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Philosophising on the great philosophers
Who was very rarely stable ... '
KANT is virtually unreadable. My father's copy of The Critique of Pure Reason has his pencil corrections from the original German. Intimidating or what? The original German is also virtually unreadable – or so the Germans tell us. Bandwormsätze is how they describe it – tape-worm sentences.
Back in a day (it wasn't the day, it was just a day) I published an essay, The Philosopher's Opera (November 11, 2019) in The National. It was all about a ballad opera taking the piss out of David Hume. Eric Idle included him also in his famous Monty Python Australian Philosophers' Song:
'David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel'
Hegel (Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis) was a big deal when my father graduated at Trinity College Dublin with a First in Philosophy and French. Only one other student was studying the same combination, Samuel Beckett.
My father was awarded a gold medal. Sam's First was in Modern Languages, for which he, too, won a gold medal (real gold, in those days, I believe). Asked about his time, sharing classes with Beckett, my father's response was not only typical of himself but was thoroughly Beckettean: 'We shared courses for two years, during which time we exchanged not one word.'
John Purser's father Sean (JWR) Purser studied at Trinity College Dublin with Samuel Beckett
My father went on to study in Germany, attending the great philosopher Martin Heidegger's lectures.
'Heidegger, Heidegger
was a boozy beggar
who could think you under the table'
My father was not impressed by his thinking and summed up the lectures by quoting Heidegger's most frequently used word in summation – Vielleicht, meaning 'maybe'. Between the wars was not a good time to be in Germany and my father's recollections were more sour than anything else – and he was anything but a sour man.
My father was a poet and philosopher and lectured on English Literature at the University of Glasgow which published his book on aesthetics, Art and Truth.
The university's publishing branch is essentially moribund now, which is a disgrace.
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His long poem, The Soliloquists, is a dialogue between a Philosopher, a Sceptic, and a Poet. It's not everybody's bedtime reading, but I think highly of it, chiefly because the Poet wins hands down. EM Forster wrote of it and others of my father's poems: 'I like them because they move me and keep hitting my mark.
'I too get tempted by easy despondency, and have watched nature for a sign (the white bird on the sea) and have been rebuked, and I share your poet's preferences for the minute and the temporary over the logical and – I would add – the eternal.'
The Irish writer James Stephens wrote: 'I think it is a very remarkable piece of work & I hope to everything that it quickly finds a publisher.'
It did. The Fortune Press, which published people such as TS Eliot, Philip Larkin and Dylan Thomas.
This is how The Soliloquists ends:
This 'I' that's now rejected by
the 'I'
Of others will absorb them
and will sprawl
Like some wild plant through the far-distant sky;
And it will peer into the hidden lore
Of little things, and will find pleasure more
In a fly's wing than now in the Great All.
I love that. The sharing of identity becomes universal but has no need to make anything of it. It is the little things, the ones that may go unnoticed, even unloved, that will have a chance of encountering Truth herself.
No wonder my father didn't care for Beckett and his Descartian existentialist angst.
I also love Beckett as a writer, but as a philosopher I regard him as sadly deluded, especially as he understood the basic problem.
He insisted on identity, of proving that you were you, yet he wrote an extraordinary play called Not I. The title says it all. It is an attempt to escape from 'I think therefore I am'. Idle's satire is philosophically as close to establishing the reality of existence as is its original ...
'Rene Descartes was
a drunken fart
'I drink therefore I am'.'
The Gaelic languages don't have a word for 'I'. Neither does Chinese. This means that any assertion of one's self depends upon a verb, upon being part of an action. Everyone is objective not subjective. It's a good start. We hear far too much of 'I'. Plotinus didn't care for it to such an extent that he refused to sit for a portrait. His portraits are the imaginations of others.
A homage to Beckett and Plotinus's disdain for the word 'I' Apart from my father, the first philosopher I ever met was William Maclagan (1903-72) who lived in one of the houses in Professors' Square, across from the University Chapel.
In those days professors lived in Professors' Square and their children ran about the place giving that noble seat of learning a much-needed injection of real life.
Maclagan was Professor of Moral Philosophy, a good friend of my father's, and his exuberant wife Katherine of my mother's, and we played with their children.
Maclagan was succeeded by Robin Downie (1933-2023), who was a neighbour and set some of my father's poems to music. The place was stiff with philosophers, so it is small wonder that in mid-life I studied Moral Philosophy with Downie.
In the old days Moral Philosophy and Logic were separate subjects. I preferred Logic. It taught us how to pick apart the evasions and distortions of politicians and preachers.
The redoubtable Eva Schaper (Prelude to Aesthetics) was among our teachers, sorely missed, and Ephraim Borowski who has represented the Scottish Jewish community and has, no doubt, many social, moral and philosophical troubles to deal with these days.
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"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'. Thus saith the book of Exodus – but it does not say 'an arm for an eye and a stomach for an arm, and a family for a stomach, and a people for a family'. For that you have to search in our own times and you know where to look.
With Downie, we had to follow his book Roles and Values, which always seemed to me more moral than philosophical.
Downie went on to do important work in medical ethics and palliative care. I do hope his ghost gives me the freedom to end it all comfortably, unbothered by officious medical intervention. My favourite philosopher, Plotinus, will have none of that. Suicide in any shape or form is anathema to him. Socrates took his own life, so Plotinus could hardly avoid the subject, but he won't yield a millimetre. Even an insane suicide is a transgression. It's the one time I really fall out with him.
'But if a man feel himself to be losing his reason? . . . if it should occur, it must be classed with the inevitable, to be welcome at the bidding of the fact though not for its own sake. To call upon drugs to the release of the Soul seems a strange way of assisting its purposes.' (Enead I.9).
I know of a senior consultant in her nineties who had leukaemia and had no wish to undergo the officious medical intervention of her colleagues. But of course she had taken the Hippocratic Oath and the only moral option she could see open to her was to starve herself to death.
Confused? I am. The Gazans have not had that choice.
So it is for other reasons that Plotinus is my favourite philosopher, and chiefly because of Stephen MacKenna's incredibly beautiful translation.
A drawing by Leo Meltzner of Stephen MacKenna, who translated Plotinus's Enneads This is philosophical English at its very best. There isn't anyone else I'd put even close. When MacKenna came across the Eneads, he wrote that Plotinus was 'really worth a life'. MacKenna then gave that life. Here is his translation of Plotinus on the subject of Beauty (Enead I.6.4). You think philosophy at its visionary heights lacks a sense of the visceral human instincts? Read this:
'Such vision is for those only who see with the Soul's sight – and at the vision, they will rejoice, and awe will fall upon them and a trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now they are moving in the realm of Truth.
'This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this the Souls feel for it, every Soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love - just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.' (Eneads I.6.4).
The keener wound? More than one writer has described the beauty of Scotland as a wound which cannot heal. I will leave it to you to ponder the thought in relation to Love.
Is Truth then 'a delicious trouble'? A major ambition of Philosophy is to discover the Truth. What this might be in itself is enough to keep philosophers in employment for millennia.
One thing for sure, the situation in Gaza and the Israeli government's explanations for it are not the Truth. What has been going on is Evil. What can we as mere readers do in the face of Evil?
About the only course open to us beyond naming it, is to draw attention to Good. To recognise Evil but insist that it is not Absolute.
Plotinus, writing in the third century AD, offers hope:
'Evil is not alone: by virtue of the nature of Good, the power of Good, it is not Evil only: it appears, necessarily, bound around with bonds of Beauty, like some captive bound in fetters of gold; and beneath these it is hidden so that, while it must exist, it may not be seen by the gods, and that men need not always have evil before their eyes, but that when it comes before them they may still be not destitute of Images of the Good and Beautiful for their Remembrance.' (Eneads I,8,15).
Images of the Good and Beautiful for our Remembrance. Hold on to them. They are precious and if you have been reading Alan Riach's essays you know where to find them.
But you know also that they are all about you and they too are Truth. The little things.
Now in my old age, I see them daily in the forbearance of others, or in the gesture of someone who, as I struggle to don my coat, helps me on with it behind my back and by the time I have turned to thank them they have vanished into the crowd.
Human empathy. Spread it about. That much we can do.
