Nasty, Nasty...

Could there be a more exalted calling than that of philosophy? Cerebral giants pursuing the understanding of human conduct, pointing the way whereby individuals can aspire to humility, grace, morality and ethical behaviour befitting enlightened beings.

The ancients in their wisdom handed down to us the fruit of their inspired intellectual labourings. Through their efforts at divining the emotions that impel the human spirit we have achieved a certain understanding of ourselves.

Added to and embellished over the centuries by succeeding cadres of learned individuals, all publishing and explaining and examining our attitudes, actions and reactions as sometimes rational beings.

All aspects of human activity are minutely deconstructed and reconstructed. Painstaking research leads to hints of believable truth achieved. We are informed of the reasons for which we behave as we do under any and all circumstances.

We owe much to the learned scientists and professionals and academics to bring clarity and vision to the understanding and delineation of human behaviour and its outcomes. And here, front and centre, is an illustration of the very manner in which these great minds go about forming consensus and collaboration, encouraging one another to ever greater heights of Eureka! moments.

The British newspaper The Independent has latterly published details of a recently published book on philosophy peer-reviewed in what has been claimed as a most professionally scurrilous manner, bringing opprobrium to the reviewer and doubt to the credibility of the author of the book.

The author claims that his gratuitously-insulting comment regarding the attractiveness of his one-time faculty fellow had poisoned the reflective mind-set of the receiver of the graceless insult against him.

He may have a point there, for who would not feel offended when, upon greeting a colleague and presenting to him one's current female companion, the laconic response of the colleague was that he could see that the new girlfriend was not as plain as her predecessor.

Imagine, these refined and elevated minds with their great consciousness of human behaviour and the outcomes of same, reverting to snide commentary believing themselves to be ever so clever. And here we thought cattiness was a female prerogative?

Which may or may not be why the slighted colleague reviewed the recently-published opus as "woefully uninformed about the work of others and at best amateurish". Since the book advances a controversial theory rather circuitous in its apprehension and follow-through, that conclusion, emanating from the lips of a mind well versed in the matter at hand, might very well be apt.

And since the offended author has been described as "the unthinking man's thinking man" by another thinking man, one might consider the conclusion to have been a generous one. And when another writer, one whose musings and writing I find admirable described the author once as "...George Orwell's idea of the socialist who gives socialism its bad name..." I personally give credit to the reviewer.

All the more so as the author, Ted Honderich, once voiced his sympathies for Palestinian terrorism, characterizing it as a method through which neo-imperialism could be defeated. Ech!