Philosopher Hilary Lawson on why you should spend your May bank holiday at How the Light Gets In, Britain’s first festival of ‘ideas’
British music festivals are typified by hedonism, indulgence, perhaps a few chats about the nature of reality, but only if you’re stoned out of your mind. Generally speaking, lagers and lads tend to feature more than logical positivism. Not so at philosopher Hilary Lawson’s creation How the Light Gets In, which sells itself as a festival “of ideas”. Instead of Queens of the Stone Age or Adele, the headliners are philosophers (and sometimes politicians, historians and authors).
“People tend to imagine that philosophy is a technical, academic engagement, but that’s always struck us as rather absurd,” says Lawson. Philosophy isn’t just for elderly, bespectacled men – everyone is a philosopher whether you like it or not. “We’ve got no choice,” he says matter of factly. “We can’t do anything else. After all, it’s a bit of a puzzle, this issue of being alive. What are we trying to achieve, what are we trying to do, how are we to understand the world? We are faced with puzzles with everything we do.”
How the Light Gets In is a festival that explores puzzles across various fields, being an eclectic mix of philosophy, politics, science, music and comedy. This year will feature an array of speakers from former director of the CIA David Petraeus to chair of the Financial Times Gillian Tett, and influential pro-Palestinian historian Ilan Pappe. Elsewhere, physicists will spar with cultural critics and AI experts and feminist philosophers will muse against the backdrop of music and comedy, with talks titled things like ‘The Riddle of the Beginning’, ‘Beyond Biological Boundaries’ and ‘Faster Than Light’. Two of the most famous living philosophers Peter Singer and Slajov Zizek (“the most dangerous philosopher in the West”) will participate in a debate questioning the human-centricity of the tradition of philosophy until now. Singer is best known for his Book Animal Liberation, which argued that animals’ rights should be given as much weight as humans, as well as his contribution to effective altruism.
But is a philosophy festival any fun? “One of the things we found early on is that people thought ‘why is anyone gonna go to a philosophy event?’, but it turned out it was the most difficult and challenging areas [of the festival] that were the most popular.”
“The music is central to the idea of the festival. It changes the way you listen to the ideas and the way you engage in them. We’re unique in making that combination.”
Hilary Lawson
Lawson debunks my cynical assumption that the music is merely a side act to entice punters. “The music is important in that it changes the atmosphere. If you have a whole series of talks in a conference hall, there’s a risk the whole thing becomes a status game for the panel, but if you’re giving a talk and there’s music coming from a nearby tent, it somehow levels everybody and you’re somehow connected to an everyday sense of what’s important. The music is central to the idea of the festival. It changes the way you listen to the ideas and the way you engage in them. We’re unique in making that combination.” Dance music dominates the line up, which features Crazy P, The Orb and James Holden. There are also bands – last year you would have had the intense pleasure of seeing City A.M.’s multi-talented economics reporter Chris Dorrell play with his band Totally Amorphous.
Other than promoting philosophy. At the time, “British public life tended to regard philosophy as a bit of a joke. It was associated with Monty Python’s philosophical football match and there was a sense that we [British] don’t really bother with that – we’ll leave it to Parisian taxi drivers, we’re more down to earth. And that seemed extraordinary! How can we have a culture in which we avoid talking about the big picture?”
Lawson thinks that attitude is changing, perhaps in small part down to him and How the Light Gets In, founded in 2010. Despite philosophy still not being on the school curriculum (as it is in other European countries like France), people have become more willing to speak about their “philosophy”, he says – and not just on Linkedin. At the first festival, only 50 people showed up. Fifteen years later, “millions of people listen to our content every month but it’s not driven by an institutional desire on our side just to become huge. It’s about thinking the important thing for culture as a whole is somehow to be thinking and talking about the big issues since there are an awful lot of them and we can see they’re important.”
“In public life, people often put forward carefully crafted versions of what they want to say – in a sense they are marketing to us their idea.
How the Light Gets In tries to break out of that by putting people in a debate where instead of just putting forth their view, they have to respond to people.”
Hilary Lawson
People may be more receptive to talking about philosophy, but why should they experience it at a festival rather than pick up a book? “One of the characteristics of public life is that a lot of the time the things we hear from people are their carefully crafted version of what they want to say. Maybe that’s in the form of a speech, an essay, a book, but they’re carefully crafting it to make a right point and so forth – in a sense they are marketing to us their idea.
“How the Light Gets In tries to break out of that by putting people in a debate where instead of just putting forth their view, they have to respond to people who hold very different versions of things and in the process of doing that you understand a whole lot more about the conceptual geography of what’s going on and get a real insight into what’s really driving the people concerned and indeed where the edge is because everybody on their own is saying ‘I’ve got the answer, this is it’ but on some level we know that’s not right.”
Do bankers – some of whom make up the readership of this paper and may well be considering attending this fairly expensive weekend – really need a philosophy festival though? Yes, Lawson assures me. If bankers are involved in some of the biggest political events in society, like the Great Financial Crisis, we should want them to be thinking about the consequences of their actions on the whole of society.
But it’s not just bankers. “The festival is for everybody. How could you not care about the biggest topics? We’ve discussed politics and philosophy but there’s also culture, sex and society. The number of people who are single and choosing to be single has risen seven fold in the last 50 years. The predictions are that in the relatively near future that’ll become more than 50 per cent of the population. That’s an enormous change and there’s hardly any conversation about it. How could it have gone under the radar that the dominant way of being – having a partner – may no longer be the dominant way of being?”
The name of the festival derives from a Leonard Cohen song, Anthem. Lawson says this is because philosophy is “about catching sight of another world.”
“You know those images you see from two ways, as a duck or a rabbit depending on how you look at it? It seems to me the nature of the human condition is that how we see it is how it is. The festival is like that writ large. We’re always at risk of imagining how our temporary perspectival view of how it is, is how it really is. But seeing an alternative opens up a whole new potential world of stuff – and when we catch sight of that, we find it exciting.”
