Stephen Fry Narrates 4 Philosophy Animations On the Question: How to Create a Just Society?

in Animation, History, Philosophy | October 25th, 2016

How do we create a just society? 50,000 years or so at it and humanity still has a long way to go before figuring that out, though not for lack of trying. The four animated videos of “What Is Justice?”—a miniseries within BBC Radio 4 and the Open University’s larger project of animating the ideas of philosophers throughout history and explaining them in the voices of various famous narrators—tell us what John Rawls, Henry David Thoreau, and the Bible, among other sources, have to say on the subject of justice. Stephen Fry provides the voice this time as the videos illustrate the nature of these ideas, as well as their complications, before our eyes.

Imagine you had to create a just society yourself, but “you won’t know what kind of a person you’ll be in the society you design.” This thought experiment, first described by Rawls in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice as the “veil of ignorance,” supposedly encourages the creation of “a much fairer society than we now have. There would be extensive freedom and equality of opportunity. But there wouldn’t be extremes of high pay, unless it could be shown that the poorest in society directly benefited as a result.” An intriguing idea, but one easier articulated than agreed upon, let alone realized.

Much earlier in history, you find the simpler principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” an “ancient form of punishment known as lex talionis, or the law of retaliation.” Any reader of the Bible will have a strong sense of this idea’s importance in the ancient world, though we’d do well to remember that back then, it “was a way of encouraging a sense of proportion — not wiping out a whole community in retaliation for the killing of one man, for example.” While harsh punishment could, in theory, deter potential criminals, “severe legal violence can create martyrs and increase society’s problems.” The rule of law, naturally, has everything to do with the creation and maintenance of a just society, though not every law furthers the cause.

But you’ve no doubt heard of one that has: habeas corpus, the legal principle mandating that “no one, not even the president, monarch, or anyone else in power, can detain someone illegally.” Instead, “they need to bring the detainee in question before a court and allow that court to determine whether or not this person can legally be held.” Yet not every authority has consistently implemented or upheld habeas corpus or other justice-ensuring laws. At times like those, according to Thoreau, you must engage in civil disobedience: “follow your conscience and break the law on moral grounds rather than be a cog in an unjust system.” It’s a dirty job, creating a just society, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. And though we may not all have given it as much thought as a Rawls or a Thoreau, we’ve all got a role to play in it.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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John Cleese & Jonathan Miller Turn Profs Talking About Wittgenstein Into a Classic Comedy Routine (1977)

in Comedy, Philosophy | October 19th, 2016

Everyone interested in philosophy must occasionally face the question of how, exactly, to define philosophy itself. You can always label as philosophy whatever philosophers do — but what, exactly, do philosophers do? Here the English comedians John Cleese of Monty Python and Jonathan Miller of Beyond the Fringe offer an interpretation of the life of modern philosophers in the form of a five-minute sketch set in “a senior common room somewhere in Oxford (or Cambridge).”

There, Cleese and Miller’s philosophers have a wide-ranging talk about Ludwig Wittgenstein, senses of the word “yes,” whether an “unfetched slab” can be said to exist, and the very role of the philosopher in this “heterogeneous, confusing, and confused jumble of political, social, and economic relations we call society.” They come to the tentative conclusion that, just as others drive buses or chop down trees, philosophers “play language games” — or perhaps “games at language” — “in order to find out what game it is that we are playing.”

As intentionally ridiculous as that explanation may sound, it wouldn’t come across as especially outlandish in many philosophy-department common rooms today. Cleese and Miller, no strangers to playing their own kinds of language games, get laughs not so much from mocking the nonsensical complexities of philosophy — and indeed, most of their lines make perfect sense on one level or another — as they do from so vividly expressing the distinctive manner of the “Oxbridge Philosopher” characters they portray. It has everything to do with manner, both verbal and physical, taken to as absurd an extreme as their lines of thinking.

Cleese and Miller’s version of the Oxbridge Philosopher sketch here comes from the 1977 Amnesty International benefit show and television special An Evening Without Sir Bernard Miles (also known as The Mermaid Frolics), but others exist. It goes at least as far back as Beyond the Fringe’s days pioneering their hugely influential brand of British satire on the stage in the 1960s; their earlier performance just above features Miller and fellow troupe member Alan Bennett. It can still make us laugh today, but we might well wonder whether anyone in the history of humanity has ever really sounded like this — in which case, we should watch footage of real-life Oxford philosophers back in those days and judge for ourselves.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Sights & Sounds of 18th Century Paris Get Recreated with 3D Audio and Animation

in History, Philosophy, Technology | September 27th, 2016

In what is often called the “Early Modern” period, or the “Long Eighteenth Century,” Europe witnessed an explosion of satire, not only as a political and literary weapon, but as a means of reacting to a whole new way of life that arose in the cities—principally London and Paris—as a displaced rural population and expanding bourgeoisie radically altered the character of urban life. In England, poets like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift savaged their rivals in print, while also commenting on the increasing pace and declining tastes of the city.

In France, Voltaire punched up, using his pen to needle Parisian authorities, serving 11 months in the Bastille for a satirical verse accusing the Regent of incest. Despite the hugely successful premiere of his play Oedipus seven months after his release, Voltaire would ultimately be exiled from his beloved city for 28 years, returning in 1778 at the age of 83.

Now, of course, Parisians celebrate Voltaire in every possible way, but what would it have been like to have experienced the city during his lifetime, when it became the buzzing center of European intellectual life? In the video recreation above, we can partially answer that question by experiencing what 18th century Paris may have looked and sounded like, according to musicologist Mylène Pardoen, who designed this “historical audio reconstitution,” writes CNRS News, with a “team of historians, sociologists and specialists in 3D representations.”

The team chose to animate “the Grand Châtelet district, between the Pont au Change and Pont Notre Dame bridges” because, Pardoen explains, the neighborhood “concentrates 80% of the background and sound environments of Paris in that era, whether through familiar trades—shopkeepers, craftsmen, boatmen, washerwomen on the banks of the Seine… or the diversity of acoustic possibilities, like the echo heard under a bridge or in a covered passageway.” The result is “the first 3D reconstruction based solely on a sonic background.”

“We are the whipped cream of Europe,” Voltaire once said of his Paris, a luxurious, aristocratic world. But 18th century Paris was also a grimy city full of ordinary laborers and merchants, of “cesspools and kennels”—as a commentary on Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities notes—and of wine-stained streets without proper drainage. And it was a city on the verge of a revolution from below, inspired by iconoclasts from above like Voltaire. In the 3D video and audio recreation above, we get a small, video-game-like taste of a bustling city caught between immense luxury and crushing poverty, between medieval theology and humanist philosophy, and between the rule of divine kings and a bloody secular revolution to come.

We started the video above at the 2:06 mark when the animations kick in. Feel free to start the video from the very beginning.

via @WFMU/CNRS News

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

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An Animated Introduction to French Philosopher Jacques Derrida

in Philosophy | September 5th, 2016

Since the bold arrival of his book Of Grammatology in 1967, French philosopher Jacques Derrida has been understood—or misunderstood—as many things: a radical relativist who ”rejects all of metaphysical history,” a fashionable intellectual playing language games, a brilliant phenomenologist of language…. One association he vehemently rejected was with the kind of ironic, laissez faire postmodernism represented by Seinfeld. But when it came to clarifying his work for puzzled readers and onlookers, Derrida could seem as willfully, frustratingly evasive in person as he was on the page. His work, writes Williams College professor Mark C. Taylor, can “seem hopelessly obscure… to people addicted to sound bites and overnight polls.”

Most people familiar with some of Derrida’s work know a few key terms of his thought: différance, trace, aporia, pharmakon. Those who’ve only heard the name probably know only one: Deconstruction, a “way of doing philosophy,” says Alain de Botton in his video introduction to Derrida above, that “fundamentally altered our understanding of many academic fields, especially literary studies.” But what exactly is “Deconstruction”? Rather than a method, Derrida himself described it as a process already occurring within a written work, one we can observe when we “do not assume that what is conditioned by history, institutions, or society is natural.”

Derrida’s meditations on the inability of language to contain or communicate natural or metaphysical truth developed in unique life circumstances. Born into a Jewish family in French colonial Algeria in 1930, the philosopher grew up very conscious of “having been in an inferior position at the nexus of three different religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which claimed to speak the truth,” says de Botton. Upon arriving in Paris to study in 1949, Derrida found himself even further on the social margins. “Though Derrida was not an autobiographical writer, it’s hard not to read his work as a response to bigotry and exclusion.”

The claim that the philosopher—whose name has almost become synonymous with post-modernism, for good or ill—was not an autobiographical writer may seem strange to some. One of his most-read books in college courses, Monolingualism of the Other, proceeds from an investigation into his fraught relationship with the French language because of his upbringing as a religious minority in a European colony. Later, Derrida delivered a ten-hour address to a conference called The Autobiographical Animal, published posthumously (and excerpted here).

Nonetheless, Derrida would not have made much of his place as the author, this being only a rhetorical occasion for analysis. Derrida, writes Nazenin Ruso at Philosophy Now, argued that “once the text is written, the author’s input loses its significance.” The person of the author—his or her physical presence, biographical experiences, emotions, desires, and intentions—becomes irretrievable for readers, one of many absences in the text that we mistake for presence.

It’s hard to see, then, how we can speak of what Derrida’s “hope” was for his readers’ self-improvement, as de Botton says in his video introduction. This being the School of Life, we are treated to a rather utilitarian reading of the philosopher, one he would perhaps reject. But Derrida bristled at the idea that language could suffice to tell us how and who to be in the world. His suspicion of logocentrism, “an over-hasty, naïve devotion to reason, logic, and clear definition,” says de Botton, means he felt that “many of the most important things we feel can never be expressed in words.” To hear Derrida talk about the problem of privileging language over other means of expression with an artist who uniquely agreed with his position, read his interview with jazz great Ornette Coleman.

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

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The Philosophy of Bruce Lee Gets Explored in a New Podcast

in Philosophy | August 8th, 2016

Years ago, we featured a wonderful clip showing Bruce Lee, only 24 years old, auditioning for a part in the 1960s TV show, “The Green Hornet.” In the clip, Lee puts on a remarkable display of his martial arts skills, all while explaining the philosophy that guides his moves. The actor, who studied philosophy in college, looks at the camera and explains the relationship between kung fu and a glass of water. He says: “water is the softest substance in the world,… but yet it can penetrate the hardest rock or anything, granite, you name it. So, every kung fu man is trying to do that,… to be soft like water, and flexible and adapt itself to the opponent.”

That’s a good prompt to tell you about the brand new podcast that explores the philosophy of Bruce Lee, who died in 1973. Launched by his daughter Shannon Lee, each episode promises to “dig deep into Bruce’s philosophy to provide guidance and action on cultivating your truest self.” As the podcast moves along, it will help you find wisdom in Lee’s pronouncements, like: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” By now, you’re starting to see, Lee had a thing for water.

You can get the podcast via iTunes and Stitcher. Below, stream one of the first episodes that delves into his philosophy.

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Simone de Beauvoir Defends Existentialism & Her Feminist Masterpiece, The Second Sex, in Rare 1959 TV Interview

in Gender, Philosophy | August 2nd, 2016

Given how many academic philosophy departments have banished Existentialism into some primitive wilderness, it seems striking to hear people talk about it as a current phenomenon with a serious, living pedigree and a hip youth vanguard distilling its ideas into pop culture. By the time I’d heard of Albert Camus—by way of The Cure’s early single “Killing an Arab”—the references to the French philosopher and his novel The Stranger were already exotic, and as kitschy as the faux-Middle Eastern guitar line in the song. But in 1959, the hipster existentialist was a phenomenon so widespread that Norman Mailer wrote a scathing essay about the character.

And a Canadian journalist, sitting down to interview Existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, began by asking her to comment on the “group of noisy, rowdy jazz-loving young people, in the immediate post-war period.” This first wave of 50s Parisian hipsters embraced Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir right along with Coltrane and Charlie Parker.

Beauvoir dismisses any connection between her kind of Existentialism and that of the rowdy masses except that of physical proximity. Nonetheless, like 90s feminist punk rockers who spread the ideas of third wave feminism, the French and American Beats made Existentialist philosophy cool.

Beauvoir prefers to draw a clear boundary between her work and the next generation’s appropriation. By this time, both Sartre and Camus had disavowed the term Existentialist and had a falling-out over Communism. But Beauvoir uses the term and refers to a “We,” who “think—and it’s one of the most important points in existentialism—that man is the purpose of man, his own future, and the purpose of all his activities.” She draws on stark binary oppositions of “good” and “evil” to explain the “fundamental basis of what you could call our ethics,” and yet, she says, “we don’t ask metaphysical questions.”

If it sounds like Beauvoir is summarizing Sartre, that’s part of what’s going on. The interviewer keeps pressing to understand the “existentialist man’s conception of the world.” She obliges, discussing “Sartrean Existentialism” and his major work Being and Nothingness and entertaining vague questions about atheism and politics. Finally, around 12:15, they begin to talk about the book for which de Beauvoir is best known, The Second Sex, which would go on to inspire 60s feminists like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and UK collectivist magazine Spare Rib.

Calm and measured throughout the conversation, Beauvoir defends her ideas, including the most provocative, that, as the interviewer paraphrases, “You don’t believe in the existence of a feminine nature. You believe people are first human, before being male or female.” She makes it clear right away that her anti-gender essentialism has roots in an even more fundamental, and very Existentialist, skepticism: “I don’t believe in the existence of a human nature.” All of us, whatever gender we’re taught to identify with, become products of our “place, time, civilisation, and technique etc.” through cultural conditioning, not inner necessity.

The Second Sex, she says, is not a revolt or a protest, but a description of an oppressive set of relations that “currently neither men nor women can just transform… with a magic wand.” Nevertheless, de Beauvoir became increasingly activist as she aged, giving the eloquent interview on “Why I’m a Feminist” in 1975. And above all, the younger generation who picked up piecemeal Sartre also picked up enough of Beauvoir’s work to begin forcing changes in the material conditions she identified as creating gender-based forms of social oppression.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Hannah Arendt’s Diagnosis of the Banality of Evil as an 8‑Bit Video Game

in History, Philosophy | August 2nd, 2016

Permit us a couple of great oversimplifications: Hannah Arendt became well-known by writing about evil. Video games, especially classic ones, usually challenge the player to fight some kind of evil. And so we have a suitable, if at first seemingly incongruous, meeting of form and substance in this video, “What is Evil?,” from the 8‑Bit Philosophy series. It casts the 20th-century political theorist as the hero this time around, rendering in vintage video-game aesthetics her quest not simply to fight evil, but to identify evil — a much more troubling enterprise.

“Traditional conceptions of evil focus on the utter monstrosity of evil actions — the complete awe and unthinkability of horror,” says the narrator. “Called pure or radical evil, this is the sort of evil associated with antagonists or villains — is is the antithesis of good.”

It also happens to be just the sort of obvious straight-up evil video games tend to put their players up against: enemy ships you can only shoot down before they shoot you down, mad doctors you can only blow up before they blow the world up, monsters you can can only jump on before they eat you.

Arendt started seeing things differently from this black-and-white (or in the case of eight-bit video games, 64-color) conception after she saw the trial of Adolf Eichmann. “Put on trial for numerous horrors, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity — especially against the Jewish people, for overseeing the trains that transported people to Nazi death camps.” Sound like a mean piece of work though the guy may, Arendt beheld in the courtroom “an altogether innocuous and seemingly normal little man,” a “stereotypical bureaucrat” who “never stopped to put himself in anyone else’s shoes,” driven by an “unquestioning sense of obligation to authority.”

To put it in video-game terms, Arendt expected the sort of grotesque, cackling big boss that appears in the last stage, and she got the kind of drone who simply stands around waiting to be slain with one hit in the first. This led her to coin her immortal phrase “the banality of evil,” which, she explains in Eichmann in Jerusalem, describes it “only on the strictly factual level. He was not stupid. It was thoughtlessness, something by no means identical to stupidity. Such remoteness from reality can wreak more havoc than all the instincts taken together.” And what kind of sword, laser, or power-up could defeat that?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Sung as a One-Woman Opera

in Music, Philosophy | August 1st, 2016

Image by Austrian National Library, via Wikimedia Commons

What is it about Austrian philosophical prodigy Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that so inspires artists? Jasper Johns, the Coen Brothers, Derek Jarman…. Perhaps it’s easy to see his appeal to writers. His succinct philosophy of language contains a groundbreaking claim, for its time, wrote Bertrand Russell in his 1922 introduction: “In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must… be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact.”

There may be no higher praise for careful, precise language. Recalling the stock advice to “show, don’t tell,” Wittgenstein asserted that whatever bonds together the structure of sentences and the structure of the world, it is only something we can show, not something we can say. In this regard, Wittgenstein also elevated images, and he himself had a keen eye for photography and architecture. Of course, the imaginative, mystical aspect of Wittgenstein’s little book of aphorisms and symbols appeals to musicians and composers as well.

John Cage drew heavily on Wittgenstein’s work and the Tractatus has been adapted by others in musical pieces ranging from the understated and meditative to the comically ridiculous. The adaptation above takes a stark operatic approach. Composed by Balduin Sulzer, the “one woman opera,” as the singer Anna Maria Pammer’s site describes it (in Google translation from German), “drives the meticulousness and insistence of the text on the top.” Drawing on the work of the Second Viennese School, “the basic musical idea comes from the music of the time of origin of the Tractatus, i.e. the time of World War I.”

Wittgenstein has long been associated with Arnold Schoenberg and the Tractatus has been called a “tone poem.” The chilliness, alternating with rapid crescendos, with which Pammer delivers the philosophical libretto recalls the book’s tenor, as well as Wittgenstein’s temperament more generally. Given to violent outbursts and fits of derision, Wittgenstein spent the first part of his life attempting to create perfect systems— “a logically perfect language,” wrote Russell. In between this austere pursuit, he lived just as austerely and sometimes violently. John Cage’s enactment of Wittgenstein’s theories comes closer to the intent of “show don’t tell,” but Sulzer’s adaptation perhaps best dramatizes the mystical ellipses of Wittgenstein’s first major work. If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Stephen Fry Narrates 4 Philosophy Animations On the Question: How to Create a Just Society?

John Cleese & Jonathan Miller Turn Profs Talking About Wittgenstein Into a Classic Comedy Routine (1977)

The Sights & Sounds of 18th Century Paris Get Recreated with 3D Audio and Animation

An Animated Introduction to French Philosopher Jacques Derrida

The Philosophy of Bruce Lee Gets Explored in a New Podcast

Simone de Beauvoir Defends Existentialism & Her Feminist Masterpiece, The Second Sex, in Rare 1959 TV Interview

Watch Hannah Arendt’s Diagnosis of the Banality of Evil as an 8‑Bit Video Game

Hear Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Sung as a One-Woman Opera

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