The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy

Abstract

F DR. Mure's Retreat from Truth had an epigraph, it would certainly be that dictum from Appearance and Reality to which he obliquely refers in his preface: Where all is rotten it is a man's work to cry fish. That all is rotten, that spiritual sterility is leading characteristic both of contemporary poetry and of contemporary philosophy, he does not for a moment doubt; and if he cries stinking fish in a somewhat muted tone of voice, without Billingsgate vitality phrase might suggest, his despair is nonetheless genuine and bitter. If at present, he concludes his jeremiad, I had an intelligent son coming up to Oxford, should not regret it if he turned his face away from all three honour schools that include philosophy, even from Greats (p. 250). The contrast in mood with Professor Morton White's Toward Reunion in Philosophy could scarcely be more striking. White is by no means complacent about twentieth-century philosophical scene; he subjects Moore, Russell, and Carnap to lengthy, close, and critical examination. But general tone of this criticism is optimistic, ebullient, sometimes a little tiringly so. White writes as one of family, whereas Mure is self-consciously an outsider. The reunion White envisages would be a new alliance between positivism and pragmatism; these are already united in Mure's mind as different sides of bad empiricist penny. White's attitude to Mure's ecumenical maneuvers would be very like a Protestant evangelical's attitude to proposals for reunion of Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic Churches: Tweedledum at last recognizes his identity with Tweedledee. The only reunion which would interest Mure is a convergence and revitalizing of scattered forces of idealism, and of that he sees no real prospect, in England at least. Oddly enough, however-and for all this difference in manner, tone, and concern-White and Mure arrive at conclusions which at least run parallel. White would not care for Mure's phrase, the unity of value