the compulsive votary

The Form of Things: Essays on Life, Ideas and Liberty in the Twenty-First Century, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pp244, ISBN 0-297-85167-5

All windswept iron hair, square jaw, and compellingly myopic cold blue eyes, A. C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, and author of various beautifully received works such as The Refutation of Scepticism, Moral Values, An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, and Wittgenstein , is both knowing and gorgeous in the dustcover portrait for The Form of Things , something like Michael Douglas as Professor Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys , or Jeff Bridges in his low-fat tennis-playing prime, bespectacled and evaluative and very literally high-browed, with the suggestion of a predatory leonine sexuality in his smile. His expression – tolerant, privately complicated – warns of an inexorable intellect, superficially softened or disguised by the eloquence of his prose.

Fifth in Grayling's vivid essay miscellany series, The Form of Things is an anthology of pieces originally published in the New Statesman, the Independent on Sunday, the Literary Review, The Times, the Financial Times , and others. The form itself, as he points out, has a distinguished history in the literary and philosophical tradition – Herodotus, Pliny, Plutarch, Montaigne, Bacon, Dr Johnson, De Quincy. The premise? To essay contributions to the one great conversation is to offer ”pieces for a mosaic that would in sum depict something true about the human condition, and how it should be endured or if possible enjoyed – but at least understood.”

Grayling's aim is no different. He believes in electing oneself a votary of that which he calls the “considered life” (“reading, thinking, conversing, learning, enjoying, judging, being sceptical, being open-minded”). After all, as he points out, the average human life is less than a thousand months long, and as a third of those months is spent asleep, conscious human existence averages some six hundred months (“A lifetime is thus … lodged between a sleep and a forgetting; and there scarcely seems time to draw breath in it, before its last breath is drawn”). Grayling wants what L. A. Cranmer Byng referred to “the beauty that underlies the form of things,” seeking it as a bridge to others, the collective inheritance of wisdom, and as evidence of the higher spheres. “If, when griefs are accumulating, one manages to cling to the belief that the best things in human life are still deeply valuable and worth pursuing, that is what it is to be morally courageous.”

Characterized by charm and a peculiarly Edwardian languor, the musings of Grayling and those like him are, in this era of branding and empty signifiers, close to extinct. He rhapsodizes about Song dynasty monochrome porcelains (“there is only one thing in the arena of human craft that compares with the beauty of those breathtaking objects, and that is music”), and argues for the necessity of exposure to narrative art in order to educate, refine, and enlarge the sympathies (without which, of course, ethics cannot exist). “Only if one has a rich array of possible narratives and goals to choose from,” he notes, ”can those choices and actions be truly informed and maximally free.”

Saul Bellow called it the glamour of thought - as opposed, say, to Paris Hilton's doctrine of vaginal disclosure - and Grayling is nothing if not glamorous. His rhetoric is a seduction in itself (who could forget his description of the universe as “a neutral play of blind forces”?). And when he writes of the late nineteenth century Swiss Riviera as a locus for the rich and famous (“Each day English aristocrats, Russian princes, New York financiers, maharajahs, stars of opera and theatre – the scions of wealth, privilege and fame – strolled on the lake shore, or through the vineyards on the hills behind them, or yachted on the lake”), he is really only yearning for a time when philosophers and artists could be superstars, in which the immaterial not only mattered but prevailed – in essence, a derailing of the democratizing of our language (“This tendency is what, in the extreme, produces pidgins: simple clumsy languages incapable of nuance, detail, abstraction and precision”), and demotion of its elder gruntsmen (David Beckham, Shane Warne). His is a clarion call for constructive elitism.

Only occasionally does he fall into ideological potholes. Religion, he opines, is no more than “superstitious and fanciful worldviews directly descended from the ignorance of the cave-man”; Bacon and Descartes “showed how to winnow the grain of knowledge from the chaff of nonsense”; and, most embarrassingly, a “mature society … reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable disease in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have a right to censor.”

Now, other than the fact that religious feeling can spring from the intelligence of awe just as easily as it does from tribal loyalty or credulity, that which we understand to be Reason can be the subject of idolatry as superstitious and fanciful as that of any caveman. Dualism is a human construct, and “[b]ad language and sex” are inextricably associated with poverty, preventable disease in the third world, oppression, and injustice. Witness the millions (yes, millions) of women and children trafficked as sex slaves each year. And the obscenity known as the porn industry pivots upon the feminization of poverty and the “[b]ad language” through which its eroticized denigration is justified.

Infrequent caveman lapses and ideological misattributions aside, Grayling is an intellectual exquisite, graceful, commanding, inhomogeneous, and with enough insight to understand the truth of Isaiah Berlin's remark that the “philosopher sitting in his study today can change the course of history within fifty years.” Whilst not enough to turn the world on its axis, The Form of Things is an infinitely elegant work, entertaining and memorable enough to trigger important levels of change.

*Originally published in The Weekend Australian