06 Mar 2014 02:16:32
It wasn't just that he looked the part (tall, dark and slightly angular, dressed in elegant left-bank style). More important, he often talked the kind of philosophy that engages the public: not all those intricate puzzles about whether the chair we're sitting on really exists, but the big questions of morality, ethics and how one should live. It was partly because of these interests, and partly no doubt because of the connections he made through his first wife, Shirley Williams, that in the late 1960s and 70s he became the Labour government's "go-to guy" on moral policy. He chaired the "Williams committee" on obscenity and film censorship, with its now unfashionably relaxed conclusions on pornography ("the role of pornography in influencing society is not very important"). But he was also a member of commissions on public schools and gambling – and in the 90s he joined an inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act. "I did all the major vices," as he himself put it.
And tough as the philosophical issues he discussed were, he almost always wrote and spoke with clarity, wit and ruthless logic. There are some revealing clips of Williams in action still available on slightly scratchy YouTube recordings. It can be almost uncomfortable to see him, at the end of a lecture, devastatingly expose – with an apparent air of charm and endless patience – the idiocy of some poor student's criticisms. (I couldn't help thinking, as I watched, that trying to win an argument against Williams must have been much the same as trying to score a goal against Socrates.) But in other moods he could be a sparkling and seductive interlocutor. In a series of televised interviews with fellow philosopher Bryan Magee, you can find him explaining the importance of Descartes and Wittgenstein with such compelling lucidity that, for a few minutes at least, you actually think you understand. He had an extraordinary gift of "taking the audience with him", no matter how difficult the question.
That gift is very much on display in Essays and Reviews, 1959-2002. This is the fifth collection of his essays to have appeared since his death in 2003. The earlier ones have ranged from articles on the history of philosophy to a selection of his pieces on opera (yet another string to his bow). This final collection gathers together radio talks, public lectures and his more popular journalism and reviews – from the Spectator to the New York Review of Books. Almost inevitably there are some relatively slight contributions here (though Williams's relatively slight is almost everyone else's substantial) and a mixed bag of themes. But there is plenty of his characteristic style from start to finish. The very first piece in the book is a review of Richard Crossman's Plato Today, in which Williams happily concedes what many students have felt (but have usually been too scared to utter), that Plato's ideal state, as laid out in his Republic, is "a sclerotic monstrosity … based on oligarchic deceit and a contempt for … human diversity". It is a nice reminder that Williams began his academic career as a classicist – as is the very last piece in the volume, an essay written only months before he died, on "Why philosophy needs history" (ranging from Richard Rorty through Nietzsche to the 5th century BC).
But two essays in particular stand out, as fine examples of Williams's extraordinary strengths as a public philosopher – and, with the benefit of hindsight, of some of his weaknesses. The first is the published version of a lecture on student protest given at the University of London in 1968; the second, a version of a radio talk, published in the Listener in 1977 on "the logic of abortion".
The strengths are clear. Williams sliced through the muddle and over-simplifications of contemporary debate on both these topics. He showed that different types of universities in the UK produced very different kinds of student discontent (the Oxbridge boarding-school style of student life had little in common with "non-residential, urban institutions, in which students cram into lodgings … in an unsupervised way"). On a wider canvas, he explained why the British protests had been significantly different from those in the US (thanks largely to a different management and institutional structure in America). It was lazy, he insisted, to lump all student protest together into a single phenomenon, and it was missing the point. One had to think more fundamentally about the rights of students as adults (he was looking forward here to the lowering of the age of majority that was to come in 1970), what differences that would make, and what in the end university education was for.
Change in the university system was bound to come, and it would not be painless. In fact, in a marvellous aside (and one that is as perceptive and relevant now as it ever was) he reflected more generally on the sentimental "illusion endemic to mere liberalism" that change can ever be "quite painless, and that the mere removal of old-fashioned restrictions will leave everything in just the same space that it was in before, only with a bit more room to move around in it". The single true premise of conservatism, he rather archly observed, was that "significant changes have unexpected consequences" and not always pleasant ones.
It was with similar verve that he dealt with debates on abortion (10 years after the 1967 Abortion Act). Religion here was a red herring, he contended ("You do not have to have religious beliefs to be against murder, and it is not peculiar to Catholics to classify abortion as murder"). And he went on to prise apart the notions of "humanity" (or "personhood") that he claimed the arguments really rested on, and to expose their inconsistencies. If, for example, the main reason for allowing the removal of the foetus was that it was not a sentient person, then what was to stop one "removing" the senile, too? Williams himself was (in 21st-century terms) "pro-choice", but he wasn't going to let either side get away with sloppy arguments.
These are both powerful contributions, which have stood the test of time. So what are the weaknesses? First, there is a slight whiff of the sin that afflicts most "great thinkers": paternalism. This is particularly on show in the discussion of student protest. Williams was happy to sweep away the social restrictions of student life ("the Senior Tutor hiding behind the dustbins to catch them climbing over the wall"). He was far less keen on student influence on the university syllabus. Students, he agreed, had the right to complain, but "the staff also has the right, if they happen to think the students are talking ill-informed rubbish, to tell them so". For him, academic freedom did not only mean freedom from pressures of governments or big business; it meant freedom from "mass meetings of students". I do have a partial, sneaking sympathy with Williams on this. But in cold black and white, these look like the words of a man who is used to thinking that he knows best.
The second unease I have may be as much to do with the cultural climate of the late 20th century as with Williams personally. He is still known in Cambridge and elsewhere as a supporter of women's causes: he was, for example, instrumental in persuading King's College to "go mixed" in 1972, and he was one of the few men at the time who took sexual harassment seriously. All the same, there is a decidedly blokeish feel to the essays. For all its acuity, the discussion of abortion raises the issue of the experience of women only briefly, and in the very last paragraphs (where, to be fair, Williams is trenchant in stating that "their experiences are the only … honest guide … we have to what the unique phenomenon of abortion genuinely is"). And throughout the book, we are very much in a man's world. The pronouns are resolutely male – and those who now keep an eagle eye on the number of books by women that get reviewed in mainstream newspapers and magazines would find the statistics of this collection significant. There are 59 books by men reviewed within its covers, just 10 by women (and four of those as part of a composite review). It's not as if there weren't plenty of female philosophers out there and publishing books.
