On Simon Blackburn’s offbeat personal website, there are no buttons to click on, only paintings and portraits, including an animated one of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume with a winsome wink and a smile. At the top of the page is a photograph of Prof Blackburn himself, also smiling – not like Hume, but in the manner of a convincing psychopath. The caption reads: “Here is a picture of me about to pounce on someone with a quick dialectical jab to the cortex.”
When not having to pose for the camera, Blackburn, master philosopher and skilled writer, smiles easily and naturally. His voice is smooth and creamy, with a touch of gravel, like sand in a sorbet. The dress style – blue blazer and open-necked shirt – is smart but not over-considered and his spectacles are firmly attached to a fabric lanyard. He comes across very differently from the rather twitchy philosophy professors of my student days, men who were often challenged by normal human intercourse. Blackburn’s authority is carried naturally – it seems to attach itself to him unbidden, cast casually over the shoulders like a well-worn scholar’s gown.
Reading the CV is a clue as to why this might be. Since 2001, Blackburn has been professor of philosophy at Cambridge – not a professor but the professor – and, en route to this pinnacle of academe, he has travelled over several impressive crests: visiting appointments on three continents; a distinguished chair of philosophy during the 1990s at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; a six-year stint in the 1980s editing Mind (the most prestigious philosophy journal) – all this as well as publishing heavyweight books about metaphysics and morals and, more recently, three bestsellers, Think, Being Good and Truth .
We meet at the Edinburgh Book Festival, in the richly atmospheric authors’ yurt, festooned with rugs and colourful throws. Blackburn has just spoken about his latest book Plato’s Republic: A Biography in front of a capacity audience. Edinburgh, he says, is his favourite venue, not least because it is the city of David Hume, the most revered figure in Blackburn’s gallery of heroes. “Hume stands head and shoulders above everyone else, without a doubt the greatest British philosopher. He is also a model of how other philosophers should write – stylish and unpretentious, witty yet serious, clear at all times.” It occurs to me that reviewers of Blackburn’s books say much the same about his own style – “good clear-headed stuff” (Ted Honderich), “wonderfully stimulating and incisive” (John Banville). There is the odd detractor, however. One critic, dismissing Blackburn’s attempt to make a connection between Plato’s Republic and neo-conservatism in the US, wrote: “He doesn’t need to make so many cute contemporary references. We can form our own opinions about religious fundamentalism or American foreign policy, thanks.”
Blackburn is aware of ruffling feathers but responds to criticism lucidly and amiably. “Republic does have a modern resonance. Those who try to construct utopias have invariably been influenced by Plato’s text, even if they have misinterpreted it.” At this point, he mentions the Bush administration aide who accused reporters and others of still living in “the reality-based community”. Blackburn accentuates the phrase and breaks into his distinctive chortle, which sounds a bit like a man cheerfully drowning.
Plato’s Republic is the latest in a line of bestselling books that have been translated into 18 languages. Blackburn is slightly sensitive to a distinction being made between his “serious” books and his “popular” ones – popular being a wicked word in academic cloisters. But he has no fear of the wicked; some would say he positively courts wickedness, as when he signed up with Oxford University Press to write a long essay for its series on the seven deadly sins. “When I was approached, there were three sins left – anger, sloth and lust – so there was no competition really. It had to be lust, even though I was getting a bit long in the tooth for it.” The result was a rehabilitation of lust as the thinking man’s sin, a discourse both scholarly and entertaining, dubbed by one reviewer “an ornament to Prof Blackburn’s erudition”.
He is aware that there are those who say he has “sold out” but he insists there is just as much hard philosophy in Think or Being Good as in earlier, more recherché material. “I don’t think of myself as diluting philosophy, rather I’m bringing more people to it. And, actually, the place you get to is not so different.” Once again he refers to Hume, who styled himself “an ambassador from the dominions of learning to those of conversation” – a noble tradition that Blackburn is happy to uphold. “A lot of professional philosophy can be very self-contained, self-referential, narcissistic – the sort of thing the late Bernard Williams described as ‘scientific reports badly translated from the Martian’. I try to steer clear of all that.”
Blackburn first went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, 45 years ago with the intention of studying the natural sciences. Before he arrived, however, he was already beginning to have doubts about pursuing the sciences and was inclining towards English instead. His admissions tutor, a gruff man, surrounded by curious pictures of himself sporting tweeds and a handlebar moustache in the Himalayas, dismissed English as “a sloppy subject” and directed him towards the Moral Sciences (as pure philosophy at Cambridge was then called). Blackburn describes this intervention as “the most wonderful stroke of luck”. At this stage, he had no conception of the glorious tradition of philosophy at Cambridge, from Francis Bacon in the 17th century through to GE Moore, Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein in more modern times. His tutor – another stroke of luck – was Casimir Lewy, a charismatic Pole and “an inspirational teacher with a passion for clear thinking”. Blackburn was also lucky in love at Cambridge, for he met Angela Bowles, a fellow student who – he says with a glint in his eye – “grew up in Edinburgh zoo” (her father was director there). They have been married for nearly 40 years.
In 1964, just after he had finished his prelims, it became clear that Blackburn was serious about philosophy. He had planned to celebrate with the other students by having a few drinks and going punting on the Cam but, instead, found himself in the library reading Ernest Nagel’s The Structure of Science. He laughs at the memory, with a hint of the trademark self-parodic style. For his DPhil, he chose “The Problem of Induction”, something he describes as “a bad career move”, but it led to an immediate appointment as a lecturer and fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, where he remained for more than 20 years.
Professional philosophers have a reputation for being miserable – all that thinking can lead to despair. Blackburn gives no outward sign of gloom. Glass in hand, he is genial and amusing – the sort of person you would like to sit next to at a dinner party. Dig deeper, however, and the gloom is there. He doesn’t think philosophy is in a golden age. “The RAE [Research Assessment Exercise, which monitors the research done in higher education institutions] is a complete farce – it has pressurised academics to publish more and more about less and less, whether or not they have anything worth saying.” The outlook for UK politics is also pretty bleak. “The Conservatives are flailing, the Lib Dems are in outer darkness.” And Gordon Brown? “Well, he is heavily implicated. He had catastrophic policies on PFIs and he’s responsible for a lot of disinformation and financial chicanery.” Things aren’t much better across the pond. Blackburn has great fondness for the US (he spent 10 happy years there), describing it as “the powerhouse” of academic philosophy. “Yet it is a country of unbridled aggression, where violence is omnipresent. There is a kind of cowboy mentality – no problem that a gun can’t solve. It’s self-evidently impoverishing.”
Our conversation turns to a discussion of what it is to be a professional philosopher in the 21st century. “Philosophy is, of course, an ivory-tower subject but reflection – which is what philosophers do – is not the privilege of the educated elite. We are self-conscious animals, we all reflect.” He tells a story about taking part in a radio programme a few years ago. One of the other guests, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, asked him rather aggressively what use philosophy would have been on a march to Auschwitz. The answer he gave was: “Not much.” But by then, he argued, nothing would have helped much in the circumstances – not music, not the arts, not literature – not even more concrete disciplines of science or mathematics. “However, philosophy might have helped at an earlier stage to prevent the ethical climate in which Nazism flourished.”
Did he think philosophers should play a part in political life? “In other countries, it’s quite normal to have philosophers advising governments,” he says, “but it’s hard to imagine it happening here, or in the US. On the whole, intellectuals are kept pretty much under the rug.”
On the political spectrum, Blackburn is leftwing. The Blair years were “the biggest disappointment of my adult life”. Like many others he was cheering in the streets in 1997 but disillusionment set in with Iraq. “What makes it worse is Blair’s self-styled sincerity, as if it’s all right to go about believing stuff for which there is absolutely no evidence, providing he’s sincere. This amounts to what you might call a fatal privatisation of belief – taking it out of the public sphere of rational and conscious control.”
In 2002, Blackburn (along with 42 other professors) signed a letter to Tony Blair expressing alarm about the state-funding of schools teaching creationism. “The cosmos is some 15bn years old, human beings occupy an infinitesimally tiny fraction of a galaxy among a 100,000m or so galaxies. But creationists prefer their own disturbing fantasy to scientific facts.”
Blackburn’s attitude to religion is one of amused perplexity rather than contempt, though when pressed he admits to despair about humanity’s egregious self-deceptions and illusions. “You can’t check out of Hotel Supernatural with more baggage than you take with you: in other words, if you hate gays, you find a God telling you to hate gays; if you want the land, you find a God certifying that it is yours, and so on.” But he is not sanguine. “Fantasy beats reason every time.” Then, unsurprisingly, he returns to Hume, who on his deathbed told James Boswell that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he’d known “some instances of very good men being religious”. Blackburn chortles again. And curiously, for a second or two, the familiar image of Hume, the one that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, seems to merge with Prof Blackburn’s benign features. Forget the curly wig and drop an ounce or two from the jowls, and it could be the great infidel himself.
Simon Blackburn on Plato’s enchanted world
This [the beauty of the individual] is the Plato that is most attractive to artists and creators. The idea is that to look on things with real love is already to discern immortal qualities in them – qualities of beauty, grace, truth or harmony, that can in principle be manifested anywhere in space or time and are in that sense timeless. The paradigm Platonic experience is not now other-worldly, but this-worldly, only this world appreciated as it should be, when the banquet of the senses is enlarged with imagination and insight. Frequently, the insight is supposed to have a moral dimension. In the works of the writer Iris Murdoch, for example, the connection with ethics is made because the experience of love takes the agent outside him or herself, making possible an appreciation of the beloved that is itself an “unselfing”, representing a displacement of the selfish ego from its usual throne in the centre of things.
This view has much to commend it. It makes excellent sense of the evident connection in Plato’s mind between beauty, goodness and truth. For us, perhaps, these three have little to do with each other. Beauty, if we talk about it at all, is relegated to the peripheral, and persons who harp on it are regarded with suspicion: airy-fairy aesthetes, weightless and unserious. Goodness is a matter of ethics, and while we ourselves may have principles which raise us above the Athenian envoys, we become nervous if it intrudes too far into people’s minds. “Do-gooder” is a derogatory term. Meanwhile, our paradigm of truth is probably scientific truth, which has nothing much to do with either beauty or goodness. As in the Human model of motivation and action outlined above, we tend to think knowledge is one thing, and how you choose to use it, for good or ill, to create beauty or destroy it, is another thing altogether.
Part of the charm of Plato is the sense of being in a world in which these fractures did not exist. Ours may be a world in which there is a division between fact on the one hand, and value on the other. But his world is, in the phrase of the godfather of modern sociology, Max Weber, an enchanted world, in which ideas like proportion and harmony efface any such division. Beauty makes both goodness and truth manifest, so its perception and the love it engenders together give us the first step out of the Cave.
This is an edited extract from ‘Plato’s Republic: A Biography’ by Simon Blackburn (Atlantic Books, £9.99). To buy this book through FT Bookshop at £7.99 plus p&p, tel: +44 0870-429 5884 or go to www.ft.com/bookshop
Jennie Erdal is the author of ‘Ghosting: A Double Life’ (Canongate)
