OXFORD IN THE TWENTIES
you look into him you find he does not go far enough; reality,
rescued from the One, is traced back to the
infima species
but not
to the individual unit, while his distinction between
energeia
(
sig–
nificant and absolute movement) and
kinesis
(movement which is
merely relative) restores the Platonic gulf that he has just been
trying to fill in. Or so I thought. Aristotle allows that what is
energeia
from one angle may be
kinesis
from another but in that
case, I thought,
kinesis
also should be a permanent principle
whereas Aristotle supposes a highest grade in which mind thinks
only itself and this he exempts froin
kinesis.
Complete fusion of
subject and object; a full stop; death. Being opposed to this full
stop it will be seen that I was ripe for Marx whose basic thesia,
translated into Aristotelian, is that
energeia
can only be achieved
by the canalisation and continued control of
kinesis.
But, Marx
being then hardly known in Oxford, I had resort to the flashy
dynamic idealism of Gentile's 'Mind as Pure Act.'
That the Oxford philosophers were riding for a fall has been
pointed out lately in the Autobiography of the present Professor
of Metaphysics who denounces their activities as m·erely frivolous
cerebration, the desperate attempt of figures in a picture to refute
their frame by ignoring it. We who were undergraduates in the
Twenties were equally frivolous but more consciously desperate;
we felt the frame cramping us. There is nothing to be done, how–
ever, with a frame like that but to break it and we were too young
for that and England too old. Hickleton Hickleton Hickleton-the
long train settled with a jolt or two in a siding and the engine was
uncoupled for the night.
