Bryan Magee Quotes

Ignorance is ignorance, not a licence to believe what we like.

Like the character Moliere who discovered to his astonishment that he had been speaking prose all his life, I discovered to my astonishment that I had been immersed in philosophical problems all my life. And I had been drawn into the same problems as great philosophers by the same felt need to make sense of the world...The chief difference between me and them, of course, was that whereas they had something to offer by way of solutions to the problems, I had failed even to formulate very rich or sophistocated versions of the problems, let alone work my way through to defensible solutions for them. In consequence I fell on their work like a starving man on food, and it has done a geat deal to nourish and sustain me ever since.

Even if it could be shown that all explanations can be reduced ultimately to those of science, and even if all the reductions were then to be carried out, the mystery of the world as such would be as great at the end of the process as it had been at the beginning.

Uniquely specific, direct, non-linguistic experience is the element in which we live, and it is radically different from conceptual thinking, which can go on only in universals. This is why works of art, embodying as they do unique particulars and insights that cannot be conveyed in words, and cannot be mirrored in conceptual thought, have their roots in lived life and also cannot be translated [into words]. It is why, if someone responds to art predominantly with his intellect, he has already misunderstood it.

Although it may be disconcerting to find that something you have believed is mistaken, it is at the same time thrilling, because it opens up new worlds of re-evaluation and fresh thinking, new understanding and insight.

I had a pupil who turned in a couple of well-crafted essays on Descartes, subjecting "cogito ergo sum" to effective and damaging criticism...This was the sort of thing the best students did, and it was thought to be Oxford intellectual training at its most sophistocated. But I said to him, "If all the criticisms you've made of Descartes are valid-- and on the whole I think they are-- why are we spending our time here now discussing him? Why have you just devoted a fortnight of your life to reading his main works and writing two essays about them? ...More to the point: if all these things are wrong with his ideas--and I think they are-- why is his name known to every educated person in the Western world today, three and a half centuries after his death? ...[text].. The pupil saw my point straight away but was at a loss to answer...[text].. Along such lines as these I made it a conscious principle of my teaching, whatever the subject, to get the pupil first of all to do the necessary learning, and the detailed work of analysis and criticism, and then to raise "Yes, but what is the point of all this-- why are we doing it?" questions. And students almost invariably found that it was only when that stage was reached that the really exciting interest and importantance of what it was they were doing opened up before their eyes.

To take, for example, my own death: what I consider most likely to be true is that death will be the complete and utter end of my existence, with no successor existence of any kind that can be related to me as I now am. And if that is not the case, the next most likely scenario, it seems to me, is something along the lines indicated by Schopenhauer. But neither of these is what I most want. What I want to be true is that I have an individual, innermost self, a soul, which is the real me and which survives my death. That too could be true. But alas, I do not believe it.

Something else I learnt...is respect for reality as against all the many alternatives to it--conventional assumptions, fashionable ways of looking at things, ideologies, social or personal aspirations, fears, intentions, wishful thinking, religious claims, and the rest...

Most people can’t cope with knowing more than they ask.

Analytic philosophy is an intellectual pastime for people who are clever but do not want to think seriously.

It follows from Schopenhauer’s analysis that evert genuine work of art must have its origin in direct perception; that is to say it does not originate in concepts, and concepts are not what it communicates. This is what more than anything else differentiates good art from bad, or more accurately authentic from inauthentic art. The latter often originates in a desire on the part of the artist to meet some demand external to himself – to win approval, say, or be in the fashion, or supply a market – or else to put over a message of some sort. Such an artist starts by trying to thin what it would be a good idea to do – in other words, the starting point of the process for him is something that exists in terms of concepts. The inevitable result is dead art, of whatever kind, whether imitative, academic, commercial, didactic or fashion-conscious. It may be successful in its day because it meets the demands of its day, but once that day is over it has no inner life of its own with which to outlive it.

Human knowledge as it actually is and can only ever be is not a revelation of something objectively and timelessly true, an assured grasp of something existing 'out there' independently of ourselves. It is what we have the best grounds at any given time for believing. Because this is what it is, it does indeed provide the best possible basis for our suppositions and actions. But it always remains our belief, our, conjecture, our hypothesis, our theory; and as such, fallible - and also, as such, a creation of the human mind.

Men presumably always have looked at flowers and been moved by their beauty and their smell: but only since the last century has it been possible to take a flower in your hand and know that you have between your fingers a complex association of organic compounds containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and a great many other elements, in a complex structure of cells, all of which have evolved from a single cell; and to know something of the internal structure of these cells, and the processes by which they evolved, and the genetic process by which this flower was begun, and will produce other flowers; to know in detail how the light from it is reflected to your eye; and to know the details of those workings of your eye, and your nose, and your neurophysiological system, which enable you to see and smell and touch the flower. These inexhaustible and almost incredible realities which are all around us and within us are recent discoveries which are still being explored, while similar new discoveries continue to be made; and we have before us an endless vista of such new possibilities stretching into the future, all of it beyond man’s wildest dreams until almost the age we ourselves are living in. Popper’s ever present and vivid sense of this, and of the fact that every discovering opens up new problems for us, informs his theoretical methodology. He knows that our ignorance grows with our knowledge, and that we shall therefore always have more questions than answers.

As the author Bryan Magee, drawing on the work of Karl Popper, put it: No one can possibly give us more service than by showing us what is wrong with what we think or do; and the bigger the fault, the bigger the improvement made possible by its revelation. The man who welcomes and acts on criticism will prize it almost above friendship: the man who fights it out of concern to maintain his position is clinging to non growth. Anything like a widespread changeover in our society toward Popperian attitudes to criticism would constitute a revolution in social and interpersonal relationships—not to mention organizational practice.12

There is a world of difference between being lost in the daylight and being lost in the dark.

If it could be revealed to me for certain that life is meaningless, and that my lot when I die will be timeless oblivion, and I were then asked: "Knowing these things, would you, if given the choice, still choose to have been born?”, my answer would be a shouted "Yes!” I have loved living. Even if the worst-case scenario is the true one, what I have had has been infinitely better than nothing. In spite of what has been wrong with my life, and in spite of what has been wrong with me, I am inexpressibly grateful to have lived. It is terrible and terrifying to have to die, but even the prospect of eternal annihilation is a price worth paying for being alive.

From facts such as that life and consciousness are incomprehensible, and that values in art and morals are rooted outside the empirical world, it does not follow that I and my readers have immortal souls, or that there is a God who created the world. These things are not connected logically. When religious people are forced to admit this they say: “God moves in a mysterious way.” What kind of explanation is that? As Wittgenstein said, if the existence of the world we know is so miraculous that we feel a need to posit the existence of God to explain it, then the existence of God is even more miraculous, and how do we explain that? If one presses religious people for real explanations, explanations that really do explain, they retreat into protestations of how mysterious everything is, how far beyond human understanding. But we know that already. That is where we ourselves are coming from. What they are doing is using the ignorance we all share as a reason, so-called, for making unconnected assertions for which they can provide no foundations. And the worst of it is that these so-called explanations would not explain even if they were true, but would leave us shrouded in an even bigger mystery than before.

Both religious and non-religious persons need to understand that a conception of reality as existing beyond the limits of apprehensibility is entirely rational.

When religious people say to me, as they do: “Why won’t you accept our calling the noumenal ‘God’?” my reply is: “Because you have no grounds for doing so. To do that implies a characterisation of it, and insinuates an attitude towards it. You have no justification for the implying, or the insinuating, or the characterisation. You are allowing yourself to think you are in a position you are not in—and then proceeding from there.” Religious discourse has this general characteristic. It is a form of unjustified evasion, a failure to face up to the reality of ignorance as our natural and inevitable starting-point. Anyone who sets off in honest and serious pursuit of truth needs to know that in doing that he is leaving religion behind. Unless he is prepared to do that, and to acknowledge to himself that he has, he will not even have set out on the journey—nor can he, because the position he is in is not an honest and genuine starting-point. Like a false premise in an argument, it will undermine the legitimacy of everything that follows.

So although it is an extraordinary and consequential truth that we know ourselves from inside, it is an even more consequential truth that what we know is largely not material. I am not directly aware of my brain as a material object, nor of my skeleton, heart, stomach, lungs, kidneys, intestines, and all the other material things that go to make up me. Not even by an act of will can I make myself aware of most of them. Far from knowing them well, I do not know some of them at all, and have little idea how they function. I scarcely know where some of them are, still less what they look like. I am fairly sure I would be startled by the appearance of many of them, and would find the sight of them alarming, if not disgusting. A lot of people—children obviously, but many adults too—have little idea of the organs that go to make them up. In fact, the truth is that this is not what human beings think of themselves as being. I have been living in or with my body for more than eight decades now, but it has never occurred to me to think of myself as it. I own it and am in it, as a driver owns and is in a car; and in the same way what happens to it can kill me or injure me. It exerts all sorts of influences on my life, from the important to the trivial. But I am not it. At least, I have never supposed or imagined that I am.

unshakeable convictions are not knowledge.

I do find, however, that my fear of death decreases as the amount and quality of the life I would lose by it decreases. When I was younger, life was a feast, and I treated it as if I were a gourmet making his way from one banquet to another. In those circumstances the prospect of having this superabundance torn away induced panic. But now, in my eighties, life is no longer a cornucopia but something altogether more modest. The prospect of its being taken away is nothing like as distressing. When I was young, death meant the loss of a whole future, not only of my hopes, dreams and ambitions but also the actual life in all its abundance that I did in fact live in the decades ahead of me. Now there are no such decades. I have consumed them. For better and worse I have lived my life. By good fortune it has been a long one, containing a decent share of chances and opportunities, so I have little to complain about. Whether I made the best of it was up to me. If I did not, it was my fault. In the very living of that life the alternative confronting me has changed from that between death and an overflowingly full life to that between death and advanced old age. There is nothing like the same contrast. I am not claiming that I contemplate death with equanimity now—I do not. But there is no longer the sharp edge to my fear of it that there once was. This may seem paradoxical, given that I am so much nearer to it. But so it is.