“To those human beings who are of any con­cern to me, I wish suf­fer­ing, des­o­la­tion, sick­ness, ill treat­ment, indig­ni­ties, pro­found self-con­tempt, the tor­ture of self-mis­trust, and the wretched­ness of the van­quished.” Thus wrote for­bid­ding­ly mus­ta­chioed Ger­man philoso­pher Friedrich Niet­zsche, artic­u­lat­ing his coun­ter­in­tu­itive view of suf­fer­ing as some­thing desir­able. But sure­ly the Niet­zschean way could nev­er lead to an enjoy­able life? On the con­trary, explains the tele­vi­sion series Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness. “Friedrich Niet­zsche believed that all vari­eties of suf­fer­ing and fail­ure were to be wel­comed by any­one seek­ing hap­pi­ness. We should regard them as tough chal­lenges to be over­come in the same way as a climber might tack­le a moun­tain.” Thus speaks the show’s host, pop­u­lar­iz­er of philoso­phers from Socrates to Seneca, Epi­cu­rus to Schopen­hauer, Alain de Bot­ton.

Niet­zsche per­haps put more com­pelling­ly than any writer before or since the notion of “no pain, no gain.” De Bot­ton, a phi­los­o­phy enthu­si­ast eager to look for the­o­ry in prac­tice, vis­its a ded­i­cat­ed, sac­ri­fice-mak­ing dancer from the Eng­lish Nation­al Bal­let, the com­bi­na­tion of whose acquired phys­i­cal grace and painful his­to­ry of toe­nail bruis­es make the argu­ment in a vis­cer­al way.

He then chats with a drinks dis­trib­u­tor fresh off the fail­ure of his first busi­ness ven­ture and already work­ing hard on his sec­ond. Accord­ing to our host, Niet­zsche “did­n’t think that hav­ing failed was, in itself, enough. All lives have fail­ures in them. What makes some lives ful­filled as well is the man­ner in which fail­ure has been met.” Or, in the sim­pler words of the dis­trib­u­tor him­self, “How would you be able to judge your suc­cess if you haven’t failed?”

Although this broad­cast works as an intro­duc­tion, we don’t rec­om­mend you lim­it your learn­ing about a philoso­pher with a volu­mi­nous body of writ­ten work to videos alone. In our col­lec­tion of free eBooks, you can down­load eight of Niet­zsche’s vol­umes in a vari­ety of for­mats: Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Homer and Clas­si­cal Philol­o­gy, Human, All Too Human, The Anti Christ, The Case Against Wag­n­er, The Gay Sci­ence, and Thus Spake Zarathus­tra.

You can watch more episodes in Alain de Bot­ton’s series, A Guide to Hap­pi­ness here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Sartre, Hei­deg­ger, Niet­zsche: Three Philoso­phers in Three Hours

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Image via Flickr Com­mons

Love him or hate him, many of our read­ers may know enough about Daniel C. Den­nett to have formed some opin­ion of his work. While Den­nett can be a soft-spo­ken, jovial pres­ence, he doesn’t suf­fer fuzzy think­ing or banal plat­i­tudes— what he calls “deepities”—lightly. Whether he’s explain­ing (or explain­ing away) con­scious­ness, reli­gion, or free will, Dennett’s mate­ri­al­ist phi­los­o­phy leaves lit­tle-to-no room for mys­ti­cal spec­u­la­tion or sen­ti­men­tal­ism. So it should come as no sur­prise that his lat­est book, Intu­ition Pumps And Oth­er Tools for Think­ing, is a hard-head­ed how-to for cut­ting through com­mon cog­ni­tive bias­es and log­i­cal fal­lac­i­es.

In a recent Guardian arti­cle, Den­nett excerpts sev­en tools for think­ing from the new book. Hav­ing taught crit­i­cal think­ing and argu­men­ta­tion to under­grad­u­ates for years, I can say that his advice is pret­ty much stan­dard fare of crit­i­cal rea­son­ing. But Dennett’s for­mu­la­tions are uniquely—and bluntly—his own. Below is a brief sum­ma­ry of his sev­en tools.

1. Use Your Mis­takes

Dennett’s first tool rec­om­mends rig­or­ous intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty, self-scruti­ny, and tri­al and error. In typ­i­cal fash­ion, he puts it this way: “when you make a mis­take, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth and then exam­ine your own rec­ol­lec­tions of the mis­take as ruth­less­ly and as dis­pas­sion­ate­ly as you can man­age.” This tool is a close rel­a­tive of the sci­en­tif­ic method, in which every error offers an oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn, rather than a chance to mope and grum­ble.

2. Respect Your Oppo­nent 

Often known as read­ing in “good faith” or “being char­i­ta­ble,” this sec­ond point is as much a rhetor­i­cal as a log­i­cal tool, since the essence of per­sua­sion involves get­ting peo­ple to actu­al­ly lis­ten to you. And they won’t if you’re over­ly nit­picky, pedan­tic, mean-spir­it­ed, hasty, or unfair. As Den­nett puts it, “your tar­gets will be a recep­tive audi­ence for your crit­i­cism: you have already shown that you under­stand their posi­tions as well as they do, and have demon­strat­ed good judg­ment.”

3. The “Sure­ly” Klax­on

A “Klax­on” is a loud, elec­tric horn—such as a car horn—an urgent warn­ing. In this point, Den­nett asks us to treat the word “sure­ly” as a rhetor­i­cal warn­ing sign that an author of an argu­men­ta­tive essay has stat­ed an “ill-exam­ined ‘tru­ism’” with­out offer­ing suf­fi­cient rea­son or evi­dence, hop­ing the read­er will quick­ly agree and move on. While this is not always the case, writes Den­nett, such ver­biage often sig­nals a weak point in an argu­ment, since these words would not be nec­es­sary if the author, and read­er, real­ly could be “sure.”

4. Answer Rhetor­i­cal Ques­tions

Like the use of “sure­ly,” a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion can be a sub­sti­tute for think­ing. While rhetor­i­cal ques­tions depend on the sense that “the answer is so obvi­ous that you’d be embar­rassed to answer it,” Den­nett rec­om­mends doing so any­way. He illus­trates the point with a Peanuts car­toon: “Char­lie Brown had just asked, rhetor­i­cal­ly: ‘Who’s to say what is right and wrong here?’ and Lucy respond­ed, in the next pan­el: ‘I will.’” Lucy’s answer “sure­ly” caught Char­lie Brown off-guard. And if he were engaged in gen­uine philo­soph­i­cal debate, it would force him to re-exam­ine his assump­tions.

 5. Employ Occam’s Razor

 The 14^th-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish philoso­pher William of Occam lent his name to this prin­ci­ple, which pre­vi­ous­ly went by the name of lex par­si­mo­nious, or the law of par­si­mo­ny. Den­nett sum­ma­rizes it this way: “The idea is straight­for­ward: don’t con­coct a com­pli­cat­ed, extrav­a­gant the­o­ry if you’ve got a sim­pler one (con­tain­ing few­er ingre­di­ents, few­er enti­ties) that han­dles the phe­nom­e­non just as well.”

6. Don’t Waste Your Time on Rub­bish

Dis­play­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic gruff­ness in his sum­ma­ry, Dennett’s sixth point expounds “Sturgeon’s law,” which states that rough­ly “90% of every­thing is crap.” While he con­cedes this may be an exag­ger­a­tion, the point is that there’s no point in wast­ing your time on argu­ments that sim­ply aren’t any good, even, or espe­cial­ly, for the sake of ide­o­log­i­cal axe-grind­ing.

7. Beware of Deep­i­ties

Den­nett saves for last one of his favorite boogey­men, the “deep­i­ty,” a term he takes from com­put­er sci­en­tist Joseph Weizen­baum. A deep­i­ty is “a propo­si­tion that seems both impor­tant and true—and profound—but that achieves this effect by being ambigu­ous.” Here is where Dennett’s devo­tion to clar­i­ty at all costs tends to split his read­ers into two camps. Some think his dri­ve for pre­ci­sion is an admirable ana­lyt­ic eth­ic; some think he man­i­fests an unfair bias against the lan­guage of meta­physi­cians, mys­tics, the­olo­gians, con­ti­nen­tal and post-mod­ern philoso­phers, and maybe even poets. Who am I to decide? (Don’t answer that).

You’ll have to make up your own mind about whether Dennett’s last rule applies in all cas­es, but his first six can’t be beat when it comes to crit­i­cal­ly vet­ting the myr­i­ad claims rou­tine­ly vying for our atten­tion and agree­ment.

via Mefi

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix in 2004 Film

Daniel Den­nett (a la Jeff Fox­wor­thy) Does the Rou­tine, “You Might be an Athe­ist If…”

90 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

Dan­ish philoso­pher Søren Kierkegaard—often con­sid­ered the first existentialist—was born 200 years ago this past Sun­day in Copen­hagen. Writ­ing under pseu­do­nyms like Johannes Cli­ma­cus and Johannes de Silen­tio, Kierkegaard attacked both the ide­al­ism of con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers Hegel and Schelling and the bour­geois com­pla­cen­cy of Euro­pean Chris­ten­dom. A high­ly skilled rhetori­cian, Kierkegaard pre­ferred the indi­rect approach, deploy­ing irony, ridicule, par­o­dy and satire in a para­dox­i­cal search for indi­vid­ual authen­tic­i­ty with­in a Euro­pean cul­ture he saw as beset by self-impor­tant puffery and unthink­ing mass move­ments.

While mil­lions of read­ers have embraced Kierkegaard’s prob­ing method, as many have also reject­ed his faith-based con­clu­sions. Nev­er­the­less, his strik­ing­ly eccen­tric skew­er­ing of the tepid­ly faith­ful and over­ly opti­mistic breathed light and heat into the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry debates among mod­ern Chris­tians as they con­front­ed the find­ings of sci­ence and the chal­lenges posed by world reli­gions and mate­ri­al­ist philoso­phers like Karl Marx.

Marx and Kierkegaard’s many con­trasts and con­tra­dic­tions are well rep­re­sent­ed in Episode 4 of the BBC doc­u­men­tary series Sea of Faith, “Prometheus Unbound” (part one at top, part two imme­di­ate­ly above). The 1984 six-part series—named in ref­er­ence to Matthew Arnold’s famous poem “Dover Beach” and host­ed by rad­i­cal the­olo­gian Don Cupitt—exam­ines the ways in which the Coper­ni­can and Dar­win­ian sci­en­tif­ic rev­o­lu­tions and the work of crit­ics of reli­gious doc­trine like Freud, Marx, Niet­zsche, Strauss, and Schweitzer shook the foun­da­tions of ortho­dox Chris­tian­i­ty. Here, Kierkegaard is played in reen­act­ments with appro­pri­ate inten­si­ty by British actor Col­in Jeav­ons.

You can learn more about the doc­u­men­tary series (and pur­chase DVDs) here. And for more on Kierkegaard, you would be well-served by lis­ten­ing to Wal­ter Kaufmann’s lec­ture above. For a lighter-heart­ed but still rig­or­ous take on the philoso­pher, be sure to catch the well-read, irrev­er­ent gents at the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast in a dis­cus­sion of Kierkegaard’s earnest and often dis­turb­ing defense of exis­ten­tial Chris­tian­i­ty, The Sick­ness Unto Death.

You can find more phi­los­o­phy doc­u­men­taries in our col­lec­tion, 285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Exis­ten­tial­ism with Hubert Drey­fus: Four Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Friedrich Niet­zsche & Exis­ten­tial­ism Explained to Five-Year-Olds (in Com­i­cal Video by Red­dit)

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

Ger­man philoso­pher Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, whom read­ers of post-struc­tural­ist the­o­ry have to thank for pop­u­lar­iz­ing the ubiq­ui­tous phrase “always already,” was a very labored writer who coined much of his own ter­mi­nol­o­gy and gave many a trans­la­tor migraines. His prose betrays an obses­sion with the pow­er of lan­guage that many of his stu­dents and suc­ces­sors, such as Jacques Der­ri­da and Michel Fou­cault, inher­it­ed in the con­struc­tion of their own elab­o­rate the­o­ries. While Heidegger’s first book Being and Time (1927) had enor­mous influ­ence on Exis­ten­tial­ist and Phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal thought, he also wrote exten­sive­ly on tech­nol­o­gy, the­ol­o­gy, and art and poet­ics, engag­ing with the ideas of Edmund Husserl, Kierkegaard, Niet­zsche, and the roman­tic Ger­man poet Friedrich Hӧlder­lin.

In the short film above, see the man him­self in excerpts from a lec­ture and three dif­fer­ent inter­views. The footage comes from a 1975 doc­u­men­tary called Heidegger’s Speech­es. Hei­deg­ger first dis­cuss­es some the­o­ry of lan­guage, quot­ing Goethe, then, in an inter­view, talks about how he came to the cen­tral pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of his philo­soph­i­cal career: the “ques­tion of being,” or Dasein. The third inter­view con­cerns Heidegger’s thoughts on Karl Marx. He quotes Marx’s rad­i­cal dic­tum, “philoso­phers have only inter­pret­ed the world; the point is to change it,” and offers a crit­i­cal per­spec­tive based in hermeneu­tics. In the fourth and final inter­view seg­ment, Hei­deg­ger prof­fers some thoughts on reli­gion and com­mu­nism.

For a much fuller pic­ture of Heidegger’s life and work, watch the BBC doc­u­men­tary above, from their Exis­ten­tial­ist series “Human All Too Human” that begins with Niet­zsche and ends with Sartre. And this page also has video of a num­ber of philoso­phers dis­cussing Heidegger’s work, which left such a last­ing impres­sion on the char­ac­ter of late mod­ern and post­mod­ern thought that it’s hard to find a con­tem­po­rary philoso­pher who doesn’t owe some sort of debt to him.

It may be impos­si­ble to over­state Heidegger’s impor­tance to twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Euro­pean phi­los­o­phy in gen­er­al, and upon sev­er­al promi­nent Jew­ish thinkers in par­tic­u­lar like his for­mer stu­dent and lover Han­nah Arendt and ethi­cist Emmanuel Lev­inas. But it also must be said that Heidegger’s lega­cy is taint­ed with con­tro­ver­sy. While it’s typ­i­cal­ly good form to sep­a­rate a thinker’s work from his or her per­son­al laps­es, Heidegger’s laps­es of judg­ment, if that’s what they were, are not so easy to ignore. As the doc­u­men­tary above informs us, Hei­deg­ger was a Nazi. A review­er of a recent biog­ra­phy col­or­ful­ly sums up the case this way:

Let’s be clear about this: Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, a thinker many regard as the most impor­tant philoso­pher of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, was indeed a bona-fide, arm-aloft, palm-out­stretched Nazi. Zeal­ous­ly renew­ing his par­ty mem­ber­ship every year between 1933 and 1945, his com­mit­ment to the Nation­al Social­ist cause was unstint­ing. Nowhere was this more in evi­dence than in his pub­lic role as rec­tor of Freiburg Uni­ver­si­ty, where he praised ‘the inner truth and great­ness’ of Nazism in his 1933 rec­toral address, and lat­er penned a paean to mur­dered Nazi thug Leo Schlageter. Hei­deg­ger was no token fas­cist; he was jack-boot­ed and ready. Wear­ing a swasti­ka on his lapel at all times he, along­side his proud, vir­u­lent­ly anti-Semit­ic wife, also prac­tised pri­vate dis­crim­i­na­tion against Jews, from fel­low exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­pher Karl Jaspers to his one-time men­tor Edmund Husserl. Not that he was with­out friends. In fact his friend­ship with Eugene Fis­ch­er, direc­tor of Berlin Insti­tute for Racial Hygiene, last­ed years.

Heidegger’s Nazi sym­pa­thies are hard­ly evi­dent in his philo­soph­i­cal work, yet it is still dif­fi­cult for many read­ers to rec­on­cile these facts about his life. Some refer to a 1966 Der Spiegel inter­view in which the philoso­pher explained away his Nazism as exi­gent cir­cum­stances. Sort of what we call today a non-apol­o­gy apol­o­gy. Oth­ers, like one­time admir­er Lev­inas, don’t find the task so easy. In a com­men­tary on for­give­ness, Lev­inas once wrote, “One can for­give many Ger­mans, but there are some Ger­mans it is dif­fi­cult to for­give. It is dif­fi­cult to for­give Hei­deg­ger.”

You can find more resources on Hei­deg­ger in our archive of free online phi­los­o­phy cours­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Friedrich Niet­zsche & Exis­ten­tial­ism Explained to Five-Year-Olds (in Com­i­cal Video by Red­dit)

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness