The Metaphysics of Hangovers

Unfortunately I am chronically hungover today, and there is a slim chance that this may affect both the quality and quantity of my blogging. However, every negative can be turned into a positive by those who mean to prevail. Hangovers offer a unique opportunity for a certain kind of profound philosophising. What other experience offers such insights into the vanity, meaninglessness and suffering of existence? Or into the follies of human behaviour? What other life-event demonstrates so conclusively that joy cannot exist without pain, nor pain without joy? Or forces us to confront our true selves, stripped of the layers pretence and self-deception that are our normal modus vivendi? No other experience even comes close to revealing the fragility of the human condition. To anyone who wants to follow the Delphic Oracle’s command to Know Thyself, the hangover is an indispensable tool.

The English writer Kingsley Amis is often regarded as the world’s greatest Philosopher of Hangovers. He speaks of ‘that vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure that makes a hangover a fortunately unique route to self-knowledge and self-realisation'. He says that much of the world’s greatest literature has actually been about hangovers, while ostensibly being about something else. One suspects that much of the writing of Poe, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevksy, Sartre, Heidegger, St. Augustine and Pascal was really about hangovers. According to Amis, literature’s greatest attempt to capture the experience of the metaphysical hangover is Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis', in which the hero wakes up to discover that he has been transformed into a man-sized cockroach. I feel a bit like a man-size cockroach myself today.