A Crash Course in Existentialism: A Short Introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre & Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World

in Philosophy | December 22nd, 2016

Very broad­ly speak­ing, all phi­los­o­phy con­tains with­in it dialec­ti­cal ten­sions: some ideas seem ennobling and con­sol­ing, oth­ers unset­tling and alien­at­ing. Every school, move­ment, and indi­vid­ual thinker deals in some mea­sure of both. Some­times we feel unset­tled because of his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al dis­tance. When Socrates talks about slav­ery or cen­sor­ship in mat­ter-of-fact ways, for exam­ple, we might be star­tled, but his audi­ence didn’t see things the way we do. When it comes, how­ev­er, to the Exis­ten­tial­ists, the cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal milieu of these thinkers may resem­ble our own close­ly enough that state­ments which shocked their read­ers still shock most peo­ple today.

Take one of the big­ger ques­tions like, oh, the mean­ing of life. “We under­stand our lives as being mean­ing­ful,” says Hank Green above—brother of John Green, the oth­er half of the Crash Course edu­ca­tion­al team. We might find pur­pose and ful­fill­ment in a num­ber of things, from reli­gion to art, sports, careers, and pol­i­tics.

Exis­ten­tial­ists, Green tells us, would say that “any or all of these things can give your life mean­ing.” Con­sol­ing, eh? “But at the same time,” and here comes the down­er, “they say none of them can.” These thinkers may be spread out over time and space—from the 19th cen­tu­ry Den­mark and Ger­many of Kierkegaard and Niet­zsche to the 1950s France of Sartre, De Beau­voir, and Camus. But Exis­ten­tial­ist thinkers share at least one com­mon trait: anti-essen­tial­ism.

As Green explains, clas­si­cal phi­los­o­phy offered the com­fort­ing expla­na­tion that every­thing con­tained an essence: “a cer­tain set of core prin­ci­ples that are nec­es­sary or essen­tial for a thing to be what it is.” Not only do chairs and tables have essences but so do human beings, they thought, and “your essence gives you a pur­pose.” Still a very wide­spread and com­mon­place belief, we can prob­a­bly agree, and one peo­ple rarely think about crit­i­cal­ly unless they’re hav­ing… well, an exis­ten­tial cri­sis. So far so good when it comes to grasp­ing the essence (sor­ry) of Exis­ten­tial­ist think­ing.

Green goes astray how­ev­er, when he gets to Niet­zsche, whom he claims embraced Nihilism, “the belief in the ulti­mate mean­ing­less­ness of life.” Not only did Niet­zsche vehe­ment­ly oppose nihilism as self-defeat­ing, but he feared the con­se­quences of its spread, even if he some­times saw it as an inevitable prod­uct of moder­ni­ty. Anoth­er impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion when study­ing so-called Exis­ten­tial­ist thinkers is that they them­selves were deeply trou­bled by their trou­bling insights. Kierkegaard turned to a rad­i­cal form of Chris­tian­i­ty, Camus to an intro­spec­tive indi­vid­u­al­ism… and per­haps the most famous Exis­ten­tial­ist, Jean Paul Sartre, came to embrace doc­tri­naire Marx­ism.

But first, he for­mu­lat­ed the most quotable max­im of Exis­ten­tial­ist thought: “Exis­tence pre­cedes Essence.” From this, he drew a con­clu­sion both trou­bling and con­sol­ing: “It’s up to each of us to deter­mine who we are. We have to write our own essence through the way we choose to live.” But this lib­er­at­ed con­di­tion is absurd: it means we are ulti­mate­ly respon­si­ble for every­thing we do, even when we have no idea what’s going to hap­pen when we do it, or any larg­er pur­pose for doing it at all. Whether ardent­ly reli­gious like Kierkegaard or ardent­ly athe­ist like Niet­zsche and Sartre, Exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­phers who stared into the void found there all of the bound­less free­dom and ter­ri­fy­ing ver­ti­go we came to asso­ciate with the neu­ro­sis of the mod­ern human con­di­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Crash Course Phi­los­o­phy: Hank Green’s Fast-Paced Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy Gets Under­way on YouTube

What Is an “Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis”?: An Ani­mat­ed Video Explains What the Expres­sion Real­ly Means

Simone de Beau­voir Defends Exis­ten­tial­ism & Her Fem­i­nist Mas­ter­piece, The Sec­ond Sex, in Rare 1959 TV Inter­view

Exis­ten­tial­ism with Hubert Drey­fus: Four Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Watch a 2‑Year-Old Solve Philosophy’s Famous Ethical “Trolley Problem” (It Doesn’t End Well)

in Philosophy | December 22nd, 2016

“A run­away train is head­ing towards five work­ers on a rail­way line. There’s no way of warn­ing, but you’re stand­ing near a lever that oper­ates some points. Switch the points, and the train goes down a spur. Trou­ble is, there’s anoth­er work­er on that bit of track too, but it’s one fatal­i­ty instead of five. Should you do that?” Here we have the trol­ley prob­lem, which since its first artic­u­la­tion in 1967 by Philip­pa Foot has become the clas­sic exam­ple of an eth­i­cal dilem­ma as well as per­haps the best known thought exper­i­ment in all of phi­los­o­phy.

This expla­na­tion of the trol­ley prob­lem comes from one of the Har­ry Shear­er-nar­rat­ed BBC- and Open Uni­ver­si­ty-made ani­ma­tions pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. The short video above takes a dif­fer­ent approach, not just using a chil­dren’s train set to illus­trate it but then putting the famous ques­tion to the child him­self.


“Uh oh, Nicholas,” says the two-year-old’s father from behind the cam­era, “this train is going to crash into these five peo­ple! Should we move the train to go this way, or should we let it go that way?” The ele­gance of the tod­dler’s solu­tion, imple­ment­ed with­out hes­i­ta­tion, must be seen to be appre­ci­at­ed.

The father, E. J. Masi­cam­po of Wake For­est Uni­ver­si­ty, research­es “the effort­ful men­tal process­es that seem to sep­a­rate humans from oth­er ani­mals: resist­ing temp­ta­tions and impuls­es, rea­son­ing and deci­sion mak­ing, think­ing about and sim­u­lat­ing non-present events, and mak­ing plans for the future.” Among his pro­fes­sion­al goals, he lists work­ing toward “a the­o­ry of the human con­scious­ness” by uncov­er­ing “how con­scious thought con­tributes to human func­tion­ing in light of its appar­ent lim­i­ta­tions.” He’s tak­en on a prob­lem even hard­er than the one with the trol­leys; per­haps young Nicholas, what with his demon­strat­ed gift of “think­ing out­side the box,” invalu­able in the philo­soph­i­cal dis­ci­plines, can offer some assis­tance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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

9‑Year-Old Philoso­pher Pon­ders the Mean­ing of Life and the Uni­verse

Are You a Psy­chopath? Take the Test (And, If You Fail, It’s Not All Bad News)

The Epis­te­mol­o­gy of Dr. Seuss & More Phi­los­o­phy Lessons from Great Children’s Sto­ries

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style (1882)

in Philosophy, Psychology, Writing | December 19th, 2016

The life of Russ­ian-born poet, nov­el­ist, crit­ic, and first female psy­chol­o­gist Lou Andreas-Salomé has pro­vid­ed fod­der for both sala­cious spec­u­la­tion and intel­lec­tu­al dra­ma in film and on the page for the amount of roman­tic atten­tion she attract­ed from Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­als like philoso­pher Paul Rée, poet Rain­er Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Niet­zsche. Emo­tion­al­ly intense Niet­zsche became infat­u­at­ed with Salomé, pro­posed mar­riage, and, when she declined, broke off their rela­tion­ship in abrupt Niet­zschean fash­ion.

For her part, Salomé so val­ued these friend­ships she made a pro­pos­al of her own: that she, Niet­zsche and Rée, writes D.A. Bar­ry at 3:AM Mag­a­zine, “live togeth­er in a celi­bate house­hold where they might dis­cuss phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture and art.” The idea scan­dal­ized Nietzsche’s sis­ter and his social cir­cle and may have con­tributed to the “pas­sion­ate crit­i­cism” Salomé’s 1894 bio­graph­i­cal study, Friedrich Niet­zsche: The Man and His Works, received. The “much maligned” work deserves a reap­praisal, Bar­ry argues, as “a psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait.”

In Niet­zsche, Salomé wrote, we see “sor­row­ful ail­ing and tri­umphal recov­ery, incan­des­cent intox­i­ca­tion and cool con­scious­ness. One sens­es here the close entwin­ing of mutu­al con­tra­dic­tions; one sens­es the over­flow­ing and vol­un­tary plunge of over-stim­u­lat­ed and tensed ener­gies into chaos, dark­ness and ter­ror, and then an ascend­ing urge toward the light and most ten­der moments.” We might see this pas­sage as charged by the remem­brance of a friend, with whom she once “climbed Monte Sacro,” she claimed, in 1882, “where he told her of the con­cept of the Eter­nal Recur­rence ‘in a qui­et voice with all the signs of deep­est hor­ror.’”

We should also, per­haps pri­mar­i­ly, see Salomé’s impres­sions as an effect of Nietzsche’s tur­bu­lent prose, reach­ing its apoth­e­o­sis in his exper­i­men­tal­ly philo­soph­i­cal nov­el, Thus Spake Zarathus­tra. As a the­o­rist of the embod­i­ment of ideas, of their inex­tri­ca­ble rela­tion to the phys­i­cal and the social, Niet­zsche had some very spe­cif­ic ideas about lit­er­ary style, which he com­mu­ni­cat­ed to Salomé in an 1882 note titled “Toward the Teach­ing of Style.” Well before writ­ers began issu­ing “sim­i­lar sets of com­mand­ments,” writes Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings, Niet­zsche “set down ten styl­is­tic rules of writ­ing,” which you can find, in their orig­i­nal list form, below.

1. Of prime neces­si­ty is life: a style should live.

2. Style should be suit­ed to the spe­cif­ic per­son with whom you wish to com­mu­ni­cate. (The law of mutu­al rela­tion.)

3. First, one must deter­mine pre­cise­ly “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writ­ing must be mim­ic­ry.

4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in gen­er­al have for his mod­el a very expres­sive kind of pre­sen­ta­tion of neces­si­ty, the writ­ten copy will appear much paler.

5. The rich­ness of life reveals itself through a rich­ness of ges­tures. One must learn to feel every­thing — the length and retard­ing of sen­tences, inter­punc­tu­a­tions, the choice of words, the paus­ing, the sequence of argu­ments — like ges­tures.

6. Be care­ful with peri­ods! Only those peo­ple who also have long dura­tion of breath while speak­ing are enti­tled to peri­ods. With most peo­ple, the peri­od is a mat­ter of affec­ta­tion.

7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

8. The more abstract a truth which one wish­es to teach, the more one must first entice the sens­es.

9. Strat­e­gy on the part of the good writer of prose con­sists of choos­ing his means for step­ping close to poet­ry but nev­er step­ping into it.

10. It is not good man­ners or clever to deprive one’s read­er of the most obvi­ous objec­tions. It is very good man­ners and very clever to leave it to one’s read­er alone to pro­nounce the ulti­mate quin­tes­sence of our wis­dom.

As with all such pre­scrip­tions, we are free to take or leave these rules as we see fit. But we should not ignore them. While Nietzsche’s per­spec­tivism has been (mis)interpreted as wan­ton sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, his ven­er­a­tion for antiq­ui­ty places a high val­ue on for­mal con­straints. His prose, we might say, resides in that ten­sion between Dionysian aban­don and Apol­lon­ian cool, and his rules address what lib­er­al arts pro­fes­sors once called the Triv­i­um: gram­mar, rhetoric, and log­ic: the three sup­ports of mov­ing, expres­sive, per­sua­sive writ­ing.

Salomé was so impressed with these apho­ris­tic rules that she includ­ed them in her biog­ra­phy, remark­ing, “to exam­ine Nietzsche’s style for caus­es and con­di­tions means far more than exam­in­ing the mere form in which his ideas are expressed; rather, it means that we can lis­ten to his inner sound­ings.” Isn’t this what great writ­ing should feel like?

Salomé wrote in her study that “Niet­zsche not only mas­tered lan­guage but also tran­scend­ed its inad­e­qua­cies.” (As Niet­zsche him­self com­ment­ed in 1886, notes Hugo Dro­chon, he need­ed to invent “a lan­guage of my very own.”) Nietzsche’s bold-yet-dis­ci­plined writ­ing found a com­ple­ment in Salomé’s bold­ly keen analy­sis. From her we can also per­haps glean anoth­er prin­ci­ple: “No mat­ter how calum­nious the pub­lic attacks on her,” writes Bar­ry, “par­tic­u­lar­ly from [his sis­ter] Elis­a­beth Förster-Niet­zsche dur­ing the Nazi peri­od in Ger­many, Salomé did not respond to them.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

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

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Slavoj Žižek Answers the Question “Should We Teach Children to Believe in Santa Claus?”

in Life, Philosophy | December 16th, 2016

Local par­ent tells oth­er local par­ent how to raise their chil­dren: this sce­nario has pro­voked many a neigh­bor­hood list­serv flame­war, and maybe a street brawl or three. Unkempt and inflam­ma­to­ry philoso­pher Slavoj Žižek telling par­ents how to raise their chil­dren? Well… maybe a few hun­dred eye­rolls.

I exag­ger­ate. Žižek only address­es one small aspect of parenting—a benign, cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic one at that, which ranks far beneath, say, health and edu­ca­tion and falls in line with whether one should pre­tend to be a noc­tur­nal crea­ture who lives on children’s teeth, or to see a giant rab­bit in the spring.

We’re talk­ing about San­ta Claus, and to lie or not to lie to your kids is the ques­tion posed to Žižek by stu­dents at SUNY Brock­port in the low-qual­i­ty video above. If you can adjust to the audio/video, you’ll hear the cul­tur­al the­o­rist give an inter­est­ing answer. I can’t vouch for its con­so­nance with child psy­chol­o­gy, but as a par­ent, I can say my tiny demo­graph­ic con­firms the insight.

Though he’s near­ly inaudi­ble at first, we even­tu­al­ly hear Žižek say­ing, “No… they will absolute­ly take it as this cyn­i­cal [rea­son?] of ‘let’s pre­tend that it’s real,’ no mat­ter how much you insist that you mean it lit­er­al­ly.” For those who might ago­nize over the ques­tion, it may be most kids aren’t near­ly as gullible as we imag­ine, just good sports who don’t want to let us down.

This would not be a Žižek answer if it did not veer into claims far more ambi­tious, or grandiose, than the ques­tion seems to war­rant. Sens­ing per­haps he’s on shaky ground with the whole par­ent­ing advice thing, he quick­ly moves on to the sub­ject of “what does it mean, real­ly, to believe?” Belief, says Žižek—in the sense of indi­vid­ual, inward assent to meta­phys­i­cal propositions—is a mod­ern inven­tion.

In attempt­ing to make Saint Nicholas believ­able to chil­dren, we’ve para­dox­i­cal­ly turned him into a car­toon char­ac­ter (and in the U.S. and else­where ban­ished his lov­able demon side­kick, Kram­pus). Kids see right through it, says Žižek in anoth­er inter­view above. And so, “You have a belief which is nobody’s belief! Nobody believes in the first per­son.”

Why, then, not just admit we’re all pre­tend­ing, and say “we’re enjoy­ing a sto­ry togeth­er”? We do it every night with chil­dren, this one just involves food, lights, fam­i­ly, gifts, sweaters, uncom­fort­able trav­el and maybe reli­gious cer­e­monies of your tra­di­tion. You can often hear Žižek opine on those kinds of beliefs as well. My only com­ment on the mat­ter is to say, sin­cere­ly, Hap­py Hol­i­days.

via Crit­i­cal The­o­ry

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In His Lat­est Film, Slavoj Žižek Claims “The Only Way to Be an Athe­ist is Through Chris­tian­i­ty”

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

Hermeneu­tics of Toi­lets by Slavoj Žižek: An Ani­ma­tion About Find­ing Ide­ol­o­gy in Unlike­ly Places

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Medieval Doodler Draws a “Rockstar Lady” in a Manuscript of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy (Circa 1500)

in History, Life, Philosophy | December 13th, 2016

Sloane 554 f 53

By the ear­ly 6th cen­tu­ry, the West­ern Roman Empire had effec­tive­ly come to an end after the depo­si­tion of the final emper­or and the instal­la­tion of Ger­man­ic kings. Under the sec­ond such ruler, Theodor­ic the Great, emerged one of the most influ­en­tial works of lit­er­a­ture of the Euro­pean Mid­dle Ages: The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy. Its author, sen­a­tor and philoso­pher Boethius, wrote the text while impris­oned and await­ing exe­cu­tion.

A con­ver­sa­tion the despon­dent author has with his muse, Lady Phi­los­o­phy, the book seeks the nature of hap­pi­ness and the nature of God, in the midst of great loss, dis­grace, and tyran­ny. The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy belongs to a long tra­di­tion of prison lit­er­a­ture that extends to Don Quixote, “Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence,” and “Let­ter from a Birm­ing­ham Jail.” Almost a thou­sand years after Boethius’s 524 exe­cu­tion, one late Medieval read­er of his book—perhaps inspired by the text, or not—left the draw­ing you see above on the last page of a 15th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script.

medieval-rocker-2

Such doo­dling was com­mon prac­tice at the time, notes Medieval book his­to­ri­an Erik Kwakkel. Blank pages in man­u­scripts “often filled up with pen tri­als, notes, doo­dles, or draw­ings.” But this par­tic­u­lar doo­dle “is not what you’d expect: a full-on draw­ing of a maid­en play­ing the lute, which she holds just like a gui­tar.” Boethius may have dis­missed poet­ry in his search for hap­pi­ness in the midst of despair, but his lit­er­ary efforts might put us in mind of poet Berthold Brecht, who famous­ly wrote while in exile from Ger­many in the 1930s, “In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times.”

As if to remind us of the neces­si­ty not only of phi­los­o­phy, but also of song in dark times, our anony­mous read­er drew a “rock­star lady,” whose pose con­notes noth­ing but pure joy. We could jux­ta­pose her with the joy­ful gui­tar pos­es of any num­ber of mod­ern blues and rock stars, who have played through any num­ber of dark times. The draw­ing appears in a trans­la­tion by John Wal­ton dat­ing from between 1410 and 1500, a cen­tu­ry in Europe with no short­age of its own polit­i­cal crises and tyran­ni­cal rulers. “Even in the dark­est of times,” wrote Han­nah Arendt in her essay col­lec­tion pro­fil­ing artists and writ­ers like Boethius and Brecht, “we have the right to expect some illu­mi­na­tion,” whether from phi­los­o­phy or poet­ry. We also have the right—the medieval doo­dler in Boethius’ book seemed to sug­gest some 500-odd years ago—to rock out.

via Erik Kwakkel

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Was There a First Human Language?: Theories from the Enlightenment Through Noam Chomsky

in Biology, Philosophy, Science | December 6th, 2016

Dur­ing the 17th and 18th cen­turies, Euro­pean Enlight­en­ment philoso­phers dis­card­ed the ori­gin sto­ries in reli­gious texts as wild­ly implau­si­ble or sim­ply alle­gor­i­cal. But they found them­selves charged with com­ing up with their own, nat­u­ral­is­tic expla­na­tions for the ori­gins of life, law, moral­i­ty, etc. And most press­ing­ly for their inquiries into psy­chol­o­gy and cog­ni­tion, many of those thinkers sought to explain the ori­gins of lan­guage.

The Bib­li­cal sto­ry of the Tow­er of Babel had long been wide­ly accept­ed, either lit­er­al­ly or metaphor­i­cal­ly, as indica­tive that all humans once spoke the same lan­guage (The so-called “Adam­ic Lan­guage”). Many com­pet­ing the­o­ries came from philoso­phers like Locke, Rousseau, Condil­lac, Herder, and the Scot­tish jurist and philoso­pher James Bur­nett, known by his hered­i­tary title, Mon­bod­do.

Antic­i­pat­ing Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion as well as com­par­a­tive lin­guis­tics, Mon­bod­do argued that lan­guage arose as a response to a chang­ing envi­ron­ment, and that it came into being, along with human beings, in one place, then diver­si­fied as humans spread across the globe and diverged cul­tur­al­ly. This was known as the the­o­ry of mono­gen­e­sis, or the “sin­gle-ori­gin the­o­ry” of lan­guage.

As the nar­ra­tor in the video above, from lin­guis­tics YouTube chan­nel NativLang, puts it, even after the sto­ry had been naturalized—and the lan­guages of the world mapped into pro­to-evo­lu­tion­ary fam­i­ly trees—“Babel still held one intrigu­ing idea over us; that orig­i­nal lan­guage.” And yet, rather than search for the mys­ti­cal Adam­ic Lan­guage—the rev­e­la­tion of a divinity—as many alchemists and occultists had done, nat­ur­al philoso­phers like Mon­bod­do used emerg­ing com­par­a­tive lin­guis­tics meth­ods to attempt a his­tor­i­cal recon­struc­tion of the first human lan­guage.

They were less than suc­cess­ful. Giv­ing it up as futile, in 1866, the Soci­ety of Lin­guis­tics in Paris banned all dis­cus­sion of the issue. “Enter the late Joseph Green­berg” to begin the search anew, says NativLang. A 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can lin­guist, Green­berg used mass com­par­i­son and typol­o­gy to com­pare “super­fam­i­lies.” Lat­er lin­guists took up the chal­lenge, includ­ing Mer­ritt Ruhlen, who “com­pared vocab­u­lary from across the globe and recon­struct­ed 27 pro­to-words” sup­pos­ed­ly belong­ing to the first human lan­guage, called “Pro­to-World.” Ruhlen’s the­o­ry has since been crit­i­cal­ly sav­aged, says NativLang, and “con­fi­dent­ly tossed… into the bins of fringe lin­guis­tics, pseu­do­science… and yet, Babel’s first, and biggest claim lingers.”

The intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry in this five-minute video is obvi­ous­ly over­sim­pli­fied, but it high­lights some fas­ci­nat­ing fea­tures of the cur­rent debate. As Avi Lif­schitz, his­to­ri­an of Enlight­en­ment the­o­ry of lan­guage, writes, we tend “to assume that our own cog­ni­tive the­o­ries are the lat­est word when com­pared with those of our pre­de­ces­sors. Yet in some areas, the ques­tions we are now ask­ing are not too dif­fer­ent from those posed some two or three cen­turies ago.” In the case of the ori­gins of lan­guage, that is most cer­tain­ly so. Cen­tral to the the­o­ries of Locke and oth­ers, for exam­ple, “the pre­cise role of lan­guage in the brain and in human per­cep­tion” remains “one of the most top­i­cal ques­tions in today’s cog­ni­tive sci­ence.”

Although many schol­ars have giv­en up attempt­ing to recon­struct the orig­i­nal lan­guage, lin­guists, cog­ni­tive sci­en­tists, and evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gists con­tin­ue to find com­pelling evi­dence for the sin­gle-ori­gin the­o­ry. The NativLang video omits per­haps the most famous mod­ern lin­guist, Noam Chom­sky, who argued that a chance muta­tion occurred some 100,000 years ago, giv­ing rise to lan­guage. Even as lan­guages have diverged into what’s cur­rent­ly esti­mat­ed at around 6,000 dif­fer­ent tongues, Chom­sky claimed, they all retain a com­mon struc­ture, a “uni­ver­sal gram­mar.”

What­ev­er it might have sound­ed like, orig­i­nal lan­guage would like­ly have arisen in Sub-Saha­ran Africa, where mod­ern humans evolved some­where between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago. In 2011, Uni­ver­si­ty of Auck­land biol­o­gist Quentin Atkin­son used lin­guis­tic tech­niques some­what like Monboddo’s to show that African lan­guages—espe­cial­ly click lan­guages like the South African Xu—have con­sid­er­ably more indi­vid­ual sounds (phonemes) than oth­ers. And that lan­guages around the world have few­er and few­er phonemes the fur­ther they are from south­ern Africa.

Most sci­en­tists agree with the basic evo­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry of human ori­gins. But like Ruh­len’s “Pro­to-World,” Atkinson’s lin­guis­tic the­o­ry “caused some­thing of a sen­sa­tion,” writes Sci­ence Dai­ly, and has since come in for severe cri­tique. The debate over many of those Enlight­en­ment ques­tions about the ori­gins of lan­guage con­tin­ues. Bar­ring some dra­con­ian ban, “the search for the site of ori­gin of lan­guage,” and for the lan­guage itself and the evo­lu­tion­ary mech­a­nisms that pro­duced it, “remains very much alive.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

Noam Chom­sky Talks About How Kids Acquire Lan­guage & Ideas in an Ani­mat­ed Video by Michel Gondry

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Why Socrates Hated Democracies: An Animated Case for Why Self-Government Requires Wisdom & Education

in Philosophy, Politics | November 29th, 2016

How often have you heard the quote in one form or anoth­er? “Democ­ra­cy is the worst form of Gov­ern­ment,” said Win­ston Churchill in 1947, “except for all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time to time.…” The sen­ti­ment express­es two cul­tur­al val­ues many Amer­i­cans are trained to hold uncrit­i­cal­ly: the pri­ma­cy of democ­ra­cy and the bur­den­some­ness of gov­ern­ment as a nec­es­sary evil.

In his new book Toward Democ­ra­cy, Har­vard his­to­ri­an James T. Klop­pen­berg argues that these ideas arose fair­ly recent­ly with “most­ly Protes­tants, at least at first,” notes Kirkus, in whose hands “the idea of democ­ra­cy as a dan­ger­ous doc­trine of the mob was reshaped into an ide­al.” Much of this trans­for­ma­tion “occurred in the for­mer British colonies that became the Unit­ed States, where, at least from a British nobleman’s point of view, mob rule did take hold.”



The mod­ern revamp­ing of democ­ra­cy into a sacred set of uni­ver­sal insti­tu­tions has defined our under­stand­ing of the term. Just as the West has co-opt­ed clas­si­cal Athen­ian archi­tec­ture as sym­bol­ic of demo­c­ra­t­ic puri­ty, it has often co-opt­ed Greek phi­los­o­phy. But as any­one who has ever read Plato’s Repub­lic knows, Greek philoso­phers were high­ly sus­pi­cious of democ­ra­cy, and could not con­ceive of a func­tion­ing egal­i­tar­i­an soci­ety with full suf­frage and free­dom of speech.

Socrates, espe­cial­ly, says Alain de Bot­ton in the School of Life video above, “was por­trayed in the dia­logues of Pla­to as huge­ly pes­simistic about the whole busi­ness of democ­ra­cy.” In the ide­al soci­ety Socrates con­structs in the Repub­lic, he famous­ly argues for restrict­ed free­dom of move­ment, strict cen­sor­ship accord­ing to moral­is­tic civic virtues, and a guardian sol­dier class and the rule of philoso­pher kings.

In Book VI, Socrates points out the “flaws of democ­ra­cy by com­par­ing a soci­ety to a ship.” If you were going on a sea voy­age, “who would you ide­al­ly want decid­ing who was in charge of the ves­sel, just any­one, or peo­ple edu­cat­ed in the rules and demands of sea­far­ing?” Unless we wish to be obtuse­ly con­trar­i­an, we must invari­ably answer the lat­ter, as does Socrates’ inter­locu­tor Adeiman­tus. Why then should just any of us, with­out regard to lev­el of skill, expe­ri­ence, or edu­ca­tion, be allowed to select the rulers of a coun­try?

The grim irony of Socrates’ skep­ti­cism, de Bot­ton observes, is that he him­self was put to death after a vote by 500 Athe­ni­ans. Rather than the typ­i­cal elit­ism of pure­ly aris­to­crat­ic think­ing, how­ev­er, Socrates insist­ed that “only those who had thought about issues ratio­nal­ly and deeply should be let near a vote.” Says de Bot­ton, “We have for­got­ten this dis­tinc­tion between an intel­lec­tu­al democ­ra­cy and a democ­ra­cy by birthright. We have giv­en the vote to all with­out con­nect­ing it to wis­dom.” (He does not tell us whom he means by “we.”)

For Socrates, so-called “birthright democ­ra­cy” was inevitably sus­cep­ti­ble to dem­a­goguery. Socrates “knew how eas­i­ly peo­ple seek­ing elec­tion could exploit our desire for easy answers” by telling us what we want­ed to hear. We should heed Socrates’ warn­ings against mob rule and the dan­gers of dem­a­goguery, de Bot­ton argues, and con­sid­er democ­ra­cy as “some­thing that is only ever as good as the edu­ca­tion sys­tem that sur­rounds it.” It’s a potent idea, and one often repeat­ed with ref­er­ence to a sim­i­lar warn­ing from Thomas Jef­fer­son.

What de Bot­ton does not men­tion in his short video, how­ev­er, is that Socrates also advised that his rulers lie to the cit­i­zen­ry, secur­ing their trust not with false promis­es and seduc­tive blan­d­ish­ments, but with ide­ol­o­gy. As the Inter­net Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy sum­ma­rizes, Socrates “sug­gests that [the rulers] need to tell the cit­i­zens a myth that should be believed by sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions in order for every­one to accept his posi­tion in the city”—and to accept the legit­i­ma­cy of the rulers. The myth—like mod­ern sci­en­tif­ic racism and eugenics—divides the cit­i­zen­ry into an essen­tial hier­ar­chy, which Socrates sym­bol­izes by the met­als gold, sil­ver, and bronze.

But who deter­mines these cat­e­gories, or which vot­ers are the more “ratio­nal,” or what that cat­e­go­ry entails? How do we rec­on­cile the egal­i­tar­i­an premis­es of democ­ra­cy with the caste sys­tems of the utopi­an Repub­lic, in which vot­ing “ratio­nal­ly” means vot­ing for the inter­ests of the class that gets the vote? What about the uses of pro­pa­gan­da to cul­ti­vate offi­cial state ide­ol­o­gy in the pop­u­lace (as Wal­ter Lipp­man so well described in Pub­lic Opin­ion). And what are we to do with the deep sus­pi­cions of, say, Niet­zsche when it comes to Socrat­ic ideas of rea­son, many of which have been con­firmed by the find­ings of neu­ro­science?

As cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist and lin­guist George Lakoff writes, “Most thought is uncon­scious, since we don’t have con­scious access to our neur­al cir­cuit­ry.… Esti­mates by neu­ro­sci­en­tists vary between a gen­er­al ‘most’ to as much as 98%, with con­scious­ness as the tip of the men­tal ice­berg.” That is to say that—despite our lev­els of edu­ca­tion and spe­cial­ized training—we “tend to make deci­sions uncon­scious­ly,” at the gut lev­el, “before becom­ing con­scious­ly aware of them.” Even deci­sions like vot­ing.

These con­sid­er­a­tions should also inform cri­tiques of democ­ra­cy, which have not only warned us of its dan­gers, but have also been used to jus­ti­fy wide­spread vot­er sup­pres­sion and dis­en­fran­chise­ment for rea­sons that have noth­ing to do with objec­tive ratio­nal­i­ty and every­thing to do with myth and polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Socrates on TV, Cour­tesy of Alain de Bot­ton (2000)

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

How to Know if Your Coun­try Is Head­ing Toward Despo­tism: An Edu­ca­tion­al Film from 1946

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 17 ) |

Zen Master Alan Watts Explains What Made Carl Jung Such an Influential Thinker

in Philosophy, Psychology | November 17th, 2016

The twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry pro­duced a fair few thinkers on the human mind whose obser­va­tions still res­onate today. The Swiss psy­chi­a­trist and psy­chother­a­pist Carl Gus­tav Jung cer­tain­ly appears in that group, as does the British philoso­pher and inter­preter of Bud­dhism Alan Watts, and though not a week goes by when I don’t hear their words cit­ed, I sel­dom hear the words of both of them cit­ed by the same per­son. Though near­ly two gen­er­a­tions (among oth­er things) sep­a­rat­ed Watts and Jung, the two men did once meet, in 1958, as Watts trav­eled through Europe with his father. Three years lat­er, Jung passed on and Watts record­ed the lec­ture above.

What made Jung such an impor­tant observ­er of human­i­ty? Watts points to “one fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple that under­lay all his work and that was most extra­or­di­nar­i­ly exem­pli­fied in Jung him­self as a per­son,” which he calls Jung’s “recog­ni­tion of the polar­i­ty of life. That is to say, his resis­tance to what is to my mind the dis­as­trous and absurd hypoth­e­sis, that there is in this uni­verse a rad­i­cal and absolute con­flict between good and evil, light and dark­ness that can nev­er nev­er nev­er be har­mo­nized.”

He goes on to talk for a lit­tle under an hour about about Jung him­self, Jung’s influ­ence on his own work as a “com­par­a­tive philoso­pher,” and the con­tin­u­ing rel­e­vance of Jung’s ideas to the mod­ern world — all of which he ties togeth­er in an inte­grat­ed trib­ute to this “inte­grat­ed char­ac­ter.”

“There is a nice Ger­man word, hin­tergedanken, which means a thought in the very far far back of your mind,” says Watts. “Jung had a hin­tergedanken in the back of his mind that showed in the twin­kle in his eye. It showed that he knew and rec­og­nized what I some­times call the ele­ment of irre­ducible ras­cal­i­ty in him­self. And he knew it so strong­ly and so clear­ly, and in a way so lov­ing­ly, that he would not con­demn the same thing in oth­ers, and would there­fore not be led into those thoughts, feel­ings, and acts of vio­lence towards oth­ers which are always char­ac­ter­is­tic of the peo­ple who project the dev­il in them­selves upon the out­side, upon some­body else, upon the scape­goat.” And so, whether we enter into this field of thought through Watts, through Jung, or through any­one else, it always seems to comes back to the ancient Greeks: “Know thy­self.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Jung’s Hand-Drawn, Rarely-Seen Man­u­script The Red Book: A Whis­pered Intro­duc­tion

Carl Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in Rare Inter­view (1957)

Carl Jung’s Fas­ci­nat­ing 1957 Let­ter on UFOs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast