Hear Philip K. Dick’s Famous Metz Speech: “If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (1977)

A news­pa­per arti­cle about this speech could well be titled: AUTHOR CLAIMS TO HAVE SEEN GOD BUT CAN’T GIVE ACCOUNT OF WHAT HE SAW. — PKD

In 1977, cult writer Philip K. Dick arrived at a sci­ence fic­tion con­ven­tion in Metz, France to deliv­er a speech called, “If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Oth­ers.” (Read an edit­ed tran­script here.) The audi­ence would leave bewil­dered, mys­ti­fied. His talk ranged wide­ly across such top­ics as cos­mo­log­i­cal time, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the uni­verse as a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion, the expe­ri­ence of deja vu, and the oppres­sive regime of Richard Nixon. It would become a sort of rebus for decod­ing Dick’s fic­tion.

If the “Metz address” were only a key to the strange occur­rences in nov­els like A Scan­ner Dark­ly, Flow My Tears, The Police­man Said, and The Man in the High Cas­tle, it would be an extra­or­di­nary doc­u­ment for Philip K. Dick fans.

But just as Dick claimed that the events of his 1981 nov­el V.A.L.I.S. were real– he had actu­al­ly had a vision­ary encounter with “God” after den­tal surgery in 1974 — so here he claims to have actu­al­ly expe­ri­enced, or remem­bered, mul­ti­ple real­i­ties and, after said encounter, to have rec­og­nized them all as true.

I, in my sto­ries and nov­els, often write about coun­ter­feit worlds, semi-real worlds, as well as deranged pri­vate worlds inhab­it­ed, often, by just one per­son, while, mean­time, the oth­er char­ac­ters either remain in their own worlds through­out or are some­how drawn into one of the pecu­liar ones. …At no time did I have a the­o­ret­i­cal or con­scious expla­na­tion for my pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with these plu­ri­form pseudoworlds, but now I think I under­stand. What I was sens­ing was the man­i­fold or par­tial­ly actu­al­ized real­i­ties lying tan­gent to what evi­dent­ly is the most actu­al­ized one, the one that the major­i­ty of us, by con­sen­sus gen­tium, agree on.

“The world of Flow My Tears is an actu­al (or rather once actu­al) alter­nate world, and I remem­ber it in detail. I do not know who else does. Maybe no one else does. per­haps all of you were always — have always been — here. But I was not. In nov­el after nov­el, sto­ry after sto­ry, over a twen­ty-five year peri­od, I wrote repeat­ed­ly about a par­tic­u­lar oth­er land­scape, a dread­ful one. In March 1974, I under­stood why. …I had good rea­son to. My nov­els and sto­ries were, with­out my real­iz­ing it con­scious­ly, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. It was — this return of mem­o­ry — the most extra­or­di­nary expe­ri­ence of my life. …

The nar­row­er sub­ject of his speech, Dick says by way of intro­duc­tion, is “orthog­o­nal time,” or “right-angle time.” To explain this he calls up an image of par­al­lel uni­vers­es over­lap­ping at the edges of a “lat­er­al axis.” These blend and “come into focus,” as an enti­ty he calls “the Pro­gramer-Repro­gram­mer” changes the vari­ables, while a “coun­ter­en­ti­ty” he calls the “Dark Coun­ter­play­er” tries to mess things up. Despite the use of soft­ware terms, Dick’s imagery seems to draw as much from chess, or Tao­ism, as com­put­er sci­ence. The inter­play of programmer/counterprogrammer is a dialec­tic, result­ing in new syn­the­ses. God is not an inde­pen­dent, self-exis­tent being but some­thing more akin to Atman, “the view of the old­est reli­gion of India, and to some extent… of Spin­oza and Alfred North White­head …. God with­in the uni­verse… The Sufi say­ing [from Rumi] ‘The work­man is invis­i­ble with­in the work­shop’ applies here.”

We can­not see the work­ings of this mys­ti­cal intel­li­gence except when the illu­sion of seam­less­ness breaks down and mem­o­ries of past or alter­nate lives intrude. These are not mem­o­ries of a lin­ear time, but of oth­er pos­si­ble present times, all exist­ing at once just out of focus. Dystopi­an police states, an alter­nate present ruled by Nazi Ger­many and Impe­r­i­al Japan… These cur­rent­ly exist, Dick says, on the orthog­o­nal line of time, only we can­not see them because the vari­ables, and our mem­o­ries, have been changed to suit the lat­est ver­sion of real­i­ty, a syn­the­sis and updat­ed improve­ment. How­ev­er, it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble that we’re all expe­ri­enc­ing slight­ly dif­fer­ent real­i­ties, depend­ing on the “mem­o­ries” of alter­nate presents leak­ing into our expe­ri­ence.

Thus, the talk’s title: not only could the world be worse, he says, but it is cur­rent­ly worse in the mul­ti­verse of reject­ed alter­nate worlds we can’t (or can’t quite) see. Here, at the end of his speech, Dick gets the­o­log­i­cal, and tele­o­log­i­cal, again, claim­ing to have seen a vision of a “park­like” world that “was not what my Chris­t­ian train­ing had pre­pared me for at all.” His descrip­tion sounds ripped from the cov­er of a 70s pulp fan­ta­sy nov­el, com­plete with a naked god­dess and an alien “land­scape beyond a gold­en rec­tan­gle door­way.” He takes pains to dis­tance his vision from the Chris­t­ian gar­den of Eden, but his final remarks sound more like C.S. Lewis than the para­noid, drug-addled con­spir­acist his audi­ence might have been pre­pared to meet:

The best I can do …is to play the role of prophet, of ancient prophets and such ora­cles as the sibyl at Del­phi, and to talk of a won­der­ful gar­den world, much like that which once our ances­tors are said to have inhab­it­ed — in fact, I some­times imag­ine it to be exact­ly that same world restored, as if a false tra­jec­to­ry of our world will even­tu­al­ly be ful­ly cor­rect­ed and once more we will be where once, many thou­sands of years ago, we lived and were hap­py.

…I believe I know a great secret. When the work of restora­tion is com­plet­ed, we will not even remem­ber the tyran­nies, the cru­el bar­barisms of the Earth we inhab­it­ed… the vast body of pain and grief and loss and dis­ap­point­ment with­in us will be expunged as if it had nev­er been. I believe that process is tak­ing place now, has always been tak­ing place now. And, mer­ci­ful­ly, we are already being per­mit­ted to for­get that which for­mer­ly was. And per­haps in my nov­els and sto­ries I have done wrong to urge you to remem­ber.

Was Philip K. Dick out of his mind? He sounds per­fect­ly lucid in oth­er inter­views he gave at the same time, and dis­miss­es the notion that his ideas are the prod­uct of men­tal ill­ness. Travis Diehl writes at Art Papers that Dick has come to seem more like an actu­al than a self-styled prophet in the decades since this inter­view, and his “para­noia comes to seem more and more like pre­science,” fore­see­ing the major themes of The Matrix, Jean Baudrillard’s post­mod­ern clas­sic Sim­u­lacra and Sim­u­la­tion, and favorite philoso­pher of Sil­i­con Val­ley Nick Bostrom.

What­ev­er the source of the author’s expe­ri­ences, “the rup­ture that pushed Dick’s life toward a knowl­edge of oth­er worlds — towards gno­sis — was an aes­thet­ic one: Dick’s visions appeared accom­pa­nied, or induced, by art,” and it was only by means of art that he claimed to appre­hend them. “Our God is the deus abscon­di­tus: the hid­den god.” We can­not know what it is, he says. But this does not exempt us from the mak­ing and remak­ing of the world. No one is — to use a cur­rent term of art — a non-playable char­ac­ter. “Con­cealed though the form is,” Dick says, “the lat­ter will con­front us; we are involved in it — in fact, we are instru­ments by which it is accom­plished.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear VALIS, an Opera Based on Philip K. Dick’s Meta­phys­i­cal Nov­el

Robert Crumb Illus­trates Philip K. Dick’s Infa­mous, Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Meet­ing with God (1974)

The Penul­ti­mate Truth About Philip K. Dick: Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Mys­te­ri­ous Uni­verse of PKD

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

Listen to Plato Invent the Myth of Atlantis (360 B.C)

Myths emerge from the murky depths of human pre­his­to­ry, leav­ing their sources shroud­ed in mys­tery. But on rare occa­sions, we can trace them to a sin­gle point of ori­gin. The myth of Atlantis, for exam­ple, the ancient civ­i­liza­tion that sup­pos­ed­ly sank into the sea, has one and only one source — Pla­to — who told the sto­ry in both the Timaeus and Critias, some­time around 360 BC, as an alle­go­ry for cor­rup­tion and civ­i­liza­tion­al decay.

Pla­to puts the tale of Atlantis nesos, the “island of Atlas,” in the mouth of the aged Critias, a char­ac­ter in both dia­logues, who says he heard the sto­ry sec­ond-hand from Solon — “not only the wis­est of men, but also the noblest of poets” — who in turn brought it from Egypt, where he sup­pos­ed­ly heard it from a priest in a city called Sais.

As you can hear in the dia­logue that bears his name, read above in the Voic­es of the Past video, Critias gives a lengthy descrip­tion of the island’s size (in Timaeus it is “larg­er than Libya and Asia put togeth­er”), its loca­tion (“the Pil­lars of Her­a­cles”), and its geog­ra­phy, cities, peo­ples, and so forth. In Timaeus, Socrates declares that this tale (unlike his imag­i­nary republics) “has the very great advan­tage of being fact not fic­tion.”

But there was nev­er such a place in the ancient world. While islands have dis­ap­peared after earth­quakes or vol­ca­noes, “I don’t think there’s any ques­tion,” says geol­o­gist Patrick Nunn, “that the sto­ry of Atlantis is a myth.” Pla­to made up the lost civ­i­liza­tion and for­mi­da­ble rival to Athens, who sound­ly defeat­ed the Atlanteans, as a dra­mat­ic foil. “It’s a sto­ry that cap­tures the imag­i­na­tion,” says Bard Col­lege pro­fes­sor of clas­sics James Romm. Its pur­pose is illus­tra­tive, not his­tor­i­cal.

[Pla­to] was deal­ing with a num­ber of issues, themes that run through­out his work. His ideas about divine ver­sus human nature, ide­al soci­eties, the grad­ual cor­rup­tion of human soci­ety — these ideas are all found in many of his works. Atlantis was a dif­fer­ent vehi­cle to get at some of his favorite themes.

Why has there been so much desire to find Plato’s account cred­i­ble? Ear­ly mod­ern Euro­pean read­ers of Pla­to like Fran­cis Bacon and Thomas More — authors of The New Atlantis and Utopia, respec­tive­ly — treat­ed Atlantis as philo­soph­i­cal alle­go­ry, a fic­tion like their own invent­ed soci­eties. But lat­er inter­preters believed it, from ama­teur schol­ars to colo­nial adven­tur­ers, explor­ers, and trea­sure hunters. Atlantis, wher­ev­er it is, some thought, must be full of sunken gold.

Nation­al Geo­graph­ic quotes Charles Ors­er, cura­tor of his­to­ry at the New York State Muse­um in Albany, who says, “Pick a spot on the map, and some­one has said that Atlantis was there. Every place you can imag­ine.” Yet what­ev­er sim­i­lar­i­ties it may have had to a real place, Pla­to’s yarn was strict­ly para­ble: Its inhab­i­tants were once divine. “Sired and ruled over by Posei­don, and thus half-gods and half-mor­tals,” writes Aeon, they “despised every­thing but virtue.”

But Atlantis grew cor­rupt in time, Critias tells us, “when the divine por­tion began to fade away, and became dilut­ed too often and too much with the mor­tal admix­ture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their for­tune, behaved unseem­ly, and to him who had an eye to see grew vis­i­bly debased, for they were los­ing the fairest of their pre­cious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true hap­pi­ness, they appeared glo­ri­ous and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unright­eous pow­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Mythos: An Ani­ma­tion Retells Time­less Greek Myths with Abstract Mod­ern Designs

Ancient Phi­los­o­phy: Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia

Orson Welles Nar­rates Ani­ma­tions of Plato’s Cave and Kafka’s “Before the Law,” Two Para­bles of the Human Con­di­tion

What is the Good Life? Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Niet­zsche, & Kant’s Ideas in 4 Ani­mat­ed Videos

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

Take an Intellectual Odyssey with a Free MIT Course on Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

In 1979, math­e­mati­cian Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Esch­er, and com­pos­er J.S. Bach walked into a book title, and you may well know the rest. Dou­glas R. Hof­s­tadter won a Pulitzer Prize for Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: an Eter­nal Gold­en Braid, his first book, thence­forth (and hence­forth) known as GEB. The extra­or­di­nary work is not a trea­tise on math­e­mat­ics, art, or music, but an essay on cog­ni­tion through an explo­ration of all three — and of for­mal sys­tems, recur­sion, self-ref­er­ence, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, etc. Its pub­lish­er set­tled on the pithy descrip­tion, “a metaphor­i­cal fugue on minds and machines in the spir­it of Lewis Car­roll.”

GEB attempt­ed to reveal the mind at work; the minds of extra­or­di­nary indi­vid­u­als, for sure, but also all human minds, which behave in sim­i­lar­ly unfath­omable ways. One might also describe the book as oper­at­ing in the spir­it — and the prac­tice — of Her­man Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, a nov­el Hesse wrote in response to the data-dri­ven machi­na­tions of fas­cism and their threat to an intel­lec­tu­al tra­di­tion he held par­tic­u­lar­ly dear. An alter­nate title (and key phrase in the book) Mag­is­ter Ludi, puns on both “game” and “school,” and alludes to the impor­tance of play and free asso­ci­a­tion in the life of the mind.

Hesse’s eso­teric game, writes his biog­ra­ph­er Ralph Freed­man, con­sists of “con­tem­pla­tion, the secrets of the Chi­nese I Ching and West­ern math­e­mat­ics and music” and seems sim­i­lar enough to Hof­s­tadter’s approach and that of the instruc­tors of MIT’s open course, Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: A Men­tal Space Odyssey. Offered through the High School Stud­ies Pro­gram as a non-cred­it enrich­ment course, it promis­es “an intel­lec­tu­al vaca­tion” through “Zen Bud­dhism, Log­ic, Meta­math­e­mat­ics, Com­put­er Sci­ence, Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Recur­sion, Com­plex Sys­tems, Con­scious­ness, Music and Art.”

Stu­dents will not study direct­ly the work of Gödel, Esch­er, and Bach but rather “find their spir­its aboard our men­tal ship,” the course descrip­tion notes, through con­tem­pla­tions of canons, fugues, strange loops, and tan­gled hier­ar­chies. How do mean­ing and form arise in sys­tems like math and music? What is the rela­tion­ship of fig­ure to ground in art? “Can recur­sion explain cre­ativ­i­ty,” as one of the course notes asks. Hof­s­tadter him­self has pur­sued the ques­tion beyond the entrench­ment of AI research in big data and brute force machine learn­ing. For all his daunt­ing eru­di­tion and chal­leng­ing syn­the­ses, we must remem­ber that he is play­ing a high­ly intel­lec­tu­al game, one that repli­cates his own expe­ri­ence of think­ing.

Hof­s­tadter sug­gests that before we can under­stand intel­li­gence, we must first under­stand cre­ativ­i­ty. It may reveal its secrets in com­par­a­tive analy­ses of the high­est forms of intel­lec­tu­al play, where we see the clever for­mal rules that gov­ern the mind’s oper­a­tions; the blind alleys that explain its fail­ures and lim­i­ta­tions; and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ever actu­al­ly repro­duc­ing work­ings in a machine. Watch the lec­tures above, grab a copy of Hofstadter’s book, and find course notes, read­ings, and oth­er resources for the fas­ci­nat­ing course Gödel, Esch­er, Bach: A Men­tal Space Odyssey archived here. The course will be added to our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

Math­e­mat­ics Made Vis­i­ble: The Extra­or­di­nary Math­e­mat­i­cal Art of M.C. Esch­er

The Mir­ror­ing Mind: An Espres­so-Fueled Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dou­glas Hofstadter’s Ground­break­ing Ideas

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

Eastern Philosophy Explained: From the Buddha to Confucius and Haiku to the Tea Ceremony

There was a time, not so long ago in human his­to­ry, when prac­ti­cal­ly no West­ern­ers looked to the East for wis­dom. But from our per­spec­tive today, this kind of philo­soph­i­cal seek­ing has been going on long enough to feel nat­ur­al. When times get try­ing, you might turn to the Bud­dha, Lao Tzu, or even Con­fu­cius for wis­dom as soon as you would to any oth­er fig­ure, no mat­ter your cul­ture of ori­gin. And here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, intro­duc­tions to their thought lie clos­er than ever to hand: on The School of Life’s “East­ern phi­los­o­phy” Youtube playlist, you’ll find primers on these influ­en­tial sages and oth­ers besides, all play­ful­ly ani­mat­ed and nar­rat­ed by Alain de Bot­ton.

De Bot­ton him­self has writ­ten on many sub­jects, but has found some of his great­est suc­cess in one par­tic­u­lar area: pre­sent­ing the work of writ­ers and thinkers from bygone eras in a man­ner help­ful to mod­ern-day audi­ences. That his best-known books include The Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy and How Proust Can Change Your Life sug­gests a per­son­al incli­na­tion toward the West­ern, but through­out sub­se­quent projects his purview has widened.

With the School of Life’s Youtube chan­nel he’s cast an espe­cial­ly wide cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al net, which has pulled in not just the ideas of Pla­to, Kant, and Fou­cault but the prin­ci­ples of rock appre­ci­a­tion, kintsu­gi, and wu wei as well.

Who among us could­n’t stand to cul­ti­vate a lit­tle more appre­ci­a­tion for rocks, or indeed for the oth­er seem­ing­ly mun­dane ele­ments of the world we pass our days ignor­ing? And sure­ly we could all use a bit of the world­view behind kintsu­gi, the art of repair­ing bro­ken pot­tery in such a way as to bril­liant­ly high­light the cracks rather than hide them, or wu wei, a kind of flex­i­bil­i­ty of being com­pa­ra­ble to slight drunk­en­ness.

If these con­cepts appeal to you, you can go slight­ly deep­er with the School of Life’s intro­duc­tions to such his­tor­i­cal per­son­ages as Zen poet Mat­suo Bashō, acknowl­edged as the mas­ter of haiku, and Sen no Rikyū, who devel­oped the Japan­ese “way of tea.” These would once have seemed unlike­ly sub­jects to inter­est peo­ple from the oth­er side of the world; but as the pop­u­lar­i­ty of these videos under­scores, that era has passed. And as the School of Life expands, might it not find an even more robust audi­ence of East­ern­ers get­ting into West­ern phi­los­o­phy?

Watch nine videos here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

In Basho’s Foot­steps: Hik­ing the Nar­row Road to the Deep North Three Cen­turies Lat­er

Bud­dhism 101: A Short Intro­duc­to­ry Lec­ture by Jorge Luis Borges

What Ancient Chi­nese Phi­los­o­phy Can Teach Us About Liv­ing the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Pop­u­lar Pro­fes­sor, Michael Puett

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Kintsu­gi, the Japan­ese Art of Repair­ing Bro­ken Pot­tery and Find­ing Beau­ty in Imper­fec­tion

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

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.

Søren Kierkegaard – Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity: A Free Online Course from the University of Copenhagen

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen and Jon Stew­art, PhD present Søren Kierkegaard – Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, Irony and the Cri­sis of Moder­ni­ty, a course explor­ing the work of Den­mark’s great philoso­pher. The course descrip­tion reads as fol­lows:

It is often claimed that rel­a­tivism, sub­jec­tivism and nihilism are typ­i­cal­ly mod­ern philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems that emerge with the break­down of tra­di­tion­al val­ues, cus­toms and ways of life. The result is the absence of mean­ing, the lapse of reli­gious faith, and feel­ing of alien­ation that is so wide­spread in moder­ni­ty.

The Dan­ish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) gave one of the most pen­e­trat­ing analy­ses of this com­plex phe­nom­e­non of moder­ni­ty. But some­what sur­pris­ing­ly he seeks insight into it not in any mod­ern thinker but rather in an ancient one, the Greek philoso­pher Socrates.

In this course cre­at­ed by for­mer asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Cen­tre, Jon Stew­art, we will explore how Kierkegaard deals with the prob­lems asso­ci­at­ed with rel­a­tivism, the lack of mean­ing and the under­min­ing of reli­gious faith that are typ­i­cal of mod­ern life. His pen­e­trat­ing analy­ses are still high­ly rel­e­vant today and have been seen as insight­ful for the lead­ing fig­ures of Exis­ten­tial­ism, Post-Struc­tural­ism and Post-Mod­ernism.

You can take Søren Kierkegaard for free by select­ing the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a cer­tifi­cate, you will need to pay a fee.

Søren Kierkegaard has been added to our list of Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent

The Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, the First Exis­ten­tial­ist Philoso­pher, Revis­it­ed in 1984 Doc­u­men­tary

An Ani­mat­ed, Mon­ty Python-Style Intro­duc­tion to the Søren Kierkegaard, the First Exis­ten­tial­ist

Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games

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Ancient Philosophy: Free Online Course from the University of Pennsylvania

This two part course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia (Part 1 herePart 2 here) “traces the ori­gins of phi­los­o­phy in the West­ern tra­di­tion in the thinkers of Ancient Greece,” begin­ning with “the Pre­so­crat­ic nat­ur­al philoso­phers who were active in Ionia in the 6th cen­tu­ry BCE and are also cred­it­ed with being the first sci­en­tists.” The course descrip­tion con­tin­ues:

Thales, Anax­i­man­der, and Anax­imines made bold pro­pos­als about the ulti­mate con­stituents of real­i­ty, while Her­a­cli­tus insist­ed that there is an under­ly­ing order to the chang­ing world. Par­menides of Elea for­mu­lat­ed a pow­er­ful objec­tion to all these pro­pos­als, while lat­er Greek the­o­rists (such as Anaxago­ras and the atom­ist Dem­ocri­tus) attempt­ed to answer that objec­tion. In fifth-cen­tu­ry Athens, Socrates insist­ed on the impor­tance of the fun­da­men­tal eth­i­cal question—“How shall I live?”—and his pupil, Pla­to, and Plato’s pupil, Aris­to­tle, devel­oped elab­o­rate philo­soph­i­cal sys­tems to explain the nature of real­i­ty, knowl­edge, and human hap­pi­ness. After the death of Aris­to­tle, in the Hel­lenis­tic peri­od, Epi­cure­ans and Sto­ics devel­oped and trans­formed that ear­li­er tra­di­tion.

Part I cov­ers Pla­to and his pre­de­ces­sors. Part II cov­ers Aris­to­tle and his suc­ces­sors. Both cours­es are taught by pro­fes­sor Susan Sauvé Mey­er.

You can take these cours­es for free by select­ing the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the cours­es for a cer­tifi­cate, you will need to pay a fee.

Both cours­es will be added to our list of Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Free Clas­sics Cours­es

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

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An Interactive Visualization of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

2020 was “a year for the (record) books in pub­lish­ing,” wrote Jim Mil­liot in Publisher’s Week­ly this past Jan­u­ary, a surge con­tin­u­ing into 2021. Yet some kinds of print books have so declined in sales there may be no rea­son to keep pub­lish­ing them, or buy­ing them, since their equiv­a­lents online are supe­ri­or in almost every respect to any ver­sion on paper. As I final­ly con­ced­ed dur­ing a recent, aggres­sive spring clean­ing, I per­son­al­ly have no rea­son to store heavy, bulky, dusty ref­er­ence books, except in cas­es of extreme sen­ti­ment.

The online Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, or the SEP, dis­pensed with the need for phi­los­o­phy ency­clo­pe­dias in print years ago. It’s “the most inter­est­ing web­site on the inter­net,” wrote Nikhail Son­nad at Quartz in 2015. “Not because of the con­tent — which includes fas­ci­nat­ing entries on every­thing from ambi­gu­i­ty to zom­bies—but because of the site itself. Its cre­ators have solved one of the internet’s fun­da­men­tal prob­lems: How to pro­vide author­i­ta­tive, rig­or­ous­ly accu­rate knowl­edge, at no cost to read­ers. It’s some­thing the ency­clo­pe­dia, or SEP, has man­aged to do for two decades.”

Start­ed in 1995 by Stan­ford philoso­pher Edward Zal­ta with only two entries, the SEP is “pos­i­tive­ly ancient in inter­net years,” but it is hard­ly “ossi­fied,” remain­ing an online source “‘com­pa­ra­ble in scope, depth and author­i­ty,’” the Amer­i­can Library Association’s Book­list review wrote, “to the biggest phi­los­o­phy ency­clo­pe­dias in print.”

I per­son­al­ly think the SEP is just as inter­est­ing for its con­tent as its achieve­ment, if not more so — and now, thanks to engi­neer and devel­op­er Joseph DiCas­tro, that con­tent is more acces­si­ble than ever, though an inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tion project and search engine called Visu­al­iz­ing SEP.

Visu­al­iz­ing SEP “pro­vides clear visu­al­iza­tions based on a philo­soph­i­cal tax­on­o­my that DiCas­tro adapt­ed from the one devel­oped by the Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Phi­los­o­phy Ontol­ogy Project (InPhO),” Justin Wein­berg writes at Dai­ly Nous. “Type a term into the search box and sug­gest­ed SEP entries will be list­ed. Click on one of the entry titles, and a sim­ple visu­al­iza­tion will appear with your select­ed entry at the cen­ter and relat­ed entries sur­round­ing it.” At the top of the page, you can select from a series of “domains.” Each selec­tion pro­duces a sim­i­lar visu­al­iza­tion of var­i­ous-sized dots.

I found enough entries to keep me busy for hours in the very first domain graph, “Aes­thet­ics and Phi­los­o­phy of Art.” The last of these, sim­ply titled “Thinker,” links togeth­er all of the philoso­phers men­tioned in the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, from the most famous house­hold names to the most obscure and scholas­tic. Just skim­ming through these names and read­ing the brief biogra­phies at the left will leave read­ers with a broad­er con­tex­tu­al under­stand­ing than they could gain from a print ency­clo­pe­dia. (Click on the “Arti­cle Details” but­ton to expand the full arti­cle).

The visu­al­iz­er project car­ries forth into the data-obsessed 21st cen­tu­ry one of the best things about the Inter­net in its ear­li­est years: access to free, high qual­i­ty (and high­ly portable) infor­ma­tion with few bar­ri­ers for entry. Learn more about how to best nav­i­gate Visu­al­iz­ing SEP at Dai­ly Nous.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A Data Visu­al­iza­tion of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, 1950–2018

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized in an Inter­ac­tive Time­line

“The Philosopher’s Web,” an Inter­ac­tive Data Visu­al­iza­tion Shows the Web of Influ­ences Con­nect­ing Ancient & Mod­ern Philoso­phers

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

What Karl Marx Meant by “Alienation”: Two Animated Videos Explain

A com­mon polit­i­cal dis­tor­tion claims that social­ists are lazy and want to live off oth­er people’s labor. Nev­er mind that this descrip­tion best applies to those who do not work but live off rents, div­i­dends, and tax breaks. A big­ger prob­lem with the idea lies in its def­i­n­i­tion of “work,” con­flat­ing labor-for-hire with labor for a pur­pose. In Karl Marx’s the­o­ries, work occu­pies a cen­tral posi­tion as a human val­ue. We all want to work, he thought. We are not born, how­ev­er, want­i­ng to max­i­mize share­hold­er val­ue.

Marx believed that “work, at its best, is what makes us human,” X‑Files star Gillian Ander­son tells us in the BBC Radio 4 ani­ma­tion above. “‘It ful­fills our species essence,’ as he put it. Work allows us “to live, to be cre­ative, to flour­ish.” Work in the indus­tri­al 19th cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, did noth­ing of the kind. You only need to imag­ine for a moment the soot-filled fac­to­ries, child labor, com­plete lack of work­er pro­tec­tions and ben­e­fits to see the kinds of con­di­tions to which Marx wrote in response. “Work,” says Ander­son, in brief, “destroyed work­ers.”

Under cap­i­tal­ism, Marx main­tained, work­ers are “alien­at­ed” from their labor, a con­cept that does not just mean emo­tion­al­ly depressed or cre­ative­ly unful­filled. As ear­ly as 1844, over twen­ty years before the first vol­ume of Cap­i­tal appeared, Marx would elab­o­rate the con­cept of “estranged labor”  in an essay of the same name:

The work­er becomes all the poor­er the more wealth he pro­duces, the more his pro­duc­tion increas­es in pow­er and size. The work­er becomes an ever cheap­er com­mod­i­ty the more com­modi­ties he cre­ates. The deval­u­a­tion of the world of men is in direct pro­por­tion to the increas­ing val­ue of the world of things. Labor pro­duces not only com­modi­ties; it pro­duces itself and the work­er as a com­mod­i­ty.

In an econ­o­my where things mat­ter more than peo­ple, peo­ple become deval­ued things: the “real­iza­tion of labor appears as loss of real­iza­tion for the work­ers; objec­ti­fi­ca­tion as loss of the object and bondage to it; appro­pri­a­tion as estrange­ment, as alien­ation.” Work­ers are not only spir­i­tu­al­ly dis­sat­is­fied under cap­i­tal­ism, they are alien­at­ed from the fruit of their labor “to the point of starv­ing to death.” To be an alien­at­ed work­er means to be lit­er­al­ly kept from things one needs to live.

This is the kind of work Marx­ists and social­ists have opposed, that which gross­ly enrich­es a few at the expense of most every­one else. Whether or not we are con­tent with Marx­ist solu­tions or feel a need for new the­o­ries, every seri­ous stu­dent of his­to­ry, econ­o­my, and cul­ture has to come to grips with Marx’s for­mi­da­ble cri­tiques. In the video above, Alain de Botton’s School of Life, a self-described “pro-Cap­i­tal­ist insti­tu­tion,” attempts to do so in ten min­utes or less.

“Most peo­ple agree that we need to improve our eco­nom­ic sys­tem some­how,” says de Bot­ton. “It threat­ens our plan­et through exces­sive con­sump­tion, dis­tracts us with irrel­e­vant adver­tis­ing, leaves peo­ple hun­gry and with­out health­care, and fuels unnec­es­sary wars.” It per­pet­u­ates, in oth­er words, pro­found alien­ation on a mas­sive scale. Of course it does, Marx might respond. That’s exact­ly what the sys­tem is designed to do. Or as he actu­al­ly wrote, “the only wheels which polit­i­cal econ­o­my sets in motion are greed, and the war amongst the greedy — com­pe­ti­tion.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Marx­ism by Ray­mond Geuss: A Free Online Course 

A Short Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Karl Marx

5 Free Online Cours­es on Marx’s Cap­i­tal from Prof. David Har­vey

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

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