Bryan Magee Appreciation Society. A collection of articles on the work of Bryan Magee, curated by Tom Callagy.

An IntroductionJanuary 16, 2017

I stumbled on Bryan Magee’s book “The Great Philosophers” in New York about 10 years ago. What a joy to read! With transparent English and Bryan Magee’s ability to explain any complexity with extraordinary clarity!

I soon embarked on a many faceted journey with Bryan Magee as my guide; Firstly his personal life. Growing up in one of the roughest, poorest parts of London; the discussions with his father and grandfather, Monday after Monday, on the previous weekends activities – Shakespeare, boxing or music! His appalling desolation when at 12 years in the boarding school yard he was cruelly told of his beloved father’s death and the harshness with which his mother dealt with this. And later in life his bemusement to see Hoxton become so fashionable!

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Then there are the many aspects of his working life. The Philosopher, The music critic. The lecturer. The Writer. The Traveller. But above all the profound interests – Schopenhauer, Kant and Wagner.

His personal contacts were immense. Bertrand Russell waiting on him hand and foot whilst Russel was in his early 90’s. And the conversation as it flowed! Lenin had become a bloodthirsty tyrant, Maynard Keynes was the most brilliant mind he ever met. Einstein was much more a creative artist than a rationalist. His weekly visits to Popper and their discussions for 40 years. And all the other interesting details of an extraordinarily active life.

And then his chronicles of his slow personal disintegration in his early mid-life.

In the midst of this crisis he re-read Schopenhauer again. And to the depth of his being found in Kant and Schopenhauer his soul brothers.

“The effect Kant’s words produce in the mind to which they really speak is very like that of an operation for cataract on a blind man. Working entirely from within the central tradition of Western philosophy, Kant had carried the mainstream of its development to the point at which, without even knowing it, he made contact with the insights which lie at the heart of Hinduism and Buddhism. He had thus, without its having been any part of his intention and though he died without knowing that he had done it, connected Western with Eastern thought at the most fundamental level. All this was part of the position from which Schopenhauer saw himself as having made a decisive, not to say conclusive, advance.”

His immersion in Schopenhauer has become a lifelong love affair which he chronicles with exuberance. At the end of one book he describes Schopenhauer as an old, wise, lifelong friend sitting in a chair in the corner! For the last 10 years Bryan Magee and Schopenhauer have illuminated all aspects of my life and worldview.

All the above makes Bryan Magee a profoundly, interesting individual. His life’s journey; his vast interests, his T.V programmes; his politics; his love of music, Wagner etc. What intrigues me is that I believe all of his life and all of his interests have their origin in the following.

I believe that he is a true mystic and a religious being to the core of his existence (in a non-ideological, non-dogmatic way). From his earliest years he has known an inner world from which has emanated his sense of wonder, bewilderment and mystery. He is an example of the wonderful words of Einstein

“The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the power of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand wrapt in awe, is as as good as dead.”

To quote Bryan Magee in a similar vein.

“I have little intellectual patience with people who think they know that there is no God, and no life other than this one, and no reality outside the empirical world. Some such atheistic humanism has been one of the characteristic outlooks of western man since the Enlightenment and is particularly common among able and intelligent individuals. It is the prevailing outlook, I suppose in most of the circles in which I have moved for most of my life. It lacks all sense of mystery that surrounds and presses so hard on our lives.”

More than anything, this is my perspective on Bryan Magee. He reminds me of the person who wandered out of Plato’s Cave. In Plato’s Republic, Plato describes leaving the cave –

“First he would most easily see shadows and then the images of men and other things reflected in water and then those things themselves; and the things in the heavens and the heavens themselves he would see more easily at night, looking at the light of the moon and the stars, than he could see the sun and its light by day. Certainly, finding he would be able to look at the sun itself, not reflected in water or anything else, but as it is in itself and in its own place; to look at it and see what kind of thing it is.”

My hope in opening this age is that I may find a few like-minded souls. That we can wander in the worlds of Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer and Kant. Finding hidden gems and sharing with delight their perceptions, insights, intuitions, and knowledge.

I have yet to read his latest book “Ultimate Questions”, but enclosed below is his wonderful poem in the appendix to his book on Schopenhauer.obes and ethically produced garments.