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A curious, passing remark about Bernard Williams

Brian Leiter

Shirley Williams (the philosopher's first wife) was a major figure in British politics for many decades; her passing has led to many obituaries, including this one which included the following striking brief comment:

Her marriage to Bernard Williams was happy enough, but suffered from the inevitable difficulties of two ambitious people pursuing different careers. Life was never easygoing with her first husband, a restless, witty, attractive, sometimes cruel intellectual.

"Sometimes cruel intellectual"?  Does anyone have an idea what this is supposed to mean?

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28 responses to “A curious, passing remark about Bernard Williams”

  1. David Gordon

    The Wikipedia article about her may be the source of the comment: "[T]here was something of a strain that comes from two things. One is that we were both too caught up in what we were respectively doing — we didn't spend all that much time together; the other, to be completely honest, is that I'm fairly unjudgmental and I found Bernard's capacity for pretty sharp putting-down of people he thought were stupid unacceptable. Patricia has been cleverer than me in that respect. She just rides it. He can be very painful sometimes. He can eviscerate somebody. Those who are left behind are, as it were, dead personalities. Judge not that ye be not judged. I was influenced by Christian thinking, and he would say "That's frightfully pompous and it's not really the point." So we had a certain jarring over that and over Catholicism.[34] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Williams

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  2. Grant Lamond

    The quote from wikipedia comes originally from this profile in the Guardian (UK):

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/nov/30/academicexperts.highereducation

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  3. Alastair Norcross

    I have heard similar stories about him from people who knew him well. That kind of behavior (witty, and often vicious, put-downs) was very common in British academia at the time. When I was an undergraduate in Oxford in the late 70s and early 80s savagely witty comments on others' work, including the work of students, was the norm, or rather the ideal. Just plain savage was the norm. Williams probably stood out from many of his contemporaries by the quality of the wit that he added to the savagery. When I started graduate school in the US, working as a TA, I pretty quickly learned that US undergraduates didn't react well to the kind of comments that had been written all over my essays throughout school and university. I soon replaced "Rubbish", or "Nonsense" with "I'm not sure what you're trying to say here".

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  4. Dave

    So Professor Henry Higgins is modelled after Williams or is it the other way around?

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  5. Warren Goldfarb

    He did have a sharp tongue. Here's a mostly benign example, a recollection by Martha Nussbaum (from her 2003 Boston Review article on Williams):

    "I also recall, and perhaps with more verbal exactitude, the time I ran past his King’s College provostial window in orange running shorts with a pink top, only to be told later that the primary qualities were acceptable, but the secondary qualities rather off."

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  6. Paul Russell

    Bernard Williams supervised my PhD thesis work in Cambridge for a period of more than five years during the early and mid 1980s. At this time Williams was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge. Although he had no formal teaching or supervision responsibilities – and had many other heavy commitments and obligations – he took on my supervision and that of several others (pro bono). In this capacity I saw him regularly and got to know him reasonably well (after supervision sessions we occasionally met for lunch etc.). Later on, I kept in touch with him and saw him on a few occasions (e.g. he stayed with us when visiting Vancouver etc.). As it happens, I was also in touch with him during some difficult (personal) moments in my own life, when I had to speak to him about these matters. While there will be others who knew him better, I feel I can speak about his character and conduct – public and private – with some confidence.

    Bernard had a sharp and incisive wit – which he readily directed at other people’s foibles and pretensions (usually in a very funny manner). For the most part the targets of his wit were thoroughly deserving and capable of taking what they often dished out themselves. His wit could also be directed at his own friends and those liked and respected – he didn’t really spare anyone. Occasionally his remarks could, I think, go too far and come across as too harsh or severe. To call Williams “cruel” – a comment which has, to my knowledge, no foundation in Shirley Williams’ comments in her autobiography – is a wholly irresponsible misrepresentation of the truth.

    The truth about Williams was, in my experience, much to the contrary. Bernard displayed considerable kindness and consideration to me on any number of occasions – and I know that he treated others in a similarly considerate (and at times) caring manner. He did not, of course, suffer fools gladly and he was not interested in coming across as “a nice guy”. He had, moreover, the force of character and intellect to deliver a public blow so that it would be felt and have effect. Suffice it to say beyond this, that academic life is full of people who wear a thin facade of being “pleasant” but are no such thing. That wasn’t Williams’ style. He placed value on sincerity and honesty of a certain kind – and he acted accordingly.

    The fundamental truth about Williams and the suggestion that he was in some way unkind (or “cruel”) – a charge that surfaces off and on, here and there – is that Williams’ unusually impressive (perhaps glamorous) persona aroused/arouses deep resentment among any number of people. Academic philosophers of a certain kind are particularly prone to this: likely because they aspire to be what Williams was but they fall well short of that standard.

    One final remark or observation: while any number of philosophers may warble on and preach about doing good deeds and creating a “just”, “equitable” society etc. etc., Williams was actually directly involved in public life in any number of capacities – doing and achieving good things for vulnerable people, rather than simply talking about this or debating it. Those who suggest that Williams was “cruel” have their ethical world upside down.

    I leave to others, who perhaps knew him better, to add to this.

    Reply
  7. Jennifer Hornsby

    The "cruel" here (of "sometimes cruel intellectual") needs to be understood as it would be in 'Shirley was too kind ever to be cruel".

    Reply
  8. Ram Neta

    Williams's review of Robert Nozick's book "Philosophical Explanations" (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/02/18/cosmic-philosopher/) might offer a glimpse into the characteristic in question. I seem to recall Williams's comparing Nozick's writing to "breakfast food".

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  9. cheyney ryan

    I think philosophy in those days encouraged people to be put-down artists. I dont know if it still does.

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  10. Matthew Kramer

    I agree with what Paul Russell says in the first three paragraphs of his comment and in his fifth paragraph. In my experience, the adjective "cruel" was not applicable to Williams. However, I'd be less harsh about other philosophers than Paul Russell is in the fourth paragraph of his comment. Although my estimation of Williams is generally very favorable, there was a trait of his which I did find off-putting. It was a trait which he had in common with Ronald Dworkin: namely, a tendency to convey the impression (not explicitly, of course) that he was far too important to be wherever he happened to be at a given time.

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  11. Paul Russell

    To Matthew Kramer: What you say, in reply to my remarks, strikes me as both fair and accurate. It is true, of course, that Williams was not a perfect human being. He had some flaws as well as some (notable) virtues. Arguably he could come across, at times, as rather arrogant – I doubt that he would even deny that himself. There could, I would agree, be circumstances when some of the people/audiences that he dealt with felt slighted and were not, perhaps, treated with all the interest or respect that that they deserved. Being "sensitive" about such matters was not something that Williams attached a great deal of importance to, which might well have been one of his failings. Nevertheless, as we are agreed, although he could on occasion be arrogant and dismissive (like many other philosophers and academics), this falls well short of the wholly unfair and misleading suggestion that he was in any way "cruel". He was nothing of the kind and was, in fact, a thoroughly decent and considerate person in any number of ways.

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  12. David Owen

    When I got my first junior lectureship at Southampton in 1995, I was invited to a symposium on Oxford with lots of big name analytic philosophers as what felt like a kind of token 'continental' sacrifice (as they wanted some to talk about Foucault and genealogy). My main recollection is that Peter Railton and Bernard Williams were to two people who went out of their way to talk to me about my paper and to make me feel not completely out of place. I did not meet Williams many other times, and in those more public events, it felt a bit like he was performing to his brilliant reputation and reputation for brilliance, but I remember him more for the time when we were the last two people waiting for taxis from the Oxford college and he was encouraging and supportive of this utter nobody that no one there had ever heard of.

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  13. David

    Ram,

    after quoting a passage from Nozick's book, Williams says

    "There is a lot more of this. There is even more about people glowing. Such writing sounds like Close Encounters of Some Yet Higher Kind, or a commercial for breakfast food."

    Cruel?

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  14. Phil Gasper

    Calling someone "sometimes cruel" is not the same as calling them simply "cruel," a much harsher judgement. Williams was 48 when I first me him and had a reputation for sharp put downs, which those of us who observed him in action knew was well earned. I can imagine that in his 20s and 30s, when he was married to Shirley, his barbs would have been ever sharper. So "sometimes cruel" seems plausible to me. The fact that he also displayed many admirable qualities, isn't evidence that this description is unwarranted. People are complicated and they can change.

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  15. Martin Mellish

    I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Williams' cruelty to his wife, in front of whom he flaunted many minor affairs and one major one. Shirley was basically not allowed to say one public word about them, for fear of ruining not merely his reputation, but her own (this was many years ago though perhaps it might still apply today.)

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  16. John Haldane

    The source of the report is Shirley Williams’s autobiography Climbing the Bookshelves (London: Virago, 2009) pp. 116-7.
    Here it is in context:

    “The young Bernard was in perpetual motion, like a dragonfly hovering above a sea of ideas. Everyone he encountered, every event that occurred were material for his insight and his wit. His conversation was a work of art, though never consciously so, revealing the depth of his reading and the richness of his knowledge. He was a joy to be with, and I cannot recall any occasion when we had nothing to say to one another.

    He could be cruel too, sometimes filleting a personality with the sharp daggers of well-chosen words. I invariably rose to the defence of his victims, whether it was an inept colleague or a bumbling driver holding up his car. …

    Bernard was the most consistently fascinating person I have ever met, but he was not easy going. Nor was he faithful. Hugely attractive to women he basked in their admiration. He used to tell me that clever women were much more bewitching than stupid ones; beauty and intelligence went together. That was something I liked in him, for the women he knew as friends and lovers were never just sex objects. He appreciated them fully as people, and it was as individuals that he tried to understand them.”

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  17. Charles Pigden

    I was an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge in the 1970s and regularly attended Bernard Williams’ ‘at homes’ which were both entertaining and instructive. (As professor he was forbidden to supervise undergraduates, so in conducting the ‘at homes’ for the benefit of philosophy undergraduates he was going above and beyond the call of duty) I thought then, as I think now, that he was vastly overrated as a philosopher, not least by himself. I did not have a very high opinion of his moral character either. At that time the big issue at King’s was whether or not we should divest from Barclays bank. The college had already divested from a range of firms which did business in South Africa but our bank was Barclays. Barclays was heavily involved with South Africa but Barclay’s offered the College a sweet deal. Should we continue to bank with Barclays or should we not? The arguments for disinvestment though sometimes disguised with a veneer of bogus utilitarian reasoning were basically integrity arguments. The college should not have anything to do with this vile thing (namely the apartheid regime). The arguments *against* disinvestment were basically utilitarian. The good we could do by disinvestment from Barclay’s was vastly outweighed by the harm we could do to the college’s finances. Bernard Williams, the champion of integrity, was busy pushing the utilitarian line whilst the student radicals, led, if I remember rightly, by Simon Goldhill, were standing up for integrity. Since I was at that time a stout utilitarian, I did not denounce Williams for his inconsistency, but kept the contradiction to myself. But this did not augment my respect for his moral character.

    HOWEVER as an *educator* he was quite the reverse of cruel. He could be condescending to absent opponents. I remember his flip put-down to central state materialism ‘The reason it is so popular in Australia is that that is the only country in which it is true: brain as brawn’ (the last phrase drawled out in a toff accent). But though he could be cuttingly witty at the expense of famous philosophers, he was remarkably forebearing with the undergraduates who attended his at homes. I remember his patience with a friend of mine of (a mature student) who was obstreperously defending a crude version of emotivism as opposed to fancy prescriptivism which seems to be Williams preferred meta-ethic. Williams had all the arguments but he did not bully, brow-beat or condescend. He was patience personified (using the example fo a cake-making recipe) though my friend was clearly in the wrong.
    So whatever his personal style was in the sixties, by the late seventies, he certainly was not cruel in discussion.

    One final point: Shirley Williams was the unworthy daughter of a truly great mother , namely Vera Brittain , author of ‘A Testament of Youth’, the definitive memoir of WWI. Brittain also had the guts and gumption to oppose the terror-bombing campaign conducted by the US and the UK against Germany, as detailed in Anthony Grayling’s magnificent *Among the Dead Cities*.

    Reply
  18. Charles Pigden

    Probably not as good as David Stove's 'Robert Nozick's War Wounds' which is absolutely hilarious though exceedingly cruel.

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  19. Richard Moran

    I love that wicked review of Nozick's "Philosophical Explanations", but it should be recalled how much praise it contains for Nozick's treatment of skepticism (warranted or not). And toward the end of his life I heard Williams make a point of saying to some Harvard philosophers that, somewhat to his surprise, he thought of Nozick as one of the most sharply intelligent philosophers he had known (think who that must include). I point this out more as a statement about Williams than about Nozick.

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  20. Richard Moran

    Thank you Paul Russell, I quite agree. He was never a teacher of mine but he was kindness and generosity itself when I was an Assistant Professor and he was visiting Princeton.

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  21. John Haldane

    "Shirley Williams was the unworthy daughter of a truly great mother , namely Vera Brittain"

    I am not sure whether you mean to suggest that by her character, conduct etc, Williams was 'undeserving of having such a great mother', or that (her mother apart) she was someone who 'did not deserve respect', or something else again.

    Since the matter of her mother's stance re the war is mentioned it may be relevant to quote SW's own view: "It was this latter [Just War] doctrine that persuaded me that the war against Nazism was morally right, though not some of its instruments, such as the saturation bombing of civilians. So I never became a pacifist like my mother. I was, rather, an internationalist and someone who remained deeply sceptical about the efficacy or morality of most wars".

    Since many readers of this blog may not know much about Shirley Williams (who died 2 days ago age 90) here are links to some of the main obituaries (all substantial):
    BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-10258493
    Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/12/lady-williams-of-crosby-obituary
    Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/obituaries/shirley-williams-dead-age-cause-b1830194.html
    Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2021/04/12/shirley-williams-labour-education-secretary-left-party-help/
    Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/baroness-shirley-williams-of-crosby-obituary-90686qnhj

    Reply
  22. Grad student

    I find this discussion about Williams’ alleged cruelty of character to be extraordinarily insensitive. It is well-known that Williams suffered deeply from depression. Nussbaum writes about this here: https://bostonreview.net/archives/BR28.5/nussbaum.html

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  23. Brian Leiter

    I did not know Williams suffered from depression; I suspect I'm not alone. I don't know how it did or did not affect his occasionally sharp tongue.

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  24. Warren Goldfarb

    Nussbaum wrote: "I believe that much of his interest in Nietzschean pessimism and irrationalism was in the service of warding off a powerful depression, even perhaps despair." This is a conjecture, a speculation, a shot-in-the-dark. It is a mistake to treat "Williams suffered from depression" as some kind of established fact, or even something of which we have — unless others can provide some — any evidence except Nussbaum's speculation.
    And some common signs of depression, like anhedonia and inability to finish work-projects, were as far as I know completely absent.

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  25. John Haldane

    Nussbaum's appreciation of Williams is a significant piece of writing, testifying to her own considerable gifts of intellectual comprehension, emotional sensitivity, and wit, also registering the attraction of an undoubtedly charismatic figure. It is not, however, (nor does it purport to be) a clinical diagnosis.

    Of course, Williams took a dim view of the general run of human affairs but that was not a symptom of depression so much as an unvarnished verdict of experience and common sense. He would be the last person to seek to excuse or shield his thought or conduct behind the label of 'depression'. He was slow to excuse others and would be at least as slow to excuse himself. Williams could be fed up and touched by the melancholia of mortality, but would not confuse want of ataraxia (freedom from emotional unsettlement) with depression.

    Sharpness of tongue on the part of clever people, in an institutional context in which cleverness (as measured by quick criticisms) is prized, requires no special psychological explanation. Not everyone has the aptitude or liking for this but Williams had both. There is also the tradition in British academic circles of cutting wit. Here are three examples, none from Williams but all multiply applicable 's/he has nothing much to say but says it often and at length'; 's/he gets hold of the wrong end of the stick – slowly'; and 'not so much an argument as a rhapsodic association of ideas' – I could go on but not so far or as long as could Williams.

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  26. Jennifer Hornsby

    Indeed. This thread having been occasioned by Shirley Williams' death, it's not the place seemingly to denounce her without any explanation.
    There is an easy explanation why Shirley didn't join in her mother's opposition to the terror bombing: in 1940 she was 10 years old, and shipped off to the U.S.A.

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  27. Alex Parrish

    I thought BW’s bit about Singer and aryan values was hilarious and spot on.

    “Someone who speaks vigorously against speciesism and the human prejudice is of course Professor Peter Singer. (Incidentally, he holds his chair at the Center for Human Values at Princeton, which I have already mentioned, and I have wondered what he makes of that name. In the purely possessive, limp, sense of the expression it is presumably all right, but in the richer sense which must surely be its intention, I should have thought it would have sounded to him rather like a Center for Aryan Values.) Whatever exactly may be the structure of the human prejudice, if it is a prejudice, Singer’s work has brought out clearly some conse- quences of rejecting it as a prejudice, consequences which he has been prepared to advocate in a very robust style.“ from The Human Prejudice

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  28. Charles Pigden

    I consider Shirley Williams an unworthy daughter of a great mother not because she failed to denounce terror-bombing when she was 10, but because of the part she played in perpetuating the 40 years of Neo-liberal rule that have reduced Britain to the nasty mean-spirited and socially stratified society that it is now become. Here is Roy Hattersley on the formation of the SDP: ‘A few of the MPs who joined the new party did so out of a combination of conviction and despair. But most left labour because they believe that they would do better in the new party and then dressed up self interest to look like principle. By protecting themselves they exposed Britain to a full decade [I would say more than a decade] of Thatcherism. On Saturday mornings, when [his] constituents [brought him] their problems, it [was] difficult [for Hattersley] to forget that the oppressive immigration regulations, the shortage of rented property, the overcrowded schools and the hospital waiting lists [were], at least in part, the responsibility of that nice Mrs Williams and that clever Dr Owen. It [was] the poor who [paid ] to keep their consciences is clear.’ Hattersley published those words in 1995 and Williams’ record has not improved since then. At least in the 1990s you could say that the SDP leaders did not *want* to support the Thatcherite revolution that their actions facilitated. But in old age Williams blotted her copybook big time, by *actively supporting* the coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, leading to five years of miserable austerity (not to mention the well-deserved electoral eclipse of the LibDems) There is a lot of blame to go around for the ongoing disaster that has been British history for the last forty years. But at least some part of it goes to her.

    From a literary point of view I would add that though she was an engaging writer Williams was a lot less talented than her Mother. ‘Climbing the Bookshelves’ is not a match for the brilliant ‘Testament of Youth’.

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