The Making of a Philosopher

My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy

Colin McGinn

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780060957605
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062119865
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

Part memoir, part study, The Making of a Philosopher is the self–portrait of a deeply intelligent mind as it develops over a life on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Making of a Philosopher follows Colin McGinn from his early years in England reading Descartes and Anselm, to his years in the states, first in Los Angeles, then New York. McGinn presents a contemporary academic take on the great philosophical figures of the twentieth century, including Bertrand Russell, Jean–Paul Sartre, and Noam Chomsky, alongside stories of the teachers who informed his ideas and often became friends and mentors, especially the colorful A.J. Ayer at Oxford.

McGinn's prose is always elegant and probing; students of contemporary philosophy and the general reader alike will absorb every page.

Chapter One
First Stirrings

I WAS BORN IN 1950, FIVE YEARS AFTER THE END OF WORLD WAR II, in West Hartlepool, county Durham, a small mining town in the northeast of England. The hospital in which I was born was a converted workhouse, or homeless shelter as it would be known today. My mother was twenty years old, my father twenty-six, and I was their first child. Both my grandfathers—whose names were both Joseph, like my father’s—were coal miners, as were all of my uncles except one, who was a carpenter and bricklayer. Life expectancy among miners was low, and both my grandfathers died young from work-related diseases. Everyone in my family was short and wiry. My paternal grandfather was known in the mine as “Joe the Agitator” because of his activities in fighting for improved working conditions; he eventually became secretary of the local miners’ union, and read Karl Marx and Rudyard Kipling in his spare time. He was a kindly, clipped man, not much given to conversation, devoted to his Woodbine smokes. I never remember a time when my tiny, shrill-voiced, constantly cussing grandmother had any teeth; she chewed meat with her gums. She said “thee” and “thou” (pronounced thoo) as part of ordinary speech, as in “thee knaas Jack Ridley” (meaning “you know Jack Ridley”). Of a blunt knife she would say “I could ride bare-arsed to London on this” and give out a throaty, high-pitched cackle. I have no recollection of my maternal grandfather, though his widow is still miraculously alive at ninety. My father left school at fourteen and went “down the pit,” his first job being to pick stones out of the coal as it was shunted by on a massive belt contraption. But he quickly escaped this form of premature burial by going to night school and learning the building trade. He was sufficiently proficient at this to become general manager of a small building company while still in his twenties, and he made his career as manager of various branches of the building department of the co-op in different parts of England. He retired early and now has a second career as a painter, mainly of scenes from the mining towns in which he grew up. Some of his work is in the historical record of the art gallery that serves the area his paintings record. Both my brothers, Keith and Martin, are artists too, though I was never very strong in that department.

I have no recollection of my first three years in the northeast, and when I was three we moved to Gillingham, Kent, in the southeast of England. What a difference three hundred miles makes. Kent is known as the “garden of England,” while county Durham was a place of enormous smoking slag heaps, cramped terraced streets, and chilly outside toilets. In Gillingham I enjoyed the woods and the fields, taking a special interest in wildlife—particularly lizards and butterflies—and grew to be the tallest McGinn on record (I am five feet six inches tall), —until my giant of a younger brother took over at a remarkable five feet nine. At age eleven I took the infamous Eleven Plus, a scholastic test to determine what type of school you would go to for the rest of your school years, and did not perform well enough to go to a grammar school. I was therefore sent to the local technical school, where I was expected to learn the skills necessary to become a tradesman or technician. However, after only eight years in Gillingham we moved again, this time to Blackpool in the northwest, and after a series of mishaps I was sent to the local secondary modern school—one step down from the technical school in the south.

Blackpool is a rough, tough, garish seaside town, windy and wet, frequented mainly by working-class people taking cheap trips. Its streets are lined with pubs, fish-and-chip shops, and amusement arcades. Cultural it is not. And yet there abided an odd sense of privilege in the locals, even a kind of snobbery, since people did actually choose to pay good money to visit the place. The main activities of young men in the town were drinking and fighting, and trying to take clumsy advantage of visiting girls under the piers. The school I attended was loutish and philistine, mainly an exercise in crowd control, though frequently hilarious (the tubby headmistress was actually named Miss Bloomer—“Keks” to the boys, local dialect for “knickers”). On one occasion the PE teacher caned an entire year of boys—some ninety behinds— because someone had thrown potato crisps over the locker-room wall at the swimming pool and no one would reveal the identity of the culprit. I was caned three times in all, the other two times for no particular reason either (and it really stings too). It was not a school from the experience of which you were expected to amount to anything; most of the boys I knew there were in low-level jobs by the age of sixteen. Still, I always did pretty well in mathematics and English (but boy, was I bad at geography). I made a point of getting my homework over with as quickly as possible and spent most of my time on sports, playing drums in a rock band, and perfecting my pinball skills.

I did, however, perform well enough in my O-levels, taken at age sixteen, to be transferred to the local grammar school to study for my A-levels. Here I was spectacularly outshone by my classmates, who struck me as virtual geniuses, comparatively speaking. Some of these boys actually read books for pleasure! I was a big reader of children’s books when I was young, especially the Dr. Doolittle stories, but since adolescence I had read almost nothing, just the odd horror story or piece of science fiction. Reading had lost its magic for me at around age twelve, when, coincidentally, the hormones kicked in. What I was good at, and enjoyed, was sports, especially gymnastics and pole-vaulting (for which I held the school record). I was also part of the in-group of “mods,” who paid particular attention to their hairdos and clothes (backcombed hair sculptures, sharp suits, dancing shoes). At this time I had no thought of going to university, and the idea had never been mentioned in my house; it was not something a McGinn had ever done before. My teachers expected that I would become a PE teacher because of my sporting talents and moderate ability with book learning. My own thoughts turned rather to becoming a circus acrobat or professional percussionist. But one day at school we were asked whether we wanted to take a shot at going to university and I figured it might be worth a try. And anyway big changes were already under way in my mental development. My life started to shift to my head, at least in part. Up to now, developing physical coordination had been my chief concern, what with the sports and the drumming, but now my mind started to crave activity too. It was like a switch being turned on: The circuits began to hum.

I had fallen under the influence of a teacher, Mr. Marsh, who taught me Divinity A-level. I had already been much impressed by the intellectual adventures described in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was part of our prescribed reading for English A-level (my third A-level was Economics). But Mr. Marsh ignited in me an interest in studying and thinking, particularly about religion and theology. He was a strict teacher, but kindly—a devoted Christian with a passionate interest in his students. As I look back, he strikes me as a man who loved learning and scholarship (his favorite word was “scholar”) but who didn’t quite have the ability to make it as a university professor. He spoke of his university days as though they were a veritable heaven, his eyes burning with remembered enthusiasm. He taught us the Bible with great intensity, but not as a proselytizer—he had a genuine fascination for theological questions. He would occasionally mention philosophers as he was discussing some contentious point—as it might be, the plausibility of the virgin birth—and from him I first heard the name of Descartes.

Descartes was described as sitting in his oven on a cold winter’s day doubting everything, even the entire external world and the existence of minds other than his own. All that was left was his own self as a thinking being. This was meant to demonstrate the futility of doubt and the importance of faith: If you doubted the events of the Bible, you would end up doubting everything. In the end, Mr. Marsh triumphantly argued, Descartes could believe only in his own existence as a solitary mind—that is where doubt would lead you! This was very strange—dramatically opposed to common sense—and yet there seemed to me to be a logic to Descartes’s doubts, whatever their bearing on religion might be (in fact, Descartes’s system relies centrally on God, but Mr. Marsh never mentioned this).

As a result of these philosophical intrusions I started to dip into some elementary philosophy books (if there can really be said to be such things). Naturally, I was very concerned with whether the existence of God could be rationally established, especially since at that time I would have counted myself a Christian believer: not that I had been brought up this way, but studying the Bible under the enthusiastic Mr. Marsh had led me to these beliefs. And once you believe in God, with all that this implies, you become curious about the intellectual foundations of the belief. Is it just a matter of blind faith or can God’s existence be proven? And asking this question quickly leads to the whole issue of what a justification is anyway, as well as to questions about knowledge, certainty, free will, and the origin of the universe. God may or may not be a philosopher, but he is certainly responsible for a lot of philosophy.

And here is where my very first philosophical epiphany occurred. I was sitting in my cold, unheated bedroom in Blackpool, my drums in the corner, quietly reading a book about arguments for the existence of God (I forget now what book it was). I came across something called the “ontological argument,” invented by Saint Anselm of Canterbury in the Middle Ages. I found the argument hard to follow but absolutely riveting (a lot of philosophy is like that). I kept reading the words over and over again, trying to absorb their meaning, as my feet grew colder. The sensation was of my mind being seized by abstract reason and carried willy-nilly by the power of logic. The ontological argument goes like this: God is by definition the most perfect being of which you can conceive. He combines all the perfections in one entity—absolutely good, perfectly wise, infinitely powerful. This is just what we mean by the word “God,” and apparently we can mean this whether or not God actually exists. As Anselm put it, God is defined as the being “than whom no greater can be conceived.” That is, if God exists, then by definition he is the sum of all perfections—just as, if a unicorn were to exist it would have a single horn. The question put by someone who doubts God’s existence is whether there exists anything inreality answering to this definition. Yes, God would be the most perfect existing being if he existed: but does he? After all, I can define a word “Gad” to mean “the person who can jump bare-footed higher than thirty feet in the air with the greatest of ease,” but that doesn’t tell us that Gad really exists—and in fact there is no such person as Gad. The question of God’s existence is analogous, it might be thought; we know the definition of the word “God,” but what we don’t know is whether there is anything in reality that answers to this definition. An agnostic who doubts God’s existence surely knows perfectly well what the word “God” means—just as we all know what “unicorn” means. So at least it might be thought that atheism is a logically consistent position; it’s not like claiming that triangles don’t have three sides, which is false by definition. The question of God’s existence is a question of fact, not a question of mere definition.

But, Anselm argues, this is wrong: Atheism is not a logically consistent position after all. Why? Because we are forgetting that God is defined as the most perfect conceivable being in every respect—and is it not better to exist than not to exist? If God does not exist, then he lacks the attribute of existence; but then, isn’t he less perfect than a similar being who has this attribute? Take two beings who are alike in their perfections, except that one exists and the other doesn’t exist: Doesn’t the existent being have more perfections than the nonexistent being, since he at least exists? Not to exist is a kind of failure, a lack, but God is defined as the being who fails at nothing, who lacks no positive quality, who gets everything right, who has it all. Such a being has to exist or else he fails to have every positive quality. So the existence of God does follow from the definition of God, unlike with my case of Gad, the nonexistent high jumper. Once you know what the word “God” means you thereby know that God exists, since what we mean by God is just the most perfect being, and existence is one of the perfections. Existence is an attribute that augments or increases an entity’s degree of perfection, so the most perfect conceivable being must have this attribute.

Consider the idea of the most powerful conceivable entity: Doesn’t such an entity have to exist, for the simple reason that not existing is a drastic reduction in how powerful an entity is? To put the argument in the terse classical form in which I first encountered it: God is defined as the being than whom none greater can be conceived; but existence is an attribute that contributes to greatness; therefore God exists. God thus exists by virtue of the meaning of words, as a kind of conceptual necessity; so it is not logically coherent to doubt his existence, as if this could be a separate matter from what we mean by the word “God.” The existence of God is logically necessary, a matter of pure definition, not a matter of contingent fact. The case of God is therefore quite unlike the case of the unicorn, whose definition does not imply its existence.

Now, this is a stunning piece of reasoning. It purports to establish by rigorous logical argument that the existence of God cannot be sensibly denied. No need to appeal to leaps of faith or speculations about how the world began or the occurrence of miracles: We get the existence of God for free, as a matter of pure reason. To someone like me, at age eighteen, struggling with the question of God’s existence, this seemed like a bolt from the blue. God’s existence turns out to be as solid as the fact that four is the next whole number after three. But, as I studied the argument, rereading it, trying to probe its workings (my feet getting colder all the time), I dimly felt that somehow the reasoning was too clever by half, that it made the question of God’s existence too easy, that it rendered faith irrelevant. So, while I was impressed with the argument, and for a while obsessed with it, it left me with a disturbed feeling. A lot of philosophy is like that: gripping, momentous, but also worrying, naggingly so.

I think what really shook me up that day was a sense of the power of reason—of how logical thinking can produce big, shocking results. It is not that I still believe that the ontological argument is sound, though I don’t think there is anything obviously wrong with it. But it is a fascinating argument, simple yet intricate, and I am not now at all surprised at the impact it had on my eighteen-year-old self. On that day I knew that I wanted to learn more of this philosophy business. Apart from anything else, the argument was just so damn clever. Imagine how Anselm must have felt on the day that he invented the ontological argument; he must have walked around Canterbury in a daze of excitement and awe for weeks. (There was, unfortunately, no Saint Anselm of Blackpool, whose shrine I might visit.) In fact the argument was largely accepted by the major philosophers who succeeded Anselm, so it counts as one of the most influential philosophical arguments in history. What also impressed me on that wintry day in Blackpool was the fact that my mind could be put in contact with the minds of great thinkers from the past, and taken away from the humdrum vulgarities of the seaside town in which I happened to live. That peculiarly transporting quality of philosophy has always stayed with me, and I feel it even now as I type these words (also in a none-too-glamorous seaside town: Mastic Beach, Long Island). Philosophy can lift you up and take you far away.

At around this time I started reading books by C.E.M. Joad, at Mr. Marsh’s suggestion. Joad wrote accessible philosophy books for the general public and used to speak regularly on BBC radio in the 1950s. He was not himself an original philosopher but derived most of his ideas from Bertrand Russell, about whom more later. (Russell was once asked to write a laudatory preface for a book of Joad’s and testily replied “Modesty forbids.”) Joad’s passion was perception, and he was a devotee of the “argument from illusion.” The question at issue is whether we really see physical objects out there in space or just subjective items in our own minds. Normally, we suppose that we see physical objects all the time, and touch them too: We see trains and boats and planes, and we touch doorknobs, cups, and bodies. What could be more obvious and commonsensical? But for centuries philosophers were convinced that this was just a vulgar error, a mere manner of speaking that concealed the truth about perception. What we really perceive are elements of our own minds—variously called sense-data, impressions, experiences, representations. Perception is not a faculty that unlocks the ways of the physical world outside of our minds; rather, it is confined to a purely inner array of mental items. The only reality we ever literally perceive is a virtual reality, a shadow world of fleeting sensations. Hence the philosophers’ description of the ordinary view of perception as “naive realism”: We no more really perceive physical objects than the sun really rises or the earth is really flat—these are just naive illusions. What we perceive is inside us, not outside, as we naively think.

Why would anyone reject common sense in that way? Here is the standard argument, propounded with great force and clarity by Joad, following a long tradition. Consider illusions and hallucinations, such as seeing a straight stick look bent in water, or imagining pink rats while under the influence of LSD. The stick looks bent in just the way a really bent stick would look, and the pink rats look just the way real pink rats would look, if there were any. Illusion is precisely a mimicking of reality, which is why it can take you in. So there is no subjective difference between illusory perception and real or “veridical” perception: The world looks a certain way to you, and this looking can be illusory or veridical, depending upon whether the world is really the way it looks. From a subjective point of view, there is no distinction between Macbeth’s hallucinated dagger and a real dagger—which is why illusions can be as scary as real things. But now, in the hallucinatory case, you don’t see any real physical object— there is no object in the external world that answers to your experience. Yet you surely experience something, your mind is not a blank—things do look a certain way to you. So in this case you must be seeing something other than a physical object, and this something must be mental in nature. Call this something a “sense-datum”: so you can be said to see sense-data of bent sticks, pink rats, and daggers, even when you really see none of these physical things . You perceive the subjective appearances of things, not things themselves, since they aren’t there to be perceived. What you are aware of in a case of illusion or hallucination are nonphysical internal sense-data, not physical objects. But now, as we noted earlier, there is no subjective difference between the illusory case and the veridical case: Things look the same in both cases; your experience is the same; you can’t tell the difference. Doesn’t this mean that you must be aware of sense-data in the ordinary veridical case too? When you “see” a real dagger you see a sense-datum of a dagger; it is just that there is an actual dagger there that matches your directly experienced daggerlike sense-datum. So what you immediately perceive is always the sense-datum, not the real thing. Therefore you do not directly see physical objects at all but only their representatives in the shape of mental sense-data. It is like trying to meet the head of state and only getting as far as her emissaries. Your direct awareness stops at the level of sense-data and does not reach out and catch hold of actual physical objects. Maybe we can say that you indirectly perceive physical objects, as when you see only reflections in a mirror or somebody’s footprints in the snow. But they are not what is immediately before your mind when you have a visual experience. What is immediately before your mind is your mind itself—its current sensory contents.

This is an alarming result. It restricts your awareness to your own subjective self, cutting you off from the world of physical objects with which you naively thought yourself to be in contact. Consciousness acquaints you only with its own contents, a play of images upon a mental screen. When I first encountered this argument I would stare at the furniture around me and try to force my mind to become aware of it, to penetrate the veil of sense-data; but I had the stifling feeling that I was only gazing harder at what was inside me—my own subjective world, not the common public world I had believed in up until then. There was at best a correspondence between the subjective world I was experiencing and the physical world beyond, but there was no way I could step out of my subjective world to check that the correspondence really held—since I had no direct access to the physical objects that supposedly corresponded to my sense-data. In a way it was like discovering myself to be blind: I couldn’t see physical objects! Nor could I touch them, taste them, or smell them. My world had shrunk down to my own conscious self. I was, I suppose, as self-absorbed as many other adolescents, but this was too much. I had lost the world, or rather I had never had it to start with.

And from there it only got worse. If we never perceive physical objects, how do we know they are really there? Not by perception, certainly. Normally, you think you can tell what is in a room by going to have a look. But not so: All you determine that way is what sense-data you have after having the sense-data of walking to the room; the objects remain maddeningly out of reach. It is just a short step from this to full-blown industrial-strength Cartesian skepticism: All you really know to exist are your own subjective states and not the objects supposedly out there in the external physical world. Indeed, what right do you have to believe that there even is an external physical world? Might it not be the case that your sense-data don’t correspond to anything external at all? Might not everything be a dream? Descartes asked us to consider an evil demon who produced sense-data in our minds but made sure that nothing ever corresponded to them, so that the entire course of our sensory experience is one long delusion. How can we rule out this possibility? Not merely by appeal to our sense-data, since they would be the same, whether caused by physical objects or by the evil demon. How do you even know that you have a body? How indeed do you know that you didn’t come into existence five seconds ago equipped with an extensive range of pseudo-memories? Knowledge seems to shrink down to the inner states of a momentary self.

The updated version of Descartes’s evil demon is the “brain in a vat” scenario. Here we suppose that our brains have been removed from our heads by alien scientists with highly advanced brain technology. The scientists put our brains in nutrient vats in nice little cubicles, each with our name on. Then they hook the brains up to a machine that sends electrical inputs into our sensory nerves, which result in sense-data: We experience familiar things but always by means of these electrical stimulations. Thus it feels as if you are in a bar in New York talk...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One - First Stirrings
• Chapter Two - From Psychology to Philosophy
• Chapter Three - Logic and Language
• Chapter Four - Mind and Reality
• Chapter Five - Belief, Desire, and Wittgenstein
• Chapter Six - Consciousness and Cognition
• Chapter Seven - Metaphilosophy and Fiction
• Chapter Eight - Evil, Beauty, and Logic
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Praise for Colin McGinn
• Also by Colin Mcginn
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher