Bryan Magee: 1930-2019—the champion of philosophical wonderment

If you ask British philosophers who grew up in the 1970s and 80s whose work first got them hooked on the subject, two names come up again and again: Bertrand Russell and Bryan Magee. Russell was a titan of the field, famous for his philosophy the world over and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Magee was a writer, broadcaster and politician without a major original philosophical book to his name. But without his work, many of us would have grown up without any contact with philosophy at all and with no sense of how compelling it can be. Magee passed away on Friday, and it is worth reflecting on why he had such an enormous impact.

Those who became familiar with Magee’s cut-glass BBC broadcaster’s accent would never have guessed that he was born in 1930 to a working class clothes shop owning family in Hoxton, London. His move to the middle class began early with a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital school, followed by National Service in the Intelligence Corps and then another scholarship to read History at Keble College, Oxford, which he followed up with one year of Philosophy, Politics and Economics. It was at Oxford that he secured his seat at society’s high table, being elected president of the Oxford Union and becoming friends with future pillars of the establishment such as Robin Day, William Rees-Mogg, Jeremy Thorpe and Michael Heseltine.

Magee became a man of many parts, which included being elected as a Labour MP at the third time of trying in 1974. He held his seat for nine years, losing it a year after defecting to the SDP in 1982. He was also a poet and the author of numerous works of non-fiction. His widely acclaimed Wagner and Philosophy secured his reputation as a serious writer. But for many of us he will forever be remember as the presenter of two seminal television series, recorded nine years apart. Men of Ideas (1978) was a 15-episode introduction to philosophy. Each consisted of nothing more than Magee and his guest on a sofa talking. The formula was repeated with The Great Philosophers in 1987.

Watching the programmes today (all can be found on YouTube) the plummy accents, the brown furniture sets and the beige suits are only the most obvious ways in which they are incredibly dated. AJ Ayer puffing away on a cigarette is perhaps the standout period feature. More significantly, each series featured only one woman, Iris Murdoch in the first and Martha Nussbaum in the second. This barely even merits as tokenism: Murdoch, it seems, was considered an honorary man, given the series title.

All of this reflects the worst aspects of the old Reithian paternalism in which the great and the good would share their wisdom with the great unwashed. But the series also had another side. This wasn’t dumbed down “popular philosophy” but straight down the line philosophy for the people. Magee spoke to top, serious thinkers genuinely trying to convey what is interesting about their subject without gimmicks or condescension.

Magee’s skills as a presenter were clearly vital to the success of the programmes. He was much more than an interviewer. Many of his questions were in fact clear summaries of essential points which he was in effect inviting his guests to elaborate on. These contributions served to anchor the discussions in the intelligible and offer a model of lucidity that the experts were challenged to match.

Today, it seems broadcasters are afraid to present serious ideas as directly as Magee did. You need to have charismatic presenters talking to camera as they walk restlessly through exotic locations. Two static cameras recording a conversation seems frightfully dull. But it wasn’t and still isn’t. Many talk wistfully about Magee’s two series and express the wish that broadcasters would have the good sense to try something similar today. I wish they would.

I only met Magee once and the context was telling. I was giving a talk at a day course organised by Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education. Magee was in the audience and I was told he was a regular attender. Most people who have attained the status of Magee would never be seen listening rather than talking at such events. Magee was clearly a man who never stopped wanting to learn and never thought he was too good to learn from others alongside everyone else.

In his penultimate book, Ultimate Questions, written in his mid-eighties, Magee set out what he thought he had learned about “the fundamentals of the human situation.” The book is infused with a sense of wonder and amazement. This, Aristotle said, is what philosophy is born in. But as it grows up astonishment is often tamed and converted into neat theories and explanations. Magee, however, kept the flame of wonderment alive. The unifying theme of the book was how much we simply don’t know. Our minds, bodies and language all place barriers between ourselves and reality as it is in itself. We can’t even understand ourselves fully. Magee came to embrace this. Better to accept that human understanding is a rag-bag of inconsistent and contradictory fragments than force our picture of the universe into a coherent but thereby distorted whole.

In that book and elsewhere Magee admitted that philosophy had not in any way diminished his terror of death. I found this refreshing. Ever since Socrates calmly drunk his hemlock, we have associated the true philosopher with perfect equanimity about their mortality. But this was precisely the opposite of what Socrates modelled. It was only because Socrates believed his soul was immortal that he was so unperturbed. Philosophy can help you come to terms with your mortality but that doesn’t mean you stop being bothered by it.

In the third and final volume of his autobiography, published last year, Magee wrote: “It is terrible and terrifying to have to die, but even the prospect of eternal annihilation is a price worth paying for being alive.” Thanks to his work, many more people have had their eyes opened to philosophy and can see even better why this is exactly right.