Crumbs! Tintin and the fake news fiasco...

Can you name a living British philosopher? alas, I think most Britons would be able to name more British hairdressers, or British bakers, than British philosophers.

The poet W.H. auden put it crisply when he wrote:

‘To the man in the street, who, I’m sorry to say, Is a keen observer of life, The word “Intellectual” suggests straight away a man who’s untrue to his wife.’ Perhaps as a result of this suspicion, our homegrown philosophers tend to remain firmly behind closed doors, working on books destined to be appreciated only by that select band of other philosophers with whom they haven’t fallen out.

But in France, any philosopher with a bit of zip can look forward to a flourishing media career, regularly being invited on television and radio to deliver topical opinions on all sorts of things, high and low, from the role of women in society to the hidden meaning behind the shape of the Toblerone bar.

In France, they have Bernard Henri-Levy and Michel Houellebecq.

In Britain, we have ann Widdecombe and Piers Morgan.

Given the choice, I suppose I would opt for the French system, but our country’s antiintellectualism does have its compensations. One of them is that we don’t have to endure the chatter of aspirant public intellectuals voicing dafter and dafter opinions in the hope of getting themselves on telly.

Take the case of Vincent Cespedes, for instance. Last week, the 44-year-old philosopher came up with the idea that Tintin is a girl. after appearing on TV and radio to argue his point, he waited a week before declaring that he was only joking, and that Tintin is in fact a boy.

‘I had just finished a book by Raymond Ruyer which shows that Homer is a woman,’ he told the Huffington Post in his original statement. ‘I had some sort of software in my head when I got back into Tintin and it immediately seemed obvious to me.’

Voila! Cespedes became famous all over France.

His evidence for Tintin’s femininity was, it must be said, a trifle patchy. He pointed to a Tintin story in which Tintin dressed in a skirt, though most people would identify it as a kilt. at this point, I wondered who he would alight on next. Would he take his magnifying glass to a photograph of The Royal Family at Balmoral and decide that Prince Philip was also a woman?

Or would he point to the movie Braveheart, and argue that Mel Gibson was a woman? after all, it is a well-known fact that Mel is short for Melanie.

In his original thesis, he argued that Tintin’s creator, Hergé, played a joke on his readers by portraying him as a boy, but ‘carelessly’ left enough clues for the truth to emerge.

In support of this thesis, he pointed to the 1941 staging of Tintin In The Indies in Brussels, in which the role of Tintin was played not by a man but by an actress, Jeanne Rubens. Yet the same could be said of Bart Simpson, who is voiced by a woman, nancy Cartwright. Does this mean that Bart is secretly Bartella? Cespedes also argued that, having studied the Tintin oeuvre: ‘You never see his penis.’ Well, it would be very odd if you did. and there are any number of fictional heroes — Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Harry Potter — who never put their private parts on display. Does this mean they are all female, or, at the very least, in the process of transitioning? From now on, would they prefer to be identified as Cherie Holmes, Jemima Bond and Harriet Potter?

Despite all these obvious holes in his thesis, Monsieur Cespedes was catapulted to the forefront of French philosophy, and made headlines all over the world.

and, a week later, Mr Cespedes has announced that he never actually believed that Tintin was a girl, and that his original announcement was a philosophical experiment in ‘fake news’.

So now the man who became famous for saying that Tintin was a girl has just become even more famous for saying that Tintin is a boy, which is what everyone imagined in the first place. So we are back at square one.

Which all goes to prove the point that Cicero first made 2000 years ago: there is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it. Unless, of course, you include what that same philosopher will say next.