Nodding In On The Great Conversation: Juvenilia and Published and Unpublished Essays on David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Higher Education

Published by Society for Philosophy & Culture at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Robert Paul Wolff

The Collected Essays of Robert Paul Wolff

Four Volumes

Volume I

Nodding in on the Great Conversation

Juvenilia and Published and Unpublished Essays on David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Higher Education

Robert Paul Wolff

Edited by Michael Hemmingsen

Society for Philosophy & Culture

Wellington

2013

Published by

Society for Philosophy & Culture

Wellington, NZ

2013

books@philosophyandculture.org

© Author

ISBN: 978-1-3013079-4-4

In the days before television, social life consisted for the most part of informal visiting, and there were many evenings when my parents welcomed friends into their living room. Five or six of them would sit on the sofa and chairs with drinks and perhaps a bit of food, talking through the evening about families, children, politics, and – if the visitors were teachers – about the hated Board of Education. Until my bedtime, I would be permitted to sit quietly on the first steps of the stairs and listen. My fondest dream was some day to be permitted to take part in the conversation. The point wasn’t to win an argument, or make converts, but simply to be one of the voices. As I grew older, this childhood wish became transmuted first into the desire to be part of the conversation that constitutes the public life of the nation, and then into a larger desire to participate, at least as a subordinate voice, in the Great Conversation of Western Civilisation.

– A Life in the Academy, Robert Paul Wolff

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Juvenilia

Letter to the Harvard Crimson, and the Aftermath

Letter to Astounding Science Fiction

First Publications

Professor Ryle’s Discussion of Agitations

A Reply to Mr. Corbett

Part II: The Philosophy of David Hume and Immanuel Kant

Introduction

Why Indeed?

Hume’s Theory of Mental Activity

Kant’s Debt to Hume via Beattie

Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Remarks on the Relation of the Critique of Pure Reason to Kant’s Ethical Theory

Ontological and Epistemological Problems in the Foundations of Kant’s Rechtslehre

The Completion of Kant’s Moral Theory in the Tenets of the Rechtslehre

Review of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: An Analysis of Main Themes in His Critical Philosophy by Robert Howell

Review of Laws of Freedom: A Study of Kant’s Method of Applying the Categorical Imperative in the Metaphysik der Sitten by Mary J. Gregor

Part III: Higher Education

Introduction

The Pimple on Adonis’ Nose

Review of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom

What Good is a Liberal Education?

The Purpose of a Liberal Education

Ideology and Oppression at Amherst College

Correspondence Between Robert Paul Wolff and Frederick A. Olafson

Some Heretical Thoughts on the Rat Race for the Top Jobs

Philosophy in South Africa Today

Review of Chains of Thought: Philosophical essays in South African Education by Wally Morrow

Tertiary Education in the New South Africa: A Lover’s Complaint

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce papers in this volume: Duke University Press for permission to reproduce Hume’s Theory of Mental Activity, originally appearing in The Philosophical Review; Peter Lang Publishers, for permission to reproduce "Remarks on the Relation of the Critique of Pure Reason to Kant’s Ethical Theory," originally appearing in New Essays on Kant, edited by B. den Ouden and M. Moen; Springer International, for permission to reproduce "Review of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: An Analysis of Main Themes in His Critical Philosophy by Robert Howell," originally appearing in Synthese; Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce Professor Ryle’s Discussion of Agitations, and A Reply to Mr. Corbett, originally appearing in Mind; State University of New York Press for permission to reproduce "The Completion of Kant’s Moral Theory in the Tenets of the Rechtslehre," originally appearing in Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy, edited by J. Kneller and S. Axinn; University of Pennsylvania Press for permission to reproduce Kant’s Debt to Hume via Beattie, originally appearing in The Journal of the History of Ideas; the Journal of Philosophy, for permission to reproduce "Review of Laws of Freedom: A Study of Kant’s Method of Applying the Categorical Imperative in the Metaphysik der Sitten by Mary Gregor; the American Association of University Professors for permission to reproduce Review of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom," originally appearing in Academe; Skidmore College for permission to reproduce What Good is a Liberal Education? originally appearing in Salmagundi; Wiley-Blackwell for permission to reproduce Philosophy in South Africa Today, originally appearing in The Philosophical Forum; and Perspective in Education for permission to reproduce "Review of Chains of Thought: Philosophical Essays in South African Education by Wally Marrow," originally appearing in Perspective in Education. Also included is a letter to Astounding Science Fiction.

We would also like to thank Megan Mitchell for her considerable assistance in preparing this book.

Introduction

With this volume, I launch what will eventually be a series of volumes of my collected published and unpublished papers, organised thematically. The formal journal article has not been my literary form of choice during the course of my long career. Looking over my bibliography, I find no more than two dozen published items that can be considered scholarly articles even by the stretch of a generous definition, not all of them by any means peer reviewed. No doubt that seems like quite a lot to a young man or woman just starting an academic career, but when one reflects that my first journal article appeared in 1954, two dozen in fifty-nine years scarcely suggests a frantic pace of publication. My preferred literary form has been the book, and over the past half century, I have published twenty-one volumes and written five more that have never (until the advent of e-publication) seen the light of day.

My entire life has been lived very much in my head. I am constantly day-dreaming, and much of the time that inner voice is rehearsing ideas and arguments that eventually find their way onto the page. When I started this project of assembling and sorting through my published and unpublished papers, I found a number of full-scale well worked out essays that I either delivered as lectures and then stored in a file cabinet or else wrote as a kind of intellectual exercise without ever sharing them, until now, with another living soul. I have been at this so long that I had quite forgotten some of these essays until I undertook a systematic examination of my file cabinets.

My goal in all of my writing is to take difficult ideas and render them so clearly and simply that my readers can contemplate them and enjoy their beauty. I am no sort of scholar at all. Indeed, of all the items that will find their way into this series of volumes, there is really only one that can truly be called scholarship, namely the appendix to my doctoral dissertation, published in 1960 under the title Kant’s Debt to Hume via Beattie. Although it is no more than a footnote to the history of modern philosophy, I am inordinately proud of my one venture into scholarship, and it is reproduced in this volume so that everyone can see that at least for a brief moment, I actually made a contribution to knowledge.

Almost all of the ninety or more essays, reviews, comments, and broadsides that I have written at one time or another fall naturally into six groupings: the philosophical theories of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, philosophical issues of higher education, the theories of Karl Marx and the classical political economists, political theory, practical politics, and a series of extended essays written for my blog. In this volume, after a brief section devoted to four very early items that I have labelled juvenilia, I present a selection of essays in the first two categories: Hume and Kant, and higher education. A second volume will be devoted to essays and other materials on the economic theories of Karl Marx and Classical Political Economy. A third volume will be devoted to Political Theory and Practical Politics. The final volume will be devoted to my blog essays.

Part I: Juvenilia

Letter to the Harvard Crimson, and the Aftermath

Setting to one side the announcement of my birth, of which I was the subject rather than the author, the first time my name appeared in print was on November 7, 1951. This was during the height of the anti-communist hysteria that took its name from the actions of Senator Joseph McCarthy. I was at the time a seventeen year old sophomore in Harvard College, fresh from a course in which we had read, among many other things, On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill. The President of Harvard was James Bryant Conant, a distinguished chemist who during his long tenure at Harvard introduced a number of important reforms. Conant took what was at the time considered a moderate position on the question of whether members of the Communist Party should be allowed to teach in universities. He said that he would not fire a communist, should one be discovered on the Harvard faculty, but he would not hire one either, regardless of his professional qualifications. I was outraged, and with a copy of On Liberty in hand, I banged out a letter on my little typewriter to the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, ending with the following rhetorical flourish: and if Dr. Conant will say, before having heard the Communist, that he does not, cannot, have some truth to offer, then I say that he has forfeited his role as protector of free thought and expression in the university and should yield to a man who will defend these basic freedoms. Of course they printed it!

My letter provoked a response from another undergraduate (an upperclassman), and as so often happens in these exchanges, he bestowed an honorary doctorate on me by referring to me as Dr. Wolff (despite my having identified myself as a member of the class of ‘54). Well, there was another Robert Wolff in the Harvard community, Robert Lee Wolff. Bobby Wolff, as he was known to his friends, was a distinguished historian of Byzantium, a corpulent man married (I was later told) to a social climbing wife. He was also then the director of Harvard’s Regional Studies Program on the Soviet Union. You can imagine how thrilled he was to get confused with me! He wrote a stiff, formal little letter to the Crimson announcing that he was not me and did not agree with what I had written.

And there it would have ended, except that ten years later, I was a young Instructor in Philosophy and General Education at Harvard and Bobby Wolff was by now Professor Robert Lee Wolff, Chair of the History Department. I had acquired a certain local notoriety in Harvard Square both for my very vocal advocacy of nuclear disarmament and for my support for the newly established Castro government in Cuba, all of which was making Bobby Wolff apoplectic. Once again, he took to the pages of the Crimson to proclaim that he was not me and did not share my views with regard to Cuban affairs, nuclear disarmament, or, so far as I can determine, anything else.

I was by then Head Tutor of a newly established interdisciplinary major in Social Studies, complete with an office and a secretary (a very nice woman perhaps thirty years older than I who was married to a Divinity School professor). The morning after a bibulous Winthrop House Senior Common Room dinner – one of only three times in my life when I have been drunk – Bobby Wolff called my office, beside himself with outrage. My very proper secretary handed me the phone. It seemed that a group of young writers and artists in Cuba had sent me a long telegram congratulating me on my role in a Cuba Protest Meeting at Harvard (reported in the Times), and the cable had been delivered by mistake to Professor Robert Lee Wolff. Kindly tell your Cuban friends to take me off their mailing list, he said with a note of desperation in his voice. I explained that the reason for the confusion was that he was a famous scholar, whereas I was a very junior philosopher who was quite unknown, a situation I was doing my best to rectify just as fast as I could. With a strangled cry, he said, Well, just don’t marry a woman named Mary! and hung up. I collapsed with laughter, inasmuch as my long-time girlfriend, Cindy, whom I very much hoped to marry, was named Mary Cynthia Griffin.

But Bobby Wolff had the last laugh. Three years later, Cindy, then my wife, won an AAUW dissertation fellowship to complete her doctoral dissertation on the novels of Samuel Richardson, and before we left for a summer in England where she cold some archival research, we deposited the $2400 in our bank account in the Harvard Square branch of the Cambridge Trust Company. When we returned at the end of August, there was no sign of the money. The cheque had been deposited to the account of Robert Lee Wolff, and although it was big bucks for us, it apparently was too small an amount for him to notice. It took us a while to recover the funds.

And there it ended, until thirty years later, by which time I as a Professor at the University of Massachusetts and the volunteer Executive Director of Harvard/Radcliffe Alumni/ae Against Apartheid. I returned from South Africa to find a story in the Harvard Crimson about the divestment struggle, featuring what they mistakenly identified as a picture of me. It was, of course, a picture of the now deceased Professor Robert Lee Wolff. I wrote a sad valedictory letter to the Crimson correcting the error and explaining that as Professor Wolff had twice taken to the pages of the Crimson to proclaim his utter lack of connection with me or with any of my views, I owed it to him to clear up the confusion one last time.

And there the story ended, or so I thought. When I conceived the idea of e-publishing s series of volumes of my published and unpublished papers, I decided to begin this first Volume with the four letters – my original letter, Robert Lee Wolff’s response, his second response, and my final letter in 1991. My indefatigable research assistant, Megan Kelly Mitchell, wrote to the Crimson, as she had to all the other professional journals, journals of opinion, and newspapers in which I had appeared, asking for permission to reproduce my contribution. Without exception, every single one of them graciously granted that permission without fee, save for one – The Harvard Crimson. The President of the Crimson, Bobby Samuels, wrote back to her asking $150 – this for four letters dating back to 1951, two of which I had written myself.

I can afford the price, heaven knows, but I was really rather distressed by this lack of graciousness, so I wrote to Mr. Samuels. Here is the email exchange:

Dear Mr. Samuels, I have tried several times to reach you without success, but my research assistant, Ms. Mitchell, tells me she has exchanged email messages with you at this address, so I shall try again. Seriously, do you really want me to pay $150 to reprint two letters I wrote to the Crimson sixty years ago, and two letters Professor Robert Lee Wolff wrote in an effort to disambiguate himself from me? I would have hoped that a sense of humour was not dead on Mt. Auburn Street, despite the tendency of Harvard to monetise everything that falls under its basilisk eye. I am going to assume that I have the right to reproduce my own letters, since I wrote them and hence own them. But if you really wish to stop me from reproducing Robert Lee Wolff’s letters, I shall paraphrase them [fair use"] and add an explanation in my collected papers to the effect that Harvard, finding itself strapped for cash, has been forced to milk every last possible source of funds. Sigh. As the first Head Tutor of Social Studies, I would have expected better of the Crimson. Perhaps I shall be forced to attend my sixtieth reunion next year and carry a placard of protest. Robert Paul Wolff Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Afro-American Studies"

"Dear Professor Wolff, Thank you for writing. If $150 seems to steep, we would be happy to negotiate a more mutually agreeable price. However, you do not have the right to reproduce the letters you sent without the permission of The Crimson, since The Crimson owns the copyright to all original material printed in its pages. Best, --- Bobby Samuels President The Harvard Crimson"

Oh well. Apparently a sense of humour does not exist in Harvard Square. What a pity. OK. I propose one dollar. I defy you to find anyone in the world who would pay more for that material. Robert Paul Wolff

Hi Professor Wolff, Unfortunately, that amount is not acceptable to us. Consequently, you do not have permission to reprint any of the four pieces you mentioned. Best, Bobby Samuels

I am ashamed to admit that at this point I lost my temper. Here is my final communication:

"Dear Mr. President, I quite well realize that the Harvard Crimson considers itself incomparably superior to the NY Times, and would therefore not stoop to imitating that regional sheet, but I thought you might like to know that the Times has graciously granted me permission, without fee, to reproduce a letter I wrote to them during the time that I was on the Harvard faculty. I would imagine that when you take over as Editor in Chief of the Times, you will want to change that practice. Robert Paul Wolff Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Afro-American Studies"

Letter to Astounding Science Fiction

[My second venture into print was of a more serious nature, consisting as it did of a fervent defence of Aristotle. As a boy, I was an avid reader of science fiction. In the 40’s and 50’s, the leading sci fi publications were two stubby little monthly magazines with nubby pages called Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction. All the big names appeared there, including L. Ron Hubbard, who announced the birth of his new psychological therapy, Dianetics, in a pair of what were at least supposedly non-fiction articles. (Trouble with the law for practicing medicine without a license led Hubbard to transform Dianetics into the religion of Scientology, protected by the First Amendment.) One of the oddities of the sci fi world in those days was the popularity of something called Non-Aristotelian logic. There was even a famous novel by the great sci fi writer A.E. van Vogt, which, if memory serves, appeared originally as a serial in a predecessor to Astounding Science Fiction. All of this was connected in some mysterious manner with the then fashionable theories of Count Alfred Korzybski, which went by the name General Semantics.

By 1953, I was a serious student of Mathematical Logic, and the casual slandering of Aristotle by those entranced by many-valued logics and other arcana offended my deeply conservative soul. The result was this letter to Astounding Science Fiction.]

To the Editor:

I am a student of Logic and Philosophy at Harvard University. I have been reading and enjoying science fiction for many years, now, and generally have no complaints or criticisms to make. For some time, however, I have read with increasing annoyance the many editorials, and the like, on so-called Aristotelian Logic, and the proposed Null-A logics. Your editorial of April, ‘53, seems to provide as good an opportunity as any to get a few simple facts straight, so that we can dispense with this nonsense about non-Aristotelian logic.

Your editorial, in effect, says that while all human action is governed by, and completely describable in the framework of, an Aristotelian Logic, human thought is capable of grays and shadings and tones, which it is even possible to communicate to other human beings. You then go on to make the error, apparently indigenous to science fiction, of asserting that these grays and shadings are characterised and governed by a multivalued logic. I do not know just what the fascination of multi-valued logics is to the modern scientist and science-fiction writer, but their misuse and incorrect application is perhaps the most common modern error. Since most of your stories are chemically, physically, and biologically correct wherever possible, I think we ought to set the record straight for logic.

First let me say unequivocally that not one of the conditions mentioned by you in this or any other article, nor any of the conditions ever described or alluded to in your magazine or any other magazine, can be characterised by anything but two-valued Aristotelian Logic! Furthermore, probably 99% of the errors can be traced to one fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and claims of two-valued logic.

Let us consider the old situation of the three buckets of water, filled respectively with hot, lukewarm, and cold water. Now, it is said, this is a situation in which we need three values to describe the situation, for it is not a true-false, on-off, hot-cold set-up, but a yes-maybe-no, hot-medium-cold one. That this point of view is subscribed to by you can be seen from the passage in which you say of Aristotelian logic that it insisted that everything in the world was either pure white or pure black, and later, that his every act must necessarily be on a yes-or-no basis.

In other words, you seem to think that Aristotle was unaware of greys, or lukewarm water, or of indecision. You also seem to think that he, and Aristotelian logicians, wish to restrict the world to what in ordinary language are called opposites. Your view, however, is the result of the most elementary misreading of Aristotle and the logicians. In fact, it is so simple a mistake that I am afraid it will almost come as an anti-climax. To state it as simply as possible, no one ever claimed that water was either hot or cold. They either claimed that it was hot or not-hot. And by not-hot is meant anything but hot, including lukewarm. Similarly, no one has ever claimed that things are either black or white. They have claimed only that they are either black or not-black, where not-black may include any shade of grey, green, chartreuse or purple you like. It may even include those things which are not any colour at all, like sounds or tastes – there, incidentally, would have been a more convincing argument for three-valued logics, although it would have been equally incorrect.

As for your shadings of human thought, the same applies. Just as the existence of thousands of alternative actions in a given situation does not change the fact that any given one of them is either done or not-done, so too the existence of even a continuous shade of feelings and states-of mind does not change the fact that for any given one of them, a person either feels or not-feels it.

Perhaps one of the sources of your error is the failure to notice that the values, truth and falsehood, are applied by logicians to sentences, not to situations. Thus, one may have a description sentence for each of a thousand possible events, each one stating that that event has taken place, but once those sentences have been composed, it is absolutely and unequivocally true that each one is either true or false. The shading comes not in the values but in the situations described by those sentences, and Aristotelian logic is as alive to such facts of life as modern science fiction.

In short, the solution to the problem stated at the end of your editorial is that it doesn’t exist. Our actions and feelings are equally shaded, and equally characterisable completely within old-fashioned Aristotelian Logic. As for why that fact is so, the best answer I have seen to date can be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but that is another, and vastly more complicated, question – Robert Wolff.

First Publications

My maiden professional publication in a peer-reviewed Philosophy journal appeared in 1954, and there is a story connected with it (as there seems to be with everything I have written). A good deal of background is called for here. The Harvard Philosophy Department has a long and very distinguished tradition of philosophically trained logicians who view Formal Logic as a branch of Philosophy, not of Mathematics. The tradition goes back at least to Alfred North Whitehead, the metaphysician who co-authored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, and continued with the great epistemologist Clarence Irving Lewis, with whom I had the great good fortune to study. When I arrived at Harvard in 1950, the bearer of the flame was the relatively young Willard van Orman Quine. Quine in the early 30’s had been one of the original members of The Society of Fellows at Harvard, an honour conferred upon young men (and later women, eventually) from around the world so promising that it was thought they did not even need to bother with actually getting a PhD. Over the years, a series of brilliant young logicians were taken by Quine under his wing, awarded Junior Fellowships in the Society, and then appointed to Assistant Professorships in the Philosophy Department. During my undergraduate years, Quine’s best student, Hao Wang, served as Assistant Professor, and another outstanding student, Burton Dreben, was a Junior Fellow.

My very first course at Harvard as a sixteen year old first semester freshman was Quine’s course on symbolic logic. The next semester I took Visiting Professor Nelson Goodman’s course on Logical Philosophy, and in my sophomore year, I took Quine’s graduate Mathematical Logic course and Wang’s graduate Set Theory seminar in the autumn and Quine’s graduate Math Logic seminar in the Spring. By the time I was eighteen, I was being whispered about as the next in line.

I had decided to complete my undergraduate degree in three years, something that was much easier to do at Harvard than elsewhere. The standard load at Harvard was four courses a semester – eight semesters, thirty-two courses, and they gave you a degree, unless you failed something, which at Harvard was rather hard to do. Being quick at arithmetic, I figured out right away that if I took five courses a year for three years, and spent one summer taking two summer school courses, I could rack up the required thirty-two in three years. Which I proceeded to do. In my third year, which was to be my last, two of my ten courses were tutorial for credit, which was supposed to give you time to write a senior honours thesis. There was only one slight hitch. In order to get credit for the two courses, you had to actually write a thesis.

The Department assigned Hao Wang as my tutor, and I made an appointment to talk to him about what I should do for a thesis. Wang was a rather shy man, whose Chinese-English accent sounded a good deal like German to me. Although I had taken his seminar the previous year, I had never actually had a conversation with him. Wang pulled out a Rand Corporation monograph by the great logician Alfred J. Tarski entitled A Decision Method for Elementary Geometry, and told me to work on it. I took it back to my tiny room in Adams House and started to read it. Tarski said right off that the decision method was an extension of something called Stürm’s Theorem. Stürm’s Theorem. What on earth was Stürm’s Theorem? This was a generation and a half before personal computers and two generations before the Internet, so Googling was out of the question. I finally tracked down Stürm’s Theorem in the library in an Algebra book, where I learned that it has something to do with the number of real roots of a polynomial. I went to work, and after a month or so I had mastered Tarski’s argument well enough to write a ten page exposition of it, which I took off to give to Wang.

What should I do now? I asked. Looking at a corner of the ceiling rather than at me, he said, Put it through in an axiom system, in a voice that indicated that the meeting was over. Back in my room, I stared at the wall. Put it through in an axiom system, Wang had said, making it clear that this was something he could handle on a lazy afternoon before tea. Put what through in an axiom system? What axiom system? What did put it through mean? I was stumped, and more than a little mortified. Going back to see him and asking him what he meant was clearly out of the question. As the days passed, I grew more and more dismayed. If I did not actually write a thesis, I got no credit for my two semesters of tutorial, and I would be two courses shy of graduation. Never mind honours. I wouldn’t even graduate!

Finally, in a panic, I went to see Professor Morton White, the one certifiably sane member of the department. I threw myself on his mercy. White said soothingly, You are taking my course on Analytic Philosophy, aren’t you? Yes, I said. "And we have just finished talking about Ryle’s Concept of Mind, haven’t we?" This was Gilbert Ryle, hotshot Oxford philosopher and editor of the leading English philosophy journal, Mind. Write a thesis about Ryle. Well, that was something I could do. In short order I cranked out 54 easily forgotten pages on Concept of Mind, bagged a Magna, and graduated. Some years later, I was told privately that had I done a logic thesis, I would have been put up for a Junior Fellowship. Oh well. In fact the next in line was my classmate, graduate apartment mate, and later colleague at Columbia, Charles Parsons, who was indeed awarded a Junior Fellowship, did superb work on Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, and spent the last part of his distinguished career as a member of the Harvard Philosophy Department.

The next year, I entered the graduate program in Philosophy at Harvard, passed the Prelims, Harvard’s version of General Examinations, was awarded a Frederick Sheldon Travelling Fellowship, and sailed off to Europe for my Wanderjahr. During that first graduate year, at the suggestion of White, I extracted from my honours thesis the only original passage – two and a half pages on something called agitations – and submitted it to Mind. White said that Ryle was rather generous in his support of young philosophy students, even when they disagreed with him, and might just agree to publish it as a Note. Sure enough, Ryle accepted it. Then, my luck had children. Someone named Corbett published a response to my note, saying that I was all wrong, and I got to write a one and a half page response. Two publications in a major journal from my undergraduate Honours Thesis. I was on my way! Here they are.

Professor Ryle’s Discussion of Agitations

The attempt to explain law-like statements about the physical world has often led to the postulation of some sort of substance or stuff, which endured through the many alterations of the world, and hence accounted for the continuity and order of those alterations. In the same way, a dispositional account of mental-concepts runs the risk of hypostatising the patterns of behaviour, either as Faculties and Ideas or as Dispositions.

Professor Gilbert Ryle, in Concept of Mind,[1] occasionally commits this error, although he would undoubtedly repudiate it if confronted with it explicitly. One of the most interesting examples of this hypostatisation is the discussion of agitations in the chapter entitled Emotions. An analysis of the argument will illustrate the way in which the error is committed, and the care which must be exercised to avoid objectifying dispositions, tendencies, and other pseudo- substantives.

Ryle begins the chapter by distinguishing four different kinds of emotions: moods, motives (or inclinations), feelings, and agitations. The last three are relevant to our discussion. Motives are simply the dispositions and inclinations which he has previously analysed; pride, vanity, avarice, patriotism, laziness, and so forth. Feelings are the sorts of things which people often describe as thrills, twinges, pangs, throbs, wrenches, itches, prickings, chills, glows, loads, qualms, hankerings, curdlings, sinkings, tensions, gnawings, and shocks (83-84).

Quite different from these are agitations, or commotions. Agitations are conflicts or interferences between two motives, or between a motive and the world. They are frustrations, shocks, anxieties, and distractions. Ryle says:

…agitations… presuppose the existence of inclinations which are not themselves agitations, much as eddies presuppose the existence of currents which are not themselves eddies. An eddy is an interference-condition which requires that there exist, say, two currents, or a current and a rock; an agitation requires that there exist two inclinations or an inclination and a factual impediment (93-94).

For example, if a man is both patriotic and cowardly, he will be torn between a desire to help his country by serving in the army, and a fear of being wounded or killed. Or, if he is avaricious, but is prevented by circumstances from acquiring a large amount of money, he will suffer anxiety and frustration. In each case, the thwarting of some motive is the essential characteristic of the agitation.

The evidences of these agitations are feelings:

What feelings do causally belong to are agitations; they are the signs of agitations in the same sort of way as stomach-aches are signs of indigestion. Roughly, we do not… act purposively because we experience feelings; we experience feelings… because we are inhibited from acting purposively (106).

And in case it is thought that these feelings are simply accidentally concomitant with the inhibitions of actions, Ryle adds: "...we can induce (sic) in ourselves genuine and acute feelings by merely imagining ourselves in agitating circumstances" (106-107).

Although this explanation of agitations may be quite perceptive, it is not available to Ryle, for it involves an essential hypostatisation of motives, or inclinations, which he has earlier construed as nothing more than particular types of complex dispositions. In order to see this more clearly, let us consider the man who was described as both patriotic and cowardly. According to Ryle’s theory, what does this description amount to?

To call a man patriotic is to say that he would react to certain situations in certain ways. For example, in a discussion of the relative merits of modern nations, he would defend his own country. He would give time and energy to bond drives and safety campaigns, and would observe rationing regulations without trying to get a little extra for himself. These and many other actual and hypothetical actions form a pattern of behaviour which we label patriotic. As Ryle observes, the man may not do all, or even most of these things, but we apply the term so long as he does, and is prone to do, a good proportion