FROM THE PHILOSOPHERS

As we continue to query the current state of our world, Alexander McCall Smith calls to question the meaning of it all with the help of philosophers sitting on his bookshelf

Alexander McCall Smith muses on how philosophy, once so popular amongst all Scots, has lost its way

There was a time when there was a good chance that every arts graduate of a Scottish university was a bit of a philosopher. The old Scottish MA degree encouraged just about every student to take at least one course in moral philosophy or in logic and metaphysics. That meant a large dose of David Hume, backed up with forays into Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, and of course certain significant Greeks.

This insistence on an exposure to philosophy was part of the celebrated Democratic Intellect so elegantly explored by George Davie in his seminal book on the subject. That approach was founded on the notion that education should be as all-embracing as possible. And it served Scotland extremely well in producing a broad and, it could be argued, moral outlook on life.

Philosophy has continued to be widely taught, of course, but for some time it withdrew into something of an ivory tower, with scant attention being paid to the philosophical needs of ordinary people. Academic philosophy was a major culprit in that respect: the average person is simply not going to engage in debates on the issue of whether we can safely say that we exist – or indeed that we mean anything. We clearly do exist, and we are equally satisfied that our existence has some meaning.

Similarly, most of us proclaim a belief in free will whatever arguments determinists put forward: without an acceptance of free will, we could not conduct our lives in a meaningful way. So if there was a lack of interest on the part of the general public in philosophical debate, then the blame for that could, in large measure, be placed at the feet of those academic philosophers who remained uncertain about their existence and about whether any one thing was preferable to any other thing.

Relativism did great damage. If everything was equally good, why make any statement other than one of personal preference? Indeed, for some time western philosophy failed to give anyone a convincing reason to get out of bed in the morning.

But things have changed, and philosophy is once again doing the work that it always should have been doing in helping people to understand the world they live in. And people who may never have studied philosophy in an academic context, are delighting in the renaissance of the subject, explained in ways that can be grasped by all and concerned with issues that touch the lives of all of us just about every day.

And that is important: every single day each of us is called upon to make some decision that has a moral dimension to it. How do we treat a trying friend? How much do we give to charity? Are we ever justified in keeping an uncomfortable truth from another who might benefit from knowing it?

The questions come thick and fast from the moment you look in the bathroom mirror in the morning. That simple act can give rise to unsettling questions, such as: is the person I see in the

Proust’s views of memory are in accordance with contemporary neuroscience

mirror the same person who bore my name twenty years ago?

This renaissance has taken a variety of forms. I particularly enjoy the approach in which the lives of various thinkers are examined with a view to helping us to lead our own lives. This has been done with Montaigne, Dante, and Proust.

Proust was the subject of Alain de Botton’s remarkable book How Proust Can Change Your Life. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be Proust, but I can understand how he can intensify our experience of the world.

In the same vein, I have on my shelves the book Proust was a Neuroscientist, which purports to show that Proust’s views of memory are in accordance with what contemporary neuroscience has discovered about human memory.

Most recently this welcome popularisation of philosophy has explored what we can learn about our own lives by considering the lives of animals. This is not entirely new: decades ago, Roger Grenier published an exquisite collection of essays, The Difficulty of Being a Dog, which looked at the meaning of canine lives. This included Odysseus’ dog, Argos, Elizabeth Barret Browning’s dog, Flush, and Sigmund Freud’s chow, Lün. Imagine being Freud’s dog: Do I really have to fetch that ball? What does it all represent?

Subsequent contributions to the genre have included Feline Philosophy, by John Gray, which is sub-titled Cats and the Meaning of Life. The author sets out various lessons we can learn from cats, one of which is It is better to be indifferent to others than to feel you have to love them. That, we are told, is the view cats take. Possibly. But we should not emulate cats too enthusiastically: cats are, in my view, consummate psychopaths.

Then there is A Short History of Birds by Philippe Dubois and Élise Rousseau. This sets out lessons that we can learn from birds. One of these is ‘the true definition of love is to love simply, like doves’.

Yes, but be careful about taking birds as role models. I observe birds in my garden. I feed them (because Immanuel Kant, by one reading, suggests that I must), but they seem to spend all their time squabbling and chasing others away from the food.

How unlike human beings…