I wonder how many people, intrigued by this book, have actually carried out any of the experiments. It misses the point to see them as ‘thought experiments’, as if they are interesting just to think about. They are real experiments and only achieve anything if one actually does them. But they are experiments about thought, in that they attempt to alter or modify the ways we think.
Most of the ways in which we think are unexamined and automatic. Roger-Pol Droit has written a series of short essays, suggesting exercises that might change our view of reality. It’s amusing, imaginative, wryly sceptical. Droit has no cosmology; rather he concentrates on the minutiae of daily life. It reminds me of another book of essays by a Frenchman, Philippe Delerm’s The Small Pleasures of Life.
But that book was about ordinary things, like having a glass of beer. This book recommends rather odd activities. Only profoundly unimaginative readers will not have done a number of these experiments already. For example, experiment no. 2, to ‘empty a word of its meaning’—I can remember repeating, with my sister, the word door, and being surprised at how arbitrary it started to sound, and how quickly. It’s the surprise that illustrates how accustomed we are to not examining everyday things, such as words.
Or take experiment no. 5: to look up at the night sky and imagine that you’re looking down on the stars. Haven’t most of us done that, or something like it? I lie in my backyard and look up at the sky through the branches of trees, and without much effort find myself looking not up but out, aware of gravity holding me in place as if I were clinging to a light on the ceiling, looking down into an enormous room.It’s possible, perhaps instructive, to see the world differently; this is the point of many of the experiments. But it is also possible to see the world wrongly. A former teaching colleague of mine claimed that one of his Year 10 students knew the world was round, but thought that we lived on the inside. A harmless misapprehension? Or something only a step away from loony conspiracy theories?
Why are the words ‘the philosophy of’ in the book’s title? ‘Experiments in Everyday Life’ would do as well. Droit is identified on the jacket as a philosopher, but I doubt whether this material is what he teaches