Bryan Magee (1930-2019) never had an easy relationship with philosophical problems. One day in chapel at Christ’s Hospital, the Sussex boarding school to which he won a scholarship at the age of eleven, the potential truth of solipsism – the idea that we can only be sure of the existence of our own minds – bore down on him with overwhelming force. When he closed his eyes, the entire scene before him – hundreds of other boys, the building itself – disappeared, leaving him in darkness. But did that mean that external reality was in some way dependent on our senses? Was our immediate consciousness the only aspect of reality that we really knew existed? The young Magee found this thought terrifyingly claustrophobic; feeling (and looking, as he was later told by baffled classmates) physically sick, on the point of fainting, he ran out of chapel, down the middle of the two packed choir stalls, in view of the whole school.

It seems likely that Magee had an undiagnosed anxiety disorder that made him prone to panic attacks such as the one described above. But the incident also demonstrates the relationship with philosophy that he was to have for the rest of his life, as well as the kind of philosophical problems with which he was most involved. Grappling with questions about the limits of knowledge and the ultimate nature of reality, as it exists (if it exists) independently of perception, was for Magee the opposite of an academic pursuit – which explains, in part, why he could be so critical of university philosophers. It was a matter of first-order existential importance with the power to disturb as well as exhilarate.

When the chapel incident occurred, Magee hadn’t yet learned to call his problems philosophical, nor did he have any idea that philosophy had existed as a distinct intellectual tradition for more than 2,000 years. He was born in 1930 to a shop-keeping family in Hoxton, at the time London’s worst slum – an unlikely place for boyhood philosophising. Magee attended a local state school until he won the scholarship to Christ’s Hospital. From there, he went onto Keble College, Oxford (also on a scholarship), becoming president of the Union and graduating with degrees in History and Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Magee then spent a year as a postgraduate philosophy student at Yale, after which his life followed a trajectory that would be hard to imitate today, but which makes him the biographer’s dream subject: he pursued simultaneous careers as a novelist, philosopher, journalist, TV and radio presenter, arts critic and Labour MP. Today, five-and-a-half years since his death, Magee is remembered most as a hugely influential populariser of philosophy, whose two BBC TV series on the subject (1978’s Men of Ideas and 1987’s The Great Philosophers) attracted non-specialist audiences of millions.

The format was daring in its simplicity: Magee and a prominent philosopher sat together on a sofa, in an otherwise bare studio, and discussed philosophical ideas in a way that was intelligible to the non-specialist: a chain-smoking A.J. Ayer critiqued logical positivism, for example, while an excitedly-babbling Isaiah Berlin explained what philosophy actually is. Magee lounged sideways on the sofa, his inside leg crossed upon it and a set of notes in his lap, peering at his guests through a pair of large, square-lensed glasses. In a perfect BBC accent and with lots of hand movements, he interrupted frequently to clarify important points, often with greater lucidity than the philosopher sitting opposite – Isaiah Berlin said on the programme that Magee had summed up his definition of philosophy ‘far better’ than he had. No new piece of jargon or idea escaped these requests for clarity, giving the interviews a slightly tutorial-like feel. Though the drab, beige set now looks its age, the discussions themselves, still watched on YouTube today, have lost none of their vigour or relevance.

Despite achieving fame through television, Magee has been largely forgotten for the two things that were most important to him: writing, and the pursuit of answers to a cluster of questions concerning meaning, knowledge and reality. In fact it is slightly misleading to present these as two separate activities, because for Magee they were essentially one. As he put it in his private notebooks (a highly revealing collection of aphorisms, mini-essays and reflections jotted down throughout his life): ‘I write because it is the only way I can live deeply. I would not know how to confront the basic facts of life, like death, consciousness and personality, if I did not write about them. Perhaps some people can master them by contemplation like medieval saints; but if I did not write about them I should evade them, and this would mean living frivolously’.

The result was an extraordinarily varied body of published work that goes much deeper than the two TV series. As well as newspaper articles, reviews, academic papers and poetry, Magee wrote more than twenty books – several on philosophy (including studies of Artur Schopenhauer and Karl Popper), a travel memoir about America, two novels, three volumes of autobiography, two acclaimed works on Wagner, two short, provocative titles on politics, and a pioneering study of homosexuality, in which he argued for the legalisation of sexual acts between homosexual men. There is also a fascinating body of unpublished material that includes postcards, correspondence, essays, diaries and notebooks, poetry and a novel. Influential though they were, Magee’s two TV series must be understood in the context of a life spent in pursuit of philosophical understanding. At the centre of that life, always more important to its subject than any other activity in which he was engaged, was writing.

In particular, I believe, Magee was only able to achieve everything he did in bringing philosophy to a non-specialist audience because of his own deep engagement with philosophical problems. Magee’s fundamental belief – that thinking about philosophical matters is a fundamental aspect of being human, not an obscure discipline for specialists – wasn’t a pedagogical stance, adopted to sell books and make TV shows. Rather, it stemmed from his intensely emotional engagement with philosophical problems, which began during childhood. This gave a compelling urgency and enthusiasm to his work; when combined with his hatred of obfuscation and his talent for exposition and synthesis, it made him one of the first really effective popularisers of a subject whose relative accessibility, and position in the mainstream, we take for granted today. He was certainly the first to make use of the then-relatively new medium of television.

In claiming that Magee was a philosopher first, populariser second, I am adopting a stance that is unorthodox even amongst his fans. The argument against doing so can be summarised as follows: ‘Yes, Magee was an extremely effective – indeed inspirational – conveyor of other thinkers’ ideas, both in his TV programmes and books. He talked and wrote about philosophy for a general audience perhaps better than anyone ever has, but he didn’t do it himself. He didn’t write books like Plato or Hume did, for example, expounding a system built upon new insights. Nor was he a professor of philosophy at a university, teaching undergraduates and writing books and articles that, while not perhaps in the same class as The Republic or A Treatise of Human Nature, do take the subject forward.’

This view gives undue privilege to two ways of being a philosopher and unjustifiably ignores a third. Magee readily admitted that he was not creatively original in philosophy, far less a thinker in the same league of his two heroes, Schopenhauer and Popper. ‘As a philosopher’, he once wrote in his notebooks, ‘I am like a deep-sea diver who is not very good. I struggle under the water with heavy bullion and colossal chests, and then return to the surface empty-handed’.

Consideration of this point brings us to the issue of whether originality is too high a standard by which to classify someone as a philosopher (and whether we might admit degrees of originality in doing so). If it is at least a necessary condition, then one could argue, with Magee, that the majority of people considered philosophers in the second sense – university academics, engaged in the subject professionally – don’t merit the term. ‘To expect all university teachers of philosophy to be themselves good philosophers’, Magee wrote in an article for Prospect magazine in 2000, ‘would be the same mistake as to expect all university teachers of literature to be good poets, novelists or playwrights. In each case, of course, a few are, but it would be unfair to expect all the others to be. But in these days of “publish or perish,” how are those others to prosper in their careers?’

By doing what all academics do: teaching, holding administrative posts, critiquing the work of others, whether contemporaries or the great dead and writing the kind of papers known to all undergraduate students of philosophy – Edmund Gettier’s ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ (1963), for example, or Thomas Nagel’s ‘What Is It Like To Be a Bat?’ (1974). While Magee acknowledged that this was valuable work, he considered it a different kind of activity from that in which original, creative thinkers engaged, and believed that only the latter deserved to be called philosophers. Regardless, he had no interest in an academic career, preferring instead the lifestyle of a roving man of letters. At least the first part of his golden rule as a writer – ‘Never write unless you have something to say. Then devote all your abilities to making it as clear as you can’ – would have been much more difficult to follow as a university teacher constantly under pressure to publish. He loved being attached to academic institutions in an informal, part-time manner, however, and held many visiting fellowships, both in the UK and abroad, throughout his life.

Magee, then, admitted he wasn’t an ingenious philosophical writer and had no desire to be an academic philosopher. Nevertheless, he was someone who involuntarily had philosophical problems, who was obsessed with them, and who spent his life trying to find solutions to them, or at least get clear about what the problems actually are. From his Hoxton childhood to his death in Oxford at the age of 89, whatever else he was doing, Magee was wholeheartedly engaged with the puzzles of human existence. His intense existential preoccupation, in fact, qualifies him as a philosopher in one of the original senses of the word.

In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates argues that ‘[…T]hose who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men’. Magee held a similar conception of philosophy, as the activity through which one comes to terms with the inevitability of (at least) one’s bodily expiration: intellectual serenity achieved through the acquisition of philosophical insight. That was the theory, anyway. His notebooks contain several variations on the idea that death is ‘the most important thing in life’, as well as the bare, challenging statement that ‘philosophy is the conquest of death’. Seen in one way, Magee’s life was a sustained attempt to make that conquest. What he really wanted, what tormented him with both its importance and elusiveness, was to discover the meaning of life. At times, that quest brought him to the edge of sanity.

Magee had lived with a stomach-churning fear of death since childhood; but during his late thirties and early forties, terror at the prospect of oblivion overwhelmed him. As Magee described

it in Confessions of a Philosopher (1997) – part history of philosophy, part autobiography – ‘I was on the point of being flung into eternal night. I raged against it with the whole of my being. And the impossibility of doing anything about it came close to sending me off my head with frustration and panic’. Two major books came out of this dark, turbulent period: Facing Death (1977), a work of philosophy thinly disguised as a novel; and The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1983), an in-depth study of the German thinker, prompted by Magee’s epiphanic re-discovery of his writings in the early 1970s. Magee saw these books as a complementary pair. Both had their genesis in his mid-life crisis, and both, he said, had stretched his understanding of the human condition to its limits – Schopenhauer intellectually and Facing Death emotionally. Magee was not at home as a novelist, and Facing Death is stilted and unsatisfactory as a work of fiction. Perhaps for this reason, it is one of his least-known books, but because of its philosophical cIt’s not just because of his unusually intense engagement with philosophical puzzles that Magee deserves to be called a philosopher. He also defended, with characteristic urgency and lucidity, a distinctive set of philosophical views. In the closing pages of his last book, Ultimate Questions (2016), while declaring that he had no ‘secret, mad illusion’ that he was in the same class as Locke or Hume, he nevertheless laid claim to some clearly demarcated philosophical territory – ‘in the same way as Locke has become known as the empiricist among philosophers, and Hume as the sceptic, and Schopenhauer as the pessimist, I would choose, if I were to merit a tag, to be known as the agnostic’.ontent, it remains of interest.

It’s not just because of his unusually intense engagement with philosophical puzzles that Magee deserves to be called a philosopher. He also defended, with characteristic urgency and lucidity, a distinctive set of philosophical views. In the closing pages of his last book, Ultimate Questions (2016), while declaring that he had no ‘secret, mad illusion’ that he was in the same class as Locke or Hume, he nevertheless laid claim to some clearly demarcated philosophical territory – ‘in the same way as Locke has become known as the empiricist among philosophers, and Hume as the sceptic, and Schopenhauer as the pessimist, I would choose, if I were to merit a tag, to be known as the agnostic’.

The term ‘agnosticism’ was first publicly used in 1869 by the biologist T. H. Huxley. Today, it is usually regarded as a stance on the existence of God: standing in between the theist, who claims that God exists, and the atheist, who claims that God does not exist, the agnostic argues that it is impossible to know either way (in Facing Death, the protagonist John Smith declares that ‘religion and atheism are equal and opposite errors’). But Huxley had originally defined agnosticism in a much broader way, ‘not [as] a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle […]: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration’.

Although there is no evidence that Magee consciously regarded himself as adhering to Huxley’s conception of agnosticism, he also employed it as an intellectual method. For him, as for the term’s inventor, it was not just a denial of the possibility of knowledge about the existence of God, or (what was much more interesting to Magee) a mind-independent reality – although Magee was convinced that the latter existed, and that we glimpsed it through aesthetic experience. It was a mode of being that conferred on us the responsibility to constantly critique our beliefs, adjusting or jettisoning them in the light of new insights. Magee found a similar epistemological method in Popper’s philosophy of science, specifically in his claim that falsification is an essential aspect of progress. ‘For all of us, in all our activities’ he wrote in his 1974 book Popper, ‘the notions that we can do better only by finding out what can be improved and then improving it; and therefore that shortcomings are to be actively sought out, not concealed or passed over […] are liberating to a remarkable degree’. If everyone tried to live in this way, there would be a ‘revolution in social and interpersonal relationships’.

Magee’s adherence to agnosticism as method rather than doctrine also explains his insistence, perhaps counterintuitive, that it did not lead to relativism. It’s easy to see how the latter could result from the former: if we can never aspire to know answers to many of the most fundamental questions of existence – Do we have a soul? Is there an afterlife? What, if anything, confers objective meaning on our lives? – then surely we have to accept all purported answers as equally valid, because they might all be true. Magee thought that was lazy. Popperian criticism, or the application of Huxley’s principle, will still reveal some beliefs to be less justifiable or likely to be true than others. Progress is possible, even if we can never arrive at a settled position; indeed the condition of progress is never regarding a belief as immune from revision. This is how Magee was able to combine agnosticism as regards the existence of God with criticism of religion in almost all other respects. By requiring its adherents to live ‘as if’ its tenets were true, religion, he argued, was incompatible with intellectual integrity. Religious belief might be an effective soporific, especially at the end of one’s life, but it was not an open-minded, truth-seeking activity.

The other area in which Magee defended a distinctive set of views – this time with a passion that could spill over into anger – was on the purpose of philosophy. In his notebooks, Magee summed up the dichotomy with which he was concerned as follows: ‘In the second half of his life, Wittgenstein held that it was illegitimate for philosophy to produce explanatory theories; its task was wholly analytic. Popper, on the contrary, held that explanatory philosophical theories could be deeply illuminating, and that the search for better ones was the most important single task of philosophy. These two approaches polarised the twentieth century’s most significant conflict with regard to the nature of philosophy. It is a conflict in which I am wholly on Popper’s side’. Magee had in fact been on Popper’s side ever since the days of his boyhood philosophising in Hoxton.

When he arrived at Oxford in 1949, at the age of nineteen, Magee already believed (without being fully aware of this belief) that it was philosophy’s job to try to explain the world as given to us in experience, or at least explain why that world was so weird – why the ‘common sense’ conception of reality contained hardly any common sense. He wanted answers to the problems that had obsessed him since childhood: how do we bend our fingers? How can a ball move through space? Is the world still there when we’re not perceiving it? He was therefore ‘scandalised’, as he later put it, to discover that Oxford’s philosophers were doing something that he thought not only radically different, but infinitely inferior.

Magee’s undergraduate years at Oxford, 1949-53, coincided with the golden age of what came to be known as ordinary language, linguistic or simply Oxford philosophy. Its fundamental premise was that, if analysed properly, so-called philosophical problems – including all of those that Magee had been carrying around with him for over a decade by this point – can be shown to have arisen from the misuse of everyday language and/or conceptual errors. Once we identify and resolve these confusions, its practitioners thought, the problems will simply evaporate. The leading Oxford practitioners of this approach during Magee’s undergraduate years were J.L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle. Austin ran a series of seminars in which apparent synonyms such as ‘tool’, ‘utensil’ and ‘implement’ were scrutinsed for slight differences in meaning. Meanwhile, Ryle wrote a famous book called The Concept of Mind, in which he aimed to prove that Cartesian dualism, which he pejoratively dubbed the ‘Dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’, was owed to one huge category mistake.

Magee never lost his visceral loathing of this approach, which he later defined in his notebooks as ‘an intellectual pastime for people who are clever but do not want to think seriously’. He thought Austin, Ryle and their followers had confused the means of doing philosophy – concepts, language, logic – with its subject matter, and thus doomed themselves to superficial circularity. They didn’t realise this themselves, thought Magee, because they’d never had philosophical problems in the way he had. This was certainly true of Ryle and Austin, both of whom had come to philosophy from Classics and never lost sleep – let alone suffered emotional crises – over their subject. Such intense subjective involvement would have been regarded as suspicious in 1950s Oxford (and might still be seen as a handicap in professional philosophy today), but it was crucial to Magee’s effectiveness as a populariser.

In his appearance on Magee’s 1978 TV series Men of Ideas, A.J. Ayer rehearsed the most obvious response to the charge that linguistic philosophy was trivial: ‘…[T]he answer is that the distinction between “about language” and “about the world” isn’t all that sharp, because the world is the world as we describe it, the world as it figures in our system of concepts. In exploring our system of concepts you are, at the same time, exploring the world’. Like Austin and Ryle, Ayer was never emotionally troubled by philosophical problems, mainly because he saw it as an entirely abstract enterprise. He once remarked to Isaiah Berlin, as they walked through Christ Church Meadows in Oxford in the 1930s, ‘There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis […] and there is all of this [gesturing to their surroundings], all of life’. For Magee, there was no difference. In response to Ayer’s defence of linguistic philosophy, he insisted that discourse about the world and discourse about language exist on two logically different levels, and can therefore never be identical.

In a somewhat despondent entry in his notebooks, presumably written late in life, Magee looked back over his career: ‘I do not know how good my work is. If I have made clearer than anyone else things that are basic to the human condition insofar as we claim to understand it, that is an achievement. But I do not know if I have done that. And if I have, I do not know whether the content of what I have said includes anything original’.

Magee’s achievement is no less important for not consisting in original philosophy. The comments underneath the YouTube videos of his BBC programmes hint at the enormous impact his work continues to have on readers and viewers. Underpinning it all was his own philosophical quest, which aimed at two interdependent goals: equanimity in the face of death by grasping the ultimate nature of reality. Magee’s conviction that the latter was impossible meant that he never really attained the intellectual peace that Socrates said came to all philosophers. But the true challenge for the agnostic – and one which Magee did meet – was not reaching for the easy remedies of faith. ‘If I’m required to be a hero, that’s how’, says John Smith in Facing Death, ‘not standing fast in courage and faith, but standing fast without courage and faith. Standing fast in terror and uncertainty. Not knowing. Knowing I can never know’. Magee’s attempts to know, to understand, resulted in a body of work that is of great value to philosophy – and of life-changing importance to many people.