The Amphibium, pt. 8
This is Vol. 8 of the Amphibium.
Attentive readers will notice that it’s been a while. In retrospect, I’ve decided to say that this newsletter took a summer hiatus. In truth, life just got busy, and it seemed a bit presumptuous to send out a message alerting you all that I wouldn’t be sending out messages for a while. My own experience with this sort of newsletter is that I am generally happy to find one in my inbox but I don’t really miss them when they don’t show up. It’s been gratifying and a bit surprising to hear from a lot of you, expressing the hope that I would keep writing these things. Also, for whatever reason, I’ve gotten a bunch of new subscribers in the past few months, which means there are a fair number of you who have been signed up for this newsletter for a reasonably long time without ever getting one. Welcome!
All of this has made me want to get back on some regular footing here. So I aim to revert to the original plan, which was to send this newsletter out bimonthly, in the second and fourth weeks of each month. I’m going to try to stick with that plan even if it means occasionally sending out something short and under-baked. If this proves too much amid other responsibilities, I might give the thing up, but I’ll let you all know before doing so, rather than disappearing on you as I did this time.
Difficult Things Made Clear
Something I wanted to write about over the summer was the death of Bryan Magee. Magee was one of those figures that seem strangely not uncommon in British culture but completely impossible to imagine over here. He published a volume of poetry as an Oxford undergraduate. He did graduate studies in philosophy at a time when Anglo-American philosophy was completely dominated by logic and linguistics, but his own impulses were toward the Continental style, and he learned German in order to study it. He then served as a member of Parliament for a decade before returning to philosophy and becoming something of a freelance thinker with various academic affiliations.
Magee was not a particularly original mind, but his book-length study of Schopenhauer is quite good. He also had a great love of music; he was a music critic for various publications, and he wrote a couple of books about Wagner, one of which I’ve read and enjoyed.
But his real claim to fame–at least, the reason I know anything about him–is as a television host. Throughout the 70s and 80s, he put together a series of BBC shows in which he would sit on a couch with a famous contemporary academic philsopher–Isaiah Berlin, Martha Nussbaum, John Searle, W.V. Quine–to discuss some major historical thinker.
For whatever reason, I stumbled upon these shows on YouTube around the time that my daughter was born, and when she was just a few weeks old and I started giving her bottles in the middle of the night, I got into the habit of watching one of these videos when I did. Magee is an excellent explainer of difficult philosphical ideas; he often knows as much about the subject as his expert guests, but he’s very good at letting his interlocutors take charge. He combines the “common sense” for which British philosophers are known with a real love and appreciation for Continental metaphysical speculation.
One of the best of his programs, a conversation about philosophy and literature with Iris Murdoch, is here. You can find many more with some quick googling.
The clothes and the affect and the production values and the occasional cigarette smoke all give the videos the feel of a particular historical moment, and they’re the kind of thing you watch with a certain nostalgia for a time when such things still got put on the air. It’s a bit like the shock of watching old clips from Dick Cavett or Buckley’s Firing Line, times a thousand. But as it happens, Magee’s own moment was not especially more hospitable to difficult ideas, according to a quote from his obituary:
There is, throughout television, an urge to translate all subject matter into entertainment, and because this militates against the making of serious demands on the viewer, the result is a common refusal to confront the making of difficult things clear as a task to be tackled.
I find it quite admirable that, rather than throwing up his hands and blaming his moment, he took the need to entertain as a challenge and went right at the problem of trying to make difficult things clear. I will admit that until I stumbled upon his obituary, I had assumed he was already long dead. In any case, he gave me many hours of thought and, yes, entertainment during a very special time in my life, and I was sorry to hear of his passing.
Quitting while we’re, well, wherever we are right now
If you’re new, you can find more about me here. Now that I’m back in business, it’s an ideal time to forward this to anyone you think might be interested.
Until next time, which will be a shorter time than last time’s next time.