‘Every town a home town, every man a kinsman’, begins a philosophical poem from the Purananuru, an ancient anthology of Tamil poetry. The poem ends with the equally resonant line, ‘we are not amazed by the great, and we do not scorn the little’.

In a few short words, the poem quietly rebukes those of us inclined to make the mistakes it identifies.

It is true that we are, most of us, awed by what seems grand and imposing, and disdainful of the modest and everyday. This is one of the reasons that the common idea of ‘philosophy’ takes it as something dark, mysterious, altogether beyond our comprehension.

This leads to a curious phenomenon: when we encounter something that we do not understand in philosophy, we take its unintelligibility as licence to ignore it. And when we encounter something that we do understand, paradoxically, we take its intelligibility as licence to ignore it.

But not everything that is philosophical need be incomprehensible. Both in the ancient Indian and the ancient Greek traditions of philosophy, texts of great difficulty jostle with ones that are both vivid and accessible. What makes them profound is not that they are about deep things, but that they are deep about everyday things.

In both traditions, it is true, there is a great emphasis on seeing past what is available to the senses. Recall that the Sanskrit word generally translated as philosophy is ‘darshana’, cognate with words that mean ‘vision’ or ‘perception’. Similarly, the Greek philosophers made great play of the fact that their words for seeing and knowing were extremely similar. But there is another way of understanding what is involved in seeing. Philosophy isn’t always about seeing past everyday things, but about seeing more deeply into them.

Some of the traditional subjects of philosophy in both traditions can seem abstract and removed from everyday life: being, knowledge, truth, goodness, and so forth. But they are also about things that are part of life — beauty, war, love, and bringing up children. On all these topics, many of the texts of both traditions pontificate at a high level of abstraction. But this abstraction is not, and has never been, the only way to think or write about them. That is why the abstract treatise is only one of the many literary forms philosophers have used to express their philosophy.

Another such form is the poem, such as the one quoted above, which works not through rigorous argument or the construction of elaborate systems, but through suggestion. We come to see their point not because they argue us into submission but because we recognise in them something that we had half-suspected before.

Yet another such form is the story, whether the literary short story or the folk tale, the novel or the parable, the epic or the anecdote. Again, what matters is not the grandeur of the storyteller’s ambitions but the depth of his perceptions. A very short story can say more than a much longer one, if it has just the right words. Once we see this, virtually anything can be material for philosophy.

Over the past year in these columns, I have tried to be eclectic in my choice of subjects: from classical music to pop, from the films of Satyajit Ray to the B-movies of the 1980s, from cartoon strips to bureaucratic language. I have tried to use these things as invitations to reflection on more general questions about art, exploitation, vengeance, childhood and nostalgia. The cultural artefacts are not simply examples used to illustrate a general thesis, but a way of allowing ourselves to see the world anew.

The risk in taking on such subjects is that a reader will be tempted to think that one is simply stating the obvious, merely giving voice to common sense. But stating the obvious can sometimes be a useful thing to do, and there is nothing ‘mere’ about common sense. The term common sense is sometimes used to mean a body of widespread prejudices. But the word has another, more useful meaning. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz puts it, “When we say someone shows common sense we mean to suggest more than that he is just using his eyes and ears, but is … keeping them open, using them judiciously, intelligently, perceptively, reflectively.”

No piece of philosophy, no writing, can or should try to save its readers the trouble of thinking for themselves. I have tried in these columns not to close off questions but to open them up. I have tried to show, with examples, how all of human life and experience, the most rarefied as well as the most popular, can be invitations to reflection. If a few readers have been motivated to accept the invitation, the effort will have been worth it.

Saturday School concludes with this piece

Nakul Krishnais a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge

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