Doubt, No Doubt — Julian Baggini

A philosopher and a writer: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.

I have been a freelance writer and philosopher for around a quarter of a century. I value the rigour of academic life and learned a lot by doing a PhD, but I wanted to be a generalist, joining the dots, not a specialist, carefully analysing them in relative isolation. There is, alas, little room for such synoptic thinking in academe. I agree with you when you say “Depth of thought calls for breadth of study,” but you are a rare beast if you’ve been able to do this within the university environment.

What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour? 

I haven’t yet come across a satisfactory definition of humour. One of its key features, however, is that it punctures pomposity and pretension. That’s why I find it philosophically powerful. The human condition is absurd, but whereas the French existentialists gravely frowned at this, there is a form of British existentialism that saw the same absurdity and laughed. I refer, of course, to Monty Python, which deflated grand narratives, mocked unwarranted certainty, and asked us to make the most of life as it is, here, now.

In general, I think the quotidian is a rich philosophical source. My most recent book is The Book of Coffee, a rewrite of Okakura Kakuzō’s 1906 classic, The Book of Tea. Okakura uses tea culture as a part that illuminates the whole, a way to understand the then dominant philosophy in Japan, a blend of Daoist and Zen thought. I updated it using contemporary coffee culture. The Book of Coffee is all about how meaning, value and purpose should be found in the textures of daily life, not in an illusory transcendent or eternal realm.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena? 

I think psychologists have more to tell us about the nature and causes of cruelty than philosophers. And also artists. Watch the films of the Coen Brothers. Again and again, they show us what psychologists tell us. Yes, there are a few psychopaths and sociopaths who revel in cruelty. But most of what we call “evil” is done by ordinary people who, small step by small step, succumb to greed, vanity, insecurity, and other psychological weaknesses, until they end up doing terrible things that they, and others, would never have thought them capable of.

There is a profound moral lesson in this. We ought always to strive to do the right thing, even in small matters, because virtue is rarely swept away by a wave of wickedness, but is eroded drop by drop by small peccadilloes.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend? 

In ethics, I think Philippa Foot is under-appreciated. She thought slowly and wrote little, but as a result what she did publish is gold. Foot tried to close the is/ought gap, arguing that there are facts that can and should change our values. She got us to attend more carefully to what ethical thinking really involves. It is not primarily about constructing arguments, but attending to the world and what matters in it. Again, I think the Coen Brothers make similar points, albeit very differently.

Anyone interested in critical thinking has to read psychology. No matter how clever you are, how good you are at logic, if you are not aware of your biases and how the mind distorts our reasoning, all you will be doing is using your intellect to justify what you want to believe. The best single volume for this is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.

I also recommend a new book by Amy Olberding, Kill All the Chickens. It’s about grief, loss and memory, but also about the nature and limits of philosophy. I think a philosopher who doesn’t have doubts about the value of what they are doing is not being very philosophical. Questioning and scepticism should extend to the value of questioning and scepticism themselves.