When Victor sat down again he pictured himself thinking, and tried to superimpose this picture on his inner vacancy. If he was essentially a thinking machine, then he needed to be serviced. It was not the problems of philosophy but the problem with philosophy that preoccupied him that afternoon. And yet how often the two became indistinguishable. Wittgenstein had said that the philosopher’s treatment of a question was like the treatment of a disease. But which treatment? Purging? Leeches? Antibiotics against the infections of language? Indigestion tablets, thought Victor, belching softly, to help break down the doughy bulk of sensation?
We ascribe thoughts to thinkers because this is the way we speak, but persons need not be claimed to be the thinkers of these thoughts. Still, thought Victor lazily, why not bow down to popular demand on this occasion? As to brains and minds, was there really any problem about two categorically different phenomena, brain process and consciousness, occurring simultaneously? Or was the problem with the categories?
From down the hill Victor heard a car door slam. It must be Eleanor dropping Anne at the bottom of the drive. Victor flicked open his watch, checked the time, and snapped it closed again. What had he achieved? Almost nothing. It was not one of those unproductive days when he was confused by abundance and starved, like Buridan’s ass, between two equally nourishing bales of hay. His lack of progress today was more profound.
He watched Anne rounding the last corner of the drive, painfully bright in her white dress.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ said Victor with boyish gloom.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Oh, it’s been fairly futile exercise, but I suppose it’s good to get any exercise at all.’
‘Don’t knock that futile exercise,’ said Anne, ‘it’s big business. Bicycles that don’t go anyplace, a long walk to nowhere on a rubber treadmill, heavy things you don’t even need to pick up.’
Victor remained silent, staring down at his one sentence. Anne rested her hands on his shoulders. ‘So there’s no major news on who we are?’
‘Afraid not. Personal identity, of course, is a fiction, a pure fiction. But I’ve reached this conclusion by the wrong method.’
‘What was that?’
‘Not thinking about it.’
‘But that’s what the English mean, isn’t it, when they say, “He was very philosophical about it”? They mean that someone stopped thinking about something.’ Anne lit a cigarette.
‘Still,’ said Victor in a quiet voice, ‘my thinking today reminds me of a belligerent undergraduate I once taught, who said that our tutorials had “failed to pass the So What Test”.’
Anne sat down on the edge of Victor’s table and eased off one of her canvas shoes with the toe of the other. She liked to see Victor working again, however unsuccessfully. Placing her bare foot on his knee, she said, ‘Tell me, Professor, is this my foot?’
‘Well, some philosophers would say that under certain circumstances,’ said Victor, lifting her foot in his cupped hands, ‘this would be determined by whether the foot is in pain.’
‘What’s wrong with the foot being in pleasure?’
‘Well,’ said Victor, solemnly considering this absurd question, ‘in philosophy as in life, pleasure is more likely to be an hallucination. Pain is the key to possession.’ He opened his mouth wide, like a hungry man approaching a hamburger, but closed it again, and gently kissed each toe.
Victor released her foot and Anne kicked off the other shoe. ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ she said, walking out carefully over the warm sharp gravel to the kitchen door.
Victor reflected with satisfaction that in ancient Chinese society the little game he had played with Anne’s foot would have been considered almost intolerably familiar. An unbound foot represented for the Chinese a degree of abandon which genitals could never achieve. He was stimulated by the thought of how intense his desire would have been at another time, in another place. He thought of the lines from The Jew of Malta, ‘Thou hast committed Fornication: but that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.’ In the past he had been a Utilitarian seducer, aiming to increase the sum of general pleasure, but since starting his affair with Anne he had been unprecedentedly faithful. Never physically alluring, he had always relied on his cleverness to seduce women. As he grew uglier and more famous, so the instrument of seduction, his speech, and the instrument of gratification, his body, grew into an increasingly inglorious contrast. The routine of fresh seductions highlighted this aspect of the mind–body problem more harshly than intimacy, and he had decided that perhaps it was time to be in the same country with a living wench. The challenge was not to substitute a mental absence for a physical one.
Anne came out of the house carrying two glasses of orange juice. She gave one to Victor.
‘What were you thinking?’ she asked.
‘Whether you would be the same person in another body,’ lied Victor.
‘Well, ask yourself, would you be nibbling my toes if I looked like a Canadian lumberjack?’
‘If I knew it was you inside,’ said Victor loyally.
‘Inside the steel-capped boots?’
‘Exactly.’
They smiled at each other. Victor took a gulp of orange juice. ‘But tell me,’ he said, ‘how was your expedition with Eleanor?’
‘On the way back I found myself thinking that everybody who is meeting for dinner tonight will probably have said something unkind about everybody else. I know you’ll think it’s very primitive and American of me, but why do people spend the evening with people they’ve spent the day insulting?’
‘So as to have something insulting to say about them tomorrow.’
‘Why, of course,’ gasped Anne. ‘Tomorrow is another day. So different and yet so similar,’ she added.
Victor looked uneasy. ‘Were you insulting each other in the car, or just attacking David and me?’
‘Neither, but the way that everyone else was insulted I knew that we would break off into smaller and smaller combinations, until everyone had been dealt with by everyone else.’
‘But that’s what charm is: being malicious about everybody except the person you are with, who then glows with the privilege of exemption.’
‘If that’s what charm is,’ said Anne, ‘it broke down on this occasion, because I felt that none of us was exempt.’
‘Do you wish to confirm your own theory by saying something nasty about one of your fellow dinner guests?’
‘Well, now that you mention it,’ said Anne, laughing, ‘I thought that Nicholas Pratt was a total creep.’
‘I know what you mean. His problem is that he wanted to go into politics,’ Victor explained, ‘but was destroyed by what passed for a sex scandal some years ago and would probably now be called an “open marriage”. Most people wait until they’ve become ministers to ruin their political careers with a sex scandal, but Nicholas managed to do it when he was still trying to impress Central Office by contesting a by-election in a safe Labour seat.’
‘Precocious, huh,’ said Anne. ‘What exactly did he do to deserve his exile from paradise?’
‘He was found in bed with two women he was not married to by the woman he was married to, and she decided not to “stand by his side”.’