Professor Angie Hobbs

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

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My castaway this week is the philosopher Professor Angie Hobbes. Her current professional role is promoting the public understanding of philosophy. The point? Well, to help us to apply the rigor, clarity, and precision of big philosophical thoughts to our everyday lives. Born in Sussex, her happy childhood was deeply marked by the death of her much loved and profoundly disabled sister.

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an event that would lead my castaway to a great appreciation of the fragility of life.

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A bright child, she didn't particularly shine at school, and was at one point even expelled.

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But as inspirational teachers introduced her to a love of literature, she went on to read classics at Cambridge, discovering a deep and abiding passion for philosophy, in particular the ancient Greeks. She says, I see myself as helping people think through problems and broadening their range of concepts and ideas. I genuinely think that philosophy can help people lead a more flourishing life, both individually and communally. So, Angie Hobbes, I guess straight off the bat then, I should ask you what the key components are, do you think, to a flourishing life?

Presenter1:44

Oh, well I think for most people a bit of uh reflection is helpful about the kind of ends or goals that you want to achieve and the best means of getting there. And to do that I think you need to think about what it means to be a human being. What might it mean to live a well lived human life? I think there's a really key difference between the notion of a flourishing life, which we might get from the ancient Greek word eudaimonia, and the notion of happiness. Happiness is quite a subjective concept about how you feel today. We can't always feel happy, but we can aim to try to flourish, even at those periods of our lives when we're not feeling so happy. So of course you want love. You want romantic love, erotic love, you want love for your children and friends, satisfying work. You want to do your little bit to make the world a better place. I I hope you agree with me that relevance is an important thing to mention here. You know there are many people who don't live as you do the life of the head, of thoughts and w how we can usefully explore our life and think about our motivations and so on. They're just blinking while busy getting on with it. Do you think that philosophy, pure philosophy, is relevant to people in the twenty first century?

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Of course, otherwise I wouldn't be doing my job. I mean, think of all the problems we've got in the world at the moment to do with what money is for. How can we make and spend and invest money in so that it serves the greater good as well as our own? The relation between fairness and equality. What does it mean to possess physical or mental health? I don't think we're doing so well without using philosophy. I think it's worth giving it a try. It'd be fair to say that most of my castaways are no slouches when it comes to busy schedules. But I mean, you you you take the biscuit. Looking at your diary and the amount of things that you pack into a week

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I'm imagining time on this island might be um you know might be rather desirable. Oh, I can't wait. I mean I'm I do hope eventually to be rescued, but I'm hoping it won't be for a few weeks. And if by some unhappy uh accident my mobile phone gets washed up intact, I'm chucking it straight back in the sea. I'm longing to get on this island. So Angie Hobbes, tell me then about your first disc.

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Oh, yes, Patty Smith Because the Night. Now this came out while I was at Sixth Horn College at Colliers in Horsham in West Sussex. And I adore dancing. I never get a chance these days, and even when I do, my fifteen-year-old daughter forbids it. I shall dance on this island with great relish, but I used to dance it a lot at school and university. And I'm playing this for all those who remember what we used to quaintly call discos in Lower Beading Village Hall, circa 1978.

Professor Angie Hobbs4:39

Understand the way I feel under your command. Take my hand as it's underfand. We can touch it now, keep touching now, kids watching now.

Speaker 24:59

No too long.

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That was Patty Smith and Because the Night and Memories for You, Angie Hobbes, of Dancing at the Disco. You are now Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. As part of that role, I saw you talking to a bunch of school children, and you gave them this fundamental question. You said, What makes me me?

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Which set me wondering how much have you thought about what makes you you?

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I think I'd come at that question in two ways. There's the the question about personal identity. Am I the same person that I was yesterday or the day before? Given that we all change all the time, at what point does change break down personal identity? In terms of what makes me me well

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To be honest, I'm too busy to think about it a huge amount. I mean, I am aware that I'm very driven. I'm extremely aware that we're only on this planet for a very short amount of time. So I'm very conscious of mortality. Not in a morbid, gloomy way. I'm quite a happy person, but we're not here for long and I want to crack on. Might it be the case that as fewer and fewer of us here in Western Europe at least connect with organized religion, as people themselves have to work out what is a good life, what is an ethical life, what are the standards that are important to them, as we individualize as a society, do you think philosophy becomes even more important?

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I do, and I also think philosophy has a really vital role in helping assist interfaith dialogue and dialogue between people of faith and people of no faith, or agnostics. I I myself am an agnostic in the sense that I do not have a belief in God, but neither do I have a very strong belief that God does not exist, which I take to be atheism.

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And I think that's one of the reasons I really love ancient Greek philosophy, because though a number of the ancient Greek philosophers were profoundly religious, and Plato would be one of them, my favourite, they weren't espousing any of the current great global sort of monotheistic religions. So.

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I think studying philosophy in general, but ancient Greek philosophy in particular, can help include people into an ethical debate. When it comes to let's just say that intolerance is at the at the centre of the problems that we have right now, various people's intolerances of how other people live.

Professor Angie Hobbs7:20

Tolerances of ha

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If you are trying to encourage people who believe themselves to be being influenced by something greater than anything on this earth, they're not going to listen to philosophers, are they? They feel that they're already being called by something greater. At that stage, possibly. I don't know. I mean, you'd have to take it case by case. But this is one of my main arguments for wanting to get philosophy into primary schools. Because by the time children start being targeted by various groups, whether they're gang-related or related to some kind of religious or political extremism, that can happen quite young, ten, eleven, twelve. When that starts to happen, you already want to have good habits of reasoning and thinking in place to help protect children against various forms of indoctrination. Because I think you're absolutely right. There may come a point when it's very, very difficult to change people's mindset. And you want to get in there first and say, on what conceivable grounds

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A Do you think that this belief is superior, and B that you think it gives you the right to treat other humans inhumanely?

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Let's have your next piece of music, Angie, your second one. Why what is it, and why have you chosen this? Ah, now, my first musical memories are of my father singing to me. He had a lovely voice, and he used to get in at seven fifteen every evening from London and come straight up and sing to me.

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There was a lot of Marlene Diesrecht I remember, a lot of musicals, but what I particularly remember are the ballads and the folk songs. And of all the ballads that I remember, Comin' Through the Rye is the one I remember most. And this is a beautiful new recording, commissioned specially for Desert Island discs.

Professor Angie Hobbs9:07

Gen a body meet a body comin' through the rye Gina body kiss a body need a body cry Elkalasias her laddy Nin they see oy Yet all the lads they smile at me When comin' through the rye Gen a body meet a body comin' free the tun Gina body kiss a body need a body frun Elkalasias her lardy Ninisi oi Yet all the lads they smile at me When comin' through the rye Among the train there is a swing and dearly loom a sail But what is name or what is him? At any certi tail Elkalasias her lardy Nini say oi Yet all the lads they loom me wheel And what the wood am I?

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That was coming through the rye, performed by Robin Stapleton. Now, given that your professional life then is dedicated to trying to understand the biggest dilemmas that face us as human beings, when did it all start? Were you a very inquisitive, bright little girl?

Presenter10:33

I was certainly inquisitive, and we had the kind of discussions around the family table where, you know, we would talk about free will and determinism and stuff like that. So my parents didn't talk down to us at all, so there'd be good, vigorous debates. Tell me more then about your parents. Well, my father was a lawyer in London, loved music, loved reading, very well read, but also loved sport and the theatre. And my mother shared a lot of those interests. She had to leave formal education before sixth form. Why was that? For financial reasons, which was a great shame because she had been destined, apparently, to read classics at Cambridge, though she never told me that heroically until after I'd got in, because she didn't want to put any pressure on me.

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I have a wonderful memory. My dad was away on business.

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And I was in bed I would have been about ten or eleven and I heard gales of laughter coming from the sitting room, and I went down, and there was my mother in a Chinese silk kimono, which I had never seen.

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Smoking a cigar, which I'd never seen, drinking a bottle of drambuille.

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And watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, which my father, in a very strange illiberal moment, because he was a liberal man, he'd forbidden the family to watch Monty Python. He'd never seen it. He'd decided it was the end of civilisation as we know it. And I just suddenly came in, and there was this drinking, smoking, hooting woman. And I just thought, I'm only beginning to understand this woman. What did you get up to as a little child? Was it sort of playing in the woods? Yes, so I was brought up at the foot of Leith Hill in the Surrey Hills. And my adored older brother was away at school a lot of the time. He's seven years older than me, seven and a half.

Professor Angie Hobbs12:10

Uh

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My sister, who was four years older, was very, very profoundly physically and mentally disabled, so it was a very solitary childhood, not at all unhappy, not lonely, but I was off in the woods and the fields. And my really deep love of the English countryside, I think, comes from just, you know, hours lying on my back in long grass amongst the buttercups and daydreaming.

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I think your next disc displays another profound love that started in childhood. Just tell us a little bit about this third piece.

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Oh, yes. Now, cricket. I adore cricket, and the test match special team over the years are my sort of constant companions. My whole family adored cricket, including my mother. Now, this was Headingly 81. This is the ashes when Botham's heroics rested a seemingly lost Testmatch back. Now, I was actually playing a game called Stewball at the time. I was vice captain of Surrey under 22 for a while.

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And I was fielding on the boundary and this match was going on and everybody had their car doors open. I was listening to the commentary. So as I was fielding, I remember hearing all the cheers and hoping that the ball didn't come my way so I could continue listening to the commentary.

Speaker 413:37

Here's Lily coming in now to Belle to Botham.

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And he cuts this one, and that's four.

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Now over the ropes, a lovely one, just backward a point.

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Short outside the Ostamp, Lily Boley, too short to Botham. Here comes Lawson in now to Botham. He gets there, he bowls it short, Botham cuts. That's going to be four runs, I think. Yes, Chappell's not-oh, he does, he dives and does very well to stop it. But he was near the boundary and he couldn't prevent it from rolling over for four. Bothham fairly smacked that one away square with the wicket. Chappell went sprawling across and, as it were, tipped it round the post.

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That was a compilation from what became known as Botham's Ashes from the 1981 England versus Australia Test match at Headingley, and you heard there, of course, from Brian Johnson and Henry Blofeld. So tell me more then about your home life. Michael is the big brother, seven and a half years older than you, and Diana, your sister, four years older than you. And as you say, she was profoundly disabled and was living at home. Yes, no, my parents fought very hard to keep her at home because she was born in the late fifties and they were under a lot of pressure to put her in a home. And she had cerebral palsy very badly indeed. She couldn't move or talk or do anything. She did enjoy music. She did have a lot of pain, though. It was a tough life for her. But she was very loved. It can often be the case that when somebody in the family who's living at home has a severe disability, and it could be a parent with an illness, or it could be a brother or sister.

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The life of the family is governed by, you know, we must be quiet because Diana is having a bad day today, or we must not go to that place because it's difficult to get a wheelchair to. Was that your experience? No, I mean, my parents were absolutely brilliant. My brother and I had a really rumbunctious, normal, loud, noisy, happy childhood. You know, we were absolutely encouraged to have friends round at a moment's notice. We were never once told to be quiet, not once. I mean, we used to play a game of it. And I remember my mother would be feeding my sister. So my sister would be in my mother's lap, and my mother would be spooning food in her mouth, and we'd just charge in the room, turn off the lights, charge over the table, knock the food everywhere. You know, not once were we told off. And to be fair, my sister seemed to love it. And she seemed to love being part of the party. And you were 11 when she died. And not the effects long term, but the effect at the time to lose a sister. What effect did it have on you at the time?

Professor Angie Hobbs16:02

Yeah.

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It was um

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It was an extraordinary day. I mean, I I was going to go and kiss her good morning, and I remember being told not to go into her bedroom because she had a cold.

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And I can remember listening outside the door and hearing her breathing, and somehow I just knew.

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I just knew that she was dying. I don't know how I knew, but I did. And, um.

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I couldn't deal with it at that time. I took our new puppy out for a walk. I didn't want to be in the house when she died. And I remember knowing, or feeling I knew, the exact second when she died. I remember being up by the pond up the lane and thinking, oh, she's died the second. No, I don't know if it was that second, but I went back a few minutes later and she had just died. And yes, the house did become quiet then. And as I said, it was normally a very happy, lively house full of people, full of parties, full of music, but no, not for a few months.

Professor Angie Hobbs17:09

Mm.

Presenter17:12

And I went away to boarding school. I think my parents wanted me to get somewhere a bit happier. If that was the the immediate effect at the time.

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You said earlier that you are always busy and you are always conscious of the fact that life is finite and that you must make the most of it. Would you say that is the profound effect of having lived with a sister and watched her die at such a young age, that you absolutely feel compelled to make the most of the life that you've been given to live?

Professor Angie Hobbs17:29

That you must

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I'm sure it's a factor. It wasn't at all a morbid household, but

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I was just very, very aware of the fragility and finitude of life. Not just the fact it's going to end, but how vulnerable we all are.

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And how we all need help. I mean, my sister clearly needed help, but I'm very aware that everybody, all of us, me included, we all need help.

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Let's have some more music, Angie. It's uh it's your fourth of the morning. Oh, yeah. Well, this is just quite simply my favorite piece of music by my favorite composer, and this is my favorite movement in it. It is absolutely beautiful and will lift me on my desert island.

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That was part of the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, played by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karrigan. So Angie Hobbes, a professor, as we know, with a first class degree from Cambridge, and many prizes won there along the way.

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It's very interesting that you didn't I mean, you got all the grades in school, clearly, to get into Cambridge, but you didn't really flourish in school.

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Was certainly at both my prep school and my boarding school, where I did O-levels. I think it took me a while to get going. I'm grateful to both schools for a few really wonderful teachers and for friendships that have lasted me all my life. So I have good memories of both schools, but I think it's fair to say that I wasn't the kind of student they wanted. They were both schools aimed at turning out Christian young ladies who were going to be good wives of successful men. That was the ethos of both schools, and I just sort of didn't get it. And I never was seeking to be naughty, but I was always getting into trouble. I remember just not doing any needlework for a year. There were too many of us for the needlework class, and I used to go off into the cookery room next door and actually just do my Latin homework, which I much preferred. And the teacher who didn't like me just used to call in and say, you okay in there? And I'm okay, yeah, fine, fine. And of course, I didn't have anything to wear for the parade at the end of the year.

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And she was very cross and told me she was not going to teach me needlework any more and she wouldn't teach me cookery either. And I was sent to the vice principal and I was told and this was only about nineteen seventy four

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So not that long well.

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No, I don't think that long ago. And I remember the vice-principal saying, You're going to leave the school not able to sew or cook properly. How will you ever find a husband? And I said, and I didn't mean to be rude. I said, Well, I intend to marry a man who can sew, and got into the most awful trouble. But of course, she got the last laugh, because I never have been married. And clearly, had I had sewing skills, you know, potential husbands would have been queuing up. Was that when you were expelled?

Professor Angie Hobbs21:01

No, I don't think it's a good idea.

Professor Angie Hobbs21:03

I got it.

Presenter21:31

I was only technically expelled. I can't boast about it. There was a party after our we did our O levels, as they then were, and in fact my friends and I hadn't particularly enjoyed this party, and we'd gone off walking by the lake, and we got back and found that the head mistress had expelled, I think, over seventy of us. I mean the whole future sixth form.

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Now, I I I'd been going to leave anyway, so it didn't really affect me. And apart then from hopefully at some point finding a husband who could sew, what did you think what did you think you would do after school and after education?

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Looking back, it's extraordinary how little notion any of us had about careers. Even though after leaving Cambridge, I didn't know. I trained to teach English as a foreign language and had an absolutely blissful year of living dangerously in Naples. And on that note, let me then ask you about this, yes, this next piece. Oh, yes. Naples introduced me to many things. It's a wonderful, pulsating, vibrant city.

Professor Angie Hobbs22:20

Let me then ask

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I shared a flat with two other teachers who introduced me to jazz and blues and all sorts of stuff. So this next record is me being twenty three, utterly carefree, let loose in this extraordinary city where you felt that anything could happen and it often did.

Speaker 222:47

Fish in the sea, you know how I feel.

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River running free, you know how I feel.

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Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel.

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It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life.

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For me.

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And I'm feeling

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Eagle and girl

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That was Nina Simone and Feeling Good. And as we would say in Glasgow, Angie Hobbs, you were going your dinger doing that. You really enjoyed it. So as we know then, you graduated with a first. You taught English in Naples and not just taught English in Naples, had a lot of fun too. And then

Speaker 223:22

Yeah.

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Um you returned to do your doctorate at Cambridge, and after that you spent the next twenty years at Warwick University. First of all, you were a lecturer, then a senior fellow in the public understanding of philosophy.

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And clearly you are somebody who is very well suited to academia. What do you think it is that makes a good academic that rises through the ranks? Uh there are lots of different ways of being a good academic. I mean there isn't just one blueprint. You clearly have to love reading and research and writing and delving and b being curious and wanting to push your

Presenter24:08

intellect to its limits. Most academics teach as well, and you have to love communicating. You have to enjoy spending time with eighteen to twenty two year olds, which I genuinely do.

Presenter24:20

And you you need to have a passion for your subject. I think that's the main thing. Some of the work that you've done out in the field, as it were, has been with business leaders. How genuinely receptive are they when you talk to them about, say, economic growth versus fairness within a business? Do you see their eyes light up or do you see them sort of sit back in their chairs and wait for the barrage, the unwelcome barrage, of what they should be thinking about, that they don't really want to think about? I never tell people what they should be thinking or how they should be living, because nobody likes to be told how to live, least of all me. So I would never do that. I make suggestions and I issue invitations about you might want to go through these doors, you might want to consider these ideas, this way of looking at things. No, never tell people what to think. I'm sure some people are there because they've got to tick a corporate social responsibility box. I'm not naïve. Do their ice clay sofa.

Presenter25:21

I hope by the end of the session their eyes have lit up again. I mean, it's interesting. Often the people at the very top of the company are the ones most engaged because they've gone through their career ladder. They're sort of rich, successful, and 50, and they're thinking, what do I do now with my life? And how can I use what I've done, you know, for some bigger purposes? Let's take a break for some music, Angie Hobbs. Your sixth track of the morning. Oh, yeah. Why this? Yes, well, again, I mean, I grew up dancing to the stones, and as well as the raucous brown sugar kind of dancing, there's also the romantic stones, the lyrical stones.

Speaker 425:49

Uh yes.

Presenter26:01

At these discos in Lower Beading Village Hall and the like, there would always be a slow song second from the end. It would be something like what we're about to hear, and everybody would start smooching, and then they would have something with the lights up to get everybody out of the corners at the end. And both then and in later years, this song has very particular romantic associations for me.

Speaker 226:42

Good friend me away.

Presenter26:46

The Rolling Stones, Wild Horses. Angie Hobbes, you've mentioned a few times your daughter, Molly, who's fifteen, the one who's not that comfortable with you dancing, but you do it anyway. You had her when you were relatively late. You were in your late 30s. I was, yes. I mean, I'd longed for a child for years. So a lot of my thirties was taken up with trying to have a child. And conception was not difficult, but holding on to conceptions was. For most of my pregnancy with Molly, I had to lie flat on my back in bed. I longed for a child beyond anything, so I was prepared to do whatever it took. And she's absolutely wonderful.

Speaker 226:54

Do it any

Presenter27:23

I'm conscious you you said to me when I asked you right at the beginning about what it is that that makes a flourishing life, one of the things you said was love. And of course the ancient Greeks have so many words for it, don't they? Philia, Luddus, Eros, Pragma, and so on. How central is it to your life to have love in it, not just with your child? Because you work so hard, I'm worried there isn't space.

Professor Angie Hobbs27:34

Philea Lottus Eros Pragma.

Presenter27:45

Well, I separated from my daughter's father about three years ago, after over twenty years, and I hope there is going to be space for love. There have been some dates. I'm very hopeful that a romantic life will be possible over fifty. I'm an optimist. So let's see what the future holds. Professionally, you deal with the very big questions. And I wonder, you know, seeing that the very great love that your parents exhibited towards your sister.

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Has that given you cause to ponder on the, you know, the price that we pay for love, and and that and philosophically also the idea that somehow there are always checks and balances?

Presenter28:27

Well, if you're really going to love and open yourself up to both loving and indeed being loved, you have to allow your skin to be thin, to get really close to another human being. You need to let your defences down and prepare to be hurt. But that is a price worth paying.

Presenter28:47

Angie Hobbes, let's hear your uh penultimate disc then. What are we going to hear? Ah, well now, I love the poet troubadours, uh, Cohen and Dylan.

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We've been talking about the importance of intimacy, and Cohen to me is the poet of intimacy. And I love Cohen because he loves older women. And this is the most beautiful, sensuous, private soul.

Speaker 429:10

Many men have loved the bell

Speaker 429:15

You fasten to the ring

Speaker 429:20

And everyone who wanted you.

Speaker 429:24

They found what they will always want again.

Speaker 429:32

Your beauty lost to you yourself Just as it was lost to them

Presenter29:39

That was Leonard Cohen and Take This Longing. We touched earlier on on the possibilities of philosophical exploration, allowing young minds to understand things like extremism and why they should question it or intolerance and so on. But of course, it's not all negative, is it? There's a huge positive side to the idea that very young minds can be fired up about the imaginative possibilities of where life could take them through philosophy. Well, absolutely. Young children have such a sort of natural zest. And why would we not want to harness that? Let them explore these ideas like what is time, if God is good, why do bad things happen, whatever. And philosophy is one of the humanities subjects that can help them to understand that there are different ways of living and being and thinking that might not be on offer in their own postcode. Reason can help us find a way out, but only if reason is properly trained. And it's that sense of extending imaginative possibility that for me is perhaps the most important gift that philosophy, along with other subjects, can give young children. And that's why I think it's so important to start the journey young.

Presenter31:00

And I've seen classes of children as young as six, seven, eight really intrigued by can I step into the same river twice, for instance? Heraclitus' great question. In fact, at university we looked not just at Heraclitus, can you step into the same river twice, but his pupil Cratylus saying you can't step into the same river once, because if everything's always changing and flowing.

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Then identities can't even form.

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And that really intrigued me. And children get that because.

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Children brought up on a diet of Harry Potter or Doctor Who or Lord of the Rings are used to making.

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Huge imaginative leaps through time and space. Talking about fantastical other worlds, I'm about to cast you away, of course. You're going to this desert island. In practical terms, how are you going to deal with it? Are you you a practical person? You're a survivor?

Presenter31:54

I think I'm a survivor. Um well, of course I can't sew. Uh we we've established that. I actually did learn to cook quite well.

Presenter32:02

I have done quite a few canoeing and camping holidays in Ontario, so should any bears get washed up on this desert island, I will be fine. Tell me about your eighth disc, Engie Holmes. What's this?

Presenter32:15

Ah now well, of course, after my few weeks of utter peace and resting, I do want to be rescued. But if I have to see out my days on this desert island, then this utterly sublime piece by Talis can see me out.

Presenter33:33

Part of Thomas Talis's Spem in Allium, sung there by the Talis scholars in Merton College, Oxford, directed by Peter Phillips. So, Angie Hobbes, the moment has come then. When I give you the books, you get the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible, and you may take one other book along to accompany them. What's it going to be? I'm going to take the collected poems of Yeats. I love learning poetry by heart. It's one of the things from my school days I'm really grateful for. And I'm hoping that with some time to reflect, I'll uncover some of the

Presenter34:05

Layers of complexities in some of the poems. It's yours then, and a luxury too. I was never allowed to learn a musical instrument. My parents, I think, felt that was just something they couldn't cope with. So I would love a harp, and I'd like lots of teach-yourself harp books and lots of replacement strings. All of that is yours, then, as your luxury. And if you had to save just one of these eight tracks, which one would it be?

Presenter34:31

Ooh, it's got to be Beethoven 7th. It's yours. Professor Angie Hobbs, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Presenter35:20

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio4.