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Jumpers - Philosophy in Farce

Philosophy in Farce
by Anthony Quinton

Philosophers do not make much of a showing in imaginative literature. One or two turn up in novels, like the tormented Mr Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Bertrand Russell, in priapic rather than intellectual form, as Mr Scogan in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. In plays there are even fewer. There is that philosophy master in Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who displays modest proofs of professional qualifications by way of little discourses on logic and ethics. His is a very small part; its crucial element is that it is he who opens M. Jourdan's eyes to the fact that he has been speaking prose all his life. A claim might be put in on behalf of Faust. When he first heaved into view in the late sixteenth century many German philosophers were occultists or alchemists. But, by and large, Jumpers is the first play to bring what is recognisable as philosophy on to the stage.

Jumpers is a farcical comedy, indeed, at first glance, a farce pure and simple. All four of the conventionally defining characteristics of farce are present: highly improbable situations (the collapsing pyramid of gymnast-philosophers for a start), familiar characters (the flighty wife, the heavy-footed policeman), extravagant exaggeration (Archie's distinctions, Crouch's sudden promotion) and violent horseplay (the death of McFee).

The perpetual crises of entrances and exits and near-exposures of (possibly) adulterous goings-on are reminiscent of the golden age of Brian Rix. But there is an important difference. No trouserless vicar of the Whitehall theatre ever broke off in mid-pursuit of a German parachutist, while an unhelmeted village constable with his face covered with lipstick raced eagerly after him, to make a well-argued scholarly case for the reservation of the sacrament or the retention in liturgical practice of the service for the churching of women. But George, the philosopher-hero of Jumpers is pretty authentic. His lengthy speeches in their philosophical stretches, consist of reasonings philosophers have actually employed, at least to the extent that the boisterous exigencies of the plot allow. There really are such things as Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers and Thomas Aquinas's five ways of proving the existence of God.

If Jumpers had been no more than a farce there would have been no reason for this level of authenticity. To call Molière back into service again, when he wanted to ridicule doctors he put cheerful absurdities into their mouths, not large chunks of the real thing. Thus in the glorious finale of Le Malade Imaginaire in which the doctors chant to each other in a wild mixture of French and Latin, we are offered such genial rubbish as (I give it in English) “It is asked of me by the learned doctor what is the cause and reason why opium brings sleep, to which I reply, because there is within it a dormitive virtue whose nature it is to stupefy the senses.”

Not that philosophy proper, unburlesqued, does not invite mockery. Schopenhauer said, with great ceremony, “The world is my idea”, to which the appropriate reply is “No it isn't, you fool”. Then there are A.J.Ayer's “Moral and religious utterances are literally devoid of sense” (literally?), Karl Popper's “We can never know, we can only guess” (never?), McTaggart's “Time is not real” (used it to be?). These are at least intelligible, however absurd, unlike such self-exploding rot as the relativist motto – there is no such thing as objective truth (then why imply that there is by saying so?). And there are more terrible specimens to be found over the Channel or the North Sea.

G.E.Moore, the counterpart in real life of George in Jumpers, although thought of as almost exaggeratedly down to earth, was quite capable of follies of this kind. In a long, successful, repetitive career as a – and for the most part the – leading philosopher at Cambridge, from the reign of Edward VII to that of George VI, he confined himself almost entirely to three problems: how does sense-perception give us knowledge of the external world, what is the nature of good, and what exactly is this activity of philosophical analysis in which I am so resolutely engaged? On the first topic he maintained that the senses do not actually perceive material things, only mental images from which we must hope it is possible somehow to infer their existence. (He never doubted, all the same, that we do know for certain of the existence of a good many material things.) He held that the two supremely good things are the contemplation of beauty and affectionate personal relations. This is unworldly, perhaps appropriately so in view of his role as patron saint, or non-playing captain, of the Bloomsbury group. But he was too earnest a person for it to be a frivolous indifference to that to which most people would give priority: the relief and prevention of suffering.

Rather to his surprise, and, I dare say, to that of many others, he was given the Order of Merit. When he got back from Buckingham Palace to Cambridge he was asked about how he got on with the king. “Well”, he replied, “first the King spoke and then I spoke”. A further refinement of the story, which I hope is true, says that he went on “The astounding thing was that the King had never heard of Wittgenstein”.

George and G.E.Moore have a good deal in common. Both are dedicated philosophers, constantly going round in argumentative circles. They share one major philosophical interest: the justification of moral beliefs. Peculiar to George, however, is a concern with large metaphysical issues: the existence of God and the question of death and immortality. George is clearly pretty much of a failure in his domestic life and in his profession, the only chair rated lower than his is that in divinity. He is despised by his glitteringly oily vice-chancellor, Archie. G.E.Moore in his comparably small world was a conspicuous success. He would seem to have had something George completely lacks, a compelling personality. He was thought well of by those who came in touch with him. No-one appears to admire George.

Possibly the largest difference between George and the real Moore is in their marriages. Dotty is glamorous (even if fading), unstable, seemingly seducible. The real Moore's wife, although also much younger than her husband (and called Dorothy), seems to have been a pretty solid citizen. She always addressed her husband as 'Moore' and is reliably reported to have smoked a pipe. Their union is as far removed as it could be from farce; George's is right in the thick of it. The one thing that is altogether unfarcical about George is his philosophy, although, as has been suggested, quite a lot of perfectly genuine philosophy is readily available for ridicule.

George Orwell once said something to the effect that the most important change to the human, perhaps to the Western, mind in the twentieth century was the very widespread disappearance of a belief in the survival of death. The effect of that on morality could be profound. It is not just the removal of the sanction of eternal punishment or of any post-mortem penalty for earthly misdeeds. More fundamentally, it undermines a very widespread assumption: that in the after-life there will be compensation for sufferings and deprivations endured while alive on earth. Kant argued for immortality as being presupposed by the harmonisation of virtue and happiness categorically demanded by the moral sense of mankind.

The conviction that happiness and virtue are never to be brought together can lead to the policy of grabbing everything you can for yourself while there is still time. I am not wholly persuaded of this. It seems to me that what people call the “materialism” of the present age is the outcome, rather, of accelerating technical progress in eliminating suffering and poverty so that they no longer seem to be part of the unalterable nature of things. But no doubt there is something in it. Anyway, George's intense metaphysical anxiety seems to be focussed on this problem. And it is plainly not raw material for farce, except of an extraordinarily nihilistic kind. Jumpers is a farcical comedy, but it is a farcical comedy of ideas.

Jumpers first appeared three decades ago. Philosophy was much more in the public eye then than it is today. The austerities and consequent boredom of the war and the years that directly followed it awoke an appetite for intellectual self-improvement from which philosophy, along with a lot of other things, benefited. There were philosophers about able and willing to catch the attention of a large public audience: Bertrand Russell and A.J.Ayer and poor old “Professor” Joad, who never reached that rank, but was at least lively and colourful. That has all rather petered out. The brightest young philosophers nowadays emigrate to the United States, where the pay is better and there is less bureaucratic harassment, and where, to be fair, the real life of the subject now is to be found. For a philosopher, Jumpers evokes happier times gone by.


© Anthony Quinton, June 2003

Lord Quinton taught philosophy in Oxford from 1949 to 1978 and then became president of Trinity College