New British Philosophy

The Interviews

Julian Baggini, Jeremy Stangroom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134544561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

From popular introductions to biographies and television programmes, philosophy is everywhere. Many people even want to be philosophers, usually in the café or the pub. But what do real philosophers do? What are the big philosophical issues of today? Why do they matter? How did some our best philosophers get into philosophy in the first place?
Read New British Philosophy and find out for the first time. Clear, engaging and designed for a general audience, sixteen fascinating interviews with some of the top philosophers from the new generation of the subject's leaders range from music to the mind and feminism to the future of philosophy.
Each interview is introduced and conducted by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom of The Philosophers Magazine. This is a unique snapshot of philosophy in Great Britain today and includes interviews with:
Ray Monk - Biography; Nigel Warburton - the Public; Aaron Ridley - Music; Jonathan Wolff - Politics; Roger Crisp - Ethics; Rae Langton - Pornography; Miranda Fricker - Knowledge; M.G.F.Martin - Perception; Timothy Williamson - Vagueness; Tim Crane - Mind; Robin Le Poidevin - Metaphysics; Christina Howells - Sartre; Simon Critchley - Phenomenology; Simon Glendinning - Continental; Stephen Mulhall - the Future; Keith Ansell Pearson - the Human.

1 Philosophical Biography

In conversation with Ray Monk

British philosophy has not traditionally taken much of an interest in the lives of its great figures. A recent graduate in the subject is likely to be familiar only with a few choice anecdotes, some apocryphal, some true.

So, for example, they may know that Nietzsche went mad, not because of his philosophy, but because of syphilis, and that his final breakdown saw him hugging an ass, sobbing; that Kant lived his whole life in Königsberg, where his walks were so regular that the women of the town set their clocks by them; that Wittgenstein once threatened Popper with a poker; that Descartes died prematurely when he contracted pneumonia while visiting Queen Christina of Sweden; that Socrates was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens; and that Diogenes lived in a barrel and masturbated in public.

Biographical information about philosophers thus serves as no more than an amusing diversion. Give us anecdotes and tales of amusing foibles, but please, do not think biography could be important to philosophy itself.

This lack of interest in the lives of philosophers has its counterpart in the subject’s history. The history of philosophy tends to be studied as if it were no more than an extended argument, a great conversation begun by Plato and Aristotle and continued up until the present day.

What does not get examined very often is the historical context within which the philosophers worked. The best scholars have always attended to these social and cultural factors, but more often than not they get placed to one side, especially in the teaching of the subject. Whereas it is commonplace in, say, the teaching of literature to begin a course on the nineteenth century novel with an examination of the society and culture of the time, a course on Descartes is more likely to begin with the text itself, or at most a reference to its philosophical antecedents.

What explains this relative lack of biographical and historical interest in British philosophy? Certain feminist critics argue that it is a product of a masculine conception of philosophy, where the self and the intellect are seen as independent, free-floating and autonomous. Men, who have denied the links between their intellectual pursuits and their bodies, gender and position in society, have dominated philosophy. Women, it is argued, are far more aware of the intimate link between how one thinks and rationalises, and one’s nature as an embodied, socially and historically located individual. The ahistorical and non-biographical trend in philosophy merely reflects the male delusion that reason can be, and often is, separated from the individuals and societies within which it operates.

Whether or not one agrees wholeheartedly with this critique, at least part of it is undeniably true. That is to say, it is at least possible that what at first glance may appear to be detached, unbiased reasoning is largely a product of specific personal and social influences. Whether this undermines the philosophy or not is a further question. Whatever the answer to it, it does suggest that insight can be gained into the arguments of a philosopher by attending to those facts of their life and times.

Ray Monk is one of the few philosophers working in Britain today who has taken philosophical biography seriously. There are several biographies of philosophers available, but Monk’s work stands out. For Monk, biography is not a diversion, but his core work. The bibliographies of many scholars contain a biography or two, but for Monk, biography has dominated his professional output for the best part of two decades, resulting in a life of Wittgenstein and two volumes on Bertrand Russell. These biographies are intended not only to tell interesting stories for their own sake, but to cast light on the philosophy of their subjects. Monk has related life and thought in a way which is extremely unusual in the British philosophical tradition. He is, therefore, something of a pioneer and it will be interesting to see whether one consequence of this is that we will see more philosophical biography in the twenty-first century than we did in the twentieth.

Philosophical biography is a specialism which didn’t exist when you began your career. So how did you end up specialising in a specialism that didn’t exist?

My postgraduate work was on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics, and the way I got into biography was that I became convinced that almost all of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics misunderstood it. It misunderstood it in a particular kind of way. I felt that what was needed to correct the misunderstanding wasn’t arguing piecemeal against one view after the other. It seemed to me that what was being missed was what you might call the spirit in which Wittgenstein wrote. It also seemed to me reading Wittgenstein, particularly the various draft prefaces he wrote to Philosophical Remarks, that he felt that acutely too. He felt that even the people who understood in a detailed way his views on this, that and the other, had missed his attitude to these questions. It seemed to me that one way of getting across the spirit in which Wittgenstein wrote would be to describe the life and the work alongside each other, so that one could read his work informed by some understanding of how he was writing and what attitudes were informing it.

That’s interesting, because the philosophy of mathematics is one of the most abstract parts of philosophy and is therefore one which you would imagine you could treat with the least reference to a person’s particular life.

In general that might be true, but in Wittgenstein’s case it isn’t. Some of his most passionate writing is on mathematics. He didn’t just have an argument against logicism. He hated logicism. He described logicism as a cancerous growth. He talks about the disastrous invasion of mathematics by logic. Why did he feel so strongly about that? Because it’s a symptom of what he perceived to be a more general cultural degeneration. When one understands that, one sees those remarks and the tone of them in the right context.

When you started out doing the philosophy of mathematics, presumably the way you were being taught and led did not push you towards the lives of the people behind it. So when you came to see those lives as important, did that seem like a major switch in the way you were thinking?

No. In my own case it went hand in hand with a more general disenchantment with academic philosophy. I left academic philosophy and did other things.

What was the root of the disenchantment?

The feeling that nothing serious was being said or entertained, but that a series of intellectual games were being pursued as a career.

Do you think that’s still the case with most academic philosophy?

I think it’s got a lot better. I’m talking now about the early 1980s, when I think British analytic philosophy was at its most arid. I went to a series of seminars in which the problem of adverbial predication was being discussed. This went on for about eight weeks, and the issue being discussed was this: if you say ‘John walked up the hill slowly’ it follows that John walked up the hill. If you say ‘John walked up the hill quickly’ it also follows that John walked up the hill. However, ‘John walked up the hill slowly’ implies not-‘John walked up the hill quickly’, and the problem was to devise a way of preserving those inferential relations. Well, what interest does this have? I found myself thinking that the pleasure one derives from those kinds of problems has no more depth to it than the pleasure one derives from a crossword puzzle.

You obviously admire Russell’s early work in the philosophy of mathematics, and some people might ask what the point of that is - trying to explain how all of mathematics can be explained purely in terms of logic. That might also seem to be a nice intellectual game to play.

But one has to understand what he thought he was doing. He thought that he was laying bare the most general features of reality. We don’t believe he was doing that, but if we did, it would be a tremendously important thing. The people pursuing adverbial predication were not animated by the passion that Russell was animated by, which is the feeling that they’re discovering something about reality. That seemed to me missing. What was going on here was that an intellectual puzzle was being pursued because it was a diverting intellectual puzzle.

Does it really matter what’s motivating people? You seem to be saying that the motivation is important to the value of the end product. Some people might be motivated purely in the way that someone else is motivated by a crossword puzzle, but you don’t know where these things will lead in philosophy. It’s always worth going away and studying these things, because what might look like a bit of scholastic debate might actually end up leading to something which crucially changes our understanding.

Yes, but you’re asking why I was disenchanted with analytic philosophy. It was because of the motivation, not the end result. I didn’t feel part of a community that was interested in understanding things worth understanding.

Thinking a little more about how learning about someone’s life might help you understand their philosophy, it might seem surprising that it is even possible. For example, you wouldn’t think you would learn something important about quantum theory by looking at the lives of scientists who formulated it. So you wouldn’t see there being any scientific interest in the lives of scientists. Where is the philosophical interest in the lives of philosophers?

It varies from philosopher to philosopher, I think. It’s almost certainly not true that light can be shed on every philosopher’s work by consideration of their life. I’ve yet to read anything about Kant’s life that was enormously revealing about his work, whereas I think with Wittgenstein and Russell, much can be learned in different ways by looking at their work in the context of their lives.

With Wittgenstein, you talked about the spirit of his work. What is that spirit of his life and work?

It’s summed up in the remark ‘logic and ethics are fundamentally the same’. There are two very striking facts about Wittgenstein. On the ethics side, he pared his life down to the minimum, so as to make as central as possible his search for decency, the drive to be a decent person. That is one of the most conspicuous and striking things about Wittgenstein. Whether you think he was a decent person or not, you can see that a lot of things he did were motivated by this drive. On the logic side, he had a relentless drive for clarity. It seems to me that in Wittgenstein’s case, one can see that these are two sides of the same coin, that he thought one couldn’t achieve clarity unless one achieved decency. He remarked to Russell that thinking about logic and thinking about his sins were simultaneous. In a remark in a letter to Russell, he asks, ‘How can I be a logician before I’m a decent human being?’ He thought what got in the way of thinking clearly was as often as not vanity, a refusal to come clean with oneself.

To acknowledge that helps understand where the philosophy is coming from and what’s motivating it. It’s presumably a fallacy to move from that to saying that you can actually judge the philosophical end result by looking at the biography. Would you want to maintain the traditional view that the validity or otherwise of the philosophical position can be judged independently of any facts about the life of the philosopher?

Well, yes. But often what that shows is how little is gained by judging the validity of a philosophical position. But surely it’s true that whether the proofs of the Principia are valid or not cannot in any way depend on any facts about Russell’s life.

You’ve indicated that there are limitations on judging validity. Some might think that’s all you have to do. If we talk about arguments being sound rather than valid, you might think all you have to do is look at the arguments and if they work, they work, and if they don’t, they don’t - end of philosophy.

No, I don’t think so. Philosophy would be a very arid business if that were the case. The great philosophers are those with insight, insight into something important. Of course, when one’s teaching students, one says ‘Don’t just give me your conclusion, give me arguments’. But who reads Nietzsche, who reads Wittgenstein, who reads Kierkegaard, laying it out as if it were a piece of propositional calculus, and says this argument goes through or it doesn’t? It would be impossibly boring and would miss the point.

A problem with training students in the way that we do is that we encourage them to be concerned with whether an argument is valid or not, and we don’t encourage them very much to consider the question of whether the argument is interesting or not. You can see the results of that in academic journals. When I’m sent articles to provide a reader’s report on for journals, more often than not the editor will want to know: Does this article show that the person is up to date with the reading? Is this argument a novel contribution to the literature? Is this argument sound? They don’t want to know if it’s very boring.

Let’s turn to your first biography of Wittgenstein. He’s a great subject in lots of ways because he led a very singular life, yet he also conforms to the stereotype of the tortured genius. There’s a remark he makes on his death bed which is perhaps surprising given what’s come before. He says, ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life’. How does that fit in with the fact that he seemed to have had a remarkably difficult, troubled life? Did it surprise you when you first heard of it?

It didn’t surprise me particularly. One would be loath to regard that as Wittgenstein’s definitive comment, a summation of his life. It was a remark made at a particular moment, for a particular audience; tell them I’ve had a wonderful life. It seemed to me the kind of thing that Wittgenstein would want said to his closest friends. But I also think he thought he had indeed, in some ways, had a wonderful life. And indeed it was a wonderful life.

In what respects? Not in the sense that it was more enjoyable than most, for example.

No, but Wittgenstein achieved a kind of purity of purpose that very few of us achieve. That’s one of the things that makes him so fascinating. A lot of the things that occupy my time - about my kids, about my mortgage, about day to day life - Wittgenstein successfully eliminated from his life, and that gives his life a kind of archetypal purity and concentration. There’s something wonderful about that. It would have surprised me if he had said, ‘Tell them I’ve had a happy life’.

Something strikes me as similar about Wittgenstein and Russell’s philosophical lives and careers. Both in their earlier philosophies were trying to set out something that was pretty systematic and logically complete, in different spheres. They then came to see these attempts as failures, though how they moved on from that differed. Did it colour your view of the subject when you looked at two of the greatest philosophical minds of the last century and saw that they both, for different reasons, came to the conclusion that it was not possible to give a fully consistent, systemised account of key major areas in philosophy?

I don’t think so. Perhaps it confirmed my view of philosophy. It does make them particularly interesting figures, because one then wants to understand what hopes were being thwarted. The hope that was being thwarted in Wittgenstein’s case was the hope of achieving complete crystalline clarity, and the hope that was being thwarted in Russell’s case was the hope of achieving complete certainty. I think there’s something revealing in that contrast about why we do philosophy. Do we do philosophy because we want absolutely certain foundations for everything we believe, as Russell did; or do we do philosophy because we feel it muddled, a bit confused, and we want this confusion dispelled?

Both of these people, whose abilities outstrip those of most of us, concluded that we couldn’t have either of those things. Have the consequences of those failures been taken to heart by philosophers practising today?

I’m not sure I see philosophy like that, as it were, learning from other people’s mistakes. Perhaps you could. But what would taking that on board mean? It might mean going through that process yourself. It doesn’t go without saying that you could take up where Wittgenstein left off. To understand Wittgenstein or Russell’s work, you might have to be tempted by the aspirations that motivated them and then perhaps see that this complete certainty, this complete clarity, is a chimera.

Did you share either of those motivations when you first got into philosophy?

More Wittgenstein’s than Russell’s. More to do with wanting clarity than certainty.

How has that been shaped by your studies, particularly of Wittgenstein? How have you come out the other end of that?

I suppose by thinking that clarification is a process, not a state. This is wherein lies the virtue of philosophy, despite all the boring stuff which is done in its name. Why do we do philosophy? Because there is a process of clarification and this is a good thing. A really good tutorial session, a really good seminar, is when the students come with some- thing which is bothering them and they leave the room slightly clearer about what that is than before. But they haven’t achieved any final state. Hopefully, what they’ve done is think through something which is now a bit clearer.

Wittgenstein’s reaction to his earlier failure was to come back with a different type of philosophy. The work of the later Wittgenstein really does divide people. There are people who worship the man and others who despise him. But both of them might agree that Wittgenstein in a sense turned his back on philosophy as we know it. How radical do you think his break with the philosophical tradition he had both been educated in and contributed to was?

Very radical indeed, to the point where, to be a Wittgensteinian philosopher, in the sense of the late Wittgenstein is more or less incompatible with pursuing philosophy as a career.

Would you consider yourself to be a Wittgensteinian in that sense?

I think one of the important lessons to be learned from the later Wittgenstein is that philosophy is not a science and not a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Philosophers
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Philosophical Biography
• 2 Ethics in the Modern World
• 3 The Role of Political Philosophy
• 4 Aesthetics and Music
• 5 Power, Knowledge and Injustice
• 6 Feminism and Pornography
• 7 Mind Matters
• 8 The Concerns of Analytic Philosophy
• 9 On Vagueness
• 10 The Rebirth of Metaphysics
• 11 Continental Philosophy and Emancipation
• 12 The Analytic and the Continental
• 13 Sartre’s Existentialism
• 14 Post-Analytic Philosophy
• 15 A Post-Human Hell
• 16 Philosophy and the Public
• Appendix: Rationale and Purpose
• Further Reading