…more obscurely, he felt the need to prepare himself (and to prepare me) for an iron future, drawing closer month by month.
Primo Levi (1984), ‘Iron’
1. Introduction
Should I be doing philosophy, at all?
Bernard Williams invites us to consider this question in his late essay, ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’. It is an essay of decline and impending loss. Though marked by his characteristic reserve and humour, we also find the poignancy of a self-described ‘senior philosopher’ (Williams Reference Williams2000: 495) reflecting on the activity he devoted his life to, academic philosophy, during what would be the last stage of both his career and his life. We find him concerned that that activity has come to understand itself in ways that will deprive it, and us, of its distinctive intellectual value. And we find these concerns about philosophy paired with an awareness that he, an ‘old man’ (Williams Reference Williams2000: 495), may be a target of Nietzsche’s quip that his late reflections on what philosophy could be if only it overcame these misunderstandings are not the result of renewed understanding, wisdom, and clear-sightedness but rather, the decline of weariness.
The humanistic conception of philosophy Williams defends here understands it as part of a ‘more general attempt to make the best sense of our life … in the situation in which we find ourselves’ (Williams Reference Williams2000: 479). By the conclusion of the essay, he warns that even if we were to reconceive of philosophy in this way, external factors, such as education’s turn toward ‘the technical and commercial’, may leave humanistic inquiry in general as no more than part of ‘the heritage industry’ (Williams Reference Williams2000: 496). His final sentence is enigmatic:
If that is how it is preserved, it will not be the passionate and intelligent activity that it needs to be. We all have an interest in the life of that activity – not just a shared interest, but an interest in a shared activity. (Williams Reference Williams2000: 496 – my emphasis)
To illuminate this remark, we can situate this essay against some of Williams’ nearby reflections: with an earlier public piece, ‘What Hope for the Humanities?’ published in 1987, and with his final book, Truth and Truthfulness. Several connections emerge between Williams’ conception of humanistic inquiry and our modern liberal state and society. In ‘What Hope for the Humanities?’ (Williams Reference Williams2014b [1987]), he argues that members of our society and ‘those who are trying to run it’ need truthful and shared understandings of ourselves: it is only truthful understandings of ourselves that can issue in ‘reasoned demands for change’ (Williams Reference Williams2014b: 274). And here too, a warning of loss: ‘the alternative to reasoned change is, as always, not no change, but unreasoned change, which will destroy not only the Humanities but the society that forgets about them’ (Williams Reference Williams2014b [1987]: 274). And looking to Truth and Truthfulness, we find a warning issued to liberal humanists that should we deny that our collective efforts to understand and make sense of ourselves could or should be something intelligibly guided by the value of truth,Footnote 1 ‘we shall certainly lose something and may well lose everything’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 7).
We might wonder, a quarter of a century later, whether Williams’ worst fears for us are coming true: whether we are now losing everything. But we should here heed Williams’ clarification that the salient ‘we’ for the enterprise of philosophy as he imagines it (and so, for the piece of philosophy we are here engaged with) is not the ‘inclusive ‘we’ which brings together as a purely abstract gathering any beings with whom human beings might conceivably communicate about the nature of the world’ (Reference Williams2000: 484). It is rather, as he puts it, a ‘contrastive “we”, that is to say, humans as contrasted with other possible beings; and, in the case of many human practices, it may of course mean groupings smaller than humanity as a whole’ (Reference Williams2000: 484). And so, to ask whether we are losing everything we must also ask and attempt to answer: who are ‘we’ and what might we be losing?
Narrowly, a reader of both Williams’ essay and this one might be an academic philosopher concerned that contemporary academic philosophy, whether humanistic or not, is in a state of decline. This may be because of both internal factors (such as certain dominant images of what philosophy is or must be) and external ones (economic, institutional, political, cultural, etc.). More expansively, ‘we’ may also be liberals in the most minimal, most inclusive sense that Williams marks here: inheritors of an outlook with, ‘at least one fixed point’ that is so basic it can seem inescapable: ‘that in some sense every citizen, indeed every human being… deserves equal consideration’ (Reference Williams2000: 492). With this demarcation in place, one might begin to sense more vividly the difficulties that Williams alludes to in gaining clarity about who ‘we’ are, in the circumstances we now find ourselves in, a quarter-century after his essay. ‘We’ now seems to exclude those who, at the turn of the century, were not so obviously excluded, or not so obviously transparent in their laxity with that fixed point, or not so obviously powerful – not so able to quickly upend and compromise the liberal norms and institutions we have relied on, imperfectly, to manifest that outlook. We – some of us – may be sympathetic with Williams’ concerns throughout his work that though there are many explanations for the possible decline of liberalism, at least part of the story is that we cannot make sense of the concepts we have relied upon to express and understand it, and so, ourselves.Footnote 2 Thus, we can read ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’ as an expression of Williams’ own sense of himself as both a liberal and a pessimist, with his pessimism lying partly in his sense that his liberal outlook was facing a crisis.Footnote 3
After offering his conception of philosophy and acknowledging that it seems to require that a philosopher know too much about too many things, Williams imagines a young philosopher wondering out of impatience, ‘can’t we just get on with it?’ (Williams Reference Williams2000: 495). But in situating this essay against Williams’ other work and the concerns we find there, we might now imagine a different young philosopher, in 2026 rather than 2000, who recognizes in herself both some form of Williams’ liberalism, and some form of his pessimism about the survival of that outlook. We might imagine her seriously considering the possibility that she is living through the future Williams warned us about, and so, returning to the question that a younger Williams proposed as the basic ethical one, sometimes asked in moments of urgency and despair:
How should I live?Footnote 4
And stemming from that question, a particular version of the one that I began with:
Should I be doing philosophy, at all?
Could academic philosophy, in the situation we find ourselves, be anything other than distraction or frivolity; political timidity; a withdrawal and evasion from life?
It is not obvious that Williams’ later work would even aspire to address her and her concerns. In a review of Williams’ Making Sense of Humanity, Roger Scruton laments that the kind of philosophy collected there, like most of academic analytic philosophy, had lost its way. Scruton begins by remarking that Williams ‘is the most prominent writer on ethics among living British philosophers’ (Scruton Reference Scruton1995: 35) – and then goes on to note the dearth of substantive ethical content and guidance in his essays. Scruton writes that rather than, for example, providing an ‘ordinary person’ with guidance on how to live a happy human life in an Aristotelian vein, Williams instead ‘explores fruitless by-ways’, and takes up a stance altogether too sceptical and academic to be anything but negative and unhelpful (Scruton Reference Scruton1995: 35). The title of the review is ‘Ethics for the Amoral’.
The next year, in another reflection about the nature of philosophy, Williams responds to Scruton with some explanations for his seemingly unnecessary technicality, and criticisms of the alternative ‘humanistic’ conception of philosophy that Scruton seems to prefer.Footnote 5 We can bring Williams’ comments there together with his (Reference Williams2000) discussions of philosophy as a humanistic discipline. For Williams, ‘discipline’ implies that ‘there had better be something that counts as getting it right, or doing it right’ (Williams Reference Williams2000: 477), and essential for philosophy’s sense of doing it right is that it retain an ‘intense attention’ to what it is saying, and whether what it is saying is true (and, as he discusses here, ‘rings true’) (Williams Reference Williams2014c [1996]: 369). For Williams, philosophy’s dedication to being truthful means that a philosopher must cultivate the discipline of being able to resist certain temptations of thought, three of which guide my reading here and which are especially important to heed given the question our imagined philosopher is facing.
First, a philosopher would have to resist the temptation of thinking that she knows in advance what directions her reflections will take, and so, would have to cultivate the patience for working through questions that themselves are not obviously and immediately connected to the concerns that may have sparked her inquiry in the first place. Second, she would need the discipline to consider and speak to more than the immediately obvious explanations and results of the problems we are facing, individually or collectively. This is partly because our feelings – and so what may seem to be our concerns, our fears, our despair – do not immediately reveal their significance: what they are about, and what emotions they may even really be. A disciplined ability to both take one’s emotions seriously and yet see beyond their immediate surface-level meanings in the present moment, Williams suggests, is something that teenagers must eventually learn, and which some philosophers, he believed, never do.Footnote 6 Third, she would have to cultivate the discipline needed to resist he own desires to be helpful. If philosophy can be helpful at all, it cannot give up on its commitment to being truthful, rather than helpful. If the truth is helpful, it is helpful simply as such. And if it is truth, it may not offer any comfort or consolation of the kind that often satisfies a non-disciplined interest in philosophy driven by one’s urgent, present concerns.Footnote 7
With these points in mind, I will show how we can, after all, construct a response from Williams to the philosopher I’ve asked us to imagine. This is because, as I’ll illustrate, Williams’ later work remains humanistic and ethical in the sense that he never wavers from that original, fundamental question: How should I live? Deliberation, for Williams, remains ‘radically first-personal’ (Reference Williams1986: 21), and this includes his own deliberations about how he is to proceed in philosophy and why, given a more general sense of how he thought he, or someone who shared his outlook, should live. But, as I will also demonstrate, because of his conception of the discipline it takes to do philosophy well, this dimension of his thought yields responses to our imagined contemporary philosopher which could only be indirect, and allusive. The ethical content here is not absent; it is, in a way characteristic of Williams’ style and views about moral philosophy, oblique.Footnote 8 While what he writes might serve as some kind of ‘guidance’ for her, it neither aims to be nor is it presented as such; and while it might be helpful in some way, it does not help by providing the immediate comfort of either easy hope or despair.
2
Even in better circumstances than those our imagined philosopher imagines herself to be in, Williams did not think it was obvious that philosophy was worth dedicating one’s life to. In a discussion of Plato, he quotes extensively from Callicles, whom Plato uses to voice the idea that he, Plato, had been mistaken in ‘applying his talents to philosophy’:
Philosophy is no doubt a charming thing, Socrates, if someone is exposed to it in moderation at the appropriate time of life. But if one spends more time on it than he should, it is the undoing of mankind. For even if someone has great natural advantages, if he engaged in philosophy far beyond the appropriate time of life, he will inevitably turn out to be inexperienced in all those things in which a man has to be experienced if he is to be admirable and good and well thought of. Such people have no experience of the laws of their city or of the kind of speech one must use to deal with people on matters of business, public or private; they have no experience in human pleasures and appetites; no experience, in short, of human character altogether. So when they venture into some private or political activity, they will become a laughingstock…
So when I see an older man still engaging in philosophy and not giving it up, I think such a man by this time needs a flogging. And I was just saying, such a man, even with natural advantages, will end up becoming unmanly and avoiding the middle of the city and its meeting places – where, as the poet said, men become really distinguished – and will slink away from the rest of his life, whispering with three or four boys in a corner, never coming out with anything free-spirited, important, or worth anyone’s attention… (Williams Reference Williams2006: 162–163)
It’s notable that Williams quotes these charges so extensively (I’ve truncated his use of them here), and his cattier remarks about philosophy suggest his sympathy for them.Footnote 9 He does not, as some philosophers might, simply dismiss Callicles as a philistine. Nonetheless, it’s also clear that Williams’ relentless critiques of philosophy are borne of a hope that if understood in certain ways rather than others, it could be worth dedicating one’s life to – even as an ‘older man’ with many obvious talents and passions outside of it.
Most well-known of his critiques, Williams believed that philosophers would have to cease constructing moral theories that cannot make sense of their own relation to practice. And as he focuses on in Williams (Reference Williams2000), philosophy in general would have to resist what he considers to be certain scientistic misunderstandings of itself. There are several related elements of the distinction he draws between the natural sciences and philosophy as a humanistic discipline, three of which will be relevant to my reading here.Footnote 10
The first is that, for Williams, we should take seriously the idea that the success of the natural sciences rests on their ability to reach an ‘absolute’ conception of the universe, or the world ‘as it is anyway’, where for Williams this means ‘give a representation of it which is to the largest possible extent independent of the local perspectives or idiosyncrasies of enquirers’ (Williams Reference Williams2000: 481). Philosophy as a humanistic discipline, in contrast, plays a role in a more general attempt to understand our life in our circumstances – the pronoun here understood, again, contrastively and not inclusively. It does not aim at descriptions of the ‘world as it is anyway’. We are trying to understand ourselves and our life, and the self-reflexivity of this pursuit is one that will have rely on concepts and explanations that we can recognize as more local and idiosyncratic than those used by the natural sciences. If we face certain crises or puzzles in trying to explain, understand, or defend our outlook – for example, if we cannot make sense of why we continue to use a concept such as ‘autonomy’ in certain ways (perhaps because we cannot make sense of a metaphysically free will) this will place pressure on us to give, perhaps, a rearrangement of the ideas that are part of that concept as we’ve inherited it. This investigation will be one motivated by a problem and need an answer for us; others who do not share our concept of autonomy may be able to see that we are suffering from a difficult of explanation in our outlook, but it will not be their intellectual or cultural difficulty to resolve it.
The second is that historical understanding is essential for our reflective understanding of our possession of certain concepts rather than others. Scientific practice, if understood as an attempt to arrive at a representation of the world ‘as it is anyway’ does not require a historical understanding of its subject matter for it to succeed in its ambitions: such an understanding assumes a vindicatory history of discovery. Philosophy as a humanistic discipline cannot similarly ignore the history of its subject matter, that is, our lives, including our intellectual activities and the concepts we use and have used to understand ourselves. For example, a reflective understanding of our ethical concepts requires a historical understanding of them.Footnote 11 Only a historical understanding of our concepts will reveal both their contingency, and their content. Such an understanding will reveal that, for example, our concept of autonomy arose because of our contingent cultural development (not every human culture will possess such a concept); and we can only understand what our particular concept of autonomy entails by understanding how it arose given that particular history. That history may also reveal to us why it is that, after all, we’ve been left with a concept that can seem both so central to our outlook and also (given certain developments of it) so incoherent.
Clearly, Williams distinguishes between scientific and humanistic inquiry partly to understand the ambitions of both better – and clearly, he does so in order to restore to humanistic inquiry, and philosophy understood in a particular way, a sense of its distinctive intellectual value in the face of the more obvious intellectual authority of the sciences. The fact that philosophy understood in this way does not aim to provide an absolute conception of the world does not in any way make it less valuable. But, returning to the line of thought I am explicating here, there is one less obvious motivation that appears to have led Williams to the question of the differences between these two kinds of endeavour.
In his response to Scruton’s criticisms, Williams provides an example of how an accessible and politically pressing question about the value of free speech may lead to investigations that may strike some as ‘fruitless by-ways’. We might wonder, for example, whether the value of free speech lies partly in its ability to get us closer to the truth. But, he wonders, is there any deeper connection between our conception of freedom, and the truth? Williams here introduces a recollection from Primo Levi. Levi characterizes a kind of freedom he experienced as a scientist, in work where he was governed only by the structure of the world, ‘[independent] of human will’ (Levi Reference Levi1984: 366). But is that a coherent and accurate understanding of what scientific pursuit could be? And so, an immediately accessible question that begins in an important and pressing human concern may naturally lead to and necessitate less accessible inquiries in the philosophy of science and metaphysics. Indeed, for Williams, it partly leads to the question of whether science can be understood as offering us an absolute conception of the world, and what it would mean for its history to be a history of discovery.
Williams returns to the example of Levi in Truth and Truthfulness, but the path to his discussion there is indirect and embedded within the overall structure and topics of the book. Williams begins Truth and Truthfulness with an argument that any human society must involve the exchange of information and so will develop some versions of the ethical dispositions of Accuracy and Sincerity, themselves understood as dispositions to value the truth (arriving at it and being reliable in giving it to others). As any human society becomes larger and more complex, it will make sense for its members to rely on divisions of labour in their epistemic pursuits, and so, the actual history of our complex societal development will be a history of contingent refinements of the virtues of Accuracy and Sincerity within communities smaller than the whole of our society. As he notes, one such community that arose for us, because of our actual contingent history, was a scientific one. A community of scientists, when things are going well, will come to internalize certain refinements of the dispositions of Accuracy and Sincerity that will sustain the pursuit of scientific truth as an intrinsic good. Through this internalization, one’s self-respect as a scientist will depend on the respect of other members of that community, and in a healthy scientific community one will only gain that respect by doing good science (and, as he discusses, even if one’s motives were for the glory of scientific respect).
Williams then turns his attention directly to politics, and, in particular, to the expression and refinement of the virtues of Sincerity and Accuracy within a scientific community itself embedded within a greater community with a liberal outlook: that is, our outlook. There, Williams proposes, it not only makes sense to think of the pursuit of scientific truth as having both intrinsic value (and the instrumental value of technology) – but an instrumental personal value. The pursuit of scientific truth may, in this cultural and historical context, express and embody a kind of honesty and form of political freedom central to our liberal outlook.
He then returns to Levi and focuses in more detail on Levi’s autobiographical piece, ‘Iron’. In Levi’s reflections as a graduate student in Turin, he is clear about what he sensed about the situation in Europe, and for himself after the passing of the Italian Racial Laws in 1938:
Night lay beyond the walls of the Chemical Institute, the night of Europe: Chamberlain had returned from Munich duped, Hitler had marched in Prague without firing a shot, Franco had subdued Barcelona and was ensconced in Madrid. Fascist Italy, the small-time pirate, had occupied Albania, and the premonition of imminent catastrophe condensed like grumous dew in the houses and streets, in wary conversations and dozing consciences. (Levi Reference Levi1984: 40)
However, as Levi puts it, ‘this night did not penetrate the walls of the Chemical Institute’ (Levi Reference Levi1984: 40). And he finds this light in his work even as he begins to experience the withdrawal of his Christian colleagues. For Williams, Levi’s work (described by Levi as discerning what elements lay in samples provided by his professor) was relief from fascism’s ‘suffocating and poisonous’ ‘tissue of lies and emptiness’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 144). This work was difficult and required discipline, and though Levi writes of his relationship to ‘Matter’ changing through his investigations, finding that it becomes ‘dialectical’ and like a ‘face-to-face confrontation’, on Williams’ reading it is important that the obstacles he faced were not obstacles presented by any other human being’s will. To get around those obstacles and arrive at the discoveries about the natural world he sought, ‘no strategies of conciliation or evasion, no bargaining’ would do (Williams Reference Williams2002: 145). The result he wanted was difficult to achieve because of the stubbornness of nature. Thus, the relief Levi experiences is because his work manifested a central form of freedom:Footnote 12 to ‘not be subject to another’s will in working toward something that you find worthwhile’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 145). He contrasts this ‘basic’ form of freedom with a mistaken conception of it, ever persistent in philosophy, as being free of any obstacles whatsoever (Williams Reference Williams2002: 145). Levi also finds an expression of this basic form of freedom with his fellow graduate student Sandro Delmastro in the mountains outside of Turin, confronted with obstacles presented by the ‘obstinacy, the unanswerability of natural fact’: ‘A piton goes in or it doesn’t, the rope holds or it doesn’t: these were the sources of certainty’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 144). No strategies of conciliation or evasion or bargaining would do, here, either. In both activities, both Levi and Delmastro found relief in a form of freedom from the fascist darkness that surrounded and encroached on them, and which would soon, Levi recollects, cost Delmastro his life.
To make vivid Williams’ observations about this basic kind of freedom and its value, we can remind ourselves of the oppression one experiences when the barriers standing in one’s way of pursuing something worthwhile are the expressions of another’s will or of some human institution with whom one can only bargain, attempt to evade, or pacify. We can remind ourselves of the degradation one may experience if, when even those strategies won’t work, one can only plead or beg. And this basic understanding of freedom, Williams argues against Rorty here, finds a particular cultural refinement and expression for us liberalsFootnote 13 in which it is inseparable from understanding truth as an intrinsic value. As he goes on to discuss, Orwell’s Winston is shattered through the imposition of another’s will: his freedom is denied in a paradigmatically horrific way, where part of our understanding of that horror and the cruelty he is subjected to necessarily includes that what he is denied is his basic grasp of the truth through the directed imposition of another person’s will. It is this liberal sense of freedom that Winston is denied, and that Levi obtains by encountering only the barriers of nature in his pursuit of the truth.
We can now turn back to the question I began with, as Williams turns to such a question here, as well. He writes: ‘Primo Levi was a scientist, and science made his point … Might similar meanings be found in scholarship?’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 145) Might similar meanings be found in philosophy? Might philosophy, too, be understood as something that provides not just distraction or evasion, as a centrally important form of personal-political freedom inseparable from the value of truth, in our own dark times?
The worth of philosophical work in such a context depends on how one conceives of and conducts it. If it could be modelled directly on methods and ambitions of the natural sciences – if, for example philosophers could conceive of ourselves as making discoveries of the kind that Levi was making within the walls of the Chemistry Institute, achieving a representation of nature ‘as it is anyway’ free of the imposition of the wills of others – then Williams’ understanding of Levi would carry over to us easily. But, as we have already seen, he thinks this is a mistaken model of philosophy and so should not sustain the sense that one was doing something worthwhile in times like Levi’s, or (perhaps) times like ours.
Other understandings of philosophy will also not do. Consider some reflections from C.S. Lewis (Reference Lewis1939), offered to a group of Oxford students as the darkness descended upon them in 1939, in the year after the time recollected by Levi. As Lewis puts their questioning to themselves:
A University is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death and military service, why should we – indeed how can we – continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns? (Lewis Reference Lewis1939: 1)
There are many aspects of Lewis’ discussion that we might find encouraging. He tempers a certain kind of ahistorical panic and alarm by presenting a longer view of the history of mankind in which times of war cannot be clearly distinguished from ‘normal’ times, and he reminds the students that human beings would have never attempted the cultivation of culture at all had they waited for such illusive, non-existent times of normalcy. But his answer, overall, is explicitly religious. The students worry that their thoughts should be wholly occupied by the war; Lewis recounts how in his own experience in the trenches of WWI, as he drew closer to the war itself, his mind and his conversations became less filled with details of ‘the allied cause and the progress of the campaign’ (Lewis Reference Lewis1939: 2), and instead filled with Tolstoy. Why? Should we understand this as a mind’s flight from reality, in a time of hopelessness? Not at all. Lewis explains to them: ‘The war will fail to absorb our whole attention because it is a finite object, and therefore intrinsically unfitted to support the whole attention of a human soul’ (Lewis Reference Lewis1939: 3). And philosophy, in its contemplation of the infinite – of the Divine – is what our souls were made to do, and even in the trenches it is a small humble offering to God that we turn our souls toward an activity perfectly aligned with and expressive of our nature.
This kind of answer – though responsive to the urgent worries of the students he was speaking to – is not one that would satisfy Williams, and any consolation that it might offer us would come too cheaply. We must be more disciplined. Williams as unrelenting naturalist might remind us: we are not the kind of ensouled beings Lewis believes we are, and philosophy could thus not be that kind of activity with that kind of value. As a philosopher with a deep sense of tragedy, he would scoff at the idea that there is any kind of metaphysical harmony between our capacities for reflection and contemplation and the world we find ourselves in. Even if one were not as confident in one’s own naturalism as Williams was in his, and even if one is occasionally – as I am – temperamentally inclined toward something like Lewis’ answer, a modern liberal philosopher should not rest easy with any immediate sense of consolation or relief it may seem to provide. One might, after all, not actually believe what it proposes about us and about philosophy, despite one’s ability to find some immediate comfort and relief in it. This may be because one continues to fantasize that philosophy is this kind of activity, without squaring this fantasy with the fact that one cannot sustain the kind of metaphysical picture this fantasy requires. And if we think that we have overcome that picture while holding onto the remnant of it that sustains our confidence in our steadfast dedication to philosophy, we remain in a kind of self-soothing ‘muddle’ that it will take both more philosophical work and more honesty with ourselves to undo.Footnote 14 It would take philosophical work and discipline to either resist the consolation provided by an outlook that one does not in fact share, or to show how we could be that kind of being and how philosophy could be that kind of activity, given everything else that makes sense to us now. It would take the discipline of Accuracy to resist the tendencies of our self-soothing wishes to subvert our grip on reality.
And there are important political implications in either accepting or resisting the consolations offered by Lewis, which themselves may help us dispel the force of the wishes which find satisfaction in them. Even if we could accept philosophy as, in Lewis’ words, a ‘humble offering…’ which in its ‘own small way’ was an ‘approach to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty’ (Lewis Reference Lewis1939: 6), we should wonder whether this is what we want from it, even in our darkest moments, given what else our wanting this would entail. We need more discipline here, too, to resist what can initially be an alluring picture of ourselves and the world. Consider Williams’ remarks about a Platonist interpretation of Levi: perhaps Levi, in discoursing with Nature eternal, finds escape into it, finding freedom through ‘transcend[ing] human affairs altogether’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 142). Elaborating on a deep tension within Plato to leave both the cave and the world, Williams remarks that this vision ‘offers liberation from humanity rather than expressing liberation for humanity’ (Reference Williams2002: 143, my emphasis). As he continues:
Sometimes the suggestion is that real beauty and value are not to be found in this world at all, and that what is here is only some image or association of them; it is as though the world contained a photograph in place of a lover, or no lover and only a madeleine. But elsewhere, and more truthfully, [Plato] suggests that what we need is here, but only in an incomplete, never satisfactory form (Reference Williams2002: 143).
In other words, the enemy Levi’s work relieved him from was not the human world itself. His enemies were the fascists and their lies, and they were his enemies precisely because they threatened all the (incomplete and never satisfactory) things he loved within the human world. And while he may have experienced his freedom as a relief from his dire and oppressive political circumstances, it was not actually freedom from them. It is an attractive fantasy that we, as reflective beings, could insulate ourselves from the more devastating aspects of the world by insulating ourselves from it entirely: a fantasy that philosophy has often, historically and contemporarily, capitalized on. But it is exactly one kind of fantasy, and one kind of consolation, that Williams hopes we can learn to resist, and which he believes philosophy should not continue to encourage in its self-understandings.
Thus, not only is Lewis’ answer supported by an understanding of the world and ourselves that Williams thinks we (we modern liberals) can no longer make sense of, we must resist the conception of philosophy it encourages if we aspire to make philosophy consistent with our (or one might think, any) political outlook. While Lewis’ answer is a religious one and a useful foil for that reason, there are forms of philosophy which may deny the religion but retain, unwittingly, the metaphysics and the consequences of it. The hope that philosophy could be the kind of reflection that does not stand in an adversarial relationship to our commitments and political activities, but is a necessary supplement to them, is indeed a central aspect of Williams’ reconceptualizing it as the humanistic discipline he imagines. Here, the ‘finite’ objects of human society and human history, and not the ‘discoveries’ of an unencumbered outlook or disembodied intelligence which aspires to absolute truths, are exactly the appropriate objects of contemplation and reflection for us.Footnote 15 What would save us now from the ‘unreasoned changes’ that may destroy liberal society, if any kind of philosophical reflection could, is not unworldly, ahistorical, apolitical contemplation – but precisely its opposite.
Such reflection could not be guided by a hope to obtain truths about nature or the universe independent of the contingent human world: it would be about that world, and it would be an understanding for us, who are shaped entirely by it. And as we’ve seen, philosophy as a humanistic discipline is essentially entangled with the enterprise of history. This leaves the question of whether pursuing this could be for us what chemistry was for Levi – an expression of a kind of liberal freedom, understood as not being subject to anyone else’s will while one pursues the truth – with less obvious answers. While Williams considers the idea of scholars doing the diligent and hard work of ‘collecting facts’ about that world (whether out of literary curiosity or antiquarianism), he goes on: ‘…historical research will not make sense unless it is driven by some question, and ultimately by the prospect of interpretation’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 146). And once large-scale historical interpretation is needed to answer the questions that form a larger intellectual enterprise of making sense of ourselves, the worry looms that the contestability of historical narratives may be, after all, the result of ‘shadows cast by rival wills’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 146). This worry was especially pronounced in the context Williams was writing in, in which some humanists themselves had come to understand social reality, including their own intellectual endeavours, as simply a function of power and ideology, and where those with actual power had come to think of humanists as uninterested in the truth at all, perhaps because of their political commitments which seem to override or even float free from it. Given all of this, could such studies, including philosophy understood in this way, ‘never quite offer the kind of liberation and significance that Levi found in natural science’? (146).
It is this question that Williams remarks that he will turn his attention to in the final chapter of Truth and Truthfulness. But in fact, the underlying question about humanistic inquiry and its relation to truth which animates the entirety of the book. The answer Williams arrives at is a complex one. On the one hand, he argues against certain misconceptions of what truth would have to be for it to be intrinsically valuable, and what history would have to be in order to be truthful. Truthful history is what we need, and he attempts to show that there is nothing a priori that rules out the possibility of truthful history or the possibility of philosophy which depends on it. The kind of truth needed here is compatible with the insight that that the histories we arrive at and which will make sense to us will appeal to ‘local’ concepts and explanations in ways that chemistry and the other natural sciences will not.Footnote 16 There is, one might think, a kind of optimism in this possibility.
We must then consider whether this kind of humanistic scholarship is possible within our actual circumstances. And again, there seems to be some room for optimism here. Williams notes that liberalism has a distinct ability and historical self-conception that could allow dispositions of truthfulness and the institutions which support them to thrive. Such institutions, embedded in a liberal society, can support a truthful pursuit of history, at least when compared to religious and governmental monopolies on such pursuits and institutions. Moreover, a liberal society is also one that needs the pursuit of truthful history for several reasons, as I’ve already mentioned: that the changes we insist upon or that those who govern us implement could be reasoned in the sense that they are informed by an accurate sense of who we are and where we’ve come from and so properly relate such changes to our practices. And all of us who live within a liberal society, different as we are, must come to a basic shared understanding of ourselves needed to avoid descending into ‘warring tribes’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 268). We can think back to his caution that not only do we have a shared interest in the activity of disciplined humanistic understanding, but an interest in that activity being shared by all of us.
At the same time, though, Williams’ philosophical optimism is paired with a concern stemming from the very real challenges that any liberal society faces. A liberal society may suffer from certain demands on truthfulness that no functioning society could live up to, for example, that our governments be fully transparent. And in unmasking the myths that may uphold alternative ways of organizing human society, liberalism must unmask its own myths by coming to a truthful understanding of its own history – one that is not prima facie vindicatory. In doing so, it may also support and drive the development of truthful histories and self-understandings that none of us could live with.Footnote 17 And we must also acknowledge and meet the challenge that one historically contingent manifestation of the virtue of Sincerity for us is authenticity, and so members of our society may experience demands on their authenticity as rendering them unable to identify with the basic, large-scale shared understanding needed to live peacefully with others who not only do not share that identity, but who may seem, or be, hostile to it.
Thus, the story Williams tells about the viability of liberalism, and so the viability of the truthful pursuit of humanistic inquiry, is one ripe for the possibility of a tragic end. It is not that liberalism must fail, but that its deep internal tensions and conflicts must be acknowledged and somehow resolved. Philosophy could play an important role in meeting this challenge, but not in the scientistic forms that Williams (Reference Williams2000) is concerned to critique, and not in the forms that it may become given external pressures on the academy. Liberal society needs to support the institutions that allow for our pursuit of truthful history and truthful self-understandings, and to encourage liberal refinements of the virtues of truthfulness which may be ‘courageous’ and ‘intransigent’ in the face of political threats – partly because we have all come to understand the pursuit of truth as an expression of our freedom and, as scholars, a condition of our self-respect (Williams Reference Williams2002: 269). At the very same time, this society must find ways to moderate and refine the most destructive manifestations of the passion for truthfulness in ways that do not compromise its own legitimacy, or the pursuit of the forms of humanistic inquiry it needs to survive.
3
Should I be doing philosophy, at all?
If, as I’ve suggested, Williams’ indirect response to our imagined young philosopher lies in his final book, his answer is as indirect and complex as that book is. On the one hand, it has focused intensely on characterizing and refining some of what may be basic elements in her own liberal outlook, and her own self-understanding. And about that outlook and her pursuit of philosophy, it contains an important and hard-won piece of optimism. It is possible, in an important sense, to pursue philosophical inquiry as Levi pursued science in 1938, as a meaningful embodiment and expression of a central value of her, and our outlook. It need not be something which serves as mere distraction or evasion from the looming and living catastrophes; it need not be mere frivolity or ‘disenchanted careerism’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 3) while Rome burns. It need not be something which, because of its ambitions, focus, or self-understanding, an activity that directly conflicts with her political orientation or action. Rather, it is possible for her to pursue philosophy as something which provides not just the relief of distraction, but relief because she is engaged in the worthwhile and truthful pursuit of making sense of our life and ourselves.Footnote 18 Interpreted through the outlook that has formed her and all of us, this kind of inquiry can be understood as an expression of a political value that stands against all that is threatening that outlook: a freedom that cannot be understood independently of its relationship to truth. Indeed, if Williams’ conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline is cogent, she may even resist the threats to that outlook. That is, she might even pursue philosophy that is hated by its detractors not just for what it is, but for ‘what it says’ (Williams Reference Williams2014c [1996]: 370). But if she does this she must, among other things, have resisted the temptations to think of our minds at their most philosophical as best suited to look away from those threats to a world that is more ‘absolute’, or timeless, or eternal; she must, instead, look directly toward the history and contingency that surrounds us and has formed us.
On the other hand, the answer may disappoint her in one way that disappointed hopes can be disappointed: not by an unmasking or reconsideration of that hope by showing it to be confused or incoherent, but by a forced confrontation with the brutal reality of how things have turned out. Williams’ philosophical optimism carries him, and us, only so far. It is not that the nature of philosophy, the nature of truth, the nature of liberalism, or the unfolding of an absolute history resist her ability to pursue philosophy understood in this way. Her obstacles will include the standards of the kind of philosophy that may now be available to her to write and publish, languishing under the demands of a professionalized and routinized academic discipline, and suffering from certain scientistic misconceptions of itself. The resistance lies in the deep tensions of the liberal framework that she works within, that she was formed by, and which she needs to support the institutions needed to sustain her intellectual activities. She may now find that that liberal framework can no longer sustain confidence in its legitimacy, or in the health of its institutions. The resistance lies in a contingent history which did not have to unfold in this way, in a political reality that threatens disciplined pursuits of the truth, and which was not inevitable.
In other words, though Williams does not think that it is inevitable that liberalism would fail, it is entirely possible – and one senses from his writings, probable – that it would. Beyond his work’s predictive powers, what he hoped we would come to understand is that history did not end with our outlook, and it is only misunderstandings of ourselves and the lack of historical sense in our ‘local tradition’ of philosophy that could have led us to think that it did or would.Footnote 19 Our current external problems are real – whether tyrannical, authoritarian, theocratic, oligarchic, imperialist, technological, or economic in source. And the internal problems are real, too. Indeed, they may be even worse than Williams imagines. A quarter century ago, he could coherently write that even within a crisis of our outlook we would retain at least one, minimal fixed point: ‘that in some sense every citizen, indeed every human being… deserves equal consideration’ (Williams Reference Williams2000: 492). We might now have lost any hope that this basic fixed point is possible to unify a society around given the various ways in which it can be interpreted and how cheaply it may seem to come to hold. We might wonder now whether this fixed point really is or was so basic to us after all. ‘We’ may have no idea who we are or who ‘they’ are; ‘we’, in any robust sense, whether inclusive or contrastive, may not even be a term we can continue to use with any traction if, deprived of a shared understanding of our history, we also have no shared understanding of who we are.
Of course, we should imagine our young philosopher responding, perhaps things are not so dire; perhaps pessimism is itself a political failure. Perhaps, also, we should take seriously the idea that Williams might not simply be weary but also suffering from the tendency of philosophers to think that they were writing at the end of their own outlooks. But it is consistent with Williams’ insistence on the discipline needed to do philosophy that one would have to refuse both the easy consolations of hope and equally, the easy consolations of despair. In other words, to determine whether one should be pessimistic about the prospects of her outlook, she would have to engage in the kind of philosophical inquiry that Williams encourages us here to pursue. She would have to do so because it will make sense not only of where and who she now is and thus whether her intellectual activities make sense, but whether her political activities do, as well. To understand what we can do and why, whom we might be able to persuade, and on what grounds, who is unpersuadable, and why, what is left for us to do once persuasion is no longer possible – to understand whether we now form a ‘we’ at all and why, one must continue do the difficult and disciplined work it takes to understand where we’ve come from, where ‘they’ve’ come from, and where, if anywhere, we can go together.
But now, suppose that amid that kind of inquiry and reflection our imagined philosopher came to question whether we are going anywhere together, at all. Suppose she comes to believe that both the external threats to our outlook and the interpretive, political, and practical tensions within it will become too great to overcome and that the future that lies ahead is one that she finds unacceptable. Suppose it is also not a future that she imagines will support truthful humanistic inquiries of any kind, including a form of philosophy she had hoped to dedicate her life to. Her imagination may seem to simply give out. It is not a reproach, Williams writes, that we cannot see beyond our outlook, beyond ‘the outer limits of what [we] find acceptable: [No] one can do that’ (Williams Reference Williams2000: 494).
Nonetheless, to respond to the philosopher who finds herself in this darker place, we can now turn to one final, unobvious line of thought from Williams. In Truth and Truthfulness, he remarks that there would have been no point for Levi, in his circumstances, ‘to spend time on acrostics, even very difficult ones, or on sophisticated chess problems’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 144). But then again, he asides in an endnote, ‘if one’s civilization is coming to an end’ – perhaps it might make some sense to do this after all. It would, he suggests, still be more ‘seemly than incoherent metaphysical despair’ (Williams Reference Williams2002: 296, n. 22). Within that endnote, he then approvingly cites two lines from a poem by a man who, like Levi, Lewis and perhaps himself, believed that he could be facing the end of his outlook: W.H. Auden. Here is that poem in its entirety:
The Epigoni (1976)
No use invoking Apollo in a case like theirs;
The pleasure-loving gods had died in their chairs
And would not get up again, one of them, ever,
Though guttural tribes had crossed the Great River,
Roasting their dead and with no name for the yew;
No good expecting long-legged ancestors to
Return with long swords from pelagic paradises
(They would be left to their own devices,
Supposing they had some); no point pretending
One didn’t foresee the probable ending
As dog-food, or landless, submerged, a slave;
Meanwhile, how should a cultured gentleman behave?
It would have been an excusable failing
Had they broken out into womanish wailing
Or, dramatising their doom, held forth
In sonorous clap-trap about death;
To their credit, a reader will only perceive
That the language they loved was coming to grief,
Expiring in preposterous mechanical tricks,
Epanaleptics, rhopalics, anacyclic acrostics:
To their lasting honour the stuff they wrote
Can safely be spanked in a scholar’s foot-note,
Called shallow by a mechanised generation to whom
Haphazard oracular grunts are profound wisdom.
Auden refers, simultaneously, to the ‘lesser generation’ of the last poets of the Roman empire, and to poets, including himself, of his own outlook, the decline of which included the loss of poetry as he understood and practiced it. Williams’ casual use of this poem is elusive, indirect, and oblique. So, I will finish with one more interpretive, imaginative leap in constructing how this line of thought is responsive to the question I began with.
If we are liberal philosophers at the end of our outlook, there remain things it would make sense for us to do that are not expressions of hopefulness, but that would nonetheless reflect the values of our declining outlook and discipline. Even if all that we can be now are the epigoni of that discipline – even if all that we can muster are our versions of acrostics or sophisticated chess problems – at least these seemingly meaningless activities might themselves be a sincere and accurate expression of the fact that what we love is coming to grief. Whether suitable or not for ‘cultured gentlemen’, even a wail may be truthful; it may even take the form of philosophy. But even here, we must be disciplined. What we should not do, in our ignorance of our own history – as philosophers and as liberals who share at least one fixed point and whose self-respect and freedom depends on our truthfulness – is to continue to rely on understandings of ourselves and philosophy that flourished and fed on that ignorance, even in our despair. We should not have hoped that God, the arc of history, or the force of reason would intervene; we should not despair because they did not, but because we did not.Footnote 20, Footnote 21
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