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

Introduction to Philosophy: A Free Online Course from the University of Edinburgh

Cre­at­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh, the online course Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy intro­duces stu­dents to “some of the main areas of research in con­tem­po­rary phi­los­o­phy. In each mod­ule, a dif­fer­ent philoso­pher will talk [stu­dents] through some of the most impor­tant ques­tions and issues in their area of exper­tise.” The course begins by ask­ing “what phi­los­o­phy is – what are its char­ac­ter­is­tic aims and meth­ods, and how does it dif­fer from oth­er sub­jects?” Then the online course (offered on the Cours­era plat­form) pro­vides an overview of sev­er­al dif­fer­ent areas of phi­los­o­phy, includ­ing: Epis­te­mol­o­gy, Phi­los­o­phy of Sci­ence, Phi­los­o­phy of Mind, Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy, Moral Phi­los­o­phy, and Meta­physics.

You can take Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy for free by select­ing the audit option when you enroll. If you want to take the course for a cer­tifi­cate, you will need to pay a fee.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Oxford’s Free Course Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing For Begin­ners Teach­es You to Think Like a Philoso­pher

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

Michael Sandel’s Free Course on Jus­tice, the Most Pop­u­lar Course at Har­vard, Is Now Online

 

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Discover Ibn Sina (Avicenna), a Missing Pixel in Your Image of Philosophy: Partially Examined Life Episode #267 Featuring Peter Adamson

Most Amer­i­can stu­dents in phi­los­o­phy live on a diet of ancient Greek phi­los­o­phy on the one hand, and then “mod­ern” phi­los­o­phy, which starts around the time of Descartes (the 17th cen­tu­ry), with numer­ous schools and approach­es spilling into the present day. If you get any­thing from between those ancient days and moder­ni­ty, it’s prob­a­bly some church­men, i.e. Augus­tine (from the 4th cen­tu­ry) and Thomas Aquinas (the 13th cen­tu­ry), with per­haps a few Romans thrown in there and (if you’re Jew­ish) Mai­monides (12th cen­tu­ry).

But a key part of this lin­eage was the East­ward turn that the great works of Greek and Roman phi­los­o­phy took dur­ing the so-called Dark Ages, when they were pre­served and copied in the Islam­ic world, and this peri­od pro­duced a wealth of phi­los­o­phy includ­ing two fig­ures who became influ­en­tial enough in the West that their names were Latinized: Ibn Sīnā (980‑1037 C.E.) and Ibn Rushd, a.k.a. Aver­roes (1126–1198). Aquinas was very famil­iar with these fig­ures and incor­po­rat­ed them into his influ­en­tial works, and in the case of Ibn Sina, at least, impor­tant fig­ures like John Locke had def­i­nite­ly known at least about his views, if not his actu­al works.

On the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast, which has been going for 13 years now, we range wide­ly over the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy but had not actu­al­ly cracked the Islam­ic world. Luck­i­ly, Ibn Sīnā is one of the favorite philoso­phers of one of our favorite guests, Peter Adam­son of King’s Col­lege Lon­don. Peter runs his own pod­cast, The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy (With­out Any Gaps), which as the name implies, cov­ers Medieval phi­los­o­phy with admirable thor­ough­ness, cov­er­ing not only Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd, but also fig­ures like al-Rāzī, al-Fārābī, Al-Ghazālī, and many oth­ers.

Peter was good enough to rec­om­mend some read­ings to intro­duce us and our lis­ten­ers to this fig­ure, some of which he actu­al­ly wrote. Because of the vol­ume, redun­dan­cy, and style of Ibn Sīnā’s writ­ings, some sort of guide to col­lect and to some degree explain pas­sages is essen­tial for get­ting a han­dle on this idio­syn­crat­ic and bril­liant thinker. He wrote at least three dif­fer­ent ver­sions of his all-encom­pass­ing sys­tem, which was influ­enced by and meant to sup­plant Aris­totle’s. In addi­tion to philosophical/theological top­ics, it includ­ed math­e­mat­ics, sci­ence, psy­chol­o­gy, and more. So instead of try­ing to read a whole work cov­er­ing all that, it makes more sense to pick indi­vid­ual top­ics and then look at the var­i­ous for­mu­la­tions he gave about these.

Our two top­ics for this dis­cus­sion were a pecu­liar argu­ment for the exis­tence of God — with impor­tant impli­ca­tions for talk­ing about meta­physics more gen­er­al­ly — and an argu­ment for the imma­te­ri­al­i­ty of the soul, which like­wise tells us a lot about the way that Ibn Sīnā thought about knowl­edge and its rela­tion to the world.

The argu­ment for the exis­tence of God was lat­er called by Thomas Aquinas “the argu­ment from con­tin­gency.” It posits that things in the world don’t sim­ply exist, but that they require some­thing else to sup­port their exis­tence. This isn’t a cause is the chrono­log­i­cal sense that we talk about it: a pri­or event that gave rise to the thing. Rather, the mate­r­i­al com­po­nents of some­thing in a cer­tain arrange­ment make it con­tin­ue to exist as that thing right now; for exam­ple, a house exists because its com­po­nent wood parts exist, with nails and such hold­ing them in place. And the wood in turn has its char­ac­ter because of its physical/chemical com­po­nents, etc. If these com­po­nent caus­es weren’t in place, the thing would not exist; the thing is thus “con­tin­gent,” mean­ing it might well not have exist­ed were it not for those caus­es.

This pic­ture of the uni­verse thus includes a giant net­work of causal­i­ty, but does that net­work itself rest on any­thing? Accord­ing to Ibn Sīnā, there must be some­thing that is not con­tin­gent that holds every­thing else up. But is this thing God (in the sense that a good Mus­lim of his time would rec­og­nize it)? Ibn Sīnā then has a long series of argu­ments to show one by one that just by being “the nec­es­sary being,” this enti­ty also must be unique, must be all-pow­er­ful, gen­er­ous, and all the oth­er things one would expect God to be.

The argu­ment for the immor­tal­i­ty of the soul is per­haps Ibn Sīnā’s most famous argu­ment, often called the fly­ing or float­ing man argu­ment. It’s a thought exper­i­ment where­by you imag­ine you’ve just been cre­at­ed, but ful­ly mature, so you can think, but with no mem­o­ry, and your sens­es are inop­er­a­ble. You can’t even feel grav­i­ty or the ground under your feet (thus the “fly­ing” part). Accord­ing to Ibn Sīnā, you would still in such a sit­u­a­tion know that you exist. Since your appre­hen­sion of self did not include any part of your body (you could­n’t feel your body at all), that is sup­posed to prove that your body is not an essen­tial part of what you are.

Ibn Sīnā thought this argu­ment defin­i­tive because of his the­o­ry of knowl­edge by which if you know any­thing at all, then you know about the essen­tial com­po­nents of that thing. If you know what a tri­an­gle is, you know that it’s an abstract geo­met­ri­cal fig­ure with three straight sides. If you know what a horse is, you know that it’s a bio­log­i­cal ani­mal with a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter that you can iden­ti­fy. And to know what you are essen­tial­ly, you only need know that feel­ing of your own mind; any­thing else about that mind being asso­ci­at­ed with a par­tic­u­lar body that lives in a par­tic­u­lar part of the world and is just knowl­edge of con­tin­gent, rela­tion­al facts about your­self.

PEL hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er and Dylan Casey grap­ple in detail with Peter about these argu­ments, both on this record­ing and on a sec­ond part of the dis­cus­sion for those that want to hear more. To read more about these argu­ments and get the cita­tions to the texts we read for this dis­cus­sion, see the essay for this episode at partiallyexaminedlife.com. The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy pod­cast also fea­tures four mono­logues and an inter­view about Ibn Sīnā. Don’t let this gap in your knowl­edge of major fig­ures in intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry remain unfilled!

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is the host of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, Pret­ty Much Pop, and Naked­ly Exam­ined Music pod­casts. He is a writer and musi­cian work­ing out of Madi­son, Wis­con­sin. Read more Open Cul­ture posts about The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life.

Image by Solomon Grundy.

A Short Animation Explores the Nature of Creativity & Invention, with Characters That Look Like Andrei Tarkovsky & Sergei Eisenstein

A gen­tle­man goes to the movies, only to find a mar­quee full of retreads, reboots, sequels, and pre­quels. He demands to know why no one makes orig­i­nal films any­more, a rea­son­able ques­tion peo­ple often ask. But it seems he has run direct­ly into a grad­u­ate stu­dent in crit­i­cal the­o­ry behind the glass. The tick­et-sell­er rat­tles off a the­o­ry of uno­rig­i­nal­i­ty that is dif­fi­cult to refute but also, it turns out, only a word-for-word recita­tion of the Wikipedia page on “Pla­gia­rism.”

This is one of the ironies in “Aller­gy to Orig­i­nal­i­ty” every Eng­lish teacher will appre­ci­ate. In the short, ani­mat­ed New York Times Op-Doc by Drew Christie, an offi­cial Sun­dance selec­tion in 2014, “two men dis­cuss whether any­thing is tru­ly orig­i­nal — espe­cial­ly in movies and books,” notes the Times. The ques­tion leads us to con­sid­er what we might mean by orig­i­nal­i­ty when every work is built from pieces of oth­ers. “In cre­at­ing this Op-Doc ani­ma­tion,” Christie writes, “I copied well-known images and pho­tographs, retraced innu­mer­able draw­ings, then pho­to­copied them as a way to under­score the un-orig­i­nal­i­ty of the entire process.”

From William Bur­roughs’ cut-ups to Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” mod­erns have only been re-dis­cov­er­ing what ancients accept­ed with a shrug — no one can take cred­it for a sto­ry, not even the author. Barthes argued that “lit­er­a­ture is pre­cise­ly the inven­tion of this voice, to which we can­not assign a spe­cif­ic ori­gin: lit­er­a­ture is that neuter, that com­pos­ite, that oblique into which every sub­ject escapes, the trap where all iden­ti­ty is lost, begin­ning with the very iden­ti­ty of the body that writes.”

In Christie’s short, the smar­tass the­ater employ­ee con­tin­ues quot­ing sources, now from the “Orig­i­nal­i­ty” Wikipedia, now from Mark Twain, who had many things to say about orig­i­nal­i­ty. Twain once wrote to Helen Keller, for exam­ple, out­raged that she had been accused of pla­gia­rism. He came to her defense with an earnest con­vic­tion: “The ker­nel, the soul—let us go fur­ther and say the sub­stance, the bulk, the actu­al and valu­able mate­r­i­al of all human utter­ance — is pla­gia­rism.”

Post­mod­ern sophistry from Mark Twain? Maybe. We haven’t had much oppor­tu­ni­ty to ver­bal­ly spar in pub­lic like this late­ly, unmasked and in search of enter­tain­ment in a pub­lic square. If you find your­self exas­per­at­ed with the stream­ing choic­es on offer, if the books you’re read­ing all start to feel too famil­iar, con­sid­er the infi­nite num­ber of cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties inher­ent in the art of quo­ta­tion — and remem­ber that we’re always repeat­ing, replay­ing, and remix­ing what came before, whether or not we cite our sources.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Every­thing is a Remix: A Video Series Explor­ing the Sources of Cre­ativ­i­ty

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

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

Has TV Rotted Our Minds? On Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast/Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast Crossover)

Mar­shall McLuhan famous­ly said “The medi­um is the mes­sage,” by which he meant that when we receive infor­ma­tion, its effect on us is deter­mined as much by the form of that infor­ma­tion as by the actu­al con­tent.

Neil Post­man, in his 1985 book Amus­ing Our­selves to Death: Pub­lic Dis­course in the Age of Show Busi­ness, ran with this idea, argu­ing that TV has con­di­tioned us to expect that every­thing must be enter­tain­ing, and that this has had a dis­as­trous effect on news, pol­i­tics, edu­ca­tion, and think­ing in gen­er­al.

In this dis­cus­sion, your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er and Bri­an Hirt join with the rest of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life crew: Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey and Wes Alwan.

The result is much more philo­soph­i­cal con­text than you’d get in a typ­i­cal Pret­ty Much Pop dis­cus­sion. Pla­to, for exam­ple, argued (through the char­ac­ter of Socrates) in the Phae­drus against writ­ing, which he said amounts to off-load­ing thought to this inert thing, when it should be live­ly in our minds and our direct con­ver­sa­tions. Post­man’s book describes the Age of Print as high­ly con­ge­nial toward lengthy, abstract rea­son­ing. High lit­er­a­cy rates, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Amer­i­ca, con­di­tioned peo­ple to expect that this is how infor­ma­tion is to be received, and as such they were, for instance, pre­pared to lis­ten rapt­ly to the Lin­coln-Dou­glas debates in which the speak­ers pro­vid­ed lawyer­ly speech­es that might span mul­ti­ple hours.

Post­man, an edu­ca­tion­al the­o­rist, described tele­vi­sion as not just pro­vid­ing a no-con­text expe­ri­ence whose high lev­el of visu­al and audi­to­ry stim­u­la­tion beats its spec­ta­tors into thought­less pas­siv­i­ty, but that its pop­u­lar­i­ty pos­i­tive­ly infects all the oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels avail­able. Of course there is still in-per­son teach­ing, but tele­vi­sion short­ens atten­tion spans such that teach­ers now feel the need to con­stant­ly enter­tain instead of forc­ing stu­dents to make the effort required to attend care­ful­ly to what they have to teach. Of course there are still books, but they are less read, and the com­pe­ti­tion of tele­vi­sion for our time has changed the pre­sen­ta­tion with­in books so that they must be as imme­di­ate­ly and con­sis­tent­ly appeal­ing as tele­vi­sion.

McLuhan described tele­vi­sion as a “hot” medi­um due to its high lev­el of stim­u­la­tion, where a “cool” one like a text­book requires more active par­tic­i­pa­tion of the recip­i­ent. We dis­cuss how Post­man’s cri­tique fares in the Age of the Inter­net, which inter­est­ing­ly mix­es things up, with more inter­ac­tiv­i­ty (in that sense cool­er) yet even more pos­si­bil­i­ty for sen­so­ry dis­trac­tion (in that per­haps more impor­tant sense hot­ter). To sup­ple­ment Post­man, we also con­sult­ed a wide­ly read arti­cle from The Atlantic writ­ten by Nicholas Carr in 2008 called “Is Google Mak­ing Us Stu­pid.”

For more philo­soph­i­cal touch­points, see the post for this dis­cus­sion at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes an equal­ly long sec­ond part that you can access by sup­port­ing Pret­ty Much Pop at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by sup­port­ing The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life at partiallyexaminedlife.com/support. Lis­ten to a pre­view of part two.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

Three Leonard Cohen Animations

Leonard Cohen, High Priest Of Pathos…

     Lord Byron of Rock and Roll…

          Gen­tle­man Zen

                Mas­ter Of Misery…Morbidity… Erot­ic Despair…

                    Prince of Pessimism…Pain…

                         Trou­ba­dour For Trou­bled Souls…

The grav­el-voiced singer-song­writer accu­mu­lat­ed hun­dreds of nick­names over a career span­ning more than half a cen­tu­ry. He wasn’t thrilled by some of them, remark­ing to the BBC, “You get tired, over the years, hear­ing that you’re the cham­pi­on of gloom.”

Tak­en all togeth­er, how­ev­er, they make for a decent com­pos­ite por­trait of a pro­lif­ic artist whose sen­su­al­i­ty, mor­dant wit, and obses­sion with love, loss, and redemp­tion nev­er wavered.

He took some hia­tus­es, includ­ing a 5‑year stint as a monk in California’s Mount Baldy monastery, but nev­er retired.

His final stu­dio album, You Want It Dark­er, was released mere weeks before his death.

Jour­nal­ist Rob Sheffield artic­u­lat­ed the Cohen mys­tique in a Rolling Stone eulo­gy:

This man was both the crack in every­thing and the light that gets in. Nobody wrote such mag­nif­i­cent­ly bleak bal­lads for brood­ing alone in the dark, star­ing at a win­dow or wall – “Joan of Arc,” “Chelsea Hotel,” “Tow­er of Song,” “Famous Blue Rain­coat,” “Clos­ing Time.” He was music’s top Jew­ish Cana­di­an ladies’ man before Drake was born, run­ning for the mon­ey and the flesh. Like Bowie and Prince, he tapped into his own realm of spir­i­tu­al and sex­u­al gno­sis, and like them, he went out at the peak of his musi­cal pow­ers. No song­writer ever adapt­ed to old age with more cun­ning or gus­to. 

Cohen also excelled at inter­views, leav­ing behind a wealth of gen­er­ous, free­wheel­ing record­ings, at least three of which have become fod­der for ani­ma­tors.

The ani­ma­tion at the top of the page is drawn from Cohen’s 1966 inter­view with the Cana­di­an Broad­cast­ing Corporation’s Adri­enne Clark­son, short­ly after the release of his exper­i­men­tal nov­el, Beau­ti­ful Losers. (His debut album was still a year and a half away.)

Ear­li­er in the inter­view, Cohen men­tions the “hap­py rev­o­lu­tion” he encoun­tered in Toron­to after an extend­ed peri­od on the Greek island of Hydra:

I was walk­ing on Yorkville Street and it was jammed with beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful peo­ple last night. I thought maybe it could spread to the [oth­er] streets and maybe even … where’s the mon­ey dis­trict? Bay Street?… I thought maybe they could take that over soon, too.

How to tap into the source of all this hap­pi­ness?

The future Zen monk Cohen was pret­ty con­vinced it could be locat­ed by sit­ting qui­et­ly, though he doesn’t con­demn those using drugs or alco­hol as an assist, explain­ing that his fel­low Cana­di­an, abstract expres­sion­ist Harold Town, “gets beau­ti­ful under alco­hol. I get stu­pid and gen­er­al­ly throw up.”

8 years lat­er, WBAI’s Kath­leen Kendel came armed with a poem for Cohen to read on air, and also plumbed him as to the ori­gins of “Sis­ters of Mer­cy,” one of his best known songs, and the only one that did­n’t require him to “sweat over every word.” (Pos­si­bly the con­so­la­tion prize for his dashed hopes of erot­ic adven­ture with the song’s pro­tag­o­nists.)

(The ani­ma­tion here is by Patrick Smith for PBS’ Blank on Blank series.)

Ani­ma­tor Joe Don­ald­son riffs on an excerpt from Cohen’s final major inter­view, with The New York­er’s edi­tor-in-chief, David Rem­nick, above.

Rem­nick recalled that his sub­ject, who died a few days lat­er, was “in an ebul­lient mood for a man… who knew exact­ly where he was going, and he was head­ed there in a hur­ry. And at the same time, he was incred­i­bly gra­cious.”

The 82-year-old Cohen spoke enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly if some­what pes­simisti­cal­ly about hav­ing a lot of new mate­r­i­al to get through, “to put (his) house in order,” but also admit­ted, “some­times I just need to lie down.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Inter­view: Record­ed by David Rem­nick of The New York­er

Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musi­cian Fea­tured in a 1965 Doc­u­men­tary

Leonard Cohen Plays a Spell­bind­ing Set at the 1970 Isle of Wight Fes­ti­val

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Watch Badiou, the First Feature-Length Film on France’s Most Famous Living Philosopher

Above you can watch Badiou, the first fea­ture-length film on France’s most famous liv­ing philoso­pher. On the film’s accom­pa­ny­ing web­site, the directors–Gorav Kalyan and Rohan Kalyan–write:

Niet­zsche wrote that all phi­los­o­phy is a biog­ra­phy of the philoso­pher. The life of philoso­pher Alain Badiou sug­gests that the reverse of this is also true: from one’s life sto­ry, we might deduce an entire sys­tem of thought.

From his birth in Moroc­co, to the events of May 1968 in Paris, to his twi­light years as a nomadic pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al, Badiou’s own biog­ra­phy is per­haps his most com­plex and thought-pro­vok­ing work. He is a man who demands to be con­sid­ered the ally of both Pla­to and Sartre, St. Paul and Lucifer, the math­e­mati­cian and the poet.

With inti­mate access, Gorav and Rohan Kalyan have pro­duced the first fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary about Alain Badiou. By address­ing the inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions in Badiou’s life and work through cin­e­mat­ic means, the film­mak­ers are con­front­ed by the inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions of cin­e­ma itself: thought vs action, inte­ri­or­i­ty vs exte­ri­or­i­ty, pres­ence vs absence. And in order to bring to their com­plex sub­ject a sense of empa­thy, clar­i­ty, and cri­tique, they must ask a ques­tion as old as the medi­um: can cin­e­ma think?

Badiou has been made avail­able through Rohan Kalyan’s Vimeo page, and it will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philoso­pher Alain Badiou Per­forms a Scene From His Play, Ahmed The Philoso­pher (2011)

Michel Fou­cault and Alain Badiou Dis­cuss “Phi­los­o­phy and Psy­chol­o­gy” on French TV (1965)

The Entire Archives of Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Fou­cault, Alain Badiou, Judith But­ler & More (1972–2018)

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Social Psychologist Erich Fromm Diagnoses Why People Wear a Mask of Happiness in Modern Society (1977)

Mod­ern man still is anx­ious and tempt­ed to sur­ren­der his free­dom to dic­ta­tors of all kinds, or to lose it by trans­form­ing him­self into a small cog in the machine. —Erich Fromm

There are more think pieces pub­lished every day than any one per­son can read about our cur­rent moment of social dis­in­te­gra­tion. But we seem to have lost touch with the insights of social psy­chol­o­gy, a field that dom­i­nat­ed pop­u­lar intel­lec­tu­al dis­course in the post-war 20th cen­tu­ry, large­ly due to the influ­en­tial work of Ger­man exiles like Erich Fromm. The human­ist philoso­pher and psychologist’s “pre­scient 1941 trea­sure Escape from Free­dom,writes Maria Popo­va, serves as what he called “‘a diag­no­sis rather than a prog­no­sis,’ writ­ten dur­ing humanity’s grimmest descent into mad­ness in WWII, lay­ing out the foun­da­tion­al ideas on which Fromm would lat­er draw in con­sid­er­ing the basis of a sane soci­ety,” the title of his 1955 study of alien­ation, con­for­mi­ty, and author­i­tar­i­an­ism.

Fromm “is an unjust­ly neglect­ed fig­ure,” Kier­an Durkin argues at Jacobin, “cer­tain­ly when com­pared with his erst­while Frank­furt School col­leagues, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.” But he has much to offer as a “ground­ed alter­na­tive” to their crit­i­cal the­o­ry, and his work “reveals a dis­tinct­ly more opti­mistic and hope­ful engage­ment with the ques­tion of rad­i­cal social change.” Nonethe­less, Fromm well under­stood that social dis­eases must be iden­ti­fied before they can be treat­ed, and he did not sug­ar­coat his diag­noses. Had soci­ety become more “sane” thir­ty-plus years after the war? Fromm didn’t think so.

In the 1977 inter­view clip above, Fromm defends his claim that “We live in a soci­ety of noto­ri­ous­ly unhap­py peo­ple,” which the inter­view­er calls an “incred­i­ble state­ment.” Fromm replies:

For me it isn’t incred­i­ble at all, but if you just open your eyes, you see it. That is, most peo­ple pre­tend that they are hap­py, even to them­selves, because if you are unhap­py, you are con­sid­ered a fail­ure, so you must wear the mask of being sat­is­fied, of hap­py.

Con­trast this obser­va­tion with Albert Camus’ 1959 state­ment, “Today hap­pi­ness is like a crimenev­er admit it. Don’t say ‘I’m hap­py’ oth­er­wise you will hear con­dem­na­tion all around.” Were Fromm and Camus observ­ing vast­ly dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al worlds? Or is it pos­si­ble that in the inter­ven­ing years, forced hap­pi­nessakin to the social­ly coerced emo­tions Camus depict­ed in The Strangerhad become nor­mal­ized, a screen of denial stretched over exis­ten­tial dread, eco­nom­ic exploita­tion, and social decay?

Fromm’s diag­no­sis of forced hap­pi­ness res­onates strong­ly with The Stranger (and Bil­lie Hol­i­day), and with the image-obsessed soci­ety in which we live most of our lives now, pre­sent­ing var­i­ous curat­ed per­son­ae on social media and video­con­fer­enc­ing apps. Unhap­pi­ness may be a byprod­uct of depres­sion, vio­lence, pover­ty, phys­i­cal ill­ness, social alien­ation… but its man­i­fes­ta­tions pro­duce even more of the same: “Them that’s got shall get / Them that’s not shall lose.” If you’re unhap­py, says Fromm, “you lose cred­it on the mar­ket, you’re no longer a nor­mal per­son or a capa­ble per­son. But you just have to look at peo­ple. You only have to see how behind the mask there is unrest.”

Have we learned how to look at peo­ple behind the mask? Is it pos­si­ble to do so when we most­ly inter­act with them from behind a screen? These are the kinds of ques­tions Fromm’s work can help us grap­ple with, if we’re will­ing to accept his diag­no­sis and tru­ly reck­on with our unhap­pi­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Albert Camus Explains Why Hap­pi­ness Is Like Com­mit­ting a Crime—”You Should Nev­er Admit to it” (1959)

How Much Mon­ey Do You Need to Be Hap­py? A New Study Gives Us Some Exact Fig­ures

The UN’s World Hap­pi­ness Report Ranks “Social­ist Friend­ly” Coun­tries like Fin­land, Nor­way, Den­mark, Ice­land & Swe­den as Among the Hap­pi­est in the World

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

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