101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life, by Roger-Pol Droit, translated by Steven Romer

Small steps for man, a giant leap for mankind

The popular philosophy racket breaks down into two complementary routines. The first has a brief to condense the writings of a master-thinker to something assimilable in a single sitting: Aristotle in a day, Descartes in half an hour, Nietzsche in 60 seconds. The arduous pleasures of thought, the rigours of reflection, are ruthlessly rendered down to half a dozen useful notions.

The second approach – of which Roger-Pol Droit's little book is a superior example – is meant to move us in the other direction. Brief metaphysical reflections on the everyday invite us to take up the challenge of thinking for ourselves. The heroes here are not great philosophers, but the dubiously constructed "ordinary readers", given a crash course in practical metaphysics and sent back out into the world with a renewed sense of its (and their) oddity. The guiding trope of the form is estrangement; its habitual trick is to make the world you thought you knew look altogether other, to dislocate ourselves from the sockets of habit.

A kind of philosophical kitsch pervades the genre: as if simple metaphysical bafflement were enough to turn one into a thinker, as if the detailed work of actual thinking were academic window-dressing. But beyond wondering whether the hefty price of a slim hardback might be better spent on a couple of cheap Penguin Platos and a second-hand Montaigne, the really interesting question concerns the pleasure the reader gets from a book like this. What sort of cultural gap does it fill?

A venerable cliché claims that philosophy begins in wonder, and Droit's book proceeds accordingly, offering 101 suggestions for creatively upending yourself and the world. These range from the ambitious "try to measure existence", through the potentially risky "telephone at random" and "tell a stranger she is beautiful", to the relatively straightforward "remove your watch".

I tried this last and discovered that my watch, spookily, had already stopped. Time is crucial to the whole project. Not only does the book encourage us to experience its passing afresh ("imagine your imminent death"), but the author suggests a duration for each experiment. While the exhortation to "hurt yourself briefly" demands seconds of discomfort, the instruction to "play the fool" requires 30 to 40 years: half a lifetime seeking the "most incongruous answer to any question".

Such is Droit's fascination with a cut-price version of Proustian temporal disarray that halfway through his genial musings I embarked on a small "experiment" of my own: "read a book of popular philosophy as if it were a work of fiction or autobiography". This book suggests an oddly archaic milieu in which the reader has time to devote to open fires, and rediscovering childhood toys in the attic of a provincial uncle. Forgetting metaphysics and paying attention to the life you would need to do it justice, maybe the whole genre is not so much intellectually improving as strictly aspirational: philosophy as fantasised luxury. Pascal wrote that most of the world's problems arose from our inability to sit quietly alone in a room. Lacking the philosopher's leisure, the rest of us can only read about the dramas that unfold there.