Gilbert Ryle, archetypical Oxford tutor - Personal Pages Index

Gilbert Ryle, archetypical Oxford tutor
john lucas
The University has been asked by the Government to say
what its strategy is. The answer is simple: the University
does not have a strategy. Strategies are for armies, where
it is essential that all activities are coordinated; universities
are not armies, and seek to foster creativity rather
than uniformity, and so should not have strategies. Full
stop. End of reply.
But that is too quick. Although it is a fair riposte to
an ill-considered demand by the Government, there are
challenges facing the University and Oxford generally
(using Lord Franks’ useful terminology, where `Oxford’
includes not only the University and the Colleges, but all
its individual members and the whole set up). Throughout
its history Oxford has faced challenges, and has
coped with them in its own arrangements and by the face
it has shown to the outside world. It is worth surveying
some of these, using a very broad brush, masking the
inevitable inaccuracies and many omissions.
In the 1970s I was nosing through the papers for
the British Association’s meeting in Oxford in 1860.
“Oxford was the coming place for science’’ I read,
expressed in almost the same terms as were being used
to push the same message in the 1970s. The enthusiasm
in 1860 was in part the result of an earlier tussle between
Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, and Mark Pattison,
the Rector of Lincoln. Pattison wanted to ease
Oxford and Cambridge out of their isolation from the
vigorous intellectual life of universities in Europe. In the
end he lost out. The agricultural depression of the late
nineteenth century left the Colleges very short of funds,
and unable to support expensive experiments. Although
good work was done in the Balliol and Trinity laboratory,
chemistry was too costly to be undertaken by Colleges
dependent on endowments, and it was only after
we nearly lost the First World War through our lack of
chemical expertise that the taxpayer provided the University
with enough money to do it properly.
In any case in 1860 chemistry was not the key science.
The key science was geology, which was revealing
the antiquity of the world, and might tell us whether we
were fallen angels or risen chimps. Geology continued to
be taught at Oxford, and I inherited my father’s grounding
in it as a little boy, and discovered myself to be a Cretacious
man, finding chalk landscapes the most beautiful,
and being indignant at a take-over bid for the Weald
by the Jurassicists. But, living in the 1930s, I caught
chemistry from the spirit of the age, and spent my pocket
money on potassium nitrate and trying to acquire cobalt
chloride; and later earned much respect from my school
mates when after mixing iodine and ammonia during
a break between lessons, and having to throw it out of
the window on the master’s return, the nitrogen iodide
exploded convincingly while we were being taught the
murkier tenses of Greek verbs. I had loved chemistry too
late. It was being torn asunder by biology and physics.
On the one hand, covalence and ions called for explanation,
and on the other, the questions organic chemists
should be answering were questions set by the biologists.
When in my last year at school I asked my chemistry
master why it was that the periods in the Periodic Table
had entries that fitted the formula 2 times n squared,
he had no answer, and I realised I must learn quantum
mechanics in order to know the answer. Harwell and
Culham are where earth-shaking research is now done,
and a new sort of biology, genetics, depending more on
information theory that biochemistry is illuminating our
understanding of life.
Financial stringency tipped the balance in favour of
Jowett. A rising generation of prosperous professionals
wanted to educate their sons properly, and an empire
needed well-educated administrators to run it. Colleges
put up new buildings to house the influx of fee-paying
pupils, and tutors came to dominate the Oxford scene. It
is unfair to describe Jowett’s Oxford as a Seventh Form
Finishing School, but the criticism has point. The picture
of the hard-working teacher – Tom Brown Stevens
of Magdalen was reputed to conduct thirty six tutorials
a week – who spent his afternoons cheering the College
team, except on Tuesdays, when he would attend Congregation
to make sure Hebdomadal Council was doing
nothing untoward, ignores a lot of serious intellectual
effort. But when I, as a new tutor at Merton, suggested
that the College should provide typing, I was met with
much misunderstanding of what Colleges were for. I
was, the Warden said, seeking to increase the Fellows’
perks; it would be like our having free breakfasts. At
length it was agreed that we could get correspondence on
College business typed, but the Senior Tutor protested
vigorously that “private work” ought to be at our own
expense. Tutors might engage in intellectual enquiry, but
it was not part of the job.
Many tutors did. The paradigm was Gilbert Ryle.
He was an arch-tutor, totally in tune with undergraduates.
When freshmen arrived at Christ Church, he could
tell from their opening remarks not only which school
they came from, but which house. But he also had read
widely – even authors in contemporary Europe – and he
wrote, while being slowly demobilised from the Intelligence
Corps, the work he later published at the landmark
“Concept of Mind”. It was the perfect expression
of his intellectual character. It put forward a version of
logical behaviourism, in which personality was completely
constituted by what a person did. He was a great
admirer of Jane Austin (and used to tell critics who wondered
if he ever read novels that he had indeed read all six
of them), and relished her delicate delineation of character
in what was actually done and said.
But the characters he understood were ex-schoolboys
– as undergraduates we sometimes would wonder
what various Oxford philosophers would have been
if they had not been dons, and were agreed that Ryle
would have been a housemaster at a leading public
school – whose athletic activities manifested their minds,
which were chiefly located in their legs; whereas the artisan
in the ancient world had worried lest his right hand
should lose its cunning, Ryle rejoiced in the mental abilities
of ankles. He had no time for the Inner Life, and his
exclusively external account was wittily lampooned by

Iris Murdoch. The Concept of Mind gave a reasoned refutation
of the extreme Cartesian dualism that had held
sway, and was an important contribution to philosophy.
Ryle was elected to the Waynflete chair. It was a good
choice on the part of the electors, but an unwise move for
him. He wanted to teach, and needed pupils. Realising
the unsuitability of the thesis-oriented D.Phil., he instituted
a B.Phil., taught and examined like a Tripos Part III
in Cambridge, and recruited many, particularly Australians,
to read it. But they were not undergraduates, and
did not have involvements in College life that undergraduates
had. So he gave weekly “informal instruction’’ to
undergraduates, and in our final year Bernard Williams
and I attended. The informal instruction was good, but
before it could begin, we had to report on JCR affairs.
Ryle was agog to hear the latest instalment of the
saga of the JCR cat. Marcus, as he was then called, had
begun to wander, and each morning there would be a
call from some other College, and the JCR boy had to go
round and retrieve him. It was thought that Marcus’ bad
behaviour was caused by a superfluity of hormones, and
the JCR committee had discussed surgical intervention,
which was favoured by the President, who was reading
medicine, but was aware of resistance by some members
of the JCR. But time was running short, and soon an
anaesthetic would be required. One member of the JCR
was outraged when, on fondling Marcus, he discovered
that the operation had been carried out, and his outage
was shared by many others who had a strong sense of the
Human Rights of cats, and an emergency meeting was
called to pass a motion of censure on the President.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he had a tutorial
at the time, and I had to chair the meeting. Bernard
was Treasurer. Things were hotting up. And then Bernard
went to the wall and took down the copy of the
rules, and in a confident tone read out a completely
imaginary rule giving the Committee sweeping powers
to act in an emergency. It worked. I managed to hide
my surprise and soon was able to move from the chair a
pacificatory motion that the cat should be renamed Abelard,
which was duly done after Hall by the ex-President,
an intending ordinand with a good voice.
Ryle was refreshed by his weekly contact with the
real world. And Bernard and I benefited greatly from his
informal instruction.