Years ago, we featured a wonderful clip showing Bruce Lee, only 24 years old, auditioning for a part in the 1960s TV show, “The Green Hornet.” In the clip, Lee puts on a remarkable display of his martial arts skills, all while explaining the philosophy that guides his moves. The actor, who studied philosophy in college, looks at the camera and explains the relationship between kung fu and a glass of water. He says: “water is the softest substance in the world,… but yet it can penetrate the hardest rock or anything, granite, you name it. So, every kung fu man is trying to do that,… to be soft like water, and flexible and adapt itself to the opponent.”
That’s a good prompt to tell you about the brand new podcast that explores the philosophy of Bruce Lee, who died in 1973. Launched by his daughter Shannon Lee, each episode promises to “dig deep into Bruce’s philosophy to provide guidance and action on cultivating your truest self.” As the podcast moves along, it will help you find wisdom in Lee’s pronouncements, like: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” By now, you’re starting to see, Lee had a thing for water.
You can get the podcast via iTunes and Stitcher. Below, stream one of the first episodes that delves into his philosophy.
Given how many academic philosophy departments have banished Existentialism into some primitive wilderness, it seems striking to hear people talk about it as a current phenomenon with a serious, living pedigree and a hip youth vanguard distilling its ideas into pop culture. By the time I’d heard of Albert Camus—by way of The Cure’s early single “Killing an Arab”—the references to the French philosopher and his novel The Stranger were already exotic, and as kitschy as the faux-Middle Eastern guitar line in the song. But in 1959, the hipster existentialist was a phenomenon so widespread that Norman Mailer wrote a scathing essay about the character.
And a Canadian journalist, sitting down to interview Existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, began by asking her to comment on the “group of noisy, rowdy jazz-loving young people, in the immediate post-war period.” This first wave of 50s Parisian hipsters embraced Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir right along with Coltrane and Charlie Parker.
Beauvoir dismisses any connection between her kind of Existentialism and that of the rowdy masses except that of physical proximity. Nonetheless, like 90s feminist punk rockers who spread the ideas of third wave feminism, the French and American Beats made Existentialist philosophy cool.
Beauvoir prefers to draw a clear boundary between her work and the next generation’s appropriation. By this time, both Sartre and Camus had disavowed the term Existentialist and had a falling-out over Communism. But Beauvoir uses the term and refers to a “We,” who “think—and it’s one of the most important points in existentialism—that man is the purpose of man, his own future, and the purpose of all his activities.” She draws on stark binary oppositions of “good” and “evil” to explain the “fundamental basis of what you could call our ethics,” and yet, she says, “we don’t ask metaphysical questions.”
If it sounds like Beauvoir is summarizing Sartre, that’s part of what’s going on. The interviewer keeps pressing to understand the “existentialist man’s conception of the world.” She obliges, discussing “Sartrean Existentialism” and his major work Being and Nothingness and entertaining vague questions about atheism and politics. Finally, around 12:15, they begin to talk about the book for which de Beauvoir is best known, The Second Sex, which would go on to inspire 60s feminists like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and UK collectivist magazine Spare Rib.
Calm and measured throughout the conversation, Beauvoir defends her ideas, including the most provocative, that, as the interviewer paraphrases, “You don’t believe in the existence of a feminine nature. You believe people are first human, before being male or female.” She makes it clear right away that her anti-gender essentialism has roots in an even more fundamental, and very Existentialist, skepticism: “I don’t believe in the existence of a human nature.” All of us, whatever gender we’re taught to identify with, become products of our “place, time, civilisation, and technique etc.” through cultural conditioning, not inner necessity.
The Second Sex, she says, is not a revolt or a protest, but a description of an oppressive set of relations that “currently neither men nor women can just transform… with a magic wand.” Nevertheless, de Beauvoir became increasingly activist as she aged, giving the eloquent interview on “Why I’m a Feminist” in 1975. And above all, the younger generation who picked up piecemeal Sartre also picked up enough of Beauvoir’s work to begin forcing changes in the material conditions she identified as creating gender-based forms of social oppression.
Permit us a couple of great oversimplifications: Hannah Arendt became well-known by writing about evil. Video games, especially classic ones, usually challenge the player to fight some kind of evil. And so we have a suitable, if at first seemingly incongruous, meeting of form and substance in this video, “What is Evil?,” from the 8‑Bit Philosophy series. It casts the 20th-century political theorist as the hero this time around, rendering in vintage video-game aesthetics her quest not simply to fight evil, but to identify evil — a much more troubling enterprise.
“Traditional conceptions of evil focus on the utter monstrosity of evil actions — the complete awe and unthinkability of horror,” says the narrator. “Called pure or radical evil, this is the sort of evil associated with antagonists or villains — is is the antithesis of good.”
It also happens to be just the sort of obvious straight-up evil video games tend to put their players up against: enemy ships you can only shoot down before they shoot you down, mad doctors you can only blow up before they blow the world up, monsters you can can only jump on before they eat you.
Arendt started seeing things differently from this black-and-white (or in the case of eight-bit video games, 64-color) conception after she saw the trial of Adolf Eichmann. “Put on trial for numerous horrors, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity — especially against the Jewish people, for overseeing the trains that transported people to Nazi death camps.” Sound like a mean piece of work though the guy may, Arendt beheld in the courtroom “an altogether innocuous and seemingly normal little man,” a “stereotypical bureaucrat” who “never stopped to put himself in anyone else’s shoes,” driven by an “unquestioning sense of obligation to authority.”
To put it in video-game terms, Arendt expected the sort of grotesque, cackling big boss that appears in the last stage, and she got the kind of drone who simply stands around waiting to be slain with one hit in the first. This led her to coin her immortal phrase “the banality of evil,” which, she explains in Eichmann in Jerusalem, describes it “only on the strictly factual level. He was not stupid. It was thoughtlessness, something by no means identical to stupidity. Such remoteness from reality can wreak more havoc than all the instincts taken together.” And what kind of sword, laser, or power-up could defeat that?
What is it about Austrian philosophical prodigy Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that so inspires artists? Jasper Johns, the Coen Brothers, Derek Jarman…. Perhaps it’s easy to see his appeal to writers. His succinct philosophy of language contains a groundbreaking claim, for its time, wrote Bertrand Russell in his 1922 introduction: “In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must… be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact.”
There may be no higher praise for careful, precise language. Recalling the stock advice to “show, don’t tell,” Wittgenstein asserted that whatever bonds together the structure of sentences and the structure of the world, it is only something we can show, not something we can say. In this regard, Wittgenstein also elevated images, and he himself had a keen eye for photography and architecture. Of course, the imaginative, mystical aspect of Wittgenstein’s little book of aphorisms and symbols appeals to musicians and composers as well.
John Cage drew heavily on Wittgenstein’s work and the Tractatus has been adapted by others in musical pieces ranging from the understated and meditative to the comically ridiculous. The adaptation above takes a stark operatic approach. Composed by Balduin Sulzer, the “one woman opera,” as the singer Anna Maria Pammer’s site describes it (in Google translation from German), “drives the meticulousness and insistence of the text on the top.” Drawing on the work of the Second Viennese School, “the basic musical idea comes from the music of the time of origin of the Tractatus, i.e. the time of World War I.”
Wittgenstein has long been associated with Arnold Schoenberg and the Tractatus has been called a “tone poem.” The chilliness, alternating with rapid crescendos, with which Pammer delivers the philosophical libretto recalls the book’s tenor, as well as Wittgenstein’s temperament more generally. Given to violent outbursts and fits of derision, Wittgenstein spent the first part of his life attempting to create perfect systems— “a logically perfect language,” wrote Russell. In between this austere pursuit, he lived just as austerely and sometimes violently. John Cage’s enactment of Wittgenstein’s theories comes closer to the intent of “show don’t tell,” but Sulzer’s adaptation perhaps best dramatizes the mystical ellipses of Wittgenstein’s first major work. If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here.
Daily Nous, a website about philosophy and the philosophy profession, recently featured a detailed mapping of the entire discipline of philosophy, created by an enterprising French grad student, Valentin Lageard. Drawing on a taxonomy provided by PhilPapers, Lageard used NetworkX (a Python software package that lets you study the structure and dynamics of complex networks) to map out the major fields of philosophy, and show how they relate to various sub-fields and even sub-sub-fields. The image above shows the complete map, revealing the astonishing size of philosophy as an overall field. The images below let you see what happens when you zoom in and move down to different levels.
To explore the map, head over to Daily Nous–or open this image, click on it, wait for it to expand (it takes a second), and then start maneuvering through the networks.
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That feeling of unsettling and profound confusion, when it seems like the hard floor of certainty has turned into a black abyss of endless oblivion…. Thanks to modern philosophy, it has a handy name: an existential crisis. It’s a name, says Alain de Botton in his School of Life video above, that “touches on one of the major traditions of European philosophy,” a tradition “associated with ideas of five philosophers in particular: Kierkegaard, Camus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre.”
What do these five have in common? The question is complicated, and we can’t really point to a “tradition.” As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Existentialism is a “catch-all term” for a few continental philosophers from the 19th and 20th centuries, some of whom had little or no association with each other. Also, “most of the philosophers conventionally grouped under this heading either never used, or actively disavowed the term ‘existentialist.’” Camus, according to Richard Raskin, thought of Existentialism as a “form of philosophical suicide” and a “destructive mode of thought.” Even Sartre, who can be most closely identified with it, once said “Existentialism? I don’t know what it is.”
But labels aside, we can identify many common characteristics of the five thinkers de Botton names that apply to our paralyzing experiences of supreme doubt. The video identifies five such broad commonalities of the “existential crisis”:
1. “It’s a period when a lot that had previously seemed like common sense or normal reveals its contingent, chance, uncanny, and relative nature…. We are freer than we thought.”
2. We recognize we’d been deluding ourselves about what had to be…. We come to a disturbing awareness that our ultimate responsibility is to ourselves, not the social world.”
3. “We develop a heightened awareness of death. Time is short and running out. We need to re-examine our lives, but the clock is ticking.”
4. “We have many choices, but are, by the nature of the human condition, denied the information we would need to choose with ultimate wisdom or certainty. We are forced to decide, but can never be assured that we’ve done so adequately. We are steering blind.”
5. This means that anxiety is a “basic feature” of all human existence.
All of this, de Botton admits, can “seem perilous and dispiriting,” and yet can also ennoble us when we consider that the private agonies we think belong to us alone are “fundamental features of the human condition.” We can dispense with the trivializing idea, propagated by advertisers and self-help gurus, that “intelligent choice might be possible and untragic… that perfection is within reach.” Yet de Botton himself presents Existentialist thought as a kind of self-help program, one that helps us with regret, since we realize that everyone bears the burdens of choice, mortality, and contingency, not just us.
However, in most so-called Existentialist philosophers, we also discover another pressing problem. Once we become untethered from pleasing fictions of pre-existing realities, “worlds-behind-the-scene,” as Nietzsche put it, or “being-behind-the-appearance,” in Sartre’s words, we no longer see a benevolent hand arranging things neatly, nor have absolute order, meaning, or purpose to appeal to.
We must confront that fact that we, and no one else, bear responsibility for our choices, even though we make them blindly. It’s not a comforting thought, hence the “crisis.” But many of us resolve these moments of shock with varying degrees of wisdom and experience. As we know from another great thinker, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was not an Existentialist philosopher, “Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being…. For the person who is unwilling to grow up… this is a frightening prospect.”
Do you know someone whose arguments consist of baldly specious reasoning, hopelessly confused categories, archipelagos of logical fallacies buttressed by seawalls of cognitive biases? Surely you do. Perhaps such a person would welcome some instruction on the properties of critical thinking and argumentation? Not likely? Well, just in case, you may wish to send them over to this series of Wireless Philosophy (or “WiPhi”) videos by philosophy instructor Geoff Pynn of Northern Illinois University and doctoral students Kelley Schiffman of Yale, Paul Henne of Duke, and several other philosophy and psychology graduates.
What is critical thinking? “Critical thinking,” says Pynn, “is about making sure that you have good reasons for your beliefs.” Now, there’s quite a bit more to it than that, as the various instructors explain over the course of 32 short lessons (watch them all at the bottom of the post), but Pynn’s introductory video above lays out the foundation. Good reasons logically support the beliefs or conclusions one adopts—from degrees of probability to absolute certainty (a rare condition indeed). The sense of “good” here, Pynn specifies, does not relate to moral goodness, but to logical coherence and truth value. Though many ethicists and philosophers would disagree, he notes that it isn’t necessarily “morally wrong or evil or wicked” to believe something on the basis of bad reasons. But in order to think rationally, we need to distinguish “good” reasons from “bad” ones.
“A good reason for a belief,” Pynn says, “is one that makes it probable. That is, it’s one that makes the belief likely to be true. The very best reasons for a belief make it certain. They guarantee it.” In his next two videos, above and below, he discusses these two classes of argument—one relating to certainty, the other probability. The first class, deductive arguments, occur in the classic, Aristotelian form of the syllogism, and they should guarantee their conclusions, meaning that “it’s impossible for the premises to be true while the conclusion is false” (provided the form of the argument itself is correct). In such an instance, we say the argument is “valid,” a technical philosophical term that roughly corresponds to what we mean by a “good, cogent, or reasonable” argument. Some properties of deductive reasoning—validity, truth, and soundness—receive their own explanatory videos later in the series.
In abductive arguments (or what are also called “inductive arguments”), above, we reason informally to the best, most probable explanation. In these kinds of arguments, the premises do not guarantee the conclusion, and the arguments are not bound in rigid formal syllogisms. Rather, we must make a leap—or an inference—to what seems like the most likely conclusion given the reasoning and evidence. Finding additional evidence, or finding that some of our evidence or reasoning is incorrect or must be rethought, should force us to reassess the likelihood of our conclusion and make new inferences. Most scientific explanations rely on abductive reasoning, which is why they are subject to retraction or revision. New evidence—or new understandings of the evidence—often requires new conclusions.
As for understanding probability—the likelihood that reasons provide sufficient justification for inferring particular conclusions—well… this is where we often get into trouble, falling victim to all sorts of fallacies. And when it comes to interpreting evidence, we’re prey to a number of psychological biases that prevent us from making fair assessments. WiPhi brings previous video series to bear on these problems of argumentation, one on Formal and Informal Fallacies and another on Cognitive Biases.
When it comes to a general theory of probability itself, we would all benefit from some understanding of what’s called Bayes’ Theorem, named for the 18th century statistician and philosopher Thomas Bayes. Bayes’ Theorem can seem forbidding, but its wide application across a range of disciplines speaks to its importance. “Some philosophers,” says CUNY graduate student Ian Olasov in his video lesson above, “even think it’s the key to understanding what it means to think rationally.”
Bayesian reasoning, informal logic, sound, valid, and true arguments… all of these modes of critical thinking help us make sense of the tangles of information we find ourselves caught up in daily. Though some of our less rationally-inclined acquaintances may not be receptive to good introductory lessons like these, it’s worth the effort to pass them along. And while we’re at it, we can sharpen our own reasoning skills and learn quite a bit about where we go right and where we go wrong as critical thinkers in Wireless Philosophy’s thorough, high quality series of video lessons.
Find more helpful resources in the Relateds below.
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You may still suffer from painful memories of having had to read Jacques Lacan in school, but look past all that verbiage about, say, desire’s “frenzied mocking of the abyss of the infinite, the secret collusion with which it envelops the pleasure of knowing and of dominating with jouissance,” and you can find real insights into humanity. The animated primer from Alain de Botton’s School of Life just above will give you a clear sense — a much clearer sense than any you might get from Lacan’s own prose — of what “the greatest French psychoanalyst of the 20th century” understood about us all.
This video, as well as Lacan’s entry in The Book of Life, breaks the man’s thought down into three parts. First, identity: following his fascination with the distinctively human experience of recognizing one’s own image, Lacan ultimately suggests that “we accept that other people simply won’t ever experience us the way we experience ourselves; that we will be almost entirely misunderstood – and will in turn deeply misunderstand.” Second, love: though given to grand statements such as “Men and women don’t exist,” Lacan comprehended “the extent to which we don’t truly comprehend our lovers and simply peg a range of fantasies drawn from childhood experiences to their physical forms,” which supports the eminently practical advice “not to be upset when we don’t feel a perfect rapport with someone who initially seemed a soulmate.”
The third part deals with the arena in which Lacan’s writings remain most often considered: politics. He came into his own as an international “intellectual celebrity” in the 1960s, the time of “the sexual revolution, great interest in communism, and lots of protests.” But he actually took a dimmer view of all that agitation than many, telling those student protesters chomping at the bit to remake society that “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.” He saw early on what we still see in every election cycle: that “we desire to have someone else in charge who can make everything OK, someone who is, in a sense, an ideal parent – and we bring this peculiar-sounding bit of our psychological fantasies into the way we navigate politics.”
You can watch Lacan engaging with one particularly rebellious student in a 1972 video we featured a few years ago, and you can see an hourlong lecture he delivered at the Catholic University of Louvain that same year in this video we posted before that. Empowered by the kind of overview of Lacan’s ideas that the School of Life has put together, you can better confront his famously (or infamously) elaborate rhetoric and judge for yourself whether to consider him a thinker who “made some extremely useful additions to our understanding of ourselves” — or, in the judgment of Noam Chomsky, a mere practitioner of empty “posturing.” But then, having lived a life that, as de Botton puts it, mixed “intellectual truth with worldly success,” can’t he be both?
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