Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T11:09:56.215Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Orwell and the Anti-Realists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Stephen R. L. Clark
Stephen R. L. Clark
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 67 , Issue 260 , April 1992 , pp. 141 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Orwell, G., Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954; first published 1949), 241.Google Scholar

2 Orwell, , op. cit., 241f.Google Scholar A similar point was made by Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ch. 5: ‘If a man should talk to me of “a round quadrangle”, or “accidents of bread in cheese”; or “immaterial substances”; or of a “free subject”; or “free will”; or any “free”, but free from being hindered by opposition, I should not say he were in error, but that his words were without meaning, that is to say, absurd’.

3 O'Brien speaks: Orwell, , op. cit., 213.Google Scholar

4 Orwell, , op. cit., 250.Google Scholar

5 See Tugwell, Simon, Humanity, Immortality and the Redemption of Death (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 1989).Google Scholar

6 Blackburn, S., ‘Errors and the Phenomenology of Value’, Morality and Objectivity, Honderich, T. (ed.), (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1–22.Google Scholar

7 Robinson, H., Matter and Sense (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Cupitt, D., Creation out of Nothing (London: SCM Press, 1990), 183.Google Scholar

9 Satan speaks: Milton, J., Paradise Lost 1.250–6.Google Scholar

10 History of the Peloponnesian War 3.82.Google Scholar Cf. Naipaul, V. S., Among the Believers (London: Andre Deutsch, 1981), 34Google Scholar: ‘One of the English-language magazines I bought was… The Message of Peace, and, as its title warned, it was full of rage’.

11 ‘To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out…; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it…; to forget whatever was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again…’; Orwell, op. cit., 31f; see also 171.

12 Orwell, , op. cit., 45f.Google Scholar ‘As the Party slogan put it: “Proles and animals are free.”’: ibid., 61.

13 See Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).Google Scholar

14 O'Brien speaks; Orwell, , op. cit., 212.Google Scholar

15 Orwell, , op. cit., 50.Google Scholar

16 O'Brien speaks: Orwell, , op. cit., 215.Google Scholar

17 Frost speaks: Lewis, C. S., That Hideous Strength (London: Bodley Head, 1945), 318f.Google Scholar Lewis's story deals with the (miraculously thwarted) attempt to establish a society very much like Orwell's world, and makes much clearer than Orwell's story does how ordinarily sinful people could come to accept the establishment of Hell-on-earth.

18 Lewis, , op. cit., 411.Google Scholar

19 Orwell, , op. cit., 159.Google Scholar

20 O'Brien speaks: ibid., 214.

21 O'Brien speaks: ibid., 197: see also, after Winston's psychological destruction, 238.

22 Orwell, , op. cit., 68.Google Scholar

23 Orwell, , op. cit., 52.Google Scholar

24 Orwell, , op. cit., 184.Google Scholar

25 Cf. Orwell, , op. cit., 28 & 102.Google Scholar

26 O'Brien speaks, in the Ministry of Love: Orwell, , op. cit., 204.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 208.

28 Orwell, , op. cit., 51.Google Scholar

29 Orwell, , op. cit., 216.Google Scholar

30 ‘“Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless”’; O'Brien speaks, Orwell, , op. cit., 215.Google Scholar

31 Orwell, , op. cit., 233.Google Scholar

32 Orwell, , op. cit., 102.Google Scholar

33 Orwell, , op. cit., 176.Google Scholar

34 Orwell, , op. cit., 215.Google Scholar The same prophecy was made by Wickson, in London's, JackThe Iron Heel (Moscow & Leningrad: Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1934; first published 1907), 94f.Google Scholar London's future history is very like Orwell's: what Orwell realized was that the organization of Revolutionary Fighting Groups (ibid., 220ff.) that permeates the organization of the Iron Heel would actually serve the Heel's purposes, and that Socialism itself would serve as the overt ideology of the oppressors (as the Foreign Workers Press so lamentably failed to see). P. Vaillant-Couturier's complacent praise, in the introduction to the Foreign Workers' edition, of the USSR as ‘a revolutionary people that nothing can vanquish because it is armed with a correct doctrine, applied in a consistent manner by a disciplined Party, with the enlightened and enthusiastic support of the masses’ is a reminder that Orwell did not have to invent Ingsoc.

35 Orwell, , op. cit., 176.Google Scholar

36 Orwell, ibid.

37 Orwell, , op. cit., 86.Google Scholar

38 Rorty, R., Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Min nesota Press, 1982), xlii.Google Scholar See Stout, J., Ethics since Babel (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co:, 1990), 257.Google Scholar Stout goes on to say, contra Rorty, that he and ‘the example of every remaining virtuous person, as well as whatever exemplary lives we can keep alive in memory’ can still Condemn the torturer (ibid., 259). But that is to miss Orwell's point.

39 Orwell, , op. cit., 23, 86, 184, 196.Google Scholar

40 Orwell, , op. cit., 227f.Google Scholar

41 Stout, , op. cit., 257 (my italics).Google Scholar

42 Gabriel Gale speaks: Chesterton, G. K., The Poet and the Lunatics (London: Darwen Finlayson, 1962; 1st ed. 1949), 91f.Google Scholar

43 Orwell, , op. cit., 239.Google Scholar

44 Buchan, J., ‘Stocks and Stones’ (1911), The Moon Endureth (London: Nelson, 1923; 2nd edn), 161.Google Scholar

45 Yeats, W. B., Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1950), 37.Google Scholar

46 Buchan, , op. cit., 162.Google Scholar

47 Naipaul, , op. cit., 354.Google Scholar

48 Goldstein's, Book: Orwell, , op. cit., 167.Google Scholar Big Brother's face, by the way, is ‘black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen’: ibid., 16.

49 Winston meditates: Orwell, , op. cit., 223.Google Scholar See also O'Brien: ibid., 200: ‘reality is not external. Reality exists in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal’.

50 See my ‘Cupitt and Divine Imagining’: Modern Theology 5, 1988, 45–60.Google Scholar

51 Chesterton, , op. cit., 92f.Google Scholar

52 Orwell, , op. cit., 68.Google Scholar The preceding sentence (‘They [the Party intellectuals] were wrong and he was right!’) echoes the Chanson de Roland: ‘Paiens ont tort. Chrétiens ont droit!’

53 Chesterton, G. K., ‘Ballad of the White Horse’: Collected Poems London: Methuen, 1950, 12th edn), 233.Google Scholar

54 Contrast Sartre, J.-P., Nausea (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965)Google Scholar and Murdoch, I., The Sovereignty of Good (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 41.Google Scholar

55 Chesterton, G. K., The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946; first published 1904), 154.Google Scholar

56 Chesterton, ibid., 156f.

57 Chesterton, , Notting Hill, op. cit., 64.Google Scholar

58 Chesterton, Collected Poems, op. cit., 268.Google Scholar

59 Orwell, , op. cit., 23.Google Scholar

60 Orwell, , op. cit., 185.Google Scholar

61 Chesterton, , Collected Poems, op. cit., 312.Google Scholar

62 Ibid., 345.

63 Augustine, , De Libero Arbitrio 2.13.35Google Scholar: The Teacher, The Free Choice of the Will & Grace and Free Will, tr. Russell, R. P. (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), 144.Google Scholar

64 Augustine, , Confessions 10.8, tr. Matthew, T., Huddleston, R. (ed.) (London: Burns & Oates, 1923), 286.Google Scholar

65 Raine, Kathleen, The Inner Journey of the Poet (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 57.Google Scholar