Ken Starr may want to subpoena Mike McCurry's bookstore receipts to find out whether F. H. Bradley has been on the White House spokesman's reading list. McCurry's discourse with reporters last week on "ontology" puts THE SCRAPBOOK in mind of the late-Victorian philosopher, who was something of a neo-Hegelian, something of a neo-Platonist, and something of a nut. Bradley published a famous book in 1893 called Appearance and Reality, arguing that the dilemmas, complexities, and confusions of knowing what's real are so massive that reality itself must be a delusion and the notion of truth a snare for the unwary.
And McCurry is nothing if not wary. The contrast between his straightforward answers on other subjects and his complex, nuanced, and uninformative answers on Monica Lewinsky has been apparent since the scandal broke: In March, when THE WEEKLY STANDARD's Tucker Carlson asked him if he wanted to find out what went on between Bill and Monica, McCurry replied, "God, no. No. No, I really don't want to know." But as McCurry now reaches the final months of his tenure, he seems to have decided to raise even higher the intellectual tone of his occasional Socratic discourses with the press. He reached a new peak at last Tuesday's press conference. When a reporter asked whether he was willing to state flatly that the president has told the truth about Lewinsky, he replied, "I can only report what I ontologically know."
THE SCRAPBOOK suspects the word he was groping for is not "ontology" -- the branch of metaphysics that studies reality or being -- but "epistemology" -- the study of knowing. On the other hand, if you dwell on the difficulties of knowledge long enough, it is reality that starts to look wobbly. And McCurry has been doing a lot of dwelling on the difficulties of knowledge. At Tuesday's press conference, of 78 questions asked about the Lewinsky affair, McCurry replied to 66 not with an answer but with a description of the epistemological complexities in ever attaining to knowledge. On Wednesday, he did almost as well, answering 71 of 85 Monica questions with philosophical explications of the impossibility of truth. "I don't know," he replied to one query. "I don't have any thoughts," he answered another. "You know more than I know," he retorted. "I don't have any clue," he explained. "I'd only be speculating as a layman." "I have no way of judging." "I don't have any factual basis to give you a speculative answer." "Who knows?" "What is widely reported and what is the truth may or may not be the same thing." "This is kind of a minimalist construction, I grant you."
In the announcement week before last of his impending departure, McCurry mentioned that one thing he'd look to do in his retirement is some teaching. After this performance, the philosophy department of every college in the country should be knocking at the door of America's new-found epistemologist, our home-grown F. H. Bradley.