## 1. Life (1903-1987)



John Niemeyer Findlay was born on 25 November 1903 in Pretoria, South
Africa, in what was then the Crown Colony of the
 Transvaal.[1]
 His father, born in South Africa, was by descent Scottish, Welsh, and
English; his mother, also born in South Africa, was by descent French,
German and Dutch. The Findlays and the Niemeyers were distinguished
South African families. Findlay's great grandfather, on his
father's side, was the Scottish captain of the ship
*Alacrity* and an early European explorer of South Africa. His
great uncle, on his mother's side, was the poet Eugene Marais,
one of the founders of Afrikaans literature. Findlay's father
advised the government on legal matters, and his cousins included a
Cape Prime Minister, the novelist, Olive Schreiner, and the Brazilian
architect Oscar Niemeyer. This birth and lineage has its effect.
Findlay's manner, though never cold, combined that mixture of
aristocratic courtesy and unwavering self-assurance sometimes
associated with the well-born. This heritage might explain
Findlay's confidence in swimming constantly against the
philosophical mainstream, and, in his metaphysical work, far out to
 sea.[2]




From 1909, Findlay attended various grammar schools in Pretoria and
the High Veld. He learned Latin and Greek at school, Dutch from his
nurses, Afrikaans from his friends and French entirely on his own. 
He memorized poems and wrote many himself. Later in life, he joined a
theater company and acted in all the major plays of Chekhov. This love
of language and theater generated his eloquent prose style, an apt
vehicle for later virtuoso exercises in phenomenological description.
It also percolated into Findlay's teaching manner, often highly
theatrical. He would, for example, in seminars, put a handkerchief
over his face and then snatch it off, as an illustration of the
Husserlian distinction between unfulfilled and fulfilled intentions.
In 1915, Findlay moved on to the High School for Boys in Pretoria,
where he was (as he writes) "monotonously" the top student
in his class every year.



Two items of philosophical note emerge from Findlay's youth:



First, at age seven Findlay became a firm vegetarian, not because meat
animals can suffer, but because (he writes) meat animals are
conscious, which gives them moral status. (That Findlay was a
vegetarian will come as a surprise to some of his former graduate
students, who may have observed Findlay carving roast beef at his
supper parties, but never noticed he took no plate of his own.)
Perhaps Findlay's early attitude towards non-human animals
provoked his later separation of mentality from linguistic
 competence.[3]




Second, possibly in reaction to the Christian orthodoxy prevailing at
the High School for Boys, Findlay began reading the theosophists,
including Madame Blavatsky, and, one after another, Max
Muller's "Sacred Books of the East", adding
"a little Sanskrit" to his linguistic repertoire.
Findlay's affection for Buddhism and Hinduism was lifelong, and
his disaffection with monotheism was also lifelong. It motivated his
most discussed article, "Can God's Existence Be
Disproved?" (1948a) the title of which was emended by Ryle from
the submitted original, "A Disproof of the Existence of
 God".[4]
 But Findlay was more drawn to the metaphysics of the
theosophists, which he identified with Neoplatonism, than to their
spiritual exercises, and his interest in Madame Blavatsky was guarded.
Nevertheless, Findlay later remarked that his Gifford lectures were
theosophy, with all the defective points left out.



Findlay graduated from high school in 1922, and his brother gave him
as gifts copies of Henri Bergson's *Creative Evolution*
(1907 [1911]) and William Wallace's translation of
Hegel's *Logic* (Hegel 1830 [1873]), his first books of
Western philosophy. Hegel' *Logic* presented Findlay
with an immanent absolute that displaced the Upanishadic mysticism of
his teenage years.



In 1924, Findlay won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, and spent two
years at Balliol, reading greats. Despite his affection for Hegel, or
perhaps because of it, Findlay had little interest in the British
Hegelianism of Bradley or Bosanquet. He veered away from modern
philosophy into studies of Plato, developing the hypothesis that
Aristotle's disparaging remarks about Plato's late
philosophy were important indicators of a deeper Platonic system than
is found in the dialogues. This historical work, conceived decades
before German scholars began writing in earnest about the
*ungescriebende Lehre* of late Plato, earned him a First. It
also planted the seeds of a book on Plato, which Findlay eventually
published, after a typically long gestation, in 1974.



In his third year at Oxford, Findlay discovered Russell, Wittgenstein,
and the new realism, which put him at odds with the prevailing Oxford
idealism. Findlay's admiration for Russell, a thinker dismissed
by a contemporaneous Oxford don as "not a philosopher, but a
criminal" foreclosed any possibility of a fellowship. 



So, in 1927, Findlay returned to South Africa as a young philosophy
lecturer at the University of Pretoria, his first appointment in an
extended *Wanderjahre* that included positions at Dunedin
(New Zealand, 1933-1944)
Grahamstown (Eastern Cape, S.A.1944-6), Pietermartizberg
(Natal, S.A, 1946-1948). It was at Dunedin that he met and
married his wife Aileen Hawthorn, with whom he had three children in
the early 1940s.



The *Wanderjahre* for the Findlays continued in the Northern
hemisphere after World War II at Newcastle on Tyne (1948-51),
with an appointment as chair at Kings College, University of London
(1951-1965), and with professorships at Carleton College (1965),
the University of Texas (1966-67), Yale University
(1967-73) and Boston University (1973-84). 



Findlay's academic appointments do not track his intellectual
development; the crucial turns in his mental life involved academic
leaves. In 1929, Findlay went to Germany and spent part of 1930 in
Berlin. There he learned German, and discovered the works of Brentano,
Meinong, and Husserl. Brentano inspired Findlay's book,
*Values and Intentions* (VI begun in 1933, published in 1963);
Meinong inspired the book *Meinong's Theory of Objects*
(M, begun in 1931, published in 1933,) and Husserl inspired Findlay to
undertake the translation (begun in 1939, published in 1970). of
Husserl's intricate *Logisiche Untersuchungen.* The
research on Meinong involved several stays at the University of Graz,
where he received a doctorate in 1932 for his work on Meinong. The
depth of his commitment to the phenomenological tradition is indicated
by the scale of these projects, involving decades of work on an almost
daily basis.



The second leave of consequence was in 1938 and 1939, where Findlay
went from New Zealand to England via North America. He met Carnap at
Berkeley, Russell in Chicago, Quine in Boston, and Heidegger in
Freiburg. The analytic philosophers made a good impression, Heidegger
a bad one: 



> 
> 
> One of those natural catastrophes that occur even in philosophy, a
> blanketing snowfall beneath which all the familiar landmarks in
> philosophy are gradually obscured. 
> 
> 
> 



Heidegger told Findlay that he would perhaps understand the mysteries
of Angst and Nothingness if he had had front line experience during
the First World War. 



> 
> 
> His black leggings and peasant attire gave him the vague aspect of a
> circus-master, cracking his whip while the ominous shapes evoked by
> his discourse seemed to caper around. (ML: 31) 
> 
> 
> 



While in Freiburg Findlay took a quiet sidelong glance at the workings
of Nazism: "the youths and maidens with their bright
faces", and "some poor Jews silently praying as they
passed the ruins of their demolished synagogue" (Ibid.)



Returning to England, Findlay abandoned Oxford for Cambridge, met with
Moore and Wittgenstein, and attended their seminars in Fall 1939. The
result was a stream of papers in a hard-core analytic style, tightly
reasoned and bristling with distinctions. These include "Time: a
Treatment of Some Puzzles" (1941b), "Goedelian Sentences:
A Non-Numerical Approach" (1942), "Morality by
Convention" (1944),"Can God's Existence Be
Disproved?"(1948), "The Notion of Infinity" (1953),
and "The Justification of Attitudes" (1954), all anthologized in
*Language, Mind, and Value* (LMV, 1963).



When Findlay was appointed to King's College at the University
of London in 1951, he found himself in competition with A. J. Ayer,
the leading light at the University College branch of the same
university. Ayer, still professing logical positivism, was attracting
the best students and professors, so Findlay, by way of strategic
contrast, made Hegel the Special Author in the curriculum at Kings.
The choice proved surprisingly popular. Ayer generously responded
with an offer to publish a book by Findlay on Hegel. The book,
*Hegel: A Re-examination* (1958) written in a clear style, was
for decades a life raft for those graduate students who despaired of
ever understanding Hegel in the raw. 



Findlay's efforts in the Hegel book led to a change of method in
his work. The requirements of analytic philosophy--the demand for
clarity, the insistence on deductive connection of ideas-- gave way to
a more flexible movement of thought, where many connections of ideas
were declared to be "logical" even if the connection was
less than deductive. Contradictions and antinomies were embraced;
"clarity is not enough" became a rallying cry. The new
technique for philosophy is described in Findlay's article
"Essential Probabilities" (1967a). Essential probabilism
encouraged Findlay to return to his long abandoned book on the mind,
published as *Values and Intentions*, in 1961. He returned to
his youthful interest in metaphysics, presenting his own speculative
system in two series of Gifford lectures, *The Discipline of the
Cave* (DC, 1966) and *The Transcendence of the Cave* (TC,
1967). In the Gifford lectures, Findlay reintroduced the absolute that
he had foresworn in his essay on God. He now conceded publicly that
the monotheists were right to have an absolute, but wrong in the
absolute they chose. "How odd/of God/to choose/the
Hindoos", says the preface to *The Transcendence of the
Cave*. The later writings of the 1970s are footnotes and
supplements to what is given in these three books from the 1960s.



From the standpoint of mainstream analytic philosophy, Findlay serves
as the dedicated contrarian. He threw Husserl at Frege, Meinong at
Russell, Brentano at the later Wittgenstein. He did not attack with
the contemporary method of generating counterexamples to mid-level
philosophical generalizations. He set up Husserl and Meinong and
Brentano as substantial figures, as worthy of interest as their
analytic counterparts. When these three diverged from the analytic
gods, they provided full-fledged philosophical alternatives, not
isolated pot-shots.



As for his systematic metaphysics, which exudes an almost Leibnizian
optimism regarding the failures of the everyday world, Findlay himself
felt doubts. What he once said about Hegel applies to his own
works:



> 
> 
> When I do hard theoretical work...I feel clear too that the world
> has a sense, and that no other philosophy [than Hegel's]
> expresses this sense satisfactorily. But in my more frequent mood of
> mild depression, I am not a Hegelian: I regress to a materialism which
> is not, I fear, at all dialectical. I see the world as devoid of
> sense, I submit masochistically to its senselessness, even taking more
> comfort in its cold credibility than in the rational desirability of
> Hegelianism. ("The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel", 1959a
> [LMV: 231]) 
> 
> 
> 



Despite these depressions, Findlay remained loyal from first to last
to his favorite texts: the *Timaeus* of Plato, the
*Enneads* of Plotinus, and the *Logic* of Hegel:
"Plato for inventing the forms, Plotinus for relating them to an
absolute, and Hegel for setting them all into dialectical
motion" (Lecture at Baruch College, New York City, April 1976.
unpublished). The reward for loyalty was a singular philosophy of
unusual scope.


## 2. *Meinong's Theory of Objects* (1932-3)



Findlay reports that he was won over to realism (i.e., anti-idealism),
during his undergraduate years, mainly through clandestine readings of
Russell and Moore. Reading Russell, he certainly became acquainted
with the name and ideas of Alexius Meinong, discussed by Russell at
length in 1904 and 1905 (Russell 1904 [1973]). In 1930, after he
acquired German, Findlay began reading Meinong's works in
earnest, under the direction of Meinong's pupil Ernst Mally.



The result was the book, *Meinong's Theory of Objects*,
published by Oxford in 1933, and expanded in 1963 into
*Meinong's Theory of Objects and Values* (M). This book,
for decades, was the standard reference work on Meinong in the
Anglophone world. Given Mally's imprimatur, we can presume that
Findlay's account of Meinong is accurate, but what is more
relevant is Findlay's defense of Meinong against his critics,
Russell most of all.



The dispute turned, notoriously, on the status of non-existent
objects. For Meinong, there are non-existent objects, they can possess
properties, and true things can be said about them. For Russell, there
are no non-existing objects, they cannot possess properties, and
nothing true can be said about them. So, for Meinong, it is true the
golden mountain is golden, because everything that is *F* and
*G* is *F*. For Russell, it is false that the golden
mountain is golden, because there is no such thing as the golden
mountain to be golden.



Russell dismissed Meinong with a few deft sentences in 1905. If you
say that the golden mountain is golden, then you must say that there
is a golden mountain, that there are chimeras, that there is a present
King of France. This offends, Russell later wrote, against our
"robust sense of reality". Furthermore, if the golden
mountain is mountainous and golden, then the round square is both
round and square, so something exists that is round and square. This
offends against the law of non-contradiction. Many readers accepted
these arguments as decisive. But not Findlay. 



To begin, there is a question as to whether Russell got
Meinong's position right. Meinong never maintained that the
round square existed (or subsisted). On the contrary, it neither
exists nor subsists, so for Meinong nothing exists that is both round
and square. But it can be a subject of predication, and if the
predication is correct, it is a part of a fact, and facts about
contradictions are not contradictions. In other words, in terms of
propositions, Meinong maintained that:


* (1) the round square is
round



and


* (2) the round square is
non-round



are both true but denied that from (2) one could infer


* (3) not (the round
square is round.)



Now (3) contradicts (1) but (2) does not. So we have Meinong
maintaining, as a general law, "The *F* and *G* is
*F*", and Russell maintaining, as a general law,
"Nothing can be a subject of predication unless it
exists". This seems to pit a logical proposition against a
metaphysical one, a win for Meinong. 



The round square inhabits a realm Meinong called *Aussersein*,
and Findlay points out that sections of *Aussersein* can be
grouped into compatible entities and consistent propositions (or
facts) about them. These correspond, Findlay argues, to the different
domains of different possible worlds (M: 58)) That different possible
worlds can have different domains would become one of Findlay's
major complaints against Wittgenstein's *Tractatus* and
its fixed domain of ultimate objects. 



There are, of course, metaphysical issues lurking in the background.
Russell certainly wanted to make statements that, *prima
facie*, are about non-existents, like the present king of France.
Russell's famous trick replaces statements about non-existing
individuals with statements about sets of properties that do not
jointly hold of any individual. Findlay believed that Russell's
idea was best expressed by Moore in 1918:



> 
> 
> We have said that 'lions are real' means that some
> particular property or other--I will say, for the sake of
> brevity, the property of being a lion, though that is not strictly
> accurate, does in fact *belong to* something--that there
> are things that have it, or, to put in another way, that the
> conception of being a lion is a conception which does apply to some
> things--that there are things that fall under it. And similarly
> what "unicorns are unreal" means is that the property of
> being a unicorn belongs to *nothing*. Now, if this is so, then
> it seems to me, in a very important sense, 'real' and
> 'unreal' do not in this usage stand for any conceptions
> are all. The only conceptions which occur in the proposition
> 'Lions are real' are on this interpretation are, plainly
> (1) the conception of being a lion, and (2) the conception of
> belonging to something, and perfectly obviously "real"
> does not stand for either of these. (Moore 1918 [1959: 212]))
> 
> 
> 



Findlay disagrees vigorously with this form of metaphysical actualism,
which he describes as an illicit reduction of facts about being to
facts about so-being.



> 
> 
> Let us consider the case of a person who wishes that there were such a
> thing as a philosopher's stone. If the fact of the existence of
> the philosopher's stone is identical with the fact of the
> possession by some object in the universe of the properties of the
> philosopher's stone, then we must suppose that the person in
> question is really wishing that one or the other of the objects in the
> universe should possess the properties of (a) being a stone, and (b)
> turning baser metal into gold. But it is perfectly clear that the man
> might wish nothing of the kind. He might be perfectly content with all
> the objects in the universe... If a childless woman wishes for
> child, she does not wish to stand in the relation of motherhood to one
> of the children actually in the world, but to another child, which is
> not in the circumstances an actual child at all, but which would
> become an actual child if her wish were fulfilled. It is no doubt true
> that, if her wish is fulfilled, one of the things actually in the
> world will be her child, but it is equally true that, while she is
> wishing, she is directing her mind to something which lies beyond the
> actual world, and which will possibly always like beyond it. (M:
> 30-53-4 )
> 
> 
> 



It is not possible here to follow Findlay's defense of
Meinong's realm of objectives, which includes states of affairs,
facts, and other abstract entities that, in Meinong's
terminology, subsist rather than exist. Many of Meinong's
analyses predate the classic texts of logical atomism with which they
share a common core of analytic concerns, such as the relation between
states of affairs and facts. Findlay is even more generous than
Meinong in describing the population of subsistents:



> 
> 
> It is highly arguable that human experience, even at the level of
> perception, is rich in objects that go beyond the concrete existent
> things of an individualist ontology. The world around us seems to be
> full of bearings, of suggestions, of half-formed possibilities, of
> pin-pointed acts or circumstances, of gaps, vaguenesses, of
> generalities, or unrealized limits, and it is of dogma rather than
> direct experiences that all these higher order things will reduce to
> individuals and their actual properties. (AE: 29)
> 
> 
> 



On the analytic subjects, to which the most space in the book is
devoted, where Russell and Wittgenstein diverge from Meinong, Findlay
sides with Meinong. But his exposition is not slavish. The realm of
*Aussersein* has its problems:



> 
> 
> We speak of the world of *Aussersein*, but in reality the
> objects which have no being do not constitute a world. They are a
> chaos of incoherent fragments....Between actual existents we can
> always discover a large number of intimate connections. Beyond the
> boundaries of being no such connections subsist: there is no fixed
> distance between Valhalla and the islands of the blessed, nor does the
> planet Vulcan exert a gravitational pull on the star of Bethlehem. (M:
> 56)
> 
> 
> 



And even the famous expansion of the ontology has its problematic
side:



> 
> 
> To do what Meinong does, and merely to set the non-existent, false,
> and absurd alongside the actual and the true, to treat them like the
> white and red roses of Russell's famous
>  comparison,[5]
>  with nothing to explain the special prerogative of being real or
> being the case, is the very type of a dead, surd, and unintelligible
> mode of conception. (M: 342) 
> 
> 
> 



Despite the doubts expressed here about the realms of *Sein*
and *Aussersein*, Findlay would press them into service in many
future books. To begin, the objects of these realms serve as the
intentional objects of thought. Second, these realms provide the
referents for "vacuous" names in works of fiction. These
are the opening gambits of the next book, *Values and
Intentions*.


## 3. *Values and Intentions* (1936-63)



After completing the book on Meinong in 1932, Findlay began work on
*Values and Intentions* (VI), a project that occupied him, on
and off, for the next thirty years. The resulting book combines the
phenomenological tradition of Brentano with the analytical psychology
of G. F. Stout and the empirical discoveries of the Wurzburg
psychologists. It also attempts to integrate the philosophy of mind
and moral philosophy. Its predecessor, and perhaps its organizational
model, is Hume's *Treatise* (1738), which also begins
with perceptions, proceeds to emotions, and then moves on to
conclusions about ethics. But it rejects Hume's phenomenalism,
and attempts a smoother dialectical flow from the laws of the mind to
the rules of justice.



On a typical page of *Values and Intentions*, one finds little
argument but much description. These descriptions of mental processes
are presented as the results of introspection. Now, even by 1932,
introspection was rejected as a method in both philosophy and
psychology. This dismissive attitude was recognized, weighed, and
rejected by Findlay in his article "Recommendations Concerning
the Language of Introspection" (1948b). The reader, on first
encountering *Values and Intentions*, may stand with
Wittgenstein and declare, "By God, this is impossible". Or
she may be persuaded by Findlay that it can be done because he does
it. From Findlay's viewpoint, Wittgenstein portrays our inner
life as a desert. For him, it is a rainforest.



Findlay follows Brentano in vigorously maintaining that intentionality
is the mark of the mental. But then the exposition turns Husserlian.
Intentional objects are presented to consciousness, but they can
present themselves clearly or obscurely, completely or incompletely,
in various lights and with varying scope. There is a problem
distinguishing what is in consciousness from what lies outside it.
"We must distinguish, between what is actually and what is only
facultatively or dispositionally present to mind". The
distinction provides an occasion for a typical descriptive
excursus:



> 
> 
> The interior of a church may be *ready* to come to mind when I
> look steadily at its facade, but this is not the same as the
> actual presence to my mind of [the facade's] contrasting
> pattern of black and white layers, which I nevertheless do not
> explicitly 'notice'.... In thinking of Jeremiah I
> may, e.g., think definitively, though obscurely, of Hebrew prophets
> and prophecy: I may, however, only be *ready* to think of the
> prophet Amos or of the prophetess Joanna Southcott. (VI: 48)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 



The rule is that for every thought, there is an object of thought.
Prior and many other have objected to this: Prior's
counterexample is "I am thinking of nothing" (Prior 1971:
122-123). But these counterexamples only work if the sentences
that express them are true. One wonders if one can think of nothing,
or whether what is referred to in "thinking of nothing",
is, as older people often experience, an unnoticed bout of
unconsciousness.



A deeper problem for Findlay and the "mind as
intentionality" school is the presence of phenomena that seem to
be mental but are not intentional, like the pains and quales that
preoccupy discussions in the contemporary philosophy of mind. Here
Findlay reverts, surprisingly, to his "depressed
materialism" and identifies such states with bodily
conditions:



> 
> 
> That the category of indiscerptible, qualitative feeling has no plain
> instances has been recognized by thinkers, who, like Titchener, reduce
> the life of feeling to two strange "feeling elements" of
> pleasure or unpleasure, or who like Ryle, operate with various
> twinges, tingles, throbs, and other residua of emotional
> experience.... These doctrines are a mistake, only abstracts torn
> from sensible objects have such qualitative status, the whole placing
> of them 'in the mind' points to a confusion and
> misapplication of categories....
> 
> 
> 
> ...here their links with our conscious orientations seem
> contingent rather than necessary: it is for instance unclear
> *why* sensory pains should be so very disagreeable, so much an
> object of aversion.... our hatred of pain is not *per se*
> intelligible, but can at best achieve a quasi-intelligibility when
> seen in the more general quasi-intelligibility of 'bodily
> purpose.' 
> 
> 
> 
> The main emergent use of 'feeling' in connection with our
> own bodies, is therefore that of the largely obscure...knowledge
> of our bodily state; it is the intimation of the body itself gives us
> of our inner condition. (VI: 172-3)
> 
> 
> 



It is possible, then, to have a pain and yet not be repelled by it, a
view confirmed by modern medical research on pain agnosia.



It is not possible here to unravel all the details of Findlay's
treatment of beliefs, wishes, wants, and acts of will. Each token case
of a propositional attitude can manifest itself as a concentrated
"sense" before the mind, or spread itself out as a pattern
of behavior in the physical sphere. The account is complicated,
perhaps too complicated for anyone to have accepted it. But we must
remark on the distinction between believing and wishing, as this
points towards the ethics section of the book. When we believe that
something is so, we cannot wish that it is so. We can only wish that
it be not so. Conversely, when we believe that something is not so, we
cannot wish that it be not so, but we can wish that it be so. Wishes,
then, are directed at making the non-existent exist or the existing
not exist. (or, in a parallel way, towards the making true or the
making false of propositions.) This is the starting point of ethics.
We wish the world changed in some
 way.[6]



If ethics starts with wishes, then the ethical system that emerges
will be broadly teleological: the good is prior to the right, as the
good is what we wish for. But the good cannot be a one dimensional
good, nor can the many dimensions of good be compared with each other,
nor is it intelligible to speak of "maximizing the good".
So the system that results is a form of ideal utilitarianism of the
sort desiderated by Hastings Rashdall (1907) and described in the last
chapter of Moore's *Principia Ethica* (1903: ch. 6). It
is hostile to rule based ethical systems deriving from the Decalogue
or Kant, and hostile to puritanism while suspicious of hedonism.
Findlay's principles of axiology, culled and combined from the
works of Brentano, Meinong, Scheler, and Hartmann, as well as Moore,
Rashdall, and Ross, include:



> 
> 
> ....that there are radically different sorts or senses of value
> between which quantitative or even ordinal comparison is not readily
> possible, that there is a deep distinction between values that appear
> purely personal and those that claim cogency or validity, that value
> and values have a close and necessary relation to feeling, but that
> values that claim cogency or validity cannot be exhaustively analyzed
> or even explained in terms of mere feeling, that the main
> 'heads' of impersonal valuation, freedom, fairness,
> happiness etc, are moderately clearly and readily agreed upon though
> their detailed specification or correct practical implementation is
> infinitely controversial, that value and disvalue have close
> connections with various senses of "ought" but that the
> central sense of the latter reveal it as a much more restricted
> conception, much more closely concerned with disvalues and their
> avoidance than with values... that the values called
> "moral" presuppose all other types of value as objects of
> pursuit, but their value does not depend on the latter value, that
> moral value has a close connection with the readiness to sacrifice
> personal good for impersonal good, etc. (AE: 78)
> 
> 
> 



Perhaps the most unusual claim of *Values and Intentions* is
that there is a dialectical connection between personal values and
impersonal values. Adam Smith had described the shift from the partial
spectator to the impartial spectator, and contemporary authors remark
frequently on the transition from the first person standpoint to the
third (or second) person standpoint. In these authors, however, the
transition is contingent, based either on a free choice, or on moral
education, or on Aristotelian conditioning. In Findlay, the transition
is based on a drive for generality that is inherent in the operations
of the mind:



> 
> 
> It is natural, and nigh inevitable, for a man reflecting more or less
> disengagedly on the objects of his various parcelled interests to
> acquire a second-order zest for the interesting as such and for any
> and every interest.(TC: 70)...impersonality is by
> its nature contagious. It obeys a 'logic' and that logic is to spread, to level farther and farther, to become more and more
> absolute. Once speak for *some,* and one will find oneself
> readily forced into speaking for more, until, in all situations not
> warped by personal bias, one comes to speak for all: impersonality
> resembles the scriptural mustard-seed in whose branches the fowls of
> the air ultimately find their accommodation. (VI 430)
> 
> 
> 



Findlay in many places develops this "drive for
generality". To begin, there are certain basic values that
accompany all good thinking, such as clarity, consistency, and
simplicity. These are essential to communication; they are
"values in speaking" (1950b [LMV 105-128]), and must
be deployed even by nihilists who profess contempt for logic.
Secondly, there are the virtues of good scientific thinking, including
avoidance of arbitrary Duhemian maneuvers and manufactured concepts
like Goodman's "grue" and
 "bleen".[7]
 Thirdly, there are the virtues of good practical reasoning, including
rational arbitration between the demands of present versus future
selves. Like Sidgwick before him and T. Nagel after, Findlay argues
that the admitting the demands of my future self but a step towards
admitting the demands of other selves:



> 
> 
> The rise to self-love is in fact a matter so strange that the further
> spread to rational benevolence is trivial by comparison: having come
> to be interested in, e.g., the provision of food at a time when I am
> not hungry, it is no great wonder that I am rationally moved by
> another's real or imagined need for food as much as by my
> own.... And by, an extension natural to it, once its ampliative
> zeal has got underway, it tends to extend itself to an interest in
> what is interesting to anyone or everyone, and to develop a defensive
> dislike of whatever sets grounds to its natural expansiveness. (TC:
> 71) 
> 
> 
> 



The drive to generality moves us from favoring personal good to
impersonal goods. Rules about the right, or the "moral
ought" concern the production, distribution, or destruction of
impersonal goods. Oddly, justice in impersonal goods requires the
recognition of persons, subjective selves. These are introduced in
*Values and Intentions* via discussions of the problem of other
minds, which for Findlay is no pseudo-problem. The solution is found
by applying the ubiquitous phenomenological relation of "seeing
as" to social interactions. The argument involves the idea that
mental states are psycho-physical complexes with poignant concentrated
feelings on one side and spread out behavior on the other. We perceive
some patterns of behavior as intentional, some as mechanical. When we
perceive the behavior as intentional, we infer the psychical side.
(Findlay's discussion of reactive perceptions anticipates by
several years Peter Strawson's work on reactive attitudes.) The
bottom line, however, is familiar: justice requires placing oneself in
the shoes of the other.


## 4. The Husserl Translation (1939-70)



Findlay attitude towards Husserl was conflicted. On the one hand, he
declared, more than once and without qualification, that Husserl was
"the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century". On
the other, he rejected most of the philosophical claims published by
Husserl subsequent to 1912.



The conflict was doctrinal. The biographical section has described
Findlay's embrace of realism toward the end of his undergraduate
years. Through his long career, Findlay never wavered from his
commitment to realism, that is, to the view that very little of
reality is "mind-made". It is not surprising, then, that
Findlay would react negatively to Husserl's swerve towards
idealism, first exhibited in his *Ideen* of
 1913.[8]
 So it was also natural for Findlay to focus on Husserl's early
work, the *Logisiche Untersuchungen* (1901-03) most of
all. By the late 1930s, he was committed to translating this massive
text into English. (Wittgenstein asked him in 1939 why he was so
interested in "that old work".) When the translation
appeared, in 1970, it made less of a splash than might have been
expected. Husserl's student and assistant, Marvin Farber, had
already published a paraphrase of the *Untersuchungen* in 1942,
and laid side by side, there are not terribly significant differences
between the two renditions, and some readers prefer Farber to Findlay
the way some Anglophone Kant readers prefer Kemp-Smith to Guyer.



Whatever disagreements Findlay had as regards Husserl's
conclusions, he never wavered from his admiration of his analytical
abilities. He supported the approach to numbers presented in
Husserl's *Philosophy of Arithmetic* (1891), a book that
Husserl himself had repudiated. (Findlay endorsed Husserl's idea
of numbers as essentially sequential, and held it superior to the
Frege-Russell account: "In *Principia*", he once
remarked, "you always end up counting the quantifiers"
(1975b)). He championed Husserl's lectures on the phenomenology
of inner time consciousness (1905-11), arguing that the
unfolding-folding schema (e.g., the past becoming past past, and the
past past becoming the past past past) proposed by Husserl captured
what Kant and James had correctly but dimly prefigured concerning the
nature of time (TC: 151). Among Husserl's later works, he found
much to praise in the notion of "life world" developed in
Husserl's last book, *Experience and Judgment*
(1939).



But as regards idealism, Findlay drew a line in the sand. It is simply
false, he wrote, that *esse est construi*. He rejected
Husserl's famous "*epoche*", or
suspension of the "natural attitude" towards the world,
even arguing the *epoche*, is inconsistent with
idealism. Husserl has assumed that to not affirm the natural world is
to affirm that the natural world is not. But a true suspension would
affirm nothing, either way.



> 
> 
> Husserl has provided no good
> or even meaningful reason for doubting that the natural world exists,
> however much that existence may also have been
> 'constituted' or rather reconstituted for out minds, and
> that its processes *have* an important causal relation to the
> acts of constitution just mentioned, being in fact responsible for the
> 'fulfilment' of those acts through appropriated data, and
> that natural objects are increasingly given as they are in and for
> themselves, in an unbracketed and not merely bracketed sense, both
> through the normal perceptions of men and the theories of the less
> methodologically prejudiced scientists. ("Phenomenology and the Meaning of Realism," 1975b, 156)
> 
> 
> 



Given such deep disparagement, what did Findlay find in Husserl that
justified the accolades Findlay showered on him? Findlay in his last
book would remark that analytic philosophy has two obsessions:
reference and representation. He found in Brentano's notion of
intentionality, and Husserl's' implementation of it, a
comprehensive theory of meaning that underlay both reference and
representation and extended to areas undreamt of by the descendants of
Frege and Russell. There is more to reference than language; there is
more to representation than mental mirroring. This for Findlay was the
Husserl's enduring legacy.


## 5. Time and Tense (1941; 1956)



"The founding father of modern tense logic was J. N.
Findlay", Arthur Prior wrote in 1967. 



> 
> 
> [Findlay] said in a paper published in 1941 [1941b [1963]] that
> "our conventions with regard to tenses are so well worked out
> that we have practically the materials in them for a formal calculus.
> ...the calculus of tenses should have been included in the modern
> development of modal logics". (1967: 1)
> 
> 
> 



Findlay's commitment to tense logic in 1941 went beyond the
announcement of project for future logicians. He supplied in the
article a modal form for tensed statements, and laid down a few tense
logical "laws" governing such.



The form of tensed statements, Findlay insisted, was modal, not
variable. It had been the custom of logicians previously to consider
tensed statements as "incomplete" statements, like
Russellian propositional functions, where the gap in the function was
to be filled in by supplying a date. So


1. Archduke Ferdinand was shot at Sarajevo



was considered incomplete, neither true nor false, until the verb was
de-tensed and a date added to the statement:


2. Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated on June 28, 1914



But adding a date does not tell us that the assassination has
happened. To preserve the temporal claim, Findlay suggested the modal
form: 


3. Past (Archduke Ferdinand being assassinated)



The truth conditions of A and B differ. C is the correct translation
of A. 



Prior claimed what is modalized by Findlay is a statement, but in
Findlay's text it is more like an event description, symbolized
by "*x*". What is modalized is a mode of occurring.
Three modal laws are suggested in the 1941 article:


1. Present (*x*) implies Present (Present (*x*)):
  

What is present is presently present.
2. Future (Present *x*) implies Present (Future *x*):
  

What will be present is presently future.
3. (Past *x*) or (Present *x*) or (Future *x*) implies
Future (Past *x*):
  

What is either past or present or future will be past.



Law III shows that Findlay has not excluded vacuous names for events.
The laws apply to non-occurring events. For example, what is never
future, for example, is never past, in models with no earliest
moment.



It appears, then, that we have two different languages. In the first,
verbs are tenseless but dated. In the second, verbs are tensed but
undated. Do we need two languages? In the language with dates, we can
measure that interval between two events, and compare it with the
interval between two other events. In a system of moving objects, we
can partially order the dates via the Special Theory of Relativity.
Why bother with the tensed system at all?



In "An Examination of Tenses" (1956a), Findlay gives
reasons for retaining the tensed system. The dated system implies a
"block universe" of events pinned at unchanging locations
in space-time. But the essence of time is change. Furthermore, and
more interestingly, Findlay argues that a block universe cannot
explain the fact that we know so much more about the past than the
future, and that this asymmetry is not inferable from the structure of
space-time or the laws relating events within it. (Findlay cites
Ehrenfels [1916] for noticing that all the basic laws of physics are
time symmetric.) Findlay proposes his own explanation of the
asymmetry: collisions between particular substances changes their
configuration, and these changes, or "traces" provide
evidence in the present for collisions in the past. (This explanation
of temporal asymmetry via traces is distinct from claiming that the
collisions release heat and increase entropy, which would reduce
temporal asymmetry to principles of thermodynamics.) General
principles are not involved, only the historical facts of particular
collisions when world lines criss-cross. Why are there no present
traces of the future events? Because future collision have not yet
occurred.


## 6. The Gifford Lectures



Findlay delivered the Gifford Lectures in two series at the University
of St. Andrews, the first set, *The Discipline of the Cave*,
from December 1964 to February 1965, the second set, *The
Transcendence of the Cave*, from December 1965 to January 1966.
*The Discipline of the Cave* is dominated by the cave metaphor
presented in Plato's *Republic*; *The Transcendence of
the Cave* is dominated by the metaphor of the metaphysical
hemisphere, derived from Plotinus, especially *Ennead* V, 8,
"Of Intellectual Beauty".



The strategy of the lectures is similar to F. H. Bradley's in
*Appearance and Reality* (1893). The ordinary natural world is
found to be absurd and self-contradictory, and the contradictions
point to a different world that is ultimately real. In Bradley's
case the contradictions emerge from the idea that the ordinary natural
world is a world of substances that somehow "possess"
properties. In Findlay's case, the contradictions emerge from
absurdities in the concepts of space, time, and material bodies, not
only in their ordinary manifestations but also in their scientific
doppelgangers.



What do these alleged absurdities point to? In Bradley's case,
the absurdities of distinct substances point to a realm of
undifferentiated and undirected Feeling. In Findlay's case, the
absurdities show merely that we are in a cave, and if we are inside,
there is necessarily an outside. The outside will prove to be a
marvelously complex web of perfected individuals. Though mystics have
responded positively to Findlay's more Swedenborgian
postulations, an argument is needed to give them minimal philosophical
credibility. Findlay gives two: first, the argument that everything
that is ideal in the actual world is actual in an ideal
 world;[9]
 second, that in an ideal world the distinctions between type and
instance, between fact and value, are progressively wiped out, so that
the distinction between the ideal and the actual is no longer
applies.



The features of the Cave are given by phenomenology; the escape from
the Cave is provided by dialectic. It is not possible to follow
Findlay in all the vivid phenomenological descriptions provided in DC.
A small part of the discussion of space will serve as an example:



> 
> 
> Our idea of void space is one of most poignantly clear that we
> possess; it is the indispensable foil to body. We cannot move our
> members without being aware of it...True void is not seen or
> touched, or if seen and touched, not quite in the same manner as the
> bodies in it: it is nonetheless in front of us, even if its vividness
> is marred by one or two wafts of air or by similar
> irrelevancies... The space of our own bodies as given in bodily
> feeling in the dark watches of the night is often little different
> from void space: what is evident, indefeasible in it, is its three
> dimensionality, its extension and position, not the feeble sense
> contents that irrelevantly flicker through it (DC: 99)...[I suggest that]
> what is now called a Euclidean structure, and what is now regarded as
> a somewhat unadventurous type of spatiality among a thrilling variety
> of such, is in fact simply the notion of space as such, and all other
> notions of space presuppose it, and represent progressive deviations
> from it, deviations which present no formal impossibility, but which
> represent no less the slow demise, the putting out of action, of the
> nobly interesting notion of space. (DC: 101)
> 
> 
> 



Similar, and lengthy, phenomenological treatments are given of time
and bodies. Where are the absurdities? Findlay argues that for bodies
to be bodies, they must proceed unaffected through the media of space
and time, but at the same time, space and time, to be what they are,
must interact with body. So space and time must be absolute, and must
be relative, a contradiction. As for bodies, there are insuperable
problems about the relation between bodies and their observable
qualities, and between some bodies and their governing minds.



The list of such like antinomies is long, yet the underlying malady is
clear: in one way or another, they all stem from the separation of
individuals from each other. What is the remedy for these separations?
In the first half of the *Transcendence* Findlay considers
Hegel's proposal that these separations can be overcome by the
development of common realm of logical concepts, meanings, ideals, and
shared gods, at least where rational beings are found. But in
*Transcendence*, Lecture 5, Findlay rejects the Hegelian
option: 



> 
> 
> Our aim is therefore bring to ruin the whole teleological fabric we
> have been rearing, particularly its crowning religious
> manifestations... The main uneasiness that affects the
> teleological picture can be quite readily stated: it lies in its
> imposed, arbitrary, willful character. (TC: 102) To view all phenomena in a
> special teleological relation to our rational selves remains a
> difficult, unstable way of viewing things (TC: 103)...The stars may be, as
> Hegel said, a mere light-rash upon the sky, infinitely insignificant
> beside the simplest human thought or emotion. But is there not
> something very wanton in saying that the whole meaning of the former,
> in all their immensity of spatial and temporal extent, lies in their
> role as mere background or supposition of the latter? It is
> particularly when we consider such factors as the extent of space, now
> yawning more and more vacuously as planet after planet reveals itself
> bare of its imagined population, that a teleological absolutism
> a la Hegel seems more and more frivolous (TC: 104) ... Plainly again
> it is only by a dialectical tour of force that this can be held to be
> involved in our wretched, confused, heartless, piecemeal
> living (TC 105)... The objects of religion may be the supreme occupants
> of the human cave, but they are also the most blemished by antinomy
> and obscurity of any cave phenomenon (TC 106)... We conclude that the
> actual religions of the world, which all represent rational faith at
> its highest, are also all phenomena of the Cave, with inappropriate
> absurd, sinister, and even monstrous elements, which most apologists
> have sought to minimize. (TC: 117)
> 
> 
> 



Monotheism and Hegelianism cannot rescue us from the vast
arbitrariness of the physical universe: that these things exist and
not others, that these things are here and others are there; that
these things happened now, and not later, and that these things will
happen later but not now: all these are tossed in a sea of
contingency, all are *de trop*. But Plotinus does provide an
answer: it is not only our notions of things that can overcome
separation: is the things themselves, which contain a dimension of the
divine. This leads to the new metaphor of the "Plotinian
hemisphere". Consider the liberated inhabitants of the cave as
scattered along the equator of a sphere. Each individual is
intersected by a meridianal line, and these lines rise and converge on
the pole. These metaphorical lines of hemispheric "otherworldly
geography" include the points they intersect, so each thing at
the equator is also part of what exists at the pole, at which and in
which their differences disappear. (Take a square inscribed within a
circle and shrink it to a point; the result will be a point-like round
square.) The pole here is the Plotinian One, the
"absolute" to which Findlay will devote an entire
subsequent book, *Ascent to the Absolute*. But in the Gifford
lectures, it is the lives of the individuals as their meridians
approach the pole that is the detailed object of description. Findlay
leans here heavily on Plotinus' portrait of the Realm of Mind,
and the portrait of the spirit world of the Buddha, as given in the
Gandavyuha, in which individuals can exchange places without crossing
the space between, in which every mind is accessible to every other,
and in which the shoes of the other become one's own shoes:



> 
> 
> Life is easy yonder, and truth is their parent and nurse, and they see
> all things, not such as are in flux, but as have true being, as they
> see themselves in others... For all things are transparent, and
> nothing is dark and resistant, light being made manifest to light.
> (Plotinus *Enneads* V, 8; Findlay's own translation [TC:
> 158])
> 
> 
> 



The Gifford audience was very small, "the most exiguous of my
experience, but not inattentive". One wonders what the reception
of these lectures might have been had they been presented in 1893, the
same year as Bradley's *Appearance and Reality*.


## 7. "The Perspicuous and the Poignant"



This, the last of Findlay's "analytical" articles,
and his sole separate contribution to aesthetics, was published in
1967 in the *British Journal of Aesthetics*. The discussion of
the aesthetic values of perspicuity and poignancy harks back to
Plotinian values of clarity and intensity. But the unusual turn in the
article is the connection of the "aesthetic attitude" with
the philosophical psychology of Brentano:



> 
> 
> Brentano divided the attitudes of the conscious mind into three basic
> species. There was mere conception or presentation, having something
> before one or present to one, without taking up any further conscious
> stance towards it; there was the theoretical acceptance of something
> as real, true, existent, believable... and there was finally the
> other non-theoretical acceptance or rejection which is present in our
> feelings,... our desires, and all our practical decisions...
> We may well doubt whether pure presentation has that priority in
> mental life which Brentano gave to it, whether it is not perhaps
> rightly regarded as a deficient mode of attitudes far more involved
> and existential. However this may be, the value of the scheme is that
> is places the aesthetic field very satisfactorily--the aesthetic
> field is one of suspended conception, of pure having something before
> one to contemplate. It is a field essentially divorced from the
> Yes-No of belief and conviction, as it is divorced from the other
> Yes-No of practical concern...When we are aesthetically minded we
> are interested in what comes before us purely as an instance of
> character regardless as to whether there really is, or is not, such a
> thing or sort of thing, and our interest is moreover, not concerned,
> as practical interest always is, to bring what is merely thought of or
> intended into the field of reality, or to push something from the
> field of reality out into the field of the merely thought or intended.
> (1967d [1972: 94])
> 
> 
> 



Presentations need not, and sometimes cannot, be sensually filled, so
the resulting aesthetics does not emphasize sense perception, allowing
Findlay to speak comfortably of the beauty of mathematical proofs and
other abstracta. Likewise, the separation of presentations from
emotions, Brentano's "feelings of love and hate",
undercuts expressionistic aesthetic theories, allowing Findlay to
speak coherently about severely abstract works of art that neither
convey nor provoke emotion.



Presentations, however, can be clear or obscure, and Findlay makes
clarity a necessary condition of aesthetic quality. (This includes
being clear about obscure things). The poignancy requirement is more
unusual, and involves what Findlay describes as an
"arrest" in our normally turbulent mental life. Some
perspicuous presentations bore us, but the poignant ones captivate us:
we are rapt, ecstatic, in contemplating them, and our mind does not
wish to move on to any successive intentional act. Since aesthetic
appreciation requires such ecstatic arrests, we often suffer
"aesthetic impotence", returning to an adored object and
finding ourselves unmoved by it. Such impotence may involve a past
overestimation of the value of the object. But more often it involves
an inability to recover youthful levels of concentration. One might
consider that Findlay's doctrine of "arrest" before
works of art might explain "museum fatigue", where walking
one hall in a museum can prove as tiring as hiking one mile in the
woods.


## 8. Wittgenstein



As noted, Findlay met Wittgenstein in February 1930 and again in 1939.
His description of the first encounter, published in 1974, has been
frequently quoted by Wittgenstein's biographers (see, for
example, Bartley 1985: 192):



> 
> 
> At the age of 40 he looked like a youth of 20, with a godlike beauty,
> always an important feature at Cambridge. The God received him and
> gave him lunch in an ascetic room, beautiful in its almost total
> emptiness, where a wooden bowl of fruit on a table made one note of
> color. The God was all he had been described as being: he looked like
> Apollo who had bounded into life out of his own statue, or perhaps
> like the Norse God Baldur, blue-eyed and fair haired, with a beauty
> that had nothing sensual about it, but simply breathed the four Greek
> cardinal virtues, to which was added a very exquisite kindness and
> graciousness that bathed one like remote, slightly wintry
> sunshine... The tea that one drank with him tasted like nectar.
> (EQ: 173-4)
> 
> 
> 



Findlay was also a keen appreciator of Wittgenstein's prose
style, and felt that some fraction of Wittgenstein's influence
stemmed from the beauty of his German sentences, a beauty that an
unwary reader might mistake for truth. Nevertheless, he freely
acknowledged Wittgenstein's philosophical genius:



> 
> 
> One could not listen to Wittgenstein's least pronouncements,
> however falteringly expressed, without feeling that they sprung from a
> mind of supreme integrity and the most penetrating insight. (W:
> 24)
> 
> 
> 



and the threat it posed to his own work. If the *Tractatus* was
right, his book on Meinong was wrong; if the Blue and Brown books were
right, then *Values and Intentions* was misguided, if the
*Philosophical Investigations* (1953) got it right, the Gifford
lectures were nonsense. The defensive result was *Wittgenstein: a
Critique*, published in Findlay's eightieth year. 



> 
> 
> I have returned to my own orbit as a result of learning to answer
> almost all of Wittgenstein's rhetorical questions, which were
> intended to promote the answer "Yes", with the straight
> answer "No".(EQ: 168) 
> 
> 
> 



*Wittgenstein: A Critique* reviews the *Tractatus*, the
Blue and Brown books, *Remarks on the Foundations of the
Mathematics*, and the Investigations. The format is to take key
aphorisms from Wittgenstein, expound them at considerable length, and
then launch objections, which pile up as in a Thomistic
*Summa*, but absent the replies. For example, against the
*Tractatus*, Findlay objects (1) "Ultimate simple
objects" are not ontologically viable, whatever can be referred
to must have an internal structure, and form part of a larger
relational structure; (2) "The restriction of all domains to the
actually existent" is to be rejected because it is always
significant to suppose that this thing that exists, might have not
existed; (3) the view that "all necessities are logical
necessities" is wrong because two atomic propositions can be
inconsistent; (4) the axiom of extensionality is false because there
are significant and true modal propositions; (5) not "all
logical necessities are tautological", since , e.g.,
"*p*" and "not not *p*" differ in
sense; ( 6) the picture theory of language is wrong because meanings
are connected to objects by intentional mental acts, not by
"mirroring" (W: 222).



Husserl's "meaning as intentionality" theory is
brought to bear on the "meaning as use" doctrine of the
Blue and Brown books and *Philosophical Investigations*.
Findlay remarks that he was shocked in 1939 when Wittgenstein admitted
to him that he had already written a great deal about "mental
processes", while reading next to nothing of the great early
twentieth century experimental psychologists (SF: 31). So when
Wittgenstein mocked the story of the mind's eye viewing inner
mental pictures, he was ignorant of Titchner's work on
"imageless thought;" when he attacked introspection as
pseudo-science, he was ignorant of the careful and disciplined
introspective methods of Kulpe and the Wurzburg school, and
so forth. Many of Wittgenstein's targets are thus straw men.



Findlay readily concedes that Wittgenstein is right that there is
rarely a uniform inner experience that is invariably present in a
specific mental processes such as thinking or believing. But it is a
mistake infer from the absence of uniform inner experiences that there
are no inner experiences at all:



> 
> 
> Wittgenstein denies the existence of specific experiences of
> intending, with equal correctness and incorrectness. There are
> intentions as poignantly experienced as the nailing of these to church
> doors, and intentions distinguished only by the very faint note of
> "to be doneness", as when we go up to someone and greet
> him. (W: 39)
> 
> 
> 



And again:



> 
> 
> Wittgenstein's dogmatic pronouncement may here be contrasted
> with the vastly varied categorizations which introspective
> psychologists have brought into the examination of pain, as well as
> into every other form of organic or kinesthetic sensation, using
> metaphorical descriptions without stint, and often with great aptness.
> (W: 222)
> 
> 
> 



These inner experiences are part of a general subjectivity that form
the background without which language cannot even arise; this
background is a quasi-language of thought possessed to some degree by
non-human animals. 



> 
> 
> [Wittgenstein] has rejected what seemed to him the idle pictures that
> men fashion in going beyond the actual sues of language, but he has
> given us little understanding of what those actual uses are, and what
> they ought to be. Blind acceptance of the uses of expression, without
> a justifying ontology or experimental phenomenology, does not
> recommend itself to the most naive user of words: they look for a
> justification of use, and they seek it beyond use. The falsifying,
> merely pictorial element abounds in inner-life talk, but it will none
> the less not do to throw out the baby of inner experience with the
> bath water of undisciplined diction (W: 252)
> 
> 
> 



Wittgenstein's famous argument against "a private
language", is set by Findlay in a special context. In the
*Tractatus* Wittgenstein endorses solipsism: there is even a
example of one eye contemplating a world that is entirely its own.
Findlay argued that Wittgenstein not only preached solipsism; he lived
it. "Wittgenstein, I consider, is one of the few and genuine
complete solipsists who have ever existed" (SF: 62). He believed
that he did not know what it is to be like someone other than
Wittgenstein, or that anyone else could gasp what his own life was
like.



> 
> 
> His pervasive aestheticism certainly displayed a character that I
> believe, is technically describable as "schizoid", there
> was something, queer, detached, surreal, incompletely human about it.
> His colorless simple objects are not things that one can touch and
> handle, and his villagers who sell apples one by one taken from a
> drawer, and then ritually count them as they are taken out, or who
> assure themselves that something is red by taking a named sample of
> red out of their pockets, are plainly the inhabitants of a dream or a
> nightmare, and not of a possible village. (W: 21)
> 
> 
> 



The "private language argument" in this context, becomes
an almost hysterical attempt to provide a public world and public
communication between the separate selves of the *Tractatus*.
To insist (against private languages) that "inner processes must
have outer criteria" is not a problem for Findlay, who remained
a quasi-behaviorist to the end. The problem is to claim, as
Wittgenstein did, that in most cases outward criteria cannot be found,
and to declare on this basis that inner processes are largely
mythical. On Findlay's interpretation, Wittgenstein spent his
youthful years hiding his inner experiences, and then in later life
invented a philosophy that declared that he had nothing to hide.



The Wittgenstein wave has largely passed by, and Findlay's
multitudinous objections look a bit like overkill. Philosophy today
has rediscovered psychology, though it is the psychology of Kahneman
and Tversky and Pylyshyn, not the psychology of Brentano or Titchner.
But Findlay's style of objecting to Wittgenstein, rather than
ignoring him, presupposes a common ground, and suggests a continuing
relevance of Wittgenstein's thought for the contemporary
philosophy of mind. 



To close with an autobiographical passage: Findlay, a theosophist
surrounded by hostile logicians, seems to have found in Wittgenstein a
kindred spirit: 



> 
> 
> He treated me with extraordinary graciousness, perhaps principally
> because he saw in me an inconsequential unbelongingness akin to his
> own. He gave me his then only copy of the first 150 sections of the
> *Philosophical Investigations* to read! It is in the light of
> his many kindnesses that I should wish this present, highly critical
> book about his teachings to be regarded, not merely as a critique, but
> also as a tribute. (W: 22)
> 
> 
>