dusting those logical positivist cobwebs away: an appreciation of bryan magee as memoirist and youtuber

Earlier this year, I spent a couple of months taking in Bryan Magee’s ‘Confessions of a Philosopher’ and also looking at some of his TV interviews with philosophers recorded during the 1970s and 1980s (they’re all available on youtube, decent audio, mostly about 45 minutes long – so it’s possible to take them in while doing the washing up, cleaning etc if you’re so inclined; #DustingWithSchopenhauer, as it were, though it’s his chats with Herbert Marcuse and Iris Murdoch that I’d particularly recommend).

‘Confessions’ is, loosely, a kind of autobiography told by way of an explication of what (in Magee’s view) philosophical problems are, also what the philosophically inclined layperson should read (Kant, Schopenhauer) and what, given life’s other pressing demands, s/he probably shouldn’t bother with (most of logical positivism). While the tone is, at moments, a little impersonal – don’t read this if you want to know about the author’s sexual awakening, his family life or whether he’s ever had a dog - it nevertheless takes in childhood, youth, university, time spent (invested?) as a Labour politician, broadcaster and all the rest, also his personal friendships with both Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell. Magee talks about the latter as someone with the manners of a Victorian gentleman (Russell was already nearly thirty when Queen Victoria died), whose family background had accustomed him to being on conversational terms with the leading statesmen, thinkers, writers of the age:

When I mentioned to [Russell] what seemed to me an unsalvageable fault in Marxist theory, he said: ‘I made exactly that point to Lenin, but I couldn’t get him to see it.’

One thing I found rather winning about both the book and the broadcasts is Magee’s utter lack of false (or, indeed, any) ‘modesty’ in the conventional English sense – though this goes hand-in-hand with an admirably unsparing approach in other ways. In respect of his current affairs broadcasting, he writes that “I was among the many midwives of the revolution in social attitudes that characterised the 1960s”; better, he opens his broadcast interview with Frederick Copleston about Schopenhauer by stating that he holds himself, Bryan Magee, to be the foremost living authority on Schopenhauer “but then I couldn’t very well interview myself.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Fred!!  

It’s interesting, by the way, that Magee who was raised in a thoroughly secular home, imbued with what we might call ‘metropolitan liberal values’ (élite? no, that must be something to do with disproportionate wealth and power, not reading a book once in a while and liking opera), and who has largely since lived for culture and for ‘the life of the mind’, should have such a sympathetic view of religious faith in general and Christianity in particular – and this despite never experiencing the ‘God-shaped hole’ that we Christians like both to talk about, and from time to time peer into our unconverted friends’ psyches in the hope of discovering. For one thing, as someone with a high regard for Kant’s work on the nature and limits of what can be known, Magee finds atheism (as constructed by the likes of Richard Dawkins and other pub bores, at least; there are better atheists) facile and unpersuasive. For another, though Jesus of Nazareth gets a B-minus for his somewhat thin epistemology, he’s highly commended in other respects. Magee makes particular mention of Christ’s love, including for the 'least deserving’ – which is also, for this Christian and sinner (me, I mean, I’m trying to be rhetorical), about nine tenths of the point. Of course, Christianity is mostly not what people think it is – and I say that as someone who isn’t spiritual at all, more sort of… religious (and also a kind of 1970s Marxist sociologist manqué; I mean, who hasn't secretly wished at one time or another that they'd written Learning to Labour? I know I have!).

See also: a recent interview with Bryan Magee, a reflection on philosophy on TV and the role of the public intellectual more generally (both New Statesman).

"this is why i'm not NOT a theist - and if you'd understood kant and schopenhauer properly, you'd be just the same," suggests bryan magee

"I have little intellectual patience with people who think they know that there is no God, and no life other than this one, and no reality outside the empirical world. Some such atheistic humanism has been one of the characteristic outlooks of Western man since the Enlightenment, and is particularly common among able and intelligent individuals. It is the prevailing outlook, I suppose, in most of the circles in which I have moved for most of my life. It lacks all sense of the mystery that surrounds and presses so hard on our lives: more often than not it denies its existence, and in doing so is factually wrong. It lacks any real understanding that human limitations are drastic, in that our physical apparatus must inevitably mould and set very narrow bounds to all that can ever be experience for us - and therefore that our worldview is almost certainly paltry, in that most of what there is almost certainly lies outside it. It is complacent, in that it takes as known what is is impossible we should ever know. It is narrow and unimaginative, in that it disregards the most urgent questions of all. I think that I, like Kant, would go so far as to say that it is positively mistaken in believing that there is no reality outside the empirical realm when we know that there must be, even if we can have no proper understanding of it. Altogether, it is a hopelessly inadequate worldview from several different standpoints simultaneously; and yet it is one that tends to identify with rationality as such, and to congratulate itself on its own sophistication. Throughout my life I have found most of its adherents unable to understand that truly rational considerations lead to quite different conclusions. Such people tend on the contrary to take it for granted that anyone who adopts a different view from theirs does so from a standpoint of inadequate, or inadequately rational, reflection or intelligence - perhaps blinkered by convention, or religion, or superstition, or irrationalist beliefs of some more modern kind; or just plain muddle-headedness, if not thoughtlessness. Their attitude is what Schopenhauer called 'shallow-pated rationalism'. I have found that because its adherents identify it with rationality - and rationality with truth and enlightenment - everything said in rejection of it is misunderstood by them, supposed to come from a standpoint that is not arrived at, and cannot be defended, rationally."

from Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher (see also his remarks about Jesus and main post). 

"jesus of nazareth: a-plus for ethics, b-minus for epistemology," suggests bryan magee

“What came through to me most strongly was the radically ‘different’ character of Jesus’s moral teaching. So different is it, indeed, that it borders on the incomprehensible. Other moralists put forward rules of behaviour; other revolutionists in morals try to overthrow whatever are the existing rules and establish different ones in their stead; but Jesus is saying that rules, any rules, are not what morality is about. God, he says, is not in the business of awarding prizes to people live in accordance with moral rules. You will not win any special favours from him by being virtuous, but are only too likely to find – to your great chagrin, no doubt, as well as your incomprehension – that he loves sinners just as much as he loves you. If this infringes your sense of justice you have not understood the situation. It is no use being good in the hope of getting a reward from God: this is pure self-seeking, and therefore a self-contradictory conception of morally admirable behaviour. Only if you are good when it is not rewarded is your behaviour morally admirable. But then there is indeed no reward: so the goodness has to be its own justification, regardless of consequences. God’s loving you has nothing to do with your deserving it. He loves everybody, including the most undeserving, indeed he loves them as much as he loves you. Just as he loves the undeserving, so you also should love those who are undeserving of your love, including those who deserve it least, namely your enemies. Love is what matters, not deserving, and least of all rules. In fact, love matters about everything else. It is the ultimate reality, the true nature of existence, God. Perfect love is unconditional, and to unconditional love, deserving has ceased to matter or even have any significance. It is not that Jesus is against our living in accordance with rules. On the contrary, he recognises that rules are necessary wherever human beings live together, and he believes that they should be obeyed; but he sees them as arbitrary, superficial things that should be made subservient to human needs, not human needs made subservient to them. If we had enough love and concern for one another there would be no need for rules. We need them only because we are selfish. They are not, in themselves, good. 

These are only a few of the teachings of Jesus, but they are central to his message; and the fact that there was anyone at all going around preaching things like this two thousand years ago in a desert area of the Middle East is, to say the least of it, surprising. The extent to which they are original to Jesus is a matter that scholars dispute, and not one about which I know enough to have an independent opinion; but that the teachings themselves are unobvious, and full of deep moral insight, is clear to me. Jesus was also, although for some reason this is scarcely ever said, a profound psychologist. When, in addition to all this, one considers the audacity with which his views are expressed, and the poetically striking quality of many of his illustrations, he appears perhaps the most remarkable moralist there has ever been – a genius of a moralist, like Socrates: or perhaps even something in the way of a creative artist, like Plato. Like the historical Socrates, but unlike Plato, he confined his teaching to questions of morality. The nature of this world, and of our knowledge of it, do not appear to be concerns of his. In consequence he has nothing to offer that corresponds to the epistemological insights of Hinduism and Buddhism – and in that sense what he says might appear secondary, limited. But within the limitations of morality he goes as deep as anyone was to penetrate for the better part of two thousand years. When it comes to tellingness of moral insight, a question like ‘What will a man gain by winning the whole world at the cost of his true self?’ is unsurpassed.

from Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher. (See also 'not not a theist' and main post).

it's political correctness gone mad!

What did you do on National Selectively Misquote Sir Roger Scruton Day (which was late this year, 8th April - it moves around it bit because of the lunar calendar)?

I caused the editor of the Mail on Sunday some ten to fifteen seconds' annoyance and disquiet...