Episode 71: Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”

Feb 152013
 
Buber

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:58:21 — 108.4MB)

On Buber’s 1923 book about the fundamental human position: As children, and historically (this is his version of social contract theory), we start fully absorbed in relation with another person (like, say, mom). Before that point, we have no self-consciousness, no “self” at all, really. It’s only by having these consuming “encounters” that we gradually distinguish ourselves from other people, and can then engage in what we’d normally consider “experience,” which Buber calls “the I-It relation,” wherein we can reflect on and manipulate the world.

Buber thinks that unless we can keep connected to this “I-Thou” phenomenon, through real, mature relationships (dialogue!), and maybe also through art and the appreciation of nature (we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how, as he says, you can really have an I-Thou encounter with a tree), you’re spiritually dead, treating everyone as objects and sporting a thin, pissy sense of self to boot. If you get get in the groove, on the other hand, you’ll come off all shiny and ethical and ready to transform the world. Sweet! Oh, and by the way, the “Thou,” every thou, ends up also being a direct line to God, so all you “spiritual but not religious” folks are theists after all. Nyah nyah!

Mark, Seth, and Wes are rejoined by verbose lawyer Daniel Horne to hash through this difficult and possibly mystical text. Read more about it and get the book.

End song: “Luscious You” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000). Download it free.

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Topic for #71: Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”

Feb 012013
 

On Feb. 1 we up again with previous guest and PEL blogger (and Twitter/YouTube master) Daniel Horne to discuss Martin Buber. Buber is known as a religious existentialist, much like Kierkegaard, which means he’s concerned with our fundamental relation to reality, and thinks that our individual attitude has some impact on our being, on whether we’re living “authentically” or not.

For Buber, this means recognizing the fundamental orientation or experience as interpersonal, and specifically one-on-one. As with Hegel, we don’t start out as fully formed egos, little balls of greed with desires and maybe rights, but in sort of a formless mass with the rest of humanity, just a part of nature. We don’t get self-consciousness, or real personhood, until we’re recognized by another. But while Hegel’s picture of this is of a life-or-death struggle between master and slave, Buber thinks it’s a matter of love, of connecting with someone so that their subjectivity “fills the sky,” so that all the rest of the world you see (metaphorically) through their eyes or, better yet, in their light. Through this process I see myself: this is how the “I” is formed.

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The Existential Weirdness of Fandom

Oct 082012
 

Lucy LawlessIn one of Woody Allen’s films (Annie Hall?), one of the characters remarks that existentialism is a matter of projecting one’s neuroses onto the world. Instead of me being depressed, I am in an ontological state of despair. Instead of being a person who is considering what to do with my evening, it is the world that is pulsing with possibility. What seems especially weird about this language is that if the feelings are objective, out there in the world in front of me, then this seems to imply that they are not under my control. It means that I’m acting like a helpless infant beset by these forces.

Though the objectifying language implies this, it’s a misreading of existentialism, or rather a pop existentialism that hasn’t delved into the real theoretical goods. According to Sartre, what we call ourselves really is objective, in that it’s a social construction, not something trapped inside my head. Talking about possibilities and emotions as swirling around an infinitely small point that is consciousness is actually a pretty good phenomenological description of my experience, but a further account of experience reveals (for Sartre) that we have pretty much total control over the interpretations we give to things, e.g. over whether we see the landscape as laden with possibilities or as impossibly confining. Sartre would agree that the neurotic pop existentialist is being infantile and should just get it together.

To fandom: On our big sell-out episode, I referred to one of my motivations in looking into the topic as trying to grapple with the existential weirdness of being a fan. I’m still trying to unpack why I feel the need to use the word “existential” in that context. Continue reading »

The Invisible Man and Existentialism

Oct 012012
 

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a great American novel.

Ellison’s ability to make the reader feel the racism of the time is unsettling. The painful experience of living in a country that views you with disdain—that sees you as a problem—permeates the text.

It is also a deeply philosophical novel. Consider the following outline of the novel written by Ellison to his literary agent as he was beginning what would be a 7-year writing process:
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Episode 63: Existentialist Heroes in Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men”

Sep 212012
 
Cormac McCarthy

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:49:49 — 100.6MB)

On philosophical issues in McCarthy’s 2005 novel about guys running around with drug money and shooting each other, and about fiction as a form for exploring philosophical ideas.

What can morality mean for people who have witnessed the “death of God,” i.e. a loss in faith in light of the horrors of war? For both the protagonist and antagonist in “No Country for Old Men,” morality is about being satisfied with your own actions, even if what you’ve done is set in stone forever, and even if it were to be the last thing you do before death. This is not purely subjectivist, though, seemingly not just dependent upon our whims. In McCarthy’s sort-of Nietzschean world, we have duties toward the dead, and duties towards ourselves. It’s clear that this sort of “ethic” is not coincident with “ethics” as we’re familiar with it, as it’s something shared by both the risk-taker-with-a-heart-of-gold hero and the I’ll-kill-you-like-cattle baddie.

What does McCarthy himself think? Who knows? Like many good philosophical novelists, he puts philosophies in the mouths of his characters to try them out as world views, to see how they hang psychologically and what fate they lead to, in the author’s best estimation. Another peculiarity of the novel as ethical philosophy is that is provides a full-blown concrete ethical situation to analyze instead of a classroom abstraction.

We discuss these issues and more with Eric Petrie, Professor at Michigan State University, who’s an old friend and teacher of Dylan’s. Read more about the topic and get the book.

End song: “My Grandfather” by Dylan Casey (2001).

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Deeply Funny?

Jun 102012
 

Tom Motley (Image: Tom Motley when he’s all spiffed up.)

It is a little known fact, even among our philosophically sophisticated readers, that Heidegger argued for the supremacy of German humor. Because German jokes have the most precise underlying structure, he argued, German humor would rule the earth for a thousand years. (Sorry if you’ve already heard some version of that old joke.)

In the spirit of episode #57, I offer some philosophical comics. (These are to be viewed for entertainment purposes only; David Letterman asks that there be no wagering.) Tom Motley (not his real name) calls himself a “CARTOONiOLOGiST” and he’s one of my favorite dudes. He does all kinds of work and it’s always clever, but not always funny. In fact, he did a “comic” strip that was deliberately not funny. He called it “tragic strip” instead.

I’ve selected a couple of pieces that are particularly philosophical and also humorous. The first one is titled “Fiction Krishna” and it provides instruction on cartooning and enlightenment at the same time. (Tom teaches cartooning at The School of the Visual Arts and illustration at Pratt Manhattan but, as far as I know, he does not teach the practices leading to Nirvana.) The second piece is shorter and gives you some recipes from the Existentialists’ Cookbook, “Bean Dip & Nothingness“. As you may have guessed, Nausea is the basic premise behind all the recipes.

If you are a fairly serious comic nerd, dear reader, then you might want to check out this interview article with Mr. Motely or explore his cartooniologist blog. You might even be interested in an illustrated classic, The Golden Ass.(Insert your own ass and/or gold joke here.)

-Dave Buchanan

Stokely Carmichael’s Sartrean Influences

Mar 262012
 

One of the names dropped during the Race and Philosophy episode was that of Stokely Carmichael. Below is a famous recording of one Carmichael’s “Black Power” speeches, given after Carmichael was appointed Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC:

http://youtu.be/9cRasrZHwVI

Watch on YouTube.

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JPS, per BBC

Dec 092011
 


Watch on YouTube.

You’ll find precious little discussion of Transcendence of the Ego within the Sartre episode of Human, All Too Human, the BBC’s 1999 documentary on existentialist thinkers previously name-checked by Seth. However, you do get a capsule summary of Sartre’s thesis around the 10-minute mark. BBC provides some lucid illustrations of certain Sartrean arguments, particularly his entertaining (and somewhat telling) “pervert’s argument” against solipsism. The creepy, hyper-dramatic soundtrack is unfortunate — assigning existentialism such a morbid affect doesn’t help its cause, whatever the Gauloises-smoking set might think. Points also deducted for interviewing the inexplicably famous BHL, whose contribution is to summarize Sartre thusly, “He was freedom.” Just fast-forward through that part.

-Daniel Horne

Sebastian Gardner (via Philosophy Bites) on Sartre and Bad Faith

Dec 082011
 

Bad Faith WaiterThis Philosophy Bites episode focuses on concisely focuses on a key practical implication of Sartre’s picture of the self as a fiction as described on our episode: bad faith, which is a matter of identifying one’s free consciousness as that fiction, or more precisely, denying that the self is a fiction, that we each have a fixed nature that constrains our future choices.

Sebastian Gardner gives some of the examples of bad faith from Being and Nothingness (which has a chapter toward its beginning called “Bad Faith”), leading up to Sartre’s claim that human nature is paradoxical: we both are and are not defined by our past behavior and characteristics.

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Bob Solomon on Existentialism and Being and Nothingness

Dec 072011
 
Robert_Solomon

We’ve often name-dropped our former U. of Texas professor Bob Solomon, perhaps best known for his great original work The Passions or his appearance in the Richard Linklater film, Waking Life. For our Hegel episode, I was clutching tightly to his work explaining it: In the Spirit of Hegel.

One of his central philosophical concerns was Sartre’s view of freedom and responsibility, and his take on existentialism always seemed to climax at that point. Here he is introducing the major themes of existentialism.

Watch on YouTube.

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The Tree of Life’s Contingent Universe

Oct 202011
 

Watch on YouTube

I can write nothing on Heideggerian scholar*/(anti)Hollywood director Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life that hasn’t been better written elsewhere. Even so, the film has just come available on DVD and digital download, so I thought I’d recommend it to anyone who has been interested in PEL’s recent religion episodes. (Suggestion: try to watch the HD version of the clip.) If I had to try to connect the film’s theme to recent topics, I’d call attention to Malick’s ruminations on life’s utterly contingent nature, and whether it suggests the presence or absence of God.

While the film isn’t perfect (somebody please explain the ending!), a movie with existential dinosaurs beats a two-hour couch-warming session with another Transformers sequel. Trust me.

*I can’t find a decent link, but Malick translated Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons for Northwestern University Press before he abandoned graduate study.

-Daniel Horne

Existential Star Wars

May 112011
 

Passing on this bit of loveliness. Thanks to Paul, who posted this to our Facebook group.


Watch on youtube.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Episode 29: Kierkegaard on the Self

Nov 212010
 
kierkegaard

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:56:32 — 106.8MB)

Discussing Soren Kierkegaard’s “The Sickness Unto Death” (1849).

What is the self? For K. we are a tension between opposites: necessity and possibility, the finite and the infinite, soul and body. He thinks we’re all in despair, whether we know it or not, because we wrongly think we’re something we’re not, or we reject what we are, or we just don’t pay attention to this dynamic at all: we just go along with the crowd. So we need to keep self-examining and (he thinks) ultimately embrace our subservience to God.

Joined by guest podcaster/Kiekegaard’s lawyer Daniel Horne, we consider K.’s 3-step self-help program and whether there’s anything to be gotten here if you don’t subscribe to K’s Christianity.

Read the text free online or buy the book.We also devote some discussion to Fear and Trembling.

End song: “John T. Flibber,” from Happy Songs Will Bring You Down by the MayTricks (1994). Get the whole album free.

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