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15 | Simon Critchley — Philosophical itches & how to scratch
197 Plays1 year ago
From what human need does philosophy emerge? And where can it lead us?
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York, and a scholar of Heidegger, Pessoa, Football (Liverpool FC), and humour — among other things. He crosses over between analytic and continental traditions and freely draws on quotes from Hume, poetry and British pop bands.
Simon argues that philosophy begins in disappointment, not wonder. But its goals can be wisdom, knowledge, enlightenment, and freedom. It can play many roles: as a tool for developing scientific theories, for exposing ideology for tracing the underpinnings of language and experience. Anywhere where other fields fear to tread, that's where philosophers step in.
Show notes and links to books at Multiverses.xyz
(00:00) Intro
(3:00) Beginning of conversation: disappointment as the start of the journey
(7:55) Punk & Philosophy
(11:20) Trauma and tabula rasa
(12:30) Not making it in a band, becoming a philosopher
(19:30) Wittgenstein as a bridge between analytic and continental philosophy
(21:50) Mill and the origin of the label “continental philosophy”
(24:30) Philosophy has a duty to be part of culture
(28:00) The difficulty with philosophy being an academic tradition
(29:30) The Stone
(32:30) Football as a phenomenon for study that invites people in to philosophy
(35:00) Philosophy as pre-theoretic & Pessoa’s Ultimatum
(39:00) Will analytic philosophy run out for road and be subsumed into science?
(41:00) Two lines of human imagination
(42:00) Should philosophy ever be a single honours subject, or should it always aid other realms of thought?
(43:00) Philosophy as pre-science
(44:30) Phenomenology as reflection on the lived world
(47:00) Alberto Caeiro (Pessoa) and anti-poetry
(48:50) The saying of ordinary things to fascinate angels
(54:00) Impossible objects will keep philosophers busy
(57:00) The task of philosophy as deflationary, as not making progress
(1:00:00) Should philosophy of physics be part of physics?
(1:04:30) Context: What can’t I read Descartes like I’m talking to your right now?
(1:06:00) Is context colour or is it inseparable from ideas?
(1:15:30) Rorty: Continental philosophy as proper names vs problems in analytic philsophy
(1:19:20) Trying to walk the line between two traditions of philosophy
(1:20:00) Obscurantism vs scientism
(1:23:00) Permission to think on their own, to expose ideology
(1:26:00) The internet has been good for philosophy
(1:26:30) Audio as a new platform or agora for philosophy
Recommended
Transcript
The Origin of Metaphysics
00:00:00
Speaker
It's hard to say what philosophy is. Consider the example of Aristotle's metaphysics, perhaps his most famous set of works. But it wasn't called metaphysics by Aristotle. Rather, when librarians were compiling all his books, they put his books on physics together, and then after that, on the shelf, they put everything else. And they called it metaphysics beyond physics. It was just a description of how they shelved it.
00:00:25
Speaker
And this way of thinking about philosophy in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is, can be useful. For example, we can think of philosophy as covering pre-theoretic fields of inquiry, places where we don't have paradigms. And if we do that, it can explain why there can be a lot of disagreement about what philosophy should pay attention to and what tools it should use, basically how it should work.
Philosophical Perspectives of Simon Critchley
00:00:53
Speaker
I guess this week is Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York, among many other prestigious academic appointments. He was also the series moderator for many years of The Stone.
00:01:06
Speaker
a very influential and popular forum for philosophy hosted by the New York Times. And he's the author of a bookshelf's worth of books, rather like Aristotle, covering a diverse set of themes. Simon is perhaps best associated with the Continental School of Philosophy, and that's a label that I use with some hesitation.
00:01:25
Speaker
reasons we'll get into. He's an expert on Heidegger, for instance. But really, I think of him as a no-holds-barred sort of guy. For instance, if you read his notes on suicide, firstly, just the topic is one which very few philosophers have written about. Among them, Hume, and he quotes and Hume analyzes the arguments of Hume in some detail, but he also quotes the British band from the 90s black box recorder.
00:01:53
Speaker
There's this healthier reverence. One gets the sense from Simon that he's always seeking for the best source of knowledge or wisdom, wherever that may be, the best source of expression, in contrast to the kind of caricature that you sometimes have of continental philosophy of people endlessly commenting on, I don't know, Hegel or Sartre or something, and trying to be an iconoclast, but actually just building up new icons.
00:02:19
Speaker
In the email back and forth that I had with Simon leading up to this conversation, I described this podcast as me scratching some intellectual itches and he replied, for me life has been one long rash and perhaps that's the best positive description of philosophy, one which tells us what it is and not what it isn't. It's the scratching of itches.
00:02:46
Speaker
you're listening to multiverses. Simon Critchley, thank you for joining me.
Philosophy and Disappointment
00:03:06
Speaker
Thank you very much for having me, Jones.
00:03:09
Speaker
You've written that philosophy begins not in wonder or in a kind of sense of abundance and overflowing of concepts to analyze and so forth, but rather in disappointment. And a sense that there's something missing, a hole to fill. And I was curious, does this match your own personal journey into philosophy?
00:03:37
Speaker
Disappointment. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Gosh. I mean, the, um, the wonder thing is, uh, I just think it's just very over overstated. You know, it's the view that Aristotle attributes to thinkers, not really philosophy, physiologist, as they were called, who preceded him. And so they had a,
00:04:06
Speaker
feeling of wonder for nature. But Aristotle doesn't say that he has it, and he just proceeds with his kind of analytic taxonomical rigor. And so, but, you know, it's a popular line of thoughts that people get disappointed when you take away wonder. But, you know, I just begin from the idea that the world is howlingly defective.
00:04:34
Speaker
There's there's moral wrong, political injustice and personal disappointment, the absence of any religious fulfillment, and so on and so forth. So if you begin from disappointment, you end up with a series of problems which philosophy can help to
00:04:57
Speaker
to give you a kind of pattern for thinking them through, maybe not answer them, but think them through. So it doesn't end with disappointment. So people always think that I'm a philosopher of disappointment. The philosophy begins in disappointment. It ends, I think, in something like courage or affirmation or commitment. But you don't necessarily get there from wonder.
00:05:22
Speaker
If you just have wonder, then where does that go? You're just gonna feel wonder? Be like watching an endless Terrence Malick movie, you know? Just be this sort of sense of the glowing shining of all things. I mean, it's a good, it's a good retail line for philosophy, but I just think it's wrong. And it certainly doesn't make sense of whatever we might call the modern world. So yeah, that's, and that does, I certainly,
00:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, I was disappointed, a disappointed youth for all sorts of reasons. And then the world was disappointing, particularly being around what was happening in
00:06:11
Speaker
in Britain in the late 70s, early 80s, Thatcherism, Falklands War, massive unemployment, the collapse of the Labour Party in the face of that. And so that was pretty disappointing. And the almost certain threat of nuclear annihilation. So that was disappointing. And then also the sense of whether there's anything bigger out there, transcendent out there,
00:06:41
Speaker
god-like out there that might fill in some of the meaning gaps. So I begin, beginning from the idea of disappointment leads you into the question of really how you confront the issue of nihilism, you know, and the idea that all the highest values have devalued themselves in each point. And that, you know, and that's something which is a way of doing philosophy, which is much more
00:07:12
Speaker
much more common in the, let's say the continental philosophical tradition than it is. I think it's there in the Anglo-American tradition in countless different ways, but it's much more explicit in that tradition because it's linked to the sociology of Weber and the economic,
Philosophy's Societal Role
00:07:36
Speaker
social economic theory of Marx and so on and so forth. So the idea that
00:07:41
Speaker
Philosophy has to be allied to social sciences, and there are problems that need to be addressed, and you can't just sit back and wonder. That's not really good too much. So yeah, it's an active... It invites you to be more active, perhaps, disappointment than wonder, at least.
00:08:03
Speaker
maybe do something more practical. I'm also curious that you were a punk as well as a philosopher. I don't know if those things overlapped or if it was, was there a kind of, do you think they were both responses to the same sense of disappointment? Yeah, I mean, I grew up with, you know, around
00:08:22
Speaker
you know, my teachers were hippies, my, you know, well, they were the older teachers who were scientists. And then there were the new young kind of hip teachers who were all hippies. And the context was very much informed by that late 60s, early 70s mood of, I don't know, peace, love, understanding, you know, and to some extent elements of what seemed like an emancipatory counterculture.
00:08:52
Speaker
That, I mean, that just, that felt a piece is, it was also very class-based. It was a very middle-class view of the world. It turns out produced some great things, but, and so for people like me, the early seventies were kind of disorientating and things were really, there was sense of things really falling apart and whatever, whatever that, you know,
00:09:22
Speaker
love, peace and revolution message of the late sixties meant had gone completely sour by the mid seventies. And people like me were listening to, this is, this is the funny thing about punk that there was no movement. There was no, no name. There were people that just found, found similar bits of music, similar, similar LPs.
00:09:50
Speaker
around the same time and then began to connect that together. The bands like the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvet Underground and people just found these things and then you discovered that there were oh there's a few thousand people that are interested in this and were you know completely turned off by the excesses of progressive rock in the mid 70s and by the kind of
00:10:18
Speaker
empty hedonism of hippies. And we wanted to tear things down and smash things up. And it was a very kind of nihilistic, but incredibly energizing time to be in, particularly to be not that far from, because it was also, punk was also largely a kind of phenomenon of the suburbs.
00:10:46
Speaker
you know, as people in Bromley or where I
From Punk to Philosophy
00:10:49
Speaker
was in North Hertfordshire, looking at London, which had kind of fallen to pieces, you know, the streets were full of trash and thinking, well, this is, yeah, something's happening there. That looks great. Let's get there and, you know, see what's going on. And then fashion was very important and mainly it was about music. Everyone was in a band. I was in bands,
00:11:14
Speaker
for years and then basically what happened was that I had a serious industrial accident when I was 18. I was working in a pharmaceutical factory and my left hand, which is my writing hand and my guitar playing hand was nearly severed in an accident and it took
00:11:42
Speaker
It took, you know, I was, I was 18, so I was fit and young, which was great, but it took an awful long time to recover from that. And that, and the psychological effect of that was to sort of wipe out
00:12:00
Speaker
It had an effect on memory, which trauma often has, you know, actual physical trauma. And so I kind of just forgot all sorts of things about, I still, you know, I was reminded of them later by say my mother and my sister, but I just forgot things. And so it felt like at 18, I had a new, you know, a sort of tabula rasa, a kind of empty page I could begin to fill out. And that's where I was doing really shitty jobs.
00:12:29
Speaker
And I'd failed everything at school. And I was expecting to be in a band that was going to make it because some of my friends were in bands that made it. But that didn't happen. And then I began to read. And then went back to what was a further education college in Stevenage, the hellhole of Stevenage, Newtown.
00:12:55
Speaker
I know all these places. My sister lives in Lechworth. I grew up in Lechworth. I know. When I go back now, which is rarely, you think, wow, this was an amazing social experiment in utopian planning. I mean, for people who don't know, we should say, yeah, that the idea was the government wanted to build these beautiful new garden cities where
00:13:26
Speaker
people would have the space to play and also businesses to work in. But it didn't really work out because everyone just commuted into London. And it didn't really sustain the communities I think that they'd hoped for maybe. No, it was an absolutely fascinating experiment. And it was done with
00:13:51
Speaker
with good old fashioned capitalism being used to further noble social purposes. So it was Quaker money. It wasn't government money. Quakers ran the confectionary business. Maybe they still do, but they certainly did back then the round trees and the caperies.
00:14:16
Speaker
And it was money connected to the Quaker Confectionery business. And they had this idea of better housing conditions for ordinary people. And the whole idea of it was going to be a series of circles around Central Park. So I kind of, you know, if you read Plato's description of Atlantis, it's not a million miles away, but it was a utopian social
00:14:45
Speaker
plan and it was it was also completely ecologically designed so that the industrial area there was an industrial area my dad worked there was away from the town so the all the smoke from the factories went the other way so we had this lovely clean air it was perfect but you know you i think it's i think it's your duty to kind of hate the place that you fold yeah
00:15:15
Speaker
But then I got to Stevenage and I did A-levels, remedial O-levels and A-levels. And then went to university later, 22. And then the story takes another turn. Is this, am I recording fine? Is it coming out? Yeah, yeah, I see it coming. I see waveforms. Or waveforms or two. So then I got a second chance. And that's, I guess that's what, you know,
00:15:44
Speaker
Yeah, I got a second chance. I went to Stevenage Feather Education College. I was on the dole for a year and then I was able to get some way of mixture of working and this was a, these colleges were for people where people did hairdressing and catering and places like that. But there was a, there was a, an English department, just a couple of people and they were, and I started to read poetry and learn middle English and
00:16:14
Speaker
did all sorts of things. And then the world began to open up. And then when I got to university at 22, I wanted to do literature because that was what I really thought I was passionate about. I said, I am. But that was the thing. And particularly Joyce and Pound and Elliot and the classic modernists. And then my fourth option was the philosophy class. And this
00:16:43
Speaker
This New York guy, this Jewish New Yorker called Jay Bernstein, showed up in the room and began to talk. And I thought, wow, I've never seen this before. He was saying in the first class that philosophy is not for stupid people. So if there are any stupid people, the class, they should leave now. And I thought, oh, this is good. This is where I want to be.
00:17:12
Speaker
And I couldn't figure out how my philosophy teachers thought. My English teachers, literature teachers, they knew a lot more about what they were talking about than I did, obviously.
Critchley's Academic Journey
00:17:25
Speaker
But I could sort of figure out what they were up to in my young, naive arrogance. But the philosophy teachers genuinely perplexed me. And also, it didn't involve as much reading. You're reading smaller texts, more
00:17:41
Speaker
closely and intensely. And that appealed to me. I couldn't keep up with 600 page novels every week. So then I decided to do philosophy and then things changed. And I'm really still incredibly grateful that I went to this provincial university
00:18:08
Speaker
University of Essex and it really changed everything for me. And I ended up working there and it's a long story. I mean, it's a horrible campus, but it's, it was a really interesting experiment like Sussex and Warwick and York, the so-called new universities of the sixties. Yeah. It's interesting to me that they were teaching in the continental tradition of philosophy rather than
00:18:37
Speaker
England doesn't see itself as being on the continent for some reason. I mean, it's not on the mainland continent. It's doing its best to separate itself as much as possible for some infamable reason. But yeah, the tradition, I guess for the last century or so, had somewhat diverged from what was happening in Paris and Frankfurt and other European schools, perhaps.
00:19:06
Speaker
But maybe the kind of new universities in England were aligning themselves with a different camp, I guess. I mean, analytic philosophy, as it was so called, you know, this is really, you know, there's
00:19:22
Speaker
This begins in the early 20th century with Russell, but it really takes on that name. And also the idea, the idea is a British empiricism. What is British about empiricism? Absolutely. This is the 18th century with the French. And, you know, so we have these abstract ideas of philosophy then linked to territory to place, which is perfectly ridiculous.
00:19:48
Speaker
and Analytic Philosophy, which was full of really very interesting people. I did my M. Phil thesis on logical positivism with a particular focus on the work of Rudolf Carnap, the Vienna Circle, and then
00:20:09
Speaker
So I was, you know, my teachers at Essex were, if there was a common thread, it was Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was the common language. And that's also, it's striking in the United States that that's not the case. It's never been the case. Wittgenstein has never been a central figure. But in Britain, in those decades, Wittgenstein was a kind of common language. And if you could
00:20:35
Speaker
link it to Wittgenstein lines of thought, then there were ways of talking across these divides, which were largely ones that had been invented. And analytic philosophy became very narrow in the 1960s. Philosophy of language became a very narrow linguistic philosophy, and all sorts of big questions were just considered to be
00:21:05
Speaker
pseudo problems or irrelevant or didn't have to be answered. And philosophy prided itself on its narrowness, its scientificity, its rigor, and its hostility to any connections to other disciplines, apart from the natural sciences and perhaps cognitive science too. And so that has changed.
00:21:34
Speaker
but it still hasn't changed enough. It has changed. And the continental tradition is so called. And of course, this is all, this is all, you know, the way it's talked about is all nonsensical. The distinction between analytic and continental. I wrote a little book on this years and years ago, and it goes back to John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill talks about two tendencies in the English philosophical mind, one of which is empiricist, Benthamite,
00:22:04
Speaker
So Bentham, his teacher, is mental, that he then recovers from after his nervous breakdown, John Shermill, and a Coleridgean tendency, romantic, interpretive, hermeneutic, speculative. And these two aspects are both, they're competing constituents of the English philosophical mind. And he calls that continental philosophy, that Coleridgean tendency,
00:22:33
Speaker
That goes back to the 19th century. And that continental tradition, which was alive and well in places like Oxford, with the domination of Hegel and people like that, there was a whole British Hegelian movement. And that then gets kind of pushed out. And my thesis has always been for a while that the continental philosophy in this broad sense
00:23:02
Speaker
gets pushed out of mainstream philosophy progressively in the 20th century, maybe in the name of scientific rigor. But that re-emerges as things like English literature, which begins in 1925 when it's imported from the colonies from India, where it had been used to train Indian colonial administrators into Cambridge. And English then soaks up a lot of that continental
00:23:33
Speaker
stuff. And that's why continental philosophy, so-called, ends up being taught in literature departments, language departments, and that's still to some extent the case. But, you know, it's, as a professional master, the distinction between analytical and continental is kind of, I think it's pretty boring and narrow, but the idea that there are different tendencies of habits of mind, one of which is kind of, you know, narrowly
00:24:02
Speaker
empirical, sceptical, science-driven, and another which is more open, romantic,
00:24:13
Speaker
I think that makes sense as a kind of a cultural feature. I mean, how do you explain, you know, somewhere like England, which has, you know, the traditions of natural sciences, but also people like William Blake and Shelley and so on and so forth. So I think, you know, it's a way of making sense of culture. And for me, you know, for people like me, you know,
00:24:42
Speaker
The key thing is that philosophy has a duty, an obligation to be part of the life of a culture, the way in which a culture reflects on itself, thinks about itself. And that was not the world that I was educated in, that was not happening in.
00:25:05
Speaker
in philosophy, professional philosophy, and that has changed, that has improved, and that makes me very happy. I have a quote that I was reminded of today, and I thought it's so apt for you.
00:25:20
Speaker
It's from Miroslav Holub, the Czech poet. I've quoted already in a previous episode of this podcast, but I'm so tickled by it. I think it really works for what you're just saying about the incorporation of philosophy into life. Holub wrote that he preferred to write for people untouched by poetry.
00:25:42
Speaker
I'd like them to read poems in such a matter of fact manner as when they're reading the newspaper or go to football matches. You've written yourself about football and you've moderated a sort of forum in the New York Times. It's uncanny how that sort of matches what you're saying that philosophy should be something that talks to the lives of
00:26:09
Speaker
people and not just to the predilections of philosophers. Yeah, obviously football matches and what? So yeah, I would like them to read poems in such a matter of a fact manner as when they are reading the newspaper or go to football matches. Yeah. I think that too, I think that too, you know, there's this remark that then Bertolt Brecht makes in the 20s when he's trying to, you know, tear down
00:26:38
Speaker
bourgeois naturalistic theater and establish, you know, his own approach in Berlin. He calls it epic theater, epic theater. And what he talks about is the audience that he would like. And he says the kind of audience I'd like, my theater would be like the audience sports. Right. Who'd be relaxed, most importantly, relaxed. And
00:27:07
Speaker
attentive, knowledgeable, and smoking cigars and eating snacks, he says. So I think a lot of the problem with philosophy is that it doesn't make people relaxed. It seems like an
00:27:24
Speaker
intimidating world, perhaps deliberately intimidating, used as kind of cultural intellectual capital to kind of cow people. And that's ridiculous. I mean, the whole adventure begins with this person's Socrates wandering around asking matter-of-fact questions to other citizens and not agreeing with their answers.
00:27:54
Speaker
That's it. It's in the public realm. It's in the Agora. Philosophy really becomes an academic discipline really in the late 18th century. You could say that with someone like Kant, but Kant didn't really teach philosophy. He was teaching geography, meteorology, mathematics.
00:28:16
Speaker
all sorts of things. So the idea of the academic philosopher kind of in the universe is a very modern idea. Before that, we were either doctors often like Locke or courtiers like Leibniz, you know, attached to some kind of court structure. And there's something to that. So the identification of philosophy with the
00:28:47
Speaker
university is a real problem. The audience for philosophy, I mean, I've always been convinced that there is an audience for philosophy and philosophy needs to change and adapt in order to meet that audience. And that's something which I think has just, you know, dramatically changed in the last 20,
Philosophy's Engagement with Society
00:29:10
Speaker
30 years. And there is a lot more philosophy out there. I mean,
00:29:16
Speaker
And then, you know, yeah, and you can, you can read, you know, we, we had a column in the New York times called the stone, uh, which ran for 11 years and it was great fun. And the idea there was to use the most important media, you know,
00:29:41
Speaker
outlet in the United States. I mean, the kind of the importance of the New York Times has in the minds of your average American educated liberal is hard to, it's hard to fathom if you, you know, it's enormous. And it's actually got more enormous in the last 15, 20 years. So we, you know, we very cannily kind of
00:30:08
Speaker
because the newspaper was the newspaper, that was the gospel, that was the morning prayer of the atheist reading the New York Times. But they had this website, and I'm using quotation marks around the website, and I got to work with an editor called Peter Katapano,
00:30:30
Speaker
who remained a very good friend and we just began to do things on the website and nobody really gave a damn because it wasn't the newspaper, so it didn't matter. The newspaper mattered, the website was just something you needed to have. And then we kind of realized that we struck gold with this and we had big audiences and audiences that kept coming back for
00:30:59
Speaker
more of it. And so we developed it and it was great. And then as the medium changed, so now we're in exactly the reverse situation, the print newspaper is kind of a nice, you know,
00:31:17
Speaker
People have it for some nostalgic reasons at the weekend. They like to have a newspaper around it, read it. They just like this, look at it. Oh, that's a, but they're not looking at the op-eds thinking, well, this is what is being thought at the moment. The old thing was you read the front page of the times and then you read the inside back page with the op-eds and that would be the start of your day. Now it's gone completely digital like everything else. So we,
00:31:43
Speaker
When that happened, around 2014, 15, 16, we had an audience, we were sort of geared up for that, and it went really well. Until, you know, there were political kerfuffles in 2020, post
00:32:03
Speaker
the murder of George Floyd, which led by a kind of a circumlocutory way to a new situation where they could no longer howl series. They couldn't really have a series because they couldn't control it. And so we, things drew to an end at the end of 21 or so. Yeah, and football, I was able to write about football then.
00:32:33
Speaker
in the Times and the New York Review of Books. I wrote some things for New York Review of Books on football. That's actually where that began. Then you realize that, God, I can talk about this thing that dominates my life. And then I did a class on football as well last year around the World Cup, which was going really well until we had a strike here in November.
00:33:00
Speaker
But that's the only time I've tried to teach that material and get people to think through the phenomenon of football and take it really seriously. And that's a very good example because then you've got something, you've got a phenomenon of football that people understand with remarkable levels of complexity. And there's a history, a sociology, and all sorts of conceptual things you can pull out of footballs. Footballs are fantastic.
00:33:30
Speaker
Phenomenal and once you get to talking about football then people relax Right. They because they know, you know, they know They know what's going on. So they You get into relax. They have opinions you have opinions and you can begin a conversation So I like we're talking about football particularly with with kids actually is that you know, they They're just just sponges for the facts and you're having a
00:33:58
Speaker
a conversation of complete equality with a 10-year-old who knows a lot more than you do about which player is playing where and what their prospects are, what the XR ratings are and so on and so forth. So it's finding a phenomena that invites people in without
00:34:26
Speaker
without cheapening it, without making philosophy dumb. And there's lots of that going on as well. So we don't want that. I want philosophy to be, to maintain its rigor, its level, its interest in its own history, its deep questions, but to be in a way that is accessible to a larger audience and they feel relaxed about entertaining those questions and thinking them through.
00:34:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think you've written yourself and suddenly others have that philosophy is almost the pre-theoretic theory. And it strikes me that that allows philosophy to enter almost any discussion.
00:35:15
Speaker
wherever you have an established field, there is still a point where it touches the world and there's something inscrutable going on. And that's where philosophy can inform the discussion. Coming back to this, and I always hesitate to call it this, but the continental analytic divide.
00:35:38
Speaker
I come across another line recently in Pessoa, who I know you love. Yes, I do. And I'm actually talking in about a month to Patricio Ferrari, who's one of the translators. He's based in New York, actually. Along with Margaret Joel Costa, he's been translating poet, or sort of heteronym by heteronym, the works of Pessoa.
00:36:07
Speaker
So one of his hetremens, Alvaro da Campus, wrote this incredible piece I only read recently, Ultimatum. I don't know if you've come across it. I can't remember it, but let's go ahead. So it's one of the prose pieces.
00:36:24
Speaker
I'll tell you one of the early lines in it, nothing to do with our discussion, but it's just so good, I've got to say it. Early on he says, get out Kipling, you merchandisable practical man-of-verse scrap iron imperialist. Which is just, yeah, merchandisable is so prescient as well given, you know, how Kipling has sold really well and been disnified and so forth.
00:36:49
Speaker
But then he goes on to talk about, and I think this must have been written about 1930 or so, he talks about how he thinks philosophy should be developed. And he says, one of his conclusions is that philosophy should be integrated, integration of philosophy into art and science and the disappearance of philosophy as a metaphysical science. And so he points to,
00:37:18
Speaker
philosophy somehow disappearing and on one side perhaps being subsumed within sciences and with the other being subsumed within the arts. And it matches somewhat what you were saying, how on the one hand we have people in the kind of tradition of Carnap who are saying, well that's philosophy is just a tool to help science more or less. And on the other hand you have
00:37:48
Speaker
philosophy almost as poetry, or sometimes even written in a very poetic form, as with Nietzsche. And certainly being very influential within the arts, as Sartre and many French philosophers and others were. And that leads me to wonder, are there
00:38:12
Speaker
You've also put it in these terms, there's on the analytic side, people perhaps more interested in the problem of knowledge and getting to truth, which seems to be very aligned with the sciences. And on the continental side, there's an interest in getting to wisdom. Right.
00:38:33
Speaker
both those are legitimate concerns, but it seems to me perhaps the analytic side of things has got less road to run, if you like. If we look at the tradition of the history of philosophy, we see many branches being subsumed successfully within sciences as natural philosophy became physics, and I would argue formal logic really belongs
00:38:58
Speaker
to a branch of mathematics or to be understood as a field like mathematics, at least, and shouldn't really be considered philosophy anymore. There are interesting things about formal logic, but actually running those calculations is not philosophy.
00:39:14
Speaker
And we might say the same about cognitive neuroscience as well. And as soon as there's enough kind of crystallization of agreement in a field, it goes from being pre-theoretic to being theoretic. And one wonders if many of the things that analytic philosophy has been concerned with will just end up being, there being enough consensus that it reaches
00:39:42
Speaker
that they become part of a science or a kind of academic, separate academic discipline. Whereas- Yeah, that's good. Chronical, holistic philosophers, yeah. So maybe they're going to get there. Maybe they'll be out of the job. I know. On the other hand, and I want to bring up impossible objects here, because they seem to be things which will never fit within a theory. And perhaps you could
00:40:09
Speaker
tell us about Impossible Objects. The larger point, philosophy is, in a sense, one way of thinking about philosophy is in terms of its disappearance. You could say, well, it's a line of thought that one of my heroes growing up was a guy called Jacob Bronowski, who wrote this
00:40:37
Speaker
There's this documentary series on the BBC called The Ascent of Man that have changed that title now, but it was a wonderful, it was like the competing, it was like the answer to Kenneth Clark's civilization.
00:40:52
Speaker
in terms of a history of science. And Bronowski, who was a theoretical physicist of the first order, but also a poet and a novelist and a person of immense culture, just says, well, there are two lines of human imagination. One line moves through science and scientific inquiry. Another line moves into literature and poetry and the arts. And these are two
00:41:20
Speaker
These are two lines which are both aspects of the imagination, paths that they can travel down. They need to be unblocked and cultivated. What's the role for philosophy there? Philosophy is kind of, is the remark that Brodowski is making about it. It's the second order reflection, the step back. So philosophy has always been in a sense about its disappearance into other disciplines. And there's a long,
00:41:50
Speaker
and sort of serious argument about whether philosophy should be studied as, whether there should be philosophy departments and whether philosophy should be studied as a single owner subject. I mean, it used to be the case that many places that you couldn't do philosophy on its own, you had to do it with politics and economics or whatever it might be.
00:42:12
Speaker
And there's a case for that, that philosophy should be there as a space for thinking about foundational conceptual issues that affect every activity, every area of human learning. So I'm quite keen on that. I mean, it's also the idea that philosophy as a pre-theoretical
00:42:40
Speaker
Hmm, how'd I put this? This is a more tricky point, but I mean, if I'm anything, I'm an existential phenomenologist. That's how I like to say to people, because it, you know, nobody calls themselves that, and it's anymore, and it sounds silly. It's a lot of syllables, but... It sounds mad-ass. Yeah, I think that we have to attend to that which shows itself,
00:43:06
Speaker
phenomena and describe phenomena as carefully as we can. And those phenomena are the phenomena that we encounter in our existence, our human existence, our life in the world, with others, and everything else that that entails. And so that, I mean, Heidegger in one place, I think in 1924, calls that a pre-science, like a pre-science. It means that the sciences can
00:43:36
Speaker
you know, do their thing very well, but philosophy is there as a pre-science to accompany the procession of the sciences. In a rather poorly chosen metaphor, he even describes philosophers as the police force at the procession of the sciences. I'm not sure I want to be the police force, but the idea was interesting that we are
00:43:58
Speaker
trying to, at least people like me, are trying to attend to the pre-theoretical dimension of human experience, our actual lived engagement with the world, with others, with things, and with, and then everything that follows from that history and so on and so forth. But the minute that you make that explicit, you
00:44:23
Speaker
turn that into a series of propositions, you've made it reflective, you've made it theoretical. And that's the standard philosophical move. You begin in the world and then philosophy moves away from the world into a series of
00:44:41
Speaker
abstract theoretical problems. Think about that in relation to day carts, meditations. You just begin the process of doubt and then you try to find something which can arrest that movement of doubt and that's given a theoretical answer, the I think therefore I am.
00:44:59
Speaker
What phenomenology tries to then do is to say, well, we are, in a sense, we're doomed to reflection. And we're doomed to not just living in the world, but thinking about living in the world. So we live in the world. I'm always interested in those moments when you first wake up in the morning and you first become aware. And you are in a world, a room, an environment.
00:45:28
Speaker
For that brief period of time, you're just being there with things. And then your reflective agency moves in, you begin to sort your things out, do whatever you do in the morning. So the standpoint of reflection is something we're kind of inevitably doomed to. But the idea that philosophy should just
00:45:53
Speaker
Remain at that standpoint, I think is wrong. The task is how we take that reflection and we turn it back towards the lived, shared lived world.
00:46:04
Speaker
And that's what, it's what Merleau-Ponty calls in a lovely concept, hyper reflection. And hyper reflection is reflection upon the limits of reflection and where we try to return to what he calls the perceptual face, that we begin, we begin our experience of the world with a perceptual face, right? The world is real. This stuff is meaningful and things are in motion.
00:46:32
Speaker
And then how do we, how do we get back to that once we've become thinking things? I think is for me, you know, really, really important philosophical question. And that requires a different approach, which does bring me kind of to impossible objects and to people like Persoa, because
00:46:54
Speaker
I mean, Pessoa is fascinating because of all sorts of reasons, but the idea of writing in heteronyms in other voices, I've always found very interesting. I've experimented with that myself in different forms, you know, that taking on another persona and writing in that name, and that name could even be your own name, but then you're fictionalizing it and it gives that kind of
00:47:19
Speaker
distance is liberating. The other boar has, the one that writes, win prizes.
Exploring Lived Experiences
00:47:29
Speaker
And the Minkamposh is great. And then there's the one that really, the heteronym that I was most interested in was Alberto Caero, who is the master. The master, yeah. Keep your keep. On the hill.
00:47:47
Speaker
and who says the most banal things in poetry. What is is, I am a shepherd and I live in a cottage on a hill. And why would I doubt any of this? Because this is what I see. You talk about stones, rocks, and rivers and things, and don't reflect on them.
00:48:08
Speaker
they just are. That would be an impossible object. So the poetry that Cairo is trying to write, which is a kind of anti-poetry, you know, it's poetry without flourish, without emendation. The wish is to just say things as things, right? There's a moment in, you know, in Rilke's Duino Elegies where he's talking about, you know,
00:48:37
Speaker
What would you say to an angel if an angel appeared? I think Mendez uses this in Wings of Desire. What would you say to an angel if an angel appeared? What you'd say, you wouldn't say, you know, have you thought about the heavens or whatever day you'd say, you'd say, you know, jug, look, bridge, coffee.
00:48:58
Speaker
cigarette coffee, cigarette, you know, things like that. And this would cause wonder in an angel. So the saying of ordinary things is kind of the, and the fact that we, that we're doomed to get that wrong is kind of what's driving the impossible objects idea. And I was also back then thinking about music specifically, you know, that music is
00:49:23
Speaker
something. I've tried to write a book that will come out next year on mysticism, which is some weird shit that ends up with a lot of discussions of music. And I've just always had just that basic intuition that music makes sense of things in a way that other things don't. But how do you say that? Because if you say that propositionally, you miss the phenomenon. So how do you get closer?
00:49:52
Speaker
to the phenomenon. What if our pre-theoretical life were more like music than like propositions? I think that's right. If I think about Heidegger, I think about Heidegger again because I'm teaching him soon again. Heidegger begins from
00:50:17
Speaker
Two really simple thoughts. It's really all that he's concerned with. The first one is motion, the fact that everything is moving all the time, everything is moving. And the second is meaning, the fact that we find ourselves in a world that makes sense. So we find ourselves in a world that makes sense, and it's a world that's in motion. How do we say that?
00:50:45
Speaker
Because if we say that philosophically, we freeze it into a kind of a map or a conceptual grid, and we miss the phenomenon. And then the other thing to add is that we are meaning, we're condemned to meaning, not freedom, but meaning. We find ourselves in a meaningful context that is constantly moving. And the other things to add to that would be that human existence is
00:51:17
Speaker
I'm borrowing here from a really good philosopher that I read for decades called Thomas Sheehan. And Sheehan says the other two things is that human existence is asymptotic. It's always arriving at a point, but it doesn't reach that point. Why? Because we're mortal, right? That end point is mortality, which is nothing. And we're always, we are possibility. We are in motion.
00:51:46
Speaker
have meaning, we are possibility moving towards some point that we're never gonna reach, and we're mortal, this is gonna end, we're gonna die. And that's kind of how I see things, more or less. Yeah, I could say more, but that's a whole bundle of stuff. But Pessoa is, yeah, would be a, you know, I tried to write something about him years ago, badly, I think.
00:52:16
Speaker
quite appropriately, there's fragments about Bessoa in your book, the ABC of Impossibility. A few, at least one, I think a couple, maybe a few mentions of him. Yes, yeah. I was in Brazil, the only time I've been to Brazil, I was actually co-translating some
00:52:43
Speaker
pieces of Passawa with a Brazilian friend and trying to make sense of them because the translations back then just weren't very good, you know? So, yeah, I did go at that. And then I remember giving a talk on Passawa at a poetry conference, I suppose, in Connecticut and being told by
00:53:07
Speaker
this familiarly wonderful scholar called Marjorie Perloff, who's written a book on Wittgenstein's notebooks, which is a saucy, fantastic piece of work. She's a wonderful person. And she said, yeah, what you're saying is fine, but you're not really interested in poetry.
00:53:25
Speaker
You're interested in kind of just saying things. That's fine, but don't confuse that with poetry, which is stylization, emendation, you know, versification, so on and so forth. I mean, she has a point. So the poets that have interested me most, like Passoa and Stevens, Wallace Stevens, have been ones that are trying to
00:53:50
Speaker
say very plain things, they return to a plain sense of things. And that's all the ordinary in its ordinariness has been a constant concern of mine and how philosophy can approach that. Yeah. It seems like there's maybe different classes of impossible objects and maybe the best way to touch
00:54:16
Speaker
the primitives, as it were, the stones and the trees and the rocks is via poetry. And that's the best way to be attentive to them. But then there's things much more fluid and complex things like music. Perhaps I shouldn't say more complex. They're just impossible in a different sort of way. But I think they
00:54:39
Speaker
They're going to keep philosophers busy. I don't think we're ever going to. Maybe we're going to approach asymptotically as it were to some sort of understanding of them, but I'm not even sure if that's... No, I don't think so. I think we're just going to turn them over and over. I don't think that's a bad thing. The way I'd like to say this is that arguably philosophy has been... Something like philosophy has been around for as long as there have been human beings.
00:55:09
Speaker
around in this strange social adventure of human beings. And so I'm completely open to comparative approaches and the fact that there could be an Amerindian indigenous cosmology that is philosophically rich, fine. But philosophy in its usually recognizable sense
00:55:38
Speaker
begins in Athens in the end of the fifth century BC with the person of Socrates and he raises a series of questions, the questions that philosophers still raise and no one that had been answered. And that's the point, is it's about asking the questions and not
00:55:59
Speaker
hoping for answers. The answers are fraudulent. The people that have the answers are gurus, the people that are promising extraordinary things usually in the next 10 to 15 years. I'm reading, you know, right now I'm thinking about rising with a friend of mine, something about AI, because
00:56:27
Speaker
I'd like to write it with this friend of mine. We're looking at the expectations that were made for AI since the 50s onwards. Ten million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020, 2016, Business Insider says.
00:56:49
Speaker
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk promised that in 2019, a year from now, we'll have over a million cars with full self-driving software, everything, and so on and so forth. The fantasies around AI, the idea that there will be a
00:57:07
Speaker
you know, a technological solution that will kind of abolish humans. This is a theological apocalyptic fantasy, which is, they set us for, you know, for millennia. So I think it's, the task of philosophy is to that extent, largely deflationary, it's largely negative. It's when someone comes along
00:57:34
Speaker
promising things then you ask questions and then you realize that what they're saying perhaps doesn't make sense and then do you offer an answer? Well Socrates is quite funny about that he often doesn't give an answer the dialogue would just end or he'll tell a story there'll be an allegory of the cave most famously and so it's the idea that philosophy is
00:58:05
Speaker
does not make progress. It's largely the same activity of these large scale conceptual questions which just beset human beings and they should beset human beings. And it really helps if you are versed in this. So I think the only, I mean, I think that I think education such as I see it and I'm involved with it is a, you know, it's a
00:58:34
Speaker
An increasingly fraudulent enterprise, I think the business of our education, the business of our education is troubled for all sorts of reasons that make me really upset. So let's maybe not talk about it too much. But philosophy is something that does need to be taught. It's something that repays, if you're like an apprenticeship with some people that you
00:59:01
Speaker
just think are really very interesting. And you can read it on your own, you can do it on your own, but it really helps if you've got someone that can show you through. I don't think that's as true of history or of literature. I think, you know, you can find your way in other disciplines, but with philosophy, you know, having that figure who will, a teacher who will permit things, allow things to happen is just, it's incredibly liberating. And that's, so that's kind of what we're,
00:59:32
Speaker
trying to do more or less successfully. I don't know if I entirely agree that it needs to be taught, but I certainly agree that it needs to be learned. In contrast to, if we think of the sophists who are sort of like the self-help snake oil merchants of their day, charging for almost quick fixes and quick answers, whereas Socrates didn't take your money, but he didn't really give you an answer either. He just
01:00:01
Speaker
unpicked your beliefs and led you to having more questions than probably you wanted to. I do think sometimes, though, philosophy can deliver answers. And again, it's perhaps that type of philosophy that aligns itself closest to science.
01:00:29
Speaker
You noted earlier some places philosophy is taught in joint schools. I think it's still the case that Oxford only teaches it as a joint school at undergraduate. Suddenly it was when I was there and I did physics and philosophy. And well, there's many philosophers of physics who say, well, I would rather be in the physics faculty, but they just won't let me in. So people like my tutor was David Wallace who first did a physics degree
01:01:00
Speaker
There's David Albert, who also first did a physics degree in this now. There's a great story about David Albert basically being so pissed off with his school that he never submitted his corrected thesis. So technically he's not Dr. David Albert, but don't think it. But then they just wouldn't, physicists were fed up with
01:01:29
Speaker
people questioning the foundations of physics. They said, okay, we're not going to think about the origin of quantum mechanics or the meaning of why time flows in one direction or not.
01:01:41
Speaker
But really, to me, it seems like it should be within physics. It's an outsider, it seems to me, too, doesn't it? It raises all sorts of, I mean, quantum mechanics raises all sorts of just fascinating philosophical questions, it seems to me. Can there be a quantum view of the world without the observer who is
01:02:03
Speaker
observing without the physicist. Is this actually cold, hard reality or is this somehow observer dependent? If it's observer dependent, which I take it as a view, then it's
01:02:20
Speaker
very close to a Caicantean picture. It's not that the world is ordered insofar as we make sense of it, insofar as there's an, I think, that can organize the manifold of intuition, as he says. So yeah, so I think philosophy can, I mean, when I say deflationary and negative, I think that sense in which it can return you to, that's a huge advance because we,
01:02:49
Speaker
We ride day after day on a tide of bullshit, of a thoughtless bullshit and philosophy can
01:03:03
Speaker
can clarify that, can reorganize phenomena and can get you to actually focus on what's important. That's an answer. And I think it's, yeah, philosopher's science envy. Yeah, I've seen that over the years. It seems to me that physicists are, the difference between science and philosophy of science is,
01:03:32
Speaker
is peculiar, isn't it? Scientists can be quite sniffy about philosophers of science. Yeah. I mean, for me, that's a prime candidate for something that will just be considered physics in future. And at some point that there'll be a rapprochement or, you know,
01:03:55
Speaker
And we won't have that decision. I mean, particularly because so many people who have dual training in physics and philosophy are working and they know that they're seriously good at physics. And for that reason, they get taken seriously. I mean, Sean Carroll is another one to mention who I think is now, you know, he's a really
01:04:17
Speaker
really great theoretical physicist who's now got a, I think, a joint position in philosophy and physics, I think, at Johns Hopkins. But yeah, there's a tension here for me if we return to the other problems which just can't be solved and yet are still worth looking at. Actually, let me return to this thought, as I think it may be
01:04:46
Speaker
illustrates this in a different way. In your very short introduction to continental philosophy, you mentioned that you gave a talk once. Yes, I really enjoyed that. Thank you. You gave a talk and at the end of it, someone came up to you dinner and said,
01:05:08
Speaker
why can't I talk to Descartes? So your talk was about context. Why can't I talk to Descartes as if I was talking to you right now? And I'll tell you who that was. Oh, yes, God. As my good friend, Tim Crane, he used to use UCL and then at Cambridge and now is in the centre of European university, which now moved from Budapest to Vienna, right? Or Prague, I think of other
01:05:38
Speaker
Yeah, Tim, yeah, he was teasingly said that of a talk I gave at UCL. And I kind of, on the one hand, I think, well, yes, if these are kind of impossible topics, then and there's kind of no truth to them that can be had. Well, of course, if there's no objective truth, we kind of need to take into account the circumstances
01:06:03
Speaker
But on the other hand, I feel actually, no, like some of the things that Descartes says, which is so self-evident, that there is a timelessness to them, there is a truth to them. And there seems to have been some progress made. You know, obviously, there's interesting facts about why Descartes, you know, how he came up with the cogito, you know, I think therefore I am and we can conjecture that he was influenced by
01:06:33
Speaker
Augustinian Christianity and how the reflection of self-reflection can reveal one's relationship with God. We can also speculate about how his kind of dualism was also influenced by Christianity and the fact that we needed to have an immortal soul, but we had clearly pretty mortal bodies. And yet none of that context seems to invalidate
01:07:03
Speaker
I think therefore I am or sort of make it, convince me more or less of the, uh, Judaism arguments. Interesting. But so do you still, is it essential or is it color that, that we need to December? Yeah, that's a good question. Hmm. Uh, I think it, I mean, when I said that, and that was, um,
01:07:31
Speaker
That was a talk I gave very early on in my career. I was in Ted Honderich's room, which had been, I don't know, Ayer's room at University College London. It was an intimidating atmosphere. And Tim, I'd known Tim already as a graduate student at Cambridge.
01:08:01
Speaker
I think at that point, I was much more defensive about, well, if you're going to read a philosophy, you've got to read them in the original language to understand the genre constraints. If you're reading Descartes, the meditations, or what are meditations? Well, meditations are a spiritual form of writing that directly related to Ignatius Loyola,
01:08:28
Speaker
know, Day Cut was educated by Jesuits, there's this whole kind of Jesuistical approach that he's taking, it's written in Latin and similarly with the discourse on the method. This is, you know, he's writing in French, French becomes a literary language really through people like Montaigne, Montaigne's essays and so all of the
01:08:52
Speaker
the literary features. In fact, Descartes wrote a ballet. He was obsessed with marionettes. He was a complex human being.
01:09:02
Speaker
an author of treatises with propositions. So a book like The Principles of Philosophy that Descartes writes, a late book, is really uninteresting because it's written as a series of flat axioms. So Descartes' thinking is thinking which gets going as a literary, within a literary genre and as a literary device, like someone like Passoa.
01:09:29
Speaker
and it was written in the 17th century. And you can't just, you know, extract things from their historical context and imagine that these things are speaking to us in the same way. So there is, I think I will say contradictory things. There is, you know, concepts have to be translatable to be understandable, I think. But we have to recognize the fact that certain things are translated and there is
01:09:58
Speaker
there is a historicity to philosophy and we need a context for understanding. So if we just, you know, if we extract Descartes from his historical context, we lose sight of the actual debates that he was trying to engage in and the sophistication, the sheer, you know, literary conceptual self-consciousness of what somewhat Descartes was up to.
01:10:28
Speaker
and it becomes a series of kind of flat axioms that one can agree with or disagree with. So it's to that extent, you know, the difference between analytic and content of philosophy is to some extent the question of style, right? And an attentiveness to style and issues like historicity, the contingency of the historical formation of concepts.
Balancing Scientism and Obscurantism
01:10:53
Speaker
And there's a tendency in analytic philosophy
01:10:57
Speaker
to reduce everything to argument. This is Plato saying this, and is this true or false? Well, it's really not clear what Plato is saying. He doesn't say anything in his own voice. He suddenly didn't believe in Platonism. He appears twice. He's not even there when Socrates' death scene in the Phaedo.
01:11:28
Speaker
So the level of, to that extent, philosophy is a heteronymic enterprise, not unlike Pessoa for me. And Plato's dialogues are a myriad of different perspectives on questions where Socrates appears, sometimes it doesn't appear, appears as younger, older, and then, and
01:11:56
Speaker
Plato will do things which are completely willfully contradictory. So the end of Republic, which is an extraordinary series of arguments, which show the connection between theater, democracy, and tyranny, populism in our terms, that we end up with this bizarre story about the immortality of the soul, the myth of Ur,
01:12:21
Speaker
which people kind of just don't read, they forget about. And then there's another dialogue, which was the most longest, most continuously read dialogue of place throughout the last few thousand years, the Timaeus, which survived in a manuscript copy, which is set the day after the Republic. It was written
01:12:43
Speaker
probably 15, 20 years later, it's not clear, but he sets it the day after Republic. And Timaeus, I think Chrissias says, so what'd you talk about? Yes, I heard you had a good conversation down at the Piraeus, you know? And also the setting, that's very important. It's not in the city, it's down at the port, in a merchant's house. All these things are not incidental. And then Socrates himself gives a summary of the Republic, which is terrible.
01:13:12
Speaker
And then we go into this bizarre cosmology of Timaeus, the closest we get to a kind of general physical theory.
01:13:25
Speaker
having it, we see him elsewhere, you know, cross-examining everybody at every moment. He just says, oh yeah, Tameas, that's great. Let's hear some more. Oh, that's terrific. Let's hear some more weird stuff. So, who Plato is, I think is really unclear and how we're meant to respond to that. I think we can't reduce that to a set of arguments. I mean, remember A.J. Eyre had this series called Arguments of Philosophers.
01:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, philosophers have arguments, but there's a lot more they have as well. And so the approach that I take wants to fill out that picture. And that might lead to a quite different approach. I had my suspicions of philosophy, the idea that there is a
01:14:13
Speaker
there is there is a final vocabulary as Rorty would say a final vocabulary by which we can capture reality in a series of concepts is a philosophical dream that arguably has not survived the last few centuries and so that would be where the deflation goes. I'm increasingly I mean as I was very critical of Rorty in the when I was a lot younger and as I've
01:14:40
Speaker
As I've got older, and also I've got to know people that really knew Rawlsi, I'm more and more sympathetic to him. I really think he was onto something. And also Rawlsi wrote, and he's just beautiful prose, powerful, beautiful prose, and clear and jargon free and engaging. And so he's a kind of paradigm as to how a philosopher should write. Of course, you know, he sees himself in the tradition of someone who I've increasingly, someone that I was not,
01:15:10
Speaker
educated in, didn't know much about, but now I think is so important, who is William James, who I think is just kind of, you know, if there were a philosopher that I'd like to have a few drinks with, it would be William James, because that would be, that would be fun. And there'd probably be nitrous oxide involved. I love Rautis. I mean, it's a little bit
01:15:36
Speaker
disparaging and probably tongue in cheek, where he describes his line that you quote, that, you know, continental philosophy is a kind of procession of proper names and analytic philosophy is concerned with problems, problems versus proper names. And that does link back to this idea that the person is important within
01:15:58
Speaker
Yep, within that tradition, whereas the problem is primary. And the one requires, you know, necessarily is it is a person in time. There is a bit of high day as thought and and in a context. But yeah, I still I see I kind of
01:16:25
Speaker
I think maybe they are angling at different things. I'm thinking of the line of Wittgenstein of kicking away the ladder. I think that was originally Schopenhauer's, actually, and that all this context is all well and good. But if you can extract that idea from Descartes, you've done it. And actually, in some ways, you want to get rid of the ladder because it's just so much
01:16:56
Speaker
I don't know. It will encumber you, I suppose.
01:17:01
Speaker
On the other hand, I think, you know, one misses things on that, right? Wittgenstein gives up on, you know, he was, what was he saying? He was, he was bewitched by a certain picture of language and logic. Yeah. Well, he said that about, I guess his point was about language and, and the investigations is really about context, right? Don't look at them. I mean, look for the use, you know, all that stuff. But Schopenhauer's line on kicking away the ladder, which is perhaps
01:17:29
Speaker
better formulation of it is that when you're learning if you're interested in getting to understanding you can look at the particulars but at some point you can kick away that letter and you've arrived at your knowledge whereas obviously the phenomenologists are saying well no you really need to hang on to those details which include the context
01:17:52
Speaker
And I mean, I see the merits of both. There is a neatness which you find in, you know, obviously the analytic tradition, again, very inspired by science here, where, you know,
01:18:05
Speaker
The life of Einstein is great. It's really entertaining. Lots of wonderful, wonderful incidents going on there. But it doesn't change anything about the validity of his theories. And you can, you know, study physics without carrying one jot about how Einstein. Yes. Also remember that Heidegger says, Heidegger when he begins his lecture course on Aristotle, he says that Aristotle was born, he worked, he died.
01:18:34
Speaker
No, let's get into it. You just need to know the dates from the metaphysics and get into the argument. So there is that. Yeah, there is that that's the idea of phenomenology and herself sees itself as a rigorous science transcendental first principles. There's that too. I think it's. Yeah, I think the the problems, proper names distinction, I think has been. Over
01:19:03
Speaker
overblown the sense in which I think I react reacted to the let's say the emphasis on problems um in the and arguments which loses context and history and all of that but so let me put this another way so my work has kind of failed on multiple fronts but I mean the continental philosophers
01:19:32
Speaker
as far as I'm aware, think of me as a kind of renegade because I'm too close to analytic philosophy and have done too much kind of, you know, back in the 90s bridge building and I, you know, irreverence and I, you know, I think that there's a kind of
01:19:49
Speaker
there is a name worship in continental philosophy and people just, you know, doing a lot of fluff and not really saying much and arguments from authority, you know, Lacan says something or, you know,
01:20:07
Speaker
bad use as blah, blah, blah, blah. That's not thinking. So that side of the continental tradition, I think leads to, yes, this is the way I look at it. And this goes back to the OUP book.
01:20:20
Speaker
I think continental philosophy at its worst becomes obscurantism. It's a rejection of a scientific view of the world in the name of some higher, slightly mysterious cause, being or power or will to power or whatever it might be or
01:20:40
Speaker
the drives in psychoanalytic terms and an analytic philosophy at its worst can lead to scientism, the reduction of philosophy to
01:20:51
Speaker
basically the methodology of the natural sciences and a rather positivistic and narrow understanding. This isn't even what scientists do, it seems to me. It's what philosophers imagine that scientists do. So those two problems of obscurantism and scientism need to be identified and pushed away.
01:21:12
Speaker
as far as possible, and then we need to occupy more of a kind of central space, middle ground, which I think is like Wittgenstein, later Wittgenstein, that's the ground that they're in, and that's where we can do our work. But you're never going to keep out in scientism, you know,
01:21:35
Speaker
you know, the AI scaremongering is, you know, one version of that right now, right? And in a year's time, it will be something else. And the obscurantism, it's never going to go away. People are going to believe all sorts of weird shit because they're horribly misinformed and deluded by different things. So to that extent, philosophy, you know, has a really
01:22:02
Speaker
tough and continuous job of trying to push those two things aside and to get people to focus on here and now and what's in front of them and what the context of emergence for that thing in front of them was. And that's what I'd like to do. And insofar as that's happened in, I think that could be done.
01:22:30
Speaker
you know, and I'll just keep on keeping on. Well, I think it's important that there are rebels, right? Yeah, there are. Yeah, this is important. I just want to ask, I see more of it, you know, I see, you know, on my most
01:22:52
Speaker
narcissistic and deluded days. I like to see what I do as, you know, informed by stand-up comedians like Stuart Lee.
01:23:02
Speaker
His relationship to comedy is very much my relationship to philosophy. You use the forms and you move within them and then you try and pull things away, you try and point things out and to deliberately kind of inhabit a series of personae and fictions in order to, and what you're trying to do with that, all we're trying to do is to
01:23:26
Speaker
give people permission to think on their own, right? And that's what we're trying to do with teaching, is to get them to think on their own and do their own stuff. And also, I think the other side of where we are now is really taking, I mean, philosophy has to be a continuous takedown of ideology in whatever form it takes. But one version of that right now, say where I teach,
01:23:56
Speaker
of the New School is the ideology of social justice, the idea that we know what society is and we know what justice is. And if philosophy has shown one thing is that we don't have answers to those questions, right? We can't be committed to something we haven't the vaguest idea about. Our task is to, I mean, philosophy asks the question in the Republic, what is justice?
01:24:22
Speaker
doesn't really come up with a good answer. It's related to virtue at some level. It's perhaps orientated towards the good, and we can tell stories about that, but we don't know that cognitively. We can't base a moral view of the world on that. That's a form of ideology which needs to be exposed. So I think that philosophy has an obligation to
01:24:45
Speaker
expose ideology. And that's true here. It was true of, I don't know, it was true of, you know, philosophers in the, you know, Eastern Europe, you know, the great Hungarian traditions of Lukac and Agnes Heller, my former colleague, or what people like Jan Patocco were up to in the former Czechoslovakia, you know, that's what you, you know, you,
01:25:12
Speaker
you point out the Emperor's new clothes. And that's progress. That's something. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's all the way back to Socrates, right? He was the the ganfly. He was. Yeah. And they killed him.
01:25:29
Speaker
I killed him. He was asking for it. But it's important to remember that, that this is a high stakes game. We're not civil servants of humanity, as Husserl said. We are, at best, we're gadflies and you're going to get swatted, which is, you know, that's what...
01:25:53
Speaker
philosophers do still get imprisoned and killed. And in many countries it's still illegal or has become illegal as a form of activity. So I think we take these things for granted. I think what's changed in the last generation has been, I think thanks to things like podcasts now, I think audio is, I think the internet has been really good for philosophy.
01:26:17
Speaker
It's been really bad for literature, but it's been really good for philosophy. It's made things accessible, compressible, usable. And I think the audio is another really promising area because I think, I mean, my basic view is that people's eyes are tired, but our ears are still slightly open.
01:26:39
Speaker
Our eyes are exhausted because we're constantly looking at screens and things all the time, but there's something, our ears can take things in and philosophy can drip its poison through the ears. So I experimented in 2020 with this podcast called Applied Digger, which was great fun to do, you know, and to try and make this difficult book accessible as a series of
01:27:09
Speaker
series of audio episodes. I do think that this is kind of the platform where philosophy will happen. I don't think it's going to happen on film or on TV. It doesn't seem to work visually very well in my experience. But audio, I think, offers
01:27:31
Speaker
you know, very interesting possibilities. It's a great podcast at the moment I'm listening to by, with Taylor Carmen, Eric Kaplan, called Terrifying Questions, which is really good, where they just take, Eric Kaplan is a, they both did PhDs with Hubert Dreyfus.
01:27:49
Speaker
He went into comedy writing, was a writer for the Big Bang Theory. I worked with him a little bit on Stuff of the Stone back in the day. And they take a difficult question. And you feel that I think that's where things have migrated for the present moment. I think it does raise questions about what we're doing in the classroom with lectures and how we can get students to read. I think these are huge difficulties.
01:28:18
Speaker
how, I mean, it was difficult enough when you were a student and when I was a student to get, to push things out in order to work through daycare's meditations, but if you, that plus a smartphone is just impossible, you know? And so the, but I think the ears, I think audio is, it's a possibility, which is, I think is full of, it encourages me.
01:28:46
Speaker
Yeah, I think that is a beautiful place to end it. I mean, not to be too self aggrandizing here, but I think this is the new Ag Aura, right? We're talking. And it forces one to use
01:29:04
Speaker
plain language and there's no hiding, I think, in a conversation like this. So yeah, thank you so much for your time, Simon. Thank you very much James, it was a great pleasure. Where are you? Where are you physically located? I'm in Edinburgh, yeah.
01:29:20
Speaker
Stuley was here just a couple of weeks ago. I think we'll catch him this year. I saw him last year for the festival. But yeah, let me know if you're ever around. I re-read the How I Escaped Myself, Fate. Which thing is the festival?