Nietzsche’s Concept of Superman Explained with Monty Python-Style Animation

in Animation, Philosophy | November 20th, 2015

Friedrich Niet­zsche first intro­duced the con­cept of the Über­men­sch — often trans­lat­ed in Eng­lish as “The Super­man” — in his influ­en­tial philo­soph­i­cal work, Thus Spake Zarathus­tra (1883), writ­ing:

I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is some­thing that is to be sur­passed. What have ye done to sur­pass man?

All beings hith­er­to have cre­at­ed some­thing beyond them­selves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than sur­pass man?…

Lo, I teach you the Super­man!

The Super­man is the mean­ing of the earth. Let your will say: The Super­man SHALL BE the mean­ing of the earth!

I con­jure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of super­earth­ly hopes! Poi­son­ers are they, whether they know it or not.

Despis­ers of life are they, decay­ing ones and poi­soned ones them­selves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

Once blas­phe­my against God was the great­est blas­phe­my; but God died, and there­with also those blas­phe­mers. To blas­pheme the earth is now the dread­fulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknow­able high­er than the mean­ing of the earth!

As Eva Cybul­s­ka observes in an arti­cle on Phi­los­o­phy Now, Niet­zsche nev­er quite spelled out what he meant by Übermensch/The Super­man, leav­ing it to lat­er inter­preters to fill in the blanks. She notes: “RJ Holling­dale (in Niet­zsche) saw in Über­men­sch a man who had organ­ised the chaos with­in; [Wal­ter] Kauf­mann (Niet­zsche) a sym­bol of a man that cre­at­ed his own val­ues, and Carl Jung (Zarathustra’s Sem­i­nars) a new ‘God’. For Hei­deg­ger it rep­re­sent­ed human­i­ty that sur­passed itself, whilst for the Nazis it became an emblem of the mas­ter race.”

You can now add to the list of inter­pre­ta­tions anoth­er by Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life. In a new­ly-released ani­mat­ed video, de Bot­ton treats The Super­man as the incar­na­tion of human per­fec­tion. Embody­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics pos­sessed by Goethe, Mon­taigne, Voltaire and Napoleon (peo­ple who came clos­est to achiev­ing per­fec­tion in Niet­zsche’s mind), the Übermenschen/Supermen will live by their own val­ues (Pagan in nature); delight in their supe­ri­or­i­ty and take pity on the weak; per­haps hurt peo­ple in the name of achiev­ing great things; accept that suf­fer­ing can be a nec­es­sary evil; use cul­ture to raise the men­tal­i­ty of the soci­ety around them; and beyond.

Whether you see The Super­man dif­fer­ent­ly is anoth­er ques­tion. You can down­load Thus Spake Zarathus­tra from our Dig­i­tal Niet­zsche col­lec­tion and come up with your own take.

And, tan­gen­tial­ly, you can watch The Orig­i­nal 1940s Super­man Car­toon Free Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 100 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

The Dig­i­tal Niet­zsche: Down­load Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks

Hear Clas­si­cal Music Com­posed by Friedrich Niet­zsche: 43 Orig­i­nal Tracks

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Hegel, Kant & Niet­zsche to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca

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Get to Know Socrates, Camus, Kierkegaard & Other Great Philosophers with the BBC’s Intelligent Radio Show, In Our Time

in Philosophy, Podcasts, Radio | November 19th, 2015

When writer, politi­cian, and BBC radio and tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty Melvyn Bragg began his long-run­ning radio pro­gram In Our Time, which brings aca­d­e­mics togeth­er to dis­cuss phi­los­o­phy, his­to­ry, sci­ence, reli­gion, and cul­ture, he didn’t think the show would last very long: “Six months,” he told The Scots­man in 2009, “but I’ll have a go.” Now, sev­en­teen years after the show began in 1998, In Our Time is going strong, with mil­lions of lis­ten­ers from around the world who tune in on the radio, or down­load the In Our Time pod­cast. Though it’s easy to despair when faced with the onslaught of mass media devot­ed to triv­i­al­i­ty and sen­sa­tion­al­ism, Bragg has shown there’s still a siz­able audi­ence that cares about thought­ful engage­ment with mat­ters of import, and in par­tic­u­lar that cares about phi­los­o­phy.

Though the sub­ject takes a beat­ing these days, espe­cial­ly in unfa­vor­able com­par­isons to the hard sci­ences, the con­cerns artic­u­lat­ed by philoso­phers over the cen­turies still inform our views of ethics, lan­guage, pol­i­tics, and human exis­tence writ large. In Our Time’s phi­los­o­phy pro­grams fol­low the same for­mat as the show’s oth­er top­ics—in Bragg’s words, he gets “three absolute­ly top-class aca­d­e­mics to dis­cuss one sub­ject and explore as deeply as time allow[s].” In this case, the “sub­ject,” is often a prop­er name, like Simone Weil, David Hume, Albert Camus, Simone de Beau­voir or Socrates.

The show just as often tack­les philo­soph­i­cal move­ments like Skep­ti­cism, Neo­pla­ton­ism, or The Frank­furt School, that aren’t asso­ci­at­ed with only one thinker; like­wise, Bragg and his guests have devot­ed their dis­cus­sions to long­stand­ing philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems, like the exis­tence of Free Will, and his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ments, like the Con­ti­nen­tal-Ana­lyt­ic Split in West­ern phi­los­o­phy.

Though there is cer­tain­ly no short­age of high qual­i­ty resources for peo­ple who wish to learn more about philosophy—such as the many free cours­es, pod­casts, and lec­tures we’ve fea­tured on this site—few are as imme­di­ate­ly acces­si­ble as In Our Time’s phi­los­o­phy dis­cus­sions. Bragg describes his prepa­ra­tion for each show as “swotting”—or cram­ming. He’s not an expert, but he’s knowl­edge­able enough to ask per­ti­nent ques­tions of his guests, who then go on to edu­cate him, and the lis­ten­ers, for the almost hour-long con­ver­sa­tion. Hear how well the approach works in the In Our Time phi­los­o­phy pro­grams fea­tured here. At the top, Bragg dis­cuss­es the phi­los­o­phy and activism of Bertrand Rus­sell with aca­d­e­m­ic philoso­phers A.C. Grayling, Mike Beaney, and Hilary Greaves. Below that, he talks Kierkegaard with Jonathan Ree, Clare Carlisle, and John Lip­pitt. Just above, hear Bragg dis­cuss Jean-Paul Sartre with Jonathan Rée, Bene­dict O’Dono­hoe, and Christi­na How­ells. Final­ly, below, hear his con­ver­sa­tion on Karl Marx with Antho­ny Grayling, Fran­cis Wheen, and Sted­man Jones.

These four exam­ples are but a small sam­pling of the many com­pelling In Our Time phi­los­o­phy dis­cus­sions. Explore, stream, and down­load dozens more at the BBC Radio 4 site or hear them on Youtube and iTunes here. And if any these con­ver­sa­tions whet your appetite for more, then head over to our expan­sive archive of Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, and Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 197 Pod­casts (With More to Come)

Down­load 100 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast, Now at 239 Episodes, Expands into East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

Phi­los­o­phize This!: The Pop­u­lar, Enter­tain­ing Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast from an Uncon­ven­tion­al Teacher

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

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Hear the Writing of French Theorists Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard & Roland Barthes Sung by Poet Kenneth Goldsmith

in Comedy, Philosophy | November 10th, 2015

DerridaGoldsmith

Jacques Der­ri­da, Jean Bau­drillard, Roland Barthes… to my fresh­man ears, the names of these French the­o­rists sound­ed like pass­words to an occult world of strange and for­bid­ding ideas. I start­ed col­lege in the mid-90s, when Eng­lish depart­ments glee­ful­ly claimed post­struc­tural­ism as their birthright. Aca­d­e­m­ic cam­paigns against the fuzzy log­ic of these thinkers had not yet gath­ered much steam, though con­ser­v­a­tive cul­ture war­riors were already on the warpath against post­mod­ernism. Very short­ly after my intro­duc­tion to French post­struc­tural­ist thought, ana­lyt­i­cal pos­i­tivists launched for­mi­da­ble cam­paigns to ban­ish crit­i­cal the­o­ry to the mar­gins.

The back­lash against obscu­ran­tist the­o­ry made a good case, with pub­lic sham­ings like the “Sokal Hoax” and Phi­los­o­phy and Lit­er­a­ture’s Bad Writ­ing Con­test. Such dis­plays made the work of many Euro­pean philoso­phers and their adher­ents seem indeed—as Noam Chom­sky said of Der­ri­da, Slavoj Žižek, and Jacques Lacan—like so much vac­u­ous “pos­tur­ing.” But as potent as these cri­tiques may be, I’ve nev­er cared much for them; they seem to miss the point of more cre­ative kinds of the­o­ry, which is not, I think (as phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Eric Schwitzgebel alleges) “intel­lec­tu­al author­i­tar­i­an­ism and cow­ardice,” but instead an explorato­ry attempt to expand the rigid bound­aries of lan­guage and cog­ni­tion, and to enact the mean­der­ings of dis­cur­sive thought in prose that cap­tures its “errantry” (to take a term from Mar­tini­quan poet, nov­el­ist, and aca­d­e­m­ic Edouard Glis­sant.)

In any case, the debate was not new at all, but only a lat­er iter­a­tion of the old Continental/Analytic divide that has long pit­ted expo­nents of Anglo­phone clar­i­ty against the some­times awk­ward prose of thinkers like Kant and Hegel. And I hap­pen to think that Kant, Hegel, and, yes, even lat­er Con­ti­nen­tals like Derrida—despite the delib­er­ate obscu­ri­ty of their writing—are inter­est­ing thinkers who deserve to be read. They even deserve to be sung, bad­ly, by poets—namely by con­cep­tu­al poet Ken­neth Gold­smith, who is also found­ing edi­tor of Ubuweb, senior edi­tor of PennSound, and one­time host of a radio show on glo­ri­ous­ly weird, free-form radio sta­tion WFMU.

With his nat­ty sense of style and seri­ous appre­ci­a­tion for absur­di­ty, Gold­smith has sung to lis­ten­ers the work of Wal­ter Ben­jamin, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, and Sig­mund Freud; he has giv­en us an avant-garde musi­cal ren­di­tion of Har­ry Pot­ter; and he has turned selec­tions of Theodor Adorno’s grim Min­i­ma Moralia into 80s hard­core punk. Now, we bring you more of Goldsmith’s musi­cal inter­ven­tions: his goof­ball singing of Der­ri­da over an icy min­i­mal­ist com­po­si­tion by Anton Webern (top); of Bau­drillard over a lounge-pop instru­men­tal by Fran­cis Lai (mid­dle); and of Roland Barthes over the All­man Broth­ers (above).

As an added bonus, if you can call it that, hear Gold­smith war­ble Marx­ist the­o­rist Fred­er­ic Jame­son over Coltrane, just above. Do these ridicu­lous musi­cal exer­cis­es make these thinkers any eas­i­er to digest? I doubt it. But they do seem to say to the many haters of crit­i­cal the­o­ry and post­mod­ern French phi­los­o­phy, “hey, light­en up, will ya?”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

The The­o­ry of Wal­ter Ben­jamin, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein & Sig­mund Freud Sung by Ken­neth Gold­smith

30 Min­utes of Har­ry Pot­ter Sung in an Avant-Garde Fash­ion by UbuWeb’s Ken­neth Gold­smith

Theodor Adorno’s Crit­i­cal The­o­ry Text Min­i­ma Moralia Sung as Hard­core Punk Songs

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

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How Jean-Paul Sartre’s Philosophy Can Empower You to Live the Life You Truly Want

in Animation, Philosophy | November 2nd, 2015

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intel­lec­tu­als

Sartre, Hei­deg­ger, Niet­zsche: Doc­u­men­tary Presents Three Philoso­phers in Three Hours

Down­load Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Mod­ern Thought (1960)

140+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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

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105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More

in Education, Philosophy | October 20th, 2015

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.

At the top of the post, you can watch a whole playlist of Wi-Phi’s videos on cog­ni­tive bias­es, which add up to a sur­pris­ing­ly thor­ough half-hour primer on the forces that knock our think­ing askew, from the “alief” (an auto­mat­ic or habit­u­al men­tal atti­tude, as opposed to a delib­er­ate belief) to ref­er­ence depen­dence and loss aver­sion to what we might per­haps describe as a meta-bias amus­ing­ly called the GI Joe fal­la­cy (the ten­den­cy for our bias­es to stick around even when we should know bet­ter). Just above, we have Wi-Phi’s three-part guide to the good life, as exam­ined by Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, and Kant.

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.

The list of uni­ver­si­ty stake­hold­ers in Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy nowa­days includes, we should note, Duke, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts at Amherst, and U. Toron­to, in addi­tion to Yale and MIT. Plus, you’ll find that profs from oth­er uni­ver­si­ties have con­tributed to the video col­lec­tion. For exam­ple, Chris Sur­prenant (Uni­ver­si­ty of New Orleans) cre­at­ed the videos on Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, and Kant. Also find com­plete cours­es taught by Sur­prenant on our list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy: An Open Access Phi­los­o­phy Project Cre­at­ed by Yale and MIT

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life: A Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast

Phi­los­o­phy Bites: Pod­cast­ing Ideas From Pla­to to Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Since 2007

Phi­los­o­phize This!: The Pop­u­lar, Enter­tain­ing Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast from an Uncon­ven­tion­al Teacher

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Lec­tures Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Noam Chomsky & Lawrence Krauss Talk About Education, Political Activism, Technology & More Before a Sold-Out Crowd

in Education, Philosophy, Science, Technology | October 6th, 2015

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.

What you won’t see in the video above is a con­ver­sa­tion Chom­sky and Krauss had with Moth­er­board’s Daniel Ober­haus, who caught up with both thinkers dur­ing the ASU event to get their take on what he calls “anoth­er great space race.” As Ober­haus makes clear, the cur­rent com­pe­ti­tion is not nec­es­sar­i­ly between glob­al super­pow­ers, but—as with so much mod­ern research and development—between pub­lic and pri­vate enti­ties, such as NASA and Space X. As we briefly dis­cussed in a post yes­ter­day on the huge amount of pub­lic domain space pho­tog­ra­phy freely avail­able for use, pri­vate space explo­ration makes research pro­pri­etary, mit­i­gat­ing the poten­tial pub­lic ben­e­fits of gov­ern­ment pro­grams.

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ori­gins Project Brings Togeth­er Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Fla­tow, and More on One Stage

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Noam Chom­sky Explains Where Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Went Wrong

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

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The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Podcast, Now at 370 Episodes, Expands into Eastern Philosophy

in Philosophy, Podcasts | September 25th, 2015

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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.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: A Free Course That Explores Phi­los­o­phy from Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

Death: A Free Phi­los­o­phy Course from Yale

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Radical French Philosophy Meets Kung-Fu Cinema in Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)

in Film, Philosophy | September 17th, 2015

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

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.

via UBU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

The Five Best North Kore­an Movies: Watch Them Free Online

Bruce Lee Audi­tions for The Green Hor­net (1964)

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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