The Devilish Art

A friend once asked Iris Murdoch, is someone really writing your biography? The British philosopher and author was genuinely bemused. ‘I don’t read biographies,’ she replied, ‘but apparently people buy them. But me? What is there to say about me?’ Murdoch was surprised, not simply that anyone would be interested in her life, but that audiences would read biographies at all.

What surprises me is that a philosopher, and one of her calibre, would dismiss biography quite so quickly. To my mind, the philosophical imagination is enriched and enlivened by the study of biography. And, by implication, all intelligent, curious minds also benefit from what Henry James called the ‘devilish art’.

This esteem for life writing is by no means shared by all philosophers. Martin Heidegger, for example, once began a lecture with a quick biography of Aristotle. ‘He was born,’ said the German philosopher, ‘he worked and he died.’ And that was it. For Heidegger, philosophy was about ideas, not the stories of their originators or refiners. Despite his interest in ‘authenticity’, Heidegger was unconcerned with the details of life, with the private and public impression left behind.

In their different ways, Heidegger and Murdoch were suggesting that philosophy—that is, precise, profound, expansive thought—has no need for biography.

II

There are good reasons for this. One is that in biography we find a convenient but muddled excuse for dismissing ideas—we play the man, not the ball. For example, we might reject Nietzsche’s ideas on pity, because of his inability to live up to them. ‘Pity,’ wrote Nietzsche in his notebooks, ‘is a squandering of feeling, a parasite harmful to moral health … If one does good merely out of pity, it is oneself one really does good to, not the other.’ Yet the self-confessed ‘warlike’ writer collapsed in tears when he saw a man whipping a horse. But if it’s true that pity moved Nietzsche to protest and faint on that Turin street (and this is by no means proven), this simply means Nietzsche was a tragic, contradicted creature—like all of us. It suggests not that his ideas were unreasonable or unworkable, but that his aspirations outstripped his abilities. Similarly, philosophical ideas aren’t always a good guide to their author. Hobbes’ political philosophy, for example, with its dismal portrait of human nature, smacks of alienation and egotism. Despite his analytical gifts, he failed to see the social ‘glue’ behind states and individuals—what Alasdair MacIntyre called ‘one of the oddest of Hobbes’ confusions’. Reading Leviathan, we might expect the Englishman to be severe, selfish and rude. Yet according to his biographer, gossip-hound John Aubrey, Hobbes was a gregarious, kind man—loyal, generous and funny. And these qualities came not from a contractual calculation, but from a native warmth and sociability. Hobbes is a telling reminder: we cannot always translate philosophy into virtue or vice, into the simple lessons of a morality tale.

Reading biography can also give a misleading impression of ease, entertainment and simplicity. Sartre’s autobiography, for example, is a beautifully written, clear, enjoyable book. As he did with many of his ‘literary’ works, the great existentialist philosopher gave up chewing his amphetamine tablets to write his autobiography, allowing him to concentrate on style and tone. (This says a great deal about expectations of readability in philosophy generally.) The result is funny, beautiful and touching—it is everything that Being and Nothingness is not. Sartre’s magnum opus is difficult, dense and counterintuitive, informed by Hegel’s zig-zagging dialectic and Heidegger’s spiralling rambles about Being. To understand Words is not to understand Sartrean philosophy—on the contrary, it can give a skewed, narrow interpretation, as we mistake the intimate detail of memoir for the consistency and necessity of logic.

We cannot reduce thought to biography, or vice versa—a refutation of one is no proof against the other. And a grasp of someone’s life does not guarantee an appreciation of their ideas. Heidegger was right to discuss Aristotle’s concepts instead of his affected lisp or luxurious clothes. And Murdoch’s indifference was undoubtedly a reasonable caution against confusion—perhaps she didn’t want her elegant ideas sullied by stories of youthful promiscuity or fraught adoration. In the world of thought, the vicissitudes of birth, love and death are sometimes a poor guide.

III

Nonetheless, when read intelligently and imaginatively, biography is vital for thought. And this is ‘vital’ in the original sense of the word: concerned with the stuff of life. Biography does not replace philosophical analysis; rather, it reveals the conditions in which thought flourishes or wanes. At its best, biography exposes the ties between psychology, society and cognition—the forces that enhance and inhibit the flourishing of ideas in everyday living. It teaches us what ideas look like when they’re most alive.

Take the notion of freedom in Spinoza’s work. With his geometric, mathematical method, the great Dutch philosopher’s liberty seems mechanical and lifeless, a schematic of liberty but not liberty embodied. But in biographies of Spinoza, we confront genuine freedom—not purely cognitive or logical, but incarnated in a crucial decision: to refuse employment at Heidelberg University. He gave up ‘a life worthy of a philosopher’, with all its prestige and economic stability, in favour of lens-grinding. ‘You see, distinguished Sir,’ he wrote to the professor who offered him the position, ‘that I am not holding back in the hope of get- ting something better, but through my love of quietness, which I think I can in some measure secure, if I keep away from lecturing in public.’ This guaranteed him the peace of mind and freedom of movement he desired, and which allowed him to write his esteemed works. He chose his own laws—his own ‘necessity’—over the seductive distractions of salaried life.

The result was genuine philosophy, but it was also illness and death: Spinoza died from tuberculosis not long after refusing the Heidelberg job, his condition no doubt worsened by the glass dust he inhaled every day. His freedom was entangled with quite ordinary physiological and economic constraints; the price of liberty was, quite literally, his life. This isn’t freedom preserved as a pure, logical concept, but realised in the painful, compromising, even embarrassing choices of professional life.

For philosophers, this is more than a consoling anecdote—it offers a test of sorts. It asks: Does your ideal of freedom allow for these banal but vital decisions, or does it dismiss them as irrelevant or ‘worldly’? It provides a touchstone for so many metaphysical phantoms and enhances the business of thought. This is what Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘The Art of Biography’, called ‘that high degree of tension which gives us reality’. For Woolf, fiction was the supreme imaginative act, which conjured up a vivid world. But only the finest writers were capable of this, whereas any accomplished biographer could produce a world of inspiring, revivifying facts. The biographer, wrote Woolf, ‘can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders’.

IV

But this, in turn, requires imagination. This might sound more literary than philosophical—the stuff of fiction, not analysis and debate. But philosophy trades in good ideas, and these always inhabit actual minds. Sometimes, to best appreciate the singularity and significance of a concept, we have to grasp the mind that bore it. And this requires imagination: the creative capacity to enter into an alien consciousness and understand its motivations and limitations. Take, for example, William James’ idea of ‘chance’. At first blush, it seems a rudimentary concept—simply the opposite of necessity. But it was crucial for James’ ability to teach, write and love. Throughout his life, the philosopher and psychologist was burdened by depression and illness. He pined, he brooded, he agonised. What was left to him in this state, what his biographer Linda Simon calls his ‘joyless, lonely existence’, was simply his freedom—the assertion of his native liberty. ‘I may not study, make, or enjoy,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘but I can will.’ In his journal entries, his letters to his fiancee, and in the careful descriptions Linda Simon offers, we enter into James’ psychological struggles; we perceive the torment behind the vivid blue gaze. And in doing so, we can recognise the immense importance of chance: the possibility that the world can be otherwise; that it is not pure necessity, a fully determined, ‘unbending unit of fact’, as James put it. The significance of his idea is not its complexity or nuance. It’s the way it clears up the psyche’s muddling ambiguities.

In other words, biography can help to sharpen and intensify our sympathy. We more fully grasp a concept’s workings by inhabiting the mind of its originator. We might still judge that a concept is wanting in logic or accuracy—but the biographical imagination enables us to better under- stand its intimate worth: its potency in the psyche of an individual.

And this, in turn, is crucial for the examined life. We are, for good and evil, creatures of interest, limitation and agenda. Conflict, even at its most civilised, is ubiquitous in the workplace, public sphere and private life. To better understand one another, we require more than the tools of logic—important as these are. We also need to cultivate our capacity for understanding: the felt, speculative journey into another consciousness. Of course, some debates or differences will be left raw and unresolved, some points of agreement left untouched. But a careful study of written lives at least allows a greater familiarity with the workings of the thinking mind, and to more fully grasp its barriers to persuasion—others’ and our own. Put simply, good biography is training in intellectual compassion.

V

Finally, biography—good or bad, edifying or vulgar—is a lesson in mortality. In memoirs and life stories, we encounter the endless repetition of birth and death, which Leonard Woolf drily described in his memoirs: ‘one is forced to regard oneself as an entity carried along for a brief period in the stream of time, emerging suddenly at a particular moment from darkness and nothingness and shortly to disappear at a particular moment into nothingness and darkness’. To witness a great mind facing this ‘lightning flash’ can be telling and edifying. In a generous, detailed record of their human span, we see how real human beings struggled to conquer, justify and embrace life, how they faced disappointment, success, confusion and death, Henry James’ last ‘distinguished thing’.

This awareness of mortality, neither morbid nor cavalier, informs good philosophy. This is because final scenes, generously and gently recorded, allow us to take stock. ‘For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day,’ wrote Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, ‘and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.’ Aristotle’s point wasn’t that a man couldn’t be happy before death, that the fickle mood of our last hours determines our contentment with life. He meant that it requires the sweep of a life to assess the worth of our ideas, disposition and achievements. And, perhaps more importantly, if our life has been lived well, the accidents or misadventures of death cannot diminish the value of our ideals. A bad fate is not always proof of bad ideas, or good ideas imperfectly applied.

In the best biography, we confront these conclusive moments. We witness how thinkers, artists and political figures, under the initial conditions of family, birthplace and period, conduct the great experiment of life; how they justify their basic, vital hypotheses. We see Seneca courageously, patiently, painfully ending his life; William James struggling freely, to Freud’s admiration, with the necessity of bodily failure; and Nikos Kazantzakis, pencil in his left hand, trying to transubstantiate flesh into spirit. This is not philosophy—it is what philosophy requires to flourish: a sensitive, discriminating grasp of what it is to live and die mindfully.

© Damon Young