A Philosophical Reflection on Getting Older

Portrait of the Artist as a 

Darkly Enlightened Philosopher

(SA 2025) [1]

 

"Darling, am I looking old? / Tell me dear I must be told ..." [2]

 

I. 

 

You know you're getting older not just when another birthday looms on the horizon - each candle on the cake essentially another nail in the coffin - but when, following the presentation of a short paper at Kant's Cave [3], a young woman approaches not to discreetly slip you her phone number or ask for your email address, but to inform you of the fact that you remind her of her father.

 

Still, as a friend said with a smile, at least she didn't say grandmother ... 

 

 

II.

 

Many people like to believe that there are advantages to growing older; that experience makes one a little wiser, for example. But this is bullshit: and even if it were true, who wants a smidgen more wisdom when you can't see, can't run, can't breathe, and your hair has fallen out?

 

The fact is, most great works of philosophy were produced by thinkers in their mid-to-late 30s - Heidegger, for example, was 37 when Sein und Zeit was published - and whilst there are of course exceptions - such as Kant and his three Critiques - we can confidently say that there are very few works of significance written by thinkers over the age of 55 [4].  

 

As I'll be 62 next week - the same age as Wittgenstein when he died - that means I'm now way over the philosophical hill ... Still, at least I'm not buried beneath it.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The photo was taken on February 3rd 2025 at Kant's Cave (see note 2 below). I'm not sure if I look darkly enlightened, as intended, or simply like an old punk; one person described me as resembling a flamboyant East End gangster - i.e., a Kray brother dressed by Vivienne Westwood. 

 

[2] Lyrics from the X-Ray Spex song 'Age': click here to listen to it on a Peel Session (recorded 6 Nov 1978 and broadcast on the 13th of that month). 

 

[3] Kant's Cave is a monthly meeting organised by Philosophy for All and held in a first floor function room at the the famous Two Chairmen pub, in Wesminster. The paper addressed the question: What is the Dark Enlightenment?

 

[4] See the post by Eric Schwitzgebel analysing the question of what the average age is when philosopher's complete their most influential work: The Splintered Mind (12 May 2010): click here. 

From Kant's Cave to Nietzsche's Kindergarten (Confessions of a Children's Entertainer)

Me in my role as a punk children's entertainer 

(c.1985)

 

Now watch closely little girl as I prick your red balloon 

with a safety pin ...

 

I. 

 

Last night I gave a short talk to the crowd gathered at Kant's Cave; a monthly meeting organised by Philosophy for All [1] and held in a first floor function room at the the famous Two Chairmen pub, in Wesminster [2].

 

The paper addressed the question of what constitutes dark enlightenment [3], so perhaps not ideal material for "shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats" [4] - or indeed young children. 

Nevertheless, I was delighted to discover that one of the people Zooming into the event was watching it accompanied by her precocious four-year-old son, who was equally fascinated by my public persona and appearance as he was by the contents of the paper itself:  

 

Mummy, why does he talk so fast? Why is he wearing such funny clothes? What's a zombie apocalypse?

 

 

II. 

 

Deleuze says that children are born philosophers or, more exactly, natural Spinozans; by which I think he means they instinctively know how to map real (rather than imaginary) trajectories and experiment with immediate (rather than representational) affects. 

 

That may or may not be the case. 

 

But what is undoubtedly true is that I should never have abandoned (my very short-lived) career as a punk children's entertainer in the mid-1980s, in order to become a failed artist and spectacularly unsuccessful poet-philosopher. 

 

For it seems I have a real knack for amusing little ones (and corrupting young minds in the manner of Socrates), whereas I have strictly limited talents as a grown up intellectual and adult educator. 

 

Not that I'm unhappy about this: for like Nietzsche, I think it is only by remaining a little childlike ourselves that we remain close also to the flowers, the grass, and to butterflies ... [5]

         

 

Notes

 

[1] Founded by Anja Steinbauer in 1998, Philosophy for All is an independent non-profit organisation that welcomes everyone with a love of wisdom - whatever their intellectual background or IQ - to attend its various events; walks, talks, film screenings, etc. Click here to visit the PfA website for full details.

 

[2] The Two Chairman is thought to be the oldest public house in Westminster and is housed in an 18th-century Grade II listed building in a part of Town at one time as notorious for cockfighting as political intrigue.        

 

[3] I published a four-part series of posts on dark enlightenment on Torpedo the Ark in July 2024: click here for part one, on the politics of hate; here for part two, on exiting the present; here for part three, on the zombie apocalypse; and/or here, for part four, on rejecting universalism. These four posts essentially formed the heart of the paper given at Kant's Cave.

[4] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', 38, p. 102. 

 

[5] See Nietzsche writing in Human, All Too Human, Vol. II, Part 2 ('The Wanderer and His Shadow'), section 51. 

 

 

All That Jazz

Theodor Adorno, D. H. Lawrence, 

and Sebastian Horsley: they fucking hate jazz

 

'Jazz is the false liquidation of art [...] the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment ...' [1]  

 

 

I.

 

Sebastian Horsley famously didn't like jazz and refused to believe that other people liked it either; "once they're in Ronnie Scott's, they're asleep like everybody else" [2]. 

 

Of course, Horsley is not alone in hating jazz and certainly not the first person to express his contempt for the genre. One recalls that Adorno, for example, wrote a number of essays that expressed his negative evaluation of jazz as an art form and dismissed the claims made on its behalf by exponents and admirers. 

 

In brief, for Adorno, jazz was not only formulaic and banal, but it also lacked moral-aesthetic truth value and was essentially alienating and dehumanising (and not in a good way). Mostly, however, he despised it for being popular; a commodity born of modern mass society and the music industry. 

 

Although Adorno lived until 1969 - and despite the fact that jazz became increasingly complex and avant-garde, deviating significantly from its own origins as an upbeat genre to which the Bright Young Things of the so-called Jazz Age could dance the night away - he never revised his opinion of it.   

 

 

II. 

Another famous critic of jazz and popular modern culture in general - including the cinema and the radio - was the English writer D. H. Lawrence, who, in many ways, anticipated what Adorno would say, albeit using less openly Marxist terminology [3].

For although Lawrence was from a working-class background and frequently expressed concern with how he might appeal to as wide a readership as possible, he often used the word popular negatively to denote cultural forms that, in his view, lacked the spiritual and intellectual value that he believed genuine art possessed. 

 

As he grew older, Lawrence became increasingly critical of popular culture and the "bulk of our popular amusements" [4], including gramophone records; famously breaking one on Frieda's head in a notorious incident of domestic violence after she played it over and over, driving him into a rage with its dreary jazz trombone and crude sexual innuendo [5].

 

Does this make Lawrence and Adorno reactionary cultural elitists? Maybe. At the very least, we can agree that their views are out of tune with more informed opinion on the subject of jazz and popular culture - although Horsley would certainly have been sympathetic.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Adorno wrote that "Jazz is the false liquidation of art" in his 1967 essay 'Perennial Fashion - Jazz'. It can be found in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (Routlege, 1990).

      He described jazz as the "mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment" in his much earlier text, 'On the Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening' (1938), which can be found in his book The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Routledge, 1991).     

 

[2] For Sebastian's highly amusing take on punk, jazz, and Notting Hill contra Soho, click here.   

[3] See Gemma Moss, ‘Popular Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 145-159. 

      As Moss rightly notes, Lawrence and Adorno were both living in a period when European culture was becoming increasingly Americanised and transforming into commercial mass culture with its standardised models of entertainment generating mechanical responses in the audience. In other words, both Lawrence and Adorno believed that popular art forms - such as jazz - create a public who become used to a limited range of emotions and ideas.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 244. 

 

[5] The record - 'Empty Bed Blues (Columbia, 1928) - was by the African-American singer Bessie Smith, with Charlie Green on trombone and Porter Grainger on piano. Smith was extremely popular during the Jazz Age and is now regarded not only as one of the greatest singers of her era, but a major influence on many other blues singers and jazz vocalists. 

      For an interesting essay on Lawrence and Bessie Smith, see Fiona Becket, 'A Brand New Grind: D. H. Lawrence, Manliness and the Blues', in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies - click here to access as an online pdf. 

      Readers who wish to listen to the track can do so by clicking here.