People / Bristol Breakfasts
Breakfast with Bristol24/7: Julian Baggini
Philosopher Julian Baggini has just published his nineteenth book. Martin Booth meets him for toast and enlightenment.
Julian Baggini doesn’t have far to walk from his garden flat in Redland to our arranged meeting point at Tradewind Espresso on Whiteladies Road. It’s shortly after 8am when he arrives, the pair of us being the first two customers of the day in the café, and he has already spent half an hour working at home.
The morning is when he is at his most productive, he tells me as we settle down for breakfast; for him toast and jam, for me banana and walnut bread.
is needed now More than ever
Baggini is a philosopher unusual for not being an academic – although he does have a PhD. He is now principally a writer of books and articles, and a TEDx talk he presented on what makes you, you has at the last count been viewed 837,000 times on the main TED website.
There is a vanity inherent in writing, says Baggini, who has just published his nineteenth book.
“When you write a book, at some level you’re saying, ‘hey people, I have something to say worth listening to,” he says while perusing the tempting menu. “The spirit in which I try and do it, is I don’t know whether this is interesting to you or useful to you or not, but I’ll put it out there and if other people judge, great.”
His new book, The Edge of Reason, asks what it means to be mean to be rational. What is reason? A lot of people deny or say it’s not desirable to be rational, he tells me.
“It was a funny thing for me to do because it felt like an indulgence. I really wanted to put this all together almost for my own sake to get clear about it, but I just kind of assumed it wouldn’t sell,” he chuckles. “The book’s now coming out and I’d be pleasantly surprised if it sells anything at all!”
Our food arrives, smooth jazz on the stereo.
So are Baggini’s ideas worth listening to? “I get around that by genuinely believing that there’s very little if anything that’s completely new to be said. But what I think and what I try to specialise in is synthesising and applying.
“So,” he pauses and chuckles again. “I don’t have to think that I’ve had a single brilliant idea. We’ve got over two and a half thousand years of philosophy, some of the most brilliant minds in history have applied themselves to it, if there was something earth shattering you knew that we didn’t know already, most of it is out there, so it’s putting it together and applying it… I don’t have to think that I’m a brilliant, original thinker. I just have to think that there’s a job to be done of putting things together in the right way. If someone hasn’t done that satisfactorily, then I’ve got a job.”
Baggini likes to tell people that he is a writer if they ask him what they do, “but I have to say I write about philosophy otherwise it’s too vague”.
Baggini was the first person in his family to go to university. His undergraduate degree was originally English and philosophy at Reading before he dropped the English and concentrated exclusively on the philosophy, then did his PhD at UCL.
After university he founded the quarterly Philosophers’ Magazine that kickstarted his writing career and saw him get his first commissions. “It opened the door, but you’ve then got to deliver otherwise you don’t get invited back in again. That’s too sui generis to repeat, but if you want to be freelance, if you want to do your own thing, you have to create your own platform.”
He became a self-employed freelancer in London. Circumstances took him to Manchester and then Bristol, which he chose to live in having only visited once before.
“Bristol is a very inspiring place in lots of ways. The world can be a very grim place. But in Bristol we stay cheerful because there’s lots to hearten you, there’s a lot of positivity but in a constructive rather than just an idealistic way. There’s a lot that goes on in Bristol that’s about making either the world or this corner of the world a better place…
“One of the nice things about Bristol, I find it almost irresistible not to describe places as if they were people. Bristol seems remarkably comfortable to be what it is. If you go to many places in the world, they define themselves by the places they are not. Bristol is just happy to be Bristol.”
Baggini gets up to leave Tradewind Espresso for the short walk back to his flat, Bristol’s philosopher-in-chief still searching for that brilliant idea.
Illustration by Anna Higgie.
On November 7, Julian Baggini will be at Waterstones giving a talk as part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas.