Nicholas Mosley Interview Transcripts 2

JB - I know you'd done some philosophy at university before the war and I suppose that the character Stephen in Accident represented something of what you learnt there. NM - Yes that's true, and of course after leaving university I did continue to read philosophy, bits here and there in my spare time. And what I roughly learned was this, which is Stephen's introductory talk to his pupils about philosophy:

There is a lot of nonsense talked about philosophy nowadays; people say it is no longer a guide to everyday experience. This criticism is superficial. There is no more useful work than to illuminate old obscurities and contradictions, and by understnding them prevent more pathological confusions. For the rest - for what has to grow - this has to be found by the whole of life, and not particularly by intellectul discipline. [Accident, Hodder & Stoughton  p.14]

J - But you thought that something needed to be done in an area other than strict philosophy. N - Well, I thought that what needed to be done was probably outside the area of what people at that time were apt to call philosophy, but I thought that it could still be philosophy, in a slightly different style from what people were talking about just after the war. I suppose this book was about the early sixties, that kind of thing.  J - Well in the early sixties philosophers were doing a lot of logical theory, and they were beginning to look at ordinary language, but it was all in the effort to make something precise of it and to find a sort of structure that was universal, a logical structure.  N - That was the kind of stuff that I tried to understand I suppose, but found it very difficult to understand because they were defining philosophy in such a small area, and the more they defined it, to make it true or accurate, there was less and less space that philosophy was actually relevant to. And, as far as I could understand it in my own sort of amateur reading, it was this kind of thing that Wittgenstein had been saying in his later work. He had been saying that the areas that philosophy could profitably deal with, what it was traditionally understood that philosophy could deal with, was getting smaller and smaller; and then about life and what was going on, et cetera, one had to be silent - in what had traditionally been called philosophy. And it seemed to me - I don't know about Wittgenstein - that one didn't have to be silent about it in other forms of language.  J - An aesthetic language of some sort.  N - Yes, poetry, art... any sort of aesthetic language. This didn't mean that anything went in this language, because this sort of language has its own disciplines, but of course it was much more difficult to put the disciplines of  poetic language into clear language than it is was the disciplines of rational language. J - Well the answer to that from a philosopher is that it is because it has something to do with truth and meaning, that it tries to capture things which the more disciplined study has left aside, or what Wittgenstein said had to be left aside. N - Yes, but then what I began to feel was that when one was dealing with life, with human beings' actual experience of life, this wasn't comprehendable, apprehendable, in very clear cut rational terms. One's experience of life was of a series of contradictions, you could call them, or paradoxes. One's experience of life, one's ordinary life as a human being, one's heartfelt life, was full of paradoxical, almost contradictory pulls, contradictory truths, and this was something outside the area of what rational, analytical philosophy thought itself able to deal with.

J - You wanted to look then precisely at the areas that philosophy said it couldn't get a handle on.  N - Yes, well it seemed to me as though philosophy was almost saying that it couldn't get a handle on anything to do with human beings... almost. I mean it could only get a handle on the rational faculty of human beings, the faculty of saying that if 2+2 = 4 then... It handled that, which is very real, but this is quite a small part of what people spend most of their time caring about. J - You mentioned Wittgenstein, and he did focus on language as part of ordinary life, and he employed the notion of a language game, which is part of an interaction, but really he didn't penetrate that; it was part of distancing himself from a study of communication as it's actually pursued.  N - Well I think that's what I gathered. The idea had been thrown in that language is a game, with the sort of rules of games, rules of style, of what made meaning, what was in the context and what wasn't, all those sorts of rules. But then, as far as I can understand it, Wittgenstein, having recognized this, then didn't do much enquiry into - or demonstration of - what he meant by this business of language being a game, or language games. And so then I got the idea that one could do much more about this in fiction, in telling a story, because in telling a story you're not just saying 2 + 2, you're saying this happens and then that happens, and this might not have a very direct, rational connection with that, but it has a connection which you can see if you tell a story. Because this is one's experience of life. In life this event happens, and then that event, and there's no very rational connection, but one can recognize the way these things make a story, because this is what one recognizes about one's own life, this is one's experience of one's own life. So I thought this sort of thing we're talking about could be done in the form of a novel, in fact really it could almost only be done in the form of a novel, or fiction.

J - Going back to Wittgenstein - he didn't talk about what happens to your perception of your conduct and experience after you've recognized that there's this cluster of games that you're involved in by society.  N - Right, he didn't go on to say, ok once you've recognized these things he was talking about, what happens then, what's the different style of carry-on? And of course what began to interest me later was about Wittgenstein the man. All these little books about Wittgenstein the person started coming out in the early seventies, these memoirs of people who knew him. And this was very interesting because what one saw was that Wittgenstein in fact was trying to live some style as a consequence of what he was talking about. He wasn't writing about what this style was, but he was obviously trying to live it in the strange, sort of difficult life that he was leading. He stopped being a philosopher at Cambridge at the beginning of the war and became a hospital orderly, then he was taken out of that and given quite interesting research work to do in medicine in the hospital. And then after the war he went back to philosophy and he was trying to live what he'd felt and learned in doing his philosophy, but as far as I can make out he didn't feel confident about writing it.  J - Well this was partly because of his earlier book The Tractatus and a shift in his view about the possibilities of the investigation of language and the use of language in an investigation of itself. On the philosophical level his work was paradoxical as well, because he was trying to do something which later on he said couldn't be done. And if one properly understood what he was trying to say about the limits of language then one would, having read his book, go on to something else.

N - Yes, well I really can't understand ninety-five percent of The Tractatus, my mind doesn't work like that, but I struggled along, and I got the feel of what he was saying, which is what you say. This very intense concentrated effort was really at the end aimed at saying that this really wasn't what mattered. One was using traditional rational analytical philosophy in order to say that traditional rational analytical philosophy was hardly saying anything at all. And in fact when one has made this effort, he had the image that you should sort of kick away this ladder by which one had reached this point of understanding about how limited the whole thing was, kick away the ladder that got one to this realization and then go onto something different. That wasn't exactly what he said - "go onto something different" - but then if one kicks the ladder away one is onto something different. J - You saw it as a hope that there might be something to go on to. N - Yes, when one kicks the ladder away one is on a roof or something, wherever one was trying to get to on a ladder, the top of a tree, halfway up a tree. Then what is interesting is what you do, what happens to you when you're halfway up the tree.

J - Part of that is obviously the use of fiction to try to say something about philosophy and life in general, but it also mixes all that theoretical interpretation of the study with your life. N - Yes. One learns the limits of rationality, which I think is a very important thing to learn, because an awful lot of life goes on in these hopeless arguments - Yes you did, No I didn't, Oh yes you did... - as though one were arguing rationally in an area where rationality can't ever get anywhere. And in all these rows in families, of course each thinks they're being rational. Well they are being rational, but it simply isn't helping what they're talking about at all.  So yes, I think it is important for ordinary human life that one should say, look, skip all this, you've got your rationality, I've got mine, but this isn't very interesting. The only interesting thing is to see, ok this is the way I look at it, this is the way you look at it, ok, so what then.. what happens then, when we see this?  J - Well I'm not sure its having your own rationality, but its having a good story that you can use to make your point. N - Yes, but you see one uses rationality from a premise, and everyone has their own premise, and then you go back and argue about these. Rationality is a tool that's relevant for clearing things up, but it's not relevant to getting on with life. I'm not sure that's quite the way to put it, but in this area words are very difficult. It depends on some sort of style, yes.

J - The other approach to your interest in philosophy is by looking at your early essay on David Hume and the problem of personal identity. You quoted it in your autobiography, on Descartes.  N - Oh, I remember, yes. If you look at what a person is then you can see all these particular things, parts of a person, but by looking in, noticing bits of yourself, you're not [finding] constructing anything that we'd call a self. But then what I would have said wouldn't I is that this self that can see the separate unconnected things, the self that sees this, is not in that same category. The thing that can see this is one's self; the thing that can see oneself as a lot of separate things isn't a lot of separate things, it's the thing that can see it. J - Yes, well a philosopher would say this does not offer an answer either, that that doesn't provide a real, essential self because of course there's another level of perception of that, and so you can generate an infinite regress. N - Well sure, but there's no harm in that. It seems to me to be a good thing to realize that one is generating some infinite regress, because what the self is...  perhaps this is a very good description of what the self is: it's an infinite regress, a regress or progress to something infinite. And this is a very good thing to think. The human can't handle more than one step back, there is the me that can watch myself, perhaps there's a me that can just watch me watching myself, but ok, after that, it floats off, into some state that philosophers call infinite regress, to some state where you lose control, but this is what you feel yourself, what a human being is.

J - The point is not to try to provide a rational justification, but to notice this process going on. N - No, I think the failure is to try to provide an exact definition of self, exactly what it is. Because as I say, you can make one definition, then a definition of that definition, and then you go floating off. Well now if you're an analytical philosopher you say, alright, the whole thing is nonsense; if you're me then you think the whole thing's... you're really getting at the nitty-gritty, this is exactly what human experience is. And if you do look at yourself looking at yourself then you do realize you're involved in something that you can't quite put into words but which is extremely real. And you can call it something infinite, that's fine. And I think that's an actual experience, you see. I think the hard-nosed analytical philosophers are the ones who are dealing in sort of fairy-tales, and they know they are, they're trying to define, narrowing down the area of what they're talking about until it's sort of nonexistent. 2+2=4 therefore 2+2=4, because "2" is such that...  They narrow it down to tautology, nothing at all. If they call that nothingness hard-nosed experience, they're welcome to it. But actual experience is this thing that goes floating away from very real experience, to something infinite. Call it infinite or what you like, but it's something outside the area of these sorts of words. J - There just is something that can't be grasped. N - It's something that can't be grasped by analytical words; it can be grasped, has been felt to have been grasped, by poets, artists, mystics, saints.  Sure, people have felt they've grasped it, but one thing they can't do is put it on a half sheet of notepaper which will be understandable in rational language.

J - You feel that unless we as theorists, or novelists or artists, acknowledge that subjective base of experience, or experience of being a person, then philosophy can't say anything interesting about life, is that it?  N - Well, yes, I think all, pretty well all what has been traditionally recognized as good art, literature, always has this feel about it, it's always the individual in relationship with and his struggle with the larger entity, his realization that there is some scheme of things which he's in relation to, and learning about, and finding his way in and through. J - I suppose the other side of this is that living and living well, living rightly in some way, is not just a matter of following the rules of some game either. This would be the other weakness of the games metaphor. N - Well I think learning how to live is... Yes, you're not only learning what the rules of the game are, you're making them up at the same time, you're learning how to make the rules of the game. Putting it like that makes it sound arbitrary, everyone just makes up their own rules, which in a way everyone tries to do, but in trying to do this you learn that it doesn't work, unless you're in harmony with everyone else's games. If you make up the rules of your own game and just go busting along you're apt to come to grief quick. People aren't going to like you, work with you; you aren't going to get anywhere. So you learn to make your game in relation to all the other games going on, and the cosmic game, which you can call either the total of everyone's games or something more than the total, something infinite, more than the total. That I don't think matters; whatever you feel, you find the words to try to put most accurately what you feel; but you're finding what is your real game - by "real" I mean what seems to work, to fit best with the cosmic game.

J - I think the premise of this must be that the rules that are offered in regard to the real difficulties of life don't work, or in trying to apply them to the paradoxes of life, the rules offered by society, or by philosophers, just can't be applied. N - Yes, I think that's absolutely true. I think in the experiences of ordinary life, in everyday, basic life, human beings find themselves naturally, without any fault of theirs, find themselves naturally involved in paradoxical situations, that the old ways of looking at things, the analytical ways of looking at things, simply can't deal with. And I think because they've been somehow taught that rationality ought to be able to deal with this, that experience ought to be reasonable, they should be able to make it reasonable, and then they can't do it, this is very worrying, and it causes an enormous amount of worry and concern. In ordinary life one can, for instance, genuinely love one's wife and husband and genuinely think they're a pain in the neck, and there are moments when one wishes they would sort of go back to one's mother-in-law. And people think there's something wrong in this, that this can't be right: if I love my husband or wife I shouldn't think like this, or I don't really think like this, there's something wrong. And people get very confused, and then they say one of these things can't be so, either I don't love my wife or I don't think this. So people just go into confusion, or they blot it out, or sit on it... all the jargon talk of it festering in the unconscious, getting ill, become stupid and ill. Whereas in fact this is what human beings are like: one does love people and one does sometimes wish they were elsewhere or something. One has temptations to... one can't be too frivolous; on the other hand it might not be a bad thing to be a bit frivolous, comic about it, because this is true. What we haven't got is a way of talking about these paradoxes in a natural way. It is not only the thing about loving one's wife and getting fed up; it's all the paradoxes between what one knows is one's social duty, the conflict between that and between what might be necessary for oneself; what is selfish and what is not: is being selfish on one level in the end good for everyone else or not. I mean all these simple things come up everyday in people's lives, not only to people who think about these things but also to those who do not think easily, naturally, in these terms. They just happen the whole time.

J - To be a character in society but to also know that you're this disappearing point of knowing that won't stand still for analysis, that can't be produced in any way, can't be grasped in language... N - Well it can be grasped in a story, that's the thing. You can tell a story about a man genuinely loving his wife (I'm going back to this one because I suppose we've got stuck on it) and genuinely getting fed up, and genuinely trying to work this out, through, make it bearable... And the way he can do this is not by saying it's not true but by admitting it, by looking at himself in this paradoxical situation as a paradoxical being, as a being whose mind works in this contradictory paradoxical way. And by so doing, what's interesting about life is that by looking at these things I think the contradictions are worked out. It is only if you don't admit they exist that these kinds of contradictions, paradoxes, are not worked out and people go into confusion. And after all, this is the theory behind a lot of psychotherapy stuff at the moment. A great mass of individuals do find themselves at certain moments stuck in these paradoxes. The answer isn't sort of "problem solving": leave your wife, or don't leave your wife, or stop wanting to get rid of her every now and then or something. The answer is to look at the truth of what you are as a human being, and then the problem mysteriously, wonderfully, seems very often to answer itself, in that something new, something then further happens. The answer to these things is not in rationality, not the rational answer A or B, it's in what actually happens as part of the continuing story. So if the person can see himself as he really is, then something different starts to happen.
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  This then became a discussion of Mosley's determination to write about characters which are not "all of a piece".