Watch Noam Chomsky & Lawrence Krauss Talk About Education, Political Activism, Technology & More Before a Sold-Out Crowd

Found­ed and direct­ed by physi­cist Lawrence Krauss, Ari­zona State’s Ori­gins Project has for sev­er­al years brought togeth­er some of the biggest minds in the sci­ences and human­i­ties for friend­ly debates and con­ver­sa­tions about “the 21st Century’s great­est chal­lenges.” Pre­vi­ous all-star pan­els have includ­ed Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Bri­an Greene, and Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawk­ing has graced the ASU Ori­gins Project stage, as has actor and sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor Alan Alda. And this past March, in a sold-out, high­ly-antic­i­pat­ed Ori­gins Project event, Krauss wel­comed Noam Chom­sky to the stage for a lengthy inter­view, which you can watch above.

Although Krauss says he’s wary of hero wor­ship in his lauda­to­ry intro­duc­tion, he nonethe­less finds him­self ask­ing “What Would Noam Chom­sky Do” when faced with a dilem­ma. He also points out that Chom­sky has been “mar­gin­al­ized in U.S. media” for his anti-war, anar­chist polit­i­cal views. Those views, of course, come wide­ly into play dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, which ranges from the the­o­ry and pur­pose of education—a sub­ject Chom­sky has expound­ed on a great deal in books and inter­views—to the fate of polit­i­cal dis­si­dents through­out his­to­ry.

Chom­sky also gives us his views on sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Q&A por­tion of the talk above, in which he answers ques­tions about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence—anoth­er sub­ject he’s touched on in the past—and ani­mal exper­i­men­ta­tion, among a great many oth­er top­ics. Krauss most­ly hangs back dur­ing the ini­tial dis­cus­sion but takes a more active role in the ses­sion above, offer­ing views on med­ical and sci­en­tif­ic ethics that will be famil­iar to those who fol­low his athe­ist activism and cham­pi­oning of ratio­nal­i­ty over reli­gious dog­ma.

What you won’t see in the video above is a con­ver­sa­tion Chom­sky and Krauss had with Moth­er­board’s Daniel Ober­haus, who caught up with both thinkers dur­ing the ASU event to get their take on what he calls “anoth­er great space race.” As Ober­haus makes clear, the cur­rent com­pe­ti­tion is not nec­es­sar­i­ly between glob­al super­pow­ers, but—as with so much mod­ern research and development—between pub­lic and pri­vate enti­ties, such as NASA and Space X. As we briefly dis­cussed in a post yes­ter­day on the huge amount of pub­lic domain space pho­tog­ra­phy freely avail­able for use, pri­vate space explo­ration makes research pro­pri­etary, mit­i­gat­ing the poten­tial pub­lic ben­e­fits of gov­ern­ment pro­grams.

As Chom­sky puts it, “the envi­ron­ment, the com­mons… they’re a com­mon pos­ses­sion, but space is even more so. For indi­vid­u­als to allow insti­tu­tions like cor­po­ra­tions to have any con­trol over it is dev­as­tat­ing in its con­se­quences. It will also almost cer­tain­ly under­mine seri­ous research.” He refers to the exam­ple of most mod­ern computing—developed under pub­licly-fund­ed gov­ern­ment pro­grams, then mar­ket­ed and sold back to us by cor­po­ra­tions. Krauss makes a case for unmanned space explo­ration as the cost-effec­tive option, and both thinkers dis­cuss the prob­lem of mil­i­ta­riz­ing space, the ulti­mate goal of Cold War space pro­grams before the fall of the Sovi­et Union. The con­ver­sa­tion is rich and reveal­ing and makes an excel­lent sup­ple­ment to the already rich dis­cus­sion Krauss and Chom­sky have in the videos above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ori­gins Project Brings Togeth­er Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Fla­tow, and More on One Stage

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Noam Chom­sky Explains Where Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Went Wrong

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

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Podcast, Now at 370 Episodes, Expands into Eastern Philosophy

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Per­haps you’ve heard of a phe­nom­e­non called “pod­fade,” where­in a pod­cast — par­tic­u­lar­ly an ambi­tious pod­cast — begins by putting out episodes reg­u­lar­ly, then miss­es one or two, then lets more and more time elapse between each episode, one day ceas­ing to update entire­ly. It pleas­es us to report that The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps, the pod­cast offer­ing just that, on whose progress we’ve kept you post­ed over the past three years, not only shows no signs of pod­fade, but has even broad­ened its man­date to include a greater vari­ety of philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions than before.

For those who haven’t heard the show, The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps comes from Peter Adam­son, phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Lud­wig Max­i­m­il­ians Uni­ver­si­ty Munich and King’s Col­lege Lon­don, and “looks at the ideas, lives and his­tor­i­cal con­text of the major philoso­phers as well as the less­er-known fig­ures of the tra­di­tion.”

The main show has put out 379 episodes so far, begin­ning with the pre-Socrat­ics (specif­i­cal­ly Thales) and most recent­ly exam­in­ing Fran­cis­can pover­ty, and now a new branch has grown, start­ing from Adam­son and col­lab­o­ra­tor Jonar­don Ganer­i’s intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy. (Hear the first episode of the Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy series below.)

Episodes of this new series on the Indi­an tra­di­tion, Adam­son writes, “will appear in alter­nat­ing weeks with episodes on Euro­pean phi­los­o­phy.” He also men­tions a “fur­ther ambi­tion to cov­er the oth­er philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions of Asia (espe­cial­ly Chi­nese) and also African phi­los­o­phy and the phi­los­o­phy of the African dias­po­ra, but of course India will take a while so you’ll have to be patient if you are wait­ing for me to get to that!”

You can sub­scribe to The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps’ Indi­an phi­los­o­phy series on its very own pod­cast RSS feed, or on iTunes here. Philo­soph­i­cal­ly-mind­ed binge-lis­ten­ers beware; you could lose a lot of time to these two shows. “I’ve been doing my laun­dry to it for months and I’m only up to Mai­monides,” says one com­menter on a Metafil­ter thread about the new series. “I am total­ly not ready for this Patañ­jali.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: A Free Course That Explores Phi­los­o­phy from Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

Death: A Free Phi­los­o­phy Course from Yale

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­maand the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Radical French Philosophy Meets Kung-Fu Cinema in Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

And here I’d always con­sid­ered La Chi­noise the only French-lan­guage film that used both bor­rowed Chi­nese imagery and lofty the­o­ry to mount a cri­tique of cap­i­tal­ism. It turns out that six years after Jean-Luc Godard made that movie, Sinol­o­gist, Sit­u­a­tion­ist, and film­mak­er René Viénet came out with the next impor­tant vol­ume in that fas­ci­nat­ing minor tra­di­tion, La Dialec­tique Peut-Elle Cass­er Des Briques? (Can Dialec­tics Break Bricks?), an entire Hong Kong mar­tial-arts pic­ture entire­ly repur­posed into, as Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Richard Met­zger puts it, “a cri­tique of class con­flicts, bureau­crat­ic social­ism, the fail­ures of the French Com­mu­nist Par­ty, Mao­ism, cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny, sex­u­al equal­i­ty and the way movies prop up Cap­i­tal­ist ide­ol­o­gy.”

Using as its visu­al mate­r­i­al 1972’s Crush, Tu Guangqi’s hand-to-hand-com­bat-inten­sive tale of Kore­an rebel­lion against Japan­ese impe­ri­al­ism, the film fol­lowed the mod­el of Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? “which re-dubbed humor­ous dia­logue over a Japan­ese spy movie to make the plot about a recipe for egg sal­ad […] but here the cin­e­mat­ic Sit­u­a­tion­ist provo­ca­teur is less out for laughs (although there are plen­ty of them) and more about the polit­i­cal sub­ver­sion.” This inter­sec­tion of lo-fi chop-socky action with high-flown rev­o­lu­tion­ary jar­gon and aca­d­e­m­ic name-drop­ping (“My Fou­caults! My Lacans! And if that’s not enough, I’ll even send my struc­tural­ists”) has for decades struck its view­ers as sub­lime­ly ridicu­lous. But do the images and the dia­logues real­ly clash as total­ly as they would seem to?

“Like many Hong Kong pro­duc­tions of the ear­ly sev­en­ties,” writes Luke White at Kung Fu with Braudel, “the sce­nario of the orig­i­nal film is clear­ly one in which colo­nial exploita­tion and resis­tance are at issue. Set in Korea under the Japan­ese occu­pa­tion that last­ed much of the first half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the heroes (those turned by Viénet into ‘the Pro­le­tar­i­ans’) are the mem­bers of a mar­tial arts school who start to resist the colo­nial vio­lence of the mil­i­taris­tic Japan­ese forces. How­ev­er poten­tial­ly con­ser­v­a­tive the nation­al­is­tic dimen­sion of its nar­ra­tive, this is also a work about strug­gle and lib­er­a­tion from tyran­ny in some of its most typ­i­cal­ly mod­ern forms.” In its mul­ti­plic­i­ty of pos­si­ble inter­pre­ta­tions, La Dialec­tique Peut-Elle Cass­er Des Briques? joins the ranks of all the most inter­est­ing works of art — and it cer­tain­ly makes for a refresh­ing break from actu­al­ly read­ing your Fou­caults, your Lacans, and your struc­tural­ists.

via UBU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

The Five Best North Kore­an Movies: Watch Them Free Online

Bruce Lee Audi­tions for The Green Hor­net (1964)

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­maand the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

48 Animated Videos Explain the History of Ideas: From Aristotle to Sartre

This year we’ve been fea­tur­ing short ani­mat­ed videos from BBC Radio 4, all cov­er­ing the big ques­tions: How did every­thing begin? What makes us human? What is love? How can I know any­thing at all? They’ve all come script­ed by philoso­pher Nigel War­bur­ton (he of Phi­los­o­phy Bites pod­cast fame) and nar­rat­ed by a host of nota­bles from both sides of the pond like Stephen Fry, Gillian Ander­son, Aidan Turn­er, and Har­ry Shear­er. They’ve illus­trat­ed the philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts at hand not just with elab­o­rate and joke-filled draw­ings that come to life before your eyes, but with direct ref­er­ence to the ideas of his­to­ry’s best-known thinkers: Aris­to­tle, Descartes, Hume, Wittgen­stein, de Beau­voirSartre, Freud, Chom­sky — the list goes on.

Now you can expe­ri­ence all of them in the one big playlist embed­ded just above, which pro­vides a grand his­to­ry of ideas with a suc­ces­sion of bite-size videos. The intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney begins with Dio­ti­ma’s con­cept of desire as a form of beau­ty and ends, 47 one- to two-minute celebri­ty-nar­rat­ed and philo­soph­i­cal­ly scin­til­lat­ing pro­duc­tions lat­er, with Karl Pop­per’s con­cept of fal­si­fi­ca­tion, under which an idea only attains the des­ig­na­tion sci­en­tif­ic if it could, in prin­ci­ple, be proven false.

Once you’ve gone through all these videos, despite how much they them­selves will have taught you, you’ll sure­ly want to go even deep­er into all these big ideas. In the ser­vice of that goal, why not have a look through some of the oth­er philo­soph­i­cal resources we’ve fea­tured, includ­ing our archive of Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, our col­lec­tion of Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks, pod­casts like Oxford’s phi­los­o­phy lec­tures and The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps, Bryan Magee’s tele­vi­sion inter­views with philoso­phers, and of course, phi­los­o­phy explained with donuts.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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:

How Can I Know Any­thing at All? BBC Ani­ma­tions Fea­ture the Phi­los­o­phy of Wittgen­stein, Hume, Pop­per & More

What is Love? BBC Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Fea­ture Sartre, Freud, Aristo­phanes, Dawkins & More

What is the Self? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Nar­rat­ed by Stephen Fry on Sartre, Descartes & More

How Did Every­thing Begin?: Ani­ma­tions on the Ori­gins of the Uni­verse Nar­rat­ed by X‑Files Star Gillian Ander­son

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

How to Live a Good Life? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Nar­rat­ed by Stephen Fry on Aris­to­tle, Ayn Rand, Max Weber & More

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

Phi­los­o­phy Bites: Pod­cast­ing Ideas From Pla­to to Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Since 2007

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­maand the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Tolstoy and Gandhi Exchange Letters: Two Thinkers’ Quest for Gentleness, Humility & Love (1909)

Gandhi.Tolstoy

Some of the most rig­or­ous moral thinkers of the past cen­tu­ry have spent time on the wrong side of ques­tions they deemed of vital impor­tance. Mohan­das Gand­hi, for exam­ple, at first remained loy­al to the British, man­i­fest­ing many of the vicious prej­u­dices of the Empire against Black South Africans and lob­by­ing for Indi­ans to serve in the war against the Zulu. Maya Jasanoff in New Repub­lic describes Gand­hi dur­ing this peri­od of his life as a “crank.” At the same time, he devel­oped his phi­los­o­phy of non-vio­lent resis­tance, or satya­gra­ha, in South Africa as an Indi­an suf­fer­ing the injus­tices inflict­ed upon his coun­try­men by both the Boers and the British.

Gandhi’s some­time con­tra­dic­to­ry stances may be in part under­stood by his rather aris­to­crat­ic her­itage and by the warm wel­come he first received in Lon­don when he left his fam­i­ly, his caste, and his wife and child in India to attend law school in 1888. And yet it is in Lon­don that he first began to change his views, becom­ing a staunch veg­e­tar­i­an and encoun­ter­ing theos­o­phy, Chris­tian­i­ty, and many of the con­tem­po­rary writ­ers who would shift his per­spec­tive over time. Gand­hi received a very dif­fer­ent recep­tion in Eng­land when he returned in 1931, the de fac­to leader of a bur­geon­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment in India whose exam­ple was so impor­tant to both the South African and U.S. civ­il rights move­ments of suc­ceed­ing decades.

One of the writ­ers who most deeply guid­ed Gandhi’s polit­i­cal, spir­i­tu­al, and philo­soph­i­cal evo­lu­tion, Leo Tol­stoy, expe­ri­enced his own dra­mat­ic trans­for­ma­tion, from land­ed aris­to­crat to social rad­i­cal, and also renounced prop­er­ty and posi­tion to advo­cate stren­u­ous­ly for social equal­i­ty. Gand­hi eager­ly read Tolstoy’s The King­dom of God is With­in You, the novelist’s state­ment of Chris­t­ian anar­chism. The book, Gand­hi wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, “left an abid­ing impres­sion on me.” After fur­ther study of Tolstoy’s reli­gious writ­ing, he “began to real­ize more and more the infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties of uni­ver­sal love.”

It was in Eng­land, not India, where Gand­hi first read “A Let­ter to a Hin­du,” Tolstoy’s 1908 reply to a note from Indi­an rev­o­lu­tion­ary Tarak­nath Das on the ques­tion of Indi­an inde­pen­dence. Tol­stoy divides his lengthy, thought­ful “Let­ter” into short chap­ters, each of which begins with a quo­ta­tion from the Vedas. “Indeed,” writes Maria Popo­va, the mis­sive “puts in glar­ing per­spec­tive the nuance­less and hasty op-eds of our time.” It so affect­ed Gand­hi that, in 1909, he wrote to Tol­stoy, thus begin­ning a cor­re­spon­dence between the two that last­ed through the fol­low­ing year. “I take the lib­er­ty of invit­ing your atten­tion to what has been going on in the Trans­vaal for near­ly three years,” begins Gandhi’s first let­ter, some­what abrupt­ly, “There is in that Colony a British Indi­an pop­u­la­tion of near­ly 13,000. These Indi­ans have, for sev­er­al years, labored under var­i­ous legal dis­abil­i­ties.”

The prej­u­dice against col­or and in some respects against Asians is intense in that Colony….The cli­max was reached three years ago, with a law that many oth­ers and I con­sid­ered to be degrad­ing and cal­cu­lat­ed to unman those to whom it was applic­a­ble. I felt that sub­mis­sion to a law of this nature was incon­sis­tent with the spir­it of true reli­gion. Some of my friends and I were and still are firm believ­ers in the doc­trine of non­re­sis­tance to evil. I had the priv­i­lege of study­ing your writ­ings also, which left a deep impres­sion on my mind.

Gand­hi refers to a law forc­ing the Indi­an pop­u­la­tion in South Africa to reg­is­ter with the author­i­ties. He goes on to inquire about the authen­tic­i­ty of the “Let­ter” and asks per­mis­sion to trans­late it, with pay­ment, and to omit a neg­a­tive ref­er­ence to rein­car­na­tion that offend­ed him. Tol­stoy respond­ed a few months lat­er, in 1910, allow­ing the trans­la­tion free of charge, and allow­ing the omis­sion, with the qual­i­fi­ca­tion that he believed “faith in re-birth will nev­er restrain mankind as much as faith in the immor­tal­i­ty of the soul and in divine truth in love.” Over­all, how­ev­er, he express­es sol­i­dar­i­ty, greet­ing Gand­hi “fra­ter­nal­ly” and writ­ing,

God help our dear broth­ers and co-work­ers in the Trans­vaal! Among us, too, this fight between gen­tle­ness and bru­tal­i­ty, between humil­i­ty and love and pride and vio­lence, makes itself ever more strong­ly felt, espe­cial­ly in a sharp col­li­sion between reli­gious duty and the State laws, expressed by refusals to per­form mil­i­tary ser­vice.

The two con­tin­ued to write to each oth­er, Gand­hi send­ing Tol­stoy a copy of his Indi­an Home Rule and the trans­lat­ed “Let­ter,” and Tol­stoy expound­ing at length on the errors—and what he saw as the supe­ri­or characteristics—of Chris­t­ian doc­trine. You can read their full cor­re­spon­dence here, along with Tolstoy’s “Let­ter to a Hin­du” and Gandhi’s intro­duc­tion to his edi­tion. Despite their reli­gious dif­fer­ences, the exchange fur­ther gal­va­nized Gand­hi’s pas­sive resis­tance move­ment, and in 1910, he found­ed a com­mu­ni­ty called “Tol­stoy Farm” near Johan­nes­burg.

Gand­hi’s views on African inde­pen­dence would change, and Nel­son Man­dela lat­er adopt­ed Gand­hi and the Indi­an inde­pen­dence move­ment as a stan­dard for the anti-apartheid move­ment. We’re well aware, of course, of Gand­hi’s influ­ence on Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. For his part, Gand­hi wrote glow­ing­ly of Tol­stoy, and the mod­el the nov­el­ist pro­vid­ed for his own anti-colo­nial cam­paign. In a speech 18 years lat­er, he said, “When I went to Eng­land, I was a votary of vio­lence, I had faith in it and none in non­vi­o­lence.” After read­ing Tol­stoy, “that lack of faith in non­vi­o­lence vanished…Tolstoy was the very embod­i­ment of truth in this age. He strove uncom­pro­mis­ing­ly to fol­low truth as he saw it, mak­ing no attempt to con­ceal or dilute what he believed to be the truth. He stat­ed what he felt to be the truth with­out car­ing whether it would hurt or please the peo­ple or whether it would be wel­come to the mighty emper­or. Tol­stoy was a great advo­cate of non­vi­o­lence in his age.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Gandhi’s Famous Speech on the Exis­tence of God (1931)

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Leo Tolstoy’s Masochis­tic Diary: I Am Guilty of “Sloth,” “Cow­ardice” & “Sissi­ness” (1851)

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

Albert Einstein​ & Sigmund Freud​ Exchange Letters and Debate How to Make the World Free from War (1932)

einstein freud

The prob­lem of vio­lence, per­haps the true root of all social ills, seems irre­solv­able. Yet, as most thought­ful peo­ple have real­ized after the wars of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the dan­gers human aggres­sion pose have only increased expo­nen­tial­ly along with glob­al­iza­tion and tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment. And as Albert Ein­stein rec­og­nized after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshi­ma and Nagasaki—which he part­ly helped to engi­neer with the Man­hat­tan Project—the aggres­sive poten­tial of nations in war had reached mass sui­ci­dal lev­els.

After Einstein’s involve­ment in the cre­ation of the atom­ic bomb, he spent his life “work­ing for dis­ar­ma­ment and glob­al gov­ern­ment,” writes psy­chol­o­gist Mark Lei­th, “anguished by his impos­si­ble, Faus­t­ian deci­sion.” Yet, as we dis­cov­er in let­ters Ein­stein wrote to Sig­mund Freud in 1932, he had been advo­cat­ing for a glob­al solu­tion to war long before the start of World War II. Ein­stein and Freud’s cor­re­spon­dence took place under the aus­pices of the League of Nation’s new­ly-formed Inter­na­tion­al Insti­tute of Intel­lec­tu­al Coop­er­a­tion, cre­at­ed to fos­ter dis­cus­sion between promi­nent pub­lic thinkers. Ein­stein enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly chose Freud as his inter­locu­tor.

In his first let­ter to the psy­chol­o­gist, he writes, “This is the prob­lem: Is there any way of deliv­er­ing mankind from the men­ace of war?” Well before the atom­ic age, Ein­stein alleges the urgency of the ques­tion is a mat­ter of “com­mon knowledge”—that “with the advance of mod­ern sci­ence, this issue has come to mean a mat­ter of life and death for Civ­i­liza­tion as we know it.”

Ein­stein reveals him­self as a sort of Pla­ton­ist in pol­i­tics, endors­ing The Repub­lic’s vision of rule by elite philoso­pher-kings. But unlike Socrates in that work, the physi­cist pro­pos­es not city-states, but an entire world gov­ern­ment of intel­lec­tu­al elites, who hold sway over both reli­gious lead­ers and the League of Nations. The con­se­quence of such a poli­ty, he writes, would be world peace—the price, like­ly, far too high for any world leader to pay:

The quest of inter­na­tion­al secu­ri­ty involves the uncon­di­tion­al sur­ren­der by every nation, in a cer­tain mea­sure, of its lib­er­ty of action—its sov­er­eign­ty that is to say—and it is clear beyond all doubt that no oth­er road can lead to such secu­ri­ty.

Ein­stein express­es his pro­pos­al in some sin­is­ter-sound­ing terms, ask­ing how it might be pos­si­ble for a “small clique to bend the will of the major­i­ty.” His final ques­tion to Freud: “Is it pos­si­ble to con­trol man’s men­tal evo­lu­tion so as to make him proof against the psy­chosis of hate and destruc­tive­ness?”

Freud’s response to Ein­stein, dat­ed Sep­tem­ber, 1932, sets up a fas­ci­nat­ing dialec­tic between the physicist’s per­haps dan­ger­ous­ly naïve opti­mism and the psychologist’s unsen­ti­men­tal appraisal of the human sit­u­a­tion. Freud’s mode of analy­sis tends toward what we would now call evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy, or what he calls a “’mythol­o­gy’ of the instincts.” He gives a most­ly spec­u­la­tive account of the pre­his­to­ry of human con­flict, in which “a path was traced that led away from vio­lence to law”—itself main­tained by orga­nized vio­lence.

Freud makes explic­it ref­er­ence to ancient sources, writ­ing of the “Pan­hel­lenic con­cep­tion, the Greeks’ aware­ness of supe­ri­or­i­ty over their bar­bar­ian neigh­bors.” This kind of pro­to-nation­al­ism “was strong enough to human­ize the meth­ods of war­fare.” Like the Hel­lenis­tic mod­el, Freud pro­pos­es for indi­vid­u­als a course of human­iza­tion through edu­ca­tion and what he calls “iden­ti­fi­ca­tion” with “what­ev­er leads men to share impor­tant inter­ests,” thus cre­at­ing a “com­mu­ni­ty of feel­ing.” These means, he grants, may lead to peace. “From our ‘mythol­o­gy’ of the instincts,” he writes, “we may eas­i­ly deduce a for­mu­la for an indi­rect method of elim­i­nat­ing war.”

And yet, Freud con­cludes with ambiva­lence and a great deal of skep­ti­cism about the elim­i­na­tion of vio­lent instincts and war. He con­trasts ancient Greek pol­i­tics with “the Bol­she­vist con­cep­tions” that pro­pose a future end of war and which are like­ly “under present con­di­tions, doomed to fail.” Refer­ring to his the­o­ry of the com­pet­ing bina­ry instincts he calls Eros and Thanatos—roughly love (or lust) and death drives—Freud arrives at what he calls a plau­si­ble “mythol­o­gy” of human exis­tence:

The upshot of these obser­va­tions, as bear­ing on the sub­ject in hand, is that there is no like­li­hood of our being able to sup­press human­i­ty’s aggres­sive ten­den­cies. In some hap­py cor­ners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abun­dant­ly what­ev­er man desires, there flour­ish races whose lives go gen­tly by; unknow­ing of aggres­sion or con­straint. This I can hard­ly cred­it; I would like fur­ther details about these hap­py folk.

Nonethe­less, he says weari­ly and with more than a hint of res­ig­na­tion, “per­haps our hope” that war will end in the near future, “is not chimeri­cal.” Freud’s let­ter offers no easy answers, and shies away from the kinds of ide­al­is­tic polit­i­cal cer­tain­ties of Ein­stein. For this, the physi­cist expressed grat­i­tude, call­ing Freud’s lengthy response “a tru­ly clas­sic reply…. We can­not know what may grow from such seed.”

This exchange of let­ters, con­tends Hum­boldt State Uni­ver­si­ty phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor John Pow­ell, “has nev­er been giv­en the atten­tion it deserves.… By the time the exchange between Ein­stein and Freud was pub­lished in 1933 under the title Why War?, Hitler, who was to dri­ve both men into exile, was already in pow­er, and the let­ters nev­er achieved the wide cir­cu­la­tion intend­ed for them.” Their cor­re­spon­dence is now no less rel­e­vant, and the ques­tions they address no less urgent and vex­ing. You can read the com­plete exchange at pro­fes­sor Powell’s site here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Calls for Peace and Social Jus­tice in 1945

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

Sig­mund Freud Appears in Rare, Sur­viv­ing Video & Audio Record­ed Dur­ing the 1930s

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

Watch The Half Hour Hegel: A Long, Guided Tour Through Hegel’s Phenomenology, Passage by Passage

Big books can be daunt­ing. Big, com­pli­cat­ed books can seem insur­mount­able, espe­cial­ly if you’re try­ing to read them on your own. How many of you have tried to read Joyce’s Ulysses’ and bailed out with­in 30 pages? Raise your hands. Well, per­haps you’ll be pleased to learn about Frank Delaney’s Re:Joyce pod­cast, which, since 2012, has been tak­ing lis­ten­ers on a slow walk through Joyce’s mas­ter­piece, some­times sen­tence by sen­tence. Episode 273 has just been post­ed, which fea­tures Delaney unpack­ing a scene in “Hades,” or what amounts to Chap­ter 6. By my count, Frank has only cov­ered about 15% of the book. So it’s hard­ly too late to jump in.

If you’re look­ing to work your way through anoth­er bear of a book, give Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of the Spir­it a try. Writ­ten in 1807, the Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy had a pro­found effect on the devel­op­ment of Ger­man and West­ern phi­los­o­phy, and it’s a noto­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult read. That’s where the Youtube series “Half Hour Hegel” comes in handy. Cre­at­ed by Gre­go­ry Sadler, a philoso­pher by train­ing, the series fea­tures “25–35 minute YouTube videos lead­ing stu­dents through the entire text of G.W.F. Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of Spir­it, para­graph by para­graph, engag­ing in a close read­ing of the text with­out skip­ping any of the mate­r­i­al.”

You can find 67 videos so far (watch the playlist above), cov­er­ing 5 main por­tions of the text: the Pref­ace (lec­tures 1–31), the Intro­duc­tion (lec­tures 32–38), Sense-Cer­tain­ty (lec­tures 39–44), Per­cep­tion (lec­tures 45–51), and Force and the Under­stand­ing (lec­tures 52–65).”  By the end of the project, there will be rough­ly 300 videos in the series. You can keep tabs on the video playlist here. And you can sup­port Sadler’s work over on his Patre­on page.

Oth­er cours­es on Hegel can be found on our list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro to G.W.F. Hegel, and Every­thing Else You Want­ed to Know About the Daunt­ing Ger­man Philoso­pher

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Hegel, Kant & Niet­zsche to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca

 

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Philosophy Explained With Donuts

philosophy donuts

We’ve all seen them, on the board­walks of Venice Beach or of the Jer­sey Shore: poop-joke t‑shirts that state the gist of var­i­ous world reli­gions or philoso­phies by ref­er­ence to the afore­men­tioned bod­i­ly func­tion. Clever they aren’t, but the form adapts to anoth­er, more taste­ful for­mu­la­tion (pun most def­i­nite­ly intend­ed) in the list above, which briefly describes the philo­soph­i­cal pro­grams of six­teen promi­nent West­ern thinkers with ref­er­ence to that uni­ver­sal­ly beloved food, the donut. To wit: pre-Socrat­ic Greek philoso­pher Her­a­cli­tus gets summed up with “You can’t eat the same donut twice,” a twist on one of his famous few apho­risms. Lud­wig Wittgen­stein’s phi­los­o­phy becomes an ellip­ti­cal series of pos­si­ble donuts in var­i­ous lan­guage games: “Fried Pas­try, Zero, Park­ing lot spin, Spare tire.” And so on.

No need to point out the over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion inher­ent in this strat­e­gy; that’s kind of the point. It’s a joke, after all, but one the author—whoever that is—clearly intends as a means of break­ing the ice and get­ting down to more seri­ous explo­rations. But what if the donut is the seri­ous explo­ration? Such is the case in a 2001 arti­cle pub­lished in the jour­nal Basic Objects: Case Stud­ies in The­o­ret­i­cal Prim­i­tives by Colum­bia phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Achille C. Varzi.

Sim­ply titled (in the British spelling) “Dough­nuts,” Varzi’s paper explores the donut, or “torus” in the lan­guage of topog­ra­phers, as a the­o­ret­i­cal object for an onto­log­i­cal thought exper­i­ment. In short, he asks whether or not we can say that the donut hole is an actu­al exist­ing enti­ty or sim­ply a fig­ure of speech, a “façon de par­ler.” In the tra­di­tion­al view, that of the topog­ra­phers, who prac­tice “a sort of rub­bery geom­e­try…. The only thing that mat­ters is the edi­ble stuff. The hole is a mere façon de par­ler.”

On anoth­er, more three-dimen­sion­al view of the rela­tion­ship “between void and mat­ter,” things look dif­fer­ent: “We must be very seri­ous about treat­ing them [donut holes] as ful­ly-fledged enti­ties, on a par with the mate­r­i­al objects that sur­round them.” The real exis­tence of the hole can­not be eas­i­ly dis­missed with­out run­ning into a prob­lem, “the dilem­ma of every elim­i­na­tive strat­e­gy: if suc­cess­ful, it ends up elim­i­nat­ing every­thing just in order to elim­i­nate noth­ings.” No hole, no donut. (Though, as Simone De Beau­voir appar­ent­ly rec­og­nized, “Patri­archy is respon­si­ble for the shape of the donut.”) The donut hole the­sis also forms part of the argu­ment in an aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy paper from 2012 enti­tled “Being Pos­i­tive About Neg­a­tive Facts” from Phi­los­o­phy & Phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal Research. On the way to show­ing that “neg­a­tive facts exist in the usu­al sense of exis­tence,” authors Stephen Bark­er and Mark Jago, both of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham, come to sim­i­lar con­clu­sions about the donut, with ref­er­ence to ear­li­er work by Varzi:

Holes pose some­thing of a philo­soph­i­cal quandary and, per­haps as a result of their mys­tery, are often treat­ed as imma­te­r­i­al enti­ties (Casati and Varzi 1994). Yet we seem to be able to per­ceive holes, gaps, dents and the like. The view of holes as imma­te­r­i­al objects is, we think, very much in line with think­ing of the neg­a­tive as the meta­phys­i­cal­ly undead. Giv­en our accep­tance of neg­a­tive facts, we can offer a sto­ry about holes on which they are mate­r­i­al enti­ties. If there is a donut hole then there is a spa­tial region involv­ing the instan­ti­a­tion of donut-dough which is inti­mate­ly con­nect­ed with an absence there­of.

Make of these claims what you will, but I think what we see in both essays is that seri­ous inter­est in a friv­o­lous object can pro­duce illu­mi­nat­ing dis­cus­sion. That describes the the­sis of the site Improb­a­ble Research, who bring us both of these donut exam­ples; their motto—“Research that makes peo­ple LAUGH and then THINK.” I don’t know if either essay—or even the donut joke at the top of the page—really makes for ha-ha laughs so much, but these argu­ments about the mate­r­i­al exis­tence of the imma­te­r­i­al space of donut holes cer­tain­ly chal­lenged my think­ing.

via Improb­a­ble Research

Relat­ed Con­tents:

140+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Phi­los­o­phy Ref­er­ee Hand Sig­nals

Mon­ty Python’s Best Phi­los­o­phy Sketch­es

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

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

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

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