These metaphors remain as undercurrents throughout the book, in which Buckingham nests his own stories within stories, as well as drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Levinas, always gently ribbing the often rather dour canon of ethical philosophy. Suggesting that we renounce the possibility of finding dry land, at least for the duration of reading, he casts off into the world of storytelling, investigating the rich seam of writing about everyday experience in Benjamin and Rosenzweig. From the premise that experience is inherently liquid and unstable, Buckingham weaves the notion of ethics itself as a kind of experience, felt in the body rather than reasoned through by the mind. Fans of Salman Rushdie may recall the ‘Ocean of the Sea of Stories’ from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a beautiful (and partly allegorical) book written in the wake of the fatwa against Rushdie.

He takes this powerful metaphor, originally made by Aristotle, and combines it with another from the 10th century Indian text, the Kathāsaritsāgara, that of the ‘Sea of Stories’. He suggests that this project has demonstrably failed – that we are hopelessly lost navigators in the ocean of ethical quandaries, forever dreaming of dry land (and sometimes believing we’re on the way there), but never quite finding it. In Finding Our Sea Legs, Buckingham starts from the premise that the goal of most Western philosophy has been to use reason to find a place of solid ground – a set of definite propositions about the world – which might supply a basis for our lives, and in particular our ethical lives.

What follows is more of a summary of Sea Legs than a review, as I’m partly attempting to work out for myself what the book means. His work moves deftly between philosophy, fiction, travel, and children’s writing, and I am particularly enamoured with a book of his which deserves a much wider audience in my opinion, a collection of short stories entitled Sixty-Four Chance Pieces.Taking the ancient Chinese divinatory text, the I Ching as a basis, he transforms and elaborates each of its sixty-four hexagrams into a short story, by turns surprising and hilarious, and often very moving. For more recent work, visit Will’s personal website. I’ve enjoyed Will’s writing for several years now, first through his (now archived) blog, which is well worth a browse. Over Christmas I finally got round to re-reading Will Buckingham’s Finding Our Sea Legs, a rather unusual book of ethical philosophy which I first read in 2016, and which has been knocking about in the back of my head ever since.

The philosophy book by will buckingham