A pioneer of “Afrofuturism,” bandleader Sun Ra emerged from a traditional swing scene in Alabama, touring the country in his teens as a member of his high school biology teacher’s big band. While attending Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University, he had an out-of-body experience during which he was transported into outer space. As biographer John Szwed records him saying, “my whole body changed into something else. I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn.” While there, aliens with “little antenna on each ear. A little antenna on each eye” instructed him to drop out of college and speak through his music. And that’s just what he did, changing his name from Herman Blount and never looking back.
Whether you believe that story, whether Sun Ra believes it, or whether his entire persona is a theatrical put-on should make no difference. Because Sun Ra would be a visionary either way. Combining Afrocentric science fiction, esoteric and occult philosophy, Egyptology, and, with his “Arkestra,” his own brand of free jazz-futurism that has no equal on earth, the man is truly sui generis. In 1971, he served as artist-in-residence at UC Berkeley and offered a spring semester lecture, African-American Studies 198, also known as “Sun Ra 171,” “The Black Man in the Universe,” or “The Black man in the Cosmos.” The course featured readings from—to name just a few—theosophist Madame Blavatsky, French philosopher Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, black American writer and poet Henry Dumas, and “God,” whom the cosmic jazz theorist reportedly listed as the author of The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (otherwise known as the King James Bible).
Sun Ra wrote biblical quotes on the board and then ‘permutated’ them—rewrote and transformed their letters and syntax into new equations of meaning, while members of the Arkestra passed through the room, preventing anyone from taping the class. His lecture subjects included Neoplatonic doctrines; the application of ancient history and religious texts to racial problems; pollution and war; and a radical reinterpretation of the Bible in light of Egyptology.
For more of Professor Ra’s spaced out presentation, see the Helsinki interview above, also from 1971. And if you decide you need your own education in “Sun Ra 171,” see the full reading list from his Berkeley course below, courtesy of the blog New Day.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Radix
Alexander Hislop: Two Babylons
The Theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky
The Book of Oahspe
Henry Dumas: Ark of Bones
Henry Dumas: Poetry for My People eds. Hale Charfield & Eugene Redmond, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1971
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, eds. Leroi Jones & Larry Neal, New York: William Morrow 1968
John S. Wilson: Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It’s At, United States Information Agency
Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan: Black Man of the Nile and His Family, Alkibu Ian Books 1972
Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney: The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, and the Law of Nature, London: Pioneer Press 1921
The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (Ra’s description; = The King James Bible)
Pjotr Demianovitch Ouspensky: A New Model of the Universe. Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art, New York: Knopf 1956
Frederick Bodmer: The Loom of Language. An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, ed. Lancelot Hogben, New York: Norton & Co. 1944
The political intersection of Ayn Randian libertarians and Evangelical conservatives is a baffling phenomenon for most of us outside the American right. It’s hard to reconcile the atheist arch-capitalist and despiser of social welfare with, for example, the Sermon on the Mount. But hey, mixed marriages often work out, right? Well, as for Rand herself, one would hardly find her sympathetic to religion or its expositors at any point in her career. Take her sound lashing of writer, scholar, and lay theologian C.S. Lewis, intellectual hero of Protestant Christianity. (Wheaton College houses his personal library, and there exists not only a C.S. Lewis Institute, but also a C.S. Lewis Foundation.) Lewis’ The Abolition of Man(1943), while ostensibly a text on education, also purports, like Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, to expound the principles of natural law and objective moral value. Rand would have none of it.
Religion journal First Things brings us excerpts from the edited collection, Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors. In it, Rand glosses Lewis’s Abolition of Man with savage ferocity, calling the author an “abysmal bastard,” “cheap, drivelling non-entity” [sic], and “abysmal scum!” The screenshot above (Lewis left, Rand’s annotations right) from the First Things’ blog post offers a typical representation of Rand’s tone throughout, and includes some particularly elaborate insults.
The C.S. Lewis Foundation comments that Lewis “probably would not have approved of the level of venom, but he probably would not have liked Rand’s philosophy much either.” Another Christian academic has successfully squared an appreciation for both Rand and Lewis, but writes critically of Rand, who “seems to have interpreted Lewis’s book as a Luddite screed against science and technology,” part of her “tendency to caricature her opponents.” Certainly no one ever accused her of subtlety. “It’s pretty clear,” our professor continues, “that when showing students how to engage in scholarly discourse, Ayn Rand should not be the model.” No, indeed, but how she would thrive on the Internet.
The new open philosophy journal, Ergo, was “created in response to a need for general philosophy journals that are efficient, open access, inclusive, and transparent.” Traditional philosophy journals move slowly, taking somewhere between 5 and 9 months to tell scholars whether their submissions will be accepted or not. They overwhelmingly favor work written by white men. And they cater to metaphysics and epistemology, while giving less attention to the philosophy of mind, ethics, and political theory.
Enter Ergo, the new open journal created by The University of Michigan, which just published its first issue online.The average time-to-decision was 21 days, with the journal rejecting 93% of the submissions. The first five accepted articles covered Epistemology (twice), History of Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Biology, and Philosophy of Mind. And, as the editors seem acutely aware, the first submissions were still dominated by men. (Get more background on the journal here.)
All of the articles are free to readers (while authors retain copyright under a Creative Commons license.) You can find more free publications by the University of Michigan in our previous post: 15 Free eBooks on New Media Studies & the Digital Humanities.
For Sigmund Freud, a joke was never just a joke, but a window into the unconscious, laughter an anxious symptom of recognition that something lost has resurfaced, distorted into humor. For Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek, jokes function similarly. And yet, in keeping with his commitment to leftist politics, he uses jokes not to expose the hidden terrain of individual psyches but “to evoke binds of historical circumstances hard to indicate by other means.” So writes Kenneth Baker in a brief SFGate review of the recent Žižek’s Jokes, a book-length compilation of Žižekisms published by MIT Press. Baker also points out a defining feature of Žižek’s humor: “Many of Žižek’s jokes preserve or even amplify the vulgarity of their demotic or pop cultural origins.” Take the NSFW joke he tells above at the expense of a Montenegrin friend. Žižek explains the joke as part of his maybe dubious strategy of countering racism with “progressive racism” or the “solidarity” of “shared obscenity”—the use of potentially uncomfortable ethnic humor to expose uncomfortable political truths that get repressed or papered over by politeness.
Some of Žižek’s humor is more trigger-warning worthy, such as his retelling of this old Soviet dissident joke or this “very dirty joke” he reportedly heard from a Palestinian Christian acquaintance. On the other hand, some of his “dirty jokes” replace vulgarity with theory. For example, Žižek likes to tell a “truly obscene” version of the famously filthy joke “The Aristocrats,” which you’ll know if you’ve seen, or only read about, the film of the same name. And yet in his take, instead of a series of increasingly disgusting acts, the family performs “a short course in Hegelian thought, debating the true meaning of the negativity, of sublation, of absolute knowing, etc.” This is perhaps an example of what Baker refers to as Žižekian jokes that are “baffling to readers not conversant with the gnarly dialectics of his thought, which does not lend itself easily to sampling.” Be that as it may, much of Žižek’s humor works without the theoretical context, and some of it is even tame enough for water cooler interludes. Below are four examples of “safe” jokes, culled from website Critical Theory’s list of “The 10 Best Žižek Jokes to Get You Through Finals” (which itself culls from Žižek’s Jokes). “Some of the jokes [in Žižek’s book] provide hilarious insights into Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalysis or ideology,” writes Critical Theory, “Others are just funny, and most are somewhat offensive—a characteristic Žižek admittedly doesn’t care to correct.”
#1 There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida…
about a group of Jews in a synagogue publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: “O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!” After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest: “O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!” After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: “O God, I am nothing.” The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: “What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!”
#4 When the Turkish Communist writer Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the mid- 1930s, the time of the big purges…
and show trials, a Soviet apologist trying to convince him about the need for violence against the enemies evoked the proverb “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” to which Istrati tersely replied: “All right. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelet of yours?”
We should say the same about the austerity measures imposed by IMF: the Greeks would have the full right to say, “OK, we are breaking our eggs for all of Europe, but where’s the omelet you are promising us?”
#7 This also makes meaningless the Christian joke…
according to which, when, in John 8:1–11, Christ says to those who want to stone the woman taken in adultery, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone!” he is immediately hit by a stone, and then shouts back: “Mother! I asked you to stay at home!”
#8 In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic,…
a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.”
And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the “red ink”: we “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict —“war on terror,” “democracy and freedom,” “human rights,” etc.—are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. The task today is to give the protesters red ink.
For more of Slavoj Žižek’s witticism, vulgarity, and humorous critiques of ideological formations, political history, and Hegelian and Lacanian thought, pick up a copy ofŽižek’s Jokes, and see this Youtube compilation of the politically incorrect leftist philosopher’s humor caught on tape.
I can vividly recall the first time I read C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. I was fourteen, and I was prepared to be terrified by the book, knowing of its demonic subject matter and believing at the time in invisible malevolence. The novel is written as a series of letters between Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood, two devils tasked with corrupting their human charges, or “patients,” through all sorts of subtle and insidious tricks. The book has a reputation as a literary aid to Christian living—like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—but it’s so much more than that. Instead of fire and brimstone, I found ribald wit, sharp satire, a cutting psychological dissection of the modern Western mind, with its evasions, pretensions, and cagey delusions. Stripped of its theology, it might have been written by Orwell or Sartre, though Lewis clearly owes a debt to Kierkegaard, as well as the long tradition of medieval morality plays, with their cavorting devils and didactic human types. Yes, the book is baldly moralistic, but it’s also a brilliant examination of all the twisted ways we fool ourselves and dissemble, or if you like, get led astray by evil forces.
If you haven’t read the book, you can see a concise animation of a critical scene above, one of seven made by “C.S. Lewis Doodle” that illustrate the key points of some of Lewis’s books and essays. Lewis believed in evil forces, but his method of presenting them is primarily literary, and therefore ambiguous and open to many different readings (somewhat like the devil Woland in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita). The author imagined hell as “something like the bureaucracy of a police state or a thoroughly nasty business office,” a description as chilling as it is inherently comic. As you can see above in the animated scene from Screwtape by C.S. Lewis Doodle, the devils—though drawn in this case as old-fashioned winged fiends—behave like petty functionaries as they lead Wormwood’s solidly middle-class “patient” into the sinister clutches of materialist doctrine by appealing to his intellectual vanity. As much as it’s a condemnation of said doctrine, the scene also works as a critique of a popular discourse that thrives on fashionable jargon and the desire to be seen as relevant and well-read, no matter the truth or coherence of one’s beliefs.
Screwtape was by no means my first introduction to Lewis’s works. Like many, many people, I cut my literary teeth on The Chronicles of Narnia (available on audio here) and his brilliant sci-fi Space Trilogy. But it was the first book of his I’d read that was clearly apologetic in its intent, rather than allegorical. I’m sure I’m not unique among Lewis’s readers in graduating from Screwtape to his more philosophical books and many essays. One such piece, “We Have No (Unlimited) Right to Happiness,” takes on the modern conception of rights as natural guarantees, rather than societal conventions. As he critiques this relatively recent notion, Lewis develops a theory of sexual morality in which “when two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also—I must put it crudely—good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people.” The C.S. Lewis Doodle above illustrates the many examples of fickleness and inconstancy that Lewis presents in his essay as foils for the virtues he espouses.
The Lewis Doodle seen here illustrates his 1948 essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” in which Lewis chides readers for the panic and paranoia over the impending threat of nuclear war in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such an occurrence, he writes, would only result in the already inevitable—death—just as the plagues of the sixteenth century or Viking raids:
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
It seems a very mature, and noble, perspective, but if you think that Lewis glibly glosses over the substantively different effects of a nuclear age from any other—fallout, radiation poisoning, the end of civilization itself—you are mistaken. His answer, however, you may find as I do deeply fatalistic. Lewis questions the value of civilization altogether as a hopeless endeavor bound to end in any case in “nothing.” “Nature is a sinking ship,” he writes, and dooms us all to annihilation whether we hasten the end with technology or manage to avoid that fate. Here is Lewis the apologist, presenting us with the starkest of options—either all of our endeavors are utterly meaningless and without purpose or value, since we cannot make them last forever, or all meaning and value reside in the theistic vision of existence. I’ve not myself seen things Lewis’s way on this point, but the C.S. Lewis Doodler does, and urges his viewers who agree to “send to your enquiring atheistic mates” his lovely little adaptations. Or you can simply enjoy these as many non-religious readers of Lewis enjoy his work—take what seems beautiful, humane, true, and skillfully, lucidly written (or drawn), and leave the rest for your enquiring Christian mates.
Over at his blog Leiter Reports, UC Chicago professor of philosophy Brian Leiter is currently conducting a very interesting poll, asking his readers to rank the 25 philosophers of “the modern era” (the last 200 years) who “have had the most pernicious influence on philosophy.” The pool of candidates comes from an earlier survey of influential philosophers, and Leiter has imposed some conditions on his respondents, asking that they only rank philosophers they have read, and only include “serious philosophers”–“no charlatans like Derrida or amateurs like Rand.” While I personally wince at Leiter’s Derrida jab (and cheer his exclusion of Rand), I think his question may be a little too academic, his field perhaps too narrow.
But the polemical idea is so compelling that I felt it worth adopting for a broader informal survey: contra Leiter, I’ve ranked five philosophers who I think have had a most pernicious influence on the world at large. I’m limiting my own choices to Western philosophers, with which I’m most familiar, though obviously by my first choice, you can tell I’ve expanded the temporal parameters. And in sporting listicle fashion, I’ve not only made a ranking, but I’ve blurbed each of my choices, inspired by this fun Neatorama post, “9 Bad Boys of Philosophy.”
While that list uses “bad” in the Michael Jackson sense, I mean it in the sense of Leiter’s “pernicious.” And though I would also include the proviso that only “serious” thinkers warrant inclusion, I don’t think this necessarily rules out anyone on the basis of academic canons of taste. One might as well include C.S. Lewis as Jean Baudrillard, both of whom tend to get dismissed in most philosophy departments. My own list surely reveals my anti-authoritarian biases, just as some others may rail at fuzzy thinking with a list of postmodernists, or socialism with a list of Marxists. This is as it should be. Defining the “bad,” after all, is bound to be a highly subjective exercise, and one about which we can and should disagree, civilly but vigorously. So with no more ado, here are my five choices for “Most Pernicious Western Philosophers.” I invite—nay urge you—to make your own lists in the comments, with explanations terse or prolix as you see fit.
The Dominican friar and author of the near-unreadably dense Summa Theologica made it his life’s work to harmonize logical Aristotelian thought and mystical Christian theology, to the detriment of both. While for Aquinas and his medieval contemporaries, natural theology represents an early attempt at empiricism, the emphasis on the “theology” meant that the West has endured centuries of spurious “proofs” of God’s existence and completely incomprehensible rationalizations of the Trinity, the virgin birth, and other miraculous tales that have no analogue in observable phenomena.
Like many church fathers before him, Thomas’s employment as a kind of Grand Inquisitor of heretics and a codifier of dogma makes me all the more averse to his thought, though much of it is admittedly of great historical import.
Schmitt was a Nazi, which—as in the case of Martin Heidegger—strangely hasn’t disqualified his thought from serious appraisal across the political spectrum. But some of Schmitt’s ideas—or at least their application—are particularly troubling even when fully divorced from his personal politics. Schmitt theorized that sovereign rulers, or dictators, emerge in a “state of exception”—a security crisis with which a democratic society cannot seem to cope, but which is ripe for exploitation by domineering individuals. These “states” can legitimately appear at any time, or can be ginned up by unscrupulous rulers. The crucial insight has inspired such leftist thinkers as Walter Benjamin and theorists on the right like Leo Strauss. Its political effects are something altogether different. Writes Scott Horton in Harper’s:
It was Schmitt who, as the crown jurist of the new Nazi regime, provided the essential road map for Gleichschaltung – the leveling of opposition within Germany’s vast bureaucracy – and it was he who provided the legal tools used to transform the Weimar democracy into the Nazi nightmare that followed it.
This same road map—many have alleged—guided the unilateral suspensions of constitutional protections and human rights protocols machinated by Bush and Cheney’s Neoconservative legal advisors after 9/11, who read Schmitt thoroughly. (I intend here no direct comparison whatever between these two regimes, Godwin willing.)
Though he wrote copiously on epistemology, religious toleration, education, and all sorts of other important topics, Locke is often remembered as everyone’s favorite liberal political philosopher. His anonymously published Two Treatises of Government has had an outsized influence on most modern democratic constitutions, and given his primary antagonist in the first part of that work—Sir Robert Filmer, staunch defender of the divine right of kings and natural hierarchies—Locke seems positively progressive, what with his defense of a civil society based on respect for labor and private property against the unwarranted power and abuse of the aristocracy.
But Locke’s Filmer works as something of a straw man. Examined critically, Locke is no democratic champion but an apologist for the petty tyranny of landowners who gradually eroded the commons, displaced the commoners, and seized greater and greater tracts of land in England and the colonies under the Lockean justification that a man is entitled to as much property as he can make use of. Of course, in Locke’s time, and in our own, proprietors and landowners seize and “make use of” the resources and labor of others—slaves, indigenous people, and exploited, landless workers—in order to make their extravagant claims to private property. This kind of appropriation is also enabled by Locke’s thought, since property only justly belongs to the “industrious and the rational”— characteristics that tend to get defined against their opposites (“lazy and stupid”) in any way that suits those in power.
Another darling of Enlightenment tradition, Descartes gets all the credit for founding a philosophy on radical doubt, and thereby doing away with the presuppositional theological baggage imposed on thought by scholastics like Aquinas. And yet, like Locke, Descartes gets too easy a pass for reducing his method to terms that are by no means unequivocal or universally meaningful, though he pretends that they are.
Descartes explains his method as a means of eliminating from his mind all conceptual clutter but those ideas that seem to him “clear and distinct.” Oddly the two bedrock concepts he’s left with are an unshakeable faith in his own individual ego—or soul—and the existence of a monotheistic creator-God. Thus, Descartes’ method of radical doubt leads him to reaffirm the two most core concepts of classical Western philosophy, concepts he more or less assumes on the basis of intuition—or perhaps unexamined ideological commitments.
This is a tough one, because I actually adore Kierkegaard, but I love him as a writer, not as a philosopher. His critiques of Hegel are scathing and hilarious, his takedowns of the self-satisfied Danish petit-bourgeoisie are epic, and the tonal range and ironic deftness of his numerous literary voices—personae as diverse as desert saints and scheming seducers—are unequalled.
But I recoil from the ethical philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, as so many people recoil from Nietzsche’s brinksmanship with traditional Christian morality. Kierkegaard’s reduction of the human experience to a false choice paradigm—“Either/Or”—, his ethics of blind irrationalism couched as a justifiable leap of faith, exemplified by his glorification of Abraham’s willingness to kill his son Isaac… these things I can’t help but find abhorrent, and if I’ve ever been tempted to read them as ironic expressions of the author’s many masks, further study has robbed me of this balm. Kierkegaard the writer offers us a great deal; Kierkegaard the moral philosopher, not so much.
So there you have my list—riddled, to be sure, with inaccuracies, prejudice, and superficial misreadings, but an honest attempt nonetheless, given my inadequate philosophical training. Again I’ll say that the inclusion of any of these five names in a list of philosophers, pernicious or no, means that I believe they are all thinkers worth reading and taking seriously to some degree, even if one violently disagrees with them or finds glaring and grievous error in the midst of seas of brilliance.
Now that you’ve read my “Five Most Pernicious Philosophers,” please tell us readers, who are yours, and why? Your griping explanations can be as short or long as you see fit, and feel free to violently disagree with my hasty judgments above. Ad hominem attacks aside, it’s all within the spirit of the enterprise.
While theorist and provocateur Slavoj Žižek tends to get characterized—especially in a recent, testy exchange with Noam Chomsky—as obscurantist and muddle-headed, I’ve always found him quite readable, especially when compared to his mentor, psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan. As an interpreter of Lacan’s theories, Žižek always does his reader the courtesy of providing specific, concrete examples to anchor the theoretical jargon (where Lacan gives us pseudo-mathematical symbols). In the short Big Think clip above, Žižek’s examples range from the history of physics to the Declaration of Independence to the familiar “male chauvinist” scenario of a man, his wife, and his mistress. Žižek’s point, the point of psychoanalysis, he alleges, is that “people do not really want or desire happiness.”
This seems counterintuitive. Happiness—our own and others—is after all the goal of our loftiest endeavors, no? This seems to be the pop-psych rendition of, say, Maslow’s theory of self-actualization. But no, says Zizek, happiness is an integral part of fantasy. Like the philanderer’s mistress, the object of desire must be kept at a distance, he says. Once it is achieved, we no longer want it: “We don’t really want what we think we desire.” And in keeping with Žižek’s example of infidelity—which may or may not involve the chauvinist killing his wife—he tells us that for him, “happiness is an unethical category.” I find this statement intriguing, and persuasive, though Žižek doesn’t elaborate on it above.
He does in much of his writing however—explaining in Lacanian terms in his essay collection Interrogating the Real that our desire for something we think will bring us happiness can be construed as a kind of envy: “I desire an object only insofar as it is desired by the Other.” Furthermore, he writes, “what I desire is determined by the symbolic network within which I articulate my subjective position.” In other words, what we think we want is determined by ideology—by the cultural products we consume, the soup of mass media and advertising in which we are permanently immersed, and the political ideals we are taught to revere. What does authentic “self-actualization” look like for Slavoj Žižek? He tells us above—it means being “ready to suffer” for the creative realization of a goal: “Happiness doesn’t enter into it.”
Žižek cites the example of nuclear scientists who willingly exposed themselves to radiation poisoning in pursuit of discovery, but he could just as well have pointed to artists and writers who sacrifice comfort and pleasure for lives of profound uncertainty, religious figures who practice all kinds of austerities, or athletes who push their bodies past all ordinary limits. While there are several degrees of pleasure involved in these endeavors, it seems shallow at best to describe the goals of such people as happiness. It seems that many, if not most, of the people we admire and strive to emulate lead lives characterized by great risk—by the willingness to suffer; lives often containing little in the way of actual happiness.
Whatever stock one puts in psychoanalytic theory, it seems to me that Žižek raises some vital questions: Do we really want what we think we want, or is the “pursuit of happiness” an unethical ideological fantasy? What do you think, readers?
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
