Geoffrey Hawthorn

Cary Grant sits down at a table with Ralph Bellamy and Irene Dunne in 1937 and says: ‘So you two are going to get married.’ It is The Awful Truth. Grant sits down at a table with Bellamy and Rosalind Russell in 1940 and says again: ‘So you two are going to get married.’ It is His Girl Friday. Asked what the Bellamy character in the film, the man who plans to marry his former wife, looks like, Grant replies: ‘Like that fellow in the movies. What’s his name? Ralph Bellamy.’ Jokes within jokes. Howard Hawks having a joke with Leo McCarey. Hawks perhaps treating McCarey’s The Awful Truth like the front page of a paper, something to be revised at speed in the light of new and startling developments. Hawks perhaps doing this to The Front Page itself, the play from which His Girl Friday comes. For His Girl Friday, the fastest of a set of wonderfully fast Hollywood films of the Thirties and Forties, not only moves by cut and splice at a pace that a play never can. It also, as the film it is, refers repeatedly to itself.

Textbook writers set examinations. The rationale is clear, the interest transparent. In what in the United States is called ‘behavioural science’, such people have a standard first chapter and a standard first question. What is behavioural science the science of? In BS101, the standard first course, some more or less elaborate padding with examples of the answer ‘just that, behaviour’ will do. In BS201, however, candidates might be expected to have picked up the now conventional view in the post-empiricist philosophy of science (PS101) that to construct such a science, we not only abstract and generalise but also observe with categories that we ourselves bring to the behaviour that interests us. Behaviour, in the strict sense, is mute. By BS301, though, candidates might also have picked up the complicating view in the post-empiricist philosophy of the more deliberately human sciences that behaving humans often themselves describe what they do, and that such descriptions are not merely important additional information, but decisive. Human actions, in this view, are their descriptions. Indeed, by the end of BS301 candidates might find themselves steering, or simply veering, to the uncomfortable conclusion that there are two sorts of human science, one more or less behavioural, the other, as fashionable language now has it, hermeneutic: and yet that we set these two sorts of science up to deal with what on any moderately commonsensical view appears to be the same subject-matter. BS401 (and PS401) will only compound the problem. There, candidates might and arguably should be encouraged to abandon the view that an agent’s description of what he is doing has any cognitive privilege after all. ‘The difference between his description and ours,’ in Richard Rorty’s words, ‘may mean that he should not be tried under our laws. It does not mean that he cannot be explained by our science.’ Realism, the doctrine that things are as they are independent of any description of them, can only be false for things which just are their descriptions. For these, there is no conceivable fact of the matter. (For Rorty, any realism, if not false, is idle, since because of the interference of language we can never know that we know even the properties of things which have properties. This breezy bleakness does have the striking if solitary virtue of dissolving all claimed differences between the two sorts of science.) Nevertheless, the agent does still have his descriptions. The suspicion remains that unless we can actually talk to him and persuade him to change his mind, our own descriptions, if different, are still in some sense misdescriptions. They are our descriptions of him, but they are not descriptions for him. Here the arguments finally break out and break down. BS501 (and PS501 too) await their textbook writers.

In Diderot’s ‘Les Bijoux Indiscrets’, a man acquires a ring which has the power to make sexual organs speak. Michel Foucault says that he wants to make that ring speak for itself. (He sketched part of his project in this paper last summer: Vol. 3, No 9.) Sexuality ‘traces that line of foam which shows just how far speech may advance on the sands of silence’. To speak of it, to ourselves, to each other, to those who hire out their ears, is, we think (or Foucault thinks we think), to reach the root of our subjectivity. That is his interest in it. Speaking of sexuality is the present limit of that ‘immense labour to which the West has submitted generations in order to produce … men’s subjection: their constitution as “subjects” in both senses of the word’. It is the present limit of confession in a confessional civilisation. And in its pretended disillusion, it is the present limit of illusion. For ‘the subject’ is a construction, something that is produced in ‘discourse’, something which itself presents a question; something which cannot thus be taken, as it has so long been taken, in much Christian theology and in the secular philosophy which followed, as the touchstone of any answer to some other question.

By the time he was 34, Thomas Macaulay had had a fellowship at Trinity, practised law for a year or two, sat in the Commons for four, and been appointed to a seat on the Supreme Council in India. On the boat to Calcutta, he wrote to Ellis, he had read the Iliad and the Odyssey, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbon on Rome, Sismondi on France, Mill on India, ‘the seven thick folios of Biographica Brittanica’ and ‘the 70 volumes of Voltaire’. Once there, he took to ‘passing the three or four hours before breakfast in reading Greek and Latin’, started to reflect on politics at home, and decided to write his History of England. ‘For what is it,’ he asked, ‘that a man who might, if he chose, rise and lie down at his own hour, engage in any study, enjoy any amusement, visit any place, travel to foreign countries, consents to make himself as much a prisoner as if he were within the rules of the Fleet – to be tethered for 11 months of the year within a circle of half a mile round Charing Cross?’

Spain was in doubt about its new dominion in the Antilles. In 1493, the Pope Alexander VI had granted Ferdinand and Isabel the right to conquer and also to enslave the inhabitants of the islands. But only two years later, Isabel was intervening to stop the sale of some that Columbus had sent back to Seville. It was not that she or anyone else objected to slavery itself. There was no moral problem, for instance, about buying Africans from the Portuguese. It was rather that she regarded the American Indians as vassals of her own crown and was clear, as she reminded the governor of Hispaniola in 1501, that they should be treated as well as the inhabitants of Castile itself. But she died, the Pope had decreed otherwise, and despite some revived resentment at his again presuming a temporal power, a junta of advisers called by Ferdinand in 1504 upheld the Pope’s view.