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Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper (Modern Library Paperbacks)

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REVIEW: I've heard it said that "life's a journey, not a destination." This is applicable to this book and its apply named subtitle "A Journey Through Western Philosophy." It follows the author from his philosophical thinking in childhood, through his formal schooling in the subject, and on to his personal relationships with famous philosophers and his advanced study, thinking and writing about the subject. The book is not a destination in that its purpose is not to espouse a particular philosophy or theory, although he does make his own opinions quite clear (e.g. about what is good philosophy and what is not). Even though the book has a few weaknesses, it is highly interesting and easy to read. Especially useful to those who are beginning their own "journey" into philosophy.

This book is also typical of a number of others that I like in that it is hard to categorize. It is not quite: an autobiography, or a book on philosophy, or a biography of other philosophers. It is in some ways all of these and even includes a chapter that is almost a "how-to" on writing a novel. The advanced philosophy reader may not gain much from Magee's book, but an amateur or beginning reader like myself should find it very worthwhile. It helped me understand some of the major schools or trends in philosophy and helped me create a reading program for further study (e.g. which authors to start with and which to avoid for a while). I also found it to be a good book to read after Magee's other book "The Story of Philosophy" which started my interest in the subject. I also highly recommend that as an introduction.

STRENGTHS: For the most part, just the right breadth and depth for the non-advanced philosophy reader. The personal accounts of Magee's interactions with philosophers such as Popper and Russell are very interesting and hard to find anywhere else. The author has done a very good job at making his personal journey broadly interesting to the reader.

WEAKNESSES: For my interests, Magee spends too much time rejecting certain types of philosophy (e.g. linguistic). His arguments are convincing, but the total amount of ink spent on it is too much and he sounds almost defensive at times (perhaps at not rejecting it sooner?).

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK: Probably most useful to the non-advanced philosophy reader who is beginning his/her own "journey".

ALSO CONSIDER: "The Story of Philosophy" also by Magee

Confessions can be of two kinds: confessions of faith and confessions of failure. Bryan Magee's vividly written intellectual autobiography has the character of both. His convictions make for exhilarating reading; but his failure to find in philosophy a reliable answer to his deepest concerns casts a shadow over the book, which darkens in the last chapter to a tormented despondency.

Magee's basic conviction is that philosophy is hugely important, in that it deals - or should deal - with all our ultimate questions about what the world, and therefore our existence in this world, is really like. His most trenchant attacks are on the Logical Positivists who dominated the Oxford scene at the time when he was an undergraduate there, and for many years afterwards. They ruled out as "non-philosophical" any discussion which was carried on in language that did not meet their narrow criteria of meaningfulness. The Linguistic Philosophers, who gradually took over from the Logical Positivists, were even less concerned with the truth or verifiability of a proposition. Instead, they thought that the principal task of philosophy was to elucidate the way words were used in practice, by examining, for example, the way in which the same word might mean different things to different people. They believed that it was not the business of philosophers to go beyond that and to produce any theories: as Gilbert Ryle defined it, philosophy was merely "talk about talk".

Magee describes these Oxford philosophers as having all the characteristics of a narrow and intolerant sect. They considered that Kant and Schopenhauer, who showed up the limits of empiricism, had so little to say that seemed to them "meaningful" that no acquaintance with them was required of undergraduates. Neither Kant nor Schopenhauer were part of the philosophy courses at Oxford, which jumped straight from Hume to Wittgenstein.

Magee had the strong conviction that the empirical world cannot be all there is: empirical and linguistic theories had nothing to say about those experiences we have, and have very intensely, which are therefore profoundly meaningful, but whose source we can hardly explain adequately: these include the arts (and especially Magee's great love of music) and intimate personal relationships.

After Oxford, Magee took a post-graduate course at Yale. He draws a vivid contrast between the cliquish atmosphere among Oxford philosophers and the broad and generous interest in the whole field of philosophy at Yale. There Magee discovered Kant, and at last he had found a thinker who spoke to his intuition that there was more to philosophy than the dry, narrow and limited fare that was dished out at Oxford. For it was Kant who explained that there must be a reality (the noumenal world) beyond the phenomenal world of which we have experience; that the noumenal world is something we cannot ever know because we are forced to perceive the world in terms of the concepts and categories which we have as human beings and which may not correspond at all with what Reality is actually like.

For Magee, however, the existence of a truth hidden from us has always been for him "almost intolerably frustrating" (a phrase he uses several times in the book); and so it was not until he discovered Schopenhauer that his thirst for a philosophical glimpse of what that Reality might be was somewhat assuaged.

In many ways, Schopenhauer says, we see ourselves phenomenally, as material objects mediated by space and time; but as material objects we are unique in knowing ourselves also from the inside. Because we are part of the noumenal reality, we therefore also experience something of the noumenon, as it were, from the inside, feeling the noumenon at work within us (even though we don't know what it is.) That experience is direct and intuitive; it is not the result of reasoning or of perceptions mediated by our concepts. It is not sensory at all and cannot be adequately described in sensory terms. For example, when we hear music or see a work of art, we can give a sensory description in terms of sound or sight signals we receive; but more significant is the non-sensory experience which transports us into a non-sensory realm, gives us a feeling of at-One-ness with something beyond ourselves, i.e. with the noumenal.

That discovery was for Magee an enormous enrichment of the way he understood himself and could establish in some way a connection between himself and the noumenon. But even Schopenhauer does not fully deal with Magee's "almost intolerable frustrations"; and we now have to turn to the second meaning of "Confessions": the confession of a kind of failure, the cloud that casts a shadow over his entire philosophical enterprise.

Almost throughout his life Magee has been haunted by an existentialist Angst, and he records times when this has plunged him into real terror. In his last chapter he defines the ultimate questions of philosophy as "questions that are of the greatest possible urgency for us, concerning as they do our annihilation or survival." He courageously admits, more than once, that the prospect of extinction terrifies him. He is not religious; he thinks that religious beliefs in any kind of immortality are based on wishful thinking; but he hopes desperately that there might be philosophical grounds for believing in some kind of the survival of the Self. If there is no kind of immortality at all, then life is absurd in the sense in which some of the continental Existentialists used that word. But Magee is not prepared to conclude that life is absurd; he is still hoping that philosophy may break through to produce a convincing argument for some kind of immortality.

Most of the book can be understood and enjoyed by readers who come to it with no previous knowledge of philosophy; the style is crystal clear, expansive and vigorous, except perhaps in the last chapter whose content is also rather harder going.

Finishing this book, I more deeply understood a quote from Bertrand Russell --"There is a communion of philosophers as well as saints and it is largely that that keeps me from feeling lonely." I strongly recommend this excellent book if you just feel like kicking your shoes off in the privacy of your own house, and informally enjoy what Plato termed 'that dear delight' of philosophy with one of the keenest and most erudite philosophical minds of whom I am aware. Magee shares in lucid and at times beautiful prose his life of struggle with the enduring existential problems, and in so doing summons the reader to join him and the countless other great minds who have spent a lifetime in the sustained and systematic attempt to understand the world through Reason. Reading it, I felt a deep, spiritual-like pleasure as if I myself were taking part in a gab session with Magee, Kant, Schopenhauer, Popper, Wittgenstein et. al. Is there a more compelling reason to read than to achieve this sort of communion?

The major theme running throughout is an assault on the unbounded arrogance of Analytic Philosophy. Magee hammers home page after page how the fundamental 'raison d'etre' of Philosophy was betrayed by the contented gameplayers of Oxford and Cambridge during the 20th century. Although not as elevating as other parts of the book (and also conspicuously causing Magee to depart from the dispassionate and wise philosopher/narrator role), nonetheless this theme should find sympathetic ears from all those who think And feel that there are in fact 'real' problems that run deeper than just grammar and language; and moreover who think that it is somehow around the grappling with these problems that we are to ultimately gain our humanity.

Mr. Magee, thank you for sharing your life. You have helped me to better understand myself.

After reading Bryan Magee's The Story of Philosophy I got the itch to read some of his other books. This is the first one I picked up. It is a great read. It tells the story of his own journey through philosophy, how he became interested in philosophy and the intellectual journey he took to get from his childhood curiosity about philosophy to the point he is at today. As one digests each chapter one gets exposed to many of the philosophers who have shaped the content and direction of philosophy over the centuries. Magee not only summarizes the main ideas of the philosophers who have influenced him but also gives his opinion as to where they were right, where they were wrong and how they fit into the total picture. His explanation of how we can still learn from a philosopher even when he is wrong is especially good. I recommend the book highly for anyone who has some background in philosophy.

Bryan Magee, well known for his previous works and popularisations, gives in this account an 'insider's look' into not just into how philosophy was practised in the 20th century, but also gives key insights into some of the greatest thinkers in the history of philosophy: St Augustine, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, the Greek philosophers, but most notably, Kant and Schopenhauer.

Like his other book 'The Story of Philosophy', 'Confessions of a Philosopher' outlines the historical development of philosophy from the time of the Greeks too the present. Magee brilliantly expounds the incredible influence this has had on civilisation and on the immense importance of the great thinkers. But most importantly, in my view, he recongises the tremendous importance of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose ideas were as revolutionary to philosophy as those of Plato and Aristotle before him.

Magee clearly understands the importance of Kant, but goes one step further and explains the most difficult yet important aspects of Kant's philosophy, such as his distinction between 'appearance' and 'reality', his view we can only understand what we can percieve and 'order' according to our minds, the fact that God's existence (or nonexistence) can no longer be proved rationally, and so on, in beautifully clear and vivid prose. Magee is not just a acute philosopher, but is also a first class writer and populariser; something that is rare in philosophy.

Magee utterly destroys the old stereotype of philosophy as being either pointless pedantry over words (something he correctly attributes to the excessive focus on linguistics by many contemporary analytic philosophers) or as air-headed speculative metaphysics with no connection to the real world.

Magee argues, quite convincingly, that like science, philosophy is not merely about clarifying concepts or analysing our language, but about understanding our world, our place in it, and indeed, the universe as a whole. He pulls no punches, blasting postmodernism, some aspects of continental philosophy, and the Anglo-American tradition of 'analytic philosophy' as being utterly useless, and as giving philosophy a bad reputation.

The other interesting facet of Magee presentes in his book is the fascinating autobiographical material, including his encounters with great thinkers such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, his views on Wittgenstein, his deep thoughts about the nature of time, and his immense reverence for Kant and Schopenhauer. Especially interesting is his recognition of the importance of Schopenhauer, one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century whose extremely important work was overlooked because of the popularity of Hegel.

Magee's book is also refreshingly sprinkled with positive references to science. It seems fashionable these days in the humanities to either denounce science as either some 'social construction' designed to enforce some ideaology, or to ignore it altogether. Magee rightly demolishes this view as the height of stupidity and arrogance, borrowing liberally from great philosopher/scientists like Kant, whilst at the same time not falling into a naive scientism that the positivist movement seemed to get trapped in.

Magee's book ends with a poignant and wrenching view of the question of death. He illustrates his own struggle with his knowledge that he, like the rest of us, will eventually die, fully aware that in the shadow of Kant all attempts to prove the existence of God and an afterlife are futile exercises in speculation. Magee grasps this existential dilemma to its fullest extent and masterfully argues we may have an immaterial component to our being that survives death. Like all true philosophers, Magee doesn't force any dogmas down your throat but only asks you to consider the possibility, and even then, only tentatively. Although I cannot regard his arguments as proof any conciousness survives our death, he certainly makes you think about it.

Several critics have derided this book and Magee himself as pretentious. I must disagree. If anything, Magee did the most anyone ever did to open my eyes to the wonder of philosophy and to the importance of great thinkers like Plato, Kant and Schopenhauer. Magee's anguishing and intensely personal accounts of his attempts to find knowledge and understanding echo deeply within one's soul, and so easy and conversational is his prose is that you identify and empathise with him without even knowing it, feeling as though he is guiding you every step of the way. He lacks the pretension of Russell, the arrogance of Popper, the blind ideaological stupidity of many 'postmodern' thinkers, and the annoyingly dismissive attitude towards metaphysical questions typical of some science writers. He communicates the deepest and most important human endeavour-philosophy, in clear and concise terms and in doing so avoids the sophisty and intellectual self-congratulation one finds in so many academic writings. If you want to dig deeper into philosophy, then this is a good place to start.

I read Magee out of casual curiosity rather than
to survey the breadth of western philosophy.

His book really is a memoir of his intellectual
development filled with frank, simple reasons for
his satisfaction or dissatisfaction with numerous
philosophical responses to basic questions about
the world.

I have been out of college or a formal learning
environment for close to 20 years.

Yet Magee clarified the meaning and significance
of Kant's "synthetic a priori" concept in a
way my college philosophy course did not.

He writes on dozens of issues: Platonism, Aristo-
telianism, Logical Positivism, violent revolution,
Kant, Hegel, the advantage of reading primary works,
the importance of open discourse with others however
critical they may be, romantic love, Jesus Christ.

Throughout the memoir Magee's guiding principles
remains clear: be true to your own experience
always demanding satisfying answers to your
questions but permit others to criticize your
arguments, and steer clear of dead, unfruitful
philosophical traditions.

Magee is a wonderful writer, first of all; my interest was held for nearly all of its 463 pages. By the time one gets to the book's penultimate chapter, "The Main Split in Contemporary Philosophy," one has already heard quite enough about said split, as that seems to underly virtually every other chapter in the book. HOWEVER, I (myself an on-again-off-again student of philosophy) have sometimes been turned off by much of professional philosophy's seeming nit-pickiness at the expense of tackling "the really big questions," and I have never seen (and never expected to see) such an eloquent and impassioned expression of this frustration as that found in these pages. Like me (and perhaps you), Magee HAS philosophical problems, and this is his story of grappling with them. And quite a captivating story it is. Philosophical ideas come alive in this book--if not consistently so, at least at times extraordinarily so. If this were a novel, I would say that its main character, Bryan Magee, is underdeveloped, but the author tells us up front that the book "is about ideas: the autobiographical element is medium, not message." For anyone wanting to get her or his feet wet in what Philosophy is about, or for an insider wanting a glance at someone who was personally acquainted with some of the greatest thinkers and ideas and institutions of our time, this is a great place to start.

Bryan Magee's masterly confessions cover not only his philosophical work, but also his life as a Labour politician and his TV and writer's career.

As a politician, he was disappointed by the only marginal impact of government interventions and became a political Liberal. But his main aim has always been individual freedom.

His analyses of the philosophy of Popper, Russell, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Mill, Augustinus, Schelling, Fichte, Frege, and others, are profound, extremely clear and to the point (a rarity today).
He is absolutely correct in his evaluation of the British language philosophy: she constitutes the bankruptcy of philosophy and ends in a morass of 'playing with words'. The assumption that everything can be expressed by words is too preposterous to take it even into consideration: how do you say a piano concerto of Mozart or the Mona Lisa. As one other philosopher asked in an interview on the BBC: have they nothing else to do in this world?

His world view is rather pessimistic: people are lead by false values (mimicry, compromise ...) rather than by love, loyalty to truth or integrity.
Other leitmotivs in this book are his fear for death and the intellectual catastrophe of common sense (our senses discern nothing of what happens in the real, physical world: atoms, speed of the earth...)

Nevertheless, I disagree with him on one crucial point : his Kantian philosophical problem of the link between personal freedom and the determinist physical laws. For Magee, it is impossible to have individual freedom in an empirical world reigned by these laws. There must for him be a world (a part of the human body) outside these laws, that provides the foundation for freedom.
I side here with Popper and Stephen Hawking who say that the solution of this problem lays in the brain. Our brain is subject to the uncertainty principle, in other words, to the randomness associated with quantum mechanics (S. Hawking 'Black Holes and Baby Universes).

For a refutation of Kant, see W. Heisenberg 'Physics and Philosophy'.
This book constitutes an enriching and most entertaining dialogue with the reader. Not to be missed.

Many people think of philosophy as a bunch of useless ideas bandied about by stale old professors who do not get out much, and regrettably, quite a few philosophers can be blamed for this. Philosophy as it should be, however, can tell you powerful things about the nature of your life and how you should treat others and yourself. If philosophy were useless, Socrates would not have been deemed dangerous enough to be executed!

Bryan Magee's struggles in life, and his resource to philosophy for the answers underscores the deep power and attraction philosophy can hold, as he sets out in his autobiography.

Magee is an interesting character, as while he is avowedly unreligious he has a worldview very unlike most atheists or agnostics, and I think most people will find that he nonetheless has a very spiritual streak in him, as Magee has an extremely strong sense of wonder and does not cling to the materialistic dogmas of most modern atheists. He is remarkably honest, and I think he is a great travelling companion for anyone seeking the truth.

Philosophy needs more popularizers and apologists, those who can make tough concepts understandable and also convince people that those answers are very important and applicable towards our lives. Mr. Magee does an impressive job of this in relating his life's pilgrimage in philosophy, and while one may not always like his conclusions, I think his questions and his very earnest response to those questions will inspire us and get us asking questions of our own.

I'll admit that I was originally turned off by the corny title and cover of the book, but once I got past that, I realized that few minds have grasped the real meaning and import of western philosophy like Magee's has. Magee is the best kind of philosopher--exhibiting disciplined thinking with an incredible grasp of the material's meaning. His critique of modern analytic philosophy is profound and displays incredible insight. His grasp of the mystery of existence is deep and his ability to convey that mystery to the reader is his shining accomplishment. Magee makes it clear that you don't need to be religious to really feel that mystery. His general criticisms of both religionists and humanists are right on. Religious people tend to be smug about and uncritical of their inherited ideas, and humanists tend to lose the sense of the crushing mystery of why there is anything at all rather than nothing.

I can honestly say that no book has hit me so profoundly as this one (other than Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, which Magee addresses with great skill in his book).