Hear John Malkovich Read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Set to Music Mixed by Ric Ocasek, Yoko Ono & Sean Lennon, OMD & More

in Music, Philosophy, Photography | March 15th, 2016

So, imagine that you’re John Malkovich. I know, you’ve seen this movie before, but hear me out: you’re one of the most venerated actors of your generation. You are entering your sixth decade and could probably coast into your golden years on accolades and prestige parts. But do you rest on your laurels? Or do you become a model and collaborator with photographer Sandro Miller, appear in an Eminem video… read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” over an ambient piece of music called “Cryogenia X,” then have the results remixed by Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, Ric Ocasek, new wave icons Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and other musical legends?

The answer is all of the above. You’re John Malkovich. You can do whatever you want. “When I have an idea for something,” says Malkovich, “I expect my collaborators to collaborate on that idea and if someone else has an idea, then I’ll certainly collaborate with them.” It’s that kind of disciplined, yet genial flexibility that made Malkovich perfect for the role of himself in Spike Jonze’s surreal comedy. Now the last of the projects in that extracurricular list above brings more surreality into Malkovich’s repertoire, in the form of a double LP’s‑worth of dreamlike recitations of Plato’s classical myth, called Like a Puppet Show, released on Black Friday of last year.

With original music composed by Eric Alexandrakis, the album came out on vinyl as a 2 LP picture disk featuring photos from Malkovich and Miller’s photo project “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.” The collaboration recalls other literary musical projects, such as Kurt Cobain and William S. Burroughs’ “The Priest They Called Him” (and Burroughs’ earlier work with Throbbing Gristle), as well as a recent joint project on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, with Iggy Pop and electronic composer Alva Noto. But there’s also a disorienting strangeness here those other experiments lack.

Ono and Lennon’s version “Cryolife 7:14,” the second track above, is, oddly, the most conventional of the three digital uploads we get to hear for free. Malkovich reads a portion of the text straight through, over wordless moans from Yoko and psychedelic lounge music from Lennon. In OMD and Ric Ocasek’s renditions, however, Malkovich’s voice gets cut-up into a series of disjointed samples. Rather than tell a story—that ancient 2,500-year-old story from Plato’s Republic about ignorance and awakening—these pieces suggest painful poses, emotional shocks, repetitive conditions, and weird ontological angles. What does it all mean for Malkovich?

It’s hard to say. He’s more steeped in process than interpretation. “Music,” says Malkovich, “creates its own kind of dream state.” If there’s any political subtext, you’ll have to supply it yourself. Malkovich—who gamely dressed as Che Guevara in one of his Sandro Miller recreations of famous photographs—has also been described as “so Right-wing you have to wonder if he’s kidding.” We know, of course, how Yoko feels about things. It’s part of what makes the collaboration so fresh and compelling—it doesn’t feel like one of those “of course these people got together” projects that, while satisfying, can suffer the fate of the supergroup: too many cooks.

Here, each collaborator—the 2,000-years-dead philosopher, the celebrated actor and photographer, and the legendary musicians—comes from such a different realm of experience and talent that their meeting seems more like a mountaintop conference of wizards than a celebrity jam session. If you like what you hear (and see), Malkovich, Alexandrakis, and Miller promise more. They’ve founded a record label, Cryogenia, and plant to release more musical/photographic projects in the near future.

Plato’s Cave Allegory Animated Monty Python-Style

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Orson Welles Narrates Plato’s Cave Allegory, Kafka’s Parable, and Freedom River

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

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11 Essential Feminist Books: A Reading List by The New York Public Library

in Gender, History, Literature, Philosophy | March 9th, 2016

We now find ourselves about a third of the way through March, more interestingly known as Women’s History Month, a time filled with occasions to round up and learn more about the creations and accomplishments of women through the centuries. And “who better to honor this March than history’s influential feminists?” writes Lynn Lobash on the New York Public Library’s website.

We’ve previously featured treasures from the New York Public Library, including art posters, maps, restaurant menus, theater ephemera, and a host of digitized high-resolution images. Today it’s time to highlight one of the many recommended reading lists that the NYPL’s librarians regularly create for the reading public. “Know Your Feminisms”–a book list “essential for understanding the history of feminism and the women’s rights movement”–could easily be used in a Feminism 101 course. It runs chronologically, beginning with these ten volumes (the quoted descriptions come from Lynn Lobash):

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929). “This essay examines the question of whether a woman is capable of producing work on par with Shakespeare. Woolf asserts that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ ”
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949). “A major work of feminist philosophy, the book is a survey of the treatment of women throughout history.”
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963). “Friedan examines what she calls ‘the problem that has no name’ – the general sense of malaise among women in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig (1969). “An imagining of an actual war of the sexes in which women warriors are equipped with knives and guns.”
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970). “Greer makes the argument that women have been cut off from their sexuality through (a male conceived) consumer society-produced notion of the ‘normal’ woman.”
Sexual Politics by Kate Millett (1970). “Based on her PhD dissertation, Millett’s book discusses the role patriarchy (in the political sense) plays in sexual relations. To make her argument, she (unfavorably) explores the work of D.H Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Sigmund Freud, among others.”
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (1984). “In this collection of essays and speeches, Lorde addresses sexism, racism, black lesbians, and more.”
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1990). “Wolf explores “normative standards of beauty” which undermine women politically and psychologically and are propagated by the fashion, beauty, and advertising industries.”
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler (1990). “Influential in feminist and queer theory, this book introduces the concept of ‘gender performativity’ which essentially means, your behavior creates your gender.”
Feminism is for everybody by bell hooks (2000). “Hooks focuses on the intersection of gender, race, and the sociopolitical.”

To see the very newest books the NYPL has put in this particular canon, the latest of which came out just last year, take a look at the complete list on their site. There you’ll also find “Well Done, Sister Suffragette!,” a shorter collection of five books on history’s fighters for women’s rights: the slave-turned-orator Sojourner Truth, activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, social reformer Susan B. Anthony, nineteenth amendment-promoter Alice Paul, and radical Catholic journalist Dorothy Day.

Note: You can download Gloria Steinem’s recent autobiography, My Life on the Road, as a free audiobook if you sign up for Audible.com’s free trial program. It’s narrated by Debra Winger and Steinem herself. Learn more about Audible’s free trial program here.

Simone de Beauvoir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intellectual and Feminist (1960)

The First Feminist Film, Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922)

The Feminist Theory of Simone de Beauvoir Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games (and More)

100,000+ Wonderful Pieces of Theater Ephemera Digitized by The New York Public Library

Foodie Alert: New York Public Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restaurant Menus (1851–2008)

New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use

The New York Public Library Lets You Download 180,000 Images in High Resolution: Historic Photographs, Maps, Letters & More

Download 2,000 Magnificent Turn-of-the-Century Art Posters, Courtesy of the New York Public Library

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.

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Jean-Paul Sartre on How American Jazz Lets You Experience Existentialist Freedom & Transcendence

in Literature, Music, Philosophy | March 2nd, 2016

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 philosophical novel Nausea, which he considered one of his finest works of fiction or otherwise, the stricken protagonist Antoine Roquentin cures his existential horror and sickness with jazz—specifically with an old recording of the song “Some of These Days.” Which recording? We do not know. “I only wish Sartre had been more specific about the names of the musicians on the date,” writes critic Ted Gioia in a newly published essay, “I would love to hear the jazz record that trumps Freud, cures the ill, and solves existential angst.”

The song was first recorded in 1911 by a Ukranian-Jewish singer named Sophie Tucker, who made her name with it, and was written by a black Canadian named Shelton Brooks. But Sartre’s hero refers to the singer as an African-American, or as “the Negress,” and to its writer as “a Jew with Black eyebrows.” Was this a mix-up? Or did Sartre refer to another of the hundreds of recordings of the song? (Perhaps Ethel Waters, below?). Or, this being a work of fiction, and Roquentin himself a failed writer, are these identifications made up in his imagination?

In his description of the recording, Roquentin reduces the singer and composer to two broad types: the jazz singing “Negress” and the “Jew”—“a clean-shaven American with thick black eyebrows,” who sits in a “New York skyscraper.”

This stereotyping creates what Miriama Young calls “an objectification of the voice and the persona behind it.” In the novel’s strangely happy ending, Roquentin recovers his disintegrating self by attaching it to these nameless, static figures, who are as repetitious as the record playing over and over on the phonograph, and who are themselves somehow “saved” by the music.

Sartre,” James Donald argues, “still believed in the redemptive power of art.” In the last mention of the record, Roquentin asks to hear “the Negress sing…. She sings. So two of them are saved: the Jew and the Negress. Saved.” And yet, rather than discovering in the music a redemptive authenticity, argues Donald, Sartre’s use of jazz in Nausea is more like Al Jolson’s in The Jazz Singer, a “creative act of mishearing and ventriloquism,” or a “generative inauthenticity.”

Sartre’s early conception of “the redemptive power of art” depended on such inauthenticity; “the work of art is an irreality,” he writes in 1940 in The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. As in Roquentin’s diary, writes Adnan Menderes, or the novel itself, “in a work of art the here-and-now existence of human being could be shown as interwoven in necessary relations. But in contrast to the work of art, in the real world the existence of human being is contingent and for this very reason it is free.” It is that very freedom and contingency out in the world, the inability to ground himself in reality, that produces Roquentin’s nausea and the existentialist’s crisis. And it is the jazz recording’s “irreality” that resolves it.

Sartre’s use of the racialized types of “Negress” and “Jew” as foils for the complicated, troubled European psyche is reminiscent of Camus’ later use of “the Arab” in The Stranger. Though he critically explored issues of racism and anti-Semitism at length in his later writing, he was perhaps not immune to the primitivist tropes that dominated European modernism and that, for example, made Josephine Baker famous in Paris. (“The white imagination sure is something when it comes to blacks,” Baker herself once wearily observed.) But these types are themselves unreal, like the work of art, projections of Roquentin’s imaginative search for solidity in the exotic otherness of jazz. Nearly ten years after the publication of Nausea, Sartre wrote of the pull jazz had on him in a short, tongue-in-cheek essay called “I Discovered Jazz in America,” which Michelman describes as “like an anthropologist describing an alien culture.”

In the 1947 essay, Sartre writes of the music he hears at “Nick’s bar, in New York” as “dry, violent, pitiless. Not gay, not sad, inhuman. The cruel screech of a bird of prey.” The music is animalistic, immediate, and strange, unlike European formalism: “Chopin makes you dream, or Andre Claveau,” writes Sartre, “But not the jazz at Nick’s. It fascinates.” Like Roquentin’s recording, the Nick’s Bar jazz band is “speaking to the best part of you, to the toughest, to the freest, to the part which wants neither melody nor refrain, but the deafening climax of the moment.”

Gioia recommends that we abandon Theodor Adorno as the go-to European academic reference for jazz writing (I’d agree!) and instead refer to Sartre. But I’d be hesitant to recommend this description. Jazz, improvisatory or otherwise, does extraordinary things with melody and refrain, tearing apart traditional song structures and putting them back together. (See, for example, Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts” from 1947, above.) But it does not abandon musical form altogether in a sustained, formless “climax of the moment,” as Sartre’s sexualized phrase alleges.

Yet in this new jazz—the crashing, chaotic bebop so unlike the crooning big band and show tunes Sartre admired in the 30s—it would be easy for the enthusiast to hear only climax. This music excited Sartre very much, writes Gioia; he “called jazz ‘the music of the future’ and made an effort to get to know Miles Davis and Charlie Parker [above and below], and listen to John Coltrane,” though “his writings on the subject are more atmospheric than analytical.”

With humor and vivid description, Sartre’s essay does a wonderful job of conveying his experience of hearing live jazz as an amused and overawed outsider, though he seems to have some difficulty understanding exactly what the music is on terms outside his excitable emotional response. “The whole crowd shouts in time,” writes Sartre, “you can’t even hear the jazz, you watch some men on a bandstand sweating in time, you’d like to spin around, to howl at death, to slap the face of the girl next to you.”

Perhaps what Sartre heard, experienced, and felt in live bebop was what he had always wanted to hear in recorded jazz, an analogue to his own philosophical yearnings. In an article on one of his major influences, Husserl, written the year after the publication of Nausea, Sartre describes the way we “discover ourselves” as “outside, in the world, among others,” not “in some hiding place.” Strong emotions, “hatred, love, fear, sympathy—all those famous ‘subjective reactions that were floating in the malodorous brine of the mind…. They are simply ways of discovering the world.”

We come to authentic existence, writes Sartre—using a phrase that would soon resound in Jack Kerouac’s coming existential appropriation of jazz—“on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans.” In this way, Gioia speculates, Sartre likely “saw jazz as the musical manifestation of the existential freedom he described in his philosophical texts.” Sartre may have misread the formal discipline of jazz, but he describes hearing it live, among a sweating, throbbing crowd, as an authentic experience of freedom, unlike the recording that saves Roquentin through repetition and “irreality.” In both cases, however, Sartre finds in jazz a means of transcendence.

via fractious fiction

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

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Walter Benjamin’s 13 Oracular Writing Tips

in Literature, Philosophy, Writing | March 1st, 2016

Image by Walter Benjamin Archiv, via Wikimedia Commons

The probability of Walter Benjamin’s name coming up in your average MFA workshop, or fiction writers’ group of any kind, likely approaches zero. But head over to a name-your-critical-political-literary-theory class and I’d be surprised not to hear it dropped at least once, if not half a dozen times. Benjamin, after all, mentored or befriended the first generation Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, Leo Strauss, and nearly every other twentieth-century German intellectual who escaped the Nazis. Tragically, Benjamin himself did not fare so well. It has long been believed that he killed himself rather than face Nazi capture. Another theory speculates that Stalin had him murdered.

Since his death, the legend of Benjamin as a kind of heterodox Marxist prophet—an image he fostered with his embrace of Jewish mysticism—has grown and grown. And yet, despite his rarified academic pedigree, I maintain that writers of all kinds, from the most pedantic to the most visceral, can learn much from him.

Benjamin did not strictly confine himself to the arcane textual analysis and literary-theological hermeneutics for which he’s best known; he spent most of his career working as a freelance critic and journalist, writing almost casual travelogues, personal reminiscences of Weimar Berlin, and approachable essays on a variety of subjects. For a few years, he even wrote and presented popular radio broadcasts for young adults—acting as a kind of “German Ira Glass for teens.”

And, like so many writers before and since, Benjamin once issued a list of “writer’s tips”—or, as he called it, “The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses,” part of his 1928 treatise One-Way Street, one of only two books published in his lifetime. In Benjamin’s hands, that well-worn, well meaning, but often less than helpful genre becomes a series of oracular pronouncements that can seem, at first read, comical, superstitious, or puzzlingly idiosyncratic. But read them over a few times. Then read them again. Like all of his writing, Benjamin’s suggestions, some of which read like commandments, others like Nietzschean aphorisms, reveal their meanings slowly, illuminating the postures, attitudes, and physical and spiritual disciplines of writing in surprisingly humane and astute ways.

The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses:

Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.
Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.
In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.
Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.
Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.
Nulla dies sine linea [‘No day without a line’] — but there may well be weeks.
Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.
Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.
The work is the death mask of its conception.

via Clarion 18/BrainPickings

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

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Dear Immanuel — Kant Gives Love Advice to a Heartbroken Young Woman (1791)

in Philosophy | February 23rd, 2016

What to do when your love life goes south? Twentieth-century America established the tradition of seeking the counsel of an advice columnist, but in eighteenth-century Austria, with neither Dear Abby nor Ann Landers to whom to turn, you’d have to settle for the next best thing: Immanuel Kant. At least the 22-year-old Maria von Herbert, an avid student of Kant’s philosophy, felt that was her only option, and in 1791 wrote as imploringly follows to the author of A Critique of Pure Reason:

Great Kant,

As a believer calls to his God, I call to you for help, for comfort, or for counsel to prepare me for death. Your writings prove that there is a future life. But as for this life, I have found nothing, nothing at all that could replace the good I have lost, for I loved someone who, in my eyes, encompassed within himself all that is worthwhile, so that I lived only for him, everything else was in comparison just rubbish, cheap trinkets. Well, I have offended this person, because of a long drawn out lie, which I have now disclosed to him, though there was nothing unfavourable to my character in it, I had no vice in my life that needed hiding. The lie was enough though, and his love vanished. As an honourable man, he doesn’t refuse me friendship. But that inner feeling that once, unbidden, led us to each other, is no more – oh my heart splinters into a thousand pieces! If I hadn’t read so much of your work I would certainly have put an end to my life. But the conclusion I had to draw from your theory stops me – it is wrong for me to die because my life is tormented, instead I’m supposed to live because of my being. Now put yourself in my place, and either damn me or comfort me. I’ve read the metaphysic of morals, and the categorical imperative, and it doesn’t help a bit. My reason abandons me just when I need it. Answer me, I implore you – or you won’t be acting in accordance with your own imperative.

Von Herbert’s letter began a brief correspondence taken, two centuries later, as the subject of Kant Scholar Rae Helen Langton’s paper “Duty and Desolation.” The aged philosopher, writes Langton, “much impressed by this letter, sought advice from a friend as to what he should do. The friend advised him strongly to reply, and to do his best to distract his correspondent from ‘the object to which she [was] enfettered.’ ”

And so Kant drafted his thorough reply:

Your deeply felt letter comes from a heart that must have been created for the sake of virtue and honesty, since it is so receptive to instruction in those qualities. I must do as you ask, namely, put myself in your place, and prescribe for you a pure moral sedative. I do not know whether your relationship is one of marriage or friendship, but it makes no significant difference. For love, be it for one’s spouse or for a friend, presupposes the same mutual esteem for the other’s character, without which it is no more than perishable, sensual delusion.

A love like that wants to communicate itself completely, and it expects of its respondent a similar sharing of heart, unweakened by distrustful reticence. That is what the ideal of friendship demands. But there is something in us which puts limits on such frankness, some obstacle to this mutual outpouring of the heart, which makes one keep some part of one’s thoughts locked within oneself, even when one is most intimate. The sages of old complained of this secret distrust – ‘My dear friends, there is no such thing as a friend!’

We can’t expect frankness of people, since everyone fears that to reveal himself completely would be to make himself despised by others. But this lack of frankness, this reticence, is still very different from dishonesty. What the honest but reticent man says is true, but not the whole truth. What the dishonest man says is something he knows to be false. Such an assertion is called, in the theory of virtue, a lie. It may be harmless, but it is not on that account innocent. It is a serious violation of a duty to oneself; it subverts the dignity of humanity in our own person, and attacks the roots of our thinking. As you see, you have sought counsel from a physician who is no flatterer. I speak for your beloved and present him with arguments that justify his having wavered in his affection for you.

Ask yourself whether you reproach yourself for the imprudence of confessing, or for the immorality intrinsic to the lie. If the former, then you regret having done your duty. And why? Because it has resulted in the loss of your friend’s confidence. This regret is not motivated by anything moral, since it is produced by an awareness not of the act itself, but of its consequences. But if your reproach is grounded in a moral judgment of your behaviour, it would be a poor moral physician who would advise you to cast it from your mind.

When your change in attitude has been revealed to your beloved, only time will be needed to quench, little by little, the traces of his justified indignation, and to transform his coldness into a more firmly grounded love. If this doesn’t happen, then the earlier warmth of his affection was more physical than moral, and would have disappeared anyway – a misfortune which we often encounter in life, and when we do, must meet with composure. For the value of life, insofar as it consists of the enjoyment we get from people, is vastly overrated.

Here then, my dear friend, you find the customary divisions of a sermon: instruction, penalty and comfort. Devote yourself to the first two; when they have had their effect, comfort will be found by itself.

Von Herbert’s original “long drawn out lie,” according to another letter Langton quotes from a mutual friend of Von Hebert’s and Kant’s, came about when, “in order to realize an idealistic love, she gave herself to a man who misused her trust. And then, trying to achieve such love with another, she told her new lover about the previous one.” But by the time she picked up her pen to cast her fate to the judgment of her favorite thinker, the problem had transcended the state of a lovers’ quarrel to become an all-consuming state of desire-free hollowness. Only Kantian principles, she insisted, stood between her and suicide.

She lays out her situation even more clearly in her reply to Kant’s reply:

My vision is clear now. I feel that a vast emptiness extends inside me, and all around me—so that I almost find myself to be superfluous, unnecessary. Nothing attracts me. I’m tormented by a boredom that makes life intolerable. Don’t think me arrogant for saying this, but the demands of morality are too easy for me. I would eagerly do twice as much as they command. They only get their prestige from the attractiveness of sin, and it costs me almost no effort to resist that. […] I don’t study the natural sciences or the arts any more, since I don’t feel that I’m genius enough to extend them; and for myself, there’s no need to know them. I’m indifferent to everything that doesn’t bear on the categorical imperative, and my transcendental consciousness—although I’m all done with those thoughts too.

You can see, perhaps, why I only want one thing, namely to shorten this pointless life, a life which I am convinced will get neither better nor worse. If you consider that I am still young and that each day interests me only to the extent that it brings me closer to death, you can judge what a great benefactor you would be if you were to examine this question closely. I ask you, because my conception of morality is silent here, whereas it speaks decisively on all other matters. And if you cannot give me the answer I seek, I beg you to give me something that will get this intolerable emptiness out of my soul.

“Kant never replied,” writes Langton. “In 1803 Maria von Herbert killed herself, having worked out at last an answer to that persistent and troubling question — the question to which Kant, and her own moral sense, had responded with silence. Was that a vicious thing to do? Not entirely. As Kant himself concedes, ‘Self-murder requires courage, and in this attitude there is always room for reverence for humanity in one’s own person.’ ” The words of a thinker, indeed, though we can probably see why no modern-day Immanuel Kant has gone into the business of providing solace to the brokenhearted.

via Critical Theory

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.

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Existentialist Psychiatrist, Auschwitz Survivor Viktor Frankl Explains How to Find Meaning in Life, No Matter What Challenges You Face

in Philosophy, Psychology | February 19th, 2016

Free will often seems like nothing more than a cruel illusion. We don’t get to choose the times, places, and circumstances of our birth, nor do we have much control over the state of our states, regions, or nations. Even the few who can design conditions such that they are always secure and comfortable find themselves unavoidably subject to what Buddhists call the “divine messengers” of sickness, aging, and death. Biology may not be destiny, but it is a force more powerful than many of our best intentions. And though most of us in the West have the privilege of living far away from war zones, millions across the world face extremities we can only imagine, and to which we are not immune by any stretch.

Among all of the psychiatrists, philosophers, and religious figures who have wrestled with these universal truths about the human condition, perhaps none has been put to the test quite like neurologist and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, but lost his mother, father, brother, and first wife to the camps.

While imprisoned, he faced what he described as “an unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself.” After his camp was liberated in 1945, Frankl published an extraordinary book about his experiences: Man’s Search for Meaning, “a strangely hopeful book,” writes Matthew Scully at First Things, “still a staple on the self-help shelves” though it is “inescapably a book about death.” The book has seen dozens of editions in dozens of languages and ranks 9th on a list of most influential books.

Frankl’s thesis echoes those of many sages, from Buddhists to Stoics to his 20th century Existentialist contemporaries: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Not only did he find hope and meaning in the midst of terrible suffering, but after his unimaginable loss, he “remarried, wrote another twenty-five books, founded a school of psychotherapy, built an institute bearing his name in Vienna,” and generally lived a long, happy life. How? The interview above will give you some idea. Frankl maintains that we always have some freedom of choice, “in spite of the worst conditions,” and therefore always have the ability to seek for meaning. “People are free,” says Frankl, no matter their level of oppression, and are responsible “for making someone or something out of themselves.”

Frankl’s primary achievement as a psychotherapist was to found the school of “logotherapy,” a successor to Freudian psychoanalysis and Adlerian individual psychology. Drawing on Existentialist philosophy (Frankl’s book was published in Germany with the alternate title From Concentration Camp to Existentialism)—but turning away from an obsession with the Absurd—his approach, writes his institute, “is based on three philosophical and psychological concepts… Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.”

You can hear how Frankl works these principles into his philosophy in the fascinating interview, as well as in the short clip above from an earlier lecture, in which he rails against a crude and ultimately unfulfilling form of meaning-making: the pursuit of wealth. Even us materialistic Americans, renowned for our greed, Frankl notes with good humor, respond to surveys in overwhelming numbers saying our greatest desire is to find meaning and purpose in life. Like no other secular voice, Frankl was confident that we could do so, in spite of life’s seeming chaos, through—as he explains above—a kind of idealism that brings us closer to reality.

Note: You can download Frankl’s major book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” as a free audio book if you join Audible’s 30-Day Free Trial program. Find details on that here.

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

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

in Education, Philosophy | February 19th, 2016

Vlogbrothers and “Nerdfighter” online personalities Hank and John Green set about conquering the world of educational media a few years ago—while also writing bestselling novels, recording popular albums, and creating startups and charitable organizations on the side. They’ve almost succeeded, with their “Crash Course” video series steamrolling its way through U.S. History, World History, and the History of Everything Else, as well as Psychology, Literature, the Sciences, and, now, Philosophy, just above, with Hank taking on the professorial duties. “It’s gonna be hard,” he says in the intro video above, “and enlightening, and frustrating, and if I do my job properly it’s going to stick with you long after you and I have parted ways.”

Hank begins where we generally do, in ancient Greece, and introduces the three main branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Next up, in episode two above, he dives into logic and argumentation, subjects dear to the heart of an internet-based educator, whose audience is quite familiar with the contentious online commentariat. Hank’s style, like his brother’s, is hip, fast-paced, and full of witty editorial asides, enhanced by clever editing, pop-culture references, and animated visual aids. In short, he’s exactly what you wish your college professors were like in the classroom.

Is taking one of the Green’s “crash courses” the equivalent of a college intro course? I guess it would depend on the college, the class, and the instructor. Your mileage may vary with any educational experience, and everyone has their own way of learning. If you’re comfortable having information delivered at the speed of advertising—which I do not mean as an insult, but as an accurate description of their pacing—then you may find that the Green’s methods work perfectly well. If you need to mull things over, take careful notes, hear in-depth explanations, etc., you may consider these videos as fun ways to get your feet wet. Then when you’re ready to dive in, consider taking one of the many free online philosophy courses we feature on the site, and supplementing with podcasts, free eBooks, and other resources.

If you follow this playlist, you can find more Crash Course Philosophy videos as they become available.

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

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Jacques Derrida on Seinfeld: “Deconstruction Doesn’t Produce Any Sitcom”

in Philosophy, Television | February 2nd, 2016

Jacques Derrida could enjoy a good movie like anyone else. In a 2002 interview with TIME, he declared “I have watched The Godfather 10 times. I must watch it whenever it’s on.” Who couldn’t?

Coppola films were one thing. Apparently sitcoms quite another. In another 2002 interview, a journalist asked the French philosopher whether, in so many words, deconstruction shared anything in common with Seinfeld and the ironic/parodic way it looks at the world. This was taking things too far. “Deconstruction, as I understand it,” said Derrida, “doesn’t produce any sitcom. If sitcom is this, and people who watch this think deconstruction is this, the only advice I have to give them is just stop watching sitcom, do your homework, and read.” The cringeworthy scene originally appeared in the documentary, Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Hoffman.

via Peter B. Kaufman

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