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PARTISAN REVIEW
In philosophy I was drawn two ways. I wanted the world to be
One, to be permanent, the incarnation of an absolute Idea (though
the word 'Idea' is inadequate since this Idea must be as much
superintellectual as God, if there were a God, would be super·
human). At the same time any typical monistic system appeared
hopelessly static, discounting Becoming as mere illusion and ham·
stringing human action. My tutor, one of Oxford's few remaining
neo-Hegelians, maintained, in face of the pigeon-hole philosophy
flourishing at Cambridge, that neither logic nor ethics could be
separated from metaphysics. I found his attitude sympathetic
since my instinct was to drag in ultimate reality everywhere. The
attempt of semanticists to narrow philosophy to the clarification of
language was in my opinion as mere a parlor game as the tradi–
tional formal logic of bottled syllogisms. Reading F. H. Bradley's
'Logic' I was delighted to find him saying that any judgment about
anything whatsoever is a judgment about the Universe; I tried to
suppress the feeling that in that case it becomes impossible to
assess a judgment without subpoenaing the Universe (and how dif–
ficult it is to get that witness into court).
The stress laid upon Ancient Philosophy in our course re–
peated the pattern of our social position as public school boys; we
spent a great deal of time pitting Aristotle against Plato but had
no adequate foil to the school of idealism which both represent.
Nobody mentioned Democritus. On this select arena of ancient
idealism my sympathies were divided. The ·Platonic hierarchy
mounting up to and subsumed under the Form of the Good inevit–
ably appeals to anyone whose childhood has been fed on Christian–
ity and his adolescence upon Shelley. The Form of the Good, the
One, may be food or it may be dope but it stops the hunger of the
waifs of Here and Now. Many people therefore are ready to
plump on the One until the wind blows under the door of that sup–
posedly sound-proof system-'But where,' says the wind coldly,
'where are the other .eleven?' Aristotle,
if
only by contrast with
Plato, appeared as the champion of the Other Eleven.
Aristotle the biologist was anxious to avoid the gulf between
Being and Becoming established by Plato the mathematician. His
concept of
energeia-significant
and so, in a sense, eternal move–
ment exemplified in the time-world-was an antidote to the static
and self-contained heaven of Plato's transcendent Forms. But when
