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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
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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

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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

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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

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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

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27 Ibid., 208.

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

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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.

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36 Orwell, ibid.

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

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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

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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

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56 Chesterton, ibid., 156f.

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

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

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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

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