OXFORD AND GERMANY
931
than aim towards a roof which might be high but which still shut
out the stars. I did not have Auden's self confidence which told him
that even whilst he was learning he could dominate his knowledge. I
was afraid of being ruled by what I learned and everything about
Oxford made me afraid of the Oxford training, most of all the dons
and their published work. Accordingly I sought out the school in
which I had least aptitude, since I had no gift for thinking abstractly:
this was P.P.E.-Philosophy, Politics and Economics. It wa!' stupid of
me to have chosen this. I would have done far better to have studied
languages in which I would at least have gained a little knowledge to
extend my reading, which I have gained slowly and painfully subse–
quently.
I do not know whether it is usual to teach philosophy as I was
taught it. In the first lesson we were told that
J.
S. Mill's
Utilitarian–
ism
meant the greatest happiness of the greatest number and that for
Mill Happiness was the criterion of moral value. In the next tutorial
we were told that Mill was wrong because he had forced himself into
the position where according to his criterion a very happy pig might
be considered morally better than a moderately happy human being.
Obviously this was outrageous. Mill himself realized that it was
outrageous so accordingly he introduced standards of Higher and
Lower kinds of happiness into his philosophy. Here he was caught
out because if you talk of a higher happiness your criterion which
qualifies happiness is not happiness but something else. Next please.
The next philosopher is Locke. We were told what he thought and
then why he was wrong. Next please. Hume. Hume was wrong also.
Then Kant. Kant was wrong, but he was also so difficult to under–
stand that one could not be so sure of catching him out.
This might be described as the Obstacle Race way of teaching
philosophy. The whole field of human thought is set out with logical
obstructions and the students watch the philosophers race around it.
Some of them get further than others but they all fall sooner or
later into the traps which language sets for them. It soon occurred
to me that it was useless to enter a field where such distinguished
contestants had failed.
My life at Oxford was
in
fact spent in reading Shakespeare, the
Elizabethans, the Romantics and a great many modern writers. I
developed also a passion for the late quartets of Beethoven, which has
