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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Holidays

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.

It’s time to pack the sunscreen. Don’t forget to take out the travel insurance. Excited? Undoubtedly. Whether it’s a five-star weekend break, a budget getaway, or glamping at Glastonbury, most of us look forward to a bit of time away. Some philosophers, however, have taken a dim view of vacations. Emily Thomas, in her book The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad (2020), recounts for instance how Francis Bacon (1561-1626) claimed that “travel would bring about the apocalypse” (p.2).

That prophecy, we can reliably say, did not materialize. Still, many philosophers were of the same opinion on holidays as the 1st Viscount St Albans (Sir Francis’s other title). Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), for one, took a similar view when he contemptuously wrote that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (Philosophical Investigations, 1953, p.132). Holidaying must have been an issue that exercised him a fair bit, for he later used an example of an exchange which suggests that his excursions were rather stressful occasions for all concerned. How else can we interpret the following?: “I am asked: ‘How long are you staying here?’ I reply: ‘Tomorrow I am going away; it’s the end of my holidays’.” (Ibid, p.281).

Others had happier memories. Wittgenstein’s Austrian compatriot Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) recalled a vacation in 1932 ‘in the beautiful Tyrolese hills’: “We had a happy time, with plenty of sunshine, and I think all tremendously enjoyed these long and fascinating talks” (Conjectures and Refutations, 1963, p.253). Popper and Wittgenstein were notoriously bitter rivals, so it is perhaps to be expected that the two also differed on the enjoyment of holidays.

Popper was also not a fan of Plato (428-347 BC), and his book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) was among other things a long diatribe against the ancient Greek philosopher’s politics in the Republic. Still, on one matter Popper and Plato agreed: they both liked holidays, since the Greek wrote late in life that, “No one was to be praised more than ‘holiday-makers’. The person who organised vacations should be highly esteemed and deserves to be awarded the first prize” (The Laws, 658).

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) – among other things, a classicist – would have agreed. She relished the relative anonymity that travel can bring. As she put it, “Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows your name and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time. In the opacity of foreign places all specific references to yourself are blurred” (Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, 1957, p.138). Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) put it equally well:

“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.”
(The Fairy-Tale of my Life, 1871, p.330)

Happy Holidays!

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