Self portrait, Austin Osman-Spare, 1910
Before we start, why aren't you buying my fucking book? Look, 50 of you a day are still traipsing over here, and I haven't posted for Christ knows how long. Today, we have a little epistle on the importance of introducing yourselves to philosophy while you are under house arrest. But some of you must come over here because you enjoy the writing, for Christ's sake. Imagine how much enjoyment you will get from a whole novel! It's 2.99 (can't do quid signs with this fucking Spanish keyboard) and you can get it for Kindle here. Every book sold gives me enough royalties, roughly, for a 1.8kg bag of rice, so it's like crowd-funding a poor exiled writer except you actually get something back. Vamos!
Many
years ago a dreadful movie came out in the UK. It was called Morons
from Outer Space and
the only actors I can remember were the least funny of all the many
television male double acts Britain has produced over the years,
Smith and Jones.
The
premise is in the title. Aliens have arrived on earth, but the mere
fact of their having travelled across galaxies to get here is no
proof of their intellectual superiority. They are morons. There was,
however, one instructive scene if taken out of context and made into
a metaphor for modern man and woman in general.
The
aliens have been captured and are under observation. The belief is
still that they represent an intellectual master-race. They are given
a chess set, the assumption being that they will easily master this
classic game of intellect and strategy. One of the higher-ups on the
observation team is breathlessly informed that the aliens have begun
to use the game, and the chief hurries down to the holding cell.
The
aliens have indeed begun to use the game. One of them is wielding it
like a bat while the others lob chess pieces at him to whack across
the cell.
It is the only funny scene I recall from a truly dire film.
For
the chess set read the higher brain and for the aliens read mankind,
most of it. Human beings, whether you are going to like this or not,
have been kept away from the one thing that will make them genuinely
contented in a way that cars, houses, swimming-pools, clothes,
electronic trinkets, beach holidays and all the other ephemera of
today’s rather tawdry and shallow existence, the modern toys of
Dionysus (see Traumaville
passim)
will not and cannot.
As
I have been tirelessly informed for most of my adult life, being a
well-read brainbox is not going to bring home any bacon. Personally,
I can talk with you until cows begin to make their way home about
most areas of intellectual life, while being almost unable to lead
any kind of coherent existence in the way others of my acquaintance
have successfully orchestrated. Family, career, stable relationships
both amatory and social have all proved far too much for me, whereas
Immanuel Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason – which
I am due to re-read when I have cleared the current decks – and
Martin Heidegger’s Being
and Time – which
I recently re-visited – have not. Two
notoriously difficult works of German philosophy I can master. The
art of staying out of trouble I cannot.
Currently,
however, the Western world finds itself in an existential pickle
which I suspect, via the sounding-house of social media, some of you
are not up to. This is because you are afraid of being alone and that
is because the modern world will not allow you to be alone. It is
geared towards the relentlessly social. Of course, I am not talking
to those of you self-isolating with families. That presents different
challenges and will gift different rewards. But, if you are
self-isolating with yourself, you may need a little advice from a
black belt in splendid isolation.
I
am not going to suggest that you reach for the German existentialists
(I should stress that I am well aware, thank you very much, that Kant
was not an existentialist). But what I am suggesting is that you dip
your toe in the water of philosophy. Kindle is, for me, one of the
truly great inventions that mankind has come up with and, like the
higher cortex, most people seem to be whacking chess pieces across
the cell with it.
You
see, we are all children of the visual age, what French thinker Guy
Débord
calls ‘the society of the spectacle’. With the visual image, the
consumer doesn’t have to do too much, just sit back and open your
eyes. Your brain, not so much.
The
written word is different. You have to engage with it, reach out to
it, help it to help you. And you should do it as soon as you can.
Now, when you may be forced to be alone for some time with a self you
may know very little of, would be a good time, because death is in
the room in more ways than one. Marcus Aurelius, the kindest Roman
Emperor, quotes from Hesiod in his Meditations;
‘Soon,
very soon, thou wilt be ashes, or a skeleton, and either a name or
not even a name; but name is sound and echo. And the things that are
valued in life are empty and rotten and trifling, and like little
dogs biting one another, and like little children quarrelling,
laughing, and then straight away weeping.’
This
decision to delve
rather
than to have chess pieces thrown at you is one of the few genuine
belongings you have, once you realise what having something really
means. Nothing
is ours,
writes
Seneca to his friend Lucilius, except
time.
And
don’t expect philosophy to act like a sudden pick-me-up. You are
not going to open Epictetus and read a few lines and settle in
comfortable as though it were a soap opera. Read and re-read. If you
like the feel of a line, read it again. And don’t care about what
the good people say. I’m choosing these lines more or less at
random, like the sortes
method
of reading the Bible – as a good friend on Facebook reminded me –
where you let the Good Book fall open and are guided for the day by
the first line you read. This from one-time slave Epictetus;
‘If
you desire philosophy, prepare yourself from the beginning to be
ridiculed, to expect that many will sneer at you, and say, He has all
at once returned to us a philosopher; and whence does he get his
supercilious look for us? Do you not show a supercilious look; but
hold
on to the things which seem to you best as one appointed by God to
this station. And remember that if you abide in the same principles,
these men who first ridiculed will afterwards admire you; but if you
shall have been overpowered by them, you bring upon yourself double
ridicule’.
You’ll
find that in the Enchiridion,
the
sayings of Epictetus. It
costs about as much as a bag of crisps on Amazon.
You won’t find it on Netflix.
