As a council member of the National Library I had the privilege of not only going to this lecture last Friday night but of having dinner with Ray, the benefactors of the lecture (John Seymour – whom I taught Legal Writing and Research alongside in 1990 or thereabouts – and his wife Heather) and some other nice people that night.
In any event, I really loved the lecture which is a tour of biography through the ages and addresses Samuel Johnson’s five questions/issues about biography. What are they? Well you’ll have to come along to the lecture to find out.
In any event, one thing I loved is that in discussing biography, and the question of whether the subject of the biography has a privileged position in understanding himself that the biographer can never penetrate. Monk discussed Wittgenstein’s private language argument in a way that had relevance for my own thinking about private and public goods. Wittgenstein’s argues for the priority of the public and the shared – just as I would put public goods – specifically emergent public goods prior to private goods.
Anyway, go if you can. As you know I occasionally get a bit carried away with enthusiasm for something or other and the chiming of the private language argument with all my priors may have pushed me over the edge into this malady, but I can also report that everyone else I spoke to thought it was a wonderful lecture. And Ray was kept to time (I think 40 minutes) by Anne-Marie, our National Librarian – an otherwise wonderful woman – who nevertheless deprived us of another ten or twenty minutes of the lecture in which Oppenheimer would have been wound into the narrative alongside fellow biographees Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell.
