Eulogy for Nick

Good afternoon everyone. I was humbled to be asked by Chris to give the eulogy for Nick. I want first to thank Nick’s sisters and his friend Liz for helping me to put these words together. And I thank his nephew Barnaby for his efforts in organising this service.

Let me start more or less from the beginning.

Nick was eight when he moved in 1945 with his parents and younger sisters Philippa and Venetia from London to a rural spot close to the sea in Port Quin in Cornwall where his parents had bought properties.

Philippa and Venetia have kindly described to me what life was like in Quay Cottage. Their childhoods had a feral quality, with freedom to roam cliffs and explore caves in a way today’s children rarely do. The sisters describe the boy Nick as inventive, curious, a practical joker, and a protective older brother, who at 15 spent an entire summer building a small sailing boat from a kit he asked his parents to give him. Philippa described him to me as full of “life urge”.

Nick failed the 11-plus exam not once but twice. Perhaps the signs were emerging of the tendency of philosophers towards literalness and precision, sometimes not without cost. On one occasion he failed to impress an examiner who asked him to draw her a man, whereupon Nick obligingly drew her as a man. But the young Nick was a voracious reader. Once he had read all the books in the family home he proceeded to read all the books in the local postal library.

In his personal webpage containing  autobiographical notes, Nick was to give details of the books he chose to read later in his adolescence, starting with popular science books and then a range of literary classics from Dostoevsky to Virginia Woolf. He regarded this as the beginning of his real education.

Nick’s official secondary education took place at Bedales School in Petersfield. He was lucky both to be in a co-ed establishment and, because of temporary living arrangements made by his family, avoid being a boarder, which I suspect he would have hated. He played violin in the school orchestra. His sisters also attended the school and Venetia told me that in the breaks she sometimes found Nick surrounded by a circle of girls. Was he attracting them with his intellectual charisma, or perhaps life urge? I wonder how many budding philosophers have pulled that off in school.

Inspired by his readings of Arthur Eddington, which informed Nick that physics is really mathematics, he went to University College London to study maths. Despite passing his exams, Nick’s grant was stopped in his second year because he had not attended enough lectures. Nick had discovered that, in his own words, maths did not seem to be about anything, and he was miserable. So he did his National Service, being in the last annual cohort of compulsory service, and became a Sergeant in the Educational Corps. Then he went to Manchester University to study philosophy.

For those who don’t know Nick’s webpage, the About Me section is an astonishing account of his early philosophical agonies and ecstasies. Astonishing not just in the sense of how honest and searing his description of struggles with self-identity and his place in the universe are, but how much these struggles went to the core of his being. I have known many philosophers in my life, but not many have had this degree of existential identification with philosophy.

Nick went on to do an MA in philosophy in Manchester and discovered the writings of Karl Popper. Popper’s understanding of what philosophy is or should be, had a lasting impact on his thinking. Nick compared it to the kind of philosophy being done in Oxford in the decades after the war. For him Oxford philosophy was too arid, simply nit-picking about the way we use words. An acerbic critic once described it as “intellectual nose-picking”. Nick wanted an approach that embraced science as well as the betterment of the human lot. He was to spend time as a visiting graduate student at the London School of Economics in order to attend Popper’s seminar and learn more about his program of critical rationalism.

But Manchester had another seismic impact on Nick’s life. It was there that in 1963 he met Chris, then a student of French at the University. Chris, who as you know became a successful language teacher in London schools, was to provide devoted companionship and support for Nick for the rest of his life. Within Nick’s family she remains a beloved sister-in-law and aunt. Many friends and relatives here today know how much she meant to Nick, and how through her sense of fun and lively wit she enhanced Nick’s relationships with others.

After his MA studies Nick taught philosophy of science at Manchester University for a year, and was then awarded a permanent appointment at his would-be alma mater, University College London, in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. In his teaching stint there of 28 years, he went from Lecturer to Reader, retiring in 1994 in order to devote himself entirely to his writing. And it was a handful of years into that stint, that I got to know Nick.

I came to Chelsea College London in 1971 to do graduate studies in history and philosophy of science and quickly discovered that Nick was an active player in the London scene in this subject. I found him approachable, unstuffy and stimulating. It was the beginning of a half-century on-and-off dialogue. I initially took an interest in Nick’s ideas in the philosophy of science, leading to what he called Aim-Oriented Empiricism. I had considerable sympathy for his views, but our interactions over the years were mostly about the philosophy of physics. We debated the meaning of quantum mechanics and how it ties in with Einstein’s theory of relativity. We argued about the meaning of probability in physics and whether it is a mind-independent piece of physical reality.

It would be an understatement to say that Nick had strong views, which his interlocutors found a tad difficult to dislodge. But encased in those views were original and insightful ideas. Nick was not heavily into mathematics, but his intuitions in physics, despite no formal training, were to my mind often subtle and provocative. We did not always see eye-to eye, but he really made me think— and often laugh. He would look at you incredulously, dolefully, when you happened to say something he didn’t agree with, but at the same time he encouraged debate, even if his listening efforts were not always, shall I say, exemplary. He was not modest about his ability to solve some of philosophy’s big problems, but at the same time he didn’t take himself too seriously. Above all, his sincerity and honesty shone through. We enjoyed each other’s company and I admired him.

Nick’s interests went far beyond modern physics and traditional philosophy of science. Here is what he wrote on his webpage:

“Much of my working life has been devoted to trying to get across the point that we urgently need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry, so that the basic aim becomes to promote wisdom rather than just acquire knowledge.”

This aspect of Nick’s work led to the publication of over a dozen impassioned books and many papers. The response of the academic world was, for Nick, largely disappointing and frustrating. However I feel it should be noted that in 2009, a volume was published of essays from international interdisciplinary scholars on his work, along with his replies. Nick may have expected more over the years in the way of acknowledgment, but this kind of thing does not happen to everyone.

I would now like to read some words of appreciation sent to me by two colleagues, words which touch on this wider, moral dimension of Nick’s work. The first is Fred Muller, professor of philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and a long-standing friend of Nick and Chris. I quote:

“Few people I have met in the world of philosophy [have been] as passionate about their views as Nicholas Maxwell. Nick was the opposite of the detached reasoner. To be an academic philosopher was more than a job for him; it was a calling. He kept hammering home his central ideas indefatigably.  Critics misunderstood him, often deliberately, he once told me, because they [had] no response. He did have something
to say; but [it] was not always easy to distill this [something] from his ongoing raging prose. He cared for the world, for humanity, for the future, and considered his central argument a platform to launch a revolution in academia: [it’s] not knowledge we should be after, but wisdom, which Nick took to be the capacity to realise what is of value to us, and to do everything in our power to secure it. Who could disagree with that? The discussion [about] what exactly is of value to us, what are we prepared to do, and what we are wiling to sacrifice, in order to secure it, is a very
old question that humanity will discuss until the end of days … Nick has contributed his part, that much is certain.”

The second colleague is Simon Saunders, like myself an emeritus professor of philosophy of physics at Oxford and who is with us today. I quote:

“I first met Nick shortly after my arrival at Chelsea College, in 1977. I found him inspirational -- kind, funny, serious, passionate and a delight to talk to. There was a bit of joyousness to our interactions; I recall one, where I proposed we sing our philosophical debates, as in opera; and Nick loved the idea, we did a duet. He was up for anything.
I later found one of his papers quite persuasive, arguing with typical ambition and generality that objective probability, and the concept of an ‘open’ future, was incompatible with special relativity. It was excoriated by Howard Stein, the doyen of philosophy of spacetime in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but Nick was in good company: Howard was just as lethal in his comments on Hilary Putnam. In later years Nick spoke of this contribution of his as not really important, but to me it was. He, Stein, Putnam – great philosophers of science, at the top of their game.
Above all, and it became clearer in his later life, he was a man possessed of a moral vision. He had great moral seriousness. What so distinguished it was that it had nothing to do with ordinary political questions; it was a kind of ethics of intellectual endeavour. It was remarkable, and I only wish I could have assisted him better in explaining it. But as always with Nick, he did it his way.
In our last communication, we were trying to arrange a visit to his home, before Christmas. He wanted to learn more about quantum computing. I cherish that in him. He was curious to the last. “
I visited Nick and Chris at the end of October last year. Despite his weakened state, the discussion lasted four happy hours. Nick was so animated in expounding his ideas and exasperations with his usual gesticulations that he seemed to get younger by the minute. When I got up to leave, he shrank back into the sofa, diminished. After I left I thought of the great medieval mathematician and scientist called Alhazen, who hailed from what is now Iraq. It wasn’t just that Alhazen was a pioneer in the articulation of the experimental scientific method and hence a sort of early precursor of Nick’s own aim-oriented empiricism. In my October visit, when Nick and I touched on the physics of transpiration in trees, he suddenly, flatly denied one of the widely accepted technical claims in plant science which I just told him about. Let’s not worry about whether he was right or wrong. As Alhazen wrote:

“The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and ... attack it from every side.”

There was Nick, knowing he had only months to live, still vigorously, passionately, upholding the goal of truth. Chris, ever supportive, said she was proud of him. I left our discussion saddened at the prospect of losing an old friend. But also with the uplifting feeling, not for the first time, that there was a greatness about Nick, who just might have been ahead of his time.

Harvey Brown