Cicero hoped all these ides would volatilise inside us. Would gain their own strange life. Would open their eyes inside us.
And spawn some UK variety of European thought! Some native variety of continentalism!
Some amalgam of council estate and Heidegger. Of Sunderland in general and Jewish philosophical modernism!
And what happened?
Couldn’t Cicero see we were helpless? That we had no savant’s gifts. No high IQs. That no intellectual miracle could be expected of us.
Who were only ever good at turning upon themselves! Upon each other! At piss taking and self-derision!
Only when we drank, only then could we lose our impostor’s syndrome. Our acquired underconfidence. Only then did we come into glorious intellectual life. Did the philosophical heavenly fire reach us. Burn inside us.
Drunk: that’s when our philosophy would come alive. Our philosophical method. Which obtained only as banter philosophy. As piss taking philosophy. It was dialogical, in its own way, Cicero said. Socratic, perhaps. Or perhaps not.
Merriment philosophy. As much pathos as philosophy, As much nonsense as sense. Turning all of philosophy into a gigantic joke.
Not philosophy as it had ever been known. Pataphysics, instead. Palavering. Persiflage.
Work in Progress 