Where did the idea for HowTheLightGetsIn festival come from? Why did you feel that the UK needed a philosophy and music festival?
Well, you know, it wasn't a grand plan. I have had an involvement with philosophy ever since I was an undergraduate. And it seemed to me that philosophy was something of a joke in [British] culture as a whole at the time, more associated with the Monty Python [sketch] the Philosophers’ Football Match, then with answering any serious questions. And I think many people thought philosophy was just lost in an argument over the meaning of words and indeed was incomprehensible.
And that seemed to be a mistake. It seemed to me that philosophy is about the biggest questions in life. It doesn't have to be an arcane, abstruse subject. We're all involved in it whether we like it or not. We're alive, and we have to cope with the strangeness of being alive.
So that was really the origin of the idea, I guess. And initially, it was just a few people in a small chapel in Hay-on-Wye. And from the moment that we did that first [event], we got a remarkable response. And so it's just grown in a rather crazy way now. We now have 10 million views online on our site. And I think to some small degree, we have changed the way people think about what philosophy is.
Was there anything that surprised you, in terms of what was popular?
[Initially] I thought that perhaps the more technical subjects, about the nature of language and truth, or about, you know, subatomic physics or something, would not be our strongest suit. And we would go for topics that were more easily accessible, more Moral Maze as it were, that sort of thing. But in fact, it was the most technical subjects that we got most engagement with. And I think the reason for that is not that we were attracting a particularly “nerdy” audience (although I'm sure we have some very brilliant people in our audience) but that it wasn't being found anywhere else. Those conversations were not found in culture generally, they were talked about in an ivory tower context.
What we found is if we put on these debates about, you know, what is the nature of the world? What is the nature of truth? What is the nature of reality? People loved it, because we were actually talking about the big stuff. And we weren't trying to dumb it down for the audience.
In politics, for example, we are happy to listen to, I don't know, Question Time, or Newsnight, about a topic we may know nothing about. But we listen and we quickly get the idea. There are different views, different positions, and we work out what's going on. Well, exactly the same is true for philosophy … And it’s really gripping for people.
Philosophical questions should certainly have a universal appeal. But do you also think we're in a historical moment now, when humanity is facing multiple existential crises, where it has a particular role to play?
Absolutely. I think that in the west we have had, for at least a few hundred years, the idea that we were gradually progressing towards a better world … We were morally better than our predecessors, we were developing a fairer, more equitable society and so forth … And that started to fall apart in the latter part of the 20th century. Partly as a result of postmodernist type moves in thought – the recognition that there are many different perspectives and we can't rely on our own – but also because the simplicity of the idea that science was just discovering everything, and coming to a final answer, looked less and less credible.
And so, indeed, philosophy has a key role to play, because we are now in a space where those previous modernist certainties have faded. And to a considerable degree, many people are very lost.
What would you say to the critics of postmodernism who see the tradition as destructive and chaotic, due to its apparent claim that “truth does not exist”?
So, postmodernism certainly made it look as if there was no particular moral outlook, there was no particular theoretical outlook, that it was all a question of the perspective that you had, and people would have different perspectives. And you were just left in a multitude of alternative diverse perspectives. And of course, that, if left at that level, it's fantastically debilitating. How do you choose between them? You just get conflict between the different outlooks and the situation looks intractable.
It's not really possible to go back to those simplicities of objectivity that we once had, say, in the British case, in the high point of the Victorian period. We recognise that it is the case that there are alternative perspectives ... but nevertheless, we have to find a way to move forward.
What I would argue is, we have to give up on the idea that our language and our descriptions of the world uncover the truth. That's not, I think, what they're doing. Our descriptions of the world are tools to enable us to intervene in the world. They help us get things done. And of course, we always want a better tool. You know, if you are using a pen, you want to make sure it’s a good pen. You might improve the nib, or if it's a ballpoint pen, you want to make it flow a little bit better, whatever it might be. But there's no true pen. There's no ultimate pen. There is just a better way of intervening in the world.
And you determine, I think, a better way to intervene in the world by looking to see how it's working at the moment. How is your theory working? How might it change? How might you be able to improve things? So I think you can give up the idea that we are uncovering the truth of the world and [instead] recognise that different people have different frameworks, which enable them to do different things.:
Is that what you meant when you wrote in an article for the Institute of Art and Ideas that “the abandonment of realism does not entail a chaos of equal alternatives”?
Yes. You don’t just think, “well, everything is equal”. You're trying to make a framework which works better, which achieves outcomes that are more effective and so forth. I think we need to double down on empiricism, looking to see how our theories work. And at the same time, double down on rationality.
Rationality is really out of out of favour at the moment. It’s somehow thought that rationality is embedded in a particular outlook: a western enlightenment, male perspective and so forth. It has been associated with that, because that's about the idea that it uncovers a single truth … But I think that we can recognise that the power of the Enlightenment, the power of liberal democratic views, was not about the uncovering of the truth, but it was about uncovering key strategies of improving the way that we think, through empiricism and rationalism. And that's what we need to focus on.
But surely there are some facts that can be proven to be true?
No single claim about the world has been identified, which is unchallengeable – that is, independent of the context in which the claim is made. I've had numerous arguments with realists about this. I have sought to demonstrate that even in claims like “London is the capital of France”, you can find a context in which that could be held to be true.
Just imagine: there’s an economist talking to a set of bankers in Paris. And he begins by saying, “London is the capital of France”. And he goes on to show how he thinks that the power of the financial City of London means that it actually controls the economic framework in which Paris is operating. And that would then mean that his claim that “London is the capital of France” is true. So context is everything.
And I think the mistake that some critics of postmodernism make is to have a theological view about truth. I do think it's theological, really. They see themselves as scientists, they're attached to the idea that they can see how things are. And I am profoundly against that. It's a dangerous view, it makes you arrogant, it makes you think there's only one way of going about things and makes you dismissive of other people.
[At the same time,] I’ve spent most of my life criticising postmodernism, because in some forms it's completely incoherent. When it's expressed in the form, “there is no truth” – most of the time, that's incoherent, because that's a claim, which is supposedly a truism, you know: it is true, but there is no truth. Well, you’ve got something wrong there, and postmodernism is at risk of those sorts of criticisms. We have to work out how to move forward and create an overall framework that isn't self-contradictory in that way, or results in the chaos that some forms of postmodernism do, without thinking that we can just retreat to a sort of “theology of truth”.
What do you make of political actors like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, who seem to be using a perverted version of postmodernist relativity to further their own agendas?
I think lots of different things are going on there. On the one hand, I do think that the intellectual culture of the west – which became more postmodernist, in many fields – did mean that thinkers like Trump and Putin were able to echo that idea of alternative ways of putting things, in defence of their views. I mean, that postmodern way of looking at things wasn't responsible for Trump and Putin, and I don’t think they both go around studying [deconstructionist philosopher] Derrida, but I think that in an inchoate sort of way it it enabled them to defend their position as an alternative perspective.
I'm going to add something much more controversial, though, in response to that, which is that [Trump and Putin] did also identify something – which was that the main outlook of the liberal media in the west was largely the same. It had a similar framework and understood the world in a similar sort of way. And it assumed that this outlook was the truth, with a capital "T", and that everybody else was somehow lying if they held a different perspective.
Can you give us an example?
Well, if you look at the recent situation with Putin and Ukraine, you see this in action. So that initially, the response to Putin was “Oh, he's obviously deranged”. It’s not helpful to see the world like this: a person is behaving in a way which doesn't fit with how we see it, so he's obviously mad … Putin’s way of seeing the world, as I understand it, is very much in terms of a Russian nationalist perspective, a Russian imperialist perspective to some extent, and he's wishing to extend Russian power. Now, we might think that's quite wrong. Of course, I think it's totally wrong. We should do everything we can to counter it. But it is not helpful to think, “Well, we've covered the truth. And he's just mad.”
Do you think it would be helpful for politicians to think more philosophically? To bring us back to the festival, is that something that HowTheLightGetsIn is attempting to do, by including politicians as speakers and guests?
We're always trying to do that. We’re trying to bring to bear the bigger questions on whatever the topic is. And that might be political. Obviously, at the moment, we're all very focused on [the Ukraine war]. But I think it applies in every area. So with science, we ask questions around, where are our current theories going? Are we achieving what we want to achieve? And that, in a way, is just bringing philosophy into culture.
What about encouraging debate between disciplines?
The silo discipline of a lot of academic subjects means that these bigger questions tend to get overlooked in some form or another … And that's why our speakers come, you know, all of these world-leading figures … it's not a marketing exercise to promote your book. It's about talking about ideas. And all of the people we invite are fascinated by ideas. That's what really motivates them.
And we also try and encourage a situation where people do genuinely mix. So for example, with our speakers, we don't have separate VIP areas, we encourage them to go out, you know, join the coffee queue like everyone else. You might be standing next to the world's leading scientist in a particular area, or a major politician. It also means that those people are really engaged. And we involve music and comedy and those sorts of things, because it softens all of that status stuff.
I mean, we all have to deal with the fact that, you know, life is a really puzzling thing. We're all going to die sometime. And we don't really understand what the hell's going on … So [the festival is] providing that space where people can have that conversation – whether it's on the dance floor, or in a comedy tent, or when they're talking about some technical philosophical point – they can really engage in the question of what it is to be alive.
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More details on HowTheLightGetsIn, the world's largest philosophy and music festival, can be found here. New Humanist magazine is a philosophy partner of the festival, and we hope you can join us on 2-5th June on the River Wye in Hay. Along with headliners Yuval Noah Harari, Richard Dawkins, Roger Penrose and Slavoj Žižek, our editor, Samira Shackle, will be chairing an event on "Necessity and Lies".
Readers receive a 20% discount, with the code NEWHUMANIST20. Advanced tickets are now on sale.
For those of you who can't be with us in person, the festival will also be streaming online during the 2nd-5th June. Click here for more information and to purchase online tickets to watch the festival livestream. Additionally, all the debates and talks from the festival will be gradually released online in the months following the festival on the Institute of Art and Ideas online platform, IAI.TV.
