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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Cars

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.” Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957.

Motorcars were, for rather obvious reasons, not a subject that Plato, Aristotle, or Kant wrote about. But from their invention in the early Twentieth Century they did appeal to philosophers. Elizabeth Anscombe used motorised vehicles to explain what she did not mean by ‘the expression of intention’ in her famous book about it: “One might as well call a car’s stalling the expression of its being about to stop” (Intention, 1957, p.5).

Those familiar with game theory will probably know the game of ‘chicken’. But few are aware that the metaphor was formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who wrote:

“Chicken… is played by choosing a long, straight road with a white line down the middle and starting two very fast cars toward each other from opposite ends. Each car is expected to keep the wheels on one side of the white line. As they approach each other, mutual destruction becomes more and more imminent. If one of them swerves from the white line before the other, the other, as they pass, shouts ‘Chicken!’”
(Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, 1959, p.30)

The British philosopher had a thing for cars, having written earlier that, “No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behaviour to sin; he does not say, ‘You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.’ He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right” (Why I am Not a Christian, 1927, p.40)

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt compared the dictator to a motor car, “In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it into motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his ‘intangible preponderance’.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1949, 373). We do not know if the German-Jewish political philosopher was a petrolhead. In the aforementioned book, she wrote about driving as “some substitute for this kind of ‘self-satisfaction’.” She had sympathy with someone who would get the thrill out of “[the] hot speed on a motor-bike.” Yet, later in life she sounded more sceptical when she wrote that we consume cars “as though they were the ‘good things’ of nature” (The Human Condition, 1958, p.125). Her one-time lover, Martin Heidegger, was none too keen on modern technology, either; but he maintained that “we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen” (The Origin of the Work of Art, 1950, p.25). With these thoughts we can all drive into the sunset.

Matt Qvortrup’s book Great Minds on Small Things is published by Duckworth.