Independent Indian: Work & Life of Dr Subroto Roy

John Wisdom (1904-1993), Main Philosophical Works:

Interpretation and Analysis, 1931
Problems of Mind and Matter 1934
Other Minds, 1952
Philosophy & Psychoanalysis, 1953
Paradox & Discovery, 1965
Logical Constructions (1931-1933),1969
Proof and Explanation (The Virginia Lectures 1957), 1991

Secondary literature:
Wisdom: Twelve Essays, R. Bambrough (ed) 1974
Philosophy and Life: Essays on John Wisdom, I. Dilman (ed) 1984.

Renford Bambrough (1926-1999), Main Philosophical Works:

“Socratic Paradox”, Philosophical Quarterly, 1960

“Universals and Family Resemblances”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1960-61

“Plato’s Modern Friends and Enemies”, Philosophy 1962

The Philosophy of Aristotle, 1963

“Principia Metaphysica”, Philosophy 1964

New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (edited by R. Bambrough), 1965

“Unanswerable Questions”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 1966

Plato, Popper and Politics (edited by R. Bambrough), 1967

Reason, Truth and God 1969

“Foundations”, Analysis, 1970

“Objectivity and Objects”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1971-72

“How to Read Wittgenstein”, in Understanding Wittgenstein, Royal Institute of Philosophy 1972-3

“The Shape of Ignorance”, in Lewis (ed) Contemporary British Philosophy, 1976

Introduction & Notes to Plato’s Republic (Lindsay trans.), 1976

Conflict and the Scope of Reason, 1974; also in Ratio 1978

“Intuition and the Inexpressible” in Katz (ed) Mysticism & Philosophical Analysis, 1978

Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge, 1979

“Thought, Word and Deed”, Proceedings of Aristotelian Society Supplement 1980

“Peirce, Wittgenstein and Systematic Philosophy”, MidWest Studies in Philosophy, 1981

“The Scope of Reason: An Epistle to the Persians”, in Objectivity and Cultural Divergence, Royal Institute of Philosophy, 1984

“Principia Metaphysica: The Scope of Reason” also known as “The Roots of Reason”; a work and manuscript mentioned several times but now unknown.

A personal note by Subroto Roy for a public lecture delivered at the University of Buckingham, August 24 2004:

“Renford Bambrough and I met once on January 31 1982, when I had returned to Cambridge from the USA for my PhD viva voce examination. He signed and gave me his last personal copy of Reason, Truth and God. Three years earlier, in 1979, I, as a 24 year old PhD student under F.H. Hahn in economics, had written to him expressing my delight at finding his works and saying these were immensely important to economics; he invited me to his weekly discussion groups at St John’s College but I could not attend. Between 1979 and 1989 we corresponded while I worked in America on my application of his and Wisdom’s work to problems in economics, which emerged in Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry (Routledge, International Library of Philosophy 1989, 1991), a work which got me into a lot of trouble with American economists (though Milton Friedman and Theodore W. Schultz defended it). Bambrough said of it “The work is altogether well-written and admirably clear”. On another occasion he said he was “extremely pleased” at the interest I had taken in his work. The preface of my book said he was not responsible for the use I had made of his writings, which I reiterate now. Returning to Britain in 2004, I find the work of Wisdom and Bambrough unknown or forgotten, even at the great University North East of Buckingham where they had lived and worked. In my view, they played a kind of modern-day Plato and Aristotle to Wittgenstein’s Socrates; in terms of Eastern philosophy, the wisdom they achieved in their lives and have left behind for us in their work to use and apply to our own problems, make them like modern-day “Boddhisatvas” of Mahayana Buddhism. My lecture “Science, Religion, Art, and the Necessity of Freedom” purports to apply their work to current international problems of grave significance, namely the cultural conflicts made apparent since the September 11 2001 attacks on America. As I am as likely to fail as to succeed in making this application, the brief bibliography given above is intended to direct interested persons to their work first hand for themselves.”

April 2007: See also Preface 2007 to the republication here at www.independentindian.com of Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry, and also the 2004 public lecture “Science, Religion, Art & the Necessity of Freedom”.

A few months ago, I started another blog dedicated to getting DH Lawrence’s Phoenix out to be read by everyone freely today. This is especially urgent given all the rubbish emerging and all the rubbish that yet threatens to emerge about Lawrence, especially from India, especially from Kolkata, in fact especially from a neighbour of mine of whom it may be said as Leavis once said of another: he is “completely blind to literature and art, and completely without understanding of his incapacity”.

The aim of my Lawrence blog, as stated on July 15 2007, is given below:

“Phoenix was a volume published in 1936 edited and with an introduction by Edward D. McDonald containing the posthumous papers of D. H. Lawrence, including the bulk (possibly all) of his known non-fictional writings. Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 in Victoria Street, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, and died on 2 March 1930 in Villa Robermund, Vence, Alpes Maritimes. He was perhaps the greatest novelist, writer and literary critic of the 20th Century, and his genius is manifest in Phoenix.

I bought my copy of the book, a first American edition, in Washington DC, in the summer of 1992. It has been a source of depthless pleasure and wisdom ever since. It does not appear to be available in print nor is it even known by those who pretend to be authors, novelists, writers and literary critics today. What I propose to do in this blog is to type in as much of the text of as many of its articles as I can, as and when I feel like it, in order to share the pleasure of its genius with anyone who visits this blog.

How I came to Lawrence’s work is briefly as follows. When I was about 23 or 24, in 1978 or 1979, I was in a conversation at a restaurant opposite Kings College, Cambridge (the Copper Kettle?) with a friend at the time, John Lyon, later of the University of Bristol. I was a Research Student in Economics under Frank Hahn, John was a Research Student in English under Q D Leavis. Both of us were members of Corpus Christi College, and lived at Lekhampton. There would have been others present at the conversation, probably Robert D. Fluharty, lawyer of West Virginia, but I cannot recall who they may have been. John was arguing or perhaps mentioned that he had come from the Leavis home where it was mentioned that Anna Karenina was the greatest novel that had been written. I recall thinking this to be an inane point of conversation, and it would be years before I realised that I had thought this because I had been still at the time someone who thought excessively highly of modern economics.

John may have been referring to FR Leavis’s masterly essay on Anna Karenina, which too I came to read decades later. The name of FR Leavis was faintly familiar, and I think I once saw him at Heffer’s bookstore shortly before his death. Leavis’s name and work then appeared again in the work of the philosopher Renford Bambrough, whose influence on my own work has been described at my main blog www.independentindian.com.

A decade later, in 1988-89 in Honolulu, I read War and Peace for the first time, and some years later read Anna Karenina too. In Washington and New York City in 1992-1996, and also in Pasadena and Honolulu in 1989-1991, I collected the work of the Leavises and also Lawrence, all of which has been a source of much pleasure since. In all that, Phoenix has been paramount.

Subroto Roy

Kolkata, India,

July 15 2007″

“For Art there is no Ugliness in Nature”

“I have arrived at this belief by the study of Nature. I can only grasp the beauty of the soul by the beauty of the body, but some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and will declare how the whole earth is beautiful. I have never been able to say this in sculpture so well as I wish and as I feel it affirmed within me. For poets Beauty has always been some particular landscape, some particular woman; but it should be all women, all landscapes. A negro or a Mongol has his beauty, however remote from ours, and it must be the same with their characters. There is no ugliness. When I was young I made that mistake, as others do; I could not undertake a woman’s bust unless I thought her pretty according to my particular idea of beauty; today I should do the bust of any woman, and it would be just as beautiful. And however ugly a woman may look, when she is with her lover she becomes beautiful; there is beauty in her character, in her passions, and beauty exists as soon as character or passion becomes visible, for the body is a casting on which passions are imprinted. And even without that, there is always the blood that flows in the veins and the air that fills the lungs.”

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)

Note from SR: My father was a senior diplomat in India’s Embassy in Paris 1971-1973, and I (who had gained admission at Haileybury College, Hertford, in England to do Natural Science at Advanced and Special levels) loved my visits to Paris, crossing the Channel by boat or hovercraft. We lived at 14 Rue Eugene Manuel and I came to know Paris as well as a 17-18 year old could. In 1978 I returned from Cambridge to Paris for an interview, and that visit allowed me to come to know better the magnificent and moving art of Rodin. I later found his aesthetic philosophy captured in the statement above, which seems to me to be summarised by this equation:

Beauty = Ugliness + Love

which implies

Beauty - Love = Ugliness

E.g. a beautiful woman who is unloved becomes ugly just as a plain woman who is loved becomes beautiful. If DH Lawrence had known of Rodin’s statement

” some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and will declare how the whole earth is beautiful”

he would have found it resonant. Perhaps his own magnificent descriptions as a naturalist made Lawrence the successor whom Rodin had wished for.

I found Rodin’s statement quoted (I think) in the work of Havelock Ellis. I wrote to the Musee Rodin once to ask if they knew of its original location but I do not have any answer.

It seems incredible that D. H. Lawrence from about 1910 until his death in 1930 produced this immense body of creative work and perhaps more I am unaware of:

Novels:

St Mawr

Aaron’s Rod

Kangaroo

The White Peacock

Sons and Lovers

The Trespasser

The Lost Girl

Women in Love

The Rainbow

The Plumed Serpent

The Virgin and the Gypsy

(with ML Skinner) The Boy in the Bush

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Short Stories:

The Prussian Officer

England, my England

The Captain’s Doll

Twilight in Italy

The Woman Who Rode Away

Poetry

Bay

Look! We have come through!

Amores

Birds, Beasts and Flowers

Tortoises

Love Poems and Others

New Poems

Pansies

Collected Poems

Plays

Touch and Go

The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd

David

Belles Lettres etc

Studies in Classic American Literature

Movements in European History

Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

Fantasia of the Unconscious

Sea and Sardinia

Mornings in Mexico

Translations of Giovanni Verga: Lttle Novels of Sicily

Phoenix: Posthumous Papers edited and with an introduction by Edward D. McDonald

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited and with an introduction by Aldous Huxley

(Secondary Literature: DH Lawrence: Novelist by FR Leavis)

Science, Religion, Art & the Necessity of Freedom: Reason’s Response to Islamism

by
Subroto Roy, PhD (Cantab.), BScEcon (London)

A public lecture delivered as the Wincott Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Buckingham on August 24 2004, based on a keynote address to the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats, Manila, November 16 2001

I am most grateful to the University of Buckingham for allowing me to refresh and carry forward my research these last several months. For some 25 years I have been learning of and reflecting upon the work of two great modern British philosophers, John Wisdom (1904-1993) and Renford Bambrough (1926-1999). In the 1980s in America, I came to apply their thinking in Philosophy of Economics (Routledge 1989), a book which got me into a lot of trouble there. Returning to Britain in 2004, I am dismayed to find their work almost forgotten or unknown today, even at the Ancient University that had been their home. “Orientalists” from the West once used to comprehend and highlight the achievements of the East for the peoples of the East who were unaware of them; I am happy to return the favour by becoming an “Occidentalist” in highlighting a little of the work of two of Britain’s finest sons of which she has become unaware. Wisdom and Bambrough played a kind of modern-day Plato and Aristotle to the Socrates played by Wittgenstein (1889-1951); the knowledge they achieved in their lives and have left behind for us to use and apply to our own problems make them, in terms of Eastern philosophy, rather like the “Boddhisatvas” of Mahayana Buddhism. I do not expect anyone to share such an extravagant view, and will be more than satisfied if I am able to suggest that we can have a grasp of the nature and scope of human reasoning thanks to their work which may help resolve the most intractable and seemingly irreconcilable of all current international problems, namely the grave cultural conflicts made apparent since September 11 2001.

2. The September 11 attacks aimed to cripple one of the world’s largest and most important countries in a new kind of act of war. The perpetrators apparently saw themselves — subjectively in their own minds — acting in the name of one of the world’s largest and most important religions. Since the attacks, the world has become an unusually bewildering place, as if notions of freedom, tolerance and the rule of law have been proven a lie overnight, as if virtues like patience, common reasoning and good humour have all become irrelevant, deserving to be flushed away in face of a resurgence of ancient savageries. The attackers and their friends taunt the West saying their love of death is greater and more powerful than the West’s love of life; the taunts and the counter-taunts of their powerful adversaries have had the effect of spraying panic, mutual fear, hatred or destruction across the surface of everyday life everywhere, so we now have bizarre scenes of people taking off their shoes and clothes and putting them on again while travelling, and of the British public being advised on how to cope with nerve gas attacks when they might have much rather been watching “reality TV” instead. An Age of Unreason appears upon us.

The very simple proposition I put forward here is this: there are, indeed there cannot be, any conflicts that are necessarily irresoluble. To put it differently, the logical scope of common reasoning is indefinite and limitless. There is no question to which there is not a right answer. If I was asked to answer in one sentence what has been the combined contribution to human thought of Wittgenstein, Wisdom and Bambrough, indeed of modern British philosophy as a whole, I would say it has been the proof that there are no unanswerable questions, that there is no question to which there is not a right answer.

By “common reasoning” I shall mean merely to refer to the structure of any conversation well-enough described by F. R. Leavis’s operators in literary criticism:

“This is so, isn’t it?,

Yes, but….”.

My “yes” to your “This is so, isn’t it?” indicates agreement with what you have said while my “but…” tells you I believe there may be something more to the matter, some further logical relation to be found, some further fact to be investigated or experiment carried out, some further reflection necessary and possible upon already known and agreed upon facts. It amounts to a new “This is so, isn’t it?” to which you may respond with your own, “Yes, but…”; and our argument would continue. Another set of operators is:

“You might as well say…”;

“Exactly so”;

“But this is different…”

This was how Wisdom encapsulated the “case-by-case” method of argument that he pioneered and practised. It requires intimate description of particular cases and marking of similarities and differences between them, yielding a powerful indefinitely productive method of objective reasoning, distinct from and logically prior to the usual methods of deduction and induction that exhaust the range of positivism. We are able to see how common reasoning may proceed in practice in subtle fields like law, psychology, politics, ethics, aesthetics and theology, just as objectively as it does in natural science and mathematics. Wittgenstein had spoken of our “craving for generality” and our “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case”. Wisdom formalised the epistemological priority of particular over general saying: “Examples are the final food of thought. Principles and laws may serve us well. They can help us to bring to bear on what is now in question what is not now in question. They help us to connect one thing with another and another and another. But at the bar of reason, always the final appeal is to cases.” And “Argument must be heard”.

In all conflicts – whether within a given science, between different sciences, between sciences and religion, within a given religion, between different religions, between sciences and arts, within the arts, between religion and the arts, between quarrelling nations, quarrelling neighbours or quarrelling spouses, whether in real relationships of actual life or hypothetical relationships of literature and drama – an approach of this kind tells us there is something further that may be said, some improvement that can be carried out, some further scope for investigation or experiment allowing discovery of new facts, some further reflection necessary or possible upon known facts. There are no conflicts that are necessarily irresoluble. Where the suicide-bombers and their powerful adversaries invite us to share their hasty and erroneous assumption that religious, political or economic cultures are becoming irreconcilable and doomed to be fights unto death, we may give to them instead John Wisdom’s “Argument must be heard.” Parties to this o