Marshall McLuhan and Tom Wolfe: both writers, both astute observers of modern humanity, and both public figures whose work has, over the years, enjoyed high fashionability and endured high unfashionability. You might think the connection between them ends there. But when the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth and the centennial-celebrating site Marshall McLuhan Speaks came about, whose eloquent introduction to the thinker (who famously declared the world a “global village” where “the medium is the message”) got used there? Why, the man in white’s.
In the 20-minute video above, Wolfe lays out not just a précis of the insights that made McLuhan “the first seer of cyberspace,” but gets into his biography as well: his humbly respectable origins in Edmonton, his background as a literary scholar, his conversion to Catholicism, the beginnings of his teaching career in Cambridge and Wisconsin, his “extracurricular gatherings devoted to the folklore of industrial man,” his struggle to reconcile his interest in the writings of philosopher-paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin with his own religious convictions, and the considerable fame he accrued making pronouncements on the media in the media.
“No doubt the internet would have delighted him,” says Wolfe. “He would have seen it as a fulfillment of prophecies he had made thirty years before it was born, as an instrument for the realization of his dream of the mystical unity of all mankind. [Watch him predict the world would be knitted into a global village by digital technology in some vintage video.] Here, in a specific, physical, electronic form, was the seamless web of which he had so often spoken. Today thousands of young internet apostles are familiar with Marshall McLuhan, and are convinced his light shines round about them. From the editors of Wired magazine to the most miserable dot-com lizards of the chat room, they have made him their patron saint.”
To get an even deeper sense of how much Wolfe has thought about McLuhan, have a look at his first annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture, delivered at Fordham University in 1999. And unlike many intellectuals who only turned back to re-examine McLuhan after the age of the internet had retroactively validated even some of his wildest-sounding speculations, Wolfe has been tuned in to McLuhan’s frequency since way back. In 1970, the two even got together for a televised chat in McLuhan’s back yard (a clip of which you can watch just above), which revealed that, for all the fascination Wolfe had with McLuhan, the interest was mutual.
The history of moral philosophy in the West hinges principally on a handful of questions: Is there a God of some sort? An afterlife? Free will? And, perhaps most pressingly for humanists, what exactly is the nature of our obligations to others? The latter question has long occupied philosophers like Immanuel Kant, whose extreme formulation—the “categorical imperative”—flatly rules out making ethical decisions dependent upon particular situations. Kant’s famous example, one that generally gets repeated with a nod to Godwin, involves an axe murderer showing up at your door and asking for the whereabouts of a visiting friend. In Kant’s estimation, telling a lie in this case justifies telling a lie at any time, for any reason. Therefore, it is unethical.
In the video at the top of the post, Harry Shearer narrates a script about Kant’s maxim written by philosopher Nigel Warburton, with whimsical illustrations provided by Cognitive. Part of the BBC and Open University’s “A History of Ideas” series, the video—one of four dealing with moral philosophy—also explains how Kant’s approach to ethics differs from those of utilitarianism.
In the video above, Shearer describes that most utilitarian of thought experiments, the “Trolley Problem.” As described by philosopher Philippa Foot, this scenario imagines having to sacrifice the life of one for those of many. But there is a twist—the second version, which involves the added crime of physically murdering one person, up close and personal, to save several. An analogous but converse theory is that of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer (below) who proposes that our obligations to people in peril right in front of us equal our obligations to those on the other side of the world.
Finally, the last video surveys one of the thorniest issues in moral philosophical history—the “is/ought” divide, as problematic as the ancient Euthyphro dilemma. How, asked David Hume, are we to deduce moral principles from facts about the world that have no moral dimension? Particularly when those facts are never conclusive, are subject to revision, and when new ones get uncovered all the time? The question introduces a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between facts and values. Moral judgments founded on what is or isn’t “natural” flounder before our terror of much of what nature does, and the very partial and fallible nature of our knowledge of it.
The problem is as startling as Hume’s critique of causality, and in part caused Kant to remark that Hume had awakened him from a “dogmatic slumber.” What may strike viewers of the series is just how abstract these questions and examples are—how divorced from the messiness of real world politics, with the exception, perhaps, of Peter Singer. It may be instructive that political philosophy forms a separate branch in the West. While these problems are certainly difficult enough to trouble the sleep of just about any thoughtful person, in our day-to-day lives, our decision making process seems to be much messier, and much more situational, than we’re probably ever aware of.
Whether they submit to his mighty philosophical influence, resist it with all their own might, or fall somewhere in between, everyone who’s read the pronouncements of Friedrich Nietzsche (find his ebooks here) recognizes his voice — well, his textual voice, that is. Having died in 1900 after spending the last decade of his life in a mental breakdown, the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evilhas an excuse for not leaving behind much in the way of audio material. But love Nietzsche or hate him, a reader has to wonder: what did the guy actually sound like?
Here to satiate our curiosity come Flavia Montaggio, Patricia Montaggio, and Imp Kerr, authors of the Investigative Genetics paper “DNA-based prediction of Nietzsche’s voice,” which supposedly offers a scientific means of doing just that. “We collected trace amounts of cellular material (Touch DNA) from books that belonged to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,” reads the abstract, which goes on to describe the gathering of Nietzsche-related data eventually “converted into bio-measures that were used to 3D-print a vocal tract and larynx through which phonation was organically generated.” The result, after running everything through a series of text-to-speech simulations: “the first attempt at simulating the voice of a deceased person”:
It all seems legit, right? Or maybe you German-speakers out there will suspect something fishy, starting with the unlikely name of Imp Kerr. It actually belongs to “a Swedish-French artist living in New York City, mostly known for her fake American Apparel advertisement campaign,” or so reads the Wikipedia page quoted by a Language Log post on the project. “I have no idea whether anything in the Wikipedia article about Imp Kerr is true,” writes author Mark Liberman, “but it’s clear from internal evidence that the alleged Investigative Genetics article is a piece of performance art.”
Liberman breaks down the paper’s humorous elements, from its “many segments that display quasi-scientific terminology in meaningless or contradictory ways” to its simple inability to “restrain a certain telltale playfulness” (as when it deals with a resonance “lower than expected in regards of Nietzsche’s robust mandibles”). All this may remind you of the famous hoax wherein physicist Alan Sokal published a paperful of sheer nonsense in a respected cultural-studies journal. Or you may think of the film above, which purports, questionably, to show Nietzsche’s last days. It just goes to show that, if your ideas live on, you live on — or your readers will try to make you do so.
A philosopher perhaps more widely known for his prodigious mustache than for the varieties of his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche often seems to be misread more than read. Even someone like Michel Foucault could gloss over a crucial fact about Nietzsche’s body of work: Foucault remarked in an unpublished interview that Nietzsche’s “wonderful ideas” were “used by the Nazi Party.” But that use, he neglected to mention, came about through a scheme hatched by Nietzsche’s sister, after his mental collapse and death, to edit, change, and otherwise manipulate the thinker’s work in a way The Telegraph deemed “criminal.” Foucault may not have known the full context, but Nietzsche had about as much sympathy for fascism as he did for Christianity–both reasons for his break with composer Richard Wagner.
What Nietzsche loved most was music. Even in the wake of this scandal, with Nietzsche fully rehabilitated at the scholarly level at least, the philosopher is generally read piecemeal, used to prop up some ideology or critical theory or another, a tendency his anti-systematic, aphoristic work inspires. A more holistic approach yields two important general observations: Nietzsche found the mundane work of politics and nationalist conquest, with its tribalism and moral pretensions, thoroughly distasteful. Instead, he considered the creative work of artists, writers, and musicians, as well as scientists, of paramount importance.
Nietzsche almost entered medicine and was himself an artist: “before he engaged himself fully as a philosopher, he had already created a substantial output as poet and composer,” writes Albany Records. In an 1887 letter written three years before his death, Nietzsche claimed, “There has never been a philosopher who has been in essence a musician to such an extent as I am,” though he also admitted he “might be a thoroughly unsuccessful musician.” In any case, he hoped that at least some of his compositions would become known and heard as complementary to his philosophical project.
Now serious readers of Nietzsche, or those simply curious about his musicianship, can hear most of those compositions in a Spotify playlist above. Performed by Canadian musicians Lauretta Altman, Wolfgang Bottenberg, and the Montreal Orpheus Singers, the music ranges from sprightly to pensive, romantic to mournful, and some of it seems to come right out of the Protestant hymnals he grew up with as the son of a Lutheran minister. Nietzsche composed music throughout his life—a complete chronology spans the years 1854, when he was only ten, to 1887. See The Nietzsche Channel for a thorough list of published Nietzsche recordings and sheet music. To listen to the music here, you will need to download and register for Spotify.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger, widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, was a Nazi, a fact known to most anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the subject. In a New York Review of Books essay, Harvard intellectual historian Peter E. Gordon points out that “the philosopher’s complicity with the Nazis first became a topic of controversy in the pages of Les Temps modernes shortly after the war.” The issue arose again when a former student of Heidegger published “a vigorous denunciation” in 1987. In these cases, and others—like his protégé and onetime lover Hannah Arendt’s defense of her former teacher—the scandal tends to “always end with the same unsurprising discovery that Heidegger was a Nazi.”
What stirs up controversy isn’t Heidegger’s membership in the party, but his motivations. Was he simply a shrewd, if craven, careerist, or a genuinely hateful anti-Semite, or a little from each column? Whatever the explanation, Heideggerians have been able to wall off the philosophy from supposed moral or political lapses in judgment. Arendt did so by claiming that Heidegger, and all of philosophy, was politically naïve. Recalls Adam Kirsch in the Times:
The seal was set on his absolution by Hannah Arendt, in a birthday address broadcast on West German radio. Heidegger’s Nazism, she explained, was an “escapade,” a mistake, which happened only because the thinker naïvely “succumbed to the temptation … to ‘intervene’ in the world of human affairs.” The moral to be drawn from the Heidegger case was that “the thinking ‘I’ is entirely different from the self of consciousness,” so that Heidegger’s thought cannot be contaminated by the actions of the mere man.
The publication of Heidegger’s so-called “black notebooks,” journals that he kept assiduously from 1931–1941, may change all that. They show Heidegger formulating a philosophy of anti-Semitism—using the central categories of his thought—one that operates, as Michel Foucault might say, along “the rules of exclusion.”
In published excerpts of a translation by Richard Polt, an executive member of the Heidegger Circle, Critical Theory shows how much Heidegger turned his own conceptual apparatus against Jews. At one point, he writes:
One of the most secret forms of the gigantic, and perhaps the oldest, is the tenacious skillfulness in calculating, hustling, and intermingling through which the worldlessness of Jewry is grounded.
In this short passage alone, Heidegger invokes lazy stereotypes of Jews as “calculating” and “hustling.” He also, more importantly, describes the Jewish people as “worldless.” As Critical Theory writes, “Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) is the basic activity of human existing. To say that the Jews are ‘worldless’… is more than a confused stereotype.” It is Heidegger’s way of casting Jews out of Dasein, his most important category, a word that means something like “being-there” or “presence.” Jews, he writes, are “historyless” and “are not being, but merely ‘calculate with being.’”
Moreover, Heidegger took up the Nazi characterization of Jews as corrupt underminers of society. As representatives of modernity, and its technocratic domination of humanity, the Jews threatened “being” in another way:
What is happening now is the end of the history of the great inception of Occidental humanity, in which inception humanity was called to the guardianship of be-ing, only to transform this calling right away into the pretension to re-present beings in their machinational unessence…
The except goes on at length in this vein, with Jewish “technological machinery” posing a threat to civilization. Perhaps most shockingly, Heidegger attributed Nazi concentration camps to “self-destruction,” completely absolving by omission, and minimizing and excusing, the crimes of his party. An article in Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera documents Heidegger’s defense of Nazism and his claim in 1942 that “the community of Jews” is “the principle of destruction” and that the camps were only a logical outcome of this principle, the “supreme fulfillment of technology,” “corpse factories.” The real victims, of course, are the Germans, and the Allies are guilty of ”repressing our will for the world.”
Heidegger intended the “black notebooks,” so damning that several scholars of Heidegger fought their publication, to be released after all of his work was published. As with all of the philosopher’s difficult work, the notebooks are often obscure; it is not always clear what he means to say. But major Heidegger scholars have responded in a variety of ways—including resigning a chairship of the Martin Heidegger Society—that suggest the worst. According to Daily Nous, a website about the philosophy profession, when Günter Figal resigned his position in January as chair of the Martin Heidegger Society, he said:
As chairman of a society, which is named after a person, one is in certain way a representative of that person. After reading the Schwarze Hefte [Black Notebooks], especially the antisemitic passages, I do not wish to be such a representative any longer. These statements have not only shocked me, but have turned me around to such an extent that it has become difficult to be a co-representative of this.
Whether or not this new evidence will cause more of his adherents to renounce his work remains to be seen, but the notebooks, writes Peter Gordon, will surely “cast a dark shadow over Heidegger’s legacy.” A very dark shadow.
These days Noam Chomsky is probably most famous for his consistent, outspoken criticism of U.S. foreign policy. Yet before the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, Chomsky became internationally famous for proposing a novel solution to an age-old question: what does a baby know?
Platoargued that infants retain memories of past lives and thus come into this world with a grasp of language. John Locke countered that a baby’s mind is a blank slate onto which the world etches its impression. After years of research, Chomsky proposed that newborns have a hard-wired ability to understand grammar. Language acquisition is as elemental to being human as, say, dam building is to a beaver. It’s just what we’re programmed to do. Chomsky’s theories revolutionized the way we understand linguistics and the mind.
Above is a clip from the film. In his thick French accent, Gondry asks if there is a correlation between language acquisition and early memories. For anyone who’s watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you know that memory is one of the director’s major obsessions. Over Gondry’s rough-hewn drawings, Chomsky expounds: “Children know quite a lot of a language, much more than you would expect, before they can exhibit that knowledge.” He goes on to talk about new techniques for teaching deaf-blind children and how a day-old infant interprets the world.
As the father of a toddler who is at the cusp of learning to form thoughts in words, I found the clip to be fascinating. Now, if only Chomsky can explain why my son has taken to shouting the word “bacon” over and over and over again.
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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
In the world of the 8‑bit video game, there may be no more a frustrating, Sisyphusean task than completing the various iterations of Mega Man. Each successive level can feel endless, as one dies and starts again, time after time, with no glorious end in sight. It can feel like, as Friedrich Nietzsche might say, being caught in a cycle of “eternal recurrence,” destined to repeat the same actions, over and over again for eternity.
The videos here then—part of the popular trend of 8‑bit shorts—use the graphics and bleeping sound effects and music of Mega Man to illustrate Nietzsche’s seemingly pessimistic ideas. First, with a nod to Rust Cohle, we have the theory—or rather the thought experiment—of “eternal recurrence.” Drawing on Arthur Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Buddhism, Nietzsche imagined a universe with no end and no beginning, an endless loop of suffering in which one is destined to make the same mistakes forever.
If this seems terrifyingly bleak to you, you may approach life through a haze of resentiment, Nietzsche might say, a bitter tangle of anger and blame that rejects the world as it is. The one who overcomes this snare—the ubermensch—has achieved self-mastery. Strong in the ways of the “will to power” is he, and delighted by the prospect of living in the present moment an infinite number of times, even if the universe is cold, cruel, and indifferent to human existence. The “will to power” governs all life, for Nietzsche, and human life in particular is weakened by ignoring this fact and clinging to moral systems of resentiment like that of Christianity.
Nietzsche’s argument against Christianity, as explained above at least, is that it encourages, even celebrates mediocrity and frowns upon excellence. That such is the general tenor of our current age—an assessment the narrator makes—is debatable. Yes, we may promote mediocrities at an alarming rate, but we also at least nominally celebrate uber men (almost always men), who may not truly be self made but who surely live by the dictates of the will to power, taking what they want when they want it. Whether Nietzsche’s characterization of this predatory behavior as the highest of human possibilities inspires you or not may depend on how far you feel yourself to be above the common herd.
Nietzsche’s amoral philosophy has appealed to some pretty predatory characters, but it also appeals to anti-authoritarian, post-modern types because of his critical stance toward not only religion, but also what can seem like its secular replacement, science. Nietzsche respected the scientific method, but he recognized its limitations as a means of describing, rather than explaining the world. All of our descriptions are interpretations that do not penetrate into the realm of ultimate causes or meanings, and cannot provide a privileged, god-like vantage point from which to make absolute judgments.
When, in the hopes of replacing the certainties of religious morality and metaphysics, we elevate science to the position of ultimate truth formerly granted to the mind of god, we lose sight of this basic limitation; we commit the same fallacy as the religious, mistaking our stories about the world for the world itself. Would Nietzsche’s extreme skepticism have made him sympathetic to today’s climate science deniers and antivaxxers? Probably not. He did recognize that, like the physical bodies where thought takes place, some ideas are healthy descriptions of reality and some are not. Nonetheless, our explanations, Nietzsche argued, whether scientific or otherwise, are contingent—effects of language, not exposés of Truth, capital T.
For more 8‑Bit Philosophy, see our posts on Plato, Sartre, Derrida, as well as Kierkegaard and Camus, all illustrated in short, nostalgic recreations of classic video games.
Here at Open Culture, we like to think we keep discussions reasonable. Not every site can say that; if you’ve ever dared to scroll down into the comments on Youtube (to pick an example purely at random) you know what I mean. But on that very same repository of streaming videos and shouting matches, you can also find a helpful aid to your debates both online and off: PBS Idea Channel’s “Guide to Common Fallacies.”
When humans talk, sometimes we adhere to the rules of logic, and sometimes we break from them. In everyday life it doesn’t matter that much either way, but, in the heat of an argument, and especially amid the potential conflagration of an internet argument, consistency is all. Under such conditions, someone who commits even a common logical fallacy may well do so without realizing it, and if you feel like educating them, you can reply with a link to whichever of these videos covers the fallacy they used:
Host Mike Rugnetta (whom you might remember from the previous Idea Channel video we featured, “Math Might Not Actually Exist”) breaks down the fallacy in question, accompanying his explanation with a visual stream of illustrations, clips from movies, TV, and video games — and of course those mainstays of comment threads, animated GIFs. And he doesn’t just explain, he demonstrates, staging a short debate with a straw-filled, shoddily arguing version of himself each and every time.
Logic has always struck me as an inherently fascinating subject, and these videos certainly provide quick and funny hits of it. I do have my doubts as to whether they’ll actually help anyone win an argument. So point out others’ logical fallacies if you must, but bear in mind that you might be the only one who learns anything as a result.
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