This paper is concerned with two theories of history—those of Hegel and of Marx. Its primary aim is to clarify. The writings of Hegel are notoriously obscure, and those of Marx have been variously interpreted, so there is room for a paper which tries to ensure that when the theories of history propounded by Marx and Hegel are criticized, what are criticized are views which they actually held. It is no part of this paper's thesis that, in his theory of history, Marx consciously borrowed from Hegel. But it will be argued that there is more of Hegel in Marx than is sometimes supposed, and that if this fact is ignored one seriously distorts Marx.

A paradoxical situation exists in the study of Wittgenstein. There is a sharp disagreement in the interpretation of his thinking about the concept of following a rule. According to one group of philosophers Wittgenstein's position is that this concept presupposes a human community in which there is agreement as to whether doing such-and-such is or is not following a particular rule. A second group of philosophers hold that this interpretation of Wittgenstein is not merely wrong, but is even a caricature of Wittgenstein's thought: for when Wittgenstein says that following a rule is ‘a practice’ he does not mean a social practice, he does not invoke a community of rule-followers, but instead he emphasizes that following a rule presupposes a regularity, a repeated or recurring way of acting, which might be exemplified in the life of a solitary person. On the first interpretation it would have no sense to suppose that a human being who had grown up in complete isolation from the rest of mankind could be following rules. On the second interpretation such isolation would be irrelevant.

In Principia Ethica Moore held that the meaning of the word ‘good’ is a simple, unanalysable, non-natural property. Several features of this claim might be questioned. It might be questioned whether there are properties at all, and whether, even if there are, they are ever the meanings of words. Again, it might be questioned whether the word ‘good’ expresses a property, even assuming that some other words do. Moore considers this latter question, but not the former (in Principia Ethica). The two questions may seem connected by the fact that a negative answer to the first trivially leads to a negative answer for the second. But this triviality should be a caution to us. Otherwise we may confuse nominalism with ethical non-cognitivism or ‘anti-realism’.

An almost unbelievable amount of false philosophy has arisen through not realizing what ‘existence’ means…. [It] rests upon the notion that existence is, so to speak, a property that you can attribute to things, and that the things that exist have the property of existence and the things that do not exist do not. That is rubbish (Bertrand Russell).

I have dared to puncture several metaphysical balloons and nothing came out of them but hot air (Voltaire).

Among the miscellany of philosophical achievements bequeathed us by the Enlightenment is the account, worked out by Hobbes, Locke, Hume and others, of the conditions for the existence of the kind of civil or commercial association that depends upon contract. The theory of civil association has subsequently exercised the kind of fascination for moral philosophers that a highly successful theory is apt to exercise in any field of enquiry: it has, that is, both inspired later writers and to some extent restricted their horizons.

My title has been taken from the following passage in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

Describe the aroma of coffee—why can't it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are words lacking?—But how do we get the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack of such a description? Have you tried to describe the aroma and not succeeded? (610).

Human conflict and its resolution is obviously a subject of great practical importance. Equally obviously, it is a vast subject, ranging from total war at one end of the spectrum to negotiated settlement at its other end. The literature on the subject is correspondingly vast and, in recent times, technical, thanks to the valuable contributions made to it by game theorists, economists, and writers on industrial and international relations. In this essay, however, I shall discuss only one familiar form of conflict-resolution. There is room for such a discussion, because philosophers have lately neglected compromise, despite the interest shown in it by the aforementioned experts, and despite the classic treatments of it by Halifax, Burke and Morley. Truly, ‘…compromise is not so widely discussed by philosophers as one might expect’, and ‘…the idea of compromise has been largely neglected by Anglo-American jurisprudence’.

The other night I had a very strange, and strangely coherent, dream. Socrates and Meno appeared to be arguing with each other in my presence. They talked English, I suppose, since I clearly thought I followed them; but I seem to remember that Greek words occurred from time to time. When I woke it seemed to me that the dream had some bearing on disputed matters of Platonic interpretation, so I shall try to reconstruct it here. Meno speaks first:

Tell me, Socrates, do you think that the just and the admirable are the same thing?

I should hardly think so; for we call many things admirable—for example a young lad's cheek—which we would hardly call just; and perhaps vice versa. But I am only guessing, of course, because I cannot know whether A is the same as B unless I know what A is and what B is.

‘There just has to be some connection between thinking and what goes on in my head when I am thinking,’ said someone to me recently. ‘When I am thinking,’ he continued, ‘the thinking is going on in here’, at which he pointed with his forefinger at his head. I indicated mild dissent. ‘You seem to me to be overlooking plain facts,’ he retorted. ‘There are thoughts in my head. Nothing could make me doubt that. If I am given a complicated calculation to do, I might start off by trying to do it in my head (once again, pointing at his head) but, finding it too hard, I might continue the calculation I had begun in my head on paper, on the table in front of me (now pointing at an imaginary piece of paper in front of him). The calculation started off being done in my head and finished up being done on paper.’

These remarks on following a rule are especially concerned with what Peter Winch has had to say on the matter, and with the flawed logic of his reasoning; but they are also intended to cast some light on the logical character of metaphysical reasoning generally. In The Idea of a Social Science, one of Winch's main aims is to show that what he calls meaningful behaviour must involve some kind of understanding or reflection. His strategy appears to consist in trying to show, first, that all such behaviour, or perhaps behaviour as a whole, is rule-governed and, secondly, that following a rule necessarily involves ‘matters for reflection’. It will be my contention that the method employed in this argument, like the method employed throughout his book, is essentially metaphysical and incapable of yielding anything other than vacuous conclusions.

The verb know has the following well-known property. If someone is correctly described as knowing that p then it is the case that p, and if someone is correctly described as knowing wh (what time it is, where the cat is, when lunch will be and so on), then any proposition which spells out what they know in knowing wh will be true.

There are certain remarks in Culture and Value in which Wittgenstein writes about Jews and about what he describes as their ‘Jewish mind’. In these remarks he appears to be trying to make a distinction between two different spiritual forces which operate in Western culture and which give rise to two different types of artists and works of art. On one side of the divide are Jews and works of art imbued with Jewish spirit. On the other side are men of culture and works of art which exhibit a non-Jewish spirit. Among the various remarks made in this context, he offers the following thoughts about the spiritual nature of Jews, their mentality, character and artistic achievements:

‘You get tragedy when a tree, instead of bending, breaks. Tragedy is something un-Jewish’ (1). Following Renan he writes: ‘The Semitic races have an unpoetic mentality, which heads straight for what is concrete’ (6). This, he explains, is because Jews are attracted by ‘pure intellectualism’. ‘I think it would be possible now to have a form of theatre played in masks. The characters would simply be stylized human types.’ (In his opinion this suits Karl Kraus's plays and their abstract nature.) ‘Masked theatre is anyway the expression of an intellectualistic character. And for the same reason perhaps it is a theatrical form that will attract only Jews’ (12). ‘The Jew is a desert region, but underneath its thin layer of rock lies the molten lava of spirit and intellect’ (13). ‘It is typical for a Jewish mind to understand somebody else's work better than that person understands it himself.’ But intellect, it seems, is not a mental attribute providing for genius and true creative powers. ‘Amongst Jews “genius” is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) … It might be said (rightly or wrongly) that the Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass; its way is rather to make a drawing of the flower or blade of grass which has grown in the soil of another's mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture. We aren't pointing to a fault when we say this and everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear. It is only when the nature of a Jewish work is confused with that of a non-Jewish work that there is any danger, especially when the author of the Jewish work falls into the confusion himself, as he so easily may. (Doesn't he look as proud as though he had produced the milk himself?)’ (18–19).