Philosopher A Kind Of Life

Prof Ted Honderich, Ted Honderich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415276313
• eBook ISBN: 9781134560738
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The story of Ted Honderich, philosopher, a story of a perilous philosophical life, marked by critical examination, and a compelling personal life full of human drama. This is the story of Ted Honderich's perilous progress from boyhood in Canada to the Grote Professorship of Mind and Logic at University College London, A. J. Ayer's chair. It is compelling, candid and revealing about the beginning and the goal, and everything in between: early work as a journalist on The Toronto Star, travels with Elvis Presley, arrival in Britain, loves and friendships, academic rivalries and battles, marriages and affairs, self-interest and empathy. It sets out resolutely to explain how and why it all happened.

It is as much a narrative of Ted Honderich's philosophy. He makes hard problems real. Philosophy from consciousness and determinism to political violence and democracy comes into sharp focus.

Along the way, questions keep coming up. Does the free marriage owe anything to the analytic philosophy? What are the costs of truth? Are the politics of England slowly making it an ever-better place? Is an action's rightness independent of the mixture of motives out of which it came?

1
This Green Summer

This is now a place where I am alone, a small room of recesses and bays, bright at the window. It is made calm by the green palisade of trees against the sky at the bottom of the gardens, a backdrop waiting for the rest of the play. The room is freshly painted in its old colours, two light and just different blues on the walls, the whiter one above the picture rail under the white ceiling. In the room there are now the things of only my own life, and only one kind of life. It is an orderly study again. A table in the window without clutter, a brass clock on it that gets attention. Watercolours and paintings, two of them large and emotional impressions of trees, framed by me. In place of women’s radio programmes, there is quiet Bach and Mozart, or silence except for the birds. In a recess, a framed announcement recalling my inaugural lecture, ‘The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes’, not certain to escape the eye of a visitor rightly seated.

Up the few steps from the study and along the hallway, past the undetaining watercolours, past the empty space from which the too detaining still-life departed with Jane, is the drawing room. I learned to call it by that name, a little resolutely. It is large enough to have held a few dozen friends and acquaintances who trooped in once more to the Christmas drinks, perhaps some of them a little resolutely too.

Through three good windows, their slender glazing bars as well preserved as those of the study, the drawing room also looks out to the palisade of trees. This room is still brighter than the study, being somewhat higher in the house. It has six sides, in two light and just different greens, the nearly white one above. Wainscot rail reinstated in very living memory. Older urns and swales in relief on the fireplace. Odd pillars of books on the tables and on the carpet, next to the wicker settee and chairs and the brown Victorian sofa. Flowers and candles, and some small brass vessels, nicely worked frowa caskets, brought back from visits as external examiner to the university in Ghana. Eleven small portraits in a line around the room, some of eighteenth-century gents in ruffs, several of Russian lads, the latter in memory of the Soviet Union I was too sensible or respectable or timid to support.

I see again that the room is a bit contrived, perhaps a bit comic. Even worse in the report of a guest of sceptical sensibility or with an eye for social aspiration? This does not much touch my simple pleasure in it. In particular, I do not follow persons of more rigorous taste who would exchange its decorous ease for, say, one of those white cells of the Palais Wittgenstein, those stern products of functional necessity and geometry, dutifully visited in Vienna the other week. The philosopher-architect, after arriving at the dimensions for his white shoeboxes, took more aesthetic thought only to conceal the central heating and to determine the right height for the door handles. They look pretty high to me.

The third of my more easeful rooms is through two facing doors from the drawing room. It too is in accord with the principle of decoration already noticed, owed to departed Janet: two just different yellows here. A good table and ten chairs. This dining room is heavy with more pictures, some above others, a motley but all in accord with another principle, my own. It is that the main value of art must surely have to do with its being true of something, and so it is better when we are not left wondering what that thing might be. Hence the reproduction of a portrait of Hume, patron saint of philosophers of my inclination, and also, Victorian or later, the still-lifes, studies of women and landscapes, etchings on wood of lion, tiger and fox, profile of the Spanish lieutenant and so on, and portrait of the host. There are French doors to a pretty balcony. Some later Juliet could lean against that white balustrade. An older and wiser one might be best.

What remains to be noted in Flat B, this first-floor setting of my life, is a bedroom. One large window of sixteen panes, looking into the boughs of a great tree at the front of the house. A smaller room, two pinks, more pictures. In a section of the bookcase are the books I have written. Those once brave hopes, still not extinguished. They are somewhat revived now by the growing company of their translations. There is space left for another two or three vols, including the one that will do the trick, at last guarantee me a future. I made the solid bed too. It is in a new position now, against a different wall. For a time I avert my eyes from it.

Out of the window and down below, in the garden between the house and the street, in the shadow of the chestnut boughs, connected to the house by stained-glass porch and perambulator store, is something else. It is The Studio, as it says on its door, and as it is named, its definite article intact, in five hundred letters about rent arrears and damp and keys. An artist’s studio of good size, added to the property, like the porch and pram store, by some Victorian. Good-enough brickwork, chimney, slate roof, broad skylight over a good working space and two galleries. In it is an adversary, the socialist landlord’s problem, the occupant who seized her moment and would succeed the tenant. Does my life have an adversary in it more often than others? Do I just make more of my ordinary allotment of adversaries than others do? Let me look away from that for a time too.

The narrow street takes its short way down from St John’s Church at the top, cream and upstanding, to the shops and Hampstead Heath at the bottom. The street is still quiet enough, save for the morning cars. Its cited charm has not been too much touched by garden designers and by the determination of new residents to floodlight their Regency stucco, for purposes of night security as they say. Once Albion Grove, it now has a name not writ in water, Keats’s. In it, when it was a village path, he wrote and lived a part of his brief life, the best part and some of the rest. The nightingale in the garden, other odes, beauty and truth, love of Fanny, the drop of blood on the pillow, and the parting. I pedal past his house each morning to the other place of my life. Down the hill through Belsize Park, Chalk Farm, Primrose Hill, Camden Town and Euston, to Bloomsbury and my other room.

It too can seem closer to being my life than just a setting of it, closer to being the stuff of my life than just a principal location of it. Can there be some sense in this, some plain truth? Some actual philosophy, some English philosophy, not only fancy or feeling or French performance?

The room is one of pride and success, history, work, many lectures and papers, fewer pleasures, argument in good temper and bad, strategies and alliances, beginnings and endings of careers, hurt and sad drama. The main hurt and sad drama was also a stabbing, some say. It is of a size owed to the good opinion that was had, by himself and others, of an earlier and larger Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London. A. J. Ayer, Professor Sir Alfred, Freddie, known to me in all those roles, all attacked with practised panache. In the first, he wrote the book Language, Truth and Logic. It inspired my retorts to teachers of my late boyhood who tried to lead me into deep thinking. Along with the decency of the Welfare State, which lingers on far less well, and placenames, and the lure of a past, and not much susceptibility to the American way of life, the book brought me to England.

University College London, as resistant to the inclusion of a comma in its name as The Studio is to the loss of its definite article, stands as firmly and as godlessly in Gower Street as it did in 1828, when it first set out to awaken Oxford and Cambridge from their dogmatic slumbers. It was the original University of London. Its Corinthian portico and measured dome, partly paid for by the worthy Grote, welcomed atheists, Dissenters, Catholics, Utilitarians, Jews, women, and other lower orders. It was a breath of fresh air. It still is, despite being effectively a university itself, with some thousands of students and with a good sense of its achievements and of the worth of respectability. Such a breath was Jeremy Bentham himself, its presiding spirit and household god. The great Utilitarian also had self-regard, presumably even more than Freddie. His auto-icon, which is to say his mummified skeleton, remains with us in a college cloister, according to his instructions. The beadles unlock his box to tourists with moderate gravity.

My room is away from the portico and dome, on the other side of the college, in Gordon Square, where blue plaques recall the Bloomsbury past. In particular those Stracheys, Bells, Carringtons, Morrells and Woolfs, not quite immortal, officially committed to the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. The room is large, L-shaped and suited to a worthy Victorian. It is all of the first floor of the house of the philosophers of the college, my colleagues, the Department of Philosophy. Six floors of Lecturers, Senior Lecturers and Readers, working their way down from the attic or up from the basement by patience and publications.

In the settled scheme of things, the room is both the Grote’s own study and teaching room and also a place for other lectures, seminars and meetings. Thus it welcomes visiting philosophers, up from Oxford to do a turn on this metropolitan stage, or in from Berkeley to bring confident news of California and the future. The ring of soft armchairs and sofa, now green, has behind it rows of upright and serviceable chairs, 45 of them. Undergraduates or postgraduates hear about and may find themselves in only the company of only a philosophical subject-matter. Time and space, causation, possible worlds, the Redundancy Theory of Truth, modal logic, mind and brain, or Functionalism. Scepticism, Moral Realism, the values of art, the rationality of the free market, what it is like to be a bat, or, once in a long while, the proprietary doctrines of Aristotle, Kant and other greats of the past. No longer, I am pleased to say, Freud’s theory of sexuality, which, after an extended appearance, slipped off the curriculum.

The rest of life just comes to a stop for a while as various propositions are laid out and turned over by me or by the visitors, or by my departmental colleagues when they book my room in the hope that their own smaller rooms will be insufficient for their audience. But the room has long had another part to play in our lives as well. Here we have had our departmental meetings. Occasions for the sharing out of labours, the gathering of opinions on undergraduates, and the massed interviewing of candidates for lectureships. Who is to join us and who not? Very serious matter. Here too the Headship of the department has been our unofficial or official subject. That was the hurt and the sad drama, maybe a stabbing.

In a distant corner, a personal computer and a steamer trunk. The computer delivers my thoughts of yesterday back to me for further revision, and also the e-mail, often from my daughter in Princeton. My son, not having an ocean between us, preserves his independence more sternly. The steamer trunk has past in it. A thousand dated notes, many of self-mortification or self-justification, an official complaint or two of injustice, histories of academic struggles and transactions, and also very many letters, some of them sweet letters of love, desire and marriage. Safer here than in Hampstead. A small archive of the struggle.

I admit to the usual amount of interest in myself and my thinking, but am reassured that this self-interest may issue in something more general. My aim, of course, is not another autobiography. Who in my authorial situation does not promise more? The first of my two aims is to open up a kind of life. It is to make plain a kind of life by a good means, quite possibly the very best means. That is getting into view and telling the truth about a suitable instance or example of the thing. My life, although notable in parts, is not much more than middle-sized. I do not have the satisfaction and misfortune of being a real individual, so impressively and uselessly different that to learn of me is to learn only of me.

The kind of life in question is that of a working, academic or university philosopher. Not real life, they say. Still, carried on quite as fully elsewhere as in studies, lecture rooms, common rooms and committee rooms. We do not leave our natures behind in leaving our places of work.

Of course this example of the full-time professional philosopher will be different from other examples of the kind, even greatly different, perhaps to their relief. But will it not be more enlightening as to the kind, nevertheless, than any general distillation, composite, constructed average member, survey, or group photo? Particularly if I really make use of my unique knowledge of the example from the inside, really try to tell the truth? Rousseau left a lot out in his confessions, and not just the bit about baring his bum in the street in the hope of a spanking. May I, in this more confessional age, be different from him not only in being middle-sized but by leaving less out?

My second aim is explanation. How do I and my kind get to places like this? What explains the rest of what else needs saying of me in this green summer – about my philosophical commitments and tendencies, my daily round, and my inner life? They say philosophy doesn’t come from nowhere, summoned into being by pure reason and reading good books. Also, why did those non-philosophical things in the recent past happen as they did? Could it be that the philosophy and the habits in it explain more of the rest of my life than the rest of life explains them? Out of what prehistory did the philosophy and its habits and the rest of life come? But perhaps this aim of explanation is too brave – even before it turns to trying to explain itself.

I see from the philosophical quotations book of Jane and Freddie that it was Kierkegaard, gloomy sod that he was, who said that life must be understood backwards, but has to be lived forwards, and so it can never be understood at all. No moment can have the complete stillness needed for a real view backwards. Is it true? Or, before we get to that, there is that old reflex question. What does it actually mean that might be true? And if we have to be content with an answer about the reach of explanation, the extent to which a life and a kind of life can be explained, that in itself will be to find out something.

The philosophical furniture of my mind consists in fewer pieces than are in my rooms, heavier ones. Whatever their history, and whether they stand to love, beds, rent and adversaries as effects or causes or neither, they do not seem external to me, but internal. They are not goods for sale, for example, or means of getting on in the world, helpful though they have been. Do these pieces hang together themselves? They are certainly no three-piece suite. I have had a thought or two of adding and rearranging things, if not of getting rid of any. Well, maybe even getting rid of something.

One large item of my inner furniture is determinism, or rather one kind of thing that goes under that heavy name. I expound it to the first-year undergraduates who drift into my college room for their General Introduction to Philosophy, Mondays at 11, the more incredulous taking themselves to deserve the soft armchairs. We use the heavy name ‘determinism’ in a certain way, for theories that say nothing about freedom or responsibility or hopes, but leave all that to later.

What the theories do say, very roughly, is that each of the actions in our lives and also the choosing and willing of it is an effect. It is the effect of a sequence of events or states or properties, each of these also being an effect. The sequence starts further back than any first thought or feeling about the action, let alone the choosing or willing of it. Indeed the sequence goes back to events that are not thoughts or feelings at all. Each effect is what it sounds like, something that had to happen. There was no other possibility. It wasn’t just probable, to any degree. If a story of this kind is clear enough to be true or false, and if it is true, then there is a sense in which everything is fixed or settled in advance, all choices and decisions and all actions, and thus a sense in which everything could have been predicted. All of it, if you subtract the mythology from the word, was fated.

I am the somewhat reluctant owner of such a theory, a philosophy of mind in itself, worked out in more detail than some of my fellow workers have valued. 644 pages of detail. Some people say it is clear enough, and many say that any such thing is false – falsified by the physics of Einstein et al. They say Quantum Theory settles the matter. Determinism is now history, quite a good piece of history since it has Spinoza, Hume, Newton and indeed Einstein himself and most of science in it, but still history. The fact of the matter is that we now know there are things that happen that are not effects. Ask any physicist.

This has been hard for me to believe, partly because the interpretation of Quantum Theory, the understanding of what it comes to in terms of the world, is allowed by most of its users to be a mess. Certainly it is a mess, and has remained so for too long. Sometimes verbiage and enthusiasm conceals this, but not very much. What is the mathematics or formalism of the theory about? Certainly not particles or waves of matter in any ordinary or plain senses of the words, as is readily admitted, even celebrated. The fundamental question of what the theory is about goes without a decent answer. So another question arises. Are the things in the theory that are said not to be effects in fact things which we determinists say are effects? We only say events are effects. There are certainly things that are irrelevant to determinism, these being non-events in general, starting with numbers, propositions and locations. We don’t say 7 is an effect.

There is also some other trouble for the disprovers of determinism. Suppose, despite my sensible doubt, that we take up the common interpretation of Quantum Theory. Suppose there really are rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of plates
• 1 This green summer
• 2 Village
• 3 City, school, Saturdays, girls
• 4 From university distracted, First Love
• 5 Awake in England
• 6 Bracing life, assigned to punishment, married again
• 7 A department joined, moral and political utterances
• 8 Nadir, determinism again, America
• 9 Academic battles, political violence, an ending
• 10 Effects, a proud Scot, justice, 4 Keats Grove
• 11 The higher social life, Chancery Court, much else
• 12 Mind and brain etc., anathema
• 13 Professor, psychoneural intimacy, disarrays
• 14 Mental and other events, Johnny, determinism done
• 15 Life-hopes, the Grote, an idea’d girl
• 16 Harmless drudge, functionalism, socialist landlord
• 17 Ingrid, court again
• 18 Consciousness as existence, farewells
• 19 Coda
• Index