Bryan Magee and the Meaning of Life

The realisation hit Bryan Magee like a wrecking ball. At one level he had everything: “good health, energy, adventurous life, rewarding friendships, exhilarating love affairs, success in my work, exciting travel, the sustained nourishment of music, theatre, reading”, but now it was all being “overwhelmed, almost literally so, by a sense of mortality”. (Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, 1997. All references are to this book unless otherwise stated.)

And this was no ordinary fear. It seemed to Magee that his death was woven into the very fabric of the universe and whether he faced it or fled from it, it didn’t matter. For several years he was “engulfed by mind-numbing terror in the face of oblivion”.

Magee was on a quest all his conscious life, a quest that had two dimensions: to escape the existential dread and nihilistic meaninglessness that assailed him; and to do so by ascertaining the meaning of life. Ultimately, it seems this quest led to an unexpected denouement, as we will see.

In the middle of a successful career, Magee found that a ghastly maelstrom of anxiety had opened up before him:

I craved for my life to have some meaning. I found the thought that it might just mean nothing at all, might, in a long perspective, be nothing at all, terrifying … I was only too aware that there might be no point in it. The whole thing could just be contingent, arbitrary, accidental, meaningless.

No matter how ardently he “hungered for it to have meaning, [the] meaninglessness of everything” hung like a shroud over his life. “I felt what can only be described as existential terror, a horror of nothingness.” Trapped in a nightmare, Magee confronted one insurmountable fact: “death, my death, the literal destruction of me!” It was inevitable: “Nothing that I could ever do, now or at any other time, could make any difference” when it will soon dissolve “into complete nothingness for the rest of eternity”. And how could it matter to anyone else, “when they too are eternally nothing?”

If the permanent destination of all of us is “the void” then whatever we do is little more than a “little human game”, Magee thought, as we “busy ourselves with our little lives and all their vacuous pursuits” that help us “shut out the black and endless night that surrounds us”. “I used to look at people going about their normal lives with everyday cheerfulness and think: … In a short time every one of them will be dead … Why aren’t they overwhelmed with horror at it?’” They seemed “like a lot of lunatics chuckling dementedly while the asylum burnt down and turned them to ash”.

Born in 1930 in working-class Hoxton on the fringes of London’s East End, Magee was brought up in a flat above his family’s clothes shop, where he’d had to share a bed with his older sister. His relationship with his mother was very difficult. He recalls her as quite a beauty but also as “very damaged [and] as near to being a person without feelings as I have come across”. Apparently disappointed at her humble status, “she showed no interest in or affection for her children, hated them enjoying themselves and was constantly slapping her son in the face, her tongue sharp with mockery”. (Daily Telegraph, “Bryan Magee: Obituary”, July 26, 2019)

Fortunately, Bryan was close to both his father and paternal grandfather who, although they were denied much formal education, were both intelligent and shared a contagious interest in books, music and the arts. His father was a great admirer of Shakespeare and Wagner and would queue for hours to get tickets to performances of their works. These enthusiasms were passed on to Bryan.

Scholarships took Bryan to Christ’s Hospital School and to Keble College, Oxford, where he took degrees in History (1952) and then Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1953), and later on to Yale, where he studied philosophy on a post-graduate fellowship. An impressive and popular figure, he was elected president of the Oxford Union, and his university friends included William Rees-Mogg, Jeremy Thorpe, Robin Day and Michael Heseltine, all of whom went on to prominent careers in journalism, politics or broadcasting—fields in which Magee also had considerable impact.

Aside from a very successful career as a broadcaster, occasional academic, and nine years as first a Labour and then a Social Democrat MP, Magee was the author or editor of twenty-three books, beginning with the self-published and revealingly titled Crucifixion and Other Poems (1951), dedicated to the memory of Richard Wagner, a permanent presence in his life, about whom he would write two well-received books, Aspects of Wagner (1968) and The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (2001), the latter bearing a revealing epigram taken from the mystical German poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear”. Pursuing such themes, he later published Facing Death (1977) and The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1983/1997), an unusually accessible text on the deeply pessimistic, post-Kantian German “philosopher of the Will” who played a pivotal role in Magee’s intellectual and personal life. On the other hand, he wrote a standard short introduction on the combative Karl Popper (1973) and several lighter, journalistic studies of American politics, including The New Radicalism (1962) and The Democratic Revolution (1964), published just as the 1960s cultural revolution was getting under way.

However, it was as the host of two pioneering BBC television series on philosophy that Magee most fully demonstrated his exceptional ability to communicate ideas effectively to a mass audience. Each of these series, Men of Ideas (1978) and The Great Philosophers (1987), took about two and a half years to prepare and produce, and consisted of fifteen episodes. The guests were prominent philosophers. In Men of Ideas they discussed such topics as Marxist Philosophy, Martin Heidegger and Modern Existentialism, the Two Philosophies of Wittgenstein, Logical Positivism and its Legacy, and the Spell of Linguistic Philosophy; in The Great Philosophers they discussed Plato, Aristotle, Medieval Philosophy, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the American Pragmatists, Frege and Russell. Both series had considerable impact (Men of Ideas drew a steady one million viewers per episode), and they remain available on YouTube and as podcasts, which is fortunate because nothing comparable has appeared since. They are also available as edited books.

In an earlier radio series in 1970-71 Magee spoke with such luminaries as A.J. Ayer, Bernard Williams, Anthony Quinton, Gilbert Ryle and Peter Strawson. It also appeared as a book, Modern British Philosophy (1973), but the broadcasts are lost. In a revealing observation about this extended exploration of “the tradition in which I had been trained”, Magee concluded that overall, “their work constituted a bankrupt tradition”. This had begun promisingly enough with the logical analysis of ordinary language statements pioneered by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, but had then taken off “in the wrong direction, transmogrifying a technique into a subject matter”, a shift triggered by the domineering presence at Cambridge of Ludwig Wittgenstein and accomplished by J.L. Austin and Ryle at Oxford. Magee’s judgment here seems to reflect his lifelong impatience with forms of philosophy that don’t engage with the deeper metaphysical issues that had concerned him throughout his life.

Paradoxically, Magee’s tremendous productivity was coupled with a long-term depressive illness. Ordinarily, this illness would have been quite debilitating and have made sustained, high-quality work difficult if not impossible. It may be that Magee suffered from High Functioning Anxiety Disorder. At any rate, the opening chapter of Magee’s Confessions makes it clear that he was an intellectually precocious and extremely introspective young person, liable to solipsism, and besieged by doubts about the reality of the world and of other people, and by the sense that his life was totally determined by forces he couldn’t apprehend. He was also haunted by such philosophical puzzles as Zeno’s Paradox, and became very anxious that he couldn’t think his way out of them. He recoiled from the thought that such matters were literally “unthinkable”, but were nevertheless undeniable aspects of reality, indeed, that “they were problems about reality”, the reality in which he was doomed to live.

One illuminating episode stands out from his childhood, overwhelming him one morning as he stood amongst 800 students in the chapel of Christ’s Hospital School singing a hymn. He began to close and open his eyes, blocking out and then re-admitting to consciousness all the other boys:

Up to that moment I had always taken it for granted that I was in immediate contact with the people and things outside me … but now, suddenly, I realised that their existence was one thing and my awareness of it something radically other. Their existence was out there, independent of me: but all the awareness and experience and knowledge I could ever have of it was inside my head, and that could pop into and out of existence irrespective of them. I could make it come and make it go whenever I liked, simply by opening and closing my eyes.

It was a profound and upsetting insight, akin to the reaction of Jean-Paul Sartre to his acute experience at the contingency of the world described in La Nausée (1938): “With a horrible churning over of my stomach I realised that … when I close my eyes they disappear”—that is, they literally ceased to exist. It seemed they were utterly contingent upon whether Bryan perceived them or not:

Even now, after all these years, what I cannot put into words is how indescribably appalling I found that moment of insight, how nightmarish. I was inundated by crashing great tidal waves of nausea, claustrophobia and isolation, as if I were forever cut off from everything that existed apart from myself and as if I were trapped for life inside my own head.

His reaction was extreme:

I was overwhelmed by panic and the need to escape from the situation—just get out. Groping and blundering, I lurched along the row of boys in my pew, and under the eyes of the whole school … I veered distraught down the channel between them and out of the building.

The greenish pallor of his face convinced everyone that he’d simply been physically ill, but from then on he had a phobia at attending chapel and “from that day on I wrestled with demons for at least a part of every day of my life”. What was the nature of these demons?

That everything existed outside my mind, and I was cut off from it for ever and for always, irretrievably alone, trapped for life inside the tiny box of my skull, never, never, never able to get out and be part of the rest of everything there was. The feeling was one of total, permanent and unsalvageable isolation from everything and everybody, combined with intolerable claustrophobia, a waking nightmare of being locked up inside myself.

All he had access to, he lamented, were images in his mind of whatever it was that was out there in the world. He had no doubt that the latter existed—“there wasn’t anything that wasn’t”—it was just that it couldn’t be grasped, it was “ultimately unconceptualizable”. It was like a proto-Kantian intuition: “Here, it seemed to me, was the last word in paradoxes: everything that actually exists is unknowable, and the whole of whatever it is we experience is image only, with no existence independent of our experience.”

Eventually he found an answer, in his mid-teens, in The Bible of the World (1940), edited by R.O. Ballou, a gigantic (1400+ pages) survey of the world’s major religions. The section on the Hindu Upanishads really captured his attention, ratifying his intuition about the split between the world as we experience it, and reality as it is:

I found it said that the entire world of human knowledge and experience consisted of images only, which were fleeting and had no abiding reality, whereas real reality, that which existed permanently, was something we could have no direct knowledge of, and therefore could form no clear and determinant conception of.

In the next moment came a further insight that forged a crucial connection in his evolving mental world, determined his thinking for the rest of his life, and later shaped his answer to what he became convinced was the ultimate question: What is the meaning of life?

What was this insight? Magee stressed in his Confessions that from his childhood he’d had an intense intuition that everything is One but had struggled to reconcile this with the evanescent and kaleidoscopic realm of images that suffused his consciousness; now he felt he had the answer: “The Upanishads … said that what presented this indefinite number of variegated images to our minds was not an equal number of un-get-at-able somethings corresponding to the separate images, but just One Big Something.” It alone was the ultimate reality, all the rest—the great never-ending flood of images that assail us all the time—was illusion, powerful, compelling, and often irresistible, but illusion, nonetheless. Moreover, these Hindu scriptures affirmed that we become differentiated from this One Big Something when we come into existence as individuals, and that we dissolve back into It when we die, “and that, actually, was ultimately all there is”.

Was this then the (grim, unedifying?) solution to the question of the meaning of life, arrived at by Magee as a teenager and retained implicitly throughout his life until it collapsed around him in his early forties? This collapse was cataclysmic:

Words cannot express the appalled and appalling emotions that overcame me. The chief was a kind of claustrophobia of the spirit: I felt blocked, stifled, straitjacketed, bound, gagged, taped, unable to move even so much as an eyebrow. It was horrific … I knew in my bones that I was not going to live beyond the following winter.

Ironically, this mid-life crisis occurred after Magee had made a major investment of time and effort researching the meaning of life. He had even broken the question down analytically: “Can there be any such thing as a meaning of life? If there can, have we human beings any possibility of finding out what it is?, and, If finding out is a possibility for us, how should we go about it?” It was ironic because this systematic effort only deepened, rather than alleviated, his sense of dread, seemingly confirming the existentialist notion that everyday life is a facade, obscuring its ultimate emptiness, and that it doesn’t pay to delve too deeply into it.

Magee began with the conviction that “to anyone thinking like this the only human activity that seems to have any importance at all is the search for meaning in life”.

And like other philosophers and literati who’ve faced such existential assaults, Magee felt that the only appropriate response was intellectual activity, and that he could think himself out of the nihilistic abyss that threatened to engulf him. Consequently, “in this frame of mind, I read or re-read the central masterpieces of the great philosophers … as if my life depended on it”.

It was not easy, as he was “racked with unliterary and unintellectual thoughts”, returning obsessively to questions of fortuity, contingency and inevitability that surrounded any consideration of life and death, corralling all thoughts of escape, while “total oblivion, eternal or timeless nothingness” lurked in the darkness beyond.

Nevertheless, he persisted, exploring what the arts, and especially Wagner and Gustav Mahler had to offer. He also returned to the great religions, concluding that Buddhism was the most impressive, while Christianity was “crude”, although he gained something from his encounter with medieval philosophy. Overall, however: “I could not help still looking on religion as essentially a cop-out, for all its beguiling but incidental merits.”

Much of Magee’s Confessions records his extended inquiries into the Western philosophical tradition, especially Immanuel Kant, J.G. Fichte, F.W.J. Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, all of whom he interpreted, at least initially, as affirming “the Kantian empirical realism/transcendental idealism view of total reality”. According to this model:

what we human beings can think, perceive, know, experience, or be aware of in any way at all depends not only on what the reality is with which we have to deal but also on the apparatus we have for doing those things, i.e., our human bodies with their senses, nervous systems and brains. If this equipment can deal with something it is by virtue of that fact an object of possible experience for us.

The latter can be any number of things, “but whatever these are, the totality of them constitutes the outer limit of what we can have any thought or awareness of”. Crucially, our sensory apparatus is contingent, so what we can know in no way reflects the totality of what there is to know, which remains forever beyond our apprehension in a transcendent realm.

Critically for Magee’s protracted inquiries, “nearly all of what matters most to us inhabits the transcendentally ideal part of it, within which nothing could be known and therefore no factual propositions asserted”, or, as Wittgenstein asserted at the very end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (In dealing with the Tractatus, Magee dismisses as misguided the more conventional interpretations of the work of the meaning of this gnomic utterance.)

And so, Magee arrived in mid-life at an intellectual cul-de-sac, consumed by despair, convinced that he “was not going to live beyond the following winter … What changed everything at the very last moment was reading the last of the so-called great philosophers that was left for me to read.”

He had discovered the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, the legendary “philosopher of pessimism” who had had such a widespread if “subterranean” cultural influence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bertrand Russell observed in his History of Western Philosophy:

Schopenhauer is in many ways peculiar among philosophers. He is a pessimist, whereas almost all the others are in some sense optimists … He dislikes Christianity, preferring the religions of India, both Hinduism and Buddhism. He is a man of wide culture, quite as much interested in art as in ethics [and] his appeal has always been less to professional philosophers than to artistic and literary people in search of a philosophy that they could believe.

Amongst the latter can be listed Wagner, Nietzsche, Ivan Turgenev, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Freud, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence. Magee had to ask himself why he’d not previously engaged with the one philosopher above all who was vital to an understanding of Wagner, his favourite composer, about whom he’d written two books and many reviews. He conjectured that his keeping philosophy and Wagner separate may have been akin to being in love with two women at the same time and not wanting them to meet, perhaps because they might find they shared an affinity from which he was excluded.

Ultimately, however, Magee concluded that it was because he didn’t regard art as primarily an intellectual activity. Indeed, “the relationship between artists’ attachment to theory and their quality as artists is usually one of inverse proportion: the more attached they are to theory the less good they are as artists”. Consequently, the Schopenhauerian dimension of Wagner’s music arises not of any desire of his to give Schopenhauer’s ideas musical form, but out of their joint occupancy of the mental world of “Dark Romanticism”, the sub-genre of the Romantic movement identified by the literary theorist Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony (1930).

Magee finally encountered Schopenhauer while browsing in a bookshop and coming across Patrick Gardiner’s 1966 book on the philosopher.

Flicking through it, he found that “certain quotations leapt at me out of the book in a way I have experienced neither before nor since: it was as if they flew up into my face off the page”. For example, “The man of talent is like the marksman who hits a target the others cannot hit, the man of genius is like the marksman who hits a target they cannot even see!” More importantly, “When I read the words ‘the solution of the riddle of the world is only possible through the proper connection of outer with inner experience’ it was as if someone had switched a light on inside my head.” Magee felt that Schopenhauer had gone beyond even Kant to make “discoveries of the highest value: the foundation of ethics, the nature of art and in particular of music, the true nature of religion” and the meaning of life itself.

But it was some years before Magee fully engaged with Schopenhauer. This occurred in a café in Aix-en-Provence as Magee read again the philosopher’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation:

Never have I had the feeling of being so directly and vividly in personal contact with an author: Arthur Schopenhauer was in the room there with me, sitting in front of me, talking to me, his hand on my arm or my knee, coining each new minted phrase as he uttered it.

Finally he had grasped the essence of Schopen­hauer’s system. He found they shared the same dualist, “phenomenal/noumenal” view of total reality as “an immaterial, undifferentiated, timeless, spaceless ‘Something’ of which we can never have direct knowledge but which manifests itself to us as this differentiated phenomenal world of material objects (including us) in space and time”. Moreover, and reassuringly, “this conclusion [was] strikingly similar to the view taken within the mainstream traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism”, that Magee had first noticed as a schoolboy reading the World Bible. Magee found that Schopenhauer, “to a degree unmatched by any other philosopher, writes about the world as I encounter it, and about life as I encounter it”. Moreover:

He speaks to me, as no other philosopher does, direct and in his own human voice, a fellow spirit, a penetratingly perceptive friend, [and], although I frequently do not agree with what he says, I always listen to him.

What is the heart of Schopenhauer’s philosophy? Magee was reluctant to accept the conventional view that Schopenhauer was the pre-eminent “philosopher of the Will”. This reluctance arose from his concern that use of “the Will” to signify the noumenal must inevitably mislead people into conflating Schopenhauer’s ontological notion with other uses of the term. To avoid this, Magee spelt out what “the Will” must be, according to Schopenhauer:

It is a boundless, unconscious, impersonal, non-living, non-cognitive, utterly purposeless drive … It is not to be understood as connoting anything to do with consciousness or mind or self-awareness of any sort. It is nothing to do with aims, wishes or intentions, nothing necessarily to do with life, which is highly contingent and might easily never have come into existence. It connotes something that is prior not only to life but to matter, a blind, non-material, non-personal, non-living force.

Magee also spelt out how the Will makes its presence known through the tremendous turbulence that characterises the human mind, “the greater part of which is repressed and unknown to us because to face up to it would cause us a degree of disturbance that we could not handle”. These are utterly wilful libidinous, aggressive, acquisitive and destructive forces “whose presence within us we do not wish to acknowledge, not even in the secrecy of our own thoughts and so we deceive ourselves about what our own characters and motivations are, allowing only such interpretations of them to appear in our conscious minds as we can deal with”.

This is an extremely unedifying vision of the universe and humanity’s place in it, and it seems there is no retreat from it. As Magee makes clear in Wagner and Philosophy (2000):

Life consists of endless willing, trying, hoping, driving, grasping, yearning—we are all the time, from our earliest babyhood onwards, wanting something, reaching out for something. And what is more, this endless willing is inherently unsatisfiable, because the moment a wish is gratified another takes its place; and because adversity, misfortune, accident, illness, disappointment, frustration and failure are common human experiences … and because in the end even the luckiest in life are doomed … to be overwhelmed and obliterated by death … Life is unavoidably tragic.

Magee goes even further in The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, describing how his intellectual mentor was “possessed by the idea that there is something inherently evil, monstrous, wicked about the ultimate force that constitutes the world … as a beginningless and endless expenditure of groundless energy on an astronomical scale, utterly without self-awareness or purpose”. Most succinctly put, it is “Schopenhauer’s view that simply what is is inherently terrible—inherently violent and inherently tragic”. It seems Magee’s acute insight into the contingency of existence was accurate: life is little more than a cosmic error or an accidental excrescence of the Will. As Schopenhauer concludes, in The World as Will and Representation: “nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist”.

How do people live in such a world? First, human beings are, like every other living thing, driven by the will to live: “They will struggle for this end against anything and anybody to the utmost limits of their powers, and in the last resort all else will be sacrificed to it, including the lives of other people.” The will to live reigns supreme even when life “is full of want, misery, trouble, pain, anxiety … he fears above everything else the end of this existence, which is nevertheless for him the one and only thing certain”.

Second, people have no choice in the matter. As various existentialists have observed, human beings are simply “thrown into” existence and proceed from that fact until death dissolves them back into the nothingness from which they emerged as sentient creatures. And sadly, it is this quality of sentience that delivers them into the agony of questioning the meaning and point of it all.

How does this illuminate the meaning of life? Has Magee’s lifelong attempt to escape the nihilism that first terrified him as a school student only ultimately delivered him into a higher nihilism? Here Magee and his readers face the moment of truth, to which his whole life, as recounted in his Confessions, was heading:

At the end of it all I have no solutions. I am as baffled now by the larger metaphysical questions of my existence as I was when I was a child, indeed more so, because my understanding of the depths and difficulties of the questions themselves is now so much greater …

Indeed, he writes, “No one reading this book can have imagined that I was going to end it by pulling out of a hat, in the last chapter, solutions to the fundamental problems of philosophy.” This seems a wilful evasion, as the momentum of Magee’s inquiries, stretching across years and through all manner of mental agonies and insights, was clearly heading towards the great denouement: This! is the meaning of life! Instead we find: “The end of this book has to be nothing more than that, just simply the end of this book.”

Must it be left there? No, because Magee has done himself an injustice: he may not have captured intellectually the meaning of life, but he has exemplified it existentially through the relentless lifelong pursuit of his quarry. As a young person, Bryan plunged down the rabbit hole of meaning, wondering, like Alice in Wonderland, just how deep it was, but he seemed always sure that he would get to the bottom of things. However, unlike Alice’s fall, which ended comfortably enough “upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves”, it turned out there was no end for Magee, just the endless plunge through the masterpieces of metaphysics, a non-result with which, it transpires, he was reconciled. And so, at the end of the quest it seems that, for Bryan Magee, the meaning of life is simply its pursuit. As in so many great endeavours, the meaning of the quest is the quest itself.

Mervyn Bendle’s previous articles in this series on modern philosophers and the meaning of life have been on A.J. Ayer, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Isaiah Berlin and Simone de Beauvoir.