Colin McGinn is not Pablo Picasso.
The Times of London – January 13
“I won’t talk to my colleagues about philosophy. It is too boring to me,” he [McGinn] says.
But why?
“They are too stupid.”
He can’t say that!
“No, they don’t get it. And I don’t want to have an hour’s conversation about it.”
But they have read the same texts?
“Oh, yes. This is where I get much more intolerant. I know exactly what they are going to say. They ought to know what I am going to say, but apparently they don’t.”
We love you too Colin. Elsewhere he launches into personal attacks against the recently deceased, which is always a pleasant way to pass the time with major newspaper reporters.
Thanks to Peter Ludlow for the link, which has sadly now expired for those without Times subscriptions. I’ve attached the text below for those without subscriptions.
In the interview McGinn goes on to attack philosophers for their poor dress sense. From someone who looks like this, I’d say that’s a bit rich.
Oops, that’s Colin Quinn, not Colin McGinn. Colin McGinn looks like this. The two Colins are easy to tell apart. One is an obnoxious loudmouth with an ego problem, and the other lives in New York.
Funnily enough, out in Davis the faculty have better dress sense than the undergraduates. California is such a strange place.
McGinn also mentions his rock’n’roll habit but doesn’t fill us in about how successful his bands have been. Or maybe the journo just cut that bit out.
There’s plenty more to write about here, but let’s close for now with his claim to be a meat-eating vegetarian. There’s no position so absurd that some philosopher…
London Times, Edition 1DD TUE 13 JAN 2004, Page Times2 8
“I have three main parts to my life: Philosophy, Surfing and Rock’n’roll” Interview; Professor Colin McGinn; The Andrew Billen interview
ANDREW BILLEN FEATURES
Professor Colin McGinn has spent his career pondering the mystery of consciousness and other philosophical problems, but believes that the real meaning of life is to be found on the beach.
PROFESSOR McGinn is floating horizontally in his New York apartment, legs straight, his body supported only by his arms. How did we get here, I ask myself, and although Colin McGinn is one of the cleverest British philosophers, it’s not a philosophical inquiry. I’m just trying to work out how we got from the mystery of consciousness, the qualia question (excuse me getting technical), to this demonstration of the professor’s upper-arm strength.
McGinn, a short, robust 53-year-old with a disturbing facial similarity to Anthony Hopkins -and one hell of a pair of biceps -is the author of an acclaimed intellectual memoir, now out in paperback, The Making of a Philosopher. It is beautifully and clearly written and humanises the abstruse discipline of analytical philosophy. Yet it can’t prepare me for this interview, now in its fourth hour. So far he has called his colleagues stupid, told me how gym work can improve my abs, joked that he should get a cut of the profits from the Matrix franchise and acted out a near-death experience aboard a surf-kayak.
Philosophy, he explains, is about following a sequence of thoughts to their logical conclusion. In this, I conclude, it does not reflect life. Bertrand Russell could not have predicted the progression of this encounter.
Another “how did we get here?” question is answered by The Making of a Philosopher. It explains how the grandson of two Durham miners, an 11-plus failure, became one of New York’s top philosophers. The answer, like the answer to how you get to Carnegie Hall, is that you practise. Like so many slow-burning intellectuals, McGinn was inspired in adolescence by a teacher, in his case a divinity master, Mr Marsh.
Marsh brought up Descartes’ puzzle about how can we know if there is a physical universe if all we have to go by are our internal senses. Might not an evil demon have imposed an entirely false sense of the world in our minds? The Matrix, as McGinn has written enthusiastically from time to time, merely updates this nightmare and adds flying karate.
As a teenager, McGinn spent hours staring at furniture trying to “penetrate the veil of sense data”. The first in his family even to consider university, at Manchester he fell under the spell of the philosopher Dr Wolfe Mays. “I liked,” he wrote, “his open immodesty, his sense of his own importance, as well as his love of showing off.”
He went on to Oxford and London universities, embarking on “a decade of effort”. In 1989 he resigned acrimoniously as Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford and joined Rutgers University in New Jersey, something of a philosophy hothouse. He lives across the Hudson from it in an apartment that he bought ten years ago for $250,000 and that is now worth $1 million.
So getting from Hartlepool to Manhattan is relatively easily explained.
This is more than can be said for the conclusions that his profession tends to reach. If Descartes could make the existence of the whole universe uncertain, Saint Anselm’s “ontological argument”, which also fascinated the teenage McGinn, was able to make God suddenly appear in the room. At this stage in the book (and it was only page eight) I began to feel a queasy foreboding for my own sanity.
Does he ever fear that this way madness lies?
“They are way out, some of these things. You wonder ‘Are you thinking about insane questions?’ You become a bit obsessive, of course. I know extremely distinguished philosophers -two in particular, Saul Kripke and David Lewis, who died recently – who are very strange characters. They are not normal by any normal standards.”
Yet he has stayed normal?
“Well, with me I think it is because I didn’t start out as a very scholarly type of boy and I still think of myself as having three parts to me. There is my intellectual part, the part most of the world knows about. Then another part of me is sports. I still have a fascination for it and I hope I do tell you a bit about my interest in water sports. (He will, he will.) And then there is also my rock’n’roll side. I have my drum kit in the other room. But these parts rarely enter into my life as a philosopher and intellectual.”
A drum kit and a kayak will, indeed, have little purchase on the problem of consciousness -and if consciousness does not strike you as a problem, read his admirable 1999 layman’s book on the subject, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World; it soon will.
“Consciousness,” he explains to me, “is such a vague word. It can mean so many things, but what I mean by it is actually just sensation, experience, sentience. So when I look at this, I have a sensation of blue. The problem is if you look in my brain you don’t see a sensation of blue. You see my neurons firing at the back of my brain. The question is, how does that sensation of blue relate to my neurons firing? That’s what people call qualia.”
In 1991 he bundled his work on the subject into a book called The Problem of Consciousness. Its conclusion was that it was an unsolvable mystery. Popular science magazines began to run stories on him; Newsweek noticed; he got labelled, after a rock band, philosophy’s New Mysterian. But much of academia was outraged. Daniel Dennett, of Tufts University in Massachusetts, wrote that he was “embarrassed to be in the same profession” as McGinn and brought out a book in response, Consciousness Explained. The debate has been feverish ever since, although McGinn’s hunch is that it will peter out quite soon: “Nobody will come up with anything, you see.”
McGinn’s well-argued defeatism is dangerous stuff, however, for it touches on a longer tradition of saying that most philosophical questions are equally illegitimate. Their illegitimacy would explain why, unlike the material sciences, philosophy fails to come up with definitive answers and why one school’s thinking rarely builds on another’s.
So why not just close the book on it?
“Well, in a way, you can close the book on it, according to me. But I’m not saying something so radical. Many people have said that in philosophy you are not going to find the answers to questions in the way you do in other areas. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no value in it.”
Because we should know the limits of knowledge?
“Exactly. You should understand the limits.”
Now, your ordinary taxpayer might wonder, if clever men such as McGinn think that they have been asking unanswerable questions, should they not have a stab at more pressing questions? There is an amusing passage near the end of The Making of a Philosopher in which McGinn runs into Jennifer Aniston at a film premiere. She asks about his favourite philosophers, but turns out not to have heard of Russell, Kant or Descartes. Afterwards he reflects that she probably meant Eastern philosophy. And why shouldn’t she? At least Eastern philosophy tackles the metaphysical questions most of us ask.
“The trouble with the meaning of life topic,” says McGinn, “is that people would love to say something about it, but what can you say that is new, interesting or worthwhile?”
How about ideas on how to live life, then? After all, Sartre changed people’s lives with his thinking.
“Yes, he did. I’d love to be able to think of some line of thought that would have that kind of status as something that would change people’s lives, but I just don’t have any good ideas along those lines.”
McGinn, it should be said, is not uninterested in morality. He is the general editor of a series of Verso books on ethics, whose subjects have so far been slavery, animal rights and drug laws. He is also a public enemy of moral relativism and postmodernism. He thinks that burning witches was wrong full stop, never mind that we are judging another culture from the perspective of another time.
But although this talk sounds refreshing, it is not original. Nor, he says, does he find it intellectually challenging. I get the feeling, too, that ethics, mired as they are in life, do not allow him the intellectual escape that pure theory does, that exhilarating feeling, as he has written, that he has taken flight, left gravity behind. In his memoir McGinn says he believes strongly in the idea of virtue and right conduct. Yet from our conversation it transpires that, like the rest of us, he is perfectly capable of living life in murky contradiction to his beliefs.
His memoirs are so silent on his sex life that I wondered if I was going to meet a monkish intellectual. In fact he has been married three times, while all the time maintaining a theoretical opposition to the institution. At 21, he wed a fellow student, Marion Page. They had not wanted to marry, but had come under irresistible pressure from her father. As it turned out, she hated marriage even more than he did and the relationship crumbled. He later lived for a decade with the American philosopher Dr Anita Avramides, now of St Hilda’s, Oxford. They finally married so that she could stay teaching in Oxford, even though by that time he had decided to leave her for a woman he had met in America. (Along the way he had a son, Bruno, now grown up, by another relationship.) “So you see in both cases I didn’t really want to be married and neither did the people I was married to, but, for these external reasons, we did it.”
So why did he marry his current wife, a film publicist, Catherine Mortenson? That was different: “I started thinking ‘I’m 52. Referring to your ‘girlfriend’ when you are 52 seems ever more silly. So I thought ‘What the hell?’ ” There is a second instance of a conflict between McGinn theory and McGinn practice, although it may worry me more than it does him. After 30 years’ abstinence, he has started eating meat. Yet he thinks meat-eating is wrong and of himself as a vegetarian. In that case, I say, I’m a vegetarian, too.
“Good! I have said to people over the years ‘I am not trying to persuade you to be a vegetarian, but I would like to persuade you that there is something wrong about eating meat’. But to many intellectuals that sounds like ‘I am not going to live by my principles’. They can’t bear that idea, so they attack your principles.”
The reason he started eating meat again, animals might like to know, seems to be that he could not bear the predictability of these attacks from his regrettably predictable colleagues.
“I won’t talk to my colleagues about philosophy. It is too boring to me,” he says.
But why?
“They are too stupid.”
He can’t say that!
“No, they don’t get it. And I don’t want to have an hour’s conversation about it.”
But they have read the same texts?
“Oh, yes. This is where I get much more intolerant. I know exactly what they are going to say. They ought to know what I am going to say, but apparently they don’t.“It is a fault. But I am not as bad as Bernard Williams. He apparently was horrible to people. He could not tolerate people being less clever than him. He was quicker than anybody else, and if they were not as quick as him, he would show his disdain for them.”
Yet he confesses that he, too, can write savage book reviews. Nor does he forgive easily; he still refuses all contact with Oxford University, in punishment for its refusing him unpaid leave when he was considering moving to New York.
“No,” he says, “I don’t forgive much at all.”
Unless you count Alan Partridge’s favourite philosophical thinker, Peter Ustinov, I have previously interviewed only two philosophers: Bernard-Henri Levi and Mary Warnock. As with McGinn, I left both impressed by their practical obtuseness as much as their intellectual brilliance. McGinn this morning, for example, has trouble working out where to sit to avoid the sun’s glare, leaving me to come up with the radical idea of drawing the curtains. The Making of a Philosopher is a charming book, but it does not persuade you that analytical philosophy is of much practical value even to its parishioners.
“They look terrible to start with,” says McGinn of his contemporaries. “I don’t like people looking terrible. Their clothes are terrible. They will be intolerant of people whom they don’t think of as at their intellectual level. People who are very nice, interesting people, they’re just not interested in them.”
Paradoxically, the book does, however, make philosophy sound cool -as cool as McGinn’s other loves: John Lennon, computer games, gym workouts and, of course, surfing. Boy, does this man love the surf!
Once we get to the topic, he is soon on his feet miming how mighty waves nearly threw him deathwards. He owns six kayaks, two wind-surfers, two surfboards, two kite-surfing outfits and two powerboats. The book paid for a home for them all in Long Island.
He’s so obsessive that in a recent lecture he compared “full-throttle philosophical thinking” with surfing.
“Showing off,” he added, “is an integral part of their exercise, but, as I remarked earlier, I have no objection to showing off.”
And this is, I realise in retrospect, exactly how we get from consciousness to gymnastics, why he is performing his Matrix act for me, balancing his torso on his arms, defying gravity, physical and intellectual: the more or less bearable lightness of Colin McGinn.