570 - Freedom and Immorality

Freedom and Immorality
By Ian T. Ramsey
157 pp. London, S.C.M. Press, Ltd., 1960. l6s.

This most ample statement, to date, of the views of the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford upon the vexing subject, the meaning of religious language, was first given as the Forwood Lectures in the University of Liverpool, 1957. In this published version, they are a part of the admirable "Library of Philosophy and Theology" of which Professor Ramsey himself is one of the general editors and which was the first, is still one of the few and most successful attempts, in English, to produce some kind of discussion between those philosophers and theologians who were rooted mainly in the Anglo-Saxon empiricist, and more recently, Oxonian tradition and those whose work revolved about the problems after Kant-the phenomenology and existentialism of the philosophers; Barthianism, Bultmannianism among theologians.

Ramsey's book is not only the most sophisticated volume in this series; in a way impossible to more than suggest here, it offers the side-benefit of bringing divergent motives of contemporary thought into focus.

It seems absurd to suggest what few on either side of this division could even find intelligible, let alone could admit: but, as heterogeneous as to style, method, and explicit conception of philosophy as are-say-Barth, Bultmann, and Sartre, on one hand, and the linguistic analysts on the other, the single most annoying barrier between them has been the product of the thing they have most fundamentally in common. I mean, of

571 - Freedom and Immorality

course, a new, still emerging and not yet acknowledged change in their joint expectations for and conception of philosophical or theological what does the difference mean?-authorship and argumentation. The fact that this conception and these expectations have been gradually coming to the level of the explicit for over three hundred years should not conceal from us their peculiar bearing on contemporary thought. When in a pluralist culture there are no premises beyond dispute, there is no knock-down proof. A work in philosophy cannot simply make allusion to the most impersonal and publicly-shared facts and then wait for the power of reason to perform its magisterial role. In such a case, a game at once more desperate and less sober is required.

For both the English-speaking and the Continental thinkers philosophizing has, therefore, been becoming-for all their surface differences more and more a matter of dialectical challenge, personal confrontation, argumentum ad hominid, confession, provocation, indirection, and irony -whether it be of the sort one finds in a novel by Camus, a play by Sartre, Letters of Bonhoeffer or in a B.B.C. broadcast by Professor John Wisdom. Philosophy is something one "does"-it is a practice. One, therefore, writes it, if at all, not for the public, to propagate views. One addresses himself to a puzzle, a paradigm, or a person. The Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, the Kierkegaard of the pseudonymous authorship: on the surface at such opposite poles; underneath, both as to substance and method, so much alike.

As the concerns of reflections take their rise less and less in the large, public world of unproblematic common-sense and come to rest-since Descartes' Cogito-more and more in privacy, in the most intimate, it is inevitable that philosophizing should eventuate less in "documents" and more in dialogues; less in declarations and more in debate, whether they turn about the "self" (as in Kierkegaard) or about "words" (as in Wittgenstein); which is to say, at bottom, about the act and limits of speech.

In Professor Ramsey's book one has not a program nor a methodological proposal but a dialectical challenge, full of ironies, wit, thrusts of provocation, and concrete paradigms. It is neither Kierkegaard nor Wittgenstein; but it is an inquiry which owes much to both. It is not a posting of theses; it is more like a cross-examination.

It is easy enough to summarize the argument. "[I] . . . believe that the kind of situations which justifies belief in freedom and immortality, is the kind of situation to which we must appeal, if we seek an empirical justification for the language of metaphysics and philosophical theology in general."

To propose such a summary is to alert even a beginner to all the ways in which we might attack it. However, to be too much on the alert is

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to tempt to the horrible kind of complacency against which even irony is powerless.

It is a measure of Ramsey's success as a dialectician that when we have finished his book, it no longer seems important to wonder whether we have been thinking about theology or about philosophy; or whether the issues upon which it bears are theological or philosophical ones. Even less is one inclined to summarize the "Ramsey Line" and to take sides on it. The reading is its own reward.

William H. Poteat
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina