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Music and metaphysics: HowTheLightGetsIn 2015

HowTheLightGetsIn (named, aptly, in honour of a Leonard Cohen song) has taken the festival world by storm with its yearly celebration of philosophy and music. We spoke to founder and festival organiser Hilary Lawson, who is a full-time philosopher, Director of the Institute of Art and Ideas, and someone with lots to say about keepings things equal and organising a great party.

How did the festival first get started?

So, the HowTheLightGetsIn (HTLGI) festival has been running for 6 years now. I’d like to say that there was some grand idea behind it but I’m afraid there wasn’t. As a philosopher I’d had experience of how the academy works and I was aware that culturally speaking philosophy was a joke, more associated with the ‘Monty Python philosopher’s football match’ than serious scholarship. The reason that the academy had walled itself in such a way was that it seemed to be engaged exclusively in a technical conversation about the meaning of words which had no real bearing on people. It had become impenetrable; people couldn’t understand what philosophers were saying. Growing up with philosophy and being a philosopher myself I’d seen this from the inside.

I had an experience twenty years ago where I was at a conference with the American philosopher Richard Rorty who at that time one of the leading philosophers in the world. We were standing at the back of a session, listening to the speaker and I turned to Richard and said “I didn’t understand anything of that”. He turned to me and said, straight away, “yes I didn’t understand any of it either – I very rarely do”. Meanwhile apparently erudite questions were being asked from the floor. There probably wasn’t anyone there who understood what the speaker has said but they were apparently asking these good questions. Afterward Rorty admitted to me: “you know, I’ve been going to these conferences for about 30 years and I hardly ever understand them!” It was like we both knew this but had never called it. I think from that point I thought I’m not going to play this game.

Why did you choose the festival format?

So what we try to do here is provide a framework for serious interaction. There is no attempt to dumb anything down, the philosophers are just there to make their case and try to convince the other people and the panel. If you have two people who are disagreeing about quantum physics you learn more than a solo speaker. Gradually over the years I think it’s beginning to work, people go away and feel genuinely exhilarated. This rarely happens in academic circles because people are constantly worrying about how clever they look or their status but there is really no need.

We are fervently against celebrity culture so we don’t choose people because they are well known. We choose the ideas and the topics first and then we choose people who have a strong and original view. We are therefore trying to cage a creative atmosphere.

HTLGI combines art, philosophy, and music. Why mix the three?

On the one level it’s because it’s fun and it’s nice to have a party. But I think there is another element here which is about fighting the status game. When you have a panel of people, if you’re not careful, the people on the panel become the “gods” as it were and that’s not conducive to conversation. When music drifts in from next door’s tent it is not an intrusion, I think it just softens everybody, people are less status conscious. So music helps to create that atmosphere.

This year the theme of HTLGI was “fantasy and reality”. Does this reflect the dual nature of the festival?

We are driven by our theme and we have a different one each year so of course each one breaks out differently. But we do use our theme to help unite the different elements of the festival. The different people who are on our teams such as arts or philosophy are looking to see what’s coming up in each area and having a theme helps us have an attack plan as to how we divide things up.

We also try to be on the zeitgeist. You’re right that the “fantasy and reality” theme fits with my personal thoughts on the philosophy front but it’s also right for now. We are always looking to stay relevant and so we don’t yet know what our theme will be next year.

It has been said that HTLGI poses an alternative to the increasingly corporate literary festival model. Was this intentional?

I mean we’re different. There are people who want to go along and see their celebrity author and we’re not in that space. You don’t come here to get an autograph; you come here to be involved in a conversation.

There are no solo speakers invited to the festival unless they are also willing to take part in a debate. It’s not just about pushing books it’s about opening ideas up to challenge. There is of course space for the more traditional approach that but it’s a different space. Some people will prefer it, some people will prefer us.

Do you hope to make philosophy accessible to a wider audience? There’s a huge range of people here, from all different age groups, professions, and backgrounds.

You’re right we do have a large age range here, which is remarkable. A lot of literary festivals have an age limit like 50-70 but as you can see here we have a lot of young people and a lot of older people.

I think that if you had a really broad brush, once upon a time us philosophers thought that we could explain the truth of the world and since then there has been slow, gradual withdraw from that. Although very few people describe themselves as post-modernist we are in a post-modernist world and many people as a result are very lost. So we are trying to stand in that space, and lots of people from lots of different places are keen to get involved.

In your introduction to the conference programme you make the statement that published ideas are “dead” as they can’t evolve any further. Do you therefore think that we should get rid of books with everything in discussion or should we just do lots more new editions?

No, not at all, and we shouldn’t get rid of books or formal education. But we should not pretend to seek the “objective truth” but make a more honest space as it mean there’s no need to hide subjective opinions. It’s more about your take on ideas not, for example, what the string theory is as we can look that up on Wikipedia. So we’re not anti-books at all, we just don’t want play the status game.

Featured image credit: How The Light Gets In 2015, banner. Image courtesy of Hilary Lawson.

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