As Adrian Moore points out in his (very helpful) introduction, Bernard Williams “himself brought out three collections of essays during his life-time: Problems of the Self, Moral Luck and Making Sense of Humanity… a fourth is published posthumously under the title The Sense of the Past. A fifth collection consisting of hitherto largely unpublished essays on politics … is also published posthumously, under the title In the Beginning Was the Deed. The present collection, which does not overlap with any of these, in effect completes the set.” In doing so it nevertheless manages to “span Williams' entire career”, and thus to provide a very fair sense both of the range of his interests and of the peculiar power of his way of ‘doing philosophy’.
It is only right, however, that, before going further, I should put my own cards as a reviewer on the table. Bernard and I were contemporaries as students in the same College at Oxford, where he was very much one of the leaders of a small group who used to debate philosophical issues in our student societies, in the queue for coffee in the JCR or wherever else the place might find and the mood might take us. Later, but now as far back as well over forty years ago, we together edited a book of invited essays under the title, in its English incarnation, of British Analytic Philosophy, an enterprise undertaken on the initiative of an Italian publisher (Lerici), who did finally succeed in producing Filosofia analitica inglesi a full year after the appearance of what was originally supposed to have been the subsequent English edition; but that in itself is another story. So although it is true that in later years we only succeeded in keeping in far too intermittent touch, I retain many warm memories of just how stimulating close exchanges with Bernard could be.
Reading this collection has been, then, a strange (and strangely rewarding) experience as if of an on-going discussion renewed; and renewed in a series of overlapping contexts in which one can see Bernard's main preoccupations and intuitions in philosophy - though I can imagine him recoiling from this use of the term ‘intuition’ - coming, as they develop, ever more clearly to the fore. Certainly, one of his great strengths as a philosopher was his quite exceptional readiness for and ability in closely argued discussion. His own remarkable speed in seeing how arguments and their counter-arguments might develop several alternative moves ahead of the point to which anyone else might yet have followed them was something that he could not but delight in. At the same time, he had no patience with those whose work in philosophy was limited to however ingenious technical display or whose primary concern was to make sure of saying nothing that could be shown to be in any way mistaken or wrong.
All this comes through clearly enough in this collection of papers, brought together under the three only quasi-distinct heads of Metaphysics and Epistemology, Ethics and The Scope and Limits of Philosophy. The two philosophers whose names occur most frequently in this collection are Wittgenstein and Nietzsche; and I have often thought that, incisive and agile as he was in all the intricacies of analytic philosophy at its best, Bernard might well have found himself temperamentally more at home had he happened to have been philosophically brought up in a context where, for a variety of historical reasons, philosophy carries with it much more by way of literary and/or social and political commitment. But maybe not, after all. One of the most striking passages in a collection which contains repeated strictures on an analytic philosophy that occupies itself with little but itself, is to be found at the end of the piece on Political Philosophy and the Analytic Tradition, where he acknowledges having “spoken critically of some earlier limitations of the genre” and that he does “not think that reform has changed or will change it out of all recognition.” Nevertheless he takes “a generous view of it [even if] much of what is called philosophy is excluded.” And goes on: “It is cheering that in political philosophy it has survived its regeneration into something interesting, with its undoubted virtues intact. In its insistence, at its best, on the values of unambiguous statement and recognisable argument; its lack of contempt for the familiar; its willingness to meet with the formal and natural sciences; its capacity for genuine and discussable progress - in all this, and despite its many and often catalogued limitations, it remains the only real philosophy there is.”
“Unambiguous statement and clear argument” - these for Bernard were fundamental philosophical commitments, and were outstanding among his own philosophical strengths. At the same time he was clear that respect for these basic philosophical values must not be allowed to obscure what he saw as the inescapable complexities, not to say messiness, of life as it actually is. “What I take philosophy to be”, he affirms in the striking essay that gives its own title to the book, “[is] a part of a more general attempt to make the best sense of our life. And so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves.” But ‘making the best sense of our life’ should not be understood as the elaboration of some would-be philosophical resolution of all its inherent conflicts and inconsistencies, but rather as a laying bare of their nature and of their deeper roots. Bernard certainly agreed with Isaiah Berlin that there can be circumstances in which some of our most unshakable value commitments may turn out to be not only incompatible with each other, but incapable of being ranked in any order of priority as if in accordance with some calculable conversion table of moral currencies. Nor could it, in his view, be any business of philosophy to try and foist upon us some unifying reconciliation of such conflicts. As he put it in that essay on Political Philosophy, “We can, to some extent, understand why we have conflicting sentiments, but that does not mean, or should not mean, that we therefore withdraw our loyalty from them.” Philosophy can help us to understand the nature and origins of our dilemmas - which is already important enough; but it cannot resolve them for us. We ourselves have to settle on how to deal with the fact that it may be logically impossible to live in accordance with all of even our very strongest moral convictions. If it was one of Bernard's most constant concerns that philosophy should never descend into pure technical expertise, but, as he says in that title essay, “should think of itself as part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and of our activities”, he was at the same time insistent that it should never lay claim to being able to go beyond its own intrinsic limits.
The peculiar kind of understanding needed for philosophy to make such sense as might be possible of ourselves and of our dilemmas was not so much scientific as historical; “in order to answer many of its questions it needs to attend … in particular to history.” And although “in fact we are very unlikely to be able to make complete sense of our outlook … history may help us to understand why this should be so …” And what is so important about such understanding? “Above all, historical understanding - perhaps I may now say, more generally, social understanding - can help with this business, which is quite certainly a philosophical business, of distinguishing between different ways in which various of our ideas and procedures can seem to be such that we cannot get beyond them, that there is no conceivable alternative.” But while such an understanding can, hopefully, enable us to see how and why we have got to be where we now find ourselves to be, to see how it is that our form of life has come to be what it is and why and how it is different from that of others, our story should not be misunderstood as being one of demonstrable progress. “In the particular case of the natural sciences, the later theory typically explains in its own terms the appearances which supported the earlier theory, and, furthermore, the earlier theory can be understood as a special or limited case of the other.” Explanations which satisfy this condition Bernard called vindicatory. But “philosophy, at any rate, is thoroughly familiar with ideas which indeed, like all other ideas, have a history, but have a history which is not notably vindicatory.”
And herein lies a problem for all of us, the problem of how best to accommodate the mutually competitive insights that while we cannot but hold the values most fundamental to our own outlook to be superior to those held by peoples of radically incompatible outlooks, there is in principle no place to be found outside our own outlook in which we might look to establish some sort of trans-outlook proof of the to us undeniable superiority of our own - undeniable, for that is what it is for them to be fundamental for us. Bernard did indeed think and in his last book (Truth and Truthfulness) sought most vigorously to argue that there is what he called ‘a universal human need’ for such virtues as, for example, accuracy and sincerity; but, while he was equally clear that “liberal forms of argument are a central part of the outlook that we accept … If we consider how these forms of argument came to prevail, we can indeed see them as having won, but not necessarily as having won an argument.”
No-one, certainly, enjoyed tough intellectual argument more than Bernard; and not a little of his enjoyment came, of course and very fairly, from his exceptional gift for dialectic in practice -from his mastery of complexity and from his quickness and clarity in its exhibition. But, as he knew well and as he constantly reminded us, mastery of complexity and even the most incisive clarity are, in philosophy as in life, simply not enough. Bernard, it is fair to say, was always and, for a leading analytic philosopher, exceptionally sensitive to the inescapably undissolvable tensions of life, and sensitive even to the logically baffling urge to express these tensions in terms of paradox. Most of the quotations that I have allowed myself in this review come from the title essay of this collection, first published in 2000, only three years before his death. But it is entirely appropriate that the collection should open with his early essay on Tertullian's Paradox, first published over half a century ago. In this paper, he explains at the outset, “I try to bring out a certain tension, a pull between the possible and the impossible, a sort of inherent and necessary incomprehensibility, which seems to be a feature of Christian belief, and to locate this point of tension more exactly within the structure of the belief.”
It is hard to re-read this essay without feeling a certain tension between Bernard's natural intellectual impatience with the obstinacy of that incomprehensibility and his own instinctive appreciation of its necessity. “If the Christian faith is true, it must be partly incomprehensible. But if it is partly incomprehensible, it is difficult to see what it is for it to be true … It follows further … that it is difficult to characterise the difference between belief and unbelief.” Tertullian, as he pointed out both at the beginning and again at the end of this essay, ended up as a heretic; but, one is inclined to say, if one follows the drift - no, the argument - of this his first published paper, it must be hard in the end to tell the difference between a ‘true’ believer and a heretic. What can, however, be said, as Barry Stroud so well puts it in his contributory dust-cover piece of blurb, is that “Bernard Williams brought human life into philosophy, and so into the philosophy of all of us. No-one outdid him in his mastery of those abstract complexities without which no real philosophy is possible. But through all the intricate reasonings his eye was always on what counts most: making the best sense of the lives of human beings.” His departure from our scene is our loss; we can only be thankful that collections such as this allow discussion with him to continue.
