Overlooking the city’s skyscrapers, my leisurely mornings began on my rooftop terrace with a new chapter of the History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.
From it, I drew conclusions that suited my rather middle-brow intellect and preference for human quirkiness over abstruse theory.
If a party, for instance, was held at Plato’s rather well-appointed home, I imagined Manny Kant would be holding court to those who assumed he must be very clever on the basis that they didn’t understand a word he said.
Descartes would be hiding from his over-enthusiastic friends in the oven, (where he did his best thinking) until the growing heat convinced him of his existence. Socrates would be mingling in the garden with the smokers and existentialists, shoeless, and asking awkward questions. Sartre would be texting his soul-mate, Simone, with pictures of the ‘nauseating’ sticky hors d’oeuvres, while rather disturbing the waitress he was flirting with by saying ‘hell is other people’s parties’. Camus would match him by darkly demanding ‘one good reason why I shouldn’t top myself’ before both hit the bottle and dance-floor on the basis that the booze and music could end at any time.
Meanwhile, Schopenhauer would be depressing the arty types in the attic; Marx inciting the servants to have their own party; ‘JS’ Mill wondering why all the guests were so pale, male and bearded; Zeno befuddling the stoners with paradoxes; and Thales obsessively contemplating a glass of water.
Elsewhere, the charismatic Romantics would be loudly demanding attention as if it was all about them before posing for enigmatic selfies to post on Instagram. The Stoics would quietly make do with a bowl of peanuts, while the Hedonists would be hogging all the best drugs, figuring tonight’s high outweighed tomorrow’s hangover. The Sceptics and Cynics wouldn’t RSVP. The first presuming the invites were a wind-up, the latter assuming it would be crap anyway. Nobody would miss them.
The entertainment would be rather lost on the sober British contingent. In the hallway, they would discuss more practical matters, except for Berkeley, who was actually Irish, thank you very much, and hallucinating that none of it was real anyway. MC Bentham would be on the decks playing the most popular music for the most people off-their-faces. This would rather save the day as Nietzsche was being particularly rude to everyone; while Heidegger was describing his beer in minute detail to the Nazi gate-crashers, and insisting afterwards, rather unconvincingly, that they weren’t really friends.
Meanwhile, Hobbes would cause consternation by charmlessly dismissing his fellow guests as ‘nasty, brutish and short’ despite later claiming he was taken out of context. Amid the carnage, Darwin looks on impassively, but without surprise. Watching Byron swinging from the chandeliers, he drily observes: ‘I blame the parents’. Hegel agrees it’s all rather inevitable and will, no doubt, recur again and again...
The party would end at midnight due to the Christians turning up to complain about the noise and blasphemy. They would justify it by quoting verbatim from an ancient book of regulations written by a rather vengeful old git before, rather hypocritically, scrapping amongst themselves. The Catholics would slink away guiltily.
Sadly, Jesus didn’t make it as he was the only real peace-maker of the bunch and got waylaid breaking a kebab roll with a homeless woman on crack. When told his ‘mate’ Paul was causing a scene at the party, he mumbled something about ‘silly cant’ before pointedly saying he’d rather go for pint with the traffic-wardens and stockbrokers.
On the morning after, if you couldn’t remember what happened, never fear, Aristotle would have taken detailed notes on everything.
Really, you’d have to be a philosopher to know why the book ran to 800 pages.