Alec Ritchie Memories and Reflections
Alec Ritchie was one of my lecturers when I studied philosophy at the University of Newcastle, from 1964 to 1969. I did courses he conducted on Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Rationalism and Empiricism, Philosophical Analysis, Epistemology and Mathematical Logic. In 1968 with Bill Doniela he assessed a thesis I wrote on Theories of the Proposition and he was the supervisor of a Master of Arts Honours thesis I began in the following year. Apart from a brief visit to his home my contact with him was confined to the university.
When I enrolled in first-year Philosophy Ritchie was on sabbatical so I did not meet him until the following year, 1965, when he was appointed Associate Professor and then Professor. Alexander Boyce Gibson and John Passmore came to Newcastle, still only a university college at Tighe’s Hill, for the professorial inauguration. Ritchie introduced them at an informal colloquy in which Boyce Gibson and Passmore raised a few issues and fielded some desultory questions from us students. Ritchie sat between them relaxed and contented. He was a mellow fellow. And why not? At 52 he had received the highest formal recognition of his long and often demanding devotion to philosophy. We were all pleased for him.
I knew Ritchie had been a student of John Anderson’s but I did not know that he had been close to him personally or that he had taught in Anderson’s department for a while. Knowing these facts I would have been more intrigued by Ritchie’s reticence about his teacher and one-time companion. Anderson’s name was used rarely in his lectures or in his casual conversation and Ritchie gave no indication that Anderson or his ideas shaped his philosophical outlook. On one occasion, though, he did seem to tell me that Anderson should remain dead and buried. So far as I could see, Alec Ritchie was not an Andersonian.
At this stage in Ritchie’s philosophical career a hardline Andersonian would have dismissed him as an apostate seduced by the allure of modern Anglo-American philosophy, for Ritchie was given over to conceptual and linguistic analysis. He also betrayed signs of an inclination for the philosophy of commonsense and “ordinary language”.
When did the “fall from grace” begin? Not presumably when he was studying philosophy under Anderson in the early thirties. Then, according to Ritchie’s obituary, he was “deeply involved with Anderson’s philosophy and the undergraduate activities that grew up around this radical professorial figure”, and being especially interested in Anderson’s political views Ritchie had accompanied him to a union meeting in Newcastle (1)
1 Nonetheless, Ritchie also had a strong interest in English, for he completed his first degree with majors in both subjects. And it was with English, not philosophy, that he was professionally concerned from his graduation in 1934 until the late forties. He was in that period a teacher of English (and presumably History) with the New South Wales Department of Education. In 1941 he gained a Master of Arts degree in English. His educational work in Borneo during the war and his teaching in matriculation courses in post-war Sydney probably saw Ritchie preoccupied with the teaching of English and study skills rather than with philosophy.
But he managed to stay in touch with John Anderson and maintain his interest in philosophy, particularly pre-war. For some of the thirties he was a member of “the democratic group” formed by Harry Eddy, a resolute Andersonian, to discuss socio- political and historical matters. Around 1938-39 he was living in a flat next to the Eddys in Kirribili and was frequently in the company of Anderson. “Alec was very much devoted to Anderson”, says Madge Eddy, “and became a bit like a favourite son” (2). Sometime in the late forties a resolve was forming in Ritchie to make philosophy, not English, his profession. He worked as a part-timer in Anderson’s department before gaining in 1950 a teaching fellowship in Alan Stout’s department. In the same year he left for London to pursue a Ph.D. at Bedford College. I doubt that Anderson would have encouraged such a move. However, two of Anderson’s former students and then colleagues, might have. John Passmore had spent a stimulating sabbatical year in England from late 1947 and John Mackie had done a Greats course at Oxford from 1938 to 1940. Both had taken a dip in the big pond and were soon to move on themselves from Sydney, for promotion and opportunity.
If all ambitious philosophers must bite the hand that fed them, as David Armstrong has maintained, then Alec Ritchie was only doing what came naturally. In setting out for England he was leaving his mentor and friend and his philosophical home behind. Quite likely he was already attracted to some of the methods of analytic philosophy. At any rate, the philosophical action was “over there”. Sydney -- anywhere in Australia -- was definitely off the intellectual pace. The new ideas and the frontrunners – Ayer, Ryle, Popper – were in the Old Country. It offered the prospect of new encounters and new acquaintances, and a qualification from England would surely count for more than an equivalent one from Sydney. Having made the jump from English to Philosophy at 37 Ritchie might have heard time’s winged chariot. It was time to strike out, time to achieve.
As his obituary records, “Alec’s experience of philosophy in England provided new directions and ways in which to develop” his philosophical interests, but surely it was much more than that: it was a watershed in his life and work. The seven years overseas were probably rivaled only by his undergraduate years for the change and excitement they generated. In London he was living on the edge, or rather two edges. One was the blunt drudgery of teaching in London County Council schools; the other was the prickling excitement of philosophical discussions, the writing of his thesis and contact with the likes of Acton, Saw, Findlay, Joad, Popper and Ayer. He was not likely to be suffering from Them Sydney Blues. Like many another Australian before and after him
2 Ritchie was making his pilgrimage to the modern heart of the language, literature and wider culture that had shaped and sustained him. The boy from Kempsey, the high school teacher with an M.A. in English and only a major in philosophy, was right in the intellectual swim, but he was not in over his head. And he was laying the foundations of a career in philosophy. In 1950 Ritchie sailed from Sydney with an Andersonian past and in 1957 returned with an Analytic future.
Ritchie told me very little about his time in England. Once he revealed that the teaching he did in London schools for a living drained and dispirited him. Maybe it was too painful a memory, for he did not elaborate on this brief statement. He was more forthcoming with a few anecdotes involving Karl Popper and A.J. Ayer. His first experience of Popper was at a postgraduate seminar in London. A Ph.D. candidate was to read part of his thesis but had no sooner finished reading the title when Chairman Popper cut in and proceeded to give his own views on the subject for the entirety of the session. The putative presenter did not get another word in, even edgewise, though he might have had something to say under his breath. On another Popperian occasion the seminar somehow reached the discussion stage and Ritchie made a remark from the floor that pierced Popper’s self-preoccupation. “The linguist’s talking about talk is like the idealist’s thinking about thought”, Ritchie commented – and thereby earned himself the privilege, when the seminar finished, of being taken by the Great Monologuist for a cup of tea in the university canteen.
The anecdote I liked most involved A.J. Ayer. He invited Ritchie to accompany him to Heathrow where Ayer was to catch a plane. As London weather would have it, a Dickensian fog descended on the city and their cab was brought to a standstill. As the world was shut out Ayer opened up. It wasn’t a sin of commission he wanted to disclose but rather one of omission. Much to Ritchie’s surprise Ayer tearfully revealed that he had been suicidal for some time because he could not find an answer to a particular Realist argument someone had presented against his phenomenalism. I don’t know whether Ritchie helped him out philosophically but the fog did lift. Ayer took off, rose to higher honours, wrote many more books and lived happily ever after, I imagine, with his theory of perception.
I had not even heard Ayer’s name when I began epistemology under Ritchie in 1965. One of the set texts was Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge but Ritchie carelessly did not refer to him in lectures as A.J. Ayer or even just Ayer. Though I used to sit close to the front and my hearing was good, I was confused by Ritchie’s saying once or twice what I took to be “frigid air”. My classmates were also confused. What did this have to do with epistemology? Somehow it eventually became clear that Ritchie was mumbling “Freddie Ayer”. So bad was Ritchie’s delivery in those lectures that one of the students stood up in class and angrily complained to him about it. He was in fact only giving vent to the irritation and frustration that we all felt. Ritchie took it badly and castigated the student for his protest or manner of protest. He was furious. It was the only time I saw him angry. He and the student met later in Ritchie’s office, after which the student withdrew from the course.
3 Ritchie’s poor enunciation was not his sole fault as a lecturer in those days. He did not engage with his audience. He was insufficiently mindful of its make-up and limitations. There was little eye contact and his body language was not outgoing. He was oblique rather than direct in manner. Still, these faults ceased to matter to me. I was more interested in what he had to say and in his way of doing philosophy.
Neither of these was Andersonian. An epiphany, perhaps, of Ritchie’s attitude towards Anderson was a remark he made to me in either 1967 or 1968. I was in Bill Doniela’s office one morning when Ritchie walked in briskly. He seemed a little impatient or irritated. Without looking directly at me or Doniela he declared: “Peter, I’ve just come from putting the stones back on John Anderson’s grave”. When I, and no doubt Doniela, appeared mystified by this abrupt announcement, Ritchie added: “I’ve been reading your essay”. I don’t recall that he said anything more. At that time Doniela’s room also doubled as the departmental part-time secretary’s office, and Ritchie might have been after some stationery or whatever. At any rate he left about as suddenly as he had arrived.
Both Bill Doniela and I thought it was a strange moment. Ritchie was capable of being provocative, of stirring the pot. No other colleague of his, not even Sandy Anderson, was as interested in exploring and developing Anderson’s ideas as Doniela, and among the students no one was as committed to studying Anderson as either Brian Birchall or myself. But Ritchie had looked miffed. He gave the impression that he had read something he didn’t altogether like, and I am sure he was not simply accusing me of plagiarism. In fact, as I said to Bill Doniela at the time, I could not recall saying anything particularly Andersonian in that essay. That was part of the reason for finding Ritchie’s “outburst” so surprising. I think now, as I did then, that Ritchie was expressing his disapproval of an Andersonian idea or doctrine being “resurrected”. Anderson was dead. Amen. Even if he was “having a go” at us, the spirit of his jest was anti-Anderson.
Furthermore, the remark was quite consistent with the conclusion I had already reached about Ritchie’s attitude to Anderson’s philosophy. For him Anderson seemed persona non grata. His name or his ideas rarely came up, and if they did, there was generally no endorsement. I can recall only one occasion when Ritchie acknowledged something from Anderson. It was in a lecture on Descartes. Ritchie surprised me by using approvingly an Anderson refutation of the Cogito in Studies in Empirical Philosophy. It was the exception that proved the rule. At another time, he remarked to me that Brand Blanshard and Anderson were quite similar in their philosophical thinking, although Ritchie pointed out that Anderson would have disagreed with the American’s view of necessity. It was the objectivity in Blanshard’s idealism that allowed them to be brought together. (Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis was the major text in Ritchie’s course Philosophical Analysis.)
And for me that was as far as Ritchie went explicitly with Anderson and his philosophy in the time that I was acquainted with him. Perhaps he considered that the Andersonianism in his department needed to be toned down. Until 1966 all his philosophy colleagues – Sandy Anderson, Bill Doniela and David Dockrill -- had also
4 been students of Anderson. Dockrill, for all his evenhandedness, was not an Andersonian, but the other two would certainly have passed muster as followers, albeit with different degrees of intensity and emphasis. More generally, and allusively, I think Andersonianism was to Ritchie in his fifties what the background radiation is to the Big Bang: something diffusely present as a leftover from a volatile shaping occurrence; although muted now it is a sign that something momentous did happen once. Or, Anderson was for Ritchie rather like easy-listening music: pleasant enough as muzak but bound before long to become tedious and irritating – and needing a quick flick of the remote.
The second allusion captures more strongly the element of rejection in Ritchie’s later attitude towards Andersonian philosophy than is conveyed by the bland summations of his obituary. “The example of Anderson’s character and thought was to remain a positive influence in Alec’s understanding of the philosopher’s task even though later experience and reflection led to new orientations and modifications of the philosophy he had learnt in Sydney”. And “he never lost his respect for Anderson’s teachings but he became less interested in the imperatives of that system of philosophy and more concerned with the close study of the particularities of individual problems.”
It is difficult for me to see how Andersonianism remained a positive influence on Ritchie’s understanding of the philosopher’s task after Ritchie took up a markedly different way of doing philosophy. I also question to what degree Ritchie could continue to respect Anderson’s teachings after he had become less interested in their major tenets. From what I could see Ritchie had lost interest in Anderson’s philosophy. There seems to be more than a whiff of euphemism (perhaps unintended) clouding the obituary’s report of Ritchie’s adherence to and departure from Andersonianism. But we need to crack open terms such as positive, task, modifications, respect and less to clarify precisely the extent to which Ritchie had changed in relation to Anderson. We would need to specify, to analyse. And that is a task the later Ritchie would have relished. In sharp contrast to his famous mentor the magic was in the minutiae, in digging deep rather than staking out new ground.
As a philosopher Ritchie’s dominant strength was his remarkable capacity for intricate analysis and fine distinctions, as well as his ability to focus and keep a grip on an issue. Presented with or presenting a problem his first action was to unpack it, to reveal how complex it was, what unexpected aspects it had, and how hard it might be to find an actual solution. In Philosophy and Language (3) one of Ritchie’s major aims is to make clear the different aspects of language and the different ways in which it is studied.
So, if I say ‘there are three rivers that flow into the Hunter’, we may be said to be confronted with (1) a pronounced sentence, which the grammarian may analyse, and either grammarian or rhetorician may classify, (2) a pattern of sounds which constitute pronounced words, (3) a sentence which is understood by those who know the meaning of the words, (4) a statement, which can be made confidently or uncertainly, loudly or softly, and truly or falsely, (5) if we are to believe our logicians, a proposition which
5 alone should be called “true” or “false” and which is, or corresponds to, or is not, and fails to correspond to, a state of affairs. Indeed, I can draw some more rabbits out of this hat: the sentence is an indicative one, has the form of a fact claim; I have performed a speech act in uttering it; and it is effective as a communicative speech act because it belongs within a speech community in at least two senses, that of normal contemporary speakers of English and a special group who can take the use of the proper noun “Hunter” in their stride.
Sometimes Ritchie’s painstaking effort to clarify by providing details and making distinctions can make one pause over the density of expression that results. Later in the same paper he remarks on the independent “structure” of language:
We find a language to be so, in learning that it is so. We find the grammar fixed and the logical relations of statements unalterable; and once it becomes apparent that the grammatical forms and logical forms are comparatively limited, by contrast with the vocabulary, and that the logic offers to be comprised within a rational system of interrelated forms, it becomes easy to treat language as having a rational and constructive or organizing core which contrasts with the non-rational and proliferative vocabulary (4).
Perhaps hasty composition and a degree of feeling led to this overstuffed and confusing sentence in a letter he wrote to the editor of Opus (the student newspaper at Newcastle) in 1969.
For students to be able to leave the rails of full, or over-full, syllabi and curricula, the useful and laid down and preliminary and career-determining, to be able to pay attention to life and ways of life, to the society around and themselves in society, a society (in a wide sense, the world) disturbed and uncertain, full of tensions and clashes, high endeavour and fumbling speech for belief and grounds for changing beliefs, as well as stupidity, greed, betrayal and abnegation, suggested a final end to the three-Rs mentality, the utilitarian endorsement of education as providing the minimum that “society” demanded (5).
Here the phrasal subject is diffuse and begins too far from its verb. For the reader the full stop comes as a mercy. The striving for clarity is bound to involve detail and distinctions and cause occasional slips into prolix and confusing expression. In fact analysis can be a maze, a knot garden, in which participants often not only do not find their way out but come to forget why they entered in the first place. The analysis of the problem becomes the problem – or, as Ritchie, or G. E. Moore, might say, the analysis of the original problem gives rise to one or more further problems or sources of confusion that obfuscate, or distract us from, the problem that the analysis was trying to clarify or solve.
Ritchie was an honest and scrupulous philosopher; no distinction or difficulty was glossed over or ignored. But he often left me with the impression that he was content to be engaged in the process of philosophizing whether or not it led to any outcome. Toss him an onion and he would be happy, if he could, to peel it forever. For the most part
6 Ritchie’s analysis usually did clarify a problem even if it did throw up more problems – an outcome that Ritchie would have considered philosophically right and proper.
Perhaps forty years later I am over-reacting to Ritchie’s penchant for analysis. He did not offer what I wanted as a young student. I was not just after a degree; that was merely a by-product of enrolling in an Arts degree, something I hardly thought about. I wanted answers to many questions. I wanted to learn and discover, to become a citizen in the republic of letters and a participant in the great debate. And you could not gain that status without a sound and broad basis of knowledge. I wanted, and felt myself to be on, an intellectual adventure that had no end. Without knowing, I was looking for exemplars of such a quest who could be leaders and companions at the same time. To borrow from a José Feliciano hit of the time: Ritchie didn’t light my fire. He just smothered it with more questions. The quest did not go straight on and upwards; it curled back on itself like a question mark. Answers were as questionable as questions. There was no way out of uncertainty.
I have now to confess (and there’s no fog about) a sin of commission: overall I thought Ritchie was a mediocre philosopher. To me as a student he seemed conventional and conservative, diffident and uncommitted, deficient in daring. Obviously he believed in philosophical analysis but otherwise he was Professor Neutral. I saw enough to conclude that he was fascinated by the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and that he was especially interested in certain issues thrown up in epistemology. What he made of it all I couldn’t tell. From some things he said and argued I inferred he was probably, like Anderson, a realist and empiricist and an atheist, but how far he had dug into these positions and was prepared to defend them I had no way of knowing – or of gauging Anderson’s influence on these likely “convictions” (a common term of Ritchie’s).
Anderson’s hand could be discerned, though, in a response Ritchie made to a controversy at the university early in 1969. What Ritchie said jolted my general impression of him as a pussy-footing academic and philosopher. He came out strongly against the notion of the university as primarily a training institution and insisted that a university’s main concern was to promote the academic way of life with its pursuit of truth and its “being part of or caught up in a sheerly open-ended discipline”. I was surprised and pleased not just by some of what he said but by the firmness with which he said it. There were qualifications and concessions to the status quo in universities but I had not expected him to be so forthright in favour of academicism. To me and my student friends Ritchie seemed to have acted out of character.
He was responding to a circular I had sent to all heads of department in my role as editor of Opus. The circular contained a letter that had been sent to me by an intending student who had sought advice from the Student Counseling Unit on which subjects to take in an Arts Degree. He had been advised to avoid philosophy since it was “pretty useless”. This remark troubled the potential, mature-age student because he expected a university to be more than a “glorified Tech.”. So much did Ritchie’s response letter rely on Andersonian terms or concepts I could have accused him of lifting the stones himself from Anderson’s grave. At the outset he quickly rejected utility as a measure of a
7 subject’s worth, pointing out as well that useful and useless are relational words. He improved on Anderson’s use of utilitarianism by substituting the more precise phrase “utility-morality”, but even here he invoked the Andersonian idea of a morality or way of life, this latter phrase being used explicitly as Ritchie summarized his position. His emphatic rejection of the “utilitarian concept”, his whole-hearted endorsement of the academic way of life as central to the university, as well as his reliance on some key Andersonian terms, revealed that somewhere in Ritchie’s thought, but not in the main quad, Anderson was alive and kicking.
I never again saw Alec Ritchie so much at ease as he was on that day in 1965 when he became professor. He struck me as a rather reserved, perhaps introverted, person – certainly not an outgoing, havachat type. I never saw him dallying in the corridors or lounging about in the offices of colleagues. He always seemed a little distant, somewhat apart from students and colleagues. When he spoke he was brief, careful, measured. Watch what you say and do. Get on with it – these could have been his imperatives. He was in charge of a growing department and had plenty to do, but even so there always seemed to be something else to which he must attend.
Neither this touch of unease nor his containment sprang from a well of egocentricity or misanthropy. He was patient, tolerant, sympathetic and generous. Once into a conversation with him you could find a surprising geniality and wit. Standing next to him at a university urinal one day I nodded at the slight curves in the urinal wall that offered a token privacy to each “micturator”. “Even here there are divisions among men,” I quipped. Quick as a flash Ritchie rejoined: “But the divisions are equal”. A wayward and troubled young man I was twice helped by Ritchie to overcome two terrible scholastic lapses. Without that help (and the support and encouragement of Bill Doniela and David Dockrill) I might not have managed to get a degree. Ritchie’s decisions in my favour were the more notable, given that I do not believe he liked me much and, rightly, lacked faith in my future as a philosopher.
Maybe Ritchie’s physique determined his general busyness and that touch of Being-at- Unease-in-the-World. He was not built for comfort, being tall, rangy and raw-boned. You could imagine him answering to the handle of Slim, riding tall in the saddle and roping maverick problems in some Western – where the philosophy, at any rate from his bunk, would have been more ornery than homespun.
And yet it was a hallmark of Ritchie’s method in philosophy to start out from what we commonly know and deal with – “our immediate situation”, “the familiarly complex”, “the complex familiar” or “the functioning familiar”. Here is that element of commonsense philosophy I mentioned before. Early in his 1970 paper Philosophy and Language he remarks “[t]here is something difficult in the very notion of language being problematical. If we consider our immediate situation… we would assume without reflection that I spoke in a language which you understand… . Further in the same paper he is insistent that complexity in the study of language is grounded in the familiar. “But stressing the obvious is important if the exhibited complexity makes clear that the central sense of a host of technical terms is to be found in the functioning familiar, and reflection
8 upon it”. Later he maintains that the distinctions to be found in logic and grammar are “rooted in the familiarly complex and it is there that we will find the sense of arguments such as whether it is sentences, statements, or propositions that are really what is true or false…”.
At this starting-point Ritchie has both feet planted in the world of commonsense, and no matter into which rarefied realm his analysis might venture he likes always to return home. Philosophical analysis must still accord with the familiar. No kicking away of ladders for Ritchie. His instrument for unpicking the complex skein of the familiar is something which is itself part of that world: language. For Ritchie, “our world as remembered or expected or as generally thinkable is identical with what we say and can say to have happened or to be likely to happen or to be the case”. And again in Philosophy and Language he makes the same point more fully: “But the apparent identity of what can be said, what can be thought, and what can be, the brute fact of “all men are mortal” being from one point of view a sentence, and part of a language, a statement, its ‘expression’ being a speech act (or a thought, if I say it silently to myself), and a melancholy state of affairs, is reflected in our situation as speakers and listeners in a language community” (6). It is this postulated identity that makes language, for Ritchie, such an effective means of understanding reality.
It is a primary weapon in his exposé of the wrong-headedness of Descartes’ Cogito. The basis of Ritchie’s critique is that Descartes cannot use Je (or any other self-referring word) to stand for a self that is simply a thinking thing, because such a usage does not accord with the full referential range of Je. It is, to put it briefly, Descartes the man (body and soul) who is content finally, and falsely, to think of himself as solely a thinking thing. The degree to which Ritchie invokes language in argument can be gauged from the concluding paragraphs of his paper Structure and Context in Descartes’ Meditations (7). He completes the third-last paragraph by maintaining “that the causally necessary conditions of concept-development, and of language-use, may present us with justification for rejecting claims and arguments presented in a language and running counter to the conditions of the use of such a language to claim and to argue”. And it is by an appeal to a linguistic point that Ritchie crystallizes his case against Descartes in the final paragraph. “And it might be worth a moment… considering whether this claim does not break upon the rock of ‘Ego’ (or ‘Je’ or ‘I’). If it were a proper name for a simple self-conscious substance, the matter might be very different. But it is not such a name, and we have, I suggest, adequate reasons for concluding that such a simple substance is not identical with René Descartes, and that it cannot be referred to by René Descartes’ use of ‘Je’ or ‘Ego’”.
John Anderson does not argue characteristically in this way. It is not on the facts of language-use but on “facts themselves” (that which language fits as a glove) that he relies, and he is keener to point to lapses in logic than to linguistic error. His world of states-of-affairs could very well have much in common with Ritchie’s familiarly complex world, but I could imagine Anderson arguing that complexity is not all that familiar. At any rate, I have no doubt that Ritchie went about philosophy quite differently from Anderson.
9
To my conclusion that Ritchie was not a follower of John Anderson in the sixties – when I knew him – I would add the opinion that he was not an Andersonian for most of the forty-one years between his departure for England and his death in 1991. From what his obituary tells us we can infer that he was influenced by Anderson as an undergraduate and probably for an indefinite period afterwards. If Madge Eddy’s recollection is accurate, Ritchie and Anderson were personally close in the late 1930s. But how much of Anderson’s philosophy did Ritchie accept, and did it condition his thinking, his outlook and his behaviour? And for how long?
I can accept that some of Anderson rubbed off on to Ritchie and was never completely worn away. From reading Anderson’s work and, further, from reading and hearing what former students have said about him, anyone can realize how he could quicken and develop a young person’s interest in thinking, in philosophy, and in particular Anderson’s own set of ideas. I can believe that Anderson got Ritchie going intellectually, that he fired him up with logical rigour, an enthusiasm for thinking, and a range of interconnected ideas with which to sort out important issues in socio-political and personal life. I can accept that Ritchie retained some of his former teacher’s concepts in his own thinking about ethics, politics and education, and that he remained always fond of and grateful for his contact with Anderson.
But there is so much I am sceptical about. My experience of Ritchie confirms that you can begin as an Andersonian and develop into something quite different, even antithetical. Ritchie was far from being a zealous lapsed believer bent on showing the remaining faithful the error of their ways. Rather, whatever Andersonianism there was in him gradually lost its zing and settled as a more or less inert residue at the bottom of his mind. Something would stir it up from time to time but it could manage little more than a brief fizz before subsiding again.
Obviously the issue of Ritchie’s allegiance to Anderson cannot be settled by a number of images. We need to propose the necessary and sufficient conditions of being an Andersonian. We need to acknowledge that you can be an Andersonian and cease to be an Andersonian. We need to realize that an Andersonian can become an anti - Andersonian. Can you at any time be an Andersonian if you hardly mention his name or never invoke any of his leading ideas and do philosophy in a strikingly different way? Unless you are living in a place where Anderson is proscribed and the penalty for any breach is death, or there are other serious pro/inhibitions, the answer must surely be no.
Far too many people who did a year or more of philosophy under Anderson as undergraduates and donned his ideas for a while have been dubbed Andersonians too casually. Imitation is not emulation. Andersonianism is not a fad or a youthful posturing; it is a way of life (to use one of Anderson’s own major socio-psychological concepts). It is a dynamic mix of beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. You cannot be an Andersonian, I suggest, unless you believe that existence is made up of an infinite number of complex states-of-affairs and that everything is propositional. You need to believe that logic and ontology are interwoven. You cannot be an Andersonian if you do
10 not believe that existence in space-time is the only kind of existence and that there are no upper or lower or privileged levels of existence. There is inescapable conflict everywhere. You must accept the objectivity or independence of things, and that includes relations as well as qualities. You need to believe that nothing is beyond criticism and that criticism is at the heart of culture.
In ethics, it is moralities, not morality, goods, not goodness, which you must consider. In social and political philosophy, ways of life or social movements are more fundamental than individuals. Education is intellectual; it has its own integrity and is not for anything else. You must be a freethinker, someone to whom no idea is intellectually anathema. Indeed, thinking must be an ongoing full-blooded concern (“Seize hold of things; hammer out the issues; abjure dilettantism in any shape”). Perhaps finally you must be a proponent and defender of freedom.
Necessary all these factors might be, but I hesitate to say which of them is/are also sufficient for being an Andersonian. Let me here fall back on a point Anderson himself made in that early paper Empiricism (8). “It is obviously not an easy matter to describe a whole outlook; an attitude of mind which is felt to cover a range of problems cannot readily be communicated without going over all these problems”. Like Anderson, Ritchie was, I would say, a realist, a “naturalist”, materialist, pluralist, determinist and positivist, but so were many other philosophers whom no one would call Andersonian.
Compared to contemporaries such as John Mackie and John Passmore and even Harry Eddy, who was not a professional philosopher, Alec Ritchie was a lesser light philosophically. He lacked either their passion for thinking or their degree of interest in issues and their pursuit of solutions. I doubt that his career lived up to the expectations, vague as they probably were, that he might have entertained while in London. I think he would have liked at the end to have done far more writing and research than his teaching and administrative duties came to allow him at Newcastle. I do not know enough about Ritchie or his circumstances to hazard an opinion as to why the writing/research side was smothered by the more mundane tasks of running a department, serving on boards and committees and engaging in wider university activities. These are necessary and valuable endeavours but they are not at the heart of being a philosopher. Thinking is, and the best of it is achieved through research, reflection, writing and communication in lectures and publication. Therein lies the buzz of academic life and the thrust of intellectual growth.
Nevertheless, Alec Ritchie was an able philosopher with impressive skills in analysis and argumentation. He would be at home in all but the most specialized of philosophical discussions. He was especially adept at the Lockean task of clearing away the undergrowth for the heavier artillery to roll forward (Ritchie would admit that clarity is not enough). He had a watchmaker’s finesse in picking things apart to see how they worked or why they were not working. Like a forensic lawyer he could expose assumptions and latch on to inconsistencies. He was open, objective and disinterested, and would follow an argument wherever it might lead.
11 Even in the sixties I did not care much whether Ritchie was then an Andersonian or not, although I was interested in the matter as a question of fact. He did not have to be an Andersonian and he does not now. Forty years later I have made it an issue simply because I happened to see him listed as an Andersonian in JA (9) and thought that by and large he did not belong there (along with quite a few other listed “Andersonians”). I remember Alec Ritchie now with more respect, and definitely more admiration and affection than I held for him as a student. My own faults and limitations have pressed upon me over time and, among many other things, I have come to see him more justly. He was a better philosopher than I never was.
Peter Harris March 2006
References 1. Cetus, University of Newcastle alumni magazine, 1991. 2. Heraclitus, No. 58, May 1997, p.3. 3. Dialectic, Vol. 5, 1971, pp 3-4. 4. Op. cit. p. 8. 5. Opus, Vol. 16, No.2, 18th April, 1969, p. 5. 6. OP. cit., p. 6. 7. Dialectic, Vol. 3, April 1969, pp. 11 & 12. 8. Studies in Empirical Philosophy, Angus & Robertson, 1962, p. 3. 9. A journal dedicated to Professor John Anderson, his family and associates, No.26, 2005.
Further personal and professional knowledge of Alexander Maclean Ritchie can be obtained from the University of Newcastle Archives. A list of its holdings relating to Alec Ritchie follows.
12