Nietzsche, Wittgenstein & Sartre Explained with Monty Python-Style Animations by The School of Life

in Philosophy | May 12th, 2015

Angst. Nau­sea. Selb­stüber­win­dung. All, sure­ly, words we’ve used before, but have we paid atten­tion to their prop­er philo­soph­i­cal con­texts? The well-known and wide­ly-read philoso­phers Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Niet­zsche used those words and oth­ers in very spe­cif­ic ways to express con­cepts essen­tial to their cer­tain­ly eccen­tric but even more cer­tain­ly impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal writ­ings. These brief, Alain de Bot­ton-nar­rat­ed video primers from The School of Life’s series on phi­los­o­phy will get you start­ed on com­ing to grips with just what these 19th- and 20th-cen­tu­ry thinkers had to tell us about our own lives.

The new video on Wittgen­stein con­cen­trates on its sub­jec­t’s life­long grap­pling with the prob­lems of lin­guis­tic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, from his first con­clu­sion that “lan­guage works by trig­ger­ing with­in us pic­tures of how things are in the world” to his sec­ond that “lan­guage is like a kind of tool that we use to play dif­fer­ent ‘games.’ ” The video on Sartre deals with the exis­ten­tial­ist’s con­tentions that “things are weird­er than we think,” that “we are free,” that “we should­n’t live in bad faith,” and that “we are free to dis­man­tle cap­i­tal­ism.” The video on Niet­zsche explains just what it means to become an Über­men­sch — a goal achiev­able, for exam­ple, by using your capac­i­ty for selb­stüber­win­dung to over­come your sklaven­moral.

Though watch­ing these philo­soph­ic primers might well make you ever so slight­ly con­ver­sant in Wittgen­stein, Sartre, and Niet­zsche, The School of Life has clear­ly craft­ed them (using goofy cut-up visu­als and a healthy rate of quips per minute) pri­mar­i­ly as an enter­tain­ing means of whet­ting your intel­lec­tu­al appetite. If you’d like to know more about these mod­ern philoso­phers, have a look at our links to oth­er relat­ed posts below. And if you’d like to go broad­er before you go deep­er, do watch the rest of the series, which will get you start­ed on every­one from Aris­to­tle and the Sto­ics to La Rochefou­cauld and Hei­deg­ger.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

140 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es 

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

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

A Guide to Hap­pi­ness: Alain de Bot­ton Shows How Six Great Philoso­phers Can Change Your Life

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

Bertrand Rus­sell on His Stu­dent Lud­wig Wittgen­stein: Man of Genius or Mere­ly an Eccen­tric?

Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Trac­ta­tus Gets Adapt­ed Into an Avant-Garde Com­ic Opera

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

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Short, Strange & Brutal Stint as an Elementary School Teacher

in Education, History, Philosophy | May 6th, 2015

Wittgenstein students

Lud­wig Wittgen­stein fin­ished writ­ing the Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus, the achieve­ment for which most of us remem­ber him, in 1918; three years lat­er came its first pub­li­ca­tion in Ger­many. And to what prob­lem did Wittgen­stein put his lumi­nous philo­soph­i­cal mind in the inter­im? Teach­ing a class of ele­men­tary school­ers in rur­al Aus­tria. “Well on his way to being con­sid­ered the great­est philoso­pher alive,” as Spencer Robins puts it in a thor­ough Paris Review post on Wittgen­stein’s teach­ing stint, he also found him­self “con­vinced he was a moral fail­ure.” Search­ing for a solu­tion, he got rid of his fam­i­ly for­tune, left the “Palais Wittgen­stein” in which he’d grown up, and out of “a roman­tic idea of what it would be like to work with peasants—an idea he’d got­ten from read­ing Tol­stoy,” went to teach kids in the mid­dle of nowhere. See them all above.\

“I am to be an ele­men­tary-school teacher in a tiny vil­lage called Trat­ten­bach,” Wittgen­stein wrote to his own teacher and friend Bertrand Rus­sell in a let­ter dat­ed Octo­ber 23, 1921. A month lat­er, in anoth­er let­ter, he described his cir­cum­stances as those of “odi­ous­ness and base­ness,” com­plain­ing that “I know human beings on the aver­age are not worth much any­where, but here they are much more good-for-noth­ing and irre­spon­si­ble than else­where.” The great philoso­pher’s exper­i­ment in pri­ma­ry edu­ca­tion would appear not to have gone well.

And yet Wittgen­stein comes off, by many accounts, as an exem­plary and almost unbe­liev­ably engaged teacher. He and his stu­dents, in Robins’ words, “designed steam engines and build­ings togeth­er, and built mod­els of them; dis­sect­ed ani­mals; exam­ined things with a micro­scope Wittgen­stein brought from Vien­na; read lit­er­a­ture; learned con­stel­la­tions lying under the night sky; and took trips to Vien­na, where they stayed at a school run by his sis­ter Her­mine.” Her­mine her­self remem­bered the kids “pos­i­tive­ly climb­ing over each oth­er in their eager­ness” to answer their philoso­pher-teacher’s ques­tions, and at least one par­tic­u­lar­ly promis­ing kid among them received Wittgen­stein’s exten­sive extracur­ric­u­lar instruc­tion — and even an offer of adop­tion.

We might also con­sid­er Wittgen­stein a cham­pi­on, in his own way, of equal treat­ment for the sex­es: unlike oth­er teach­ers in rur­al ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Aus­tria, he expect­ed the girls to solve the very same ver­tig­i­nous­ly dif­fi­cult math prob­lems he put to the boys. But by the same token, he doled out cor­po­ral pun­ish­ment to them just as equal­ly when they got the answer wrong, and even when they did­n’t grasp the con­cepts at hand as swift­ly as he might have liked. This rough treat­ment cul­mi­nat­ed in “the Haid­bauer inci­dent,” an occa­sion of child-smack­ing con­se­quen­tial enough in Wittgen­stein’s life to mer­it its own Wikipedia page, and which effec­tive­ly end­ed his edu­ca­tion­al involve­ment with young­sters. The inci­dent report­ed­ly left  an 11-year-old school­boy “uncon­scious after being hit on the head dur­ing class.”

“Ulti­mate­ly, he was to alien­ate the vil­lagers of Trat­ten­bach with his tyran­ni­cal and often bul­ly­ing behav­ior, the result of a mind unable to empathize with the stage at which some of his pupils found them­selves in their learn­ing,” writes edu­ca­tion blog­ger Alex Beard in his own post on Wittgen­stein-as teacher. “Today we would admire his high expec­ta­tions and the puri­ty of his inten­tion as an edu­ca­tor, but look rather less kind­ly on the Ohrfeige (ear-box­ing) and Haareziehen (hair-pulling) that his stu­dents lat­er recalled.” We mod­ern-day Wittgen­stein fans have to ask our­selves what won­ders we might we have learned had fate assigned our ele­men­tary-school selves to his class­room — and whether we would have grad­u­at­ed to our next year unscathed.

Read more about Wittgen­stein’s stint as a teacher at The Paris Review.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell on His Stu­dent Lud­wig Wittgen­stein: Man of Genius or Mere­ly an Eccen­tric?

Wittgen­stein and Hitler Attend­ed the Same School in Aus­tria, at the Same Time (1904)

Wittgen­stein Day-by-Day: Face­book Page Tracks the Philosopher’s Wartime Expe­ri­ence 100 Years Ago

Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Trac­ta­tus Gets Adapt­ed Into an Avant-Garde Com­ic Opera

See the Homes and Stud­ies of Wittgen­stein, Schopen­hauer, Niet­zsche & Oth­er Philoso­phers

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

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How to Live a Good Life? Watch Philosophy Animations Narrated by Stephen Fry on Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Max Weber & More

in Animation, Philosophy | May 4th, 2015

We recent­ly fea­tured a series of ani­ma­tions from BBC Radio 4 script­ed by philoso­pher Nigel War­bur­ton, nar­rat­ed by writer, per­former, and all-around wit Stephen Fry, and deal­ing with a big ques­tion: what is the self? Those four short videos called upon the ideas of thinkers as var­i­ous as Sartre, Descartes, and Shake­speare. This new fol­low-up draws from the intel­lec­tu­al wells dug by the likes of Aris­to­tle, Max Weber, Ayn Rand, and the Bud­dha to address a still big, some­what less abstract, but a per­haps even more impor­tant prob­lem: how do I live a good life?

Rand, as her many detrac­tors nev­er hes­i­tate to put it, thought the answer lay in fol­low­ing the high­est man­date, our own self­ish­ness. Bud­dhism, for its part, puts its stock into four noble truths: the inescapa­bil­i­ty of suf­fer­ing, the ori­gin of that suf­fer­ing in our own minds, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of chang­ing our lives if we stop crav­ing so many things, and the use­ful­ness of the Bud­dhist “eight­fold path” in doing so. Max Weber argued that the “Protes­tant eth­ic,” as defined by Calvin­ism, made cap­i­tal­ism itself into the big deal it has become today. And Aris­to­tle rec­om­mend­ed liv­ing vir­tu­ous­ly as a means of attain­ing eudai­mo­nia, or flour­ish­ing.

Alas, for all the impor­tant work done by these and oth­er thinkers, the attain­ment of a good life can remain pret­ty elu­sive for us mod­ern folk. Maybe we can do no bet­ter than learn­ing what our pre­de­ces­sors have thought and said on the sub­ject as best we can, and decid­ing for our­selves from there. But for­tu­nate­ly for us mod­ern folk, we have videos like these at our fin­ger­tips which make it not just quick and easy to take a first step toward that state, but which get us laugh­ing along the way. As with the rest of these series of ani­ma­tions on life’s big ques­tions, the best jokes appear sub­tly, so you’ve got to stay atten­tive — sure­ly one of the more impor­tant virtues any­one, ancient or mod­ern, can cul­ti­vate.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

140 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

What is the Self? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Nar­rat­ed by Stephen Fry on Sartre, Descartes & More

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

Learn Right From Wrong with Oxford’s Free Course A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners

How Did Every­thing Begin?: Ani­ma­tions on the Ori­gins of the Uni­verse Nar­rat­ed by X‑Files Star Gillian Ander­son

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

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

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Read Noam Chomsky & Sam Harris’ “Unpleasant” Email Exchange

in Current Affairs, Philosophy | May 1st, 2015

In 2013, we doc­u­ment­ed the acri­mo­nious exchange between Noam Chom­sky and Slavoj Žižek, which all start­ed when Chom­sky accused Žižek of “posturing–using fan­cy terms like poly­syl­la­bles and pre­tend­ing [to] have a the­o­ry when you have no the­o­ry what­so­ev­er.” To which Žižek respond­ed: “Chom­sky, … always empha­sizes how one has to be empir­i­cal, accu­rate… well I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empir­i­cal­ly wrong in his descrip­tions…” And so it con­tin­ued.

Two years lat­er, Chom­sky now finds him­self in anoth­er fraught exchange — this time, with Sam Har­ris, author of The End of Faith and Let­ter to a Chris­t­ian Nation. It’s a lit­tle hard to pin down when the dust-up first began. But, it at least goes back to Jan­u­ary, when Har­ris took Chom­sky to task  (hear an excerpt of a longer pod­cast above) for draw­ing a moral equiv­a­lence between U.S. mil­i­tary action and the vio­lence com­mit­ted by some of Amer­i­ca’s his­tor­i­cal foes (e.g., the Nazis dur­ing WWII and lat­er Al-Qae­da).

Over the past week, Chom­sky and Har­ris con­tin­ued the debate, trad­ing emails back and forth. Their corre­spon­dence runs some 10,000 words, but it only amounts to what Har­ris ulti­mate­ly calls “an unpleas­ant and fruit­less encounter” that demon­strates the “lim­its of dis­course.” It’s an exchange that Chom­sky seem­ing­ly pre­ferred to keep pri­vate (his per­mis­sion to print the emails was grudg­ing at best), and Har­ris saw some virtue in mak­ing pub­lic. The final email by Har­ris reads:

May 1, 2015

From: Sam Har­ris
To: Noam Chom­sky

Noam—

I’ve now read our cor­re­spon­dence through and have decid­ed to pub­lish it (www.samharris.org). I under­stand your point about “exhi­bi­tion­ism,” but I dis­agree in this case.

You and I prob­a­bly share a mil­lion read­ers who would have found a gen­uine con­ver­sa­tion between us extreme­ly use­ful. And I trust that they will be dis­ap­point­ed by our fail­ure to pro­duce one, as I am. How­ev­er, if pub­lish­ing this exchange helps any­one to bet­ter com­mu­ni­cate about these top­ics in the future, our time won’t have been entire­ly wast­ed.

Sam

Whether Sam is right about that (is there some­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly instruc­tive here?), you can decide. Here’s the entire exchange.

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:

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Slavoj Žižek Responds to Noam Chom­sky: ‘I Don’t Know a Guy Who Was So Often Empir­i­cal­ly Wrong’

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Read 9 Free Books By Noam Chom­sky Online

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Animated Philosophers Presents a Rocking Introduction to Socrates, the Father of Greek Philosophy

in Philosophy | April 27th, 2015

Would there be such a thing as phi­los­o­phy had there been no such person—or lit­er­ary char­ac­ter, at least—as Socrates? Sure­ly peo­ple the world over have always asked ques­tions about the nature of real­i­ty, and come up with all sorts of spec­u­la­tive answers. But the par­tic­u­lar form of inquiry known as the Socrat­ic method—a blan­ket pre­sump­tion of ignorance—would not have become the dom­i­nant force in West­ern intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry with­out its name­sake. And that is, of course, not all. In the work of Socrates’ high­ly imag­i­na­tive stu­dent, inter­preter, and biog­ra­ph­er Pla­to, we find, as Alfred North White­head sug­gest­ed, a “wealth of gen­er­al ideas” that have made for “an inex­haustible mine of sug­ges­tion” for philoso­phers since antiq­ui­ty.

As blues­man Robert John­son did for rock and roll, Socrates more or less sin­gle-hand­ed­ly invent­ed the for­mu­las of West­ern thought. He might be called the first philo­soph­i­cal rock star—and judg­ing by the Guns N’ Ros­es sound­track to the ani­mat­ed video above, the pro­duc­ers of the Greek Pub­lic Tele­vi­sion series Ani­mat­ed Philoso­phers seem to feel the same. Dubbed into Eng­lish, and with char­ac­ter ani­ma­tion that owes more than a lit­tle to South Park, this episode makes the case for Socrates’ impor­tance to phi­los­o­phy as tan­ta­mount to Christ’s in Chris­tian­i­ty. Over­stat­ed? Per­haps, but the argu­ment is by no means a thin one.

To make the point, writer, edi­tor, and host George Chatzi­vasileiou inter­views Greek philoso­phers like Vasilis Kara­ma­n­is and Vasilis Kalfas, who basi­cal­ly agree with Roman ora­tor Cicero’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Socrates bring­ing “phi­los­o­phy down from the heav­ens to the earth”… as well as, says Kalfas, “into the city” as a “teacher of the cit­i­zen” in a mod­ern demo­c­ra­t­ic city-state. A key part of Socrates’ appeal is that he “did not take any­thing for grant­ed, no mat­ter how obvi­ous it may have seemed.” Though this atti­tude is as much a per­for­mance as it is a gen­uine admis­sion of igno­rance, the Socrat­ic approach nonethe­less set the stan­dards of intel­lec­tu­al integri­ty in the West.

The com­par­i­son with Christ is rel­e­vant in more ways than one. The fathers of the Chris­t­ian church relied as much on Pla­to and his stu­dent Aris­to­tle—some­times it seems even more so—as they did on the Bible. Per­haps chief among ear­ly the­olo­gians, Bish­op Augus­tine of Hip­po receives the ani­mat­ed rock star treat­ment above in anoth­er episode of Ani­mat­ed Philoso­phers, this one sub­ti­tled in Eng­lish. The many oth­er episodes in the series—on Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Dem­ocri­tus, Empe­do­cles, Par­menides, Plot­i­nus, Epi­cu­rus, Her­a­cli­tus, and Pythagoras—are all avail­able on Youtube, but only in the orig­i­nal Greek with no titles or dub­bing. It’s no great sur­prise the series focus­es almost exclu­sive­ly on Greek philoso­phers. And yet, nation­al pride notwith­stand­ing, the ancient civ­i­liza­tion does have legit­i­mate claim to the ori­gins of the dis­ci­pline, espe­cial­ly in that most influ­en­tial fig­ure of them all, Socrates.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

140 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A His­to­ry of Ideas: Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain The­o­ries of Simone de Beau­voir, Edmund Burke & Oth­er Philoso­phers

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

Allan Bloom’s Lec­tures on Socrates (Boston Col­lege, 1983) 

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

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What is the Self? Watch Philosophy Animations Narrated by Stephen Fry on Sartre, Descartes & More

in Animation, Philosophy | April 22nd, 2015

If you’ve fol­lowed our recent phi­los­o­phy posts, you’ve heard Gillian Ander­son (The X‑Files) speak on what makes us human, the ori­gins of the uni­verse, and whether tech­nol­o­gy has changed us, and Har­ry Shear­er speak on ethics — or rather, you’ve heard them nar­rate short edu­ca­tion­al ani­ma­tions from the BBC script­ed by Phi­los­o­phy Bites’ Nigel War­bur­ton. Now anoth­er equal­ly dis­tinc­tive voice has joined the series to explain an equal­ly impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal top­ic. Behold Stephen Fry on the Self.

These four videos draw on Socrates’s work on what it means to know one­self (and the lim­its of one’s knowl­edge); Erv­ing Goff­man’s (The Pre­sen­ta­tion of Self in Every­day Life) Shake­speare­an obser­va­tion that we all play roles on this stage of a world; Rene Descartes’ famous dec­la­ra­tion “I think, there­fore I am”; and Jean-Paul Sartre’s con­cept of human exis­tence pre­ced­ing human essence (which, if it sounds a bit fog­gy, the video will clar­i­fy). Whichev­er of these thinkers’ claims sound most plau­si­ble to you, you’ll come out feel­ing a bit sur­er that, what­ev­er con­sti­tutes our selves — if indeed we have them — it isn’t what you might have assumed going in.

If the notions that we know noth­ing, that we have no fixed iden­ti­ties, that we cre­ate our­selves (and/or our selves) by our own actions, and that a trick­ster demon may be con­trol­ling your thoughts even as you read this seem too detached from every­day expe­ri­ence to eas­i­ly grasp, at least we have a sen­si­ble Eng­lish voice like Fry’s to guide us through them. The stereo­types may say that the peo­ple of that prac­ti­cal-mind­ed land don’t go in for this kind of talk. But I pro­pose a refu­ta­tion: specif­i­cal­ly, a refu­ta­tion in the form of a return by Fry to talk about two of his fel­low Britons, David Hume and George Berke­ley. They had a few things to say about the self — to put it mild­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

A His­to­ry of Ideas: Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain The­o­ries of Simone de Beau­voir, Edmund Burke & Oth­er Philoso­phers

How Did Every­thing Begin?: Ani­ma­tions on the Ori­gins of the Uni­verse Nar­rat­ed by X‑Files Star Gillian Ander­son

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

Has Tech­nol­o­gy Changed Us?: BBC Ani­ma­tions Answer the Ques­tion with the Help of Mar­shall McLuhan

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

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

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Slavoj Žižek Calls Political Correctness a Form of “Modern Totalitarianism”

in Philosophy, Politics | April 22nd, 2015

Opin­ions on what we gen­er­al­ly mean by the phrase “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” vary wide­ly. Does it refer to the ways we try to main­tain basic polite­ness and com­mon decen­cy in what we like to think of as a plu­ral­is­tic, egal­i­tar­i­an soci­ety? Or is it a form of Orwellian, state-spon­sored mind con­trol that squash­es dis­sent and ban­ish­es unpop­u­lar ideas from pub­lic dis­course? On the one hand, sto­ries of unac­cept­ably abu­sive behav­ior in work­places, class­rooms, and gov­ern­ment build­ings abound, seem­ing to require plac­ing rea­son­able lim­its on speech. On the oth­er hand, extreme exam­ples of ram­pant “trig­ger warn­ings” and oth­er such qual­i­fiers—on col­lege lit­er­a­ture syl­labi, for exam­ple—can seem hyper­sen­si­tive, patron­iz­ing, and sil­ly at best.

In the Big Think video above, Marx­ist the­o­rist, cul­tur­al crit­ic, and pro­fes­sion­al provo­ca­teur Slavoj Žižek approach­es the term as a kind of enforced nice­ness that obscures oppres­sive pow­er rela­tion­ships. He begins with an exam­ple, of a so-called “post­mod­ern, non-author­i­tar­i­an father,” who uses a sub­tle form of emo­tion­al coer­cion, play­ing on feel­ings of guilt, to enforce love and respect for a grand­par­ent. This mod­el, says Žižek, is “par­a­dig­mat­ic” of “mod­ern total­i­tar­i­an­ism”:

This is why the for­mu­la of mod­ern total­i­tar­i­an­ism is not “I don’t care what you think, just do it.” This is tra­di­tion­al author­i­tar­i­an­ism. The total­i­tar­i­an for­mu­la is, “I know bet­ter than you what you real­ly want.”

“In this sense,” says Žižek, “I am hor­ri­fied by this new cul­ture of experts.” In his typ­i­cal­ly ani­mat­ed style, he leaps from case to case—the ban­ning of pub­lic e‑cigarette smok­ing, for example—to show how con­cerns about pub­lic health or racism give way to mean­ing­less, cul­tur­al­ly stul­ti­fy­ing mor­al­iz­ing. His point that polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness can be a humor­less “self-dis­ci­pline” is per­sua­sive. Whether his exam­ples of “pro­gres­sive racism”—or the social release valve of obscene or racist jokes—translate to an Amer­i­can con­text is debat­able. (Trig­ger warn­ing: Žižek drops a cou­ple n‑words).

Does the uncouth Žižek get a pass because he dis­avows per­son­al prej­u­dice, even as he makes light of it? Is there real­ly a “great art” to the racist joke that can bring peo­ple clos­er togeth­er? Do we need a “tiny exchange of friend­ly obscen­i­ties” to estab­lish “real con­tact” with oth­er peo­ple? I for one wouldn’t want to live in a soci­ety with­out obscene humor and hon­est, open con­ver­sa­tion. But whether all forms of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness— what­ev­er it is—are “mod­ern total­i­tar­i­an­ism,” I leave to you to decide. It does seem to me that if we can’t have polit­i­cal debates with­out fear and shame then we real­ly have lost some mea­sure of free­dom; but if we’re unable to debate with good will and sen­si­tiv­i­ty, then we’ve lost some impor­tant mea­sure of our human­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek: What Full­fils You Cre­ative­ly Isn’t What Makes You Hap­py

Slavoj Žižek on the Feel-Good Ide­ol­o­gy of Star­bucks

Slavoj Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy Decodes The Dark Knight and They Live

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

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The Contributions of Women Philosophers Recovered by the New Project Vox Website

in Philosophy | April 14th, 2015

project vox

“If I am con­demned, I shall be anni­hi­lat­ed to noth­ing: but my ambi­tion is such, as I would either be a world, or noth­ing.” — Mar­garet Cavendish (1623–1673)

A phi­los­o­phy can­di­date or fem­i­nist schol­ar ven­tur­ing into Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s new Project Vox web­site may expe­ri­ence a sen­sa­tion akin to dis­cov­er­ing King Tut’s tomb.

Such trea­sures! Not just a scrap here and a morsel there, but a seri­ous trove of infor­ma­tion about phi­los­o­phy writ by females!

Lady Damaris Masham (1658–1708), Mar­garet Cavendish (1623–1673), Vis­count­ess Anne Con­way (1631–1679), and Émi­lie Du Châtelet were high­ly thought of in their day, and praised by male con­tem­po­raries includ­ing John Locke.

Project Vox seeks to res­ur­rect their over­looked-to-the-point-of-undis­cov­ered con­tri­bu­tions by pub­lish­ing their long out of print texts, some trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish for the first time. Bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion and sec­ondary resources will pro­vide a sense of each philoso­pher as well as her phi­los­o­phy.

Even­tu­al­ly, the site will include a forum where teach­ers can share les­son plans and arti­cles. Male phi­los­o­phy doc­tor­ates cur­rent­ly out­num­ber their female coun­ter­parts by an over­whelm­ing num­ber, but that may change as young women begin to see them­selves reflect­ed in the cur­ricu­lum.

Edu­ca­tors! Edu­cate thy­selves! Project Vox is the Guer­ril­la Girl of ear­ly mod­ern phi­los­o­phy!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Down­load 110 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks: From Aris­to­tle to Niet­zsche & Wittgen­stein

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

Han­nah Arendt Dis­cuss­es Phi­los­o­phy, Pol­i­tics & Eich­mann in Rare 1964 TV Inter­view

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

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