Doubtless many out there will be as appalled as I am about how the members of the Writers’ Guild – my term – club together to write bullshit blurbs for each other’s books.  I got a cracker the other day.  A C Grayling is an English philosopher who will write about anything at the drop of a hat.  He has written a book Philosophy and Life.  Since I have written about this, believing that the philosophy taught  at our universities is practically useless, I picked the book up. 

Here were the standard blurbs.  One stood out:

Grayling’s intimate and vital dialogue with many of the greatest thinkers since antiquity will inspire each of us to discover the best life we are capable of living.

This is the very ecstasy of bullshit – ‘Simon May, author of Love: A History.’

So, I buy a copy of the book with little hope and great foreboding.    It is about the Socratic Question: ‘What sort of person should I be?’  Any ‘reflective person,’ we are told, will pause and ask what really matters.  Hmmm….On page seven: ‘The word I will use to capture this net of currently prevailing social sentiment, opinion, custom, tradition and expectation is ‘normativity.’’  The foreboding is turning into despair.  Then on page fifteen: ‘In considering who we are, we have to take into account the related questions of intersectionality and positionality.’ 

Well, there goes my $28.  By page fifteen.  I should have known better.  Divide the world in two.  Those who have majored in philosophy at university – including me – and those who have not.  The former recognises this as bullshit immediately; the latter just gives up, and goes back to celebrating the mystère of  the rugby league of Melbourne Storm (who just lost a Grand Final). 

And that would be just as well.  By page 315, we get:

A reading of Dewey and Heidegger, and a grasp of the implications of Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’ for the Cartesian tradition in epistemology, are healthy correctives when one is tempted to wonder if a subjectively idealist epistemological solipsism might be true.

So, I look up Simon May in the Index.  Voilà!  Simon gets the Rolls Royce treatment for his thoughts on ‘love’ over  nearly two pages.

The point is well made….And then May points out how disastrously high this raises expectations: no imperfect mortal can provide what a divine lover offers.  Being loved by God gives the beloved a home in the universe,  a guarantee of existential safety, which May calls ‘ontological rootedness’….

There it all is – red-handed. 

So, next time you run into a philosopher, ask them how long it has been since they felt ontologically rooted.