All philosophies have a common failing. They imagine life can be ordered by human reason. Either the mind can devise a way of life that is secure from loss, or else it can control the emotions so that it can withstand any loss.
In fact, neither how we live nor the emotions we feel can be controlled in this way. Our lives are shaped by chance and our emotions by the body. Much of human life - and much of philosophy (and religion) - is an attempt to divert ourselves from this fact.
Diversion was a central theme in the writings of the seventeenth-century scientist, inventor, mathematician and religious thinker Blaise Pascal, who wrote: "Diversion. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things."
My lifelong all-absorbing diversion had been my work, until I arrived back in deepest suburbia in early 1985 and looked around for something to divert me from the sameness on all sides. I found it in the ABC Radio's nightly Late Night Live, initially compèred by Richard Ackland until Phillip Admans picked up the Late Night Live microphone in 1991.
Phillip Adams' trademark wit and incisive commentary, his sharp analysis of current events, and his hot debates in politics, science, philosophy and the arts, made Late Night Live my diversion of choice for well over thirty years, all of will come to an end when he retires in late June.
Thanks for having been my bedfellow for three decades, Phillip. Your wit and erudition will live on in your Bedtime Stories, published in 2012.
