The latest installment from The School of Life’s animated video series introduces us to Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of bad faith, a concept integral to his philosophy, Existentialism. As Mark Linsenmayer, one of the founders of The Partially Examined Life podcast, explained on our site back in 2011, “bad faith” is a tendency we have to “disassociate ourselves from our actions,” or more commonly, to claim we have “more limited choices [in life] than we actually do.” He went on to say:
Bad faith is possible because of the nature of the self… There is no predetermined ‘human nature’ or ‘true you,’ but instead you are something built over time, by your own freely chosen actions, too often using the roles and characteristics others assign to you.
As is their wont, The School of Life takes Sartre’s notion of bad faith and applies it to everyday life, showing how it can help you create the life you want to live–from entering into more satisfying relationships, to getting out of dead-end jobs.
For anyone looking to get a fairly accessible introduction to Sartre’s philosophy, you might want to start with his 1946 lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism. And down below, in the Relateds section, we have more helpful introductions to Sartre’s liberating philosophy.
You may remember that we featured Wireless Philosophy, an open access philosophy project created by Yale and MIT, back in 2013 when it first got started. Wi-Phi, for short, has kept on keeping in with its mission of producing free, informative and entertaining animated videos meant to introduce a host of philosophical issues. Our own Josh Jones called it “a necessary service to those just beginning to wade out into the sea of The Big Questions” in 2013, and now, in 2015, you can wade in from a wider expanse of the Big Question coastline than ever before. There are currently 105 Wiphi videos in total.
Both of those playlists do come with a certain practicality, at least by philosophical standards: who, after all doesn’t want to think more correctly (or at least less incorrectly), and who doesn’t want to live the good life (or at least a better life than they live now)? But the harder core of casual philosophy enthusiasts — always a demanding group — should rest assured that Wiphi also offers video series on more abstract or historical philosophical topics, such as the seven-part playlist on classical theism above. Dig deeper into their Youtube channel and you’ll find more simple but not simplistic lessons on the philosophy of mathematics, language, ancient China, and much more.
Founded and directed by physicist Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State’s Origins Project has for several years brought together some of the biggest minds in the sciences and humanities for friendly debates and conversations about “the 21st Century’s greatest challenges.” Previous all-star panels have included Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Brian Greene, and Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawking has graced the ASU Origins Project stage, as has actor and science communicator Alan Alda. And this past March, in a sold-out, highly-anticipated Origins Project event, Krauss welcomed Noam Chomsky to the stage for a lengthy interview, which you can watch above.
Although Krauss says he’s wary of hero worship in his laudatory introduction, he nonetheless finds himself asking “What Would Noam Chomsky Do” when faced with a dilemma. He also points out that Chomsky has been “marginalized in U.S. media” for his anti-war, anarchist political views. Those views, of course, come widely into play during the conversation, which ranges from the theory and purpose of education—a subject Chomsky has expounded on a great deal in books and interviews—to the fate of political dissidents throughout history.
Chomsky also gives us his views on science and technology, particularly in the Q&A portion of the talk above, in which he answers questions about artificial intelligence—another subject he’s touched on in the past—and animal experimentation, among a great many other topics. Krauss mostly hangs back during the initial discussion but takes a more active role in the session above, offering views on medical and scientific ethics that will be familiar to those who follow his atheist activism and championing of rationality over religious dogma.
As Chomsky puts it, “the environment, the commons… they’re a common possession, but space is even more so. For individuals to allow institutions like corporations to have any control over it is devastating in its consequences. It will also almost certainly undermine serious research.” He refers to the example of most modern computing—developed under publicly-funded government programs, then marketed and sold back to us by corporations. Krauss makes a case for unmanned space exploration as the cost-effective option, and both thinkers discuss the problem of militarizing space, the ultimate goal of Cold War space programs before the fall of the Soviet Union. The conversation is rich and revealing and makes an excellent supplement to the already rich discussion Krauss and Chomsky have in the videos above.
Perhaps you’ve heard of a phenomenon called “podfade,” wherein a podcast — particularly an ambitious podcast — begins by putting out episodes regularly, then misses one or two, then lets more and more time elapse between each episode, one day ceasing to update entirely. It pleases us to report that The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, the podcast offering just that, on whose progress we’ve kept you posted over the past three years, not only shows no signs of podfade, but has even broadened its mandate to include a greater variety of philosophical traditions than before.
For those who haven’t heard the show, The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps comes from Peter Adamson, philosophy professor at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and King’s College London, and “looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.”
The main show has put out 379 episodes so far, beginning with the pre-Socratics (specifically Thales) and most recently examining Franciscan poverty, and now a new branch has grown, starting from Adamson and collaborator Jonardon Ganeri’s introduction to Indian Philosophy. (Hear the first episode of the Indian Philosophy series below.)
Episodes of this new series on the Indian tradition, Adamson writes, “will appear in alternating weeks with episodes on European philosophy.” He also mentions a “further ambition to cover the other philosophical traditions of Asia (especially Chinese) and also African philosophy and the philosophy of the African diaspora, but of course India will take a while so you’ll have to be patient if you are waiting for me to get to that!”
You can subscribe to The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps’ Indian philosophy series on its very own podcast RSS feed, or on iTunes here. Philosophically-minded binge-listeners beware; you could lose a lot of time to these two shows. “I’ve been doing my laundry to it for months and I’m only up to Maimonides,” says one commenter on a Metafilter thread about the new series. “I am totally not ready for this Patañjali.”
And here I’d always considered La Chinoise the only French-language film that used both borrowed Chinese imagery and lofty theory to mount a critique of capitalism. It turns out that six years after Jean-Luc Godard made that movie, Sinologist, Situationist, and filmmaker René Viénet came out with the next important volume in that fascinating minor tradition, La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques?(Can Dialectics Break Bricks?), an entire Hong Kong martial-arts picture entirely repurposed into, as Dangerous Minds’ Richard Metzger puts it, “a critique of class conflicts, bureaucratic socialism, the failures of the French Communist Party, Maoism, cultural hegemony, sexual equality and the way movies prop up Capitalist ideology.”
Using as its visual material 1972’s Crush, Tu Guangqi’s hand-to-hand-combat-intensive tale of Korean rebellion against Japanese imperialism, the film followed the model of Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? “which re-dubbed humorous dialogue over a Japanese spy movie to make the plot about a recipe for egg salad […] but here the cinematic Situationist provocateur is less out for laughs (although there are plenty of them) and more about the political subversion.” This intersection of lo-fi chop-socky action with high-flown revolutionary jargon and academic name-dropping (“My Foucaults! My Lacans! And if that’s not enough, I’ll even send my structuralists”) has for decades struck its viewers as sublimely ridiculous. But do the images and the dialogues really clash as totally as they would seem to?
“Like many Hong Kong productions of the early seventies,” writes Luke White at Kung Fu with Braudel, “the scenario of the original film is clearly one in which colonial exploitation and resistance are at issue. Set in Korea under the Japanese occupation that lasted much of the first half of the twentieth century, the heroes (those turned by Viénet into ‘the Proletarians’) are the members of a martial arts school who start to resist the colonial violence of the militaristic Japanese forces. However potentially conservative the nationalistic dimension of its narrative, this is also a work about struggle and liberation from tyranny in some of its most typically modern forms.” In its multiplicity of possible interpretations, La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques? joins the ranks of all the most interesting works of art — and it certainly makes for a refreshing break from actually reading your Foucaults, your Lacans, and your structuralists.
This year we’ve been featuring short animated videos from BBC Radio 4, all covering the big questions: How did everything begin?What makes us human?What is love?How can I know anything at all? They’ve all come scripted by philosopher Nigel Warburton (he of Philosophy Bites podcast fame) and narrated by a host of notables from both sides of the pond like Stephen Fry, Gillian Anderson, Aidan Turner, and Harry Shearer. They’ve illustrated the philosophical concepts at hand not just with elaborate and joke-filled drawings that come to life before your eyes, but with direct reference to the ideas of history’s best-known thinkers: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Wittgenstein, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Freud, Chomsky — the list goes on.
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Some of the most rigorous moral thinkers of the past century have spent time on the wrong side of questions they deemed of vital importance. Mohandas Gandhi, for example, at first remained loyal to the British, manifesting many of the vicious prejudices of the Empire against Black South Africans and lobbying for Indians to serve in the war against the Zulu. Maya Jasanoff in New Republic describes Gandhi during this period of his life as a “crank.” At the same time, he developed his philosophy of non-violent resistance, or satyagraha, in South Africa as an Indian suffering the injustices inflicted upon his countrymen by both the Boers and the British.
Gandhi’s sometime contradictory stances may be in part understood by his rather aristocratic heritage and by the warm welcome he first received in London when he left his family, his caste, and his wife and child in India to attend law school in 1888. And yet it is in London that he first began to change his views, becoming a staunch vegetarian and encountering theosophy, Christianity, and many of the contemporary writers who would shift his perspective over time. Gandhi received a very different reception in England when he returned in 1931, the de facto leader of a burgeoning revolutionary movement in India whose example was so important to both the South African and U.S. civil rights movements of succeeding decades.
One of the writers who most deeply guided Gandhi’s political, spiritual, and philosophical evolution, Leo Tolstoy, experienced his own dramatic transformation, from landed aristocrat to social radical, and also renounced property and position to advocate strenuously for social equality. Gandhi eagerly read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, the novelist’s statement of Christian anarchism. The book, Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, “left an abiding impression on me.” After further study of Tolstoy’s religious writing, he “began to realize more and more the infinite possibilities of universal love.”
It was in England, not India, where Gandhi first read “A Letter to a Hindu,” Tolstoy’s 1908 reply to a note from Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das on the question of Indian independence. Tolstoy divides his lengthy, thoughtful “Letter” into short chapters, each of which begins with a quotation from the Vedas. “Indeed,” writes Maria Popova, the missive “puts in glaring perspective the nuanceless and hasty op-eds of our time.” It so affected Gandhi that, in 1909, he wrote to Tolstoy, thus beginning a correspondence between the two that lasted through the following year. “I take the liberty of inviting your attention to what has been going on in the Transvaal for nearly three years,” begins Gandhi’s first letter, somewhat abruptly, “There is in that Colony a British Indian population of nearly 13,000. These Indians have, for several years, labored under various legal disabilities.”
The prejudice against color and in some respects against Asians is intense in that Colony….The climax was reached three years ago, with a law that many others and I considered to be degrading and calculated to unman those to whom it was applicable. I felt that submission to a law of this nature was inconsistent with the spirit of true religion. Some of my friends and I were and still are firm believers in the doctrine of nonresistance to evil. I had the privilege of studying your writings also, which left a deep impression on my mind.
Gandhi refers to a law forcing the Indian population in South Africa to register with the authorities. He goes on to inquire about the authenticity of the “Letter” and asks permission to translate it, with payment, and to omit a negative reference to reincarnation that offended him. Tolstoy responded a few months later, in 1910, allowing the translation free of charge, and allowing the omission, with the qualification that he believed “faith in re-birth will never restrain mankind as much as faith in the immortality of the soul and in divine truth in love.” Overall, however, he expresses solidarity, greeting Gandhi “fraternally” and writing,
God help our dear brothers and co-workers in the Transvaal! Among us, too, this fight between gentleness and brutality, between humility and love and pride and violence, makes itself ever more strongly felt, especially in a sharp collision between religious duty and the State laws, expressed by refusals to perform military service.
The two continued to write to each other, Gandhi sending Tolstoy a copy of his Indian Home Rule and the translated “Letter,” and Tolstoy expounding at length on the errors—and what he saw as the superior characteristics—of Christian doctrine. You can read their full correspondence here, along with Tolstoy’s “Letter to a Hindu” and Gandhi’s introduction to his edition. Despite their religious differences, the exchange further galvanized Gandhi’s passive resistance movement, and in 1910, he founded a community called “Tolstoy Farm” near Johannesburg.
Gandhi’s views on African independence would change, and Nelson Mandela later adopted Gandhi and the Indian independence movement as a standard for the anti-apartheid movement. We’re well aware, of course, of Gandhi’s influence on Martin Luther King, Jr. For his part, Gandhi wrote glowingly of Tolstoy, and the model the novelist provided for his own anti-colonial campaign. In a speech 18 years later, he said, “When I went to England, I was a votary of violence, I had faith in it and none in nonviolence.” After reading Tolstoy, “that lack of faith in nonviolence vanished…Tolstoy was the very embodiment of truth in this age. He strove uncompromisingly to follow truth as he saw it, making no attempt to conceal or dilute what he believed to be the truth. He stated what he felt to be the truth without caring whether it would hurt or please the people or whether it would be welcome to the mighty emperor. Tolstoy was a great advocate of nonviolence in his age.”
The problem of violence, perhaps the true root of all social ills, seems irresolvable. Yet, as most thoughtful people have realized after the wars of the twentieth century, the dangers human aggression pose have only increased exponentially along with globalization and technological development. And as Albert Einstein recognized after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which he partly helped to engineer with the Manhattan Project—the aggressive potential of nations in war had reached mass suicidal levels.
After Einstein’s involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb, he spent his life “working for disarmament and global government,” writes psychologist Mark Leith, “anguished by his impossible, Faustian decision.” Yet, as we discover in letters Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud in 1932, he had been advocating for a global solution to war long before the start of World War II. Einstein and Freud’s correspondence took place under the auspices of the League of Nation’s newly-formed International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, created to foster discussion between prominent public thinkers. Einstein enthusiastically chose Freud as his interlocutor.
In his first letter to the psychologist, he writes, “This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” Well before the atomic age, Einstein alleges the urgency of the question is a matter of “common knowledge”—that “with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for Civilization as we know it.”
Einstein reveals himself as a sort of Platonist in politics, endorsing The Republic’s vision of rule by elite philosopher-kings. But unlike Socrates in that work, the physicist proposes not city-states, but an entire world government of intellectual elites, who hold sway over both religious leaders and the League of Nations. The consequence of such a polity, he writes, would be world peace—the price, likely, far too high for any world leader to pay:
The quest of international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action—its sovereignty that is to say—and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.
Einstein expresses his proposal in some sinister-sounding terms, asking how it might be possible for a “small clique to bend the will of the majority.” His final question to Freud: “Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?”
Freud’s response to Einstein, dated September, 1932, sets up a fascinating dialectic between the physicist’s perhaps dangerously naïve optimism and the psychologist’s unsentimental appraisal of the human situation. Freud’s mode of analysis tends toward what we would now call evolutionary psychology, or what he calls a “’mythology’ of the instincts.” He gives a mostly speculative account of the prehistory of human conflict, in which “a path was traced that led away from violence to law”—itself maintained by organized violence.
Freud makes explicit reference to ancient sources, writing of the “Panhellenic conception, the Greeks’ awareness of superiority over their barbarian neighbors.” This kind of proto-nationalism “was strong enough to humanize the methods of warfare.” Like the Hellenistic model, Freud proposes for individuals a course of humanization through education and what he calls “identification” with “whatever leads men to share important interests,” thus creating a “community of feeling.” These means, he grants, may lead to peace. “From our ‘mythology’ of the instincts,” he writes, “we may easily deduce a formula for an indirect method of eliminating war.”
And yet, Freud concludes with ambivalence and a great deal of skepticism about the elimination of violent instincts and war. He contrasts ancient Greek politics with “the Bolshevist conceptions” that propose a future end of war and which are likely “under present conditions, doomed to fail.” Referring to his theory of the competing binary instincts he calls Eros and Thanatos—roughly love (or lust) and death drives—Freud arrives at what he calls a plausible “mythology” of human existence:
The upshot of these observations, as bearing on the subject in hand, is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies. In some happy corners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever man desires, there flourish races whose lives go gently by; unknowing of aggression or constraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk.
Nonetheless, he says wearily and with more than a hint of resignation, “perhaps our hope” that war will end in the near future, “is not chimerical.” Freud’s letter offers no easy answers, and shies away from the kinds of idealistic political certainties of Einstein. For this, the physicist expressed gratitude, calling Freud’s lengthy response “a truly classic reply…. We cannot know what may grow from such seed.”
This exchange of letters, contends Humboldt State University philosophy professor John Powell, “has never been given the attention it deserves.… By the time the exchange between Einstein and Freud was published in 1933 under the title Why War?, Hitler, who was to drive both men into exile, was already in power, and the letters never achieved the wide circulation intended for them.” Their correspondence is now no less relevant, and the questions they address no less urgent and vexing. You can read the complete exchange at professor Powell’s site here.
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