Drier, and a great deal more refreshed, you bid farewell to the bartender and Plato, and venture back out into the sunshine. The kitten tentatively peeks out of your hoodie pocket, squints warily, before emitting a grumpy mew and disappearing back into the fabric.
You wander further down the country path, which is lined with independent, pastel-coloured shops and cafes, plus some pretty residential houses with white picket fences and a variety of eccentrically designed postboxes. You can see yourself retiring here…unless you find a way out.
Everything is contentedly hushed in the air, so you pause at the sound of loud conversation, of nasal voices competing for attention. You stand and observe the scene play out behind the glass window of the ‘Arkadan Bean’, an aromatic trail of espresso slipping through the door. A group of five white, middle-aged men in tweed jackets sit in a circle of chairs.
‘But you’re simply not listening to my exposition,’ argues one to the rest. ‘I clearly stated that the mind -‘
‘Metaphysics!’ cries a man further to the side. The others sigh exasperatedly, as if they’ve heard this one too many times.
‘Fine, fine, fine…’ says the first man. ‘That, uh, empirical collection of impressions and thoughts -‘
‘Metaphysics!’
Another sigh.
‘Gah! Alright, let’s leave that line of reasoning for the moment…Instead I think perhaps -‘
‘Metap-‘
‘OH SHUT UP!’ exclaim the chorus of men.
‘I’m only doing what you instructed me to…’ mutters the ‘metaphysics’ man sheepishly.
‘Well, evidently those instructions are not working in our favour,’ the first man grumbles, shaking his head in his palms. ‘Oh, my dear Vienna Circle, whatever are we to do?’
He meets your gaze completely by accident, and awkwardness hits you like the water from an errant hose. Walk away, walk away, walk away…
Aaaand in your haste you collide with another body. As you are swung to the ground and everything becomes horizontal, you find yourself worrying less for your own safety and more for the kitten’s.
Fortunately, you land on your back; your cargo is intact, if dazed. An ache stiffens your spine like the juddering echo of a gong after making contact with a hammer. You make yourself sit up, rub the back of your head, and move to help the man lying next to you.
‘I’m so sorry! Are you alright? Let me help you up,’ you babble, cheeks hot with embarrassment.
‘Oh, no bother, no bother,’ replies the man, now standing. He has a firm hand grip but stringy arms; as he brushes dirt and dust off his shirt, you recognise his thirty year old face as you did Plato’s and Kant’s.
‘You’re Ayer, aren’t you?’
He looks startled, then impressed, then airily smug.
‘Why yes, yes I am. And you are…?’
‘Oh, nobody important.’
‘Well, be that as it may, I’m obliged to thank you for helping me up. Having one’s head too wrapped up in thoughts can be dangerous on a public pedestrian route, wouldn’t you say?’
He chuckles in the way only an Oxford academic from the 1930s can. You try not to feel too unnerved.
‘You’re welcome,’ you reply. ‘But then, I wasn’t exactly going to get up and walk away. That wouldn’t exactly be the ethical thing to do.’
A not-so-subtle shade of disapproval crosses Ayer’s face, but his tone is jovial enough: ‘And what do you mean by that, old bean?’
‘Um…’ you begin. What is it with philosophers asking you deceptively obvious questions today? ‘I mean I would’ve felt bad if I didn’t help you up, because, y’know, that sort of thing is one person’s duty to another.’
‘Dear me,’ tuts Ayer, rolling his eyes. ‘Yet another misguided thinker who is convinced that ethical terms have any bearing on reality at all…’
‘What, you think they don’t?’ you say, aghast.
‘Oh come now, in every case in which one would commonly be said to be making an ethical judgement, the function of the relevant ethical word is purely ‘emotive’. It is used to express feeling about certain objects, but not to make any assertion about them.’
What a bold statement, you think to yourself.
‘So you’re saying that all ethical statements are based purely on emotion? That we’re always talking past each other and not saying anything relevant about the world at all?’
‘Precisely,’ says Ayer, pleased with your quick understanding. ‘Ethical concepts are nothing more than pseudo-concepts, founded on untenable metaphysics. From an empirical perspective, it is simply too great a thing to ask of my mind.’
‘So you don’t like metaphysics either?’ you ask, remembering the other Vienna Circle members back in the Arkadan Bean. Ayer shakes his head as a child would at a plate of brussell sprouts.
‘Oh no, no, no. I do my thinking in accordance with the Verification Principle - my own invention, you see - which dictates that if a statement is neither analytic nor established by empirical means, then it is nonsensical and generally of no use to anyone, least of all to someone like me.’
At this moment you notice that, during this conversation, the white kitten has crawled out of your hoodie, clambered its way up the fabric on its little claws, and is now sitting quite comfortably on your shoulder, like a parrot with fur. This is evidently some kind of light bulb experience for you, because the next thing to come out of your mouth is this:
‘Wait a minute, how can you follow that when the principle itself is neither analytic nor capable of being established by empirical means? I mean, doesn’t that just make the whole thing incoherent by its own logic?’
Somewhere in this kooky philosophical universe, a tumble weed is skittering along the ground. The only change in Ayer’s expression is a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
‘Er…well I…I um - excuse me, I have to er, goodbye.’
Reassuringly, unlike Kant he doesn’t snap out of existence immediately, but shuffles away in the manner of someone whose entire epistemological belief system has just been knocked down by the smallest nudge. You shrug this sight off easily enough, and stroke the kitten’s ears.
‘Maybe I should give you a name while I’m here,’ you muse, continuing your excursion down the path. ‘Like, I don't know, Eureka.’
YOU ARE READING
Your Adventures In Philosophy Town
Historical FictionThis is what happens when you take a writer and give her lots of Ethics revision to do: as bizarre as I knew this was going to make me look, I decided to take the crazy philosophical adventures my mind had been concocting and put them onto paper...b...
