Hannah Arendt Discusses Philosophy, Politics & Eichmann in Rare 1964 TV Interview

Han­nah Arendt’s work has come under some crit­i­cal fire late­ly, what with the release of the Mar­garethe Von Trot­ta-direct­ed biopic, star­ring Ger­man actress Bar­bara Sukowa as the con­tro­ver­sial polit­i­cal the­o­rist. At issue in the film and the sur­round­ing com­men­tary are Arendt’s (alleged­ly mis­lead­ing) char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of the sub­ject of her 1963 book Eich­mann in Jerusalem, as well as her ambivalent—some have said cal­lous, even “victim-blaming”—treatment of oth­er Jews. None of these con­tro­ver­sies are new, how­ev­er. As Arendt schol­ar Roger Berkowitz notes in a recent New York Times edi­to­r­i­al, at the time of her book’s pub­li­ca­tion, “Near­ly every major lit­er­ary and philo­soph­i­cal fig­ure in New York chose sides in what the writer Irv­ing Howe called a ‘civ­il war’ among New York intel­lec­tu­als.”

While acknowl­edg­ing Arendt’s flaws, Berkowitz seeks to exon­er­ate the best-known con­cept that emerged from her work on Eichmann’s tri­al, the “banal­i­ty of evil.” And while it can be com­fort­ing to have an inter­preter explain, and defend, the work of a major, con­tro­ver­sial, thinker, there is no intel­lec­tu­al sub­sti­tute for engag­ing with the work itself.

In the age of the media interview—radio, tele­vi­sion, pod­cast and otherwise—one can usu­al­ly see and hear an author explain her views in per­son. And so we have the inter­view above (in Ger­man with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles), in which Arendt sits with tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ter and jour­nal­ist Gunter Gaus for a Ger­man pro­gram called Zur Per­son (The Per­son), a Char­lie Rose-like show that fea­tured celebri­ties, impor­tant thinkers, and politi­cians (includ­ing an appear­ance by Hen­ry Kissinger).

A blog­ger at Jew­ish Phi­los­o­phy Place writes that Arendt’s interview—a tran­script of which was lat­er pub­lished in The Portable Han­nah Arendt as “What Remains? Lan­guage Remains”—is “slow and delib­er­a­tive, not sharp and declar­a­tive, mov­ing in cir­cles, not straight lines.” The inter­view touch­es on a vari­ety of top­ics, draw­ing on ideas expressed in Arendt’s ear­li­er works, The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism and The Human Con­di­tion. She is some­what cagey when it comes to the so-called “Eich­mann Con­tro­ver­sy,” and she may have had per­son­al as well as pro­fes­sion­al rea­sons for indi­rec­tion. Her affair with her for­mer pro­fes­sor, avowed and unre­pen­tant Nazi Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, dogged her post-war career, and the afore­men­tioned intel­lec­tu­al “civ­il war” prob­a­bly increased her cir­cum­spec­tion.

Arendt’s crit­ics, then and now, often remark upon what the Jew­ish Phi­los­o­phy Place writer suc­cinct­ly calls her “dis­dain for oth­ers.” While the new biopic (trail­er above) may obscure much of this crit­i­cal controversy—unfilmable as such things are anyway—readers wish­ing to under­stand one of the Holocaust’s most famous inter­preters should read, and hear, her in her own words before mak­ing any judg­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger Talks About Lan­guage, Being, Marx & Reli­gion in Vin­tage 1960s Inter­views

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

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

Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated “Polysyllabic Truisms”

To the delight and sat­is­fac­tion of hun­dreds of our read­ers, we recent­ly fea­tured an inter­view in which Noam Chom­sky slams post­mod­ernist intel­lec­tu­als like Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan as “char­la­tans” and posers. The turn against post­mod­ernism has been long in com­ing, a back­lash the polit­i­cal right has made the­ater of for years, but that thinkers on the polit­i­cal left, like anar­chist Chom­sky, Marx­ist Vivek Chib­ber, and self-described “old left­ist” Alan Sokal have pur­sued with just as much vig­or (and more rig­or). In the inter­view clip above, Chom­sky makes a blan­ket cri­tique of what the inter­view­er calls the “left crit­i­cism of sci­ence” as impe­ri­al­ist, racist, sex­ist, etc. His answers shed quite a bit of light on what Chom­sky per­ceives as the polit­i­cal ram­i­fi­ca­tions of post­mod­ern thought as well as the ori­gins of the dis­course.

Chom­sky char­ac­ter­izes left­ist post­mod­ern aca­d­e­mics as “a cat­e­go­ry of intel­lec­tu­als who are undoubt­ed­ly per­fect­ly sin­cere” (I sus­pect this is a bit of unchar­ac­ter­is­tic politesse on his part). Nonethe­less, in his cri­tique, such thinkers use “poly­syl­lab­ic words and com­pli­cat­ed con­struc­tions” to make claims that are “all very inflat­ed” and which have “a ter­ri­ble effect on the third world.” Chom­sky argues (as does Chib­ber) that “in the third world, pop­u­lar move­ments real­ly need seri­ous intel­lec­tu­als to par­tic­i­pate. If they’re all rant­i­ng post­mod­ernists… well, they’re gone.” His assess­ment of post­mod­ern cri­tiques of sci­ence echoes his crit­i­cism of Zizek and Lacan. (Chom­sky appears to use the words “poly­syl­lab­ic” and “mono­syl­lab­ic” as terms for jar­gon vs. ordi­nary lan­guage.):

It’s con­sid­ered very left wing, very advanced. Some of what appears in it sort of actu­al­ly makes sense, but when you repro­duce it in mono­syl­la­bles, it turns out to be tru­isms. It’s per­fect­ly true that when you look at sci­en­tists in the West, they’re most­ly men, it’s per­fect­ly true that women have had a hard time break­ing into the sci­en­tif­ic fields, and it’s per­fect­ly true that there are insti­tu­tion­al fac­tors deter­min­ing how sci­ence pro­ceeds that reflect pow­er struc­tures. All of this can be described lit­er­al­ly in mono­syl­la­bles, and it turns out to be tru­isms. On the oth­er hand, you don’t get to be a respect­ed intel­lec­tu­al by pre­sent­ing tru­isms in mono­syl­la­bles.

This last point is some­thing Chom­sky elab­o­rates on as the impe­tus for post-struc­tural­ism in the acad­e­my, say­ing “it’s pret­ty easy to fig­ure out what’s going on. Sup­pose you’re a lit­er­ary schol­ar…. If you do your work seri­ous­ly, that’s fine, but you don’t get any prizes for it.” He makes the claim that human­i­ties schol­ars use mys­ti­fy­ing jar­gon and cook up “the­o­ry” in order to com­pete with the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists and math­e­mati­cians, who get prizes, grants, and pres­tige for advanc­ing incred­i­bly com­pli­cat­ed sci­en­tif­ic work.

Even more than this gen­er­al accu­sa­tion against the­o­rists in the human­i­ties, Chom­sky makes the polit­i­cal point that French intel­lec­tu­als in Paris, “the cen­ter of the rot,” were the last group of left­ists to be ded­i­cat­ed, “flam­ing” Stal­in­ists and Maoists. In order to save face, such peo­ple had to sud­den­ly become “the first peo­ple in the world to have dis­cov­ered the gulags.” It’s a very damn­ing char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, and one he could no doubt sup­port, as he does all of his claims, with a dizzy­ing num­ber of spe­cif­ic exam­ples, though he declines to name names here. He does, how­ev­er, ref­er­ence Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s sad­ly out-of-print  Intel­lec­tu­al Impos­tures, a book that patient­ly expos­es French post-struc­tural­ist thinkers’ abuse of sci­en­tif­ic con­cepts. (Sokal, a physics pro­fes­sor, famous­ly punked a well-regard­ed human­i­ties jour­nal in the mid-nineties with a pho­ny arti­cle).

Chom­sky’s cranky con­trar­i­an­ism is noth­ing new, and some of his polemic recalls the ana­lyt­ic case against “con­ti­nen­tal” phi­los­o­phy or Karl Pop­per’s case against pseu­do-sci­ence, although his invest­ment is polit­i­cal as much as philo­soph­i­cal. The inter­view­er then moves on to reli­gion. Chomsky’s thoughts on that sub­ject are gen­er­al­ly nuanced and fair-mind­ed, but we don’t get to hear them here, alas, though he’s had plen­ty to say else­where.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

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

John Searle on Foucault and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy

It is some­times noted–typically with admiration–that France is a place where a philoso­pher can still be a celebri­ty. It sounds laud­able. But celebri­ty cul­ture can be cor­ro­sive, both to the cul­ture at large and to the celebri­ties them­selves. So it’s worth ask­ing:  What price have French phi­los­o­phy and its devo­tees (on the Euro­pean con­ti­nent and else­where) paid for the glam­our?

Per­haps one casu­al­ty is clar­i­ty. The writ­ings of the French post­mod­ernist philoso­phers (and those inspired by them) are noto­ri­ous­ly abstruse. In a scathing cri­tique of the­o­rist Judith But­ler, an Amer­i­can who writes in the French post­struc­tural­ist style, philoso­pher Martha Nuss­baum of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go sug­gests that the abstruse­ness is cal­cu­lat­ed to inspire admi­ra­tion:

Some precincts of the con­ti­nen­tal philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion, though sure­ly not all of them, have an unfor­tu­nate ten­den­cy to regard the philoso­pher as a star who fas­ci­nates, and fre­quent­ly by obscu­ri­ty, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stat­ed clear­ly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pur­sue them on one’s own. When they remain mys­te­ri­ous (indeed, when they are not quite assert­ed), one remains depen­dent on the orig­i­nat­ing author­i­ty. The thinker is heed­ed only for his or her turgid charis­ma.

On Fri­day we post­ed an excerpt from an inter­view in which lin­guist Noam Chom­sky (some­thing of a polit­i­cal celebri­ty him­self) exco­ri­ates Jacques Der­ri­da and Jacques Lacan, along with Lacan’s super­star dis­ci­ple, Sloven­ian the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek, for using inten­tion­al­ly obscure and inflat­ed lan­guage to pull the wool over their admir­ers’ eyes and make triv­ial “the­o­ries” seem pro­found. He calls Lacan a “total char­la­tan.”

Lacan had a pen­chant for using trendy math­e­mat­i­cal terms in curi­ous ways. In a pas­sage on cas­tra­tion anx­i­ety, for exam­ple, he equates the phal­lus with the square root of minus one:

The erec­tile organ can be equat­ed with the √-1, the sym­bol of the sig­ni­fi­ca­tion pro­duced above, of the jouis­sance [ecsta­sy] it restores–by the coef­fi­cient of its statement–to the func­tion of a miss­ing sig­ni­fi­er: (-1).

Chom­sky’s crit­i­cism of Lacan and the oth­ers pro­voked a wide range of com­ments from our read­ers. Today we thought we would keep the con­ver­sa­tion going with a fas­ci­nat­ing audio clip (above) of philoso­pher John Sear­le of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, describ­ing how Michel Fou­cault and Pierre Bour­dieu–two emi­nent French thinkers whose abil­i­ties Sear­le obvi­ous­ly respected–told him that if they wrote clear­ly they would­n’t be tak­en seri­ous­ly in France.

Sear­le begins by recit­ing Paul Grice’s four Max­ims of Man­ner: be clear, be brief, be order­ly, and avoid obscu­ri­ty of expres­sion. These are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly vio­lat­ed in France, Sear­le says, part­ly due to the influ­ence of Ger­man phi­los­o­phy. Sear­le trans­lates Fou­cault’s admis­sion to him this way: “In France, you got­ta have ten per­cent incom­pre­hen­si­ble, oth­er­wise peo­ple won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a pro­found thinker.”

Sear­le has been care­ful to sep­a­rate Fou­cault from Der­ri­da, with whom Sear­le had an unfriend­ly debate in the 1970s over Speech Act the­o­ry. “Fou­cault was often lumped with Der­ri­da,” Sear­le says in a 2000 inter­view with Rea­son mag­a­zine. “That’s very unfair to Fou­cault. He was a dif­fer­ent cal­iber of thinker alto­geth­er.” Else­where in the inter­view, Sear­le says:

With Der­ri­da, you can hard­ly mis­read him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You mis­un­der­stood me.” But if you try to fig­ure out the cor­rect inter­pre­ta­tion, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Fou­cault, who was more hos­tile to Der­ri­da even than I am, and Fou­cault said that Der­ri­da prac­ticed the method of obscu­ran­tisme ter­ror­iste (ter­ror­ism of obscu­ran­tism). We were speak­ing in French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscure­ly you can’t tell what he’s say­ing. That’s the obscu­ran­tism part. And then when you crit­i­cize him, he can always say, ‘You did­n’t under­stand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the ter­ror­ism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an arti­cle about Der­ri­da. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quot­ed that pas­sage, and he said yes.

NOTE: For more on John Sear­le, includ­ing links to his full Berke­ley lec­tures on the phi­los­o­phy of mind, lan­guage and soci­ety, see our post, “Phi­los­o­phy with John Sear­le: Three Free Cours­es.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)

Noam Chomsky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Empty ‘Posturing’

Noam Chom­sky’s well-known polit­i­cal views have tend­ed to over­shad­ow his ground­break­ing work as a lin­guist and ana­lyt­ic philoso­pher. As a result, peo­ple some­times assume that because Chom­sky is a left­ist, he would find com­mon intel­lec­tu­al ground with the post­mod­ernist philoso­phers of the Euro­pean Left.

Big mis­take.

In this brief excerpt from a Decem­ber, 2012 inter­view with Vet­er­ans Unplugged, Chom­sky is asked about the ideas of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Der­ri­da. The M.I.T. schol­ar, who else­where has described some of those fig­ures and their fol­low­ers as “cults,” does­n’t mince words:

What you’re refer­ring to is what’s called “the­o­ry.” And when I said I’m not inter­est­ed in the­o­ry, what I meant is, I’m not inter­est­ed in posturing–using fan­cy terms like poly­syl­la­bles and pre­tend­ing you have a the­o­ry when you have no the­o­ry what­so­ev­er. So there’s no the­o­ry in any of this stuff, not in the sense of the­o­ry that any­one is famil­iar with in the sci­ences or any oth­er seri­ous field. Try to find in all of the work you men­tioned some prin­ci­ples from which you can deduce con­clu­sions, empir­i­cal­ly testable propo­si­tions where it all goes beyond the lev­el of some­thing you can explain in five min­utes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fan­cy words are decod­ed. I can’t. So I’m not inter­est­ed in that kind of pos­tur­ing. Žižek is an extreme exam­ple of it. I don’t see any­thing to what he’s say­ing. Jacques Lacan I actu­al­ly knew. I kind of liked him. We had meet­ings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total char­la­tan. He was just pos­tur­ing for the tele­vi­sion cam­eras in the way many Paris intel­lec­tu­als do. Why this is influ­en­tial, I haven’t the slight­est idea. I don’t see any­thing there that should be influ­en­tial.

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed con­tent:

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky and Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature and Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Jacques Lacan Talks About Psy­cho­analy­sis with Panache (1973)

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)

Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

What Do Most Philosophers Believe? A Wide-Ranging Survey Project Gives Us Some Idea

What do most philoso­phers believe? The ques­tion may only inter­est oth­er philosophers—and when it comes to such eso­teric con­cerns as the “ana­lyt­ic syn­thet­ic dis­tinc­tion,” this is prob­a­bly true. But when it comes to the big issues that have giv­en every thought­ful per­son at least one sleep­less night, or the ques­tions reg­u­lar­ly explored by spec­u­la­tive fic­tions like Star Trek or zom­bie movies, the rest of us might sit up and take notice.

Two con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers, David Chalmers and David Bour­get, decid­ed to find out where their col­leagues stood on 30 dif­fer­ent philo­soph­i­cal issues by con­struct­ing a rig­or­ous sur­vey that end­ed up account­ing for the views of over 3,000 pro­fes­sors, grad­u­ate stu­dents, and inde­pen­dent thinkers. Most of the respon­dents were affil­i­at­ed with pres­ti­gious phi­los­o­phy depart­ments in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, though sev­er­al con­ti­nen­tal Euro­pean depart­ments are also rep­re­sent­ed.

Some semi-famous names come up in a perusal of the list of pub­lic respon­dents, like A.C. Grayling and Mas­si­mo Pigli­uc­ci. For the most part, how­ev­er, the sur­vey group rep­re­sents the rank-and-file, toil­ing away as teach­ers, thinkers, writ­ers, and researchers at col­leges across the West­ern world. You sur­vey geeks out there can dig deeply into Chalmers and Bourget’s detailed account­ing of their method­ol­o­gy here. But for a quick and dirty sum­ma­ry, let’s take a cou­ple of gen­er­al cat­e­gories and look at the results.

Meta­physics:

The issues that fall under this head­ing broad­ly involve ques­tions about what exists, and why and how it does. Here’s a break­down of some of the big­gies:

  • God: athe­ism 72.8%; the­ism 14.6%; oth­er 12.6%

Grant­ed, this is an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. Pop­u­lar notions of these cat­e­gories don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly cor­re­spond to more sub­tle dis­tinc­tions among philoso­phers, who may be strong or weak athe­ists (or the­ists), or hold some ver­sion of deism, agnos­ti­cism, or none of the above.

  •  Free will: com­pat­i­bil­ism 59.1%; lib­er­tar­i­an­ism 13.7%; no free will 12.2%; oth­er 14.9%

Com­pat­i­bil­ism, the major­i­ty view here, is the the­o­ry that we can choose our actions to some degree, and to some degree they are deter­mined by pri­or events. Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism (relat­ed to, but not syn­ony­mous with, the polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy) claims that all of our actions are freely cho­sen.

  • Metaphi­los­o­phy: nat­u­ral­ism 49.8%; non-nat­u­ral­ism 25.9%; oth­er 24.3%

Nat­u­ral­ism, accord­ing to the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary, is “the idea or belief that only nat­ur­al (as opposed to super­nat­ur­al or spir­i­tu­al) laws and forces oper­ate in the world,” or “the belief that noth­ing exists beyond the nat­ur­al world.” Note that meta­phys­i­cal nat­u­ral­ism needs to be dis­tin­guished from method­olog­i­cal nat­u­ral­ism, which near­ly all schol­ars and sci­en­tists embrace.

  • Abstract objects: Pla­ton­ism 39.3%; nom­i­nal­ism 37.7%; oth­er 23.0%

This dis­tinc­tion gets at whether abstrac­tions like geom­e­try or the laws of log­ic exist in some immutable form “out there” in the uni­verse (as Pla­ton­ic ideas) or whether they are “nom­i­nal,” no more than con­ve­nient for­mu­las we cre­ate and apply to our obser­va­tions. It’s a debate at least as old as the ancient Greeks.

Per­son­al Iden­ti­ty:

In this gen­er­al cat­e­go­ry, we deal with ques­tions about what it means to be a per­son and how we can exist as seem­ing­ly coher­ent indi­vid­u­als over time in a world in con­stant flux. Let’s take two fun exam­ples that deal with these quan­daries, shall we?

  • Tele­trans­porter: sur­vival 36.2%; death 31.1%; oth­er 32.7%

Here, we’re deal­ing with a thought exper­i­ment pro­posed by Derek Parfit (one of the par­tic­i­pants in the sur­vey) that pret­ty much takes the Star Trek trans­porter tech­nol­o­gy (or the hor­ror ver­sion in The Fly) and asks whether the trans­port­ed individual—completely dis­in­te­grat­ed and recon­sti­tut­ed some­where else—is the same per­son as the orig­i­nal. In oth­er words, can a “per­son” sur­vive this process or does the indi­vid­ual die and a new one take its place? The ques­tion hinges on ideas about a “soul” or “spir­it” that exists apart from the mate­r­i­al body and asks whether or not we are noth­ing more than very spe­cif­ic arrange­ments of mat­ter and ener­gy.

  • Zom­bies: con­ceiv­able but not meta­phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble 35.6%; meta­phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble 23.3%; incon­ceiv­able 16.0%; oth­er 25.1%

Zom­bies are every­where. Try to escape them! You can’t. Their preva­lence in pop­u­lar cul­ture is mir­rored in the phi­los­o­phy world, where zom­bies have long served as metaphors for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a pure (and rav­en­ous) bod­i­ly exis­tence, devoid of con­scious self-aware­ness. The prospect may be as fright­en­ing as the zom­bies of the Walk­ing Dead, but is it a real pos­si­bil­i­ty? A sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of philoso­phers seem to think so.

As I said, these are just a few of the issues Chalmers and Bourget’s sur­vey queries. Physi­cist Sean Car­roll has a quick sum­ma­ry of all of the results on his blog, and Chalmers and Bour­get have made all of their data and analy­sis very trans­par­ent and freely avail­able at their Philpa­pers site. David Chalmers, who spe­cial­izes in phi­los­o­phy of mind and looks like one of Spinal Tap’s doomed drum­mers, spills the beans on his ideas of con­scious­ness in the video at the top.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Do Physi­cists Believe in God?

50 Famous Aca­d­e­mics & Sci­en­tists Talk About God

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix in 2004 Film

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

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

Philosophy’s Power Couple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Featured in 1967 TV Interview

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau­voir were twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry philosophy’s pow­er cou­ple, in a time and place when pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als were true celebri­ties. In the mid-six­ties, they were not only fas­ci­nat­ing writ­ers in their own right, but also activists engaged in inter­na­tion­al strug­gle against what they defined as the glob­al­ly inju­ri­ous forces of cap­i­tal­ist impe­ri­al­ism and patri­ar­chal oppres­sion. In 1967, Sartre, along with Bertrand Rus­sell and a hand­ful of oth­er influ­en­tial thinkers, con­vened what became known as the “Rus­sell Tri­bunal,” a pri­vate body inves­ti­gat­ing war crimes in Viet­nam. De Beau­voir mean­while had pub­lished a suite of mem­oirs and prize-win­ning nov­els, and her ground­break­ing fem­i­nist study The Sec­ond Sex had been in pub­li­ca­tion a full twen­ty years.

In the inter­views above with Sartre and de Beau­voir, the “free and inti­mate cou­ple,” a mod­el of exis­ten­tial­ist free love, receives rev­er­en­tial treat­ment from the CBC. The jour­nal­ists describe Sartre as “the most famous and con­tro­ver­sial writer of his time…. An ally of stu­dents and inter­na­tion­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies [and] a very pub­lic fig­ure.” Sartre’s Paris apart­ment, an “aus­tere room,” rep­re­sents “a kind of uni­ver­sal con­science.” There are long, lin­ger­ing shots of the writer at work, pre­sum­ably on his Flaubert study, ten years in the mak­ing at this point. Sartre becomes pas­sion­ate when the inter­view­ers ask him about the dan­gers of the Viet­nam War. He responds:

There is noth­ing glo­ri­ous about a super­pow­er attack­ing a small nation which can­not fight on even terms, and yet resists fierce­ly, refus­ing to yield…. My per­spec­tive is sociopo­lit­i­cal as well as moral. The Viet­nam war is the very sym­bol of impe­ri­al­ism, the fruit of today’s monop­o­lis­tic cap­i­tal­ism.

For Sartre, phi­los­o­phy and pol­i­tics are insep­a­ra­ble. “The war in Viet­nam,” he says, ”dis­putes my work, and my work dis­putes the war.”

When the scene shifts to the sep­a­rate home of de Beau­voir, nick­named “Cas­tor” (the beaver), the cam­era lingers over her col­lec­tion of knick-knacks. Her home is “like a muse­um of her own life… filled with rem­i­nis­cences of Cuba, Africa, Japan, Spain, Chi­na, Mex­i­co.” She dis­cuss­es her time spent with Fidel Cas­tro at his coun­try home (“He fish­es with his gun, shoot­ing at trout”), and talks about her mem­oirs. “I am attached to my past,” she says, “but I don’t shun the present and future. Arti­facts and sou­venirs are meant to pre­serve the present. To buy a sou­venir is there­fore an invest­ment in the future.”

Sartre and de Beauvoir’s rela­tion­ship is sto­ried and com­plex. In his lengthy 2005 expose for The New York­er, Louis Menand describes it thus:

Their liai­son was part of the mys­tique of exis­ten­tial­ism, and it was exten­sive­ly doc­u­ment­ed and cool­ly defend­ed in Beauvoir’s four vol­umes of mem­oirs, all of them extreme­ly pop­u­lar in France…. Beau­voir and Sartre had no inter­est in var­nish­ing the facts out of respect for bour­geois notions of decen­cy. Dis­re­spect for bour­geois notions of decen­cy was pre­cise­ly the point.

Their sex­u­al rebel­lion seems nov­el for the times, but the way they con­strued their open rela­tion­ship also relied on Roman­tic clichés and the medieval for­mu­la of court­ly love. As Sartre would say of their roman­tic “pact”: “What we have is an essen­tial love; but it is a good idea for us also to expe­ri­ence con­tin­gent love affairs.” His Aris­totelian argu­ment, Menand writes, “worked as well on her as a dia­mond ring.” The couple’s egal­i­tar­i­an sex­u­al pol­i­tics often seem at odds with their prac­tice, in Menard’s esti­ma­tion, in which Sartre seemed to gain the upper hand and both wield­ed pow­er over their con­quests.

While spec­u­la­tions on their arrange­ment may seem pruri­ent, the two doc­u­ment­ed their own dal­liances obses­sive­ly in their work—both fic­tion­al and non—referring to their entourage of admir­ers and lovers as “the fam­i­ly.” They adopt­ed young women, fre­quent­ly stu­dents, as pro­tégées, and seduced both women and men in what their for­mer lover Bian­ca Bienen­feld, in her mem­oir A Dis­grace­ful Affair, would call “act­ing out a com­mon­place ver­sion of ‘Dan­ger­ous Liaisons.’”

Author Hazel Row­ley, who also wrote on Franklin and Eleanor Roo­sevelt, doc­u­ment­ed their 51-year part­ner­ship in her book Tete-a-Tete, a biog­ra­phy writ­ten in coop­er­a­tion with de Beauvoir’s adopt­ed daugh­ter (and pos­si­ble lover) Sylvie Le Bon de Beau­voir and con­test­ed by Sartre’s adoptee, Arlette Elka­im-Sartre. Like all rad­i­cal fig­ures, Sartre and de Beau­voir need to be accept­ed as warts-and-all human beings. Their influ­en­tial work is not negat­ed by their con­tra­dic­to­ry lives, but the per­son­al and polit­i­cal do make for a strange blend in the case of these intel­lec­tu­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intel­lec­tu­als

Lovers and Philoso­phers — Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beau­voir Togeth­er in 1967

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

“Performance Philosopher” Jason Silva Introduces Mind-Altering New Video Series, “Shots of Awe”

Remem­ber that 1996 doc­u­men­tary The Cruise, chron­i­cle of New City Tour guide Tim­o­thy “Speed” Lev­itch, who com­pressed ency­clo­pe­dias full of ref­er­ences into a man­ic spit­fire style? Well, “per­for­mance philoso­pher” Jason Silva’s mono­logues are a bit like Levitch’s, with a lot less Woody Allen and a lot more of Richard Linklater’s ani­mat­ed head­trip Wak­ing Life.

Silva’s got a new web­series out called “Shots of Awe,” which he describes as “freestyle phi­los­o­phy videos [that] cel­e­brate exis­ten­tial jazz, big ques­tions, tech­nol­o­gy and sci­ence.” These short videos are indeed “shots,” with each one com­ing in at under three min­utes. The short above, “Awe,” defines the term as “an expe­ri­ence of such per­pet­u­al vast­ness you lit­er­al­ly have to recon­fig­ure your men­tal mod­els of the world to assim­i­late it.”

While the Eng­lish prof. in me winces at the use of “lit­er­al­ly” here (“men­tal mod­el” is a metaphor, after all), the video’s machine-gun edit­ing and Silva’s “con­trast between banal­i­ty and won­der” have me con­vinced he’s onto some­thing. Check out the series’ trail­er here and see two addi­tion­al episodes, “Sin­gu­lar­i­ty” (below) and “Mor­tal­i­ty.” The series is host­ed on Discovery’s Test­Tube net­work and fol­lows up Silva’s Espres­so video series.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jason Sil­va Preach­es the Gospel of “Rad­i­cal Open­ness” in Espres­so-Fueled Video (at TED­G­lob­al 2012)

Enthu­si­as­tic Futur­ist Jason Sil­va Wax­es The­o­ret­i­cal About the Immer­sive Pow­er of Cin­e­ma

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

Introducing Wireless Philosophy: An Open Access Philosophy Project Created by Yale and MIT

“Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy,” or Wiphi, is an online project of “open access phi­los­o­phy” co-cre­at­ed by Yale and MIT that aims to make fun­da­men­tal philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts acces­si­ble by “mak­ing videos that are freely avail­able in a form that is enter­tain­ing” to peo­ple “with no back­ground in the sub­ject.” To accom­plish this goal, they have con­tract­ed with an impres­sive range of pro­fes­sors of phi­los­o­phy from pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try. Wiphi is still very much a work-in-progress, but they cur­rent­ly fea­ture some inter­est­ing intro­duc­tions to clas­si­cal philo­soph­i­cal issues. Cur­rent­ly, the site divides into sev­er­al basic cat­e­gories like “Crit­i­cal Think­ing,” “Epis­te­mol­o­gy,” “Meta­physics,” “Ethics,” and “Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy.” Much of these are still unfin­ished, but the few videos on the site, such as those relat­ed to the prob­lem of free will and the exis­tence of God, pro­vide view­ers with much to chew on.

In the video above, MIT phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Richard Holton explains the basics of the prob­lem of free will. He divides this into two dis­tinct prob­lems: the meta­phys­i­cal and the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal. The first prob­lem states that if the laws of nature are deter­min­is­tic, every­thing that will hap­pen is fixed, and there is in fact no free choice (no mat­ter how we feel about it). Holton choos­es to focus on the sec­ond prob­lem, the prob­lem of fore­knowl­edge. Put sim­ply, if things are deter­mined, then if we know all of the con­di­tions of real­i­ty, and have ade­quate resources, we should be able to pre­dict every­thing that is going to hap­pen.

Holton leaves aside enor­mous­ly com­pli­cat­ed devel­op­ments in physics and opts to illus­trate the prob­lem with what he calls “a sim­ple device.” In his illus­tra­tion, one must pre­dict whether a light­bulb will turn on by turn­ing on anoth­er light­bulb, part of a sys­tem he calls a “frus­tra­tor.” In this sce­nario, even if we have all the knowl­edge and resources to make per­fect­ly accu­rate pre­dic­tions, the prob­lem of “frustrators”—or faulty observers and feed­back loops—complicates the sit­u­a­tion irrev­o­ca­bly

In the video above, Pro­fes­sor Tim­o­thy Yen­ter describes the Cos­mo­log­i­cal argu­ment for the exis­tence of God, clas­si­cal­ly attrib­uted to Aris­to­tle, elab­o­rat­ed by Islam­ic philoso­phers and Thomas Aquinas, and tak­en up in the Enlight­en­ment by Leib­niz as the prin­ci­ple of suf­fi­cient rea­son. One of that argument’s premis­es, that the cos­mos (every­thing that exists) must have a cause, assumes that the causal cir­cum­stances we observe with­in the sys­tem, the uni­verse as a whole, must also apply out­side of it. Pro­fes­sor Yen­ter describes this above in terms of the “fal­la­cy of com­po­si­tion,” which occurs when one assumes that the whole has the same prop­er­ties as its parts. (Such as argu­ing that since all of your body’s atoms are invis­i­ble to the naked eye, your whole body is invis­i­ble. Try head­ing to work naked tomor­row to test this out.)

This brings us to the prob­lem of infi­nite regress. In the sec­ond part of his intro­duc­tion to the Cos­mo­log­i­cal Argument—in which he dis­cuss­es the so-called Modal Argument—Professor Yen­ter explains the key prin­ci­ple of Ex nihi­lo nihil fit, or “out of noth­ing, noth­ing comes.” This seems like a bedrock meta­phys­i­cal prin­ci­ple, such that few ques­tion it, and it intro­duces a key dis­tinc­tion between nec­es­sary things—which must exist—and con­tin­gent things, which could be oth­er­wise. The most impor­tant premise in the Modal Argu­ment is that every con­tin­gent thing must be caused by some­thing else. If all caus­es are con­tin­gent (which they seem to us to be) they must pro­ceed from a nec­es­sary, self-exis­tent thing. Whether that thing has all or any of the prop­er­ties clas­si­cal­ly ascribed to the the­is­tic God is anoth­er ques­tion all togeth­er, but Aquinas and the clas­si­cal Islam­ic philoso­phers cer­tain­ly thought so.

While there may be no philo­soph­i­cal nut­crack­er large enough to crack these prob­lems, they remain per­pet­u­al­ly inter­est­ing for many philoso­phers and sci­en­tists, and under­stand­ing the basic issues at stake is fun­da­men­tal to any study of phi­los­o­phy. In that sense, Wiphi pro­vides a nec­es­sary ser­vice to those just begin­ning to wade out into the sea of The Big Ques­tions.

 Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Lawrence Krauss Explains How You Get ‘A Uni­verse From Noth­ing’

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Lec­tures Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

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

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