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ON THINKING AND DRINKING

Drinking wine is a serious business, according to Roger Scruton, an academic philosopher. Anthony Gottlieb reviews his book "I Drink Therefore I Am" ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

A minor travail for anyone involved in the world of philosophy is having to endure snatches of Monty Python’s “Philosophers’ Drinking Song” when you are introduced at a party. One must try to smile politely upon learning for the hundredth time that “Socrates himself was permanently pissed", that “Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel”, and that the correct parsing of Descartes’ famous cogito is “I drink, therefore I am”. One might expect a book that takes this slogan as its title to be an embarrassing bore. But Roger Scruton’s "I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine" is never that.

Scruton has written a mostly light-hearted book about a pleasure that he takes very earnestly—indeed his insistence that wine is historically and morally one of the foundations of civilisation gives a new meaning to the term “serious drinker”. He is primarily an academic philosopher, specialising in musical aesthetics, and the author of several excellent accounts of modern thought for the layman. Scruton is also a composer, a conservative pundit, a memoirist, and latterly a devotee of the traditional pastimes of the English country gentleman, especially fox-hunting (of which one of his more than 30 non-fiction books is a passionate defence). "I Drink Therefore I Am" combines many of the ingredients of late-vintage Scruton: social conservativism, a love of the land, philosophical curiosity, and a fondness for uncorking dusty bottles from the cellar of his memory.

A more fitting subtitle might have been “Reflections In Wine”, since the book aims to show how deep facts about the human condition—how, for example, we flourish when rooted in a place and in a culture—can be seen mirrored in the way that wine is made and best appreciated. In addition, the book not infrequently shows signs of having been written by a man in his cups.

Scruton can turn a lovely phrase, especially when sporting his laurels as a prose-poet of nostalgia, and he is an adept expositor of abstract ideas. But in these pages we also read that Cicero was “a jolly good bloke”; that the great medieval Islamic philosopher, Avicenna, “shagged himself to death”; and that Jean-Paul Sartre was “crazy”. We must leaf through Blimpish rants and chauvinist sneers about the “ghastly” clothes of tourists in Italy, the awfulness of anything in plastic bottles, the “sterilizing gaze of American scholars", and the “nonsense prattled out by Richard Dawkins” (I suspect that Scruton is one of those who does not himself believe in God, but thinks it is best for the rest of us to do so). We learn that in the case of wine, “as with women and horses, the real best is second best”.

Scruton can do better than this, and usually does when his tongue has not been inordinately loosened. The trouble with his thesis that wine can make better thinkers of us is that it is equally true that it can make worse thinkers of us, too; and since Scruton seems unable to tell the difference in his own case, he may not be the right person to go to for a theory about the matter.

Still, it is impossible to dislike a man who mixes rosé into the oats of his beloved horse. (“Sam the Horse” has six entries in the index—more than most philosophers.) "I Drink Therefore I Am" is not only a stimulating read in itself but also has useful tips for those with illiquid finances who are in search of liquid stimulation. Go for little-known vineyards next to famous properties, he counsels, and the second wines of august chateaus—such as, for a very good Pomerol, Branaire Ducru’s Ch. Mazeyres.

The book’s light-hearted appendix, in which Scruton suggests what to drink when reading various philosophical texts, is probably destined for a wide circulation in college bars, at least at Oxford and Cambridge. Some of the tips are philosophical in-jokes (drink tar-water when reading Bishop Berkeley, who eccentrically advocated it as a cure-all) and some are agreeably weak (Heidegger, who wrote copiously about “nothing”, should be toasted with an empty glass). Sartre should be read with a 1964 Burgundy, since that was the year of publication of "Les mots", which Scruton judges to be his best book.  Because Scruton regards Sartre as, on balance, a bad man, he is relieved to report that it will probably be impossible to find a 1964 Burgundy.

Descartes, though deserving of recognition, is “the most over-rated philosopher in history”, according to Scruton, and he recommends “a Chateauneuf-du-Pape from old vines, with the smooth velvet finish and liquorice and thyme aromas of the Provencal hillsides. Such a wine will compensate for the thinness of the 'Meditations' and give you rather more to talk about.” Other recommendations are convoluted rather than cheeky, as in the case of Plato: “The sugar in a refined Vouvray is fully integrated into the structure, like the ornaments into a classical façade. Its fluted mineral columns, with their flower-filled capitals, call out for a firm base of argument, of the kind that Plato hoped always to provide.” For Leibniz, we are to try a Crianza or Reserva Rioja, though I would like to know why, and—most bafflingly of all—while Aristotle’s drier works should be accompanied by plain water, the "Prior Analytics" (his treatise on the syllogism) needs to be preceded by a ginger biscuit.

Scruton’s publisher tells us in a blurb that this book is an “antidote to the pretentious clap-trap that is written about wine today.” Perhaps his aim is, in part, to drown out one form of pretentiousness with another, more high-falutin' one.

"I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine" (Continuum), by Roger Scruton, out now
 

Picture credit: gutter (via Flickr)

(Anthony Gottlieb is a former executive editor of The Economist and author of "The Dream of Reason". His last article for Intelligent Life was about the meaning of God in the age of New Atheism.)