A. J. Ayer, Mike Tyson, and Alfred North Whitehead
If I were forced to categorize this post, I’d be torn between two options: the category of “Trivia about philosophers that I find interesting” and the category of “How can I distract myself for at least a minute from the country that is falling apart around me?” I’m hard pressed to decide between the two, so I guess I’ll put it in both.
One rather interesting anecdote in Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates describes an encounter between the philosopher A. J. Ayer and the professional boxer Mike Tyson. (Perhaps you’ll be as surprised as I was to discover that there was such an encounter!). Somehow Tyson and Ayer ended up at the same party in New York City in 1987. Ayer was chatting with other guests when they were interrupted by a woman who said that a friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. Ayer rushed to the bedroom, and found Tyson pushing himself on the young (and then relatively unknown) Naomi Campbell. Ayer instructed Tyson to back off. Tyson was not impressed: “Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.” Ayer was not intimidated: “And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest we talk about this like rational men.” As they continued their conversation, Campbell managed to slip away.
Callard took this anecdote from Ben Rogers’s biography of Ayer (p. 344). I was intrigued enough to retrieve that book from the library. I quickly confirmed the story, but then found myself reading more of the biography. Frankly, my interest surprised me. My only contact with Ayer before then was reading his first book Language, Truth, and Logic in college years (ok, decades) ago. I’m pretty sure that was standard fare for philosophy majors when I was in college – perhaps it still is. And, I have to say, I wasn’t convinced by his argument. But I skimmed a few pages of the biography. Ayer’s life seemed rather interesting — I was particularly taken by his insistence that philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with day to day life (another point of disagreement!) — so I brought the book home from the library and began reading it.
So how does Alfred North Whitehead get into this account? I’ve admitted that I didn’t think much of Ayer’s work. In fact, I think that if I were to set up a conceptual map, ranking all of the philosophers whose work I’ve read from the one with whom I agreed the most to the one with whom I agreed the least, Whitehead would be very close to the head of the line and Ayer would be at, or at least very near, the end of the line. I’ve long thought that Ayer’s work in particular and analytic philosophy more generally are big parts of the reason that Whitehead’s work fell out of favor in the mid-twentieth century. In my judgment, this was a mistake, the ill effects of which we are still suffering. I wouldn’t have said that analytic philosophy is worthless, but I do think its influence has been greater than it should have been.
In 1935, Ayer applied for a studentship at Oxford (a position created for Albert Einstein five years earlier and left vacant when Einstein departed for Princeton). Whitehead, by then having moved from London to Cambridge to join Harvard’s philosophy department, wrote an enthusiastic letter of endorsement, saying that he considered Ayer to be in the same league as “J.M. Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and others of that type among my old pupils” (Rogers, pp. 113f). Pretty high praise, coming from Whitehead, and a lesson for me regarding the importance of respecting a variety of philosophical views. I knew that Ayer knew Russell, and that Russell was Whitehead’s student, colleague, friend, and co-author, but I didn’t realize that Whitehead knew much about Ayer’s work, much less that he valued it so highly.
Hoping to learn more, I consulted Victor Lowe’s two-volume of Whitehead; I found no entry for Ayer in the index of that comprehensive work. But, interestingly enough, a web search turned up Ayer’s review of volume one of that biography. It’s a rather lukewarm review, though with the exception of Ayer’s skepticism about Whitehead’s theism, the review is more a criticism of Lowe’s account than a criticism of Whitehead.
As an aside, here’s an unrelated tidbit from Rogers’s biography, yet another admonition to appreciate the importance of diversity in philosophy. British philosopher R.G. Collingwood was largely unsympathetic to Ayer’s views, but that didn’t mean he thought Language, Truth, and Logic was irrelevant. Apparently Collingwood happened to be in an Oxford bookstore and “overheard [H.W.B.] Joseph and [H.A.] Prichard complaining to each other that Lanugage, Truth, and Logic had ever found a publisher. Collingwood … turned to them: ‘Gentlemen, this book will be read when your names are forgotten’” (p. 125n). Ouch.
Admittedly, all of this is a bit too much in the weeds for most people. But I found it interesting in itself, and also a minor distraction from all the turmoil going on around me. Returning to Callard’s book, perhaps I could see all this as a small example of what she sees as the value of dialogue among people who disagree on answers to difficult questions. And that brings me back to the world outside my reading room: there are many reasons to be concerned about the state of the United States in particular and the world more generally, but I’d place the disdain for diversity near the top of a list of those concerns. Yes, I think diversity is important in philosophy. It’s even more important in democracy. Unlike Ayer, I’m convinced that philosophy really does have something to say about how best to live in the world.