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The Philosopher as Actor

by Peter Rickman

Pursuing the elusive image of philosophy I turn to the analogy with acting. Naturally I must be suspect of explaining what is familiar to me by what is not. I have taught philosophy for many years but could not act for toffee. No amount of make-up would make me a plausible butler this week and a burglar the next. Nor have I acquired the art of dissembling. In vain do I try to look pleased to see someone if I am not. Yet I have some credentials. Like most philosophers from Plato onwards – with striking exceptions of course – I am a teacher and at least some university teaching means giving a performance. I am facing maybe a hundred first year students whom I am to introduce to philosophy. They have already been lectured at for hours in stuffy rooms and are hungry or tired. Most of them have not chosen philosophy; it is just a part of a package they have to take. For fifty minutes I have to hold their attention, interest and amuse them, if possible, make them enthusiastic. Much more is involved than knowing your subject: skills are called for not unlike those of an actor. On the purely technical level you need to vary your voice to avoid monotony, not cover your mouth or turn your back while speaking, not be distracting by mannerisms such as rattling the change in your pocket and relate the gestures you make to what you are saying. At the same time you have to project your own dedication and enthusiasm and convey that your subject is fun as well as important. If you seem bored, why should the students not be just that?

Much of this, of course, applies to lecturing any subject but it is particularly important with philosophy, where vocational reasons for attention are less obvious. Medical students know that if they miss something they may one day kill a patient. Students of engineering or business management believe that doing well will improve their vocational prospects. But what harm can there be in sleeping through Plato’s Republic?

I am not saying that philosophy can be likened to acting because lecturing on it involves a kind of acting. I am only claiming the right to speak about acting, because lecturing on philosophy requires a carefully contrived performance, not to create an illusion but to express and project one’s own involvement.

So what are the parallels worth emphasising? I start with interpretation. It is hardly controversial that the actor interprets – gives life and body to a text. The words are given but he uses the resources of his personality to make something of them. The philosopher too is an interpreter. The given text is life, is human experience and it needs making sense of. This is one of philosophy’s important jobs. And this making sense, remains, as is the case with acting, an intensely personal matter. Of course you can’t make life what you will according to your whims, as you can’t act Hamlet in any odd way. But there are no fixed criteria of getting it right, there is leeway for individual points of view. These two points involved in interpretation need underlining. Neither in acting, nor in philosophy can we abandon the idea of truth, of criteria for a better and worse interpretation. Of an acting performance we may say that it is convincing, coherent, consistent, st imulating, thought-provoking or, of course, the opposite. We say the same kinds of things about philosophies. Yet interpretation always represents a point of view, it is someone’s interpretation and reflects the interpreter’s outlook, temperament and situation. It is this curious balance to be struck which is interestingly like the actor’s job.

A good actor, I am sure, will study and respect his text. He will try to be faithful to the style and manners of the age, social setting etc in which the action is to take place. He will reflect on the personality and problems of the character he is representing, yet all is to be transmuted by a personal quality he brings to all his performances.

The parallel to philosophy is close. It is based on a sober survey of experience and sustained chains of reasoning. Expressions of ideas or feelings unsustained by argument are not philosophy. Yet we are confronted by irreconcilable differences between different philosophers and schools of philosophy. The reason, I believe, is precisely that philosophies also reflect the outlook and temperament of their authors. Their optimism or pessimism, scepticism or intellectual confidence, their acceptance of diversity or longing for unity colour philosophic enterprises and create divergencies which do not yield to rational debate. This is as it should be, it is part of what philosophy is meant to be. My philosophy reflects how I after careful attention, see the world. You may catch me out on logical inconsistencies, or point out facts I failed to take into consideration and thus force me to modify my view but you have no basis for rightly challenging my point of view.

To show that both acting and philosophy involve interpretation is not enough for my case, for it could equally establish the philosopher as art or music critic, as codebreaker, business analyst, novelist or journalist. I turn to a feature of acting which at first glance may seem to create a difficultly. The actor works on a text which is, normally, not his own. His performance is guided by someone else’s ideas. He is, in a sense, a mouthpiece. Of course the actor may creatively develop the character on the page, may embroider the action with business of his own, but the ground plan is not of his making and limits his freedom.

This does not look like a good fit with philosophy. Surely the philosopher’s putting pen to paper (or today, operating his wordprocessor) in his study is controlled by nothing except the laws of libel. He is a free creator, often even a trailblazer of new ideas and new ways of thinking.

Let me admit that this element of trailblazing is a unique feature of philosophy, and no doubt one of its glories, which has no obvious parallel in acting or other professions I want to compare philosophy with. Analogies have their limits and one should not ignore them for the sake of neatness. However, emphasis on the original, pioneering aspect of philosophy disguises a factor well worth remembering and the analogy to acting may help us there. Philosophy has, in quite a definite sense, no subject matter of its own. It discovers nothing in the sense in which biologists, archaeologists or astronomers make discoveries. There are no facts for lecturers to convey and students to put in their notebooks. Instead it highlights what is familiar and taken for granted. What it pioneers is ways of thinking and talking about the familiar. This is where the analogy with acting becomes relevant. We have read, let us say, King Lear in school and, as likely as not, we were bored with that out-of-date stuff. And then we see it performed with a great actor representing the old man as I saw Lawrence Oliver in that role and it comes to startling life, becomes meaningful and infinitely moving. The role of a good deal of philosophy is just like that. The ‘text’ is provided by our daily experience and our everyday interpretations of it, even the scientific explanations and systematisation of our experience. It is given highlights of meaning by philosophic interpretations.

There is one more, final, aspect which reinforces the power of our analogy. Acting is clearly not a theoretical but a practical activity. Whatever thinking and theorising may go into acting, it is literally manifest, observable, and physical activity. It means waving your arms, walking about, kissing, fighting and the like. My point is that philosophy too is not a purely theoretical activity like pure mathematics. We cannot distinguish pure philosophy from applied philosophy in the sense in which we can distinguish pure and applied mathematics.

One hardly needs to stress the danger of pushing the analogy too far. Philosophising does not involve kissing or fighting in the sense in which it is part of acting. Nor do we need to deny that distinctions between pure and applied philosophy can and have been made. The former may consist of such classics as the works of Spinoza or Kant, the latter of such recent developments as medical ethics, the philosophy of accountancy and the like. But then the works of Spinoza or Kant – to stick to my examples – are not that pure. Far from simply describing, explaining and clarifying they offer practical guidance. Spinoza’s Ethics, explicitly, points the way to ‘blessedness’ and offers ‘tips’ about how to gain control over one’s passions. Kant’s writings not only offer criteria for principled actions but also tells us how to avoid asking silly questions or giving ill-supported answers.

Apart from some fringe subjects such as logic, philosophy is about living and it is hard to avoid a sense of personal commitment. In the case of science there is not usually a strong connection between a physicist’s work and his personal life. If he is a petty thief it does not throw doubt on his theories though it may on their authorship. But would we not feel distinctly uneasy if we learned that Hume was a credulous victim of door to door salesmen, Kant a busy adulterer, or Spinoza a hypochondriac? Philosophy needs to be acted out in personal commitment. The analogy with acting underlines this difference between philosophy and other academic disciplines.

Here I rest my case, or should I say ‘take my curtain call?’

Peter Rickman is a Visiting Professor at the City University in London.