Episode 109: Jaspers’s Existentialism with Guest Paul Provenza

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 109 is something like, is science sufficient to give us a satisfying worldview? And we'll be discussing Karl Jaspers's essay On My Philosophy, which is an existentialist tract from 1941. You can join the discussion, get the text, and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer attempting to communicate in the light of transcendence from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Seth: And this is Seth Paskin clarifying his existence in Los Angeles, California.

0:43 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey encompassing in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:49 Paul: This is Paul Provenza, not really sure about existing in Los Angeles.

0:54 Mark: Very nice. Are you sure about existing or exists? I don't know how you do the existence with a Z as a adjective.

1:03 Paul: It was so great to see Karl Jaspers was so far ahead of a time. He's like a dj. He's like a mixmaster with a capital Z at the end. This is awesome. He should be working with Prince.

1:15 Mark: This is probably a less familiar name to a lot of people than Sartre or Heidegger or these folks, but this was the guy who was an older contemporary of Heidegger. He and Heidegger met at Husserl's 61st birthday party. I saw.

1:28 Paul: Which, you know, was crazy.

1:32 Mark: They found that they were kindred spirits, and they had a correspondence from then all the way to the 60s, on and off, despite a violent disagreement over the whole Nazi thing where Heidegger got to keep his job, and Jaspers, who had a Jewish wife, did not. And then after all that blew over, Jaspers wrote a letter to say maybe Heidegger shouldn't be allowed to teach. But yet he still respected the guy. So they still continued to correspond, and it eventually warmed up by the 1960s.

1:57 Paul: Why let a little thing like Nazism get in the way of a friendship?

2:03 Mark: There's a whole book of their correspondence, and there's like a whole decade where it's very sparse and very cool as compared to the stuff from before, that this is an easy thing for us to get sucked into. But apparently Heidegger did express not, I'm sorry, but he at least said he was ashamed at one point.

2:17 Unknown speaker: What?

2:18 Mark: Yes.

2:18 Seth: I never heard that in the correspondence.

2:20 Mark: I just read this today.

2:21 Paul: Yes, but apparently he said that to a mentor of his in a private conversation, and then the mentor went and brought that to the appropriate academic figures or something. And they went, okay, you're like fifth level Nazi.

2:34 Wes: You're not.

2:35 Mark: I think the mentor might have been Jasper's. To combine our two stories here.

2:39 Dylan: Really.

2:39 Mark: So I was just looking at a review. I was curious as, like, because, you know, they both use the term design, and they seem to have a lot of other things in common. I was wondering who influenced who. It does seem like mostly it's Jasper's influence, Heidegger. But there's so much overlap that it's. And they use the term so differently. Anyway, it's not obvious, but part of what I stumbled across in looking at that was a book review for this collected correspondence of these two guys. And they mentioned the thing about the shame.

3:03 Dylan: You should know, Paul, that Mark always reads eight times more stuff than we do.

3:07 Wes: Agreed to read on.

3:08 Dylan: And he will constantly refer to it over and over.

3:11 Mark: No, it's a rule that I don't do that. That's why it's a rule.

3:15 Paul: Is he gonna finish the test early and sit there and just work on his BlackBerry? He's just gonna. You guys, come on.

3:23 Mark: I'll finish my test and then I'll make up extra questions and then I'll answer them.

3:31 Dylan: We should also introduce Paul, Mark. Yeah.

3:33 Mark: Oh, come on. People know who Paul is. We don't need to introduce Paul.

3:36 Paul: Yeah, you and I have the same crowd.

3:40 Mark: People who watched VH1 in the 80s or something like that.

3:43 Paul: There you go. By the way, ex is determined by how much material is on the Internet. If you existed before the Internet, your stuff's not up there. It's as if you didn't exist at all.

3:54 Mark: Well, then I'm glad that I got to see a number of episodes of your fairly recent show the green room on YouTube for free. So.

4:02 Paul: Yeah, that's illegal.

4:05 Seth: I watch them legitimately on Showtime.

4:08 Mark: All right.

4:08 Seth: And I highly encourage.

4:09 Paul: This is a man who understands morality.

4:11 Mark: And if you are not familiar with late 80s standup, then you might know Paul most intimately from the Aristocrats, the awesome film. And in fact, we should just do our own version of this right here to take up the rest of the,

4:25 Paul: you know, the Monty Python philosopher song. I do believe there should be an Aristocrats version of that.

4:32 Mark: All right, so folks can Google that on their own or perhaps watch it illegally on YouTube. I don't know if that's possible.

4:37 Wes: Find a way to pay for it, if that's still possible.

4:40 Paul: Amazon.

4:42 Mark: Okay, what else should we say about Paul? Paul, what are other things that you're promoting right now.

4:47 Paul: Right now there's a project called Setlist, which is there's 65 episodes on YouTube on the Nerdist channel, a series in the UK that we're trying to get up and running in the States as well. It's very, very fun variation on comedy. We create the set lists for the comics and they have to improvise it in front of the audience and some brilliance happens. It's really great fun. So, as I said, there's about 60 episodes on YouTube right now, and hopefully we'll get a deal for an American.

5:18 Mark: And I can only hope that Karl Jaspers will come up as one of the topics in someone's set list just to confound them.

5:23 Paul: It will now.

5:27 Mark: Good.

5:27 Seth: Paul, we should also mention you have

5:29 Paul: your book, yes, Satiristas, which has been out for a couple of years, but still worth reading. And I think I'm gonna buy string cheese later. That's about all I got going.

5:38 Unknown speaker: Okay.

5:39 Dylan: So, Paul, you're the one who suggested this particular reading, and I.

5:43 Mark: No, no, he didn't.

5:44 Dylan: He didn't.

5:44 Paul: No, I suggested, you know, my attorney, Mr. Linsenmayer, he was okay with it.

5:50 Mark: First his representatives.

5:51 Dylan: He consented. He consented.

5:53 Mark: He wanted to pick his own thing. But then what happened? You. Do you actually like this or you just got tired and didn't want to choose something else?

5:58 Paul: No, I actually. Well, what happened was I went down the rabbit hole. Man, these rabbit holes go in a million different directions. It got so confusing. And that's why I was thinking of going in another direction. But then I said, no, I'll just stick with what you guys want to talk about and let you carry the ball.

6:14 Mark: Well, I was inspired to pick this by listening to your performance on the modern day Philosophers podcast. So I want to thank Danny Lobell for connecting us with you that unless I can email someone out cold and they'll respond to it, then I can never get them on the show. So there are intermediaries involved here that I'm very excited about.

6:32 Paul: There's a whole philosophy underworld. It's like human trafficking with ideas.

6:40 Mark: Danny brought you on to talk about a very difficult reading, Saul Kripke, that we haven't even gotten to yet because there's so much like preliminary shit that you have to read before any of that even starts to make sense.

6:50 Paul: Yeah.

6:50 Mark: So we're finally, after five years, almost ready for it, but we haven't quite gotten there yet. I was impressed during that discussion that, first of all, you were more on topic than Danny was. And kept kind of like, let's bring it back to the text. So when you're doing that to the host and the host is trying to spin off in different directions, that's awesome. And then also just. You displayed an evident interest both in. I know from your other, you know, that you've been involved in the New atheist movement a little bit. I watched you in a documentary about that.

Introducing Richard Dawkins. I believe you're interested in science. You're interested in. You know, I think you brought up the term existentialism a bunch of times. So bringing forth an existentialist who is sort of ambivalent about science. And he's not a religious. He's not Kierkegaard, he's not a religious figure, but he definitely is not a Dawkins. You know, he thinks that there's a purpose for the religious urge and that it's sort of essential to live a meaningful life, this urge toward transcendence. But at the same time, you also brought up Zen and mindfulness and presence and stuff that I think is very much in tune with at least some versions of existentialism.

7:53 Paul: Absolutely. It was interesting because going down the Jasper's road, Jasper's rabbit hole, it raised a lot of questions. And I think I'm more confused about Jasper than I am clear after reading him. So I'm interested in talking about this and finding out just how stupid I am.

8:09 Mark: There's a reason why we don't limit ourselves to getting professional philosophers or obsessed amateurs like ourselves on here as guests because, you know, we want this to be a reality check. We want. It just can't be a community talking to itself in some ridiculously insular way.

8:25 Paul: Well, isn't that the problem with philosophy in general? Seriously, I mean, it's a snake eating its own tail over and over and over again. That's why I left. I actually started out at University of Pennsylvania as a philosophy major and I actually left after two years because A, it just wasn't funny enough and B,

8:44 Mark: you weren't reading the right philosophers, apparently.

8:47 Paul: Apparently I should have been reading Stephen Wright. No, I just found it really ideologically masturbatory.

8:56 Wes: Really.

8:56 Paul: I just felt like a lot of regurgitation, a lot of parsing of things that it was almost crazy to continue parsing them because there were so many. Like, that's one of the problems I had with Jasper's is that, you know, he uses words like transcendence. There's like, there's so many different interpretations of what the word transcendence means. And it's just hard enough just to figure out what his definition of it is. And then when everybody else chimes in around it, it just becomes more and more confusing. And it just seems to me to be obfuscating more than anything else.

9:29 Seth: I'm glad you brought that up because I had a similar experience reading just this little snippet. So he's got a text called, I think Reason and Existence. It's like five lectures and the introduction that was written by somebody else. Some professor from Northwestern says a lot of people get exasperated by the fact that Jasper's doesn't define his terms and he does that on purpose.

9:50 Paul: I'm so glad it's not just me, though. That's the big problem. That's it right there. I would have stayed in philosophy if everybody got up and said, you know what? I don't know what the hell's going on either. That would have been great.

9:59 Mark: That they're by nature indefinable in some way. And that's like only a conclusion that you figure out at the end of it. When you figure out like that this urge towards transcendence is in itself an urge towards something that cannot be put into words. And so you can describe the experience of being pushed or having this urge to transcendence and the process of philosophy by which you somehow leverage this in interesting ways. But that ultimately he thinks that the doctrines that come out of philosophy are nothing. That there's not going to be anything that sort of someone who didn't go through the process of figuring it out with you is going to be able to understand.

10:35 Paul: Right? Well, he does get into that. He does get into how your own circumstances, the.

10:40 Seth: What's the word?

10:40 Paul: Historicity. Historicity. Historicity. That sounds like some sort of a medication they're advertising. May also cause anal bleeding. Try historicity. All that sort of stuff about context and separating yourself from context and consciousness, basically all that sort of stuff ultimately gets down to like, really, the Zen koans make more sense to me because they are more intuitive and less specific and suggest being in a place that cannot be literally articulated.

11:16 Dylan: So you like the encompassing?

11:18 Paul: I love the encompassing. You get me a good encompassing. I am in. I like encompassing more than pie.

11:26 Mark: So the encompassing is one of the key terms in here. Also translated in a different article that I read as the comprehensive. I know that helps a lot. But yes, it's that at which. So for doing science, we're elaborating particular things, right? We're investigating particular things.

11:42 Paul: It's the General theory as opposed to the specific theory.

11:45 Unknown speaker: Right.

11:45 Mark: So science has the push toward more and more and more and more general. Right. But then it never gets according to Jasper's all the way to an actual worldview, even the scientific worldview itself of I will only believe things that I have good rational justification for. And all the things that a Dawkins would say is these are the guiding force of my life. They are not themselves proved by scientific experiments. They are sort of prior in some way. You learn about them through doing science. You learn about that attitude and they

12:14 Paul: accumulate to what ultimately one would hope is towards a worldview. But there is that aspect of we're at a place in time and technology and scientific advancement where we can actually really seriously and concretely talk about things like parallel universes. And those things are not abstractions in the same way to me that discussions of them are in philosophy. Probably because we've taken all the baby steps along the way to understand the concept in terms of the physical world and the math of it all and understanding, you know, I mean we have cell phones, they work.

We know that, you know, we're at that place. So a lot of these concepts of what science is able to prove or isn't able to prove, that gap seems to be shrinking in terms of our understanding of vaguer, less concrete, less definitive aspects of science. You know, theoretical physics right now, I mean, it may as well be magic, don't you think?

13:13 Mark: Well, that was certainly when he was writing too. But yeah, Dylan's the actual physicist.

13:17 Dylan: So have you seen the way physics gets made?

13:22 Wes: It's not pretty.

13:24 Dylan: The thing about science is that it accretes, it builds on itself and there's always this kind of tie back to stuff we can basically agree about talking about. So every time a scientist makes an experiment or they say, well I have a new theory, any scientist worth their salt is they'll say, okay, well let's agree about what we're going to measure, what we're going to be looking at together, right? And then if you get a different answer from me for anything, then the way we sort it out is we go make a measurement of that thing or of something related to it and that'll tell us which one of us is right.

In that way it ends up being a single worldview so that there may be parts of it that don't relate to one another. You might not be able to calculate everything that goes on in a cell from first principles, from particle physics, but the conce science is that you ought to be able to do that. And so there is an argument within science, if some of those concepts are localized within science itself. So that you could never really even to talk about doing a quantum field theory calculation of the behavior of a cell. That's saying that, well, I ought to in principle be able to do that doesn't even really make sense that there are different sorts of entities and science going on at different scales.

14:32 Wes: And cosmology can get pretty speculative. And I don't think the many worlds theory or a theory of multiple universes is widely accepted. And I think some physicists think it's.

14:42 Dylan: It's nuts, it's a consequence of the mathematics.

14:44 Wes: Right, right, right.

14:45 Paul: But my point being though, that these kinds of ideas are no longer abstract in terms of our being able to understand them. You see where I'm going with that?

14:54 Seth: Yeah.

14:54 Dylan: So you mean that I can make a mathematical argument that would tie back what I was imagining about parallel universes where I could have some content to what I mean by that. It's not just a fanciful imagination or a mythological story.

15:08 Wes: They're ent different concepts though. The use of multiple universes in philosophy is a tool of modal logic. Kripke in the use in physics is. So it's about possibilities. It's really about the concept of possibility.

15:22 Paul: That's what I mean. In the realm of science, which Jaspers sees as he sees something binary there, but in the world of science, it sort of crossed over into so many of the abstract ideas about reality and consciousness that were the realm of philosophy, but now even sort of part of the popular vernacular, we understand them in a different way. So a lot of what has gone on in philosophy almost seems quaint.

15:46 Wes: I would argue that the many worlds hypothesis, which again many physicists don't think highly of, is more speculative and imprecise use of a concept of a, of a world or universe than its use in modal logic. Just because it's more abstract with logic doesn't mean it's less precise or ultimately even less practical. So remember, this development of logic also led to technology of the computer. And there's lots of fanciful sounding stuff that goes on in philosophy that's a result of the fanciful kinds of stuff that goes on in higher mathematics. But right. Some of these things have applications and then so there is that crossover to physics.

16:22 Seth: But to try to tie what I think Paul's point is back to the text, which is usually my job on the podcast.

16:27 Paul: Nicely done.

16:28 Seth: I like that. You know what you might consider as the totality of things that science is giving us an understanding of. We have scientific knowledge of ever more increasing things. And as the collection of scientific knowledge expands, the knowledge that is abstract or vague or in the corners or what have you starts to shrink. That makes sense. What I think Jaspers is trying to say about that is it doesn't really matter how much it expands. The total collection of scientific knowledge does not itself give a picture of our experience in the world in its totality. That's one thing he wants to say, is that we can add up all the science together and it's not going to tell us what it's like to be a human being.

17:03 Dylan: Right.

17:03 Paul: Or to be this individual human being.

17:05 Seth: To be this individual. And then the other part that he wants to make that he's going to distinguish from philosophical knowledge and this is one thing that I really liked about it was scientific knowledge is ahistorical. We do not need to reinterpret a scientific fact or a theorem in the light of every generation or our experience in the world does not color or impact how we see certain constants or scientific theorems. Whereas he says the history of philosophy and I took away from the text also things like art and poetry are also always self referencing and always self analyzing its own history in light of its current presence.

17:37 Wes: Very well put.

17:38 Paul: Isn't it also cultural? You can separate science from culture to a certain degree, but I don't believe you can separate philosophy from culture.

17:47 Mark: We got to keep in mind he tells the story at the beginning of this essay of sort of his origin story as a philosopher that he didn't really become a philosopher until he was like 40 years old that he trained first as a lawyer and then he switched to medicine and psychology. Yes, psychiatry.

18:01 Paul: And that's fascinating because that relationship is reality stuff. I mean he was so focused on delusions and our perspectives on delusions, separating our judgments about delusions and all that sort of stuff, which I thought was really, really interesting.

18:14 Mark: Yeah, but he was very conscious as a psychiatrist of the metaphors that they would use in grounding their science that he says first before psychoanalysis came along it was talk about the brain. And he refers to this, I think as some kind of funny. Clearly at this point in the 1920s or whatever, they weren't talking about neurons in the brain in any precise way. It was more just making these gross, not very really scientifically grounded theories about, you know, it's not even that much different than one years or so before when they're talking about the humors and

18:44 Paul: I was just going to say that

18:47 Mark: saying that brain does this or that's

18:48 Wes: going on at this point. Freud himself started out as a neurologist. Yeah, right.

18:52 Mark: And so graduating then to psychoanalysis, which is its own little self involved, nonverifiable, you know, that it's often used as an example of a scientific approach that is not scientific in sort of a fundamental way that you can't test the basic assumptions. Right, right.

19:07 Paul: Talk about leap of faith.

19:09 Mark: So in the same way Dylan was talking about that we sort of say that there's these things that we say, we engage in the specific scientific work, that we agree on this bunch of fundamentals and then that gives us a shared grounding to investigate something specific. He thinks that first of all that makes all science hypothetical in a certain way. That like, well, if you agree with this shared paradigm, then you can accept this alleged fact that we're putting forward in this new thing. And plus he just thought in observing his fellow scientists, they just did not put enough work into questioning these fundamental assumptions that it's fine if you have it hypothetically in the way I just described, as long as you're very keenly aware of the chain by which you are supporting your current thing and you can say on what basis your current claim is, you know, ultimately comes down to.

And he just thought that it was much too common. And maybe scientists are less guilty of this now, but for folks to elaborate some very practically useful theory in their bit of science and then take from that, you know, especially in psychology, like now we have discovered the nature of man and then to give these sort of overweening statements that amount to a philosophy, but it's a half assed philosophy done with no knowledge of actual philosophy. This is what he's objecting to. He's objecting to, first of all, he thinks science sets the standard for rigor.

You know, he started as a scientist, it fulfilled his need for facts and solidity. So he absolutely thinks that philosophers who ignore science are just fucking idiots. If you embrace irrationality or something like this, then you're just confused, you don't know what you're talking about. But at the same time that if a scientist goes beyond their scope and puts forth philosophical statements that something is going wrong. And I think ultimately what this leads to is that most of the things we would talk about as philosophical generalizations, whether they're made by scientists or philosophers, he thinks are the wrong way of doing philosophy.

As I was saying that earlier, that his ultimate point in philosophy is that you get to this Personal, existential, this is my relationship to the world. And you can't characterize that it's characterized by a way of being. And it's not characterized by, here's a set of statements, generalizations about the nature of man in the world and all this crap that I believe that as soon as you take a dogma like that and then you teach it to somebody else, there's something that's not true philosophy, according to him. So I think a lot of what scientists might object to about philosophy isn't the kind of philosophy that Jaspers is actually gonna like either.

21:20 Seth: That section you're talking about, Martin, he's not just complaining about philosophers. He's complaining about doctors, psychiatrists, scientists. I mean, he felt that, I think methodologically, all of these different disciplines were lacking. And he uses. He talks about one specific example when talking about doing dream analysis, I think, or something like that, where he says, you know, we shouldn't be focusing on the content, but we should be looking at how the belief is held by the individual, you know, that something as simple as that points to a methodological problem. And so he brings that over to philosophy when he gets there later on. But it starts very deeply rooted in what he was seeing in psychiatry and medicine.

21:53 Dylan: I think what you're saying reminds me of, I guess, section three of the essay. He says that philosophical thought is practical activity, although a unique kind of practical activity. So it makes it be scientific. So the way he formulates his philosophy is in terms of questions, question asking. In this section, he goes through and he talks about Kant's four questions or five questions, and then says, well, now in modernity we have four different questions. And just to tie us back to the science thing. His first question that he talks about is, that's the most important one is what is science?

And trying to understand what that is. And he goes on to talk about it along the lines of what you said, Mark. He says that science, you ought to neither skeptically surrender everything nor to see something dogmatically as a conclusion in advance, but rather to retain the attitude of the researcher. Accepting knowledge only on the way, with its reasons and relative to its viewpoints and methods, turned out to be far from easy. This attitude of mind is attainable only with an ever active intellectual conscience. So the activity of doing science is an attitude of mind.

It's a disposition. It's not the facts, it's not the theories themselves. It's a way of doing things. And to him, it seems to me that's the same attitude you have in philosophy. It's a disposition of mind. It's not the particular theories, it's not the particular writers, it's a way of doing things.

23:07 Seth: It's not because it's not knowledge. Philosophical knowledge isn't knowledge in the same way that scientific knowledge is. And you wouldn't need to reinterpret it every generation. And each individual wouldn't have to do it for themselves if it was somehow something that could be grasped. Or it's an activ. It's a quintessential or essential human activity. That's what philosophy is for him.

23:25 Dylan: I did want to quibble though, about the not interpreting science part, because I must have blasted by that section or that part. He says that science is completely ahistorical.

23:35 Seth: No, no, no, no, no.

23:36 Mark: He says it is universally science, to deserve its name, must be cogent and universally valid. Which means that sort of like Paul was saying, it's not supposed to be historical.

23:44 Dylan: It may have aspirations of universality. And that's certainly true. It's certainly the case that the disposition of science conclude is true everywhere, always, unless you come up with some circumstance. Right. And that circumstance would have to be accountable in terms of that whole. That's absolutely correct, but it's not quite the case. It seems to me that science doesn't get reinterpreted historically, even mathematics. I mean, the way the Greeks understood geometry is different than the way we would understand geometry. The way they understood numbers is different than the way we understand numbers. Even if we can gloss the fact that we're talking about the number two together, the way they understood what number two was is different than the way we understand number two. It's not the same thing.

24:28 Seth: But the study of science, it's not a historical. It doesn't reinvestigate or work through its own history. The history of science does that, but science doesn't.

24:36 Dylan: It depends. If you run into a conflict that causes you to re investigate what you thought about before in science, you're not

24:42 Seth: going to go back and revisit the history of science. You're going to investigate the conflict which is going to be between two competing theories.

24:48 Dylan: Sure.

24:48 Seth: That may themselves have a history and have origins.

24:52 Paul: There's a certain amount of it that is fundamental, that it doesn't change over time in history and culture. Is that what you're saying?

24:59 Seth: Yeah, exactly. Science references its own totality in the present. It doesn't reference its own history. As far as the way scientific theorems are judged as valid or not. Right.

25:09 Dylan: Are you saying anything different than scientists don't talk about Newton but philosophers talk about Plato.

25:14 Seth: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying and I think that's what Jaspers is saying

25:18 Mark: and it's the reason for that. Besides which the paradigm of science here is empirical science which is supposed to be making factual assertions about the experience world. So mathematics though highly related to science and certainly in many of the discussions we've read is brought up as a paradigm of science or a paradigm of reason. But mathematics is strangely completely absent from anything that I read from Jasper's here I think maybe the number two, anything involving a priori knowledge like that, you know, or at least according to somebody that liked Kant like Jasper did, it's a priori knowledge is not what he has in mind that that is actually a piece of philosophy as he says that sciences sort of start as philosophy and become their own thing when they get their methods established and become more purely empirical disciplines.

25:56 Paul: I'm speechless.

25:58 Seth: That often happens after Marx speaks.

26:00 Mark: Well let's turn to another quote here. Scientific knowledge is always. This is under the same section what is science? Such scientific knowledge is always particularized that it does not aim to embrace the totality of being but only a specific subject. Here's the new part that it affords no aim to life has no answer to the essential problems that move man. That it cannot even furnish a compelling insight into its own importance and significance. In other words that in just investigating facts where do values come from? You don't get values from science. You come with values already sort of built in and you use them while you're doing science. Maybe science informs them, improves them in some way but you know the is ought distinction right there, it makes it so you need something that's interesting to me.

26:37 Paul: I mean like when it became clear that every atom in your body, my body and everything around us comes from the same place and goes back to the Big bang. How does that not create a worldview? How is that separate from a worldview? How can you say we're stardust, we're all stardust and be inured to what that means.

27:01 Dylan: It also point to just evolution, right? I mean it's clear that.

27:04 Paul: Yeah, okay yeah, yeah.

27:05 Dylan: That Darwin's evolution had a tremendous effect. People who objected to it saw it as directly attacking not just their Christian

27:14 Paul: world, an entire worldview, an entire belief system.

27:17 Seth: Yeah, no that's very true.

27:19 Wes: Well arguably though it's a mistake to see it as because it doesn't actually have any implications for values.

27:27 Dylan: Paul, what do you Mean, say what you mean about why you're calling a set of values a worldview.

27:32 Mark: Okay, I thought that was the uncontroversial part of it.

27:36 Paul: Yeah, me too. I think because values are subjective and worldview is a little bit more of an objective, objective word for this. But my point is the same though, is that the impact is still profound.

27:49 Wes: So saying that. So, for instance, you know, the advent of the theory of evolution or the idea that the Earth is no longer at the center of the universe, those sorts of things may have affected and did affect values and might have depressed people or had any other effects you might imagine. But that doesn't mean that they actually have any demonstrative implications for values. I can't derive anything from the fact of evolution about what I morally ought to do. For instance. Instance.

28:14 Paul: I mean, if we find our common ancestor, our genome, zero, you know, we're all African over time. Does that not affect us culturally in terms of our values? It's the only hope I have.

28:28 Wes: Yeah, but I think the causality here is. So there's a difference between logical implication and causality. However, it might affect us culturally. The ultimate question of demonstrating some value or another. So, for instance, that the Earth is

28:42 Paul: not the center of the universe, not

28:42 Wes: at the center of the universe, might make us feel more insignificant. But it doesn't actually demonstrate that nothing actually follows from that fact. It's just a particular reaction to it.

28:52 Paul: Let's say, if we can scientifically arrive at, say, the classifications of race and all of those sorts of distinctions between people, if we change the nomenclature, if we, you know, the idea of race is questionable anyway. If we ultimately find out that no, in fact we are all related by, we all come from the same ancestors, how can that not change our values in terms of the way we exist in the world with others?

29:15 Wes: You would need other values at work. So, for instance, suppose you thought you had the idea that we ought to behave certain ways towards creatures with a certain level of sentience. And then you discovered empirically, let's say as much as you can, that apes had that level of sentience or they had that quality in them that we thought, okay, this means that you have to, to treat them a certain way and call them people and so on and so forth. So it's not that you can't have that kind of effect, but you need a sort of moral or evaluative or normative premise at work in the first place to make that connection.

You can't just pull values, whole cloth out of facts. And I Think another good example of what I'm trying to say is go back to our Owen Flanagan episode on Buddhism where he was looking at attempts to say that we could scientifically establish what happiness is. But when we work with science we have to work with concepts that are established in non scientific ways. So the concept of happiness can be more or less sophisticated and if I go out and test it I might have some simplistic idea that happiness is just people being, you know, experiencing pleasure or something like that or I might have a more sophisticated version of happiness, one that comes from Buddhism or Aristotelianism.

And the science I do in testing those ideas is predicated on a lot of conceptual work that comes first. So I think a Jaspers would rightly say that there are domains, there are questions, genuine areas of philosophical concern where science can't answer those questions, only philosophy can answer those questions. And those areas have to do with reflection, with thinking about myself as a human being. And the reason why it's sort of cordoned off is because consciousness and subjectivity are cordoned off. They are not themselves empirical objects for scientific, of scientific study.

We have to get at them from the inside whether one agrees with or not. I think that's the overall sketch of what Jasper's is getting at.

31:06 Paul: It all sounds very Eastern to me.

31:08 Wes: I think he's very influenced.

31:10 Seth: Yeah, I did read somewhere that he did either do some Buddhist studies or he was somehow in contact, he was familiar with it, how much he incorporated it, his language is very non Buddhistic, non Eastern.

31:20 Paul: Well let me ask you this, when he talks about religion is he talking about religion or is he talking about this sort of Zen kind of spirituality?

31:30 Mark: I was hoping we would shift the discussion to there because here's the thing, usually in the public forum, which is why I as a political movement am very much in sympathy with a lot of what new atheism is arguing. Because if the alternative to believing in science is believing in religious superstition then you know, obvious, come on. But the public debate about that is so debased that we're starting with such a giant level of ignorance that we should even have to come forward and say no, no, we should pay attention to science and reason is almost ridiculous.

So that is not the conflict that anybody who's into philosophy who spends a lot of time thinking about this stuff, you know, thinks about it in terms of it's more. Well certainly everybody who's religious is not just a superstitious nut job. Like there are plenty of really, really smart religious people and so, so Kierkegaard in particular was a guy that Jaspers ran into and said, wow, this guy. I don't ultimately buy any of his Christianity, but he was such a crazily impressive smart human being. And these things that I'm reading in him are so motivating to me.

And in fact he sketches a lot of very tight parallels with things that Nietzsche had to say.

32:38 Seth: Right.

32:38 Mark: So a guy who believed exactly the opposite, who was very anti religious. And Jasper's with both these guys thought that ultimately the content of their religious belief is almost of no consequence. The thing that he was interested in is their egg. Existential attitude of this leap toward whatever of how they did philosophy on the margins as he describes it, the fact that they were thinkers outside their time, you know, that's what really drove him. So the thing that he's proposing, Jasper's as an alternative to just following what science says is not going to some ancient superstitions. But at the same time he insists on using, I don't know if he used it in this essay so much, but he had a whole other book that I read some of about the concept of philosophical faith that he definitely draws on in here.

33:20 Paul: And the leap of faith.

33:22 Mark: Yes, exactly. And the fact that he is not afraid of using that term.

33:25 Paul: But he also uses the term transcendence, you know, which is fraught with all

33:28 Seth: sorts of interpretations precisely to this point, Mark. I mean his rhetorical move in this essay is he wants to set up and say, okay, this is what I see science as and philosophy. And we find out religion and art and poetry and such are also kind of against that. But then the immediate defensive move is you have to say I'm not talking about, about reason versus faith or intellect versus emotion. And so he says normally you think of intellect set up against feeling, subjectivity, instincts. And that means you're talking about the rational versus the irrational. And the irrational is something that he says in a very nice passage, is to be either despised or desired. Which I liked quite a bit.

34:05 Paul: That's pretty poetic.

34:07 Seth: And what he says is. No, I'm not talking about.

34:09 Wes: He's rejecting that definition of I think.

34:11 Seth: Yes, yes, exactly. What he's saying is that reason, the way he's talking about is, he's talking about, you might call it capital R reason, that's searching after truth with a capital T, which by the way only happens through transcendence with a capital T and a Z at the end. And he at one point says, I'm talking about real truth versus the Merely correct. And again, this goes back, I think, to this idea that knowledge of facts or knowledge of things, which is the way he's kind of characterized the body of scientific knowledge, is not going to get you to morality, ethics, right, Action, happiness, fulfillment, all the things that are really interesting about what it is to exist in this world.

And that's what he thinks he's setting the stage for. And then he makes a very short aside where he says actually in this realm of transcendence, philosophy and religion both have a place where philosophy gets transcendence through reason. Religion reaches transcendence through. He doesn't use the word revelation, but that's what he's talking about. He's thinking of religion, to use a technical term, apophatically. So he's talking about apophatic or transcendent experiences that happen through revelation versus reason being used to reinterpret the history of philosophy in light of our current time through my own inner self experience, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

35:23 Wes: And I think, Seth, I mean what you just said there gets us at this word transcend and transcendence. We don't have to throw up our hands in the air about it because we know.

35:32 Paul: No, no, no. I actually want to know. Do you guys think that he is. Is using the word any differently than it's used in Buddhist context?

35:40 Mark: Can you characterize what you take transcendence to mean in Buddhist context so we can answer that?

35:44 Paul: Well, it gets into that the duality that he talks about, about inward and outward and from outside or from inside, that transcendence is in the Buddhist sense of knowing thyself, knowing who you as the individual are, regardless of the context of society and the realities of the world around you, that there are truths about who you that are not referential to the world outside.

36:11 Wes: I think that's the key, the not referential part. And I think he's riffing off of Kant's transcendental. So the idea is that there might be truths about the human that are not a matter of empirical fact that we have to talk about from the inside, starting to some extent from experience, from our reflective experience and self consciousness.

36:32 Paul: Well, which is a whole other question because how do you separate anything from experience? How do you separate any thought process from experience? How to separate.

36:42 Seth: He's okay with not doing that.

36:43 Wes: Yeah, but the difference is between science. Science in the strict sense focuses on objects for which we can collect empirical

36:51 Mark: data which involves abstracting from particular experiences to the general. To that. Anybody that does this experiment would have the same experience the same data.

36:58 Wes: Right. It has to be repeatable. And Mark, you mentioned this is one of the problems with say psychoanalysis is that it's not repeatable and it's not that psychoanalysts aren't. Freud was very scientifically minded and there's more of a scientific spirit, ironically in his writing than say in a Jaspers or any philosopher. But he gave up on the neuroscience, it's true, because he didn't see it as getting at the problems he wanted to understand and he focused on observing individuals. But the nature of that is that he's focused on human beings as radical particulars.

So. So they have their own cultures almost and they have their own little associative meanings and so on and so forth. So when you study this person and you draw certain conclusions about what a dream means or what's going on in this person's life, it's not repeatable and strictly speaking it isn't science. But that's not to say it's not valuable because you can find things out about a human being by sitting in sessions with them and observing just that person and talking to them that you wouldn't find out by surveying 100 people and having them take, take these sorts of psychological research questionnaires where they rank their happiness.

What's your mood on a scale of 1 to 10, and so on and so forth. Those things are repeatable and they're rigorous so they have their own sort of value. But they're also necessarily more general and more clumsy and they don't get at, let's say, a particular person's essence. And if that's what you want to understand, if you want to get at that level of granularity, then I think other methods are warranted.

38:20 Mark: What you're describing does sound a little like what he talks about is his own method, this existential clarification.

38:26 Wes: Right.

38:27 Seth: Like Paul, I have a tendency to interpret everything in terms of Buddhism. I see it everywhere.

38:32 Unknown speaker: Do you?

38:33 Seth: But I can easily make a comparison here. Jaspers is talking about this process of doing philosophy, this existence. Clarification is an activity that the individual goes through interpreting their own experience, inner life in their historical context around this and that. It's ongoing and what you're trying to do. There's a whole element we've missed by the way, on communication that we desperately need to come back to at some point. But his point is you go through this process and the goal is everybody goes through this process and we connect on a really fundamental level through part of this experience in this process.

And when you're talking about Buddhism and you're talking about enlightenment or awareness, there's a. You know the famous saying, before enlightenment, I was depressed. After enlightenment, I was depressed. That enlightenment is not something that happens. And then full stop, we're done. You still have to live your life and you still are a human being and you're still subject to all of these things and you still have to

39:24 Paul: deal with culture and society.

39:25 Seth: Culture, society and your own inner experiences. It's just you do it with some kind of awareness that you didn't previously have. But it's an activity, and so it's an ongoing activity. And my sense of what he means, whether he was just creating a space for religion because he didn't want to completely cut it out and get into that, but I think his notion of what religious experience of transcendence is that it is not something that informs your everyday experience of life in quite the same way that the activity of philosophy is.

39:54 Paul: Does.

39:54 Seth: It's something else, which I think he might take down a different path, namely around certain social mores, ethical systems.

40:02 Paul: Here's where I go with this, is that this notion of existenz, and as you said, it sort of informs your life. It seems very close to art. If you're a musician, I'll talk about myself as a comedian. It seems to me that you reach a certain point where every experience you have goes through the lens of your art, goes through the lens of what's funny about that? Is that funny? That's funny. That's not funny. Relatively speaking, all those sorts of things. It's like if you're a musician, you hear rhythms, you hear music, you experience music through every aspect of your life. Even in a conversation with somebody else, you're aware of timbre and rhythm and all those sorts of things. Is that what we're talking about? Are we talking about that kind of a thing? Are we talking about this sort of practical aspect of there is something upon which all the questions of my existence sort of revolve?

40:56 Mark: I would venture that the difference is that reason, as he sees it, capital R Reason, again, is about critically going beyond any boundaries that you set for yourself. So as soon as you set up a standard of is this funny or not? And you say, this is my lens, then he's going to say no. To really assert your own freedom is to go beyond that, to pull a Steve Martin and say, I don't have to be anymore. You know, so immediately go meta. You know, that's why I can Never be like an actual comedian. Because as soon as I sit down to write a comedy sketch, like I go meta and it's not funny anymore. I think maybe that boundary breaking to a ridiculous extreme is what he would see as characterized following the dialectic, eliminating

41:39 Paul: the judgment of what's funny or not funny or just.

41:44 Mark: Yes, just let it be. And there's actually a lot of.

41:47 Paul: There you go. That's funny and not funny at the same time.

41:51 Mark: Yes, a lot of my favorite kinds of humor are exactly that kind of stuff that it's just like this is so surreal. I don't know if this is funny or not.

41:58 Seth: I do think that comedy as an activity could be seen as a way of. It is philosophy. It can be philosophical.

42:06 Paul: Okay, so you understand where I was coming from.

42:07 Seth: I do understand where you're coming from. When we get to talk about communication, I have a lot to say.

42:10 Paul: And I think music is similar in that way as well.

42:12 Seth: Yeah, absolutely. I think anything that has a communicative aspect to it, where you use it to make a connection to other people and talk about a truth of experience, has the potential to play into this.

42:24 Dylan: Not because it's merely communication, but because it's a mode of inquiry.

42:28 Seth: It's a mode of inquiry. It's an inner experience that you then communicate. And if it touches and kicks off or allows other people to have an inner experience of a similar truth, then that's the type of activity that I got the sense he was talking about when he's talking about doing this. Clarification. But again, we need to talk about that communicative aspect before that going to make sense.

42:48 Dylan: Doing music isn't doing philosophy. Is that what we're saying?

42:51 Seth: No.

42:52 Paul: In that case I'm just really looking at it as a sort of mechanism.

42:56 Mark: The living authentically part is more what we're concerned with. The existenz is philosophy. The only way is actual. The process of analyzing the philosophical tradition. Surely that's not the only way. Living on authenticity.

43:08 Seth: No, God damn it. The only way to live authentically is to reread all of Plato in the original Greek.

43:15 Dylan: But the distinction of living authentically. Do you think Jaspers was saying that the goal of philosophy is living authentically? And that is doing philosophy or being philosophical is one of the ways of doing that?

43:28 Paul: Or perhaps just his own way of doing it. It's his way.

43:32 Dylan: I guess I was imagining that there was a way of thinking about art, of being an artist or being a musician that involved this kind of constant questioning so that you would Be, I don't know, authentic in your life in that way. And it would be philosophical in that way. But it wasn't in the particulars of the way you played the drums or the way you were a mechanic or any of those things. Any of those particulars about the way you did your living weren't the philosophical part. It had to do with his disposition.

43:59 Paul: The disposition, right.

44:01 Dylan: Your particular attitude of things.

44:03 Seth: And here this makes a distinction, Dylan. So what Jaspers is talking about is this activity of. Of looking inside yourself, taking your inner experiencing, filtering through the lens of your contemporary situation, and investigating, like, say, the history of philosophy that was. Well, you can be an artist and you can work your way through the history of art because art has the same kind of thing that philosophy does, which is we don't stop looking at Renaissance annunciations, right?

44:29 Paul: And Greek statues and reimagined.

44:32 Seth: You take your own experience and you reimagine it and that process. Whereas being a mechanic, you don't go through the history of. You don't do that same activity. But you can be mindful and aware in a Buddhist sense when you're working. And we talked about this in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. So I won't get into it because that's the whole point of that book. But I'm just saying that there are probably a couple of things that typically are going to have to do with investigating a tradition or history. And it's going to have some kind of symbology associated with it, whether it's language or pictorial representation or music or sound, you know, something like that. And in the sense of comedy, there are comics who are philosophers or are very philosophical, and there are ones who are less so.

45:14 Mark: Can I ask, Paul, are the good comics in your mind, the ones who pay attention to the history of comedy and kind of are self consciously aware of how they're riffing on George Carlin in some tradition?

45:26 Paul: I don't think so. I think at some point it just sort of becomes unconsciously embedded. I mean, when you start doing comedy, you're really doing an impression of somebody doing comedy because you don't have the performance skills, you don't have the experience. You can't take lessons like you can on the piano. So we all end up sort of going up there, projecting some sort of an imitation of what we think a comedian is or the kind of comedian we would like to be. So I think inherent in that is a presupposition of all of that stuff. I believe that somebody like Steve Martin was Very much aware of, of the history of comedy.

But more importantly, he was driven by the immediate scenario in which he emerged. He was looking at what was being done around him and actually went back to a clown like form, which goes way back. He actually went, you know, everything old becomes new again. I mean, if Bob Newhart or Professor Irwin Corey showed up now as 25 year olds, they'd be hailed as visionaries and geniuses. What made Steve Martin interesting was because of the time he was in and his choice to not engage in it the way others were engaging in it in the time that he was pursuing it.

He had a lot of sense of the history of it, but I don't think it's necessary. I think it sort of becomes inherent. I'm sorry to sort of talk in circles there, but it's a little bit vague.

46:51 Mark: No, it sounds like even though you just said no to my question, I heard it as a yes. How'd that happen?

46:59 Unknown speaker: Hello?

46:59 Paul: Is this thing off?

47:00 Mark: Steve Martin is, you know, one of the reasons that they're so great is because they are in touch enough with the history that there's a resonance and depth to what they do, that even if they're reacting negatively to the people that were immediately before them and, you know, I want to do something different, I want to be a rebel there, they're doing that often by channeling something that's even more subconsciously impressed on them.

47:19 Paul: Well, then, yeah, then the answer is yes, because I think it's inherent in the form. I think in order to just get up and do stand up, you're appropriating stuff that's been done before. You're appropriating pretty much every device you have in the.

47:32 Mark: You've appropriated it, but it's coming from a fresh place. So it does sound like, well, you

47:36 Paul: may not be aware of it. A lot of people are doing great work who aren't aware of, oh, you know what that is. That's something that Ernie Kovacs did. They're not aware of it, but it's sort of inherent in the vernacular.

47:48 Seth: Well, that went to an interesting place because I wasn't even talking about the history of philosophy. I was thinking about comedians who take meaningful themes that are meaningful in a philosophical context and apply it in, in to their own truth and then find a way to articulate that to an audience, that it resonates with them.

48:05 Paul: Well, I guess you're talking Carlin there, aren't you?

48:07 Seth: Carlin, Louis CK, even Patton Oswalt, I think.

48:11 Paul: Yeah, very much so, yeah. Well, they're all from that same sort of DNA. They're all working in the same way.

48:14 Seth: I think it's a performative version of what we typically think of as scholastic, but it's a very similar kind of activity.

48:21 Paul: Comedy in general, I think, swims on the same end of the pool as philosophy does. I think. I think we're, you know, whenever comedy is talking about ideas as opposed to culture. Well, I think it's true for any art form and I think any art form that is dealing with ideas as opposed to culture, I think you end up in the realm of philosophy, do you not?

48:39 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. It's. What is it? History of the World, Part one, Stand Up Philosopher.

48:44 Seth: Is that what it is? Yeah, exactly.

48:46 Wes: It's the reflective, observational element. So I think that the two are cousins in a way.

48:51 Mark: It does seem though that there's an anti intellectual strain that is easily available to comedy because of our shared experience of confusion that it's funny. If we approach even this book and say, what the hell is Jasper's talking about this. What a.

49:04 Paul: You know, there's nothing more philosophical that's about the human condition right there.

49:08 Mark: Well, but. Right. So if you use that kind of. It's like the joke, what's the deal with X? Okay, well, that could lead you down a path of sort of, you know, like Louis CK does of coming up with a novel take on X and blah, blah, blah. And that's what makes. Really. But if you just end up dismissing it as a lot of what? A lot of crazy nonsense that the government is doing and a lot of crazy nonsense that, you know, there's a type of comedy that preys on people's fear of ideas and fear of the unknown. In other words, when conservatives try to do political comedy that will resonate with an audience, it will make them laugh.

49:41 Paul: Have you ever seen the Christian comedy circuit?

49:44 Wes: No.

49:45 Seth: Yeah.

49:45 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

49:45 Paul: It's a thin circle.

49:46 Wes: Sounds amazing.

49:47 Paul: It's a real thing.

49:48 Mark: The funny bone in the body of Christ. I remember that on a poster.

49:53 Paul: That's great. Just like music, there are bar bands that aren't doing a single thing original, but they're just fun to listen to. There's a lot of comedy that's just bar bands and then there are real breakthrough artists and there's everything in between.

50:07 Mark: I just find it funny. Like again, Danny Lobell, I like his podcast, I like what he does, but some of it is the fun. It's not only it's an honest curiosity about philosophy, but it's also a. Oh gosh, it's philosophy so hard and we're all so confused together. And that's fun to be confused together. And so that a lot of the, you know, the discussions where you guys left Kripke, like what the fuck is Kripke talking about? And then you just kind of leave it there and maybe listeners will go read some Kripke on their own, but probably not because it was really set up as something that's not very entertaining as far as the material you guys are entertaining as opposed to the material, you know. So I'm just.

50:41 Paul: How many people think right now are masturbating over Jaspers? Come on, we're talking about, you know,

50:47 Seth: there is a mad rush on Amazon right now has sold out of Reason and Existence.

50:51 Mark: It pulls in two different ways. Even though there's a lot of similarities, as you were saying, between philosophy and comedy that, you know, a philosopher is going to be tenacious and bugged about this. Like if I'm confused by this book, fuck, I don't want to be confused. I want to then for the next two years.

51:04 Paul: But a comedian's. But a comedian's job is first and foremost to entertain. A philosopher's job is first and foremost to become obsessed with that.

51:11 Seth: You know.

51:12 Wes: Right. The philosopher is just putting off the punchline for, you know, ad infinitum, basically, hopefully.

51:20 Paul: But I mean, you know, comedy is a. Carlin always used to refer to it as a vulgar art form in terms of vulgar meaning of the people. You know, it's not an elitist thing. It's a comedy at its best appeals the same to Karl Jaspers as it does to your 25 year old nephew. It is meant to be something that is of the people, not above the people. This is certainly not meant to be in the realm of academia where the tracks have to be more and more well focused.

51:49 Seth: Well, there are those of us who believe that philosophy should be more of the people.

51:52 Paul: Well, that's.

51:52 Seth: And we started off this conversation. Academy identification of philosophy has killed it.

51:57 Paul: Yes, but that's a general discussion about academics across the board, really. I mean, you want to talk about any of the social sciences, that question I think is fundamental.

52:07 Seth: Yeah.

52:08 Paul: One of the things that's so spectacular about Jared Diamond's book Guns Germs and Steel is how he does exactly that. He's talking to academics and he's talking to the guy riding the bus on the way to his mechanics job. You know, that is a sort of paradigm that should be aspired to for

52:25 Seth: a Lot of people. I'm laughing because we had the same conversation when we had Sandel, Michael Sandel on who's a philosopher from Harvard who wrote a book on justice, actually a couple books on justice and the moral limits of markets. He's like an around the world speaker, very popular and I really like him and his style and I like the fact that he's bringing it to the masses. And Wes did not necessarily share my enthusiasm.

52:48 Paul: Well, it's interesting because, you know a lot of academia is about keeping itself self perpetuating. You know, there's a lot of arcane aspects that are designed to. It's like the ancient guilds, you know. No, there's no way you could know about how to be a stone mason. That's the province of just a few. You know.

53:05 Wes: Let's go to bring it back maybe to Seth's wanting to talk about communication because there's a point in this where Jasper talks about the philosophical mood arising from the experience of insufficiency in communication.

53:16 Paul: Oh yeah, yeah.

53:17 Unknown speaker: Yes.

53:18 Wes: Is that a good segue? Yeah.

53:19 Mark: So this is totally fundamental that like before you do any studying the history he was saying even before he recognized what philosophy was he was already obsessed with it. That was just his personality when he started out. And part of that was just about how hard it is when finally somebody agrees with you. Maybe they're just doing it to be friendly and out of solidarity and to have a nice drink together. And it's not that you actually understand each other that he felt this. This is, you know, one of the key, the hallmarks of existentialism is this ultimate.

Even though we have the social mechanism that tie us together, we have economies and other schools and things like that. But ultimately we're alone in our heads and when we try to express what's really important it's really freaking hard to do that. And you can only really do that, he thinks, not with a mass of people speaking to an audience as a lecturer or a comedian or anything but with an individual that you have a lot of interaction with and so you kind of get enough back and forth so you understand each other's motivations and things and then maybe you can come to some common ground.

54:19 Paul: He was writing before Twitter because that's

54:21 Seth: where the answer was can I read this quote? The thesis of my philosophizing is this. The individual cannot become human by himself. Self being is only real in communication with another self. Being alone I sink into gloomy isolation. Only in community with others can I be revealed in the act of mutual discovery. My own freedom can only exist if the other is also free. Free.

54:45 Mark: Throwing on that last sentence there as if that means the same thing earlier

54:50 Wes: there he's talking about solitude in nature can indeed be a wonderful source of self being. But whoever remains solitary in nature is liable to impoverish his self being and to lose it in the end. So this reminds me of our Hegel episode where at a certain point Hegel sort of invokes the Kantian idea that part of the unity of consciousness comes from its scientific activity, from its synthesizing activity on objects of nature and objects of experience. But for Hegel that's not enough. That doesn't give us our full humanness, let's say our full self conscious unity. So we need self being requires more than being alone with nature, more than scientific activity per se. It requires this connection with other consciousnesses.

55:36 Mark: I would say more than Buddhist contemplation of transcendence. I think this answers directly your earlier question. Yeah, that if I'm understanding, maybe I'm not understanding Buddhism correctly, but at least the way you described it, it didn't sound like you necessarily needed other people there with like you were saying it's in disconnection with the society around you. Whereas Jasper says yes, of course, disconnection with the bullshit around you. But authentic relations with other people are like an essential part of it.

55:59 Paul: Identity is really big in this discussion here. I mean, is our identity projected onto us or is our identity created? You know, we're social beings. You're very different when you're alone than you are when you're with even one other person. Person. Your spouse, your lover. The person that's closest and perhaps knows the most about you. We have a whole bunch of different identities. So who are we outside of a social context? Is it even the same existence when we're on our own in our own thoughts as opposed to in society?

56:32 Seth: Yeah, and I think that's the part where he kind of departs from what we typically think of as existentialists and existentialism, this idea that we're somehow isolated and alone. He doesn't really address that point, but he doesn't say, at least in what we read explicitly, Explicitly we're socially constructed or what have you. But what he does say is this authentic experience that we are driving at does require social interaction. It's something you don't do yourself in isolation as some sort of.

56:58 Paul: And is that just a function of the fact that it's impossible to do that in isolation?

57:02 Seth: He's acknowledging it whether he's just stating a fact or if he's trying to justify it, I'm not quite sure.

57:08 Wes: I don't know if it's impossible because he talks about this idea of impossible impoverishment. So whoever remains solitary in nature is liable to impoverish his self being and lose it in the end. So it's impossible to be fully actualized without others. I think he definitely thinks that's true other human beings.

57:25 Dylan: Because when we were just talking about this, it made me want to make clear that we're talking about being isolated from other human beings, not being isolated sensorily from the world.

57:35 Seth: Right, right, right.

57:35 Paul: No, yeah.

57:36 Wes: No, in fact, quite the opposite. He's talking here about being highly engaged with the world of objects.

57:42 Dylan: So communication here really means talking really with other people.

57:46 Wes: It means a deeper implication of that, which is that the foundation of language is being able to read others intentions. Right. Being able to inhabit their minds to some extent. That's another way of sort of getting at the Hegelian. And there's a definite reference to Hegel here, the Hegelian mutual recognition. Right. I must have another consciousness that's aware of my consciousness to be fully conscious, that kind of thing.

58:11 Dylan: I guess I was thinking of the distinction between the communication that comes out of reflection, of seeing yourself or seeing another human being and recognizing that, but having that happen as a result of reflection versus the kind of communication that results from seeing yourself understood.

58:29 Wes: How are you distinguishing those? I thought maybe.

58:32 Dylan: I'm not.

58:32 Wes: I'm not sure what you're getting at. Sorry.

58:33 Paul: I tell you what, you're not seeing yourself understood, I'll tell you that much right now.

58:38 Dylan: That's exactly right.

58:39 Mark: The thing that confused me in here is there are two strains. One is this straight up Hegelian. You need another person to recognize you and that's how you gain a sense of self. But then he also gives this Kierkegaardian version of that, which is unless you have this contact with the transcendent, unless you engage in existens, you make the jump and relate to the transcendence that is in everything. And he has a lot to say about the encompassing and the being that is reflected through individual beings that you might study but is never exhausted by them.

It's like Lacan refers to this as the real, that is that which escapes any particular symbolization, any particular thing you might as a scientist say grasp. So at times it sounds like he thinks it's sufficient for you to, you know, gain. It's certainly a necessary part of Gaining your full selfhood to engage the transcendent. But that seems like a totally different thing to me than this engaging another person. So how do we reconcile these two strains?

59:32 Seth: Okay, here's how I would do it. Let me read another quote. Communication also points to this more. Communication is the path to truth in all of its forms. Thus, the intellect finds clarity only in discussion how man as an existent, a spirit as existence, is or can be in communication. That is what allows all other truth to appear. Okay, so I think we have to kind of take a more expansive view of the idea of communication, but really kind of points back to language or as I was saying before, some kind of symbology in that the reason he wants to engage with the history of philosophy is he wants to have a dialogue with these philosophical texts. That's a form of communication.

1:00:14 Paul: This is Socratic communication.

1:00:16 Seth: It's Socratic, it's dialectic, it's in dialogue. And presumably he's talking about doing this with text, but also doing it with people. And presumably, Dylan, I think you could do it with a work of art. And when you touch transcendence in an isolated form, non philosophically, religiously, then you're having that revelatory type experience, but because it's not encased in communication with another being, it's not fully realized. And you have that same. We go back to that same experience.

1:00:47 Paul: That's another existential dilemma right there.

1:00:49 Seth: How so?

1:00:49 Paul: Does it even exist unless you communicate it?

1:00:52 Mark: Well? Yeah, that's part of the thing. So if you don't believe that the result of philosophy is an objective set of doctrines that you can write down and that other people can then confirm in the way that they can confirm the results of science, then how do you nail it down? Like, that's one of the criticisms of existentialism altogether is, you know, for instance, oh, if you're an existentialist, you don't believe in an objective set of values that we all should follow. So if you're only using your own standard, if you're creating values, as Nietzsche says, for instance, how do you make sure you're not cheating? How do you make sure that you don't say, oh, I'm making a law for myself, but then tomorrow I'm going to change it to something else and then I'm going to slide around? Well, intersubjective communication is the substitution for the objectivity that is lost.

1:01:37 Seth: Yeah, yeah. And it's also, I think he's creating an imperative towards either voicing or engaging others as part of this Process that I think has a normative component to it that is important.

1:01:56 Mark: Hey, why don't we stop for a second? All right, back to it.

1:01:59 Seth: Last night we'd driven up to go to Griffith park and the line was all janky. So we just took off and we tried to find a place to grab a drink. And so we just kind of hit on the map, Cocktail bar. And this place came up and it said it was called Jumbo Clown.

1:02:13 Paul: Jumbo's Clown Room. It's awesome.

1:02:14 Seth: Jumbo's Clown Room.

1:02:15 Paul: It's awesome.

1:02:16 Seth: And the first review says, let me get one thing straight, this is not, not a strip club. And we went in there and was like, wow, this looks like a strip club.

1:02:24 Paul: Well, it's different in that most strip clubs don't have like C sections and heroin tracks. Well, they, they Phlebotomy scars.

1:02:36 Seth: The girls come out and they dance, but they don't strip. And there's a pole and all that. And you're not allowed to actually touch the, you know, put money in the. So everybody just kind of. They come out, do like a two minute dance and people throw ones onto the floor.

1:02:48 Unknown speaker: Mmm.

1:02:48 Paul: It's a wacky place, right?

1:02:50 Seth: Yeah, and really nutty place. The strippers were like, love my wife's glasses. And we're taking them off and wearing them, doing their dance. It was a lot of fun, but we had to eat something afterwards, let's put it that way. Anyway, I felt like that was a unique Los Angeles experience. You're not likely to get anywhere else.

1:03:04 Paul: That is the underground guide to LA evening for you.

1:03:08 Seth: It was great.

1:03:09 Mark: Now, should I make a segue and then use your story as part of the episode, or should we just pretend it didn't happen?

1:03:17 Seth: Let me think about that.

1:03:18 Mark: You had this shared bizarre experience with your wife and presumably with other people in the room. This would seem to be not the kind of thing Jasper's talking about in terms of explicit communication. That it's more just solidarity and hanging out together and. But to me, I think maybe those things are not so easily divided as he seems to think that. If you're an extreme pessimist about the possibility of authentic communication, communication, then maybe all there actually is is, well, we tried. We're having a good time here on the call, even though I don't understand what the fuck you're talking about, but we're having a good time.

1:03:52 Paul: So much of that, you know, the idea of authenticity, all that, I mean, I think I understand it in the intuitive sense, but it's culture I mean, communication is full of so much obfuscation. There's so much confusion. There's more miscommunication than there is communication. I mean, other than, you know, hard facts. I mean, try and express a feeling. Try and express a sort of an emotion. You try and, you know, are you ever really communicating it? You know, so I'm not sure exactly what that means once you take it outside the realm of org kill lion

1:04:24 Mark: or Jaspers and Heidegger think that they're great friends and that they're kindred spirits and they write about the same stuff and they disagree about some things and they criticize each other's work. But they have this communication through letters for a long period. And then they discover when this thing comes up, the whole Nazi thing, like, I don't know, that I actually know you. What the fuck? Where did that come from? Like that makes you think the whole thing was. There was some illusion involved in all the prior supposedly shared communication.

1:04:51 Seth: Yeah, well. So the question about whether authenticity is possible or whether it's just an elitist way that philosophers try to protect philosophy and the history of philosophy comes up in a lot of the things we discuss. But your question, I think, Mark, points to something more fundamental, which is, are we to believe that if each of us has an authentic. Or we have this authentic engagement with the history of philosophy that we are going to come to agreement? Can we engage each other authentically and disagree? And I think the answer there is yes.

Because philosophy. I disagree. Success, proof. Point taken. Is that since philosophy is not a body of knowledge, we're not here to get consensus about a fact. We're not here to agree on something necessary necessarily. We're here to engage, to have this inner experience and articulate it and whatever. And because we're human beings, much of that's going to be shared. But because we're distinct individuals, a lot of it's going to be different.

1:05:44 Dylan: Explain to me how authenticity is related to communication and agreement.

1:05:49 Seth: I think in Jasper's mind there's. I think he very much has a similar notion to the Heideggerian notion of Das man, the inauthentic everyday, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that those of us who can have authentic experience, you know, we have this authenticity, authentic encounter with being. Through the history of philosophy and self realization, etc. We are able to communicate at a deeper, more authentic level. I think that's about as much as we get out of this essay.

1:06:14 Dylan: So in that way, authenticity has to do with being like an authentic man or an Authentic person and your relationship with being with a big B as opposed to being authentically yourself that is true to yourself and that way of speaking about your own particular being.

1:06:32 Seth: Yeah, I think it's definitely more the former for Jaspers.

1:06:35 Dylan: Yeah. Usually when we, at least colloquially now when we talk about authenticity we mean something like keeping it real and we mean by not denying ourselves, not putting on airs or making concessions to public life and stuff like that.

1:06:51 Paul: When I think of authenticity in contemporary terms I think of it as not having an agenda.

1:06:56 Seth: Agenda being a meat present.

1:06:59 Paul: Yeah. You know, non manipulative and just divorce from judgment.

1:07:04 Mark: This whole discussion is just to get you to read my screenplay. Is that. Can you do that?

1:07:11 Paul: No, I read it already. It's we. I already have something like it in development.

1:07:18 Dylan: This drive towards authenticity I link up with a notion of honesty and brings me back. This makes me understand why Jasper's so interested in science because I think one of the paradigmatic features of science is earnestness and honesty. And I'm not sure that it's always a virtue but it's presupposed in science that when you engage in investigating the world you're doing so authentically, earnestly, honestly, that the questions are real questions. There's no such thing as an ironical scientific question question.

1:07:52 Paul: But you're leaving out the realities of politics and all that sort of stuff.

1:07:57 Dylan: I am leaving those things out and any scientist would say that's not science, that's politics, whatever. And I agree with you.

1:08:03 Paul: But I think that's how science can function inauthentically, is those other forces.

1:08:09 Dylan: It could function inauthentically. But I guess what I want to say is that a scientist would recognize that as a corruption of their scientific process.

1:08:18 Mark: Hopefully after 50 years of it being used to support racism or whatever the horrible. Yes, somebody would figure it out.

1:08:25 Dylan: Well, I think you're misrepresenting it as, you know, everybody on that bandwagon and stuff like that.

1:08:29 Paul: But anyway, I understand what you're saying. I just felt that was important.

1:08:32 Seth: Yeah, I think that's.

1:08:34 Dylan: Yeah, I think it's very important. And that's also true not just within the cultural issues but also within science itself. I mean this is something like Kuhn's discussion of paradigms and science and so forth.

1:08:46 Seth: Yeah.

1:08:47 Paul: And interestingly because I also think ego is a big part of. Of a lot of inauthenticity and again

1:08:54 Dylan: all of those things cut across regardless of whether it's science or not. I wanted to say that it was kind of a paradigmatic feature. But I also wonder if even somebody who's behaving ironically, if they have to do that.

1:09:08 Paul: That's a very interesting thing. I think there should be a whole school of philosophy around irony. I think there is.

1:09:17 Mark: And Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was a prime guy about irony, Jasper's idol. So, like he has this in mind somehow.

1:09:23 Dylan: Yes. And lots of people also just say that's all Socrates is about. I mean, it's been around in philosophy forever.

1:09:29 Paul: Yeah, I suppose. But I think ironic is a mode, a mode of being really do.

1:09:36 Dylan: Yeah.

1:09:37 Mark: Maybe part of what makes it so that the results of philosophy are not like the results of science, that you can then go back and redo the experiment and stuff is if you take on a different point of view, then you come up with different philosophical consequences. And that's in fact, part of the dialectic as you proceed in your philosophical thinking, is you come to some definite philosophical conclusion and then you sort of turn your point of view around. And one of the ways of doing that is by adopting an ironic stance. Like Dostoevsky, who made some of the most effective arguments for atheism, which was not at all his view, because he sort of could take the same information and do a different kind of interpretation. And even consciously, even ironically, on purpose skewing things as a method of advancing philosophically.

1:10:22 Paul: Yeah, yeah. That's what satire in its purest form is.

1:10:25 Wes: Right. And I think there's an argument to be made that this is an authentic way of living. Nietzsche is another applicable figure. Right. For this question of living, ironically. And it's not ironically in the sense of taking nothing seriously. It's ironically in the sense of being always being able to take a reflective stance towards what one may believe past.

1:10:45 Paul: Right. And in some contexts, embracing the alternative just for the experience. Yeah, exactly.

1:10:51 Seth: I'm glad you brought up Nietzsche and I'm glad you mentioned that, Paul, because one of the things I was thinking. I'm very glad, was that when Dylan was speaking, I think part of another thing about the authentic stance is a kind of courage to think about things that are uncomfortable to think about or hard to think about are not immediately practicable and that sort of thing. And so irony and satire are ways, in some sense, of approaching things that are difficult or challenging their strategies. Satire certainly is a strategy for approaching something that's very difficult to talk about.

1:11:20 Paul: Yes.

1:11:21 Seth: You know, directly. And that one of the things I wanted to say that again differentiates philosophy and science in this Jasper worldview is that you don't need a lot of courage to tackle any particular scientific problem. There are, at least, if you think in terms of physics. Physics. It's not like there are problems in physics which they might be daunting in terms of their complexity, but they don't have a lot of things associated with them that would make it personally challenging. Whereas if you're going to say, okay, what should I be in life? Or how should I treat other people? Or should some people be slaves? And the kinds of questions that we typically think of as being philosophical.

1:11:58 Mark: Or is my entire worldview.

1:12:00 Seth: Or is my entire. Yeah. Being able to entertain a counterfactual or something that you don't. Being able to entertain another belief. I mean, who was it that said the ability to retain an idea and its opposite in your head is the true hallmark of intelligence? Right. Or something that just being able to entertain the possibility that you might be wrong or that you may have to change who you are or how you live is terrifying.

1:12:22 Paul: So that comes from a sort of ability to be unattached to things like being right.

1:12:28 Mark: That explains some of his fascination with religion, that he is not sort of by nature religious. He might have been raised in a religious. Certainly he was in a religious culture, as we really all. Paul, you know, he would say, if you think our intellectual climate, even way after his death, is free of the foundational metaphors and stuff that came out of religion, he would definitely think that the new atheists are. Even though they're affirming things against what traditional religion taught, the way in which they're doing it. And this is just, you know, this is a criticism you often hear that they are the prophets of atheism or something like, you know, there are all these things sort of set up by society, these patterns that we've come into. And I completely forgot why I started that sentence. So somebody else say something.

1:13:09 Paul: What the hell is wrong with Mark?

1:13:12 Dylan: I mean, didn't this start with Seth saying that. That scientists are cowards?

1:13:19 Paul: They're not courageous.

1:13:20 Mark: They're not courageous.

1:13:21 Dylan: Which isn't quite the same thing as not as being a coward.

1:13:24 Seth: That is not at all what I said. I didn't say they were not courageous. I said when you think of something like physics or mathematics, it doesn't take.

1:13:31 Dylan: You're saying it doesn't change your worldview.

1:13:33 Seth: I'm not saying it doesn't change your worldview because I get back to Wes's point. We have lots of worldviews that have as part of their foundation, scientific knowledge. And when that scientific Knowledge gets proved incorrect, that worldview gets undermined. Right, we talked about that earlier but what I'm saying is centrism. What I'm saying is Dylan, maybe this is just my naivete or you might call it ignorance. Are there scientific problems in physics, let's say are there outstanding problems in physics? Physics that if they go one way or the other can have ramifications for things like social order or political structure or even our own notions of our own identity that you would be like I don't know if I want to go and actually delve into this because I might be afraid of what I might find.

1:14:18 Paul: Well isn't that what Darwin was dealing with?

1:14:20 Seth: Yeah, that's why I'm using physics as I want to start with something that I think would be non controversial controversial and we can kind of bleed into controvertible yeah free will aspect around like

1:14:30 Wes: well and Andrew Sullivan for instance has been having this debate with others for a long time about whether or not it's legitimate to look into IQ breakdowns by race. So isn't that one area where someone might say is that a legitimate object of scientific inquiry or is that just an excuse to.

1:14:47 Paul: Wasn't it Shockley, the Bell Curve?

1:14:49 Dylan: That's the most recent one but of course it's gone on.

1:14:52 Wes: The debate's been kind of reignited recently so that just occurred to me and then also the courage of say a Galileo to say ah, the Earth isn't the center of the universe those sorts of things I mean I get your point Seth. Questions of values can be taboo even to think the alternatives. Right. It's not exactly as taboo to entertain the idea as a scientist that the Earth is in the center of the universe even if it's taboo to communicate it. But there are certain things, people in terms of values and things like that and deeper philosophical questions. There are certain things that are too dangerous even to think and this is by the way part of what Nietzsche means by his invocation to live dangerous what he really means is to think dangerously to be able to think horrible terrible things.

1:15:34 Seth: Right.

1:15:34 Mark: This is yeah living, thinking on the margins. That's exactly what Jaspers is talking about.

1:15:39 Wes: The things that are. That everyone takes for granted are repulsive and immoral.

1:15:43 Paul: That's kind of an artistic impulse there.

1:15:45 Mark: Yeah, let's stop arguing about whether scientists are cowards but recast it in terms of. It's the job of the philosopher according to Jasper to actively seek out something that will contradict your most cherished beliefs. So this is what I was Trying to say before about why he was so fascinated about religion is because he disagreed with it. He was so insane. Like, how could people take this as their worldview? He had to understand it in some strong way, even though he was forever going to be outside it, he says. And so he finds a place for it and is able to appropriate some of the language, the language of faith and things that I think was probably something that was fundamentally foreign to him when he started out.

This is just a guess, but that by the end of this article at least we see that it has a place. In fact, the thing that gets people to be religious in the first place is the very same thing that gets people to be philosophical. And in fact, philosophy is sort of parasitic as a social phenomenon on religion. If you didn't have a whole society that was religious in the first place, you wouldn't get philosophers out of that. So that's at least one of the points of philosophy.

1:16:45 Wes: Well, say why is that?

1:16:46 Mark: And the thing that he got out of engaging.

1:16:48 Wes: Explain that a little more.

1:16:49 Paul: That's kind of a chicken and egg question.

1:16:51 Mark: So let's find the quotes in that section so we can be a little clearer.

1:16:56 Paul: Here's a quote right here. It says, I agree with Mark. Wes, shut up.

1:16:59 Wes: That's real.

1:17:00 Dylan: That's about as specific.

1:17:04 Mark: Where the problem is not merely grasped by insight but is actually solved. Man has become narrow when religion is excluded by philosophy or philosophy by religion, when one side asserts dominance over the other by claiming to be the sole and most exalted authority.

1:17:17 Paul: Well, see, this is why I needed to ask whether or not he means religion or he means spirituality.

1:17:24 Mark: I think philosophy, he means spirituality, religion, he actually means dogma here. This is a very weird section in that it seems to contradict. He's saying at the beginning, as soon as you think that we've not just grasped by insight, which would be spirituality, but you've actually solved the problem. You've come up with the dogma. You said there is a God and I can say some positive things about it. Then you've become narrow. So he starts off by slamming religion. However, the next sentence, when religion is excluded by philosophy or philosophy by religion, when one asserts dominance over the other by claiming to be sole and most exalted authority, the man loses his openness to being and his own potentiality in order to obtain a final closing of knowledge.

But even this, this final closing of knowledge remains closed to him. You can't even. He's saying there's something inevitable about religion. And I'm not sure I completely understand that there. I understand from the other side that if you foreclose philosophy and are strictly religious then you can narrow. But why is he saying the opposite of.

1:18:17 Seth: Because religion has a relationship to transcendence in the same way as philosophy. Philosophy's method for getting at transcendence is reason. But we have a lot more in us than reason. So it's inevitable that some other aspect of our being which is not reason, which is in this case is revelation or experience. So you kind of want to approach transcendence and religion is a mode of that happening.

1:18:39 Mark: But I don't think that's what he means by reason. You're using the term reason for the understanding. Right. What science uses. But he explicitly says reason is about pushing the boundaries, is about not just merely understanding something but coming up against the limits.

1:18:53 Seth: No, I'm using reason with a capital R the way he is. I'm saying there's transcendence for Jaspers. There's this horizon of experience that he calls transcendence, the totality that we cannot grasp in once and we never will. We don't access that through knowledge. Knowledge, we use our intellect instead. We use reason with a capital R. And we go through this philosophical exercise. We'll go, guess what? That transcendence doesn't disappear if we don't use reason, if we're having experience or if we're having an aesthetic experience or a religious experience and yes, a mystical experience. And he's saying we can't do away with that and we shouldn't. It's a necessary part. But we have to recognize that it is a very specific way of approaching this other thing that by the way, you should be approaching the right way.

1:19:38 Paul: How is that addressed by dogs? Dogma?

1:19:40 Mark: I think it's not. Yeah. I think it's ultimately he only likes the apophatic part of religion.

1:19:44 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:19:45 Mark: That he thinks as soon as you

1:19:46 Paul: have a dogma, love of a parent for a child or whatever, I mean that sort of human thing, that sort of profound emotional thing, none of that has anything to do with dogma. So that's why I try to get at.

1:19:59 Seth: He's just saying dogma's like knowledge. If you encode something in dogma, it's like saying this is a fact. And that closes off all the possibilities. And it tries to take this expansive. Never to be captured. Captured thing and package it. And that's why it's wrong and it's totally unsupportable.

1:20:14 Paul: Why does he say it's necessary if

1:20:16 Seth: that's if dog is not necessary. The religious experience is necessary.

1:20:19 Paul: The religious experience.

1:20:20 Wes: Well, transcendence is necessary. But he wants to get rid of the revelation part of that. That's the part of the religion that he wants to get rid of.

1:20:26 Paul: In that transcendence doesn't mean that, you know, with a capital K. Is that what you mean?

1:20:32 Wes: Yeah, exactly. So he talks about transcendence. Philosophy as such, however, cannot look for transcendence in the guarantee of revelation. Revelation, but must approach being in the self. Disclosures of the encompassing. Sounds very Heideggerian that are present in man as man. And then he goes on to say something in answering the question of transcendence about that sounds. Knowledge of transcendence is not an answer to the question of transcendence. The answer comes indirectly by a clarification of the incompleteness of the world, the imperfectibility of man, the impossibility of a permanently valid world, world order and so on and so forth. Things that sound somewhat skeptical in the broad sense of our not being able to have this. Not being able to have a final truth with a capital T. We don't

1:21:19 Mark: have a. Yeah, truth is the activity. Yeah.

1:21:21 Paul: It sounds to me like he's saying that happiness and transcendence is in the acceptance of the fact that you'll never know.

1:21:31 Wes: Yeah, I think it does sound like that there.

1:21:33 Paul: It doesn't get more Buddhist than that.

1:21:34 Dylan: Yeah, but it's not just acceptance. Right. Is acceptance that you won't know, but always still trying to know. Otherwise you're just. You're in this mode of complacency which won't involve ever trying to reach truth. It's not as simple as saying, oh, I can't know the truth.

1:21:52 Paul: What if the truth is unknowable?

1:21:53 Dylan: Even if you grant that it's unknowable in the sense of a dogma, it is something you always have to rekindle and rebuild yourself. I mean, this goes back to the historicity of any individual situation. Situation. As well as that the truth comes from within yourself in your own experience with the world. So you don't get it without trying to reach for it. It can't be poured into you. You can't read it in a book. It comes out of that activity that you're reaching out for.

1:22:22 Paul: What is the difference then between peace and complacency?

1:22:26 Wes: It sounds like our skepticism episode now. Yeah.

1:22:29 Mark: So all the types of existentialism have in common that you're on a razor's edge in some way. That for Camus, for instance, you always have to embrace the absurd, embrace the fact that we have these strivings and purposes, but at the same time if we think about, we realize they're pointless.

1:22:46 Paul: And that by the way, is the cracked mirror of the comedy lens. Yeah, yeah, I mean that seriously.

1:22:53 Mark: So there's a version of existentialism that doesn't necessarily point toward intellectualism. Right. That if the point is to realize that what you're doing is ultimately absurd, then going and reading a bunch more philosophers and interpreting them from the past is not necessarily the next move you need to take. Right. Camus does not agree with Jasper's in that or Sartre's. His thing is we all have this ultimate complete freedom and then we all. It's so comfortable for us to deny that in some way that we say, oh that's just my character, that's just the way I have to do it.

Or that's just my circumstances, my choices are limited. But you know, Sartre thinks that to be virtuous, insofar as an existentialist can buy into a notion of virtue, is to keep this balance in mind. And so Jasper's version of that here is this existenz is this constant push toward transcendence and applying rigor but embracing something that is beyond the capacity to be rigorous about it. That's the balance that somehow you need to keep to be intellectually honest and aware. And he thinks if you are the that kind of person, then you're not going to end up joining the freaking Nazi party or doing some other stupid ass thing.

Like at the very least, this is what it is to be a conscious, aware human being and in turn some kind of good citizen. Though it might not, you know, determine what political party you join. But it'll make you honest, It'll make you honest.

1:24:19 Paul: But what if your honesty is. What if your particular truth sucks for everybody else? I mean.

1:24:25 Seth: Well, you know, I was going to read this quote where he talks about this very thing and then as reading it I realized that of it kind clarifies absolutely nothing. It's a, it's, it's a beautiful piece of poetry, but it's basically saying absolutely nothing about it. And I think this is. We may have hit the limit of what we're able to get out of this text, which is really a kind of semi biographical overview. We may have to hit, we may have to hit one of the more serious texts to get at that. Or he may just never say it because it's one of those things that gets left undefined. Because if you defined this transcendent thing, you'd be putting it in a box and dogmatizing it. Closing the door, right?

1:25:03 Mark: Well, he's already given us the answer in communication that the existentialist anti hero is. I'm a badass and that's my truth and I don't give a shit about any of you. But can you be that kind of person and also have a personal relationship with another in the way that Jaspers is recommending? Maybe. There are certainly evidence in literature of, you know, when Dexter falls in love or whatever the stigma. Well, was she just a doormat or was she an intellectual equal that Hitler had this relation to? Like I would think Jasper would need to rule that out in advance that he would say that if somebody that's this up thinks that they have an authentic relationship, really it's because it's a master slave relationship. It's that somebody else is weak enough to accept their bullshit wholeheartedly.

1:25:49 Paul: Impure and untrustworthy.

1:25:51 Seth: Yeah, we can call it Braun's theorem.

1:25:54 Paul: Braun's theorem, yeah. That's if a piece of toast falls, blame the Jews

1:26:02 Seth: buttered side down. This is not the first philosopher that we've talked about who has a notion of authenticity. And every time this comes up we have this discussion that, well, we have to assume that if you were doing it authentically you wouldn't be a dick or a Nazi or a fascist or a serial killer killer or something like that. And we're never going to answer that question and we're certainly not going to do it in this case and have him say, the reality is, I think he would say, of course, you know, you wouldn't do that. And we could probably go back and say, well, if you actually look at the history of philosophy and if you were to look in your own self and recognize another self being as an other who has the same right to existence and this activity of self realization that you do, you would come to some kind of thing where peace reign on earth and everybody should have the same opportunities and blah blah, blah.

But I think we kind of have to leave it there. I just, I'm afraid of going down the authenticity rat hole again.

1:26:59 Wes: I mean, ultimately he wants to get at this concept of freedom, right?

1:27:03 Mark: My own freedom can only exist if the other is also free.

1:27:06 Wes: This whole last section, this last part of the essay is focused on trying to retrieve some sense of Kantian autonomy even though he wants to see it as historically conditioned in some way. So for instance, here's a quote in thinking along These lines. Philosophy employs a twofold presupposition that is objectively unprovable but accomplishable in practice. First, man is autonomous in the face of all the authorities of the world. The individual reared by authority at the end of the process of his maturation decides in his immediacy and responsibility before transcendence what is unconditionally true.

So the idea is like Sartre, there has to be some point where we're not simply the product of our circumstances and through this imminence, through this interiority, we can act freely. I think that's part of what he's trying to get at. So unlike a Heidegger of course who in some ways was more obviously beholden to the authority of his times to bad effect.

1:28:03 Paul: That's I think a very true statement when it comes to parent child relationship. But as soon as you have to deal with institutions I think you're screwed.

1:28:12 Wes: Say more about that.

1:28:13 Paul: Well, you know, the idea of being able to decide against the authority that has shaped you is virtually impossible in modern society. Given the institutions of law and government and from global to federal to state to community to whatever, you're always beholden to the institutions of authority. I think we're kind of in this weird existential delay dilemma as human beings right now where we are not able to mature from our authority that we are constantly kept under it.

1:28:48 Mark: I think he calls those limit situations. And since he was there when the Reich was arising and the authority there was much more immediately invasive. It might have been more unitary and not as ubiquitous in the way you're talking about is from all directions but just it was so freaking in your face like. I think he's very very much aware.

1:29:04 Seth: He's. He's definitely aware of it. But I think that even though Jaspers may have appreciated the significance of the point and have seen a true propaganda machine that completely manipulated the culture in the form of National Socialism that what's happening with individuals today is their authority doesn't mean hierarchical authority in the form of law or government only any anymore. It's the authority of ideology and of opinion that gets manifested through all of this new media and constant barrage of information. It's got to be extremely difficult for individuals to overcome all of that authority and all those different guises in order to have an authentic experience of transcendence and come to some belief about what is unconditionally true. Through that encounter.

1:29:55 Paul: I was actually really specifically talking about authority in the literals sense that you can take all the teaching of your parents and all the child rearing and what have you, and walk away from them and take what is true and valid for you and what isn't, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But you can't do that. As far as government goes, I mean, try to live like Thoreau or Walt Whitman, you know, recommends. Good luck getting the permits for that.

1:30:25 Wes: Okay, Now I need to move out of here.

1:30:27 Dylan: You need to leave California. California. It's not so hard.

1:30:31 Paul: Go to that cabin in the woods and see what happens when you try and, you know, when you don't install a sewer, that point of being able to transcend authority and sort of, you know, move on to your own truth. I think it's impossible in this day and age.

1:30:47 Mark: So you don't think he's talking about freedom of belief? You know, one thing that we don't, at least officially, no matter how intrusive the government it might be in its regulation, they have at least ostensibly a hands off your mind policy. You know, whatever insidious shit might be going on underneath that.

1:31:04 Seth: What could be less true now, really?

1:31:06 Paul: What could be less true than that? While it may not be about religion, it certainly is about big life ideas, big life aspects.

1:31:15 Wes: They might try and influence us, but they, as of yet, don't have direct control. The Amazon's coming out with a new thing, which is cloud Close, but it involves drones.

1:31:24 Paul: You know, I mean, it happens all the time.

1:31:26 Wes: Direct mind.

1:31:27 Paul: I don't know if it's just a function of years between Jasper's writing and now, or if it's ever been true that you can really transcend government and culture. You know, I just think that's an interesting question that gets down to a lot of sort of fundamental stuff that philosophy of days Gone by presupposes.

1:31:46 Wes: Yeah, I think you're thinking here about liberty, liberty of action, and then connecting that to freedom of thought.

1:31:53 Paul: You see, that's the thing is that what does all this mean practically? I mean, does it mean that you live authentically internally if you can't live authentically externally? Is that a transcendent time?

1:32:06 Wes: I mean, it could mean that you have values and beliefs that aren't simply a product of what's external to you, more of a product of this reflection and transcendence and so on.

1:32:19 Mark: I would think that he would see it as inconceivable. Like he talks about it being inconceivable that somebody like Kierkegaard or Nietzsche would have lived through the Reich without pretty much getting executed. There's no way that A soul that is truly on the edge and truly independent like that could even take it like he did, where he just wasn't allowed to teach because he had, as a Jewish wife.

1:32:40 Wes: Nietzsche was the problem of German nationalism and railing against it before it had become that virulent. I guess it was already virulent in his time, but ironically. And then he was put to use by the Reich as a endorser of that kind of thinking when he was an opponent. So, yeah, we can imagine him railing against Reich and I have difficulty believing he could live through it. Yeah.

1:33:02 Paul: What happens when the transcendence takes you to a place where the society and the culture in which you live is anathema?

1:33:11 Mark: Yeah, he thinks that's expected, that that would happen, that you're going to find out everybody's sheep in there.

1:33:15 Wes: It's all heard thinking, deluded bastards.

1:33:18 Paul: Or just the values are not authentic for you at all. You know, the huge overriding values.

1:33:24 Dylan: But that doesn't seem to me like a new problem. And it's certainly not localized even modernly to the U.S. yeah, that's true.

1:33:32 Seth: So I'm reading this and again, there's a lot of flowery language, but I want to honor the fact that Jaspers had read Marx and he was good friends with Max Weber. So it wasn't like he didn't understand the historical development of capitalism and how that impacted individuals and how it tied into the rise of fascism and communism. I'm sure he was aware of all these things. It's just not articulated in what we read of his. If your encounter with transcendence demands revolutionary ideas that you come away from this thing. I know that capitalism is fundamentally flawed in its structure and that it will generate inequality and blah, blah, blah. So my encounter with transcendence tells me that we have to implement some different form of social order or some different form of economic order. I have to believe that he would say, yeah, you have to honor that. And I just don't know.

1:34:21 Wes: Practically, he's trying to reconcile these two opposing threads because the word, this word historicity that comes about as a critique of Kant and with Hegel, the Kantian transcendental ego, which is sort of super historical, historical becomes Geist and it becomes embedded in history and it becomes cultural and so on and so forth. So on the one hand he seems to be saying, yes, I understand the role of culture and the social right in forming us, but on the other hand, he still wants to talk in a way that sounds like a very radical conception of free will. And something we saw in Sartre. And I honestly didn't understand how he would reconcile them but it seemed pretty clear to me he wanted to embrace both of those horns of the dilemma.

1:35:00 Mark: Sartre just doesn't put up with any excuses that if you say oh but I'm in a fascist regime and I can't do anything like fuck you, you still have freedom, you still have free will, you know, you could even change how you interpret things. And that's. But Jaspers recognizes what Heidegger call our facticity. So I think that's what he calls these limit situations. The term is just thrown out in this essay for a second actually. He thinks that running up against a practical limit like an oppressive regime is one of the things that incites you to mentally jump to a new place, to make a philosophic advance, to get in touch with transcendence. That having these physical limits, having real suffering makes you a deeper person.

1:35:39 Seth: You remind me in that introduction to reason and existence that I read the guy who wrote the introduction mentions that Jaspers had this idea that there were kind of three parts to the human condition. There was that kind of factical empirical part, there was an intellectual part and there was a spiritual part. And that each one played in a different way field. And part of what his existence clarification is understanding that each of these things has their own logic and their own structure and they each approach transcendence in different ways and part of it is harmonizing those three things.

So there's a sense in which the structure is there to say oh I'm having a spiritual experience with the transcendent. But that doesn't change my material conditions the way that I live my life and every day. And maybe it can't although that would would suck to have some kind of experience and then say well I have this awareness and this knowledge but it can have no impact on my every day.

1:36:35 Mark: Certainly he doesn't think that you've pointed out what he thinks is the role of what philosophers are actually supposed to do. They're not just supposed to incite you to exert your existence and be an individual. But what fills up his giant freaking books, his three volume philosophy that came out in 1930 is something that's parallel to what Heidegger's being in time is. And what Jasper says it's laying out the structures of the encompassing. And you just actually mentioned three of them. So we can see the encompassing on the one hand in the part of the world that escapes any specific scientific inquiry.

That's what we've talked about it before, but also we can see it in human nature itself that as a psychologist you can make human nature an object and study it. Then there's some part of humanity, you know, our depth, that still escapes that so that you can get at the encompassing from either direction, inward or outward. And then within those realms they each have subdivisions. So you just laid out the three that he identifies. There's the empirical existence that you mentioned and then the existence is consciousness and existence is spirit. And consciousness has to do with pretty much like what the transcendental subject is for Kant.

And spirit has to do with what spirit means for Hegel. If those references don't mean anything to you, don't worry about it right now because it would take too long and

1:37:50 Paul: we didn't read this part.

1:37:51 Mark: He just name drops them in this essay. It's really a summary of his greater work. He doesn't even define the word existence in this essay at all. He attempts it with transcendence and he does it with reason A little at the end with all these important things. He waits till the very end.

1:38:06 Paul: This feels like the Cliff Notes to his stuff.

1:38:08 Seth: Yeah, yeah, actually. Well at least he doesn't do it in a footnote like Kant. I was just trying to get a rise out of Wes, but I think fell asleep.

1:38:16 Wes: What's,

1:38:21 Mark: What's left on our plate here? Any big themes that we haven't yet talked about?

1:38:26 Paul: What is it that is revolutionary or compelling about Jasper that isn't already in the canon?

1:38:35 Mark: Well, he might have been first, it's unclear to me but all these things that we associate with Heidegger and then Sartre ripped off Heidegger, the whole French existential socialist movement. So Jaspers might have actually been the first one and he was trying to take Kant and do something cool with it. So Kant had this idea, the structure of the mind where we've got sensibility and we've got the understanding and that's how we use science. But then we have reason and reason is a faculty that likes to synthesize everything and so it jumps beyond what it should be doing.

Science tells us everything we observed. There's causal relations between it. In fact that becomes a preconception conception. We approach science with the idea of course everything that we see is going to have a cause. It's not something that science even proves. It's a built in principle of the understanding. Well, reason comes along as a different mental faculty and says well that must apply to everything, even things that we couldn't possibly experience to the metaphysical itself. And so people think oh I could prove the existence of God. Everything has a cause.

The original cause must be God. Well Kant says bullshit. You can't apply the stuff that we use for science to reality itself, to the in itself, to the thing, the noumena. So Jaspers is taking that model but saying that reason in trying to jump at the transcendent is not just cheating. And in fact Kant himself in every work, right, he's most famous for the Critique of Pure Reason where he set out these limits for reason. Reason should not be talking about, should not be doing metaphysics at all. Kant says the understanding, like I was just saying, only apply to the things that science can study, that things we could potentially experience.

But then he goes on and writes a moral tract and says well yeah, of course we can't use science to discover morality, but still reason itself, sometimes practical reason, it just, we can't help but reflect on it that we, if we're acting consistently then we act according to this absolute moral law, the categorical imperative. And then we just did another episode where he applies a similar kind of thing to even aesthetics about what makes something beautiful. So he clearly thought that these temptations of reason that there's some legitimate. Maybe Kant won't call it knowledge, but there's some reason that a philosopher would want to be saying I think it's regulative, yes, saying things about these supposedly forbidden realms.

And Jaspers is taking that exact same picture but is interpreting it differently. So reason then becomes this urge to defy all limits towards trans transcendence and he makes it instead of just like an impersonal activity of the scientist who's maybe trying to extend his reach beyond his grasp. It's a deeply personal urge and it is what makes us then have to posit the transcendent. Sometimes he even uses the word God for it. He doesn't want to say it's the Christian God or something but to dwell on the question is there God? You know, if there's a leap of faith where we believe an actual prophecy opposition not Jesus is Lord specifically or something, but that God is in other words, the transcendent is there is something more than just the stuff that we can touch and feel.

There is an in itself, there is a noumenal that somehow beyond space and time or maybe we can't say anything about it but just that it is there and this is something essential to human psychology without which we're not even people, not something to be fought against. It's something that we have to embrace and channel in intellectually respectable.

1:41:59 Wes: Right.

1:41:59 Paul: It's very, very, very Eastern.

1:42:03 Dylan: Paul, that's not the first time you've said that. You obviously have that contrast in mind.

1:42:08 Paul: That comment just now was in the context of my question that Mark just elaborated upon in that what's new about what Jaspers is saying. It sounds to me like a sort of convoluted. As I said before, it's like, it's almost like some of the koans are more meaningful than the volumes of writing about this that he's done in that they are as mysterious as what it is they're trying to convey.

1:42:38 Dylan: And that's because you see them as condensed but richer.

1:42:42 Paul: I see them as intuitive, as operating in the exact place that Jaspers is talking about. Exactly. The place where not knowing is know knowing, you know what I mean? And that place of not having clarity but taking the leap of faith, of understanding something that's not verbalized in literal terms.

1:43:04 Mark: Right. He's trying to express these perennial truths. I mean you're saying, I just said, oh, you asked what's new about Jaspers and I tried to put him in a specific historical context but you're saying ultimately there's nothing new about this. He's saying the same freaking ideas I'm asking. I think he would agree with you that the first thing we talked about here, here is that the philosopher's job is to take the old and make it new again. Is that this book I've got in front of me that was about philosophical faith, it's actually called the Perennial Scope of Philosophy.

So he actually thinks that philosophers ultimately, like yeah, you want to study their historical conditions to figure out what they're saying, but ultimately they speak timelessly to each other. You should be able to sort of set them side by side. And he did a lot of this. He has a giant four volume thing going through other philosophers, including Jesus and Buddha.

1:43:47 Paul: And this is the historical.

1:43:49 Seth: Yes.

1:43:49 Mark: So he thinks that yeah, we do need to dwell on that stuff and I'm sure a lot of the reason that he's come up with this is entirely because of the stuff that he's read. But he thinks that a chief difference between now and when original Buddhist writings were coming out is that we do have this very propositional mode of knowledge that it sounds weird even to talk about philosophy discovering something but yet you can't say what it's discovered in words. It's not a doctrine like that doesn't even make sense to us. So he has to at least couch his formulation in a way that explains why it doesn't make sense according to our current categories, whereas an ancient Buddhist would just not feel the need to do that. They're not fighting against the same literalist version of knowledge.

1:44:30 Wes: Right.

1:44:30 Paul: Which is almost as if they were writing in a way that Jaspers is talking about is transcendent.

1:44:36 Seth: Yes, he's got that Germanic thing. He's very much a product of both his culture and his time that he's got this urge to systematize.

1:44:44 Paul: Yes, yes.

1:44:45 Seth: He's pulling all these threads and then he's trying. It's like, okay, how do I get the self actualization thread and the radical freedom thread, but also the social existence thread and how do I save transcendence and weave it all together? And the giant volumes he wrote are evidence that he was struggling to put all this stuff together.

1:45:03 Paul: But I guess that is the job of philosophy, isn't it?

1:45:06 Seth: Yeah, I'm kind of of two minds here. I'll say this, the English translation of

1:45:11 Paul: this little short work, there's that as well.

1:45:13 Seth: Yeah, he's quite poetic. There are a number of passages that I think are popular poetic and I'm just generally sympathetic to philosophers from this era who went through the war. They have a strong and I think undeniable and meaningful urge to make sense of a world that lost all of its meaning.

1:45:33 Paul: It's so funny that you bring that up in quite that way because I've been thinking all along of Viktor Frankl who specifically manifests what you're talking about. I think I've been thinking all along about that. This Frankl keeps popping up in my head as we talk about all this.

1:45:47 Seth: I think that's an interesting connection, but it's really about how that experience radically transformed them and gave them this urge to find answers. He's clearly driven by a purpose that's not purely intellectual or academic. He's not jerking off on descriptives and definite descriptors or, you know, this kind of stuff. He's clearly motivated by some fundamental questions and he wants to help make sense of the human experience. And I for one appreciate that.

1:46:17 Paul: So why is it that he is so much lesser known than Heidegger?

1:46:22 Mark: I think just lines of influence politics, you know. I think Jaspers was a really well known figure at the time. From what I read, he was better known for his contemporary political writings that he was in favor after the war and that he was sort of one of the intellectuals in charge of reconstructing German culture or something. It's just that, you know, those particular things that he was most famous for then don't resonate with us and just, you know, patterns of scholarship that not as many people were talking about him. Whereas maybe there'll be a Jasper's revival.

1:46:52 Paul: Heidegger is so commonplace.

1:46:55 Seth: Heidegger generated a bunch of students and disciples that took his message to various places. And that in itself also meant that he was translated earlier and more frequently. I mean, as I understand it, there's a lot of Jaspers that still hasn't quite been translated translated yet. There's also, there's kind of a cult around Heidegger. His personality drove a lot of the mystery around him and made him desirable. And Jasper seems like he's probably pretty level headed.

1:47:21 Paul: Heidegger's just a sexier character. Probably because he was a Nazi.

1:47:24 Seth: For aspiring students. Yeah.

1:47:26 Mark: Having opaque writing in some ways helps the mystery that. Yes, okay. The short thing that we read was hard to understand, but I think that's mostly because it was this Cliff Notes version of longer things. But in the longer things that I was looking at, he was going out of his way to be just as clear as possible given that he's talking about really difficult, difficult things. There's sort of not as much mysterianism going on as in Heidegger or Wittgenstein or some of these less organized guys that I think wrote in a more rushed way, more poetic maybe. This had so many quotes in it like Emerson or you know, some of the other ones we've read recently. I'm not sure why people don't read this just for classic literature.

1:48:03 Paul: Yeah, it's always good to remember how ignorant you are.

1:48:07 Mark: I find it interesting to look at him as another variation these of apophatic theologians that even though he says, oh no, I'm not religious, he's so in favor of spirituality and in respecting religion that the difference between the various, you know, so Schleiermacher is a guy that we read earlier is another one of these. Karen Armstrong wrote a book against the New Atheist called the Case for God that is entirely about apophatic theology. That it's not that all these people that are objecting to the literal people believing in the Virgin Mary, they're missing the point of religion. The point of religion is religious experience is this sort of leap. It's not about any dogmas or doctrines at all. So there's a whole school, you know, a whole even branch of Protestantism or Unitarianism that already has held this for, you know, 100, 200 years. These are not new ideas.

1:48:50 Paul: The thing is that most of what we think of as Christian dogma, let's just say Christian for the sake of argument. That's really a minority. I mean most people who identify as Christians are very reasonable, rational people. And mostly they're Christian because they like this, the pancake breakfasts and they like the community. The way people identify is not the same. And most people identify in really kind of superficial sort of comfort based community membership kind of things. That may be what gives them some transcendence of some kind, you know, but very few people really are the dogmatic kinds of religious people that we associate with religious dogma.

1:49:30 Mark: So Jaspers, I think has some trouble with elitism. He does have a problem with pure democracy. Just getting back to his politics, witnessing what he witnessed. The masses are too easily led that they need an intellectual elite to write about philosophy. You know, it's not realistic for him if he sets this huge high standard for what being an awake and aware person is. You know, to exert your existence requires studying the history of philosophy in great depth. To not only dwell on each sentence slowly, but to have a scope, which

1:50:00 Paul: means you have to be of a particular class to study and blah blah, blah.

1:50:04 Mark: It seems like he's setting up yes, that society needs people like him to lead it forward in some way. And religion is okay because at least keeps the masses in a sort of a spiritually receptive mood that maybe they would get into philosophy or have kids that will get into philosophy. Whereas if you're purely imminent, secularist, we only embrace what we see, then you're spiritually dead in a way that he thinks is fatal.

1:50:29 Paul: I do think it's interesting that as a psychologist he was so focused on delusions and how clinically to assess delusions and work with delusions. And yet religious transcendence is still at the core of a lot of his

1:50:44 Mark: writing, if it has any content at all. Right, put the name God on it or something. And if it's concrete enough, he's gonna himself say that it is in some way delusional. It is trying to tie the transcendent down to a specific dogma. It's something I'd have to think more about or explore with him. That's what he really wants you to do, is for you to read along with him and have active reading. If you don't get him, if you don't follow him, it's because you're not doing the work you need, need to do as a reader that you have to be a really active philosophical reader to get into this.

So he sort of provides a context, an excuse for a whole bunch of subsequent continental philosophers to write in obscure ways that the elitism is sort of built into that. It, you're not really engaging it fully unless you can penetrate in here. Which means a lot of not just reading carefully but reproducing the experience yourself.

1:51:32 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:51:33 Mark: Making your own mind say it out loud. It's like if you're a professor and you're trying to inspire your students it seems like a pretty good start. But as a prescription for a society it at least seems very idealistic if not just downright problematic the way you've

1:51:48 Dylan: described it it just sounds so overly intellectual. Even when we were talking about transcendence before we had this short discussion about the possibility of having authentic and living authentically that was really non intellectual right?

1:52:02 Mark: He thinks intellectual. It's not sufficient. You can't just be a super scientist, you have to give yourself but you have to have the intellectual part. Yeah, you're right.

1:52:09 Dylan: I'm thinking of the example that we most recently had Thoreau's encounter with the woodsman in Walden. This guy, he doesn't understand except that he sees him as living completely authentically A man who lives in perfect self understanding who just does what he does

1:52:26 Mark: outside of society with no education and no need of it.

1:52:30 Dylan: Yes, with an utterly open clarity of expression experience but he is fundamentally deeply non intellectual and unmoved by the kinds of inquiries that Thoreau is moved by and in the end Thoreau admires him deeply and finds him utterly confusing. But when I think of religious experience I don't think of intellectual activity at all. And even, even what Paul was talking about in terms of the Zen koan and stuff like that that seems to be not anything about thinking exactly.

1:52:57 Paul: Yeah, I know what you mean. It almost subverts thinking. Right.

1:53:01 Mark: So but Jaspers has that. That his big problem with religion is not even that it jumps to conclusions but that it claims exclusivity that Christianity in particular, the fact that it says we're not just a way to God but we are the way to God that he thinks is the most destructive political aspect of it. So I think other ways of being religious he would have much less problem with even Christian ways that are non exclusivist. So I do think that maybe, maybe his reading fat philosophy books is one way to transcendence it is the way of intellectuals of his type but I don't necessarily think that he would rule out other ways it's just that it somehow needs to be nailed down.

If you just have a purely emotional leap, then, like, well, what does that leave you? Maybe a tyrant comes along and says, use that spirit and fight. Kill for me. And you say, yes, I am spirited. And you take that. It subverts everything.

1:53:51 Paul: Didn't the National Socialists? Didn't so much of the German population just have that leap of faith into.

1:53:57 Mark: Yes. So that's the danger when you abandon intellect. Next time, we're going to talk about Alfred North Whitehead's the Concept of nature from 1920.

1:54:06 Dylan: Are we really?

1:54:07 Wes: Yes. Wow.

1:54:08 Seth: All right.

1:54:09 Wes: According to Mark's unilateral decision, we are

1:54:13 Mark: supported by your donations. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. Big donors since last time have included Sims Preston, Mark Cohen, Palio Goulard, Luis Fernando Leite, Andrew Evans, William Cromartie, Robert Ralston, Howard Claire, Jesse Rodriguez, Imad Zaheer, James Hubka, Jacob Lundgaard, Kevin Rogers, Roger Crandy, Cesar Vega, Peter Stacy, Kane Anderson, Chris Jarzombeck, Christine Urquart, Alexander Conrad, Richard Ostrom iii, Lisa Erickson, Adrian Bach Sall, Michael de Camp, Ernest Prabhakar, Steven Meyer, Kurt Gallagher, Max Friedman, and John Lamond. Thank you. Also to the smaller donors, including those who are newly or on a continued basis signed up for our $5 a month citizen site. Thank you eternally, Paul.

1:54:57 Paul: Thanks for having me, guys. I'm really honored and this was a treat. Normally I'm really high when I'm talking like this, so this was a nice. This was a refreshing change.

1:55:07 Mark: Reading Jasper doesn't just make you by itself.

1:55:09 Paul: I got to tell you, I'm a little bit high.

1:55:11 Mark: All right, good night, everybody.

1:55:13 Seth: Good night.

1:55:14 Wes: Good night.

1:55:14 Paul: Thank you guys, really, truly. I'm. I'm really flattered. I'm really honored. I hope this doesn't ruin everything.

1:55:46 Unknown speaker: Else. What you don't really see you want to leave but you jumped in the stair why get started again? This won't go anywhere Just another. It's just another place to grow Just another way to get down on your hands and knees and cross this time just put the dark glasses on and get used to the sight do blot your eyes don't tell a lie when you call on the phone. Time when everybody know jump another way too far Just another place to cross Just another way to get down on your hands and knees and cross.

1:58:46 Wes: Crown

1:58:48 Unknown speaker: it's just another place to crawl Just another way to get down on your hands and knees and cross.