A philosophical life Archived article from Nov 18, 2002 By Douglas Frank   The state of ignorance We are suffering from what I called "cognitive closure" with respect to the mind-body problem. Just as a dog cannot be expected to solve the problems about space and time and the speed of light that it took a brain like Einstein's to solve, so maybe the human species cannot be expected to understand how the universe contains mind and matter in combination. Isn't it really a preposterous overconfidence on our part to think that our species -- so recent, so contingent, so limited in many ways -- can nevertheless unlock every secret of the natural world? As Socrates always maintained, it is the wise man who knows his own ignorance. -- From "The Making of a Philosopher" by Colin McGinn For Colin McGinn, philosophy is the love of his life, but it might also be the bane of his existence. This becomes apparent in "The Making of a Philosopher" (HarperCollins, 2002), a new memoir by McGinn, a professor of philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences-New Brunswick. McGinn traces his intellectual life from his beginnings as a student in an English technical school to his becoming an Oxford don to his arrival at Rutgers, which with Princeton, Columbia, the City University of New York and New York University "now has the strongest field of philosophers on the planet," he writes. "The purpose of the book is to explain philosophy in an accessible, engaging way," he says in his preface, to convey "a sense of philosophy as a lived subject -- as part of a flesh-and-blood human life." He calls the book an "intellectual autobiography about "what has gone on in my mind." McGinn, who is regarded as one of the leading lights in philosophy today and is the author of 13 other books, makes it clear throughout the 241-page volume that he has had a quarter-century love affair with philosophy. But he also reveals some of the warts and blemishes of the field and its practitioners, questioning whether humankind at this stage of evolution has enough brainpower to answer the questions it poses. In a chapter on metaphilosophy -- the philosophy of philosophy -- he speculates about why philosophy does not make the kind of steady, assured progress that is associated with the sciences and with history, archaeology, even literary scholarship. "Every generation of philosophers repudiates the insights of the previous generation so that there is no cumulative body of philosophical knowledge that everyone can agree to," he writes. "Philosophers always seem to be bickering and dithering, to put it unkindly." The reason we cannot make solid progress with such issues as the mind-body problem, he writes, "is that our human intelligence is not cut out for the job." Over coffee at Starbucks in New Brunswick, he admitted that this belief is somewhat blasphemous and hasn't made him many friends. "I think my reputation might have suffered a bit for saying that. It makes me more famous for saying it, but within the academy, they don't like to hear it." Nevertheless, he believes that we're really not smart enough to do philosophy. "But we have to try -- perhaps that's our fate. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything we've solved -- like solving Fermat's Theorem in mathematics. We are still dealing with all the same questions that Plato raised." McGinn was born into a working-class family five years after the end of World War II in West Hartlepool, a small mining town in the northeast of England. An indifferent student in his early years, he spent most of his time playing sports, performing on drums in a rock band and perfecting his pinball skills. During this period, he did not consider going to a university at all, he recalls. "The idea had never been mentioned in my house; it was not something a McGinn had ever done before." But later, attending school in Blackpool, he fell under the influence of a divinity teacher, a Mr. Marsh, who "ignited in me an interest in studying and thinking, particularly about religion and theology." He was asked one day if he wanted to "take a shot at going to university, and I figured it might be worth a try." Up to that point he had concerned himself with physical coordination sports and drumming. "But now my mind started to crave activity too. It was like a switch being turned on; the circuits began to hum." He received his first "philosophical epiphany" while studying the "ontological argument," posited by Saint Anselm of Canterbury in the Middle Ages, which, simply stated, holds that if God is defined as the most perfect being that can be conceived of, then He certainly cannot lack the attribute of existence. The argument was largely accepted by the major philosophers who succeeded Anselm, so it counts as one of the most influential philosophical arguments in history. As he thought about this concept and others, McGinn "began to realize that even the most familiar belief might be mistaken, a mere prejudice -- that everything had to be open to rational scrutiny." Still later, it was Freud who got him interested in the workings of the mind and led him to decide to study and get a degree in psychology at Manchester University with an eye to becoming an educational or clinical psychologist. He applied himself to his studies and was admitted. "I had gone from underachieving jock-mode to pocket-sized intellectual in less than a year, and philosophy had to take a lot of the blame," he writes. As he proceeded through his education, he encountered the works of Bertrand Russell, who "made the life of the mind seem like a heroic adventure, not a monkish confinement to dusty libraries. It was reading him that persuaded me that I wanted to become a full-time, card-carrying philosopher," recalls McGinn. After graduating from Manchester in 1971, with a degree in psychology, McGinn pursued a somewhat rocky road that eventually led him to Oxford to study philosophy. From there, his career took off. He won Oxford's coveted John Locke Prize, taught at University College in London and the University of California -Los Angeles (where he got hooked on video games and fell in love with his 1963 Chevy Impala), and eventually returned to Oxford in 1985 to take a position as the Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy, thus becoming one of the "glimpsed dons ... like cerebral gods, remote but real." In the late 1980s, however, he came to the realization that "Oxford had become a bit of a philosophical backwater, with the best philosophy being done in America," and he subsequently accepted a job offer from Rutgers. However, he continues to view philosophy as "a condition of terminal puzzlement, a permanent fretting ignorance," and in the book wonders if he hasn't argued himself out of a job after 25 years. "Well, not exactly: I have just redefined the job," he answers his own question. "Maybe we can't solve the main problems of philosophy, but we can at least reflect on them, formulate them clearly, spell out the various options, develop a sense of their depth," he writes. So then, he is asked, is it the thrill of the chase that keeps you going? "Perhaps it is," he concedes, taking a sip of his coffee.

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