Three Philosophers

This is the second post in a two part reflection on my Intellectual Formation

What is a philosopher? The obvious modern answer is someone trained to think clearly: someone who analyses concepts, interrogates arguments, exposes contradictions and insists that claims be supported by reasons. Today, this person is most likely to be found in a university, writing for other philosophers and participating in a professional discipline with its own standards, disputes and hierarchies.

There is nothing wrong with this picture. Philosophy without rigour quickly becomes a refuge for vagueness, intuition and inflated claims. Arguments matter. Definitions matter. The ability to see that a conclusion does not follow from its premises matters. Public life would be improved by more of this kind of discipline and rather less confidence unsupported by thought.

Yet this is not quite what the word philosopher originally meant. A philosopher was a lover of wisdom. The phrase suggests something more than analytical competence. It implies a person whose life is oriented towards truth, someone for whom thinking is not merely an intellectual activity but part of a larger attempt to see clearly and live well.

The two ideas should belong together. The lover of wisdom needs reason, otherwise love of truth can become self-deception. The rational interrogator needs some sense of what truth is for, otherwise intellectual power risks becoming sterile. But the modern university has become much better at recognising the first quality than the second.

The two philosophers who most shaped my understanding of philosophy came to represent these possibilities for me. Bernard Williams was one of the most celebrated moral philosophers of the twentieth century, an intellectual of extraordinary speed and power. Fergal O’Connor was a Dominican priest who taught political philosophy at University College Dublin and was scarcely known outside it. Williams wrote books that continue to be studied around the world. Fergal wrote almost nothing. Williams possessed a degree of cleverness I found thrilling and intimidating. Fergal possessed something I found much rarer: wisdom.

I knew both men. Fergal shaped the understanding of philosophy that eventually took me to Oxford. Williams confronted me with a very different version of what a philosopher was. Only much later did I see that the contrast between them was also the contrast I had been trying to understand in Plato: the relationship between logos and eros, between reasoning and seeing, between the intellectual power to test an argument and the desire that turns a person towards truth.

That was the question I carried to Oxford, although I did not yet know how to state it.

Fergal O’Connor

Fergal taught political philosophy at UCD through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. He had studied in Dublin and Oxford and later completed a doctorate on Aristotle and Aquinas at the Gregorian University in Rome. He taught Plato, Hobbes and Rousseau, among others, but Plato was his great love.

He was also a Dominican priest, and this mattered to the kind of philosopher he was. His philosophical interests did not remain inside the university. He worked among poor and disadvantaged people in Dublin’s inner city. At a time when unmarried mothers were condemned and humiliated in Irish society, Fergal was involved in creating practical forms of support for them. He appeared on Irish television speaking in ways priests were not expected to speak and was reprimanded by the Catholic hierarchy. He continued because he believed that what he was doing was right.

I do not mention this to turn him into a saint. Moral courage does not prove that someone’s philosophical views are correct, and a beloved teacher is not exempt from the ordinary limitations of personality and judgment. What mattered was the continuity between Fergal’s thinking, teaching and conduct. Justice was not simply a concept he analysed. It made claims upon him.

The same was true of his teaching. In Fergal’s seminars, philosophy ceased to be a collection of positions advanced by important men in the past. The questions became immediate. Justice, authority, virtue and the good life referred back, often uncomfortably, to the people in the room. He had a way of making inherited opinions appear less secure without making the encounter feel like a contest.

He was a gentle man, much softer than Plato’s Socrates. He did not appear to enjoy cornering people or exposing their ignorance. But there was something of the gadfly in him. He would allow a confident position to unfold until its weaknesses became visible, often to the person who had expressed it. His classes could wander, but the apparent digressions frequently changed the meaning of the original question. You left not necessarily with a neat conclusion, but with the sense that something you had taken for granted no longer looked the same.

Most importantly, Fergal communicated a love of the search for truth. This was not simply enthusiasm for philosophy as a subject. He conveyed that truth mattered independently of professional success, social approval or institutional loyalty. Philosophy was not an exhibition of cleverness. It was an attempt to see more honestly, including a willingness to discover that one’s own commitments were wrong.

His conflict with the Church followed from the same disposition. He was not rebellious for the sake of being rebellious. But loyalty to an institution could not relieve him of the obligation to judge what that institution was doing. The Church possessed a confident moral language, extensive authority and a formidable apparatus of rules. Yet those rules were being applied in ways that caused suffering to vulnerable women and children. Fergal returned moral judgment to the human reality the abstractions were supposed to serve.

This was one reason his teaching of Aristotle’s phronesis, practical wisdom, mattered so much to me. Practical wisdom is not merely the ability to apply a rule. It is the capacity to recognise what a particular human situation requires when goods conflict, circumstances change and no procedure can decide the matter in advance. Ireland had no shortage of moral rules. What it often lacked was wise judgment about the people upon whom those rules descended.

Fergal did not merely explain practical wisdom. He tried to practise it.

Plato, logos and eros

The first essay in this pair asked whether Plato was a philosopher. The question was deliberately provocative because Plato was obviously one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. But he was not a philosopher in quite the form the modern university has taught us to expect. He wrote no treatises and never stated his conclusions in his own voice. He wrote dialogues in which philosophy took place between people.

Fergal helped me see why this mattered. Plato certainly foregrounded logos. Socrates reasons, questions, distinguishes and refutes. He refuses to accept authority, convention or rhetorical brilliance as substitutes for an account that can withstand examination. Philosophy begins when a person is prepared to give reasons for what he believes.

That achievement cannot be overstated. Without logos, the love of truth can collapse into enthusiasm or self-deception. People can feel deeply that something is true and be completely wrong. Argument subjects desire to discipline. It forces us to expose our beliefs to questions we do not control.

But Plato did not think logos was sufficient.

The person seeking truth must also want it. More than that, desire shapes what a person is capable of seeing. The prisoners in the Cave are not trapped simply because they lack better arguments. They are attached to the shadows. Their sense of status, knowledge and reality has been formed within the world projected on the wall. To leave the Cave is not merely to receive new information. The whole person must be turned.

This is where eros enters.

In the Symposium and the Phaedrus, desire is not treated only as an unruly force that reason must suppress. Properly educated, it becomes the energy that draws the soul beyond its present condition. Eros is the love of beauty, truth and the good. It is what makes the philosophical ascent possible.

Reasoning can challenge what we think we see, but it cannot by itself determine what we are drawn to look at. A person may follow an argument while remaining fundamentally unchanged. He may agree that justice matters and continue to live unjustly, or concede that status does not bring happiness while organising his life around status. The conclusion has been accepted, but the person has not been turned.

This is why seeing is so central to Plato. The highest kind of understanding is not simply the possession of a correct proposition. It is an apprehension of reality that has become possible through a long education of thought and desire. Plato often associates this with nous: the moment in which truth is not merely argued towards but seen.

The Seventh Letter offers the most memorable image. Philosophical understanding, Plato says, cannot simply be written down and transferred from one mind to another. It arises after sustained engagement with the subject and a shared life of inquiry, suddenly kindling like a spark from a fire. The spark is not a rejection of reason. It comes after questioning, argument, attention and intellectual discipline. Logos prepares the ground. Eros draws the soul towards truth. Nous is the recognition that becomes possible when the two work together.

This was the Plato I learned from Fergal. It was also the Plato I found in the philosophial writings of Iris Murdoch.

Iris Murdoch and the education of vision

Murdoch remains one of the most important figures in my intellectual formation. She had once been part of Oxford philosophy, but she stood increasingly apart from its dominant currents and eventually became better known as a novelist. Before going to Oxford, I wrote to her. She replied that she could not supervise me because she was no longer a member of the faculty and, in any event, was now much more of a novelist than a philosopher. I later met her, but that belongs to another story.

What mattered was that Murdoch understood Plato’s spirit as well as almost anyone I had read. For her, moral and philosophical life depended upon attention: the difficult work of seeing reality without forcing it into the shapes created by fantasy, vanity and self-interest. We do not become good merely by acquiring correct principles. We must learn to look more justly.

Murdoch gave philosophical language to something Fergal had already shown me. Reason can test what we think we see, but it cannot by itself teach us what deserves attention. The quality of our vision depends upon the quality of our desire. If the self remains enclosed within its own fantasies, its reasoning may become extremely sophisticated while continuing to serve distortion.

This is why Murdoch’s Platonism was so important. She resisted the idea that moral philosophy could be reduced to decisions, choices and publicly defensible arguments. Long before the moment of decision, a person’s attention has already been shaped. What appears salient, what is ignored, what is loved and what is feared all affect the moral world that becomes visible.

The connection with eros is clear. Love, properly understood, is not merely a feeling directed at an object. It is a discipline of attention. It draws us beyond the self and towards a reality that does not exist merely for our purposes. Fergal admired Murdoch. The Plato he taught was similarly concerned with the education of desire and vision. Philosophy was not only logos: the rational testing of propositions. It was logos animated by eros, disciplined thought directed by a love of truth. The aim was not simply to arrive at conclusions but to become capable of seeing.

That was the Plato I carried with me to Oxford.

Oxford and the literary Plato

My work at Oxford began in Classics rather than Philosophy. My first supervisor was Richard Rutherford at Christ Church, an accomplished scholar of Greek and Latin literature who took Plato seriously as a writer. This initially seemed promising. At least he did not treat the literary character of the dialogues as an inconvenience surrounding the arguments.

But our interests were not quite the same. Rutherford was attentive to the beauty and texture of Plato’s prose, the construction of individual dialogues and Plato’s place within Greek literature. I was trying to make a more disruptive claim. The form of the dialogue did not merely make Plato an unusually gifted writer. It expressed a different conception of philosophical truth from that assumed by many later philosophers.

Character, setting, irony and dramatic sequence were not aesthetic additions to an argument that could otherwise stand alone. They showed how logos operated within human beings whose desires, fears and ambitions affected what they were capable of seeing. The dramatic form was part of Plato’s philosophy because Plato understood that truth was not received by a disembodied intellect.

Rutherford did not initially have a great deal to say about this. He had considerably more to say about the dubious standard of my Ancient Greek. He was right. Rutherford was a distinguished classicist, while my Greek was, at best, at the level of a poor undergraduate. I had arrived wanting to make a large claim about Plato without possessing anything close to the linguistic command expected in an Oxford Classics environment. I wanted to discuss philosophical truth. Rutherford understandably wanted to establish whether I could construe the sentences properly.

This was one of the more chastening aspects of Oxford. I believed I had glimpsed something important, but I had not equipped myself adequately to demonstrate it. The more unconventional the claim, the greater the burden of scholarship. I was not yet able to carry it.

Rutherford and I did not have much in common intellectually, and I suspect I was a frustrating post-graduate student. Towards the end, however, he seemed to recognise that I was reaching towards a more substantial philosophical issue than he had initially assumed. He also concluded, reasonably enough, that what I wanted to do no longer fitted comfortably within Classics. He arranged for me to work with Bernard Williams, then White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Corpus Christi College.

Bernard Williams and philosophy as logos

It would be easy, and wrong, to turn Williams into a convenient symbol of everything I found unsatisfactory about Oxford philosophy. His own work resisted abstract moral systems and insisted that ethical thought remain answerable to history, psychology and the complexity of human life. In the 1970s and 1980s, he had also been one of Britain’s most visible and engaged philosophers. He appeared on television and radio, participated in public commissions and involved himself in questions extending well beyond the university. Martha Nussbaum has also credited him as a principled ally of women at a time when female philosophers struggled to be taken seriously in a male-dominated academic world.

That record matters. It shows that Williams was not merely a detached technician of arguments. He was engaged in public life and appears to have possessed qualities of courage and generosity that I did not see. But I did not see them. The Williams I encountered was my supervisor, and he frankly wasn't the best supervisor. He took ages to respond to my submissions. When I met him I saw the extraordinary speed of mind for which he was famous. He could grasp the direction of an argument before I had properly stated it, identify its weakest point and move several stages beyond it while I was still trying to explain what I meant. To sit opposite him was to become acutely aware of the difference between having an intuition and possessing an argument.

But what I did not experience was the quality that had drawn me to philosophy through Fergal. Williams did not make me feel that we were participants in a shared search whose outcome mattered to both of us. I experienced him mainly as a devastating interrogator of an inadequately prepared student. This may say as much about the circumstances as it does about Williams. A supervisory relationship offers a narrow view of another person. I was insecure, under-equipped and struggling to articulate a project that crossed disciplinary boundaries. Williams may reasonably have found my ideas vague. Others encountered sides of him I did not.

Memory is not neutral either. I met Fergal during the expansive years of intellectual discovery and Williams during an experience of contraction and failure. Affection has probably softened one man and disappointment sharpened the other. Even after allowing for all of this, however, the contrast remains. Williams represented logos at its most formidable: analytical power, argumentative discipline, the capacity to expose confusion with extraordinary speed. Fergal possessed logos, but in him it seemed inseparable from eros: from a love of truth that shaped his teaching, his attention and his conduct. Williams made me see how inadequately I could argue. Fergal made me want to seek truth.

They were not the same achievement.

The outsider’s problem

My difficulties at Oxford were not simply the result of two supervisory relationships that failed to produce what I had hoped. I arrived from an intellectual tradition that made me sensitive to questions the dominant culture at Oxford did not seem to recognise as questions. Before Oxford, I had completed a two-year master’s thesis under Richard Kearney, whose work in continental philosophy and hermeneutics gave me a very different formation from that of most British philosophy students. Through Gadamer, I had learned that interpretation never begins from nowhere. We approach texts with historically formed assumptions and categories. The task is not to eliminate these preconceptions, which is impossible, but to become conscious of them and allow the text to challenge them.

At Oxford, many philosophers did not seem to regard their approach to Plato as an interpretation at all. They identified claims, reconstructed arguments and decided whether those arguments succeeded. The method presented itself not as one historically particular way of reading Plato but as philosophy simply doing its proper work. From my perspective, an unexamined image of the philosopher had already determined the reading. Plato was treated as though he were essentially a modern academic philosopher who had made the inconvenient choice to distribute his arguments among dramatic speakers.

I thought this was anachronistic. Plato never spoke in his own voice. The meaning of a claim could not be separated from the fact that he gave it to this speaker, before these people, in this setting and at this point in the encounter. The drama showed logos being shaped by eros, character and circumstance. It revealed not simply what people argued but what they loved, feared and were capable of seeing.

My position outside the British analytical tradition made some of these assumptions visible because they were not wholly my own. But it also left me badly equipped to challenge them. The Oxford students and professors around me were quicker, better trained and more accomplished in Greek and scholarship. I often wondered whether my talk of hermeneutics, dramatic form and philosophical formation reflected genuine insight or simply my failure to understand philosophy at the required level. This produced an uncomfortable combination of inferiority and superiority. I felt less clever than the people around me while believing I could see assumptions they could not see in themselves. At times, that conviction was undoubtedly defensive. It protected me from the possibility that I was simply failing.

Looking back, I think both things were true. I was inadequately prepared, and I had perceived a genuine problem. Oxford may have been insufficiently open to the question I wanted to ask, while I lacked the Greek, scholarship and philosophical precision required to make the argument compelling.

I had seen something. I could not yet make it clear.

What the contrast taught me

Only much later did I understand that the difference between Fergal and Williams was connected to the argument I had been trying to make about Plato.

Williams embodied the philosopher as rational interrogator. His great power lay in logos: in clarifying, distinguishing, testing and dismantling. Fergal embodied the philosopher as lover of wisdom. He valued logos, but his reasoning was animated by eros, by a desire for truth that joined thought to judgment and judgment to life. The distinction is not between reason and feeling, still less between intelligence and its absence. Eros without logos can become fantasy. Logos without eros can become sterile: brilliant at criticism, uncertain about what the criticism is for. Plato needed both. Philosophy begins in the desire to see and advances through disciplined argument. In the best case, the two prepare the moment of recognition Plato associated with nous.

Modern academic philosophy is exceptionally good at recognising logos. Arguments can be written, criticised and assessed. Analytical power can be displayed. Eros is more difficult to verify, and wisdom harder still. A person can write brilliantly about the good while living badly, or analyse practical wisdom without possessing much of it.

That does not make academic philosophy worthless. Williams showed me the extraordinary power of a trained philosophical intelligence. Oxford exposed the weakness of my Greek, the gaps in my scholarship and the distance between an intuition and a defensible argument. I needed that discipline, even if I did not receive it in a form I found inspiring.

But Fergal showed me why philosophy mattered. He taught me that truth is not simply something to be established. It is something to be loved, seen and lived by.

Fergal gave me the desire for truth. Oxford exposed the discipline truth demands.

What is a philosopher?

What, then, is a philosopher?

The modern answer remains indispensable. A philosopher reasons carefully, exposes confusion and subjects claims to public argument. Without logos, the love of wisdom can become little more than an attractive story we tell about ourselves.

But logos is not enough. A philosopher must also possess eros: the desire for truth and the willingness to be changed by what the search reveals. Reason tests what we think we see; love turns us towards what is worth seeing.

Plato’s achievement was to hold these together. Fergal helped me understand the desire. Williams showed me the force of reason. I went to Oxford because of the first and discovered how I probably needed more the second.

It has taken me more than thirty years to see that the philosopher requires both.