Do All Roads Lead to Philosophy on Wikipedia?: They Do About 97.3% of the Time

Pull up the Wikipedia page for Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love,” the 1984 sin­gle now known for re-pop­u­lar­iz­ing the genre of Japan­ese “city pop.” Then click the first of its links (not relat­ed to the lan­guage of the arti­cle itself), which leads to Takeuchi’s own page. If you keep fol­low­ing that same pro­ce­dure, you’ll con­tin­ue on to City Pop, then Japan­ese Pop Music, then Pop­u­lar Music. Keep drilling down, and you’ll pass the very con­cepts of music and sound, then enter the realms of physics, the sci­en­tif­ic method, log­i­cal propo­si­tions, and the phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage. This is one exam­ple pro­vid­ed by the video above from YouTu­ber Not David, which inves­ti­gates whether all roads on Wikipedia even­tu­al­ly lead to phi­los­o­phy.

There is, of course, a Wikipedia page about this, called “Get­ting to Phi­los­o­phy.” “Fol­low­ing the first hyper­link in the main text of an Eng­lish Wikipedia arti­cle, and then repeat­ing the process for sub­se­quent arti­cles, usu­al­ly leads to the Phi­los­o­phy arti­cle,” it says. “In Feb­ru­ary 2016, this was true for 97% of all arti­cles on Wikipedia (includ­ing this one).” As for the rest, they “lead to an arti­cle with­out any out­go­ing wik­ilinks, to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops.” This is actu­al­ly the case with the path start­ing from “Plas­tic Love,” after Phi­los­o­phy of Lan­guage goes in cir­cles around con­cepts, abstrac­tion, and log­ic itself, nev­er quite reach­ing Phi­los­o­phy prop­er.

Or at least that’s what hap­pened for me today; it could go dif­fer­ent­ly tomor­row, or even a few sec­onds from now. Ever since Wikipedia went live in 2001, its main dif­fer­ence from oth­er ency­clo­pe­dias has been that it’s con­stant­ly chang­ing, and the rate of that change has only increased over time. The “phi­los­o­phy game,” as Not David calls it, is at all times sub­ject to break­age, but also to un-break­age. At nor­mal times, Orange Juice to Phi­los­o­phy takes thir­teen steps, Apple Juice to Phi­los­o­phy takes fif­teen steps; both the Cal­gary Flames and Edmon­ton Oil­ers lie six­teen steps from Phi­los­o­phy. But things go hay­wire if some­one goes and, say, re-orders the links on the Aware­ness arti­cle so Psy­chol­o­gy comes first.

These things hap­pen: Wikipedia is, after all, the ency­clo­pe­dia that any­one can edit. And as you can see (at least as of this writ­ing), Aware­ness now links first to Phi­los­o­phy again. These changes play hav­oc with the efforts of any­one try­ing to map out the con­nec­tions between one part of Wikipedia and anoth­er, as Not David does in this video. But they don’t alter the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of net­work design, which his analy­sis illu­mi­nates. As with the cor­pus cal­lo­sum, which con­nects the two hemi­spheres of the human brain, Phi­los­o­phy is less impor­tant for what direct­ly con­nects to it than for its own func­tion as a con­nec­tor. And indeed, haven’t philoso­phers always want­ed to know how every­thing fits togeth­er?

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion of the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy

A Data Visu­al­iza­tion of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, 1950–2018

Lis­ten to Wikipedia: A Web Site That Turns Every Wikipedia Edit Into Ambi­ent Music in Real Time

Philo­graph­ics Presents a Visu­al Dic­tio­nary of Phi­los­o­phy: 95 Philo­soph­i­cal Con­cepts as Graph­ic Designs

Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Course

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Death: A Free Online Philosophy Course from Yale Helps You Grapple with the Inescapable

It pays to think intel­li­gent­ly about the inevitable. And this course taught by Yale pro­fes­sor Shelly Kagan does just that, tak­ing a rich, philo­soph­i­cal look at death. Here’s how the course descrip­tion reads:

There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will exam­ine a num­ber of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mor­tal­i­ty. The pos­si­bil­i­ty that death may not actu­al­ly be the end is con­sid­ered. Are we, in some sense, immor­tal? Would immor­tal­i­ty be desir­able? Also a clear­er notion of what it is to die is exam­ined. What does it mean to say that a per­son has died? What kind of fact is that? And, final­ly, dif­fer­ent atti­tudes to death are eval­u­at­ed. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is sui­cide moral­ly per­mis­si­ble? Is it ratio­nal? How should the knowl­edge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?

Major texts used in this course include Pla­to’s Phae­doTol­stoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, and John Per­ry’sA Dia­logue on Per­son­al Iden­ti­ty and Immor­tal­i­ty. Kagan also lat­er pub­lished a com­pan­ion book–simply called Death–which can be pur­chased online.

You can watch the 26 lec­tures above. Or find them on YouTube and iTunes in video and audio for­mats. For more infor­ma­tion on this course, includ­ing the syl­labus, please vis­it this Yale site.

This course has been added to our list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aldous Hux­ley, Dying of Can­cer, Left This World Trip­ping on LSD (1963)

Alan Watts Explains Why Death is an Art, Adven­ture and Cre­ative Act

J. Robert Oppen­heimer Explains How, Upon Wit­ness­ing the First Nuclear Explo­sion, He Recit­ed a Line from the Bha­gavad Gita: “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroy­er of Worlds”

Zen Mas­ter Alan Watts Dis­cov­ers the Secrets of Aldous Hux­ley and His Art of Dying

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Watch The Idea, the First Animated Film to Deal with Big, Philosophical Ideas (1932)

A vague sense of dis­qui­et set­tled over Europe in the peri­od between World War I and World War II. As the slow burn of mil­i­tant ultra­na­tion­al­ism min­gled with jin­go­ist pop­ulism, author­i­tar­i­an lead­ers and fas­cist fac­tions found mount­ing sup­port among a cit­i­zen­ry hun­gry for cer­tain­ty. Europe’s grow­ing trep­i­da­tion fos­tered some of the 20th century’s most strik­ing painter­ly, lit­er­ary, and cin­e­mat­ic depic­tions of the total­i­tar­i­an­ism that would soon fol­low. It was almost inevitable that this peri­od would see the birth of the first deeply philo­soph­i­cal ani­mat­ed film, known as The Idea.

The Idea first emerged as a word­less nov­el in 1920, drawn by Frans Masereel. Masereel, a close friend of Dadaist and New Objec­tivist artist George Grosz, had cre­at­ed a stark, black-and-white sto­ry about the indomitable nature of ideas. Employ­ing thick, aggres­sive lines obtained through wood­cut print­ing, Masereel depict­ed a con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal order’s fight against the birth of a new idea, which even­tu­al­ly flour­ished in spite of the establishment’s relent­less attempts to sup­press it.

Set­ting to work in 1930, a Czech film­mak­er named Berthold Bar­tosch spent two years ani­mat­ing The Idea. Bartosch’s visu­al style remained true to Masereel’s harsh, vivid lines. His ver­sion of the sto­ry, how­ev­er, took a decid­ed­ly bleak­er turn—one that was more rem­i­nis­cent of the writ­ings of his com­pa­tri­ot, Franz Kaf­ka. Where­as Masereel believed that the puri­ty of good ideas would over­whelm their oppo­si­tion, Bar­tosch, work­ing a decade clos­er to the Nazis’ ascen­dan­cy, was wary of such ide­al­ism.

Above, you can watch what film his­to­ri­an William Moritz has called “the first ani­mat­ed film cre­at­ed as an art­work with seri­ous, even trag­ic, social and philo­soph­i­cal themes.” Paired with a haunt­ing score com­posed by Arthur Honeg­ger, the 25-minute ani­ma­tion is a pow­er­ful­ly mov­ing med­i­ta­tion on art, strug­gle, puri­ty of thought, and pop­ulist sav­agery that remains untar­nished after eight decades.

You can find oth­er great ani­ma­tions in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in Novem­ber, 2013. It was writ­ten by Ilia Blin­d­er­man. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4 Franz Kaf­ka Ani­ma­tions: Watch Cre­ative Ani­mat­ed Shorts from Poland, Japan, Rus­sia & Cana­da

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

The Ground­break­ing Sil­hou­ette Ani­ma­tions of Lotte Reiniger: Cin­derel­la, Hansel and Gre­tel, and More

Orson Welles Nar­rates Ani­ma­tion of Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry

The Tale of the Fox: Watch Ladis­las Starevich’s Ani­ma­tion of Goethe’s Great Ger­man Folk­tale (1937)

Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling Science From Pseudoscience (1966)

Pho­to by Tamiko Thiel via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

How can we know whether a claim some­one makes is sci­en­tif­ic or not? The ques­tion is of the utmost con­se­quence, as we are sur­round­ed on all sides by claims that sound cred­i­ble, that use the lan­guage of science—and often do so in attempts to refute sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus. As we’ve seen in the case of the anti-vac­cine cru­sade, falling vic­tim to pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic argu­ments can have dire effects. So how can ordi­nary peo­ple, ordi­nary par­ents, and ordi­nary cit­i­zens eval­u­ate such argu­ments?

The prob­lem of demar­ca­tion, or what is and what is not sci­ence, has occu­pied philoso­phers for some time, and the most famous answer comes from philoso­pher of sci­ence Karl Pop­per, who pro­posed his the­o­ry of “fal­si­fi­a­bil­i­ty” in 1963. Accord­ing to Pop­per, an idea is sci­en­tif­ic if it can con­ceiv­ably be proven wrong. Although Popper’s strict def­i­n­i­tion of sci­ence has had its uses over the years, it has also come in for its share of crit­i­cism, since so much accept­ed sci­ence was fal­si­fied in its day (Newton’s grav­i­ta­tion­al the­o­ry, Bohr’s the­o­ry of the atom), and so much cur­rent the­o­ret­i­cal sci­ence can­not be fal­si­fied (string the­o­ry, for exam­ple). What­ev­er the case, the prob­lem for lay peo­ple remains. If a sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry is beyond our com­pre­hen­sion, it’s unlike­ly we’ll be able to see how it might be dis­proven.

Physi­cist and sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor Richard Feyn­man came up with anoth­er cri­te­ri­on, one that applies direct­ly to the non-sci­en­tist like­ly to be bam­boo­zled by fan­cy ter­mi­nol­o­gy that sounds sci­en­tif­ic. Simon Oxen­ham at Big Think points to the exam­ple of Deep­ak Chopra, who is “infa­mous for mak­ing pro­found sound­ing yet entire­ly mean­ing­less state­ments by abus­ing sci­en­tif­ic lan­guage.” (What Daniel Den­nett called “deep­i­ties.”) As a balm against such state­ments, Oxen­ham refers us to a speech Feyn­man gave in 1966 to a meet­ing of the Nation­al Sci­ence Teach­ers Asso­ci­a­tion. Rather than ask­ing lay peo­ple to con­front sci­en­tif­ic-sound­ing claims on their own terms, Feyn­man would have us trans­late them into ordi­nary lan­guage, there­by assur­ing that what the claim asserts is a log­i­cal con­cept, rather than just a col­lec­tion of jar­gon.

The exam­ple Feyn­man gives comes from the most rudi­men­ta­ry source, a “first grade sci­ence text­book” which “begins in an unfor­tu­nate man­ner to teach sci­ence”: it shows its stu­dent a pic­ture of a “wind­able toy dog,” then a pic­ture of a real dog, then a motor­bike. In each case the stu­dent is asked “What makes it move?” The answer, Feyn­man tells us “was in the teacher’s edi­tion of the book… ‘ener­gy makes it move.’” Few stu­dents would have intu­it­ed such an abstract con­cept, unless they had pre­vi­ous­ly learned the word, which is all the les­son teach­es them. The answer, Feyn­man points out, might as well have been “’God makes it move,’ or ‘Spir­it makes it move,’ or, ‘Mov­abil­i­ty makes it move.’”

Instead, a good sci­ence les­son “should think about what an ordi­nary human being would answer.” Engag­ing with the con­cept of ener­gy in ordi­nary lan­guage enables the stu­dent to explain it, and this, Feyn­man says, con­sti­tutes a test for “whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a def­i­n­i­tion. Test it this way”:

With­out using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own lan­guage. With­out using the word “ener­gy,” tell me what you know now about the dog’s motion.

Feynman’s insis­tence on ordi­nary lan­guage recalls the state­ment attrib­uted to Ein­stein about not real­ly under­stand­ing some­thing unless you can explain it to your grand­moth­er. The method, Feyn­man says, guards against learn­ing “a mys­tic for­mu­la for answer­ing ques­tions,” and Oxen­ham describes it as “a valu­able way of test­ing our­selves on whether we have real­ly learned some­thing, or whether we just think we have learned some­thing.”

It is equal­ly use­ful for test­ing the claims of oth­ers. If some­one can­not explain some­thing in plain Eng­lish, then we should ques­tion whether they real­ly do them­selves under­stand what they pro­fess…. In the words of Feyn­man, “It is pos­si­ble to fol­low form and call it sci­ence, but that is pseu­do­science.”

Does Feynman’s ordi­nary lan­guage test solve the demar­ca­tion prob­lem? No, but if we use it as a guide when con­front­ed with plau­si­ble-sound­ing claims couched in sci­en­tif­ic-sound­ing ver­biage, it can help us either get clar­i­ty or suss out total non­sense. And if any­one would know how sci­en­tists can explain com­pli­cat­ed ideas in plain­ly acces­si­ble ways, Feyn­man would.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: A Toolk­it That Can Help You Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Sep­a­rate Sense from Non­sense

The Life & Work of Richard Feyn­man Explored in a Three-Part Freako­nom­ics Radio Minis­eries

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Man­u­al by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt (RIP)

Richard Feyn­man Presents Quan­tum Elec­tro­dy­nam­ics for the Non­Sci­en­tist

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Jean-Paul Sartre Rejects the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964: “It Was Monstrous!”

In a 2013 blog post, the great Ursu­la K. Le Guin quotes a Lon­don Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment col­umn by a “J.C.,” who satir­i­cal­ly pro­pos­es the “Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal.” “Writ­ers all over Europe and Amer­i­ca are turn­ing down awards in the hope of being nom­i­nat­ed for a Sartre,” writes J.C., “The Sartre Prize itself has nev­er been refused.” Sartre earned the hon­or of his own prize for prize refusal by turn­ing down the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture in 1964, an act Le Guin calls “char­ac­ter­is­tic of the gnarly and counter-sug­gestible Exis­ten­tial­ist.” As you can see in the short clip above, Sartre ful­ly believed the com­mit­tee used the award to white­wash his Com­mu­nist polit­i­cal views and activism.

But the refusal was not a the­atri­cal or “impul­sive ges­ture,” Sartre wrote in a state­ment to the Swedish press, which was lat­er pub­lished in Le Monde. It was con­sis­tent with his long­stand­ing prin­ci­ples. “I have always declined offi­cial hon­ors,” he said, and referred to his rejec­tion of the Legion of Hon­or in 1945 for sim­i­lar rea­sons. Elab­o­rat­ing, he cit­ed first the “per­son­al” rea­son for his refusal

This atti­tude is based on my con­cep­tion of the writer’s enter­prise. A writer who adopts polit­i­cal, social, or lit­er­ary posi­tions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the writ­ten word. All the hon­ors he may receive expose his read­ers to a pres­sure I do not con­sid­er desir­able. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize win­ner.

The writer must there­fore refuse to let him­self be trans­formed into an insti­tu­tion, even if this occurs under the most hon­or­able cir­cum­stances, as in the present case.

There was anoth­er rea­son as well, an “objec­tive” one, Sartre wrote. In serv­ing the cause of social­ism, he hoped to bring about “the peace­ful coex­is­tence of the two cul­tures, that of the East and the West.” (He refers not only to Asia as “the East,” but also to “the East­ern bloc.”)

There­fore, he felt he must remain inde­pen­dent of insti­tu­tions on either side: “I should thus be quite as unable to accept, for exam­ple, the Lenin Prize, if some­one want­ed to give it to me.”

As a flat­ter­ing New York Times arti­cle not­ed at the time, this was not the first time a writer had refused the Nobel. In 1926, George Bernard Shaw turned down the prize mon­ey, offend­ed by the extrav­a­gant cash award, which he felt was unnec­es­sary since he already had “suf­fi­cient mon­ey for my needs.” Shaw lat­er relent­ed, donat­ing the mon­ey for Eng­lish trans­la­tions of Swedish lit­er­a­ture. Boris Paster­nak also refused the award, in 1958, but this was under extreme duress. “If he’d tried to go accept it,” Le Guin writes, “the Sovi­et Gov­ern­ment would have prompt­ly, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly arrest­ed him and sent him to eter­nal silence in a gulag in Siberia.”

These qual­i­fi­ca­tions make Sartre the only author to ever out­right and vol­un­tar­i­ly reject both the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture and its siz­able cash award. While his state­ment to the Swedish press is filled with polite expla­na­tions and gra­cious demur­rals, his filmed state­ment above, excerpt­ed from the 1976 doc­u­men­tary Sartre by Him­self, minces no words.

Because I was polit­i­cal­ly involved the bour­geois estab­lish­ment want­ed to cov­er up my “past errors.” Now there’s an admis­sion! And so they gave me the Nobel Prize. They “par­doned” me and said I deserved it. It was mon­strous!

Sartre was in fact par­doned by De Gaulle four years after his Nobel rejec­tion for his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the 1968 upris­ings. “You don’t arrest Voltaire,” the French Pres­i­dent sup­pos­ed­ly said. The writer and philoso­pher, Le Guin points out, “was, of course, already an ‘insti­tu­tion’” at the time of the Nobel award. Nonethe­less, she says, the ges­ture had real mean­ing. Lit­er­ary awards, writes Le Guin—who her­self refused a Neb­u­la Award in 1976 (she’s won sev­er­al more since)—can “hon­or a writer,” in which case they have “gen­uine val­ue.” Yet prizes are also award­ed “as a mar­ket­ing ploy by cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism, and some­times as a polit­i­cal gim­mick by the awarders [….] And the more pres­ti­gious and val­ued the prize the more com­pro­mised it is.” Sartre, of course, felt the same—the greater the hon­or, the more like­ly his work would be coopt­ed and san­i­tized.

Per­haps prov­ing his point, a short, nasty 1965 Har­vard Crim­son let­ter had many, less flat­ter­ing things than Le Guin to say about Sartre’s moti­va­tions, call­ing him “an ugly toad” and a “poor los­er” envi­ous of his for­mer friend Camus, who won in 1957. The let­ter writer calls Sartre’s rejec­tion of the prize “an act of pre­ten­sion” and a “rather inef­fec­tu­al and stu­pid ges­ture.” And yet it did have an effect. It seems clear at least to me that the Har­vard Crim­son writer could not stand the fact that, offered the “most cov­et­ed award” the West can bestow, and a heap­ing sum of mon­ey besides, “Sartre’s big line was, ‘Je refuse.’”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Camus Wins the Nobel Prize & Sends a Let­ter of Grat­i­tude to His Ele­men­tary School Teacher (1957)

Jean-Paul Sartre & Albert Camus: Their Friend­ship and the Bit­ter Feud That End­ed It

Hear Albert Camus Deliv­er His Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech (1957)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson Debated Capitalism Versus Marxism

Karl Marx was a Ger­man philoso­pher-his­to­ri­an (with a few oth­er pur­suits besides) who wrote in pur­suit of an under­stand­ing of indus­tri­al soci­ety as he knew it in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and what its future evo­lu­tion held in store. There are good rea­sons to read his work still today, espe­cial­ly if you have an inter­est in the his­to­ry of eco­nom­ic and soci­o­log­i­cal the­o­ry, or in the time and places he lived. But in the almost cen­tu­ry-and-a-half since his death — and more so dur­ing the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, dur­ing which the osten­si­bly Marx­ist project of the Sovi­et Union rose and fell — he’s turned from a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure into an icon­ic specter, rep­re­sent­ing either pen­e­trat­ing insight into or cat­a­stroph­ic delu­sion about the orga­ni­za­tion of human soci­ety.

It was sure­ly Marx’s ten­den­cy to inflame strong opin­ions that got him placed at the cen­ter of a debate between the psychologist/cultural com­men­ta­tor Jor­dan Peter­son and the philosopher/cultural the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek. The event took place in 2019, at Toron­to’s Sony Cen­ter, billed as a clash of the titans on the sub­ject of “Hap­pi­ness: Cap­i­tal­ism vs. Marx­ism.”

In fact, it end­ed up cov­er­ing a wide range of twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry issues, with each of the two unortho­dox, high­ly rec­og­niz­able pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als giv­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic per­for­mances on the eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies of the day. Yet they aren’t as opposed as one might have imag­ined: “I can­not but notice the irony of how Peter­son and I, the par­tic­i­pants in this duel of the cen­tu­ry, are both mar­gin­al­ized by the offi­cial aca­d­e­m­ic com­mu­ni­ty,” Žižek remarks ear­ly on.

Indeed, writes the Guardian’s Stephen Marche, “the great sur­prise of this debate turned out to be how much in com­mon the old-school Marx­ist and the Cana­di­an iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics refusenik had. One hat­ed com­mu­nism. The oth­er hat­ed com­mu­nism but thought that cap­i­tal­ism pos­sessed inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions. The first one agreed that cap­i­tal­ism pos­sessed inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions.” Nev­er­the­less, as in many a debate, the sur­pris­ing com­mon ground is more inter­est­ing than the pre­dictable points of con­flict, espe­cial­ly on themes broad­er than any set of ‑isms. “My basic dog­ma is, hap­pi­ness should be treat­ed as a nec­es­sary by-prod­uct,” says Žižek. “If you focus on it, you are lost.” To this propo­si­tion Peter­son lat­er gives his hearty assent. As for what, exact­ly, to focus on instead of hap­pi­ness… well, that’s a mat­ter of debate.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek Calls Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness a Form of “Mod­ern Total­i­tar­i­an­ism”

Karl Marx & the Flaws of Cap­i­tal­ism: Lex Frid­man Talks with Pro­fes­sor Richard Wolff

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Slavoj Žižek Responds to Noam Chom­sky: ‘I Don’t Know a Guy Who Was So Often Empir­i­cal­ly Wrong’

Mil­ton Fried­man & John Ken­neth Galbraith’s Present Their Oppos­ing Eco­nom­ic Philoso­phies on Two TV Series (1977–1980)

An AI Gen­er­at­ed, Nev­er-End­ing Dis­cus­sion Between Wern­er Her­zog and Slavoj Žižek

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Simone de Beauvoir Explains “Why I’m a Feminist” in a Rare TV Interview (1975)

In Simone de Beau­voir’s 1945 nov­el The Blood of Oth­ers, the nar­ra­tor, Jean Blo­mart, reports on his child­hood friend Marcel’s reac­tion to the word “rev­o­lu­tion”:

It was sense­less to try to change any­thing in the world or in life; things were bad enough even if one did not med­dle with them. Every­thing that her heart and her mind con­demned she rabid­ly defended—my father, mar­riage, cap­i­tal­ism. Because the wrong lay not in the insti­tu­tions, but in the depths of our being. We must hud­dle in a cor­ner and make our­selves as small as pos­si­ble. Bet­ter to accept every­thing than to make an abortive effort, doomed in advance to fail­ure.

Marcel’s fear­ful fatal­ism rep­re­sents every­thing De Beau­voir con­demned in her writ­ing, most notably her ground­break­ing 1949 study, The Sec­ond Sex, often cred­it­ed as the foun­da­tion­al text of sec­ond-wave fem­i­nism. De Beau­voir reject­ed the idea that women’s his­tor­i­cal sub­jec­tion was in any way natural—“in the depths of our being.” Instead, her analy­sis fault­ed the very insti­tu­tions Mar­cel defends: patri­archy, mar­riage, cap­i­tal­ist exploita­tion.

In the 1975 inter­view above with French jour­nal­ist Jean-Louis Ser­van-Schreiber—“Why I’m a Feminist”—De Beau­voir picks up the ideas of The Sec­ond Sex, which Ser­van-Schreiber calls as impor­tant an “ide­o­log­i­cal ref­er­ence” for fem­i­nists as Marx’s Cap­i­tal is for com­mu­nists. He asks De Beau­voir about one of her most quot­ed lines: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” Her reply shows how far in advance she was of post-mod­ern anti-essen­tial­ism, and how much of a debt lat­er fem­i­nist thinkers owe to her ideas:

Yes, that for­mu­la is the basis of all my the­o­ries…. Its mean­ing is very sim­ple, that being a woman is not a nat­ur­al fact. It’s the result of a cer­tain his­to­ry. There is no bio­log­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal des­tiny that defines a woman as such…. Baby girls are man­u­fac­tured to become women.”

With­out deny­ing the fact of bio­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence, De Beau­voir debunks the notion that sex dif­fer­ences are suf­fi­cient to jus­ti­fy gen­der-based hier­ar­chies of sta­tus and social pow­er. Wom­en’s sec­ond-class sta­tus, she argues, results from a long his­tor­i­cal process; even if insti­tu­tions no longer inten­tion­al­ly deprive women of pow­er, they still intend to hold on to the pow­er men have his­tor­i­cal­ly accrued.

Almost 50 years after this interview—and 75 years since The Sec­ond Sex—the debates De Beau­voir helped ini­ti­ate rage on, with no sign of abat­ing any­time soon. Although Ser­van-Schreiber calls fem­i­nism a “ris­ing force” that promis­es “pro­found changes,” one won­ders whether De Beau­voir, who died in 1986, would be dis­mayed by the plight of women in much of the world today. But then again, unlike her char­ac­ter Mar­cel, De Beau­voir was a fight­er, not like­ly to “hud­dle in a cor­ner” and give in. Ser­van-Schreiber states above that De Beau­voir “has always refused, until this year, to appear on TV,” but he is mis­tak­en. In 1967, she appeared with her part­ner Jean-Paul Sartre on a French-Cana­di­an pro­gram called Dossiers.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

Simone de Beau­voir Speaks on Amer­i­can TV (in Eng­lish) About Fem­i­nism, Abor­tion & More (1976)

Simone de Beau­voir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intel­lec­tu­al and Fem­i­nist (1960)

Simone de Beauvoir’s Phi­los­o­phy on Find­ing Mean­ing in Old Age

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

See Albert Camus’ Historic Lecture, “The Human Crisis,” Performed by Actor Viggo Mortensen

Back in 2016, New York City staged a month-long fes­ti­val cel­e­brat­ing Albert Camus’ his­toric vis­it to NYC in 1946. One event in the fes­ti­val fea­tured actor Vig­go Mortensen giv­ing a read­ing of Camus’ lec­ture,“La Crise de l’homme” (“The Human Cri­sis”) at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty–the very same place where Camus deliv­ered the lec­ture 70 years earlier–down to the very day (March 28, 1946). The read­ing was ini­tial­ly cap­tured on a cell phone, and broad­cast live using Face­book live video. But then came a more pol­ished record­ing, cour­tesy of Columbi­a’s Mai­son Française. Note that Mortensen takes the stage around the 11:45 mark. You can read a tran­script of “The Human Cri­sis” here.

“The Human Cri­sis” will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in April, 2016.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Camus on the Respon­si­bil­i­ty of the Artist: To “Cre­ate Dan­ger­ous­ly” (1957)

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Albert Camus’ Exis­ten­tial­ism, a Phi­los­o­phy Mak­ing a Come­back in Our Dys­func­tion­al Times

What is Albert Camus’ The Plague About? An Intro­duc­tion

Hear Albert Camus Read the Famous Open­ing Pas­sage of The Stranger (1947)

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.