On Searle on Williams

Yes. Well, Bernard was a very good friend of mine. He had an enormous influence on me of the kind that would be hard to describe because it was mostly just admiration for his sheer intellectual abilities. I think Bernard was as intelligent as any human being I’ve ever met. He had a kind of quickness which was stunning. Now one consequence of that is there’s a sense in which people who knew him well, or at least in my case, we always feel the published work is not up to the level of the Bernard we remember. Yes, it’s wonderful and admirable, the published work, but the particular fire and light that came from discussions with Bernard are lost on the printed page. Now whether that’s inevitable, or whether or not he had actually been more patient about sitting down and doing a hard slog necessary to write a great book, I don’t know. I know that in the last years of his life he suddenly became very productive. I think -- I mean now since we’re talking about somebody I admire -- that in some ways his career was a disappointment to his admirers because he never produced a work of the calibre of his highest ability. And one of the reasons for that is he had all this other stuff going on. He was always on some Royal Commission, or dining in Buckingham Palace...

He could see instantly the flaws in arguments, including his own. This was the fatal element: that Bernard could see the limitations of philosophical theories, but they led to him seeing the limitations of his own theories, and that was partly debilitating.--John Searle interviewed by Tim Crane [HT Dailynous]

Searle's recent interviews have been making a splash (recall). I am a bit sad that in these interviews, nobody knowledgeable interrogates his exchanges with Derrida.

Anyway, Searle's comment on Williams has escaped, I think, scrutiny. Williams's career was not a professional failure; he was at one point Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and Deutsch Professor at Berkeley. His books are widely cited (I blogged about his truth book once), and some of his thought experiments have become evergreens in moral philosophy. I read Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy before I went to graduate school and it assured me that analytical philosophy need not be forfeited to the technicians. (Recently, I wrote a paper on moral luck in which I offer a correction to his account from the vantage point of Adam Smith's treatment.)

Searle's comments remind us of two non-trivial facts: (i) it's very hard to capture in print "the particular fire and light that came from discussions;" (ii) even the most talented and best situated amongst us (e.g. Williams) are unlikely to write "a great book." The two facts are connected, although not by logical entailment. The known professional ways of communicating philosophy -- the journal article, the book -- are both designed to prevent 'fire and light.' Some such affect, "quickness," and "insight" (a key word in the interview with Searle) are not the product of journal articles and books, specially written in the registers of analytical philosophy, in particular; it embraces the ideals of responsible speech in its self-image opposed to purported Heideggerrian nonsense.

Even most philosophical dialogues rarely manage to capture what it's like to participate in philosophically satisfying conversation. It is no surprise, I think that besides Plato, Nietzsche's and Kierkegaard's writings, Seneca's Letters, Montaigne's Essays, Spinoza's Ethics, endure because they have found rhetorical forms that capture features of the 'fire and light.' What these thinkers have in common is that they have found formats that allow them to convey rigor, affect, and dialogic elements that are key to such 'fire and light.' (See these posts on Seneca: here, here, here.)* Searle mistakenly thinks that single-minded focus, lack of distraction, and patience are necessary for writing a "great book." This may be true for certain industrious souls of the sort that thrive within the division of intellectual labor as practiced by professional philosophers, but it is not a universal truth (as reflection on the examples of the this very paragraph reveals). In so far as Williams aspired to such greatness (an open question for me), he clearly thought he needed immersion in professional and public affairs.

 

At the end of the quoted passage, Searle implies that Williams's intellectual integrity got in the way of his own success. Now, before publication was essential to professional success, we were all familiar with perfectionists who become incapable of completing works. (Morgenbesser may well be the archetype for a few generations.) But, as noted, Williams’s integrity did not prevent him from being productive; rather they prevented him from proposing in Searle’s words “philosophical theory.” In his works, Williams successfully manages to convey quite a few of his reasons for doing so (leaving aside if these reasons convince everybody).

If we drop the requirement that philosophy should produce philosophical theories then we might be better able to appreciate Williams’s achievements. In so far as Williams conveys this feature of his philosophical character, I am inclined to think his work is a remarkable achievement—a rare instance of integrating personality with work.

Note that too exclusive focus on verbal intelligence and quickness (both singled out by Searle), are the sort of intellectual virtues that have, I think, helped generate and perpetuate patterns of exclusion that have been terrible for professional philosophy (recall boy-wonders). If these are the kind of criteria that one deploys in evaluating written philosophy, one may well end up overvaluing a certain glibness and cleverness and miss genuine greatness when it stares one in the face; if I am right about this, it would be a nice example of the deformation of the intellectual sentiments that are a consequence of norms of the profession.+

I am not claiming, of course, that Williams's writings are great. I say this not because it would be inappropriate to ask of his works if they are great. He was, after all, not above giving criteria for greatness (see this list of three on being a great metaphysician), although Williams is quick to add that "arguments" are more important than greatness. Perhaps, too, he though that it would be too Nietzschean to call attention to the fact that one's commitment to the kind of intellectual integrity he exhibited presupposes a certain greatness?

 

*I know this is a counter-intuitive claim about Spinoza's geometric method; but Spinoza uses Scholia, forewords, appendices to bring in dialogic elements--it is also noteworthy that the Ethics was published alongside his letters.

+Sadly, Searle does not comment on what he learned from Williams on the nature of friendship.

Comments

[Nicholas Denyer]

Actually, it the Knightbridge Chair. Knightsbridge is a suburb of London.