Introduction by T.S. Eliot to O.S. Wauchope (1948)

Deviation into Sense: The Nature of Explanation, by O.S. WAUCHOPE, 1948, London, FABER & FABER

The following text is from the front and back flaps of the jacket of the first edition of this book. I presume it was written by T. S. Eliot, then director of the literary division of Faber & Faber. What an irony of history that Eliot, who four years earlier (1944) had rejected George Orwell's manuscript of “Animal Farm,” would promote the publication of this strange book in which a pig appears in the final chapter. It must have taken a lot of courage for the publisher to publish such an antiquated philosophy book in London, the center of English philosophy at the height of analytic philosophy at that time. After all, Gilbert Ryle's “The Concept of Mind” was published in 1949, the following year, to great acclaim. If it had not been for the fortuitous chance that Wauchope's manuscript for this book was brought to Faber & Faber, where the rebellious poet T.S. Eliot was director of the literary department, the book would never have seen the light of day. And if Motohiro Fukase, a scholar of English literature who includes Eliot, had not happened to come into possession of this book, it would never have been translated into Japanese. And Koichi Yasunaga, who was greatly influenced by Wauchope, would not have been able to produce a series of works on the subject. Hisao Nakai described Koichi Yasunaga as follows. “...... Yasunaga will be rediscovered ...... many times in the future.” One can't help but wonder at the strangeness of the human world.

 Deviation into Sense is an original and remarkable contribution to philosophy, on which Mr. Wauchope has been engaged for a number of years. ‘The business of the philosopher is,’ he writes in his Introduction, ‘as it always has been, to find a standpoint from which all the variety of reality could be viewed as the parts of a comprehended whole.  . . . It is to explain experience.   . . .  There is no science on earth so useful as an explanation of reality would be, if we had one.’

 His book sets before the reader the plainest of distinctions—that between life and death. Because we are not dead yet, this is better expressed as the difference there is between life and death-avoiding, between spontaneous behaviour and defensive behaviour—all activity being of the one kind or the other. It is claimed that, with this distinction as first-stage analysis of consciousness or self, a complete and self-compatible philosophy is possible, one that satisfies the lay reader who requires that a philosophy shall be recognizable by him as having something to do with life as he knows, and yet one that need shy at no problem of the sort that professional philosophers have tried to solve.

 By way of illustration, this philosophy in a series of brilliant chapters, is brought to bear on a variety of departments of human knowledge not ordinarily associated with one another. And Mr. Wauchope concludes, as all philosophers really should, with a devastating and delightful allegory.

 Deviation into Sense is the product of rare mind—the kind of mind which can not only analyse but think for itself. And what is almost rarer still, Mr. Wauchope does know how to write.