Dea Alter Vult Poem by gershon hepner

If you should happen to be tootin’
your horn, do not be high-falutin’.
Please be a fellow who falutes
as low as other people’s boots,
so they’ll look down at you while rootin’
for you since you are low-falutin,
but when with a philosopher,
look up, and be the boss of her.

After Linda had commented on my poem “Apothegms” with the words, “Short but very pointed! I love the way you mix high fallutin' with demotic! ” I found in moreintelligentlife.com, a website that appears on aldaily.com, a review of Roger Scruton’s “I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine” by Anthony Gottlieb, a former executive editor of The Economist and author of Reason”:

A minor travail for anyone involved in the world of philosophy is having to endure snatches of Monty Python’s “Philosophers’ Drinking Song” when you are introduced at a party. One must try to smile politely upon learning for the hundredth time that “Socrates himself was permanently pissed', that “Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel”, and that the correct parsing of Descartes’ famous cogito is “I drink, therefore I am”. One might expect a book that takes this slogan as its title to be an embarrassing bore. But Roger Scruton’s 'I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine' is never that. Scruton has written a mostly light-hearted book about a pleasure that he takes very earnestly—indeed his insistence that wine is historically and morally one of the foundations of civilisation gives a new meaning to the term “serious drinker”. He is primarily an academic philosopher, specialising in musical aesthetics, and the author of several excellent accounts of modern thought for the layman. Scruton is also a composer, a conservative pundit, a memoirist, and latterly a devotee of the traditional pastimes of the English country gentleman, especially fox-hunting (of which one of his more than 30 non-fiction books is a passionate defence) . 'I Drink Therefore I Am' combines many of the ingredients of late-vintage Scruton: social conservativism, a love of the land, philosophical curiosity, and a fondness for uncorking dusty bottles from the cellar of his memory…
The book’s light-hearted appendix, in which Scruton suggests what to drink when reading various philosophical texts, is probably destined for a wide circulation in college bars, at least at Oxford and Cambridge. Some of the tips are philosophical in-jokes (drink tar-water when reading Bishop Berkeley, who eccentrically advocated it as a cure-all) and some are agreeably weak (Heidegger, who wrote copiously about “nothing”, should be toasted with an empty glass) . Sartre should be read with a 1964 Burgundy, since that was the year of publication of 'Les mots', which Scruton judges to be his best book. Because Scruton regards Sartre as, on balance, a bad man, he is relieved to report that it will probably be impossible to find a 1964 Burgundy.
Descartes, though deserving of recognition, is “the most over-rated philosopher in history”, according to Scruton, and he recommends “a Chateauneuf-du-Pape from old vines, with the smooth velvet finish and liquorice and thyme aromas of the Provencal hillsides. Such a wine will compensate for the thinness of the 'Meditations' and give you rather more to talk about.” Other recommendations are convoluted rather than cheeky, as in the case of Plato: “The sugar in a refined Vouvray is fully integrated into the structure, like the ornaments into a classical façade. Its fluted mineral columns, with their flower-filled capitals, call out for a firm base of argument, of the kind that Plato hoped always to provide.” For Leibniz, we are to try a Crianza or Reserva Rioja, though I would like to know why, and—most bafflingly of all—while Aristotle’s drier works should be accompanied by plain water, the 'Prior Analytics' (his treatise on the syllogism) needs to be preceded by a ginger biscuit.
Scruton’s publisher tells us in a blurb that this book is an “antidote to the pretentious clap-trap that is written about wine today.” Perhaps his aim is, in part, to drown out one form of pretentiousness with another, more high-falutin' one.


12/30/09