Light As Ayer

Sir Alfred J. Ayer (1910-1989), as A. R. Lacey’s A Dictionary of Philosophy listed him, was the man who “introduced logistical positivism to Britain in 1936, and has since defended an empiricist outlook, writing mainly on perception and meaning, as well as on various historical issues.” But as Ayer himself acknowledged, and his friends affirmed, there seem to have been two Ayers, A. J. and Freddie.

A. J., the philosopher, was the man who, at twenty-six, published Language, Truth and Logic (1936), which put into philosophical play the severe strictures of the Vienna Circle against metaphysics and everything else that did not lend itself to scientific verifiability. Its young author was for a time thought extremely clever by both Wittgenstein and Einstein, and considered generally as the inheritor and continuater of the great tradition of empiricism in English philosophy running from Hume through Locke through Mill through Russell.

A. J. Ayer was the man who, toward the end of his life, claimed that the pursuit of truth was his main goal. “From the beginning of his life to the end,” writes Ben Rogers in his excellent new biography of Ayer (A. J. Ayer: A Life), “he believed in an absolute ethic of reason, of truth: Winning people to your point of view was important, but getting the philosophy right was more important still.”

Freddie Ayer, on the other hand, was a man who knew how to dance the samba. A much-married man — his marriages numbered four, two to the same woman — he had children both in and out of wedlock, cuckolded and was himself cuckolded. (Rogers reports that the philosopher Stuart Hampshire had a child with Ayer’s first wife, Renee, while Ayer was still married to her.) He was mad for sport, a big fan of the Tottenham Hotspur football team, and himself a cricketeer of style and ability. A radio and television performer, he was a regular on a very popular English radio show called The Brains Trust. His specialty was taking the atheist side in debates on the existence of God. In the 1940s, he reviewed movies for the Nation. Sheila Graham, the last lady friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was the mother of Ayer’s daughter, who learned Ayer was her father only when she was forty-six. That was Freddie.

An only child, born in 1910, Alfred Jules Ayer descended from Dutch-Jewish merchants on his mother’s side, Swiss-Calvinist bankers and professors on his father’s. His father was a man of a certain cleverness — he was for a time secretary to Alfred Rothschild, of the banking Rothschilds — but evidently little gravity. His mother was soft, insecure, neurotic. Family sentiment was all but non-existent in Ayer, both as a boy and later, but the key figure in his early life was his mother’s father, Dorus Citroen, wealthy and cultivated, a Jewish anti-Zionist and a strong believer in intermarriage, who forbade his three daughters to marry Jews. He encouraged Ayer to model his life on that of Disraeli.

The young Ayer had the oddity and the dandyishness of Disraeli, if little else. Without any Jewish training, cultural piety, or belief, Ayer was nonetheless always taken as Jewish. The map of Israel was written on his face. He was thought, along with Isaiah Berlin and Solly Zuckerman, in Stuart Hampshire’s phrase, “one of Oxford’s three brilliant Jews.” Peter Vansittart, in his memoir In the Fifties, recalls Evelyn Waugh, with characteristic tact, entering a party and inquiring, “Which of the Yids is Freddie Ayer?” Ayer himself, after a life of impressive accomplishments, told Anthony Grayling, his last graduate student, that he still felt that “one day someone is going to point a finger at me: ‘You are a fraud. You got into Eton and to Christ Church, you were an officer in the Welsh Guards, you became Wykeham Professor at Oxford and you secured a knighthood. But underneath you are just a dirty little Jew-boy.'”

Not that Ayer’s being taken as Jewish greatly slowed his progress in England, a society unique in the history of the world in judging — at least for a few centuries — merit in young men largely on their ability to achieve mastery in manipulating two dead languages. Intellectually precocious as he was, schoolboy scholarship provided no serious hurdle to Ayer, and he took all the jumps in easy stride, winning scholarships to the best schools.

At Eton, he finished first in classics and second overall. He was also considered cheeky, overly pleased with his own cleverness, too aggressive. That he went about trying to make converts to atheism couldn’t have helped much. At university, he took a seminar on Thomas Aquinas with Father Martin d’Arcy who later called Ayer “the most dangerous man at Oxford.” Rather an impressive thing to be called, really, when one is not yet twenty-one.

Philosophy first became a subject of serious interest for Ayer at Eton, where he discovered Bertrand Russell’s Sceptical Essays, which swept him away. (Ayer’s grandfather wanted him to become a barrister, and one winces at the prospect of the terror he could have evoked in that role.) Ben Rogers reports that he took a sentence from the book’s first essay — “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true” — as a motto throughout his own philosophical career. The book also supplied the eighteen-year-old Ayer with an introduction to modern philosophy, its strengths and weaknesses; and Russell’s own program, to put philosophy on a firmer, more scientific footing, soon became Ayer’s.

In the twentieth century, philosophy has attracted those brightest of students who have a taste for, and ability to range freely within, abstraction, but without a necessarily strong aptitude for science. For a complex of reasons, philosophy has been demoted from its former standing as queen of the sciences to something approximating the physics of the humanities. While there is no doubting Ayer’s philosophical spirit — his dedicated pursuit of truth as he understood it — there is also reason to believe that for him, who was so good at all games, philosophy also functioned as a game of sorts, the best game in town perhaps, but still a game.

There are no Bobby Fischers, let alone Mozarts, in philosophy — no, that is to say, prodigies — but once he took up philosophy, Ayer immediately came to play it at a very high level. A paragon of precocity, he was given a lectureship at Oxford before he graduated; such were his powers of concentration, he could read and write while being driven in the sidecar of a motor-cycle. He must have had a towering IQ but, alas, with little in the way of subtlety of intelligence of the kind that goes to understanding human character and motivation. When Ayer and Isaiah Berlin sat for a coveted fellowship to All Souls College, only Berlin, with the more finely textured mind of the two, won it (the first Jew in the history of All Souls to do so).

The iconoclasm that appears to have been part of the young Freddie Ayer’s nature elided nicely into the work of A. J. Ayer, the philosopher. This iconoclasm took the philosophical form of extreme rationalism. “Everything,” he remarked, “needs its own proof.” At Oxford, Gilbert Ryle, one of his tutors, noted that he was “an extremely penetrating and unsentimental thinker.” The “unsentimental” referred to his coldness; respect never entered into Ayer’s relations with his academic elders. If anything, he was rather fond of causing them to squirm. As a young don at Christ Church College, for example, Ayer delivered himself of a lecture to a banquet of old boys on how the Christianity of Ruskin, one of the college’s most distinguished former members, twisted Ruskin’s thought and, while at it, turned him into a left-winger. Ayer had a taste for this sort of thing — for lighting firecrackers in intellectual nursing homes.

Ayer’s was the Oxford generation that came after that of Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton, Brian Howard, & Co., the children of the sun, in Martin Green’s phrase. His was the generation of the early thirties, high on the list of whose luminaries were Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Goronwy Rees. It was Rees who later blew the whistle on the spies Burgess and McLean and of whom, such was his charm, Hampshire said that “he could never be tedious enough for his own good.” All came under the influence of Maurice Bowra, the classics don who was fifteen years older and whose clique, of which Ayer became a member, was known as “the immoral front.” Ben Rogers puts it with nice precision when he writes of Ayer’s generation at Oxford that it “was worldly, fun-loving and experimental” yet its “privileges were still Victorian.” It had, in short, the best of both worlds.

Ayer’s grandfather gave him an allowance that permitted him to live in the expansive style that he easily grafted onto his somewhat rebarbative personality. The book on Freddie Ayer was that he was mannered, affected, precious, snobbish. He was all these things while also feeling insecure, out of place, an outsider. Isaiah Berlin recalls Ayer referring to himself in the third person. Two brilliant young Jews from well-off families, Berlin and Ayer were always being compared. Berlin attempted — successfully — to capture Oxford by learning and ingratiating charm, while Ayer attempted — less successfully — to capture it by sheer intellectual aggression.

The two men, who should have been friends, never quite were. Ayer was hedonist and confident, Berlin prudish and diffident; Ayer the cold atheist, Berlin deeply respectful of a Judaism in which it is not altogether certain he believed. Ayer, in the first of his two autobiographies, thought his own mind more incisive than Berlin’s, but his range narrower. Berlin thought well of Ayer’s intellectual gifts, but in the end felt he did not put them to good use: “He was the best writer of philosophical prose since Hume, better even than Russell, but he never had an original idea in his life. He was like a mechanic, he fiddled with things and tried to fix them.”

The decisive event in Ayer’s professional life was his trip, in 1933, to Vienna, where he was invited to attend the meetings of the now famous Vienna Circle. Made up of twenty scientists (many of them theoretical physicists) and philosophers — including such luminaries as Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and Kurt Godel — the Vienna Circle, which met every week or so at the University of Vienna, was a reaction to the false omniscience of German philosophy, which not only claimed to be in possession of the answers to all the great metaphysical questions, but thought that it could also explain all branches of science without really bothering to have learned them.

This is vastly to simplify, but the gravamen of the Vienna Circle was that nothing was true that could not be submitted to scientific proof. Straight-away this excluded all discussion of metaphysics and human nature. Truth or falsity wasn’t, for logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, of the least interest. What couldn’t be verified was meaningless. “All philosophical questions,” as Ayer reported from Vienna to Isaiah Berlin in Oxford, “are purely linguistical.”

The twenty-three-year-old Ayer hadn’t much German, and thus couldn’t contribute to the meetings of the Vienna Circle, but he was able to take away what he needed. Not the least of what he took was a certain cachet from having attended them. (The only other outsider invited to the meetings was W. V. Quine, the thenyouthful Harvard philosopher.) Soon after his return to England, Ayer would become known, as Rogers puts it, as logical positivism’s “apostle to England.”

Every idea, Nietzsche somewhere says, has its autobiography, which may or may not be true, but what seems less arguable is that it is in intellectual biography that one can hope to learn why certain thinkers were attracted to specific ideas. Why would the young Ayer have been so inflamed by those ideas that have gone by the name of logical positivism — ideas that seem, on the face of it, to cut him off from so many of the interesting questions of the subject in which he would expend most of his life’s intellectual energy?

Part of the attraction of logical positivism for Ayer must have resided in its philosophically avant-garde status. As such it was a club with which to beat many of the philosophy dons at the Oxford of his day, who tended to be distinctly rear guard. Ayer’s college at Oxford, Christ Church, more aristocratic and religious than most Oxford colleges, also had higher than the usual number of anti-Semites; one of them, when a studentship was arranged for Albert Einstein, referred to him as “some German Jew.” The principal figures in philosophy were neo-Hegelians or realists, labels that qualified them, philosophically, as fuddy-duddys of the first order.

Along with logical positivism’s intrinsic attractions, it provided the added pleasure of blasting all the old wisdom. For logical positivism, ethics wasn’t a serious question; God wasn’t even discussable. Critique of language was logical positivism’s speciality. Philosophy, as Gilbert Ryle was to say, was “talk about talk.” In the attack upon traditional philosophy, Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic was his biggest firecracker of all — a double cherry bomb and roman candle combined. “The really defining feature of the book,” as Ben Rogers notes, “is not so much its attack on metaphysics as a more far-reaching rejection of philosophical authority in both knowledge and morals.”

The liberating effect of the book when it was first published in 1936 reverberated down the decades. (It is a book that continues to be widely used in undergraduate philosophy courses.) Some of this effect can be felt even today in reading Language, Truth and Logic. The quick, short sentences, all burnished clarity with scarcely any brambly qualification appearing in subordinate clauses, burst like a spray of perfectly aligned machine-gun bullets upon the target of traditional philosophy.

Colin McGinn recalls the excitement of reading this book as a boy of nineteen and feeling that he was “being inducted into a cult of pellucid evasion. It felt so liberating to declare everything that most troubled me to be nothing but nonsense.” McGinn would have second, very different thoughts, which he recently expressed in a review of Rogers’s biography in the Times Literary Supplement: “But I would now say that not only did Ayer never have an original idea in his life, he also never had a good idea, his own or anyone else’s.”

With the publication of Language, Truth and Logic when its author was only twenty-six, A. J. Ayer was well on his way to establishing his philosophical reputation. Freddie Ayer, meanwhile, was on his way to making a fine muddle of his life.

The chief agency of this muddle was sex, of which the young philosopher couldn’t seem to get enough. (Sex to the generation who came into their majority in the 1930s seems to have replaced alcohol as the opiate of artists and intellectuals.) In later years, Ayer would describe himself, amusingly and not at all imprecisely, as “a notorious heterosexual.”

“Vanity,” Ayer told Ved Mehta, when he was interviewing him for Fly and The Fly-Bottle, his 1963 book on English philosophy. “Yes, vanity is the sine qua non of philosophers.” Ayer returned to this theme in a 1989 interview with Ted Honderich. “I’m vain,” he remarked, “but I’m not conceited. . . . A vain man is one who’s proud to display his medals. I am vain. A conceited man is one who thinks he deserves more medals than he’s got. I’m not conceited.” A nice distinction, but not a sufficiently comprehensive one to cover Ayer’s own case. He was also vain in the Johnsonian sense, for in Ben Roger’s account, if Ayer came to believe that in his own life vanity dominated, he also concluded that in the end vanity was all there was.

Asked late in life by an interviewer what he thought the chief defect of Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer replied: “Well, I suppose that the most important defect is that all of its was false.” Rogers also quotes Ayer telling a journalist: “It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all a wasted effort.” Colin McGinn bangs in the nail of agreement: “He [Ayer] is now very little read within analytical philosophy — his chosen field — and his ideas play almost no role in contemporary debates. Compared to W. V. Quine and P. F. Strawson, say, let alone Russell and Wittgenstein, he is a negligible figure on the philosophical scene.”

Poets, through tradition beginning at least as long ago as the Romantics, are allowed to behave badly, even madly. Philosophers may behave madly — see Nietzsche — but not badly. Socrates put the final kibosh on that when he agreed to die for his ideas, thus establishing the link between a philosopher’s life and his ideas. Heidegger is unlikely ever to break free of the strong taint his active Nazism has placed on his ideas. Even allowing a certain leeway for foolish politics — one thinks here of Bertrand Russell, whose wacky late-life leftism does not disqualify his standing as one of the great figures in twentieth-century philosophy — one nonetheless tends to judge, at least in part, the quality of a philosopher’s ideas by the life he has led.

Ayer does not score high here. His philosophy, built on the notion of the primacy of sensory experience, left him bereft of any solid grounding in reality. His biographer suggests that “it could be argued against it that Ayer’s empiricism and epicureanism were two sides of the same coin.” Colin McGinn goes much further, claiming that Ayer’s philosophy, in which sensations “are the fundamental reality,” left him entrapped in his own subjectivity, solipsistic and sensation-mongering, with no regard for the past and less for the future.

Try to imagine living such a philosophy and you might get a sense of what it was to be A. J. Ayer: “a series of tenuously related sensations surrounded on all sides by an abyss of emptiness.”

Ayer was not charmless. Many people who met him thought him stylish, elegant, intellectually dashing. “Every remark he made,” one of his last students recalled, “sounded a chord of originality, sincerity and brilliance combined.” His success with women came from a unique method of seduction for an Englishman of his day — he actually listened to them. Far from being a ruthless Don Juan, he tended to submit himself to women, to act the supplicant, pleading his case and often winning. Many of these women, long after their affairs with him were over, remained his friends. But there can be little doubt that Freddie Ayer was on a program, as his friend Philip Toynbee acknowledged, of strict hedonism, which in practice meant that he had little regard for the effects of his conduct beyond the immediate pleasure it brought.

Neither an immoralist, nor even an amoralist, Ayer believed morality was possible without religion, a belief held by most people in a secular age. His own politics, fairly standard leftism, were highly moralistic.

First set in motion by the Spanish Civil War, they carried all the usual mistakes of faulty observation that seem inevitably to follow from that position: The chief insight he seems to have brought back from a brief visit to the Soviet Union in 1954, for example, was that it seemed to him strikingly like Victorian England. The appropriate punctuation mark to cap the obtuseness of that observation doesn’t exist. He was — no great surprise here — strongly against the war in Vietnam.

An effective teacher, himself stimulated by disagreement, he cultivated and brought along the brightest of his students, and did what he could to see them well-placed in academic jobs. He built a powerful philosophy department at University College London. As a thinker, he seems to have been best on the attack. “If you write good prose,” he told an interviewer in 1989, “you can’t succumb to the sort of [intellectual] nonsense we get from Germany and from France.” Although he was early sympathetic to existentialism, he was very sharp at piercing the pretensions and muddle of the existentialists, and his attacks on Sartre stung sufficiently to cause Sartre to say: Ayer est un con. That remark, considering the source, is worth more than most literary prizes.

Still, there was something undeniably insubstantial, something light, about Ayer. His philosophy turns out to be less complicated than his domestic life. He had four children and more stepchildren than one can keep count of; and he went from being a decent to an indifferent to a non-existent father. As a husband, he only occasionally lapsed into fidelity. Viewed quantitatively, he did quite well in this line. Models and aristocrats were among his lovers; so were the wives of friends, including that of E. E. Cummings. Well into his sixties, Ayer was married and had two love affairs going; his last love affair was with a woman forty years younger than he. His view of philandery seems to have been roughly that of the more tolerant referees of the National Basketball Association: no harm, no foul. Switching sports quickly here, one of his wives remarked: “Some men played golf, Freddie played women.” It all might seem more amusing had not various of his children been left stranded on the fairway.

“The thing about Freddie,” one friend reported, “was that you saw his vices immediately, and spent the rest of your life discovering his virtues.” This, though, was a minority view. Most people found him wanting, especially in the realm of feeling. Intro-spection was another of his deficiencies; he seems to have been quite without any. Nor did he have any compunction in determining whose interests came first. The playwright John Osborne, never a man given to soft judgments, called Ayer “possibly the most selfish, superficial, and obtuse man I have ever met.” Frederick Raphael, reviewing one of Ayer’s two disappointing — because largely bereft of insight — volumes of autobiography, wrote: “A systematic prejudice against speculation has created, it seems, a Narcissus incapable of seeing himself, and hence others.”

In 1998, the year before his actual death, Ayer choked on a bit of smoked salmon, passed out, and his heart stopped for fully four minutes. When, with the help of medical assistance, he regained consciousness, he reported having a so-called near-death experience — a red light supposedly responsible for the governing of the universe shone, something resembling the River Styx appeared, and other trimmings were included — that found its way into the National Enquirer. He told an interviewer for the Tatler that the experience made him a bit more “wobbly” on the question of the existence of an afterlife. Although this did not in any way qualify his lifelong atheism, it apparently made him, for the first time in his life, responsive to nature. “Freddie has got so much nicer,” his wife said, “since he died.”

But Ayer’s settled views, long since solidified, underwent no fundamental change. He believed, in his biographer’s words, that “philosophy was quite incapable of offering an authoritative answer to the question ‘How should I live?'” His own philosophy appears to have provided him with no clues whatsoever, except perhaps to live in and for the moment. In his valedictory talk as the Wykeham Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, his own summary of the achievements of twentieth-century philosophy held only that “the answers are not much clearer, but the questions are.” In the history of twentieth-century philosophy, he is likely to go down as less a major philosopher than as one of the subject’s leading technicians.

One thinks of the contrast with Bertrand Russell, whose own skeptical rationalism, for all its shortcomings, nevertheless put him in touch with the tragic sense of life. “Often I feel that religion, like the sun,” Russell wrote in his autobiography, “has extinguished the stars of less brilliancy but not less beauty, which shine upon us out of the darkness of a godless universe. The splendor of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not dazzled by the divine radiance; and human comradeship seems to grow more intimate and more tender from the sense that we are all exiles on an inhospitable shore.” Such perception was unavailable to Ayer, who, despite his piercing intelligence, seems to have gone through life blindfolded. Dream of nothing in your philosophy and you not only miss out on the chance of heaven but on so much of what goes on on earth, too.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.