When I was young, I wanted to become a maestro on the football pitch, a master of the sport, an aficionado of all the patterns, tactics and geometry of the game; as a player, I loved solving the riddle of the match in front of me and facing up to the moving conundrum, like a general that gives his orders not with his voice alone but also with feints, light touches, movements of the ball and a clever positioning that alters the gravitational field of the match. I elfed about the pitch, with moves like music, my feet like pianist’s fingers trilling across the keys… I have carried these passions and propensities into teaching and philosophy. Thinking, like football, becomes most profound when it is most balletic, outwitting difficulties with graceful movements. And just as, in football, there are some passes that come out of nowhere to open up the game—a clip that splits the centre-backs or a killer-ball between the lines—so I live for those thoughts, incisive and pitch-perfect, that come out of nowhere to open up the world for us, that get a whole crowd of hopes up on their feet, unlock systems of defence, and allow us to access those beautiful danger-zones of life, putting us in for a goal-scoring opportunity. Those are the kinds of thoughts that make us playmakers of history itself!

There is another aspect of football that carries into philosophy as well: thinking is a team sport. It is my aim, through the medium of Éducation Totale, to train a squad of fellow thinkers, beautiful ballers on that other plane of life. I want to populate the world with no. 10s of thought, brave defenders of big ideas, tenacious intellectual battlers, virtuoso dribblers who can get through the tiniest gaps, goal-poachers who know how to finish a move with grace, and all those whose speeches end with that magical sound of a ball rippling the back of the net. Thinking requires both solitude and community. It takes all sorts to make a winning combination.

I achieved great success in academic work during my time at four outstanding English universities: Liverpool University; the University of Oxford; University College London; and King’s College London, where I earned my PhD in Philosophy in 2022. But it is my belief that schools and universities no longer edify and upbuild the minds of students. The “education” they offer is rote-learning and drudgery, which shrinks the soul rather than allowing it to flourish. That is why I have devoted myself to the creation of an alternative mode of education, one that sees the electrification of each kid as a condition of him/her understanding anything. Thinking may be hard, as learning a dance is hard, or as finessing a poem is: but, like dance and poetry, its success brings exultation, mirth. Thought at its most illustrious evolves into play. When my students speak up, their faces beam; there is giddiness in their voices. Even their conversations amongst each other afterwards are fuelled by a new exuberance and verve. Thinking, speculating, interpreting—these become refined forms of happiness to them. Their philosophy is full of laughter, which is how Nietzsche imagined the philosophy of the gods. Creativity, as I see it, occurs at an uncanny point where relaxation and concentration are one: it is to that zone of life that I lead my students. That is why they will even sit down contentedly and apply themselves to thirty minutes of tricky analysis or diligent investigation: they know from experience that, when they get to the end of that tunnel, the light will be glorious.

A friend once told me that I seemed “ageless” to her, older than any man alive and at the same time younger than any child. I have assumed that ambivalent description as a personal motto in my life as philosopher, teacher and dad: be both young and ancient. I play hide-and-seek in the park like a military commando and I splash about in Shakespeare like a kid in the bath… But the wisdom about mixing the young and the ancient goes further than that. I love when different areas and different eras of life crosspollinate and intermingle. In the course of discussions in the classes I run, we find Obsidian’s Outer Worlds offers insights into Plato’s Republic; we put Bacon’s New Atlantis next to Kubrick’s Space Odyssey. We see how Sum 41 transfigure words of Emerson, enriching their resonance. My students come to see that philosophy can swoop in from anywhere at any time: it is both the youngest and the oldest thing at once. Nietzsche’s way of talking about this was to say that philosophy is, not “timeless,” but untimely: it unsettles the zeitgeist; you never know when or in what form it will strike. It appears like Hermes in winged-sandals, always laughing—that messenger of the gods who, despite his august years, kept an adolescent’s face and a kid’s love of mischief. My students see that the most venerable philosophy is also about the lives they already live and the things they already think about. There is a current that runs from their spontaneous thoughts to the most ancient civilisations. When you wake from the book, the world around you is flushed with new life—a sudden colour come from elsewhere.

Socrates once said that the best horse-riders challenge themselves by training the friskiest horses. Whoever is in charge of this cosmos, whether gods or natural laws or a series of accidents waiting to happen, has applied the Socratic logic to me in the form of three lovely, rascally boys, my sons, those child-shaped frisky horses. Juggling the demands and desires of these leprechauns has made me a nimbler teacher. I have discovered how important it is not to crush the energy and rambunctiousness of kids, even if this hospitality makes life difficult for the adults. I help my kids learn, not to repress, but to master their exuberance. It is this ethos I carry with me into teaching as well. To practise philosophy is to sculpt human energy. This is the art I have set myself to master.