One time I asked David Stove, a philosopher at Sydney University’s Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy, whether he thought there were such things as foundational truths – propositions that underlay and supported the edifice of human knowledge. 

     “Yes,” Stove replied without hesitation. “But no gentleman would ask you what they were.”

Another time, at one of the Trad and Mod Staff Club luncheons where I learned how they philosophize when the accent is British, Stove characterized Continental philosophy as the genre where Deep calls to Deep. From the emphasis he put on the noun, it was clear that neither the Caller nor the Called would prove of the slightest interest to David Stove.

When I was a kid, I had no interest in growing up to be Deep. What did interest me? Well, how much easier it was to climb a tree barefoot than with shoes on. Shoeless, your foot more easily gripped the tree bark and kept you aloft.

Another interest was winning dueling contests, using branches for swords. If you want to win, don’t take one single step backward. Just stand there crossing swords – thwack, thwack, thwack. Quite mistakenly, your opponent is likely to infer that, since he’s not winning, he must be losing. To vary the monotony of (as he thinks) losing, he might just take one step back. If he does that, you can drive him to the wall!

Such were the shallow lessons of the summer I was ten, my last summer at Hilltop, the bungalow colony in the Watchung Mountains of New Jersey, where my family vacationed, along with other families and their children, who were playmates for me.

I carried into grownup life a rather similar, pared-down sense for keeping life intelligible, which meant simple. So the first apartment I could pay for out of an assistant professor’s salary was a one-room, partly furnished with wooden crates kindly donated by the Italian grocer across the street on Third Avenue. That way I had a coffee table and a dining table, though I still had to purchase a few chairs, a rudimentary bookcase and a desk. Picked ‘em up for a song.

After each teaching year, I would go through any new things accumulated during that time and I’d discard whatever I no longer needed.

Eventually this spareness was forced to give way to the stuff inherited after my parents died. Some of the bulkier items could be shipped to the house in Maine, but there were pieces that obviously did not belong downeast. Among the latter was a large, square coffee table, actually made from the mold of an Egyptian wall relief. I don’t know what it said, in hieroglyphics, but it reflected my mother’s life much more than mine. I was reluctant to let it go, but it was certainly too big for my one-room apartment. 

Speaking of desired spareness versus the intrusions of stuff, lately I’ve been reading a book titled The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle by David Edmonds. The “Vienna Circle” was the name self-bestowed on a brilliant group of scientifically, philosophically and/or mathematically accomplished thinkers who met to discuss their view of the methods by which philosophy might lend clarifying support for progress in the sciences. 

The Vienna Circle desired spareness. “Above all, they detested metaphysics—claims about the nature of reality that … go beyond what can be established by math/logic and by empirical science.” This was a period of enormous creativity in the sciences. “Alongside Einstein, physicists such as Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg were reimagining and redescribing the way the world was constructed (p. 23).” Within the Vienna Circle, some differences emerged about what might distinguish verifiable claims from meaningless, nonsensical ones, but all agreed on the objective. It was to bring to philosophy the level of clarity and meaningfulness that the sciences already exemplified.

Among the Viennese innovators working in a deliberately modern spirit was Sigmund Freud. It seems that “in the nineteenth century Charles Darwin had forced mankind to … see itself as part of the animal world … . Modernism placed an emphasis on the animal, on the emotional and the irrational parts of our … makeup, on our sexual and primeval urges (p. 76).”

Although they were unclear as to whether psychoanalysis did or did not meet the Vienna Circle’s criteria for a science, all the same a number of Circle members quietly got themselves psychoanalyzed. In this number was Frank Ramsey, brilliant theoretician of mathematics. He underwent six months of psychoanalysis. In 1925, he gave a talk to the Apostles, a self-selected and secretive Cambridge society considered by its members to include none but the best and the brightest. Ramsey’s talk was about the Oedipus Complex, a psychological self-contortion that, according to Freud, was universal in men. 

“In my own case,” said Ramsey, “I think my interest in philosophy … is derived from a fairly well repressed infantile rivalry with my father and my wish to kill him. This means that I can never get any great satisfaction from philosophizing, never anything like the pleasure I should have got from killing my father, which my conscience or rather my love for him forbade me to do when I was small.”

Freud named this hypothetical complex after Oedipus Rex, a play by Sophocles staged in Athens in 467 BCE. Speaking of which, as it happens, I was some years ago crossing the campus of Columbia University at night when I noticed that this very play by Sophocles was being staged outdoors on the steps of the mall. As I stood there to watch, King Oedipus had just discovered that the older woman whom he’d married, Jocasta, was in fact his mother, and the stranger he’d killed in a conflict on the road had been his father. The desolation of spirit that was figured forth by the actor was so torrential, so devasting, that I myself could not bear to watch it any longer. I moved along.

Think about it. How likely is it that such a catastrophic mismatch (as we may call it) is playing itself out beneath the surface of every man you meet? I have no trouble supposing that the male infant, like the female infant, has a longing for its mother. But wouldn’t that be for the safety and security of her womb, which the infant might still remember, rather than for a copulatory connection for which the male infant lacks even the necessary biological toolbox? Oh well. Let’s move along …

It seems to me that for the brilliant Frank Ramsey to internalize the Freudian hypothesis was like my trying to cram the Egyptian-mold-with-ancient-hieroglyphics coffee table into my small city apartment. In my own case, it got justified eventually when I married Jerry and we moved into a bigger house. 

But in Ramsey’s case? Freudian psychoanalysis was as well-placed as an oversized Egyptian coffee table in a one-room city apartment.