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page 2 of On
Becoming A Philosopher
When I returned to England
as a teenager it was to a place intensely familiar
and luminous because whenever in my reading I
was not either in the ancient world or somewhere
else in history, I was there – and especially
in London. Everywhere one goes in London, even
on ordinary daily business, one encounters its
past and its literature – retracing Henry
James's first journeys through the crowded streets
of what was in his day the largest and most astonishing
city in the world, seeing Dickens's Thames slide
between its oily banks, and Thackeray's Becky
tripping down Park Lane smiling to herself. In
this spirit my imagination heard the roar from
Bankside, where pennants fluttered above the Bear-garden
and the theatres, and saw crowds milling under
the jewelled lanterns of Vauxhall Gardens, where
fashion and impropriety mingled. Deptford on the
map seemed to me a horrifying name, because Marlowe
was stabbed there. On the steps of St Paul's I
thought of Leigh Hunt's description of the old
cathedral, before the fire, when it was an open
highway through which people rode their horses,
in whose aisles and side-chapels prostitutes solicited
and merchants met to broker stocks, and where
friends called to one another above the sound
of matins being said or vespers sung. London is
richly overlaid by all that has happened in it
and been written about it. There is a character
in Proust who is made to play in the Champs Elysees
as a boy, and hated it; he later wished he had
been able to read about it first, so that he could
relish its ghosts and meanings. Luckily for me
I came prepared just so for London.
It seemed entirely appropriate
to me later, as an undergraduate visiting London
at every opportunity, to spend afternoons in the
National Gallery and evenings in the theatre (every
night if it could be afforded – and even
when not) because that is what my companions –
my friends on the printed page under the sunlit
window in Africa, such as Hazlitt, Pater, and
Wilde – intimated was the natural way of
relishing life.
But it was not just the
relish that mattered, for everything offered by
art, theatre and books seemed to me rich grist
for the philosophical mill, prompting questions,
suggesting answers for debate and evaluation,
throwing light on unexpected angles and surprising
corners of the perennial problems of life and
mind. An education as a philosopher involves studying
the writings of the great dead, which enables
one to advance to engagement with the technical
and often abstruse debates of contemporary philosophy.
But philosophical education requires more than
this too, for in order to do justice to the question
of how these debates relate to the world of lived
experience – of how gnosis connects with
praxis – a wide interest in history, culture
and science becomes essential. The reason is well
put by Miguel de Unamuno. "If a philosopher
is not a man," he wrote, "he is anything
but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and
a pedant is a caricature of a man."
At Oxford I had the good
fortune to be taught by A. J. Ayer, a gifted and
lively teacher, and P. F. Strawson, one of the
centuryıs leading philosophical minds. There were
other accomplished philosophers there whose lectures
and classes I attended, but I benefited most from
personal intercourse with these two. And when
in my own turn I became a lecturer in philosophy,
first at St Anne's College, Oxford and then at
Birkbeck College, London, I appreciated the force
of the saying "docendo disco" –
by teaching I learn – for the task of helping
others grasp the point in philosophical debates
has the salutary consequence of clarifying them
for oneself.
Socrates liked to tease
his interlocutors by saying that the only thing
he knew was that he knew nothing. There is a deep
insight in this, for the one thing that is more
dangerous than true ignorance is the illusion
of knowledge and understanding. Such illusion
abounds, and one of the first tasks of philosophy
– as wonderfully demonstrated by Socrates
in Plato's "Meno" – is to explore
our claims to know things about ourselves and
the world, and to expose them if they are false
or muddled. It does so by beginning with the questions
we ask, to ensure that we understand what we are
asking; and even when answers remain elusive,
we at least grasp what it is that we do not know.
This in itself is a huge gain. One of the most
valuable things philosophy has given me is an
appreciation of this fact.
Another is the permission
to keep alive and fresh the child's curiosity
which first prompted me to take Plato's "Charmides"
from the library shelf. "Philosophy begins
in wonder," Alfred North Whitehead said,
"and when philosophic thought has done its
best, the wonder remains." Another thing
Socrates could have said that he knew, because
all students of philosophy know it, is that the
wonder arrived at by philosophy is an enriched
and insightful wonder, and is one of the most
exalted possessions of the human spirit.
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