An autobiographical sojourn of a philosopher to explain his moorings in philosophy is fraught with its intrinsic perils - that of becoming a self-indulgent, subjective rambling of personal notions and prejudices. For those brought up on Bertrand Russel's "History of Philosophy" or Will Durant's "The Story of "Philosophy" or, for that matter, T.Z. Lavine's "From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest", this volume is sure to come as a let-down.
But then, Bryan Magee does not make such reflective pretensions. He does not make tall promises of prattling about the lives and convictions of the world's greatest philosophers from Socrates and Plato to Francis Bacon and Baruch Spinoza to Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre. In fact, the biographies are allowed to remain in the previous renderings of the histories and stories of philosophy by the greats. Magee leaves the discourses to others, and talks of nothing but philosophy. In doing so, he summarises key elements and essentials of Western metaphysics and epistemology.
The autobiography is only the form, and not the content in itself. Yes, he does take the reader on a journey through 2,000 years of enquiries into existence and reality, and in the bargain this excursion takes the silhouette of his memoirs. He retells the germination of philosophical queries in his consciousness as a tender five-year-old, and divulges his gradual, but slow realisation that his interests were essentially philosophical in character. There are no lurid or morbid confessions here. Nor are there sado-masochistic renditions of any failure to grapple with philosophical issues and problems.
For someone who can take credit for popularising the subject of philosophy in Great Britain considerably, Magee presents expositions of philosophers he studied and read about or had the chance to meet and interact with. He has a lot to say about them and he does not mince words in the course. His is an intellectual derision of the "Oxford philosophers," who, he contends, decided that philosophy was not about the nature of existence but about the nature of language, yet refused to give any consideration to fiction. Karl Popper, a personal acquaintance, is described as a man who persevered in philosophy's true duties in the face of widespread academic triviality.
Magee is brutally honest in admitting that he, like everyone does, did have philosophical problems. He is candid about these dilemmas as also the dichotomies that exist in the philosophical world. He recognises this inherent cleft and explains that his concerns - that of reality and existence - have always been ideas in themselves and not the propping up of the status quo burdened by its own weight in the subject called philosophy. He acknowledges that at times of philosophical crises, he did fall back on the ideas and opinions of others, Schopenhauer, for instance.
Magee's favourites are Immanuel Kant, for articulating so persuasively how much conceptions influence perceptions; Arthur Schopenhauer, for his philosophy of art; Bertrand Russel, for his logic; and Karl Popper, for his science. Still enough, he recommends a reading list and leaves the reader the liberty not to accept his own interpretations at face value but assess philosophers and their beliefs by reading the original texts. Few philosophers can be so upright so as to even suggest that it is better to go through the elementary works than to go by the critiques scrawled by subsequent philosophers. There is, after all, no dearth of either such men or such omnipresent books.
It is always fascinating to know what it takes for a philosopher to be one. This thinker does not offer solutions and answers. He raises questions. This book is about amateur philosophers and not the professional or academic variety. Magee, who himself studied academic philosophy at Oxford and Yale, goes on to prove that one does not need an academic degree to be one.
Review: Confessions of a Philosopher
