We no longer live in a time when college freshmen get shocked by much of the reading material assigned to them. Counterintuitively, the texts that do retain their power to disturb young minds (presuming they can read texts in the first place) tend to skew old — and in one prominent case, about 2,400 years old. Even the most superficial interpretations of Plato’s Republicchallenge the political assumptions held by almost every student today, at least in the developed West. Many of them hold those assumptions so deeply that they’ve never articulated them. Encountering the arguments made by Plato’s Socrates in favor of a society ruled by an enlightened upper class, tightly controlled from above in everything from the division of its labor to the content of its art, prompts them to do so.
Or rather, it prompts them to do so in an ideal educational setting, but then, Plato was dedicated to nothing so much as the ideal. When he casts Socrates as making the case for the best possible relationships between ruler, state, and individual, he creates less a how-to manual (as Machiavelli did nineteen centuries later, in a brutally quasi-satirical spirit) than a means of better understanding extant societies by bringing their characteristics into relief through comparison.
We may reflexively quote Churchill’s remark about modern democracy, vulnerable as it is to manipulation by all manner of unsavory actors, being “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” but we nevertheless flinch from holding it up too closely against any kind of ideal system.
It’s tempting to declare that we wouldn’t want to live in the republic of the Republic. (Some of us may have succumbed to that temptation in the political-philosophy lecture hall.) But a more reflective reading reveals a good deal about Plato’s time as well as our own. In the 78-minute video above, Jared Henderson takes us through the Socratic dialogues that propose and refine this Utopia, with its philosopher-kings, noble lies, spiritual aristocrats, breeding festivals, and guardians trained from the cradle. He arrives at certain unfashionable ideas, such as the ultimate task of refining one’s own soul and the necessity of persuading those impervious to philosophy with myth. Even those of us who regard ourselves as sophisticated thinkers, impervious to the crude rhetoric of ideologies and demagogues, would do well to ask ourselves: how much of that thinking has been shaped by the stories we’ve heard all our lives?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
A century later, on another continent, Hegel’s thought influenced the course of a very different struggle. And while the historical conditions of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and mid-twentieth-century America present entirely different sets of specific concerns, the same general observation applies: the time and place of such radical thinkers as Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Huey Newton and a host of other activists presented “peculiarly auspicious” circumstances for revolutionary social philosophy.
But while these figures appear today as the vanguard of radical black thought, Martin Luther King, Jr., the most widely celebrated of Civil Rights leaders, “is often conflated with neoliberal multiculturalism,” writes Critical Theory, his program associated with “the failure of the civil rights movement to dismantle the ongoing systemic white supremacy of the status quo.” And yet, King’s movement not only succeeded in ending legal segregation and hastening the passing of the Civil Rights Act; it also provided direction for nearly every nonviolent social movement from his day to ours. King’s legacy is not only that of an inspiring organizer and orator, but also of a radical thinker who engaged critically with philosophy and social theory and brought it to bear on his activism.
We are generally well aware of King’s debt to Gandhi and the Satyagraha movement that won Indian independence in 1947, yet we know little of his debt to the same thinker who inspired Marx and his contemporaries—G.W.F. Hegel. As philosopher Nolen Gertz has demonstrated on his blog, King was highly influenced by Hegelianism, as much as, or perhaps even more so, than he was by Gandhi’s movement. Marx may have turned Hegel’s system on its head, but King, writes Gertz, “fought White America… by turning the ideas of dead white men against the oppressive practices of living white men.”
King read and wrote on Hegel as a graduate student at Boston University and Harvard in the mid-’50s, where he studied theology and the history of philosophy and religion. He took a yearlong seminar on Hegel with his advisor at BU, Edgar Brightman (see King’s diagram notes of Hegel’s system above), and found a great deal to admire in the “dead white” philosopher’s logical system, as well as a good deal to critique. The two-semester class, King wrote in his autobiography, was “both rewarding and stimulating”:
Although the course was mainly a study of Hegel’s monumental work, Phenomenology of Mind, I spent my spare time reading his Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. There were points in Hegel’s philosophy that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, his absolute idealism was rationally unsound to me because it tended to swallow up the many in the one. But there were other aspects of his thinking that I found stimulating. His contention that “truth is the whole” led me to a philosophical method of rational coherence. His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.
While King may have disagreed with Hegel’s idealism, he found support for his own philosophy of nonviolence in Hegel’s dialectical method, a mode of analysis that seems particularly well suited to socially revolutionary thought. In Stride Toward Freedom, King wrote,
The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of nonviolent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites—acquiescence and violence—while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.
King’s critical appraisal of Hegel extended to other radical philosophical thinkers as well, including Kant, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche. Gertz offers many samples of the budding Civil Rights leader’s notes on various thinkers and philosophies, including the first paragraph of an essay entitled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” (below), in which King confesses that his encounter with Existentialism often “shocked” him, especially since he had “been raised in a rather strict fundamentalist tradition.” And yet, he writes—in an allusion to Kant’s reaction to David Hume—he acquired “a new appreciation for objective appraisal and critical analysis” that “knocked me out of my dogmatic slumber.”
In the essay, King writes, “I became convinced that existentialism, in spite of the fact that it had become all too fashionable, had grasped certain basic truths about man.” He seems particularly drawn to Kierkegaard (see his notes on the philosopher below). Yet it is Hegel who seems most responsible for awakening his philosophical curiosity. As King scholar John Ansbro discovered, King “stated in a January 19, 1956 interview with The Montgomery Advertiser that Hegel was his favorite philosopher.” Later that year, King gave an address to the First Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change in which he used Hegelian terms to characterize the Civil Rights struggle: “Long ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued that justice emerges from the strife of opposites, and Hegel, in modern philosophy, preached a doctrine of growth through struggle.”
Independent scholar Ralph Dumain has further catalogued King’s many approving references to Hegel, including a paper he wrote entitled “An Exposition of the First Triad of Categories of the Hegelian Logic—Being, Non-Being, Becoming,” the “last of six essays that King wrote” for his two-semester course on the philosopher. King also approached Hegel by way of an earlier Civil Rights leader—W.E.B. Du Bois, who read the German philosopher while studying with prominent social scientists in Berlin, and who applied Hegelian logic to his own analysis of racial consciousness and struggle in America.
Interestingly, what neither King nor Du Bois remarked on is the fact that Hegel was likely himself inspired by black revolutionaries. The Haitian Revolution, argues scholar Susan Buck-Morss, gave Hegel the impetus for his analysis of power and his “metaphor of the ‘struggle to death’ between the master and slave, which for Hegel provided the key to the unfolding of freedom in world history.” While Hegel’s thought is a philosophical thread that winds through the work of radical thinkers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his own philosophy may not have taken the direction it did without the revolutionary struggles against oppression waged by former slaves in the New World centuries before King led his nonviolent war on the oppressive system of segregation in the United States.
H/T Nolen Gertz
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
In 1927, Bertrand Russell delivered a lecture titled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” At the time, such a declaration was still fairly bold, as was the reasoning he provided for it. Nearly three decades thereafter, he included in his collection Portraits from Memory another, shorter piece, “Why I Am Not a Communist.” That description was safe to apply to oneself in 1954, at least in the mainstream of the English-speaking world. It would have been riskier for those who moved in intellectual circles, as a celebrated philosopher like Russell most certainly did. What’s more, his criticism extended not just to communism as then instantiated by certain societies in the world, but to the thought of Karl Marx himself.
Russell makes two charges against Marx: “one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred.” In his view, the author of Capital commits intellectual fraud by opportunistically accepting Thomas Malthus’ dire prediction of population growth (while rejecting it at other times), as well as applying David Ricardo’s theory of value, which describes it as a kind of embodied labor, to wages but not the prices of manufactured goods.
“He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners.” Marx sees their uprising against capitalists as inevitable due to his “extension to world history of certain features prominent in England and France a hundred years ago” and belief in “a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions.”
This dismissal of Marx’s worldview as “mere mythology” has something in common with Russell’s critique of Christianity, and not coincidentally so. “I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing something or other,” he says in the clip above. “I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt.” And “if a philosophy is to bring happiness, it should be inspired by kindly feeling. Now, Marx is not inspired by kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat, but he really wanted is the unhappiness of the bourgeois. And it was because of that negative element, because of that hate element that his philosophy produced disaster.” There are, perhaps, arguments to be made that communism, as practiced in, for example, the Soviet Union, took the form it did precisely because it departed from Marxist lines. Whether that was better or worse than the alternative is a matter no philosopher can settle.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Marcus Aurelius did not have a smartphone. In fact, he didn’t have a phone of any kind, owing to the fact that he lived in the second century, though we can be reasonably certain that he commanded more than enough messengers to keep himself informed around the clock. That’s because he was the Roman emperor at a time when the Roman Empire was at its height. And so, none of us will ever know Marcus’ freedom from digital distraction, nor will we know the intense responsibility he must have felt, no matter how grand a title we attain in our own careers. Still, even here in the twenty-first century, we would all do well to live by the example he left.
So believes Ryan Holiday, a popularizer of Stoicism, the school of thought primarily defined by Marcus’ writings, as well as those of statesman-dramatist Seneca the Younger and former slave Epictetus. In his Meditations, Marcus included enough detail about his own life that Holiday could make the video above for his YouTube channel Daily Stoic, which breaks down the emperor’s daily routine.
He rose at dawn, but not out of natural inclination. He did his reflection, including a realistic adjustment of his expectations for the day, before the siege of duties and requests began. He defined time for what Cal Newport, Holiday’s colleague in the smarter regions of digital-era self-help, would call deep work.
As with any popularization, Holiday conveys Marcus’ life and thought in terms the man himself wouldn’t recognize, even if they were translated into Latin. One fashionable expression he doesn’t use but could have is “work-life balance.” “Marcus was not all about business,” Holiday says. “We know that he was active in physical exercise. We know that he enjoyed boxing and wrestling and hunting and horseback riding. We know that he would take walks.” He would also go to the Colosseum, though without hiding his lack of interest in gladiatorial combat. If he spent more time reading and thinking in his prime seat than getting into the spirit of the games, why attend at all? Perhaps he thought in the manner of Martial, a poet of an earlier generation whose sentiments would nevertheless ring true with Stoics ancient or modern: “These are my times, and I must know them.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Over the years, you’ve probably heard at least a few people casually describe themselves as Epicureans. As used today, the label can refer to as little as enjoying the occasional expensive restaurant meal. The bar was a bit higher in the second century, as explained by ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan in the new video above from his channel Told in Stone. But there is, at least, one major aspect of the original doctrine laid out by Epicurus (341–270 BC) with which most any of his self-styled followers in our time would agree: that pleasure is the greatest good. Whether they would follow that premise all the way to the conclusions Epicurus did is another matter.
For that ancient Greek philosopher, Ryan explains, “happiness was the sole legitimate goal of human existence. The essence of happiness is freedom from anxiety. Since the greatest source of mental disturbance is fear about death and the afterlife, it is necessary to understand the true nature of the universe.”
Thereafter come the principles about atoms drifting through the infinite void, a subject of less interest to many twenty-first century “Epicureans” than the mechanics of the Williams-Sonoma rewards program. Still, they would do well to learn at least one relevant Greek term: ataraxia, or the “tranquility that comes from being sufficient in oneself.”
Achieving ataraxia is not a matter of merely indulging the senses. Rather, “all sources of unnecessary mental disturbance should be removed.” That means no politics and probably no marriage, though friendship is acceptable. Though fairly ascetic in its original form, Epicureanism drew quite a few high-profile Romans as adherents — and as detractors. No less a figure than Cicero, for example, attacked both its opposition to traditional Roman religion and, perhaps predictably, its isolation from public life. Plutarch went so far as to write anti-Epicurean treatises, including one titled “It Is Not Possible to Live Pleasurably According to the Doctrines of Epicurus.” That may or may not be true by our modern standards, but the question is worth contemplating over a good dinner.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We previously brought you the BBC series of short animated videos, A History of Ideas. Produced in collaboration with the UK’s Open University and narrated by Harry Shearer, these fun introductions to such philosophers as Simone de Beauvoir and Edmund Burke, and such weighty philosophical topics as free will and the problem of evil, make challenging, abstract concepts accessible to non-philosophers. Now the series is back with a new chapter, How Did Everything Begin?, a survey of several theories of the origins of the universe, from Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical speculations, to Hindu cosmology; and from theologian William Paley’s design argument (below), to the theory of the Big Bang (above).
The two videos here present an interesting counterpoint between the origin theories of astrophysics and theology. Though current-day intelligent design proponents deny it, there is still much of William Paley’s argument, at least in style, in their explanations of creation. First propounded in his 1802 work Natural Theology, the theologian’s famous watchmaker analogy—which he extended to the design of the eye, and everything else—gave Charles Darwin much to puzzle over, though David Hume had supposedly refuted Paley’s arguments 50 years earlier. The Big Bang theory—a term created by its foremost critic Fred Hoyle—offers an entirely naturalistic account of the universe’s origins, one that presupposes no inherent purpose or design.
As with the previous videos, these are scripted by the host of the Philosophy Bites podcast, Nigel Warburton. This time around the videos are narrated by Gillian Anderson, whose voice you may not immediately recognize. Rather than sounding like Dana Scully, her famous X‑Files character, Anderson speaks in a British accent, which she slips into easily, having lived in the UK for much of her childhood and now again as an adult. (You may have seen Anderson in many of the English period dramas she has appeared in, or in British crime drama The Fall or Michael Winterbottom’s uproarious adaptation of Tristram Shandy.)
These fascinating speculative theories—whether scientific or mythological—are sure to appeal to fans of the X‑Files, who can perhaps begin to believe again, or remain skeptical, thanks to Chris Carter’s R‑rated director’s cut of X‑Files: I Want to Believe, coming out this fall.
Watch the remaining videos in the series below:
Thomas Aquinas and the First Mover Argument
Hindu Creation Stories
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Tucked in the afterward of the second, 1982 edition of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, we find an important, but little-known essay by Foucault himself titled “The Subject and Power.” Here, the French theorist offers what he construes as a summary of his life’s work: spanning 1961’s Madness and Civilization up to his three-volume, unfinished History of Sexuality, still in progress at the time of his death in 1984. He begins by telling us that he has not been, primarily, concerned with power, despite the word’s appearance in his essay’s title, its arguments, and in nearly everything else he has written. Instead, he has sought to discover the “modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects.”
This distinction may seem abstruse, a needlessly wordy matter of semantics. It is not so for Foucault. In this key critical difference lies the originality of his project, in all its various stages of development. “Power,” as an abstraction, an objective relation of dominance, is static and conceptual, the image of a tyrant on a coin, of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan seated on his throne.
Subjection, subjectification, objectivizing, individualizing, on the other hand—critical terms in Foucault’s vocabulary—are active processes, disciplines, and practices, relationships between individuals and institutions that determine the character of both. These relationships can be located in history, as Foucault does in example after example, and they can also be critically studied in the present, and thus, perhaps, resisted and changed in what he terms “anarchistic struggles.”
Foucault calls for a “new economy of power relations,” and a critical theory that takes “forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.” For example, in approaching the carceral state, we must examine the processes that divide “the criminals and the ‘good boys,’” processes that function independently of reason. How is it that a system can create classes of people who belong in cages and people who don’t, when the standard rational justification—the protection of society from violence—fails spectacularly to apply in millions of cases? From such excesses, Foucault writes, come two “‘diseases of power’—fascism and Stalinism.” Despite the “inner madness” of these “pathological forms” of state power, “they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality.”
People come to accept that mass incarceration, or invasive medical technologies, or economic deprivation, or mass surveillance and over-policing, is necessary and rational. They do so through the agency of what Foucault calls “pastoral power,” the secularization of religious authority as integral to the Western state.
This form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.
In the last years of Foucault’s life, he shifted his focus from institutional discourses and mechanisms—psychiatric, carceral, medical—to disciplinary practices of self-control and the governing of others by “pastoral” means. Rather than ignoring individuality, the modern state, he writes, developed “as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns.” While writing his monumental History of Sexuality, he gave a series of lectures at Berkeley that explore the modern policing of the self.
In his lectures on “Truth and Subjectivity” (1980), Foucault looks at forms of interrogation and various “truth therapies” that function as subtle forms of coercion. Foucault returned to Berkeley in 1983 and delivered the lecture “Discourse and Truth,” which explores the concept of parrhesia, the Greek term meaning “free speech,” or as he calls it, “truth-telling as an activity.” Through analysis of the tragedies of Euripides and contemporary democratic crises, he reveals the practice of speaking truth to power as a kind of tightly controlled performance. Finally, in his lecture series “The Culture of the Self,” Foucault discusses ancient and modern practices of “self care” or “the care of the self” as technologies designed to produce certain kinds of tightly bounded subjectivities.
When he began his final series of talks in 1980, the philosopher was asked in an interview with theDaily Californian about the motivations for his critical examinations of power and subjectivity. His reply speaks to both his practical concern for resistance and his almost utopian belief in the limitless potential for human freedom. “No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us,” Foucault says.
We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power.
Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.
Read Foucault’s statement of intent, his essay “The Subject and Power,” and learn more about his life and work in the 1993 documentary below.
Most of our conception of Stoicism, an ancient school of thought much featured here on Open Culture, derives from the writings of just three figures: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca the Younger. But there were other Stoics, and despite their antiquity, we may yet learn more about them. Take Chrysippus of Soli, who was officially known as the Second Founder of Stoicism due to his influence on its spread throughout the Greek and Roman world. What we know of his demanding work, we know because of references written on scrolls inadvertently preserved in a villa in Herculaneum when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79. To date, most of those “Herculaneum papyri” have been unreadable, but soon, thanks to technologies like X‑ray microtomography and artificial intelligence, that may change.
In 2023, we posted about the decoding of the first word of one such scroll, an achievement made with the incentive of prizes offered by a contest called the Vesuvius Challenge. Now, says its website, “we have completely virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667 — the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge community knows as Scroll 4 — without ever touching its pages.”
What appears to be little more than a big hunk of charcoal, further damaged by several physical unrolling attempts in less technologically advanced times, turns out to be “a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings.” The scroll’s last preserved column even drops the name of Aristocreon, “nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus,” suggesting it dates to the second century BC.
These collaborative efforts, both technological and intellectual, have made PHerc. 1667 “the first Herculaneum papyrus to be digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end, and made available for sustained scholarly study.” But there are also other texts still being deciphered, including PHerc. 139, which has been identified as “Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 — a treatise by the Epicurean philosopher whose works fill so much of this library.” In their day, Stoicism and Epicureanism stood as similar but rival philosophies, and it seems that the owner of the so-called Villa of the Papyri (possibly Julius Caesar’s father-in-law) had an interest in both of them. Ancient Stoics and Epicureans carried on a lively debate about how to live, some of whose arguments were written down. If the necessary technologies continue to advance, perhaps we’ll one day be able to read them all and pick that conversation up right where they left it off. Learn more about the decoding of the papyrus here and here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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