the brain. But in that case how are they related to the physiological processes in the body? Drury concentrates mainly on the case of normal perception. The gist of his argument is as follows: We are tempted to think of seeing, for instance, as a process which begins with light rays from an object coming through the pupil of the eye, through the lens and on to the retina, and which ends by our seeing the object. This last step in the series of events in question consists of our having a visual impression of the object. We have no difficulty in understanding how each part of this process leads to the other until we come to the last step. For the visual impression which we finally have or experience is a mental state, while its immediate predecessor is some electrical activity in the brain – a physical state. The question is: How are these two connected? Drury argues that this particular question, and many others like it – eg. How does cerebral activity give rise to consciousness, or to thoughts in the mind? – come from confusion. There is something wrong about the way we have set up the problem. If we think of seeing as the final step in a chain of events in the body, and if we then think of it as a private sense-datum, we are in for difficulties that are insurmountable. This whole way of thinking, therefore, needs careful scrutiny. Drury argues that hallucinations, for instance, constitute a special case which can only be understood in relation to normal cases of perception. In the normal case what we see is the object before our eyes and not a visual impression, a sense-datum, from which we infer its existence and what it is like. There is no question, therefore, of explaining how a process which originates with the reflection of light from an object before our eyes ends with an impression ‘in the mind’, the having of which constitutes seeing the object. While it makes sense to ask how it is that a man comes to see hallucinations, and the answer may be in terms of the effects of too much alcohol in the blood, or some permanent damage in the brain, it does not make sense to ask how a man sees what is in front of his eyes. Unless we could take this and

REVIEW OF DANGER OF WORDS BY ILHAM DILMAN

339

much else like it as not needing explanation we could not explain anything – not, for instance, how an hallucination occurs. There are two points here, though it is the second one which Drury particularly emphasizes: (i) that what we see directly and immediately when we look at an object in front of our eyes is not a private sensedatum, something mental, but the object itself, and (ii) that it makes no sense to ask for an explanation of seeing what is before our eyes, as it does to ask ‘why does he see pink rats?’. The question of the relation between the mind and the body raises some further difficulties in the case of thinking. For while what I see when I look at an object is the object itself and not a private sense-datum that needs accounting, I can think of an object in its absence and even after it has been destroyed. Hence my thoughts are distinct from what I am thinking about. Here the question arises: what are they? what is a thought? And one cannot discuss the question of how the body and mind are related in the case of thinking without raising this question. Drury does not discuss it; but his point that it makes no sense to ask for an explanation of seeing applies equally to thinking. Wittgenstein said that there are certain things that we have to accept as given and that it would be a confusion to seek an explanation of them. In this connection he mentioned certain features of our behaviour that characterize our ways of living and which lie at the foundations of much of what we do. When he said that the philosopher ‘must do away with all explanation’ (Investigations sec.109) he was thinking of such facts about us, for instance, as that the kind of instruction we receive in the use of words leads us to use them in an enormous variety of connections, far exceeding those which were actually mentioned or illustrated in those instructions, and that to a large extent we agree in our use of them. The philosopher’s task is to bring such facts into focus and show their importance, not to explain them. Any explanation offered will turn out to be circular, empty or fictitious. There are many such facts about us. For instance, that we learn from experience. This is one fact, among many others, which underlies the possibility of our thinking and reasoning at all. But it does not distinguish us from animals as the previous one does. What does distinguish us from them is the whole network of activities in which beliefs, so based on experience, and not arrived at by reasoning, have a special position – such activities as collecting evidence, setting up and carrying out experiments drawing inferences, evaluating them, distinguishing between well-grounded beliefs and unsound ones, activities which could not have developed apart from the use of language and which, in turn, play important roles in our lives and make a difference to a great deal of what we say and do. Thinking is something that appears in these activities and many others, and it is made possible, as language is too, by such important facts about us which Wittgenstein invites us to note and describe. These facts do not explain why we think; they help us to understand all that goes into thinking and underlies its possibility. Nor does it make sense to try to explain them. We become aware of such important facts ‘if we suppress the question “why?”; and then in the course of our investigations these facts lead us to an answer’. (Investigations sec. 471) The same applies to seeing, hearing, remembering – though Drury does not pursue the questions to which noting such facts would lead us to an answer – for

340

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

instance: What constitutes the difference between a dog who sees what is before him and a camera which produces a picture of it? Is there something present in the one case and not in the other which is the seeing – say, a mental picture in the case of the dog? What is the difference between a man who remembers and a machine from which you learn some information stored in its ‘memory’? If there is a difference, as surely there is, is it to be found in a ‘mental process’ which constitutes remembering? If this is looking for the difference, and so for what it means to remember, in the wrong dimension, where then is it to be found? At this point the temptation to take a behaviouristic line becomes great. One of Wittgenstein’s contributions here was to lead us away from it. The way he assembled these facts he urged us to note is very much at the centre of this. Still, when all this is said and done, it remains true that nothing more can be said than that we are the kind of creatures who can see, think, remember, speak, carry out calculations. (see Investigations sec. 25) To appreciate this is at the same time to have gained the conceptual grasp which we lacked when, for instance, we asked about the relation between normal thinking and cerebral activity. In addition, once we appreciate that nothing more can be said here, these facts may become the object of a different kind of contemplation: it may strike us as a wondrous thing that we can see things, that we can remember, that we can think. In the gratuity of their existence these things may strike us as something to marvel at, a ‘miracle’. Wittgenstein spoke of this experience in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’. (The Philosophical Review vol. 74, Jan. 1965, pp. 10–11) In Philosophical Investigations he wrote: ‘What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings.’ (I, sec. 415) I hinted at the significance of these remarks for the kind of conceptual clarification sought in philosophy. Drury sees this important aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the perspective of some of his early ideas. He thus shows us something fresh about this strand in Wittgenstein’s thinking which Wittgenstein himself did not emphasize in his later writings, namely that the noting of these facts and seeing their interconnection can open up the door to a deeper response in us – wonder. This response, marvelling at what is always before our eyes, though all our training militates against taking note of it, is to be contrasted with, looking for an explanation. It is a response which words can easily stifle, one whose most natural medium of expression is poetry and ritual. This is the main thing I believe Drury to have had in mind when he named his book The Danger of Words. Though this theme is very much at the heart of the second part of his chapter on ‘Body and Mind’ (starting on p. 299), his questions there are not the same as the ones he has discussed in the first part of the chapter. There he has combatted one form of materialism, one which gives primacy to the body over the mind. Here he combats another form of materialism, or better ‘materialism’ in another sense of the word. The former is a more purely conceptual position, the latter is an ethical one. Where the latter speaks of the body, or more appropriately ‘the flesh’, what is in question is a carnal orientation to life. What it denies is not the primacy of ‘mental phenomena’ over the body, but the reality, of a life of the spirit, a life in which there is active regard for spiritual values. It is such a life that is represented as an ‘illusion’. The words ‘the body is the tomb of the soul’ take issue with such a view, and not

REVIEW OF DANGER OF WORDS BY ILHAM DILMAN

341

with the view that ‘only the body is real’, as an epiphenomenalist may say this. In short, the problems that centre around the relation between ‘body and mind’ are not the same as those that centre around the relation between ‘the flesh and the soul’. Drury does not make this clear, though he is clear that he is addressing himself to ethical questions in the second part of chapter 3, that what he argues calls for ‘a decision of the will’ , one that cannot be substantiated by any ‘proof or verification’: ‘The very notion of proof or verification is misunderstanding and superficiality here.’ (p. 303) It is true that a man attracted by Pavlov’s materialism is likely to see nothing in the ethical perspective on which Socrates elaborated when he spoke of the soul as imprisoned within the body. But there is no strict logical connection between these two kinds of materialism. It would be interesting to bring out what kind of conceptual connection there is between them nevertheless. Drury emphasizes how much has been achieved by ‘purely physical methods of treatment’ in the case of mental illness. Yet he does not think that his faith in these methods in any way conflicts with the stand he takes against ‘materialism’: (i) These methods are appropriate in the case of mental disorders and Drury sees nothing wrong in admitting that these disorders may be completely determined by physiological processes. (ii) The use of such methods need not constitute a manipulation of the patient and does not preclude an attitude of compassion towards him in his affliction. Nor does it preclude the recognition that in the end there is no reason for such affliction being the lot of some people and not of others. This, in fact, is a central theme in Drury’s book. Thus drugs are used by psychiatrists for the relief of mental distress. Some people also use them to obtain a heightened awareness of things and supposedly to transcend the limitations of everyday life. Some even believe that in this experience they may find a short-cut to religious insight. The public attention given to this view is, I think, an aspect of the shallowness of our age which Drury brings out in his book. He contrasts these two uses of drugs and warns against the dangers involved in the latter use, the enormous ethical error present in this way of thinking. Simone Weil’s distinction between those who seek after sensations and those who labour and create has a direct bearing on this way of thinking. She says that those who live only for and by means of sensations are ‘deceived by life’ and that this attitude does not bring a person ‘in contact with all that is real in life’. ‘Real’ here is a value term, and talk of deception equally brings in certain value judgments. Those who believe they can find a short-cut to religious insight in drugs are also deceived by life and, not surprisingly, take a very shallow view of religious experience. The very idea of a short-cut, the impatience, the reluctance to take the road that involves labour and pain, betrays this superficiality. 4. Psychiatry and Ethics. What Drury says in the first four chapters of his book naturally leads to the questions he speaks about in the final chapter. Here the book reaches its peak. The central question concerns the distinction between ‘madness and religion’, pathology and spiritual experience. This has an obvious practical import for a psychiatrist using physical methods of treatment. Drury raises the question by presenting four cases he met in his capacity as a psychiatrist. Three of these he

342

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

treated successfully. About the fourth he says: ‘I gave this man no treatment other than insisting that he had his breakfast in bed and allowed us to restore a rather emaciated frame. I learnt more from talking to him than he did listening to me.’ (p. 322) He compares the symptoms and state of mind of each with the experiences of people we recognize as spiritual teachers, Tolstoy, George Fox, Joan of Arc. The similarities are remarkable; where then is the difference to be found? He considers four different answers, one of which once appealed to him very strongly. He dismisses them all. He then suggests that the search was ‘nothing but a will-o’-the-wisp’. This leads him to ask: ‘What about those mechanical methods of treatment ...? Are they not sometimes at least a gross interference ... ?’ (p. 329) His answer is: No. A psychiatrist is right to fight against mental illness with all his energy and weapons. What he must recognize and never forget is that the health for which he fights is not an absolute good. Its loss, in one sense, is nothing. A man may be mentally ill, he may even be an idiot, and yet he may be a saint. (vide Dostoyevsky, The Idiot; Simone Weil, ‘Human Personality’ sec. 6, Selected Essays 1934–45, trans. by Richard Rees, Oxford 1963) These categories are not exclusive. Thus it is ‘a common prejudice that ... if Joan of Arc was a schizophrenic she could not at the same time be a saint’. (p. 342) Of course they do not coincide with each other. They are categories that belong to different levels or grammars of speech and thought, and the question of how they are related to each other is a very difficult one. Drury tells us that a mental illness may be a terrifying experience, disabling ‘the patient for the daily commerce of social life’. (p. 342) But it may heighten his awareness of things which that life makes us insensitive to, things even from which some people turn away in their devotion to such a life. (See Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych; Kierkegaard: ‘as stillness dwells in the desert, so double-mindedness dwells in the press of busyness’, Purity of Heart, Fontana books, p. 95) ‘Every mental illness,’ Drury writes, ‘can be a religious experience.’ Whether it is or not depends on a great many contingencies. ‘Conversely,’ he says, ‘every religious belief and practice where it is deep and sincere is madness to those who trust in themselves and despise others.’ (vide Simone Weil on ‘la folie d’amour’ vs. ‘la raison terrestre’ in ‘Luttons-nous pour la justice?’, Ecrits de Londre, Gallimard 1957; Kierkegaard, ‘the view of the moment’ of Christ’s crucifixion, Purity of Heart, p. 121) Drury gave the fourth man he mentions no treatment not because he judged him to be a saint, but because he judged him not to be mentally ill. His answer to the question ‘Should I give treatment to this man referred to me as a psychiatrist?’ is ‘If he is mentally ill, yes’. He does not tell us, though, how this other question is decided. Is it to be decided by an expert? In one sense obviously yes. But I mean, is it a question with a definite answer, to be answered by special, esoteric techniques? Or is it like the kind of question with which we guide ourselves in our apprehension of people’s character, their inwardness, the depth of their spirituality – and even when we know them well? I gather that Drury thinks it is not a question of this kind, the kind he wrote about in the chapter ‘Science and Psychology’.

REVIEW OF DANGER OF WORDS BY ILHAM DILMAN

343

Drury gave treatment to Father A, Miss B, and Guard C, not because he judged their spirituality to be false or shallow, but because he considered them to be mentally ill. This is not to say that we cannot ask whether a man’s spirituality is genuine, whether the religious convictions he gives expression to go deep with him. Drury does not think that this is a question for the expert, though it cannot be decided well by just anyone, and calls for spiritual discernment. It is not an ethically neutral question; you cannot answer it without acknowledging the reality of spiritual values and considering the matter from their perspective. Otherwise, what is depth of spirituality will appear as ‘madness’ or ‘folly’ – to wit the mathematician’s judgment about Pascal’s ‘nervous breakdown’ mentioned by Drury. Nor can one make a man’s subsequent achievements and success the criterion of the spirituality of his experiences: ‘What sort of results? What sort of success? Is failure and defeat always to be a condemnation?’ ‘Who is to be the judge of the results?’ (p. 326) Obviously this criterion can only be found in the ‘inwardness’ of his experiences; it cannot be judged by any ‘outward’ results – which is not to say that it does not appear in his life.2 5. Some Questions. A. It seems, then, that the question of whether a man’s experiences are genuinely spiritual is not a scientific question: ‘It is hidden inwardness that is the rock over which a scientific and objective psychology will always come to grief.’ (p. 280) On the other hand, according to Drury, the question whether a man is mentally ill or not is a scientific question. If spirituality and mental pathology do not exclude one another, and if in a particular case a man’s mental illness could be a vehicle of his spirituality, would it be right for a psychiatrist to treat him? As I said the answer Drury finally reaches is a clear one. He compares the psychiatrist position here to that of the physician. But it seems to me that the two positions are different. A severe physical illness which beings a man face to face with death may be a spiritual experience, it may deepen the man’s spirituality. But here the illness is one thing and the spiritual experience is another. So the wisdom or insight which the experience brings is imaginable apart from the illness. Is it always like this with a mental illness? Is it not sometimes the case that a severe depression which could be relieved by drugs is itself an expression of a man’s having lost his way spiritually, his concern about it, and his struggle with moral and spiritual difficulties? Was it not so with Tolstoy during the period which he describes in My Confession? I agree with Drury that the idea that ‘if Tolstoy really suffered from melancholia his challenge to our whole western way of life would be largely blunted and nullified’ is a prejudice. (p. 328) But is there not a difference between living through this melancholia and emerging from it a wiser person, as Tolstoy did, and taking a drug to get rid of it? Drury writes: ‘A doctor who attempts to shorten and relieve the suffering of the mentally ill in no way diminishes the lesson of madness.’ (p. 329) While I agree with this entirely, it seems to me that sometimes there may be a different kind of learning here, one which cannot be separated from living through the experiences which his mental illness forces on the patient. (vide Freud’s idea of ‘working through’ one’s depression, or Melanie Klein’s idea of some forms of adult depression as representing an attempt to come to terms with genuine moral problems connected with one’s anger, hatred, and what makes for those tendencies

344

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

in one to be callous, selfish, resentful and unforgiving) Drury himself tells us of the idea ‘that such states, these dark nights of the soul, are necessary stages in the growth of spiritual maturity’. (p. 320) The question is – in what sense ‘necessary’? Wittgenstein has emphasized that you cannot achieve philosophical insight if you do not feel bewilderment: ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”’. (Investigations sec.123) I suspect that it is often like this where spiritual agony coincides with mental illness. If I am right, then the problem Drury posed would not have been solved: ‘This man’s two years of suffering could, have been terminated in as many weeks. But would it have been right to do so?’ (p. 321) For the answer would be: It depends on the man and the nature of his suffering. So here the psychiatrist would have to use judgment and discretion, the kind of judgment which no amount of scientific training could have given him. Drury writes that a mentally ill person may be successfully treated by ‘some recently qualified young man to whom the spiritual agony of the patient is something quite outside his comprehension’. (p. 321) This, together with his faith in the physical treatment of mental illness, leads him to say: ‘None of us are able to ‘heal the soul’ as the word psychiatrist implies.’ (p. 305) He wishes, however, that it were otherwise: I would like to be able to cure my patients by discussion, advice, wise counsel, and from an understanding of their spiritual needs. But my experience has been that in all the serious disturbances of the mind such as find their way into a mental hospital, the word has lost its power. (p. 325) It would be presumptuous of me to question Drury’s experience as a psychiatrist. But I should like to ask him one or two philosophical questions. (i) What does he mean by ‘the word has lost its power’? He may mean no more than this: ‘I do not know how anyone could talk Father A out of his depression convince Miss B that her vision was an hallucination; demonstrate to Guard C that his sense of mission was a delusion.’ (p. 325 italics mine) But is contact and communication by means of words to be confined to this? Drury denies that ‘a mental illness is a degradation of the total personality’. (p. 328) Is it not then at least sometimes possible for the psychiatrist to begin by listening to his patient seriously, gain some of his confidence, find that he is not wholly foolish as he appears, and also discover a bridgehead of communication which can eventually lead to an increased area of give and take so that the psychiatrist can help his patient by attending to his problems rather than by getting rid of them by means of drugs or electro-convulsive therapy? I should think that the voices Joan of Arc heard were hallucinations. But this does not make her mission a delusion. A psychiatrist who started by trying to convince her of the first would only succeed in closing all channels of communication with her. If, however, he began by taking his patient seriously, he would find time enough to disentangle these two questions. (ii) This may be impossible sometimes; perhaps it is ‘in all the serious disturbances of the mind’. But then what are the words ‘all’ and ‘serious’ meant to cover? B. This brings me to the relation between normal psychology and psychopathology. Where does normality end and pathology begin? Drury in some ways speaks as if the line between them is a sharp one and there is nothing problematic about where to draw it. I say ‘in some ways’ for, of course, the chapter on ‘Madness and Religion’ raises some very deep questions about one aspect of this problem. Still his final

REVIEW OF DANGER OF WORDS BY ILHAM DILMAN

345

solution, as we have seen, is that religious experience straddles the line between normal psychology and psychopathology, which says little about the location of this line in the manifold of human behaviour. Earlier, in connection with Drury’s treatment of the ‘body and mind’ question in the case of perception, this is how I read part of his argument: Hallucinations, for instance, constitute a special case which can only be understood in relation to normal cases of perception. While we can ask what makes someone see hallucinations, a similar question makes no sense in connection with normal perception. Now it may be that the key to the way Drury sees the relation between normal psychology and psychopathology is to be found here. But if so, I think that the analogy is all wrong. For this important distinction between the norm and the variety of special cases which deviate from it applies within normal psychology; it cannot be made into a distinction between normal and abnormal psychology. Otherwise the realm of normal psychology would be the realm of what we need no explanation of. And yet, of course, the chapter on ‘Science and Psychology’ is a study of the character of the very explanations we seek in normal psychology. In chapter 1 Drury warns against taking the names for different mental illnesses too seriously: The chief danger of an unsystematic nomenclature is the danger of regarding its classification as mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive. For example it is only too easy to get involved in a controversy as to whether this patient is a schizophrenic or a case of endogenous depression, when for all we know he might be both at the same time; or neither, but some other disease for which we have at present no convenient name. [and earlier] “We have indeed a nomenclature, but we have no system of naming.” (p. 262) He does not doubt that a ‘system of naming’, a systematic and exhaustive classification is possible in this sphere. Might this not be an illusion? Psychiatrists often distinguish between psychoses and neuroses, contrasting both with normality. When Drury speaks about mental illness he is thinking primarily of the psychoses – melancholia, the manic-depressive illnesses, schizophrenia and paranoia. But is the distinction between these and the neuroses a sharp one? Can we even say that what are in question are purely medical categories? When Drury writes that ‘every religious belief and practice where it is deep and sincere is madness to those who trust in themselves and despise others’ (p. 329) he does not mean ‘appears madness’. If so, is this not an acknowledgment that madness and its subdivision are not purely medical categories? My guess is that the psychoses constitute a very mixed bag and that they cannot be distinguished and ordered in terms of purely organic criteria. I suspect that any attempt to do so will simply perpetuate those errors in diagnosis about which Drury complains in the chapter on ‘Words and Transgressions’. In many places in his book Drury alerts us to the important differences between the concepts of physical and mental illness. Part of what he has in mind may be put like this: A physical illness or disability, apart from being sometimes very painful, may change our life and relationships very radically. While this is often true of a

346

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

mental illness, and to a greater degree, it affects one in a much more intimate way. A man who is losing his hearing, for instance, is forced to give up listening to music – something which may have meant a great deal to him. A man who becomes bedridden with an illness has to give up much of the activities which he shared with his wife. But a man who develops paranoia will find that he is himself poisoning relationships which he has cherished with his suspicions and accusations. He may not be able to help it, but nevertheless the source of his agonies is himself, not some disability in his body – something that affects his will and personality ‘from within’. I suspect, however, that the conceptual differences here are even greater than Drury makes out. For where, for instance, a person’s will is affected, the disease, however little he is able to help it, is in the will or of the will. And this means that whatever the analogies that sustain the use of the term ‘disease’ in this connection, the sense of the term will be seriously transformed. We shall be able to resist such transformation, I think, if we hold that all psychotic mental disorders are completely determined by changes in the patient’s physiology and are, in that sense, epiphenomena – that is by reducing them to physical illness, by representing them as a form of bodily disease which affects the mind. Now while this may be true of some psychotic disorders, I do not see what grounds one can have for holding that it is true of all – unless one restricts one’s use of the expression ‘psychotic disorder’ to just those cases where this is true. I do not suppose that there is a consensus in psychiatry on the use of this expression. Still to restrict its use in this way is to change what meaning it has and to impoverish the kind of understanding a psychiatrist seeks in trying to reach a diagnosis – much in the way that a similar sharpening of the term ‘intelligence’ has done. Why should it not be the case that some mental illnesses, psychoses, originate in the mind, in the emotions? After all, Drury asks the same question with regard to Weissman’s theory which holds that all psychological traits that have not been acquired through some form of learning are passed on from parent to child through the inheritance of anatomical structure. I must say that my own prejudices incline me the opposite way from Drury on both these questions. C. I have already emphasized that Drury’s talk of ‘the inexplicable’ throughout his book is important and central to what he wants to say. I admire what he says. My only reservation is that in a few places he seems to slip into a familiar but untenable epistemological position – one that is reminiscent of Hume. When he insists that Socrates’ view of the soul as imprisoned within the body cannot be proved Drury is clear that the notions of ‘the inexplicable’ and ‘mystery’ which he has been using are ethical concepts. For here, he says, ‘agnosticism has no meaning’: ‘These are questions, I say, that the conduct of life demands an answer from us now, at once.’ (p. 303) In other words, to think that an answer to them has to wait on the discovery of facts of which we are at present ignorant is to misunderstand their logic. What they call for is not research into the unknown but contemplation of what we all know, wonder at its ‘contingency’ or ‘gratuity’ – at there being no reason why it should be so and not otherwise. What we should avoid thinking is that there are deeper reasons and explanations here which, in its limitedness, human reason cannot grasp. This latter thought, unless it is no more

REVIEW OF DANGER OF WORDS BY ILHAM DILMAN

347

than an expression of humility, is a distortion of the religious concept of mystery to which Drury’s notion of ‘the inexplicable’ has many affinities. The quotation from Simone Weil on the title page in no way supports the epistemological position from which I should like to dissociate Drury. Yet when in the Preface I read the following quotation I am not sure whether I can do so completely: ‘The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.’ It sounds as if scientific explanations are not really what we take them to be, namely forms of explanation. Some of Drury’s remarks on science are uncomfortably reminiscent of Mach’s views – scientific theories as ‘ingenious abbreviations’. See: (p. 309) If they are no more than this they could hardly have any explanatory power. If, on the other hand, they provide new ways of connecting and representing phenomena then they certainly help to further our understanding of these phenomena. Drury, of course, never wanted to deny that within their proper spheres the sciences contribute to our understanding of the world we live in. He wanted to draw attention to the limits of this whole area of human understanding, to warn against the pretentions of science, and to make us take note of the variety of serious questions which fall outside the province of the sciences. When Drury speaks of the dangers of taking an ‘hypothesis’ for a fact, of thinking of it as ‘something which has enabled us to see behind the curtain of sensations’ (p. 309), he is warning us against confusing the facts that we study in science with our means of representation. (see Investigations sec.104, and also Tractatus 6.341) But the very words in which he makes this important point pull him towards a position akin to Mach’s: There is nothing behind the curtain of sensations – or, in Carnap’s words: ‘In science there are no “depths”, all is on the surface.’ And such a statement is in error not because of what it denies. For if one were to go in the opposite direction and claim that there is something behind the surface though we can never know what it’s like, since we can never ‘see behind the curtain of sensation’, the error would be just the same. It lies in the epistemological priority given to the notion of sensation. (I shall comment further on this point in section D below.) Again when Drury says that ‘every mentally ill patient is an individual enigma, and we should always think of him as such’ (p. 304) he does not mean that there is a great deal about him which we do not as yet, or could never, understand. Very roughly, he is saying that a psychiatrist should never forget that he is dealing with a person and not a faulty mechanism to be put right. He then says: ‘There will always be in psychiatry the realm of the inexplicable. An inexplicable which does not exist in any other branch of medicine.’ How does this square with the claim that no natural phenomena can in the end be explained? On the face of it these two statements conflict in their claim as to the scope of ‘the inexplicable’. I say ‘on the face of it’ for I believe that Drury wishes to make an important contrast between psychiatry and medicine – one which I suggested may have more dimensions than Drury brings out. Yet this time what he goes on to say seems to come close to the very confusions be has combatted in connection with the ‘body and mind’ problem: ‘There is still, for instance, a great deal to learn about, say, the action of the tri-cyclic drugs on the biochemistry of the brain. But no discovery can ever be made as to how these drugs

348

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

can relieve melancholia and change nihilistic delusions. This leap from the physical to the mental will remain always in the realm of the inexplicable.’ (p. 305) Notice the temporal expression ‘will always remain’ which goes with the notion of a ‘leap’. If I was right in my earlier reading of what Drury says, namely that the idea of a leap from the physical or physiological to the mental, for instance in the case of normal perception, is a symptom of conceptual confusion and that the desire for an explanation here comes from this confusion, then on this page at least Drury is being drawn into the very confusions he is concerned to combat. It isn’t as if there is something here we shall never succeed in explaining, but that there is no logical room for an explanation. Our idea that there is and that the explanation that would fill it is forever out of our reach – ‘the mysterious action of the body on the mind’ – is a symptom of philosophical confusion. Yet there is a connection with the earlier statement that I queried. For it is not only the action of the body on the mind which philosophers have found ‘mysterious’, but also the action of one body, say, a billiard ball, on another. Thus Hume wrote that ‘nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets’ and that ‘we are ignorant of the manner in which bodies operate on each other’: We know that, in fact, heat is a constant attendant of flame; but what is the connection between them we have no room so much as to conjecture or imagine. (An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding) He then represented the philosophical difficulties about the relation between body and mind as a special case of these more general difficulties: “Why has the will an influence over the tongue and fingers, not over the heart or liver?... We learn the influence of our will from experience alone. And experience only teaches us how one event constantly follows another, without instructing us in the secret connection which binds them together.” (ibid.) This ‘secrecy’ is precisely what gives us the impression of a ‘leap from the physical to the mental [which] will remain always in the realm of the inexplicable’. Still I am sure that Drury never meant to equate ‘the inexplicable’ with any gaps in human knowledge or understanding in this way: ‘Agnosticism has no meaning when applied to those questions which by their very nature will never be a matter of scientific investigation.’ (p. 303) He said that the function of philosophy is not to add ‘to the sum total of human cleverness and skill’. (p. 316) Its wisdom consists in recognizing how little we understand. Not to recognize this is to be morally deceived. This deception is inseparable from complacency and arrogance – of which pretentiousness is one variety. The wisdom which the Delphic oracle found in Socrates lies in the peculiar combination of courage and humility for which he has come to be known. This is what links the different confusions about the logical limits of scientific inquiry which Drury is concerned to bring out. Two of these in particular we should be careful not to run together. One of these is the confusion involved in not recognizing that scientific explanation, like any other explanation, has an end. The misunderstanding in question concerns the concept of explanation; it does not consist in failing to recognize that there are explanations which are beyond the reach of our reason and intelligence: ‘The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind [science]

REVIEW OF DANGER OF WORDS BY ILHAM DILMAN

349

only staves off our ignorance a little longer.’ (Hume) The other one lies in our failure to recognize the variety in our quests for explanation and in the misunderstandings involved in our inclination to treat every question as either scientific or a symptom of confusion from which it may be possible to extract a scientific question. It is mainly the second of these confusions that Drury is concerned with in the chapter on ‘Science and Psychology’. D. In a few places in Drury’s book I find a tension between a kind of empiricism which is reminiscent of Hume and Mach, and a more profound strand that owes much to Wittgenstein. To say that science takes its start from the reality of everyday language and the questions asked in it, that it takes for granted many ‘common-sense truisms’ – for instance, that water boils when heated and not freeze – as not needing explanation, is not the same thing as the claim that ‘there is nothing in science which was not first in the senses’. (p. 313) For much of what is first in the senses presupposes those categories of everyday language on which sophisticated scientific language is founded. But the reality of everyday language from which science takes its start is not something that is founded on the senses. The senses enter the foundations of human knowledge in general and scientific knowledge in particular in a different way, namely through their peculiar role in the life of those who speak our language. Both the use of the senses and the use of language are part of our natural history. They are intertwined in the sense that the ways in which we use our senses and the activities in which the senses play their peculiar role – for instance, observation in scientific experiments – are inconceivable apart from the language we speak. Equally, the language we speak is one that has developed in the context of activities in all of which the use of the senses play an important role. It seems to me that the main weakness of all forms of empiricism lies in the epistemological priority accorded to the senses. I can think of no form of empiricism which gives due recognition to the interdependence between the use of the senses and the use of language in human life. 6. Finally a word about Drury’s style and the tone in which his book is written. In all the five lectures which make up the chapters of this book Drury deals with deep and difficult problems and what he says comes very much from his own experience and from reflection on that experience. But the seriousness with which he treats these problems is never heavy. On the contrary it has a certain disarming quality. Part of this is bound up with the way he uses anecdotes – eg. the examiner asking Drury about the importance of why the spleen drains into the portal system (p. 263), the timid addict who fought the carbon dioxide mask (p. 263), the man who was appointed official ‘rodent operator’ to the unit (p. 277). The philosophical penetration in each of these is inseparable from the simplicity with which the moral of the story is brought out: ‘Damn it all, the bird has to sit somewhere’; ‘I was reminded of Voltaire’s remark: “This animal is very dangerous, when it is attacked it defends itself.”’ We find it in the conversations of Wittgenstein quoted from memory in the Preface. Drury describes it as ‘introducing philosophical clarity by means of a full-stop’. Another part of Drury’s disarming way is to be found in the generosity with which he writes about those people he criticizes – for instance Eysenck. See: p. 283

350

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

NOTES 1. The expression is one which Wittgenstein used in connection with Fraser. See ‘Remarks on The Golden Bough’, The Human World May 1971, p.31. 2. I have discussed what this contrast comes to in a paper called ‘Wittgenstein on the Soul’, to be published in a collection of lectures on Wittgenstein given at the Royal Institute of Philosophy, edited by Professor Godfrey Vesey.

Correspondence and Comment FACT AND HYPOTHESIS Mr Dilman’s thoughtful review of my book The Danger of Words (Human World 14) has shown me that the epistemology I there hinted at was too briefly expressed and lacked adequate examples to avoid misinterpretation. I am therefore grateful to him for giving me an opportunity to expound in greater detail the theory I now hold. “In a few places I find a tension between a kind of empiricism which is reminiscent of Hume and Mach and a more profound strand that owes much to Wittgenstein.” (Dilman) I regret now that I used the expression: “There is nothing in science that was not first in the senses.” This was slovenly and vague. I would now say this. Every scientific hypothesis, if it is to be meaningful, must be begotten of observation and give birth to verifiable predictions. And these initial observations and subsequent verifications must be capable of being described in terms of immediate sensory perception. If this is not done the hypothesis is liable to float freely and to give rise to all manner of confusions. Two books: One Wittgenstein often praised to me the other he ridiculed. The first was Faraday’s Natural History of a Candle. The second Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe. What is the striking difference between these two books? Whenever Faraday uses hypothetical language he immediately goes on to describe in minute detail the actual experiments on which the hypothesis is based (and in the original lectures demonstrated the experiments before the eyes of his audience). But Jeans on the other hand makes startling assertions about the nature of the Universe (The Universe is like a rapidly expanding soap bubble) but never tells us what the Astronomer actually does and observes. It is the skills and techniques which scientists make use of that constitute the very soul of each particular science. Let me exemplify. 1. Chemists tell us that a molecule of Water consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. This means that we can perform the familiar experiment of decomposing a given volume of water, by means of electrolysis, into two parts of hydrogen and one of oxygen. And in a further experiment recombine these gases in suitable proportions to form once again water. But now if we don’t mention these experiments the statement about a molecule of water is liable to make us feel that science has discovered new entities, molecules and atoms, and that our senses are too crude, and somehow deceive us, so that we do not see the real nature of things. But everything is what it is and not another thing. Water is water, neither molecule or atom. It is that wonderful substance that quenches our thirst and delights our eyes in rivers and lakes. The atomic theory consists of two things. First the discovery of some remarkable experiments, something we can now do. Then secondly an ingenious notation by means of which these experiments can be concisely recorded and further experiments suggested. It did not conduct us behind the curtain of sensation. (p. 349)

352

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

2. Physicists tell us that light has a velocity of 187,000 miles per second. This was first begotten by Romer’s observation that there was a delay between the expected time of an eclipse of Jupiter’s moon and the actual observed time. This delay being a function of the distance at the time between the earth and Jupiter. Here it must be said that a very high degree of skill and instrumentation had first to be developed before such an observation could be made. Then much later Fizeau devised an ingenious terrestrial experiment in which the light returning from a distant mirror was occluded by a rapidly rotating spoked wheel. To construct such an apparatus and to use it was no amateur matter. But now again if these highly skilled and technical matters are not mentioned and the phrase “the velocity of light” is left bare, imagination comes into play. Velocity! surely then there must be something that moves. A stream of photons? A wave motion in an unknown medium? Yet the experiments reveal no such entities. Everything is what it is and not another thing. Light is light, neither particle nor wave. It is the glory of a sunrise, the serenity of a full moon, and the amazement of the stars. 3. Popular books on astronomy tell me that when I look at the great nebula in Andromeda I am really seeing something that was contemporary with a period millions of years ago, before man had yet appeared on the earth. This I take to be nonsense. What I see is always simultaneous with my seeing it. And if you deny that, what criterion of simultaneity do you use? Here again the word velocity has led us astray. We imagine some thing that leaving the nebula travels through the immensity of space to impinge on my retina and be conveyed via the optic tract to my visual cortex. But this as I tried to show in my book makes nonsense of all perception. Here I imagine an indignant astronomer would intervene—“my dear fellow, we can now measure the distance between us and the nebula in Andromeda, what more can you want?” I would reply that if you talk of measurement you must tell me the method of measurement used. In this particular case it all depends on an ingenious speculation (Leavitt, 1912) that always and everywhere throughout the universe the absolute luminosity of a Cepheid Variable can be deduced from observing its periodicity. Now photographs taken with the largest telescopes reveal that there are Cepheid Variables in the Andromeda nebula. The discrepancy between the apparent luminosity and the calculated absolute luminosity enables us to estimate the immense distance involved. This is speculation; only a very clever mind and a highly trained observer would have thought of it. But speculation remains speculation and should be labelled as such. It should not be put before a gullible public as the very latest discovery of scientific certainty. 4. When at the end of the last century such distinguished physicians as Charcot and Janet, Bernheim and Liebault thought that the phenomena of hypnosis were worthy of scientific study they soon discovered that under hypnosis patients could recover memories that were not available in the waking state. Also that commands given to a hypnotised patient would be carried out meticulously although the subject was not aware that they were so being obedient, and would invent a fictitious motive for their behaviour. Now having used hypnosis in suitable cases for the last twenty years I know that these are indeed facts. They are facts which the language of every

Correspondence and Comment

353

day life is not equipped to describe except in terms of a long circumlocution. So it became convenient to introduce a special terminology and to speak of “unconscious” memories and “unconscious” motives. But every adjective is in deadly danger of being transformed into a substantive. So it came about that psychologists began to speak of “the unconscious mind”, as if some new entity had been discovered. A mysterious second self that accompanied us all at all times and was the “real” source not only of dreams and neuroses, but of art and mythology, history and religion. This is superstition and has done infinite harm. Wittgenstein once made the remark that “physics is what physicists do.” And one could go on to say that chemistry is what chemists do, astronomy is what astronomers do, psychology is what psychologists do. These various “doings” are highly skilled procedures requiring years of apprenticeship. To communicate these skills from one generation to another each science develops its own technical language. To join in the activities one must learn the appropriate language. The danger arises when one learns the language without mastering the skills it is meant to mediate. It is as if a man should memorise a musical score without understanding that it was meant to be performed! In my book I quoted a long passage from Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon in which he extolled all the harvest of useful inventions which were the fruit of the Baconian philosophy. But Macaulay overlooked something Bacon once wrote: “Without doubt the contemplation of things as they are without superstition or imposture, without error or confusion, is in itself a nobler thing than the whole harvest of inventions.” (Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism 129) The attainment of this contemplative ideal is the true goal of philosophy. This is no aberration of certain minds but a passion without which a man is not fully awake. The danger is that in our haste to reach this goal we tend to take the discoveries of natural science as an answer. Or if we cannot accept this to think there is yet another science, metaphysics, which will bring us satisfaction. But philosophy is an ascetic discipline, a via negativa; by insisting that everywhere and always we say only so much as we really know, it potentiates the “inquietum cor nostrum”. There is a reality outside the world, that is to say outside space and time, outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world. —Simone Weil, Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations, 1943 M. O’C. Drury

Letters to Rhees St Patrick’s Hospital 22 September 1959 Dear Bob, Many thanks for your letter of the 11th. I see your point about Janet trying to show the continuity between normal and pathological states and that what you want is to see the differences. I wondered if it would help if I described to you an actual case such as I have to deal with every week and try and show in what circumstances I use the phrase ‘this patient has a delusion’. Anyhow I am enclosing such a case history taken from my clinical notes, in the hopes it will throw some light on your problem. The point I think is that the word delusion is used not because of the recognition of some special mental state, but of a form of behaviour and speech occurring in a particular context. All the information in the enclosed history has some relevance in making the diagnosis (including the response to treatment!) Such histories are very common and it is convenient to call such illness by a special name. In saying it is a mental illness, I mean that the abnormalities are shown in behaviour and speech. I consider myself that the cause is probably some bio-chemical disturbance of the brain though this has not yet been proved. Does this help? [The case-note referred to in the letter does not survive]

St. Edmondsbury 10 May 1969 …About my own paper on ‘Body and Mind’; I am now trying to improve the short section about mescaline etc., it is not as easy as I thought to say just what is so pernicious in Huxley’s advice. Because of childhood associations the smell of incense always has a profoundly sobering effect on me, like hearing a church bell. Isn’t the use of incense comparable to the use of a drug? (If the drug was really safe). I think the solitary use has got to come in somewhere here. Incense is permissible in a church, one would define as aestheticism its use in private. But I must get this all sorted out before I think of doing anything further with my paper. If I could then write a longer paper about the meaning of the term ‘mental illness’, I might combine all this with the ‘Religion and Madness’ paper, and make one small volume out of them. But all the confusions surrounding ‘mental illness’, delusion’, ‘hallucinations’ these are very daunting!

Letters to Rhees

355

Ailesbury Lawn 24 January 1970 Dear Bob, .…Now about my writing. I am struggling on and now have three longish papers finished. The first is called ‘On the danger of words’, and is concerned with the many confusions in our present psychiatric jargon. I am due to read it to our ‘Journal Club’ on Monday week, I hope it may help some of our younger members, but I expect a savage attack from senior members. I am particularly attacking in one part what is now called ‘a double blind trial’, this is where a new drug is tried out without the doctor who is using it knowing what it is or whether it is only a dummy tablet! I am of course opposed to this on ethical grounds but in my paper I try and show the logical fallacy involved in thinking this is ‘highly scientific’. It is now I am told impossible to get a report on a new treatment unless a double blind trial has been done. The book [probably: An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 1865] you sent me when I was in hospital by Claude Bernard has been an enormous help to me, for I can quote from such a famous scientist many things in support of what I am saying. I am also attacking what Bernard called the danger of too much erudition hampering original writing. Again it seems the bad fashion to-day to begin every scientific paper with ‘a review of the previous literature’, this is usually nothing but ‘padding’, and the bibliography at the end of the paper is just swank. Bernard is also excellent on the very limited value of statistics in medicine, and the elaborate statistical mathematics in the journals to-day is I think so much fog. So I think we may have a lively evening. Only I mustn’t get too excited. I want to add a fourth paper before I even think of publishing (the other two would be the one you saw on ‘Mind and Body’, and the older one on ‘Madness and Religion’.) The fourth one I have made a start on but since we moved out here have made no progress with, it must be done to complete the series. It is really an attempt at an expanded commentary on the remark Wittgenstein makes at the end of the Investigations about the barrenness of experimental psychology, that experiment and conceptual confusion pass each other by. Here one is going to be swimming against a very strong tide, and unless I can say something with real force it will be no good. But how much it needs saying! My main theme is that previously Psychology was always studied along with Logic, Ethics, and Metaphysics, and that this was wisdom. When Psychology tries to become ‘one of the natural sciences’ it can become so only by passing over everything that makes the word Psychology arouse a deep interest. I could draw here on my own experience in trying to lecture to medical students on ‘normal psychology’. I found that if I confined myself to experiments on perception, memory, animal behaviour, etc., I was giving them something that was really of no use to them. In the end I told the college that I thought lectures on normal psychology were an unnecessary burden on a syllabus that was already overburdened. I would like to get this down in writing, but it is not easy. I have been reading again the 1914-1916 Note-Books. It struck me what an excellent commentary the later works are on the puzzles and insights of these early notes. ‘Logic must take care of itself’, ‘This is an extremely profound and important insight’, couldn’t it be said that all the subsequent writings were in a sense

356

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

a development from this one insight? I wish someone could show the continuity of Wittgenstein’s thought, I think much too much has been made of the remark that after discussions with Sraffa he felt like a tree that had been deprived of its branches, I couldn’t do this because I am for one thing quite ignorant of the symbolism of the Principia Mathematica… I wish you would do it!

Ailesbury Lawn 18 June 1970 Dear Bob, I had only a few days before finished writing a paper which I hope to read to our Psychiatric club next Autumn, and which is largely directed against the sort of extravagant nonsense that Delgado [Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado, author of Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1969)] (and many others) are claiming for the future of a mechanistic psychology. It is interesting that all these psychologists always prophecy about the discoveries that will be made ‘in the next few years’, and admit that at the moment the science is still only in its early stages. This sort of prophecy has now being going on for over a hundred years, as I show by a series of quotations in my paper. This at least should make one begin to be suspicious. I would send you the paper but it is still in need of correction, and I have only one copy. I foolishly did not make a carbon copy of it. First of all the word ‘stimoceivers’ is no more than another example of ‘dormitive properties’, it suggests a scientific understanding of something that is very, very far from being understood. There are some careful experiments of Penfield that are worth mentioning here. Penfield is a very skilful brain surgeon, and in the course of operations has made some sober observations and no startling claims. It is possible to operate on the brain under local anaesthesia. The brain tissue itself is entirely insensitive to being touched, cut, or cauterised! This is something that needs emphasising. Now Penfield found that when he touched certain very localised areas in the per-frontal gyrus with a weak electric node, involuntary movements were produced in the arms, legs, face, etc. These in many ways looked like purposive movements, and the patients were quite conscious of the movements that were taking place, but also knew that they had not willed these movements and could not stop them. There was no ‘centre’ which when stimulated would give the illusion that the patient was producing the movement of his own free volition. Now if a patient comes to a psychiatrist and says I am addicted to a form of anti-social behaviour, say drug addiction, or indecent exposure to children, and genuinely wants to get rid of these impulses and habits; then it may be that already or in the near future we may have some ‘mechanical’ (chemical or electrical) means of helping him. Our present resources are certainly very limited, there is a chance that they may get better, no one can be sure. But it seems certain to me that if the subject didn’t want to change his habits, no mechanical treatment could have any effect. Delgado wants to persuade people that he and others are on the verge of

Letters to Rhees

357

great discoveries, so he writes a book in which he presents his evidence, or gives a lecture in which he invites discussion. Does he think that in the next five years it will no longer be necessary to present his conclusions, that he will merely have to install a minute ‘stimoceiver’ in the audience’s brain to convince then that what he says is true? And what would true mean in this case? I would like to ask Dr Delgado if he considers that supposing he fell into the hands of some “anti-social group”, they could by mechanical means convince him that his theories and experiments were a lot of nonsense. A good person is good because he wants to be good, not because his brain functions in a certain way. A true theory is true because it is supported by sound reasoning and experimental evidence, not because the person’s brain had been modified in a certain way.

Ailesbury Lawn 30 July 1970 Dear Bob, ….Tomorrow is my last day at Lucan before my holiday starts. I hope during the holiday that I will be able to get on with some work in ‘philosophy’; at the moment I don’t feel I dare write anything. I have been pondering over the difficult problem of ‘responsibility’ in mental illness and not getting any clearer. It can’t be done without clarity about the conception of responsibility in everyday normal life, and that again is a dangerous subject to handle. Your remarks in your last letter about being ‘profoundly silly’ gave me some help at seeing where the difficultly might lie. It is true that in everyday life we don’t have much difficulty in deciding that a person is responsible, and again in hospital it is on the surface easy to decide what a patient is responsible for and where his illness must be blamed. I am sure that to regard any one as no longer having any responsibility is the most terrible thing to say of anyone. I wonder if the right answer is not to have any definite conceptions, any general rules, but always to leave it to the decision of the moment. Just recently there has been a trial here of a man who shot and killed his wife and two children. He was suffering from a profound depression and thought he was saving them from a similar fate. He was found ‘guilty but insane’ and is now in the criminal mental hospital. I kept thinking what would I do for such a patient. If he hadn’t done the murder probably a few electro-convulsive treatments would have cured his depression, but now what a terrible thing for him to regain normality and remember what he had done. It seems to me that there is nobody who attempts to discuss this type of problem, in spite of all the literature on psychiatry. I think most psychiatrists write as if no one is ever responsible but all is determined either psychologically or neurologically; but they all act as if people were responsible, especially when a patient’s behaviour is particularly troublesome. But I mustn’t ramble on in this vague way, it will only show how much I need my holiday!...

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis PREFACE

These lectures are in substance those which at one time I gave to medical students and psychiatrists in training. I found that medical students wished to know something about the subject, if only because future patients might ask them about its suitability. Psychiatrists, I consider, should be acquainted with the subject for it is sometimes the best method for treating functional nervous disorders. It is also desirable that the general public should be in possession of the necessary information in order to protect them against the blandishments of those who advertise themselves. The students of the philosophy of psychology will have to give attention to the phenomena presented by altered states of consciousness. So it seemed to me that there was room for a short book giving the essential facts about hypnosis and in which the author confined himself to those facts that he had been able to verify in his own experience of this form of therapy.

LECTURE 1

An Historical Review of Hypnotic Therapy Ladies and Gentlemen, Over twenty years ago I found myself in considerable difficulties. I had for a few years been working in a large and busy mental hospital and had been concerned with the treatment of the acute psychoses schizophrenia, melancholia, mania, etc. Already in those days the physical methods of treatment for these illnesses were proving more effective than any purely psychological approach. Suddenly I was asked to take over a branch of the hospital situated in a large country house some miles from the main building. Here I was to find myself confronted with problems of an entirely different nature: the common neuroses, as distinct from the psychoses. In popular language ‘nerves’ (often in fact very disabling and distressing complaints) as distinct from ‘madness’. To give you an idea of the type of problem I refer to I will mention a few typical examples from my case books. 1. A fighter pilot who had served throughout the last war. He was now a commercial traveller and his work necessitated long journeys by car. Two years previous to seeing me he had begun to suffer attacks of panic in his car and could not complete his journey. On some occasions so acute was his fear that he had to abandon the car and come home by taxi. As you can well understand his future employment was already in jeopardy. 2. A young housewife who had begun to be unable to leave the house alone. If she did attempt to go out to do her shopping or to visit friends she was seized by such a sense of fear that she could no longer continue. At the same time she began to be afraid of being in the house alone. This led to rather harrowing scenes when her husband had to leave for work. 3. A middle-aged woman who had developed spasm of her eyelids. For the past two years she had been to all purposes blind. Her daughter had had to give up her employment and remain at home, for her mother was now unable to do the simplest jobs and had to be guided by hand. She had been seen by a number of ophthalmic specialists without benefit. 4. A research student who had as a child nearly choked by swallowing some food ‘the wrong way’. Recently he had found at meal times that he could not swallow the food that was in his mouth. He had either to spit it out or remove it with his fingers: a source of considerable embarrassment. In fact

360

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

he now always ate alone and had to refuse all social engagements which involved eating in company. 5. A schoolteacher who had developed a ‘writers’ cramp’. He could no longer correct his pupils’ exercises in writing or write on the blackboard. As soon as he began to try his hand went into a state of spasm and he could not proceed. I could of course go on with a list of such problems but you will have already got an idea of the sort of cases I found myself confronted with. I venture to say that as future consultant psychiatrists these are the sort of problems that will tax your ability most. The treatment of the psychoses is rapidly becoming standardised, but there is by no means the same agreement about what to do for the common neuroses. Chemotherapy alone is not, I believe, the right treatment for these conditions in spite of the newer ‘tranquilisers’ that are now available. Besides you will generally find that by the time such patients come to you they will already have been tried with most of the suitable drugs in the pharmacopeia on prescription from their general practitioner. Now finding myself confronted with such problems and being at a loss how to deal with them, I began to read as widely as I could the books that had been written on the treatment of the common neuroses. In the course of my reading I came across the writings of the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet. I was impressed by the careful observation and clinical acumen shown in these books. (I refer to Les nevroses et les idees fixes, Les obsessions et la psych-asthenie, L’etat mental des hysteriques, Les medications psychologiques) Janet had had a long life, he had been a pupil of the great Charcot and had not died until after the second world war. He was also, and this appealed to me particularly, very well read in philosophy, having obtained his doctorate in philosophy on the same day as his doctorate in medicine. To my surprise I found that Janet to the end of his days used and recommended ‘hypnotism’ as a valuable method of therapy in properly selected cases. He wrote: It has been my tendency, my misfortune perhaps, to have a fondness for moderation and to dislike the absurd exaggeration of extremists. That is why twenty years ago I exposed myself to contempt when I said that hypnotic suggestion was not everything; and that as why to-day, I run the risk of making people laugh at me by saying that hypnotism counts for something after all. Now when I read this in such a cautious and scientific writer as Janet, I began to suspect that my dislike of the subject of hypnotism might be no more than an inexperienced prejudice. I decided that sceptical as I was and without any training in the subject I should at least give hypnotism a trial in those cases where all other treatments had failed. I happened at that time to be treating a patient in hospital for an intractable insomnia. Her sleep was every night disturbed by terrifying nightmares, and none of the drugs then available were able even in maximum doses to achieve more than a few hours of sleep. So one afternoon, having some free time at my disposal I decided to see if I could do anything with hypnosis. I had already rehearsed in my

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

361

own mind the technique of inducing hypnosis but had no idea what exactly to look for or to expect. To my great surprise I found her after a few minutes of induction in what appeared to me to be a condition very similar to being asleep. I then gave her the post-hypnotic command that immediately after the session she would go up to her room, have an hour of natural sleep, then come back and report to me. On my waking her out of the trance state she seemed to have no idea what had been told her and I did not enlighten her. To my relief she came back in exactly one hour to tell me that the most surprising thing had happened, she had had an hour of natural sleep in the afternoon, a thing that had never happened before. From then on I was able without the use of hypnotic drugs to get her to achieve natural sleep free from nightmares. As you can imagine this was a most startling discovery for me and it convinced me that I must read all I could about the subject of hypnosis, and continue to experiment with it. As the history of hypnotism is interesting and my reading of it taught me important lessons, I will introduce the subject with an account of some of the more important names in its development. It is usual to begin the history of hypnotism with the arrival in Paris in the year 1779 of a Viennese physician called Anton Mesmer. Mesmer (b. 1734, d. 1815) lived at the time when the phenomena of magnetism and electricity were first beginning to attract the attention of scientists. It was the age of Volta, of Galvani, of Benjamin Franklin. Mesmer conceived the idea that there was such a thing as ‘animal magnetism’, that a mysterious fluid could be transferred to the body either by the use of an iron magnet or by the direct action of the physician making ‘passes’ over the patient’s body (in much the same way that magnetism can be transferred from one iron rod to another by stroking). Mesmer found that these procedures would sometimes produce a ‘crisis’ accompanied by convulsive seizures, while at other times a trance-like state was achieved. Both these types of result relieved the patient of many pathological symptoms, he claimed. Mesmer offered a treatment for many conditions for which at that time orthodox medicine had no remedy. He soon established a large practice, so much so in fact that the word, to ‘mesmerise’, became part of both the English and French vocabularies, and has remained so to this day (though not many realise its origin). It cannot be denied that Mesmer was a rather theatrical performer. He treated his patients in collective sessions in a semi-darkened room, a small orchestra playing in the background. At the dramatic moment Mesmer would appear dressed in a lilac robe and carrying a ‘magnetised’ rod of iron. These details (often quoted) have led to the belief that Mesmer was something of an imposter. I do not think, however, that he has been given the credit due to him. His ‘sessions’ might be regarded as the first use of what is now so popular – ‘group therapy’. As regards his use of music, it should be remembered that Mesmer was a close personal friend of the great Mozart, and may have had an understanding of the influence of music that we now neglect. Again he was by no means as dogmatic about the ‘magnetic’ nature of his cures as has been asserted, and sometimes spoke of the ‘imitative theory’, thus indicating the possibility of a psychological explanation of his results. He was always ready to treat the poor free of charge and

362

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

carried out this treatment himself, often handing over his more wealthy patients to his pupils. Mesmer’s increasing popularity aroused the jealousy of his more orthodox colleagues. So intense was the controversy that in 1784 a Royal Commission was set up to enquire into the subject of ‘animal magnetism’. We can see the importance which was attached to the subject when we notice the names of those who agreed to serve on this commission. There was Lavoiséer, the founder of modern chemistry; there was Benjamin Franklin serving as the first U.S. ambassador to France; and there was Doctor Guillotine, who was soon to make his reputation in a more incisive manner! The commission came out strongly against Mesmer and had little difficulty in exposing the unscientific nature of his ‘magnetic’ theory. But they do not appear to have examined closely the patients he had cured, and Mesmer justly complained of this neglect. However the result of this adverse judgement was that Mesmer had to leave Paris. He retired to Switzerland and spent the remainder of his life in comparative obscurity, but still continuing to treat the poor for nothing. Here three of Mesmer’s pupils deserve a brief mention. As early as 1780 D’Eslon had made the sensible remark: ‘If the medicine of imagination is the best, why should we not practise the medicine of imagination?’; thereby indicating that he too realised that Mesmer’s methods were not necessarily bound up with his magnetic theory. The Marquis de Puysegur was the first to emphasise that an apparent trance-like state was as common and as effective as the convulsive crises that also occurred in Mesmer’s sessions. He drew attention to the amnesia that often accompanied these trances, and to the possibility of inducing positive and negative hallucinations in suitable subjects. The Marquis also found that he could carry on conversations with his subjects when they were in a state of ‘somnambulism’, (thereby anticipating the method which was to be rediscovered by Breuer and Freud in their first book Studies in hysteria). In 1819 the abbe Faria published an important book entitled De lascause du sommeil lucide. In this book he emphasised the importance of ‘suggestion’ in the induction and utilisation of trance-like states as a means of therapy. One of the most interesting personalities in the history of hypnotism is John Elliotson (b. 1791 d. 1868). Elliotson as a young man was dissatisfied with the current methods of treatment he found in use. It was still the period when frequent ‘bleedings’, violent purges and emetics were employed. Elliotson was the first person in England to recognise the importance of Laenec’s discovery of the stethoscope and he himself made some important observations on the signs to be found in auscultation. His colleagues ridiculed his ‘bringing a little piece of wood’ into the sickroom, and told him he would learn nothing from it. In 1831 Elliotson was appointed Professor of Medicine in the recently founded University College, London. It was on his initiative that University College Hospital was founded, for Elliotson insisted that if he were properly to carry out his teaching he must have the means of instruction at the bedside. In 1837, having observed a demonstration of ‘animal magnetism’ by one of Mesmer’s pupils, Elliotson was sufficiently impressed to begin some experiments in this form of therapy. Soon his demonstrations attracted so many students that he had to transfer his teaching from

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

363

the wards to a large lecture hall. His advocacy of ‘animal magnetism’ aroused the antagonism of the hospital authorities, who refused to attend his demonstrations. He was requested by the Dean to desist from the use of this treatment within the walls of the hospital. Elliotson replied: ‘This institution was established for the discovery and dissemination of truth; all other considerations are secondary. We should lead the public, not the public us.’ The dispute continued, and finally Elliotson was forced to resign his Professorship when he refused to accept a ruling by the Hospital Committee that the practice of ‘animal magnetism’ or Mesmerism was no longer to be permitted in the hospital. He never obtained another academic post but continued to practice as a private individual and never ceased to advocate the advantages of ‘animal magnetism’ in suitable cases. He started the publication of a journal entitled The Zoist in which information about the phenomena of Mesmerism was regularly reported. In 1846 he was invited to give the Harveian Oration, but when the Lancet learnt that his subject was to be ‘Mesmerism’ every effort was made to prevent his appearing. He was described by that journal as a ‘professional pariah’, and a disgrace to the college. In spite of this concerted opposition the lecture was given. Elliotson appealed to his listeners to give the subject serious scientific consideration, and not to condemn a phenomenon they had not even taken the trouble to observe. He pointed out how many innovations in the practice of medicine had at first been opposed, but had later become established practice. He quoted vaccination against smallpox as an example. He condemned the frequent use of ‘bleeding’, purgation, blistering, etc., which were then orthodox procedures for a variety of illnesses. He told his audience that Hysteria in spite of its name had nothing to do with the uterus and was as common in men as in women. To advise marriage in such cases was often disastrous. Mesmerism was the only method of treatment for such cases and the prescription of medicine useless. As well as being an enthusiastic advocate of Mesmerism, Elliotson made many other important contributions to the practice of medicine in his day. He wrote of the importance of sanitation and of the diseases caused by the overcrowding and insanitary housing of the poor. (And this was in an age when the bacterial aetiology of these infectious diseases was unknown). He protested at the harshness of the criminal code and at the lack of attention that was paid to the mental state of convicted criminals. He called for a system of universal education for all children. I mention these points because it seems to be a common belief, even to-day, that those who advocate hypnotism are too unscientific to take an interest in any other branch of medicine. Elliotson is an example of a man who was well ahead of his time in many respects, and at the same time saw nothing unscientific in the use of ‘mesmerism’. An attractive figure in the history of hypnotism is that of James Esdaile (b. 1808 d. 1859). Esdaile graduated in 1830 at Edinburgh and was appointed as a Surgeon to the East India Company. His work involved the performance of both major and minor operations on patients for whom at that date no form of anaesthesia was available. Esdaile had read accounts in Elliotson’s journal, The Zoist, of the anaesthetic potential of ‘mesmerism’, but he felt sceptical about these claims and also

364

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

of his own ability to induce ‘animal magnetism’. It was not until 1845, when one day he had to perform a particularly painful operation on one of his patient’s patients, that he decided to see if there were really any truth in the claims that were being made for the anaesthetic properties of ‘animal magnetism’. To his surprise he found that it was very easy to produce a trance-like state in his patient within a few minutes of induction, and that he was then able to perform the painful operation without the patient showing any signs of discomfort. On waking his subject up, Esdaile found him quite oblivious to the fact that the dreaded operation was now over. I would dwell on this experience of Esdaile’s for a moment. For it has frequently happened that the most enthusiastic advocates of hypnotism have begun with a thoroughly sceptical attitude both as to the efficacy of the treatment and their own ability to induce a trance. Their enthusiasm has only arisen on seeing for themselves the cures obtained. This has been my own experience too; I began with considerable doubts and only time removed them. It is just not true that belief in the value of hypnotism is a necessary pre-requisite to obtaining results. Esdaile was one of the few experimenters in hypnotism to receive official encouragement (though that name had not yet become widely known, and Esdaile like Elliotson continued to speak of ‘mesmerism’ or alternatively ‘animal magnetism’). The Governor of the East India Company in Bengal was so impressed by Esdaile’s work that he had a special hospital built where treatment by ‘mesmerism’ could be carried out; independent medical visitors were appointed to report critically on Esdaile’s work. Two years later Esdaile was able to report on a large number of surgical operations that had been performed in this hospital without the patients showing any signs of pain or of subsequent shock. The independent visitors fully confirmed these claims. Esdaile finally had to leave India for reasons of health. Before going he was able to report several thousands of minor surgical procedures and about three hundred major operations performed under ‘animal magnetism’. These latter included nineteen amputations and one lithotomy. He was also able to point out that the mortality from these operations compared very favourably with that in other hospitals where no form of anaesthesia was used. Indeed Esdaile had begun to operate on patients who had been rejected by other surgeons as presenting too great a risk. On returning to his native Scotland Esdaile tried to get reports published in a reputable journal. He was encouraged in this by Sir J. Y. Simpson – who was in the near future to discover the anaesthetic properties of chloroform. But the editors of the then current medical journals refused to publish Esdaile’s articles, stating that ‘hysterical behaviour among the natives of Bengal would be of no interest to the sober inhabitants of Great Britain.’ You will have noticed that both Elliotson and Esdaile continued to use the words ‘animal magnetism; or alternatively ‘mesmerism’. They were still thinking in terms of a physical explanation of the phenomena they observed and of the use of a magnet as a necessary part of the technique. The introduction of the word ‘hypnotism’ and the discovery that the phenomena were capable of a purely psychological explanation was entirely due to the work of a Manchester surgeon James Braid (b. 1795 d. 1860).

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

365

Braid had already established a considerable reputation as a surgeon when, hearing that one of Mesmer’s pupils was planning to give a demonstration of ‘animal magnetism’ in Manchester, he said to one of his professional colleagues that they should go along and expose the procedure as fraudulent. Accordingly, after the Frenchman had claimed to have put a young girl into a trance-like state Braid got up and said: ‘This whole affair is as big a piece of humbug as I have ever witnessed’. The Frenchman (whose English was not very good) replied: ‘Will the gentleman who says it is all bog please come up on the platform’. Braid whispered to his friend to come up with him, saying ‘I will soon put an end to this nonsense’. Having arrived on the platform he took a pin from his lapel and proceeded to insert it under one of the girl’s finger nails – expecting her to react violently and so expose the so-called ‘trance state’. To his astonishment nothing happened; the girl seemed quite insensitive to pain. Braid turned to his colleague: ‘This does not look to me as if it were “all Bog”; there is something here that must be investigated.’ Surgical operations were still being carried out without any form of anaesthesia, and Braid decided to experiment with the technique he had observed to see if he could render the operations he had to perform less painful. He soon found that it was not difficult to induce a trance-like state and that he could relieve pain by this method. He carried out experiments to determine the best method of induction, and soon convinced himself that a magnet played no real part in the attainment of the trance. He came to the conclusion that the phenomena were capable of a purely psychological explanation and proposed that the word ‘neuro-hypnotism’ should be used – to indicate that the magnetic theory was no longer required. This was later contracted to ‘hypnotism’ and the word has remained in use ever since. Braid also introduced a novel method of inducing hypnotism, which has remained one of the best and is still in use. (I will not describe it now as I will be discussing it at some length in a subsequent lecture.) Like Elliotson, Braid had to put up with intense opposition to his claims. Some surgeons argued that it was necessary for patients to feel pain at the time of operation and that if they did not do so the subsequent recovery was less satisfactory. Braid was also attacked from the pulpit, one preacher stating that hypnosis was making use of a ‘satanic agency’. Braid was not disturbed by this opposition and continued to use hypnotism in the treatment of a variety of complaints. But he always insisted that hypnotism was not to be regarded as a universal panacea but was just one of the methods of treatment available for certain intractable complaints. He objected strongly to being called a ‘Hypnotist’, as if this was the only method of treatment he employed. His work was more favourably received in France. Broca, a name well known in the history of neuro-anatomy, read a paper to the Academie des Sciences which attracted attention to the importance of Braid’s investigations and methods. But with the discovery of chemical methods of producing anaesthesia, such as nitrous oxide, ether and chloroform, interest in hypnosis as a means of relieving pain fell into abeyance.

366

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

These latter methods were more certain, more time-saving, and more in line with the concepts of scientific medicine. However, in spite of this decline in interest, some practitioners, particularly in France, continued to use hypnosis as a means of treating a variety of complaints for which other methods of therapy had failed. The real revival of interest in hypnosis was largely due to an obscure French general practitioner, A. A. Liebault. Having used hypnosis on many of his patients for twenty years, he wrote a book entitled Du sommeil et des etats analogues, consideres au point de vue de l’action de la morale sur la physique. It was published in 1866, but so little attention was paid to it that only one copy was sold. Liebault had to wait another eight years before a stroke of luck made his name famous. He happened to cure a patient who had previously consulted the distinguished professor of medicine in the town of Nancy, Bernheim by name. Bernheim had been unsuccessful in his treatment and the patient informed him of the result of Liebault’s method. Bernheim felt rather sceptical of what he heard but resolved nevertheless to visit Liebault at his clinic and observe what he did. He came away so impressed that he began to hypnotise himself and invited Liebault to join him in establishing a clinic for the express purpose of continuing the work. This clinic soon became famous and attracted the attention of doctors throughout Europe. Hypnosis once again became a subject of general interest, and journals were published reporting the results obtained by this method of therapy. Charcot, one of the great names in the history of medicine, and particularly of neurology, was at this time at the height of his fame in the Salpetriere in Paris. His famous Tuesday morning clinics were attended by doctors of all nationalities. Charcot thought the phenomena of hypnosis were well worthy of a neurologist’s attention and gave frequent demonstrations of the subject in his clinic. The subject became highly respectable and was no longer derided as being unscientific. (To-day when I still find many of my colleagues suspicious of my interest in hypnosis I console myself with the thought that the great Charcot would have approved of what I am doing.) Among those foreign physicians who attended the demonstrations of both Bernheim and Charcot was a young Austrian neurologist called Sigmund Freud. In a short auto-biography Freud writes as follows: I witnessed the moving spectacle of old Liebault working among the poor women and children of the labouring classes; I was a spectator of Bernheim’s astonishing experiments among his hospital patients; and I received the impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes at work which yet remained hidden from the consciousness of man. Freud always spoke of his later work in psycho-analysis as the child of hypnosis (and in true Freudian fashion the child killed the father!). It was the fact that post-hypnotic commands were meticulously carried out by the subject without his remembering that he had been so instructed, and with his often giving an entirely fictitious reason for his behaviour, that necessitated the invention of the term ‘the unconscious mind’. For such post-hypnotic commands were neither entirely forgotten, otherwise they would not have been carried out, nor could one say that they were remembered, for the subject had no such recollection.

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

367

Freud returned to Vienna determined to carry on with the hypnotic work he had observed in France. He collaborated with Breuer in publishing his first book, ‘Studies in hysteria’. But Freud used hypnosis as a means of getting the patient to talk to him and remember the traumatic events which had produced his pathological symptoms. When he found that hypnosis did not always give him such information he developed the method of ‘free association’ and abandoned hypnosis. The originality of Freud’s writings and the daring nature of his speculations attracted so much attention that psycho-analysis turned people’s interest away from hypnosis. To-day, however, psycho-analysis in the strict Freudian manner is not so popular as it was and its therapeutic value is often called into question. Certainly it is a lengthy (and expensive) procedure. For example it would not have been possible for me to adopt this method for the numerous patients I found myself responsible for and whom I described to you earlier in this lecture. Nor had I had the advantage of what is called a ‘training analysis’ – regarded by the orthodox as a necessity. Accordingly I decided to use hypnosis as Bernheim and Liebault had done in their Nancy clinic, and to see what transpired.

LECTURE 2

Some Fundamental Questions Ladies and Gentleman, I spent some time in my first lecture telling you of the history of hypnosis. I wished to show that hypnosis, in spite of opposition, had kept coming back into use over a period of at least two hundred years; and that some of the most distinguished physicians had considered it a valuable method of treatment. I hope therefore that you will now feel ready to consider the subject with a mind free from prejudice. When I had decided to experiment with hypnosis as a means of treatment for those patients for whom I could see no more orthodox form of therapy, I set myself ten questions which I wished to solve: 1. Is there really a specific mental state that can be described as being in a hypnotic trance? 2. How many people can be put into this state of mind if it really exists? Few, many, or all? 3. How many people can act as hypnotists? is it a skill that requires some special gift, or is it a technique that anyone who wishes to can learn? 4. What is the best method of inducing a hypnotic trance? 5. If a trance state is obtained what is the best way of using such a state of mind for therapeutic purposes? 6. Having induced a trance state and having made use of it, will there be any difficulty in terminating it? 7. Are there any dangers or contra-indications to using hypnosis? 8. If hypnosis is a reality what benefits can be obtained by using it? That is to say, what type of complaint can be treated by this method? 9. Is there any risk of patients becoming addicted to hypnosis? That is, is there a danger that once having embarked on this treatment they will become more and more dependent on its repetition? 10. How long is a course of hypnotic treatment to last? Will it be a matter of a few weeks, months or even years? I have now been using hypnosis for twenty-five years and I consider that I can give you a definite answer to all these ten questions. This is what I propose to do in the following lectures. And I will begin with the first and most important of them: is there really such a mental state as being in a hypnotic trance? I call it the most important, for if the answer to this is in the negative then the other questions hardly arise.

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

369

And my answer is an undoubted ‘yes’. A hypnotic trance is a peculiar mental state different both from being asleep and from being awake. I believe if you decide to take up the practice of hypnosis you will fairly quickly come across phenomena that will convince you of the truth of what I say. There will indeed be some cases where you will not be sure that any change in mental state has occurred; but there will be others where you will have no doubt but that you are dealing with something ‘sui generis’. I will begin therefore by telling you of a few of the more striking phenomena that have convinced me of the genuine nature of hypnosis. I have already mentioned the first time I attempted to use hypnosis and was able to obtain a natural night’s sleep for a patient who had previously proven resistant to all drugs even the maximum possible dose. Of course I was very lucky to have stumbled the first time on a patient who was so unusually susceptible. From what I have told you of the history of hypnotism you will remember that such an experience had happened to others who approached the subject with considerable scepticism; I hope that you may be equally lucky, but would advise you not to give up if your first case proves less dramatic. Such immediate results are not the rule, as I will explain later. One summer’s afternoon when I had been using hypnosis for about a year, and was already convinced of its value, I was treating a patient for claustrophobia. The induction had gone smoothly and I had completed the psychotherapy under hypnosis. As had been my custom I then left the patient for ten minutes, without saying anything more and watching closely to see if any movement occurred (I will explain the importance of this procedure very soon.) On this particular occasion I suddenly saw that a wasp had settled on the patient’s forehead. I went over hastily to brush it away but before I could do so saw that the patient had been stung, the typical wheal appearing on her forehead. Now I had not suggested anaesthesia but to my surprise the patient showed no sign of discomfort and did not move or attempt to put her hand to her head. But ten minutes later when I brought her out of the trance she immediately put her hand to her forehead and exclaimed “Oh something is stinging me.” I explained what had happened to her and she said that she had no recollection of anything stinging her under hypnosis. I would add that since then I have frequently observed flies settle on a patient’s face or hand and they have made none of the usual gestures to brush it away. On another occasion I had just induced what I considered a sufficient depth of trance when I was called away to see to a more urgent problem in the hospital. I left the patient in charge of a nurse without giving any instruction to the patient. When I returned in half an hour I noticed that the patient seemed to be still in the same position and trance-like state that I had left her in. The nurse told me that she had not moved. I continued the psychotherapeutic part of the session and when the patient was awake again I found she had no idea that I had been called away or that the session had been unduly prolonged. Following the above experience it was sometimes my custom to induce hypnosis in the patient’s bed-room first thing in the morning and to leave him or her in a trance-state until lunch-time. Such patients usually expressed surprise at the time

370

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

passing so quickly: ‘Why’, they said, ‘I have only just finished breakfast’. Again I often used hypnosis last thing at night to obtain sleep without the use of hypnotic drugs. The patients always woke in the morning in a perfectly normal manner. I had a patient well accustomed to hypnosis being treated for insomnia and a variety of phobias. It was necessary for her to have a tooth removed. She disliked intensely having either a general anaesthetic or even a local one, and asked me if it would be possible to have the extraction done under hypnosis. In view of what I had read of Esdaile’s use of hypnosis in surgery I agreed to ask her dentist if he would mind my inducing hypnosis in the dental chair. Many dentists have now found hypnosis useful in allaying fears of the same chair, and so he agreed to my request. The extraction was performed without the patient feeling any pain and indeed she was only convinced that the tooth had been removed when she was shown it. The dentist said that it had not been an easy extraction. I could of course go on and recount many other experiences which have convinced me that there really is a peculiar state of mind which can be called ‘being in a hypnotic trance’. But my belief is that if you decide to take up this fascinating branch of medicine you will sooner or later find yourself face-to-face with such unexpected experiences as these. When this does happen you will want to ask yourself: ‘What is the explanation for this unusual state of consciousness, or, if you prefer it, unconsciousness?’ You will at once find yourself in the midst of a bewildering number of theories. Mesmer as I have told you tried to explain the phenomena in terms of the theory of magnetism as it existed in his day. (Notice that we still talk of induction – a term borrowed from magnetic theory.) Braid, when he discovered that the magnet played no necessary part in the induction process, coined the word ‘hypnotism’ – thinking in terms of artificially induced sleep. This word was also unfortunate in one respect: it is now certain that the hypnotic trance differs in every respect from normal sleep. Indeed it is essential to explain to a patient that they are not going to go to sleep. Later Braid came to emphasise the importance of the patient fixing his attention on some bright object, and wished to substitute the term ‘monoideism’ for hypnosis. Although this method of fixation of attention is a very valuable one the term Braid introduced never took the place of hypnotism. Liebault, although he often spoke of artificially induced sleep, in his last book on the subject wrote as follows: Although I have been a psychological magnetist and have long opposed the fluidist theory, I can no longer regard certain phenomena as not being due to the effect of one organism on another, without any interference with the conscious thinking of the subject concerned. There are truths to be found in both camps. A. A. Liebault: Etudes sur le zoomagnetisme Charcot with his interest focussed on neurology thought that a purely a purely objective and neurological description of hypnotic phenomena could be given. He taught that the ability to be hypnotised was already a sign of nervous ill-health and that three distinct stages could be delineated in every case – catalepsy, lethargy and

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

371

somnambulism. Charcot’s teachings were hotly denied by the Nancy school, who were convinced that his ability to hypnotise did not indicate any state of previous nervous ill-health, and that Charcot’s three distinct phases were produced by his leading the patients to expect such stares. For the Nancy school there were various degrees of depth of hypnosis forming a continuum. Bernheim thought that all the phenomena of hypnosis could be explained in terms of ‘suggestion’. Janet pointed out how vague the term ‘suggestion’ was and that it in turn required a more thorough exposition. His fascinating book ‘L’automatisme’ contains an account of his numerous experiments in hypnosis. These people were all actively engaged in the treatment of patients by hypnosis. But the academic psychologists have also tried to establish a scientific investigation of the subject. William James in his epoch-making work Principles of psychology devoted a whole chapter to the subject of hypnotic experiments. In 1933 Hull, a leading exponent of ‘learning theory’, published a complete book on the subject, Hypnotism and suggestibility. Since then there have been many other books, both of pure theory and of strict experimental investigations. I fear that in mentioning the extent of the literature I may have frightened you off any further interest in the matter. Especially when I tell you that these writers all have a different theory to put forward. On the one hand you have those who think that a purely physiological theory is possible, eg, Platonov and those who adopt the neuro-physiology of Pavlov. Others favour a concept based on current ‘learning theory’, eg. Hull and Weitzenhoffer. Then again such writers as Kubie and Margolin attempt a theory of hypnosis based on the Freudian conception of ‘transference’. Or I might mention a writer such as R. W. White who thinks that hypnosis is largely a matter of goaldirected striving, the patient trying to act the part of what he conceives a hypnotised person should do. But there is no need to be alarmed at the diversity of these attempted explanations. For when it comes to the technique of inducing hypnosis and then making use of the trance state for therapeutic purposes there is no longer such a divergence of views. I think it is important that the strict scientific investigation of hypnotic phenomena should be continued by academic psychologists; but the results obtained so far are, it seems to me, of little practical importance to a clinician wishing to use hypnosis as a form of therapy. And so I can tell you that there is no need for you to make yourself master of this enormous literature before starting work. My own belief, for what it is worth, having read the books referred to above, is that in hypnosis we have a unique form of consciousness that is not explainable in terms of any other known and more familiar state. We are all aware that there are two distinct forms of sleep – normal sleep and ‘rapid eye movement sleep’ – and that these show different E.E.G. patterns of waves; both forms being important for full mental health. I suggest that there are also two forms of waking consciousness – the normal everyday state of alertness, and the hypnotic state. We are all familiar with the state of mind in which a good actor on the stage, a powerful orator in the pulpit, or even a well written and powerful story, can make us for a time oblivious of our own self-consciousness and of what is going on around us. I suggest to you that such

372

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

limitation of the conscious field is the beginning of the hypnotic state and that it is no mere metaphor when we say of a great actor that he ‘hypnotised’ his audience. There is however one aspect of hypnosis that both clinical workers and experimental psychologists are agreed on, and this is of some importance. All who have worked with hypnosis have agreed that there are various degrees of depth obtainable in different subjects. Various scales of measurement have been drawn up in an attempt to make these degrees objective and measureable. These scales of depth involve experiments on the subject such as testing for anaesthesia, catalepsy, automatism, and in the deeper stages positive and negative hallucinations. It is justifiable to use these tests on healthy volunteers (as has often been done) but it would not be right to subject a patient to these potentially frightening experiences; the golden rule in the clinical use of hypnosis is that nothing must be done other than that directed to the precise benefit of the patient. The academic psychologists’ work in drawing up scales of hypnotic depth has, however, resulted in some conclusions of importance to clinical work: 1. It seems fairly well established that hypnotic susceptibility is a fairly constant factor of the subject’s personality; that the depth of the trance obtained in any one session depends more on the patient’s susceptibility than on the skill of the hypnotist or on the particular technique used in induction. A certain amount of learning does occur in the first few sessions but after about six or so treatments the maximum level of depth has been reached. (This conclusion does of course assume that the hypnotist has himself mastered his technique and has had sufficient experience to be fully proficient in applying it.) 2. Only a small number of patients, probably no more than five percent, will ever reach the deep, so-called ‘somnambulist’ stage. That is to say, a depth at which amnesia for the whole session as anesthesia for surgical operations is obtained, and after which post-hypnotic commands will be carried out punctiliously. That only this small number of subjects can be so hypnotised has no clinical importance; for it is now also well known that even a light degree of hypnosis enables treatment by ‘suggestion’ to be effective. And this light trance state is obtainable in nearly every subject. Only about five percent of patients are unable to achieve this light degree of hypnosis. Milne Bramwell in his standard work on the subject, ‘Hypnotism, its history, practice and theory’, published as long ago as 1903, drew attention to this important work; he observed and reported case histories in which he had obtained satisfactory results even when he was not certain that any appreciable degree of hypnosis had been reached. Bernheim also made a similar observation. 3. With experience it will be possible for the practitioner to determine by observation the degree of trance state obtained without having to resort to my particular tests. (I will be discussing these observations with you in a later lecture, and so will not digress now. But for convenience it will be sufficient to speak of ‘light’, ‘medium’ and ‘deep’ trance states; always remembering that these represent stages on a continuum and do not imply any abrupt passage from one to another.) To illustrate the above important conception I might report to you Liebault’s conclusions. I make no excuse for using figures a hundred years old, for I consider that Liebault knew as much about hypnosis as any one has ever done – in spite of all

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

373

the research that has been carried out since his day. Liebault based his observations on 2,654 case histories of which he had record. He noted that of these patients only five percent had proved completely refractory to all attempts to hypnotise them. Forty three percent achieved a light trance; forty one percent a medium degree of depth; and eleven percent a deep state. These figures agree very closely with any similar statistics published by other workers in the subject, including those academic psychologists who have approached the subject in a strict experimental investigation. You will find in many books a description of various tests which can be carried out before attempting to induce hypnosis; these tests being designed to give an indication of the degree of susceptibility of the subject. I refer to such tests as ‘the body sway test’, ‘the hand clasping test’ and the use of ‘Chevreul’s pendulum’. I am not going to discuss these as I have found them unnecessary and liable to make the patient feel rather foolish, as if one were trying to exert some mysterious influence over him rather than teaching him to do something for himself; as the vast majority of subjects are susceptible at least to the lightest degree of hypnosis it is best to begin straight away, and not try and determine the trance state which will be reached by any other tests beforehand. There is however one preliminary procedure I do advise, and that is to carry out the usual routine medical examination – such as you would do for any other method of treatment before prescribing. Such a procedure has several advantages. It puts the whole subject into the straightforward context of normal medical treatment, and does not suggest that there is something mysterious about the method you are considering employing. Secondly it may well be that from time to time such an examination will reveal some genuine organic condition requiring other treatment than hypnosis. Thirdly, in giving the patient the necessary instructions to enable you to carry out such a physical examination, you are already training him to obey your commands, and putting him into a proper state of mind to carry out your later instructions. Of course if the patient has been referred to you by a competent physician who has been able to assure you that no organic disease has been found, then it will be wiser not to repeat such investigations: only make sure that you tell the patient the reason for your omitting the usual routine. We have now answered the first two questions I set myself when I decided to give hypnotic treatment a trial; there is a unique state of mind which can be described as being in a hypnotic trance; and the vast majority of subjects can obtain a sufficiently deep state to enable its use as a means of therapy. The third question was ‘Who can hypnotise?’ And the answer to this is very short: everyone. That is to say, if you are prepared to acquaint yourself with the necessary preliminary literature, and then to practise the technique, you will in a short time find yourself competent. There is no such thing as a special gift for hypnosis. Some years ago a friend wrote to tell me that he had discovered he had ‘hypnotic Powers’. I wrote back telling him not to speak so foolishly, everyone had hypnotic powers if they took the trouble to acquire them. The art of hypnosis is no more difficult to learn than, say, the art, of using a stethoscope; of course practice and growing experience are necessary as well, and one’s technique will improve as time goes on. To begin with you must be prepared for failures, and a failure to obtain hypnosis

374

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

can be a rather humiliating experience in the presence of a patient who has come expecting something dramatic; but you must not let such embarrassment deter you from persevering. There is another danger that is likely to occur in the early stage of your apprenticeship. Early on you will probably come across one of that small percentage of patients who are able to obtain a deep trance state on the very first session. This is always such a startling experience that you will be in danger of making it a paradigm for all future treatments. This must be guarded against: the majority of patients will not achieve this depth at any time, and the lighter and less dramatic trance states are of equal value for therapy. I mention some names if you wish to read further in this subject: 1. Weitzenhoffer: Hypnotism, an objective study of suggestibility (New York: John Wiley & Son, 1953). (The bibliography at the end of this book extends to 508 references.) 2. Platenov: The word as a physiological and therapeutic mechanism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959). (This is a most interesting book, a well documented account of the attempt to explain all the phenomena of hypnosis in terms of orthodox Pavlovian neurology. The references to English literature on the subject extend to over 500 titles.) 3. Hilgard, E.R.: Hypnotic susceptibility (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1965). 4. Scott Moss, C.: Hypnosis in perspective (New York; The Macmillan Co., 1965). (These last two books both contain references to several hundred papers on the subject in various journals.)

LECTURE 3

Trance Induction Ladies and Gentlemen, In this third lecture I will be concerned with answering the question: “What is the best technique for inducing hypnosis?” A great many different methods have been recommended from time to time: you can find them described in a book by Weitzenhoffer entitled General techniques of hypnotism (Grune and Stratton, 1957). This runs to 434 pages – giving you some idea of the numerous methods that can be used. I would regard a great many of these as of historical interest only, and would advise you to confine yourself to mastering a few, and to learning these few ‘by heart’, so that you can carry them out without any hesitation or stumbling. As a general principle I would advise you to avoid any techniques that make use of some mechanical apparatus; I refer to the use of such instruments as a ticking metronome or Luy’s flashing mirror. Again I would emphasise that it is no use, as some people advise, simplifying the proceedings by substituting a tape recording or gramophone record for your own presence. As I will be telling you, the timing of the various stages is essential, differing from patient to patient, and this timing requires close observation of the patient and his progress to a true trance state. There is no short cut to achieving the best results, hypnosis will always be a rather tiring therapy, and unless you a are prepared to put all you have into it you will not get good results. I will now describe my standard procedure of induction, interrupting the account by tell you what you should be observing and what you should be doing with your hands as well as with your voice. First of all, and this is essential, you must do all you can to explain to the patient the scientific principles behind what you are doing. Nearly everyone comes to hypnosis with false ideas generated by what they have read or seen on television. You must give the patient time to ask any relevant questions that may be troubling him, so eliminating any fears on his part that might prevent success. I begin by explaining to my patient that in medicine we use the techniques of hypnosis entirely for the benefit of relieving the symptoms that are troubling him; that my object right from the beginning is to teach him something that he can do himself, and so eventually to make him free from the need for any drug therapy or any dependence on me or any other doctor. I explain to the patient that every human being has two ‘nervous systems’ – the ‘voluntary’ and the ‘involuntary’. I illustrate this distinction by the fact that during his physical examination he has carried out certain voluntary actions according to my instructions; whereas if during that examination I had told him to slow down his heart he could not have obeyed, as the heart rate is under the control of the involuntary nerves. Having made this distinction clear I then go on to explain that

376

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

the symptoms he has complained of are similarly involuntary manifestations, and that the treatment we are going to use is directed to giving him some control over this part of his body, I find that most neurotic patients have been either told by well meaning friends, or have told themselves, to ‘pull themselves together’, or to ‘snap out of it’; it is a relief to them to be told that these exhortations are meaningless, but that there is indeed something they can learn to do – namely the art of relaxing deeply under hypnosis, there by bringing their involuntary nervous system under their control. One further point which I have found it essential to explain to the patient before attempting hypnosis: nearly everyone thinks that hypnosis consists of going to sleep, and that if they have not been asleep the treatment has not worked. Here of course the very name ‘hypnosis’ is partly to blame for the misunderstanding. It is therefore necessary to tell the patient that although it sometimes happens that subjects do go to sleep, this is not an essential part of the treatment and that he will most probably be fully conscious of what I am doing and saying during the session. Having then allowed my patient to ventilate any fears or misunderstandings which he may have had concerning hypnosis, and having made sure that he understands the essential point of the treatment is to give him some degree of control over his ‘involuntary nervous system’ – that is that he is going to learn to do something and not merely have something done to him – I begin the first induction. The first step in the induction process is to put the patient into the most comfortable position possible. At first I used an ordinary couch or sometimes a comfortable arm-chair, but I discovered early on that I got the best and quickest results by using a special form of chair called a ‘relaxator’. This particular chair enables one to put a patient into a position where he can lie back with his head a little lower than his feet and with his knees slightly bent. Having made sure that the patient is feeling comfortable in this position, I then draw the curtains so that the room is in darkness except for a reading lamp on my desk. More important than the darkness, though, is that the room should be warm; it is impossible, I have found, for someone to relax if he is feeling cold. (Esdaile noted that he was able to get quicker and better results in the steamy heat of Bengal than he did when he returned to the chillier temperature of his native Scotland.) Then standing in full sight of the patient at the foot of the couch, I begin as follows: I want you to take a deep breath, as deep as you can and hold your breath while I count to ten. Then when I reach ten breathe out emptying your lungs to the full and letting your whole body relax with you. Now a good deep breath, hold it! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I carry out the above instructions three or four times, until I am satisfied that the patient is obeying me perfectly. (You must watch the patient carefully and aim to reach the number ten at the moment he just has to take another breath; a little experience will soon enable

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

377

you to adjust your counting to the right pace for each subject. The object of this preliminary exercise is to get the patient to associate your reaching the number ten with a sense of relief and ‘letting go’. Pavlovians would describe it as establishing a conditioned reflex to the word ‘ten’.) Having completed the above exercise I change my position and stand beside the patient, telling him as follows; Now I want you to concentrate on your ordinary natural rhythymical breathing. Do something we are not usually accustomed to do. Turn your attention to being conscious of your breathing. Conscious of the rhythmical movement of your muscles and ribs. Conscious of the air passing in and out of your nostrils. Deep steady rhythmical breathing. I give the above instructions in a low tone of voice, and as the patient’s breathing takes on a steady rhythm I try and adjust the rhythm of my sentences to the rhythm of his breathing. (With a little practice this is not difficult to do.) Then I proceed to sneak as follows: You have now got the rhythm of your breathing perfect. Those muscles and ribs are moving under your control. They are obeying you. In a short time that same feeling of power and control will come spreading over your whole body. Arms and hands, feet and legs, head and neck and face and eyes. A feeling of complete relaxation. When I am satisfied that the patients breathing is now completely regular I move to a standing position behind the end of the couch and give the following instructions: Now i want you to begin to occupy your mind with a monotonous task. Imagine you have to count silently in your mind backwards from three hundred. Do not from now on pay much attention to what I am saying but concentrate on the counting. Three hundred, two ninety nine, two ninety eight, two ninety seven, continue the monotonous counting. (The object of this method of distracting the patient’s attention is to prevent his mind from wandering on to worrying thoughts. The counting backwards is to make it difficult for him, so that it requires his full concentration. And as I will be explaining later it does often provide a clue to the depth of hypnosis reached.) For the next procedure I use Braid’s method of eye fixation. I take a small electric torch and hold it about one foot above the patient’s eyes and a little way backwards so that he has to strain his eyes to see it. In doing this I say: Keep your eyes fixed on this bright point of light trying not even to blink. Breathing steadily and rhythmically. Mind occupied with the monotonous counting. Eyes steady on the one point. In a few minutes you will begin to feel your whole body relaxing. Arms and hands feeling heavy like lead. You can feel the weight of them lying on your lap. Legs warm and comfortable. All feeling of

378

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

tension in the legs gone. You are hardly consious of them. The whole body sinking into the chair. All feeling of strain in the back gone. Head lying back on the pillow with all tension in neok and forehead and temples gone. Your eyes are getting tired. The lids are drooping a little. Soon they will be closing, closing, closing. I continue the above remarks for as long as necessary, until I begin to see the eye-lids trembling and fluttering. This is the essential moment to speak very softly but firmly as follows: I am now going to count slowly to ten and by the time I reach ten your eyes will be so sleepy that you will have to close them and let them remain closed. Now! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. (In doing this counting you should let your voice become gradually and more and more emphatic. If all has gone well you will find in the majority of cases that the patient’s eyes are closed.) I then pause for a short while to see if there is any tendency for the patient to open his eyes; if he does open them it is a sign that the hypnosis has not been successful, and I will have to repeat the whole induction over again, saying to the patient: Now you have got the idea all right and we will repeat the exercise over again. In the majority of cases as I have said this repetition will not be necessary, but sometimes two or even three such inductions are required. Once I am satisfied that the patient’s eyes are closed and show no tendency to open again I speak as follows, rather rapidly and in a low monotonous voice: Now all is peaceful and quiet all tension gone. You are relaxed and sleepy restful and still. Every muscie and nerve relaxing with you linked to that steady rhythmical controlled breathing. See now the legs are so comfortable you are hardly conscious of them. Here I adopt a technique that Mesmer attached great importance to (he was obviously thinking of the way a magnet can be used to transfer magnetism from a magnet to an inert piece of iron.) I draw my fingers lightly downwards from the hips to the feet sever times. This I believe not only helps to deepen the trance but also serves as an indication that complete muscle relaxation has been obtained, for with a little experience you will be able to appreciate that in so touching the legs no reflex action of the muscles occurs. Then I repeat: See now you have relaxed your legs so well that you are hardly conscious of them. Next I draw my fingers lightly downwards from the shoulders to the tips of the fingers, saying:

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

379

Your arms have become so heavy that you could hardly lift them up you can feel the weight of them lying on your lap. Then I touch the eyelids gently, saying: Your eyes are so sleepy that you don’t want to open them let them remain closed. Again I observe whether in touching the eyelids there is any reflex tightening of the palpebral muscles. Then I proceed to use a technique which was Esdaile’s innovation, gently massaging the forehead with my fingers and saying at the same time: See now every muscle and nerve in the body is relaxed and comfortable. Sleepy drowsy and at ease. All tension gone. (You will have noticed from what I have just described that the induction of hypnosis is a very monotonous procedure in which you have to repeat yourself over and over again. And that it is useful to have as many synonyms available as possible. It is essential to keep up a continuous flow of instructions in the same quiet monotonous tone of voice.) The patient should now be in the first stage of hypnosis, and you can pause for a few minutes to observe him closely. There should be no tendency for him to change his position and no movement of the legs and particularly of the fingers. The eyes too should remain closed. You will soon come to recognise what I might call the ‘Hypnotic facies’. The patient will be breathing rather deeply and steadily, like a person who is asleep; the muscles of the face will be relaxed so that the mouth is slightly open, and all tendency to frown will have gone, leaving the forehead free from wrinkles. Having satisfied yourself that this stage has been reached you can now proceed to deepen the trance. Here I find myself differing from the procedure recommended in most books on the subject. Hull introduced the useful terms ‘homo-active suggestions’ and ‘heteroactive suggestions’; by homo-active suggestions he meant repeating the previously given suggestions over and over again; by hetero-active he meant entirely new instructions. These new instructions might take the form of “your eyes are now so firmly closed you can no longer open them, just try.” And then you would observe the patient trying to open his eyes but in fact only managing to raise his eyebrows. Or again you might suggest that his arm had become so rigid that he could no longer bend it at the elbow; and again you would perceive him trying to flex his arm but being unable to do so. Many other similar challenges can of course be given. This is the orthodox approach; at first I used to follow it and am still convinced that in many cases such challenges are effective. But now I use them no longer. My objection is that they are not effective in every case and that if the patient manages to do what you have told him he can’t do, then you have ‘lost face’, and your subsequent suggestions will be less effective. But more important than this is the fact that such challenges can be rather frightening to a nervous patient such as the treatment is designed to help. Besides, my whole aim in hypnotic treatment is to give the patient a sense of personal control over whatever symptoms have been troubling him; and so to suggest to him that he cannot do something is to defeat my

380

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

purpose – to give the impression that I am exercising some mysterious power over him, and not that he is learning to do something which in time will no longer need my instructions. I have therefore long given up this method of deepening the trance state. Instead I proceed as follows, using repeated homo-active suggestions rather than hetero-active ones: I am now coing to count slowly again to ten and as I count you will feel yourself relaxing more and more. So that by the time you reach ten you will feel so relaxed and drowsy time will seem of no importance. You just won’t notice the passage of time. It will all seem like a pleasant dream. (The importance of this last suggestion will be made clearer when I come to describe a method of estimating the depth of trance state.) Then, slowly walking away from the patient, I say: One, two - deeper and deeper Three, four - more and more relaxed Five, six — all tension gone Seven, eight, nine, ten ten ten I have spaced the words above deliberately to indicate the pauses I use in delivery. I adopted the technique of walking away from the patient when a patient told me some years ago that as the relaxation seemed to be getting deeper it sounded as if I were getting further and further away in the distance. (For this reason it is of advantage to use a fairly large room for the treatment so that you can make this feeling of ‘fading’ effective.) By this stage the induction of hypnosis should be complete, and you can proceed to the utilisation of the trance for purposes of therapy; this is a more difficult operation than the induction and I will therefore leave it for a subsequent lecture. But there are still a few points concerning the induction that I should mention. Firstly this, it has taken me considerably less time to describe the process than the actual performance takes. It would have been tedious to have repeated the same words over and over again, but in an actual session such repetition will often be necessary; I find that a minimum of ten minutes is required and I like to allow myself an hour for a first session. Secondly you may well ask me: “how do you know that the patient is really hypnotised, seeing that you do not use the challenges that others use for such ascertainment?” The answer is that I have found four tests which I regard as sufficient to satisfy myself that some degree of hypnosis has been reached; 1. After the session has been completed I ask the patient how long it has seemed to him that he was lying there. Over and over again patients have replied “Oh, only a few minutes”. I can then show them that in reality it has been over half an hour. This time distortion is very characteristic. 2. Throughout the session the patient will lie completely still, even when I am not speaking. For this reason I end the session by ten minutes or so of silence, observing that such immobility has been obtained.

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

381

3. You remember that I instruct the patient to start counting backwards in order to concentrate his concentration. If hypnosis has been obtained he will tell me that he only got a little way with the numbers, and that they then seem to fade out of his memory. 4. But the best proof of all that hypnosis has been obtained is that the therapy begins to show itself effective. As the sessions proceed the distressing symptoms begin to come under control. I have from time to time asked intelligent patients to give me an account of what they themselves experience during a hypnotic trance. These accounts are all very similar and I will now repeat to you a typical one. The patient wrote as follows: I have always been a very light sleeper and am awakened by the slightest noise. In the years following the birth of my children all normal sleep pattern evaded me and I seldom had a complete night’s sleep. I found it both difficult to get to sleep and I was awake in the early hours of the morning. This pattern of insomnia soon began to show its effect on my whole life. I could not cope with my day’s work. I was constantly tired, irritable and impatient. Even the chores I had always enjoyed doing, and my social life at home or with friends, simply had no interest for me anymore. My doctor recommended tranquilisers and sleeping pills. They helped me a little to sleep longer but they left me with headaches and a ‘hangover’ feeling during the day. Soon I began to lose weight, had no interest in my personal appearance and I became very depressed about my whole life. On the advice of my doctor I consulted a psychiatrist whom I hoped would find a more in depth solution to my problem. He suggested a short period of hospitalisation where I was treated with several days of complete rest under heavy sedation. When this was completed he started me on a course of normal daily routine and prescribed various tablets daily and nightly to build up my mental and physical health. The days went reasonably well but the sleep pattern showed no improvement and the depression continued. After several changes of medication had not brought about much change in my insomnia my psychiatrist asked me if I would be willing to try a course of hypnotic treatment. Naturally I was willing to try anything he suggested but personally I had reached a stage where I was sceptical and unimpressed that any therapy could help me, particularly one where deep relaxation was concerned. It just seemed impossible to me that anything could ever make me relax again. I had never heard of ‘the art of deep relaxation’ so did not know what to expect when the time of my first session arrived. Let me state at this point that when the first session was over I was absolutely convinced that there was something that could be done to give me hope for the future. Anyone who has suffered from depression will realise what that means. The first session lasted for about thirty minutes but to me it seemed like ten and I still recall how I was anxious to ask the psychiatrist to let me have another session right away. To relax in any way had never seemed to me a possibility

382

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

before. Now here I was hardly able to raise myself from the couch and that feeling of floating remained with me for some hours, and returned again when I had learned the art of deep relaxation for myself. Of course that took several lessons but I soon found that sitting or lying in a comfortable position I could practice it without any difficulty. Immediately after the breathing exercises I could feel my fingers and hands becoming quite numb, the pain in my back (which had troubled me for some years) would simply sink away. I could never concentrate on the counting for more than a few numbers, and my eyelids became so drowsy and heavy that I seldom needed any light to focus on. The night after my first session I really did sleep better. When I left hospital I had had six lessons. I was sleeping all night without the need for any ‘sleeping pills’, my appetite had returned my weight was increasing, and best of all my feeling of depression had lifted. All that the psychiatrist had promised during the therapy had come to pass and returns to me again and again when I practice the ‘art of deep relaxation’. I have chosen this one account out of many similar ones as an illustration of what the patient experiences as distinct from what the doctor observes. I do not of course regard such an anecdote as in any way a convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of hypnosis. There is only one way to become so convinced, and that is to use it yourself. Remember that Braid began by describing hypnosis as the biggest piece of humbug he had ever heard; that Esdaile was extremely sceptical whether he could perform an operation without causing pain; that it was only when Bernheim saw the results that Liebault was obtaining, that he adopted this form of therapy; and that it was watching Bernheim and Liebault at work that so impressed the young Freud.

LECTURE 4

Trance Utilisation Ladies and Gentlemen, In this lecture I will be concerned with the more difficult aspect of hypnotic therapy: trance utilisation as distinct from trance induction. The induction of an hypnotic state is a fairly standardised procedure and anyone can master it with a few month’s practice. But the use of such a state is a matter in which you will always be learning and improving your technique. You will remember that in my review of the history of hypnosis I mentioned how Breuer and Freud introduced the novel idea of getting the patients to talk to them when under hypnosis, and so to reveal the origin of the symptoms that were troubling them. Then later, when Freud found he could not get the information which he was convinced was there – latent in the unconscious mind – he turned away from using hypnosis in favour of ‘free association’. The daring originality of Freud’s speculations attracted such a fascination that hypnosis suffered a temporary eclipse. More recently the long drawn-out nature of a full psycho-analysis has caused some psychiatrists to return to the use of hypnosis as a means of obtaining quicker results: and so the method known as ‘hypno-analysis’ was adopted by many. In this technique hypnosis is used to regress the patient to his earliest memories and so to elucidate the unconscious material that the analyst is convinced must be the cause of the manifest symptoms. Those who advocate this use of hypnosis would consider that I had no right to speak about it as I have not undergone the two years’ or so required training analysis. My own opinion though is that Freud probably knew more about the subject than any of his successors, and that if he found hypnosis unsatisfactory as compared to free association, he probably knew what he was talking about. In my practice I have gone back to the form of therapy that was used by the French psychiatrists in the hey-day of hypnosis: the use of hypnosis that was advocated by Liebault, Bernheim, Janet, and Charcot. That is, to let the patient remain silent and the therapist do all the talking. This is the method which usually goes by the name of ‘direct suggestion under hypnosis.’ In my experience it is more profitable to the patient to be told that we are going to be concerned with the immediate present and future than that we are going to try to get back into the remote past – even if the origin of his symptoms is somehow connected with that past. I tend to think that a continuous pre-occupation with remote memories may in itself become a secondary neurosis! Now many will say that if you merely remove the manifest symptoms and do not get to the root of the matter, no permanent cure will be obtained; and that the patient, having got rid of one set of symptoms will soon substitute others by way

384

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

of compensation. I can only say in reply to such a criticism that over twenty-five years of using ‘direct suggestion under hypnosis’ I have never been troubled by the patient’s developing substitute symptoms. In my opinion this belief in the need to go back into the past and reveal the origin of the disease is a dogma not based on any detailed clinical proof. I do not deny that the seeds of future neurosis may be sown in early childhood, but I do deny that it is essential to spend a lot of time laying these bare. I would say that the disease is the sum total of the manifest symptoms and that if you can free the patient from his symptoms you have a perfect right to speak of a cure. After all, that is what the patient appeals to the doctor to do. Therefore, in the belief that it is a successful method of treatment, I am going to describe to you what I mean by ‘direct suggestion under hypnosis’. Although the phrase ‘direct suggestion under hypnosis’ is the traditional one, it is not in my opinion a very good indication of what should be done in trance utilisation. Janet long ago pointed out how indefinite the word ‘suggestion’ was and how it needed a more precise definition. I consider the word ‘suggestion’ to imply too hesitant and tentative a meaning, whereas in speaking to a patient under hypnosis it is necessary to be precise and emphatic. But then again the word ‘Command’ which is sometimes used for post-hypnotic instruction is too authoritarian and didactic. (it is a matter of the greatest importance to discover the yourself the precise tone of voice that should be employed in trance utilisation.) If I had to choose a phrase it would be something like ‘encouragement under hypnosis’, ‘learning under hypnosis’, or ‘instruction under hypnosis’. I think the best way I can illustrate this use of hypnosis in therapy is to take one particular example and to describe to you in detail how I would proceed. And I will for this purpose take one type of case that is very common and which I have found responds regularly to hypnotic therapy. Indeed these cases are so common that they have been given a special name, the ‘housebound housewife’. Mrs. B. aged 24, married with two children. No evidence of marital disharmony and no financial worry. She complained that for a year now she had felt too nervous to go out on her own to do her shopping or to visit friends. She had also begun to feel nervous when left alone in the house, so that there had been tearful scenes when her husband had to leave the house in the morning to go to work. She remembered quite clearly when this feeling of panic first attacked her, it was when she went to visit a friend who was sick in hospital. Now having elicited a history such as this it is essential to enquire into what precise bodily symptoms the patient experiences. These may vary from case to case. I refer to such symptoms as ‘palpitations’, ‘nervousness in the abdomen’ (often described as ‘butterflies in the stomach’), tightness in the chest, breaking out in a cold sweat, a feeling of weakness in the legs, trembling, frequency of micturition, etc, etc. I say it is essential to elicit this information for during the course of therapy each particular symptom must be dealt with in turn. Having got such a detailed history and having carried out a routine physical examination to exclude any obvious organic disease, I would proceed to give this patient the explanation of hypnosis that I described to you in a previous lecture. Then having got her consent to undergo such therapy I would use the

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

385

standard method of induction which I described to you in the last lecture. In this particular case I see from my notes that induction of hypnosis was not difficult and that the first induction was completed in ten minutes. Having paused for a few minutes to observe that the patient was remaining immobile and showing no signs of opening her eyes I spoke as follows, rather quietly but slowly and firmly: You have begun this afternoon to do something yourself to get rid of those fears that are making life so difficult. It is not going to be a matter of more drugs and pills. You have tried all these already. But it is going to be something that you can learn to do for yourself. Not something I do but something you have begun already to do for yourself. The art of deep healing relaxation. Of course like any skill it will be a matter of practice. But as the lessons procede you will find it getting easier and easier. Next time you come to me and get comfortably settled in the chair, as you are now, and take the three deep breaths holding your breath while I count to ten. Then the steady rhythmical breathing that you are now using. Conscious of the air moving in and out of your nostrils the mind occupied with the monotonous counting. The eyes closed. You don’t want to open them. You feel your whole body relaxing. Arms and hands. Feet and legs. Lying in the chair with no feeling of tension in the back. Head lying back on the pillow with all tension in the neck and temples and forehead gone. And all those involuntary nerves which have caused you so much trouble are coming back under your control. No more sense of panic. No palpitations. No sinking feeling in the abdomen. No weak feelings in the legs. No trembling. No breaking out into a cold sweat. But calmness. Tranquility. A sense of power and control. But that is not the most important thing. The important thing is that the effect of what you are now doing to your nerves will begin to remain with you. Something of what you are doing now will be with you when you get up. It will begin to spread out over the days and nights. In time over the weeks and months. Until all trace of these morbid fears will be conquered and defeated and gone. You are going to conquer them. Defeat them. And get rid of them. In this simple natural physiological way. It is going to be a way by which you will find your way back to equanimity, contentment, power and control. Having said this I paused for a few minutes and once more observed the patient closely. She remained immobile and did not open her eyes. Then I repeated the above instructions again using similar words. It would be too monotonous and unnecessary to do this here in a lecture. But I would add this: you will have to when using hypnosis to put up yourself with the monotonous nature of the proceedings, though it won’t bother the patient and they will not be aware of it when the session is over. You will feel tired if you have done the work properly, but they will feel rested. After repeating the above instructions one or two times, then, I said: You are building up and making certain a linkage an association between that deep rhythmical breathing and all those involuntary nerves that have caused you so much distress. In the future if you begin to feel any sense of panic ail you will have

386

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

to do is to concentrate for a few months on your deep breathing and confidence and peace of mind will return at once. Something you can do anytime wherever you are. Something no-one would notice you doing. And when you realise that you can bring these unpleasant feelings under control instantly you won’t be afraid of them any more. In time after a few lessons you will begin to find that you don’t require me any more that you can use this simple technique to achieve tranquility and peace of mind. I attach importance to emphasising right from the beginning that the whole object of the treatment is to teach the patient how to become independent of me or of any medication. I will be saying more about this when I become to discuss some of the possible dangers of hypnosis. The above instructions repeated several times were with this particular patient all I thought it wise to do in the first session. Then before ‘waking the patient up’ I left her lying still for a further ten minutes saying nothing more. Here I would mention something that I have observed, and which I have not found mentioned in the books on the subject that I have read. That is that the hypnotic trance itself without any spoken suggestions’ is itself of benefit to the patient. They ‘wake up’ feeling as if they had had a sound sleep. The first time you have induced an hypnotic state you will probably feel some trepidation about terminating the session and bringing the patient back to a normal state of consciousness. But there is really no need to feel anxiety on this account. It happens very rarely that the patient does not ‘awaken’ when so instructed but passes into a natural sleep from which in time he will awaken spontaneously; but this I can say with confidence is very seldom the case. When I was resident in hospital I made use of this phenomenon for patients suffering from insomnia. I would induce hypnosis in their own bedroom and then make no attempt to rouse them; the night nurse would tell me in the morning that the hypnotic state had changed after a time into one of natural sleep and the patient would wake in the morning without any further instruction from me. If however, as in the case of the particular patient we are discussing, I wish to terminate the trance and allow her to go home, I use the following procedure; When you get up from the relaxation you will feel perfectly normal and natural. All heaviness in the arms and legs will have gone. You will have no difficulty in opening your eyes. You will get up feeling rested and refreshed. But the effect of what you have done to your involuntary nerves will remain. Your fears are being conquered and defeated. Now I am going to count backward from ten and when I reach one you will open your eyes slowly not suddenly with a jerk. Ten - nine - eight - seven - six - five - four - three - two - one. The reason for emphasising the importance of waking up slowly and for prolonging the counting is that if the patient is suddenly woken up he is liable to be left with a headache for some hours. I have observed this myself and find it mentioned in some of the standard books on the subject.

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

387

Many books on hypnosis recommend that before ending the session the patient should be instructed that on the next occasion they will enter the trance state at a word of command such as ‘go to sleep’. In a few of the earlier cases I treated I satisfied myself that in some of them such a shortening of the induction was effective. But I now never use this simplification. It smacks too much of magic and undermines the conception of ‘learning’ which I wish to emphasise from the start. I always hope that in time the patient will learn the ability to use ‘self-hypnosis’; that is, to be able to achieve a degree of deep relaxation on their own. And if this is to be learnt it is necessary for them to have a more lengthy procedure to employ. Hence throughout the course of treatment I always make use of the method of induction I have already described to you. When Mrs. B. came to me for her next ‘lesson’, she was able to tell me that there had already been a slight improvement in her condition. She had been able to do some tidying in her front garden which she had been unable to face for several weeks. So I then proceeded to induce hypnosis in the standard manner and repeated all the instructions that I had given last time and which I dealt with in length above. Then I went on to the next stage, speaking as follows: You have begun to bring your nerves under your control. From now on you will after every session be able to do more and more without feeling any sense of panic. Just for a moment make a vivid picture in your mind of your working in your garden feeling perfectly at ease. No more palpitations. No more nervous feeling in your stomach. No breaking out in a cold sweat. Then I paused for a few minutes while the patient had time to picture this scene. Observing that she showed no sign of distress whilst so picturing her activity I then said: Now let that scene all fade away from your mind, and concentrate once again on the deep rhythmical breathing. All those troublesome involuntary nerves of yours are coming back under your control. They are learning to obey you instead of you having to obey them. So now I want you to take a look into the future. Picture yourself leaving the house feeling quite confident and relaxed. Walking down the village street and going into the show where you want to buy your groceries. As you picture this scene you feel no sense of fear. You can stand in the shop waiting to be served without any feeling of panic. Without any feeling that you want to get out in a hurry. Now let your mind dwell on that picture vividly as if you were there. Again the patient should be closely observed to see if any sign of distress occurs when she is so instructed. As a matter of fact I see from my notes that Mrs. B. remained perfectly relaxed when she was asked to picture this activity. But if she had shown any sign of discomfort manifested by becoming restless and tearful I would have immediately told her to let the scene fade away from her mind and to concentrate again on the deep breathing. But when I saw that she could imagine the scene with comfort I spoke as follows:

388

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

That is how you are going to feel when you next want to go out shopping. Perfectly relaxed and secure. You will remember that wherever you are this power and control over your nerves goes with you. A few moments of deep rhythmical breathing and all trace of nervousness would disappear. No more palpitation. No more feeling of nervousness in the stomach. No breaking out in a cold sweat. You have regained your freedon to go anywhere you wish to or have to. I repeated the above picturing and instruction several times. Then I left her lying quietly for the usual ten minutes; the ‘waking up’ was carried out as already described. By now you will I hope have the gotten the idea of how I use the hypnotic trance for purposes of therapy and I need not go on to describe any further sessions. After four such sessions Mrs. B. was doing her shopping with complete comfort and there were no longer any scenes of tears when her husband had to leave for work. Having got this far in her improvement I began to give her instruction in self-hypnosis: You are now able to use this control over your nerves without my help. Every day you will choose a time when you will not be disturbed. Go up to your room lie on your bed take those three deep breaths holding your breath as long as you can, and then as you breathe out letting your whole body relax with you. Then turn your attention to the steady rhythmical breathing. Conscious of the breathing. Feeling the controlled movement of your muscles and ribs. Conscious of the air moving in and out of your nostrils. Then begin to occupy your mind with the monotonous silent counting. Steady your vision on one point on the celling as if everything depended on watching that one point. You will feel your eyes getting tired and the lids will be closing ---------- closing ---------- closing. And as the eyes close a feeling of complete tranquillity will come spreading over you. The effect of relaxing like this every day will abide with you. No more nervousness. No more anxiety. Not every patient is able to earn this self-hypnosis, but I have found that the majority can. This again is a step forward in confidence and a realisation that they are no longer dependent on a doctor but can do something to help themselves. The particular patient I have chosen to illustrate the method of trance utilisation I employ was able to learn self-hypnosis quickly and made use of it every day for a time. Her progress on this regime was steady. After six sessions she was able to drive her car on her own again. By the tenth session she was able to drive in the crowded traffic of the city without feeling any sense of panic. The one remaining anxiety was that the fears would return if she had to visit a friend in hospital. This fear was overcome in the end by getting her to picture the hospital visit in several sessions. One day she found she could visit her friend in hospital with complete comfort. She had also discovered that any trace of the old feelings of panic could be eliminated at once by using the deep rhythmical breathing. I was then able to tell her that she needed me no longer, and did not see her again for three years. During that time she remained perfectly well (no development of the prophesied secondary substitute symptoms!). Her reason for

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

389

coming to see me again was that after the birth of another child she had begun to experience some of her phobias again. Three further sessions were enough to abolish these fears. I would add here that in this particular case no form of drug therapy was used. Not that I am averse to using sedative medication if the early stages of treatment, but many such phobic patients are afraid of any drugs and wish to avoid the risk of becoming dependent on them.

LECTURE 5

Illustrative Case Histories Ladies and Gentlemen, In my last lecture I described to you in some detail my method of trance utilisation. You might expect me now, if I was to follow the modern accepted procedure to give you a statistical analysis of my results. This would involve classifying patients into those cured, those improved, and those in whom hypnosis gave no benefits. This in turn would require a detailed follow up over a number of years to ascertain the permanence of the results which had proved successful. Then if the figures were to be relevant it would be necessary to compare patients treated by hypnosis with those who had had other forms of treatment; drug treatment, psycho-analysis, behaviour therapy, and no treatment at all. I must tell you now that I am in no position to give you such a mass of figures. I began to use hypnotism with considerable scepticism as to my own ability and as to the effectiveness of the method. Then when I found that I was getting good results my work load so increased that if I had attempted, to keep such a detailed analysis and comparisons I would never have got through the work load involved. All I can tell you now is that I have been using hypnosis regularly for the past 25 years often doing 20 individual sessions a week, and am satisfied that in suitable cases it is an effective and sometimes the only possible of method of treatment at present available. Instead then of presenting you with a mass of figures and a statistical analysis I think it would be more interesting and equally valuable if I was to describe to you some of the more striking case histories that I have in my files. And I would ask you to consider whether you know of any other method of treatment that would have helped these particular patients. (These figures are meagre when compared with some of those presented by the pioneer workers of the last century. Liebault based his book on records of 2,654 patients whom he had treated. At the Nancy clinic over 10,000 patients were treated in the course of ten years. Schrenck-Noting based his conclusions on a total of 8,705 patients whom he had himself observed. Janet in his ‘Psychological Healing’ states the he had treated 3,500 patients in every one of which hypnosis had been given a trial.) For the sake of continuity I will include some of the patients I referred to briefly in my first lecture when I wished to describe to you the problems that induced me to take up this work. Miss A. employed as a shop assistant, aged 20. Referred to me by a consultant physician who had seen her as an emergency in the out-patient department of a general hospital. Her story was that for the past six months she had frequently fallen to the ground when walking in the street. She had appeared semi-conscious

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

391

but was able to indicate that she had a severe pain in her left side. On these occasions she had been taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital and had a thorough examination which had included X-ray and Electro-encephalograms. These frequent examinations had not revealed any cause for her frequent falls. Then on one such event the physician who saw her sent for her father and enquired closely as to when these falls had first begun. The father said that she had never suffered from any such trouble until she went one night to see a stage hypnotist who was giving a demonstration in a theatre. (I regret to say that such performances are still legal in Ireland though most European countries have prohibited them). At the performance which Miss A. attended she was invited up on to the stage and been hypnotised. When under hypnosis she was given the posthypnotic command that later on in the evening when the hypnotist clapped his hands she would feel as if she had been shot in the left side and fall to the ground in a semi-conscious state. She proved such a sensitive subject that the stage hypnotist gave her a free pass to return every night that the show continued. Thus the above routine was continued every night for two weeks. The stage hypnotist made the heinous error of not countermanding his posthypnotic suggestion at the end of the performance. The result was that whenever there was a loud noise in the street such as a car back-firing Miss A. felt she had been shot in the side and fell to the ground in a semi- conscious state. The physician who elicited this history asked me if I thought the condition could now be reversed by further hypnosis and I replied by saying it seemed the obvious course to try. When I came to hypnotise Miss A. I found her to be one of those subjects that enable stage hypnotists to create a sensation. I had hardly begun my usual routine of induction when I saw that she had immediately passed in to a deep trance. I then told her that from now on everything would be as if she had never been on the stage, that she would no longer fall to the ground when she heard a loud noise. I repeated these instructions several times in a firm voice. On terminating the session I found that she had complete amnesia for what had been done and complete time distortion for the length of the session. To be on the safe side I continued to see her once a week for a month, repeating the same instructions. When no further falls occurred I asked her father to get in touch with me if his daughter had any return of her trouble. I did not hear from him for six months. He then telephoned me to say that his daughter had remained well, she was now married and had gone to live in London where her husband was working. It was two years before I heard of her again. Then her husband brought her to see me. He told me that when in London the falls in the street had begun to occur again. She had been admitted to a London hospital where a diagnosis of Epilepsy had been made. When she told her doctors that she was ‘a hypnosis case’ she said that they laughed at her and said there was no such condition. She had been instructed to take phenobarbitone and epanutin but these drugs seemed to have no effect on the frequency of her falls. When I saw her again she was quite bemused by the amount of drugs she was taking. I immediately started hypnosis again and reduced the intake of drugs over the course of a few weeks. Once the hypnosis suggestions

392

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

had been given she ceased to have any further falls and within a month she was free from all medication. As she was such a sensitive subject I concluded the session with the suggestion that no one who was not a doctor would be able to hypnotise her again. This patient kept in touch with me for several years and never had any relapse, nor was it necessary to use hypnotism again. She is now the mother of two children and was able to use hypnosis in the birth of these babies, no anaesthesia being required. It is my belief that hypnosis could play an important part in preparing women for child birth. I regret that I have not had the opportunity to treat more such cases. A leading American obstetrician has told me that in his city it was the custom for all post-graduate gynaecologists to be given instruction in hypnosis. Mr. B. was a research student in the University. He was referred to me after a thorough physical examination by a competent physician for the following unpleasant complaint. For the previous years he and found from time to time that he was quite unable to swallow the food he had in his mouth. He had either to spit it out or remove it with his fingers. This was such an embarrassment to him that he had to have his meals alone and to refuse any invitation that involved eating in company. He remembered vividly an occasion in childhood in which he had nearly choked when he swallowed something ‘the wrong way’. But his present disability did not come on for many years after this real fright. I have little doubt that this early experience had something to do with causing his inability to swallow on unexpected occasions. But this trauma was in no way ‘repressed’ he remembered it fully. Experiences such as this have further encouraged me to use ‘direct suggestion under hypnosis’ and not to launch out in to ‘hypno-analysis’ as a means of recovering hidden causes. I found that on the first session Mr. B. was able to enter a medium trance state deep enough for me to feel confident that post-hypnotic suggestions would be effective. And this indeed turned out to be the result. For after six sessions he was having no more difficulty in swallowing and had acquired sufficient confidence to have his meals in company. He promised to return to me at once if there should be any return of his trouble, but this proved not to be necessary. I would add that I have treated several other patients with functional dysphagia and have obtained a similar satisfactory result. Mrs. 6. aged 46, married, one child, no evidence of marital or financial trouble. This patient complained that for the past five years she had been too nervous to go out alone. This was not like the common agoraphobia in that her fear was centered round the feeling that if someone bumped into her, or if there was a sudden gust of wind she would be knocked over. As a result of this fear she always had to have either her daughter or a friend to accompany her. She required this companion to take her arm and with her other hand she needed a stick to steady herself. She had been treated by two psychiatrists during the past five years. One of these had given her a variety of pills none of which seemed to help her. The other and treated her along psycho-analytic lines attempting to produce an ‘abreaction’ to discover the hidden trauma that had caused this morbid fear. On her first visit a satisfactory depth of hypnosis was obtained. When she was in the trance state I gave her the instruction that she would be able to walk unaided

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

393

either by a companion or a walking stick. I also instructed her that she would be entirely free from the fear that someone would bump into her or that a gust of wind would blow her over. These instructions were combined with getting her to picture herself once again stepping out boldly, crossing the street, and doing all the things that in the past five years had made her afraid. She continued to come once a week and on each occasion I gave her the same instructions. Within four weeks she was able to go out shopping alone, to go to church alone and walk up the aisle unaided to the altar (her inability to do this had been a particular source of grief to her). After eight weeks of treatment she and lost the fear of crossing the street and had been able to travel in a bus alone. Treatment was continued at increasingly spaced intervals for two years. By that time she had completely gained her freedom to do all that she wished without the support of a companion. There was some difficulty in persuading her that there was no longer any need for her to continue to see me. Two years later after discontinuing all treatment I was informed that she had had no relapse. I have selected this particular case from many similar phobias because here the patient served as her own ‘control’. The duration of the complaint made it unlikely that a spontaneous remission would occur. She had been given prolonged treatment with sedative drugs without relief. The attempt to find an unconscious cause for her fear by psycho-analysis had also proved fruitless. On the other hand she began to show immediate improvement when ‘direct suggestion under hypnosis was employed’. The follow up two years after completion of treatment showed that she had not become dependent on hypnosis but could be spoken of as cured. Mr. D., aged 20, a University student. He was engaged to be married but for the past four months had been subject to a distressing complaint. Whenever he attempted to ask his fiancé out for a meal together he had been overcome by an attack of vomiting. This complaint had now grown to such an extent that even trying to speak to her on the phone cause an attack of nausea. He insisted that he was deeply in love with the girl and could give no explanation for this inability to accompany her or even speak to her. She on her part had shown great patience and sympathy with his nervous vomiting. He proved a good subject for a medium degree of hypnosis. I gave him the instruction that he would be able to control the vomiting and the feeling of nausea by concentrating for a few minutes on his deep breathing. After five weekly sessions this instruction began to take effect. He had had several evenings out with his fiancé which had been achieved without the nausea or vomiting troubling him. Telephoning was now no longer a source of stress. Treatment was continued for a further six months at increasingly spaced intervals. At the end of this period he appeared to be entirely free from his disability. I imagine that a psycho-analytically oriented physician might have interpreted this nausea and vomiting to an unconscious rejection of his fiancé, and have predicted a disastrous result of such a marriage. I can confirm however that when I saw this patient once again after ten years – he had come to see me for a minor complaint – he was able to tell me that he was happily married to the same girl and was the

394

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

father of two children. He had had no return of his nausea or vomiting since he had completed the above course of treatment. Mrs. E. aged 34, was being treated by me for insomnia and had already made good progress. She had been unable to get to sleep until early morning and had a horror of using drugs, which in any case had not been of much benefit. She was now sleeping well but came to me one day for her usual session only able to speak in a whisper. This aphonia had come on suddenly following a disagreement with her husband. As soon as hypnosis had been induced I instructed her to start counting out loud, this she did at once, then I got her to repeat several sentences after me and continued to do this until her voice had returned to its normal volume. I was not sure whether this would still be the case when I took her out of the trance. But to my gratification she spoke clearly and with no trace of whispering before she left the house. When I saw her again the following week she was able to tell me that she had had no further trouble in speaking. A similar case of functional aphonia took longer to cure. Mrs. F. had been only able to talk in a whisper for the past six months when I first saw her. She had been seen by a Laryngologist who reported that there was no apparent disease of her vocal cords. As she lived a long distance away I admitted her to hospital and gave her an hypnotic session every day. From the beginning of treatment she could speak out loud during each session, but relapsed to whispering when the session was ended. However as the days went on she had periods when her voice returned to normal, and by the end of four weeks intensive treatment all tendency to speak in a whisper had been overcome and she was allowed home. She had one relapse a few months later but a single out-patient treatment relieved her. Two years later I had a letter from her in which she said “you should hear me shouting”. The above case raises the question as to how often treatment should be given as you will have noticed I gave this patient treatment every day for four weeks. I think if time allowed the recovery of some patients would be expedited by daily sessions. But the number of patients requiring treatment has made this ideal impossible. My plan at present is to give patients in hospital two sessions a week and out patients once a week. This programme has been dictated by necessity and not from any experiment as to the ideal frequency. Many patients after about six sessions are able to use the breathing and counting technique on their own and obtain an adequate degree of relaxation. When this has been accomplished I advise them to spend half an hour a day practising it. I have had letters from many such patients several years later saying they still make use of the exercises and find them beneficial. Mrs. F. aged fifty, married with one grown up daughter. When I first saw her she had suffered for the past three years from ‘blepharospasm’. She was unable to open her eyes and was to all intents and purposes blind. Her daughter had had to leave her employment and return home as her mother needed someone to lead her about by hand. Several ophthalmologists had been consulted but had been unable to find a cause or to relieve this intense spasm. She was referred to me as a last resort to see if hypnosis would help. Her daughter led her into my room and had to guide her on to the couch. I realised that in this subject I could not use my usual technique of eye fixation on a bright

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

395

object. I had therefore to relay entirely on the breath control and the suggestions of relaxation together with the manual acts which I have already described to you in the lecture on induction. To my relief after a rather lengthy induction it was clear that she had entered into a trance state. I then told her that when I had counted to ten she would be able to open her eyes and hold them open until I told her to close them again. She obeyed this instruction perfectly. This was another patient for whom I considered daily treatment advisable. After three such sessions she was able to walk into my room unaided though still blinking a lot and at times keeping her eyes firmly closed. But after three weeks of daily treatment she had been able to go into the city and do her shopping on her own. Her daughter was now able to return to her previous employment and her mother was able to take up her household duties once again. This patient has wished to come and see me every year for the past ten years, ever since she was cured. I have never had to use hypnosis again and she has had no return of the spasm of her eyelids. Mr. G. was a schoolmaster, aged 41, unmarried. He complained that for the past six months he had developed a ‘writer’s cramp’. This had made it impossible to write on the school black-board and he could not use either pen or pencil to correct his pupils exercises. Whenever he attempted to do either of these his hand went into such a state of spasm that writing was impossible. He expressed himself perfectly happy at his work and I could not elicit any reason why this disability should have suddenly come on. Hypnosis was easily induced and when in the trance state I put a writing pad in his left hand and his own pen in the right one. I told him he could now write his name and address with ease. This indeed he did without any sign of cramp. But when aroused from the trance his old disability was again manifest. However as the sessions continued his disability began to be relieved. First of all it began to be possible for him to write with ease immediately after hypnosis. Then the effect of a session began to last longer and longer, first of all for a day or two, then for the whole week between coming to see me. It took a total of three months of treatment, the sessions being gradually reduced in frequency, before he felt confident that his writing was as easy and as perfect as it was before the cramp came on. We decided then that he might discontinue treatment but that he would report immediately if he experienced any further trouble. I did not hear from him again and so I take it that he had no return of his cramp. I have had several similar cases where a ‘writer’s cramp’ has responded to treatment by hypnosis. These cases have usually taken some time, a matter of months, to cure. A few of the patients whose symptoms had been present for a long time – several years, only achieved partial relief. But as there seems to be no other standard treatment for this quite common condition I think hypnosis should be given a trial in all such cases. Mr. H., aged 39, married. An architect by profession. For the past five years he had unexpected attacks of panic for which he could find no cause. These occurred sometimes when he was alone driving in a lonely part of the country, sometimes in a crowded place such as a church, cinema or theatre. We had been able to control these panic attacks by using the sedative drug Diazepam but had found himself

396

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

becoming more and more dependent on increasing doses of this drug. He came to me to know whether there was not some more radical treatment that would free him from this drug dependence. I explained to him the nature of hypnosis and he agreed he would like to give this a try. The first session went unusually well and a deep trance state was obtained. He returned a week later to say that he had had a week free from panic and had been able to reduce his tablets to only one per day. After four sessions he went through an experience which might have caused anyone to feel panicky, he was stuck in a lift for half an hour. He found that he could keep quite calm on this occasion by concentrating on the deep breathing that he had used to begin the hypnotic session. The discovery that he could do this on his own had given him such confidence that he felt he would like to see how he got on without any further treatment from me. I heard from him a few months later to say all had gone well. He had had to do several long journeys in the country alone, he could go to church or cinema, and had no more panic attacks. Only very rarely did he feel any need to take a sedative pill, and this was now more a precaution than a necessity. I quote this case history as it was unusual to get such a quick response for a condition that had been present for five years. Sister I., aged 39, the Mother Superior of a convent. She had over the last year become anxious about the responsibilities involved in her work. This anxiety had taken the form of attacks of palpitation and nervous diarrhoea. Her sleep had also been disturbed with a tendency to wake up about 4.a.m. and lie awake worrying. A physical examination showed no evidence of any organic disease, she herself was certain that the diarrhoea was always the result of some extra worry and was nervous in origin. Her General Practitioner had tried sedative drugs but these she said had only made her feel depressed without relieving her anxiety. The first session of hypnosis produced a medium degree of trance with time distortion. That night she slept well for the first time for months. However the abdominal discomfort and nervous diarrhoea continued to be a trouble. After the second session the diarrhoea was under control though she still had abdominal discomfort. Treatment was continued for two months at weekly intervals by the end of which she was feeling well, free of all symptoms and sleeping soundly every night. She again felt able to cope with the responsibilities of her position. I have included this case because the early morning waking may have made some of you suspect the onset of an endogenous depression, and indeed on first seeing her I felt this might well be the proper diagnosis. But as she was most unwilling to try any further drug treatment I decided to see if hypnosis would help. I will be referring to this use of hypnosis as a diagnostic criterion in a future lecture. Miss J., aged 2I, single. Holding a rather responsible position in her father’s business. Six months before being sent to me by her general practitioner she had begun to be embarrassed by blushing whenever she had to interview a client. This as you know is quite a common complaint among both men and women and has been given the grand name of ‘Erythrophobia’. This complaint in Miss J’s case and reached such a stage of embarrassment that she could not face having a meal with her friends or attend any social event. Treatment by direct suggestion under hypnosis took three months of weekly sessions. By the end of that time she was always able

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

397

to control the blushing by turning her attention to the deep breathing for a few moments. This had now given her confidence to take part in any social events that she wished to. Miss L., aged 53. Employed in an office as a typist. For the past 13 years she had complained of ‘restless legs’. During the day this had troubled her in that she was unable to sit still for any length of time but had to get up and walk about the room for a few minutes, this necessity seriously interfered with her work. At night she could not rest easily in bed because of the need to keep moving her legs. It was impossible for her to attend a cinema or concert and she could only just manage to get through a church service with considerable discomfort. These symptoms had come on soon after she had had a gastrectomy performed for a gastric ulcer. Over the years she had been treated with a variety of sedative and analgesic drugs with only temporary relief. At the first hypnotic session she was able to achieve a deep trance state. When so hypnotised, ‘suggestions’ were given that she would always be able to control this restlessness of her legs by attending for a few moments to her deep breathing. When she returned a week later she said that she had been able to sit for longer periods without having to move about, but the nights were as bad as ever. Treatment was continued at weekly intervals and after two months she was hardly troubled at all either by day or night. At this time she had a severe test for she had developed influenza which confined her to her bed for a week. To her relief she found that she could spend this time in bed without any of the old restlessness in her legs troubling her. She continued treatment for six months at monthly intervals towards the end. On completion of this course she expressed herself as confident that she could use the technique of deep relaxation on her own and control her restlessness without further need to attend me. She promised to return for further sessions should she feel in need of them, but I did not hear from her again. Miss M., aged 42. employed as a broadcaster. She came to see me complaining that over the past two years she had developed a ‘fear of the microphone’. When she came to speak into the instrument she experienced an unpleasant palpitation, her hands became moist, she had a sense of discomfort in her stomach, and recently she had developed such a tremor of her hands that it was noticeable. She had been doing this work for years with complete comfort and could give no reason why she had now become so nervous. In view of her age I thought that her symptoms might be due to her menopause, but she had no other symptoms to confirm this diagnosis. She proved a very suitable subject for hypnosis—a deep trance developing at the first session. When she returned a week later she was able to tell me that she had had no more feeling of nervousness and had carried out her broadcasting as easily as she used to do before these symptoms began to manifest themselves. We continued treatment for six weekly sessions and on completion of these she felt that her trouble was cured. Two years later she informed me that there had been no return of nervousness and she could face the microphone with confidence. Mr. N. aged 26, a factory worker. Engaged to be married. He was referred to me by his general practitioner because of his persistent habit of nail-biting. He had done this since childhood and his nails were bitten to the quick. His reason for coning for

398

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

treatment was because his fiancé disliked this habit and wished him to do something about it. To my surprise after one session only, in which he was given the instruction that he would never need to bite his nails again, he returned the week later to say that he had carried out this instruction to the letter. He had an occasional relapse during the following weeks, but in two months his nails appeared normal and his fiancé was satisfied. Mrs. N., aged thirty, married, one child. No evidence of marital or financial trouble. This patient was referred to me with a long history of ‘nervous trouble’. As a child she and had nocturnal enuresis which continued on and off till she was aged 20. She also had and attacks of asthma since childhood and these still troubled her at times. But her reason for coming to see me was a variety of phobias whose history also went back to childhood. Fear of being alone in the house, fear of crossing over a bridge, fear of water, fear of becoming pregnant again, fear of becoming insane. Over the years she had had seen two different psychiatrists for long periods of treatment with a variety of drugs, both anti-depressants and tranquilisers. She had periods when it looked as if one or other of these drugs had cured her, but invariably she relapsed in a few months time. This long series of relapses had left her despondent that any cure was possible and she only came to see me after some persuasion by her doctor. She proved a suitable subject for hypnosis, obtaining a medium trance state on the first session. Her progress was very slow with many ups and downs. I see from my notes that she attended every week for eighteen sessions before we were able to space her visits out to two week intervals. After a year of treatment she only needed to come once a month and was now making steady progress and free of all her phobias. In view of her long history I continued to see her once a month for the next year. During that year she had no relapse, and was then able to tell me that to her own delight and her husbands she had become pregnant again. The thought of child-birth no longer alarmed her. It is now three years since I last had to give her treatment but she has kept in touch with me and continued to be in perfect nervous health. I have selected this case in particular because some of the previous histories may have given you the impression that hypnosis always works quickly. This is far from being true. As you will have seen in the history just mentioned the patient had to attend weekly for four months, and the final cure took two years. I could continue to give you many more case histories from my files. Some of which responded almost at once and others which took longer. But the above accounts will have indicated that there are a variety of ‘functional nervous disorders for whom hypnosis is an effective form of treatment. And in conclusion I would ask you to consider once again, what other form of treatment can you think of which would have dealt effectively with such problems.

LECTURE 6

Some Problems and Difficulties Ladies and Gentlemen, In the last lecture I purposely confined myself to those patients for whom hypnosis provided a cure. For I wished to convince you that hypnosis was worth a trial. But I will have given you an entirely wrong impression if I have led you to believe that the treatment of ‘functional nervous disorders’ is always as simple as that. Indeed it is not. I could have selected an equal number of cases where only a partial relief was obtained, and others where in spite of achieving an adequate trance state no improvement was seen. I will then first of all speak of some of those patients who continue to show no improvement even when hypnosis seems to be adequate. I have come to regard this phenomenon as of diagnostic importance. If after six weekly sessions of adequate hypnosis the patients reports no improvement I think it is time to reconsider the diagnosis. Every psychiatrist knows the difficulty of making a differential diagnosis between an anxiety neurosis and an endogenous depression which has manifested itself by the release of various phobias or bodily discomforts. I have found that the failure of hypnosis will often enable one to distinguish between these two. I can think of a number of patients who having failed to get any relief from hypnosis were then found to respond satisfactorily to anti-depressive chemotherapy or to electroplexy. I am speaking of course of those patients who show no improvement, as I have told you many patients will need months of treatment before a complete cure is obtained, and so if only slight improvement is seen after six sessions it is worth continuing with hypnosis. I will turn now to some groups of patients in whom hypnosis is only partly successful but for whom it is well worth giving a trial.

MIGRAINE Migraine is one of those obscure diseases whose pathology is far from being understood and whose treatment is often unsatisfactory. I have from time to time been asked to treat by hypnosis certain cases of migraine who have not responded to the standard drug treatment. Some patients find that ergot preparations either do not relieve them at all or else that the side effects of the drugs are as bad as the headache itself. I was at first rather unwilling to treat migraine by hypnosis thinking that the condition was organic in aetiology. But I can now report four cases of migraine of many years standing who have obtained complete relief from their very disabling headaches and vomiting. These were all patients who and been treated over many years with a variety of drugs which had proved useless. In other patients I have been

400

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

able to reduce the frequency of the attacks from once or twice a week to only once every two months or so. Such a reduction in frequency has enabled them to live much more active lives. I have found the best results in migraine occur when the patient learns to use the technique of ‘deep relaxation’ on their own. Such patients find that at the first sign of a headache coming on they can abort it by lying down, using the standard breathing techniques, the monotonous sounding, the eye fixation, which they have learnt in the sessions with me. By achieving a state of relaxation in this way the migraine does not develop into a full blown attack lasting all day. Once a patient finds that they can so cut short attacks they begin to lose the fear of migraine and this breaks the vicious circle of increasing tension and so increasing headache. I should mention here that many patients describe as migraine, attacks of recurrent headache which are not true migraine. They are not unilateral headaches, there is no photophobia, and they do not terminate in vomiting. These ‘tension headaches’ described by the patient as a tight band around their head or as pressure on the vertex of the skull are more susceptible to relief from hypnosis than is true migraine. It is characteristic of these tension headaches that one session of hypnosis will give immediate but not lasting relief. But as the sessions proceed the frequency and the severity of the headaches are greatly reduced.

STAMMERING I have not had much experience in using hypnosis in the treatment of stammering. And such experience as I have had has not been very encouraging. By the time the patients have come to me the stammer has been present since childhood and I have in the few cases I have seen had to persist for a year or so in treating them. I can only report two cases who were completely relieved of their embarrassing complaint. Three others obtained some improvement but were not entirely cured. Four showed no improvement at all in spite of prolonged treatment. It is of interest though that all these patients could speak much more fluently when actually in the hypnotic trance, the stammer returning as soon as they were alert again.

TORTICOLLIS Torticollis is a puzzling condition. I have records of two patients who obtained complete relief after a few sessions of hypnosis. The majority of patients though have not so benefited. I have come to the conclusion that Torticollis is most commonly an organic complaint and only rarely of psychological origin. Hypnosis is worth trying in every case as it can do no harm and the neurologists do not seem to have any specific treatment to recommend.

SMOKING I have had frequent requests to use hypnosis to enable patients to give up smoking. I can only report one striking case of success. This was a middle aged woman who had been smoking fifty to sixty cigarettes a day. She was being treated with hypnosis

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

401

for insomnia and one occasion asked me if I ‘would put in a few suggestions about reducing her need for smoking’. So during the session I told her that she would never desire a cigarette again. To my great surprise she never has and got rid of the habit without the usual battle. But this is the only case that has been so successful. The majority of patients only find the craving for a smoke relieved for a day or so after a session, then the old desire returns. I fear for the majority of patients one can only recommend the usual battle. I think in some cases a heavy smoker might benefit from the routine we employ in withdrawing alcohol from one who has become addicted to it. Namely a few days narcosis in hospital to get over the physical symptoms of withdrawal from an addiction. I might here add that one patient who had become addicted to cannabis did very well after six sessions and had no withdrawal symptoms. I am now in a position to answer one more of those initial questions I mentioned in my second lecture. What type of complaint is suitable for treatment by hypnosis? I would say first of all that at least half of the patients I have treated successfully by this form of therapy have been suffering from some form of phobia, particularly the common claustrophobias and agoraphobias. I have come to consider that hypnosis is the treatment of choice for these disabling conditions. As you will have gathered form the case histories I gave in my fifth lecture pressure of events had led me to try hypnosis in many other ‘functional nervous disorders’. Sometimes with fairly rapid success, sometimes after long perseverance, I have at least obtained some relief, and there have also been patients who in spite of an adequate hypnotic state being obtained have failed to benefit. To sum up then: I think hypnosis is worth trying in those numerous patients whose symptoms do not come under any familiar diagnosis and for whom orthodox methods of therapy are not available. If you follow this rule you will sometimes get surprises and sometimes disappointments, but you will have least made an attempt to do something constructive. There now remains the final question. Is there any danger in hypnosis? Can undesired complications arise? One of the dangers I feared when I started to use this method of treatment was that patients would become more and more dependent on hypnosis. Janet had referred to some cases who had been a problem for this reason in Charcot’s clinic. So as you will remember I always from the very first session include the instruction that the object of the treatment is to make the patient free of both medicine and doctors and to learn to do something for themselves. I think in unscrupulous hands there could be a real danger of increasing dependence on hypnotic sessions, namely if this suggestion was included in the course of treatment. But with the precaution I have just mentioned it has been no problem for me. I have found in every case that with proper care the patient can space out his visits more and more, and in nearly every case there comes a time when the patient himself says that he feels he need not continue regular visits but will get in touch with me if the need arises. A few patients like to come back from time to time for a ‘refresher’ session, but this has been a matter that I could live to their own choice. At the end of the last century when hypnosis was a very lively subject of debate the danger that criminals could use hypnosis to get innocent subjects to commit crimes when under hypnotic influence was hotly discussed. This had turned out

402

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

to be a foolish fear. For one thing it is certain that no one can be hypnotised against their will, and secondly it has been often demonstrated that a command that offends the subjects moral sense is liable to terminate the trance state abruptly. Some experimental psychologists have given subjects criminal suggestions, e.g. to throw acid in a bystander’s face (the acid really being water) and these ‘criminal’ instructions have been obeyed. But the experimental subjects knew all the time that the psychologist would not suggest anything that was really dangerous. So that these experiments seem to me to add nothing to the debate. Perhaps the most important answer to this supposed danger is that ‘being under hypnotic influence’ has, as far as I can tell, never been pleaded in a court of law and been regarded as a valid plea. My own experience then is that hypnosis is a perfectly safe form of therapy and that the worst that can happen is ‘that nothing happens’. Although hypnosis in conscientious hands presents no danger to the patient it does present some dangers to the practitioner. These I must now say something about. Probably fairly soon after beginning to use hypnosis you will come across one of the five percent of subjects who rapidly pass into the deepest stage. There will then be the temptation to demonstrate for your own satisfaction some of the more striking phenomena of somnambulism. This temptation must be resisted. You must remind yourself that the only safe rule is to use hypnosis purely for the patient’s benefit. Of course this does not apply to the experimental psychologist who is working with healthy volunteers and wishes to discover just what phenomena can be produced by deep hypnosis. Again, if you have had experience of the deepest trance state there will be a temptation to regard this as the paradigm for all future patients. But here you must remember that the maximum level of trance state is much more a function of the subject’s personality than of the skill of the hypnotist. Certainly you can expect a gradual deepening of the trance for the first six sessions or so, but this learning effect soon tapers off. Luckily even the lightest stage of hypnosis is often sufficient for medical purposes. Finally if it gets known that you practice hypnosis you will unfortunately get known as a ‘hypnotist’, as if you had forsaken orthodox medicine. Braid long ago complained about this. Hypnosis is only one form of medical treatment and is no substitute when other more well-known therapies are available. But as I have tried to show there are a number of difficult ‘functional nervous disorders’ for which orthodox medicine at the present time has no specific treatment. Looking through my files for the last 25 years I see that in only about 10 percent of my patients have I made use of hypnosis. I have attempted in these lectures to present hypnosis as a straightforward technique that anyone can master who takes the trouble to do so. There is nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. In spite of repeated hostility it has now been in use for two hundred years; this would suggest that it is a form of treatment for which there is a real need. It provides a method of treatment for certain properly selected cases for which at the present time no other standard method of therapy is available. This lecture will appear very brief. The explanation of this is that it was my custom at this point to conclude the instruction with an actual demonstration of

Introductory Lectures on Hypnosis

403

hypnosis. I found that patients who had benefited from the treatment were usually willing to act as a subject for the purpose of teaching medical students and others the basic technique. Hypnosis is much more convincing when you see it done than just to read about it. In a practical demonstration you can illustrate the importance of timing; when to speak slowly, when to speak rapidly, and most importance of all you can express the essential tone of voice that is required. None of this can be conveyed by reading a book or even by listening to a lecture. It is certainly advisable that a beginner should be given supervised instruction, in this way many mistakes (such as I learnt to my cost) will be avoided.

Counsel to Townsend 22 September 1956 You, as I am too, are now in the involutionary period of life. A time of bodily, mental, and spiritual stress comparable in many ways to puberty and its similar strain. 1. Bodily health: You should watch three things and if they remain right not be concerned about your physical state. (a) Weight. Weigh yourself every two weeks on the same scales if possible and in the same clothes. If you are either losing or gaining steadily get medical advice. (b) Sleep. If you have persistent insomnia, i.e. a week without a really unbroken and restful night, get medical advice. (c) Appetite: If you get a constant dislike for food, get medical advice. If the above three matters are satisfactory, don’t worry. 2. Mental health: If you find concentration and attention becoming increasingly difficult, so that things you used to do easily are now very hard, or if certain necessary duties now become impossible, then you should again get advice. But the test is always is there a definite disability, not merely a distaste. 3. Spiritual health: Here I speak without authority. What you say does not sound either wrong or surprising to me, in fact it sounds just what I know and would expect. You are well on the high road that many have been on before you. Symbols, thoughts, words, pictures, fail to move you. You have outgrown them; but it is not true that you do not ‘desire heavenly things’, all the time you are homesick for them, you would not now suffer at all if you were not. The difficulty is always that we want to feel and see that our suffering is doing us good, but if we could do this it wouldn’t be real suffering and wouldn’t do its work. As I read the Passion it seems to me that in Holy Week Our Lord ceased to see the necessity of his suffering ‘if it be possible let this cup pass away from me’ [Matt., 26,39]. I tentatively suggest this: (a) I think you may have read too much theology and not enough of the Gospels. Don’t torment yourself by trying to read and find comfort in von Hügel, Kierkegaard, Fénelon, etc. This corresponds to meditation and you cannot do it. For spiritual reading read only the synoptic gospels in Latin (so avoiding ecclesiastical overtones in the authorised version). Don’t meditate and don’t try to understand or apply what you read, read slowly and passively.

Counsel to Townsend

405

(b) Begin every day with a very quick and unemotional remembrance of God’s provenience. That what is going to happen both outside and inside you to-day is exactly as God wishes it to be for your salvation. Vexations, despair, dryness, anxiety, are all sacraments of the present moment. I am sure I have raised many points which are obscure and where I am not clear myself, but please write as frankly as you want whenever you find you don’t agree or don’t understand.

406

PART VI

Biographical and Historical Notes ELIZABETH ANSCOMBE (1919–2001) Anscombe was the leading female philosopher practising in the analytic tradition in the twentieth century. In addition, she was a link between that style of philosophizing and a revival of medieval scholasticism, centrally focussed on Thomas Aquinas, fostered by the Roman Catholic Church since the late nineteenth century.1 Anscombe was born in Limerick, the daughter of an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The family left for London after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922; her father became head of the engineering (i.e. science) section at Dulwich College and her mother was a headmistress. Elizabeth undertook undergraduate studies in Literae Humaniores (Classics and Philosophy) at St Hugh’s, Oxford in 1937 and shortly afterwards was converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1942, she took up postgraduate studies in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. Anscombe found herself trapped in phenomenalism – broadly the notion that the only certain knowledge is of sense data. She described herself staring at objects, while questioning herself: ‘What do I really see?’ and venturing the answer: ‘A patch of yellow, perhaps?’ Wittgenstein parodied this approach in the following terms: ‘I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again “I know that that’s a tree,” pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: “This fellow is not insane. We are only doing philosophy”.’2 In lectures which Anscombe experienced as a liberation, Wittgenstein pointed out that the doubting empiricist philosopher in the garden had a genuine problem and that the realist alternative reaction (even to the extent of an implication of insanity) was an evasion, not a solution. In fact, the realists shared a similar view of the mind, and how it knows, with the phenomenalists they dismissed. The opposed sides shared the view that essentially the mind works by representing reality. Wittgenstein thought this assumption profoundly misleading because it tried to cover too many cases. Even in the Tractatus, the culmination of his early work in philosophy, he limited the representative function to what can be pictured by empirical propositions only. From the late 1920s onward, Wittgenstein moved beyond the austere logic of that book and highlighted instead certain givens of the human situation. We are inextricably language-using creatures interacting in a multiplicity of ‘language games’, which are interconnected but irreducible to one another – an insight with

408

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

far-reaching implications that are explored in the Philosophical Investigations, translated into English by Anscombe. Wittgenstein’s account moves decisively from the view that each of us is a private ‘I’ ensconced before a screen of passing images. The vast majority of us are not suffering from a ‘locked in’ syndrome. This is despite philosophical arguments, influenced, he thought, by an attempt to remove the specifically human character of knowledge in favour of scientistic versions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’. Aquinas, for his part, had held that nothing comes between the mind and the external world because they are wholly adapted to one another. After a hiatus, when Wittgenstein was taken up with war-related service in medical research, Anscombe was able to attend his lectures again in 1944. By the following year, Wittgenstein described her to Miss Myra Curtis, Principal of Newnham College ‘as undoubtedly the most talented female student I have had since 1930’ (Cam.,18 May 1945, p. 324). In the academic year 1946/47, Anscombe was awarded a research fellowship of £350 at Somerville College, Oxford but commuted to Cambridge once a week to take tutorials with Wittgenstein. These tutorials were attended also by Wasfi A. Hijab, who had come from Jerusalem in 1945 to study with Wittgenstein. They were devoted mainly to the philosophy of religion. True to the example of the ancient Greek philosophers, the tutorials were conducted in a peripatetic fashion: the two students followed the master as (weather permitting) he perambulated around the Fellows’ garden at Trinity – all the while engaging in discussion. She was described about this time by O. K. Bouwsma as ‘stocky’, dressed in ‘slacks and a man’s jacket’ and pitying of ‘very earnest’ but ‘ninny philosophers’, who had been subjected to ‘trickery and sleight of hand’ by certain fellow philosophers (names deleted), who were ‘like magicians’.3 According to Ray Monk, Anscombe became ‘one of Wittgenstein’s closest friends and one of his most trusted students, an exception to his general dislike of academic women and especially of female philosophers’ (Monk, p. 498). She visited him in Dublin in early December 1948 and stayed in Ross’s Hotel where Wittgenstein was then residing and, although working very hard, he was attentive to her. She had come to Dublin for two reasons. First because she needed help and advice following treatment by a hypnotist in England to facilitate her to give up smoking tobacco (60 Capstans Full Strength a day). While she had indeed given up the habit, she now suffered from insomnia and other symptoms. Wittgenstein referred her to Drury, who helped restore her sleep and reassured her by what she described as his ‘good sense and friendliness’. Both Drury and Wittgenstein advised her to resume smoking, which she did (Drury himself was a pipesmoker). Second, Wittgenstein wished to discuss with Anscombe his current work with a view to its being published in what became Part II of the Philosophical Investigations. Anscombe was particularly caring of Wittgenstein after his return from America in 1949, where he had fallen ill with what proved to be prostate cancer; she and her husband the philosopher, Peter Geach, were then living at 27 St John Street, Oxford – the address Wittgenstein gave as his residence at the date of his making his will (29 January 1951). She was appointed one of Wittgenstein’s three literary executors,4 along with Georg Henrik von Wright and Rush Rhees (see entry below). As well as preparing the Philosophical Investigations (1953) for publication and likewise, Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics (1967), Anscombe wrote an introduction to the Tractatus in 1959

Biographical and Historical Notes

409

and supervised the publication of other Wittgenstein writings, notably Remarks on Colour (1977) and Zettel (1981). In her own right, she made very significant contributions to philosophy. These were, first, a challenge to the Humean theory of causation. Second, she developed an account of intentional action and practical reasoning,5 which is now widely regarded as a classic. Third, she revived the Aristotelian theory of virtue as an alternative to utilitarian and Kantian duty-based ethics.6 She was appointed to a teaching fellowship at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1964. During that period Anscombe publicly protested the University’s decision to confer an honorary degree on President Harry S. Truman. She viewed his authorization of indiscriminate atomic weaponry to bomb Japanese cities in 1945 as an act of mass murder because it involved the direct killing of innocent persons, notwithstanding attempts to find leave in the principle of double effect. Already in 1949, O. K. Bouwsma recorded how Wittgenstein, whom he met at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, ‘hated Truman – a new low. “The Sermon on the Mount”! Indeed, that crook, that gangster. And telling the journalists to read it. Awful!’7 Belatedly, Truman had called a halt to the atomic bomb campaign after the attack on 10 August 1945 on Nagasaki, citing – precisely Anscombe’s point – ‘all those kids’.8 Anscombe was appointed to the chair of Philosophy in Cambridge in January1970 in succession to John Wisdom. By then a leading Roman Catholic, she defended the Thomistic doctrine of ‘transubstantiation’ as applied to the Eucharist. In 1966, she wrote against the practice of contraception and defended the Papal rejection of it in July 1968. Many anecdotes have been circulated about Anscombe. For example, an obituarist, Jane O’Grady, wrote: ‘Once, entering a smart restaurant in Boston, she was told that ladies were not admitted in trousers. She simply took them off’.9 She retired in 1986. A personal relationship between Anscombe and Drury continued. Elizabeth invited Drury to philosophical seminars held in Spode House, Staffordshire, and when Barbara Geach, her oldest child, came to Dublin to study midwifery she was invited to the Drury home. Barbara later became a professor of psychiatric nursing in the United States. (For Anscombe’s reaction to William Warren Bartley III’s account of Wittgenstein’s sexual orientation and activity, see entry for Francis Skinner below.)

CONTRACEPTION, DR GOOD AND PROFESSOR PETER COFFEY In contrast to Anscombe, Drury’s reaction to the Papal Encyclical, Humanae Vitae, forbidding the use of artificial contraceptives by Catholic couples was that it is going to put an intolerable burden on many patients I know. I am certainly not going to change the advice I have given them. Up to now they have usually got permission from their parish priest without any trouble. Now I imagine very few of the clergy will have the courage to do this. All the Bishops over here have been overjoyed and are ‘certain that the faithful will obey the Holy father’. One

410

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

professor of moral theology in Cork has had the courage to speak out against the Encyclical, and we are waiting to see what will happen to him. (Drury to Rhees: Arc. 9 September 1968) The professor referred to by Drury was Dr James Good and, as Drury had surmised, Good had his ‘faculties’ to preach and hear confessions in the diocese of Cork withdrawn because of his criticism of the papal teaching. University College Cork, however, continued to employ him as a lecturer in ‘General Philosophy’ (he held a DPh from Innsbruck), rather than Theology (he held a DD from Maynooth). In 1970 he was asked by UCC to take charge of an off-campus offering of its Higher Diploma in Education programme at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick. Requested by the Limerick college president to initiate negotiations with the National University of Ireland to secure the status of a ‘recognised College’ (as Maynooth then was), Good was given a locus standi by the Limerick College as ‘lecturer in philosophy’. Success in this venture led to the creation of a philosophy department in Limerick. Dr Good wrote a newspaper article entitled ‘They never told us about Wittgenstein’.10 The title referred to his philosophical education as a clerical student in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth c. 1941/42. One of Good’s teachers there was Peter Coffey (1876–1943), student of Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier at Louvain, who commenced teaching in Maynooth in 1902. Coffey’s two-volume, 831-page, textbook, The Science of Logic (1912), was reviewed very negatively by Wittgenstein – his first publication – in the Cambridge Review, 34 (1913), p. 351 under the title ‘On Logic and How Not to Do It’. Fergus Kerr has pointed out that although Coffey did not mention Russell or Frege (which may have irked Wittgenstein) he made ‘a serious attempt to engage with recent writers on logic, including [John Neville] Keynes and Venn … as well as physicists such as Mach and Kelvin’.11 Coffey wrote companion works on Ontology and Epistemology (1917), the latter reviewed favourably by T. S. Eliot. When James Good attended his lectures – a year or two before Coffey’s death – his modus operandi was: ‘Gentlemen, I am now on page 240 of my volume’. Then, five minutes later, ‘I am now at page 270 of my volume’. Good continues that copies were ‘handed down from one generation to the next and contained many students’ comments on the margins. Coffey rarely smiled, and whenever he did, it was duly noted as “Peter smiled today,” followed by the date. One page was marked all over with that sentence – it was the page which said that “Descartes threw out the baby with the bathwater”’ (letter to editor, 29 October 2014). Kerr’s statement that Coffey ‘was to be the most eminent professor in Ireland’,12 if true, may have rested as much as his writing on labour issues (discouraged by his hierarchical superiors) as his philosophical work, whose sphere of influence was confined to Catholic seminaries and colleges. From 1975 until 1999, Dr Good served as a missionary in the diocese of Lodwar, living in the Turkana desert in Kenya. For a time he was joined in that mission by the bishop who had sanctioned him, Cornelius Lucey. Before being appointed bishop of Cork and Ross, Dr Lucey had acted as Coffey’s successor as teacher of Logic at Maynooth. Good received an honorary doctorate (D. Litt) from the National University of Ireland in 1999.

Biographical and Historical Notes

411

DR JOHN DALE (1943–) Born in Sussex, Dale spent two years as a child in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). One quarter Irish, he studied medicine in the late 1960s at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. On completion of several lecture courses – but before commencing clinical training – he was obliged to undergo what were known as the ‘halves’ examinations. When taking a viva voce examination in Physiology, his examiner, Professor Kane, noted that Dale was carrying a book by Bertrand Russell and his first question to the examinee was whether he had read Russell’s Principia Mathematica, to which the answer was ‘no’. After asking him some questions concerning Physiology, Kane enquired whether Dale knew his colleague Drury, whom he informed Dale had been a student of Wittgenstein. Again the answer was ‘no’. Kane suggested that Dale contact Drury, who at first, as he explained to Rhees, feared ‘it would be for more gossip’ but was pleasantly surprised to find Dale ‘quite remarkably intelligent and serious’ (Arc., 22 April 1967). Thereafter Dale came regularly to visit Drury in St Edmondsbury, Lucan, Co. Dublin, to discuss the philosophical problems that interested him and receive advice on what to read in philosophy – Plato’s Theaetetus; Simon Weil and Kant (rather than Schopenhauer or Lichtenberg). Drury enjoyed their meetings, writing to Dale on 5 August 1969: ‘I have now so few people whom I can really talk to!’ – a real difficulty since ‘philosophy is “discussion”’ (Arc., 4 April 1970). However, he had already made clear to Dale that ‘it is no use us talking about philosophy unless it helps us in the real problems of living’ (Arc., 4 February 1969). Accordingly, the older doctor exercised a mentor role when Dale left Ireland and went on to work in the Canadian medical service for the Inuit peoples on the Arctic ice cap, accessing their encampments by plane.13 Dale continues to work on both scientific and philosophical puzzles. In a recent e-mail he wrote to the editor: I did disagree and still do about his [Drury’s] view on ‘consciousness’ as in his statement that ‘however much we learn of the anatomy and physiology of the brain, we will never understand the mystery of consciousness’. I may be misquoting but I believe it falls under the same mystery as magnetism did prior to electromagnetic theory and electricity prior to knowledge of electrons. In a certain sense all empirical science remains a mystery and that is to me the appeal of science and why I am now messing around with DNA in my ‘lab’. … At some point we begin to comprehend the mechanism of life itself and all that inquiry started with Schrodinger’s challenging book from the 1940s (I think). I remember being so puzzled after reading it but now with proton pumps and ATP and formation of amino acids we start to see what a self-replicating ‘crystal’ might be. With ‘consciousness’ we are probing and probing and learning little bits of essential mechanisms day by day and I am confident that we will look back in 200 years and wonder at the progress in methodology … . (5 August 2016) Wittgenstein was working on this problem in the last years of his life. Drury, for his part, wrote that each generation has to think anew the fundamental problems of philosophy in light of the ever-changing discoveries of any particular time. John

412

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Dale has faithfully identified and thought about perhaps the most fundamental contemporary problem of them all – with fateful practical consequences – what is it to be a human being?

THE DRURY FAMILY ROOTS Originally a Norman family (‘Drieu’) that came to England with William the Conqueror and settled in Bury St Edmund’s, Irish Drurys trace their ancestry to Robert Drury, a nephew of Sir William Drury (1527–79); ‘Drury Lane’ in London is called after William’s home, which was sited there. Robert accompanied his uncle to Ireland when William Drury was appointed Lord President of Munster by Elizabeth I with a special mission to subdue Gerald, the Earl of Desmond. Later, William was made Lord Justice to the Irish Council. In 1578 when Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland, was recalled by the Queen, Drury assumed Sidney’s Irish duties. William died the following year of fever and is buried in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Robert acquired lands in Laughlin, Co. Carlow but eventually the family settled in Co. Roscommon. In the canon of Irish traditional music there is a piece called ‘Planxty Drury’ (also known as Plearaca Druri), written by the blind harper, Turlough O’Carolan. This was in praise of John Drury (b. 1705) of Kingsland, Co. Roscommon, on the occasion of his marriage in 1724 to Elizabeth Goldsmith, first cousin of the poet, Oliver. The last verse of the lyric praises those who marry for love, not money; Elizabeth, apparently, was poor in comparison to her fianceé. The groom died the year after his marriage, aged twenty, but not before fathering a daughter, who inherited the Drury lands. One would like to think that magnanimity is rewarded in this life as well as the next, but in fact the Roscommon estate eventually passed out of the Drury family in a maelstrom of incompetence and litigation.

THE DRURY FAMILY IN DUBLIN Traces of the family may next be found in Dublin in the late seventeenth century in the person of John Drury of Stephen St, who had two sons, John of William St and Rev. Edward, Prebendary of St Patrick’s Cathedral (1672–1737). It is by no means certain, however, that these were direct ancestors of Con Drury. A secure ancestral line is traceable to a clergyman, Richard Drury (1758–1827), son of a merchant, born in what is now Townsend St and ministering to the parish of St Bride’s, Peter St. The St Bride’s burial ground was built over in the second half of the nineteenth century and Richard’s remains were translated to St Werburgh’s, with which St Bride’s had been amalgamated following the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869. Richard’s tombstone can still be found in the crypt. Richard’s son, William Barker Drury (1811–85),, Con Drury’s grandfather, graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1832. A classicist, he produced annotated editions of Thucydides, Book I (1834) and Herodotus, Book II (1835). These editions, with critical and historical notes, were advertised by the publishers, Milliken and Son, Grafton St, as ‘just as much as suited the wants of students’ of ‘the new course in Classics at TCD’. William was admitted to the Irish Bar in 1835. By 1850 he was

Biographical and Historical Notes

413

‘Clerk of the Custodies in the Matters of Idiots and Lunatics’14 and rose to the office of Chief Registrar of the Court of Chancery in Ireland. The emoluments attached to this position enabled him to maintain a townhouse, 21 Harcourt St (1864–82), and a 48-acre country estate, Boden Park, Scholarstown Rd., Rathfarnham. Boden Park was purchased in 1855 for £1,460 from the encumbered estates court. According to the records of the Royal Dublin Society, to which he was elected a life member in 1840, William ‘tried his hand’ at breeding Alderney cattle and exhibited them at the Spring Show of 1857. He and his wife, Ellen Taylor (1819–97) had seventeen children, five girls and twelve boys.15 The girls were called Katherine Sarah, Eileen, Marion, Pamela Elizabeth (who became a schoolmistress in Connemara) and another, Amy or Agnes, second wife of Prof D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, professor of Greek at the Queen’s College, Galway (see entry on the family connection to Galway below).

CON DRURY’S MOTHER’S FAMILY: THE REILLYS OF SCARVAGH HOUSE, CO. DOWN Wittgenstein’s biographer, Ray Monk, refers to a supposition shared by some that the family was ‘related to a German aristocratic family, the Seyn-Wittgensteins’ (Monk, p. 4). However, it is well established that the name ‘Wittgenstein’ was adopted by the philosopher’s paternal great-grandfather, Moses Maier, further to a Napoleonic decree of 1808 that Jewish families take a surname. Moses, who worked as a landagent for the princely Seyn-Wittgensteins, took the county name, ‘Wittgenstein’. There persisted in the family, however, a belief that Moses’s son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein, was the illegitimate child of Prince Georg of Waldeck and Pyrmont by Moses’s wife, Brendel Simon. This circumstance of birth was found to lack documentary proof when it was investigated in the 1930s. The investigation was carried out at the behest of the family when the issue of whether the Wittgensteins should be classified ‘fully Jewish’ or ‘Mischling’ (mixed race) arose. The decision depended on whether Hermann Christian’s putative Aryan ancestry could be established, which, as it turned out, it could not. Nevertheless, a decree, signed personally by Hitler in August 1939 accorded the desired classification in return for very substantial financial payments.16 Despite the lack of credentials, many family members adopted an aristocratic manner; indeed, Brian McGuinness in Wittgenstein: A Life (London: Duckworth, 1988) ascribes an ‘aristocratic attitude’ (p. 8) to the family as a whole. In contrast to Wittgenstein, at least one genealogical researcher suggests that Con Drury could claim descent through his mother, Anne Elizabeth Reilly (1868–1960), from an Irish aristocratic family. The Reillys (originally O’Reilly) are thought to be descendants of the clan Uí Briúin, Princes of East Breifne (now in the counties of Cavan and Leitrim). They were one of the clans from whom Kings of Connaught were chosen from the fifth century onwards in an island that lacked an enduring centralized state structure until the ‘Lordship of Ireland’ was vested in the English Crown in the twelfth century. In the early eighteenth century, Elizabeth’s ancestors became associated with Scarvagh, Co. Down when, according to legend the first of the family to drop the prefix ‘O’, John Reilly was granted 920 acres in recognition of his services during the Williamite wars in Ireland. He built Scarvagh House in 1717.

414

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

His son, also John Reilly (1745–1804), an MP for the rotten borough of Blessington, was High Sheriff for Co. Down (1776) and Co. Armagh (1786). The second John Reilly was caught up in a campaign conducted by the Lord Chancellor, John FitzGibbon, Earl of Clare, to have the members of the Irish House of Parliament reverse their decision to reject an Act of Union creating a UK of Great Britain and Ireland – a rejection driven, in part, by a fear that Catholic Emancipation would ensue. Nevertheless, British security interests, national (with a French threat in mind) and imperial (considering the loss of the American colonies), dictated that a closer union should be effected. Reilly, himself, does not seem to have benefited from ‘the pecuniary and nobiliar blandishments of Castlereagh, M.P. for Co. Down’17 that were made available to effect the subsequent reversal. This cleared the way for Westminster’s approval of the desired Act, effective 1 January 1801. Separate portraits exist of John and his wife by Thomas Pope Stevens.18 A vignette of life in the house shortly after this time is portrayed in a sketch made in 1810 by one of its female members of her harp teacher, Charles Byrne, whose tuition was through the medium of Gaelic.19 John Reilly’s eldest son, John Lushington Reilly, married Louisa Temple, leased Scarvagh House and took up the position of Collector General for the Port of Galway. There is a record in the Irish Architectural Archive stating that in 1822, John L. ‘drew a proposal for a gallery in the church of St Nicholas, Galway’ [Acc. 77/42]. A portrait of his family, entitled the ‘Reilly Family of Scarvagh’ was painted by the Galway-born artist, John Patrick Haverty (1794–1864), in whose career John L. took an active interest. Haverty also painted a picture, entitled ‘The Boating Party’, that is thought to be of the Reilly family.20 John Lushington’s son, John Temple Reilly, of ‘West House’, Galway, married Elizabeth O’Hara, of Lenaboy Castle, Salthill in 1865. Elizabeth was a granddaughter of the last Anglican archbishop of Tuam, the Most Revd and Hon. Power Le Poer Trench (1770–1839); the archbishop’s portrait hung in Con Drury’s childhood home. The newly-weds returned to the ancestral family home in Co. Down, where the family maintained a presence until 1905. Scarvagh House is still the site of a commemoration (known as the ‘Sham Fight’ and attended each year by up to 100,000 people on 13 July) of William of Orange’s victory over the Jacobite forces at the Battle of the Boyne. A portrait of the Reilly family hangs in the Speaker Conolly’s home, Castletown House, Celbridge, Co. Kildare. It was donated by Con’s brother, Myles (see entry below) to the Irish Georgian Society, custodians of Castletown House after it was rescued from dereliction by Desmond Guinness. The direct male line died with the passing in 1909 of Gustavus Miles O’Hara Reilly, brother of Anne Elizabeth.21

THE DRURY EXTENDED FAMILY IN GALWAY AND AN ADDENDUM Despite the return of John Temple Reilly to Scarvagh House, a family association with Galway endured. Con Drury’s paternal aunt, Amy (Agnes) lived in that city. In 1866, she had married the widower D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson Snr (1829–

Biographical and Historical Notes

415

1902). A Cambridge classicist, he taught in the Edinburgh Academy, where his pupils had included Andrew Lang and Robert Louis Stevenson. He was appointed professor of the Greek language in the Queen’s College Galway, in 1864, residing at No. 1 (now, no. 6), the Crescent. In the following year, he delivered the prestigious Lowell Lectures in Boston. A connection with Galway lasted until 1964 when the Thompsons’ daughter, Mrs F. L. Halliday, 3 Palmyra Crescent, died. Professor Thompson and his first wife, Fanny Gamgee, had a son – Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948) – and he too married into the Drury family. His wife, Ada Maureen Drury was a niece of Amy’s, a daughter of her eldest brother, William. The younger Thompson was a very famous biologist, a fellow of the Royal Society and a recipient of the Darwin medal, among other honours. He was an early conservationist serving on international enquiries that raised concern about the harvesting of such marine animals as seals, sea otters, and whales – and was knighted for his services in that respect as well as other achievements. He held successive professorships in Dundee (1884–1917) and St. Andrews (1917–48) and combined his expertise in biology with a proficiency in classical Greek in translating the Clarendon Press edition of Aristotle’s de Animalia (1910). His book, On Growth and Form (1917) was described by Sir Peter Medawar, the 1960 Nobel Laureate for Medicine, as ‘the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue’.22 This was perhaps tribute to its style, rather than its substance; its purpose was to make a prefatory sketch proposing an alternative to Darwin’s theory of natural selection – reservations about which, as already noted, were shared both by Wittgenstein and Drury. The book is noteworthy for its innovative use of geometrical concepts to portray biological processes. On Growth and Form is one of only six works cited in Alan Turing’s influential paper on ‘the chemical basis of morphogenesis’ (1952). Turing queried how an asymmetrical patterned animal body can grow from a perfectly symmetrical sphere (a fertilized egg). In County Galway, another aunt of Con Drury, Pamela Elizabeth Drury, is recorded in the 1911 census, then aged sixty-nine, as living in a house at Salrock, Cushkillary, Co. Galway, near Rosroe – where Wittgenstein was to stay. Her religion is given as ‘Protestant Episcopalian’. Also listed is a servant, Maggie Coyne. For many years Pamela ran an evangelical school in the area, probably under the auspices of the ‘Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics’. This mission was much resented by those to whom it was directed, as is clear from the appellation given to those who availed of its post-Famine services, ‘soupers’. As president of the ‘Irish Society’, Archbishop Trench (noted above) had advocated a policy of proselytizing, particularly in Connaught. Pamela Elizabeth Drury’s headstone, erected on her death in 1918, is located in the local Protestant graveyard.23 In Ballinasloe, the Lancasters of Ford William, descended from a sister of Elizabeth O’Hara (Drury’s grandmother), formed part of the wider family. Addendum: Galway, George Thomson and Wittgenstein A close Cambridge friend of Wittgenstein’s, George Derwent Thomson (1903–87), a Londoner of Ulster parentage and a King’s College Cambridge graduate, held

416

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

a lecturing post in Ancient Classics at University College Galway from 1931 to 1934. While there he wrote a book on Greek Philosophy up to and including Plato: Tosnú na Feallsúnachta (Baile Átha Cliath: Oifig an tSoláthair, 1935), one of the few books of philosophy written in the Irish language. Thomson had come to Ireland in the early 1920s and become fascinated by life on the Irish-speaking Great Blasket, the largest and only inhabited of seven islands three miles off Dunquin, Co. Kerry. The 150 islanders earned a livelihood from fishing, hunting and growing crops for domestic consumption. A Marxist, Thomson portrayed this economy as displaying pre-private property characteristics. He encouraged an islander, Maurice O’Sullivan, to write Twenty Years a’ Growing (Fiche Bliain ag Fás, 1933) about his self-sufficient community then on the cusp of change; the Great Blasket was evacuated in 1953. Thomson left Galway the month after Wittgenstein’s first stay in the Drury Rosroe cottage and took up an appointment as professor of Classics at Birmingham. Thereafter, Wittgenstein visited Thomson and his wife in Birmingham. In his book, The First Philosophers (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955), Thomson, according to Terry Eagleton, presented ‘the formalizing, abstracting, quantifying, homogenizing and universalizing characteristics of philosophy’ as ‘the product of commodity exchange and the invention of coinage in the Greece of the seventh and sixth centuries, B.C.’24

EILEEN DRURY (1913–2007) Originally from the Whitby area in Yorkshire, Eileen (neé Herbert), Con Drury’s wife, trained as a psychiatric nurse from 1932 to 1936. She worked in various hospitals, including the Crichton General, Dumfries. In 1943, she joined the Queen Alexander Imperial Nursing Service. This service grew very substantially during her time in it – from 640 in 1939 to 12,000 members at the end of the war. Eileen was posted to India where she served until 1946. She wrote a note detailing her journey home by air on a ‘bumpy Dakota’ starting in Bangalore on 26 April 1946. There was a stop for breakfast in Madras (Chennai) followed by an overnight stay in Calcutta (Kolkata). She arrived in Allahabad the following day for lunch and thence to Delhi, where she stayed for three days before flying to Karachi. A different transport plane, an Avro York, flew her to Shanibah in Iraq for lunch and then on to Cairo, where she spent the night. The next stop was Castel Benito in Libya where she spent another night. From there she flew to Istres in France where she had to stay two additional days before taking the final flight home. She touched down in England at Holmsley South RAF base in Hampshire on 6 May 1946. From there she went to London whence she went home to Yorkshire. Thereafter, she took up a post as staff nurse at Guy’s Hospital. She was recruited as Matron of St Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin and took up duty on 6 October 1947. Norman Moore later described her as ‘a cheerful, enthusiastic reformer’.25 She resigned her position at St Patrick’s on 28 March 1951 on her marriage to Con Drury. After Con’s death, her son Paul described her to Rhees as ‘a sort of “universal aunt” in Ailesbury Lawn, babysitting here, looking after a sick child there and advising young mothers here, there and everywhere. She seems to

Biographical and Historical Notes

417

thrive on it and is also getting out for social occasions, like trips to the theatre, more than she used to’ (Paul Drury to Rhees, Arc., 8 December 1978). On her funeral service leaflet, there was a quotation from her husband’s book, The Danger of Words, which serves to summarize a jointly held approach to their professional and personal lives: ‘And so to all of us, in sickness or in health, in sanity or madness, in the vigour of youth or in the decrepitude of senility, God speaks these words which He spoke once to St. Augustine: “Currite, ego feram, et ego perducam, et ibi ego feram” (“Run on, I will carry you, I will bring you to the end of your journey and there also will I carry you”).’26 Paul Drury received a letter from a nurse, Margaret Courtney, who had served with his parents which concluded: ‘I’m 78 now but my best days were spent in St. Pat’s … I just wanted to tell you how wonderful your parents were … it was a pleasure to know and serve under [them]’.

LUKE O’CONNOR DRURY Born in Dublin in 1953, Luke was Con’s elder son. In 1964 he enrolled in Wesley College in that city. His parents were greatly relieved that he seemed happy there as they had been ‘afraid he might feel lost in a school of 500’ (Drury to Rhees, 24 September 1964). In fact, Luke went on to win the Aer Lingus young scientist of the year national competition in 1969. He then studied experimental physics and pure mathematics at Trinity College Dublin, winning both the Fitzgerald medal in physics and a gold medal in mathematics. After graduating in 1975, he pursued a PhD in astrophysics at the Cambridge University Institute of Astronomy under the supervision of Dr John M Stewart; he was conferred with the degree in 1979. He then worked at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kemphysick in Heidelberg with Prof H. J.Voelk. A 1983 article, ‘An introduction to the theory of diffusive shock acceleration of energetic particles in tenuous plasmas’ won him international recognition. Professor Ian Axford of the Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie ranked him among the world leaders in cosmic ray research. In 1986 he returned to Dublin as senior professor in the then Cosmic Ray Section at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS; see entry below). He is now school director of the Astronomy and Astrophysics section of the institute. He is married to Anna and they have two children, Kilian and Carina. As well as involvement in plasma physics, particle acceleration, gas dynamics, shock waves and the origin of cosmic rays, Luke has played a leading role in the establishment and development of a high-end computing facility open to all relevant researchers in Ireland. He was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1995 and chosen as its president from 2011 to 2014. In a letter to his friend John Dale (see entry above) Con Drury wrote: ‘Luke and Paul haven’t yet shown any interest in philosophy, and I leave them alone in this respect. Luke is increasingly interested in pure mathematics, Paul in anything to with animals’ (Arc. 27 September 1970). There was perhaps a harbinger of Luke’s future involvement in astronomy in the purchase by his father, who enjoyed scanning the night skies, of a second-hand 6 ins. refractor telescope bought at an auction of the contents of the Lyons Demesne House, near Newcastle, Co. Kildare, in 1963.

418

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

MYLES DRURY (1904–87) Henry Myles Riley Drury, Con Drury’s elder brother, was a partner in the architectural surveying firm, ‘Drury, Gundry and Dyer’ of Bedford Circus, Exeter, and surveyor to the Diocese of Exeter. In that capacity Myles – a forename used by the Reillys for a very long time – supervised the restoration of the diocesan cathedral following extensive bombing damage by a Luftwaffe air raid on 3 May 1942. This raid was an instance of the ‘Baedeker Blitz’, so called because it focussed on cities awarded three stars by the Baedeker Guide to Great Britain; the rating referred to Exeter’s historical significance. Myles’s house on the Victoria Park Rd. in Exeter was undergoing extensive alterations prior to his marriage to Esme Margaret Wilson (b. Beijing, 1912). Wittgenstein (who had been involved in building a home for his sister, Gretl, in Vienna), climbed the scaffolding onto the roof to inspect the work more closely – and found much to comment on (‘Cons’, p. 118). Myles designed a cross (on a fifteenthcentury base) to be found in the yard of a twelfth-century church dedicated to St. Beuno at Culbone in the Exmoor National Park, reputed to be the smallest parish church in regular use anywhere in England. Relevantly, when Wittgenstein visited Myles’s architectural practice (and struck the senior partner as ‘a very intelligent young man’), he saw a draughtsman designing an altar cross and ‘quite agitated’ said to him: ‘I couldn’t for the life of me design a cross in this age, I would rather go to hell than try and design a cross’. Myles was not present in the office that day and if the draughtsman told him about it, it obviously did not hinder his undertaking such commissions in the future. In any case, Wittgenstein later regretted the remark and said to Drury that they ‘must go back and tell the man not to take the slightest notice of what I said’ (Cons., p 119). According to Monk (pp. 524 and 526), Myles bought the Connemara cottage in 1927, where Wittgenstein was to stay and won the loyalty of its caretaker, Tommy Mulkerrins, by saving him from drowning. The sisters of Myles and Con Drury were Mary Temple Drury, who was a missionary in Africa before coming home to take care of her ageing parents, and Margarette Elizabeth Valency Watson (b. 1907) of Hobart, Tasmania.

PAUL DRURY (1957–2015) Born in Dublin 24 July 1957, Paul was Con Drury’s younger son. He attended Wesley College and deciding on a career in journalism attended a course of studies in that subject in the Rathmines College of Commerce. This decision greatly troubled his father. In a letter of 23 October 1974 Drury wrote to Rhees: Paul came to me the other evening and said he now loathed the idea of going to Trinity or any other University! I think his experiences in Kerry where he made friends with the native Irish speaking peasantry had changed his outlook a lot. He feels Trinity is ‘stuffy’ and that the academic Irish taught there is quite false to the real spoken language of the people who still use it naturally and by inheritance. I asked Paul what then he wished to do when he left school next summer. He said

Biographical and Historical Notes

419

his real ambition was that in time he should become a ‘writer’! In the meantime he would do a course in short-hand and type-writing and then try and get a post in one of the provincial Irish newspaper, as far away from Dublin as he could get. Now I can’t help feeling a great deal of sympathy for this revolt, but I have always had a dislike for ‘Journalists’, and he certainly has enough intelligence to get a University degree … I shall have to think carefully what to advise him. If you feel you have anything to say to me about this, you know how much I value your advice. And you have a wider experience of the value or lack of value of a modern university. Con Drury’s dislike for Paul’s chosen field was shared by Wittgenstein from whom Con had learnt that ‘journalistic gossip is among the least attractive features of this present age’ (UCD). Undaunted, Paul became a freelance reporter on European Affairs, based in Brussels. This was followed by an extended period as successively deputy editor of the Irish Independent, editor of the Evening Herald and of the Irish Daily Star. In 2000, he took over the editorship of Ireland on Sunday and managed its transfer to the Associated Newspapers group in Ireland whereupon it became the Irish Mail on Sunday. In 2006, he was launch editor of the Irish Daily Mail, became managing editor for the group in Ireland and was an industry representative on the newly established Irish Press Council, set up ‘to provide the public with an independent forum for resolving complaints’, while defending press freedom. He retired from his executive role and concentrated on a very popular weekly column in the Daily Mail.27 He was a witness at a High Court hearing where a litigant with considerable press interests, who by-passed the services of the Press Council, successfully sued the Irish Daily Mail for defamation in connection with a column written by Paul. Paul continued to develop an already established profile as a television commentator, especially on Irish language programmes; he had been the first editor of the Irish language weekly Amárach, when publication was resumed in 1980 after it had ceased publication for several years. He also contributed scripts to the satirical radio series, ‘Green Tea’ and ‘Callan’s Kicks’ (of which he was also creative editor) for the national broadcasting body, RTE. In 2013 he contracted cancer and died on 8 March 2015; tributes were led by the president of Ireland. As it happened, he had been offered a contract to co-edit this book by Bloomsbury Academic Press in the previous weeks. He had long taken an energetic interest in making his father’s work accessible to interested parties and developed an enthusiastic interest in his family background; the results of his research were used in compiling many of these notes.28 Paul married a Galway woman, Áine Ní Fhéinne and they had three children, Eanna, Niamh and Oisín. This book is dedicated to him.

SIR DESMOND LEE (1908–83) Lee was the fellow student Wittgenstein recommended to Drury for philosophical dialogue. Although Lee was at that time taking the Classical Tripos, he attended the Moral Sciences lectures. He edited Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge 19301932 (Oxford: University Press, 1980) using class notes taken by himself and John

420

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

King, then of St. John’s College, Cambridge, who in turn obtained and consulted Raymond Townsend’s notes [see entry for Townsend below]. Drury attended many of these lectures. Although sufficiently intimate with his teacher to be invited to stay in the Wittgenstein household in Vienna, Lee lost touch with Wittgenstein when he took up a position as a university lecturer in Classics. He translated Plato’s Republic and Timaeus and Critias for the Penguin Classics Series. He was headmaster of Clifton College (Bristol) and of Winchester College. He was president of Hughes Hall, Cambridge from 1973 to 1978. He edited Drury’s ‘Letters to a Student of Philosophy’.

ARTHUR MILNE MACIVER (1905–72) AND AN ADDENDUM Son of Florence (neé Crosthwaite) and Andrew MacIver (who was killed during the First World War). Arthur’s only sibling died aged seven. He was brought up in Birkenhead and then studied classics at Oxford but came to Cambridge for one term and kept a diary of his time there (October 1929 to March 1930). By 1939 he was a lecturer at Leeds and in 1962 was appointed professor of Philosophy at Southampton; his inaugural lecture, ‘Practical Philosophy and Morals’ was delivered on 20 January of that year. In 1961–2, MacIver was president of the Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy – a position that has been occupied at one time or another by most of the prominent British philosophers since 1880. In Cons., p. 101, Drury mentions an incident that occurred at a meeting of Moore’s Saturday morning discussion class, attended by Wittgenstein: ‘A visiting student from Oxford started quoting from Kant in German. The irrelevance of this so annoyed Wittgenstein that he shouted at him to shut up.’ Later, Wittgenstein told Drury: ‘I am no saint and don’t pretend to be, but I shouldn’t lose my temper like that’. MacIver may have been the student who was object of Wittgenstein’s ire. Addendum: It is clear from his diary that McIver – and at least some of his fellow students – thought that Drury was unwilling to participate, some might now think commendably, in male sexual badinage about the few female students with whom they shared classes in Cambridge. Light on his ‘odd’ behaviour, if required, may perhaps be gleaned from a remark made by Wittgenstein’s teacher of Russian, Fania Pascal. She stated that Wittgenstein in the 1930s sought disciples with whom to work out his thoughts among ‘sons of the English middle-class’ with ‘child-like innocence and first-class brains’ (Portraits, p. 518). If this was the case, it does not seem that Wittgenstein wished that such friends would persist in such innocence into their maturity. As described in the introductory monograph, Wittgenstein considered Drury’s reaction to the sexual explicitness of the bas-relief of the God Horus in Luxor prudish (Cons, p. 128). Drury certainly contributed to the epistolary offensive against W. W. Bartley’s account of Wittgenstein’s sexual behaviour probably not out of prudery but rather because the upshot of Bartley’s claims (see entry on Skinner below) was to shift biographical focus from what he saw was most characteristic of his friend – an ascetic disposition (that had deep roots in Wittgenstein’s religious

Biographical and Historical Notes

421

sensibility, which he went to pains to portray in his writings about his teacher and friend). It is clear from his published views on the subject that Drury had positive, albeit traditional views on the exercise of sexuality, which he feared were being undermined during the course of his life. For example, in 1968, the British Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 113, carried a letter from Drury criticizing that journal for publishing ‘a comparatively favourable review of the book by W. H. Masters and V. E. Johnson entitled Human Sexual Response’. He decried ‘the preoccupation with physiological details’ as ‘useless’ and the experiments described in pursuit of that preoccupation as representing ‘such a degradation of the human spirit as to alarm me for the future of our cultural heritage’. Instead of fostering ‘intercourse … as a joyous and wonderful experience’ which ‘comes from a life shared together with increasing love and loyalty’, ‘the desire for effectiveness in sexual performance’ stultifies this development at ‘an adolescent stage’ (p. 922). Not long afterwards, and in similar vein, he wrote in a letter to Rhees concerning changing sexual mores: ‘Where sex is degraded, love is lost, and where love is lost, a cultured and kindly life such as we grew up on must needs disappear’ (Arc. Drury to Rhees, 13 July 1969). Consistent with this, in The Danger of Words (1973), Drury quoted at length from a letter on the subject written by Simone Weil to a young friend: ‘Love … often means involving forever your own life with that of another. Indeed it must always involve this, unless one of the two lovers treats the other as a plaything; in that case, one that is only too common, love has changed into something odious’ (p. 279). Perhaps Drury had, in the words Wittgenstein applied to Freud ‘something to say’, even in a post-Freudian age.

THEODORE REDPATH (1913–97) Redpath came up to Cambridge in 1931 and read English. He switched to Moral Sciences writing a thesis on Leibniz under the supervision of C. D. Broad for which he was awarded the PhD degree in 1940. He attended Wittgenstein’s lectures from 1934 to 1936 and again from 1938 to 1940, after which he undertook military officer training. He noted in his book, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Student’s Memoir (London: Duckworth, 1990) that some people believed he had achieved immortality on account of Wittgenstein’s use of him in a gruesome thought experiment ‘Suppose we boil Redpath’.29 His memoir covers a great deal of the same ground as Drury’s ‘Conversations’ and ‘Notes on Conversations’. His record of Wittgenstein’s literary tastes, reading in philosophy, musical preferences, and relationships closely agrees with Drury’s account of the same matters. What Redpath regarded as the most important lesson he learnt from Wittgenstein was that a philosophical interrogation does not resolve the perplexity that arises from such a question as ‘what is time?’ by answering the question directly. Rather, the enquiry has to be circumvented in such a way that it no longer irritates the questioner. This is achieved by exploring what prove to be the many ways in which perplexing words are used, thus avoiding the pitfall of assuming that there must be one single universally valid answer to the troubling

422

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

question (pp. 85–6). Redpath wrote an excellent paper pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of Wittgenstein’s use of this method in his only public lecture (to the Heretics).30 Redpath’s memoir provoked some excoriating commentary in a review by John C. Marshall of the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, that appeared in Nature, vol. 347 (4 October 1990) to the effect that Wittgenstein had created at Trinity a ‘superheated circus … for students in a strange land who would be incapable of understanding who he was and what he taught’ and that ‘one of the profound mysteries of the twentieth century was how did a minor Viennese aphorist come to be regarded (in some circles) as a great philosopher who had twice changed the course of the discipline?’ (p. 435) A. J. Greenfield of St Mary’s Hospital Medical School joined battle with Marshall accusing him of a sadly vacuous ‘hatchet job’ (Nature, vol. 438 (29 November 1990) p. 438). This riposte was to no avail as far as a third participant, J. R. Smythies, was concerned (see entry for Yorick Smythies below). Redpath went on to make a career at the bar but in 1950 was appointed Trinity College Cambridge’s first teaching fellow in English. In retirement, he taught in Japan and also became a wine merchant.

RUSH RHEES (1905–89) Rhees was a very close friend of Drury’s. Although Drury addressed him as ‘Bob’, the name ‘Rush’ was a significant one in the Rhees family history. It was used by successive generations of the family in memory of Benjamin Rush, a signatory of the Declaration of American Independence, who had assisted a Rhees ancestor, Morgan John Rhys, in establishing a Welsh settlement in Pennsylvania in 1794. Rhees’s father, Benjamin Rush Rhees (son of a Chicago merchant), was a New Testament scholar. He became the third president (from 1900–35) of the University of Rochester (endowed by George Eastman, founder of the Kodak Camera company). Despite his father’s position in the university, Rhees Jr was excluded by his philosophy professor, George M. Forbes, from his classes; the reason given was ‘shallow thinking and inordinate conceit’. The young man then went to the University of Edinburgh (1924–8) where his ‘conceit’ can hardly have been moderated by his being compared to ‘a young Shelley’ by Professor Norman Kemp Smith. On graduation, Rhees secured a temporary lecturing post in philosophy at the University of Manchester but this contract expired in 1932. Meanwhile, he had developed an interest in Franz Brentano – teacher not only of Edmund Husserl, as mentioned above, but also of Sigmund Freud, among many other famous men. He studied Brentano’s philosophy for two years (1934-36) in Innsbruck under Professor Alfred Kastill. Rhees worked on a PhD in Cambridge on continuity, an issue that arose in Brentano’s ‘theory of relations’. He was supervised by G. E. Moore but, to Moore’s disappointment, failed to complete his thesis. There was compensation for Rhees, however, in being able to attend Wittgenstein’s lectures and among the papers in Rhees’s Discussions of Wittgenstein (Bristol: Thoemmes Press reprint 1996) was one on continuity. Of this book, Drury wrote the following insightful comment: I am glad that the importance Wittgenstein attached to mathematics is once again stressed. This side of his work has been neglected. I would say that if you are not

Biographical and Historical Notes

423

deeply puzzled as to ‘how is mathematics possible?’ there is a serious lacuna in the rest of your philosophy. The history of philosophy alone should teach that. On the other hand, it is also important to see ‘why mathematicians make such bad philosophers’. (Drury to Rhees, Arc., 6 April 1970) Failing to secure an academic appointment, after another period studying Brentano with Kastil in Vienna and substitution lecturing in Manchester. Rhees worked for some time as a welder. However, in 1940, he was appointed to a temporary post at the University of Swansea and eventually secured a permanent lectureship there. He held this post until early retirement in 1966 – a retirement that did not end his academic involvement with the now defunct philosophy department. Rhees concentrated on Plato’s texts in his lecture courses at Swansea but also drew on his work on Brentano to teach a course on Philosophical Logic. This latter led to his editing George Boole’s Studies in Logic and Probability (1952). He and Wittgenstein were in regular contact and Wittgenstein came to visit him in Swansea on several occasions in the 1940s for philosophical discussion. This gave Rhees an incomparable knowledge of Wittgenstein’s later philosophical development. The collection of the correspondence exchanged between Rhees and Drury from 1955 to 1974 and held in Limerick contains 174 items and is not exhaustive. Several letters exceed twenty typewritten pages of philosophical commentary but there were also more personal exchanges particularly regarding their spiritual lives. Of these latter Drury wrote him: ‘When you write to me about yourself and your thoughts, I find myself thinking of the beatitudes “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness,” that is your beatitude’ (Arc., 1 August 1957). A notable feature of Drury’s letters is the inclusion of prescription scripts to allow Rhees to access Valium; on 22 April 1967, Drury wrote to Rhees ‘I do regard myself as in some sense your physician’. The two friends visited one another regularly during this period and Drury and his wife, Eileen, got to know Rhees’s wife, Jean (neé Henderson). Although Rhees was much occupied at this time discharging his role as one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors31 and, more generally, Wittgenstein expositor, he and Drury found in addition to their common devotion to Wittgenstein, new inspiration in the writings of Simone Weil. In 1969, Drury wrote to John Dale (above) that Rhees had ‘published a book of short reviews and letters … called “Without Answers.” It is rather too brief and doesn’t really do him justice, but I am glad he has got some permanent record of his work’ (28 October 1969). After his wife, Jean, died in 1982, Rhees married Peg (neé Margaret Britton), widow of Yorick Smythies (see below).32

ERWIN SCHRӦDINGER (1897–1961) AND THE DUBLIN INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES The DIAS, modelled on the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, was established by Éamon de Valera in 1940. de Valera’s aim was to enhance the profile of the Irish Free State, of which he was Taoiseach (prime minister), by founding a research institute. To begin with, the institute specialized in two areas pertinent to de Valera’s own academic interests: Celtic Studies and Theoretical Physics. De Valera had studied mathematical physics under the supervision of Arthur Conway of University College Dublin and later at Trinity College Dublin under Edmund

424

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

T. Whittaker. While at Trinity (1906–11), Whittaker acted as Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He spent the remainder of his career as professor at the University of Edinburgh but when de Valera came to power he relied on Whittaker as his advisor on science. Already in 1936, when engaged in preliminary planning, de Valera was interested in attracting Schrӧdinger to join his institute. Schrӧdinger had published four papers in 1926 which were widely regarded as major contributions to quantum mathematics. Further, he was awarded a Nobel prize, jointly with Paul Dirac, for his work on quantum wave mechanics in 1933. As it happened, Schrӧdinger was in bad odour with the post-Anschluss Nazi regime on account of anti-Nazi remarks made years previously and had moved to Belgium. De Valera succeeded in installing Schrӧdinger as inaugural director and he developed the institute into a highly regarded international centre for theoretical physics. Schrӧdinger’s theories raised philosophical issues connected with quantum theory; his thought experiment labelled ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ – an animal that simultaneously must be considered both to exist and not to exist – to illustrate the quandaries associated with whether sub-atomic objects are waves or particles, or both, or neither, is very well known. In 1943 Schrӧdinger gave a series of three lectures to audiences exceeding 400 people in Trinity College Dublin. These were later published under the title What is Life? (1944). Publication was delayed because the intended Dublin publisher broke up the type following Roman Catholic Church objections; the book was published instead by Cambridge University Press. Although much of what Schrӧdinger wrote had been anticipated by H. G. Muller, his book made better known an idea of Max Delbruck’s about the nature of the gene as a polymer. Perhaps most significant, reading this book stimulated another future Nobel prizewinner, James Watson (1962), to change the focus of his studies from ornithology to biology, in which field he was to prove a lead researcher in the uncovering of the double helical structure of DNA. The lives of Schrӧdinger and Wittgenstein had several parallels. Each was Viennese and each served in the Austrian army on the Italian front during the First World War. Each read, and was influenced by, Schopenhauer, although this influence fostered very different trajectories. Schrӧdinger developed an idealism inspired by the Hindu Upanishads (texts popularized by Schopenhauer and admired by Drury in later life). Schrӧdinger’s philosophical and scientific interests interconnected in a series of lectures entitled ‘Nature and the Greeks’ given in University College Dublin in 1948 on the origins of the scientific Weltanschauung. Each found hospitality to do their work in Ireland. Finally, each was interred according to the Roman Catholic funeral rites although not regular communicants of that church.33 Nevertheless, they do not appear to have met in a small, tight-knit Dublin – although there was a pre-existing loose connection in that a paper on colour read by Schrӧdinger to the Vienna Academy of Sciences had been funded by Wittgenstein’s sister, Gretl.34 The two did, however, connect, albeit indirectly, through Drury. He treated Schrӧdinger’s wife, Annemarie (Anny) Bertel after she attempted suicide in 1948; she was given electroshock therapy. The results were beneficial but she had to return frequently for hospital care under Drury’s oversight until she left Ireland with her husband in

Biographical and Historical Notes

425

1956. In The Danger of Words, Drury mentions that he agreed with Schrӧdinger that the most important question for a human being to ask is ‘who are we’, but that he was wrong to state that this was ‘not only one of the tasks of science, but the only one that really matters’ because it is not a scientific question at all (p. 299). It may be that Wittgenstein would have dismissively categorized Schrödinger among those scientists in whom he found ‘a tendency nowadays … when they reach middle age to become bored with their real work, and launch out into absurd popular semi-philosophical speculations’ (Cons., p. 299). He had in mind the astrophysicist, Arthur Eddington (whom Schrödinger esteemed), but the remark clearly reveals a more general aversion. Canon Comerford (above) writes that in 1938 de Valera ‘hoped Wittgenstein would contribute to an academy for advanced mathematics’ and issued an ‘invitation’ in furtherance of that plan.35 Presumably this refers to the DIAS but while this claim can be found on the World Wide Web, it is difficult to credit it. Wittgenstein’s main contact with practising physicists in the 1930s was with a former fellow student, William Heriot Watson (1899–1987), who taught physics at McGill University in Montreal. Wittgenstein and Watson exchanged clippings from newspapers and magazines, which they considered were nonsensical articles with pretensions to scientific plausibility. In particular, they considered the writings of Eddington and Jeans as reprehensible examples of a ‘type of professedly philosophical writing which accompanies popular expositions of modern science, under the guise of synthesising knowledge, for some religious end’. In a book, which Drury liked, On Understanding Physics (Cambridge: University Press, 1938), Watson presented ‘the results of my reflections in clearing up my own understanding of physics’ after the model of Wittgenstein’s ‘fight against the fascination which forms of expression have over us’ (pp. x–xi). Watson was convinced it was a ‘most important task’ to inform scientists about philosophy as they might otherwise be convinced it was of no value. Given the focus of the DIAS on Celtic studies and physics, it might be thought that here more than anywhere else one might find a scientist who does, or did, ‘physics in Gaelic’ – but apparently not. A commentator on Wittgenstein, Fergus Kerr,36 gave this as an example of something that was possible to do but that nobody would ‘bother’ with because it would be so ‘troublesome’ and ‘hard’. However, the example is misleading because research in physics is conducted primarily in mathematics, not any natural language. Physics has, to be sure, been taught through the medium of Gaelic in several Irish secondary schools and at undergraduate level at University College Galway and it is true that loan words from other languages, for example, the German ‘Bethe Ansatz’, are employed generally in physics.However, these facts do not tell against the main point regarding the pivotal ‘linguistic’ role of mathematics in physics research as the success of Chinese physicists in recent years attests.37

FRANCIS SKINNER (1912–41) AND THE ISSUE OF WITTGENSTEIN’S SEXUAL ORIENTATION Skinner was a young, talented mathematics student when Wittgenstein got to know him. He was described by Fania Pascal, who taught Russian to Skinner and

426

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Wittgenstein, as ‘an extremely shy, boyish chap … [who] had a club foot’. Theodore Redpath described him in his memoir (see above) as follows: He had had osteomyelitis when a teenager and had a very bad limp … personally devoted to Wittgenstein in an utterly unselfish and disinterested way. He was a very gentle person. He was tall and dark, with fine, closely set, rather sad, brown eyes and a long, straightish nose. With his high forehead, he had a striking profile’. (p. 25) Despite his academic gifts, he was counselled by Wittgenstein (as was the latter’s wont) to train for a useful occupation – in Skinner’s case as a mechanic in the Cambridge Instrument Company where his task was to turn main screws. (Wittgenstein was unsuccessful in persuading Alice Ambrose, Anscombe – and her husband, Peter Geach – Norman Malcolm and Rush Rhees to follow this counsel.) Wittgenstein and Skinner lived together in the late 1930s. Redpath recalled being invited ‘to have supper’ with Wittgenstein and Skinner at the latter’s lodgings: ‘When I arrived there I went upstairs and was welcomed by Wittgenstein who was sitting in a room with wooden boxes for seats, and a big box for a table. Francis was cooking a beef stew in the kitchen. … One forgot about the lack of creature comforts as the conversation moved into gear’. When he died of poliomyelitis in 1941 Skinner’s sister described a distraught Wittgenstein as like ‘a frightened wild animal’.38 A claim that Wittgenstein and Skinner were lovers was made by William Warren Bartley III in Wittgenstein (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973). This was in the context of a more general account of a putative homosexual orientation and practice by Wittgenstein. Bartley alleged that on his return to Vienna in 1919, after army service, Wittgenstein went compulsively to a known resort of homosexuals to seek partners and that he suffered feelings of guilt on account of this behaviour. This information was based on ‘confidential reports from [unnamed and not directly quoted] friends’, corroborated by ‘rough young men’ and ‘tough boys’ when Bartley enquired at bars frequented by homosexuals in London and Vienna – fifty years after the alleged events. These sources seemed tendentious. Bartley also proffered analyses of two of Wittgenstein’s dreams that he presented as suggestive of a conflict regarding a homosexual orientation – interpretations that were open to accusations of subjectivity. Bartley’s case was not improved by his adducing the presence of two phobic conditions: agoraphobia and acrophobia. Aside from their irrelevance to the issue of a homosexual orientation or not, the evidence was so negligible as to be easily dismissed; as it happens, the evidence for acrophobia relied on Drury’s recounting of Wittgenstein’s childhood fears which did not bear on acrophobia at all. Bartley’s book provoked severe adverse reactions from Wittgenstein’s friends and family. The first to comment publicly was Elizabeth Anscombe who wrote to the Times Literary Supplement on 16 November 1973 (further to a review of the book in the same publication on 17 August 1973), asking Bartley to indicate (inter alia) the nature of his sources – clearly his Achilles heel. An exchange of letters ensued involving in addition to Anscombe (who wrote again on 4 and 18 January 1974), Brian McGuinness (18 January 1974) and F. A. von Hayek (8 February 1974). However, more heat was generated than light shed on the identity of Bartley’s sources.

Biographical and Historical Notes

427

Wittgenstein’s sister, Margarete Stonborough, did make some progress on the question of sources when she discovered and interviewed the interpreter, Helmut Kasper, whom Bartley had employed on a research visit to Austria in 1969. The only information of interest she obtained, however, was that one of her sons, Thomas (Tommy), had met with Bartley during that time. Without specifically identifying Tommy, Bartley stated in the Times Literary Supplement (11 January 1974), that one of Wittgenstein’s nephew had commended him on ‘his superb joy in ferreting out sources’ (p. 32). That the nephew in question was not Major John J. Stonborough was clear from John’s dismissal of the Bartley book as a ‘farrago of lies and poppycock’ in the Human World, vol. 14 (February 1974). The same issue of the Human World carried a long and diffuse review of Bartley’s book by Rush Rhees whose tenor can be summed up in the rhetorical question: ‘What standards guided the publishers and the editor when they brought this book out and sponsored it?’ (p. 67). There was, however, one statement of fact that remained unresolved. Bartley had identified two persons as possible homosexual partners of Wittgenstein: David Pinsent (whom Wittgenstein met at Cambridge and who was undoubtedly a close friend) and Francis Skinner. However, even Bartley had to admit with regard to Pinsent, a test pilot who was killed in May 1918, that one ‘could not judge with certainty whether [his relationship with Wittgenstein] involved active sexual relations’.39 Left outstanding was the nature of Wittgenstein’s relationship with Skinner. Drury had been in a position to observe both men together especially when in 1934 all three were on holiday in his brother’s Connemara cottage. When he commented publicly on Bartley’s book in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement dated 22 February 1974, Drury stated that Bartley was ‘in error when he supposes that Wittgenstein was at any time “tormented by homosexual behaviour.”’ He reminded his readers that as a psychiatrist he would ‘be alert to problems of homosexuality whether latent or active’. This cannot, of course, be read as an outright rejection of a homosexual orientation on the part of, or homosexual practice by, his former teacher – only that Drury had not observed any perturbation on that account in Wittgenstein.40 The case rested at that point until the appearance of Monk’s biography in 1990 in which he cited a manuscript entry for 22 September 1937. In Monk’s translation, Wittgenstein wrote (in German) that in respect of Skinner, Wittgenstein felt ‘sensual, susceptible, indecent’ and that he ‘lay with him two or three times. Always at first with the feeling that there was nothing wrong in it, then with shame. Have also been unjust, edgy and insincere towards him, and also cruel’ (p. 376). It is very difficult to evaluate what the record of the reaction by Wittgenstein’s family and friends to Bartley’s allegations reveals about their precise state of knowledge, if any, in 1972, regarding Wittgenstein’s sexual orientation and practice. As far as Drury was concerned, ‘if any of Wittgenstein’s friends had been unjustly attacked he [Wittgenstein] would have rushed to their defence’ and so it was now necessary for those friends ‘to defend his memory’. Drury’s memory as ‘a personal friend’ of Wittgenstein was of the ‘nobility of his character; his asceticism, simplicity of life, purity, truthfulness’. This led him to treat Bartley’s ‘libellous statements with contempt’ (undated autograph).

428

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

Monk stated in his acknowledgements to various persons in his biography that ‘it was initially feared that the project would founder for lack of co-operation from Wittgenstein’s literary heirs’. He was, however, ‘happy to report that the exact opposite’ had ‘been the case’ (p. xi). Monk expressed thanks, in particular, to Elizabeth Anscombe for allowing him ‘access to Francis Skinner’s letters to Wittgenstein’ (p. xi). We might essay that the sense of affront at Bartley’s book was provoked by extravagant and tendentious claims that lacked documentary evidence. Bartley’s critics may also have felt that Wittgenstein’s sexual orientation had no bearing on what was important, his philosophical investigation. Even Bartley did not agree with A. W. Lewi, in his attempt to make the case inter alia that Wittgenstein’s philosophy reflected a homosexual orientation in its insistence that ‘nothing is hidden’.41

YORICK SMYTHIES (1917–80) AND A CONTROVERSY IN NATURE Smythies was a student of Wittgenstein’s in the late 1930s, in whose rooms some of the ‘starred’ (i.e. restricted admission) meetings of the Cambridge Moral Science Club took place and frequently acted as note-taker at his teacher’s classes. He was among the students of Wittgenstein’s class on the philosophy of mathematics in 1938–9, whose members included Georg von Wright, Norman Malcolm, Francis Kitto, Alister Watson, Richard Bosanquet and Alan Turing. When war broke out, he sought (and received) the status of conscientious objector. As had Elizabeth Anscombe, Smythies also converted to Roman Catholicism. Wittgenstein wrote to Smythies on 7 April 1944 about his conversion because, so he told Drury, he felt partly responsible for it, having advised Smythies to read Kierkegaard: Deciding to become a Christian is like deciding to give up walking on the ground and do tight-rope walking instead, where nothing is more easy than to slip and every slip can be fatal. … I cannot applaud your decision to go in for rope walking, because I have always stayed on the ground myself, I have no right to encourage another man in such an enterprise. … I’m really interested in what sort of a man you are and will be. This will, for me, be the eating of the pudding. So long! Good wishes!42 After graduation, Smythies, who never succeeded in securing a lecturer post, worked mainly as a librarian and was a friend of Iris Murdoch who based a character in her first novel on him. He was present at Wittgenstein’s deathbed and was bequeathed a share in the residue of his will. He is most likely the person referred to by Drury only as ‘S-------’, about whom Wittgenstein said that he was ‘the most religious man I have ever met’ (Cons., p. 139). Later in life, according to Professor Frank Cioffi, he consulted Drury regarding ‘schizophrenic episodes’ (Letter to John Hayes, 10 March 1989). Monk corroborates this stating that ‘in later life’, Smythies ‘suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and became a patient of Maurice Drury’ adding that ‘he

Biographical and Historical Notes

429

died in tragic circumstances in 1981’ (Monk, p. 403). Volker A. Munz has published (online) that Smythies’ death was connected with a history of chronic emphysema and took place in 1980; an important source for Munz was Smythies’ wife, Peg. A controversy arose out of a review in Nature of Theodore Redpath’s memoir of Wittgenstein (see entry for Redpath above). One of the contributors to the controversy, J. R. Smythies (National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London), wrote in a letter to Nature, vol. 350 (7 March 1991) that Wittgenstein was ‘just one of a long line of German-speaking philosophers (such as Hegel and Heidegger) who have dazzled some innocent English-speaking philosophers by writing material whose basic nonsense is concealed by the impenetrable thickets of the German language’. J. R. Smythies, who in the course of the correspondence disclosed that he was a ‘cousin’ of Yorick Smythies, went on to inform his readers that ‘Russell (among others) draws attention to Wittgenstein’s schizoid and paranoid personality’ and that ‘certain schizoid personalities develop the ability to write in a form of speech disorder known as schizophrenese’. The upshot of these accusations was an article by the science correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph, no. 1,554 (10 March 1991) headed ‘Revealed: the great philosopher was just a nutcase’. An editorial in The Times (Monday, 11 March 1991) entitled ‘Witlessgenstein’ sought to balance matters, stating that ‘it has taken a lesser modern wisdom to slur with the charge of insanity the wit and wisdom of Wittgenstein’ (p. 13). The well-meaning counter-pointing of ‘the charge of insanity’ with ‘wit and wisdom’ is evidence that Drury’s attempt to demonstrate no incompatibility between the two in the The Danger of Words had not reached the paper of record – at least by 1991. It is clear, however, from his correspondence that Wittgenstein suffered frequently from depressive symptoms – sometimes to the extent of contemplating suicide (an act committed by three of his brothers). von Wright’s comment in his ‘Biographical Sketch’ seems justified: ‘It is probably true that he lived on the border of mental illness. A fear of being driven across it followed him throughout his life.’43 Wittgenstein was involved in an incident in the elementary school in the Austrian village of Otterthal where he was teaching in 1926 that led to a court order to have him psychiatrically examined. He had boxed a haemophiliac pupil around the head leading to the boy’s collapse into unconsciousness. No record of the trial, if it was proceeded with, appears to survive. In the spring of 1948, Drury, who had given him sleeping tablets, put Wittgenstein in touch with Norman Moore as Wittgenstein got more and more depressed while living in Wicklow. Moore and he then met on a few occasions, as noted in the introductory monograph.

‘SWIFT’S HOSPITAL’ St Patrick’s Hospital was founded by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral (1713–45) for the purpose, as stated in his will, of providing all the needs, including medical, of ‘poor persons’ who are ‘Idiots or Lunatics... without fee or reward’. Swift’s autograph epitaph: ‘He gave the little wealth he had/ to found a home for fools and mad/and showed with one satiric touch/no nation

430

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

needed it so much’ belies his genuine intent ‘to alleviate the plight of the mentally ill’ and provide in Dublin what the Bethlem Hospital, ‘Bedlam’ (of which he was elected a governor in 1714) did not in London.44 The hospital was formally established in the year following the dean’s death. Swift was prey to several morbid fears, including fear of falling into madness. In that respect, he resembled Wittgenstein. There may be another resemblance in that, in the words of Norman Moore, Swift found that ‘the physical consummation of marriage was psychologically … repugnant to him’.45 As for Wittgenstein, he had proposed a sexually abstinent, childless, marriage (a ‘mariage blanc’) to a Swiss friend, Marguerite Respinger c. 1930.

RAYMOND D. TOWNSEND (1902–86) A New Zealander, Townsend was given a home away from home by Drury’s family. He was awarded a first in the Moral Science Tripos in 1931. According to McGuinness (Cam., p. 192), he stayed a further year to obtain a qualification in French. He contributed his notes to Lee’s and King’s edition of the 1930–2 lectures. He found a position as a schoolmaster and remained in contact with Wittgenstein, being warned by him, however, lest, as his former teacher felt, he may have been ‘drifting away from friends’ (Cam.,19 May 1939, p. 304). The connection with Drury continued: In October 1938, Drury wrote to invite him to stay with the family after Christmas ‘as you have before’ and offering ‘Pantomime, walks down the canal, Red hills, etc., etc.’ This letter concluded: ‘Although I don’t write I think of you often as the best friend I have.’ In 1940, fearful perhaps of a German invasion, Wittgenstein proposed to add Townsend to an ill Maynard Keynes and Piero Sraffa (in danger of internment if Italy, his native country, was to declare war) as a nominee entitled to access a safe deposit box in Barclay’s Bank, Benet St., Cambridge, with authority to withdraw two parcels containing family property – jewellery and musical manuscripts – should a Wittgenstein family member require them. In a letter of 28 February 1941, when Drury, now in the British army, was en route to Egypt, he wrote: ‘May I not be separated from you for too long!’ Drury and Townsend continued to correspond after the war. On 22 September 1956, Drury wrote him a letter of characteristically sensible advice on handling middle age, following conversation, which can also plausibly be taken to reveal his own fundamental convictions (see ‘Part V. Drury on Medicine, Psychiatry and Psychology’ in this book) (p. 404).

NOTES 1. The other active traditions in twentieth-century Western Philosophy were Marxism, officially established in many countries in Eastern Europe, and Phenomenology, initiated by Edmund Husserl. As a young scholar, Martin Heidegger, often ranked with Wittgenstein as one of the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, acted as Husserl’s assistant. Husserl had, in turn, been taught by Franz Brentano, who derived the key concept of ‘intentionality’ from Aquinas; knowledge is always knowledge of or about something.

Biographical and Historical Notes

431

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, eds G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), p. 467. 3. O. K. Bouwsma, Wittgenstein’s Conversations 1949-1951, eds J. L. Crafter and Ronald E. Hustwit (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1986), p. 67. 4. Wittgenstein bequeathed his furniture to her in his will and a share in its residue. 5. Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957). 6. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy, vol. 53 (1958), pp. 1–19. 7. Bouwsma, Wittgenstein’s Conversations 1949-1951, p. 47. 8. See Ray Monk, Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. 455. 9. ‘Education Unlimited’, The Guardian, Thursday 11 January 2001. 10. Sunday Independent, 25 March 1973. 11. Work on Oneself: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Psychology (Arlington, VA:, The Institute for the Psychological Sciences Press, 2008), p. 49. 12. Work on Oneself, above. 13. Dale wrote about his medical career in Snowshoes and Stethoscopes: Tales of Medicine and Flying in the Canadian North (John Dale and Daedalus Publishing, Box 489, Nelson, B. C. VIL5R2, 1997). He assembled a fine philosophical library in British Columbia and wrote more explicitly about philosophy in Notes from a Sidecar: A philosophical travelogue about the Selkirk Loop, British Columbia/Washington; Idaho (Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing, 2005). 14. See Dublin Pictorial Guide and Directory of 1850. 15. William?Kingsley (d. 1896); Richard John (b. 1846); Charles S. (1847–1903); Robert (b. 1847); Henry D. (b. 29 September 1849–d. 26 January 1931); Arthur (1854–95); Francis Barker; Alfred Edward; George (b. 1857); Maurice? H (?1858–December 1906); Aubrey (1860–93) and Thomas (1862–93). 16. For an excellent account of this very trying episode in the Wittgenstein family history, see Alexander Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). 17. Martin Mansergh, The Legacy of History (Cork: Mercier Press, 2003), p. 319. 18. National Museums, N. Ireland, no. BELUM.U5010. 19. The sketch is reproduced in Charlotte Milligan Fox, The Annals of the Irish Harpers (1911). 20. These portraits are reproduced in colour in Mary Stratton, ‘Vignettes of Family Life’, Irish Arts Review ((Spring, 2008), pp. 100–5.) 21. Information on the Reilly family can be found at lordbelmontinnorthernirelandblogspot. co.uk 22. Quoted by Ruth D’Arcy Thompson in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson: The ScholarNaturalist 1860-1948 (Oxford: University Press, 1958), p. 232. 23. The title of the second volume of Tim Robinson’s remarkable Connemara trilogy, The Last Pool of Darkness (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2008) is sourced to a reported remark by Wittgenstein to the professor of Logic and Psychology at UCD, Eamonn Feichin (sic). O’Doherty, first quoted by George Hetherington in his article ‘Wittgenstein in Ireland’ Irish University Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (Autumn 1987), p. 176. 24. ‘Wittgenstein’s Friends’ New Left Review, no. 135 (1982), p. 85.

432

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAURICE O’CONNOR DRURY

25. So quoted by Elizabeth Malcolm, Swift’s Hospital: A History of St. Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin, 1746-1989 (Dublin, 1989), p. 267. 26. Confessions, Book VI. 27. Maestro: A Collection of Writings by Paul Drury reproduces many of these columns. The book was assembled as a tribute by his colleagues and circulated privately in 2016. Included are moving references to his parents, especially on the loss of his father when he was nineteen. 28. Paul gave me to understand that he shared some of the information with Rev. Canon Patrick Comerford, whose accounts of visiting places associated with Wittgenstein in Dublin, Wicklow and England, illustrated by fine photographs, are available via Google. Some of the Comerford photographs are of the same sites as those to be found in Richard Wall, Wittgenstein in Ireland (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 29. See ed. Cyril Barrett, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversation on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), p. 24. 30. See ‘Wittgenstein and Ethics’, in Alice Ambrose and Morris Lazerowitz (eds), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Language (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1972), pp. 95–119. 31. Under the terms of Wittgenstein’s will, Rhees and his fellow literary executors were given ‘all the copyright in all my unpublished writings and also the manuscripts and typescripts thereof to dispose of as they think best but subject to any claim by anybody else to the custody of manuscripts and typescripts. I intend and desire that (the executors) shall publish as many of my unpublished writings as they think fit but I do not wish them to incur expenses in publication which they do not expect to recoup out of royalties or other profits’. Under the terms of the same will Rhees of ‘96 Bryn Road Swansea’ received ‘the rest of my books [except those bequeathed to Dr Benedict Richards and that to Dr Ludwig Hänsel] and what I call my Collection of Nonsense which will be found in a file’. One important source of items in the ‘Collection of Nonsense’ was William Heriot Watson mentioned in the entry entitled ‘Erwin Schrödinger … the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies’. Wittgenstein also expressed the hope in his will that Rhees as the sole executor would ‘accept fifty pounds for his personal Expenses in discharging this trust’. For a discussion of the different perspectives Wittgenstein’s literary executors brought to the task deputed to them under the terms of his will see: Christian Erbacher, ‘Wittgenstein and His Literary Executors’, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophers, 4, no. 3 (2016), pp. 1–39. 32. I have relied heavily in this note on the introduction by the editor, D. Z. Phillips to Rush Rhees on Religion and Philosophy ((Cambridge: University Press, 1997), pp. xi–xxii). 33. In Schrödinger’s case, the presiding priest relied on the deceased man’s tenuous connection with the church through his membership of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences; the Wittgenstein story and Drury’s role in it is recounted in the monograph that introduces this collection. 34. See Walter Moore, Schrӧdinger: Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 128).

Biographical and Historical Notes

433

35. ‘The Anglican ordinand and psychiatrist who brought Wittgenstein to Ireland’, 1 February 2015. 36. Theology after Wittgenstein, 2nd edn (London: SPCK, 1997), p. 106. 37. I am indebted to Prof Luke Drury for information in regard to this matter. 38. Rush Rhees (ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: University Press, rev. ed.,1984), pp. 15; 27; 26. 39. Bartley, Wittgenstein., p. 165 of the 2nd edn (London: The Cresset Library, 1986). 40. Brendan Kelly (in Hearing Voices, above) sketches the background to any public commentary about an individual’s homosexual orientation at that time in Ireland: ‘For much of the twentieth century, Ireland was a very difficult place to be gay: same-sex acts were criminal up until 1993 and between 1962 and 1972 there were some 455 convictions of men for crimes such as “indecency with males” and “gross indecency”’ (p. 199). 41. ‘The Biographical Sources of Wittgenstein’s Ethics’, Telos, vol. 38 (Winter 1979), pp. 63–76. 42. Cam., 7 April 1944, p. 363. 43. Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), p. 4. 44. See Elizabeth Malcolm, Swift’s Hospital, above, p. 220. 45. See Robert Wyse Jackson, ‘Stella: her relationship with Jonathan Swift’, in North Munster Studies: Essays in Commemoration of Monsignor Michael Moloney, ed. Etienne Rynne (Limerick: The Thomond Archaeological Society, 1967), p. 377.

434

Eileen and Con Drury

INDEX

abnormal psychology  273, 278, 280–1, 337, 345 Abnormal Psychology (Eysenck)  273, 280 Advaita Vedanta philosophy  50 Aeschylus  283–4 The Age of Constantine the Great (Burckhardt)  83 n.201 Albert Hall  44–5 Alcoholics Anonymous  82 n.199 Alexander, Samuel  4–5, 7, 90, 94, 99, 178 Ambrose, Alice  77 n.152 Anatomy of the Nervous System (Hanson)  296 Andromeda nebula  352 Anglican Prayer Book  161 Anglican Reformation  119 animal magnetism  362–5 Anschluss  23, 424 Anscombe, Elizabeth  46–7, 49–51, 80 n.178, 169, 407–9 Apologia (Newman)  20, 116 Appearance and Reality (Bradley)  74 n.115, 186, 313 Aquinas, Thomas  14, 407, 408 Aristotle  65 n.52, 275–6, 314 Armstrong College  110 Arnold, Matthew  166 Ascension Burial Ground  51 Astaire, Fred  109 astronomy  183, 188, 196, 204, 216, 309, 352, 353, 417 atypical depression  271 Ausgewählte Schriften (Lichtenberg)  77 n.152 Austin, J. L.  41, 69 n.73, 225 Ayer, A. J.  41, 44, 136, 151, 200, 225

Bach, J. S.  6, 58, 87, 92, 97, 117, 120, 142, 258, 286 Bachtin, Nicholas  70 n.85 Bacon, Francis  184, 308 Baghramian, Maria  76 n.137, 77 n.152 barbiturates  31, 78 n.157 barren metaphysics  288 Barrett, Cyril  64 n.43, 73 n.108 Barth, Karl  108 Bartlett, F.  295 Bartley, William Warren  17 Battle of the Bulge  28 BBC Third Programme  44, 89–92, 151 Beethoven, Ludwig van  61 n.23, 97, 103, 105, 123 Beevor, Antony  74 n.117, 75 n.122 Bell, E. T.  190 Berkeley, George  5, 40 Berman, David  78 n.158 Bernard, Claude  264–5, 267–8, 355 Bevan, Dr E. V.  46–9, 51, 142–4 Bevan, Joan  48–9 Bhagavad Gita  235, 244–6 Bible  4, 60 n.15, 96, 108, 125, 137, 143, 239, 240, 245–6, 250–1, 323, 328 The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature  108 Bismarck, Otto von  34 Black, Max  61 n.20 Blake, William  29, 130 Blandford Camp  25 blepharospasm  394 Blue Book (Wittgenstein)  59 n.9, 150, 152, 215, 220 body, and mind  288–307 body sway test  373 Bosch, Hieronymus  95, 241 Bose, S. K.  61 n.20

436 Index

Boswell, James  38, 89, 94, 133, 155, 276–7 Bouwsma, Oets Kolk  15, 17, 20, 46, 51, 61 n.21, 75 n.127, 80 n.180, 82 n.193, 408, 409 Bradley, F. H.  5, 26, 60 n.10, 65 n.48, 74 n.115, 165, 193–4, 197 Brahms, Johannes  103, 120 Braid, James  364–5, 370, 377, 382, 402 Brain, Russell  291 Braithwaite, Richard  5–6, 61 n.18 Bramnell, Milne  372 Brandenburg Concerto  286 Brentano, Franz  31 Breuer, Josef  35, 132, 147 n.41, 159, 362, 367 British Journal of Psychiatry  265, 321 Broad, C. D.  5–8, 14, 17, 25, 62 n.30, 63 n.34, 82 n.196, 102, 105, 107 Broadbent, D. E.  295 Brontë, Emily  302, 306 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)  12, 97, 100, 156 Brothers of Charity garden  59 n.6 Browne, Ivor  75 n.130 Burckhardt, Jacob  83 n.201 Calvin, John  43–4, 125, 141, 225, 242, 258 Candide (Voltaire)  118 Carroll, Lewis  174 Casals, Pablo  44, 138 Cepheid variables  187, 352 Chambers’ Encyclopaedia  273 Chatterjee, Ranjit  64 n.44 The Chemical History of a Candle (Faraday)  107, 216 Chesterton, G. K.  20 Chevreul’s pendulum  373 Christian Monasticism  323 Christie, Agatha  118 A Christmas Carol (Dickens)  66 n.58, 98 Cicero  148 n.44, 168, 233, 276 The City of God (St Augustine)  158 Clare, Anthony W.  72 n.103 Climacus, Johannes  202 Cogito ergo Sum (Descartes)  62 n.26

Collet, Robert  81 n.188 Colloquies (Southey)  138 conception of time  191–2 The Concept of Mind (Ryle)  226, 233 The Concept of Prayer (Phillips)  237 Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard)  157 Con Drury. see Drury, Maurice O'Connor Confessions (St Augustine)  9, 158–9, 206, 232, 239, 251 Connemara  18, 36, 39 Wittgenstein in  37–8 Conquest of Mexico (Prescott)  89 consciousness  297, 313 contraception  409–12 contribution to a BBC Symposium  89–92 ‘Conversation Classes’  13, 64 n.40 conversations with Wittgenstein 1929  94–8 1930  98–108 1931  108–10 1932  110–11 1933  111–12 1934  112–15 1935  115 1936  115–22 1938  122–4 1939  124–5 1940  125–6 1941  126–7 1943  127–8 1944  128–9 1945  129 1946  129–30 1947-8  130–1 1948  131–4 1949  136–43 1951  143–4 Copernican Revolution  218, 220 Copleston, Frederick  44, 81 n.187, 135–6, 151 Cornforth, Maurice  61 n.20, 62 n.30, 68–9 n.73 Cowper, William  29, 130 Crichton Royal Hospital  30 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)  12, 156, 240

Index

Critical and Historical Essays (Macaulay)  44 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant)  179, 206, 232 Crusoe, Robinson  191 Culture and Value (Wittgenstein)  35 Cunningham, Canon B. K.  14, 22, 122 Dale, John  67 n.63, 72 n.104 Daly, Cahal B.  169 The Danger of Words (Drury)  85 n.229 body and mind  288–307 fact and hypothesis  351–3 hypotheses and philosophy  308–17 letters to Rhees  354–7 madness and religion  318–29 overview  255–8 philosophy and psychiatry  330–49 science and psychology  272–87 words and transgressions  261–71 Darwin, Charles  310 D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (Beevor)  75 n.122 De Anima (Aristotle)  275 de Baudricourt, Robert  322 The Decline of the West (Spengler)  104, 189 deep relaxation  400 De l’Angoisse à l’Extase (Janet)  284 De lascause du sommeil lucide (Faria)  362 Delgado, Jose Manuel Rodriguez  356–7 demobilization  28–30 depression atypical  271 melancholy  270 Descartes  182, 275, 296 ‘Desert Fathers’  23, 224 Deutsches Afrikakorps  25 Dickens, Charles  66 n.58, 98 Dilman, Ilham  xvi, 195, 253, 351 Dilthey, Wilhelm  31 Diploma in Psychological Medicine (DPM)  52 direct suggestion under hypnosis  383–4 Disraeli, Benjamin  12 Dobb, Maurice  70 n.85 Dobzhansky, Theodosius  311 Dominican Hawksyard Priory  47

437

Don Quixote  118 Doppler effect  257 Dostoevsky, Fyodor  12, 68 n.70, 96, 100, 155–6 double blind trial  266, 355 DPM. see Diploma in Psychological Medicine (DPM) ‘Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations’ (essay)  154 ‘Dr Tennant on the Data and Methods of Philosophy’  13 drugs  271 Drury, Eileen  416–17 Drury, Henry D’Olier  3, 14 Drury, Henry Myles Riley  4, 418 Drury, Luke O’Connor  417 Drury, Maurice O'Connor Autumn 1948 conversation  134–6 contribution to a BBC Symposium  89–92 conversations on religion  42–4 (see also conversations with Wittgenstein) demobilization  28–30 on Dostoevsky  155–6 in Dublin  39–42 early years of  3–5 extended family  414–16 family in Dublin  412–13 family roots  412 first meeting with Wittgenstein  10–14 gift of radio  44–5 on Johnson  161–2 on Kierkegaard  156–8 letters to Rhees  232–4, 238–49 letter to Phillips  251–2 marriage of  47–8 medical studies and vacations  18–24 method of philosophy  170–7 mother’s family  413–14 notes on conversations  149–62 on Pascal  160–1 retirement and death of  56–8 and Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC)  24–8 on St Augustine  158–9 at St Edmondsbury  52–6 at St Patrick’s Hospital  30–1 social service of  17–18 on Tolstoy  155–6

438 Index

undergraduate education of  5–10 University College Dublin Lecture (1967)  224–31 on Weininger  159–60 and Westcott House  14–17 and Wittgenstein's resignation  31–3 Drury, Paul  70 n.84, 418–19 Drury, William Barker  4 Dublin, Drury in  39–42 Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies  57 Duck-Rabbit phenomenon  38 Dun Laoghaire  45 Du sommeil et des etats analogues, consideres au point de vue de l’action de la morale sur la physique (Liebault)  366 Easter  18, 78 n.160, 115 Eberden-Meyerhof process  293 Eccles, J. C.  289–96, 299 Eccles, William  66 n.56 Ecole Normale Supérieure  57 ECT. see electroconvulsive therapy Eddington, Arthur  107, 425 El Alamein battle  25–6 electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)  30–1, 319 ‘Elements of Philosophy’ (lecture course)  7 Elgood, Cyril  48 Eliot, George  278 Elliotson, John  362–3, 365 elucidatory proposition  213 Ely Cathedral  66 n.58, 97 Emmett, Dorothy  17, 74 n.118, 111 The Encyclopaedia of Ireland (Gill and Macmillan)  60 n.14 Engelmann, Paul  166 Epistle to the Romans  8 Erythrophobia  396 Esdaile, James  363–4, 370, 376, 379, 382 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke)  275 Essay on Bacon (Macaulay)  353 Essays on Truth and Reality (Bradley)  26, 194 Ethics (Spinoza)  275 ‘The Everlasting Gospel’  29 ‘The Existence of God’  44 Eysenck, H. J.  273, 283, 285

fact, and hypotheses  351–3 Falaise Pocket  27 fallacy of alchemists  261–3 of the missing hippopotamus  268–9 of Molière’s physician  263–5 of Pickwickian senses  269–71 of Van Helmont’s tree  265–8 Fall in Genesis  100 Faraday, Michael  107, 145 n.13, 216, 273, 351 ‘Father Brown’ stories (Chesterton)  20, 118 fideism  161 First World War  1, 5 Fitzgerald, Michael  78 n.158 FitzPatrick Scholarship  18 ‘The Flower’  56 Flowers, Berry III  55–6 Flynn, Conor F.  82 n.199 Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues (Bach)  97, 120 Fox, George  322, 323, 326 Franklin, Benjamin  361–2 Frank Ramsey (1903-1930): A Sister’s Memoir (Ramsey, Margaret)  59 n.7 Frazer, James  66 n.59, 89, 108, 161, 228, 236, 240–1, 247, 256, 332 free association  189, 367 Frege, Gottlob  1–2, 15, 59 n.2, 102 French Travelling Clock  75 n.126 Freud, Sigmund  xv, xxi, 22, 35, 53, 57, 63 n.38, 83 n.201, 103, 120, 132, 147 n.41, 159, 189, 211, 268–9, 271, 283–4, 324–5, 333, 343, 362, 366–7, 371, 382–3, 421–2 Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis (McGrath)  77 n.149 functional nervous disorders  402 Furlong, J.  192–3 The Future of an Illusion (Freud)  284, 324 Gaunilo  205 Geach, Peter  47, 79 n.167 Gedanken und Einnerungen (Bismarck)  34 General techniques of hypnotism (Weitzenhoffer)  375 Genesis  83 n.202, 245–6, 251 Gödel, Kurt  59 n.3

Index

Golden Bough (Frazer)  66 n.59, 89, 108, 161, 217, 222, 228, 236, 241, 256 Good Friday  115 Graham, Gordon  64 n.43 Grand Tour  29 Grant, Dr. R. T.  26, 127–8, 149 Greek New Testament  58 Green, Peter  233 Grimm’s fairy tales  34, 75 n.126 group therapy  361 Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Frege)  2 Guest, David  61 n.20 Hacker, P. M. S.  60 n.10 Hamann, Johann Georg  49, 83 n.204, 100, 213, 236 hand clasping test  373 Hänsel, Ludwig  71 n.95 Harveian Oration  363 Hayes, John  68 n.71, 76 n.134 Healy, David  76 n.135 Hearing Voices (Kelly)  78 n.159 Hebb, D. O.  272, 275, 280, 285–6 Hegel, G. W. F.  5, 41, 65 n.49, 188, 205, 224, 229, 315 Heller, Erich  60 n.10 Herbert, Eileen  31, 47 Herbert, George  56 ‘The Heretics’  12 heteroactive suggestions  379–80 Hetherington, George  46, 77 n.147, 78 n.160, 82 n.192 Hibjab, Wasfi A.  77 n.145, 408 Hicks, Dawes  101 Hilgard, E. R.  282 Hippias  184, 308 History of the Conquest of Mexico (Prescott)  19, 113 A History of Western Philosophy (Russell)  50, 61 n.19 Hitler, Adolf  23, 25, 121–2, 125, 129, 413 Holland, R. F.  53, 85–6 nn.229–230, 254 Holy Spirit  83 n.204, 239, 244 Holy Week  19, 115 homo-active suggestions  379–80 ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’ (short story)  71 n.94, 118 Hooker, Richard  20, 119 Houndstone Camp  24

439

housebound housewife  384 How to Help your Husband to be a Success  281 How to Win Friends and Influence People  281 Hull, Clark L.  253, 269, 371, 379 hullo letters  126 Human World (Dilman)  253 Hume, David  5, 99 ‘Hume’s Essay on Miracles’  151 A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Passmore)  60 n.16 Hunter, Leslie  17 Huxley, Aldous  306 Huxley, Julian  310, 311, 313, 314 Huxley, T. H.  289 hypno-analysis  392 hypnosis, lectures on case histories  390–8 fundamental questions  368–74 historical review of  359–67 migraine  399–400 overview  358 smoking  400–3 stammering  400 torticollis  400 trance induction  375–82 trance utilisation  383–9 hypnotic facies  379 hypnotism  360–5, 369–72, 390, 392 Hypnotism, its history, practice and theory (Bramnell)  372 Hypnotism and suggestibility (Hull)  371 hypnotist  365 hypotheses and fact  351–3 and philosophy  308–17 hysteria  270 illusion  202 imitative theory  361 inner experience  298–9 Instinct and Learning in Animals (Thorpe)  277 Intelligence Quotient  276, 277, 280, 282 Interpretation of Dreams (Freud)  83 n.201 intravenous methedrine  189 involuntary nervous system  375–6 involutional melancholia  30, 319

440 Index

The Irish Free State  29 Irish House of Commons  52 Irish Times  28, 57–8, 86 n.231 Jackson, A. C.  79 n.167 Jackson, Andrew  78 n.156 James, D. G.  61 n.20 James, William  83 n.207, 89, 99, 160, 204–5 Janet, Pierre  35, 132, 211, 262, 268–9, 272, 277, 284, 352, 354, 360, 371, 383, 384, 390, 401 Jaspers, Karl  31 Jeans, James (Sir)  107, 145 n.12, 216, 351 Jehovah ideas  239 Joan of Arc  322, 326, 328 Johnson, Samuel  38, 68 n.68, 77 n.155, 83 n.201, 94, 97, 101, 104, 120, 161–2, 304 Johnson, W. E.  5–6, 8, 61 n.21 Jones, Ernest  324 ‘Journal Club’  355 Journal of Mental Science  78 n.159 Journey’s End (play)  71 n.94, 115 Jowett Society  62 n.26 Joyce, James  20, 115 Jung, Carl Gustav  53, 211, 324–5 Kaila, Eino  76 n.136 Kant, E.  7, 40–1, 91, 100–1, 107, 179–81, 189, 205, 215, 224, 240, 314 Kelly, Bernard  75 n.125, 78 n.159 Kelly, Brendan  76 n.131, 78 n.159, 85 n.40 Kenny, Anthony  16, 61 n.17, 68 n.71 Kerr, Fergus  51, 64 n.43, 79 n.174, 80 n.181, 84 n.210, 237 Keynes, Maynard  2, 18 Kierkegaard, Søren  12, 17, 40–1, 68 n.70, 83 n.20, 91–2, 156–8, 161, 200–3, 205, 210, 212, 236, 245, 315 Killing in War (McMahan)  59 n.9 King, John  3, 14, 61 n.20, 62–3 n.32 King Lear  9, 66 n.61, 90, 107, 204 Kingston, Jenny  33–4 Kingston, Kenneth  36, 78 n.156 Kingston, Maud  34 Kingston, Richard Vickery  33–4 Kohler, Wolfgang  38 Koran  243

Krebs cycle  293 Kreisel, Georg  77 n.145 Labron, Tim  64 n.43 Latin mass  104, 246 L’automatisme (Janet)  371 Lavoisier, Antoine  186, 261–2 Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity  119 laws of nature  58, 202, 203, 217, 229, 257, 347 League of Nations  106 Lean, Martin  203 learning theory  269, 278, 282, 371 Leavis, F. R.  65 n.54 Lecons de Philosophie (Weil)  234 ‘Lecture on Ethics’  151, 153, 159 Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Barrett)  73 n.108 Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 194647 (Wittgenstein)  79 n.167 Lee, Desmond (Sir)  11, 13, 61 n.20, 62–3 n.32, 64 n.41, 97, 103, 120, 419–20 Leeper, Richard R.  22, 30, 52, 72 n.103 Leibniz, Gottfried  1, 14, 81 n.187, 98–9, 208, 326 Lessing, Gotthold  20, 43, 119, 140–1, 146 n.24, 242–3 ‘Letters to a Student of Philosophy’  55 Leviathan (Hobbes)  211 Lewis, C. I.  76 n.136 Lichtenberg, G. C.  77 n.152, 236, 237, 259, 274, 277, 285 Liebault, A. A.  352, 366–7, 370, 372–3, 382–3, 390 linguistic philosophy  225 Little Organ Book (Bach)  92 Littlewood, E. J.  59 n.3 Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine  25 Logical Form  1, 16 logical positivism  44, 202, 226 ‘Logical Positivism, Metaphysics and Ethics’ (Daly)  169 Logic (Hegel)  194 logicism  59 n.3 Logic (Mill)  6, 95 logico-philosophical error  310 Logik, Sprache, Philosophie (Schlick)  72 n.98

Index

Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. see Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein) Long, Fr. E. C.  5, 23 The Longest Day (1962)  27 Lopokova, Lydia  2 Lotze, Hermann  14 Love, Rev. Robert Grattan  48 Lowrie, Walter  157 Luther, Martin  60 n.15, 106, 125, 224, 236, 241 Luxor  26, 128, 420 Lynch, Patrick  82 n.191 Lyons, John B.  253 Macaulay, Thomas Babington  44, 138, 166, 184, 185, 276, 306, 308, 315–16, 383 MacIntyre, Alasdair  70 n.88, 80 n.177 MacIver, Arthur Milne  13–14, 48, 59 n.7, 59 n.8, 61 n.22, 62 n.30, 63 n.34, 64 n.40, 64 n.44, 65 n.47, 67 n.63, 68–9 nn.73–74, 68 n.69, 420–1 McCracken, Tim  82 n.192 McCullagh, Bob  31, 33, 76 n.140 McGrath, Desmond  31 McGuinness, Brian  61 n.16, 73 n.113, 79 n.165, 82 n.195, 83 n.203 McMahan, Jeff  2 madness, and religion  318–29 Magee, Bryan  84 n.209 Mahon, Joseph  78 n.161 Maisky, Ivan  21, 113 Malcolm, Elizabeth  52–3, 72 n.103, 76 n.132, 82 n.199, 84 n.217, 85 n.222 Malcolm, Lee  36, 77 n.145 Malcolm, Norman  6, 34, 36, 45–6, 61 n.21, 63 n.38, 65 n.50, 68 n.68, 68 n.71, 77 n.142, 77 n.152, 82 n.196, 82 nn.193–4, 161, 212 ‘Man’s Need for Metaphysics’ (Schopenhauer)  98 Martin, C. P.  310–12 Martin, Henry  74 n.116 Bartlett, Mary Emily  70 n.86 Mascaro, Juan  244 masked depression  271 Materia Medica  24 ‘Mathematical Philosophy’  6

441

Mayer-Gross, Willie  31, 82 n.199 McCabe, Herbert  70 n.88 McCullagh, Robert  31 McGrath, Desmond  31 McGrath, William J.  77 n.149 McGuinness, B. F.  61 n.16, 73 n.113, 79 n.165, 83 n.203, 163 n.2, 413, 426, 430 McTaggart, John Ellis  69 n.75, 153, 219 Medawar, Peter  310, 415 A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate from the earliest times until the year A.D. 1932 (Elgood)  48 Medico-Psychological Society  54 memory, and time conception  190–3 Mendel, Gregor  310 Men of Mathematics (Bell)  190 Mental Treatment Act (1945)  31 The Merchant of Venice  301 Mesmer, Anton  361–5, 370, 379 mesmerise  361, 363–4 Messiah  243 ‘The Method of Philosophy’  19 Michaelmas  31, 70 n.86 migraine  399–400 Mill, James  273, 275 Mill, John Stuart  5 mind, and body  288–307 ‘Mind and Body’  355 Mind and its Place in Nature (Broad)  62 n.30, 203 Mirandola, Pico della  159, 220 Monistic idealism  204 Moniz, António Egas  30 Monk, Ray  2, 12, 21, 23, 36, 38, 49–50, 72 n.100, 75 n.127, 78 nn.162–3 Montgomery, Bernard Law  25, 27–8 Mooney, Dr Louise C.  46 Moore, Dr John Norman Parker  28, 30–1, 37, 41, 48, 52, 60 n.11, 72 n.103, 77 n.158, 82 n.199, 85 n.221 Moore, G. E.  5–6, 8, 13, 15–17, 51, 63 n.39, 64 n.40, 65 n.48, 65 n.54, 70 n.86, 72 n.99, 75 n.130, 82 n.193, 101, 105, 108, 109, 111, 158, 230, 232 Moorhead, Thomas Gillman  45, 82 nn.190–1

442 Index

Moral Sciences Club  1, 6, 13, 62 n.30, 69 n.73, 70 n.88, 72 n.99, 91, 93–5, 101, 105, 156 ‘Moral Sciences Tripos’  5, 14, 204 Morgan, Charles  4, 317 Morley, John  44 Morris, Mary  75 n.121, 75 n.129 The Mortimers  19, 71 n.92 Moses and Monotheism (Freud)  284, 324 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  103, 361 Mulkerrins, Tommy  37–8 mutation-selection theory  311 My Conversion (Tolstoy)  320 The Mysterious Universe (Jeans)  107, 216, 351 narco-analysis  189 Natural History of a Candle (Faraday)  351 The Nature of Existence (McTaggart)  153 ‘The Nature of the Universe’ (article)  229 Nazis  23 ‘Neo-Pagans’  79 n.165 nervous trouble  398 Nestroy, Johann  63 n.37 The ‘Ne Temere’ decree  85 n.223 neuro-hypnotism  365 The Neuro-physiological Basis of Mind (Eccles)  289 neurosis  262 Newcastle-upon-Tyne  17, 26 Newman, John Henry  20, 80 n.180, 116 New Testament  60 n.15, 96, 235, 245, 249, 323 New Theory of Vision (Berkeley)  275 Newton, Isaac  227, 274, 294, 326 Nezahualcoyotl (Emperor)  113, 114 Nietzsche, Friedrich  83 n.201 Nikoloyevich, Sergey  49 normal psychology  xiv, 281, 344–5, 355 Note-Books 1914-1916  41, 222, 355 O’Brien, George  82 n.191 O’Casey, Sean  115 O’Connor, Richard Nugent  25 Ogden, C. K.  1 O’Hara, Charles W.  79 n.174 Old Testament  48, 67 n.66, 83 n.20, 96, 235, 239, 245–6, 250 Oliver Cromwell (Morley)  44

On Certainty (Wittgenstein)  15, 47 On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (Weil)  57 ‘On the danger of words’  355 ‘Operation Goodwood’  27 Operation ‘Market Garden’  28 Opuscula Omnia (Aquinas)  69 n.76 The Organisation of Behaviour (Hebb)  272 Origen  137 Orwell, George  51 Osgood, C. E.  282 outer experience  298–9 panic attacks  395–6 Papal Infallibility  20 Parmenides (Plato)  41, 210 Pascal, Blaise  160–1, 206, 326 Pascal, Fania  70 n.82, 83 n.207 Passmore, John  60 n.16 Pattisson, Gilbert  18, 73 n.107, 77 n.152 Pensées (Pascal)  160–1, 326 Pepler, Conrad  47, 49–51 Perception and Communication (Broadbent)  295 Percival, Richard P.  48 Pery, Edmund Sexton  52, 84 n.216 Phaedrus (Plato)  306 phenomenalism  227, 407 phenomenology  106 Phenomenon of Man (De Chardin)  313 Phillips, D. Z.  43, 236–7 Drury's letter to  251–2 Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard)  201, 245 Philosophical Grammar (Rhees)  59 n.4 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein)  36, 41, 60 n.10, 63 n.37, 64 n.46, 65 n.49, 80 n.177, 90–1, 151–2, 160, 165–6, 182, 194, 199–200, 204, 208–9, 212, 213, 215–16, 219, 226, 228, 233, 256, 258, 274, 407 philosophical problems  176–7 Philosophical Remarks (Russell)  42, 150–1 Philosophical Theology (Tennant)  11, 158, 232 philosophical writings, of Drury method of philosophy  171–7 overview  165–70

Index

reflections shared with Rhees  208–23 University College Dublin Lecture (1967)  224–31 Philosophische Bemerkungen (Rhees)  225 philosophy and hypotheses  308–17 and psychiatry  330–49 Philosophy in the Modern World (Kenny)  61 n.17 The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (MacGee)  84 n.209 Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry (Sargant and Slater)  33 Pickwick Club  63 n.35 Pickwickian  8, 16 Pickwick Papers (Dickens)  63 n.35 Pio Nono (portrait)  20 Pius IX (Pope)  116 Plato  3, 19, 27, 65 n.52, 114, 154, 167, 183, 184, 209–11, 214, 230, 236, 246, 287, 306 Parmenides  41, 210 Phaedrus  306 Protagoras  184, 308 Republic  183, 209, 211 Theatetus  27, 214 Popper, Sir Karl  61 n.18 Portrait in a Mirror (Morgan)  4 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)  20, 115 The Power of Positive Thinking (Peale)  281 Powers of the Human Mind (Reid)  275 Prayers and Meditations (Johnson)  38, 68 n.68, 77 n.152, 83 n.201, 104, 133, 145 n.9, 161 Prescott, William H.  19, 89, 113 Prichard, Harold A.  6, 12, 62 n.26, 94–5 primitive mentality  257 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead)  59 n.3, 76 n.136 The Principles of Mathematics (Russell)  59 n.3 Principles of Psychology (James)  272, 371 Prolegomena (Kant)  179 Protestant Ascendancy  20 Prototractatus – An Early Version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus  59 n.5 psychiatry, and philosophy  330–49 psychic tension  269

443

Psychological Healing  390 psychology, and science  272–87 Punic Wars  44 Purity of Heart (Kierkegaard)  245 Puysegur, Marquis de  362 Pythagorean-Socratic-Platonic conception  301 The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Schweitzer)  99 radio gift, to Drury  44–5 RAMC. see Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) Ramsey, Frank Plumpton  2, 6, 59 n.7, 59 n.8, 198 rapid eye movement sleep  371 Raven, Canon C. F.  78 n.158 Redpath, Theodore  420–1 Reilly, Elizabeth Anne  3 relaxator  376 religion Drury's conversations on  42–4 letters to Rhees  238–49 and madness  318–29 overview  235–7 ‘Religion and Madness’ paper  354 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Tawney)  43 Remarks on Colour (Wittgenstein)  47, 409 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (Wittgenstein)  32, 36, 42 Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Bartlett)  295 Renaissance  159 Republic (Plato)  183, 209, 211 Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen after the Second World War (Kelly)  75 n.125 The Return to the Mystical: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tyler)  86 n.233 Rhees, Rush  8–9, 13–14, 16–17, 27–8, 30, 34–7, 41–2, 44, 46–7, 54–8, 61 n.22, 63 n.33, 65 n.54, 68 n.69, 73 n.113, 77 n.150, 78 n.162, 79 n.173, 80 n.180, 80 n.184, 82 n.1972, 83 n.20, 85 n.229, 86 n.231, 166, 190, 225, 256, 422–3 Drury's letters to  232–4, 238–49, 354–7

444 Index

reflections shared with  208–23 Richards, I. A.  185 Richards, Benedict  49, 75 n.126, 77 n.143, 79 n.165 RIYC. see Royal Irish Yacht Club (RIYC) Robinson, Mary  79 n.168 Rogers, Ginger  109 Rommel, Erwin  25 Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC)  24–8, 67 n.67, 73 n.110, 253 Royal Corps of Signals  25 Royal Dublin Society  44, 138, 413 Royal Irish Yacht Club (RIYC)  45 Royal Victoria Infirmary  26 Russell, Bertrand  1–2, 5–6, 15, 59 n.2, 74 n.115, 76 n.136, 77 n.146, 81 n.187, 103, 150, 155, 200, 213, 258, 268 Ryle, Gilbert  41, 69 n.73, 169, 225–6, 233 St Augustine  12, 68 n.70, 158–9, 206–7, 232–3, 239, 251, 275, 329 St Bonaventure  14 St Edmondsbury  52–6, 58 St Patrick’s Day  36 St Patrick’s Hospital  22, 30–1, 51, 58 St Thérèse of Lisieux  321 Sakel, Manfred  76 n.133 Salmon, T.N.D.C.  69 n.77 Santa Maria degli Angeli  57 Sargant, William  33, 131 satanic agency  365 schizophrenia  30, 76 n.133, 78 n.158, 262, 323, 328, 342, 345, 428 Schlick, Moritz  21, 72 n.98, 106, 226–7 School of Physic Medical Scholarship  18 Schopenhauer  40, 50, 83 n.201, 89–90, 98, 135, 151, 411, 424 Schopenhauer, Arthur  40, 50, 83 n.201, 89–90, 98, 135, 151, 411, 424 Schrödinger, Erwin  423–5 Schubert Octet  54 science, and psychology  272–87 Ségur, Philippe-Paul  44 ‘self-hypnosis’  387 Sense and Nonsense in Psychology (Eysenck)  276 Sense Perception and Matter (Lean)  203 Servetus, Michael  43–4, 141 Sex and Character (Weininger)  159

Shah, Kantilal Jethabai  38, 77 n.145, 79 n.167, 83 n.203 Shakespeare, William  117, 191, 302, 306 Sherriff, R. C.  71 n.94 Shillinglaw, A.  61 n.20 ‘The Significance of Posture in the Aetiology and Treatment of Chronic Disease’ (Drury)  29 Simmonds, Nora  48 Simpson, J. Y.  364 Skinner, Francis  18, 20–1, 24–6, 111–12, 111–13, 120, 124, 126–7, 269, 274, 282, 283, 425–8 Slater, Eliot  33, 131 Smith, Kemp  180 smoking  400–3 Smythies, J. R.  78 n.158 Smythies, Yorick  31, 46, 49, 51, 144, 156, 423, 428–9 social service, of Drury  17–18 Society of Friends  322, 326 Socrates  3, 41, 106, 183, 184, 287, 300–1, 303, 306, 308, 316 somnambulism  362, 372 Southey, Robert  40, 138 Space, Time and Deity (Alexander)  4–5, 90, 94, 178 Spencer, Herbert  22, 311 Spengler, Oswald  11, 67 n.63, 104, 189, 217, 316 Spinoza, Baruch  91, 98, 208, 210 spiritual claustrophobia  12, 154 Sraffa, Piero  16, 23, 70 n.85, 110, 146 n.17, 256, 331, 356 stammering  400 Steffen, John A.  64 n.43 stimoceiver  356–7 Stonborough, Tommy  35 The Structure of the Universe (Whitrow)  187 Studies in hysteria (Breuer and Freud )  35, 159, 367 Summa Contra Gentiles (Aquinas)  69 n.76 Summa Theologica (Aquinas)  69 n.76 Sur La Science (Weil)  86 n.231 Sur la Science (Review by Synge, J. L.)  57 Swansea  27, 31, 54, 128, 145 n.6, 147 n.33, 236, 423 Swenson, David  157 Swift, Jonathan  429–30

Index

Swift’s Hospital (Malcolm)  72 n.103, 82 n.199 Synge, John L.  57 A System of Logic (Mill)  5 tactus eruditus  280 talking therapy  35 tameness  313 Tawney, R. H.  43, 225 Taylor, A. E.  35, 99, 151 Taylor, Ellen  4 Taylor, George  36 TCD. see Trinity College Dublin (TCD) Temptations of St Anthony (Bosch)  95 Tennant, F. R.  11, 69 n.74, 158, 232, 274 tension headaches  400 Teresa of Avila and the Christian Mystical Tradition (Tyler)  86 n.233 Theatetus (Plato)  27, 214 Theology after Wittgenstein (Kerr)  64 n.43 Theophrastus  275 Theories of Learning (Hilgard)  282–4 Theory and Method in Experimental Psychology (Osgood)  282 ‘theory of types’ (Russell)  2 Thomas à Kempis  111 Thomson, George  70 n.85 Thouless, Robert  73 n.113 time, and memory  190–3 Times Literary Supplement  69 n.75, 253 Tinnitus aurium  299 Tolstoy, Leo  11–12, 14, 49–50, 53, 68 n.70, 81 n.186, 96, 100, 144, 155–6, 278, 320, 326, 328, 336, 342–3 torticollis  400 Totem and Taboo (Freud)  284, 324 Townsend, Raymond D.  25, 29, 32, 47, 60 n.12, 67 n.67, 430 counsel to  404–5 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein)  1, 3, 5–6, 9, 12, 15–16, 41–2, 57–8, 60 n.10, 62 n.27, 63 n.39, 68 n.69, 76 n.136, 80 n.177, 91, 94, 150, 152, 166, 168, 178–80, 185, 195, 199–200, 203, 206–7, 206–9, 208–9, 213, 219, 226, 228–30, 232–4, 241, 256, 258, 407 trance induction  375–82 trance utilisation  383–9

445

transference  371 transgressions, and words  261–71 Treatise on Chemistry (Lavoisier)  261 Treatise on Human Nature (Hume)  275 Treatise on the Passions of the Soul (Descartes)  275 ‘trenchant parallelism’ (von Wright)  160 Trinity College Dublin (TCD)  4, 5, 18, 20, 21, 30, 37, 45, 69 n.75, 79 n.167, 112, 120, 141, 165, 412, 417, 422–4 Tristram Shandy (Sterne)  118 Twenty-three Tales (Tolstoy)  156 Tyler, Peter  86 n.233 The Uncommercial Traveller (Dickens)  66 n.58, 98 unconscious mind  366 University College Dublin Lecture (1967)  224–31 The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays (Kenny)  68 n.71 The Unscientific Conclusion (Kierkegaard)  245 Untergang des Abendlandes (Spengler)  217 Van Helmont, J. B. (Ortus Medicinae)  261, 265–7 The Varieties of Religious Experience (James)  83 n.207, 89, 99, 160, 204, 284 Vienna Circle  21, 23, 32, 34, 39–40, 45–7, 76 n.136, 99, 106, 111, 165, 226, 233–4, 367, 420, 424, 426 Visual Perception (Vernon)  295 voluntary nervous system  375–6 von Ficker, Ludwig  64 n.42 von Hügel, Friedrich  67 n.67, 99, 156, 243, 325, 326, 404 von Ranke, Leopold  71 n.96, 83 n.201 von Wright, Georg Henrik  32, 34, 36, 46, 68 n.70, 76 n.136, 76 n.138, 82 n.196, 83 n.207, 149, 155, 160, 408 Vulgate New Testament  158 ‘wake up’ method  386–8 War and Peace (Tolstoy)  81 n.186 Ward, James  42 Watson, Alister J. D.  61 n.20 Watson, Evelyn  36

446 Index

Watson, W. H.  18, 64 n.45, 70 n.81, 77 n.152 Weber, Max  31 Weil, Simone  54, 57, 85 n.225, 92, 154, 168–9, 220–2, 231, 233–5, 239–40, 242, 245, 250, 328 Weininger, Otto  159–60 Weitzenhoffer, André  371, 374, 375 Westcott House  14–17, 22, 109 White, R. W.  371 White, Terence de Vere  57 Whitehead, A. N.  6, 59 n.3 Whitrow, G. J.  187 Why I Am Not a Christian and other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (Russell)  81 n.187 Wicklow  32, 38, 132, 429 Wittgenstein in  33–7 William the Conqueror  25 Wissenchaft der Logik (Hegel)  232 Wittgenstein: A Life: Young Ludwig 18891921 (McGuinness)  61 n.16 Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949-51 (Bouwsma)  84 n.210 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  268, 328 in Connemara  37–8 conversations on religion  42–4 death of  48–51 Drury's discussions with (see conversations with Wittgenstein) Drury's first meeting with  10–14 in Dublin  39–42

medical travails  45–6 radio gift to Drury  44–5 resignation of  31–3 sexual orientation of  425–8 visit to America  46–7 in Wicklow  33–7 Wittgenstein, Paul  119 Wittgenstein and Judaism; A Triumph of Concealment (Chatterjee)  64 n.44 Wittgenstein and Natural Religion (Graham)  64 n.43 Wittgenstein and Theology (Labron)  64 n.43 Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge 19301932  15 ‘Wittgenstein Society’  13 Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (Hacker)  60 n.10 Wodehouse, P. G.  71 n.94, 118 Wood, Oscar  62 n.26 Woolf, Virginia  79 n.165 Woolworth, F.W.  20, 110, 121 The Word of God and the Word of Man (Barth)  108 words, and transgressions  261–71 wound shock  26 writer’s cramp  394 Zangwill, O. L.  273 Zettel (Anscombe)  409 The Zoist  363 ‘Zoological Gardens’  39

447

448