Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 16. No. 2, 1982 255

P. McKenzie

George Orwell, ‘Seeing’ and ‘Saying’: a reply to Francis Dunlop

By pointing to those techniques of thought control, described in George Orwell’s 1984, that constitute the very antithesis of rationality and of that which could be considered educational, Francis Dunlop is enabled to throw into sharp relief certain views of his own about the indispensable role of direct awareness, or intuition, in knowledge, and about the connection between direct awareness and human dignity. Taking ‘personal responsibility’ for knowledge [l] is crucial to becoming, and being, educated; and on his view the model of rationality that stresses, instead, an appeal to public criteria of correctness is liable to divert attention from what truly is known, and can function as an invitation to go against our better judgement. In mundane terms, being sold something which we afterwards realise we never did like, or accepting current opinions when we are quite capable of seeing them to be false, might represent this kind of failure of responsibility. The point would be that we believed we liked the object, or believed we believed the opinions, when if we had kept our heads we could have seen that we didn’t really. The misleading public criteria here might have been general taste and demand, or just the pressure of public opinion.

I hope such cases illustrate what Dunlop means. I believe they represent real moral and intellectual failings to which human beings are prone, in giving up too readily their capacity for independent judgement. I am sure such failings are widespread, and can be promoted, or combatted, by education. And I want to stress the existence of my agreement to that extent, because from now on I intend to disagree-with Dunlop’s account of direct awareness, with his discussion of 1984, and with his general conclusions.

I shall not, then, be criticising the demand for, or disputing the desirability of, developing independent judgement, nor shall I dispute that this aim is a highly important and a feasible one. What I shall be doing is challenging the validity of the alternative court of appeal from ‘public criteria’ that is proposed by Dunlop: that is, the appeal to direct awareness, or to intuition. I shall argue that these concepts are either not satisfactorily explained or, if they are, are not satisfactory in themselves; and I shall suggest that when we engage in determining what we ‘really’ feel, or think (and I take this to be a meaningful exercise), we do not arrive at our conclusions by the methods described by Dunlop. I shall argue further that the references to 1984 have only limited validity because, while Orwell does employ some sort of notion

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vaguely like ‘direct awareness’ there is not very much similarity between his account and Dunlop’s; and anyway his kind of direct awareness, in spite of some of Orwell’s own protestations, provides only a part of the psychic barrier Winston Smith erects against the ‘reform’ of his thinking. The other part is provided by language and by rationality, in a way that seems to suggest that ‘public criteria’, on one interpretation at least of the meaning of the phrase, are precisely what are required in order to resist totalitarian pressures on thought. I shall end, therefore, by trying to salvage what I regard as more benign and positive meanings of the phrase from certain dogmatic usages that are presently current and that might lend support to Dunlop’s criticisms.

The difficulties I see in Dunlop’s account of direct awareness are linked but may be considered separately. First, I am uneasy about the concept of intuition; secondly, much of what he says seems to fall foul of powerful arguments against ‘private languages’ such as Wittgenstein developed; and thirdly, the concessions he makes to the social origins of thought and mind seem, taken together, virtually to surrender his case.

On the question of intuition: it seems to me that Dunlop bases upon certain necessary truths a weight of synthetic conclusions that they cannot possibly bear. The problem might be put in this way: we know, a priori, that in a certain sense moral questions must have moral answers, perceptual questions, perceptual answers, aesthetic answers, and so on. And this (necessary) truth is what makes it plausible for Dunlop to argue that “value-experience . . . will not go away” [2]. For in the last analysis, value-experience and its language must, logically, be irreducible to some other mode of experience, or of judgment; and in this sense (though in this sense only) particular modes of encountering the world are, however connected with other modes, somehow sui generis and ultimate. Thus, for a given question, we can say in advance roughly what sort of form our answer must take, what kind of language it must be in, as it were; but what we cannot say apriori is anything about the substance of the answer, within the terms of reference already set. Thus, while we know that our results must be in a given form in order to be correct, being correct will not follow from the fact that the result takes a certain form. It seems to me that Dunlop argues from the formal requirement, already predetermined, as to kind of answer, to the consequent necessary validity of the answer. It is trivially true that moral insights must have moral expression; but this says nothing about the ways in which we may arrive at that final expression, e.g. in many cases by largely rational and explicit means. I do not say we always do; but I do say that Dunlop’s acceptance that “reason-giving in moral discussion” is an “essential practical adjunct to value-intuition” [3] is not strong enough for the possibility of reason-giving, in principle anyway, is presupposed almost all the way along; and this would apply to aesthetic judgements too.

But let us suppose, what is perfectly reasonable, that there are leaps of faith, existential choices to be made between judgments that must go beyond the evidence available. Let us suppose that intuition guides us here, in the sense in which Polanyi uses the term, to mean some sort of unformalisable, tacit skill or capacity for judgement. Dunlop cites Polanyi, so we may justifiably interpret the term in this sort of way. If we do, shall we find support for the notion that intuition provides the final court of appeal in perceptual, or value judgements? The difficulty here is that, while Polanyi (in Personal Knowledge) undoubtedly stresses that ‘commitment’ is an inescapable component of knowing, in so doing he does not affirm that ‘commitment’ makes for truth on the contrary, it includes the possibility of error-for error must be possible, in any non-formalisable system, and it is part of what it means to make judgments that they could be wrong. Polanyi vividly illustrates these possibilities of error. In Personal Knowledge he discusses cases where we “discredit the irresistible testimony of our eyes by classing something seen as an optical illusion” 141. The existence of such ambiguity is a key principle of Polanyi’s account; and his brand of intuitionism is concerned with showing that we have to make commitments, rather than that the commitments will be sound ones. So

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once again, the onus of proof is thrown back very largely upon preceding reasoning, thinking, feeling; in the last instance, we intuit; but only when we can do no other.

In short, while I accept Dunlop’s descriptions of ‘looking’ [5] as valid enough in certain respects, this ‘looking’ seems to include much we might normally think of as following ‘public procedures’ or ‘criteria’; and the end result of this activity constitutes ‘direct awareness, only in a tautological kind of way.

On the question of ‘privacy’: Dunlop here seems to me to make the assumption, much criticised by Wittgenstein, that we have certain ultimate data available for our private inspection, that are somehow incorrigible; that consciousness can be peered into and certain states and mental facts can somehow just be seen. But if we follow Wittgenstein’s arguments, it seems highly improbable that we can really have private experiences of a developed kind without the prior benefit of a public language, and of learning how to label our experiences in this; and this fact seems to leave the nature of these experiences open to correction, in principle at least. Wittgenstein says:

Being unable-when we surrender ourselves to philosophical thought-to help saying such and such; being irresistibly inclined to say it-does not mean being forced into an assumption, or having an immediate perception or knowledge of a state of affairs. [61

I take Wittgenstein to mean that ‘knowing’ or ‘thinking’ has to do with the mind‘s participa- tion in a situation that exists out there, objectively, in the structure of the argument itself. On this view, the mind is not private ‘states’, but conjunctures, episodes, active occasions in which it is caught up, but which have as one aspect, of course, the subjective experience of such states; as, likewise, it has generative capacity to push along these episodes. We may in fact regard ourselves, when thinking or experiencing, not as ‘seeing’ something so much, as being involved in an autonomous trajectory of meaning, or a sort of grammatical vice that insists, for example, that we include a main verb in our sentence. To regard ‘thinking’ psychologically is to tend to miss the importance of such public engagements of mind-not in arguments necessarily, but in the whole fabric of thought. That, anyhow, is how the working of my own mind often seems to me-since we are invoking subjective evidence. And Dunlop concedes something to Wittgenstein’s view-though not enough I believe-in his note 14.

My third objection is similar, but more broadly conceived: it seems to me that the acknowledgements Dunlop makes of the social origins of experience and mind undermine his own argument. He does seem to be conscious of difficulties in his position and he very commendably tackles them head-on. He acknowledges [7], first, that we may learn ‘at our mother’s knee’ the appropriate conditions for seeing; then he says that “there might be considerable variation” in the way “normal conditions for seeing” were attended to in doubtful cases; then he tells us that children have to learn to see (‘see’ in the cognitive, not just the physical sense here), “otherwise their seeing would remain more or less heavily distorted by the effects of infantile fantasy”. This last point so strongly suggests a normative, and social, framework for ‘seeing’ as to undermine the argument of which it is a part. But there is more: seeing that ‘is attended to’, is ‘seeing-as’, is certainly ‘conceptual’ (‘theory-laden’ I take this to mean also); there are ‘conventional factors’ involved in the very fact that Winston Smith expresses himself in a language. Dunlop is extremely fair-minded in presenting these points, which all militate against his case, in my view. No doubt he deals with them in the spirit of a pre-emptive strike; unfortunately, however, my own impression is that he has scored an own goal; for when he finally produces the conclusion, notwithstanding all he has been saying, that “a man may know such things as the number of fingers someone else is holding up without making any reference, implicit or explicit, to the social or to socially agreed criteria”, I find it impossible to come down on Dunlop’s side of the argument that he has so reasonably traced. In a similar way, he talks [8] of the indisputable fact that this life (the inner life) would hardly

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develop at all, “if men were not brought up in a community and taught a language”. To chance one more metaphor: in throwing a sop to Cerberus in this way, he has overlooked the fact that the sop is attached by an unbreakable line to the rest of the case, which surely follows it.

For is it not almost certain that to the infant, the world is an undifferentiated, unfocussed, ever-moving and changing manifold, in which the very concepts of an object, of self, of continuity are absent? In this world, to which perhaps adults revert, not in dreaming but on the boundaries of sleeping and waking, probably nothing is distinct except for certain sharp physical sensations, and perhaps inchoate surging emotions. And somehow, we have to get from that world to our well-differentiated adult one. How do we get from one state to the other? Piaget has spoken of concepts normalising perception; and this seems to be so much the usual, and obvious course of events that it is hard to see how anyone could arrive at a stable view of the world-of there even being a world-without an immersion in social practices and, most importantly, in language. What other kind of life could there be, that we would regard as human?

The above is surely the view subscribed to by Wittgenstein, in his discussion of pain language or of the application of colour words [9]: we do not have sensations, varied pictures in the mind which we all, independently, discover, then agree to give the same name to; on the contrary, the existence of public terms (or actions, or cultural objects) and their correct and incorrect usage serves, as it were, to reveal us to ourselves. And all this seems to mean that our own values and criteria for anything are in some sense social. Of course, in the tautological sense my values are and must be my values. But even when they are mine in the wider sense of representing independent judgements, they are nonetheless, it seems to me, inexorably intersubjective and just plain human rather than wholly individual in quality.

For the reasons given, then, I find Dunlop’s argument insufficiently convincing. It is however very interesting in some of the issues it raises, in particular concerning the interpreta- tion of 1984. As Dunlop says, literature may have great value in embodying features of the life of the mind. 1984 is commonly set for study at ‘0 level in English literature; it becomes important therefore to understand quite what message, or aspects of mental life, it does illustrate. Is Dunlop right in finding ‘direct awareness’ in Orwell’s book, for example?

There is something like a theory of direct awareness to be found in 1984. Dunlop’s examples partly illustrate it. I shall make three points in what follows, though: first that ‘direct awareness’ in 1984 is a much looser idea than Dunlop’s version; secondly, that it too is not very satisfactory, psychologically speaking; thirdly, that it represents only a part of the defence available to Winston Smith against Big Brother, and that not to mention the role of language in any discussion of Orwell is to leave out something of the very greatest importance, educational and otherwise, about his thought.

That which carries the weight of ‘direct awareness’ in 1984 is actually a complex of feelings, impulses, memories, sensations, all of which add up to a kind of underground psychic life that Big Brother cannot quite expunge. Even characters like the ridiculously enthusiastic Parsons commit thought crime, by muttering ‘Down with Big Brother’ in their sleep. The crucial example of this inner life is Winston Smith’s commitment to Julia: he knows he will ‘betray’ her under torture; the point is, not to betray her in the sense of really ceasing to care about her. He thinks he cannot be made to do this; in fact, we see that every last vestige of private feeling and decency can be eliminated, and is. That is (explicitly anyway) the concluding thought of the book.

Various elements compose this complex: the memory of his mother’s self-sacrifice, gratui- tous yet endowed with infinite meaning; his own delight in the beauty found in fragments from the past: a song, a glass paperweight, a book, good coffee; the countryside; the resistance of his senses to seeing 2 + 2 as 5 ; Julia’s “simple undifferentiated desire: . . . the force that would tear the Party to pieces” [lo]. Winston sees their embrace as a ‘political act’, and in Julia’s

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unthinking, apolitical sensuality he paradoxically locates the source of all future revolutionary impulses. Above all, though, Winston finds hope in the proles. The central core of humanness which he tends to identify with the ‘primitive emotions’ [ l l ] is something the proles still possess. It is among other things a secret loyalty to one another that intellectuals like Winston have lost. The woman who protests at the atrocity film in the cinema; the feelings of grief Winston recalls having seen expressed; even the fat woman’s singing: these constitute a kind of reservoir of natural feeling that will one day, Winston thinks, overturn the drab, unfeeling, puritanical system. That will be when the proles ‘become conscious’ [12]. Meanwhile, for Winston, the point must be to stay, not alive, but human.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of the adequacy of this implied theory of the inner life, we perhaps should ask whether, since the articles of faith it rests on are so deliberately shattered by Orwell, and since he allows OBrien to pour such scorn on the proles and on the very idea of humanity, he is not actually going out of his way to deny any validity to the personal and emotional life that he builds up for the reader; and that therefore we should not attribute to Orwell views like those Winston starts with. In practice, however, the effect of Orwell’s negating of the human values that are (over-optimistically) relied on is not one of the simple cancellation of a proposition but, rather, of equally real but conflicting forces (OBrien’s nihilism and the ‘inner life’) confronting one another, and of nihilism overcoming. This outcome diminishes the affective, inner life only contingently, I believe, as Orwell sees it. For him, the original claims that he has made for the emotions prove to be too strong, but not wholly misplaced. They stand, up to a point: but the image of epic heroism that stories like 1984 conventionally evoke yields, in Orwell’s pessimistic resolution, to one of pathos and despair.

The overall picture, then, is intended to be one of personal authenticity, of the possibility of ‘real’ feelings. I accept the meaningfulness of these ideas; but I have said above that I do not see ’direct awareness’ as a path to authenticity, even if such a thing as direct awareness exists at all. Far from being spontaneous, I suspect that authenticity is laboriously acquired. Also, I am doubtful whether, with the exception of the instance Dunlop cites of Winston asking how he can help seeing what is in front of his eyes, there is much in Orwell’s examples to support Dunlop’s argument, which centres, not on the possibility of authenticity (which I concede) but on the primary sources of this. Furthermore, Orwell’s examples themselves are not beyond criticism. For I believe it is fair to say that while I984 is undoubtedly a classic, a twentieth century myth of great power and originality, it is not a major document of human sensibility, as for example Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors is.

What is wrong with Orwell‘s examples of the ‘underground life’? For one thing, it seems to me that in looking for distinctively human qualities to set against the bleak world of 1984, Orwell lumps together things that need to be discriminated. There is a certain plausibility about the connections he makes, but they are didactically enforced in a way that suggests he is imposing a theory of mind rather than really exploring the world of feeling. The self-sacrifice and compassion shown by Winston’s mother; the value of spontaneous impulses; Julia’s uninhibited, ‘natural’ behaviour; the loyalty Winston feels for her; the supposed humanity of the proles: these can be related, but are not necessarily the same kind of thing at all. Nor should they, surely, all be put on one side over against some putative corrupted intelligence.

Surely this distinction between the corruptible reason, the incorruptible heart, has only a very limited validity? We know that Orwell felt a great dislike for the ‘armchair Communists’ of the 1930s, and perhaps this kind of feeling is being expressed in this contrast between proles and intellectuals. But, to treat the issue at the most obvious level, what about the intellectuals who, like Orwell himself, fought and were wounded, or killed, in the Spanish Civil War? The heroism of that period came from all quarters, not just from working-class movements.

Winston may believe that he and his fellow intellectuals are no longer human [3]; but if he and others have been dehumanised it is not, surely, because of something in the nature of the

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intellect; rather it is because of the fact they they are singled out for control, while the proles are left alone. In Orwell’s terms, if the proles are not corrupted, it is because they are not conscious: a paradoxical conclusion to say the least for one who believes in consciousness- raising. There may be some sociological truth in Orwell’s assumptions; but if there is, in elevating it to the level of metaphysical truth he crudely caricatures the life of the mind.

The identification of unthinking emotion with virtue is likewise very dubious. The good deeds, the aspirations to integrity, proceed from a level that lies deep in the personality, no doubt; but Winston’s mother’s behaviour; the chinless man’s offering of a piece of bread to another prisoner; the protests of the prole woman in the cinema: must we really assume these are somehow mindless acts, as Orwell’s scheme seems to require? A fundamental human decency is expressed here, in gestures that are useless but valuable. But are these really the prerogative of those who do not think? Orwell is trying to persuade us of something, but all is not well with his fundamental categories.

Likewise, are all emotions and feelings good? Julia’s sexuality is instinctive, spontaneous; is it really either fully convincing, or necessarily the equivalent of virtue? I do not deny that, in the face of a repressed and repressive Puritanism, of the obsessive meanness and cruelty of 1984, the uninhibited actions have something precious in common. But as Orwell presents them, they surely cannot act as a springboard to a better future; for to suggest that these actions are somehow divorced from any intellectual understanding of the situation is to invite that situation’s perpetuation; for it is one thing to mobilise scattered and embryonic notions of revolt; quite another to turn undirected emotions into conscious purpose, starting from scratch. It is noteworthy that, while Orwell expresses a general preference for proles over intellectuals (whatever such terms may mean-that is part of the problem) he treats both with a certain indiscriminate revulsion in particular instances. Is this symptomatic of his inability to relate feelings and intellect adequately in his theory of mind and personality? Does it mean that in Orwell’s eyes everyone is condemned to be either too clever by half, or stupidly emotional: a kind of holy fool?

Fortunately the story often finds its own way, independently of the theory. For example, Winston’s defences against O’Brien, that we should expect to be hierarchically structured in terms of this theory, in that intellect should capitulate first, feelings later, and some innermost integrity last, refuse to follow this neat scheme in its entirety. This is of benefit to the book, if not to the theory; it also fits in with Orwell’s other views of long standing concerning language.

The fact is that the crude distinction between the instinctive or affective on the one hand, the intellectual on the other; between intuition and rational judgement, constantly breaks down in practice. For, almost and perhaps up to the very end of the book, Winston appeals, not to feelings alone, but also to the powers of the intellect; even one might say to public criteria themselves. It is undoubtedly true that Winston reflects that “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”. Nonetheless, another thread in the book insists on the saving values, not of immediacy of experience alone, but of rationality as well, in some sense of that word that involves language, concepts, rules, objectivity, the correct use of terms. The freedom to maintain and know that 2 + 2 = 4 that Winston refers to, and not just to ‘see’ it, is a crucial example of this.

I believe that this must, logically, be so: for the same reasons as I believe that there is no really ‘private’ experience to fall back on: Winston’s most profound convictions and values have been learned, structured in terms that ultimately make reference to social criteria; without which he would not have the mind to assert his autonomy. The only appeal he can finally make to save his reason is not from the (corrupted) public language to (pure) personal experience; for what is to guarantee that the experience itself has not been corrupted? The only real appeal to be made is from a corrupt public language to a public language that retains its integrity. And Winston makes this appeal, even though at times he seems to be surrendering

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the whole realm of public discourse to O’Brien, on the grounds that he cannot win at the dialectical game.

What actually happens here, I suggest, is that Winston tries to find ways of resisting O’Brien; that faith in his feelings is one way; but that faith in certain fundamental logical presuppositions of all discourse is another. Winston does not really hand over all reason and all language to O’Brien; he retreats, to coin other sets of concepts with which to combat him. The very notion of a superior dialectical power that is nonetheless not synonymous with truth is itself a step in his argument; a dialectical, not just an emotional, advance; and it is one that Winston manages to make. The fact is, I suggest, that whatever Orwell explicitly says or assumes, rationality and clarity of mind remain the unsung heroes of 1984; just as these virtues permeate so much of Orwell’s other writing.

For the perversion of thought and of language is of course a key theme in Orwell’s work. In 1984, the perversion takes various forms. For example there is Newspeak, a language deliberately limited so that subversive or humanistic thoughts simply cannot be expressed. However, the corollary of Newspeak must, clearly, be the possibility of a language that positively does embody crucially important and meaningful distinctions, that can conduce to the health of the body politic by allowing precise and analytic expression of insights. ‘Public standards’ of correctness are critical in maintaining, or failing to maintain, such a language; the whole of Orwell’s work, explicitly and implicitly, testifies to the importance of such a language. Its purpose is to tell the truth, to serve as the medium of clear vision-Orwell’s most fundamental concern, perhaps, through Burmese Days, Down and Out in London and Paris, Homage to Catalonia, 1984, and much of his other work. He explains his position in Politics and the English Language:

. . .the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. It one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regenera- tion. [15]

Then, too, there is Doublethink, which stresses ‘the mutability of the past’ and demonstrates a capacity for (or to) ‘blackwhite’. This means “a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the willingness to believe that black is white . . .” [ 161. Once again, we run up against misuse of language, against self-contradiction: those things that are measured, not by comparison with some internal criterion of rightness, not by some totally certain direct evidence of a Cartesian kind, but by their conformity with the norms of rationality and logic. Whatever Orwell may, from one angle, suggest about the role of the affective life in the maintenance of personal autonomy, he never ceases to emphasise, deliberately or not, the parallel role of language and reason in getting us to think at all. The very doubt Winston experiences over 2 + 2 making 4 reveals the same ambivalence: he does not just insist on his capacity to see that 2 + 2 make 4, as a kind of perceptual ability; he also writes in his diary that “freedom is freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4” [ 171, and this ‘saying’ acknowledges the world of public language and standards which is as important to Orwell as the ‘seeing’. Are we to believe that being able to assert that 2 + 2 = 4 depends upon our direct awareness of the fact? Or should we rather say that our acquired understanding of what it means to assert that 2 + 2 = 4 determines the content of our direct awareness? Or should we take a third line, and recognise the role of the senses in all this, but also of the social framework of knowledge and of rules, that allows Winston to hold out as long as he does? One of the most sinister aspects of the world of 1984 is that that are no--or very few-laws: oppressive though codes of law may be, they do at least contain within them the potential for judging a person not guilty, as well as guilty. In 1984, it is the arbitrariness of such judgements

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that is so frightening, and this arbitrariness, this loss of any external point of reference, is what Orwell constantly emphasises in his account of Doublethink and of the solipsistic philosophy of the Party. For Orwell, misuse of language is crucial in all this, even though he sometimes offers explanations which overlook his own reliance on its integrity. It is hard not to think that Orwell would have had some sympathy with those who stress that words do not mean whatever we want them to mean, and that private experience is ultimately formed from concepts that are in principle publicly communicable.

If the above remarks concerning Orwell’s thought are valid, how do the conclusions arrived at relate to the main burden of my disagreement with Dunlop? In these ways, I think: first, I accept Orwell’s view of the fundamental importance of language to thought, while disputing that the two relate as he says they do; and I suggest that Dunlop pays too little attention to Orwell’s interest in language generally. Secondly, quite apart from the particular criticisms I make of the notion of direct awareness as such, I suggest that Dunlop has reared his arguments on a rickety foundation by broadly accepting the philosophy of mind presupposed by Orwell. His arguments for direct awareness could be sound; but even if they were I do not think he would be well-advised to illustrate them by citing Winston Smith’s experience.

Dunlop contrasts “two interpretations of rationality”. “On the one hand we have the stress on applying socially agreed criteria to one’s beliefs, on submitting hypotheses to public experiment either to verify or to falsify them”, and so on. “On the other we have an emphasis on disinterested looking and intuiting, on the examination of intellectual conscience, on the responsible use of our cognitive and other mental powers” [18]. It seems to me that the latter model has to proceed via the methods of the former; and that Winston’s fictional career in 1984, where he must rely on all possible sources of confidence, tends to bear this out as it is dramatically presented, even though Orwell explicitly suggests the contrary.

Having said all that, I am quite prepared to concede that much still turns on what exactly is meant by these ‘public criteria’ I have discussed. It is not really as late in the day as it may seem to raise this question, since 1 hope that the general interpretation I have given the term so far has been reasonably clear, and that I shall anyway be seen to have been defending the belief that ‘saying’ is implicated in ‘seeing’ to the bitter end. But it is certainly possible to point to cases where ‘public criteria’ might be thought to function in an overly convergent fashion. I believe P. H. Hirst’s work could provide a case in point, when he moves from a very interesting thesis about the way in which the possibility of truth and objectivity can be established, not by reference to a Platonic world of essences, but by argument from the very nature of public language itself; to a very speculative argument which attempts exhaustively to enumerate the logical types of language there are, and perhaps to proscribe certain kinds of intellectual venture as lying outside these. Even more strikingly does Allen Brent express his own extension of the thesis:

Although certain forms of knowledge should be taught in the form in which they have been developed over the centuries, nevertheless not every kind of culturally developed knowledge ought to be so taught. Only those forms that represent genuine developments of the primitive organisation of consciousness and are reflected in the normative structure of any human speech act should be so taught. [I91

I find these words disquieting, and agree with Dunlop that in certain doctrines of this kind, there is a lurking threat that the individual’s mind can as it were be composed only out of the thoughts of others, and from pre-existing structures of knowledge whose operations the individual will then reflect: almost a doctrine of a tubulu ram ready to receive a Holy Writ. On this question, I very much take the point of his reference to R. K. Elliott’s paper on ‘Education and human being’ [20]. Better a thousand times irrelevance, redundancy of information, even muddle in the classroom, given that some sense of personal involvement with knowledge arises; than the starkly opposite insistence on correctness at all costs that seems to me to

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resemble the dogmatic strictures of those literary critics who placed conformity to the Unities above all other dramatic values. Fortunately, we do not have to choose between two absurdities. If we treat the presuppositions of, for example, the Forms of Knowledge thesis in a liberal way, there seems no reason why we cannot conceive of autonomy and independence as arising from the mind‘s development in a culturally created medium; the crucial factors here do not seem to concern where knowledge comes from, but how it is held, and whether it is made one’s own. A person may be able to have confidence in his own views, not because these are somehow privately generated, but because they are open for public evaluation, and are not shown to be false. In such a case the individual is in, as it were, the machinery of proof, and driving it as though he were driving a car. The fact that the car has been made by someone else has no bearing on the fact that a driver may learn to use it correctly for purposes that are entirely his own. The driver’s freedom comes, in such a case, not from some personal act of will or of certainty, but from his mastery of the skills and techniques of driving. By submitting himself to acquire these, he becomes freer in movement.

To reiterate, finally: it seems to me that the route of escape from coercive public standards does not and cannot lie via a retreat to the personal, in the sense of the pre-conceptual. Certainly the escape from, or the response to, such dictatorial standards will call upon our notions of personal authenticity and conviction; certainly we shall grope through intuitions before we arrive at formulations. But these notions, these intuitions, will not be somehow extra-rational, belonging to an element distinct from what we combat. We can only destroy bad rules by transcending them and creating better. If language itself hangs upon us a kind of weighted net of what we may say and may not, of what makes sense and what does not (as Logical Positivism attempted to do for example), then the recourse should be to a fuller language, whose criteria are more ample and adequate. With these universal criteria of rationality in mind we may turn back upon the dictators of what is sayable as Orwell turns upon the creators of Newspeak and of Doublethink, and upon the idioms of our time that suggested these to him. For surely language is the universal democratic medium in which reason must go to work, and without which reason cannot go to work. This is the positive meaning I find in talk of ‘public criteria’: they provide the source, or the foundation, that enables us finally to be confident of what we say, not in the sense of ‘feeling certain’, but in the sense of being aware of the possible lines of justification we may take; of the evidence that exists, and of its validity; of the existence, and status, of alternative interpretations; of certain inexorable logical relationships, and so on: of all, in short, that allows us to formulate thoughts in a rule-governed way. And so, it seems to me that Orwell would recognise allies, in spite of all the ambiguities of his position, in those types of argument that emphasise public criteria of knowledge, and that, by so doing, seek to express the power of decision and judgement such standards may confer on us, to the extent, greater or lesser, that we are able to make them our own. And in consequence, I cannot help but feel that what Francis Dunlop tries so skilfully to exhibit to us, if it really exists, can never be more than the shadow side, the phase of latency of processes whose importance must remain potential until articulated in some language, or symbolism, that will impose on the boundlessness of ‘intuition’ those very limitations and distinctions which, in stopping us being right all the time, enable us to be right at all.

Correspondence: P. McKenzie, Huddersfield Polytechnic (Holly Bank), Huddersfield, W. Y orkshire .

NOTES AND REFERENCES

[I] DUNLOP, FRANCIS (1980) Human dignity and direct awareness, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 14, p. 178. [2] Ibid., p. 173.

264 P. McKenzie

[3] Ibid., p. 175. [4] POLANYI, M. (1973) Personal Knowledge, p. 319 (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul). [5] Dunlop, p. 175. [6] WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1976) Philosophical Investigations, 8 299 (p. 101e) (Oxford, Blackwell). (71 Dunlop, p. 171. [8] Ibid., p. 176. [9] Wittgenstein, op. cit.

[lo] ORWELL, GEORGE (1965) 1984, p. 130 (London, Heinemann). [Ill Ibid., p. 170. [I21 Ibid., p. 74. [I31 Ibid., p. 170. [I41 Ibid., p. 84. [IS] ORWELL, GEORGE (1957) Selected Essays, p. 143 (Harmondsworth, Penguin). [I61 1984, p. 218. [ 171 Ibid., p. 255. [18] Dunlop, p. 177. [19] BRENT, ALLEN (1978) Philosophical Foundations for the Curriculum, p. 218 (London, Allen & Unwin). [20] BROWN, S.C. (Ed.) (1975) Philosophers Discuss Education (London, MacMillan).