Robert Rowland Smith takes breakfast with Socrates

What’s the idea behind Breakfast With Socrates?

Breakfast With Socrates takes you through an ordinary day in the company of some extraordinary ideas. From waking up in the morning, through going to work, seeing the doctor, shopping, watching TV and eating dinner, it looks at everyday life through the eyes of Descartes, Weber, Nietzsche, and so on. You get advice from Machiavelli on how to behave at a party, and from the Buddha on not falling asleep in the bath. While you’re on the treadmill at the gym, Bakhtin shows you how to use your body as a political weapon.

It’s a way of taking Socrates’s dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living” very literally!

Various people, such as Alain de Botton, Nigel Warburton, Roger-Pol Droit, have been writing about the philosophy of everyday life recently. Why the recent upsurge of interest?

I’m not sure it adds up yet to a “movement”, and between those writers are differences not to be glossed over. But insofar as it can be identified, “popular philosophy” hasn’t arrived out of the blue. It has emerged in reaction to the closure of philosophy departments in universities; to the sometimes off-putting nature of Anglo-Saxon philosophy where still practised; to the intellectual limits placed on even the most highbrow journalism. If those are some of the negative conditions, then you can’t ignore the democratisation of knowledges in general. But, like all historical phenomena, popular philosophy isn’t reducible to what has preceded it – it is also new and different.

As for the everyday, the authority on the subject – Michel de Certeau – came earlier; and there’s Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. Arguably existentialism is nothing but a philosophy of everyday life – think of Heidegger and Sartre. From there, you could keep stepping backwards through the canon.

Is there anything new that you bring to this particular breakfast table?

For a start, it’s a continental breakfast – as well as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, my references are to Derrida, Bataille, and Foucault. Secondly, I don’t consider myself a philosopher – at Oxford I taught English Literature, and have written as much on Shakespeare, J. H. Prynne, Samuel Beckett. Thirdly, I have for the past decade been a management consultant, working with executives on business strategy and organisational change. Taken together, those sources mean the breakfast table has a particularly broad spread.

Critics of this brand of popular philosophy say that it reduces the subject to self-help, that philosophy is about understanding the world, not making your life more bearable. How would you reply to them?

Set aside the fact that since at least Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy, philosophy has frequently adopted a therapeutic tone, and take the critics you mention. The question suggests they’re working on a hierarchy that promotes patrician philosophy over plebeian self-help – i.e., their criticism amounts to class prejudice disguised as judgment. In response, I’d argue that understanding the world can make your life more bearable. And if, when it fails, it’s still preferable to not understanding, this isn’t because “understanding” is the be-all and end-all: understanding suggests a capability that’s mainly cognitive, whereas I’m interested also in ways of knowing that are unconscious, aesthetic, even telepathic.

Isn’t there a reason why we don’t remember Kant for his Critique of Pure Orange Juice: Shouldn’t philosophy be about the big issues?

Annie Dillard remarked that how we spend our days is how we live our lives, and Breakfast with Socrates tries to get at the mega issues through the micro ones, not to favour either. Waking up, for example, throws us into the arms of consciousness – and there’s no consciousness, I’d argue, without self-consciousness. It involves a reflective moment, a turn or fold that complicates our existence from the moment we open our eyes, meaning we live philosophically by default. Going to the gym makes us breathe harder, and respiration is never far away from questions of spirit. Being at work depends on a contract that extends from your wage packet to the socio-economic and political system. Having sex takes you to the heart of life and death.

You draw on a lot of psychoanalysis as well as philosophy. Why bring the likes of Freud and Jung into it?

I also bring in sociology, anthropology, and literature. I guess I want to say these distinctions between “psychoanalysis” and “philosophy” are not natural but institutional and historical: they are overdetermined, ideological, and, in the worst cases, anti-intellectual – the academic policing of departmental boundaries often serves to neutralise enquiry and challenge. By suppressing distinctions between disciplines, I hope to weaken them. In their place, I would like to develop an integrated and resourceful idiom more able to account for a world now outstripping every frame that either philosophy or psychoanalysis might place upon it.

Breakfast with Socrates: The Philosophy of Everyday Life is published in the UK on 22 October by Profile at £12.99. It wall be published in the US by The Free Press in March