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Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 116 No. 1 £1.50 January 2011 R.G. Collingwood J.M. Keynes Richard Hoggart Tony Judt ENGLISHNESS AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA: SHOULD MORAL PHILOSOPHERS LEAD GOOD LIVES? see page 3 Leo Tolstoy see page 11 ENGLISHNESS AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA: SHOULD MORAL PHILOSOPHERS LEAD GOOD LIVES? Fred Inglis 3 RUSSIA, TOLSTOY AND UNIVERSAL VALUES Robert Gomme 11 VIEWPOINTS: John Edmondson, Jasper Tomlinson 15 HUMANIST REFERENCE LIBRARY Purchases and donations Cathy Broad 19 ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 20 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8031/4 Fax: 020 7242 8036 www.ethicalsoc.org.uk GC Officers elected at the SPES GC meeting on 1 December 2010: Chairman: Jim Herrick Hon. Rep.: Derek Lennard Vice-chairman: Ed McArthur Registrar: Andrew Copson Treasurer: Chris Bratcher Editor: Norman Bacrac Please email texts and viewpoints for the Editor to: [email protected] SPES Staff Finance Officer: Linda Alia Tel: 020 7242 8031/4 [email protected] Librarian: Catherine Broad Tel: 020 7242 8037 [email protected] Programme Co-ordinator: Ben Partridge Tel: 020 7242 8034 [email protected] Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7242 8032 [email protected] Lettings Assistant: Marie Aubrechtova Tel: 020 7242 8031/4 [email protected] Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c) Tel: 020 7242 8033 together with: Angelo Edrozo, Alfredo Olivo, Rogerio Retuerna, Cagatay Ulker Maintenance Operative: Zia Hameed Sub-committee appointments (elected by the GC on 1 December 2010): Education & Arts Finance Hall Music Norman Bacrac Chris Bratcher Norman Bacrac Simon Callaghan Andrew Copson Jim Herrick John Edwards Giles Enders (Chair) John Edwards Marina Ingham Jim Herrick Derek Lennard Jim Herrick Derek Lennard Marina Ingham Terry Mullins Ed McArthur Don Langdown Alys Wynne-Jones Out with the old CEO and in with the new! We shall all miss our very efficient and always cheerful Chief Executive Officer Emma Stanford, who left at the end of December. Dr Jim Walsh has been appointed as the new CEO. He is expected to take up his post by mid-February. New Member We welcome Christine Seymour of Brentwood in Essex WINTER SOCIAL 12 December 2010 At the Society's Winter Social, members and friends were greeted with the offer of a glass of mulled wine (curtesy of Marina Ingham, who also arranged all the refreshments). They then heard a beautifully played piano recital from music teacher Sylvia Lee. Sylvia charmed the audience with her rendering of Mozart, Lizst and Chopin. Their wits were then exercised by a general knowledge quiz conducted this year by Norman Bacrac, the prize for top marks being won by veteran quiz-master Terry Mullins. SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 251396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are: the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism and freethought the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and education in relevant fields. We invite to membership those who reject supernatural creeds and are in sympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures, discussions, evening courses and the Conway Hall Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Reference Library. The Society’s journal, Ethical Record, is issued monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is £20 (£15 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65). 2 Ethical Record, January 2011 ENGLISHNESS AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA: SHOULD MORAL PHILOSOPHERS LEAD GOOD LIVES? Fred Inglis Lecture to the Ethical Society, 10 October 2010 In 1938 the great English philosopher, R G Collingwood, by that date having suffered the first of the small strokes which would kill him in January 1943, wrote of the pupils at Oxford who had studied under T H Green that they ‘went out into public life [carrying] with them the conviction that philosophy, and in particular the philosophy they had learned at Oxford, was an important thing, and that their vocation was to put it into practice’.1 It was that same conviction which impelled the many public-spirited, idealist (in both its technical and its domestic meanings) and strenuously agnostic men and women who founded the Ethical Society and by 1929 had completed Conway Hall to the design of Frederick Mansford. The moving spirits of the Society and, finally, of the building of its cathedral included Collingwood’s teacher, .the philosopher Bernard Bosanquet, his great ally, J H Muirhead, Arnold Toynbee, those mighty and only begetters of LSE’s intellectual proprieties, Sidney Webb, J A Hobson and R B S Haldane, and perhaps most important, the American, Stanton Coit,2 who ran for Parliament as a socialist in Wakefield, for Mayor in New York, and may be counted the senior prophet of our Ethical Churches and of old and new humanism. Lastly, in this brief shower of dropped names, I honour that of that admirable novelist, Mrs Humphrey Ward and her very good novel Robert Elsmere, in which she chronicles the passage of her hero from Christianity to the sort of ethical public- spiritedness he learned from T H Green. Making A Better Person I rehearse this corner of an intellectual history, which must indeed be familiar in these premises, in part out of a due and heartfelt sense of the honour done to me in the invitation to give this morning’s godless sermon. Naturally I wish to observe a proper piety towards our intellectual ancestors, heroes, saints and martyrs, but most of all to play on these names as swelling prologue to my imperial theme. That theme is to claim not only that the study of moral philosophy should indeed make you a better person, and that if it doesn’t then either you haven’t read the right books or else something is wrong in your moral constitution, but also to contend that a thinker’s thought is inextricable from the deep contexts of his or her life, that far from accepting the traditional separation of passion and reason, I prefer (with David Hume) to agree that ‘reason is and ought always to be slave to the passions’,3 but that inasmuch as the passions vary, and fluctuate between good and bad feelings, reason has plenty to do in ordering judgement to decide on those feelings which conduce to our best thoughts and actions, and those which don’t. I trust you will excuse the self-advertisement, but this preamble arises from the biography of R G Collingwood which I wrote recently. Collingwood will serve to illustrate the way in which thinking is performed in action, and to expand his own aphorism made in An Autobiography, that ‘the autobiography of a man whose business is thinking should be the story of his thought’4 in order to Ethical Record, January 2011 3 show how the thought was shaped by the life, or rather, how the thought which was his vocation was discovered by him and took the shape it did. The form of biography is crucial to any argument about the connection between the thinker’s life and the thoughts it produced. Obviously this is harder and harder to do the further we go back in the history of thought and of the human sciences, and we have more detail about some lives – Hobbes’s, say, or Spinoza’s – than about others, Socrates’s or Averroës’. So I am claiming that the study of moral philosophy is both intrinsically historical and intrinsically biographical: we question and interpret a philosopher’s thought as we would the man or the woman themselves. We read philosophy for the joy of it as well as in the hope of making ourselves – well! – better educated, better able to understand human conduct, better persons even. The Tradition-demolishers There are innumerable tradition-demolishers, Marxism and managerialism among them. The question now to be put is whether an English tradition of philosophising on behalf of the academy and of plain persons is still capable of connecting moral thought to good lives, of making a living polity out of old books and dead authors. One keen difficulty with answering the question is the old ruling class insolence with which Scottish philosophers, Irish poets and Welsh preacher-socialists have been casually lumped together under the English title. While firmly repudiating the class and chauvinist arrogance, it is part of my purpose to ask of our philosophers whether there remains an honest and honourable tradition of jointly English, Scots, Welsh and Irish philosophising; whether it merits patriotic esteem; whether it can be more handsomely accommodating to a great and generous imagining of a benevolently powerful European Union; whether it can teach us ordinary language moralists to do right and live well. (This is sermonising, all right.) Our topic is the necessary connection between moral thought and moral action. We look for that connection whether in the lives of professional philosophers and moralists (as we shall see in a minute, these are terms to be used with some elasticity), or in the lives of the plain people who, as Oliver Edwards said in the 18th century, “have tried in [their] time to be a philosopher, but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness [is] always breaking in”. For a longish season – let us say, since managerialism offered to run the world after the beginning of the Cold War, and long after its end – academic philosophy has been quite unable to affect the life of the polity. This state of affairs leaves such stout-hearted declarations of intent as Collingwood’s tragically unself-aware.