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).
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