Truth & Consequences

The old grad had gone back to Oxford for a casual visit. Three days later he came away so shaken and distressed that he dashed off an article about it for the New Statesman and Nation.

Oxford, he wrote (signing himself simply "Oxonian"), had become a hotbed of fascism. "Rather smart young men" with a taste for "fast cars and camel-hair coats" were displaying the books of Sir Oswald Mosley on their tables. They could be heard saying at their private binges that "soon we shall all have to be fascists, whether we like it or not."

The Greenness of Grass. What had happened to Oxford--or that splinter of it that "Oxonian" had stubbed his toe on? "Oxonian" thought one man was largely to blame--a wan and wispy philosopher named Alfred Jules ("Freddie") Ayer. Ayer's book, Language, Truth and Logic, had "acquired almost the status of a philosophic Bible" at Oxford. It insisted that "value judgments" of beauty and goodness were, philosophically speaking, nonsense. They were moral sentiments, not facts at all. Such heresies, "Oxonian" thought, left no place for human values, created the moral void fascism required.

At once the letters column of the New Statesman bristled with arguments pro & con Freddie Ayer. Did his philosophy really lead to fascism? One professional philosophizer who sided with "Oxonian" was bush-bearded C.E.M. Joad. To accept Ayer's assumptions, wrote Joad, would be to agree "that there is no meaning in the universe . . . that it means nothing to say that Beethoven is a greater musician than Mr. Sinatra . . . that all talk about God ... is twaddle."

All last month the argument went on. Readers argued about Ayer and surrealism, Ayer and mathematics, Ayer and the greenness of grass. One philosopher who paid little heed was Freddie Ayer himself. Last week, far from Oxford and the New Statesman, he was in the U.S., getting ready to teach courses at New York University.

The Agony of Philosophy. At 37, and with only two books to his credit, Freddie Ayer has become Britain's most discussed younger philosopher, the chief apostle of a school which its followers call "Logical Positivism." Freddie Ayer himself is a man who hates to get up in the morning and finds writing philosophy agony ("I smoke cigarette after cigarette, twirl my watch chain, and all that sort of thing"). The son of a small businessman, he made his way on scholarships through Eton ("I wasn't awfully happy there") and Oxford ("The people were much cleverer than one"). He stayed on at Oxford as a lecturer, then (at 34) Fellow and Dean of Wadham College. In 1947, he left for a professorship at London University.

Freddie Ayer thinks that philosophy is scientific in temper, has no business preaching moral or esthetic precepts. There are only two sorts of meaningful statements, he says--those based on observable facts, and those which connect them by logic. In Ayer's philosophy, statements like "There is a God" are neither true nor false, since he regards them as unverifiable. It means nothing to say, "That man is good to support his mother." The fact is that the man supports his mother. Calling him good merely expresses an attitude towards the action.

Ayer thinks that "Oxonian's" fuss about fascism is "extremely stupid." All he wants to do, he says, is to distinguish between sentiment and fact; the fascists were forever confusing the two. That sounded all right, in a way--but most Britons didn't like the sound.

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