What Is an “Existential Crisis”?: An Animated Video Explains What the Expression Really Means

in Philosophy | July 9th, 2016

“Who am I?” many of us have won­dered at some point in our lives, “What am I? Where am I?”… maybe even—while gaz­ing in bewil­der­ment at the pale blue dot and lis­ten­ing to the Talk­ing Heads—“How did I get here?”

That feel­ing of unset­tling and pro­found con­fu­sion, when it seems like the hard floor of cer­tain­ty has turned into a black abyss of end­less obliv­ion…. Thanks to mod­ern phi­los­o­phy, it has a handy name: an exis­ten­tial cri­sis. It’s a name, says Alain de Bot­ton in his School of Life video above, that “touch­es on one of the major tra­di­tions of Euro­pean phi­los­o­phy,” a tra­di­tion “asso­ci­at­ed with ideas of five philoso­phers in par­tic­u­lar: Kierkegaard, Camus, Niet­zsche, Hei­deg­ger, and Sartre.”

What do these five have in com­mon? The ques­tion is com­pli­cat­ed, and we can’t real­ly point to a “tra­di­tion.” As the Inter­net Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy notes, Exis­ten­tial­ism is a “catch-all term” for a few con­ti­nen­tal philoso­phers from the 19th and 20th cen­turies, some of whom had lit­tle or no asso­ci­a­tion with each oth­er. Also, “most of the philoso­phers con­ven­tion­al­ly grouped under this head­ing either nev­er used, or active­ly dis­avowed the term ‘exis­ten­tial­ist.’” Camus, accord­ing to Richard Raskin, thought of Exis­ten­tial­ism as a “form of philo­soph­i­cal sui­cide” and a “destruc­tive mode of thought.” Even Sartre, who can be most close­ly iden­ti­fied with it, once said “Exis­ten­tial­ism? I don’t know what it is.”

But labels aside, we can iden­ti­fy many com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tics of the five thinkers de Bot­ton names that apply to our par­a­lyz­ing expe­ri­ences of supreme doubt. The video iden­ti­fies five such broad com­mon­al­i­ties of the “exis­ten­tial cri­sis”:

1. “It’s a peri­od when a lot that had pre­vi­ous­ly seemed like com­mon sense or nor­mal reveals its con­tin­gent, chance, uncan­ny, and rel­a­tive nature…. We are freer than we thought.”

2. We rec­og­nize we’d been delud­ing our­selves about what had to be…. We come to a dis­turb­ing aware­ness that our ulti­mate respon­si­bil­i­ty is to our­selves, not the social world.”

3. “We devel­op a height­ened aware­ness of death. Time is short and run­ning out. We need to re-exam­ine our lives, but the clock is tick­ing.”

4. “We have many choic­es, but are, by the nature of the human con­di­tion, denied the infor­ma­tion we would need to choose with ulti­mate wis­dom or cer­tain­ty. We are forced to decide, but can nev­er be assured that we’ve done so ade­quate­ly. We are steer­ing blind.”

5. This means that anx­i­ety is a “basic fea­ture” of all human exis­tence.

All of this, de Bot­ton admits, can “seem per­ilous and dispir­it­ing,” and yet can also enno­ble us when we con­sid­er that the pri­vate ago­nies we think belong to us alone are “fun­da­men­tal fea­tures of the human con­di­tion.” We can dis­pense with the triv­i­al­iz­ing idea, prop­a­gat­ed by adver­tis­ers and self-help gurus, that “intel­li­gent choice might be pos­si­ble and untrag­ic… that per­fec­tion is with­in reach.” Yet de Bot­ton him­self presents Exis­ten­tial­ist thought as a kind of self-help pro­gram, one that helps us with regret, since we real­ize that every­one bears the bur­dens of choice, mor­tal­i­ty, and con­tin­gency, not just us.

How­ev­er, in most so-called Exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­phers, we also dis­cov­er anoth­er press­ing prob­lem. Once we become unteth­ered from pleas­ing fic­tions of pre-exist­ing real­i­ties, “worlds-behind-the-scene,” as Niet­zsche put it, or “being-behind-the-appear­ance,” in Sartre’s words, we no longer see a benev­o­lent hand arrang­ing things neat­ly, nor have absolute order, mean­ing, or pur­pose to appeal to.

We must con­front that fact that we, and no one else, bear respon­si­bil­i­ty for our choic­es, even though we make them blind­ly. It’s not a com­fort­ing thought, hence the “cri­sis.” But many of us resolve these moments of shock with vary­ing degrees of wis­dom and expe­ri­ence. As we know from anoth­er great thinker, Eleanor Roo­sevelt, who was not an Exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­pher, “Free­dom makes a huge require­ment of every human being…. For the per­son who is unwill­ing to grow up… this is a fright­en­ing prospect.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Human, All Too Human: 3‑Part Doc­u­men­tary Pro­files Niet­zsche, Hei­deg­ger & Sartre

The Absurd Phi­los­o­phy of Albert Camus Pre­sent­ed in a Short Ani­mat­ed Film by Alain De Bot­ton

Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games

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

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32 Animated Videos by Wireless Philosophy Teach You the Essentials of Critical Thinking

in Online Courses, Philosophy | July 6th, 2016

Do you know some­one whose argu­ments con­sist of bald­ly spe­cious rea­son­ing, hope­less­ly con­fused cat­e­gories, arch­i­pel­a­gos of log­i­cal fal­lac­i­es but­tressed by sea­walls of cog­ni­tive bias­es? Sure­ly you do. Per­haps such a per­son would wel­come some instruc­tion on the prop­er­ties of crit­i­cal think­ing and argu­men­ta­tion? Not like­ly? Well, just in case, you may wish to send them over to this series of Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy (or “WiPhi”) videos by phi­los­o­phy instruc­tor Geoff Pynn of North­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty and doc­tor­al stu­dents Kel­ley Schiff­man of Yale, Paul Henne of Duke, and sev­er­al oth­er phi­los­o­phy and psy­chol­o­gy grad­u­ates.

What is crit­i­cal think­ing? “Crit­i­cal think­ing,” says Pynn, “is about mak­ing sure that you have good rea­sons for your beliefs.” Now, there’s quite a bit more to it than that, as the var­i­ous instruc­tors explain over the course of 32 short lessons (watch them all at the bot­tom of the post), but Pynn’s intro­duc­to­ry video above lays out the foun­da­tion. Good rea­sons log­i­cal­ly sup­port the beliefs or con­clu­sions one adopts—from degrees of prob­a­bil­i­ty to absolute cer­tain­ty (a rare con­di­tion indeed). The sense of “good” here, Pynn spec­i­fies, does not relate to moral good­ness, but to log­i­cal coher­ence and truth val­ue. Though many ethi­cists and philoso­phers would dis­agree, he notes that it isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly “moral­ly wrong or evil or wicked” to believe some­thing on the basis of bad rea­sons. But in order to think ratio­nal­ly, we need to dis­tin­guish “good” rea­sons from “bad” ones.

“A good rea­son for a belief,” Pynn says, “is one that makes it prob­a­ble. That is, it’s one that makes the belief like­ly to be true. The very best rea­sons for a belief make it cer­tain. They guar­an­tee it.” In his next two videos, above and below, he dis­cuss­es these two class­es of argument—one relat­ing to cer­tain­ty, the oth­er prob­a­bil­i­ty. The first class, deduc­tive argu­ments, occur in the clas­sic, Aris­totelian form of the syl­lo­gism, and they should guar­an­tee their con­clu­sions, mean­ing that “it’s impos­si­ble for the premis­es to be true while the con­clu­sion is false” (pro­vid­ed the form of the argu­ment itself is cor­rect). In such an instance, we say the argu­ment is “valid,” a tech­ni­cal philo­soph­i­cal term that rough­ly cor­re­sponds to what we mean by a “good, cogent, or rea­son­able” argu­ment. Some prop­er­ties of deduc­tive rea­son­ing—valid­i­ty, truth, and sound­ness—receive their own explana­to­ry videos lat­er in the series.

In abduc­tive argu­ments (or what are also called “induc­tive argu­ments”), above, we rea­son infor­mal­ly to the best, most prob­a­ble expla­na­tion. In these kinds of argu­ments, the premis­es do not guar­an­tee the con­clu­sion, and the argu­ments are not bound in rigid for­mal syl­lo­gisms. Rather, we must make a leap—or an inference—to what seems like the most like­ly con­clu­sion giv­en the rea­son­ing and evi­dence. Find­ing addi­tion­al evi­dence, or find­ing that some of our evi­dence or rea­son­ing is incor­rect or must be rethought, should force us to reassess the like­li­hood of our con­clu­sion and make new infer­ences. Most sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tions rely on abduc­tive rea­son­ing, which is why they are sub­ject to retrac­tion or revi­sion. New evidence—or new under­stand­ings of the evidence—often requires new con­clu­sions.

As for under­stand­ing probability—the like­li­hood that rea­sons pro­vide suf­fi­cient jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for infer­ring par­tic­u­lar conclusions—well… this is where we often get into trou­ble, falling vic­tim to all sorts of fal­lac­i­es. And when it comes to inter­pret­ing evi­dence, we’re prey to a num­ber of psy­cho­log­i­cal bias­es that pre­vent us from mak­ing fair assess­ments. WiPhi brings pre­vi­ous video series to bear on these prob­lems of argu­men­ta­tion, one on For­mal and Infor­mal Fal­lac­i­es and anoth­er on Cog­ni­tive Bias­es.

Courera - Earn your Degree Online

When it comes to a gen­er­al the­o­ry of prob­a­bil­i­ty itself, we would all ben­e­fit from some under­stand­ing of what’s called Bayes’ The­o­rem, named for the 18th cen­tu­ry sta­tis­ti­cian and philoso­pher Thomas Bayes. Bayes’ The­o­rem can seem for­bid­ding, but its wide appli­ca­tion across a range of dis­ci­plines speaks to its impor­tance. “Some philoso­phers,” says CUNY grad­u­ate stu­dent Ian Olasov in his video les­son above, “even think it’s the key to under­stand­ing what it means to think ratio­nal­ly.”

Bayesian rea­son­ing, infor­mal log­ic, sound, valid, and true argu­ments… all of these modes of crit­i­cal think­ing help us make sense of the tan­gles of infor­ma­tion we find our­selves caught up in dai­ly. Though some of our less ratio­nal­ly-inclined acquain­tances may not be recep­tive to good intro­duc­to­ry lessons like these, it’s worth the effort to pass them along. And while we’re at it, we can sharp­en our own rea­son­ing skills and learn quite a bit about where we go right and where we go wrong as crit­i­cal thinkers in Wire­less Philosophy’s thor­ough, high qual­i­ty series of video lessons.

Find more help­ful resources in the Relat­eds below.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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:

Down­load 130 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es: Tools for Think­ing About Life, Death & Every­thing Between

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Primer by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt

Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detec­tion Kit: What to Ask Before Believ­ing

Daniel Den­nett Presents Sev­en Tools For Crit­i­cal Think­ing

“Call­ing Bull­shit”: See the Syl­labus for a Col­lege Course Designed to Iden­ti­fy & Com­bat Bull­shit

Oxford’s Free Course Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing For Begin­ners Will Teach You to Think Like a Philoso­pher

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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

 

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An Animated Intro to the Ideas of Jacques Lacan, “the Greatest French Psychoanalyst of the 20th Century”

in Philosophy, Psychology | June 16th, 2016

You may still suf­fer from painful mem­o­ries of hav­ing had to read Jacques Lacan in school, but look past all that ver­biage about, say, desire’s “fren­zied mock­ing of the abyss of the infi­nite, the secret col­lu­sion with which it envelops the plea­sure of know­ing and of dom­i­nat­ing with jouis­sance,” and you can find real insights into human­i­ty. The ani­mat­ed primer from Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life just above will give you a clear sense — a much clear­er sense than any you might get from Lacan’s own prose — of what “the great­est French psy­cho­an­a­lyst of the 20th cen­tu­ry” under­stood about us all.


This video, as well as Lacan’s entry in The Book of Life, breaks the man’s thought down into three parts. First, iden­ti­ty: fol­low­ing his fas­ci­na­tion with the dis­tinc­tive­ly human expe­ri­ence of rec­og­niz­ing one’s own image, Lacan ulti­mate­ly sug­gests that “we accept that oth­er peo­ple sim­ply won’t ever expe­ri­ence us the way we expe­ri­ence our­selves; that we will be almost entire­ly mis­un­der­stood – and will in turn deeply mis­un­der­stand.” Sec­ond, love: though giv­en to grand state­ments such as “Men and women don’t exist,” Lacan com­pre­hend­ed “the extent to which we don’t tru­ly com­pre­hend our lovers and sim­ply peg a range of fan­tasies drawn from child­hood expe­ri­ences to their phys­i­cal forms,” which sup­ports the emi­nent­ly prac­ti­cal advice “not to be upset when we don’t feel a per­fect rap­port with some­one who ini­tial­ly seemed a soul­mate.”

The third part deals with the are­na in which Lacan’s writ­ings remain most often con­sid­ered: pol­i­tics. He came into his own as an inter­na­tion­al “intel­lec­tu­al celebri­ty” in the 1960s, the time of “the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion, great inter­est in com­mu­nism, and lots of protests.” But he actu­al­ly took a dim­mer view of all that agi­ta­tion than many, telling those stu­dent pro­test­ers chomp­ing at the bit to remake soci­ety that “What you aspire to as rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies is a new mas­ter. You will get one.” He saw ear­ly on what we still see in every elec­tion cycle: that “we desire to have some­one else in charge who can make every­thing OK, some­one who is, in a sense, an ide­al par­ent – and we bring this pecu­liar-sound­ing bit of our psy­cho­log­i­cal fan­tasies into the way we nav­i­gate pol­i­tics.”

You can watch Lacan engag­ing with one par­tic­u­lar­ly rebel­lious stu­dent in a 1972 video we fea­tured a few years ago, and you can see an hour­long lec­ture he deliv­ered at the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain that same year in this video we post­ed before that. Empow­ered by the kind of overview of Lacan’s ideas that the School of Life has put togeth­er, you can bet­ter con­front his famous­ly (or infa­mous­ly) elab­o­rate rhetoric and judge for your­self whether to con­sid­er him a thinker who “made some extreme­ly use­ful addi­tions to our under­stand­ing of our­selves” — or, in the judg­ment of Noam Chom­sky, a mere prac­ti­tion­er of emp­ty “pos­tur­ing.” But then, hav­ing lived a life that, as de Bot­ton puts it, mixed “intel­lec­tu­al truth with world­ly suc­cess,” can’t he be both?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Charis­mat­ic Psy­cho­an­a­lyst Jacques Lacan Gives Pub­lic Lec­ture (1972)

Jacques Lacan’s Con­fronta­tion with a Young Rebel: Clas­sic Moment, 1972

Jacques Lacan Talks About Psy­cho­analy­sis with Panache (1973)

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

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Bertrand Russell Lists His 20 Favorite Words in 1958 (and What Are Some of Yours?)

in English Language, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing | June 13th, 2016

Russell_in_1938

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Is it pos­si­ble to ful­ly sep­a­rate a word’s sound from its meaning—to val­ue words sole­ly for their music? Some poets come close: Wal­lace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, John Ash­bery. Rare pho­net­ic meta­physi­cians. Sure­ly we all do this when we hear words in a lan­guage we do not know. When I first encoun­tered the Span­ish word entonces, I thought it was the most beau­ti­ful three syl­la­bles I’d ever heard.

I still thought so, despite some dis­ap­point­ment, when I learned it was a com­mon­place adverb mean­ing “then,” not the rar­i­fied name of some mag­i­cal being. My rev­er­ence for entonces will not impress a native Span­ish speak­er. Since I do not think in Span­ish and strug­gle to find the right words when I speak it—always translating—the sound and sense of the lan­guage run on two dif­fer­ent tracks in my mind.

An exam­ple from my native tongue: the word obdu­rate, which I adore, became an instant favorite for its sound the first time I said it aloud, before I’d ever used it in a sen­tence or parsed its mean­ing. It’s not a com­mon Eng­lish word, how­ev­er, and maybe that makes it spe­cial. A word like always, which has a pret­ty sound, rarely strikes me as musi­cal or inter­est­ing, though non-Eng­lish speak­ers may find it so.

Every writer has favorite words. Some of those words are ordi­nary, some of them not so much. David Fos­ter Wallace’s lists of favorite words con­sist of obscu­ri­ties and archaisms unlike­ly to ever fea­ture in the aver­age con­ver­sa­tion. “James Joyce thought cus­pi­dor the most beau­ti­ful word in the Eng­lish lan­guage,” writes the blog Futil­i­ty Clos­et,” Arnold Ben­net chose pave­ment. J.R.R. Tolkien felt the phrase cel­lar door had an espe­cial­ly beau­ti­ful sound.”

Who’s to say how much these authors could sep­a­rate sound from sense? Futil­i­ty Clos­et illus­trates the prob­lem with a humor­ous anec­dote about Max Beer­bohm, and brings us the list below of philoso­pher Bertrand Russell’s 20 favorite words, offered in response to a reader’s ques­tion in 1958. Though Rus­sell him­self had a fas­ci­nat­ing the­o­ry about how we make words mean things, he sup­pos­ed­ly made this list with­out regard for these words’ mean­ings.

  1. wind
  2. heath
  3. gold­en
  4. begrime
  5. pil­grim
  6. quag­mire
  7. dia­pa­son
  8. alabaster
  9. chryso­prase
  10. astro­labe
  11. apoc­a­lyp­tic
  12. ineluctable
  13. ter­raque­ous
  14. inspis­sat­ed
  15. incar­na­dine
  16. sub­lu­nary
  17. choras­mean
  18. alem­bic
  19. ful­mi­nate
  20. ecsta­sy

So, what about you, read­er? What are some of your favorite words in English—or what­ev­er your native lan­guage hap­pens to be? And do you, can you, choose them for their sound alone? Please let us know in the com­ments below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Cre­ates Lists of His Favorite Words: “Mau­gre,” “Taran­tism,” “Ruck,” “Prima­para” & More

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

5 Won­der­ful­ly Long Lit­er­ary Sen­tences by Samuel Beck­ett, Vir­ginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzger­ald & Oth­er Mas­ters of the Run-On

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

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Bertrand Russell: “The Problem with the World Is That Fools & Fanatics Are So Certain of Themselves”

in Life, Philosophy | June 12th, 2016

russell rules 2

Image by J. F. Horra­bin, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“The whole prob­lem with the world is that fools and fanat­ics are always so cer­tain of them­selves, but wis­er peo­ple so full of doubts.” — Bertrand Rus­sell

Our hearts go out to the fam­i­lies and friends who lost loved ones in Orlan­do this morn­ing.

 

 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Lis­ten to ‘Why I Am Not a Chris­t­ian,’ Bertrand Russell’s Pow­er­ful Cri­tique of Reli­gion (1927)

Bertrand Rus­sell and F.C. Cople­ston Debate the Exis­tence of God, 1948

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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How to Look at Art: A Short Visual Guide by Cartoonist Lynda Barry

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Life, Museums, Philosophy | June 6th, 2016

looking at art 1
Despite the small, nar­ra­tive doo­dle post­ed to her Tum­blr a cou­ple of weeks back, inspi­ra­tional teacher and car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry clear­ly has no short­age of strate­gies for view­ing art in a mean­ing­ful way.

She takes a Socrat­ic approach with stu­dents and read­ers eager to forge a deep­er per­son­al con­nec­tion to images.

how to look at art 2

She traces this ten­den­cy back forty years, to when she stud­ied with Mar­i­lyn Fras­ca at Ever­green State Col­lege. Could Fras­ca have antic­i­pat­ed what she wrought when she asked the young Bar­ry, “What is an image?”

For Bar­ry, who claims to have spent over forty years try­ing to answer the above ques­tion, there will almost always be an emo­tion­al com­po­nent. In a 2010 inter­view with The Paris Review, she addressed the ways in which art, visu­al and oth­er­wise, can fill cer­tain cru­cial holes:

In the course of human life we have a mil­lion phan­tom-limb pains—losing a par­ent when you’re lit­tle, being in a war, even some­thing as dumb as hav­ing a mean teacher—and see­ing it some­how reflect­ed, whether it’s in our own work or lis­ten­ing to a song, is a way to deal with it.

The Greeks knew about it. They called it cathar­sis, right? And with­out it we’re fucked. I think this is the thing that keeps our men­tal health or emo­tion­al health in bal­ance, and we’re born with an impulse toward it.

No won­der the snag­gle-toothed dog woman on Barry’s Tum­blr looks so anx­ious. She craves that elu­sive some­thing that nev­er much trou­bled Helen Hockinson’s muse­um-going com­ic matrons.

(Had rev­e­la­tion been on the menu, those ladies would have duti­ful­ly paged through the most high­ly rec­om­mend­ed guide­book of the day, con­fi­dent they’d find it with­in those pages.)

These days, the inter­net abounds with point­ers on how to get the most from art.

how to look at art 3

Houston’s Muse­um of Fine Arts lob­bies for a four-point method, well suit­ed to class­room dis­cus­sion.

The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Pulitzer Prize-win­ning art and archi­tec­ture crit­ic Philip Ken­ni­cott pre­scribes time and silence.

Anoth­er crit­ic, New York magazine’s fire­brand, Jer­ry Saltz, rec­om­mends an aggres­sive­ly tac­tile approach for those who would look at art like an artist. Get up close. Cop a feel. Try to see how any giv­en piece is made. (He him­self is giv­en to con­tem­plat­ing art with his hips thrust for­ward and head tilt­ed back as far as it will go, in dupli­ca­tion of Jasper Johns’ stance.)

Look­ing for some­thing more graph­ic? Abstract Expres­sion­ist Ad Rein­hardt helped the post-War pub­lic get a han­dle on mod­ern art in his icon­ic How to Look series.

For­mer muse­um edu­ca­tor, Cindy Ingram, the Art Cura­tor for Kids, echoes the spir­it of Barry’s sen­ti­ment when she states that a child’s inter­pre­ta­tion of a work’s mean­ing is no less valid than Wikipedia’s, the museum’s, or even the artist’s. Adults, don’t squelch a child viewer’s joy of art by telling him or her what to think!

Of course, some of us don’t mind a hint or two to help us feel we’re on the right track. Those in that camp might enjoy the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s 82nd and 5th series, in which expert cura­tors wax rhap­sod­ic about their love of par­tic­u­lar works in the col­lec­tion.

You under­stand that this is just the tip of the prover­bial ‘berg…

how to look at art 4

Read­ers, if you have any tips for achiev­ing rev­e­la­tion through art, please share them by leav­ing a com­ment below.

And don’t for­get to lift your short­er com­pan­ion up so he can see bet­ter.

Bar­ry’s short series of images orig­i­nal­ly appeared on her Tum­blr.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lyn­da Barry’s Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her New UW-Madi­son Course, “Mak­ing Comics”

Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry Shows You How to Draw Bat­man in Her UW-Madi­son Course, “Mak­ing Comics”

Join Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry for a Uni­ver­si­ty-Lev­el Course on Doo­dling and Neu­ro­science

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Philosophy Prof Illustrates Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in the Style of Dr. Seuss

in Comics/Cartoons, Philosophy | June 2nd, 2016

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John Hol­bo, a phi­los­o­phy prof at the Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore, recent­ly gave the world a free illus­trat­ed edi­tion of three dia­logues by Pla­to (get it as a free PDF, or via Ama­zon). Now he’s embark­ing on a new cre­ative project called On Beyond Zarathus­tra.

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Over on the Crooked Tim­ber blog, Hol­bo light-heart­ed­ly launched the project with these words:

Ever since Pla­to wrote Socrates “Will You Please Go Now!” and “If I Ran The Polis!” great philoso­phers have most­ly start­ed out as authors of (what we would now call) Dr. Seuss-style children’s books. A lot of this old stuff has been lost. Schol­ars have neglect­ed it. But I’m under­tak­ing a project of restora­tion and study, start­ing with Niet­zsche.

I’ll be post­ing updates reg­u­lar­ly to the Flickr page – few pages a week as my work pro­ceeds. We’re just get­ting to the good bits: The Rope Dancer and the Last Man!

Please do feel to share with any friends who may have a schol­ar­ly inter­est in the his­to­ri­og­ra­phy of phi­los­o­phy. (I’ll have some more notes about that soon.)

We’ve post­ed here the first four pages of Hol­bo’s new graph­i­cal project.

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To see how the project unfolds, you can reg­u­lar­ly vis­it this album on Flickr. The are cur­rent­ly 22 pages, with the promise of many more to come soon.

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And, take note, once he’s done with Friedrich, Hol­bo promis­es to turn to Descartes and Kierkegaard and give them the same Dr. Seuss treat­ment. Enjoy the ride.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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!

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

Hear Clas­si­cal Music Com­posed by Friedrich Niet­zsche: 43 Orig­i­nal Tracks

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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How to Spot Bullshit: A Primer by Princeton Philosopher Harry Frankfurt

in English Language, Life, Media, Philosophy, Politics | May 30th, 2016

We live in an age of truthi­ness. Come­di­an Stephen Col­bert coined the word to describe the Bush administration’s ten­den­cy to fudge the facts in its favor.

Ten years after the Amer­i­can Dialect Soci­ety named it Word of the Year, for­mer pres­i­dent Bush’s cal­en­dar is packed with such leisure activ­i­ties as golf and paint­ing por­traits of world lead­ers, but “truthi­ness” remains on active duty.

It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly ger­mane in this elec­tion year, though politi­cians are far from its only prac­ti­tion­ers.

Take glob­al warm­ing. NASA makes a pret­ty rock sol­id case for both its exis­tence and our role in it:

97 per­cent or more of active­ly pub­lish­ing cli­mate sci­en­tists agree: Cli­mate-warm­ing trends over the past cen­tu­ry are extreme­ly like­ly due to human activ­i­ties. In addi­tion, most of the lead­ing sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tions world­wide have issued pub­lic state­ments endors­ing this posi­tion.

In view of such num­bers, its under­stand­able that a sub­ur­ban Joe with a freez­er full of fac­to­ry-farmed beef and mul­ti­ple SUVs in his garage would cling to the posi­tion that glob­al warm­ing is a lie. It’s his last resort, real­ly.

But such self-ratio­nal­iza­tions are not truth. They are truthi­ness.

Or to use the old-fash­ioned word favored by philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt, above: bull­shit!

Frank­furt–a philoso­pher at Prince­ton and the author of On Bull­shit–allows that bull­shit artists are often charm­ing, or at their very least, col­or­ful. They have to be. Achiev­ing their ends involves engag­ing oth­ers long enough to per­suade them that they know what they’re talk­ing about, when in fact, that’s the oppo­site of the truth.

Speak­ing of oppo­sites, Frank­furt main­tains that bull­shit is a dif­fer­ent beast from an out-and-out lie. The liar makes a spe­cif­ic attempt to con­ceal the truth by swap­ping it out for a lie.

The bull­shit artist’s approach is far more vague. It’s about cre­at­ing a gen­er­al impres­sion.

There are times when I admit to wel­com­ing this sort of manure. As a mak­er of low bud­get the­ater, your hon­est opin­ion of any show I have Lit­tle Red Hen’ed into exis­tence is the last thing I want to hear upon emerg­ing from the cramped dress­ing room, unless you tru­ly loved it.

I’d also encour­age you to choose your words care­ful­ly when dash­ing a child’s dreams.

But when it comes to mat­ters of pub­lic pol­i­cy, and the pub­lic good, yes, trans­paren­cy is best.

It’s inter­est­ing to me that film­mak­ers James Nee and Chris­t­ian Brit­ten trans­formed a por­tion of their learned subject’s thoughts into voiceover nar­ra­tion for a light­ning fast stock footage mon­tage. It’s divert­ing and fun­ny, fea­tur­ing such omi­nous char­ac­ters as Nos­fer­atu, Bill Clin­ton, Char­lie Chaplin’s Great Dic­ta­tor, and Don­ald Trump, but isn’t it also the sort of mis­di­rec­tion sleight of hand at which true bull­shit­ters excel?

Frank­furt expands upon his thoughts on bull­shit in his apt­ly titled best­selling book, On Bull­shit and its fol­lowup On Truth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Schools 9/11 Truther; Explains the Sci­ence of Mak­ing Cred­i­ble Claims

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Tri­umph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the Eng­lish Lan­guage a New Exple­tive (1910)

Stephen Col­bert Explains How The Col­bert Report Is Made in a New Pod­cast

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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