H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: ROVATTI

G.: Principia Mathematica is by Whitehead and Russell, but because one of them later became a lord, posterity behaves as if arithmetic had always favoured the peerage. S.: Oxford has long held that if a title can obscure a collaboration it ought to be allowed a little exercise. G.: The nuisance is that Whitehead is the primary author in labour if not in heraldry, yet the public memory hears “Russell’s Principia” with the same ease with which it hears “the British Empire” and forgets the shipping. S.: To be fair, Whitehead had the bad taste to remain neither a lord nor a scandal. G.: Nor even properly a philosopher in the other place, by which I mean Cambridge; there he taught mathematics and only later came to philosophy after the gown had already made up its mind about him. S.: So the title itself was a Cantabrian costume. G.: Entirely. Principia is one of those Cambridge words which mean “we are Newtonian enough to borrow grandeur and modest enough not to blush.” S.: As Moore had already shown with Principia Ethica. G.: Exactly. What more principles do they want, one wonders; first mathematics, then ethics, and if they had had the courage perhaps Principia Tea-Cups. S.: Principia Small-Talk would have improved the place. G.: Cambridge never liked small talk unless it could be printed in Latin. S.: Yet later Oxford books make it sound as if Whitehead is simply the man. G.: Yes, that is the curious reverse. Urmson in Philosophical Analysis and Warnock in 100 Years of Philosophy in England write as if Whitehead occupies a central philosophical throne, when in truth he is both indispensable and oddly displaced. S.: Displaced because his importance is real but of the wrong institutional kind. G.: Precisely. He matters immensely, but not in the way Oxford later liked to tell the story of itself. S.: Not as an ordinary-language don with a staircase full of tutees. G.: Certainly not. Whitehead comes to philosophy from mathematics, which is always socially suspicious in England because it suggests one may know something before one has learnt how to speak about it apologetically. S.: So Oxford inherits Whitehead partly as a foreign body. G.: A homegrown foreign body, yes; a Cambridge mathematician later naturalised into philosophical history because the story needed one grand precursor more respectable than Bosanquet and less embarrassing than McTaggart. S.: That is already rather good. G.: Keep it and make it drier. S.: Gladly. But why does Whitehead stay so magnetised for people like Rovatti? G.: Because once an Italian writes Whitehead as a laurea title, with no subtitle at all, it ceases to be merely a philosopher and becomes a laurel wreath with a surname attached. S.: Whitehead as a wreath? G.: Exactly. The thesis is not only about Whitehead; it is a way of being laureated through Whitehead. S.: And once the wreath is on, it is difficult to take Whitehead off it. G.: That is the Milanese comedy. In Oxford I took a B.A. in Lit. Hum. and never had to write anything for the degree in that continental, laureating sense. One wrote essays constantly, of course, but not a definitive object called a thesis which follows one about like a civic title. S.: So the difference is between being assessed by repeated papers and being crowned by a single labour. G.: Precisely. Oxford punishes you in installments; Milan adorns you in public and expects fidelity to the adornment. S.: Which makes Rovatti’s Whitehead rather more destiny-like than your own relation to any single figure at Greats. G.: Entirely. I could have been said to belong to Aristotle on Monday, to Kant on Wednesday, and to a rather irritated Butler by Friday, without anyone forcing a wreath over my head. S.: Whereas one writes Whitehead under Paci and Geymonat, and Whitehead remains in the photograph. G.: Yes. The photographic element must not be underestimated in Italy. A laurea is half metaphysics and half civic portraiture. S.: You make it sound like a municipal sacrament. G.: Most education does once robes appear. S.: Yet you do not deny that Whitehead’s philosophical work, especially later, gave others plenty to write on. G.: Of course not. Process, organism, event, relations, eternal objects, God turning up in academic prose as if smuggled in under mathematical cover; there is enough material to overfeed a faculty. S.: But your complaint is historical rather than doctrinal. G.: Exactly. The historical story is misarranged. Whitehead is made to look like the continuous philosophical man when he is in truth a mathematician who moved into philosophy with astonishing breadth and rather little concern for the neat departmental border. S.: Which departments then tidy up retrospectively. G.: They always do. Universities are machines for turning adventure into curriculum. S.: Then Principia Mathematica itself suffers two distortions: first that Russell eclipses Whitehead by rank and anecdote, and second that Whitehead gets retrospectively recast as if he had always been a philosopher. G.: Beautifully put. S.: I try to keep up. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. S.: Never beyond the college allowance. But tell me about Cambridge again. You call it the other place because Oxford requires some geography of contempt. G.: A geography of familiarity, rather. Whitehead taught mathematics there, not philosophy, and that matters because Cambridge later liked to reabsorb him into philosophy without admitting that his route in was not the standard one. S.: While Oxford later tells the whole twentieth-century story as if the line ran from Moore and Russell to analysis, with Whitehead sitting somewhere like an over-furnished waiting room. G.: Yes. Warnock in particular is perfectly capable of making Whitehead seem like a station through which the train of English philosophy necessarily passed, when in fact many boarded elsewhere and hardly looked out. S.: And Urmson? G.: Urmson has the historian’s vice of elegance. He can write the narrative so smoothly that the contingent begins to look canonical. S.: That sounds like a charge you would prefer as praise in your own case. G.: Only if deserved, which is a different matter. S.: Then was Whitehead ever really one of “the men” for Oxford? G.: Not in the tribal sense. He was admired, cited, taught, occasionally revered, and more often summarised. But he was not one of the house gods in the way later memoirs can imply. S.: Because he was too metaphysical? G.: That too. Whitehead in full cry makes even the braver Oxonians reach for aspirin. He is one of those philosophers one respects by abbreviation. S.: So the very people who make him central also make him manageable. G.: Precisely. “Whitehead” becomes a chapter heading, not a living risk. S.: And Rovatti at twenty-four writes Whitehead with no subtitle, which sounds rather more like surrender. G.: Or bravado. Young men choose titles like that to show they have lungs. S.: You said as much of Italian lauree before. G.: Yes, and I stand by it. A thesis entitled Whitehead announces not merely interest but respiration. S.: Then how does the wreath work in your joke? G.: Very simply. Laurea already carries the laurel in its body. Once you write on Whitehead for a laurea, Whitehead becomes wound round your head by the institution itself. S.: That is very nearly etymological satire. G.: Etymology exists largely for satire in the right hands. S.: Then your own Greats degree spared you this. G.: Entirely. Lit. Hum. did many things to me, not all kind, but it never fastened a single philosopher to my forehead. S.: Instead it gave you a roaming license. G.: Precisely. One endured collections, schools, and an endless economy of essays, but one did not emerge as “the Whitehead man” or “the Bradley man” by ceremonial necessity. S.: So Oxford, for all its tyranny, preserved a certain anti-monographic freedom at first degree level. G.: Yes. A freedom purchased, of course, by other inconveniences, including ignorance in public and terror in private. S.: But that may be preferable to being publicly laureated as a Whiteheadian. G.: For an Englishman, certainly. We prefer our intellectual commitments to remain deniable. S.: Whereas the continental system likes declaration. G.: And supervisors. Never forget Paci and Geymonat. To have both a relatore and a correlatore is already to confess that one thesis may need two parents. S.: Or two witnesses. G.: Or two maxims, as I once said. The Maxim of Relation and the Maxim of Co-Relation. S.: You were proud of that. G.: Moderately. It is the sort of joke one earns by staying too long in libraries. S.: Then let us return to Whitehead himself. Why does the word Principia strike you as a costume? G.: Because it is at once grand and evasive. It says first things while dodging the vulgarity of saying what first things are. Cambridge adored that sort of dignity. S.: And Moore’s Principia Ethica borrows the same air. G.: Entirely. One half expects Principia Umbrellarum, a foundational account of umbrellas in pure good faith. S.: But in Whitehead’s case the title also masks authorship. G.: Yes, because a grand title invites readers to think in monuments, not in division of labour. Once the monument stands, the lord is remembered, the schoolmaster is not. S.: Whitehead was not a schoolmaster. G.: In the best English sense he was: a master of exactness without sufficient scandal to remain famous properly. S.: Whereas Russell had both scandal and a title eventually. G.: Exactly. Posterity adores moral misbehaviour supported by aristocratic punctuation. S.: Then the complaint is not merely that Russell gets more credit, but that the conditions of remembrance are socially ridiculous. G.: Deeply ridiculous. Philosophical memory is always less rational than philosophers advertise. S.: And yet you admit Whitehead’s later metaphysics has a grandeur none of the tidy analysts can match. G.: Certainly. But grandeur is not the same as influence, and influence is not the same as narrative centrality. S.: So Whitehead is indispensable but not representative. G.: There you have it. He is one of the great anomalies through which English philosophy passes without being able to say whether he belongs to the route or to the weather. S.: Splendidly put. G.: Keep that too. S.: You are distributing property recklessly. G.: I am thinking of wills and Russell, which always makes me careless. Now, Rovatti and Whitehead. Why do Italians at that moment find him attractive? S.: Because process looks like philosophy with lungs, as you said. G.: Yes, and because filosofia teoretica in Milan could still welcome a thinker who crossed science and metaphysics without apologising every third sentence. S.: Oxford required more apology. G.: Much more. One had to make metaphysics sound like housekeeping or not do it at all. S.: While Whitehead sounds like a cosmic engineer. G.: Exactly. Italians admire such men because they still believe systems may be inhabited rather than merely footnoted. S.: And Paci supervising Whitehead makes a certain sense. G.: It does. Phenomenology, process, scientificity, grand categories, all under the civic solemnity of a laurea title. One can almost hear the room. S.: Whereas at Oxford no one at first degree level is required to write Whitehead and then carry the memory in formal dress. G.: No. One carries instead the memory of question sheets, dons, tutors, and the peculiar fact that one may leave with a degree and no monograph attached to one’s name. S.: Which you think counts for something. G.: A good deal. It leaves a man with fewer ceremonial debts. S.: Fewer wreaths, more scars. G.: Exactly. And scars are easier to deny socially. S.: Then perhaps the difference is this: the laurea gives you a title through a philosopher, while Lit. Hum. gives you habits through an ordeal. G.: Very good indeed. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become laureated by compliment. S.: Never beyond the bachelor level. G.: Better. Now, tell me: why do later English histories keep Whitehead in view if he is not “the man”? S.: Because he is too large to omit and too awkward to place. G.: Exactly. Historians hate large awkward men. They therefore make them central in prose and marginal in spirit. S.: So Whitehead becomes a respectable stop on the way to what they really care about. G.: Moore, Russell, analysis, language, Austin, Ryle, Strawson, and the rest. Whitehead is placed in the vestibule with a sufficient umbrella stand. S.: Whereas Rovatti begins in the vestibule and may never quite leave it. G.: Because once Whitehead is your title, Whitehead is also your institutional ancestry. S.: And the laurel binds. G.: Yes. That is why I say one can take Whitehead off the shelf more easily than off a laurea. S.: One could make a thesis of that. G.: In Milan they probably did. S.: Then let me see if I have your four complaints properly ordered. Principia Mathematica is remembered under Russellian prestige more than Whiteheadian labour; Whitehead taught mathematics at Cambridge, not philosophy, so his later philosophical centrality is retrospective; the title Principia is a Cambridge habit of grandeur shared by Moore’s Principia Ethica; and later Oxford histories magnify Whitehead into a representative figure he never quite was. G.: Exactly. S.: And the Rovatti point? G.: That Oxford’s first degree left me unwreathed by any single philosophical allegiance, whereas a laurea entitled Whitehead crowns a young man with the very name he may later spend his life trying to wear lightly. S.: So the real joke is educational. G.: All good English jokes about philosophy are educational in the end. S.: And the punchline? G.: In Oxford one could leave with Lit. Hum. and no wreath at all; in Milan one could leave with Whitehead on one’s head, and the difficulty ever after was not to think it a hat.