Obituary for Sir Bernard Williams.

[Kiricrate]

Sir Bernard Williams, the lightning-witted Oxford professor
who is credited with reviving the field of moral philosophy
and was considered by some to be the greatest British
philosopher of his era, died on Tuesday in Oxford. He was
73 and lived at All Souls College, Oxford.

No cause of death was announced but he said in 1999 that he
had cancer.

Steering clear of monolithic system building, Sir Bernard
viewed moral codes and writings as inseparable from history
and culture, and questioned what he called the "peculiar
institution" of morality, pronouncing it a particular
development of the ethical system worked out by modern
Western philosophers. Indeed, in "Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy" (1985), considered his best book, he argued
that ethical concepts are so embedded in history that they
are often incapable of being shared by subsequent cultures,
although they can be understood to some extent through
study, and he held that the simple goals of truth were
worth pursuing.

With this in mind, he argued in a later book, "Shame and
Necessity" (1993), a study of ancient Greece, that Hellenic
ethics allowed for a wider scope of praise and blame than
did Christian-based morality, concluding that the sense of
shame can be more in tune with our intuitions than moral
guilt, and permits more latitude for living a whole life
well.

In his philosophical work, he rejected the nearly
mathematical positivism predominant when he was a student
and the utilitarian views that morality lay in seeking the
greatest good for the greatest number.

Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was born in Westcliff, Essex,
on Sept. 21, 1929, the son of Owen Pasley Denny Williams,
an architect and surveyor, and Hilda Amy (Day) Williams, a
secretary. He attended Chigwell School and went on to read
classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was already
considered a prodigy. He later was given many honorary
degrees but did not earn a doctorate. According to a
profile in The Guardian of London by Stuart Jeffries, Sir
Bernard's mentor at Oxford, Gilbert Ryle, later said of
him, "He understands what you're going to say better than
you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible
objections to it, all the possible answers to all the
possible objections, before you've got to the end of your
sentence."

According to a Guardian obituary by Jane O'Grady, Sir
Bernard neglected the historical aspect of the classics to
the degree that he claimed to have used part of his history
finals' time to learn history; he arrived 29 minutes late
for the exam wearing a white magnolia in his buttonhole.

He graduated with a congratulatory first-class degree, a
highly unusual honor in which the examining professors ask
no questions about the candidate's written work but simply
stand and applaud.

Sir Bernard then did his national service in the Royal Air
Force and excelled as a fighter pilot. He later said that
the year he spent flying Spitfires in Canada was the
happiest of his life. While on leave in New York City, he
went out with Shirley Brittain, later a prominent British
politician, who was then studying at Columbia University.
He had known her when they were students in England, and
they married in 1955. The marriage ended in 1974, The Daily
Telegraph reported. They had a daughter, Rebecca, who
survives him along with his second wife, Patricia Law
Skinner, whom he married in 1974 when she was Cambridge
University Press's philosophy editor, and their sons, Jacob
and Jonathan.

After returning to England at age 22 he was made a fellow
at All Souls but left Oxford. first for University College,
London, and later Bedford College (now defunct), reportedly
to serve the political ambitions of his wife, who later
became Baroness Williams of Crosby, a leader of the Liberal
Democrats in the House of Lords. The couple and their
newborn daughter lived in a large house in Kensington with
the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein, his wife, their four
children and various boarders, an arrangement that remained
amicable for 17 years.

Sir Bernard's academic career flourished. He went on to
become Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge
from 1967 to 1979, and then provost of King's College,
Cambridge, from 1979 to 1987, where he was earlier
responsible for its being the first Cambridge college to
admit women. He was knighted in 1999, The Daily Telegraph
reported.

At the same time he became a virtuoso of public
commissions, producing in November 1979 a masterly report
on obscenity and film censorship, which concluded that
pornography could be made available at designated sites, as
long as it was not thrust upon children and unsuspecting
members of the public. These recommendations were ignored
after Margaret Thatcher's ascent to power, although most of
them were later adopted piecemeal.

In the late 1980's he left England in disgust over the
Thatcher government to teach at the University of
California, Berkeley, with which he remained connected
almost to the end of his life, although he eventually
returned to Oxford, announcing that he did not really feel
at home in America.

All the while he continued to turn out significant books
written with great clarity, although their underlying ideas
are considered sometimes forbiddingly compressed and
obscure. But in his last, "Truth and Truthfulness" (2002),
he sought to speak plainly, and took on the post-modern,
politically correct notion that truth is merely relative,
particularly as it is expressed in the work of by his
former colleague Richard Rorty, who argues that truth is
dispensable and that its pursuit is a form of substitute
religion and as such a delusion.

In contrast, Sir Bernard tried to show in his book that in
any human society truth will be valued, and the twin
virtues of truth, sincerity and accuracy, held dear. As he
said in a San Francisco Chronicle interview last year when
asked about the philosophical value of psychoanalysis,
there was "a level of self-deception more subconscious than
unconscious that can be dealt with by the virtues of
accuracy and sincerity."

"That's what we have those virtues for," he concluded.

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

[pcosta]

Morte di un platonico censore Sir Williams, filosofo morale


C'e qualcosa nello spirito inglese che ha permesso ad uno dei suoi più grandi scrittori, Evelyn Waugh, di ordinare in questa maniera il mondo delle sue preferenze e delle sue avversioni: «Distrazioni: mangiare, bere, disegnare, viaggiare, calunniare Aldous Huxley. Avversioni: l'amore, la buona conversazione, il teatro, la letteratura, il principato del Galles». E lo stesso si potrebbe dire di Sir Bernard Williams, uno dei più grandi filosofi morali inglesi, morto a settantatre anni proprio questo 10 giugno. Come Kipling, Sir Williams amava viaggiare in auto, adorava le magnolie e aveva una passione smisurata per l'opera lirica (difendeva il suo diritto, nonostante tutto, ad amare Wagner). Quando Sir Williams era ancora uno studente si era infatti presentato in ritardo di 29 minuti ad un esame indossando sopra il suo completo una magnifica magnolia bianca per poi, dopo la laurea, diventare uno spericolato pilota della Raf e, ancora più avanti, essere considerato un intellettuale troppo liberale da Margaret Thatcher quando fu nominato, dal 1977 al 1979, presidente del Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorhip. Ma Sir Williams non è stato soltanto un grande esponente dello spirito inglese, ma è stato anche uno dei grandi filosofi di questo secolo.
Laureato ad Oxford, Williams ha insegnato a Cambridge per poi, nel 1979 diventarne addirittura il direttore. In seguito si è trasferito negli Stati Uniti, a Berkeley, continuando però a lavorare anche in Inghilterra. I libri di Williams sono letti e tradotti in tutto il mondo, anche se purtroppo, in Italia, è possibile recuperare soltanto Utilitarismo e oltre (con un intervento di Amartya Sen, ed. il Saggiatore), La moralità, un'introduzione all'etica (ed. Einaudi), Utilitarismo, un confronto (ed. Bibliopolis) e La sorte morale (ed. il Saggiatore).
Sir Williams è soprattutto noto per la sua critica all'utilitarismo e all'idea che la filosofia morale debba in qualche modo riconoscersi in un modello teorico coerente. Mal sopportava l'idea, tipicamente anglosassone e ormai di moda anche in tutta Europa, che la filosofia si debba ridurre a una questione analitica e di analisi logica del linguaggio. Certo i suoi libri non mancavano di un umorismo in grado di colpire quelle mode accademiche che, per esempio, chiudevano la filosofia morale in una discussione astratta che separa i fatti dai valori. Uno dei suoi modelli era Platone e poi, segretamente, Nietzsche (come Leo Strauss, Williams diceva che Nietzsche era uno di quegli autori da usare sempre ma da citare mai).
Nello stesso tempo però Sir Williams criticava anche coloro che, come Foucault e Derrida, distruggevano il soggetto per farne un veicolo delle pressioni della storia e del potere politico. Il suo ideale, apparentemente più modesto, era quello degli antichi: la descrizione delle situazioni morali e il tentativo, mai completo, di rispondere alla domanda socratica di «come si debba vivere». La morale non riguarda infatti soltanto la felicità e, come vorrebbero gli utilitaristi, le conseguenze delle sue decisioni, ma coinvolge quegli impulsi profondi, e difficilmente teorizzabili (e se teorizzati inevitabilmente persi), come il coraggio, l'autenticità, la fiducia e il rischio di seguire, con tutti i limiti del caso, le proprie inclinazioni morali anche quando non si sa bene dove potranno condurre. Insomma, la filosofia, per Williams, non deve calcolare e misurare, e neppure cercare un sostegno in una metafisica dei costumi, ma deve poter continuare a interrogarsi là dove ha sempre fallito, e cioè nel campo concreto della vita morale. Ed è proprio in questo luogo che il pensiero di Sir Bernard Williams ha raggiunto e continuato quello di Platone e di tutta la grande tradizione socratica.

(da Il Riformista)