A J Ayer

I recently finished reading Ben Rogers' excellent biography of AJ Ayer and it provoked a number of thoughts.

First - hedonism. Not a word most people would associate with logical positivism - but Ayer was a true hedonist. I have always enjoyed biography as a form of writing because it exposes you to different ways of living a life. There are two models suggested in this book. One is a very considered, structured way of living - setting out a plan, with intermediate targets leading to the fulfilment of ultimate objectives - and sticking to it. Most politicians I think live lives like this - Gordon Brown would be the supreme example - is there anything he does that hasn't been ruminated over and strategised months or even years in advance? You get the feeling that his whole life had been leading inexorably towards that moment last week when he stood outside No 10 as Prime Minister.

There are plenty of people in Rogers' book who opted for the careful, structured life - in particular the much more orthodox Oxford philosophers in Ayer's professional circle. One of his more austere contemporaries comments at one point as Ayer walks through the quad at Christ Church that he 'could have been a great philosopher, ruined by sex'.

Ayer was indeed something of a Don Juan. The number of women he 'bedded' in and out of wedlock is quite extraordinary. He had a talent with women - as several ex-lovers commented, unlike most men, he knew how to talk to women. He thrived on sex, drinking and dancing. One lover said she used to scratch his back while they made love so that the next in line would know of her presence through braille-reading with her fingers.

The hedonist thrives on the moment, experiments, doesn't allow commitments to tie him or her down. It is in many ways an attractive way of life - the seeking of pleasure, the almost anarchic zeal in trying new things, the freedom from constantly assessing the longer term consequences of one's actions.

But there is of course a downside. Ayer himself said towards the end of his life that he thought his epitaph should be that he had taught his students to seek the truth, but had fucked up his personal life. Towards the end as an old man he is left without firm bearings - a number of women being persuaded one after the other to take him on with reluctance - Rogers describes it as a 'game of pass the parcel'. Clearly solidity, reliability, structure, the committed relationship have their place - through these one avoids loneliness. What can seem to the hedonist like a trap, can from another perspective be an irreplaceable comfort.

Ultimately Ayer had enough people around him that he died loving and loved - despite his faults.

Death leads me to the second thought provoked by this book - God and the existence thereof. Just when you expect the story to dry up as Ayer enters old age, he collapses and momentarily dies before being brought back to life. The old athiest has an experience in the intervening moments - he meets a group of aliens who introduce themselves as the 'masters of the universe' - it is truly 'Freddie Star ate my hamster' headline material.

Does it sway him from his firm positivist position that with no irrefutable proof talk of God and the afterlife is just so much nonsense? No, he later rationalises the experience by concluding that the brain can keep functioning even after the heart has stopped beating - and therefore such an experience proves nothing transcendent.

Personally I share Ayer's humanism and found his defence of morality without a deity heartening. Some doubters find comfort in 'betting on God' - we don't know whether or not God exists, but in case he does, we don't want to get on the wrong side of him so let's bet that he does. Personally I think its more rational and ethically attractive to bet the other way. This is because we should live our lives according to what we think is right - we should live by a strong moral code and act according to it not because we instrumentally want to get to heaven or because we fear the wrath of God - but because we want to do what is right. That way we live the good life - and if God does happen to exist, he's more likely to look kindly on you for living the good life for the right reasons, than just because you wanted to get to heaven.

Where does that leave the status of ethics? No objective transcendental moral standards? Like Ayer I think I take a naturalist view of ethics - that there are certain basic facts of human nature that make it good to act in a certain way or bad to act in a certain way according to the dictates of our nature. There's a certain objectivity to that - or at least it doesn't leave us awash in a rootless moral relativism.

This is a very well written book, full of delightful anecdotes and with excellent little asides on Ayer's philosophical thought, and one that reveals a life very much lived. Now there's something to aspire to.