Three Huge Volumes of Stoic Writings by Seneca Now Free Online, Thanks to Tim Ferriss

in Philosophy | October 27th, 2017

“The great­est obsta­cle to liv­ing is expectan­cy, which hangs upon tomor­row and los­es today,” wrote Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger. “You are arrang­ing what is in For­tune’s con­trol and aban­don­ing what lies in yours.” That still much-quot­ed obser­va­tion from the first-cen­tu­ry Roman philoso­pher and states­man, best known sim­ply as Seneca, has a place in a much larg­er body of work. Seneca’s writ­ings stand, along with those of Zeno, Epicte­tus, and Mar­cus Aure­lius, as a pil­lar of Sto­ic phi­los­o­phy, a sys­tem of think­ing which empha­sizes the pri­ma­cy of per­son­al virtue and the impor­tance of observ­ing one­self objec­tive­ly and mas­ter­ing, instead of being mas­tered by, one’s own emo­tions.

The Sto­ics found their way of life ben­e­fi­cial indeed in the harsh real­i­ty of more than 2,000 years ago, but Sto­icism los­es none of its val­ue when prac­ticed by those of us liv­ing today.

“At its core, it teach­es you how to sep­a­rate what you can con­trol from what you can­not, and it trains you to focus exclu­sive­ly on the for­mer,” writes self-improve­ment maven Tim Fer­riss in his intro­duc­tion to The Tao of Seneca, the three-vol­ume col­lec­tion of Seneca’s let­ters, illus­tra­tion and lined mod­ern com­men­tary, that he’s just pub­lished free on the inter­net. (For instruc­tions on how to upload them to your Kin­dle, see this page.)

Of all the Sto­ics, he con­tin­ues, “Seneca stands out as easy to read, mem­o­rable, and sur­pris­ing­ly prac­ti­cal. He cov­ers specifics rang­ing from han­dling slan­der and back­stab­bing, to fast­ing, exer­cise, wealth, and death.” (Fer­riss has also cre­at­ed audio­book ver­sions of the texts, which you can buy through Audi­ble. Or get a cou­ple for free by sign­ing up for Audi­ble’s 30-day free tri­al pro­gram.)

Fer­ris sug­gests mak­ing Seneca “part of your dai­ly rou­tine. Set aside 10–15 min­utes a day and read one let­ter. Whether over cof­fee in the morn­ing, right before bed, or some­where in between, digest one let­ter.” He also adds that “Sto­icism has spread like wild­fire through­out Sil­i­con Val­ley and the NFL in the last five years, becom­ing a men­tal tough­ness train­ing sys­tem for CEOs, founders, coach­es, and play­ers alike,” evi­denc­ing a results-ori­ent­ed approach that may divide Sto­icism enthu­si­asts, many of whom believe that the true Sto­ic should nev­er con­sid­er the prod­uct, which will always lie out­side one’s realm of con­trol, but only the process. But even the ancients would sure­ly agree that any prompt to action is worth tak­ing, espe­cial­ly when it asks the cost of not a sin­gle coin — drach­ma, denar­ius, pen­ny, or bit.

The Tao of Seneca will be added to our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

(via /r/stoicism)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Sto­icism, the Ancient Greek Phi­los­o­phy That Lets You Lead a Hap­py, Ful­fill­ing Life

Alain de Botton’s School of Life Presents Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to Hei­deg­ger, The Sto­ics & Epi­cu­rus

A Guide to Hap­pi­ness: Alain de Botton’s Doc­u­men­tary Shows How Niet­zsche, Socrates & 4 Oth­er Philoso­phers Can Change Your Life

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

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.

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“The Philosopher’s Web,” an Interactive Data Visualization Shows the Web of Influences Connecting Ancient & Modern Philosophers

in Design, Philosophy | October 20th, 2017

How do we begin to read phi­los­o­phy? Can we slide a book from the shelf, thumb through it casu­al­ly, pick­ing out the bits of wis­dom that make sense?

Should we find a well-known “impor­tant” work, sit in a qui­et study, read the pref­ace, translator’s intro­duc­tion, etc…

How soon we dis­cov­er we know less about the book than when we start­ed.

We go wan­der­ing, lose our­selves in sec­ondary sources, gloss­es, foot­notes, com­ments sec­tions, Wikipedia arti­cles…. The impor­tant book remains unread….

In-between these two extremes are a vari­ety of approach­es that work well for many an auto­di­dact. When data sci­en­tist Grant Louis Oliveira decid­ed he want­ed to under­take a self-guid­ed course of study to “more rig­or­ous­ly explore my ideas,” he began with the hon­est admis­sion, “I find the world of phi­los­o­phy a bit impen­e­tra­ble.”

Where some of us might make an out­line, a spread­sheet, or a hum­ble read­ing list, Oliveira cre­at­ed a com­plex “social net­work visu­al­iza­tion” of “a his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy” to act as his guide.

“What I imag­ined,” he writes, “is some­thing like a tree arranged down a time­line. More influ­en­tial philoso­phers would be big­ger nodes, and the size of the lines between the nodes would per­haps be vari­able by strength of influ­ence.”

The project, called “Philosopher’s Web,” shows us an impres­sive­ly dense col­lec­tion of names—hundreds of names—held togeth­er by what look like the bendy fil­a­ments in a fiber-optic cable. Each blue dot rep­re­sents a philoso­pher, the thin gray lines between the dots rep­re­sent lines of influ­ence.

The data for the project comes not from aca­d­e­m­ic schol­ar­ship but from Wikipedia, whose “seman­tic com­pan­ion” dbpe­dia Oliveira used to con­struct the web of “influ­enced” and “influ­enced by” con­nec­tions. (Read about his method here.)

As you zoom in, click around, and access dif­fer­ent views, the dots and lines wave like ten­drils of a sea anemone. Oliveira describes the process thus: “the more influ­en­tial the philoso­pher, the thick­er and more numer­ous the lines ema­nat­ing from him. You can click on any one of these nodes to see which philoso­pher it rep­re­sents. If you click and hold, it will dis­play the net­work of philoso­phers he has been influ­enced by, and has influ­enced. Each line has an arrow at the end to denote the direc­tion of the rela­tion­ship.” (Despite his use of the mas­cu­line pro­noun, Oliveira’s web of con­nec­tions is not exclu­sive­ly male.)

Both the pro­jec­t’s site and Dai­ly Nous have more nuanced, detailed instruc­tions. While at first glance the Philosopher’s Web can itself seem a bit impen­e­tra­ble, it reveals more of its inner work­ings the more you use it. Press and hold on one of the blue dots, and it expands into a small­er clus­ter of its own, show­ing a cloud of con­nec­tions hov­er­ing around the cen­tral fig­ure. Tog­gle the “focus” and you get sec­ondary and ter­tiary rela­tion­ships.

 

Click on the lines of influ­ence and see, instead of an expla­na­tion, a some­what mys­ti­fy­ing “influ­ence score.” Click on the “Fil­ter” tab under “Set­tings” and find a range of fil­ters that allow you to nar­row or widen the scope of the map to cer­tain his­tor­i­cal peri­ods.

In addi­tion to indi­vid­ual philoso­phers, the web also con­tains the names of sev­er­al writ­ers, jour­nal­ists, colum­nists, and pop­u­lar pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als, like Paul Krug­man and Ayaan Hir­si Ali. It also dis­plays sev­er­al move­ments or schools of thought as blue dots. Want to know the big names in “Insur­rec­tionary Anar­chism”? Click on the node and chose your lev­els of speci­fici­ty.

The weak­ness­es of the approach are per­haps imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent. What good is a clus­ter of unfa­mil­iar names to the begin­ner, espe­cial­ly since each one appears devoid of his­tor­i­cal and intel­lec­tu­al con­text? Oliveira dis­clos­es some oth­er prob­lems, includ­ing an issue with the soft­ware ren­der­ing accents and for­eign char­ac­ters (as you can see in Slavoj Žižek’s entry above.)

But the more one uses the Philosopher’s Web, the more its util­i­ty becomes appar­ent. “Hope­ful­ly based on con­text,” writes Oliveira, “you should be able to fig­ure out who these peo­ple are with a lit­tle bit of google.” Visu­al­iz­ing the con­nec­tions between them gives one an instant sense of the com­mu­ni­ties and con­ti­nu­ities to which they belong, and among each clus­ter will always be at least one or two famil­iar names, at least in pass­ing, to act as an anchor.

All in all, the Philosopher’s Web should prove to be a use­ful appli­ca­tion for a cer­tain kind of learn­er, and it rep­re­sents a step-up from the rit­u­al of click­ing through Wikipedia links to try and put the puz­zle pieces togeth­er one at a time. The Philoso­pher’s Web joins a num­ber of oth­er sim­i­lar visu­al­iza­tions (see the links below) that aim at cre­at­ing sim­i­lar maps of the dis­ci­pline.

Should you find the approach a lit­tle ster­ile and schemat­ic, well… there’s always that book you put down a few hours ago.…

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Entire Dis­ci­pline of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized with Map­ping Soft­ware: See All of the Com­plex Net­works

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

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

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

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An Animated Introduction to Michel de Montaigne

in Philosophy | October 17th, 2017

Con­sid­ered the first great human­ist essay­ist, Michel de Mon­taigne was also the first to use the word “essay” for the casu­al, often mean­der­ing, fre­quent­ly first-per­son explo­rations that now con­sti­tute the most preva­lent lit­er­ary form of our day. “Any­one who sets out to write an essay,” notes Antho­ny Got­tlieb in The New York Times, “for a school or col­lege class,” a mag­a­zine, news­pa­per, Tum­blr, or oth­er­wise, “owes some­thing” to Mon­taigne, the French “mag­is­trate and landown­er near Bor­deaux who retired tem­porar­i­ly from pub­lic life in 1570 to spend more time with his library and to make a mod­est memen­to of his mind.”

Mon­taigne’s result­ing book, called the Essais—“tri­als” or “attempts”—exemplifies the clas­si­cal and Chris­t­ian pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of the Renais­sance; he dwelt intent­ly on ques­tions of char­ac­ter and virtue, both indi­vid­ual and civic, and he con­stant­ly refers to ancient author­i­ties, the com­pan­ions of his book-lined fortress of soli­tude. “Some­what like a link-infest­ed blog post,” writes Got­tlieb, “Montaigne’s writ­ing is drip­ping with quo­ta­tions.” But he was also a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern writer, who skew­ered the over­con­fi­dence and blind ide­al­ism of ancients and con­tem­po­raries alike, and looked with amuse­ment on faith in rea­son and progress.

For all his con­sid­er­able eru­di­tion, Mon­taigne was “keen to debunk the pre­ten­sions of learn­ing,” says Alain de Bot­ton in his intro­duc­to­ry School of Life video above. An “extreme­ly fun­ny” writer, he shares with coun­try­man François Rabelais a satirist’s delight in the vul­gar and taboo and an hon­est appraisal of humanity’s check­ered rela­tion­ship with the good life. Though we may call Mon­taigne a moral­ist, the descrip­tion should not imply that he was strict­ly ortho­dox in any way—quite the con­trary.

Montaigne’s ethics often defy the dog­ma of both the Romans and the Chris­tians. He stren­u­ous­ly opposed col­o­niza­tion, for exam­ple, and made a sen­si­ble case for can­ni­bal­ism as no more bar­barous a prac­tice than those engaged in by 16th cen­tu­ry Euro­peans.

In a con­trar­i­an essay, “That to Study Phi­los­o­phy is to Learn to Die”—its title a quo­ta­tion from Cicero’s Tus­cu­lan Dis­pu­ta­tions—Mon­taigne threads the nee­dle between memen­to mori high seri­ous­ness and off­hand wit­ti­cism, writ­ing, “Let the philoso­phers say what they will, the main thing at which we all aim, even in virtue itself, is plea­sure. It amus­es me to rat­tle in their ears this word, which they so nau­se­ate to hear.” But in the next sen­tence, he avows that we derive plea­sure “more due to the assis­tance of virtue than to any oth­er assis­tance what­ev­er.”

The great­est ben­e­fit of prac­tic­ing virtue, as Cicero rec­om­mends, is “the con­tempt of death,” which frees us to live ful­ly. Mon­taigne attacks the mod­ern fear and denial of death as a par­a­lyz­ing atti­tude. Instead, “we should always, as near as we can, be boot­ed and spurred, and ready to go,” he breezi­ly sug­gests. “The dead­est deaths are the best.… I want death to find me plant­i­ng cab­bages.” The irrev­er­ence he brought to the gravest of subjects—making, for exam­ple, a list of sud­den and ridicu­lous deaths of famous people—serves not only to enter­tain but to edi­fy, as de Bot­ton argues above in an episode of his series “Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness.”

Mon­taigne “seemed to under­stand what makes us feel bad about our­selves, and in his book tries to make us feel bet­ter.” He endeav­ors to show, as he wrote in his first essay, “that men by var­i­ous means arrive at the same end.” Like lat­er first-per­son philo­soph­i­cal essay­ists Kierkegaard and Niet­zsche, Mon­taigne address­es our feel­ings of inad­e­qua­cy by remind­ing his read­ers how thor­ough­ly we are gov­erned by the same irra­tional pas­sions, and sub­ject to the same fears, con­ceits, and ail­ments. There is much wis­dom and com­fort to be found in Montaigne’s essays. Yet he is beloved not only for what he says, but for how he says it—with a style that makes him seem like an elo­quent, bril­liant, prac­ti­cal, and self-dep­re­cat­ing­ly sym­pa­thet­ic friend.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Goethe, Germany’s “Renais­sance Man”

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

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

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The Existential Philosophy of Cowboy Bebop, the Cult Japanese Anime Series, Explored in a Thoughtful Video Essay

in Animation, Philosophy, Television | October 11th, 2017

Super Dimen­sion Fortress Macross, Mobile Suit Gun­dam Wing, Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion — these are the kind of titles that might ring a bell even if you have no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in futur­is­tic Japan­ese ani­mat­ed tele­vi­sion shows. But how about Cow­boy Bebop? That evoca­tive­ly West­ern name itself, not an awk­ward Eng­lish trans­la­tion of a Japan­ese title but Eng­lish in the orig­i­nal, hints that the series stands apart from all the dimen­sion fortress­es, mobile suits, and neon gene­ses out there. And indeed, when it first aired in 1997, view­ers the world over took quick note of the dis­tinc­tive sen­si­bil­i­ty of its sto­ries of a ship­ful of boun­ty hunters drift­ing through out­er space in the year 2071.

“On paper, Cow­boy Bebop, the leg­endary cult ani­me series from Shinichirō Watan­abe” — recent­ly direc­tor of one of Blade Run­ner 2049’s short pre­quels — “reads like some­thing John Wayne, Elmore Leonard, and Philip K. Dick came up with dur­ing a wild, all-night whiskey ben­der.” So writes the Atlantic’s Alex Suskind in a piece on the show’s last­ing lega­cy. “Every­one speaks like they’re back­ground extras in Chi­na­town. The show ulti­mate­ly fea­tures so many cross-rang­ing influ­ences and nods to oth­er famous works it’s almost impos­si­ble to keep track. It’s Ser­gio Leone in a space­suit. It’s Butch Cas­sidy and the Sun­dance Kid with auto­mat­ic weapons.”

And yet Cow­boy Bebop remains, thor­ough­ly, a work of Japan­ese imag­i­na­tion, and like many of the most respect­ed of the form, it has seri­ous philo­soph­i­cal incli­na­tions. Chan­nel Criswell cre­ator Lewis Bond exam­ines those in “The Mean­ing of Noth­ing,” his video essay on the series. “Can we as humans find some­thing in noth­ing, find pur­pose beyond sur­vival?” Bond asks. “These onto­log­i­cal thoughts that plague us make up the same exis­ten­tial drift our char­ac­ters repeat­ed­ly find them­selves in, and it’s what is most sig­nif­i­cant to the jour­ney of Cow­boy Bebop.” He looks past the cool­er-than-cool style, snap­py dia­logue, wit­ty gags, and rich, unex­pect­ed mix­ture of aes­thet­ic influ­ences to which fans have thrilled to find “a meta­phys­i­cal expres­sion of how peo­ple over­come their lives, par­tic­u­lar­ly the lin­ger­ing grief that comes with them.”

Tak­en as a whole, the show resolves into a pre­sen­ta­tion of life as “less of a lin­ear path towards a goal, more of a haze that we must ven­ture through with­out any guid­ance, because the sad real­i­ty of Bebop’s sto­ry is that our cast of char­ac­ters are lost in the cos­mos with­out any jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for why they live, oth­er than to exist.” The series came to a famous­ly ambigu­ous end after 26 episodes, but this past sum­mer we heard that it may return, reboot­ed as a live-action series. What­ev­er its medi­um, the world of Cow­boy Bebop — with its space­craft, its inter­plan­e­tary cops and rob­bers, and its super­in­tel­li­gent cor­gi — amounts to noth­ing less than the human con­di­tion, a place we have no choice but to revis­it. Might as well do it in style.

The com­plete Cow­boy Bebop series can be bought on blu-ray, or if you’re a sub­scriber, you can watch the episodes on Hulu.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the New Ani­me Pre­quel to Blade Run­ner 2049, by Famed Japan­ese Ani­ma­tor Shinichi­ro Watan­abe

The Phi­los­o­phy, Sto­ry­telling & Visu­al Cre­ativ­i­ty of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Ani­me Film, Explained in Video Essays

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

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.

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

in Environment, Philosophy | October 10th, 2017

In addi­tion to sum­ming up Socrates and his Euro­pean heirs, Alain de Bot­ton has also applied his five-minute ani­mat­ed video approach to the very basics of East­ern phi­los­o­phy. While offer­ing its intro­duc­to­ry sur­veys, the series may hope­ful­ly spur view­ers on to greater appre­ci­a­tion of, for exam­ple, the Bud­dha, Lao Tzu, and Japan­ese Zen mas­ter Sen no Rikyu, who refined the tea cer­e­mo­ny as a metic­u­lous med­i­ta­tive rit­u­al. Rikyu’s prac­tice shows us how much philo­soph­i­cal and reli­gious tra­di­tions (often a dis­tinc­tion with­out a dif­fer­ence) in Japan and Chi­na engage rig­or­ous­ly with every­day objects and rou­tines as often as they do with texts and lec­tures.

Yes­ter­day, we brought you sev­er­al short expla­na­tions of one such prac­tice, Kintsu­gi, the wabi sabi art of “find­ing beau­ty in bro­ken things” by turn­ing cracked and bro­ken pot­tery into gild­ed, beau­ti­ful­ly flawed ves­sels. Sev­er­al hun­dred years ear­li­er, in 826 AD, renowned Tang Dynasty poet and civ­il ser­vant Bai Juyi dis­cov­ered a pair of odd­ly shaped rocks that cap­ti­vat­ed his atten­tion. Tak­ing them home to his study, he then wrote a poem about them, influ­enced by Daoism’s rev­er­ence for the forces of nature and inspired by the hard evi­dence such forces carved into the rocks. Like the bro­ken pot­tery of Japan’s Kintsu­gi, Bai’s rocks come in part to sym­bol­ize human frailty. In this case, he casts the rocks as friends in his lone­ly old age, ask­ing them, “Can you keep com­pa­ny with an old man like myself?”

After Bai Juyi, aes­thet­ic med­i­ta­tions on the beau­ty of rock for­ma­tions became high­ly pop­u­lar and quick­ly refined into “four prin­ci­pal cri­te­ria,” writes the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art: “thin­ness (shou), open­ness (tou), per­fo­ra­tions (lou), and wrin­kling (zhou).” The found arti­facts are often known as “scholar’s rocks”—a mis­trans­la­tion, de Bot­ton says, of a term mean­ing “spir­it stones”—and are cho­sen for their nat­ur­al wild­ness, as well as shaped by human hands. They were placed in gar­dens and stud­ies, and “became a favorite and endur­ing pic­to­r­i­al genre.” Dur­ing the ear­ly Song dynasty, such stones were “con­stant sources of inspi­ra­tion,” and were “val­ued quite as high­ly as any paint­ing or cal­li­graph­ic scroll.”

So high­ly-prized were these objects, in fact, that they appear to “have has­tened the col­lapse of the North­ern Song Empire,” through a mania not unlike that which drove the tulip craze in the 17th cen­tu­ry Nether­lands. As did many Chi­nese cul­tur­al traditions—including Zen Buddhism—the love of rocks crossed over into Japan, where it was adapt­ed “in a par­tic­u­lar­ly Japan­ese way” in the 15th cen­tu­ry, inspir­ing the “sub­dued, smooth,” min­i­mal­ist rock gar­dens we’re like­ly famil­iar with, if only through their con­sumer nov­el­ty ver­sions.

As per usu­al, de Bot­ton imbues his les­son with a take­away moral: rock rev­er­ence teach­es us that “wis­dom can hang off bits of the nat­ur­al world just as well as issu­ing from books.” We may also see the love of rocks as a kind of anti-con­sumerist prac­tice, in which we shift the atten­tion we typ­i­cal­ly lav­ish on dis­pos­able objects des­tined for land­fills, trash­heaps, and plas­tic-lit­tered oceans, and instead apply it to beau­ti­ful bits of the nat­ur­al world, which require few invest­ments of labor or cap­i­tal to enrich our lives, and can be found right out­side our doors, if we’re care­ful and atten­tive enough to see them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kintsu­gi: The Cen­turies-Old Japan­ese Craft of Repair­ing Pot­tery with Gold & Find­ing Beau­ty in Bro­ken Things

East­ern Phi­los­o­phy Explained with Three Ani­mat­ed Videos by Alain de Botton’s School of Life

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

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

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Alan Watts Explains the Meaning of the Tao, with the Help of the Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn

in Comics/Cartoons, Life, Philosophy | October 9th, 2017

A Nan­cy pan­el is an irre­ducible con­cept, an atom, and the com­ic strip is a mol­e­cule. — comics the­o­rist Scott McCloud

A lit­tle over ten years ago, car­toon­ist Jim Woodring iso­lat­ed a sin­gle image from Ernie Bushmiller’s long-run­ning and deeply polar­iz­ing Nan­cy com­ic strip, cel­e­brat­ing it on his blog, the Woodring Mon­i­tor, as “the great­est Nan­cy pan­el ever drawn.”

What makes this pan­el the great­est? Woodring declined to elab­o­rate, though his read­ers eager­ly shared the­o­ries—and some befuddlement—in the com­ments sec­tion:

Slug­go has reached the per­fect state of no-effort, the satori-like denial of the “small mind” and all of the suf­fer­ing that comes with it.

… it’s the com­ic equiv­a­lent of a koan—something designed to tie our ratio­nal mind in knots so that we can glimpse enlight­en­ment.

Slug­go smiles because he knows a secret. He says no because he rejects con­sen­sus real­i­ty. He floats along because he doesn’t fight life—he sees the main­te­nance of the har­mo­ny and is one with that har­mo­ny. He knows all paths lead away from home. Instead he goes with­in and knows free­dom.

“I am con­tent. I need noth­ing, I will do noth­ing, I am fine as I am.”

Anoth­er fan, Glyph Jock­ey’s Lex 10, took it one step fur­ther, remov­ing the speech bub­ble before tak­ing Slug­go on an ani­mat­ed trip through the cos­mos, nar­rat­ed by philoso­pher Alan Watts:

In the state of being in accor­dance with the Tao, there is a cer­tain feel­ing of weight­less­ness, par­al­lel to the weight­less­ness that peo­ple feel when they get into out­er space or when they go deep into the ocean.

Gab­by Pahinui’s “Pu’uanahulu” and Ramayana imagery bestow added hyp­not­ic appeal.

Revis­it this strange lit­tle ani­mat­ed gem the next time your head­’s about to explode from stress. Don’t ques­tion or get too hung up on mean­ings, just go with the flow, like Slug­go and Watts.

Could oth­er Nan­cy pan­els serve as vehi­cles for Taoist enlight­en­ment? May­haps:

Bushmiller’s strong point was nev­er the con­tent of his com­ic strip’s jokey plots—a friend once described him as ‘a moron on an acid trip.’ In fact, the gags were even sim­pler than was nec­es­sary for a ‘chil­dren’s’ strip. That’s because they were just a vehi­cle for the con­trolled and bril­liant manip­u­la­tion of rep­e­ti­tion and vari­ety that gave the strip its unique visu­al rhythm and com­po­si­tion. Bush­miller chore­o­graphed his famil­iar for­mal ele­ments inside the tight­est frame of any major strip, and that helped make it the most beau­ti­ful, as a whole, of any in the papers.” — Tom Smuck­er, The Vil­lage Voice, 1982

Recent­ly, Bushmiller’s Nan­cy has been enjoy­ing a renais­sance. The strip that many casu­al read­ers of the fun­ny pages dis­missed as bor­ing or dumb is revered by many cel­e­brat­ed car­toon­ists, includ­ing Bill Grif­fith, Daniel Clowes, and Art Spiegel­man.

This month sees the pub­li­ca­tion of Paul Karasik and Mark New­gar­den’s How to Read Nan­cy, a book length analy­sis of one sin­gle strip, which also func­tions as a how-to and his­to­ry of the com­ic medi­um. This hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed vol­ume has in turn giv­en rise to a live­ly online How To Read Nan­cy Read­ing Group, a hotbed of fan art, altered pan­els, and Nan­cy strips from around the world.

Invite your pals over to play com­ic the­o­rist Scott McCloud’s Dadaist game Five Card Nan­cy or take the online ver­sion for a solo spin.

And for those who require con­text, here is the orig­i­nal strip from which the float­ing Slug­go pan­el is drawn.

Appar­ent­ly the key to the Tao is a plas­tic ham­mock…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

Three Charles Bukows­ki Books Illus­trat­ed by Robert Crumb: Under­ground Com­ic Art Meets Out­sider Lit­er­a­ture

Fol­low Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Barry’s 2017 “Mak­ing Comics” Class Online, Pre­sent­ed at UW-Wis­con­sin

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

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

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Hugh Hefner (RIP) Defends “the Playboy Philosophy” to William F. Buckley, 1966

in Life, Philosophy, Politics, Television | September 28th, 2017

“Mr. Hefn­er’s mag­a­zine is most wide­ly known for its total expo­sure of the human female,” says William F. Buck­ley, intro­duc­ing the guest on this 1966 broad­cast of his talk show Fir­ing Line. “Though of course oth­er things hap­pen in its pages.” Not long before, pub­lish­er and plea­sure empire-builder Hugh Hefn­er’s Play­boy mag­a­zine ran a series of arti­cles on “the Play­boy phi­los­o­phy,” a set of obser­va­tions of and propo­si­tions about human sex­u­al­i­ty that pro­vid­ed these men fod­der for their tele­vised debate. Hefn­er stands against reli­gious­ly man­dat­ed, chasti­ty-cen­tered codes of sex­u­al moral­i­ty; Buck­ley demands to know how Hefn­er earned the qual­i­fi­ca­tions to issue new codes of his own. Describ­ing the Play­boy phi­los­o­phy as “sort of a hedo­nis­tic util­i­tar­i­an­ism,” Buck­ley tries simul­ta­ne­ous­ly to under­stand and demol­ish these 20th-cen­tu­ry revi­sions of the rules of sex.

“The Play­boy founder is no match for the Catholic who snipes him at will with ‘moral’ bul­lets,” writes the poster of the video. “The acer­bic, dry Buck­ley is on attack mode with a con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ence, in moral pan­ic, behind him. The Catholic had the era of con­ser­vatism behind him. [ … ] In the 21st cen­tu­ry though, Buck­ley would have a hard­er time defend­ing moral­i­ty with Hefn­er.” One won­ders how Buck­ley and Hefn­er, were they still alive today, might revis­it this debate in 2017. (Buck­ley died in 2008, and Hefn­er passed away yes­ter­day at the age of 91.) Times have cer­tain­ly changed, but I sus­pect Buck­ley would raise the same core objec­tion to Hefn­er’s argu­ment that loos­en­ing the old stric­tures on sex leads, per­haps coun­ter­in­tu­itive­ly, to more sat­is­fied, more monog­a­mous pair­ings: “How in the hell do you know?” Though this and cer­tain oth­er of Buck­ley’s ques­tions occa­sion­al­ly wrong-foot Hefn­er, the faith­ful can rest assured that he keeps enough cool to fire up his sig­na­ture pipe on cam­era.

Note: This post first appeared on our site back in 2012. We brought it back today for obvi­ous rea­sons, and updat­ed it to reflect Hefn­er’s pass­ing. Since 2012, a huge archive of “Fir­ing Line” episodes have been put online. Get more on that here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

375+ Episodes of William F. Buckley’s Fir­ing Line Now Online: Fea­tures Talks with Chom­sky, Borges, Ker­ouac, Gins­berg & More

Yeah, Baby! Deep Pur­ple Gets Sha­gadel­ic on Play­boy After Dark

James Bald­win Bests William F. Buck­ley in 1965 Debate at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Jack Ker­ouac Meets William F. Buck­ley (1968)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How Can We Know What is True? And What Is BS? Tips from Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman & Michael Shermer

in Philosophy, Science | September 22nd, 2017

Sci­ence denial­ism may be a deeply entrenched and enor­mous­ly dam­ag­ing polit­i­cal phe­nom­e­non. But it is not a whol­ly prac­ti­cal one, or we would see many more peo­ple aban­don med­ical sci­ence, air trav­el, com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy, etc. Most of us tac­it­ly agree that we know cer­tain truths about the world—gravitational force, nav­i­ga­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy, the germ the­o­ry of dis­ease, for exam­ple. How do we acquire such knowl­edge, and how do we use the same method to test and eval­u­ate the many new claims we’re bom­bard­ed with dai­ly?

The prob­lem, many pro­fes­sion­al skep­tics would say, is that we’re large­ly unaware of the epis­temic cri­te­ria for our think­ing. We believe some ideas and doubt oth­ers for a host of rea­sons, many of them hav­ing noth­ing to do with stan­dards of rea­son and evi­dence sci­en­tists strive towards. Many pro­fes­sion­al skep­tics even have the humil­i­ty to admit that skep­tics can be as prone to irra­tional­i­ty and cog­ni­tive bias­es as any­one else.

Carl Sagan had a good deal of patience with unrea­son, at least in his writ­ing and tele­vi­sion work, which exhibits so much rhetor­i­cal bril­liance and depth of feel­ing that he might have been a poet in anoth­er life. His style and per­son­al­i­ty made him a very effec­tive sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor. But what he called his “Baloney Detec­tion Kit,” a set of “tools for skep­ti­cal think­ing,” is not at all unique to him. Sagan’s prin­ci­ples agree with those of all pro­po­nents of log­ic and the sci­en­tif­ic method. You can read just a few of his pre­scrip­tions below, and a full unabridged list here.

Wher­ev­er pos­si­ble there must be inde­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion of the “facts.”

Encour­age sub­stan­tive debate on the evi­dence by knowl­edge­able pro­po­nents of all points of view.

Argu­ments from author­i­ty car­ry lit­tle weight — “author­i­ties” have made mis­takes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Per­haps a bet­ter way to say it is that in sci­ence there are no author­i­ties; at most, there are experts.

Spin more than one hypoth­e­sis. If there’s some­thing to be explained, think of all the dif­fer­ent ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dis­prove each of the alter­na­tives.

Try not to get over­ly attached to a hypoth­e­sis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way sta­tion in the pur­suit of knowl­edge. Ask your­self why you like the idea. Com­pare it fair­ly with the alter­na­tives. See if you can find rea­sons for reject­ing it. If you don’t, oth­ers will.

Anoth­er skep­tic, founder and edi­tor of Skep­tic mag­a­zine Michael Sher­mer, sur­rounds his epis­te­mol­o­gy with a sym­pa­thet­ic neu­ro­science frame. We’re all prone to “believ­ing weird things,” as he puts it in his book Why Peo­ple Believe Weird Things and his short video above, where he intro­duces, fol­low­ing Sagan, his own “Baloney Detec­tion Kit.” The human brain, he explains, evolved to see pat­terns every­where as a mat­ter of sur­vival. All of our brains do it, and we all get a lot of false pos­i­tives.

Many of those false pos­i­tives become wide­spread cul­tur­al beliefs. Sher­mer him­self has been accused of insen­si­tive cul­tur­al bias (evi­dent in the begin­ning of his video), intel­lec­tu­al arro­gance, and worse. But he admits up front that sci­en­tif­ic think­ing should tran­scend indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties, includ­ing his own. “You shouldn’t believe any­body based on author­i­ty or what­ev­er posi­tion they might have,” he says. “You should check it out your­self.”

Some of the ways to do so when we encounter new ideas involve ask­ing “How reli­able is the source of the claim?” and “Have the claims been ver­i­fied by some­body else?” Return­ing to Sagan’s work, Sher­mer offers an exam­ple of con­trast­ing sci­en­tif­ic and pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic approaches—the SETI (Search for Extrater­res­tri­al Intel­li­gence) Insti­tute and UFO believ­ers. The lat­ter, he says, uncrit­i­cal­ly seek out con­fir­ma­tion for their beliefs, where the sci­en­tists at SETI rig­or­ous­ly try to dis­prove hypothe­ses in order to rule out false claims.

Yet it remains the case that many people—and not all of them in good faith—think they’re using sci­ence when they aren’t. Anoth­er pop­u­lar sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor, physi­cist Richard Feyn­man, rec­om­mend­ed one method for test­ing whether we real­ly under­stand a con­cept or whether we’re just repeat­ing some­thing that sounds smart but makes no log­i­cal sense, what Feyn­man calls “a mys­tic for­mu­la for answer­ing ques­tions.” Can a con­cept be explained in plain Eng­lish, with­out any tech­ni­cal jar­gon? Can we ask ques­tions about it and make direct obser­va­tions that con­firm or dis­con­firm its claims?

Feyn­man was espe­cial­ly sen­si­tive to what he called “intel­lec­tu­al tyran­ny in the name of sci­ence.” And he rec­og­nized that turn­ing forms of know­ing into emp­ty rit­u­als result­ed in pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic think­ing. In a won­der­ful­ly ram­bling, infor­mal, and auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal speech he gave in 1966 to a meet­ing of the Nation­al Sci­ence Teach­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, Feyn­man con­clud­ed that think­ing sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly as a prac­tice requires skep­ti­cism of sci­ence as an insti­tu­tion.

“Sci­ence is the belief in the igno­rance of experts,” says Feyn­man. “If they say to you, ‘Sci­ence has shown such and such,’ you might ask, ‘How does sci­ence show it? How did the sci­en­tists find out? How? What? Where?’” Ask­ing such ques­tions does not mean we should reject sci­en­tif­ic con­clu­sions because they con­flict with cher­ished beliefs, but rather that we should­n’t take even sci­en­tif­ic claims on faith.

For elab­o­ra­tion on Sher­mer, Sagan and Feyn­man’s approach­es to telling good sci­en­tif­ic think­ing from bad, read these arti­cles in our archive:

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

Richard Feynman’s “Note­book Tech­nique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detec­tion Kit: What to Ask Before Believ­ing

 

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

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