From what I’ve been able to gather, Robert Mark Hargrave—his full name, so foreign to me—spent decades teaching philosophy at Oxford’s esteemed Balliol College, a cloistered environment of the British power elite that produced at once some of that country’s worst minds (Boris Johnson went there in the 1980s) and its finest (Adam Smith, Aldous Huxley; John Wycliffe was Master of Balliol way back in the 1360s; more recently, J. L. Austin, Harold Macmillan, Roy Bhaskar, Richard Dawkins...).
Bob, as he was known affectionately to all his students, was above all a Socratic figure. He did not publish—he read, he thought carefully. His favorite activity, I think—his pride, his charm, as Deleuze would put it—was this thinking carefully. (He once made fun of me for waving my arms around, somewhat passionately, while making an argument; he thought this the pinnacle of ridiculousness, I think, that a person could get so carried away that they would let their emotions overrun their faculty of reason; he lamented my “hand-waving,” which he saw, I think, as a compensation for thinking carefully.) He loved solving crossword puzzles, seated out by the quad on a hard wood bench in a wool cardigan with a cup of coffee and pack of Gauloises—brain twisters, cognitive puzzles, mathematical quandaries, or some hapless undergraduate’s essay, to be marked in red pen with such peculiar annotations as the abbreviation “W. A.!”—short for the German phrase Wachet auf! (“Wake up!”). He lamented this absence of wakefulness in the young, this inability to see the full implications of one’s positions. Inconsistency and self-contradiction were the prime targets of this terrifyingly incisive mind. And always this interminable coffee, this endless smoking of cigarettes (which would unfortunately be his demise, his cancer proving terminal)…
I recall our tutorials on John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism on Saturday mornings in the “Buttery,” the college bar; exactly at noon he rubbed his hands together vigorously and proclaimed with evident relish, “Time for my noon glass of wine!”, before embarking on yet another inquisition of our—a group of three or four first-year undergraduates’—reading of Mill the previous weeks along with the secondary literature: Roger Crisp’s little book and J. J. C Smart and Bernard Williams’ Utilitarianism: For and Against. I think perhaps he looked down on our little group for trading the Logic paper for mere moral philosophy, Logic being his favorite thing in the whole wide world—one of my first memories as a first-year student was Bob speaking with great gusto in a glass-lined, modern meeting room (so out of place in the college’s medieval environs) about the importance of AND, the operator, and that a good deal of the world’s problems might be solved if we could only see that we needed to think not in terms of BUT—of opposition and contrast—but (!) AND, which is to say unity and synthesis. And it is a productive mental device, replacing all one’s “but”s with “and”s; it does effect a cognitive shift; one begins to see the possibility of unity where once there seemed hard, unyielding opposition.
Bob was also a great prankster, by his own admission. He delighted in telling us enraptured undergrads how he shared initials with the considerably older, far more widely-known (and more published) analytic philosopher R. M. Hare, whom I think Bob found a bit insufferable: in the college pub back in the 80s, Bob apparently made a habit of signing off his not-inconsiderable drinks bill with the initials R. M. H., trading on the ambiguity of the overlapping initials, with the consequence that poor Professor Richard Mervyn Hare was saddled with the wine bills of one Mr. R. M. Hargrave…
For he was precisely a “Mr.”—the only faculty member tarnished with this shameful civilian title in a sea of “Dr.”s. The title of “Mr.” stuck out like a sore thumb on the white-painted black tablets listing the names of faculty. He lacked credentials, but in the best possible sense. He had earned no doctoral degree, so far as I have been able to establish, and had no real publications to his name. In the Bodleian Library’s digital catalogue, I can only find one entry under “Hargrave, R. M. (Robert Mark), author”: a B.Phil. thesis with the enigmatic title Samesaying, almost Derridean in its tenor, published in 1978, Faculty of Literae Humaniores; University College, Oxford. It contains 81 leaves, measures 31 cm. Status: Theses Closed Stack (Stored Offsite). One of his students James M. Arnold has taken the trouble of scanning it and uploading it to his website: “Be aware that there is no p. 37, as it is missing from the manuscript held by the Bodleian Library.” Another Bob-like mystery, this case of the missing thirty-seventh page…In the acknowledgments, Bob thanks Peter Strawson and Simon Blackburn, and Blackburn in particular, “who with infinite patience managed to fulfil the role of sounding board without sounding bored”—a classic Bob-ism, typical of his dry, wry wit. The thesis itself I am not qualified to assess: It is heavily invested in the logical formalism of Oxford-style language philosophy, for which I confess I still have far too little patience—I am still too much of a hand-waver. Its opening salvo, “§1. What should we demand of a formal theory of meaning for a natural language L?”, was ambitious for a bachelor’s thesis, no doubt, and I should one day like to read it in full. But Bob was not a writer, a publisher of tracts, and so I readily confess I am not a reader-of-Bob, but rather an admirer-of-Bob, a thinker-with-Bob, who remembers above all else this at once lovable, prickly, thoughtful, cantankerous, jovial figure, a latter-day Socratic, in an era where such figures are no longer allowed to exist in a global academic system increasingly inimical to thought itself, thought at all costs, thought in place of the frenetic pseudo-activity of the funding bodies, with their futile “research assessment exercises,” or indeed of the professions and disciplines themselves…Was Bob not also a product of that informal motto of the college, “Effortless superiority,” a positive superciliousness that does not require a thinker to leave a written trace, so many signs, which are even faintly disreputable? To be a scholar is to have skholé, leisure, as Bourdieu reminds us. There is something gentlemanly, or gentlewomanly, about pure thought—aloof from the world of mere commerce, the traffic of printed words…This is both its risk and great attraction.
Bob was a huge admirer of the obscure Australian linguist Victor (Vic) Dudman. On Bob’s website, still archived by one of his many loving students, he declares Dudman a kind of keeper of secrets, one who has peered deep into the mysteries of language…Bob’s lesson, however, was finally not some particular language-philosophical argument about the inadequacy of the grammarians and the importance of semanticism, or similar. Rather, Bob’s lesson was at once more oblique, more general: The point of life is—to think: the pleasure of thinking, the iconoclasm of it, the hard clarity and piercing light of thought, which burns everything in its path, and which thereby clears a space for real action, properly conceived works…I can still see Bob now before my mind’s eye, nearly a decade after his passing: this philosophical rogue, grey-bearded, scraggly white hair, darkly intense eyes peering out from his bushy, raven-like eyebrows, wearing his signature wool cardigan, arms resting on his knees, and an impish smile on his lips: Stop waving your arms around! Not BUT— but (!) AND!