Learn the History of Indian Philosophy in a 62 Episode Series from The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps: The Buddha, Bhagavad-Gita, Non Violence & More

in Philosophy | July 10th, 2018

The belief in a sin­gu­lar, coher­ent “West­ern tra­di­tion” in phi­los­o­phy has led to a very insu­lar, Euro­cen­tric view in phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, as Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Nor­den write in a New York Times op-ed. “No oth­er human­i­ties dis­ci­pline demon­strates this sys­temic neglect of most of the civ­i­liza­tions in its domain,” they argue, “The present sit­u­a­tion is hard to jus­ti­fy moral­ly, polit­i­cal­ly, epis­tem­i­cal­ly or as good edu­ca­tion­al and research train­ing prac­tice.” In his fol­low-up book Tak­ing Back Phi­los­o­phy Van Nor­den argues that edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions should “live up to their cos­mopoli­tan ideals” by expand­ing the canon and teach­ing non-West­ern philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions.

One phi­los­o­phy edu­ca­tor, Peter Adam­son, pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the LMU in Munich and King’s Col­lege Lon­don, has tak­en up the chal­lenge of teach­ing glob­al philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions through his pop­u­lar pod­cast The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps, with series on the Islam­ic World, Africana, and India. With expert co-authors and guests, Adamson’s pod­casts help us nav­i­gate cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal dif­fer­ences with­out water­ing down the sub­stance of diverse bod­ies of thought.

These sur­veys of non-West­ern tra­di­tions aim to be as exhaus­tive as the pod­cast’s cov­er­age of Clas­si­cal, Lat­er Antiq­ui­ty, and Medieval peri­ods in Europe. We’ve fea­tured Adamson’s pod­casts on Islam­ic and Indi­an phi­los­o­phy in an ear­li­er post. Now we revis­it his series on Indi­an phi­los­o­phy, which has grown sub­stan­tial­ly in the inter­val, from thir­ty-two to six­ty-two episodes, divid­ed into three categories—“Origins,” “Age of the Sutra,” and “Bud­dhists and Jains.”

Indi­an Philosophy—Origins

Indi­an Philosophy—Age of the Sutra

Indi­an Philosophy—Buddhists and Jains

Very broad­ly, much Indi­an phi­los­o­phy can be under­stood as a cen­turies-long con­flict between the six ortho­dox Vedic schools (asti­ka) and the het­ero­dox (nas­ti­ka) schools, includ­ing Bud­dhism, Jain­ism, and Car­va­ka, a mate­ri­al­ist phi­los­o­phy that denied all meta­phys­i­cal doc­trines. While some strains among these schools of thought can be asso­ci­at­ed with indi­vid­ual names, like Kana­da, Patañ­jali, or Nagar­ju­na, much ancient Indi­an phi­los­o­phy “is rep­re­sent­ed by a mass of texts,” as Luke Muehlhauser writes in his short guide, “for which the authors and dates of com­po­si­tion are most­ly unknown.”

Adamson’s free pod­cast sur­vey of Indi­an phi­los­o­phy makes for enter­tain­ing, infor­ma­tive lis­ten­ing. You can down­load every episode in .zip form at the links above. Or find links to the indi­vid­ual episodes right below. To keep up with trends in the study of Indi­an phi­los­o­phy in Eng­lish, be sure to fol­low the Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy Blog. And for an excel­lent list of “Read­ings on the Less Com­mon­ly Taught Philoso­phies (LCTP),” see this post by Bryan Van Nor­den here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visu­al­ized in Two Mas­sive, 44-Foot High Dia­grams

The Philo­soph­i­cal Appre­ci­a­tion of Rocks in Chi­na & Japan: A Short Intro­duc­tion to an Ancient Tra­di­tion

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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

When Jean-Paul Sartre Had a Bad Mescaline Trip and Then Hallucinated That He Was Being Followed by Crabs

in Philosophy | July 4th, 2018

Image by Thier­ry Ehrmann via Flickr Com­mons

Some­times when con­front­ed with strange new ideas, peo­ple will exclaim, “you must be on drugs!”—a charge often levied at philoso­phers by those who would rather dis­miss their ideas as hal­lu­ci­na­tions than take them seri­ous­ly. But, then, to be fair, some­times philoso­phers are on drugs. Take Jean-Paul Sartre. “Before Hunter S. Thomp­son was dri­ving around in con­vert­ibles stocked full of acid, cocaine, mesca­line and tequi­la,” notes Crit­i­cal The­o­ry, Sartre almost approached the gonzo journalist’s habit­u­al intake.

Accord­ing to Annie Cohen-Solal, who wrote a biog­ra­phy of Sartre, his dai­ly drug con­sump­tion was thus: two packs of cig­a­rettes, sev­er­al tobac­co pipes, over a quart of alco­hol (wine, beer, vod­ka, whisky etc.), two hun­dred mil­ligrams of amphet­a­mines, fif­teen grams of aspirin, a boat load of bar­bi­tu­rates, some cof­fee, tea, and a few “heavy” meals (what­ev­er those might have been). 

These details should not undu­ly influ­ence our read­ing of Sartre’s work. Like Thomp­son, no mat­ter how phys­i­cal­ly debil­i­tat­ing the booze and drugs might have been for him, they didn’t seem to cramp his pro­duc­tiv­i­ty or intel­lec­tu­al vig­or. But his one and only expe­ri­ence with mesca­line almost sent him careen­ing over the edge, and cer­tain­ly con­tributed to an impor­tant motif in his work after­ward.

While work­ing on a book about the imag­i­na­tion, Sartre sought to have an hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry expe­ri­ence. He got the chance in 1935 when an old friend, Dr. Daniel Lagache, invit­ed him into an exper­i­ment at Sainte-Anne’s hos­pi­tal in Paris, where he was inject­ed with mesca­line and observed under con­trolled con­di­tions. “Sartre does not appear to have had a bad trip in the clas­sic sense of suf­fer­ing a major and pro­longed pan­ic attack,” Gary Cox writes in his Sartre biog­ra­phy. “But it was not a good trip and he did not enjoy it.”

The most ill effects came after­ward: “His visu­al fac­ul­ties remained dis­tort­ed for weeks.” Sartre saw hous­es with “leer­ing faces, all eyes and jaws.” Clock faces took on the fea­tures of owls. He con­fid­ed in his part­ner Simone de Beau­voir that “he feared that one day he would no longer know” whether or not these were hal­lu­ci­na­tions. They were, how­ev­er, not the worst after­ef­fects. As Sartre told polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor John Geras­si in a 1971 inter­view, crabs began to fol­low him around. He described the expe­ri­ence as “a ner­vous break­down.” The crabs fol­lowed him “all the time,” he said, “I mean they fol­lowed me in the streets, into class.”

I got used to them. I would wake up in the morn­ing and say, “Good morn­ing, my lit­tle ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time, or I would say, “OK guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and qui­et,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolute­ly still, until the bell rang.

This went on for a year before Sartre went to see his friend Jacques Lacan for psy­cho­analy­sis. “We con­clud­ed, “ he says, “that it was a fear of becom­ing alone.” While he had pre­vi­ous­ly con­fessed a fear of sea crea­tures, espe­cial­ly crabs, that went back to his child­hood, after the mesca­line trip, crabs fea­tured promi­nent­ly in his work, as Peter Royle shows at Phi­los­o­phy Now.

We find sev­er­al ref­er­ences to crabs in his short sto­ry col­lec­tion The Wall and in his famous essay “Exis­ten­tial­ism is a Human­ism.” Samir Chopra quotes crab pas­sages in Sartre’s first nov­el Nau­sea. (“At first I avoid­ed them by writ­ing about them,” he told Geras­si, “in effect, by defin­ing life as nau­sea.”) “In one of his short sto­ries, ‘Ero­s­tra­tus,’” notes Royle, “Sartre cre­ates a char­ac­ter, Paul Hilbert, who looks down on human beings from a height and sees them as crabs.” The most strik­ing use of the “crab motif” comes from his 1959 play The Con­demned of Altona, in which the pro­tag­o­nist Frantz imag­ines that by the Thir­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry, humans have become crabs sit­ting in judg­ment of the peo­ple of the Twen­ti­eth.

Crab images, Royle argues, “point to impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal ideas,” includ­ing “the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ignominy inher­ent in the con­cept of free­dom itself” and the “rep­re­hen­si­ble ‘crabs’ who decline to assume their free­dom” and thus scut­tle around mind­less­ly in groups. Crus­taceans con­tin­ued to haunt the philoso­pher. While the effects of the mesca­line even­tu­al­ly dis­si­pat­ed, “when he was feel­ing down,” writes Cox, Sartre would get the “recur­rent feel­ing, the delu­sion, that he was being pur­sued by a giant lob­ster, always just out of sight… per­pet­u­al­ly about to arrive.”

One of the “great, dark­ly com­ic fea­tures of Sartre folk­lore,” the huge, invis­i­ble lob­ster invites much spec­u­la­tion about Sartre’s men­tal health. But per­haps it was only the mon­strous embod­i­ment of his own feel­ings of mau­vaise foi, giv­en vivid form by a lin­ger­ing psy­chotrop­ic hang­over and a dai­ly diet of uppers and downers—a reminder of the “anx­i­ety, anguish, dread, appre­hen­sion, fear of pain, fear of death… [and] fun­da­men­tal absur­di­ty of exis­tence.” As Royle writes, Sartre, always fond of puns, “could only have been intrigued” by the French word for lob­ster, homard, which sounds like “homme-ard,” a coinage that might sug­gest some­thing like “a bad man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Michel Fou­cault Tripped on Acid in Death Val­ley and Called It “The Great­est Expe­ri­ence of My Life” (1975)

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Con­cepts of Free­dom & “Exis­ten­tial Choice” Explained in an Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Stephen Fry

The Draw­ings of Jean-Paul Sartre

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

The Famous Break Up of Sigmund Freud & Carl Jung Explained in a New Animated Video

in History, Psychology | June 28th, 2018

Mak­ing friends with sim­i­lar inter­ests can be a chal­lenge for any­one. But imag­ine you are the founder of an entire­ly new dis­ci­pline, with its own pecu­liar jar­gon, set of prac­tices, and con­cep­tu­al cat­e­gories. Imag­ine, for exam­ple, that you are Sig­mund Freud, who in 1896 made his break with med­i­cine to pur­sue the work of psy­cho­analy­sis. Draw­ing on clin­i­cal expe­ri­ence with patients, his own self-analy­sis, cocaine-induced rever­ies, and an idio­syn­crat­ic read­ing of Greek mythol­o­gy, Freud invent­ed his strange psy­cho­sex­u­al the­o­ries with­in the con­fi­dence of a very small cir­cle of acquain­tances and admir­ers.

One of his close rela­tion­ships dur­ing those pro­duc­tive and tur­bu­lent years, with eccen­tric ear, nose, and throat doc­tor Wil­helm Fliess—a col­lab­o­ra­tor, influ­ence, “con­fes­sor and moral sup­port­er”—end­ed bad­ly in 1906. It was in that same year that Freud met the much-younger Carl Jung. At their first meet­ing, the two “talked non­stop for 13 hours,” the Aeon video above, ani­mat­ed by Andrew Khos­ra­vani, tells us. Thus began the intense and now-leg­endary six-year friend­ship between the psy­chi­a­trists, a “pas­sion­ate and sur­pass­ing­ly weird rela­tion­ship, which, giv­en the peo­ple involved, per­haps shouldn’t come as a sur­prise.” Freud set­tled upon Jung as his pro­tege and suc­ces­sor, the “Joshua to my Moses,” over­joyed to have found a friend who seemed to under­stand his ideas inti­mate­ly.

They trav­eled to the US to give joint lec­tures and ana­lyzed each other’s dreams. Freud wrote to pro­pose that Jung should think of their rela­tion­ship as between “father and son,” an odd pro­pos­al in any friend­ship, but espe­cial­ly when the “father” invent­ed the Oedi­pal com­plex; “this did not go unno­ticed by Freud, and he freaked out a lit­tle.” The unset­tling dynam­ic already pre­sent­ed a shaky basis for a long term bond, but it was their wild­ly diver­gent ideas that ulti­mate­ly drove them apart. Jung took issue with Freud’s obses­sion with libido as the pri­ma­ry dri­ver of human behav­ior. Freud cast a with­er­ing eye on Jung’s keen inter­est in reli­gion, mys­ti­cism, and the para­nor­mal as expres­sions of a col­lec­tive uncon­scious.

As he had divorced him­self from Wil­helm Fleiss in 1906, Freud sim­i­lar­ly, abrupt­ly, broke off his friend­ship with Jung in 1913, send­ing a rather nasty break-up let­ter to sev­er their “emo­tion­al tie.” Jung, he wrote, “while behav­ing abnor­mal­ly keeps shout­ing that he is nor­mal,” giv­ing rise to “the sus­pi­cion that he lacks insight into his ill­ness. Accord­ing­ly, I pro­pose that we aban­don our per­son­al rela­tions entire­ly.” The video ends by declar­ing Freud the win­ner of this “feud,” such as it was, though the per­son­al con­flict seems rather one-sided. As Jung would lat­er relate, he “soon dis­cov­ered that when [Freud] had thought some­thing, then it was set­tled.” After Freud broke it off, Jung wrote in his diary, “the rest is silence.”

As for the lega­cies of both men, these seem set­tled as well. They both had sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on writ­ers and artists of all kinds, on lit­er­ary the­o­rists, new age mys­tics, and philoso­phers. But Jung is hard­ly tak­en seri­ous­ly in the main­stream of psy­chi­a­try, and Freud’s ideas have large­ly been aban­doned, save for one: as mil­lions who still reveal them­selves week­ly on ther­a­pists’ couch­es can attest, the talk­ing cure of psy­cho­analy­sis is alive and well.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed Video Tells the Sto­ry of Jean-Paul Sartre & Albert Camus’ Famous Falling Out (1952)

The Famous Let­ter Where Freud Breaks His Rela­tion­ship with Jung (1913)

Carl Jung Explains Why His Famous Friend­ship with Sig­mund Freud Fell Apart in Rare 1959 Audio

How a Young Sig­mund Freud Researched & Got Addict­ed to Cocaine, the New “Mir­a­cle Drug,” in 1894

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

Discover an Archive of Taped New York City-Area Punk & Indie Concerts from the 80s and 90s: The Pixies, Sonic Youth, The Replacements & Many More

in Archives, Music | June 27th, 2018

“For decades now,” John Coulthart writes at Dan­ger­ous Minds, “Hobo­ken has been on an implaca­ble course of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion… to the point that scruffy and leg­endary music venues can’t hack it there any­more.” One could replace “Hobo­ken” with the name of vir­tu­al­ly any US city that once host­ed a sem­i­nal live venue. You live long enough, you see the world com­plete­ly change, and all the punk and indie clubs shut down or moved to Brook­lyn. The 21st cen­tu­ry has giv­en us cities few indie artists or their fans can afford, even as it also gives us high-speed inter­net, huge servers, cheap web host­ing, and hard dri­ves that can hold ter­abytes of dig­i­tal music.

But at least the club shows of the past can live on in incred­i­bly awe­some archives like The McKen­zie Tapes, “a col­lec­tion of live audio record­ings from some of the New York City-area’s most promi­nent music venues of the 1980s and 1990s.”

Record­ed by David McKen­zie, a for­mer employ­ee of leg­endary Hobo­ken venue Maxwell’s and con­sum­mate con­cert-goer, the taped gigs come from such venues as The Ritz, Tramps, Irv­ing Plaza, The Roxy, the Cat Club, Bow­ery Ball­room, CBGB’s, the Knit­ting Fac­to­ry, and, of course, Maxwell’s.

Too many leg­endary bands to list in full show up here: some major high­lights include The Replace­ments at the Ritz in 1986, right after the release of Tim. (See them at the top in a sound­check at Maxwell’s that same year); the Pix­ies at Maxwell’s in 1988, play­ing songs from their just-released water­shed Surfer Rosa; Son­ic Youth on back-to-back nights at CBGB’s in 88, play­ing Day­dream Nation the month before record­ing the album. Hüsker Dü, Wire, John Spencer Blues Explo­sion, The Fall, The Feel­ies, Afghan Whigs, Mud­honey, Vio­lent Femmes, Mojo Nixon—the shows are a who’s who of punk and indie from the last two decades of the cen­tu­ry, with appear­ances from 70s leg­ends like Pat­ti Smith and Tom Ver­laine.

Sprin­kled through­out are sur­pris­es like a 1989 per­for­mance from Sun Ra and his Inter­galac­tic Arkestra at Maxwell’s and gigs by blues stal­warts T Mod­el Ford and R.L. Burn­side, as well as the occa­sion­al out­lier show abroad. The project is the work of Jer­sey City record col­lec­tor, archivist, event pro­duc­er, and pod­cast­er Tom Gal­lo, friend of David McKen­zie, and he has done an excel­lent job of pre­serv­ing not only the music from McKenzie’s tapes, but images of the tapes themselves—with hand-writ­ten band names and song titles and black-and-white Xerox­ed covers—as well as Vil­lage Voice list­ings of the gigs and occa­sion­al tick­et stubs, setlists, and live pho­tos.

Don’t expect much in the way of sound quality—that’s part of the charm of a taped show. These are raw doc­u­ments of the cas­sette age, a time come and gone, nev­er to come again. We might not mourn its pass­ing, but something—a spir­it of exper­i­men­tal, noisy, tune­ful, angry, rau­cous, lo-fi, ana­log indie fun—seems to have dis­ap­peared along with it. All of these dig­i­tized tapes are down­load­able. Put ’em on your phone and relive the glo­ry days, or dis­cov­er these trea­sures from the recent past for the first time at The McKen­zie Tapes here.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A His­to­ry of Alter­na­tive Music Bril­liant­ly Mapped Out on a Tran­sis­tor Radio Cir­cuit Dia­gram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

A Mas­sive 800-Track Playlist of 90s Indie & Alter­na­tive Music, in Chrono­log­i­cal Order

Stream a Mas­sive Col­lec­tion of Indie, Noise Indus­tri­al Mix­tapes from the 80s and 90s

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

The Simpsons Take on Ayn Rand: See the Show’s Satire of The Fountainhead and Objectivist Philosophy

in Comedy, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Television | June 25th, 2018

Say what you will about the tenets of Objectivism—to take a fan favorite line from a lit­tle film about bowl­ing and white Rus­sians. At least it’s an ethos. As for Ayn Rand’s attempts to real­ize her “absurd phi­los­o­phy” in fic­tion, we can say that she was rather less suc­cess­ful, in aes­thet­ic terms, than lit­er­ary philoso­phers like Albert Camus or Simone de Beau­voir. But that’s a high bar. When it comes to sales fig­ures, her nov­els are, we might say, com­pet­i­tive.

Atlas Shrugged is some­times said to be the sec­ond best-sell­ing book next to the Bible (with a sig­nif­i­cant degree of over­lap between their read­er­ships). The claim is gross­ly hyper­bol­ic. With some­where around 7 mil­lion copies sold, Rand’s most pop­u­lar nov­el falls behind oth­er cap­i­tal­ist clas­sics like Think and Grow Rich. Still, along with The Foun­tain­head and her oth­er osten­si­bly non-fic­tion­al works, Rand sold enough books to make her com­fort­able in life, even if she spent her last years on the dole.

Since her death, Rand’s books have grown in pop­u­lar­i­ty each decade, with a big spike imme­di­ate­ly after the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis. That pop­u­lar­i­ty isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly hard to explain as an appeal to ado­les­cent self­ish­ness and grandios­i­ty, and it has made her works ripe tar­gets for satire—especially since they almost read like self-par­o­dy already. And who bet­ter to take on Rand than The Simp­sons, reli­able pop satirists of great Amer­i­can delu­sions since 1989?

The show’s take on The Foun­tain­head, above, has baby Mag­gie in the role of archi­tect Howard Roark, the book’s genius indi­vid­u­al­ist whose extra­or­di­nary tal­ent is sti­fled by a crit­ic named Ellsworth Toohey (a card­board car­i­ca­ture of British the­o­rist and politi­cian Harold Las­ki). In this ver­sion, Toohey is a vicious preschool teacher in tweed, who insists on edu­cat­ing his charges in banal­i­ty (“medi­oc­rity rules!”) and knocks down Maggie’s block cathe­dral with a snide “wel­come to the real world.”

In response to Toohey’s abuse, Mag­gie deliv­ers a pompous solil­o­quy about her own great­ness, as Rand’s heroes are wont to do. She is again sub­ject­ed to preschool repres­sion in the clip just above—this time not at the hands of a social­ist crit­ic but from the head­mistress of the Ayn Rand School for Tots. The dom­i­neer­ing dis­ci­pli­nar­i­an tells Marge her aim is to “devel­op the bot­tle with­in” and dis­suade her stu­dents from becom­ing “leech­es,” a dig at Rand’s tendency—one sad­ly par­rot­ed by her acolytes—to dehu­man­ize recip­i­ents of social ben­e­fits as par­a­sites.

Read­ers of Roald Dahl will be remind­ed of Matil­da’s Miss Trunch­bull, and the bar­racks-like day­care, its walls lined with Objec­tivist slo­gans, becomes a site for some Great Escape capers. These sly ref­er­ences hint at a deep­er critique—suggesting that the lib­er­tar­i­an phi­los­o­phy of hyper-indi­vid­u­al­ism con­tains the poten­tial for tyran­ny and ter­ror as bru­tal as that of the most dog­mat­i­cal­ly col­lec­tivist of utopi­an schemes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Christo­pher Hitchens Dis­miss­es the Cult of Ayn Rand: There’s No “Need to Have Essays Advo­cat­ing Self­ish­ness Among Human Beings; It Requires No Rein­force­ment”

Flan­nery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960)

When Ayn Rand Col­lect­ed Social Secu­ri­ty & Medicare, After Years of Oppos­ing Ben­e­fit Pro­grams

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

A Brief, Visual Introduction to Surrealism: A Primer by Doctor Who Star Peter Capaldi

in Art, History | June 22nd, 2018

Sur­re­al­ism, accord­ing to this short Unlock Art video from the Tate, began in Paris, at the cafe Les Deux Magots, in 1924. You can still go there, but among its habitués you won’t find the fel­low on whom the cam­era zooms in: André Bre­ton, author of the Sur­re­al­ist Man­i­festo. That influ­en­tial text drew inspi­ra­tion from the work of Sig­mund Freud, father of psy­cho­analy­sis, specif­i­cal­ly his book The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams.

“Bre­ton believed art and lit­er­a­ture could rep­re­sent the uncon­scious mind,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor Peter Capal­di, well known as one of the Doc­tors of Doc­tor Who. He then names some artists who agreed with Bre­ton on this point, such as Sal­vador Dalí, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Rene Magritte — just a few of the Sur­re­al­ists. “Sur­re­al,” as an adjec­tive, has per­haps fall­en vic­tim to debase­ment by overuse in the past 84 years. But Bre­ton had spe­cif­ic ideas about Sur­re­al­is­m’s poten­tial effects, its sources of pow­er, and its meth­ods.

Desire, for instance, “was cen­tral to the Sur­re­al­ist vision of love, poet­ry, and lib­er­ty. It was the key to under­stand­ing human beings.” Sur­re­al­ist artis­tic prac­tices includ­ed putting objects “that were not nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with one anoth­er togeth­er, to make some­thing that was play­ful and dis­turb­ing at the same time in order to stim­u­late the uncon­scious mind.” Think of Dalí’s 1936 Lob­ster Tele­phone, made out of those very objects. “It’s about food and sex,” Capal­di pro­nounces. The Sur­re­al­ist vision also extend­ed to more com­pli­cat­ed endeav­ors, such as elab­o­rate paint­ings and films that still fas­ci­nate today.

You can catch up on Sur­re­al­ist film here on Open Cul­ture, begin­ning with Luis Buñuel & Sal­vador Dalí’s night­mar­ish 1929 short Un Chien Andalou, con­tin­u­ing on to the Sur­re­al­ist fea­ture Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy (a col­lab­o­ra­tion by the likes of Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger and Hans Richter), and the his­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist cin­e­ma as pre­sent­ed by David Lynch, a film­mak­er wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the move­men­t’s mod­ern heirs. Whether Bre­ton would rec­og­nize the Sur­re­al­ist sen­si­bil­i­ty in its cur­rent man­i­fes­ta­tions will remain a mat­ter of debate, but who could watch this Unlock Art primer and fail to sense the fas­ci­na­tion its basic ideas — or basic com­pul­sions, per­haps — still hold today?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

Restored Ver­sion of Un Chien Andalou: Luis Buñuel & Sal­vador Dalí’s Sur­re­al Film (1929)

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

When The Sur­re­al­ists Expelled Sal­vador Dalí for “the Glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Hit­ler­ian Fas­cism” (1934)

30 Hours of Doc­tor Who Audio Dra­mas Now Free to Stream Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What Makes Taxi Driver So Powerful? An In-Depth Study of Martin Scorsese’s Existential Film on the Human Condition

in Film | June 21st, 2018

The field jack­et, the mohawk, the “real rain” that will “wash all this scum off the streets,” the vir­tu­oso track­ing shot over the after­math of a mas­sacre, “You talkin’ to me?”: so many ele­ments of Taxi Dri­ver have found per­ma­nent places in cin­e­mat­ic cul­ture, and almost as many have found per­ma­nent places in the cul­ture, peri­od. Thanks to its wide-rang­ing influ­ence as well as its pres­ence that endures more than forty years on, even those who’ve nev­er seen the movie in some sense already know it.

What makes Taxi Dri­ver so pow­er­ful? Lewis Bond, video essay­ist and cre­ator of Chan­nel Criswell, sets out to answer that ques­tion in the two-part, fea­ture-length analy­sis above. Mar­tin Scors­ese’s fifth film, and the sec­ond of his col­lab­o­ra­tions with Robert de Niro, Taxi Dri­ver came out in 1976.

Adapt­ing the film noir tra­di­tion for an even more cyn­i­cal post-Viet­nam era, it osten­si­bly mount­ed a grim cri­tique of Amer­i­ca. Audi­ences of the 1970s, espe­cial­ly audi­ences of New York­ers, might have read­i­ly iden­ti­fied with the judg­ments of moral, social and urban decay bit­ter­ly aired by de Niro as Travis Bick­le.

But before long, those first view­ers sure­ly real­ized that they were watch­ing a work of art both more com­plex and more uni­ver­sal than that. Bond’s read­ing of the film gets right to the study at its heart of iso­la­tion, hypocrisy, puri­ty, cor­rup­tion, desire, and vengeance, char­ac­ter­is­tics found in but hard­ly unique to the human expe­ri­ence in 70s New York City. “Mar­tin Scors­ese’s 1976 film is a film that does not grow dat­ed, or over-famil­iar,” writes Roger Ebert in a 2004 appre­ci­a­tion. “I have seen it dozens of times. Every time I see it, it works; I am drawn into Travis’ under­world of alien­ation, lone­li­ness, hap­less­ness and anger.”

Ebert under­stands, as Bond does, that “utter alone­ness is at the cen­ter of Taxi Dri­ver, one of the best and most pow­er­ful of all films, and per­haps it is why so many peo­ple con­nect with it even though Travis Bick­le would seem to be the most alien­at­ing of movie heroes. We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are bet­ter at deal­ing with it.” Yet over the past four decades, even as New York has emerged from near-bank­rupt­cy to become one of the most expen­sive and glam­orous of all cities, real-life Travis Bick­les have vis­it­ed their vio­lent, mis­be­got­ten vengeance all over Amer­i­ca. Mak­ing Taxi Dri­ver, Scors­ese and his col­lab­o­ra­tors thought they were cap­tur­ing the dying gasp of a city. Instead, they cap­tured an aspect of the human con­di­tion that haunts us more than ever today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Revis­it Mar­tin Scorsese’s Hand-Drawn Sto­ry­boards for Taxi Dri­ver

Robert De Niro’s Taxi Cab License Used to Pre­pare for Taxi Dri­ver (1976)

What Is Apoc­a­lypse Now Real­ly About? An Hour-Long Video Analy­sis of Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Viet­nam Mas­ter­piece

Mar­tin Scors­ese Teach­es His First Online Course on Film­mak­ing: Fea­tures 30 Video Lessons

The Essen­tial Ele­ments of Film Noir Explained in One Grand Info­graph­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Barack Obama Shares a List of Enlightening Books Worth Reading

in Books, Current Affairs | June 20th, 2018

Pho­to by Pete Souza via obamawhitehouse.archive.gov

What­ev­er his­to­ri­ans have to say about his polit­i­cal lega­cy, Barack Oba­ma will be remem­bered as charm­ing, diplo­mat­ic, thought­ful, and very well-read. He honed these per­son­al qual­i­ties not only as a politi­cian but as a schol­ar, writer, and teacher, roles that require intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty and open­ness to oth­er points of view. The for­mer pres­i­dent was some­thing of a dream come true for teach­ers and librar­i­ans, who could point to him as a shin­ing exam­ple of a world leader who loves to read, talk about books, and share books with oth­ers. All kinds of books: from nov­els and poet­ry to biog­ra­phy, phi­los­o­phy, soci­ol­o­gy, and polit­i­cal and sci­en­tif­ic non­fic­tion; books for chil­dren and books for young adults.

It is refresh­ing to look back at his tenure as a reli­able rec­om­mender of qual­i­ty books dur­ing his eight years in office. (See every book he rec­om­mend­ed dur­ing his two terms here.) Read­ing gave him the abil­i­ty to “slow down and get per­spec­tive,” he told Michiko Kaku­tani last year. He hoped to use his office, he said, “to widen the audi­ence for good books. At a time when so much of our pol­i­tics is try­ing to man­age this clash of cul­tures brought about by glob­al­iza­tion and tech­nol­o­gy and migra­tion, the role of sto­ries to unify—as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize—is more impor­tant than ever.”

While many peo­ple have been hop­ing he would weigh in on deeply dis­turb­ing cur­rent events, he “has been rel­a­tive­ly qui­et on social media of late,” notes Thu-Huong Ha at Quartz. But he has con­tin­ued to use his plat­form to rec­om­mend good books, sug­gest­ing that the per­spec­tives we gain from read­ing are as crit­i­cal as ever. “In a Face­book post pub­lished on Sat­ur­day, Oba­ma rec­om­mend­ed some of the non­fic­tion he’s read recent­ly, focused on gov­ern­ment, inequal­i­ty, and his­to­ry, with one book that address­es immi­gra­tion. Togeth­er the rec­om­men­da­tions are an intel­lec­tu­al anti­dote to the cur­rent US pres­i­dent, who eschews read­ing,” says Ha.

The list below includes Obama’s brief com­men­tary on each book and arti­cle.

Futureface: A Fam­i­ly Mys­tery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belong­ing, by Alex Wag­n­er (2018)

Jour­nal­ist Alex Wag­n­er inves­ti­gates a poten­tial new twist in her family’s his­to­ry. “What she came up with,” Oba­ma writes, “is a thought­ful, beau­ti­ful med­i­ta­tion on what makes us who we are—the search for har­mo­ny between our own indi­vid­ual iden­ti­ties and the val­ues and ideals that bind us togeth­er as Amer­i­cans.”

The New Geog­ra­phy of Jobs, by Enri­co Moret­ti (2012)

Econ­o­mist Enri­co Moret­ti argues that there are three Amer­i­c­as: brain-hub cities like Austin and Boston; cities once dom­i­nat­ed by tra­di­tion­al man­u­fac­tur­ing; and the cities in between. “Still a time­ly and smart dis­cus­sion of how dif­fer­ent cities and regions have made a chang­ing econ­o­my work for them,” writes Oba­ma, “and how pol­i­cy­mak­ers can learn from that to lift the cir­cum­stances of work­ing Amer­i­cans every­where.”

Why Lib­er­al­ism Failed, by Patrick J. Deneen (2018)

Polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Patrick J. Deneen argues that lib­er­al­ism is not the result of the nat­ur­al state of pol­i­tics and lays out the ideology’s inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions. “In a time of grow­ing inequal­i­ty, accel­er­at­ing change, and increas­ing dis­il­lu­sion­ment with the lib­er­al demo­c­ra­t­ic order we’ve known for the past few cen­turies,” says the for­mer pres­i­dent, “I found this book thought-pro­vok­ing.”

“The 9.9 Per­cent Is the New Amer­i­can Aris­toc­ra­cy,” by Matthew Stew­art (June 2018)

In The Atlantic, Matthew Stew­art, author of The Man­age­ment Myth, defines a “cog­ni­tive elite,” a “9.9%” of Amer­i­cans who val­ue mer­i­toc­ra­cy and, he argues, are com­plic­it in the ero­sion of democ­ra­cy. “Anoth­er thought-pro­vok­ing analy­sis, this one about how eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty in Amer­i­ca isn’t just grow­ing, but self-rein­forc­ing,” says Oba­ma.

In the Shad­ow of Stat­ues: A White South­ern­er Con­fronts His­to­ry, by Mitch Lan­drieu (2018)

Mitch Lan­drieu, the for­mer may­or of New Orleans, Louisiana, writes in his mem­oir of the per­son­al his­to­ry and reck­on­ing with race that led him to take down four Con­fed­er­ate stat­ues in 2017. “It’s an ulti­mate­ly opti­mistic take from some­one who believes the South will rise again not by reassert­ing the past, but by tran­scend­ing it,” writes Oba­ma.

“Truth Decay: An Ini­tial Explo­ration of the Dimin­ish­ing Role of Facts and Analy­sis in Amer­i­can Pub­lic Life,” by Jen­nifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, RAND Cor­po­ra­tion (2018)

This report for the non­prof­it RAND Cor­po­ra­tion, avail­able as a free ebook, attempts to study the ero­sion of fact-based pol­i­cy mak­ing and dis­course in the US. “A look at how a selec­tive sort­ing of facts and evi­dence isn’t just dis­hon­est, but self-defeat­ing,” says Oba­ma.

While the for­mer pres­i­dent no longer has the pow­er to sway pol­i­cy, he can still inspire mil­lions of peo­ple to read—essential for stay­ing bal­anced, informed, and reflec­tive in our per­ilous times.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pres. Oba­ma Releas­es a Free Playlist of 40 Songs for a Sum­mer Day (Plus 6 Books on His Sum­mer Read­ing List)

The 5 Books on Pres­i­dent Obama’s 2016 Sum­mer Read­ing List

The Oba­ma “Hope” Poster & The New Copy­right Con­tro­ver­sy

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

An Introduction to Ivan Ilyin, the Philosopher Behind the Authoritarianism of Putin’s Russia & Western Far Right Movements

in History, Philosophy, Politics | June 19th, 2018

Fas­cism had been creep­ing back into Euro­pean and North Amer­i­can pol­i­tics for many years before the word regained its cur­ren­cy in main­stream dis­course as an alarm­ing descrip­tion of present trends. In 2004, his­to­ri­an Enzo Tra­ver­so wrote of the “unset­tling phe­nom­e­non” of “the rise of fas­cist-inspired polit­i­cal move­ments in the Euro­pean are­na (from France to Italy, from Bel­gium to Aus­tria).” Many of those far-right move­ments have come very close to win­ning pow­er, as in Aus­tria and France’s recent elec­tions, or have done so, as in Italy’s.

And while the sud­den rise of the far right came as a shock to many in the US, polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors fre­quent­ly point out that the ero­sion of demo­c­ra­t­ic civ­il rights and lib­er­ties has been a decades-long project, coin­cid­ing with the finan­cial­iza­tion of the econ­o­my, the pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic goods and ser­vices, the rise of the mass sur­veil­lance state, and the extra­or­di­nary war pow­ers assumed, and nev­er relin­quished, by the exec­u­tive after 9/11, cre­at­ing a per­ma­nent state of excep­tion and weak­en­ing checks on pres­i­den­tial pow­er.

This is not even to men­tion the auto­crat­ic regimes of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, which are tied to oth­er anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments across the West not only geopo­lit­i­cal­ly but also philo­soph­i­cal­ly, a sub­ject that gets far less press than it deserves. When analy­sis of the philo­soph­i­cal under­pin­nings of neo-fas­cism comes up, it often focus­es on Russ­ian aca­d­e­m­ic Alexan­der Dug­in, “who has been called,” notes Salon’s Conor Lynch, “every­thing from ‘Putin’s brain’ to ‘Putin’s Rasputin.’” (Bloomberg calls Dug­in “the one Russ­ian link­ing Putin, Erdo­gon and Trump.”)

Dugin’s fusion of Hei­deg­ger­ian post­mod­ernism and apoc­a­lyp­tic mys­ti­cism plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in the ide­ol­o­gy of the glob­al­ized far right. But Yale his­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der—who has writ­ten exten­sive­ly on both Sovi­et Rus­sia and Nazi Germany—points to an ear­li­er Russ­ian thinker whom he says exer­cis­es con­sid­er­able influ­ence on the ide­ol­o­gy of Vladimir Putin, the fas­cist philoso­pher Ivan Ilyin.

Anton Bar­bashin and Han­nah Thoburn called Ilyin “Putin’s philoso­pher” in a For­eign Affairs pro­file. Ilyin was “a pub­li­cist, a con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist, and a Russ­ian nation­al­ist with a core of fascis­tic lean­ings.” David Brooks iden­ti­fied Ilyin as one of a trio of nation­al­ist philoso­phers Putin quotes and rec­om­mends. Sny­der defines Ilyin’s phi­los­o­phy as explic­it­ly “Russ­ian Chris­t­ian fas­cism,” describ­ing at the New York Review of Books the Russ­ian thinker’s pro­lif­ic writ­ing before and after the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, a hodge­podge of Ger­man ide­al­ism, psy­cho­analy­sis, Ital­ian fas­cism, and Chris­tian­i­ty.

In brief, Ilyin’s the­o­ret­i­cal works argued that “the world was cor­rupt; it need­ed redemp­tion from a nation capa­ble of total pol­i­tics; that nation was unsoiled Rus­sia.” Ilyin’s, and Putin’s, Russ­ian nation­al­ism has had a para­dox­i­cal­ly glob­al appeal among a wide swath of far right polit­i­cal par­ties and move­ments across the West, as Sny­der writes in his lat­est book The Road to Unfree­dom: Rus­sia, Europe, Amer­i­ca. “What these ways of think­ing have in com­mon,” write The Econ­o­mist in their review of Sny­der’s book, “is a qua­si-mys­ti­cal belief in the des­tiny of nations and rulers, which sets aside the need to observe laws or pro­ce­dures, or grap­ple with phys­i­cal real­i­ties.”

Sny­der sum­ma­rizes Ilyin’s ideas in the Big Think video above in ways that make clear how his thought appeals to far right move­ments across nation­al bor­ders. Ilyin, he says, is “prob­a­bly the most impor­tant exam­ple of how old ideas”—the fas­cism of the 20s, 30s, and 40s—“can be brought back in the 21st cen­tu­ry for a post­mod­ern con­text.” Those ideas can be sum­ma­rized in three the­ses, says Sny­der, the first hav­ing to do with the con­ser­v­a­tive reifi­ca­tion of social hier­ar­chies. “Social advance­ment was impos­si­ble because the polit­i­cal sys­tem, the social sys­tem, is like a body… you have a place in this body. Free­dom means know­ing your place.”

“A sec­ond idea,” says Sny­der, relates to vot­ing as a rat­i­fi­ca­tion, rather than elec­tion, of the leader. “Democ­ra­cy is a rit­u­al…. We only vote in order to affirm our col­lec­tive sup­port for our leader. The leader’s not legit­i­mat­ed by our votes or cho­sen by our votes.” The leader, instead, emerges “from some oth­er place.… In fas­cism the leader is some kind of hero, who emerges from myth.” The third idea might imme­di­ate­ly remind US read­ers of Karl Rove’s dis­missal of the “real­i­ty-based com­mu­ni­ty,” a chill­ing augur of the fact-free real­i­ty of today’s pol­i­tics.

Ilyin thought that “the fac­tu­al world doesn’t count. It’s not real.” In a restate­ment of gnos­tic the­ol­o­gy, he believed that “God cre­at­ed the world but that was a mis­take. The world was a kind of abort­ed process,” because it lacks coher­ence and uni­ty. The world of observ­able facts was, to him, “hor­ri­fy­ing…. Those facts are dis­gust­ing and of no val­ue what­so­ev­er.” These three ideas, Sny­der argues, under­pin Putin’s rule. They also define Amer­i­can polit­i­cal life under Trump, he con­cludes in his New York Review of Books essay.

Ilyin “made of law­less­ness a virtue so pure as to be invis­i­ble,” Sny­der writes, “and so absolute as to demand the destruc­tion of the West. He shows us how frag­ile mas­culin­i­ty gen­er­ates ene­mies, how per­vert­ed Chris­tian­i­ty rejects Jesus, how eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty imi­tates inno­cence, and how fas­cist ideas flow into the post­mod­ern. This is no longer just Russ­ian phi­los­o­phy. It is now Amer­i­can life.” There are more than enough home­grown sources for Amer­i­can author­i­tar­i­an­ism and inequal­i­ty, one can argue. But Sny­der makes a com­pelling case for the obscure Russ­ian thinker as an indi­rect, and insid­i­ous, influ­ence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

George Orwell’s Final Warn­ing: Don’t Let This Night­mare Sit­u­a­tion Hap­pen. It Depends on You!

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

Rapping, Deconstructed: How Some of the Greatest Rappers Make Their Rhymes

in Music, Poetry | June 15th, 2018

If high school Eng­lish teach­ers can chal­lenge skep­ti­cal stu­dents to cul­ti­vate an appre­ci­a­tion for Shake­speare and poet­ry with rap-based assign­ments, might the reverse also hold true?

Many afi­ciona­dos of high cul­ture turn up their noses at rap, believ­ing it to be a sim­ple form, requir­ing more brag­gado­cio than tal­ent.

Estelle Caswell, rap fan and pro­duc­er of Vox’s Ear­worm series, may get them to rethink that posi­tion with the above video, show­cas­ing how great rap­pers assem­ble rhymes.

Caswell uses visu­al graph­ing to explain the progress from the A‑A-B‑B scheme of ear­ly rap­per Kur­tis Blow’s “The Breaks” (1980) to the com­plex and sur­pris­ing holorimes of her per­son­al favorite, MF DOOM.

To appre­ci­ate her visu­al break­downs, you must under­stand that raps can be scored like tra­di­tion­al music. Here the bar reigns supreme—each bar con­sist­ing of four beats. The fur­ther out we go from rap’s ori­gins, the more its prac­ti­tion­ers play with place­ment and rhyme.

Above are some lyrics from Eric B. and Rakim’s 1986 cut, “Eric B. Is Pres­i­dent,” fea­tur­ing inter­nal rhymes high­light­ed in yel­low and mul­ti-syl­lab­ic rhymes picked out in pink. You’ll also find them escap­ing the tyran­ny of the bar line, con­tin­u­ing the rhyme on the first beat of the next bar.

Caswell is so intent on exam­in­ing the late Noto­ri­ous B.I.G.‘s “Hyp­no­tize,” that she over­looks a rather siz­able ele­phant in the room, the misog­y­nis­tic POV behind those en and oo sounds.

Short­ly there­after, Mos Def ups both the rhyming game and the fem­i­nist account­abil­i­ty, by stuff­ing his com­po­si­tions with mul­ti-syl­lab­ic words and phras­es that sort of rhyme—cinnamon, Entenmann’s, adren­a­line and “sent to them.”

Mean­while, Andre 3000 is play­ing with vary­ing the accent of his rhymes, rel­a­tive to the beat and bar, rather than com­mit­ting to a pre­dictable thud­ding.

Eminem, who has the dis­tinc­tion of pen­ning the first rap to win an Acad­e­my Award, places a pre­mi­um on nar­ra­tive, and refus­es to con­cede that noth­ing rhymes with orange.

Cur­rent chart top­per Kendrick Lamar’s gal­lop­ing “Rig­amor­tis” estab­lish­es a musi­cal motif that Caswell com­pares to Beethoven’s famous fifth.

MF DOOM kicks the ball fur­ther down the court with dou­ble enten­dres, word­play and a will­ing­ness to steer clear of the expect­ed “b word.”

Lis­ten to a Spo­ti­fy playlist of the songs ref­er­enced in the video.

Delve fur­ther into the sub­ject by read­ing the thoughts of rap ana­lyst Mar­tin Con­nor, whom Caswell cred­its as a sort of bea­con.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

Found­ing Fathers, A Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed By Pub­lic Enemy’s Chuck D, Presents the True His­to­ry of Hip Hop

150 Songs from 100+ Rap­pers Get Art­ful­ly Woven into One Great Mashup: Watch the “40 Years of Hip Hop”

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