You may remember the genre of the kitchen sink dramas and movies of the late fifties and early sixties. The rather pompous middle-class attitudes and characteristics of the previous ages were suddenly shoved aside, and we saw what real life for so many people really was – Albert Finney shooting his nagging, corpulent neighour in the backside with his airgun in “Look Back in Anger,” teenage girls getting pregnant and actually having abortions or

babies; people behaving like normal confused, struggling, battling, stoic everyday people instead of mythical heroes uttering banalities and sucking on tobacco pipes.

The kitchen sink syndrome brought us down to the nitty gritty of life – the reality of ordinary life, if you like — and that, like it or not, is where we’ve been ever since. And so much so that now, of course, we’re searching again for dreams.

But the analogy of the kitchen sink applies to philosophy too. There are two forms of philosophy to my mind – academic and real life. I’m not dismissing academic philosophy, Far from it. Without it, we wouldn’t have the vast treasure-house of historical thought, theories and concepts which provides the critical basis of any philosophical advance today.

But the problem is, academics don’t talk to ordinary people like us, they talk to each other. And they tend to talk in a language that is peculiarly, and sometimes deliberately so, their own. Not only that, but they tend to compete for academic recognition and acclaim in that same esoteric language, and to the point that their arguments can become so hair-splitting, nit-picking, and their language so obscure, that the wondrous, exciting, challenging adventure of philosophy – as it applies, with such fiery illumination, to the condition of man — is lost in stifling irrelevance and obscurity.

The latter-day philosopher Bryan Magee is among those who watched philosophy plunge into obscurity and very nearly perish in the academic battles that raged through the cloisters of Oxford University in the 1940s. Philosophy, as he saw it, simply lost touch at that time with what it really was.

“The greatest tragedy of academic philosophy in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world,” Magee wrote, “is that it was developed as a profession largely by people who did not themselves have philosophical problems and who, perhaps for that reason, operated with a commonsense view of the world and equated philosophical activity with conceptual analysis.” And he used the term “commonsense” in its defined opposition to metaphysics.

Magee saw philosophy being smothered by academic theories such as “linguistic analysis” – in which it was believed that all issues could be solved by logical analysis of the way we say things, and that there was no need for philosophy, per se, at all. He also cited “logical positivism” and its Verification Principle – another seething academic mind-play – for, as he said, “outlawing more or less the whole of philosophy apart from logic.”

On the one hand, the logical positivists claimed the task of philosophy, its contribution to our understanding of ourselves and our world, had been taken over by science. On the other, the linguistic analysts saw philosophy as “talk about talk.” And by all accounts, that’s what it virtually became – talk about talk — with adventurers and firebrands like Magee tearing their hair out because of the extent that modern philosophy had, to all intents, lost touch with its core issue: the human dilemma.

But like me, Magee was not turning his back on academic philosophy; far from it. He simply saw the history of philosophical thought, it’s great thinkers, and its key theoretical milestones, as a kind of travelling companion, or guru, or Obi Wan Kanobi of his own philosophical adventure.

“What I’m trying to understand,” he wrote, “is the world in which I find myself. I read the great philosophers because they enlighten me about what I’m trying to understand, often giving me insights of enormous depth that I could not have arrived at without them.

“But in the final analysis, what matters to me is not what they believe but what I believe. I am interested in their work in so far that it is grist to my mill. So I treat them not as objects of study in their own right, as a scholar would, but as life-enhancing companions and guides, shipmates cannier than I am in a voyage of discovery on which we are all embarked.”

And Magee’s wonderful enlightenment takes me back to, of all places, the kitchen sink. It’s here that cups and dishes and cutlery have to be washed. It’s here that fundamentally relevant questions are asked – Why am I here, washing up? Why am I here, period? What is my role, if any, in the vast, incomprehensible universe and cosmos around me? 

Am I, like the rest of humankind, special or unique, an entity with a purpose and destiny, or simply a random occurrence in an equally random, indifferent state of affairs so incomprehensible as to defy all human attempt to solve its mystery?

Standing at the sink, thinking my kitchen sink thoughts, I’ve arrived, as Bryan Magee says, at my own intuitive theories and – who’s to say? – conclusions. That the mystery about us is so vast, so incomprehensible, so awesome, that it just cannot be a random indifference.

That the whole incredible marvel of my existence in it all, the tiny bit-part I share with all the millions and millions of other characters in this cosmic theatre, this cannot be something indifferent either.

That if the reality of my existence is so questionable, if all around me is so radically different to what it seems, then death, to me, in its assumed finality, is just as questionable too.

That’s what the kitchen sink does for me, as I watch the grimy water and last stringy suds revolve down the plughole. It reminds me that philosophy is of no use to me unless it seeks the answers to the vital, fundamental questions that I ask about my own, and mankind’s, existence. Anything less than that is simply linguistic analysis – talk about talk. 

And in support of this, I leave you with another observation by Bryan Magee that, to my mind, could hardly have come from the cloisters of academia, but surely from the ponderings of another excited, adventuring intellect at the kitchen sink.

Magee was attacking logical positivism again, and principally its view that commonsense decrees that everything around us – the physical world – is the sole reality, and all that we really need to worry our pretty little heads about.

Says Magee: “I regard this enthronement of commonsense as an intellectual catastrophe. Modern science has shown that behind our moment-to-moment experience of the everyday world, teem truths and realities that commonsense is totally unaware of.

“For instance, that every physical object in our environment is a whirl of molecules and atoms made up of sub-atomic particles in random motion at speeds approaching that of light.

“That all this is transmutable into energy, that every physical object is a space filled with force, is not at all the commonsense way of looking at things. Nor is the fact that the air around us is full of invisible waves of information-bearing particles, to wit television and radio waves.

“Even something so basic as that we are living on the surface of a giant ball that is rotating on its axis at speeds of up to a thousand miles an hour, while at the same time hurtling through space, is, I am tempted to say, impossible to see or feel, even when we know it to be true, and so, contrary to commonsense.

“Everything revealed to us by relativism and quantum physics shows that our immediate physical surroundings are bizarre – beyond anything imaginable, until recently, to human beings.”

Yes, it’s all bizarre and unimaginable, I agree, even as I wipe the sink, hang up the tea-towel, switch off the kitchen light, close the door – wondering if then, in the causality of phenomenon as a perception of reality, there’s actually nothing there any more.