It is a mark of that success that so many of the prominent writers and academics who have contributed to this collection of essays (and two poems) on Gaita’s ethical thought accept Romulus as the ground of that thought and are comfortable with the idea that a barely educated blacksmith of peasant background, a man who once contemplated murder and who never fully recovered from the psychosis to which he succumbed in mid-life, had a depth of understanding which, when presented in the language of moral philosophy, put that profession to shame (as the endorsements to the second edition of Good and Evil attest).

Certainly, that recognition comes more from the writers than from the academics, for which reason, perhaps, Anne Manne, in a concluding interview, presses Gaita to clarify the role of Romulus in philosophical terms, by drawing on Plato’s notion of wisdom as recollection. Gaita responds that he could write about goodness because, remembering his father, he knew what a good man was, just as he could philosophise about friendship because he had experienced Romulus’s friendship with Hora. Nicely put, but more telling is that others have come to see his philosophy in a similar light.

Raimond Gaita (photograph by Konrad Winkler)

Dorothy Scott, for example, after a discussion of why a language of moral obligation is more appropriate to child protection issues than a language of human rights, hones in on an illuminating insight clearly derived from Gaita’s childhood. Scott quotes him: ‘Children need to be loved and to love their parents without shame [her italics].’ We know from elsewhere that it was in continuing to respond to his mentally ill wife, Christina, with a compassion which triumphed over the sense of violation to his male honour – she had abandoned him for his friend Mitru – that Romulus enabled Raimond to love his mother ‘without shame’, both before and after her early suicide. In Scott’s hands, the understanding ‘that a child can be nurtured in love in the midst of great suffering’ becomes advice to social workers: treat the parents of vulnerable children with respect, no matter how apparently bad the parenting.

J.M. Coetzee (photograph by Bert Nienhaus)

The notion of a love which transcends shame or dishonour is an instantiation of Gaita’s notion of a goodness which goes beyond the virtues of character. It is of a piece with what he learned from Romulus, that people can be ‘broken but not diminished’. J.M. Coetzee sees this as an essentially Greek sense of the tragic, and since no such idea is to be found in the ancient Greek philosophers – for Socrates only corrupt souls are ‘broken’ – he locates it as Homeric, speculating that the fact of Romulus and Hora ‘following a Homeric code in the twentieth century suggests that the code they lived by had been passed from generation to generation for millennia’. Having unintentionally undermined any conception of Romulus as a ‘moral genius’, Coetzee proceeds to pay tribute to Raimond for the literary artistry by which this ancient ethical code has been brought to us in ‘accents of truth’.

Coetzee is not the only one moved by Romulus’s world to shift the focus back onto Raimond. The editors acknowledge that this is an odd collection in that about half the chapters are by Gaita’s close personal friends, some of whom strike a startlingly intimate note, while the rest are more conventional pieces of the kind one might expect to find in a Festschrift (which is more or less what this book is). Significantly, it is the more personal contributions which suggest where Gaita’s thought might go next. There is a reason for this, to do with the uncategoriseable nature of his writing. For while the more academic essays are, without exception and befitting the moral seriousness of the occasion, thoughtful, carefully argued pieces which refine, modify, or apply Gaita’s concepts in a way relevant to the professions of law, social work, and, of course, philosophy, they are contained within the limits of those professions.

As Christopher Cordner (a philosopher) demonstrates by way of buying into Plato’s ‘quarrel between philosophy and poetry’, Gaita’s conviction that what he wants to say demands ‘a language closer to that of poetry’ than is normal amongst philosophers, places his philosophy in a state of tension with the discipline. The point can be generalised, for the language of love is not easily professionalised. Like Iris Murdoch, who also tried to reintroduce notions of goodness and love into philosophy, Gaita will probably remain on the margins of the profession. But he has given us something which Murdoch has not, a good part of his personal world, and it is that world, illuminated now by the loving, but piercing, perceptions of his close friends, which is the door to another chapter in this closely interwoven life and thought.

Barry Hill

The standout essay (containing one poem and fragments of another) is Barry Hill’s loving and profound tribute, ‘Rai Gaita’s Mont Blanc: A New Poem Imagined’, the unifying theme of which is the continuity between the mountain-climbing life Gaita abandoned for philosophy and the courageous manner in which he lived the philosophic life. Gaita, Hill suggests, does not so much take ‘an idea for a walk’ (Hill’s rendition of Paul Klee’s taking a line for a walk) as take it ‘up onto a rock face’, for, like Shelley, he had discerned in the rock face of Mont Blanc ‘The Secret Strength of Things / That Governs Thought’. Someone on a rock face is exposed whether the mountain be real or metaphorical, and Hill, unrelentingly intimate, doesn’t shy away from revealing the vulnerability of ‘this friend who so needs us to attend to his anguish’, a need so ‘transparent’ as to make him a ‘suitable case for treatment’.

Hill is not the only friend to offer Gaita psychological insights. Here, he gently questions the latter’s rejection of Freud with the Freudian suggestion that perhaps he fears his suffering being stolen from him. Gaita has responded to these urgings in the direction of psychology by announcing that he will now turn his attention to that subject. It will be interesting to see how his dedication to the Socratic ideal of the examined life – in his terms, the imperative of lucidity – accommodates that lucidity which can be achieved only through the insights of others, at the same time as he holds a distance from Freud. As Hill puts it, Gaita ‘has bound his ethics into the primal bonds of friendship’ so one can guess – hope – that we will have a moral psychology in which the role of the therapist is displaced by the role of friendship, the point being that friends like Hill are, themselves, the treatment.