Ultimate Questions

"Did you know him? My favourite episode of Philosophy Bites was a compilation, when you asked people, ‘What is philosophy?’ I think at the end of each interview you were asking people that, and you put it all together. And I was like, ‘oh my God, they can’t agree!’ Yes, and I thought, ‘No wonder philosophy is not taken seriously.’ You know, I think if you asked physicists or psychologists they wouldn’t be so all over the place. I thought it was brilliant. I don’t think he needed to reread Schopenhauer. Bryan Magee was a 20th century philosopher, scholar and Member of Parliament, an unusual combination. I first ran across him in his book, Confessions of a Philosopher , which I thought was a wonderful combination of the personal and the philosophical, the academic and the accessible. I realize it’s not any one thing he wrote, but the way he wrote it and who he was. My editor says—and I like this—that the reader will follow a good writer anywhere and that’s the way it is with Bryan Magee: I would follow him anywhere. I always found him thoughtful and even writing as an elderly man, he retained the curiosity of a child. It’s been said that a philosopher is a seven-year old with a bigger brain, and I think there’s something to that. I think Magee was a seven-year old with a very large brain. He never lost that sense of wonder, even as he rose the ranks of academia at Oxford, if I have that right? Maybe that’s why, then. He’s another feral philosopher. He was extremely learned but extremely accessible. Ultimate Questions was, I believe, his last book before he passed away and it’s very slim, 127 pages. Again, it’s not at all methodical. I realize that my favourite philosophy books are the ones that are not methodical. It’s like Schopenhauer’s collection of essays. So here I found one of my favourite contemporary philosophers joining hands with one of my favourite 19th century philosophers, Schopenhauer. I liked that Magee loved this grumpy Schopenhauer and saw the bright side of Schopenhauer—the man who is often referred to as the philosopher of pessimism, including by Magee. Magee also had this love of music that I’ve been trying to come around to, because I tend to have a tin ear and not be a musical person, even though, oddly, I love sounds because I worked in radio. I love ambient sounds and acoustic noises, but not music. There’s one line from Bryan’s Ultimate Questions where he’s describing listening to music, “when I listened to music I was the music.” That is philosophical. That’s spiritual, that’s religious. That’s personal. An academic philosopher would never write a line like that, even if they experienced it. I felt that especially toward the end of his life, Magee was like, ‘Screw it, I can write whatever I want.’ Ultimate Questions is a good title too. Yes, and he acknowledged that he was scared, which I thought was courageous. He acknowledged that despite all his learnedness, he didn’t know what happens when you die. It’s his final attempt to grapple with these big questions. And that’s another thing I love about Magee and about philosophy in general, that when it’s done well it has no time for the trivial and the silly. It’s all about big questions and it can be conveyed in a fun way, but that doesn’t make the questions any smaller. He was passionate. Getting back to Socrates, all philosophy begins with wonder—he allegedly said—and that, to me, is important, that sense of wonder. I make a distinction in my book between wonder and curiosity, because we often conflate them, and I think they’re slightly different. Curiosity has a kind of restlessness to it and impatience. Your curiosity is always kind of moving along, ‘I’m curious about that, but wait, what’s that over there, that shiny object I’m curious about that.’ Wonder is more like curiosity with its feet up, with a drink in its hand, saying, ‘I’m going to wonder about this.’ It has a sense of expansiveness to it and it also has this childlike quality, to wonder like a child. I think all of the philosophers I write about and all these books I recommend as life-changing books of philosophy contain the childlike sense of wonder that real philosophers, as I see them, never lose. Which is not to say they should write like five-year olds. You use more complex sentences, but you don’t lose that sense of wonder that we all have as children. I think we’re all born philosophers, but we have it beaten out of us as we grow older. But a few of us—like you and like Brian Magee—don’t lose it. It isn’t fully beaten out of them. Like all jargon, it’s meant to exclude others from your club. But why one would exclude people from the club of philosophy is beyond me. Einstein said that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t really know it well enough and I think that’s true. If you really understand something, you can explain it simply. It’s when you’re a little unsure in your understanding that you have to prop it up with a lot of fancy language."