Peter Strempel, 4 February 2023
Julian Baggini’s Guardian piece, ‘Think yourself better: 10 rules of philosophy to live by’, goes a long way towards explaining why so many people distrust real philosophy (not the kind found in bookshop ‘self help’ sections). And how almost anything vital and fresh can be turned rancid by appropriating it for an unthinking, neurotic bourgeoisie, scared of life and everything in it.
Baggini begins his decalisticle with a predictable, almost mandatory homage to non-Western culture, just to prove he’s no Xenophobe. But quoting a possibly mythical Indian sage with fortune cookie wisdom to arrive at the bon mot ‘be sincere’ is almost laughable. How many cheap reds did it take, over a Chinese takeaway, before this sounded remotely profound?
Quoting Janet Radcliffe Richards is just painful virtue signalling, particularly since the quote bears almost no real relationship to the advice about being charitable in our thinking about our adversaries.
Really? Charitable to fascists, social media lynch mobs, conspiracy theorists, and outright nut-cases? I suppose Baggini is advocating cowardice as a virtue because he doesn’t like getting beaten up. Fair enough. But it ain’t philosophy worth passing gas over.
Next up is Philippa Foot. In 4000 years of philosophy, we get two Brit women in the top ten? OK. But with the advice being about humility? Almost as if asking for someone to mansplain stuff to you? Grow up Baggini; if you don’t know about it, shut up, by all means, but let’s not have that middle class cowardice about never venturing any opinion until you’ve tested the water and found you will say nothing controversial, true or not.
William of Ockham? Is that reference here to justify never pursuing thought to any depth? And as a ready-made excuse for any journalist being shallow and uninformative by never telling truth to power, saying something original, or following any story to its logical end, which is always where the money trail leads.
Only idiots believe journalism is about talking down to people as if they are all idiot children.
Dignifying a reference to Confucius by taking it seriously is just not in me.
Onora O’Neill: third Brit woman mentioned. We get it, Baggini: your feminist credentials are passable in any trendy Bistro. You could have picked someone more original to proclaim the virtue of eclecticism, though. And you did mention Bhikhu Parekh, Brit man with impeccably non-Caucasian credentials, even if you did that to horribly mangle Immanuel Kant to justify groupthink and social media bubbles.
Interesting choice to talk about clarity: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Hands up anyone who understands what the fuck Ludwig was on about! Even if we accept that clarity is better than certainty, since certainty is an immature fantasy, why would clarity always be better than complexity?
Clarity is almost always a lossy downsampling of more complex ideas. Have a read of Hans Vaihinger, sometime. Heidegger would have been the better choice to quote about 'truth' being a many layered thing that is revealed progressively, and not in a simple terms to suit a functionally illiterate audience making it a point of pride to eschew thought.
But full marks for getting Wittgenstein’s name in there, Baggini; since no one really knows what he was talking about, it makes you look clever, innit!
Fourth Brit woman: Iris Murdoch. With some wisdom about paying attention that is really only wisdom for the generations that need to be told what attention is and how to apply it. I suspect that by now Baggini has, in some weird Freudian way, revealed something about himself: he is actually a yappie little silky terrier wearing his owner’s home-made, crocheted doggie coat, lest he catch cold during walkies to the shops for milk, biscuits, and cheap sherry.
Using Aristotle to justify the biggest cowardice in journalism today is almost worthy of some kudos. But Aristotle didn’t really hold forth on any remotely contemporary reality. It is not true in the abstract or the concrete that a neutral stance between two sides is wise, since there are no two sides to everything. Most of the time there many, sometimes only one, and none of the time are any of them virtues or vices.
I wonder just how pissed on cheap wine, and lapsing into coma from too much cheese, you have to be to think of Baggini’s list as in any way edifying, entertaining, related even remotely to philosophy worthy of the name, or useful in any real sense?
Maybe Baggini meant to satirize himself and his entire profligate social class ...