Philosophy

If the only story you’ve heard about Immanuel Kant’s life is that it was so regular that the citizens of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) would set their watch by his daily walk, then this book has much to teach you. In fact the provenance of this oft repeated anecdote is an essay by the German poet Heinrich Heine, who, far from being an eyewitness, had never even met Kant: ‘Everything had its set time, and the neighbours knew that it was exactly half past three when Immanuel Kant, in his grey frock coat, rattan cane in hand, emerged from his front door.’ The Kant that emerges from these pages is less dull and more recognisably human than his metronomic image. He played billiards, gambled and socialised with the great and good of Königsberg.

How can Britain cut its spiralling benefits budget and the number of alienated youths spending taxpayer-generated monies on frivolous consumer goods, facing off against the police and making life unpleasant for those of us not involved in creating poverty porn documentaries? Traditional answers – such as colonising Africa or declaring war on, let’s say, Russia – are off the table. Drones, AI and our defence budget mean that there is no prospect of a Crimean War II, led by the kind of martial Britons who so frightened the Duke of Wellington on the Peninsular campaign. What then? Britain’s current problem is one that the heroes of Joad Raymond Wren’s scintillating book never had: a complete want of thinking outside the box.

Over the long span of human existence, different cultures have held varying notions as to how responsible we are for our own thoughts and beliefs. Before the dawn of the Abrahamic religions, and in places untouched by these faiths, it tended to be the rule that individual members of the group could only be understood as parts of the whole, or in the grander cosmic scheme of things. The ascendence of Christianity in Europe, with its idea of the indivisible soul, tilted matters more towards a belief in individual agency and accountability. This concept, secularised by Descartes, who gave us the commanding rational ego, has proved resilient ever since, despite the best efforts of Freud, neuroscience and gene selection theory to dethrone it.

In the not-too-distant future, if your T-shirt starts giving fashion advice or we’re all enslaved by a race of disease-resistant metahumans, then blame Martin Amis. More precisely, blame his obsession with Space Invaders. With a foreword by Steven Spielberg, Amis’s 1982 Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines gave intellectual heft to a pursuit – videogaming – that had hitherto been the preserve of glassy-eyed youths. His advocacy proved prescient. Over the next couple of decades, the best minds of a generation dedicated their lives to making pixellated worlds as compelling and realistic as possible.

Consciousness is thought by many to define what it is to be human. We know that animals are conscious to some extent, but they don’t have what we have in that department. So if we can explain how human self-awareness works it will be a Rosetta Stone to understanding what makes our species so odd, or, depending on your view, so special. Also: big brains love exercise. And the great thing about this topic is that it can be tackled by biologists, neurologists, philosophers, physicists and even novelists. It’s an interdisciplinary, no-holds-barred intellectual wrestling match. Michael Pollan, an American journalist and academic who works at both Harvard and Berkeley, comes from a literature background but is fluent in the relevant science.

You find yourself in the heat of an argument and your mulish interlocutor refuses to see the light. ‘Please,’ you implore, ‘be reasonable.’ But what exactly are you asking? Do you want him to be more rational? Or to act as a typical person might act in his shoes? Maybe the whole question is hopelessly subjective, as your paragon of reasonableness may be his idea of madness, and vice versa. Or else perhaps your request is a mere smokescreen – a sly piece of rhetoric to mask your will to power behind the language of decency? In a short and deftly argued book, Krista Lawlor, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University, dives into the questions of how to be reasonable and why it matters – in law, in our relationships, in morality and in political life.

What biographer would pass up a time-travelling opportunity to meet their subject face to face? This novel’s protagonist, Gavin Mulvany, an academic specialising in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is somehow able to slip back in time to 1777, a year before the fractious French writer died. He turns from irritating fan to close companion, accompanying Jean-Jacques on long philosophical rambles and coach journeys around Paris. They attend the premiere of Voltaire’s last play (as does Marie Antoinette), call on Benjamin Franklin and visit the Marquis de Sade in a lunatic asylum. Gavin’s long-delayed book about Rousseau is concerned to solve the puzzle of why a passionate theorist on children’s education could dispatch his own five newborns to a foundling hospital, never to see them again.

The world divides between creeps and jerks. History can be seen as a long, unedifying creep, or what one of Alan Bennett’s characters called ‘one fucking thing after another’. Alternatively, it might be seen as consisting of jerks – that’s to say, big events that revolutionise the world (the invention of the printing press, the advent of steam, the French Revolution, Hiroshima, Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the world wide web). The latter position is essentially that of the philosopher Alain Badiou. The French Maoist maintains that the significance of events that stand out from the usual blah of history can only be grasped retroactively – vindicating Zhou Enlai’s reply when asked in 1972 about the significance of the French Revolution: ‘Too early to say.

Joanna Kavenna is very serious about games. Her novels have a certain playful quality, even her debut Inglorious, where the humour and allusions are Mittel-european. More markedly ludic are her Lewis Carroll-esque fantasy about quantum physics, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and the Philip K. Dickish tech-dystopia of Zed. In Seven, however, it’s not just the style but the subject. As if to make clear that games are neither childish nor mere distractions, there is a pointed reference to Johan Huizinga’s study Homo Ludens¸ published on the eve of the second world war. The narrator here is working for a formidable philosopher in Oslo, whose current project is entitled ‘Thinking outside the Box about Thinking outside the Box’. (‘I’m serious,’ the narrator archly notes.

We often forget to ascribe agency to modern Tibet. Politically, it seems to lie mute in the behemoth shadow of China. Culturally, we encounter it more as the backdrop to journeys of self-discovery than a producer of modern culture in its own right. But the villages of the Tibetan plateau are defiantly cosmopolitan in Ning Ken’s novel, the first by this important Chinese writer to be translated into English. Sardonic and erudite, it’s the only major literary treatment of Sino-Tibetan relations to appear in English in decades. The author belongs to the generation of such era-defining Chinese novelists as Mo Yan and Yan Lianke, publishing his first fiction in the heady days of reform and opening-up.

A researcher arrives in Trieste to piece together the life of a well-known literary figure. In cafés, bookshops and hospitals he visits the friends and lovers who were part of the writer’s circle. Now dying themselves, they share echoes of a literary scene that has long since dispersed. Women recall how they were celebrated in poetry; men how their conversation sparkled. Someone remembers how the writer once asked if he might immortalise one of his witticisms in his work: ‘Forty years ago I made a joke in a bar, and he said “Oh that’s good! Will you give it to me? I want to put it in my novel.’” But the proposed novel never came. At the heart of this short, dreamlike book is a gap: the great writer around whom this literary society orbited never published anything.

A hundred years ago, T.S. Eliot wrote to Geoffrey Faber, for whose publishing company he had just started work, complaining: ‘The Defence of the West… is a subject about which everyone thinks he has something to say.’ Plus ça change? Back then, people were coming to terms with a war that had shown the West to be neither as unified nor as civilised as had been assumed. A century on, American isolationism, demographic decline, mass immigration, Islamism and a slow but decisive shift in global economic gravity are giving commentators the opportunity to bloviate endlessly about the decline/suicide/end/decay/of the West. But what exactly it is that we are defending or lamenting is far from clear. Georgios Varouxakis’s The West attempts to answer that question.