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A campus satire whose hero is an academic philosopher, whose creator was an academic philosopher.
Clearly a book *about* academic philosophy can't *be* philosophy. It could be anthropology / sociology / economics: we might learn the *facts* about academic philosophy. But even if such facts were available, let alone readable, they remain but a trace of the human relationships: the inner-life of the university.
To represent the truth about academia as it is from the inside Drummond had to recreate that world, inhabiting the characters and their predicaments imaginatively. In other words he had to write a work of fiction, because the truth about human relationships can be grasped only through the imagination.
But why reproduce the pub conversations of academics in a work of fiction when he could have recorded or even filmed them, i.e. journalism which in some degree guarantees truth: even if someone's faking for the camera, it's still *them*.
What can't be captured by journalistic means are the back and forth of people's relationships over time, set against their social and economic exigencies; their sexual and political motives, how their rivalries play out against the larger poltical background, of the university itself but also the greater world beyond it.
The exigency we know as the 'hangover' is paradigmatic. One could film it, catalogue every physical symptom, but no cumulation of scientific fact could convey what the hangover *is* for its subject. That can only be grasped from the 'inside' or *phenomenologically* in philosophy-speak.
Our hero, Ren Christopher, the character we're rooting for, is a probationary lecturer who enjoys a drink. His justifying to himself going to work, facing down his monstrous 1.30pm hangover is one that every boozer should identify with.
A novel with a boozy young lecturer is bound to recall Kingsley Amis's 'Lucky Jim', and there is a plain-speaking Amis-like quality to Drummond's writing. But the overarching theme here is political. Ren Christopher is not only not 'left-wing', he's not shy about being 'right wing'.
Aristotle called man the "political animal". All animals exist in some power relation with others, only man represents those relationships to himself symbolically as a system: only man discourses politically. To that extent all human relationships must have a poltical dimension.
Whether City v United or Sunni V Shia, the former are no more fighting over football than the latter theology: the colours or creed furnishing the totems, rationalising the rivalry. That the fiercest rivalries are between those closest and sharing the same outlook is a commonplace, the rivalry being prior to its rationale.
What marks out the rivalry between university 'intellectuals' is that it's all the fiercer for being *entirely* 'symbolic' or 'academic' which is as much as to say *political*. Where nothing material is at stake, unlike a sporting or boxing contest, say, where you're openly trying to knock each other out, there can be no means for resolution.
Among the takeaways of this novel is laying bare the facts about the bureaucratic, anti-educational nature of the modern university; that the left-wing politics isn't so much a product of left-wing opinions on the part of academics, a popular misapprehension, as enshrined in the structure of the institution as such.
The counterproductive results of conceiving of the administration of a university according to a commercial business model have never been shown to better effect than here, not in an English context anyway. Universities are now *institutionally* anti-educational, the bureaucratic machine expanding at the expense of its educational host, which is to say to the detriment of education itself, understood as the transmission of knowledge.
An abiding theme in the writings of my old university teacher Roger Scruton was the principle of *uselessness*. A liberal education, i.e. in the humanities is and ought to be intrinsically *useless*: to be valued for its own sake. Mastering a dead language serves no worldly purpose of itself, yet requires mastery of one's own. Philosophical arguments are ‘useless’ by definition, but being able to make a logical argument should serve one in any field of endeavour.
It's no different in architecture, another of Scruton's concerns: 18th century London town-houses were built for no purpose beyond the requirement to be pleasing to the people living in them. Yet those same buildings today serve any number of functions, whereas purpose-built office blocks are typically demolished in a few years.
This is a delightful read. If the book scarcely diguises its political sympathies, the reader is never hectored. There's an episode involving a visiting lecturer which didn't quite work for me. Nevertheless I didn't skip a sentence, the flow of the writing carrying me along.
The storyline involving spurious research on the part of a Psychology professor is not only superbly done as fiction but also sheds light on the methods behind the kind of research that is daily disseminated uncritically in the mass media, reinforcing the official orthodoxy, shaping public discourse.
I originally discovered Hector Drummond via his blog, a valuable source of truth amid the virus hysteria. Likewise this book shares many insights about the nature of academia, and by extension about public life in England today. Writing about the expansion of the univerity sector back in the 50s, novelist and university lecturer Kingsley Amis foretold: 'More will mean worse.' This book spells out what *worse* means now. Deserves to be widely read.
Can't help thinking that the title does it no favours marketing wise. Not that I can think of a better one... Malcolm Bradbury had a hit with 'The History Man' in the 70s about a sociology lecturer. 'Philosophy Man' could at least register with a likely target market... Though if any academic subject takes the flak in this book it's more Psychology than Philosophy. 'The Psychology Man'?
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 June 2020Format: Kindle Edition
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 November 2020Format: Kindle Edition
Top reviews from other countries
- Robert HookwayReviewed in the United States on 11 August 2018
I hope he writes some more
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