“What we can know, and what we can understand, is so influenced by our location in time that it is impossible for us to disentangle that influence and get a clear look at it.”
Some years ago, I highlighted this passage in the British philosopher Bryan Magee’s book Ultimate Questions. He published it in 2017 at the age of 87, two years before his death. It remains one of my favourite works of everyday philosophy: lucid, scrupulous, generously brief. It’s the kind of book I’d like to write, some day. It’s the kind of book you need to have done a lot of thinking and feeling to write.
Philosophy is the love of wisdom, and wisdom is (among other things) the struggle to disentangle yourself sufficiently from time to see the world more clearly. It’s hard to imagine an insight that would count as wise on one day but have no relevance by the next. Yet, as Magee suggests, wisdom also lies in the acknowledgement that ultimate questions don’t necessarily yield ultimate answers. “This too shall pass” goes the Persian adage. It’s one of the most famous lines in wisdom literature precisely because it captures the paradox of impermanence: that the lack of surety is our only surety. Or is it? Philosophically speaking, I find myself obliged to believe that even impermanence may not be a universal truth.
Here’s another way of thinking about wisdom: you know it when you see it. Or rather, you only truly appreciate it when you feel the claim of an insight upon you. Wisdom isn’t like the height of Mount Everest, a recipe for carrot cake, or a quadratic equation. Its worth rests upon its integration into a life. This is why it’s so hard to be wise before rather than after events. Before would be much more useful. But all the eloquence in the world cannot compel someone to be wise. Those who are wise before their time can usually point to some lessons taught by painful experience. Wisdom is at once handed down and aspiring towards the universal – yet resolutely embodied within an unfolding life.
Towards the end of Ultimate Questions, Magee talks about his own intellectual development. He doesn’t discuss it in terms of knowledge acquired or theses debated. Rather, he describes becoming less certain over time. “When I was young,” Magee writes, “it seemed self-evident that we should try to live in the light of such truth as we can know, and I treated with contempt any suggestions that we might choose not to do that.” But now he is less sure. What of those who cannot face certain truths? What of his own fears and losses? “I used to regard commitment to this kind of truth-seeking as the overriding value – the need to discover, and live in the light of, as much truth as we can find out about whatever it is we are… But I have discovered that there are things that I too cannot bear.”
Philosophers have a habit of declaring the pursuit of wisdom humanity’s highest goal. By happy coincidence, this often seems to mean the kind of wisdom they themselves are preoccupied with. Magee is more modest. For him, the shared project of better understanding the self and the universe is both never-ending and geared towards progress, thanks to the human capacity to share and test rival theories in knowledge of their incompleteness. “Since we cannot live without applying or presupposing standards and values, the best way to engage with those is not as faiths or ideologies but provisional, as being open to criticism both from ourselves and from others, and open to revision in the light of experience as well as criticism.”
Not all views are equal, but no view is timelessly correct. This may sound little more than common sense. But it cuts against a contrary current in philosophy, which holds that wisdom should aspire towards the timeless: to justifications that cannot be denied by any rational being.
Among the greatest 20th century thinkers devoted to such a view was the philosopher Derek Parfit, whose last work On What Matters tried wholly to disentangle goodness from time. “It has been widely believed that there are… deep disagreements between Kantians, Contractualists, and Consequentialists,” he argued. “That, I have argued, is not true. These people are climbing the same mountain on different sides.” Parfit feared that if humanity could not converge on objective moral truth, we would be left with nihilism – with nothing mattering at all. The three volumes of On What Matters are a dazzling attempt to scale this summit. He set out to prove that, with careful enough reasoning, we will recognise we have been heading to the same place all along.
I admire and worry about this brilliance. It is a magnificent achievement. Yet it is also austere. I worry because it suggests the bonds and obligations that exist between people are wholly detachable from life and contingency, care and memory. Parfit wanted to save morality from the abyss. But wisdom, I suspect, is not waiting on any summit. For the journey is all there will ever be.
This is Magee’s vision. He remains an optimist – not a cynic, not a sceptic – but his optimism lives in the interplay of doubts and theories, the endless testing and revision that constitutes our collective thinking. For me, this is a wisdom humane enough to be guided by: a way to grapple with both our insignificance and our boundless collective capabilities. We are brief, but the conversation is long.
What we know, we know together. The knowledge is not lodged in any one of us. It lives in the exchange, the handing on, the slow accretion of insight across time. Parfit’s mountain assumes a summit that the right climber might one day reach on behalf of us all. But the better image may be philosophy’s oldest: a river whose tributaries join, separate and rejoin, carrying sediment from distant sources towards an ocean none will see.
I exist: a mind, a life. I know that I exist, but not what I am. Wisdom may be the same. We can acquire it and show it, possess it and praise it. But we cannot see it whole. It asks us to participate in a mystery we cannot exhaust: the strangeness of other minds, the fact that you are there and I am here, reaching across time and space without ever quite arriving. What we can know is so shaped by our moment that we cannot step outside it. This is not a defeat. It is the condition of the conversation.
From the Observation edition, available from our online store
