rowland manthorpe dot com

I reviewed this about two months ago for the Literary Review and have been “getting round” to posting it up ever since. Productivity reaches a new high.

Robert Rowland Smith is a consultant,writer and teacher with a great middle name. His book seems to be being received well, although it did get an enjoyably vicious review in the Observer, from Theodore Dalrymple:

No thought is too banal for Rowland Smith; unfortunately, his banality is perfectly compatible with error. He rarely loses an opportunity to suppress what is true and suggest what is false.

Funny, but harsh. I thought this was a case of “wrong reviewer, wrong book.” Dalrymple - a bit of a gun - seemed almost offended to be asked to review a work of popular philosophy. He attacked the form and genre, rather than the content, and gave little impression that he had actually read beyond the table of contents.

Reviewing is an immanent art. It works best when it adapts to the goals and conventions of its subject (while bearing in mind the genre, of course). Smith’s book is far from perfect. But Dalrymple’s review was the equivalent of criticising Woolf for failing to develop minor characters or Powell for lacking gripping plots.

You can read my effort (the original, not the cruelly cut Literary Review version) after the jump.

The philosophy of everyday life is a publishing phenomenon. For a slightly less-than-bargain price, the philosophically-minded reader can share coffee with Plato and a cab with Aristotle, discuss love with Goethe, listen to Rousseau on dogs and Wittgenstein on beetles. Some of these books are worthwhile, but in financially-straightened times the trend is towards cash-ins. Would breakfast with Socrates turn out to be anything more than a cynical marketing ploy?

Well, it turns out I’m the cynical one, because when it’s written by Robert Rowland Smith, everyday philosophy is neither contrived nor formulaic. Nor is it strictly philosophical. Drawing on psychologists, writers and film makers as much as the prefects and hall monitors of the philosophy department, Smith follows the events of an unbelievably hectic but still fairly recognisable day, ruminating on a variety of familiar rituals, including waking up, getting dressed, going to work and taking a bath. Socrates, the head boy of the piece, barely gets a mention. Nevertheless, his vision of the examined life guides the entire enterprise.

Smith’s approach is a truly local one. Like a man with a hangover at an all-you-can eat buffet, he prefers to take as many bites as possible at his subjects, refusing to limit himself to a single main dish. His appetite for theory is voracious and wide-ranging, but never descends to mere gob-stuffing. Smith, who writes columns on “life lessons” for the Evening Standard, appears to have mastered the art of intellectual grazing. It’s “a bagel with Hegel” and “eggs with Bacon”: clever, witty and eminently readable.

A single example will not do this method justice. One of Smith’s morsels – the idea, say, that the gourmet’s fondness for food and drink that is, if not actually rotten, then at least in an advanced state of maturation, resembles Edward Said’s appreciation for “late style”, the phenomenon whereby an artist’s adult work surpasses his youthful efforts in depth and subtlety – might make a nice snack, but it won’t satisfy a hungry mind. As with any meal, the ingredients are important, but the skill is in their combination.

The chapter on going to the gym provides a perfect illustration. Smith opens with the thought that gym-bunnies are individualistic and introverted, noting that the combination of “exertion with concentration and, in the locker room, ablution with being on display, a certain bracing of the self is called for, a girding of one’s boundaries”. So far so predictable, but from there Smith pivots to the idea that in their ethos of privacy in public, the rules of the gym resemble those in places of worship, from the prick of conscience on down. It’s just an idea, of course, and before it becomes silly Smith spins away. Maybe gyms are more like hospitals than churches, he suggests: the body rather than the soul is on trial, and everyone knows it, which is why “with degrees of slyness, all gym-goers, like all inpatients, wonder about the vitality of the bodies trooping past”. Three paragraphs, three ideas. Fine writing.

Smith ends the gym chapter on a Foucauldian note, comparing muscle-bound physique to the “docile body” created by state coercion, and in general there is an anti-capitalist note to his musings. The chapter on work concludes by wondering if we might take it back “to a more fundamental form, one that involves less talking and more honest labour”. Considering waking up, he laments the “mechanical and monetary madness” which has “forced a global productive insomnia whereby the moment Japan goes to sleep, America wakes up and hurries to the screen”.

If there is a fault to this book, then it is Smith’s handling of that overall theme. He plays it light for the most part, careful not to offend too many sensibilities, and his delivery is consistently moderate. A less reasoned tone or a more forceful overall thesis might push the reader through the day. As it is, the pace occasionally flags, and the book can sometimes give the impression that it hangs on a device rather than a message.

Philosophers are under no obligation to advance systems of thought or to try and tell us what to think. Like Socrates, Smith is working to challenge his fellow citizens’ theoretical presuppositions, a goal that is aided by a certain coolness. When encouraging people to examine their lives, it is usually more effective to come at them with tact and understanding rather bludgeoning them into submission with the blunt weapon of their own contradictions.

There is no such thing as a completely neutral approach, however. Even the blandest questions arrive with their own ideological underpinnings. Smith’s provocations have a common purpose: to encourage us to think instead of consume, love instead of labour. It is hard to square such a position with the form and style of this book.

For all the fine ingredients that have gone into it, Breakfast with Socrates’s pick-and-mix style reminded me most of a piece of fast food, to be read on the run and digested without undue fuss – in other words, a piece of capitalist ephemera. Smith, charmingly modest, acknowledges this possibility, but who truly thinks their book will be “rubbed out” and discarded? Such an acceptance never made fine art. I can’t help wishing Smith had written less for the marketplace, more for himself and for the future. As it is, I won’t be giving up my cynicism about everyday philosophy just yet.

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