A very public feud between two philosophers involving damning book reviews, professional roastings, and personal slights shows how bitter, unforgiving — and unwittingly hilarious — academic spats can be, says Stuart Jeffries in a comment in the EducationGuardian of December 21st, 2007.
It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad,” begins Colin McGinn’s review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. “It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.”
The ending isn’t much better: “Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others).”
And in the middle, there is nothing to cheer the book’s author. Honderich’s book is, according to McGinn, sly, woefully uninformed, preposterous, easily refuted, unsophisticated, uncomprehending, banal, pointless, excruciating.
What does the man on the receiving end think of this review? “It is a cold, calculated attempt to murder a philosopher’s reputation,” says Honderich. The review has reignited a feud between the two philosophers that shows how bitter, unforgiving and (to outsiders) unwittingly hilarious academic disputes can be. It certainly makes the bear pit that is journalism seem like sunshine and lollipops by comparison.
McGinn is unrepentant. When I ring him in Miami to find out if there is any chance of a rapprochement, he tells me: “It’s not like you’re hitting someone over the head with a hammer. Ted is not very good at philosophy. That’s the problem.” So probably not.
Instead, the feud is escalating into philosophy’s equivalent of a prize fight between two former colleagues who are both among the showiest brawlers in the philosophy dojo. In one corner is McGinn, 57, West Hartlepool-born professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, and the self-styled hard man of philosophy book reviewing. In the other corner is Honderich, 74, Ontario-born Grote Professor Emeritus of the philosophy of mind and logic at University College London, and a man once described by fellow philosopher Roger Scruton as the “thinking man’s unthinking man”. They are using all the modern weapons at their disposal – blogs, emails, demands for compensation from the academic journal that published the original review, an online counter-review, and an online counter-counter-review.
The heart of their dispute, though, may not be over intellectual matters at all, but about something one of them said more than a quarter of a century ago about the other’s ex-girlfriend (of which more later).
What is amazing about McGinn’s review is that it appears in volume 116 of the Philosophical Review, an august journal where peers review each other in pernickety if colourless prose. McGinn’s tone has scandalised some parts of the philosophical community, including correspondents to the influential blog the Leiter Report[s]. “If McGinn is seeking to deter others from committing the intellectual crimes he attributes to Honderich,” suggests one post, “could he not achieve this end in other, less inflammatory ways?” That said, others on the site think McGinn’s hostility is warranted: “This sort of tone is appropriate, I think, when dealing with unserious mediocrities who are mysteriously accorded stature well beyond what they deserve.”
Don’t you regret writing the review that way, I ask McGinn? “I know Ted and know I don’t think much of him as a philosopher. But if you ask did that affect the way I wrote the review, absolutely not. If you allow personal hostilities to distort what you write, you’re going to get caught out.
“It would have been different if it had been a junior person. I wouldn’t do it to a junior. But Ted deserved it. It had to be done.”
Honderich replies: “For McGinn to say that is for him to be a philosopher on the moon. Nobody on Earth believes that his review is not motivated by animus. To suggest the tone wasn’t dictated by any history of hostility between us is crazy.”
Intellectually, they hold very different views on one of the hottest, and most intractable of philosophical problems, consciousness. Honderich calls himself a radical externalist on consciousness, meaning, he writes in his book, that “my perceptual consciousness now consists in the existence of a world”.
If I (this blogger) may squeeze in a comment: If he would say that my perceptual consciousness consists in the existence of a world for me, I think he would be on the right track.
McGinn thinks Honderich’s brand of radical externalism is bogus. “Ted’s saying that one’s perceptual content just is that thing, a table for example. But if you close your eyes, does the table stop existing? On Ted’s account it seems to, which is just wild.”
If I close my eyes, the stable ceases to exist — for me.
McGinn, by contrast, is the world’s leading proponent of the so-called new mysterian position… whereby some philosophical problems, consciousness among them, are insoluble. In this, he claims other leading thinkers — Noam Chomsky and Thomas Nagel among them — are new mysterians, too. Chomsky, for instance, maintains that just as a mouse will never be able to speak like a human (because of its biology), so certain problems may be beyond human understanding.
What a revelation!
Honderich heaps derision on this new mysterian position, describing it as a “form of intellectual wimpishness”. “And in any case, how dare McGinn rubbish my position. Twelve leading philosophers contributed to a book about my theory [a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies last August] and not one of them was as abusive as he was.”
See my comments on this.
Honderich believes there is more than intellectual difference behind his and McGinn’s row. “At UCL we had a jokey locker-room relationship,” recalls Honderich. “But then I made a misstep. I suggested to him that his new girlfriend was not as plain as the old one, and I could see the blood drain out of his face. That was possibly the start of our frostiness.” Forget, perhaps, abstruse philosophical disputes in understanding the men’s mutual bile. Rather, cherchez la femme.
The relationship has not since thawed. On page 222 of the 2001 autobiography, Philosopher: A Kind of Life, Honderich has a discussion of the department and refers to McGinn. He writes: “The envy of my small colleague, Colin McGinn, also vegetarian, extended to even wanting to be Martin Amis.” What was that about? Well, McGinn is not just a philosopher but a published, if rather unsuccessful, novelist; what’s more, Honderich is 6ft 4in of gangly Canadian socialist philosopher, so most people must seem small. Honderich thinks this explains McGinn’s hostile review.
“That just isn’t right,” counters McGinn. “I’d written hostile reviews about Ted before that autobiography. It wasn’t animus at all.” He points out that he once wrote a review for the London Review of Books of a collection of posthumous papers by AJ Ayer, Honderich’s predecessor as Grote professor at UCL (Honderich is now Ayer’s literary executor.) In that piece, McGinn castigated the book’s introduction, which consisted of Honderich’s funeral eulogy for Ayer, calling it “ill-written, plodding and faintly nauseating in places”. It’s a charge that still rankles. “It is as though it was a piece of shit by some adolescent muckraker,” says Honderich. “But anyway, with that he was the first to insult me in print.”
Neither of these men, it seems fair to point out, has read enough Epictetus. “Remember,” wrote the Stoic thinker, “that foul words or blows in themselves are no outrage, but your judgment that they are so. So when any one makes you angry, know that it is your own thought that has angered you. Wherefore make it your endeavour not to let your impressions carry you away.”
But philosophers, on occasion, are not very philosophical. Ludwig Wittgenstein allegedly threatened his fellow Viennese Karl Popper with a poker during an argument about the existence or otherwise of moral rules at the moral sciences club at Cambridge. Jean-Jacques Rousseau convinced himself he was the victim of an international conspiracy, led by David Hume. He wasn’t, but Hume was delighted when the Frenchman got the hump and shoved off back to the other side of the Channel…
