Remembering Hulme: A Neglected Philosopher-Critic-PoetAuthor(s): Richard ShustermanReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1985), pp. 559-576Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709545 .Accessed: 03/01/2012 13:28

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REMEMBERING HULME: A Neglected Philosopher-Critic-Poet

BY RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

I. The centenary of T. E. Hulme, born on September 16, 1983, has passed with surprising silence. I have scanned the notices of literary and aesthetic journals and have not found any conferences or publications to commemorate this event and remember the poet-critic-philosopher who not long ago held center stage as a still influential father of modernism and the New Criticism. Indeed, in the late thirties, Hulme's reputation was so great that a reviewer in Scrutiny wrote of "The T. E. Hulme Myth" and felt the need to debunk it and minimize the importance and intrinsic interest of his ideas.' Interestingly, during Hulme's brief life, cut short by death in battle in 1917, he had comparatively little fame or influence;2 and now, after about four decades of posthumous fame (ini- tiated by Herbert Read's publication of Hulme's Speculations in 1924),3 Hulme seems destined to sink back into oblivion, to be vaguely remem- bered merely as an influence on Eliot, Pound, and the Imagists.

I come neither to bury Hulme nor to praise him but primarily to remember him. In doing this, I hope to correct some of the recent misinterpretations of his philosophy of literature, which perhaps have helped make him seem less interesting and memorable; and I would also like to point out the virtually unrecognized close connections of his thought with that of Moore and Russell, and thereby suggest that Hulme is philosophically something other and more than the mere Bergsonian propagandist he is typically portrayed to be. Finally, having corrected these errors of commission and omission in the interpretation of Hulme's thought, I shall go on to maintain that some of his central philosophical ideas and insights, which have been largely overlooked and neglected, are at the forefront of philosophical developments today. Therefore, before condemning Hulme to oblivion, we should recognize that he can be

See H. A. Mason, "The T. E. Hulme Myth," Scrutiny, 7 (1938), 215-16. 2 See S. Hynes, "Introduction," in T. E. Hulme, Further Speculations (Minneapolis,

1955), vii. "Unfortunately, he died before his ideas had gained any currency beyond his own circle, and it is only since his death, or more precisely since the appearance of Speculations in 1924, that he has come to be taken serously." Future page references to Further Speculations (hereinafter abbreviated as FS) will appear in the text parenthetically. See also A. R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (London, 1960), 14. "Hulme's death was not dignified by an obituary notice, not even in The New Age for which he had written most of his work."

3T. E. Hulme, Speculations, ed. H. Read (London, 1924; republished 1960). Page references to this work (hereinafter abbreviated as Spec.) will be to the 1960 edition and will appear in the text parenthetically.

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Copyright 1985 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.

560 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

reclaimed as a rich prophetic mind whose ideas continue to have great relevance for twentieth-century thought.

II. Although Hulme published during his lifetime many articles in

philosophy and aesthetics (mainly in The New Age), it was the publication of his posthumous Speculations that established his reputation as a leader of the anti-romantic, modernist revolution in poetry. More particularly, it was Hulme's seminal essay in that volume, "Romanticism and Clas- sicism", which contains his vociferous condemnation of the "moaning" emotionalism, "sloppiness," and "vagueness" of romanticism and his

contrasting advocacy and prophecy of "a period of dry, hard, classical

verse," where "the great aim is accurate, precise, and definite description" and the capturing and conveying of "visual meanings" (Spec., 126-27, 132-33, 135). The same essay also contains criticism of the excessive seriousness of the "high-falutin" romantic imagination, and contrasting advocacy of "fancy" as "the necessary weapon of the classical school," with its sophisticated humor, irony, and recognition of man's limits (Spec., 120-21, 137).

This emphasis on the dry, concrete, precise, and visual in poetry powerfully reverberated in the modernist poetics and poetic practice of Eliot and Pound, while Hulme's idea that great poetry need not be of

high seriousness but can instead exploit the classical virtues of sophis- ticated humor and irony was also echoed by the New Critics and erected into the principle that irony and ambiguity are of the very essence of

poetry.4 It is no wonder, then, that in the heyday of modernist poetics and the New Criticism Hulme's reputation reached mythic proportions.

Hulme's reputation of importance eventually led to the publication of additional material in S. Hynes' collection, Further Speculations, in

1955, and it also led in turn to a reexamination, reinterpretation, and reassessment of his thought. By that time, revolutionary zeal for both modernist poetics and the New Criticism had sufficiently cooled to allow a more critical assessment; and we find two excellent literary theorists, Murray Krieger and Frank Kermode, not only criticizing Hulme's ap- parent inconsistencies and weaknesses of thought but also totally reversing the original (and, of course, Hulme's own self-proclaimed) interpretation of his stance as anti-romantic.5

Now it must be confessed at the outset that Hulme's philosophical and aesthetic writings do seem to exhibit many glaring tensions and

apparent inconsistencies, which allow variant interpretations of his work and can encourage misinterpretations of it. I shall not try to resolve or

justify all these apparent inconsistencies, nor am I confident that they

4 P. Rackin, "Hulme, Richards, and the Development of Contextualist Poetic Theory," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 25 (1967), 413-25.

5 Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis, 1956), 31-45; and F.

Kermode, Romantic Image (London, 1961), 119-37.

REMEMBERING HULME 561

could all be adequately resolved. However, there are some good expla- nations and extenuating circumstances for these alleged inconsistencies which should be kept in mind.

First, since much of the Hulme corpus was posthumously published, selected, and edited (not always flawlessly) from "a great mass of note- books and manuscripts" (Spec., xi), it seems hard to condemn Hulme for ultimately holding all the alleged inconsistencies.6 It is more likely and certainly more fair to suppose that much of this material was left unpublished by Hulme himself because he was not fully satisfied with it, and that many of the apparent inconsistencies derive from views which Hulme once held but grew to doubt or discard. As we shall later see, the simple hypothesis that Hulme's thought significantly developed as he matured will readily explain many of the striking tensions in his corpus, though the idea of treating Hulme's thought developmentally was frus- trated from the start by the fact that Read published Speculations without taking the trouble to date the constituent essays, so that a temporal development, if one existed, could be perceived. Fortunately, however, later scholarship has partly remedied this inattention to Hulme's intel- lectual development, and we now know, for example, that his early enthusiasm for Bergson greatly waned as his own thought matured.7

Secondly, we should remember that Hulme wished to postpone the serious and definitive statement of his philosophical views until he was forty. Hulme allegedly was fond of saying, "I am a heavy philosopher. I shall write nothing until I am forty" (FS, xi). He only lived to thirty- four and, had he lived longer, would probably have rejected much of his corpus as jejune juvenilia. Though he may have called himself "a heavy philosopher" (probably jestfully as a pun on his weight of two hundred pounds), Hulme actually confesses in one of his essays that he is essentially "a dilettante," one of the "English amateurs in philosophy," whose read- ing errantly follows his own interest from question to question, philos- opher to philosopher, rather than systematically studying the field, and who will therefore not be ready to do philosophy in a rigorous, sustained fashion until the age of forty (Spec., 39-41). Hulme's writings thus do not represent a real attempt at systematic philosophy; and in such un- systematic philosophical reflections, Hulme was not likely to be especially troubled by possible inconsistencies, but rather more concerned about getting the particular idea, perspective, or insight that currently moved him to be as vivid and convincing as he could make it.

Finally, as I shall later argue in considerable detail, though Hulme

6 On the nature and extent of Hulme's posthumous papers and the difficulties in

editing them, see Read's "Introduction" to Speculations, xi-xv. On the loss of Hulme's

manuscripts, see Jones, 148; and on Read's neglect in dating the selected essays and in

identifying the sources of Hulme's quotations, see my following text and note 23. 7 Hynes' "Introduction," in FS, xiii-xiv, and Jones, 62.

562 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

was not blind to the merits of systematic, scientific philosophy (as he is sometimes falsely supposed to have been),8 the sort of philosophy that Hulme was ultimately most interested in doing is one that is intentionally unsystematic and that could tolerate statements that seemed inconsistent, provided that they were edifying. As Herbert Read was quick to realize in editing Hulme's posthumous papers, "he was not, by design, a sys- tematic thinker" (Spec., xv).

Our recognition and explanation of apparent tensions and inconsist- encies in Hulme's writings may, at the same time, not only explain but largely exonerate the misinterpretations of his thought. Yet there is still the obligation to correct these misinterpretations. Let us return, then, to Krieger and Kermode. Krieger, in The New Apologists for Poetry, aims to demonstrate that Coleridge was the essential source of the poetic theory of the New Criticism, and thus faces the task of reconciling this propo- sition with Hulme's status as a patriarch of the New Criticism who was an avowed and vociferously outspoken opponent of romanticism. Krie- ger's general strategy is to reinterpret Hulme as an essentially Coleridgean romantic who is such a confused, though insightful, thinker (witness his apparent inconsistencies) that he does not realize his true position and its affinities. The particular tactic for implementing this strategy is to identify Hulme's own position with his early sympathetic exposition of Bergson's philosophy, a philosophy that is essentially romantic, and then to assimilate this Bergsonian expression of romanticism into the tradi- tional Coleridgean mould. Thus, despite Hulme's self-proclaimed anti- romanticism and explicit reversal of Coleridge's preference for imagi- nation over fancy, Krieger argues:

But there is also a quite different side of Hulme. In his essay on Bergson, in which he expounds sympathetically the aesthetic of his master in philosophy, there is a description of the poet's activity that seems nearly as transcendental as Coleridge's.... This conception gives the poet a far higher and more romantic function than Hulme has assigned him in his severe "Romanticism and Clas- sicism." ... The poet must not give us as the world 'the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude' (note how apt this Coleridgean phrase is here) which our senses normally allow to us; rather he must give us the rare world beyond, which he somehow intuits.9

By such assimilating sleight-of-hand Krieger tries to transform Hulme's virulent anti-romanticism and advocacy of fancy over imagination into a romantic advocacy of a theory of imagination that "seems not far removed from the imagination invoked by Coleridge."'0

One is therefore obliged to assert what any straightforward reading

8 See, for example, Hynes, FS, xiv, xx. 9 Murray Krieger, 33-34. 0 Ibid., 34.

REMEMBERING HULME 563

of Hulme's work should make evident, that Hulme was not a confused

Coleridgean romantic who thought that poetry took us beyond the senses to a metaphysical intuition of the essence of reality. Hulme, even when

expounding Bergson, always insisted that the aim of poetry is to capture and convey particular physical things and visual images, not metaphysical essences. Thus, even in his essay on "Bergson's Theory of Art," Hulme maintains that the poet's aim is not to render the Bergsonian metaphysical flux but "to express the individual thing which he has seen" (Spec., 160), and that good poetry is that which captures and conveys the "presence of a vividly felt physical and visual scene" (Spec., 164). Elsewhere, we read that the poet's job is "recording impressions by visual images," "seeing 'solid' things," the greatest poets being those who "saw solid, definite things and described them" (FS, 73, 78, 80). Finally, in his more definitive and influential "Romanticism and Classicism,"11 Hulme's op- position to the romantic conception of the poet's role as transcendental seer could hardly be clearer. The goal of poetry is not visionary meta-

physical truth; rather "the aim is accurate, precise, and definite descrip- tion.... It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing,... an actually realised visual object.... It doesn't matter if it were a lady's shoe or the starry heavens" (Spec., 132, 134, 137). And in contrast to the romantic poetic of Wordsworth and Col-

eridge, the light in which Hulme's poet should see these objects "is always the light of ordinary day, never the light that never was on land or sea"

(Spec., 127). Krieger's additional attempts to identify Hulme's theory with Col-

eridge are equally weak and ineffective. The fact that Hulme notes (par- enthetically, in the course of a diatribe on how romantic thought deteriorates clear meanings) that Coleridge's term "vital" originally had a clear and definite sense, denoting the phenomenon of organic unity, and was only subverted into a vague and mysterious notion by later romantics; and the fact that Hulme goes on to assert that the notion of

organic unity is important to Bergson's philosophy and to aesthetics in

general, are taken by Krieger as strong evidence of Hulme's Coleridgean romanticism as opposed to his claimed allegiance to "the old classical view." 12 Krieger seems strangely unaware that the notion of organic unity is not the invention of Coleridge, Bergson, or romanticism, but was

originally an important classical concept, clearly formulated in Aristotle's

I Though this essay is not dated by Read, it is clearly one of Hulme's more mature efforts, and, as Krieger himself notes, "repeats in more narrowly literary terms, the

general argument of his more ambitious 'Humanism and the Religious Attitude' " (Krie- ger, 34), which is known to be one of Hulme's latest works, completed while he was "lost" in London by the War Office between 1915-1916. See Hynes in FS, xxviii, and Jones, 135-36.

12 Krieger, 39-40.

564 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

Poetics and frequently employed and interpreted in pre-romantic thought.3

Frank Kermode's misinterpretation of Hulme is similar in spirit and substance to Krieger's but different in particulars because he has a slightly different axe to grind. In Romantic Image Kermode too wishes to show that certain romantic tenets about poetry, most importantly that "the

image... is the primary pigment of poetry," "are none the less funda- mental to much twentieth-century thinking about poetry," even "for critics and poets who are militantly anti-Romantic."14 But Kermode is not fixated on Coleridge and rather views Hulme's theory in a broader romantic context, characterizing the theory as "a modernized, but es- sentially traditional, aesthetic of Symbolism."'5 Like Krieger, Kermode dismisses Hulme's fervent anti-romantic proclamations and maintains that his theory is simply a "version of the Magic Image, or Romantic anti-positivism." 16

Again, Bergson provides the philosopher's stone which converts Hulme's anti-romantic pronouncements into mainstream romanticism. Hulme, we are told, "was a devoted admirer of Bergson" from whom he imbibed "his strong affiliation to that organicist, anti-positivist stream of ideas that stems from the Romantic movement."'7 Hulme's poetic theory is thus said to assert that "poems are concerned with intuited truth" of a metaphysical nature, the poet succeeding to "pierce the veil" of ordinary sensual perception and to grasp through special intuition "a

higher but finite order of truth."'8

Though Kermode is more scrupulous than Krieger and much closer to Hulme, objections of the same sort hold against his reading. He takes Hulme's early enthusiasm for Bergson as the continuously dominant factor in Hulme's poetic theory; he takes Hulme's exposition of Bergson's views on art for Hulme's own considered views, and even further gives them primacy and dominance over Hulme's more mature and indepen- dent theoretical statements (e.g., "Romanticism and Classicism" and "Humanism and the Religious Attitude"). Moreover, we must again insist that throughout Hulme's writings, even in his exposition of Bergson, poetry is essentially concerned not with intuited truths but with concretely perceived things and visual impressions; it does not aim at transcendental

13 See Aristotle's Poetics, chapters 7, 8. For discussion of pre-romantic treatment of organic unity, see W. K. Wimsatt and C. Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (Chicago: Univ. Press, 1978), vol. 1, 28-34, 123. See also J. Benziger, "Organic Unity: Leibniz to Coleridge," PMLA, 66 (1951), 24-48.

14 Kermode, vii. 5 Ibid., 121.

16 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 121-22. 18Ibid., 128, 130.

REMEMBERING HULME 565

"higher" truth but at the surprisingly difficult task of accurately rendering the solid things and concrete images of non-transcendental experience.

Finally, we must again point out that Hulme's apparent organicism is not proof of his romanticism, nor is the acceptance of the importance of intuition and non-discursive knowledge proof of romantic antipositiv- ism, if by the term "positivism" is meant to include philosophical thinking that can be characterized as scientific and systematic. On the contrary, the notions of organic unity and intuition play leading roles in the moral and aesthetic philosophy of G. E. Moore,19 and the idea of a non- discursive, direct knowledge (especially of sensory images or sense-data), "knowledge by acquaintance," forms the very foundation of Bertrand Russell's theory of meaning and epistemology.20 These two systematic or scientific philosophers are surely not to be linked, simply by their em- bracing such notions, to the anti-positivist romantic stream which issued Bergson. Yet Russell and Moore may be profitably linked to Hulme as positive influences in the development of his later philosophical thinking. Their influence will be discussed in the next section.

III. Having been interested in philosophy as an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1902-1904 (and then again, through Bergson's recommen- dation, in 1912), Hulme had long been aware of the reputation and importance of the philosophy of Moore and Russell (who, of course, were both at Cambridge).21 However, not until the later years of his life did Hulme actively address their thought and incorporate it into his own philosophy. About the reason for this delay of interest, there is no cause to doubt the truth of Hulme's own lengthy account of it in his discussion and praise of Moore and Russell as leaders of "Neo-Realism."22

Having lived at Cambridge at various times during the last ten years, I have

19 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge, England, 1903, repr. 1978), viii-x, 6- 12, 18-22, 27-36. For an account of Moore on organic unity, see my recent paper "Osborne and Moore on Organic Unity," British Journal of Aesthetics, 23 (1983), pp.

20 See B. Russell, "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 11 (1911), repr. in Mysticism and Logic (London: Penguin, 1953), pp. 197-218; and also The Problems of Philosophy (London: Home University Library, 1912; republished London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971). References to Russell's The Problems of Philosophy will be to the 1971 edition.

21 Hulme, expelled from Cambridge in 1904 for brawling, was readmitted in 1912, thanks to Bergson's strong letter of recommendation. However, Hulme was never grad- uated from Cambridge or from any other university. For these and other biographical facts concerning Hulme's early schooling, undergraduate vicissitudes, and philosophical interests and pursuits, see Jones, 17-24, 57-67, 76-90. It is worth noting, however, that in 1910 Hulme became a member of the Aristotelian Society, which was then chaired by Moore and largely dominated by the philosophical thought of Moore and Russell. Jones notes that in the company of such powerful scientific philosophers "Hulme was strangely silent" and "uncharacteristically passive" (76), probably because he came to the Society's meetings more to listen and learn than to contribute.

22 Speculations, op. cit. (see note 3 above), 39-45.

566 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

naturally always known that the only philosophical movement of any importance in England is that which is derived from the writings of Mr. G. E. Moore. I now find these writings extremely lucid and persuasive, yet for years was entirely unable to understand in what lay their value. It was not so much that I did not

agree with what was said, as that I was entirely unable to see how any meaning could be attached to some of its main contentions. (Spec., 39)23

Hulme then relates how his reading of Husserl and Husserl's followers led him to understand and appreciate the "intellectualist" and "realist"

philosophy of Moore and Russell; and he goes on to explain his circuitous course to a philosophical enlightenment, which from the start was at his

doorstep as representative of "the typical difficulties of the dilettante," who, since "he only reads what he finds interesting," is unlikely to come into close contact with a philosophy unless it involves topics or methods close to his own views or interests (Spec., 39-40). Hulme thus relates:

When, with entirely empirical and nominalist prejudices, I read Moore and Russell, there was no foothold for me; they dealt with logic and ethics, and

holding, as I did, entirely relativist views about both, I naturally found nothing familiar from which I might have started to understand the rest. The Germans I mentioned were useful in this way; they made the intellectualist, non-empirical method comprehensible to me, by enlarging its scope-applying it not only to

logic and ethics, but to things which at the time did interest me. This provided me with the required foothold. (Spec., 41-42)

If Hulme came to understand and appreciate Moore and Russell, what sustenance did he draw from their philosophy? I have already suggested that whatever commitment Hulme had to the importance of intuition and the principle of organic wholes would have been greatly reinforced by Moore's Principia Ethica. For here all ethics is based on the intuition of the indefinable property of goodness, whose presence in

anything is organically not reducible to its presence in the parts of that

thing, and where a major part of the ideal life is the appreciation of aesthetic organic wholes.24 Russell, too, though sharply critical of Berg-

23 Hulme goes on to give quotations from Russell and Moore, generally without giving their precise sources, and Read was not a meticulous enough editor to trace them. For those interested in these sources, the quotes from Russell on Spec., 43-44 are from B. Russell, The Philosophy of Leibniz (Cambridge, England, 1900); 2nd edition (London, 1937), 8, 12; and from The Problems of Philosophy, 54. The quotation on Spec., 44 which Hulme attributes to Moore's article on the "Nature of Judgement" is indeed from G. E. Moore, "The Nature of Judgement," Mind, 8 (1899), 182-83. But Read incorrectly asserts that "this article is now reprinted in Dr. Moore's Philosophical Studies" (Spec., 44n). The article was not reprinted in that collection nor indeed ever reprinted by Moore. Earlier quotations from Russell (Spec., 28) are from B. Russell, "On Scientific Method in Philosophy" (1914), repr. in Mysticism and Logic, 95-96, 105-06, 119.

24 Principia Ethica, 188-202.

REMEMBERING HULME 567

son's exaggerated claims for intuition and instinct, accords intuition a fairly wide and important cognitive role in his own philosophy.25

However, let us now consider Moore and Russell's realism, which Hulme finds congenial and which, in its variety of aspects, bolsters his theory of poetry and broadens his conception of philosophy. One aspect is their early realism with respect to sense-data or sensibilia. In rejecting idealism and its view that the objects of perception are only in our minds, Moore and Russell maintained that the sensory images or sense-data we see are real entities that actually exist outside the mind.26 Russell went so far as to maintain that sense-data are physical and real even when they are the stuff of hallucinations, illusions, and dreams; and he regarded them as "ultimate sources of both meaning and truth."27 Though "sense- data" was used as a general term to cover all the senses, both Moore and Russell concentrated mainly on visual sense-data.

All this dovetails very nicely with Hulme's imagist poetic, where the poet's goal in capturing and conveying reality is not a transcendental truth but a definite visual image, "to get a physical image," "a vividly felt actual sensation," "a vividly felt physical and visual scene" (Spec., 135, 151, 164). Hulme also treats meaning as ultimately dependent on (visual) sense-data, complaining that in ordinary language "we replace meaning (i.e. vision) with words," which tend to lose the images they originally were to represent (FS, 77). His allegorical heroine, Aphra, "sees each word with an image sticking on to it," and we are urged to "regard each word as a picture, then a succession of pictures" (FS, 78, 83). Though the style is quite different from Russell's, the idea is surely close to Russell's picture theory of language, where "in a logically perfect language the words in a proposition would correspond one by one with the components of the corresponding fact."28

Indeed, the theme of the ambiguity, vagueness, and often obfuscating nature of ordinary language, the need to struggle to free thought from linguistic snares and make language more precise and reflective of reality, is a major theme that Hulme shares with Moore and Russell. Moore's dissatisfaction with the typical ambiguity of language and his meticulous attempts to render philosophical questions and assertions more precise

25 "On Intuitive Knowledge," in The Problems of Philosophy, 64-68. 26 G. E. Moore, "The Refutation of Idealism" (1903) and "The Status of Sense Data"

(1913-14), both reprinted in G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies (London, 1922); and see B. Russell, "The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics" (1914), reprinted in Mysticism and Logic.

27 D. Pears, Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition (London, 1968), 32. For good discussions of Moore's and Russell's views on the reality of sense-data and on other aspects of their philosophical realism, see J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London, 1957), 203-41; and A. J. Ayer, Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage (London, 1971).

28 B. Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," reprinted together with his "Logical Atomism" in D. Pears (ed.), Russell's Logical Atomism (London, 1972), 52.

568 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

by unpacking these ambiguities became a legend which inspired not only philosophers but his wide-ranging Bloomsbury devotees.9 Russell, of course, constantly complains of the inadequacy of ordinary language whose "words are all ambiguous" and "more or less infected with va- gueness," and whose subject-predicate grammatical structure conceals the logical form of certain propositions and thus leads to erroneous monistic metaphysics.30

Similarly, Hulme decries the vagueness and clumsiness of ordinary language (a "large clumsy instrument," FS, 83) and inveighs against the "dignified vagueness" of romanticism (Spec., 132). For Hulme:

The great aim is accurate, precise, and definite description. The first thing is to recognise how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language by its very nature ... expresses never the exact thing but a compromise-that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and directly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language.... Plain speech is essentially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors, that is, by fancy, that it can be made precise. (Spec., 132, 137)

For Hulme this is not only the aim of the poet but of what he calls the "visual philosopher" (FS, 9-10).

Having noted that Hulme shared Moore and Russell's critique of language and ideal of precision, let us return to their early realism that Hulme so appreciated, which was not confined to maintaining the reality of sense-data and physical things, but also affirmed the reality of concepts, propositions, and objective values.31 The objective reality of concepts, propositions, and values was very important to Hulme in his criticism of what he called "the philosophy of humanism," which is the major target of Hulme's philosophical and aesthetic polemics and underlies his attack on romanticism, which Hulme regards as but an expression of the humanist spirit.

Rejecting ontological monism32 or what he calls "the principle of continuity," Hulme maintains that:

29 See J. M. Keynes, "My Early Beliefs," reprinted in S. P. Rosenbaum (ed.), The Bloomsbury Group (Toronto, 1975), 55-56.

30Russell's Logical Atomism, 52, 128-29, 151-52, 159. 31 For the early "platonistic" realism of Moore and Russell, see G. E. Moore, "The

Nature of Judgement," and B. Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge, Eng- land, 1903). Both later retreated somewhat from the extreme realism maintained in these works. For the objectivity of value, see Principia Ethica, and Russell's "The Elements of Ethics," in Philosophical Essays (London, 1910), where Russell confesses his debt to Moore in this matter.

32 One might add that Hulme's firm commitment to ontological pluralism also places him with Moore and Russell, who developed their pluralistic realism in reaction to Bradley's monistic idealism. Hulme sometimes follows Russell in characterizing his plu- ralistic ontology as "atomism" (Spec., 219-20, 222). It is perhaps worth noting that

REMEMBERING HULME 569

reality is divided into three regions, separated from one another by absolute divisions, by real discontinuities. (1) The inorganic world, of mathematical and physical science, (2) the organic world, dealt with by biology, psychology and history, and (3) the world of ethical and religious values. (Spec., 5)

Hulme strongly opposed the humanist ideology that man is essentially perfectible, that he is the measure of all things, and that human life is the ultimate value, because such ideology seemed to lead to a confusion of these regions, and hence:

to the creation of a series of mixed or bastard phenomena,... Romanticism in literature, Relativism in ethics, Idealism in Philosophy and Modernism in Re- ligion. ... Romanticism, for example, confuses both human and divine things, by not clearly separating them. The main thing with which it can be reproached is that it blurs the clear outlines of human relations-whether in political thought or in the literary treatment of sex-by introducing in them the Perfection that properly belongs to the non-human. (Spec., 10-11)

Bergson's central notion of progressive, creative evolution, with its prom- ise of perfective finalism, was firmly rooted in the humanist tradition of deifying the vital, and Hulme's mature recognition of this greatly eroded his early enthusiasm for Bergson.

Essential to Hulme's attack on humanism is his denial that all truth and value is in essentially human terms and is man-dependent. Now though Moore and Russell might be characterized as humanist in their ideology or Weltanschauung, Hulme helped himself to their opulent realism, which afforded him a realm of being, truth, and value beyond the relativism of human experience and desires. Hulme found in these "intellectualist and realist" philosophers (Spec., 40) a realism which not only balked at reducing the physical world to mental experience but which, employing a non-empirical reasoning to achieve apriori conceptual knowledge, also refused to reduce concepts to psychological ideas, prop- ositions to mental acts or linguistic expressions, or ethical values to human desires and attitudes. After bringing some relevant quotations from the writings of Moore and Russell, Hulme draws the following summarizing conclusions:

A proposition ... is not something relative to the human. A proposition ... does not itself contain words ... it contains the entities indicated by words.... Logic, then, does not deal with the laws of human thought but with these quite objective sentences. In this way the anthropomorphism which underlies certain views of logic is got rid of. Similarly, ethics can be exhibited as an objective science, and is also purified from anthropomorphism.

All these subjects are thus placed on an entirely objective basis, and do not

Hulme is not the only leader of modernist poetics to learn from Russell's philosophy. T. S. Eliot's debt to Russell has been described in my "Eliot and Logical Atomism," ELH, 49 (1982), 164-78.

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in the least depend on the human mind. The entities which form the subject- matter of these sciences are neither physical nor mental, they "subsist." They are dealt with by an investigation that is not empirical. Statements can be made about them whose truth does not depend on experience. When the empirical prejudice has been got rid of, it becomes possible to think of certain "higher" concepts, those of the good, of love, etc., as at the same time, simple, and not necessarily to be analysed into more elementary (generally sensual) elements. (Spec.,44)

Hulme felt that his belief in a realm of truth and value beyond the mentalism of idealist philosophy and the subjectivism of humanist ethics found strong support in the early radical realism of Moore and Russell and in Moore's doctrine of the non-natural, simple (i.e. unanalysable), yet objective nature of the good, which Russell also (following Moore) initially advocated, though later rejected (perhaps too late for Hulme to notice) for ethical subjectivism. Hulme in fact explicitly acknowledges his debt to Moore in "the establishment of the objective character of ethical values .... The school of Moore and Husserl break the humanist tradition ... in as far ... as they free ethical values from the anthro-

pomorphism involved in their dependence on human desires and feeling" (Spec., 62, 83).

Mention of Husserl brings us to still another central idea that the mature Hulme came to share (though perhaps with a slightly different angle) with Moore, Russell, and, of course, Husserl. This is the belief that philosophy may be pursued as an objective, "impersonal and exact science," "a difficult investigation into the relations between certain very abstract categories," through a "method ... as purely scientific and

impersonal as that of mathematics" (Spec., 14-15). The younger Hulme had had very different philosophical proclivities,

which are most evident in his reviews for The New Age in 1909. As a zealous Bergsonian neophyte, he scorns and denigrates scientific philos- ophy as "the disease of intellectualism," whose "counter philosophy" distorts reality in abstract logical principles and concepts (FS, 4, 9-10). The young Hulme grudgingly admits that logic and abstraction may have some "function in philosophy, though a secondary one." "But," he goes on, "metaphysics could exist without it, and ... what we require now is a race of naked philosophers, free from the inherited embellishments of logic" (FS, 11-12). The naked philosopher is "the visual philosopher," who, like the poet, is in close contact with concrete experience and realities, and whose "method of thinking is visual" in terms of "physical metaphors" and "concrete forms" (FS, 10). This identification of the poet and philosopher was taken by Hulme to its ultimate conclusion "that philosophy is an art and not a science" (FS, 18). Despite its having "the appearance of a science" and using "scientific terms," philosophy does not provide truths about the cosmos; "one merely finds elaborate

REMEMBERING HULME 571

and complete ways of expressing one's personal attitude towards it" (FS, 18). "All philosophy is bound to be untrue, for it is the art of representing the cosmos in words, which is just as much a necessary distortion as the art of painting, which represents solidity in a plane of two dimensions" (FS, 19-20).

The young Hulme thus presented a very fierce anti-scientific and anti- rationalistic philosophy which seems surprisingly contemporary. His no- tion of philosophy as an art of purveying attitudes rather than a science achieving truth, his attack on the intellectualist logocentric bias of West- ern thought, his radical linguistic-based scepticism about achieving truth because of the inevitable distortive gap between reality and any words we use to describe it, and finally, even his advocacy of the written and visual in literature as against the traditional dominance of the oral33: all this is extraordinarily suggestive of some of the influential ideas associated with Derrida. Thus, for those who are all too ready to forget Hulme as a source of the now outmoded school of New Criticism, one might make a case for him as a precursor of the currently fashionable deconstructionist school of thought.

However, as we have already noted, Hulme (who first thought that philosophical intellectualism necessarily meant Hegelianism, FS, 3-4) modified his extreme anti-intellectualist position as a result of his admiring acquaintance with the intellectualist, scientific philosophy of Moore, Rus- sell, and Husserl.34 He cites extensively from the two latter in joining their appeal "for a truly scientific philosophy" (Spec., 28) and echoing their fear that such philosophy tends to be corrupted by the expression of the philosopher's personal religious or ethical preferences and attitude to life. Asserting that "pure philosophy ought to be, and may be, entirely objective and scientific," Hulme praises Husserl's account of philosophy as "strenge Wissenschaft" as the best account of scientific philosophy, but he also suggests defining such philosophy "as the science of what is possible as contrasted with the science of what is" (Spec., 18). Compare this with Russell's definition of philosophy (not cited by Hulme but in an article from which Hulme elsewhere cites): "philosophy is the science of the possible."35

33 For a discussion of this issue, see my "Aesthetic Blindness to Textual Visuality," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (1982), 87-96.

34 We must be careful to note that Hulme admired only their scientific philosophy, but explicitly criticized and rejected Russell's and Husserl's ideology or Weltanschauung, which he regarded as too humanist. "What Mr. Russell has to say on the subject in 'A Free Man's Worship' is so extremely commonplace, and is expressed in such a painful piece of false and sickly rhetoric, that I have not the patient to deal with it here. Husserl, though he is better than this, is not very satisfactory" (Spec., 29-30). Hulme, a militarist violently opposed to Russell's pacificism, criticized it in a series of articles in The Cam- bridge Magazine (1916), to which Russell replied in the same journal.

35 B. Russell, "On Scientific Method in Philosophy," 108.

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Hulme Joints Russell and Husserl in demanding "a clear separation" between this "purely scientific philosophy" and the personal, expressive Weltanschauung, which "has often injuriously affected the scientific part of the subject" (Spec., 29). However, while Husserl and Russell demanded this separation merely to protect scientific philosophy from contamination by unscientific, creative Weltanschauung, Hulme desired it also because he felt that this unscientific philosophy deserved to be considered and pursued in its own right. He believed that despite the objectivity and value of scientific philosophy, it has no claim to exclusivity, nor does it satisfy all of man's philosophical needs and give him the satisfaction he seeks in philosophy. Here Hulme saw an essential and ultimately superior role for the unscientific philosophy of Weltanschauung, whose study he accordingly dubbed the "Critique of Satisfaction" (Spec., 20).

Hulme's acceptance of this expressive Weltanschauung philosophy and his account of its relations to scientific philosophy clearly adumbrate Richard Rorty's recent and influential account of what he calls "edifying philosophy" and its relations to "systematic philosophy."36 Thus, far from being outmoded the mature Hulme seems firmly in step with some of the latest philosophical developments. I shall conclude this paper by pointing out some of the striking similarities between Hulme's and Rorty's mapping of philosophy.

IV. We have already noted that Hulme recognized "the mixed nature of Philosophy and the necessity of analysing it into Scientific philosophy and Weltanschauung," which should be treated as two different subjects (Spec., 24); and we have already discussed Hulme's view of the former. Now, Weltanschauung for Hulme is the "expression of an attitude towards the world" or "the interpretation of life" (Spec., 14, 25), whose purpose is to help man cope with the world by giving him a satisfying outlook on it, a satisfying "final picture" of man's nature and destiny (Spec., 15- 16). Hulme thus infers that a Weltanschauung is not necessarily connected with a systematic philosophy, since "the effort to find some 'interpretation of life' ... may find expression not only in philosophy ... but in liter- ature," which also deals with such questions of man's state whose answers constitute "Wisdom" (Spec., 24).

However, there is always the tendency for philosophers to smuggle their Weltanschauung into their scientific philosophy "to make it seem not so much a particular attitude as a necessary fact," and Hulme therefore emphasizes the importance of "the unsystematic philosopher" in exposing this illusion and thus legitimizing the birth of a new Weltanschauung, when, at the end of an age, "the general 'interpretation of life' changes" (Spec., 24, 26).

36 R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979). Page references to this book will appear parenthetically in the text, after the abbreviation PMN.

REMEMBERING HULME 573

At the end of such periods you get a constant phenomenon, the unsystematic philosopher. When the Weltanschauung, the interpretation of life, changes, the values expressed by the elaborate and subtle conceptual form of a developed philosophy no longer fit the changed conditions. You then get philosophers ... who express the new attitude in a more personal, literary, and unsystematic way. (Spec., 26-27).

Montaigne, "coming after the decay of the scholastic system," is cited as a good example of this type of philosopher (Spec., 27); and Hulme (who surely had no pretensions of ability in scientific philosophy) ob- viously fancied himself as such as unsystematic philosopher, coming after the decay of the Kantian-Hegelian system of idealism and the humanist- romantic Weltanschauung is served. There can be no doubt that Hulme felt that he and his contemporaries were witnessing "the end of the romantic movement" and "the breaking-up of the humanist tradition" (Spec., 54, 121), and that he did all he could to hasten the demise and burial of these interpretations of life and to clear the way for a new modern Weltanschauung, characterized by a revival of the classical and religious attitudes. Hulme's own projected magnum opus (on which he had been working for ten to fifteen years and which was never completed but only posthumously published by Read in Speculations) is precisely a work of such unsystematic Weltanschauung philosophy and indeed is entitled "Cinders: A New Weltanschauung" (Spec., 215). Read tells us that the book was to have been cast in an allegorical literary form "perhaps analogous to Nietzche's Zarathustra" with a central mythical heroine named Aphra (Spec., xiv). The book, as we actually have it, consists of an unsystematic series of aphorisms, brief reflections, and parables, often of a distinctly literary and satirical character, well in keeping with Hulme's characterization of unsystematic philosophy.

Hulme, however, seems to endorse and employ one fairly systematic tool in his unsystematic philosophizing-the use of history and the his- toricist's sense of our changing categories and "certainties." In his attack on the romantic-humanist Weltanschauung and its "canons of satisfac- tion," which have been so long and so deeply entrenched in our culture that we take them for granted as inevitable, Hulme turns to history, the history of the origin of these canons and attitudes in the Renaissance, in order to show that they are by no means inevitable and indispensable and that other attitudes can be and have been adopted.

The humanist canons are, I think, demonstrably false ... by an historical in- vestigation of the varied ideals of a satisfactory position of man that have as a matter of fact been held....

I think that history is necessary in order to emancipate the individual from the influence of certain pseudo-categories ... of which we are as a matter of fact unconscious. We do not see them, but see other things through them.... For- tunately, however, all such 'attitudes' and ideologies have a gradual growth ...

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and ... a knowledge of these ideas, as it were objectified, and extended in history enables us to perceive them hidden in our own minds. Once they have been brought to the surface of the mind, they lose their inevitable character.... It is possible by examining the history of the Renaissance, to destroy in the mind of the humanist, the conviction that his own attitude is the inevitable attitude of the emancipated and instructed man." (Spec., 31, 37-38)

However, though an historicist in the recognition that man's thought is largely preconditioned by changing categories that are socially and historically given and of which he is often unconscious, Hulme did not believe in a mechanical historical determinism (Spec., 55) which could serve as the ultimate principle of knowledge and which could predict all the changing attitudes of life so that we need not expect (or fear) anything really new under the sun. Indeed, Hulme, the unsystematic philosopher, questions the very possibility of a certain, immutable foundationalist theory of knowledge, but rather asserts the need for Weltanschauung philosophy to abjure foundationalism and instead concentrate on edifying us, making us feel stronger, and helping us to cope with life.

The truth is that there are no ultimate principles, upon which the whole of knowledge can be built once and for ever as upon a rock. But there are an infinity of analogues, which help us along, and give us a feeling of power over the chaos when we perceive them. The field is infinite and herein lies the chance for originality. Here there are some new things under the sun. (Spec., 233-234).

In Richard Rorty's influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature we find a remarkably similar account of unsystematic or Weltanschauung philosophy and its relation to systematic or scientific philosophy. Like Hulme, Rorty is not blind to the power of the latter, but he clearly prefers the former and regards it as essentially superior. This preferred unsys- tematic philosophy, which Rorty terms "edifying philosophy" (and con- trasts to what what he calls "systematic philosophy"), has precisely the same major features as Hulme's: historicism, antifoundationalism, scep- ticism about absolute truth, the suitability of "abnormal" philosophical discourse (e.g., literary discourse) for philosophical expression, the ulti- mate aim of helping man to strengthen or build himself in order to cope with life and to express himself in a satisfying way, 'and the need, in achieving this aim, to emancipate man from outworn but entrenched attitudes and categories that prevent his edification.

Rorty warns that "investigations of the foundations of knowledge or morality or language or society may be simply apologetics, attempts to eternalize a certain contemporary language-game, social practice, or self- image (PMN, 9-10). Rather than the foundationalism of traditional phi- losophy, Rorty urges a philosophy whose "aim is to edify-to help ... readers, or society as a whole, break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes, rather than to provide 'grounding' for the intuitions and cus-

REMEMBERING HULME 575

toms of the present" (PMN, 11-12). This philosophy is not particularly interested in obtaining objective truth about the world, though it accepts the search for such knowledge as a valid pursuit whose results may be used to serve the end of edification. Instead, edifying philosophy aims at "finding a new and more interesting way of expressing ourselves, and thus of coping with the world" (PMN, 359), and it has a variety of methods. "The attempt to edify (ourselves or others) may consist in the hermeneutic activity of making connections between our own culture and some exotic culture or historical period.... But it may instead consist in the 'poetic' activity of thinking up such new aims, new words, new disciplines", as, for example, in the new descriptions of man "offered by poets, novelists, depth psychologists, sculptors, anthropologists, and mys- tics" (PMN, 360, 362).

The similarity of Rorty's views to Hulme's is so obvious it needs no gloss, but we might again note Hulme's hermeneutic method of edifying the modem age by connecting it with the classical spirit in literature and thought and with the anti-humanist, abstract and geometrical attitudes of Byzantine art and oriental sculpture (Spec., 81-109, 113-140).

Hulme's historicist scepticism that perhaps "there is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered" and that our most evident truths may well be just the elaborations of our current common desires and prejudices (Spec., 217, 229) is echoed in Rorty's account of the "unsys- tematic," "peripheral," or "edifying" philosopher. These philosophers "are often accused of relativism or cynicism," and "are often dubious about progress." "They have kept alive the historicist's sense that this century's superstition was the last century's triumph of reason," and they keep alive the consequent suggestion that what we accept as justified objective knowledge may be "no more than conformity to the norms of the day" (PMN, 367). Rorty goes on to describe these peripheral, edifying philosophers by contrasting them to the mainstream, systematic philos- ophers, and his account of the former could hardly portray Hulme more aptly in his role as Weltanschauung philosopher:

Great systematic philosophers are constructive and offer arguments. Great edi- fying philosophers are reactive and offer satires, parodies, aphorisms. They know their work loses its point when the period they were reacting against is over. They are intentionally peripheral. Great systematic philosophers, like great sci- entists, build for eternity. Great edifying philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation. Systematic philosophers want to put their subject on the secure path of a science. Edifying philosophers want to keep space open for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes-wonder that there is something new under the sun, something which ... cannot be explained and can barely be described." (PMN, 369-370)

Though Hulme thus seems to be an excellent example of the periph- eral, edifying philosopher, he is apparently too peripheral to have been

576 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

remembered or noted by Rorty. This is hardly a surprising and certainly a pardonable omission for a philosopher like Rorty, considering that Hulme seems to have been entirely forgotten by the community of literary critics and theorists who once mythologized him. Perhaps Hulme's ne- glect as a theorist of poetry is even somewhat justifiable, if we argue that his poetic theory has lost much of its point with the success of the modernist revolution he advocated and the overthrow of the romantic poetic against which he reacted and polemicized.

However, in this paper I have tried to recall other, less familiar aspects of Hulme's thought and to show that he was not only a philosopher of literature but a philosopher in literature. As a philosopher, Hulme de- veloped from radical anti-intellectualism to an acceptance of the aims of reason and scientific philosophy for objective truth. But this acceptance was tempered by an edifying scepticism that such objective truth cannot claim any absolute status and may later be exposed as deficient or merely conventional and, more importantly, that scientific philosophy's truth of the possible is not what man needs to gird himself satisfactorily in his effort to interpret life and to cope with reality. Hulme recognized that these edifying philosophical needs are paramount but are historically variable and changing in their form, and consequently are to be satisfied by an unsystematic, historicist, reactive philosophy.

Here Hulme's ideas are extremely topical and of considerable moment. Thus, in remembering the rich variety of Hulme's thought, we may have discovered that he is still today eminently worth remembering.

Ben Gurion University, Israel; Temple University, Philadelphia.

[I wish to thank Professor John Freehafer for some stylistic sugges- tions.]