Sex, cycling and wrestling — a summary of my lockdown reading

The late Lord Quinton, when asked “what is philosophy?” had as good an answer as anyone. Philosophy, he replied, is “thinking about thinking”.

It’s a great reply because it clears absolutely nothing up. What is “thinking”? Is the “thinking” in the first bit of the definition the same as the “thinking” in the second? “Definitions” of philosophy don’t really work. They tend to be like those Escher prints where from one perspective everything looks normal, yet from another it looks impossible. Charming because bewildering. Philosophy is recalcitrant when people try to define it. She is happiest behind the veil. That’s why we love her. We don’t want to see it all at once.

I suppose if pushed I’d have to say that philosophy is less a subject than a collection of attitudes. It involves certain ways of thinking about the world. Its subject matter is everything. Its methodology involves seeing distinctions where they don’t seem obvious and making connections when they don’t seem relevant.

Which books can take us there?

The worst ever introductory book? Probably Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which comes in at about 500 pages. About 200 of them wasted on pointless biography. The best? The same author’s Problems of Philosophy which comes in at about a quarter the length, but with an amplification of about a factor of five, when judged in terms of intellectual merit.

The reason, it’s generally agreed, why Problems of Philosophy is better, is that it asks the best questions, those a child would ask. Why is there anything? The subject matter is everything.

The subject matter is everything? Really? Yes. Here are three books which, in their own ways, show that philosophy if it’s anything at all must be at some level an analysis of the normal and the quotidian. One of them is about sex, the other cycling, the other wrestling.

This, then, is a summary of my Amazon books experience under house arrest. The philosophy ones, anyway.

Roger Scruton’s Sexual Desire is an intellectual masterpiece — but slightly hard going. He suggests a framework which distils the best of contemporary philosophy, and within that context offers an argument which situates the most common human instinct — getting your leg over — as an object of enquiry in the philosophy of mind. For Scruton, “desire” is not a property of the human as human being, but of the human as person. When I desire you, a very sophisticated chain of intellectual causation is instantiated, one which is different in kind from what’s going on in the non-human (animal) world. Sir Roger’s view is a sort of modified Kantianism. Kant was notoriously prudish. I suspect (I knew him quite well) that Scruton did much research on his behalf.

I turn from that in the direction of Ben Irvine’s wonderful Einstein and the Art of Mindful Cycling. Dr Irvine has done the best thing that any talented academic can: leave academia, so you can think for yourself. In his charming book he makes connections (implied in the title) which would be invisible to a mind captured by the constraints of tenure. Dr Irvine makes the point like this:

“’A new idea comes suddenly’, Einstein recognised. When we’re in the present, thinking about nothing in particular, gently mindful of our experience, marvellous things can happen.”

Many of these marvellous things happen when you’re cycling, apparently.

Not sure I agree. Bertrand Russell (pictured above) was on his bike when he decided that the ontological proof was false. So, with all due respect to Ben, bikes aren’t necessarily great (the ontological proof is sound and valid). But we’ll move on.

To wrestling.

Philosophy Smackdown arrived on my doorstep about a month into house arrest. It’s written by Douglas Edwards, a serious player in the fake arena of academia and a philosopher of language in the tag team that calls itself the philosophy department at Utica College, New York.

Professor Edwards has come up with a gem of a book, in the first chapter of which he establishes a persuasive analogy between professional wrestling and Plato’s cave. We all know that professional wrestling is fake (he argues) but that’s to say no more than in the world of professional wrestling there is a distinction between “appearance” and “reality”. Sometimes the wrestler will shuffle off the chains and emerge into the light… the example he cites is when “Stone Cold Steve Hart” abandoned his world title only to be “corrected” by the powers that be.

It also, by the way, carries on its front piece the following recommendation:

“’One of the best popular philosophy books I’ve ever read!’ — Mark White, author of Batman and Ethics.”

What’s not to like?

What Professor Scruton, Dr Irvine and Professor Edwards show us is this: that philosophy should be about systematic analysis of the most “ordinary” parts of human experience. The most ordinary bits are the deepest, if looked at in the right way.