Jürgen Habermas once asked Bernard Williams whether he was an Aristotelian or a Wittgensteinian. The German philosopher was keen on categorising philosophers; the British philosopher wasn’t. Too modest, he recalled, to say “I’m me” or something similar, he finally answered, “How about: I’m Nietzschean?”—a riposte, he wrote, that “really did put the petrol on the fire”.
Williams had not always admired Nietzsche. In the 1960s, he used to charge the Nietzsche enthusiast Michael Tanner with “wasting his time on rubbish that even Joad [despised philosophy populariser CEM Joad] could have refuted”. Then, during a lengthy wait in Tanner’s rooms, he began browsing the Nietzsche books scattered around and found that the very ideas with which he was currently wrestling had been developed at greater depth by the German. In an interview in 1994, Williams said that, although his philosophy lacked positions and theses, what unified much of it was his “obsession” with Nietzsche’s phrase “becoming what you are”. Williams applied that notion not just to ethics and human self-fashioning, but to philosophy itself, and the flux of philosophical concepts. Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History is a collection of philosophical essays that examine Williams’s treatment of the relation between those two disciplines. What the various authors do best is redirect us to Williams’s own work.
“Lack of a historical sense is the hereditary defect of philosophers,” wrote Nietzsche in 1878—an indictment, wrote Williams in 2002, that is just as apposite today. Certainly, philosophers revere and rehash the history of their subject, said Williams. For scientists, how the concept of the atom (for instance) originated and developed over time is immaterial to their current thought and practice, whereas philosophers continue to mull over and contest past philosophical theories and concepts. Yet, Williams regretted, his colleagues often fail to factor in how the concepts they seek to understand have changed meaning over time. Gilbert Ryle, in the heyday of analytic philosophy, urged philosophers to approach Plato’s works as though they had appeared in last month’s issue of Mind. But, said Williams, if one abstracts a concept or idea from its historical context and subsequent influence, “one has an obvious problem of what object one is even supposed to be considering. One seems simply to be left with a set of words in some modern language”. To translate the ancient Greek dei as “ought” may be unavoidable (Williams borrowed this example from the historian Robin Collingwood), but it is misleading if that term is construed as carrying its modern sense of moral obligation, so that the moral theories of the ancient Greeks are then assumed to be concerned with the same thing as those of Kant. You might as well translate trieres (a term for the ancient Greek galley) as “steamship”.
At its extremes, at least, analytic philosophy is prone to what Williams called “triumphant anachronism”. Which, he might have added, is odd for a type of philosophy that is so concerned with language. Not only have Anglo-American philosophers, for almost a century, tended to take language as the equivalent to Kant’s categories—the medium through which we perceive, and conceive of, the world—but they have insisted that, far from being a static set of lapidary logical or descriptive statements, it is essentially an activity. Words have meaning, and meanings are what they are, by virtue of the particular context in which they are uttered or written. Language should be treated almost anthropologically, as an intertwined series of “language games”. Words (as Wittgenstein put it) have meaning “only in the stream of life”.
Philosophers still think and write as if there were “an eternal man”
Yet the defect that Nietzsche diagnosed does indeed seem to be congenital: philosophers still (as he complained at the end of the 19th century) think and write as if there were “an eternal man” and “unalterable facts about mankind”, therefore an “aeterna veritas”—as if concepts such as “good”, “justice”, “duty” each somehow transfixed and condensed the entire process of their history, and possessed a timeless, transcendent, perpetual meaning. “Only something that has no history can be defined,” Nietzsche wrote. When tackling the question of morality, what gave him “a pointer in the right direction”, he said, was looking at how terms we would now translate as “good” and “bad” have been used in different languages and different eras. The result was The Genealogy of Morals, a speculation about how morality might have evolved. As Williams observed, Nietzsche explained morality in terms of “the supposed enemies of morality”: “simpler or more primitive or nonmoral or ‘lower’” forces such as hatred, resentment and self-assertion.
Nietzsche had first studied philology—aged 24, he became the youngest ever professor in the subject at the University of Basel. As an Oxford undergraduate, Williams had first studied Classics, and his moral philosophy was informed by his sense of how the concepts we use are derived from yet vastly different to those of the ancient Greeks. If philosophy “is to have anything to say to us” about ethical objectivity, he argued, “it will have to address a lot more than philosophy”; if it wants to do what it sets out to do, it has to be “impure”.
But, if considering a concept in isolation from its historical context leads to uncertainty as to what object one is actually dealing with, so too can meticulously engaging with a concept’s alterations over time. The “historical philosophising” applauded by Nietzsche and Williams can make concepts so freefloating and fluxional as to be meaningless, and render suspect the very notion of truth. In “Truth and Falsity in an Extra-Moral Sense”, Nietzsche asks what truth is, and answers: “A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms… Truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.” Seized upon with glee by adolescents, and by philosophical sensationalists who revel in nihilism, paradox and relativism, this early essay is often taken to epitomise Nietzsche’s work as a whole and to show that he always believed that there is no such thing as truth. That statement, as Williams was fond of saying, is self-contradictory since it relies on, and presupposes, truth; in the very act of denying that truth is possible, it claims to be true itself. In his last pre-posthumously published book, Truth and Truthfulness, Williams quotes the Nietzsche lines above and also lines from later works that show Nietzsche was flaying himself alive in the pursuit of truth—not truth in the sense (as in his early essay) of a compact set of congealed thoughts and metaphors that have lost their living value, but truth as the lodestar and elusive aspiration that has to be “fought for every step of the way”. “How much truth does a mind endure, how much does it dare?” demanded Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, his last book. For us “godless metaphysicians of today”, he wrote, “truth is divine”, the god to which “almost everything dear to our hearts” must be sacrificed—although he acknowledged that untruth may be more conducive to our survival.
What Nietzsche had mistakenly implied in his early essay, said Williams, was that “we can somehow look round the edge of all our concepts at the world to which we are applying them and grasp its nature as entirely unaffected by any descriptions”—including, he added, descriptions such as “formless”, “chaotic” and “unstructured”. Postmodernists and others (Williams dubbed them “the deniers”) pronounce that, because we can’t know what is (or would be) “there anyway” irrespective of us, “reality” and “truth” are empty terms; just as, because we are inescapably prone to interpret the past through the lens of our own beliefs and values, what we call history is “really” an account of ourselves now. Of course, Williams acknowledged, all that we can, or could ever, know is mediated by our perceptual and conceptual capacities, and we “cannot describe the world without describing it”. But, while doing justice to the insights underlying anti-realism and relativism, he also sought to understand and describe reality “in a way to the maximum degree independent of our perspective and its peculiarities”.
His Descartes: the Project of Pure Enquiry was warm and despairing on the challenge this presented. In Truth and Truthfulness, subtitled “An Essay in Genealogy”, he aimed to do with truth what Nietzsche had done with morality—suggest how our notions of truthfulness, accuracy and sincerity might have developed, over time, out of mere animality and self-interest.
Examining what a concept originally meant, or meant at a particular time, said Williams, can be revelatory about our own current concepts, showing us that we don’t properly understand them. Philosophers often complain that the ancient Greeks lacked notions of the will, intention or duty. If we look at their literature, though, these notions that we consider so fundamental to morality and psychology may come to appear “not so much the benefits of moral maturity as the accretions of misleading philosophy”. In Shame and Necessity, Williams used the Odyssey and the Greek tragedies to illuminate features of ethical experience that he felt philosophy now lacks. They began to be lacking in Greek philosophy, too, he said, when, after Socrates, its “sustained pursuit of rational self-sufficiency” led it to “turn its back on kinds of human experience and human necessity of which Greek literature offers the purest, if not the richest expression”. Plato’s account of what humans are and how they act was couched in ethical terms—making the mind a hierarchical structure topped by reason, which should rightfully master the desires. Psychology thereafter became “ethicized”, said Williams (which he considered a mistake), and morality developed new notions of obligation and duty. Williams wanted, he said, to show why ethical thought is not everything it seems. He deplored “the peculiar institution of morality” with its emphasis on obligation, preferring a more Nietzschean, first-personal form of ethics and (although he disliked the term) self-realisation.
By deploying the historical sense that philosophers so often lack, Williams managed to get the nearest he could to a neutral viewpoint, attaining a certain sort of objectivity. He opened new perspectives on ethics and on philosophy of mind. Like Nietzsche, he exposed “a radical contingency in our current ethical conceptions”, but, also, in “Why Philosophy Needs History” (his last pre-posthumously published essay) spoke of “a common core shared by conflicting values” (though without wholly endorsing the possibility of it). He disparaged as “unashamedly crass” the “vulgar relativism” which pronounces that moral values, rather than being objective and universal, are culturally constructed, therefore can only apply, or even make sense, within whichever cultural group constructed them; but which then proceeds to both prescribe the western value of liberal tolerance universally and exhort that all moral variations be respected equally.
Rationally, we should refrain from judging cultures too remote for their moral values to be “a real option” for us
Williams hoped to preserve what is true in relativism, and avoid its inconsistency, by advocating what he called a “relativism of distance”. Rationally, we (an invidious term, he agreed, but here referring to westerners) should refrain from judging cultures too remote from us in time or space for their moral values to be “a real option” for us. It is not the case, he said, that cultural groups believe, or have believed, in what subsequently turns out to have been false. Rather, what were once “pieces of knowledge”—to the samurai, Greek warriors, medieval knights, the Incas who sacrificed humans to the gods—are no longer available to us, just as what we now know could not have been available to them.
This might seem a bit slippery, but Williams was seeking to reconcile dateless truth with transient meanings, naked reality with the mediation of perception and language—tensions, he said, that Nietzsche had been the first clearly to identify. Like Nietzsche, he was trying to capture the live currency of truth exchange. Recognising that the meanings of our concepts are constantly changing, he was determined to tackle and channel that unrest, and to ransack and wring it out for truth.
Because Nietzsche, like Williams, was suspicious of philosophical theories, he tended to write numbered passages of apparently unrelated insights and often lists of aphorisms. Williams said (in one of his characteristic spoofs of old-fashioned, posh English usage) that it would be “a very bad idea” to imitate Nietzsche’s style. Clearly, he refrained from doing so, but he did adopt Nietzsche’s style in another sense. Nietzsche urged the importance of dancing “with the feet, with ideas, and with words”. He managed to get inside—and, almost simultaneously, outside—the concepts he examined, refusing to be caught in the perspectives he used, or his own arguments. In the very act of making a particular point, he would nimbly scorpion round on himself to scotch it. Bernard Williams—it is clear now, more than 20 years after his death—had the same sort of dexterity.
