Discover Hannah Arendt’s Syllabus for Her 1974 Course on “Thinking”

If you’ve read one work of Han­nah Arendt’s, it’s prob­a­bly Eich­mann in Jerusalem, her account of the tri­al of the epony­mous Nazi offi­cial — and the source of her much-quot­ed phrase “the banal­i­ty of evil.” That book came out in 1963, at which time Arendt still had a dozen pro­duc­tive years left. In fact, at the time of her sud­den death in 1975, she had in her type­writer the first page of what would have been the third vol­ume of her final work, The Life of the Mind. In its two com­plet­ed vol­umes, she inves­ti­gates the nature of thought and action, a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the rela­tion­ship between think­ing and moral­i­ty hav­ing been fired up with­in her at the Eich­mann tri­al.

“The Life of the Mind” also appears atop the syl­labus, recent­ly post­ed by Arendt biog­ra­ph­er Saman­tha Rose Hill, for “206: Think­ing,” a class Arendt taught in 1974 at the New School for Social Research. Encom­pass­ing a range of philoso­phers from Aris­to­tle, Cicero, and Pla­to to Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein, and Hei­deg­ger (a fig­ure with whom she could claim a more inti­mate famil­iar­i­ty than most), it seems to have offered a rea­son­ably thor­ough sur­vey of the fig­ures we think of when we think of think­ing itself.

Arendt had appar­ent­ly adapt­ed some of the con­tent from the 1973–1974 Gif­ford Lec­tures she had deliv­ered in Aberdeen, which them­selves con­densed mate­r­i­al from her cours­es on “Basic Moral Propo­si­tions,” “Think­ing,” “The His­to­ry of the Will,” and “Kan­t’s Cri­tique of Judg­ment.”

Arendt’s teach­ing at the New School, in “Think­ing” and oth­er cours­es like “Phi­los­o­phy of the Mind,” sheds a bit of light on what would have gone into the unwrit­ten third vol­ume of The Life of the Mind, or at least into the arc of the tril­o­gy as a whole. Vol­umes one and two, drafts of which she put into cir­cu­la­tion among her grad­u­ate stu­dents, were called Think­ing and Will­ing; the third was to have been Judg­ing, by far the thorni­est men­tal activ­i­ty of the set. It would be worth hear­ing from for­mer New School stu­dents of the mid-sev­en­ties who retain any class­room mem­o­ries of what she had to say on the sub­ject. As for the rest of us, we can at least still do all the read­ing for “Think­ing,” then judge for our­selves. You can find the syl­labus on the Library of Con­gress web­site.

via Saman­tha Rose Hill

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Thought of Han­nah Arendt: Pre­sent­ed by the BBC Radio’s In Our Time

Large Archive of Han­nah Arendt’s Papers Dig­i­tized by the Library of Con­gress: Read Her Lec­tures, Drafts of Arti­cles, Notes & Cor­re­spon­dence

Take Han­nah Arendt’s Final Exam for Her 1961 Course “On Rev­o­lu­tion”

A Look Inside Han­nah Arendt’s Per­son­al Library: Down­load Mar­gin­a­lia from 90 Books (Hei­deg­ger, Kant, Marx & More)

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Total­i­tar­i­an Regimes Arise–and How We Can Pre­vent Them

Watch Han­nah Arendt’s Final Inter­view (1973)

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living Virtuously (1930)

Image by J. F. Horra­bin, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Bertrand Rus­sell may have lived his long life con­cerned with big top­ics in log­ic, math­e­mat­ics, pol­i­tics, and soci­ety, but that did­n’t keep him from think­ing seri­ous­ly about how to han­dle his own day-to-day rela­tion­ships. That hard­ly means he han­dled every such rela­tion­ship with per­fect aplomb: take note of his three divorces, the first of which was for­mal­ized in 1921, the year he mar­ried his lover Dora Black. Pos­sessed of sim­i­lar bohemi­an-reformer ideals — and, before long, two chil­dren — the cou­ple found­ed the exper­i­men­tal Bea­con Hill School in 1927, intent on encour­ag­ing their young pupils’ devel­op­ment as not just thinkers-in-train­ing but full human beings.

A few years lat­er, Rus­sell pub­lished his per­son­al “ten com­mand­ments” in a cul­ture mag­a­zine called Every­man, and you can read it in full in this 1978 issue of the Rus­sell Soci­ety News. (Go to page 5.)

“Every­body, I sup­pose, has his own list of virtues that he tries to prac­tice, and, when he fails to prac­tice them, he feels shame quite inde­pen­dent­ly of the opin­ion of oth­ers, so far at any rate as con­scious thought is con­cerned,” he writes by way of intro­duc­tion. “I have tried to put the virtues that I should wish to pos­sess into the form of a deca­logue,” which is as fol­lows:

  1. Do not lie to your­self.
  2. Do not lie to oth­er peo­ple unless they are exer­cis­ing tyran­ny.
  3. When you think it is your duty to inflict pain, scru­ti­nize your rea­sons close­ly.
  4. When you desire pow­er, exam­ine your­self close­ly as to why you deserve it.
  5. When you have pow­er, use it to build up peo­ple, not to con­strict them.
  6. Do not attempt to live with­out van­i­ty, since this is impos­si­ble, but choose the right audi­ence from which to seek admi­ra­tion.
  7. Do not think of your­self as a whol­ly self-con­tained unit.
  8. Be reli­able.
  9. Be just.
  10. Be good-natured.

In the full text, Rus­sell elab­o­rates on the think­ing behind each of these virtues.  “When you wish to believe some the­o­log­i­cal or polit­i­cal doc­trine which will increase your income, you will, if you are not very care­ful, give much more weight to the argu­ments in favor than to those against”: hence the impor­tance of not lying to your­self. When it comes to lying to oth­ers, not only should gov­ern­ments tell the truth to their sub­jects, “par­ents should tell the truth to their chil­dren, how­ev­er incon­ve­nient this may seem.” And fam­i­lies as in states, “those who are intel­li­gent but weak can­not be expect­ed to forego the use of their intel­li­gence in their con­flicts with those who are stu­pid but strong.”

Rus­sel­l’s fifth com­mand­ment also applies to rela­tion­ships between the old and the young, since “those who deal with the young inevitably have pow­er, and it is easy to exer­cise this pow­er in ways pleas­ing to the edu­ca­tor rather than use­ful to the child.” And by his eighth com­mand­ment, he means “to sug­gest a whole set of hum­drum but nec­es­sary virtues, such as punc­tu­al­i­ty, keep­ing promis­es, adher­ing to plans involv­ing oth­er peo­ple, refrain­ing from treach­ery even in its mildest forms.” Alas, “mod­ern edu­ca­tion, in less­en­ing the empha­sis on dis­ci­pline, has, I think, failed to pro­duce reli­able human beings where social oblig­a­tions are con­cerned.”

This “pre­scrip­tive empha­sis — notably the stress placed on the mer­its of some hum­ble virtues — may have been influ­enced then by his prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence of pro­gres­sive edu­ca­tion,” writes The Col­lect­ed Papers of Bertrand Rus­sell edi­tor Andrew Bone. But Rus­sell still revised his deca­logue long after he left the Bea­con Hill School in 1932, with world events of the sub­se­quent decades inspir­ing him to use it in the ser­vice of what he regard­ed as a lib­er­al world­view. One ver­sion broad­cast on the BBC in 1951 includes such com­mand­ments as “Do not feel absolute­ly cer­tain of any­thing,” “Find more plea­sure in intel­li­gent dis­sent than pas­sive agree­ment,” and “Do not use pow­er to sup­press opin­ions you think per­ni­cious, for if you do the opin­ions will sup­press you” — all of which more of the last few gen­er­a­tions of stu­dents could have done well to inter­nal­ize.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bertrand Russell’s 10 Com­mand­ments for Liv­ing in a Healthy Democ­ra­cy

Bertrand Rus­sell: Author­i­ty and the Indi­vid­ual (1948)

Marcus Aurelius’ 9 Rules for Living a Stoic Life

This week, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams pro­filed Ryan Hol­i­day, a one-time pub­lic-rela­tions whiz-kid who’s rein­vent­ed him­self over the past decade as a speak­er for the dead: specif­i­cal­ly Epicte­tus, Seneca, and above all Mar­cus Aure­lius, the fig­ure­heads of the ancient school of phi­los­o­phy we now know as Sto­icism. It “cen­ters on four virtues: courage, tem­per­ance, jus­tice and wis­dom,” Williams writes. “Mar­shal­ing these will give you com­plete self-con­trol, enabling you to react with equa­nim­i­ty to all out­side stim­uli, and not whine about stuff.” Wealth “should mean noth­ing to the sto­ic, which makes it iron­ic that some of the rich­est peo­ple on Earth claim to live by sto­icism.”

That last line comes as an obvi­ous jab at Hol­i­day’s pop­u­lar­i­ty among not just sports stars and celebri­ties but big mon­ey-mak­ers in Sil­i­con Val­ley as well. But then, Sto­icism was meant to work for any­one, no mat­ter their socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus: Epicte­tus was a slave, after all, while Mar­cus Aure­lius ruled over the Roman Empire. And it is Mar­cus’ col­lect­ed writ­ings the Med­i­ta­tions (avail­able free as an eBook or audio­book) that inspired Hol­i­day’s video above from his Youtube chan­nel Dai­ly Sto­ic. In it, he presents “nine Sto­ic rules for a bet­ter life,” open­ing with an exhor­ta­tion that “life is short: do every­thing as if it was the thought or action of a dying per­son.”

The rules begin with “put peo­ple first,” which Mar­cus once demon­strat­ed as a leader by sell­ing off the impe­r­i­al palace’s fin­ery dur­ing the eco­nom­ic hard­ships of the Anto­nine Plague. Sec­ond, “anoth­er path is always open” — or, as expressed in the title of Hol­i­day’s first book about Sto­icism, “the obsta­cle is the way.” Even if you feel stuck, “you always have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to prac­tice virtue, prac­tice excel­lence, to change in some form or anoth­er based on what’s hap­pen­ing.” Third, “take it step by step”: famil­iar advice, per­haps, but a wel­come reminder that what stops us from begin­ning a project or process of change is nev­er a lack of infor­ma­tion, but a sim­ple lack of action.

Fourth, “dis­card your anx­i­ety,” which may feel caused by out­side cir­cum­stances, but in Mar­cus’ view, comes whol­ly from inside our­selves; Hol­i­day speaks of Mar­cus’ dec­la­ra­tion that he “dis­card­ed anx­i­ety because it was with­in me.” Fifth, “well begun is half done” — or as they put it in Korea, where I live, “the start is half.” No mat­ter where in the world you hap­pen to be, you can put into prac­tice Hol­i­day’s prac­ti­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of this rule: get up ear­ly in the morn­ing so as to “own the day from the begin­ning,” just as Mar­cus did. Sixth, “be strict with your­self,” even as you remain tol­er­ant with oth­ers: “leave every­one else and their mis­takes and their way of doing things to them.”

Sev­enth, “don’t resent peo­ple,” even if, like Mar­cus, you don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly like them. Your ene­mies offer you a hid­den oppor­tu­ni­ty to “be good in spite of oth­er peo­ple, to be just in the face of injus­tice, to be tem­per­ate in the face of intem­per­ance that’s being reward­ed. Eighth, “ask your­self, ‘Is this essen­tial?’ ” Whether you’re a Roman emper­or or a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry “knowl­edge work­er,” life tends to fill up with press­ing but not ulti­mate­ly impor­tant tasks, at least with­out con­stant vig­i­lance about how much they real­ly mat­ter. Ninth, keep these three mantras in mind: “Amor fati,” or “embrace your fate”; “It’s about what you do for oth­er peo­ple”; and “Memen­to mori,” or “remem­ber that death is inevitable.” The orig­i­nal Sto­ics have been gone for com­ing on two mil­len­nia now, but they still set an exam­ple for us today. How many of us can fore­see the same for our­selves?

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Is Sto­icism? A Short Intro­duc­tion to the Ancient Phi­los­o­phy That Can Help You Cope with Our Hard Mod­ern Times

The Sto­ic Wis­dom of Roman Emper­or Mar­cus Aure­lius: An Intro­duc­tion in Six Short Videos

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Sto­icism, the Ancient Greek Phi­los­o­phy That Lets You Lead a Hap­py, Ful­fill­ing Life

How to Be a Sto­ic in Your Every­day Life: Phi­los­o­phy Pro­fes­sor Mas­si­mo Pigli­uc­ci Explains

Three Huge Vol­umes of Sto­ic Writ­ings by Seneca Now Free Online, Thanks to Tim Fer­riss

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.

The Wisdom of Alan Watts in 4 Mind-Expanding Animations

Per­haps no sin­gle per­son did more to pop­u­lar­ize Zen Bud­dhism in the West than Alan Watts. In a sense, Watts pre­pared U.S. cul­ture for more tra­di­tion­al­ly Zen teach­ers like Soto priest Suzu­ki Roshi, whose lin­eage con­tin­ues today, but Watts did not con­sid­er him­self a Zen Bud­dhist. Or at least that’s what he tells us in the talk above, ani­mat­ed by Trey Park­er and Matt Stone, the cre­ators of South Park. “I am not a Zen Bud­dhist,” he says, “I am not advo­cat­ing Zen Bud­dhism, I am not try­ing to con­vert any­one to it. I have noth­ing to sell.” Instead, he calls him­self “an enter­tain­er.” Is he pulling our leg?

After all, Watts was the author of such books as The Spir­it of Zen (1936—his first), The Way of Zen (1957), and ”This Is It” and Oth­er Essays on Zen and Spir­i­tu­al Expe­ri­ence (1960). Then again, he also wrote books on Chris­tian­i­ty, on “Erot­ic Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty,” and on all man­ner of mys­ti­cism from near­ly every major world reli­gion.

And he was ordained an Epis­co­pal priest in 1945 and served as such until 1950. Watts was a tricky character—a strict anti-dog­ma­tist who found all rigid doc­trine irri­tat­ing at best, deeply oppres­sive and dehu­man­iz­ing at worst.

While Watts may not have been any sort of doc­tri­naire Zen priest, he learned—and taught—a great deal from Japan­ese Bud­dhist con­cepts, which he dis­tills in the video at the top. He gleaned very sim­i­lar insights—about the uni­ty and inter­con­nect­ed­ness of all things—from Dao­ism. Just above, see a very short ani­ma­tion cre­at­ed by Eddie Rosas, from The Simp­sons, in which Watts uses a sim­ple para­ble to illus­trate “Dao­ism in per­fec­tion.”

The con­cepts Watts elu­ci­dates from var­i­ous tra­di­tions are instant­ly applic­a­ble to eco­log­i­cal con­cerns and to our rela­tion­ship to the nat­ur­al world. “The whole process of nature,” he says above in a para­ble ani­mat­ed by Steve Agnos, “is an inte­grat­ed process of immense com­plex­i­ty.” In this case, how­ev­er, rather than offer­ing a les­son in uni­ty, he sug­gests that nature, and real­i­ty, is ulti­mate­ly unknow­able, that “it is real­ly impos­si­ble to tell whether any­thing that hap­pens in it is good or bad.” The most rea­son­able atti­tude then, it seems, is to refrain from mak­ing judg­ments either way.

It’s that ten­den­cy of the human mind to make hasty, erro­neous judg­ments that comes in for cri­tique in the Watts talk above, ani­mat­ed by Tim McCourt and Wes­ley Louis of West­min­ster Arts & Film Lon­don. Here, he reach­es even deep­er, inves­ti­gat­ing ideas of per­son­al iden­ti­ty and the exis­tence of the ego as an enti­ty sep­a­rate from the rest of real­i­ty. Return­ing to his grand theme of inter­con­nect­ed­ness, Watts assures us it’s “impos­si­ble to cut our­selves off from the social envi­ron­ment, and also fur­ther­more from the nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment. We are that; there’s no clear way of draw­ing the bound­ary between this organ­ism and every­thing that sur­rounds it.” But in order to dis­cov­er this essen­tial truth, says Watts, we must become “deep lis­ten­ers” and let go of embar­rass­ment, shy­ness, and anx­i­ety.

If you enjoy these excerpts from Alan Watts’ lec­tures, you can find many hours of his talks online. What Watts would have thought of this, I do not know, but I’m cer­tain he’d be glad that so much of his work—hours of lec­tures, in fact—is avail­able free of charge on YouTube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Great­est Hits of Alan Watts: Stream a Care­ful­ly-Curat­ed Col­lec­tion of Alan Watts Wis­dom

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy: Watch the 1960 TV Show, East­ern Wis­dom and Mod­ern Life

What If Mon­ey Was No Object?: Thoughts on the Art of Liv­ing from East­ern Philoso­pher Alan Watts

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

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Tech­nol­o­gy Can’t Grasp Real­i­ty

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

 

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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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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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