By: Patrick

It may be that the supposed virtue of being open-minded enough to change one’s mind is a relatively modern phenomenon. I often feel slightly repelled by small-minded people who have lived in small villages all their lives and have rather blunt opinions about outsiders, whether in relation to gender, class, sexuality, or race. But how are they so different from most people in history? Or even from our liberal cosmopolitan types, who have simply been exposed to a sufficient diversity of views at a critical period of their lives such that they came to be who they are and think what they think? This is not to say that racism is preferable to openness to racial diversity, but rather, as suggested above, that people in general do not seem to change their minds based on reasoned argumentation. Instead they tend to hold moral or immoral positions for non-moral reasons, for example loyalty to one’s family or tribe. Perhaps deep down we are so fragile that we cannot face the possibility of our beliefs being anything other than ‘the truth’. In light of this, no wonder religions have created such destruction in the name of truth. The question is whether science will fare any better in the long-run. The human desire for truth, however noble, too often seems to culminate in tyranny, as Paul Feyerabend said. It seems that the problem is not the nature of the truth – whether a God or a scientific theory – so much as the actual human need for truth. Perhaps the problems related to truth emerge when we refuse to accept the contingency of our beliefs or affiliations or sense of self, so we then feels obliged to impose these views on others (presumably in order to allay anxiety). What is contingent becomes seen as transcendental – the difference of the other is then often understood as evil in order to protect a precarious faith in an intrinsic identity or order.

This would seem to be counteracted by a greater ethical generosity, but this, it seems, is no easy task, as Nietzsche makes clear when he writes that all the virtues and efficiency of body and soul are acquired laboriously and little by little, through much industry, self-constraint, limitation, through much obstinate, faithful repetition of the same labours, the same renunciations. For someone who dubbed himself the antichrist, Nietzsche sounds more than a little religious when he writes this. This should come as no surprise, as the religions, which are seen by people like Jackie as the greatest violators of this principle of ethical generosity when it comes to acknowledging the value of other modes of thinking, have also developed the best techniques and exercises for cultivating it. From my own perspective, most of the best people I know are religious. This should come as no surprise, as they spend their lives devoted to the cultivation of moral sentiments, while the rest of us just assume that we are good simply by virtue of being human. However it seems that it is rarely the best religious people who have any impact on religion. I guess the same is probably true in philosophy too, which is a slightly depressing thought.

By: Patrick

A lot of people think of philosophers as quite odd fish, and rightly so. Often this has to do with the fact that they often try and convince you that tables are not really there, for example. Philosophy and madness have much in common – indeed Wittgenstein referred to philosophy as a kind of sickness. While we may not wish to take him too literally, the philosopher’s predilection for abstraction and alienation, for detachment from the body, from the world, and so on, for equivocating endlessly on the existence or non-existence of tables, for finding problems and paradoxes in what the rest of us take for granted, offers some support to Wittgenstein’s diagnosis. Jackie is prepared to concede that a table is there, but that we cannot know this ‘objectively’. I have often pointed at the table, made claims to its wooden structure as an indicator of its objective status as a table, while Jackie would shake his head and laugh at me. Needless to say I find such debates very trying on the old patience. Despite my love of philosophy, I have never been troubled by Matrix-style questions of brains in vats or the non-objective status of tables.

What has always fascinated me is that in all the time I’ve known him, he has never really veered from his position at all. I have often thought this must be quite boring, but maybe this is youth talking. Jackie is the sort of person who could see a talk on anything and then ask pretty much the same question, in which he tries to ascertain whether the speaker is claiming that what he is speaking about is in fact ‘an objective truth’. I once asked him about why he does this and questioned whether it doesn’t get a bit dull after a while. Don’t humans, like snakes, need to shed their skins from time to time in order to avoid perishing, I asked him? At this point, Jackie launched into a tirade about all the damage that had been done in the name of truth, and so on. It reminded me, as I often need reminding, that people get hurt and they carry their hurts, often in very raw forms, for the rest of their lives. Over half a century later, Jackie was still nursing the wounds of his Catholic upbringing, just like his contemporary Michel Foucault, who also spent much of his life railing against his Catholic upbringing by pointing to the social construction of our truths and their links to oppressive power structures.

For Jackie the important point was that all truth and reality is filtered through human eyes, and therefore can never be objective. So for me to claim that the table exists objectively seems patently absurd to Jackie – hence the laughing at me. Often, however, when philosophers take a strong stance like Jackie’s, it can have unfortunate consequences. For example, one day Dario asked Jackie if the world therefore did not exist before the first human who could perceive it. If it in fact did exist, this would be an objective truth and his whole system would collapse. Jackie felt that this was not a question that he could address, especially as to stick to his position would have made him sound dangerously like someone who believed that the world emerged at the same time as man, presumably as the result of some divine power and creator of humans. That said, as far as I know, he is still yet to modify his position; he still asks the same questions and denies the objective status of tables. Human, all too human…

Jackie is just one example, but I guess I have found myself so often surprised by the rather irrational foundations for the core beliefs people hold all their lives. Maybe I was naive to expect more from a society of philosophers, but in the end philosophers may not be the truth seekers they present themselves as, so much as people smart enough to use subtle logical arguments to defend their generally rather irrationally held beliefs. Most other people just punch you if you challenge their deep beliefs, so I guess the philosophical approach is the preferable one (although perhaps the less honest one). Perhaps it’s a bit strong to call philosophers irrational in their beliefs, but they are certainly emotional. William James saw this when he wrote that articulate reasons are only cogent for us when our inarticulate feelings of reality have been impressed in favour of the same conclusion. For James, the whole person is in play when we form our philosophical opinions, not just the disengaged, lucid, logical part. In this sense, the philosophical ideal of determining a position’s plausibility or absurdity rarely has its source in a process of rational deliberation.

By: Patrick

At this point it is worth taking a bit of a digression from the bickering and squabbling, specifically a more philosophical digression. I always feel more comfortable when the members of the society fall out over philosophical ideas rather than ideas about what philosophy is. These latter meta-philosophical questions tend to lead to far more damaging and long-term splits, in my experience. There was always one philosophical question that could guarantee a room united in disagreement, a disagreement that transcended any sectarian bickering – the question of God.

It would be fair to say that most of the membership is comprised of atheists of differing levels of militancy. Many people come to philosophy to find meaning in life following the much proclaimed death of God. They are generally left disappointed. One may speculate that this is what leads to the rather pessimistic and nihilistic tendencies alluded to earlier. If post-Christian philosophy has taught us anything about how to live, it is that the responsibility lies firmly on the shoulders of the individual. The reality is that for almost every human since Nietzsche, who seemed to see this radical autonomy as a source of great joy, this responsibility has been a burden far too weighty to bear. 20th century philosophy, especially Sartre’s existentialism, tended to berate the individual for taking refuge in a belief that we are less than radically free – this was seen as a dishonest move, an example of bad faith. Rousseau famously wrote that men are born free, but are everywhere in chains. In our time, stripped (largely) of God, class structures, hierarchies, and so on, the sad truth is that these chains are largely of our own making. A few people do of course seek freedom, but as some wit pointed out, to assume that because these few seek freedom that we all seek freedom is like thinking that, because there are flying fish, it is in the nature of fish to fly. I would have to agree, such is our weakness, fragility and the undeniably weighty burden of freedom. Love of truth may be terrible and mighty; the quest for freedom is equally treacherous. Some in the philosophy society continue to dream of freedom, while the rest find some consolation in fighting for a world without God.

Unofficial leader and guru of the society’s God bashing contingent was Jackie Graziano, sailor, artist, teacher, writer, revolutionary, post-modernist, humanist and, primarily, atheist. It is difficult to imagine how hurt some people can be by religion. To me it has always seemed like fairly harmless fun, but for some the desire to overturn the oppressive power of religions was a life-long one. Jackie was one such character. In pursuit of this goal, Jackie has veered in the course of his life from Marxism to Existentialism and finally ended up with Postmodernism. If in the end, as Nietzsche wrote, every great philosophy has been the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unnoticed memoir, the same may presumably be said for every less-than-great philosophy, into which category I would reluctantly have to consign Jackie’s.

By: Patrick

My comment did indeed steer the evening’s discussion into a new and unexpected direction. It was notable that very little time was actually spent discussing the question that I had posed, for with a kind of painful inevitability the group seemed drawn to a far more pertinent question concerning anarchy and the philosophy society: what do we do about Joey ‘The Bunny’ Castellano? Joey was, after all, nothing if not anarchic. Not in a political sense, but in a kind of ‘anything goes’ sense. In a recent group, he had made some outlandish statement about human nature that had incensed Pietro sufficiently for him to ask that most un-philosophical of questions: ‘What evidence do you have for saying that?’ Without missing a beat, Joey responded with ‘The fact that I just said it’. Still smarting from this encounter, Pietro was stirring up the sectarian currents that were slowly building up within the society:

‘I mean he has no respect for philosophy. All he says is that philosophers have got it wrong – that they’ve been sending us all on a wild goose chase. I mean how can he say things like that? But all of his disciples just lap it up. You should have seen them the other week – it was like the cult of Joey Castellano. The man can do no wrong in their eyes. But he’s not even doing philosophy. It’s ridiculous. I mean…’

Noticing a proliferation of nods around the room, I interjected at this point:

‘Pietro, I take your point and agree that Joey is pretty unconventional, but you have to accept that he is a Socratic philosopher. For him there is Socrates and very little else besides. So he sees it as his duty to keep questioning everything and stripping everything that we take for granted away until we realise that what we thought was the true and self-evident is in fact anything but. And of course it upsets people, but surely that’s their problem, not his. Of course, the Athenians ended up killing Socrates because he pissed them off so much’.

Pietro is of course a classic example of the kind of ‘criminal’ or ‘killer’ that Paulie and company were discussing earlier. He would definitely have sold out Socrates or Jesus or any other free thinker who challenged his ideas too much. In fact, most of the people there would have joined him. It’s strange how seriously people take their ideas. He seemed to get my point, but the resentment was still simmering in the room. Surprisingly it was Paola who re-ignited it:

‘I find Joey’s groups hostile – it’s like you can’t criticise what he says or the rest of the room turns on you. I’m not going back again on Saturdays. It’s just no fun anymore’.

‘And I’m worried about the level of debate on Saturdays – it’s dangerously low’, chipped in Placedo, a strong supporter of Pietro and a long-term antagonist of Joey, who he felt represented ‘the worst excesses of the continental tradition’. This rather racist sounding comment in fact refers to the Anglo-American vs. Continental divide in philosophy, with the former generally being about logic, reason, and polite cups of tea, and the latter characterised by emotion, subversion, and destruction (or deconstruction as they like to call it) (it should be noted that this divide is not quite as clear-cut as I just made out, but will suffice for now).

Pietro had now found his voice again: ‘Absolutely, I couldn’t believe it the other week when Mickey, you know, Mickey Ballerini, the hippie guy, well he told me that I should open my mind a bit more. I mean the bloody cheek of it. As if criticising Joey is de facto a sign of a closed mind. And then just to add insult to injury when I emailed him the other day to demand an apology cos he’d insulted me and hurt my feelings, you won’t believe what that cheeky fucker wrote back. Here we go’. He had pulled out his phone and had now triumphantly located the offending email response. ‘He wrote ‘is your mind open to the possibility that I did not hurt your feelings, I just said some words, and you let them hurt your feelings’. The bloody cheek of it’.

I found myself laughing as this was just the kind of pseudo-spiritual consciousness-expanding nonsense that Mickey comes out with the whole time. Pietro and Mickey have a strained relationship that goes back to a talk Mickey gave on happiness that Pietro, pushed to the limits by what he felt were Mickey’s non-philosophical statements, dismissed as ‘a load of utter new-age wank’.

‘I mean this isn’t philosophy’, continued Pietro, ‘this is mysticism or religion or something, but it’s not philosophy’.

I tried to counter with a reminder of the extreme elasticity of the concept of philosophy, but by this point my attempts to bridge the divide was falling on deaf ears. And anyway I largely agreed with Pietro’s verdict on Mickey’s tenuous kinship to the philosophical undertaking – we had to draw the line somewhere and Mickey seemed as good a place as any. So I just sat back, drank some of Dario’s wine, and reminded myself that the secret to getting the most out of the society was not to take anything or anyone in it remotely seriously.

By: Patrick

So anarchism was the theme for today’s meeting. Leading proceedings was Pietro DeMarco, a bearded bankrupt with badly bloated bowels. Perhaps my alliterative goals have done something of an injustice to Pietro, so I should probably try and rectify that before proceeding. Pietro is indeed a bankrupt and he does indeed have a beard. He also has irritable bowel syndrome and various other grim psycho-somatic ailments to which he seems to shamelessly refer in a manner that makes me somewhat uncomfortable. He is a delightfully contradictory character, veering between the boorish bluster and aggressive assertiveness of his working class Cockney upbringing (please note that I accept there are exceptions to this rule), and an acute sensitivity and proneness to depression (and subsequent bowel-related ailments). Or maybe this is not contradictory at all; maybe one presupposes the other. I often worry that I am a bit literal on such matters, and that any notion of contradiction in the human personality is simply a bourgeois conspiracy, aided in no small part by psychology and other enforcers of a rather dull status quo. In fact, at the risk of sounding contradictory, the truly contradictory person would surely be the person who lacked any contradictions. Perhaps this is what Chesterton was getting at when he wrote that ‘the madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason’.

Pietro was in fact anything but dull, aside from when he was being a bit long-winded. He seems to spend much of his time making demands of the society that we almost always fail to meet (for example that we should set up a Facebook page to attract new members or that members should contribute more to the online blog or that members should read more philosophy before attending groups, and so on) before quitting acrimoniously and then returning again shortly afterwards. The chorus of Katy Perry’s Hot n Cold could have been written for Pietro, as I mentioned to him once, much to his non-amusement.

So anyway, he was leading the group. There were about half a dozen of us, including a woman, Paola Greco. It is worth mentioning at this point that women do attend the society, as they have been notable by their absence from this narrative thus far. More often than not of course they get scared off by the amorous/lecherous advances of Dario, the belligerence of Pietro, or any number of other limiting factors that seem to render the society primarily masculine. This is a problem to which we will doubtless return in due course. We discussed anarchism a bit – how certain animals seem to be more cooperative than competitive, a few theories of human nature, certain apparent flaws in the whole anarchist position, and so on. Unlike Joey’s groups, this was very much philosophy as polite debate over cups of tea. I decided to steer it into potentially more controversial territory by questioning the relevance of the whole anarchy project to our philosophy society itself. After all, I suggested, with our chairman, secretary, treasurer, and an additional swollen board full of lazy philosophical equivalents of fat cats, were we not in fact reproducing the worst tendencies of the capitalist society we were spending our time critiquing?

By: Patrick

Artie died today. Or, maybe yesterday, I don’t know. The email from the secretary wasn’t clear. And I didn’t know Artie well enough to consider the details worth chasing up. A lot of our members seem to die. I hope they die well. Otherwise we may stand accused of having let them down. After all, it was Plato who wrote that ‘Those who apply themselves to philosophy in the proper way are doing no more or less than preparing themselves for the moment of dying and the state of death’. People come to the philosophy society for lots of reasons, but learning to die well is rarely one of the stated objectives. Maybe the search for Truth is a search for a peaceful death? But who cares about Truth (capital T) in philosophy nowadays? So passé…

Artie was quite misanthropic, and my suspicion is that one cannot go gently into that good night while still considering one’s fellow humans to be little more than particularly cunning, selfish, and violent apes. It seems to lack wisdom, at least according to my definition of the term. Artie would enjoy spending time with his curmudgeonly friend Gianfranco. They would slag humans off for hours on end. I’m not sure it was very philosophical, but it seemed to keep them happy.

As for what it even means to be philosophical, now that’s a tricky question. I often feel that some members have definitions so radically different from each other that they may as well be talking about different things. Often enough they literally can’t sit in the same room without laying into each other. Take Luciano and his badgering of Jonnie for juicy emotional titbits. He would call that philosophy: ‘Listen, man, philosophy is life, not hiding behind cups of tea talking about books written by dead people’. How does one square that kind of view with the ‘standard’ position that one does philosophy by reading philosophy and discussing philosophy in a respectful, boundaried manner? The unsettling fact is that one doesn’t. And hence the acrimonious fall-outs that seem to bedevil the society on a regular basis.

So that’s where things stand – a regional philosophy society at war. It was not until I attended a one-off group convened in memory of Artie that I realised how deep the fissures had grown. We met at Dario Rossi’s flat, one of my favourite venues in the city as it overlooks the rather impressive Chester Burn viaduct, one of the few notable features of the local area. Dario is also one of my favourite members of the society, a charming yet largely unsuccessful lecher. Or to be more specific, unsuccessful as a lecher; in most other respects Dario would be considered rather successful, even esteemed. And to be fair, I suspect that for most of his life Dario was considered a successful and even esteemed lecher, but back then I guess that one would use a less judgemental term like lothario or womanizer. For Dario is now seriously old – hence the judgemental position I took in using the term lecher. One has to be truly cursed to take on this title before one reaches deep into old age. At this point it becomes almost unavoidable, more a factual than a value-laden position.

Dario is another one of these fanatical types, but in his case it is the plight of the ecosystems and by extension the world to which he devotes his energies (of which there is an abundance given his lack of sexual conquests). Dario occupies a revered position within the society as he used to be friends with some prominent eco-inspired philosopher prior to moving to the UK from Canada. It is fascinating that the members tend to care so much about what these strangers write or say, while caring little for the (often more interesting) opinions of each other. But that’s another matter.

Dario takes great pleasure in flooding the mailing list with apocalyptic articles that he has sourced detailing the evermore gruesome plight of the ecosystem and all those creatures that make use of it for food and energy and so on. Or maybe he doesn’t take much pleasure himself, but his doom-laden contributions are lapped up by most of the members, especially the older male ones. Perhaps there is something comforting in endorsing a nihilistic position that positions humans as clever parasites hell-bent on destroying its host. I guess that one of the most painful things about death is the sense that the world goes on without you and doesn’t care that much when you’re gone. But if the world is unlikely to go on much beyond your own departure, then perhaps there is some consolation there. Artie was certainly one of Dario’s most enthusiastic supporters, never short of an indulgently apocalyptic response to Dario’s emails. Ironically perhaps, Artie was reading Kropotkin’s anarchist masterpiece Mutual Aid shortly before his death, a book that pre-supposes the possibility of humans living in harmonious and non-destructive ways as the basis for its possibility. I had always placed him on the side of the nihilists, but maybe he still had hope, even faith, until the end.

By: Patrick

Our final member that morning came in shortly afterwards. Luciano Corallo was one of Joey’s most devoted disciples. Young, handsome, passionate, he was one of the more militant enforcers of the primacy of the interpersonal in philosophy groups. Only recently I had been appalled as he told one of our speakers, a new member called Jonnie, that everything he had said was a waste of time before demanding to know more about his life, his emotions, every intimate detail he would reveal. Perhaps naturally Jonnie held out and kept bringing it back to the philosophy he had been talking about. Luciano gave him the usual treatment: ‘Good luck with your life mate. You’re just hiding behind cups of tea. You’re not being real with me’. And so on. I had heard a few things about him, that he was a former criminal, that he had been diagnosed schizophrenic – all interesting stuff. It turned out that he had been remanded for a night in a cell for some youthful tomfoolery and that the latter rumour was completely untrue. Nonetheless, he retained a powerful hold over me and many others. He was liable to unload on anyone at any point. He was unpredictable, Byronic, I guess you might say. I was a bit afraid of him. But at the same time confident that in time I would be able to work him out and then, if necessary, crush him. I am another one who has received the hiding behind cups of tea spiel. I ended up calling him a sociopath. I wasn’t proud of it, but I don’t think it hurt his feelings – probably because he is a sociopath. He sat down at the table and turned to Paulie:

‘You are a criminal, Paulie’.

They laughed.

And so it began, again.

In the early days I often found it difficult to keep up with the language, the intensity of the group dynamics, the whole thing really. It was like a different world. Fucking insane, I would say to myself after some meetings. Take the assumption of criminality, for example. The idea that we are all criminals is based on the suggestion that we commit emotional crimes against those we love on a daily basis. We get upset with a loved one and turn our back on them; we promise eternal friendship and then when that friend arrives at your door in the middle of a nervous breakdown, you tell him to hop it as your wife is not so fond of him. Sometimes the stakes were upped and we were all murderers, presumably to distinguish our emotional crimes from the petty sort. Mothers murder their children; husbands murder their wives, and so on. In their defence, people do commit terrible emotional ‘crimes’ every day, often without realising it, usually without acknowledging it. As R.D. Laing famously wrote, ‘the initial act of brutality against the average child is the mother’s first kiss.’ Heavy stuff. Stuff we don’t like to talk about. No wonder this group felt strange. These guys couldn’t talk about anything else!

The reference to turning a friend away at the door wasn’t just random. In fact Paulie had pretty much done it to Luciano recently. Hence the criminal reference. They were all friends now. But Paulie had let Luciano down, and this was not going to be forgotten in a hurry. Paulie, it seems to me, is going through a bit of a late life crisis. Well, not exactly a crisis as he seems quite happy, but as I mentioned earlier, he’s a bit of a fanatic about this whole relationship thing. Joey couldn’t wish for a more devoted disciple. So Paulie gets a bit sucked into this whole thing and can’t seem to help saying things like ‘The other is more important than the self’ – the kind of stuff that was emerging from 20th century phenomenologists like Levinas. He also says things like ‘I will never leave you’ and other pretty grand statements of devotion. With Paulie it’s probably a bit like the Germans prior to World War 2, with the humble Volk promising their Jewish neighbours (were such a conversation to arise) that they would not betray them to any hypothetical genocidal Nazis. Good intentions, no doubt, but somewhat more difficult to follow through on in the heat of the moment.

So anyway, Luciano had been having a few problems – work problems (a customer from his building business suing him or something), relationship problems, housing problems – all one on top of the other. Things were getting pretty heavy. Maybe naturally Luciano thought of Paulie’s rather grand promises of placing the other before the self, of never leaving a friend, and presumably various others that had been made. So he called up Paulie. Apparently Paulie was rather less than the obliging Samaritan figure when faced with a confused, unpredictable, potentially volatile Luciano pouring his heart out down the phone and asking – literally – for shelter. You see, Paulie is pretty bourgeois underneath all the big chat. He has a lot to lose. He has a big house in a nice part of town and, more importantly, a wife, Carmen, who can’t stand the philosophers – she thinks they’re all a bunch of quacks. She’s quite sensible, really. I don’t know how she puts up with Paulie and his fanatical ways. Anyway, the whole Luciano coming to stay because he’s having a breakdown conversation either never happened because Paulie bottled it, or Carmen just gave him ‘the stare’, and not much more was said. I couldn’t really envisage Paulie putting up much resistance. So the old case of one’s mouth writing cheques that one struggles to cash in the cold light of the non-philosophical reality had bitten Paulie on the ass, so to speak, and Luciano was now enjoying the sense of moral superiority that this situation had conferred on him.

To be honest, I was as well. Despite my rather lowly position in the society, I was happy enough to twist the knife by suggesting that by the sounds of it, Paulie had indeed let Luciano down in rather a big way, that he was at best a well intentioned hypocrite, and at worst a scoundrel, and so on. It was quite fun. Tino was loving it too – chipping in with occasional comments about Paulie being a fake, a fraud, a charlatan, a phony, a cheat, a shyster, a trickster, and so on. As a poet (of sorts), Tino has quite a repertoire when he decides to let rip.

Anyway, before I knew it, it was lunchtime. As the workers trooped in for sustenance to keep them working away, we each silently felt the warm glow of smugness that comes from having reached Monday lunchtime unsullied by the ignominies of the working world. This was indeed the good life I had stumbled upon.

By: Patrick

Read the previous part of the interview here.

Interviewer: What about marginal cases, in which the person is – arguably – incapable of loving, such as a miscarried baby, or a person in a ‘persistent vegetative state’? Do these cases fall outside the category of those capable of living meaningfully? Do we have to concede that the experience of one’s life as meaningful is, in these cases, the wrong measure?

Patrick: Perhaps it is worth beginning by considering animals before moving onto the examples you offered. Can an animal be said to be capable of living a meaningful life? I would have to say no. Of course animals may make other peoples’ lives extremely meaningful (for example I am pretty sure I read somewhere that some people marry their pets), but I think that questions of meaning only become relevant once one has a certain level of consciousness, including language, culture, and other elements that offer meaning to the question of meaningfulness. It’s a bit like looking at a hamster spinning in its wheel in an apparently frantic attempt to make time move faster and wondering ‘is the hamster bored?’ Surely not. The question of a meaningful life pre-supposes a subject that can engage with such a question and strive towards achieving such a goal. In light of this, I think that in those cases where human consciousness is so severely restricted that one cannot learn, gain satisfaction or fulfilment, and so on, questions surrounding such higher goals as a meaningful life are misconceived. Having said that, it is clearly possible to imagine someone with severe learning difficulties, for example, who finds meaning in life through caring for a goldfish or tending to a pot plant or something like that. While such an activity may not be seen by less cognitively impaired people as very meaningful when compared to falling in love or devoting one’s life to a worth cause, insofar as it offers a sense of fulfilment, self-efficacy, social approval and so on to the person with learning difficulties, it must be seen as contributing to a meaningful life. This suggests that in questions of living meaningfully there are no objective criteria we can point to independent of the needs of the individuals in question. Some people may just have to work a lot harder to achieve a sense of meaning in life, but this does not mean that their activities are objectively more meaningful than those who may find meaning in looking after a goldfish.

By: Patrick

Joey generally refused to eat or drink at the places we hung out. When put on the spot by a particularly insistent waitress, he would begrudgingly order some green tea or something, but generally he would order nothing. He felt that eating (and presumably drinking) was a waste of time, a way to suppress anxiety. In short, non-philosophical. Wiry and relentlessly energetic, he would often speak with such intensity that foam would build up at the sides of his mouth (presumably because he was so de-hydrated). He was certainly an unusual man, one under whose influence I would fall from time-to-time before violently rebelling as I felt my sense of self being compromised. That said, it was difficult not to admire him for his tireless enthusiasm, his devotion to philosophy, and his sheer chutzpah. He brushed my doom-laden summation of recent philosophical mishaps aside with a shrug.

‘You say nothing new. What else happens when a group of people get intimate?’

I mentioned Mickey and no one turning up to his group again, suggesting that this was not very intimate or even supportive.

Joey was un-phased: ‘As you know, Mickey was taught all he knows by the Aztec Indians. He will find a way to cope. Mickey’s problem is that he does not know how to philosophise. He just wants to expand people’s minds and then get them to sign up for one of his workshops. He doesn’t know the first thing about relationship. No wonder no one turns up to his groups.’

At this point the door opened and Tino Leonardo swept in. With no introduction he immediately started haranguing Paulie. They were kind of like brothers, I guess. Or at least that’s what Joey had suggested a while back and I guess it stuck.

Still standing, Tino laid straight in: ‘I think it’s all a bit fake, this whole relationship thing, Paulie. A bit fake, yes. And I’m not convinced by your philosophy, no not at all. It’s a ragbag of ideas loosely held together by this whole relationship thing. Not convinced at all’.

At this point, he turned round to me and grinned. He had a soft spot for me, mainly because I was prepared to listen to him. Everyone else thought he was mad. Which according to most diagnostic criteria, he is. Or at least was. He spent quite a lot of his youth believing that he was Jesus Christ and going on various ill-advised pilgrimages. He was naturally very proud to have escaped the mental health system a number of years back. He claims that it was largely due to finding language, particularly poetry. He will often stand and declaim poetry at me, or indeed at anyone who will listen. Maybe it’s like a nervous tic. He has some pretty bizarre theories, for example that Queen Elizabeth was Shakespeare, and I suspect that he still believes he is the messiah but has learnt to keep quiet about it. He occasionally goes down to speaker’s corner in London to tell people about this under the guise of ‘Mystical Bard Northern’. Despite all his quirks, he is quite a shrewd chap and I enjoy his company, often immensely. I have learnt to lay down the law with regards to declaiming his poetry; otherwise I become like a rabbit in the headlights. A bored rabbit.

Tino was back at it again before Paulie interjected, telling him to calm down and to take a seat. Tino turned to me and smiled again, aware perhaps of his tendency to make these rather flamboyant entrances. He has often been known to walk in, harangue Paulie, recite some poetry (uninvited) and then walk out again. This time he sat down. And ordered a latte.

By: Patrick

We never really worked. Work was for bums, not philosophers. Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness was our Bible. We got by, well admittedly we got by largely as we were all retired having worked bloody hard all our lives, but be that as it may, the world of work was not for us, although some of us did work, including myself. But that’s beside the point. We liked to meet on a Monday morning, to drink coffee and explore truth while the non-philosophers settled down to another week of work. As ever, Paulie Silviano, our boss, was there first. He fixed his eyes on me as I sat down. He took a sip of black coffee. I kind of knew what he was going to say. He felt that there were exciting things for us on the horizon. Things were really changing. He could feel it. I interjected:

‘But, Paulie, you’ve been saying this for months now. The reality is that we talk about all these plans, but we never get beyond the talking stage. How are we going to make an impact on the city? We just skulk around in coffee shops, generally not buying enough to keep the owners happy. We talk the talk – getting philosophy into the schools, getting big name speakers up, you know the usual stuff. But that’s the extent of it. What is it exactly that’s changing?’

It is worth mentioning at this stage that Paulie is something of a fanatic. It seems that he spent his life pursuing career goals and fucking people over while generally neglecting friendships, family, and so on. His kids have various mental health diagnoses. In the twilight of his years, he has decided to make amends. So he can’t talk about anything other than relationships. Literally. You could talk to him about anything – the taste of a milkshake, Einstein’s theory of relativity, whatever, and you can guarantee that Paulie will answer with something like ‘What I hear you/Einstein say is that there is a need for greater focus on what is going on between people’ and so on. It can get pretty fucking tedious at times. But he’s the boss – what can I do about it?

He looked at me and smiled. ‘I can’t believe you don’t feel it, all the changes that are going on between people. It’s crazy. There’s just so much energy at the moment. People are really opening up. Things are really changing’.

I mentioned that two people had apparently stormed out of the Saturday meeting after a violent disagreement over the nature and goal of wisdom. Also, that one of the group leaders had threatened to resign after a member had got bored with the philosophical nature of the discussion and started haranguing him over his status as a lonely, divorced man, the implication being that he was only interested in philosophy as he was bored, lonely and old. He had not taken kindly to this suggestion. Finally, I mentioned that one of the groups had folded as the group leader, Mickey Ballerini, had for the second time in a row found himself alone in a room, with no one to seduce with his new-age blend of pop philosophy, spirituality, and quantum physics. I must admit I was relieved as I think the guy’s a bit of a charlatan. He refers to himself as a ‘conscious evolution coach’ in his emails and has managed to get money out of the society for various things that most people would probably have done for free. That said, I kept my own personal views out of it this morning as I lumped one seeming misfortune onto another in an attempt to get Paulie to acknowledge the realities of a philosophy society that was slowly imploding, a victim of its vaulting ambition to raise philosophy into the realm of the gods, a victim, in short, of the vision of Joey ‘The Bunny’ Castellano. If Paulie was the brains of the society (well, kind of), Joey was very much the heart. A retired psychiatrist, he rejected any distinction between philosophy and psychology, a position that through his charismatic presence had filtered into the depths of the society, albeit not without considerable dissent, of which more will be said. Joey was generally at the heart of all controversies, and revelled in it. He walked in at this point.