Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day - Softcover

THERE IS A LOVELY SONG called “Alive” by Mara Carlyle that opens with the lines:

I’m surprised by the sun every day I wake up,
I’m surprised by waking up!

Mara’s voice swings from woozy to perky as she sings, mimicking the change from slumber to consciousness. What’s cute about the lyric is that it reenacts the childlike wonder of waking up, the wonder that the world is still there, that the person waking still exists. Even for grown-ups, waking after too little sleep, or with a hangover, or beside the wrong lover, or following a series of troubled dreams, there is a moment, just before the jaundice or despair reloads, when simply to be awake again, and still alive, is an amazing surprise.

Why is that? Why, even though we do it every single day of our lives, can waking up still surprise us? Is it precisely because, until that moment, you were sleeping and therefore not alert enough to be able to predict that you were about to wake up? If that is so, then technically speaking waking up can’t not be a surprise—because right before it you are, by definition, asleep.

So even though waking up might be the most foreseeable event in our lives, as dependable as the sun rising in the morning, we never actually see it coming. Predictable and unpredictable in equal measure, waking up is a paradox, a kink in the straight logic of things, which is just one of the reasons why it’s worth thinking about. In fact, as ordinary as it seems, waking up is one of the profoundest actions we can take. It may sound odd to say that there is a philosophy of waking up, but in a way the whole of philosophy is about nothing else.

For hundreds of years, philosophy has concerned itself with questions of consciousness, and being conscious, obviously enough, implies being awake. It’s true that at the end of the nineteenth century we begin to get full-blown philosophies of un consciousness—that’s what psychoanalysis is all about—but far and away the dominant trend in philosophy has been to focus on conscious phenomena, on waking life: what it is to think, to feel, to know, to believe, to sense, to perceive, to act, to choose, to like, to love, to do good and to do evil, activities that all belong to the realm of waking rather than sleeping.

So there you are: you’re awake. You may not be a morning person, but if you’re awake at least you’re conscious. Or are you? How do you know you’re not still asleep? How do you know you’re not dreaming being awake? How do you know that everything around you, including yourself, is not an illusion, a trick played on you by some malevolent sprite?

This, of course, has become one of the most famous philosophical questions of all, and the most famous philosophical answer to it came in the 1630s from RenÉ Descartes, a Frenchman who lived most of his life in the Netherlands. Like most philosophers confronted with a perplexing world, Descartes wanted to establish some certainties, and his conceit was to do so by turning philosophy on its head. Rather than starting with a hypothesis, or a set of assumptions, or a first principle, or a scientific law, he committed to start with nothing and to take nothing for granted: he would doubt absolutely everything, on a sort of “guilty until proven innocent” basis, and see where it led him.

Applying this skeptical method, Descartes arrived imperturbably at the realization that he could doubt everything except the fact that he was doubting. What’s more, if he was doubting, he had to be thinking. He then realized that only something that exists can think. How can something be thought without someone to do the thinking? Descartes was inching toward a discovery. Putting two and two together, he concluded that if you can think, you must exist. For even if you think you’re dead, the fact that you think you’re dead means you’re alive, because thinking implies existing. Descartes had found proof of existence. Hence his legendary epigram “I think, therefore I am.” It was a giant leap forward not just for philosophy but for science in general, because it seemed to establish something irrefutable, and thereby provided solid ground for all further investigation.

This is why waking up in the morning is such a philosophical act, a direct encounter with consciousness and existence. Really it’s ironic that we do it so unconsciously, because when we wake up we’re not only returning to consciousness, we’re also regaining the ability to prove it. During the night that wasn’t so certain. Although dreaming is a kind of thinking, and so another way, in theory, of proving that you exist, there were whole stretches of the night when you weren’t either thinking or dreaming, which raises the tricky question of whether you existed in those times: If thinking implies existing, do you exist when you’re not thinking? It’s a question I come back to in the last chapter of this book. For now, you know that you exist at least in the daytime.

So, having taken philosophy right back to square one, Descartes made this great jump forward, and as you stretch in the morning, no matter how grumpy you might be, you’re embracing an invisible but extraordinary phenomenon: your own conscious existence, your own awareness that you’re there. This seems like a promising start, but having hard-boiled things to this perfect egg of thought, from which everything else should have followed, Descartes was somewhat uncertain as to what to do with his certainty. You’re now awake, you’re conscious and you exist. But what next?

Being awake and conscious tends to be associated with having your faculties about you, where the word faculties effectively means your ability to think coherently, to reason things out. But just because you’re awake, does this automatically mean that your faculties of reason are working? It might not always feel like it—getting your brain into gear can take a little time—but as your eyes adjust to the light, is your reason waking up too? This is an important question, because you can be conscious and insane; being conscious and being rational don’t always go together. And it would be quite good in the morning to know not just that you exist, but that you’re thinking straight.

Let’s say that as you swim up into consciousness through the bedclothes—doubting your existence, perhaps, but thereby proving it—you become aware of the traffic outside your window; perhaps a pneumatic drill decides to join the chorus, or the recycling truck comes by and the clash of broken glass keeps shattering the peace. You curse the noise and sink back into your pillow. Sitting at the end of your bed, Immanuel Kant, who was in his prime about 150 years after Descartes, would immediately challenge you—and not just because he was a renowned insomniac, famous for working all night in nightcap and robe. He’d certainly wonder if your reaction was rational. Why?

Watching you trying to retreat under the duvet, Kant would argue that your waking perception that the sound of traffic is noisy is nothing more than that: a perception. You’re not necessarily making a rational judgment, and your reason may indeed still be asleep. For how can you be sure the noise you hear is the true noise and not just a reflection of your grumpiness? Is your reaching again for the covers the action of what Kant called pure reason, a universal truth that’s out there for everyone, or is it a personal response of laziness and avoidance?

You might imagine that everywhere on your street people are cursing along with you, but even if you were to poll your neighbors, and they all agreed that the morning traffic on your street is indeed particularly irritating, still Kant wouldn’t be satisfied. He’d be pushing not just for an empirical or democratic version of the truth, but for something more enduring—pure reason, again—which lies above, beyond, and before any interpretations, individual or collective, that are made about reality. And if you think that in this Kant is being unrealistic, or dogmatic, or unduly severe, you need only remind yourself of certain cults in which 100 percent of the membership believe one thing to be true and 100 percent of them are deluded. Universal belief in something doesn’t equate to universal truth, and Kant was keen to refer back to Copernicus, the Polish polymath who in 1514 proved that the earth goes round the sun. Until that point, everybody believed the earth lay at the center of the universe, and everybody was wrong.

It’s clear that, apart from its many other uses—birth, death, and the consummation of marriage, to name a few—the bed is a battleground for philosophies of waking up. Even if it provides firm support for the idea that you exist, it can’t be trusted to bear the weight of your perceptions. And although waking up relieves you of a large degree of doubt (Descartes), it immediately replaces it with the task of proving that what you feel first thing in the morning has any substance at all (Kant). The day has barely begun and you’ve already had quite a philosophical workout, and yet if philosophy has pondered these questions at such length, it is probably not philosophy but religion, and Christianity in particular, that has most leveraged the idea of waking up. For apart from anything else, the act of waking up is a playing out in miniature of the relationship between life and death, where going to sleep is like dying and waking up is like being born or born again. That relationship is not just metaphorical, however; there’s a very literal sense in which, when you go to bed, you can’t guarantee that you will ever wake up again. On both counts, Christianity has a special relevance.

Consider this: there’s not much point to C...