Abstract
In the past university humanities students ‘read for a degree’. Undergraduates were given a syllabus and a reading list and sent away to write essays on the basis of books they were told to read in the library. My first assignment as a philosophy student was ‘Descartes’s proofs of the existence of God’. The title was given me by my tutor as he rose from his chair to bid me good afternoon. I spent the following week reading Descartes and writing what I recall was a mediocre essay. At our next meeting I read that essay to my tutor, who made a few comments (essays were not marked), and set me the next assignment before dismissing me as before. That went on for two years. I literally ‘read for my degree’, helped by tutors whose comments on my essays were usually helpful.
Beckett did not read philosophy for his first degree as I did, but embarked on a study of the subject after graduation when he was working on Murphy in the 1930s. He had no tutor: he taught himself the history of philosophy. In a word he ‘read for a degree’, even though there was no examination at the end of his course. His notes, now published, show how extensive his reading was and how closely he studied the history of philosophy from the Presocratics to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
This book thus reveals an unsuspected side of Samuel Beckett: that of the autodidact. But we knew already that he was self-taught in at least two disciplines: music and the history of art. He was an accomplished pianist, in particular as a performer of Schubert: if not quite a virtuoso, he was more than a mere gifted amateur. In art, his knowledge of the Western canon was encyclopaedic, and he was a particular expert on the mid-twentieth century avant-garde, especially the paintings of Jack B. Yeats and Bram van Velde and the graphic works of Avigdor Arikha.
At over one hundred thousand words, Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’ constitute his most extensive hitherto unpublished text. They are now edited with a long introduction outlining the ‘origin of the Notes and his approach to them, the historical context for his view of philosophy, and the significance of the Notes within his mature writings’ (front flap). They provided him with a store of knowledge, images and phrases, upon which he drew in his work from Murphy onwards. Drawing on pioneering work by Hugh Kenner I explored the topic in Samuel Beckett’s Art (1967) and others added further to our understanding of Beckett’s debt to philosophers.
In the ‘Notes’, the history of philosophy from antiquity to the end of the medieval period occupies a little over half the text. The rest covers the Renaissance to Nietzsche. Apart from the occasional impatient aside about a particular figure, the tone is neutral throughout, as befits a document intended to be a work of reference.
The text of the ‘Notes’ is impeccably edited, with a full bibliography and index. It will keep Beckett specialists busy for years to come. A word of caution, however: the fact that, just like a conscientious student, Beckett summarizes a philosopher’s contribution to the history of philosophy, is not evidence that he actually read that philosopher’s work. An example is John Stuart Mill, whose contribution is summarized on page 470; in a letter dated 8 December 1959 he wrote ‘never read a line of Mill’ (The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 3). The philosophers he did read, and was influenced by, included Descartes, Malebranche and above all Geulincx (1624–69), whose Ethics he read in the original Latin in the library of Trinity College, Dublin.
It must also be borne in mind that Beckett never claimed to be a philosopher himself. He was exaggerating when he said to an importunate French interviewer ‘I never read the philosophers; I don’t understand what they write’ (Samuel Beckett’s Art, p. 121), and he was right to insist that there was no handy key, existentialist or logical positivist, to his work. But it is equally true that he ranged freely among the writings of many philosophers. There he found confirmation of and justification for the metaphysical obsessions that haunt his work: epistemological incertitude and the gulf between body and mind. His achievement is the transformation of such speculative problems into art.