BOUWSMA AND SMYTHIES

Through his legal pad notebooks, from 1950 to his death in 1978, Bouwsma kept track of his reflections on conversations and written remarks of a man named Yorick Smythies. Bouwsma met Smythies through Wittgenstein who described Smythies as one of his best students. To understand Bouwsma`s fascination with Smythies` thought, one must, again, understand it in light of the fact that all of Bouwsma`s thought centered around his Christian faith. Smythies was a Roman Catholic convert who reorganized his interests in Wittgenstein`s philosophy around the specific psychological needs which led to his conversion to Roman Catholic Christianity. He had reorganized the tasks of philosophy as Wittgenstein conceived them – as self-examination – to serve his need of spiritual self-examination for the purpose of confession and absolution of sin. In connection with this new task of philosophy, Smythies also, in a very critical way, claimed that Wittgenstein abstracted the whole person, with his moral and religious dimension, from the language-game. This made Wittgenstein`s view of language technical and dead in Smythies view. These thoughts of Smythies fascinated Bouwsma who was at the same time developed in an understanding of Wittgenstein`s thought and centered in Christianity which had no immediate and obvious connection to it. I have included in my selections from the notebooks as many of Bouwsma`s reflections on Smythies` ideas as possible. They reveal something central and essential about Bouwsma`s struggle to put his own ideas together. They also reveal two strains in Bouwsma`s conception of philosophy. One is that philosophy is the art of removing the illusions of metaphysics created by the inattention to language. The other is that philosophy`s importance still lies in self-understanding and in spiritual edification. In relation to Christianity in particular, philosophy`s importance lies in showing that Christianity must be not proved or defended, but lived.

In the academic year 1950-51, Bouwsma won a Fulbright Fellowship to teach and research at Magdaline College, Oxford University. During that time Wittgenstein was often in Oxford, having been diagnosed with cancer, staying with Elizabeth Anscombe who was teaching there. Again Bouwsma enjoyed walking and talking with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein suggested that Bouwsma would also enjoy meeting with the man whom Wittgenstein described as one of his best students – Yorick Smythies. Smythies, it was said, was one of the few, if not the only, of Wittgenstein`s students who would argue and disagree with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein took him very seriously.

Smythies made his living as a librarian in a small library at Oxford. He studied philosophy at nights and on the weekends – putting aside regular times to do his philosophical work. He too kept notebooks; he published very little if anything. There was a paper he gave to Bouwsma called ``Non-Logical Falsity`` which may or may not have been published, probably not. The paper is in the Bouwsma collection at the Humanities Research Center. He never held an academic position. Wittgenstein told Bouwsma that Smythies was too ``serious`` to hold an academic position. Knowing Wittgenstein`s views on academic philosophy, this was a high compliment. Smythies was married to a woman named ``Polly,`` and the Bouwsma`s became personal friends with her as well as her husband. She was the source of some information about both her husband and Wittgenstein. She told Bouwsma for example, that Smythies and Wittgenstein in earlier times would meet as often as several times a week for discussions. The Bouwsmas returned again to England again in 1956 on a sabbatical leave and again met and discussed with Smythies. During those two times in Oxford, Smythies showed Bouwsma some of his notebooks and the paper ``Non-Logical Falsity.`` They also met to discuss Dostoievski`s Notes From Underground. Bouwsma`s notebooks suggest that they also discussed Kierkegaard as a philosopher of mutual interest. Smythies believed about Kierkegaard that he made it possible to have philosophical discussions of Christianity.

Maurice O`Connor Drury reports in his recollections about Wittgenstein that Smythies wrote to Wittgenstein saying that it was in part Smythies` reading of Kierkegaard at Wittgenstein`s recommendation that led Smythies to become a Roman Catholic. This prompted Wittgenstein`s response: ``If someone tells me that he has bought the outfit of a tight-rope walker, I am not impressed until I see what he has done with it`` (Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. by Rush Rhees. 102). From what I can make of Smythies from Bouwsma`s notes, this is exactly the advice that Smythies would be prepared to take or give to another. He had thoroughly absorbed Kierkegaard`s idea of subjective truth. Coming to truth is not coming to find the truth of propositions in a logical sense, but matter of becoming in one`s life what it is that one believes. A person, then, could be true or false in a non-logical sense.

As I will try to bring out momentarily, these ideas of Smythies involved rigorous self-examination in the sphere of the ethical-religious life. He strove for clarity and honesty, not in the attempt to address logical problems but in the attempt to purify and strengthen himself in the more important task of becoming the kind of human being prescribed in Christianity. This honesty required a constant vigilance against self-deception – against ``non-logical falsity.``

The year 1950-51 which Bouwsma spent in England began not merely a life long friendship with Smythies, but a life-long source of stimulation and puzzlement at Smythies ideas. Bouwsma wrote hundreds of pages on Smythies ideas in his notebooks. He kept track of his daily discussions with Smythies, he worked through Smythies` paper ``Non-Logical Falsity,`` and he continued to reflect on various things Smythies had said to him for over twenty years. He had several hundred pages of notes typed which he kept separately as if he intended to publish something on it. These typescript notes are all on the paper ``Non-Logical Falsity.`` But in this typescript, Bouwsma frequently breaks off his discussions with a remark in which he despairs of ever being able to understand what Smythies is trying to say. Bouwsma did not and would not have published this typescript. But the typescript as well as the repeated entries throughout Bouwsma`s yellow pad journals suddenly recalling an idea of Smythies` and believing that he had at last understood what Smythies meant are a testimony to the provocative influence which Smythies` ideas had in Bouwsma. He returned to Smythies in the same manner that he returned to Kierkegaard. In fact, Bouwsma`s interest in Smythies connects to the same interest that Bouwsma had in Kierkegaard. Bouwsma too needed more than Wittgenstein could provide and had the same needs in this regard as did Yorick Smythies. I will try to bring these ideas together in more detail in what follows. I want to follow the lead of my question: Why was Bouwsma so fascinated with Smythies` notes and talk?

There is much made of the analogy of Wittgenstein`s work to psychoanalysis. Here is a way of construing that as a way of comparing and contrasting it with Smythies` work. Wittgenstein sought to understand that which gave rise to philosophical thought – what gave rise to the illusions of metaphysics.. We seek for an object as the meaning of a word. We seek for a generalization that fits all cases. We have an analogy in mind without being fully aware of it, and the analogy guides us. Bring the analogy to full view. Such notions as this are behind the comparison of Wittgenstein`s work to psychoanalysis.

Notice, however, the specific subject matter of Wittgenstein`s probes into the psyche. He follows out what leads us to Platonic forms, sense-data, private language, the ability to recognize an aspect, etc. Wittgenstein sometimes referred to his work as ``abstract problems of logic.`` And he saw these problems as removed from the daily or ordinary problems of life. He hoped that there might be some carry over to daily non-philosophical problems from the intellectual skills and habits one might acquire from working in philosophy on these logical problems. The well known story of his becoming upset with Norman Malcolm over a claim that the `British were involved in an attempt to assassinate Hitler is an example of this hope dashed. Wittgenstein hoped that Malcolm`s work with him in philosophy would have enabled Malcolm to have better judgment about ``the British character`` – that the British were quite capable of attempting to assassinate this political leader.

Now Smythies too seems to see philosophy in a way that might be compared to psychoanalysis. According to Bouwsma`s notebooks, they met to discuss Dostoievski`s Notes From Underground. And Bouwsma wrote hundreds of pages on Smythies paper ``Non-Logical Falsity`` Consider Dostoievski`s underground man in the Notes From Underground. He is an ``anti-hero`` by Dostoievski`s account. He is a person who exhibits original sin over against the Pelagian-Platonic concept of man, namely that one always acts rationally and in one`s own self-interest. Evil and wrong-doing, in this view, are the result of ignorance – one does not know what is in one`s self-interest and therefore can not follow out the dictates of reason which one does not know. Over against this conception of man, the rational animal, Dostoievski creates a character who willfully and spitefully chooses not to follow out reason`s dictates – deliberately acts against his self-interest; brings pain upon himself because he enjoys it – man: the ``spiteful animal.`` Now I take it that Smythies found this invented character fascinating because the underground man`s behavior was dominated by ``the sudden incursion of evil thoughts`` (an expression borrowed, I believe, from Samuel Johnson`s prayers). The man could not control these evil thoughts by means of his reason and learning. They presented themselves to him and were inexplicable. I take Smythies fascination with them to be autobiographical. Smythies, perhaps, needed some means to cope with his own sudden incursions of evil thoughts. Should this then be the job of philosophy – personal salvation? Smythies too found the Roman Catholic Church. He needed the church he is to have said, not everyone does , but he needed it: confession, absolution, the mass.

Smythies paper ``Non-Logical Falsity`` reveals something along the same lines. The paper jumps into the middle of a catalogue of the myriad ways in which a person can be false. Here the interest is not in logic – not in the ways in which a proposition can be true or false. Rather the interest is in how a person can be true or false – how one can deceive others and even himself about his thoughts and actions. There is no beginning or end to this paper. There is no thesis; certainly there is no clearly stated thesis or explanation of what he is doing. Smythies simply plunges in, sorting through the countless ways in which a person represents and misrepresents himself. Smythies continually makes reflexive and double reflexive observations about these presentations of ourselves. Are we aware that we have presented ourselves in certain ways? And when we are, we are now doing something different – making a different presentation of ourselves than when we are not aware of how we are presenting ourselves. Of course, we should be aware of how we are presenting ourselves. And are we always presenting ourselves? The ``I`` which is concerned to present himself in certain ways is not identical with the ``I`` which is not aware of the fact that he is presenting himself in those ways. Smythies, too, considered how we are perceived by others, as a factor in this self-examination. We are aware of how others will perceive us and so we calculate how to present ourselves to those others whom we know to be receiving our casted presentations to them. There are twenty-eight pages of such convoluted observations about how a person presents himself and how a person may be false in those presentations.

And, now, what is Smythies doing in all of this? That is one of the questions that Bouwsma puts before himself in his notebooks. In his notebooks, Bouwsma writes out numerous expressions and sentences from Smithies` paper and tries to work through each of them. He had over one-hundred pages from these notebook entries in typescript form and kept them separately along with the ``Non-Logical Falsity`` paper and a letter Smythies wrote to him about his reactions to Bouwsma`s notes on his conversations with Wittgenstein. Bouwsma clearly regarded his exchanges with Smythies as something very valuable for his own thinking. But Bouwsma was frustrated with Smythies. He could not understand him, in spite of the fact that he was getting at some things that were very important. He frequently ends his notes in this typescript paper in frustration, despairing of ever understanding what Smythies was doing. Yet he keeps coming back, trying to understand. In other places in his notebooks, often and many years later, Bouwsma will suddenly go back to something of Smythies, saying that he now thinks he understands what Smythies meant by one or another remark.

But to return: What is it that Smythies was trying to do and why was Bouwsma so frustrated by it? I want to try to explain this for myself. First, I should like to characterize Smythies interests in the following way: Smythies, I believe, catalogued these convoluted presentations of a person`s capacity for falseness as a defense against falseness in his own person. To be aware of the myriad kinds of deception which a person is capable of is to be prepared to and enabled to act against them. Sin, for Smythies, is being false – presenting oneself falsely to our neighbors and to ourselves – before god. ``The self is a self before God`` (Kierkegaard). And we are only fully aware of ourselves when we are aware of ourselves before God. This is done by examining ourselves with respect to our thoughts and actions towards our neighbors with God as our witness. Only God, besides ourselves, has access to this ``private theater`` in which we play roles and know which roles we are playing. To catalogue and call to consciousness these ways in which we can be false is to arm ourselves for a fight in which we are the sole participant. It is the fight to live honestly before God.

Smythies, again, is said to have remarked that some people needed the church and that he was one of them. Was the practice of confession not the same activity as that of being honest with oneself before God? And, as Smythies was aware, we are such convoluted creatures in our reflexive consciousness that we can only strive for complete honesty (``Be you perfect``) without fully achieving it. For this too we need confession – admission of guilt – and absolution. Without the sacrifice of the Lamb and the absolution of our sin, we are lost. The more consciousness one has, the more consciousness of guilt and the more consciousness of not being able to absolve ourselves. For this one needs God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I take this to be behind Smythies` remark that he needed the church. And surly, knowing Bouwsma, this was a part of Bouwsma`s fascination with Smythies. Notice too how closely this interpretation of Smythies parallels Bouwsma`s other main interest in Kierkegaard – consciousness of sin, subjectivity, despair, honesty before God, etc.

Compare, now, these intentions of Smythies to philosophize by means of something like ``psychoanalysis`` or self-examination with their counterpart in Wittgenstein (keeping in mind that ``psychoanalysis`` is only an analogy here). Wittgenstein wants to uncover the hidden springs of nonsense in philosophy, while Smythies wants to strengthen himself against the onslaughts of evil thoughts lurching out of the depths of his soul. I remember now the remark of Wittgenstein`s to Drury: ``I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view`` (Rush Rhees. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections. 94). One might read this to mean that while the subjects of his investigations were not the subjects of religion, he nevertheless, in probing them, uncovered the hidden springs which produced these philosophical theories. He, in doing this, also made clear the arbitrary nature of these foundations – that the foundations of our thinking generally do not rest on further foundations. And this understanding was like a religious understanding of the world . Smythies, to continue the contrast, was a religious man and did look at everything from a religious point of view. He saw himself through the eyes of a Roman Catholic Christian. His torment which he describes as ``the sudden incursion of evil thoughts`` he interprets as sin. His salvation lies in uncovering the hidden springs of those thoughts which incur his consciousness in the hope that if he can get them out and recognize the tricks of self-deception, he may move away from sin towards perfection. Philosophy, for Smythies, becomes: developing the consciousness of sin through confession. Absolution, however is beyond philosophy. It must come from God and faith which are beyond philosophy. God and faith are beyond the scope of philosophy resting on arbitrary (subjective) foundations. These two similar yet very different interests – conceptions of philosophy – captivated Bouwsma`s interest. In fact, they had captivated his attention all of his philosophical life. His interest in Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard both of which started as early as the 1930`s reflect this same attention to the issues which Smythies raises over against Wittgenstein`s interest in philosophy.

When Smythies describes the ways in which a person engages in self-deception and presents himself, he might be thought of as crafting a tool or set of tools to improve his skills in the task of self-examination. This self-examination is made in the effort to purify or purge the soul. In religious terms it is equivalent to increasing the consciousness of sin – the practice of confession in preparation for absolution. But Smythies use of these tools of self-examination have a frightening potential for overuse. If one always sees oneself as presenting oneself, developing a sensitivity for the fact that one is always presenting oneself, then the ``I`` which sees itself as presenting itself can also be seen as wanting to present itself in the manner – whichever manner – it is presenting itself. As one may always ask and is encouraged to ask why he is presenting himself in a certain manner, he should then in this case ask why he is presenting himself as one who is presenting himself in this manner. Does he, for example, want to present himself as someone who is thoroughly and rigorously honest? And why does he want to present himself in this manner? Does one, in short, ever get to the bottom of the presentations? The problem, and it is a real one, not merely a philosophical paradox, may be grasped by thinking of the idea of presentation through an analogy to the theater. If an actor asks about his role – how he is to present himself and why he is presenting himself in the manner he is – he retreats into himself in order to find the understanding to provide the answer to those questions. But if he should have the thought , which is analogous to Smythies ideas, that he, in being a person who in acting a roll is also acting a roll, then he can ask why he is playing that roll. If this goes on in such a backward-inward spiral, one comes to see all speakers in this inward dialectic as playing rolls. And now there are only rolls and no place outside the rolls for one to exist as the human being one is. To use the image of the Greek theater where the mask was worn to present the character: there are all masks and no face underneath. Masks all the way down.

This is a formula for madness. Again, it has a religious equivalent. Before God one is always guilty. And some stricken religious men come to believe that they are not only endless sinners, but that they are unforgivable – without hope. Orthodox Christianity, of course, teaches that one is forgiven in the ``perfect sacrifice, once given.`` I stumble on the foolishness of speculating on Smythies` mental health, but I can imagine that he had an unending struggle with how to pull the reigns on the runaway question of why he was presenting himself as he was. When would he be satisfied with an answer? Then too, complete honesty in ferreting out our motives rides the border between very difficult and impossible. Complete honesty also makes one impossible. Tolstoi.

Again, Bouwsma met Smythies through Wittgenstein who regarded Smythies highly, in part because Smythies would disagree with Wittgenstein and argue in an intelligent way with him. And so, Bouwsma talked with Smythies about Wittgenstein`s philosophy as well as about these issues of non-logical falsity. What were the disagreements with Wittgenstein? Here again, Bouwsma found Smythies thoughts fascinating yet difficult to understand. He could not , finally, get to the bottom of Smythies` disagreements, yet he saw enough merit in them not to dismiss them or give up trying. Frequently, even twenty years later, he returns to Smythies ideas and will start a note saying: ``I think I understand now what Smythies meant by . . . ``

Here, then, is what I can make out Smythies disagreement with Wittgenstein through Bouwsma`s notebooks. Wittgenstein refers to language as a ``technique,`` and Wittgenstein`s summary counsel about meaning is: Think of the meaning of a word not as an object but as the use of the word. Now Smythies said of this idea that it made language appear dead. It made language out to be a tool that was being used by a person. But when language and the person are separated in this way, the life which was in the person goes out of the language which is merely a tool – dead. Smythies seems to have thought that Wittgenstein in looking at the use was ignoring the life which was in the person who could not be separated from the language. In reflecting on this sometime later, Bouwsma compared this observation to a smile or frown. A person does not use a smile or frown to convey how they are feeling. A person simply smiles and frowns, and one may see in the smiling and frowning something of how the person feels. This is how it is with language. One says something and one may understand something from what is said, but it is not exactly right to describe the person as using language as if it were a tool or technique that one manipulated separately from himself. Once one learned a language, one simply spoke or wrote and it was an essential part of that person.

Now Bouwsma did not feel that Wittgenstein was wrong or had no appreciation for this point. Nor did Bouwsma believe that Smythies had missed the significance of what Wittgenstein had done in shifting meaning from an object to use. Smythies apparently saw too, according to Bouwsma, that mental states, images, feelings, etc. were not entities in the cupboard of the mind, but were to be understood by means of their expression in language and their surroundings. But meaning as use and language as technique took the life out of language.

Bouwsma struggled to see what was missing from Wittgenstein or ``dead.`` Sometimes Bouwsma worked at the idea that Smythies meant that the signs became dead when one thinks of them merely in terms of use. Here I will provide an example of the sort of thing that Bouwsma might have meant. In the primitive language-games of the builders we have moves such as ``d-slab-there.`` A shows B what is to be done with this expression – seeing how it is taught and then used in the circumstances of building – the expression is then used in accordance with the rules of the language-game. But this account might make it look as though each word was like a marker in a game and each was used in connection with the others according to rules laid down in the teaching. The very many other fantastic activities that may go on when a speaker has learned a language and gone beyond a ``primitive language`` such as this one seems well-nigh unaccountable in terms of such a simple mechanical model. Who is building the building? And why? What place does the building, the labor, the materials, etc. have in the lives of those involved in building? Is this then what makes the idea of language as technique dead for Smythies?

Now one may, as Bouwsma surely would, see that Wittgenstein acknowledges that the language-game of the builders was primitive, and further, that in fact language-games must be understood in light of ``mastering`` the whole of language and in light of the ``forms of life`` in which the language-game is a part. This would include the gestures, tones of voice, knowing glances, etc. of the speaker as well as the circumstances surrounding the sentence that is spoken. Such questions as: What is the building`s function? Why is the builder building it? Who is the builder? Why did he choose these materials? etc., are part of sketching in the surroundings – the form of life – in which the language-game takes place. The life re-appears in this. But Smythies did not seem to allow that it did in his remark that seeing language as a technique makes the language dead.

Here is another attempt to explain what Smythies may have been attempting to explain to Bouwsma in his objection to what Wittgenstein had done as dead or as taking the life out of language. After Wittgenstein establishes his idea of meaning as use as opposed to the philosophical conception of meaning as the object referred to, in the Philosophical Investigations, he has a lengthy discussion of the idea of following or obeying rules in language use. It is here, in fact, (P.I. #199) that Wittgenstein uses the word ``technique`` in connection with language: To understand language means to be master of a technique.`` The description of language as rule following may make it sound or create the misunderstanding that Wittgenstein thought of there being a complete set of rules which govern our use of language. The rules would explain how sentences could be formed and how words could be used. The rules of language might be thought of as the rules of a symbolic language which make possible the introduction of every symbol and every combination of symbols. Every word or sentence introduced like a line in a formal proof could be justified by means of the presentation of sets of these rules. This picture is of a language that is dead. It is certainly completely separated from the person and the life of the person and surroundings of any given sentence in question. Something like this might well be what Smythies had in mind when he criticized Wittgenstein as having taken the life out of language.

But the picture of an ideal language in which a rule governs every move is precisely what Wittgenstein is struggling against and, further, is an important part of the point which Wittgenstein is trying to bring out in his discussion of rule-following in this section of the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein: ``. . . if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here . . .`` (P.I. #201). When are we aware of ourselves using a word according to a rule? Very rarely. And when a word is used in accordance with a rule, is there always a clear cut use of that word according to the rule? And may there not have to be in be in the case where there is ambiguity about the rule, another rule governing the use of the first rule? How could one ever talk if this technical rule-following model of language were the correct model? Wittgenstein, in these passages, is providing a corrective to the very model of language that Smythies is attributing to him.

My purpose here is not to defend Wittgenstein against Smythies, but to try to understand Smythies and why it was that Smythies stimulated Bouwsma as he did. Smythies both understood and misunderstood Wittgenstein at the same time, though in different ways. And Bouwsma grasped this duality as well as seeing the depth in Smythies. So Bouwsma could not simply dismiss Smythies` ideas. Then, too, when Smythies says that a sentence must be understood in light of the person who speaks it, that is an important reminder! Smythies is exactly right that language – what a person says – should be understood by means of the person who speaks it. Is the person genuine? Is he given to irony? Does the person stand to gain or loose by what he says? Is his reputation enhanced by what he says? Etc. We cannot understand the talk of Socrates without understanding Socratic irony. So Smythies` observations, then, about language as technique – language as being separable or ``broken`` away from the person who speaks – are not to be dismissed.

Bouwsma would take another tack in trying to understand Smythies. It looked to Bouwsma, at times, that Smythies simply had different interests for philosophy to satisfy than Wittgenstein did. Smythies was interested in strengthening himself in the struggle against the insurgence of evil in himself. How may the incursion of evil be fought? A person is concerned or ought to be concerned, not merely with the problems of logic and language as technical problems in philosophy. But a person should be concerned with how he was to live – with what he was to become. By what thoughts should he live? Smythies was a devoted reader of Kierkegaard and taken by the idea of subjectivity in Kierkegaard. (Smythies remarked to Bouwsma on occasion that Kierkegaard enabled philosophers to discuss Christianity. I take this to mean that he thought that one could not have philosophical discussions about Christianity if one regarded Christianity as a body of doctrines.) Philosophy should be the activity of thinking which enables one to become the kind of person one ought to become. In Kierkegaard`s language, philosophy is the activity of the subjective thinker which brings the truth into existence in the life of the person. Could this then be the life that Smythies thought was missing from Wittgenstein? Wittgenstein, at least in his later work (Philosophical Investigations), had no direct interest in this. And, accordingly, Smythies had lost interest in Wittgenstein`s work. The form of his new task was to examine the person – his speech and actions – as they pertain to his ethical-religious life. Who was this person? What sort of person was he trying to become? Why does he present himself as he does? And: What are the many forms of self-deception which may stand in the path of his becoming a good person?

Smythies` ideas form a conception of philosophy which present an interesting issue with respect to the role of philosophy in education. Smythies has a different conception of the role of philosophy than does Wittgenstein, or at least, it may be described quite differently than Wittgenstein`s, as I have tried to do. Smythies sees philosophy as aiding in the task of self-examination whose aim is to develop oneself in the ethical-religious category. Wittgenstein`s task, by contrast, may be described as uncovering the analogies in our language which lead to disguised nonsense or illusions in metaphysics. We may be improved in the ethical-religious category by the removal of such illusions. Surely it is better not to suffer under illusions in our thinking in metaphysical issues. But the explanation of that ``better`` would be long and distant from what one would ordinarily regard as the ethical-religious category.

These two different conceptions of philosophy present a teacher with two different pictures of his task as teacher. Perhaps ``teacher`` is not the right word in either case. If a teacher imparts knowledge to his students, in either picture, the word ``teacher`` is wrongly applied. But if one has a Socratic conception of teacher in mind, where the teacher does something like assembling reminders for and prodding the student towards self-examination, then ``teacher`` is the right word for both Smythies` and Wittgenstein`s conceptions of philosophy. The different conceptions, however similar in this regard, still present the teacher with very different pictures of his task. These pictures and their respective tasks may be separated by means of another Socratic idea, namely that self-examination is done for the sake of virtue. In this regard, Smythies conception of philosophy is much like the Socratic conception.

The question is: What is the teacher`s aim in teaching philosophy? Is it to aid in the ethical-religious self-development of the learner or is it to aid in the development of an ear for nonsense and an eye for illusion in philosophical theories? If the latter is the aim, then the teaching and learning of philosophy may rightly be reserved for the few who have interest and aptitude for it and perhaps, for civic leaders and professionals whose theoretical assumptions may have consequences for a community. If, on the other hand, the picture and aim of the teacher is to aid in the ethical-religious development of the learner, then everyone, every individual, is under the obligation to be a learner in philosophy, and the teacher may not distinguish between students` aptitudes for philosophy. Each individual in this case must will to become a good person and the teacher must make himself available for service in the aid of that task.

The Socratic conception of the teacher`s task in assembling reminders may be described for the purpose of seeing how Smythies` conception of philosophy and teaching are different from Wittgenstein`s as follows: Socrates assembles reminders by means of assembling particular cases in order that the recognition of a common and essential element would come from an examination of these particulars. For this task he has prepared a handful of dialectical questions such as: 1) What is it that is named by the word ``___`` that appears in each of the particular objects or cases where the name is appropriately used? 2) If you define the word in question as you have, how do you account for the following object also named by that word which does not fit your definition? and 3) Is the word in question the name for a genus or species with respect to some other related word? This dialectical process in which Socrates engages the learner aims at bringing the learner ever closer to grasping the essence of the concept in question. And under the Socratic presupposition that grasping the essence of a virtue brings one to becoming virtuous, the learner develops himself in the ethical-religious category by means of philosophy.

While Smythies does not share the Socratic assumption that grasping the truth will bring one to virtue, he does believe that grasping the principles of self-deception operating within oneself enable one to move towards the good. Grasping the truth enables one to fight the falsity masked by ignorance. The important difference between Smythies and Socrates is that when Smythies pushes aside the veil of ignorance, he uncovers willful self-deception. Socrates` self examination simply pushes aside the veil of ignorance where the light of the good draws one to it by its power. The important similarity in addition to the task of self-examination and removal of ignorance is that both share the subjective, existential interest in the truth. The role of philosophy in each of these cases is to uncover that truth within oneself which will release the soul from bondage. Philosophy is what one does to fulfill one`s purpose as a human being. The examined life is the only life worthy of a human being. Philosophy gives us the only truth – the only knowledge – worth having: the knowledge necessary for becoming a human being. In this regard, Smythies turn away from Wittgenstein may be something like Socrates` turn away from pre-Socratic natural science.

Wittgenstein`s philosophical investigations counter the influence of Socratic striving for generality. ``I`ll show you differences.`` Why? ``That you may not suffer under the illusions of philosophy.`` Is removing such illusions objective knowledge? If philosophical theories are thought of as objective knowledge, then Wittgenstein`s teaching the learner to look for differences over against the objective truth of those theories should to be considered objective knowledge. It, too, is in some sense subjective – in that Wittgenstein`s teaching activates the learner in thinking – in resisting that objective knowledge. But Wittgenstein`s teaching through presenting his inner dialogue (the Philosophical Investigations presents his inner dialogue) does not aim directly at the ethical-religious development of the learner. The Tractatus honors that category by means of silence. This is why Smythies preferred the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. The Philosophical Investigations aim at ``commanding a clear view of our language.`` Why? That we may escape such illusions as that hatched by the Platonic quest for essences. Honesty, integrity, and determination are all virtues required by Wittgenstein`s invitation to command a clear view. They are virtues required in the development of one`s intelligence. Are we better for having acquired them? To be sure. But they are put in the employment of a different task than that which Smythies has conceived for philosophy.

HOME