What's it all about? Philosophy and the meaning of life
by Noel Rooney
[ bookreviews ]
What would it take to make philosophy popular? Well, there's Alain de Boton offering late (very late, Alain) versions of Wildean whimsy; but his cleverness is so subordinated to his more superficial charms that everything he speaks about becomes a species of shopping. Then there's the likes of Deepak Chopra and his blandly expansive (and expensive) lists of everything on the road to enlightenment (Walt Whitman goes Wal-Mart). Feeling better?
Whatever the answer is, it probably isn't Julian Baggini. The title of his book suggests an attempt to access the mainstream, but the effect is to topple it into the ubiquitous shopping trolley of newage 'spirituality', to compete with the vacuous homilies already resident. I was reminded of a comment by Walter Benjamin: "the empty phrase is the label that makes the thought marketable". Quite.
Should you get past that irritating front-cover bathos, you'll find a modest and sensible attempt to place ethics in the sphere of everyday life; you'll also quickly realise that others have passed this way before. Peter Singer, for instance, has dealt with a lot of these issues, and his style and approach are superior to Baggini's journeyman prosody.
Baggini's main purpose is to show that philosophy is a much better tool for analysis of life's little mysteries than the average newage psychobabble (this makes the quixotic tilt of the title mildly ironic); specifically, he offers a largely utilitarian approach to a range of ethical issues (again, Singer has been there and produced a more amiable t-shirt). Since God died, utilitarianism has become the option of choice for philosophical debate on ethics (the more cynical may be thinking that, without God, it's about the only option); and of course, utilitarianism fits nicely with liberal democracy's worldview - we can all pay lip service to the greater good.
The upshot of Baggini's investigation is that there are no easy answers (and you thought that was the easy answer), especially in a world where existentialism has morphed into an alienated version of me culture. Utilitarianism offers rational homilies where once we had heaven for guarantor; without the superhuman regulator, it can appear sensible (nice, even) but lame. For Baggini, a humanist, this is not a problem; for those of us who consider humanism as one of the last vestiges of the secret religion of the enlightenment, it most certainly is.
