He rarely loses an opportunity to suppress what is true and suggest what is false. No thought is too banal for Rowland Smith unfortunately, his banality is perfectly compatible with error. For example, in "Going to the doctor", the author writes: "If love is a kind of illness, illness is a kind of love, on the grounds that it 'flies in the night', unpredictable and blind like the winged Cupid or a contagion you can't see coming…" Not to put too fine a point on it, this is drivel, by a man who sounds like he has very little experience, or even expectation, of real illness. If anybody ever was jagged, bold, defiant and unorthodox.Ī strong vein of intellectualised humbug runs through this book. He writes approvingly of the true Nietzschean, happily shorn of supposedly bogus ethical idealism: "You'll be free to become yourself in all your nonconformist individuality – jagged, singular, wayward, defiant, eccentric, bold, unorthodox and original." I confess here that the figure of Dennis Nilsen, the serial killer who watched television with the corpses of his victims and disposed of them by flushing them down the drains, came to my mind. In a brief discussion of Hegel, Rowland Smith writes: "It would be far easier to mock Hegel's interpretation of history if it hadn't… provided grist to the Nazi mill." When he writes of Nietzsche, however, he fails to mention that he was the Nazis' favourite philosopher, perhaps because one of his own intellectual heroes, Foucault, was a Nietzschean nor does he mention that Hegel was much more an intellectual progenitor of Marxism than of Nazism. We would therefore have had no reason to turn down his invitation.
Even if one accepts that this was assassination, Socrates did not know for most of his life that he was to be assassinated and neither would we.
The book's first sentence does not inspire confidence: "Given that Socrates was assassinated by poison, you might think twice before accepting his invitation to breakfast." But is "assassination" the right word? Socrates took hemlock after being sentenced to death at his trial, refusing the opportunity to escape. Then there are the errors, omissions and evasions.
But the next four chapters are "Going to the doctor", "Having lunch with your parents", "Bunking off" and "Shopping", as if the original organising principle were insufficiently strong to sustain a book and so arbitrary choice has been resorted to. The first four chapters – "Waking up", "Getting ready", "Travelling to work", "Being at work" – lead us to suppose that the book will be a series of philosophical reflections on a normal day.
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