Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Prof Ted Honderich, Ted Honderich

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Philosopher

Routledge

Chapter One

THIS GREEN SUMMER

This is now a place where I am alone, a small room of recesses and bays,bright at the window. It is made calm by the green palisade of treesagainst the sky at the bottom of the gardens, a backdrop waiting for therest of the play. The room is freshly painted in its old colours, two lightand just different blues on the walls, the whiter one above the picture railunder the white ceiling. In the room there are now the things of only myown life, and only one kind of life. It is an orderly study again. A tablein the window without clutter, a brass clock on it that gets attention.Watercolours and paintings, two of them large and emotional impressionsof trees, framed by me. In place of women's radio programmes, there isquiet Bach and Mozart, or silence except for the birds. In a recess, aframed announcement recalling my inaugural lecture, `The Mind,Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes', not certain to escape the eye of a visitorrightly seated.

    Up the few steps from the study and along the hallway, past theundetaining watercolours, past the empty space from which the toodetaining still-life departed with Jane, is the drawing room. I learned tocall it by that name, a little resolutely. It is large enough to have held afew dozen friends and acquaintances who trooped in once more to theChristmas drinks, perhaps some of them a little resolutely too.

    Through three good windows, their slender glazing bars as wellpreserved as those of the study, the drawing room also looks out to thepalisade of trees. This room is still brighter than the study, beingsomewhat higher in the house. It has six sides, in two light and justdifferent greens, the nearly white one above. Wainscot rail reinstated invery living memory. Older urns and swales in relief on the fireplace. Oddpillars of books on the tables and on the carpet, next to the wicker setteeand chairs and the brown Victorian sofa. Flowers and candles, and somesmall brass vessels, nicely worked frowa caskets, brought back fromvisits as external examiner to the university in Ghana. Eleven smallportraits in a line around the room, some of eighteenth-century gents inruffs, several of Russian lads, the latter in memory of the Soviet UnionI was too sensible or respectable or timid to support.

    I see again that the room is a bit contrived, perhaps a bit comic. Evenworse in the report of a guest of sceptical sensibility or with an eye forsocial aspiration? This does not much touch my simple pleasure in it. Inparticular, I do not follow persons of more rigorous taste who wouldexchange its decorous ease for, say, one of those white cells of the PalaisWittgenstein, those stern products of functional necessity and geometry,dutifully visited in Vienna the other week. The philosopher-architect,after arriving at the dimensions for his white shoeboxes, took moreaesthetic thought only to conceal the central heating and to determine theright height for the door handles. They look pretty high to me.

    The third of my more easeful rooms is through two facing doors fromthe drawing room. It too is in accord with the principle of decorationalready noticed, owed to departed Janet: two just different yellows here.A good table and ten chairs. This dining room is heavy with morepictures, some above others, a motley but all in accord with anotherprinciple, my own. It is that the main value of art must surely have to dowith its being true of something, and so it is better when we are notleft wondering what that thing might be. Hence the reproduction of aportrait of Hume, patron saint of philosophers of my inclination, andalso, Victorian or later, the still-lifes, studies of women and landscapes,etchings on wood of lion, tiger and fox, profile of the Spanish lieutenantand so on, and portrait of the host. There are French doors to a prettybalcony. Some later Juliet could lean against that white balustrade. Anolder and wiser one might be best.

    What remains to be noted in Flat B, this first-floor setting of my life,is a bedroom. One large window of sixteen panes, looking into theboughs of a great tree at the front of the house. A smaller room, twopinks, more pictures. In a section of the bookcase are the books I havewritten. Those once brave hopes, still not extinguished. They aresomewhat revived now by the growing company of their translations.There is space left for another two or three vols, including the onethat will do the trick, at last guarantee me a future. I made the solid bedtoo. It is in a new position now, against a different wall. For a time I avertmy eyes from it.

    Out of the window and down below, in the garden between the houseand the street, in the shadow of the chestnut boughs, connected to thehouse by stained-glass porch and perambulator store, is something else.It is The Studio, as it says on its door, and as it is named, its definite articleintact, in five hundred letters about rent arrears and damp and keys. Anartist's studio of good size, added to the property, like the porch and pramstore, by some Victorian. Good-enough brickwork, chimney, slate roof,broad skylight over a good working space and two galleries. In it is anadversary, the socialist landlord's problem, the occupant who seized hermoment and would succeed the tenant. Does my life have an adversaryin it more often than others? Do I just make more of my ordinaryallotment of adversaries than others do? Let me look away from that fora time too.

    The narrow street takes its short way down from St John's Church atthe top, cream and upstanding, to the shops and Hampstead Heath at thebottom. The street is still quiet enough, save for the morning cars. Its citedcharm has not been too much touched by garden designers and by thedetermination of new residents to floodlight their Regency stucco, forpurposes of night security as they say. Once Albion Grove, it now has aname not writ in water, Keats's. In it, when it was a village path, he wroteand lived a part of his brief life, the best part and some of the rest. Thenightingale in the garden, other odes, beauty and troth, love of Fanny, thedrop of blood on the pillow, and the parting. I pedal past his house eachmorning to the other place of my life. Down the hill through BelsizePark, Chalk Farm, Primrose Hill, Camden Town and Euston, toBloomsbury and my other room.

    It too can seem closer to being my life than just a setting of it, closerto being the stuff of my life than just a principal location of it. Can therebe some sense in this, some plain truth? Some actual philosophy, someEnglish philosophy, not only fancy or feeling or French performance?

    The room is one of pride and success, history, work, many lecturesand papers, fewer pleasures, argument in good temper and bad, strategiesand alliances, beginnings and endings of careers, hurt and sad drama. Themain hurt and sad drama was also a stabbing, some say. It is of a sizeowed to the good opinion that was had, by himself and others, of anearlier and larger Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logicat University College London. A. J. Ayer, Professor Sir Alfred, Freddie,known to me in all those roles, all attacked with practised panache. Inthe first, he wrote the book Language, Truth and Logic. It inspired myretorts to teachers of my late...