An Introduction to the Painting of Caspar David Friedrich, Romanticism & the Sublime

When Denis Vil­leneuve was announced as the direc­tor of the lat­est cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of Dune, few could have object­ed on aes­thet­ic grounds. The blast­ed sand plan­et of Arrakis, with its storms and worms, demands a sense of the sub­lime; to a unique degree among film­mak­ers work­ing today, the auteur behind Arrival and Blade Run­ner 2049 seemed to pos­sess it. Though long since vul­gar­ized to mean lit­tle more than “high­ly enjoy­able,” sub­lime has his­tor­i­cal­ly denot­ed a rich­er, more com­plex set of qual­i­ties. The sub­lime can be beau­ti­ful, but it must also be in some way fear­some, pos­sessed of “a great­ness beyond all pos­si­bil­i­ty of cal­cu­la­tion, mea­sure­ment, or imi­ta­tion.”

That quote comes straight from the Wikipedia page on “Sub­lime (phi­los­o­phy),” which also promi­nent­ly fea­tures Cas­par David Friedrich’s paint­ing Der Wan­der­er über dem Nebelmeer, or Wan­der­er above the Sea of Fog. Com­plet­ed around 1818, it has become a famil­iar image even to those who know noth­ing of Friedrich’s work — work to which they can receive an intro­duc­tion from the new video above by Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer.

Friedrich, he explains, was “asso­ci­at­ed with Ger­man Roman­ti­cism, a ris­ing intel­lec­tu­al and artis­tic move­ment” of the late 18th and ear­ly 19th cen­turies “that sought to recon­nect human­i­ty with feel­ing and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty” after the Enlight­en­ment so desta­bi­lized human­i­ty’s Weltan­schau­ung.

Friedrich’s land­scapes, real­is­ti­cal­ly paint­ed if not nec­es­sar­i­ly faith­ful to real places, “rep­re­sent the pin­na­cle of this move­ment.” They do this by con­vey­ing “the feel­ing he has in the pres­ence of the land­scape, the stag­ger­ing encounter with the divin­i­ty he sees in it. This is the essence of the sub­lime,” which took on spe­cial urgency in an era “when sec­u­lar­ism was threat­en­ing the core of Chris­tian­i­ty.”  More than reli­gion, the Roman­tics thus began to regard nature as awe­some (in the orig­i­nal sense), hum­bling them­selves before the great­ness of land­scapes real and imag­ined. The wan­der­er loom­ing above the sea of fog is actu­al­ly an excep­tion in Friedrich’s work, most of whose human fig­ures are small enough to empha­size “the vast­ness of the ter­rain” — a sub­lime-evok­ing tech­nique that we can still feel work­ing two cen­turies lat­er, Puschak points out, in Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune.

You can pre-order Nerd­writer’s upcom­ing book Escape into Mean­ing: Essays on Super­man, Pub­lic Bench­es, and Oth­er Obses­sions here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Andrew Wyeth Made a Paint­ing: A Jour­ney Into His Best-Known Work Christina’s World

When Our World Became a de Chiri­co Paint­ing: How the Avant-Garde Painter Fore­saw the Emp­ty City Streets of 2020

Why Leonar­do da Vinci’s Great­est Paint­ing is Not the Mona Lisa

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

New Study: Immers­ing Your­self in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflam­ma­tion & Increase Life Expectan­cy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Jon Hamm Narrates a Modernized Version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Helping to Diagnose Our Social Media-Induced Narcissism

The Matrix gave a gen­er­a­tion or two rea­son to recon­sid­er, or indeed first to con­sid­er, Pla­to’s alle­go­ry of the cave. That era-defin­ing block­buster’s cav­al­cade of slick visu­al effects came deliv­ered atop a plot about human­i­ty’s hav­ing been enslaved — plugged into a colos­sal machine, as I recall, like an array of liv­ing bat­ter­ies — while con­vinced by a direct-to-brain sim­u­la­tion that it was­n’t. Here in real life, about two and a half mil­len­nia ear­li­er, one of Pla­to’s dia­logues had con­jured up a not-dis­sim­i­lar sce­nario. You can see it retold in the video above, a clip drawn from a form as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry as The Matrix’s was of the late 20th: Legion, a dra­mat­ic tele­vi­sion series based on a com­ic book.

“Imag­ine a cave, where those inside nev­er see the out­side world,” says nar­ra­tor Jon Hamm (him­self an icon of our Gold­en Age of Tele­vi­sion, thanks to his lead per­for­mance in Mad Men). “Instead, they see shad­ows of that world pro­ject­ed on the cave wall. The world they see in the shad­ows is not the real world, but it’s real to them. If you were to show them the world as it actu­al­ly is, they would reject it as incom­pre­hen­si­ble.” Then, Hamm sug­gests trans­pos­ing this rela­tion­ship to real­i­ty into life as we know it — or rather, as we two-dimen­sion­al­ly per­ceive it on the screens of our phones. But “unlike the alle­go­ry of the cave, where the peo­ple are real and the shad­ows are false, here oth­er peo­ple are the shad­ows.”

This prop­a­gates “the delu­sion of the nar­cis­sist, who believes that they alone are real. Their feel­ings are the only feel­ings that mat­ter, because oth­er peo­ple are just shad­ows, and shad­ows don’t feel.” And “if every­one lived in caves, then no one would be real. Not even you.” With the rise of dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion in gen­er­al and social media in par­tic­u­lar, a great many of us have ensconced our­selves, by degrees and for the most part uncon­scious­ly, inside caves of our own. Over the past decade or so, increas­ing­ly sober­ing glimpses of the out­side world have moti­vat­ed some of us to seek diag­noses of our col­lec­tive con­di­tion from thinkers of the past, such as social the­o­rist Christo­pher Lasch.

“The new nar­cis­sist is haunt­ed not by guilt but by anx­i­ety,” Lasch writes The Cul­ture of Nar­cis­sism. “Lib­er­at­ed from the super­sti­tions of the past, he doubts even the real­i­ty of his own exis­tence” — won­ders, in oth­er words, whether he isn’t one of the shad­ows him­self. Nev­er­the­less, he remains “facile at man­ag­ing the impres­sions he gives to oth­ers, rav­en­ous for admi­ra­tion but con­temp­tu­ous of those he manip­u­lates into pro­vid­ing it,” and depen­dent on “con­stant infu­sions of approval and admi­ra­tion.” Social media has revealed traces of this per­son­al­i­ty, belong­ing to one who “sees the world as a mir­ror of him­self and has no inter­est in exter­nal events except as they throw back a reflec­tion of his own image,” in us all. It thus gives us pause to remem­ber that Lasch was writ­ing all this in the 1970s; but then, Pla­to was writ­ing in the fifth cen­tu­ry B.C.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Two Ani­ma­tions of Plato’s Alle­go­ry of the Cave: One Nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles, Anoth­er Made with Clay

Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry Ani­mat­ed Mon­ty Python-Style

New Ani­ma­tion Explains Sher­ry Turkle’s The­o­ries on Why Social Media Makes Us Lone­ly

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Cal New­port

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Cornel West Teaches You How to Think Like a Philosopher

Cor­nel West has nev­er shied away from dis­agree­ment, which is one of the qual­i­ties that has kept him promi­nent as a pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al for decades. Anoth­er is his intense, even lyri­cal style of express­ing those dis­agree­ments — and every­thing else he has to say besides. In his aca­d­e­m­ic career he’s built a rep­u­ta­tion as not exact­ly the aver­age pro­fes­sor, as his for­mer stu­dents at Har­vard, Yale, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris, and oth­er schools have expe­ri­enced first-hand. Now, online edu­ca­tion plat­form Mas­ter­class has made his dis­tinc­tive ped­a­gogy avail­able to any­one will­ing to pay USD $20-per-month mem­ber­ship price with its brand new course “Cor­nel West Teach­es Phi­los­o­phy.”

“This class revolves around three fun­da­men­tal ques­tions,” West says in the trail­er above. First, “What does it mean to be human?” Sec­ond, “What are the forms of love that con­sti­tute the best of our human­i­ty: love of truth, love of good­ness, love of beau­ty?” Third, “How does com­mu­ni­ty, tra­di­tion, her­itage shape and mold our con­cep­tions of who we are as human beings?”

This mate­r­i­al, one sens­es, will be less straight­for­ward­ly prac­ti­cal than in some oth­er Mas­ter­class­es; but then, is there any view­er to whom it could be irrel­e­vant? What­ev­er our par­tic­u­lar field of endeav­or, each of us is, as West puts it, “a feath­er­less, two-legged, lin­guis­ti­cal­ly con­scious crea­ture, born between urine and feces, whose body will soon be the culi­nary delight of ter­res­tri­al worms.”

Yet in West­’s view, we can also reach toward high­er things. This requires the prop­er atti­tude toward wis­dom, the love of which is at the root of the very term phi­los­o­phy: hence the lessons in West­’s Mas­ter­class ded­i­cat­ed to “How to Think Like a Philoso­pher” and “How Phi­los­o­phy Serves Human­i­ty.” Lat­er he goes deep­er, and at one point even “unset­tles the mind and empow­ers the soul by illu­mi­nat­ing the del­i­cate inter­play between hope, opti­mism, and despair.” Car­ry­ing on the expan­sive tra­di­tion of W. E. B. Du Bois, West has cre­at­ed a role for him­self that encom­pass­es the work of aca­d­e­m­ic, activist, pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al, and even music-lover. For his ded­i­cat­ed lis­ten­ers and read­ers, his les­son on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and the “jazz-like con­cep­tion of phi­los­o­phy” it encour­ages will sure­ly be worth Mas­ter­class’ price of admis­sion alone. Explore the course here.

Note: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Cor­nel West’s Free Online Course on W.E.B. Du Bois, the Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Pub­lic Intel­lec­tu­al

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix

Neil deGrasse Tyson Teach­es Sci­en­tif­ic Think­ing and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in a New Online Course

Phi­los­o­phy for Begin­ners: A Free Intro­duc­to­ry Course from Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty

How to Teach and Learn Phi­los­o­phy Dur­ing the Pan­dem­ic: A Col­lec­tion of 450+ Phi­los­o­phy Videos Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What Is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War About?: A Short Introduction

After wars in Japan and Viet­nam, the U.S. mil­i­tary became quite keen on a slim vol­ume of ancient Chi­nese lit­er­a­ture known as The Art of War by a sup­pos­ed­ly his­tor­i­cal gen­er­al named Sun Tzu. This book became required read­ing at mil­i­tary acad­e­mies and a favorite of law enforce­ment, and has formed a basis for strat­e­gy in mod­ern wartime — as in the so-called “Shock and Awe” cam­paigns in Iraq. But some have argued that the West­ern adop­tion of this text — wide­ly read across East Asia for cen­turies — neglects the cru­cial con­text of the cul­ture that pro­duced it.

Despite his­tor­i­cal claims that Sun Tzu served as a gen­er­al dur­ing the Spring and Autumn peri­od, schol­ars have most­ly doubt­ed this his­to­ry and date the com­po­si­tion of the book to the War­ring States peri­od (cir­ca 475–221 B.C.E.) that pre­ced­ed the first empire, a time in which a few rapa­cious states gob­bled up their small­er neigh­bors and con­stant­ly fought each oth­er.

“Occa­sion­al­ly the rulers man­aged to arrange recess­es from the endem­ic wars,” trans­la­tor Samuel B. Grif­fith notes. Nonethe­less, “it is extreme­ly unlike­ly that many gen­er­als died in bed dur­ing the hun­dred and fifty years between 450 and 300 B.C.”

The author of The Art of War was pos­si­bly a gen­er­al, or one of the many mil­i­tary strate­gists for hire at the time, or as some schol­ars believe, a com­pil­er of an old­er oral tra­di­tion. In any case, con­stant war­fare was the norm at the time of the book’s com­po­si­tion. This tac­ti­cal guide dif­fers from oth­er such guides, and from those that came before it. Rather than coun­sel­ing div­ina­tion or the study of ancient author­i­ties, Sun Tzu’s advice is pure­ly prac­ti­cal and of-the-moment, requir­ing a thor­ough knowl­edge of the sit­u­a­tion, the ene­my, and one­self. Such knowl­edge is not eas­i­ly acquired. With­out it, defeat or dis­as­ter are near­ly cer­tain:

If you know the ene­my and know your­self, you need not fear the result of a hun­dred bat­tles. If you know your­self but not the ene­my, for every vic­to­ry gained you will also suf­fer a defeat. If you know nei­ther the ene­my nor your­self, you will suc­cumb in every bat­tle.

The kind of knowl­edge Sun Tzu rec­om­mends is prac­ti­cal intel­li­gence about troop deploy­ments, food sup­plies, etcetera. It is also knowl­edge of the Tao — in this case, the gen­er­al moral prin­ci­ple and its real­iza­tion through the sov­er­eign. In a time of War­ring States, Sun Tzu rec­og­nized that knowl­edge of war­fare was “a mat­ter of vital impor­tance”; and that states should under­take it as lit­tle as pos­si­ble.

“To sub­due the ene­my with­out fight­ing is the acme of skill,” The Art of War famous­ly advis­es. Diplo­ma­cy, decep­tion, and indi­rec­tion are all prefer­able to the mate­r­i­al waste and loss of life in war, not to men­tion the high odds of defeat if one goes into bat­tle unpre­pared. “The ide­al strat­e­gy of restraint, of win­ning with­out fight­ing… is char­ac­ter­is­tic of Tao­ism,” writes Rochelle Kaplan. “Both The Art of War and the Tao Te Ching were designed to help rulers and their assis­tants achieve vic­to­ry and clar­i­ty,” and “each of them may be viewed as anti-war tracts.”

Read a full trans­la­tion of The Art of War by Lionel Giles, in sev­er­al for­mats online here, and just above, hear the same trans­la­tion read aloud.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Life-Chang­ing Books: Your Picks

“The Phi­los­o­phy of “Flow”: A Brief Intro­duc­tion to Tao­ism

When Sci-Fi Leg­end Ursu­la K. Le Guin Trans­lat­ed the Chi­nese Clas­sic, the Tao Te Ching

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

Yale Professor Jason Stanley Identifies 10 Tactics of Fascism: The “Cult of the Leader,” Law & Order, Victimhood and More

What is fas­cism? Fas­cism is an ide­ol­o­gy devel­oped and elab­o­rat­ed in ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry West­ern Europe and enabled by tech­nol­o­gy, mass media, and weapons of war. Most of us learned the basics of that devel­op­ment from grade school his­to­ry text­books. We gen­er­al­ly came to appre­ci­ate to some degree — though we may have for­got­ten the les­son — that the phrase “creep­ing fas­cism” is redun­dant. Fas­cism stomped around in jack­boots, smashed win­dows and burned Reich­stags before it ful­ly seized pow­er, but its most impor­tant action was the creep­ing: into lan­guage, media, edu­ca­tion, and reli­gious insti­tu­tions. None of these move­ments arose, after all, with­out the sup­port (or at least acqui­es­cence) of those in pow­er.

There are dif­fer­ences between Ital­ian Fas­cism, Ger­man Nazism, and their var­i­ous nation­al­ist descen­dents. Mus­soli­ni secured pow­er chiefly through intim­i­da­tion. But once he was appoint­ed prime min­is­ter by the King in 1922 he began con­sol­i­dat­ing his dic­ta­tor­ship, a process that took sev­er­al years and required such deal­ings as the cre­ation of Vat­i­can City in 1929 to secure the Church’s good­will. Some lat­er fas­cist lead­ers, like Augus­to Pinochet, came to pow­er in coups (with the sup­port of the CIA). Oth­ers, like Hitler, won elec­tions, after a decade of “creep­ing” into the cul­ture by nor­mal­iz­ing nation­al­ist pride based on racial hier­ar­chies and nurs­ing a sense of aggriev­ed per­se­cu­tion among the Ger­man peo­ple over per­ceived humil­i­a­tions of the past.

In every case, lead­ers exploit­ed local hatreds and inflamed ordi­nary peo­ple against their neigh­bors with the con­stant rep­e­ti­tion of an alarm­ing “Big Lie” and the promis­es of a strong­man for sal­va­tion. Every sim­i­lar move­ment that has arisen since the end of WWII, says Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy Jason Stan­ley in the video above, has shared these char­ac­ter­is­tics: using pro­pa­gan­da to cre­ate an alter­nate real­i­ty and pay­ing obei­sance to a “cult of the leader,” no mat­ter how repug­nant his tac­tics, behav­ior, or per­son­al­i­ty. “Right wing by nature,” fas­cis­m’s patri­ar­chal struc­ture appeals to con­ser­v­a­tives. While it mobi­lizes vio­lence against minori­ties and left­ists, it seduces those on the right by promis­ing a share of the spoils and val­i­dat­ing con­ser­v­a­tive desires for a sin­gle, uni­fy­ing nation­al nar­ra­tive:

Fas­cism is a cult of the leader. It involves the leader set­ting the rules about what’s true and false. So any kind of exper­tise, real­i­ty, all of that is a chal­lenge to the author­i­ty of the leader. If sci­ence would help him, then he can say, “Okay, I’ll use it.” Insti­tu­tions that teach mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives on his­to­ry in all its com­plex­i­ty are always a threat to the fas­cist leader. 

Rather than sim­ply destroy­ing insti­tu­tions, fas­cists twist them to their own ends. The arts, sci­ences, and human­i­ties must be purged of cor­rupt­ing ele­ments. Those who resist face job loss, exile or worse. The impor­tant thing, says Stan­ley, is the sort­ing into class­es of those who deserve life and prop­er­ty and those who don’t.

[O]nce you have hier­ar­chies set up, you can make peo­ple very ner­vous and fright­ened about los­ing their posi­tion on that hier­ar­chy. Hier­ar­chy goes right into vic­tim­hood because once you con­vince peo­ple that they’re jus­ti­fi­able high­er on the hier­ar­chy, then you can tell them that they’re vic­tims of equal­i­ty. Ger­man Chris­tians are vic­tims of Jews. White Amer­i­cans are vic­tims of Black Amer­i­can equal­i­ty. Men are vic­tims of fem­i­nism. 

The appeal to “law and order,” to police state lev­els of con­trol, only applies to cer­tain threat­en­ing class­es who need to be put back in their place or elim­i­nat­ed. It does not apply to those at the top of the hier­ar­chy, who rec­og­nize no con­straints on their actions because they per­ceive them­selves as threat­ened and in a state of emer­gency. It’s real­ly the immi­grants, left­ists, and oth­er minori­ties who have tak­en over, “and that’s why you need a real­ly macho, pow­er­ful, vio­lent response”:

Law and order struc­tures who’s legit­i­mate and who’s not. Every­where around the world, no mat­ter what the sit­u­a­tion is, in very dif­fer­ent socioe­co­nom­ic con­di­tions, the fas­cist leader comes and tells you, “Your women and chil­dren are under threat. You need a strong man to pro­tect your fam­i­lies.” They make con­ser­v­a­tives hys­ter­i­cal­ly afraid of trans­gen­der rights or homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, oth­er ways of liv­ing. These are not peo­ple try­ing to live their own lives. They’re try­ing to destroy your life, and they’re com­ing after your chil­dren. What the fas­cist politi­cian does is they take con­ser­v­a­tives who aren’t fas­cist at all, and they say, “Look, I know you might not like my ways. You might think I’m a wom­an­iz­er. You might think I’m vio­lent in my rhetoric. But you need some­one like me now. You need some­one like me ’cause homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, it isn’t just try­ing for equal­i­ty. It’s com­ing after your fam­i­ly.”

Stan­ley offers sev­er­al his­tor­i­cal exam­ples for his assess­ment of what he breaks down into a total of 10 tac­tics of fas­cism. (See an ear­li­er video here in which he dis­cuss­es 3 char­ac­ter­is­tics of the ide­ol­o­gy.) Like Umber­to Eco, who iden­ti­fied 14 char­ac­ter­is­tics of what he called “ur-fas­cism” in a 1995 essay, Stan­ley notes that “not all ter­ri­ble things are fas­cist. Fas­cism is a very par­tic­u­lar ide­o­log­i­cal struc­ture” that arose in a par­tic­u­lar time and place. But while its stat­ed aims and doc­trines are sub­ject to change accord­ing to the psy­chol­o­gy of the leader and the nation­al cul­ture, it always shares a cer­tain group­ing, or “bun­dle,” of fea­tures.

Each of these indi­vid­ual ele­ments is not in and of itself fas­cist, but you have to wor­ry when they’re all grouped togeth­er, when hon­est con­ser­v­a­tives are lured into fas­cism by peo­ple who tell them, “Look, it’s an exis­ten­tial fight. I know you don’t accept every­thing we do. You don’t accept every doc­trine. But your fam­i­ly is under threat. Your fam­i­ly is at risk. So with­out us, you’re in per­il.” Those moments are the times when we need to wor­ry about fas­cism.

Below we’re adding Stan­ley’s recent inter­view where he explains how Amer­i­ca has now entered fascism’s legal phase. You can read his relat­ed arti­cle in The Guardian.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Yale Pro­fes­sor Jason Stan­ley Iden­ti­fies Three Essen­tial Fea­tures of Fas­cism: Invok­ing a Myth­ic Past, Sow­ing Divi­sion & Attack­ing Truth

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

20,000 Amer­i­cans Hold a Pro-Nazi Ral­ly in Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1939: Chill­ing Video Re-Cap­tures a Lost Chap­ter in US His­to­ry

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

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

Hobbes, Locke & Rousseau: An Animated Introduction to Their Political Theories

The phrase “state of nature” doesn’t get much use in phi­los­o­phy these days, but every polit­i­cal philoso­pher must grap­ple with the his­to­ry of the idea — a foun­da­tion­al con­ceit of mod­ern Euro-Amer­i­can thought in the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. These three “con­trac­tu­al­ist” philoso­phers, often grouped togeth­er in syl­labi and select­ed intro­duc­to­ry texts, relied on the notion that humans once exist­ed in an anar­chic state pre­dat­ing civ­il soci­ety, and that this state might be re-dis­cov­er­able in indige­nous ways of life in the Amer­i­c­as. In the three School of Life videos here, you can learn the basics about each of these philoso­phers and their polit­i­cal the­o­ries.

Unlike the Bib­li­cal gar­den of Eden, the state of nature was hard­ly per­fect, at least for Hobbes and Locke, who saw gov­ern­ment as a nec­es­sary medi­a­tor for com­pet­ing self-inter­ests. The kinds of gov­ern­ments they the­o­rized were vast­ly dif­fer­ent from each oth­er — one an absolute monar­chy and the oth­er a cap­i­tal­ist repub­lic. But in each theorist’s pseu­do-pre­his­to­ry, ear­ly humans gave up their inde­pen­dence by mak­ing social con­tracts for pro­tec­tion and mutu­al inter­est. These “con­tracts,” claimed both Hobbes and Locke, were the ori­gin of gov­ern­ments.

Hobbes was the first major thinker to elab­o­rate a ver­sion of this sto­ry, and his descrip­tion of life before gov­ern­ment is well-known: “soli­tary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Because of their painful exis­tence, humans would have sought out a pow­er­ful ruler to pro­tect them. They were right to do so, Hobbes believed, because only a king, as he argued in Leviathan, could pro­vide the pro­tec­tion peo­ple need. It was per­haps no coin­ci­dence that Hobbes worked for a king, his for­mer stu­dent, Charles II, restored to the throne after the Eng­lish Civ­il War that drove Hobbes to his author­i­tar­i­an views, sup­pos­ed­ly.

Despite his defense of divine pow­er, Hobbes stood accused of athe­ism and blas­phe­my for, among oth­er things, writ­ing a sec­u­lar jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for monar­chy that was not based on rev­e­la­tion or the divine right of kings. Like­wise, the first part of John Locke’s Two Trea­tis­es on Gov­ern­ment was a force­ful refu­ta­tion of divine right. But Locke’s ideas of tol­er­a­tion were far more threat­en­ing to the state, which is why he pub­lished anony­mous­ly. In his Sec­ond Trea­tise, he laid out his ver­sion of the state of nature and the social con­tract — ideas drawn in part from trav­el­ogues writ­ten by ear­ly colo­nial adven­tur­ers.

Locke’s the­o­ry of gov­ern­ment is also a the­o­ry of pri­vate prop­er­ty — the right­ful source of polit­i­cal pow­er, he believed — and who should own it. Decades lat­er, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his most salient works, includ­ing a book titled The Social Con­tract, in oppo­si­tion to the inequal­i­ty of Hobbe­sian and Lock­ean states. Rousseau believed in human per­fectibil­i­ty and claimed that gov­ern­ments imposed a “gen­er­al will” on indi­vid­u­als, repress­ing an essen­tial­ly benev­o­lent state of nature in which resources were shared.

Rousseau’s rejoin­der to the myth of vicious sav­agery gave rise to anoth­er: that of the noble sav­age, an appeal­ing image for the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies of late-18th cen­tu­ry France and lat­er utopi­an social­ists tasked with the dif­fi­cult project of imag­in­ing an alter­na­tive to polit­i­cal hier­ar­chy. In social con­tract the­o­ry, the imag­ined way for­ward derives from an imag­ined pre­colo­nial past, more “moral fic­tion” than “his­tor­i­cal fact,” as schol­ar Richard Ashcraft argues. Learn more about the myth­i­cal state of nature and the pri­ma­ry the­o­rists of the social con­tract above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Leo Strauss: 15 Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Online

Social and Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course 

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

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

Exercise Extreme Mindfulness with These Calming Zen Rock Garden Videos

The Inter­net is a place where the ancient past and the mod­ern and trend-dri­ven can col­lide and pro­duce won­drous things. The con­cept of ASMR (autonomous sen­so­ry merid­i­an response) took off in 2007, describ­ing the plea­sur­able tin­gling response from var­i­ous stim­uli, such as whis­per­ing, or qui­et­ly being read a sto­ry, or lis­ten­ing to the close­ly mic’d sounds of paper. There are cur­rent­ly some 13 mil­lion ASMR video chan­nels on YouTube.

Mean­while, the idea of the Zen gar­den is about 800 years old, and at the cen­ter of its care and upkeep is a qui­et, mind­ful prac­tice that mir­rors med­i­ta­tion. Unlike clas­sic West­ern gar­dens that brought sym­me­try and math­e­mat­ics into their design, Japan­ese gar­dens recre­at­ed a sort of curat­ed chaos. A Zen gar­den takes this idea fur­ther, mak­ing its cen­ter­piece a rock gar­den that is raked into pat­terns to mim­ic water. They are also small and meant for indi­vid­ual con­tem­pla­tion.

Artist-Design­er Yuki Kawae com­bines the two with his series of videos on his YouTube chan­nel. In close frames, he takes his rakes and cre­ates pat­terns and frac­tals in sand around a series of stones. The sound of sand and rake and ring­ing bowl make for a very med­i­ta­tive expe­ri­ence. The con­fi­dence and beau­ty of his steady hand are mes­mer­iz­ing, but you could also just lis­ten to the audio.

Kawae is based in the Bay Area and told Colos­sal that the prac­tice came out of the anx­i­ety of life in 2019:

I was quite over­whelmed with day-to-day tasks and what are the ‘expect­ed’ next steps in life…One day, I real­ized all of those thoughts were com­plete­ly gone when I was gar­den­ing, prun­ing, water­ing, and re-pot­ting the soil. That process let me be clear-mind­ed some­how, and it was very calm­ing and refresh­ing.

You don’t have to be a Zen monk to real­ize the calm­ing effects of gardening—-ask any­body who tends to their gar­den week­ly. But there is some­thing spe­cial in the min­i­mal­ism of the sand and the rake and the rock. Kawae’s “gar­den” is only cof­fee table sized.

Sand is also a good mate­r­i­al in which to prac­tice muta­bil­i­ty, says Kawae: “All the zen gar­den pat­terns are not per­ma­nent, and they get erased to start a new one. It is tem­po­rary like many things in life. It taught me about what not to over­think as what I am stress­ing about may also be tem­po­rary.”

Mean­while on YouTube there are oth­ers work­ing on Zen gar­dens. The Kikiyaya For­est Dwelling and Zen Gar­den is actu­al­ly locat­ed in the Nether­lands and the own­er posts her rak­ing adven­tures on YouTube.

And for those who would like to hear from an actu­al Zen mas­ter and gar­den­er, this hour-long pre­sen­ta­tion from Shun­myo Masuno—one of Japan’s lead­ing land­scape archi­tects and an 18th-gen­er­a­tion Zen Bud­dhist priest—will fill in the philo­soph­i­cal details.

I’ll leave the last word to 13th cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Zen mas­ter, writer, poet, and philoso­pher, Dogen Zen­ji: “Work­ing with plants, trees, fences, and walls, if they prac­tice sin­cere­ly they will attain enlight­en­ment.”

See you in the gar­den!

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Is a Zen Koan? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to East­ern Philo­soph­i­cal Thought Exper­i­ments

Take a Break from Your Fran­tic Day & Let Alan Watts Intro­duce You to the Calm­ing Ways of Zen

The Zen of Bill Mur­ray: I Want to Be “Real­ly Here, Real­ly in It, Real­ly Alive in the Moment”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Philosophy vs. Improv: A New Podcast from The Partially Examined Life and Chicago Improv Studio

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast has been shar­ing read­ing-group dis­cus­sions on clas­sic phi­los­o­phy texts for well over a decade, with over 40 mil­lion down­loads to date.

How­ev­er, inter­ac­tive con­ver­sa­tions about texts you prob­a­bly haven’t read can be dif­fi­cult to fol­low no mat­ter how much we try to make them acces­si­ble, and a decade of his­to­ry means that many names that might be dropped that those new­ly check­ing in may or may not be famil­iar with.

I’m one of the hosts of that pod­cast, and while I’m very hap­py with the for­mat and thrilled to have reached so many peo­ple with it, I also appre­ci­ate the dynam­ic of a one-on-one tutor­ing inter­change, and I stand firm­ly behind one of the orig­i­nal rules of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life: No name-drop­ping.

As we read more com­pli­cat­ed texts, our inter­est becomes fig­ur­ing out what the philoso­pher meant, and only sec­on­dar­i­ly whether that mean­ing actu­al­ly relates to some­thing in peo­ple’s actu­al lives. Yes, we are crit­i­cal (some say too crit­i­cal) of the sub­ject-mat­ter, but we’re also big fans; we could bask in the lit­er­ary glow of Hegel or Pla­to or Simone de Beau­voir or Han­nah Arendt all day, and have often done so.

My newest pod­cast, Phi­los­o­phy vs. Improv, is rec­i­p­ro­cal tutor­ing real­ized as com­e­dy (or at least per­for­mance art?). As some­one who stud­ied phi­los­o­phy for many years in school and has then been host­ing The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life for so long, I’m in a good posi­tion to come up with par­tic­u­lar philo­soph­i­cal points worth teach­ing to a new learn­er.

My Phi­los­o­phy vs. Improv co-host is Bill Arnett, founder of the Chica­go Improv Stu­dio, author of The Com­plete Impro­vis­er, and the for­mer train­ing direc­tor at Chicago’s famed iO The­ater. He has appeared repeat­ed­ly on the Hel­lo From the Mag­ic Tav­ern improv com­e­dy pod­cast as a char­ac­ter named Meta­more who leads the show’s hosts (who are all fan­ta­sy char­ac­ters a la Tolkein or Nar­nia) in a table-top role-play­ing game called Offices and Boss­es. This and oth­er shows ignit­ed in me an urge to learn the fun­da­men­tals of improv com­e­dy, and so each Phi­los­o­phy vs. Improv episode, Bill comes up with some trick of the trade to try to teach me.

There are two rules of engage­ment: First, we can’t just state up front what the les­son is. We can ask each oth­er ques­tions, go through exer­cis­es, and oth­er­wise dis­cuss the mate­r­i­al, but the les­son should emerge nat­u­ral­ly. Sec­ond, we don’t take turns in try­ing to teach each oth­er. As he’s mak­ing me act out scenes, I’m try­ing to set up those scenes or have my char­ac­ter react in such a way to exem­pli­fy my philo­soph­i­cal point. As we’re dis­cussing phi­los­o­phy, Bill is relat­ing it to com­pa­ra­ble points about improv. Of course, we’re both inter­est­ed in learn­ing as well as teach­ing, so the “vs.” in the show’s title is not so much com­pe­ti­tion between us as between which les­son ends up more near­ly pro­duc­ing its intend­ed effect in the oth­er per­son.

It is sur­pris­ing how smooth­ly these duel­ing lessons often fit togeth­er, as lessens about ethics in par­tic­u­lar, about the art of liv­ing, are very much rel­e­vant to the impro­vi­sa­tion­al skills of being present, pre­sent­ing your­self, dis­cov­er­ing the real­i­ty of a sit­u­a­tion, and explor­ing truths of char­ac­ter. Fic­tion is often a very effec­tive vehi­cle for address­ing phi­los­o­phy, whether the char­ac­ters them­selves are talk­ing philo­soph­i­cal­ly (even if they’re ani­mals, cave men, or oth­er­wise in a non-typ­i­cal sit­u­a­tion for dis­cus­sion), or per­haps we’re embody­ing some polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion or thought exper­i­ment that we’re sub­ject­ing to philo­soph­i­cal analy­sis.

Like­wise, back to the days of Pla­to, a dose of irony in dis­cussing phi­los­o­phy can be use­ful, and this for­mat allows us to not just be our­selves on a pod­cast dis­cussing phi­los­o­phy, but at any point to launch into some com­e­dy bit, and in this way show the absur­di­ty of views we’re argu­ing against or just play with the ideas in a man­ner that I think enhances men­tal flex­i­bil­i­ty, which is essen­tial both for impro­vi­sa­tion and for philo­soph­i­cal cre­ativ­i­ty.

Lis­ten to the lat­est episode (#7), enti­tled “Mer­i­toc­ra­cy Now!”

Start lis­ten­ing with Phi­los­o­phy vs. Improv episode 1.

For more infor­ma­tion, see philosophyimprov.com.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is the host of four pod­casts: Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast, Naked­ly Exam­ined Music, The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, and Phi­los­o­phy vs. Improv.

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