Pub philosophy

Engaging the Great Philosophers with Beer, Cigars and Crisps

 The famous philosopher Immanuel Kant was not renowned for his witty, pithy and accessible prose. In his celebrated masterpiece the Critique of Pure Reason he wrote as follows

 

                                    This act I name the synthesis of apprehension

                                    because it is directed immediately upon intuition,

                                    which does indeed offer a manifold, but a manifold

                                    which can never be represented as a manifold, and

                                    as contained in a single representation, save in virtue

                                    of such a synthesis.

 

Philosophy is so often difficult to understand and master. Complex arguments and obscure words, like ‘synthesis’ and ‘representation’ are not attractive and alluring. Turgid, opaque prose is as appealing as a swimming pool teeming with salt-water crocodiles. The best advice is to run very swiftly and energetically in the opposite direction. Grab a cheeseburger and read a colourful and shallow comic in the safety and comfort of a five star luxury hotel.

 

My close friend Jim Tickner is just the kind of bloke who would normally avoid philosophy like the plague. He is working class and easily bored. Mention a long word or explain a difficult and challenging thesis and Jim’s eyes will glaze over with listless incredulity. Depth and sophistication are as irritating to Jim as silver bullets are to vampires.

 

How then can we teach philosophy to Jim and his ilk? First we must understand Jim’s proletarian passion for the inane and the unimportant. Jim revels in the lurid and  louche revelations of the tabloid newspapers. Jim is amused and fascinated by the outrageous behaviour of television celebrities and football hooligans. He is at home in this sensationalised and erotic universe. He giggles, smirks and salivates as he devours this crude and salacious drivel.

 

Next we would do well to notice that Jim wastes thousands of hours every year watching football, rugby, cricket, horse racing, darts and snooker on satellite television. His wife Lou despairs of this unquenchable sporting fascination but is unable to combat this all-consuming and life-threatening disease so common among British working class men.

 

Crucially we must attend to Jim’s passionate love affair with the local boozer. He is at ease in the Dog and Duck and, surrounded by his numerous friends, slurps pints of Stella and chomps serenely on pork scratchings and salt’n’vinegar crisps. When the free sandwiches and cocktail sausages arrive, Jim oozes warmth and bonhomie. For the pub is an extension of Jim’s home. Here he laughs, chortles and debates the great issues of the day. Just how bad is the current England team and will Bristol Rovers avoid relegation to the Nationwide Conference League? 

 

If only Plato, Descartes and Nietzsche could accept Jim on his terms and accommodate themselves to Tickner’s mode of existence. Removing their cultured and sophisticated garb, they would enter the Dog and Duck and quaff beer with the cheerful and good-natured lad. Instead of droning on about ‘transcendentals’ and ‘ontologicals’, they would buy Jim a pint and offer him a Hamlet cigar. Imagine Plato belching and enthusing about the precocious skills of Wayne Rooney. Or Aristotle telling Jim a saucy gag about his mother-in-law. Picture Descartes farting and spilling his pint.

 

Can we arouse philosophical inquiry in Tickner’s sordid mind? Yes we can but we must ruthlessly eliminate all complex reasoning and present the philosopher’s key points nakedly and boldly. What are they telling us to do if we are to live happily and successfully? This is the crunch issue. Keep it simple and keep it cheeky. That is how Jim likes it.

 

It is in this context that we can teach philosophy to the barely literate and ignorant masses. Titillate them with sufficient references to cashew nuts, step-overs, Kylie’s bum and Abbot ale and you can teach them anything you like. Infuse the inane and the trivial with the deepest philosophical musings of the masters and you will tame the cheetah before she can bolt for the nearest cover. Philosophy only requires a pub make-over and she will transmogrify into a hot and gorgeous babe……appealing and alluring to Jim and his many like-minded friends (the British Public).

 

Why have I selected these philosophers and not others? Why have I chosen to present the neo-platonic philosophy of Plotinus and not the far more celebrated thought of Aristotle? Why have I tackled the pessimistic musings of Schopenhauer and ignored the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant?

 

First I have chosen these philosophers because they embody distinct and influential worldviews. For example Pico encapsulates the Renaissance mindset. His obsessions and fascinations illumine that powerful movement we call the Renaissance. And Schleiermacher may not be well-known but he incarnates the Romantic movement boldly and imaginatively. Plotinus may not be as famous as Aristotle but he distils the very essence of ancient Greek paganism with all its verve and colour.

 

Second I have selected those thinkers who will adapt most easily to the pub location. The difficulty with a thinker like Kant is that, although he exudes so many leading traits of the Enlightenment, it is very hard to translate his philosophy into simple, pithy slogans. That’s why I’ve selected the French philosopher Condorcet who is a much more accessible thinker. I’ve heard my uncle Tommy say very similar things to the Marquis but I’ve never known any ordinary person articulate Kantian nuances. Kant’s philosophy is just too difficult for the pub. Every thinker we engage with in this book can be presented both philosophically and simply (yobbishly if you want) in the pub scenario. For example the mindset of Alfred Ayer can be pithily summarised as “Only believe what you can observe!” We can imagine an old pub bore drawing on his fag and articulating such sentiments.

Plato

 

 
Thousands of years ago a man called Plato was born in Greece. Unlike Jim, Plato excelled in reading, writing and spelling and before long he had consumed vast forests of knowledge and erudition. He had an unslakable lust for study and reflection and he refused to fritter away his youth on the ignominious pleasures of snooker, public houses and darts. Not for him the idle loafing of the criminal classes or the petulant struttings of the football hooligan. Far from it; Plato surrendered to the joys and agonies of intense intellectual exertion; his mind brimmed and cascaded with honeyed insights and probing forays into distant corners of the universe. His ferocious intellect locked onto abstract complexities like a barracuda chasing its prey; his agile mind seized on logical errors like a white shark gorging on hapless seals. Plato was the supreme boffin of the ancient world and he is the most famous philosopher of all time.

 

Whenever I read the great man’s work I am compelled by some inner necessity to ponder the tragic horrors of camping. Eternal bad breath, rancid smells and aggressive mosquitoes suffocate false hopes of bliss and pleasure. The innocent camper lies down in the tent, drinks in the fragrant perfumes of the rural scene and within moments insects intrude and molest unbidden.

 

Several years ago I went camping with my wife and our two young children Hannah and Emile. My wife, Anne, is a devoted and enthusiastic camper and her ability to assemble a tent is unsurpassed and inspirational. She merely throws the tent up in the air and it comes down fully erect! I always feel intimidated by her Spartan ferocity and focus as she charges around the camp-site bellowing instructions to her nervous footsoldiers (me and the children). I know apriori would thick Jim understand this term? that I will become confused by the camping equipment; I will pretend to be busy looking for the tent pegs and the mallet but in reality I am cursing the evil day when we decided to go camping. I long to read my novel by Thomas Mann but the drudgery of camp labour dominates the horizon. There is water to be fetched. There is food to be cooked. There are dishes and pots to be scrubbed. There are bottoms to be wiped. The lager beer is warm and the mosquitoes are baying for blood.

 

The Great Greek Boffin would be entirely sympathetic to those of us who do not treasure the camping holiday. Plato’s entire philosophy can be pithily summarised in the simple slogan – “Always avoid camping – it can only damage your soul.” One of Plato’s most famous dialogues The Phaedo contains a brilliant and perceptive anti-camping polemic. It is the perfect instrument of war when combating the enthusiastic camper (my wife).

 

                        Because the body affords us countless distractions, owing

                        to the nurture it must have; and again, if any illness befall

                        it, they hamper our pursuit of that which is. Besides, it fills

                        us up with lusts and desires, with fears and fantasies of every

                        kind, and with any amount of trash, so that really and truly we

                        are, as the saying goes, never able to think of anything at all

                        because of it. Thus it’s nothing but the body and its desires that

                        brings wars and factions and fighting; because it’s over the

                        gaining of wealth that all wars take place, and we’re compelled

                        to gain wealth because of the body, enslaved as we are to its

                        service; so for all these reasons it leaves us no leisure for philosophy. 1

 

Picture it. You are lying in a tent and the gurgles and rumbles of impending diarrhoea begin to materialise. You are trying desperately to master the intricacies of Plato’s theory of recollection and suddenly you can hear the buzzings of unforgiving mosquitoes. Your feet are beginning to itch and your teeth are laced with foul, brooding odours. Suddenly your young baby daughter awakens, screaming and vomiting. Your charming wife stirs from slumber and imperiously declares:

 

                        “ Get out of this ******* tent and change her nappy now!”

 

This is not the most appropriate moment for philosophical inquiry! Physical discomfort and the craven cravings of the body have obliterated the philosophical task. It is moments like these that deepen my friendship with Jim. Tickner has always insisted in our pub conversations that camping is inherently odious and life-threatening. How right he is and how foolish I was to listen to the siren, pro-camping twitterings of my Canadian wife! Never again.

What about the influences of Socrates and his visit to Egypt?  He is alleged to have said: “I thank God, that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of Socrates”.

 

The murder of his great mate and mentor Socrates – the first philosopher martyr – by the State shocked the 28-year old Plato; it left him with a hatred of democracy.  Life would be better if it was ruled by the likes of Socrates.  Plato fled to Egypt as the first stage of his world tour.  He ended up bunking with the Pythagoreans in Italy, before he returned home to Greece and founded his Academy.  An academy for philosophers not wanna be footballers or pop stars; nothing to do with Richard, David or Carrie this one.  Though the philosopher that won most votes at Plato’s academy was Aristotle.

 

Why was the Greek boffin so contemptuous of the body? Why did he contend that the body affords us countless distractions? Why did he disdain the sensual pleasures of pubs, crisps and cigars? To answer this question we must remember that Plato was profoundly influenced by ancient religious beliefs that derive from the Orphics and the Pythagoreans. Keen students of the master are often ignorant of this important background. Too often modern intellectuals and boffins are persuaded that Plato was a purely rational thinker and as such shunned the religious world in much the same way that Jim and I studiously avoid tents, mallets and sleeping bags. How wrong they are!The Orphic movement appeared in Greece in the sixth century BC. Orphic believers were fascinated by purification-rituals and embraced an austere and ascetic lifestyle. To be ascetic means to live a solitary and self-denying kind of life. Ascetics would never be caught furtively reading the Sun newspaper or waste hundreds of pounds cavorting hedonistically in seedy Spanish night clubs. Ascetic types exude disdain and contempt for ordinary pub people who quaff lager and crack dirty jokes. 

 

The Orphics were inspired by the following ‘creation myth’. Dionysius Zagreus was the son of the great god Zeus. In a terrifying battle between the Olympian gods and the mighty Titans, Dionysius was cornered by the vast and by now ravenous monsters. In desperation he turned himself into a bull and became an entertaining and appetizing hors d’oeuvres for the gloating giants who pounced upon the hapless god and tore him apart, stuffing their greedy faces with his legs, horns and hooves. Grieving dad (Zeus) was incensed by the unsightly chomping and slurping of his ugly opponents and immediately dispatched a huge thunderbolt which burned up the salivating fiends. From the ashes of the blasted ogres, humans were created. The Orphics concluded from this that human beings are composed of an immortal soul (the good part from Dionysius) and a body (the evil part from the Titans).  

 

The Orphic punter was persuaded that our souls are immortal gods imprisoned in the body and doomed, unless released by following the Orphic way of life, to go around the wheel of rebirth in an endless succession of lives, animal and human. By ritual purifications, by an ascetic life of which the most important feature was abstinence from animal flesh, and by knowledge of the correct magical formulae to use on the journey after death, the Orphics hoped to win release from the body and return it to the company of the gods.

What about the Pythagoreans?

We have all heard about the Count of Monte-Cristo and his unpleasant sejourn in a vast French dungeon. Most of us felt rather sorry for the hapless aristocrat as he dined on rats and dug tunnels with his bare hands. Most of us felt rather cross with the scheming blighter who dispatched the innocent count to a fate far worse than camping. Well that’s exactly how those Orphics viewed our souls. Imprisoned and tormented by the stinking, carnal body. And this brings us to a hugely important topic. Reincarnation for Orphics and Platonists is a curse! It is not something to stick on your birthday party invitation. “Come to our bash and you will end up as a porcupine in the next life!” Plato was very clear about this topic. This is what he wrote in The Phaedo.

 

                        It is indeed, Cebes; and they’re likely to be the souls not

                        of the good but of the wicked, that are compelled to wander

                        about such places, paying the penalty for their former nurture,

                        evil as it was. And they wander about until, owing to the desire

                        of the corporeal element attendant upon them, they are once

                        more imprisoned in a body; and they’re likely to be imprisoned

                        in whatever types of character they may have cultivated in their

                        lifetime.’

                        ‘What types can you mean, Socrates?’

                        ‘Those who have cultivated gluttony, for example, and lechery,

                        and drunkenness, and have taken no pains to avoid them, are

                        likely to enter the forms of donkeys and animals of that sort. 2

 

 

Any honest and decent reader of the Sun newspaper should recoil in horror at this sustained and damaging attack. The Greek boffin is suggesting in no uncertain terms that lager-guzzling hooligans who eye up the local talent while cramming kebabs and other foodstuffs into their cavernous mouths are storing up trouble for themselves on the day of judgment. These foolish punters are swallowing huge globules of karmic bondage and their destiny is fixed and certain. Sin-stained souls will float out of the corpses of these sex-crazed gluttons and enter the bodies of the lowly jackass and the humble donkey!

 

The world’s most famous philosopher is also very scathing about the fairer sex and urges us to remember that men who live cowardly and immoral lives will be reborn in the second generation as women. 3 Plato would not have been a popular guest at a feminist rally. However it should be noted that Plato’s worst punishment for the most salacious, lustful and ignorant men can be easily barbecued on a grill and enjoyed with a large glass of chilled Chardonnay.

 

                        But the most unintelligent and ignorant of all turned into

                        the fourth kind of creature that lives in water. Their souls

                        were hopelessly steeped in every kind of error, and so their

                        makers thought them unfit to breathe pure clean air, and made

                        them inhale water, into whose turbid depths they plunged them.

                        That is the origin of fish, shell-fish and everything that lives in

                        water; they live in the depths as a punishment for the depth of

                        their stupidity. These are the principles on which living creatures

                        change and have always changed into each other, the transformation

                        depending on the loss or gain of understanding or folly.4

 

Stupid, thick, drunken, greedy people will eventually end up battered and fried encased in yesterday’s tabloid newspapers,in a chip shop up the Old Kent Road.

 

Last night Jim and I sat in the Dog and Duck and I really laid into the daft Bristolian for his naïve and superficial attitude to the great British chip. Jim is totally convinced that the long, thin, crisp French fry is far superior to the stubby, greasy, traditional British chip. We almost came to blows as I loudly denounced his philistine perspective. In recent weeks Jim’s Francophile prejudices have intruded steadily into every facet of his life. He is going to Brittany for his summer holiday. He is seriously considering changing his Christian name to Jules and he is constantly raving about the Arsenal players Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira. What a chump!

 

I tried (unsuccessfully) to explain to Jim the platonic viewpoint. Plato argued that there is such a thing as the perfect chip and this little beauty does not reside in Paris or in Lyon. The form of the Chip lives in an immaterial, intelligible and changeless world of Being. Jim was decidedly unimpressed by this terse analysis as he chomped scornfully on his pork scratchings. “So you’re basically telling me that all the British and French chips that exist down here are mere imitations of the perfect Chip which lives in this invisible and perfect realm?”

 

“Did you spill my pint?” I retorted playfully. “At last you’ve got the idea! The Platonic perspective urges us to go beyond the particular chip (French, British or American) and lay hold of the Universal Chip which exists timelessly in a better and more splendid world. I can’t make it any simpler than that, Tickner my lad. Get me a pint of Stella now and I will visit the toilet and spray porcelain with unwanted yellow liquid.”

 

As I returned from the comfort station, Jim seemed edgy and preoccupied as he fidgeted nervously with his car keys. “I think I’ve got it but can you just go over it one more time? I’m a mate after all and I did help you out when your house was burgled last year! Do you remember all that cleaning and hoovering I did for you?”

I had been hard on the lad and he deserved a second stab at the pudding. “From the top, one last time. Fair point about that burglar incident! Plato believed that the world around us – darts, cigars, beer mats, ashtrays, crisps, glasses, tables and chairs are mere illusions. They seem to exist but they are really shadows. The entire visible world is one huge trick. This pub we love doesn’t really exist! We could say that life is more like a David Copperfield magic show than we would care to admit. We think that there is a tiger behind the magician’s curtain but we are wrong.”

 

“You might take Plato to Milan, show him the San Siro stadium and exclaim – “Look here oh revered and mighty Greek one, this stadium is as crushingly real as a thumping Roy Keane reducer. Surely you don’t believe it’s an illusion?’ Plato would sneer with intellectual disdain and address you very sharply. He would say:

 

                        ‘You are an ignorant, unenlightened football nut. You spend your

                        entire life chasing shadows. Get a life, Jim and contemplate real

                        things like perfect triangles, squares and rectangles. Forget footballs

                        and think about the perfect circle. Get out of the pub and think

                        about the form of the crisp!

 

“The Greek boffin was convinced that the real world is somehow invisible, unchanging and eternal. He insisted that human beings used to live in this heavenly and noble world before they were born. At birth our immortal souls fell from this splendid environment and became encased in the cement bag we call the human body. Plato was convinced that human beings are really prisoners living in the most appalling prison - the fleshly body. Remember the Count of Monte-Cristo. We are really immortal souls created to live in heaven but we have fallen from our true home. Just as a Roy Keane reducer can concuss the hardest of players, so all of us have become concussed and confused. We think we belong to this place we call the earth but we are mistaken. We really belong back home in an invisible, ethereal and immaterial world filled with perfect chips and perfect dips. Plato urged his followers to shun the world and all its transitory pleasures and to embrace the lifestyle of the remote and austere philosopher. Plato contended that intellectuals and those who look after their immortal souls would return to this heavenly bliss; the rest of us would be doomed to the horrors of reincarnation. Heavy, sustained reading of pornographic magazines will guarantee a donkey’s body in the next cycle of rebirth. Where’s my pint?”

 

Jim was pensive and morose. “Do you mean that simple, ordinary blokes like me who enjoy ogling top totty and sinking gallons of amber nectar on a daily basis are destined to become shrimps and crayfish in the next life?”

 

“Yes”, I retorted firmly. “Plato would upbraid you and urge you to repent and give up your sordid, seedy and cowardly ways. Don’t take this the wrong way. I mean this as a friend. If Plato is right, you are standing on a motorway and two huge juggernauts are driving towards you from north and south at enormous speed. Death is imminent”

 

Jim croaked and wheezed as he nervously rearranged his paper napkin. Clearly he was disturbed and unsettled by this platonic sally. “Is there no hope for me, boss?” muttered the genial bookseller.

 

Rocky was by now softening as he waxed lyrical; eloquence and sweet words of comfort and consolation poured forth from his learned and cultured gob.

 

“There is a solution, grasshopper, and I will enlighten you for a couple of quid. You must learn to be a philosopher and contemplate the eternal and unchanging world of Being. Fix your gaze on the eternal world of forms. Meditate on squares, triangles and circles. Shun and eschew bodily pleasures and you will suffocate karmic bondage and, if time permits, you will leave this earthly plane and return home to that splendid and glorious heavenly realm. For fair is the prize and great the hope.”

 

“Ticky”, confided the tubby, avuncular sage, “Did you know that Tim Bowman, that plucky pal of ours, has recently shelled out serious dinero on a time machine? Yes, drummer Tim has promised me that he will time travel back to ancient Greece, smarm and charm that pagan boffin and bring him speedily to the Dog and Duck at 10 sharp. The deal is done and dusted. Plato, himself, will fill you in and ease your fevered brow. Get that pint in now and the wondrous wordsmith will sate your every metaphysical whim.”

 

As Jim returned from his expensive lager expedition, Rocky was determined to complete his exposition of the Greek master.

 

“You know how both of us loathe house work? It has to be done but we don’t like it.” Jim could only murmur in agreement. “You fully share my abhorrence not only of camping but the bitter demands of domestic drudgery. Picture it. We are loafing at home enjoying the big game and Liverpool is trouncing Panathenaikos in the Champions League. Suddenly your wife Lou and my wife Anne return from their shopping assignments and rudely interrupt our convivial fellowship. Banter is flowing and Michael Owen has just scored a cracker in the dying embers of the game. We are dancing around the room like demented jackals full of the joys of spring. Our firm intention is to sprint down to the local boozer and slurp pints for thirty or forty minutes after the game. Horror of horrors the house is filthy and untidy; we must knuckle down to serious domestic labour as the girls vent their wrath and spleen. Familiar scenario?”

 

“Plato was keenly aware that important intellectuals and boffins cannot waste a single moment of their lives grinding and sweating procuring the food, shelter and condiments so essential to a decent life. Plato’s solution was simple, stark and radical. A strict caste system will create the perfect society where boffins and clever Greeks can focus upon the sweet delights of contemplation and acute logical activity without the crude interruptions of cooking, cleaning and ironing. No doubt Plato would sneer at our ecstatic drooling over Gerrard’s killer pass but both he and us crave leisure for our respective hobbies.”

 

“Plato contended that Philosophers should rule and occupy the first rung on his societal ladder. Only those who know the forms can enjoy political power. Anyone unacquainted with the Universal Chip must serve and obey. Thick, stupid people must keep to their station and exhaust themselves in the hurly-burly of productive life. The second or middle caste will be composed of beefy policemen and tough soldiers who will maintain firm discipline and thrash lazy proletarians who refuse to labour for a good and worthy cause. Do the words ‘police state’ come to mind, Jim? Plato was most emphatic that no one in the ruling caste should be allowed to own personal property and even their own children must not be allowed to know their own parents. Plato really had it in for the family and urges us to scrap this comforting and jolly institution and embrace unquestioning loyalty to the state!”

 

“Even sexual intercourse must be regulated by the state, Jim! The Rulers are to carry out a careful breeding programme; they will stage-manage mating lotteries which will give the lusty punters the impression that they are ‘playing monopoly’ at random. In reality couples will be mated on strictly eugenic grounds. Combinations will be effected which will produce the finest possible crop of children. Does this sound rather similar to the Third Reich, Jim? Oh yes and guess what will happen to babies that are deemed inferior, Jim? You’ve guessed it. ‘Termination of contract’ is the preferred euphemism!”

 

Just then Tim Bowman appeared at the pub door shaking his head ruefully. He glanced around the pub furtively and then he spotted his two pals lurking in the darkest part of the boozer. “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news. Plato can’t come. He’s been camping all weekend in Sparta and he’s got a terrible attack of the squits. He’s frightfully sorry he can’t make it. Is anyone going to buy me a pint? I’ve forgotten my wallet.”

 references

 1 Phaedo. 66C