FLY AND THE FLY-BOTTLE by Ved Mehta. 269 pages. Atlantic Press. $4.95.
Socrates, as everyone knows, was a tiresome old man who used to buttonhole youths on the streets of Athens and teach them to think straight by making them talk in circles. In their confused gratitude, Athenians served Socrates liberally with hemlock. Since then, relations between philosophers and the man in the street have been, at best, remote.
Anyone who feels that this sorry state should (or could) be rectified had better read Fly and the Fly-Bottle. A spirited if bewildering attempt by a young Indian writer to bring a gaggle of contemporary British thinkers into popular focus, the book leads to two almost inescapable conclusions. One: British philosophers are seldom intelligible even to one another. Two: Author Mehta, who calls himself an intellectual journalist and writes for the New Yorker, did well to devote some of his interviews to historians.
Topsy-Turvy Recollections. Ved Mehta's approach is refreshingly direct. Although he has been blind since the age of three, he courageously taught himself to navigate the world without benefit of cane or canine, studied at Pomona College and Oxford. Stopping off in London recently, and finding philosophers bickering and historians snicker-sneering at each other from behind the learned journals, he resolved to talk to them all and see what the fuss was about.
But as a journalist, Ved Mehta is not quite up to his own assignment. The most charitable view of his book is that it is a bit too successful in communicating to the reader the author's own state of quizzical bemusement as he plunges into a metaphysical brier patch.
Despite many personal details (Bertrand Russell, we learn, smokes a pipe and reads detective stories) and ostentatious visual descriptions of each philosopher's appearance (which the author obviously had to ask for), it is difficult from Ved Mehta's elliptical notes to get a good grip on just what the men are or what they stand for.
What finally remains—perhaps this is all Ved Mehta wanted to convey—is the topsy-turvy recollection of a dozen or so charming fellows, many of whom seem to engage in a kind of verbal nit picking, identified with Oxford and known as "linguistic philosophy." Language is the gateway to knowledge, goes the argument, and analyzing ordinary language is the best way, if not to solve, at least to understand problems. Present-day Oxford philosophers have little patience with the philosophers of the past who wrestled mightily with ethics, metaphysics and transcendental abstractions. As one thinker explained to Ved Mehta: "Why bother listening to men whose problems arose from bad grammar?" Ved Mehta sums up: Once philosophers asked "What is truth?" Now they say, "Look at all the different ways the word true is used in ordinary speech." All these ways summed up is all that can be known of truth.