In 1930-31, Bouwsma wrote frequently to his student Morris Lazerowitz who had recently graduated from Nebraska and was moving on to graduate studies at Michigan where Bouwsma himself had done a Ph.D. In the letters he encourages Morris to follow his aspirations and talent for philosophical thinking and to continue his graduate work in philosophy. Morris` father is willing to support his son`s graduate studies. There are hint`s in Bouwsma`s letters of Morris` moodiness and discouragement, as Bouwsma urges him to continue his studies in philosophy. He alludes to ``shinning and polishing`` his silver to brightness and to Morris` keen ability to pursue philosophy. In one letter discussing Plato`s Republic, Bouwsma remarks that employment is a trust from God and that surely Morris` father, a religious man, would have seen his soap business in Omaha that way. Perhaps advice to Morris himself about pursuing teaching philosophy Ð as a ``trust from God.``
In addition to revealing Bouwsma the teacher with concern for the development of his student, the letters reveal something of the development of his own thinking in these years. Only recently had he come to teach philosophy at Nebraska, with a dissertation on philosophical idealism. He writes of his philosophical commitments to idealism and of his antipathy towards realism.
Signs that Bouwsma`s engagement with idealsm was starting to unravel are evident in his letters. The unraveling begins, not by his reading Moore, but through his attempts to work through the arguments of idealism, particularly Bradley`s, and to develop an understanding of it in connection with his own reading of the history of philosophy. Bradley, Bouwsma thought, had two unprovable claims at the center of his philosophy. One was that ``Reality is one system,`` and the second was that ``Reality is experience.`` Bouwsma, taken by the power of these two claims, saw his task as proving them Ð showing them to be true. This daunting task, he conceived, involved tracing the concept of the Absolute in the history of philosophy: Plato`s Idea of the Good; Aristotle`s prime mover; the idea of Eros Realissimum; Descartes` God; Spinoza`s Substance; Leibniz`s Monads.`` He connected this task with his idea that Bradley`s ``Reality as one system,`` required a defense in terms of what Bouwsma called ``the idea of degrees.`` While not clear from his letters how exactly showing these ``degrees`` or ``distinctions`` of Being could support Bradley`s claim, the project shows the level of abstraction at which Bouwsma operated.
His journey to the particular sentences of ordinary language, through Moore, was a long distance, but one that must have come with increasing relief. Lazerowitz would soon go to study with Moore. And Moore would come to have attraction for Bouwsma. Bouwsma mentions reading Moore and Russell in one of his letters in April of 1931. Here however, he relates to Lazerowitz that he is reading them because he wants ``to attempt to understand as much as possible, the realistic argument.`` He finds his turning to Moore and Russell appealing because of their attention to ``the notion of the particular.`` So Bouwsma`s engagement with idealism begins to unravel, it would seem, not because he is attracted to realism, but because of Bouwsma`s own attention to and need for the particulars of argument that would hold idealism together. Reading G.E. Moore must have come as a relief to Bouwsma not because the claims of realism now surpassed those of idealism, but because Moore`s arguments based on the particulars of common sense beliefs seemed to relieve him, albeit it temporarily, of the entanglements of abstract philosophy.
Other interesting aspects of Bouwsma thoughts in the letters are his analysis of Plato`s classes in the Republic, his enthusiasm for Kant`s theory of judgment; and his growing dissatisfaction with the study and teaching of logic.
Bouwsma, who must have been teaching Plato`s Republic, puzzles over the integration of the virtue in the lives, the characters, of those designated to the classes of craftsmen and guardian. Wisdom is necessary for everyone and for harmonious relationship of classes in the state. But how is wisdom to be developed in craftsman whose aim is the acquisition of wealth? How can that be? How is passion to be curbed and what is it after all? Likewise with the guardians. How is the justice, which comes from the harmony within guardians and among the classes, to come about without wisdom and intelligence as the primary aim? How are they to develop honor without wisdom? Without integrating wisdom into these classes Ð craftsmen and guardians Ð there can be no harmony. ``There must be some mistake,`` Bouwsma writes, ``in supposing that the state is the individual writ large. And of course the error is more ruinous than that. It wrecks the whole Republic.``
In a fascinating discussion of the role of the philosopher-king, the ruling class of the Republic, Bouwsma reflects on where it lies in our society. The role of the philosopher-king would be ``to interpret and give power to the aspirations of the people.`` It would be ``a great mistake,`` he writes, to identify the function of the philosopher-king with that of the presidency. Neither will it do to identify the contemporary ``professional`` philosopher as the philosopher-king. He would have a questionable place among the craftsmen class Ð the lowest class. Is this because he not only plies a technical skill, but also, finally, seeks wealth? No, the function of the philosopher-king in our culture will be found in the church more than in any other institution. The church, no doubt performing this function badly, holds the role of interpreting the human condition, calling forth justice, and reigning in the passions. This remark will surely come as a shock to those who would identify schools and universities as the bearer of this function in our society. Bouwsma was, in this remark, not prescribing, but merely describing contemporary culture. Educational institutions were not, in Bouwsma`s view, performing this function in the way that the church was. How like Cardinal Newman`s view this is: that the role of the university is to develop the intellectual virtues in the gentleman class, but that the role of the church is to develop the moral virtues in the larger society.
Lazerowitz, at the time, had been taken by Kant and wrote to Bouwsma of his enthusiasm for Kant. Bouwsma replied to several of Morris` letters having read Kant for himself, perhaps through Morris` stimulation. Bouwsma was clearly in transition in his philosophy and found something exciting in Kant. Not knowing exactly what draws him to Kant other than a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary philosophy, Bouwsma finds Kant`s theory of judgment and its rescuing of necessity from skepticism an awakening. They draw him from his stagnation. Perhaps Bouwsma`s thinking took this form: His task in idealism was to study the world and extract knowledge of Reality from experience. But Kant saw through wrestling with Hume`s view of necessity that knowledge of Reality cannot be read off of the world. In experience alone, Hume showed, there is no necessity. Kant`s identifying the principle of causality as a presupposition of knowledge now makes sense again of knowledge. But the judgments of knowledge Ð our knowledge of the world Ð come not as the result of judgments based on experience, but as the preconditions for such knowledge. Space, time, causality, and logic, are necessary preconditions of knowledge. Scientific knowledge is thereby saved by this, of course, while metaphysical knowledge is denied. What in this idea caused the excitement in Bouwsma? Was it, again, the relief from the idealist project of discovering Reality? Was it the refocusing of philosophical attention on the human producer of knowledge rather than on the world? Was it the idea, later to take full shape in Bouwsma, that philosophy`s real task is to uncover the hidden presuppositions of our thinking while doing philosophy? Or was it the growing sense in Bouwsma that metaphysics was empty? Later he often quoted Kant`s line, with pleasure, that metaphysics was like milking a he-goat and catching it in a sieve.
In a lengthy discourse attached to a letter, Bouwsma expresses his sense of the barreness of the study of logic. Logic is in a unique position of providing the criteria for the study of itself. And further, logic is empty. The subject matter of logic, points out, is the proposition. Logic describes, classifies propositions, and provides for possible relations between propositions. But these activities it performs by means of a logic that the one who studies it has arbitrarily chosen as a classification or a relational system. In Bouwsma`s view, there is a kind of game played with propositions that is invented or arranged by the mind that plays it. Further, logic is empty form. It speaks of any substance and any attribute. A syllogism may make no contact with the actual world. What does logic tell us of actual human thought?! It is awash in competing theories of correspondence and coherence with no final way of arbitrating between the two. Logic has no metaphysical commitments, Bouwsma writes, unless it is to the person who studies it.
Now these ideas of logic expressed to Lazerowitz in a letter, which by Bouwsma`s own admission are inadequately expressed, are nevertheless precursory to and consistent with his later understanding of the nature and workings of language. Logic is more like an invention than a description of human thought. The invention process may have various outcomes and should not be taken as a description of reality. Human thought, however, is language itself. How we ordinarily speak, our ordinary language, becomes the check for the philosopher`s abstractions. Logic is one form of the philosopher`s abstraction for his invention of word usage, believing all the while that he is describing reality.
Bouwsma did not write on logic. If he had, later, with his developed sensibility to the nature of language, he would not have expressed his concerns of its barreness to Lazerowitz in the way that he did. Instead, Bouwsma ignored logic. When he was required to teach logic by the university, he seems to have given students sentences, the analysis of which, were exercises in conceptual clarity. A student in one class reported that they read parts of Dostoievski`s, The Brothers Karamazov as their study of logic. Another student quoted Bouwsma as quipping of logic, with a smile, ``The circles [Venn Diagrams] confuse me.`` Although he did not endure the struggles that the young Wittgenstein did with developing an ideal logic language, Bouwsma arrived at a similar place as the older Wittgenstein did. Logic is a game arranged and played in various ways. We should not think of it as a description of the structure of our language, if we want to avoid confusions. Our natural language will have to be forced to fit the rules we have abstracted. And those rules will tell us that false and inconceivable things must be so. For intellectual play with language on a holiday, Bouwsma preferred poetry to logic.
In Bouwsma`s letters to Lazerowitz, he writes of his struggles with idealism. He speaks on occasion of his disdain for realism. Realism seems to him shallow, science modeled, and without a place for human and divine spirit. It remained an unattractive philosophy for Bouwsma, even as his difficulties with idealism mounted. In several of the later letters to Lazerowitz, Bouwsma mentions his developing interest in reading Moore and Russell. But Moore and Russell are realists. And we know that Bouwsma`s interest in Moore sprouted from this time, and would lead to Lazerowitz and other Bouwsma students going to Cambridge to study with Moore. Bouwsma`s work became intertwined with Moore`s. Still, Bouwsma never became a realist, and never gave up his dislike of realist metaphysics. What then did Bouwsma find of value in Moore`s philosophy?
The answer to this lies in Moore`s method of analysis in attacking philosophical problems Ð a method the gears of which meshed with Bouwsma`s in certain significant aspects. The first aspect was that Moore`s method of analysis was particular. In place of the abstractions of idealism painted in broad strokes of reason`s manifesting itself in the history of thought, Moore speaks of ``hands,`` ``tables,`` and ``envelopes,`` making ``appearances`` on the stage of ``my mind.`` Where the conclusion of idealism is that we cannot know of an external world nor a world of time and space beyond appearances, Moore stamps his foot insisting that we know something of the backs of our own hands, facts of place Ð London is in England, and facts of time, history, and science Ð the world existed before I was born and no one has ever been to the moon. Further, though not fully aware of its significance, Moore pays some attention to how we talk in our common everyday lives. Perhaps not enough, but he pays attention nevertheless. In all of our talk, we assent to the belief that life existed before I was born and that I do not speak as if I knew nothing of my own hands. Such aspects of Moore`s method of analysis were the aspects that appealed to Bouwsma and the teeth of the gears of his method that meshed with Moore`s. Bouwsma`s natural love of language and ear for how the ordinary person spoke became the teeth that soon came to grind against Moore`s gears when Moore`s common sense foot stamping clashed with the ways in which people actually use words.