Philosopher Hilary Lawson on why you should spend your May bank holiday at How the Light Gets In, a festival of ‘ideas’
British music festivals are typified by hedonism, indulgence, perhaps a few chats about the nature of reality, but only if you’re stoned out of your mind. Generally speaking, lagers and lads tend to feature more than logical positivism. Not so at philosopher Hilary Lawson’s creation How the Light Gets In, which sells itself as a festival “of ideas”. Instead of Queens of the Stone Age or Adele, the headliners are philosophers (and sometimes politicians, historians and authors).
So, spending your May Bank Holiday hanging out with a bunch of straight-edged, introspective philosophy nerds at events titled ‘The Riddle of the Beginning’, ‘Beyond Biological Boundaies’ and ‘Faster Than Light’. Count me out, you may be thinking. But Lawson would say you’ve got the whole idea of philosophy and philsophising wrong. “People tend to imagine that philosophy is a technical, academic engagement, but that’s always struck us as rather absurd.” Philosophy isn’t just for elderly, bespectacled men – everyone is a philosopher whether you like it or not. “We’ve got no choice,” he tells me, matter of factly. “We can’t do anything else. After all, it’s a bit of a puzzle, this issue of being alive. What are we trying to achieve, what are we trying to do, how are we to understand the world? We are faced with puzzles with everything we do.”
How the Light Gets In is a festival which explores puzzles across various fields, being an eclectic mix of philosophy, politics, science, music and comedy. This year will feature an array of speakers from former director of the CIA David Petraeus to chair of the Financial Times Gillian Tett, and influential pro-Palestinian historian Ilan Pappe. Elsewhere, physicists will spar with cultural critics and AI experts and feminist philosophers will muse against the backdrop of music and comedy. Two of the most famous living philosophers Peter Singer and Slajov Zizek (“the most dangerous philosopher in the West”) will participate in a debate questioning the human-centricity of the tradition of philosophy until now. Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation – which argued that animals’ rights should be given as much weight as humans’ – as well as his contribution to effective altruism.
But is a philosophy festival any fun? “One of the things we found early on is that people thought ‘why is anyone gonna go to a philosophy event?’, but it turned out it was the most difficult and challenging areas [of the festival] that turned out to be the most popular.”
Lawson debunks my cynical assumption that the music is merely a side act to entice punters. “The music is important in that it changes the atmosphere. If you have a whole series of talks in a conference hall, there’s a risk the whole thing becomes a status game for the panel, but if you’re giving a talk and there’s music coming from a nearby tent, it somehow levels everybody and you’re somehow connected to an everyday sense of what’s important. The music is central to the idea of the festival. It changes the way you listen to the ideas and the way you engage in them. We’re unique in making that combination.” Dance music dominates the line up, which features Crazy P, The Orb and James Holden. There are also bands – last year you would have had the intense pleasure of seeing City A.M.’s multi-talented economics reporter Chris Dorrell play with his band Totally Amorphous.
Lawson is a metaphysicist by trade. But he began to tire of some of the conversations being had in the philosophy field. “In some ways I think academic philosophy walled itself into a narrow version. Instead we see it as the big story going on in each field of human endeavour – science, politics, cultural/ and creative life. We address the big questions and we don’t think of philosophy as just a technical issue about the meaning of words.”
By we, he means the Institute of Art and Ideas, an institution he founded in 2008 to promote philosophy in everyday life. “When we started,” he explains, “there was no overall goal as an organisation. It was just initiated by the fact that as a philosopher myself I felt two things. Academic philosophy had managed to wall itself into a rather narrow perception of what was going on. Basically, arguments about the meaning of words, which seemed to me a bit crazy considering the history of philosophy and the need to be exploring the bigger questions.”
“British public life tended to regard philosophy as a bit of a joke,” Lawson tells me. “It was associated with Monty Python’s philosophical football match and there was a sense that we [British] don’t really bother with that – we’ll leave it to Parisian taxi drivers, we’re more down to earth. And that seemed, to me, extraordinary! How can we have a culture in which we avoid talking about the big picture?”
Recently, Lawson thinks that attitude has been ground down. That may, he says, be in small part down to him and How the Light Gets In, founded in 2010. Despite philosophy still not being on the school curriculum like it is in other European countries like France, people have become more willing to speak about their “philosophy”, he says – and not just on Linkedin. At the first festival, only 50 people showed up. Fifteen years later, “millions of people listen to our content every month but it’s not driven by an institutional desire on our side just to become huge. It’s about thinking the important thing for culture as a whole is somehow to be thinking and talking about the big issues since there are an awful lot of them and we can see they’re important.”
People may be more receptive to talking about philosophy, but why should they experience it at a festival rather than pick up a book? “It’s interesting, that. I think one of the characteristics of public life is that a lot of the time the things we hear from people are their carefully crafted version of what they want to say. Maybe that’s in the form of a speech, an essay, a book, but they’re carefully crafting it to make a right point and so forth in a sense they are marketing to us their idea,” Lawson says.
“A core bit of How the Light Gets In tries to break out of that and does so by putting people in a debate where instead of just putting forth their view they have to respond to people who hold very different versions of things and in the process of doing that you understand a whole lot more about the conceptual geography of what’s going on and you get real insight into what’s really driving the people concerned and indeed where the edge is because everybody on their own is saying I’ve got the answer, this is it but on some level we know that’s not right.”
Framing issues as a debate, Lawson has found, is more inclusive and approachable. “I think that’s because if you put people in a context where they arguing with somebody else about what the issue is and from the outside you don’t need to know all the fine detail to understand what’s at stake, you understand what’s at stake by seeing how they respond to each other and realising that’s really the edge. Culture is a constantly moving thing and we’re developing different ways of making sense of the world and when you get people at the forefront of their field and they’re talking to each other, you really catch sight of where the edge of culture is and what might be the future.”
Do bankers really need a philosophy festival though? Yes, Lawson assures me. If bankers are involved in some of the biggest political events in society, like the Great Financial Crisis, we should want them to be thinking about the consequences of their actions on the whole of society.
But it’s not just bankers. “The festival is for everybody. How could you not care about the biggest topics? We’ve discussed politics and philosophy but there’s also culture. Like sex and society. It’s one of the things that have gone rather unnoticed but the number of people who are single and choosing to be single has risen seven fold in the last 50 years. The predictions are that in the relatively near future that’ll become more than 50 per cent of the population. That’s an enormous change and there’s hardly any conversation about it. How could it have gone under the radar that the dominant way of being is having a partner to a situation where it looks like that won’t be the dominant way of living?”
The name of the festival derives from a Leonard Cohen song, Anthem. Because philosophy is “about catching sight of another world. You know those images you see from two ways, you see it as a duck or a rabbit depending on how you look at it. It seems to me the nature of the human condition is how we see it is how it is, the drawing of a duck. It’s like that writ large. We’re always at risk of imagining how our temporary perspectival view of how it is is how it is and seeing an alternative opens up a whole new potential world of stuff. Which I think we all when we catch sight of that find it exciting.”
