My favourite Schopenhauer

CONFESSIONS OF A PHILOSOPHER by Bryan Magee Weidenfeld pounds

Bryan Magee has made a successful career for himself as a broadcaster of philosophy. In programmes like Conversations with Philosophers, Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers of the Seventies and Eighties, he persuaded the leading philosophers of the age to take to the airwaves, and got them to talk intelligibly about their work. He has also written, among other books, two fine philosophical introductions - one to Popper and one to Schopenhauer - and a little work on Wagner's ideas.

All this is impressive, but you might think it hardly enough to merit 500 pages of philosophical autobiography. Yet this unconventional, intense and combative work proves that Magee is no ordinary pundit. He possesses a profound feeling for his subject and, more importantly, is able to articulate some of it on paper. Perhaps a certain greatness of the ego is a price that we have to pay for these rare qualities.

Confessions relates to just those parts of Magee's life and work which bear upon his philosophical development. This means we learn little about his career as a journalist and MP, but a great deal about his reading. Magee is like Russell, and unlike most other analytic philosophers, in rejecting religion while retaining an essentially religious temperament. As a result his studies seem to have had, from his student days, the character of a spiritual quest. There have been epiphanies and revelations, doubts and reawakenings. The only thing which seems never to have wavered is Magee's faith in his intellectual powers.

Magee tells us nothing about his childhood other than that he was from an early age, and in a way which found no echo among his friends, troubled by questions that he later learnt to call philosophical. At Oxford he had his first encounter with professional philosophy and found the experience dismaying: it left him with an abiding love of the subject and something like contempt for the way it is practised by academic philosophers. Logical positivism held no appeal for him; the ordinary-language approach which succeeded it he judged trivial and evasive. His tutors complained that he disregarded their method and paid no attention to the nice distinctions of ordinary language, but "luckily for me, I never lost my ultimate confidence that the boot was on the other foot ... that it was they who were intellectually unserious and I who understood what philosophy was."

A year at Yale proved more rewarding, and a seminar on Kant provided Magee with the first of a series of philosophical homecomings. It is not hard to see why Kant should have made such an impression. If Magee's outlook is characterised by a single feature, it is a troubled sense of the unknown; contrary to most analytic philosophers, who tend to the view that what we cannot know does not exist, Magee finds it natural to assume that there is infinitely more to reality than we can ever grasp. Kant, as Magee argues, was the first philosopher to make a distinction between a world of experience and a transcendent world beyond it central to his work. In doing so he identified what Magee describes as philosophy's single most important task: to work at the limits of human knowledge and "enrich our understanding of what they are and why they are limits". Magee, who ranks philosophers rather like marrows, judges Kant the greatest of them all - even greater than Socrates or Plato.

Back in London in the late 1950s, Magee discovered Popper's writings, which were then largely unknown - they are still, he contends, wildly under-appreciated. Magee quickly wrote to him, characteristically upbraiding him for his performance at a seminar, and in time the two men became close. These pages offer a vivid portrait of the great man: "He was not, as he was so often accused of being, self-centred: he was unrealistically his-own-work-centred ... Among the pleasures of discussing philosophy with him, a pleasure unknown at Oxford, was that of watching the dissolution and disappearance of an outsize ego in the problem under discussion." He admits that Popper felt no interest in the transcendental questions which increasingly occupied Magee, but argues that as a philosopher of the knowable, phenomenal world, he is the greatest of this century (those marrows again). There is, moreover, in Popper's writings about science a deep scepticism, which must have chimed with Magee's sense of our larger ignorance: if Popper taught one thing, it was that there are no general truths that we can know for certain. Magee remembers him saying, "we know nothing".

On returning from Yale, Magee eschewed academe for a part-time career as a broadcaster. This was, by his account, the best decision he could have made: it released him from "the treadmills of teaching and administration", immunised him against the influence of academic fashion and allowed him to get on with his own writing. Magee seems to take a pretty dim view of most of what passes for broadcasting in Britain - TV, he writes, is an inherently "superficial" medium - but he rates his own work as writer and broadcaster pretty high. His first serious book, The New Radicalism, offered, he tells, us a pioneering critique of Labour Party ideology from a liberal Popperian perspective. Despite the laudatory reviews (quoted by Magee), the book had little impact. The main problem was that the Labour Party followers at whom it was aimed saw it as disloyal: "The thought of actually considering what I said in case there was some truth in it occurred to very few people ... However the new radicalism did have an influence on individuals, and perhaps even on a generation of university students." His next book, The Democratic Revolution, which extended this analysis to the Third World, said things which had been said "nowhere else" in public. The later Conversations with Philosophers were "unprecedented in intellectual seriousness and scale". "I was astonished at how well the programmes were received; they were hailed in the press as a milestone in the history of radio." "For quite a few years after [Men of Ideas] my university friends told me that many of their candidates for admission, when asked why they wanted to study philosophy, said it was because they had seen my programmes." Men and women stopped him in the street to say "these were the best television programmes they had ever seen". When, however, other philosophers turned to TV, "their programmes made no impression on the public".

Yet for all of Magee's triumphs, or perhaps because of them, he went in his late thirties, through a painful and protracted mid-life crisis. He became engulfed by a crippling horror before the fact of human mortality - a "mind-numbing terror" in the face of death. Magee has characteristically little to say about the more personal background to his depression, but whatever extra-philosophical problems lay behind it, the crisis does not seem to have affected his capacity to apply himself. He devoured most of the great philosophers, and religious and spiritual writings as well, at last finding consolation in Schopenhauer. For all of his admiration of Hume, Kant, the early Wittgenstein and Popper, Schopenhauer is indeed the hero of this book. Schopenhauer is largely ignored by analytic philosophy, but Magee finds almost everything in his philosophy - the distinction he draws between the concrete world of experience and the undifferentiated, timeless, spaceless world beyond it and the place he gives to art as a bridge between the two - speak to him directly. On discovering Schopenhauer's philosophy he was moved by it, in a way usually associated with art: it spoke to his whole being.

There are shortcomings in Magee's book, not least in the way it deals in a caricature of the analytic tradition. Yet there is much more to admire in it. Magee is alive to philosophical issues in a way very few writers are; he boasts about his distance from the academic world, but it does seem to have had the effect of making philosophy "the warp and woof of my way of life".

Magee's ideas as presented here are, it is true, vague and impressionistic, but he has convictions which have enabled him to cut a distinctive path through the subject. All this is rare enough, but Magee also writes about the thinkers and ideas which matter to him with an exceptional verve and boldness; he is, in fact, a brilliant animator of other people's ideas. The result is a book very few academic philosophers could have written: something very long and often maddening, but also exciting.