Not School Digest: Asimov, Camus, Jaspers, Brecht, Peirce, Historical Jesus

0:00 Wes: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Partially Examined Life. Please consider becoming a pel citizen@partiallyexaminedlife.com membership for unlimited ad, free access to all our episodes and a host of other bonus content available from a single convenient feed that you can use. The variety of podcast apps membership also makes you a part of our Not School community, which features discussion groups with other listeners and on occasion, your pel hosts. Other ways to provide support include making a donation, purchasing merchandise, or giving us a cut of your Amazon purchases by using the link on our homepage.

0:44 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life. This is a very special non episode where we will present highlights from our Not School discussions from the last year or so. This is Mark Linsenmayer talking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:57 Nathan: And this is Nathan Hanks in Chicago, Illinois.

1:00 Mark: Today on the program we've got six different clips for you. We've got a group that I led on Karl Jaspers' Truth and Symbol. We've got another one that I led on Thomas Sheehan's Stanford Lectures about the Historical Jesus. We've got one from our long running philosophy and theater group, an essay by the playwright Bertolt Brecht about theater for pleasure or theater for instruction. We've got one by a new group on Charles Sanders Peirce's The Fixation of Belief. And we're going to wrap up with one from the Philosophical Fiction group on Camus the Fall. But first.

1:30 Nathan: Well, the first conversation that we have from the Philosophical Fiction group is the last question by Isaac Asimov. In that you'll hear myself along with Daniel Cesari, Mary and Laura.

1:44 Mark: So is this the beginning of the discussion or is this a little bit into it or.

1:47 Nathan: Yes, this is just a little bit into the discussion. You'll hear us talking about the ideas of recurrence and entropy and we get a little definition of entropy and its opposite from Cesari.

2:01 Mark: Now you've been doing this group for what, two years?

2:03 Nathan: It'll be three around this Christmas.

2:06 Mark: Wow. What's made this a successful continuing enterprise?

2:09 Nathan: I think that everybody enjoys reading fiction and it brings everyone to the table. There's something for everyone to get out of it. And as we get together and talk, our experience has been that we understand the book a little bit better. We keep having people come back.

2:23 Unknown speaker: This just reminds me of almost an anti existentialism text. It brings up the question of permanence and the meaning of life and how for whatever reason, whenever they make these jumps in the story in millions of years, people are freaked out over the fact that in a billion years time or 100 billion years time. There cannot possibly be such a thing as life. Yet how could that possibly disconcert someone who knows? No matter, you know, if it's a billion years or 10 billion years, they're going to be long dead. And somehow that affects your life.

So somehow, instead of, you know, existentialism, where you make your life by the seconds you live on this earth, somehow this backbone, knowing it's not going to be there at some point puts a real dampener on things, for whatever reason. Reminds me of, like, when you watch a. A movie and you're really hit by it, and then, like, the last scene is like the character wakes up from a dream and you're like, oh, that's bullshit. And yet how. How would that change the, you know, the feelings that were brought up while you were watching the movie during the scenes?

Or how would it change your life knowing that something's not going to be here in 10 billion years?

Yeah, that was a big concern for me, too. I thought it was maybe an open question at the end of the novel when you have that let there be light. Because I thought about the eternal recurrence, cyclical idea that maybe what has been will be again and again and again and again. And in that case, you can take it in an existentialist kind of vein. Maybe. Or maybe it's just a chance to start afresh. I mean, I don't know entropy as a concept very well, so I can't say, you know, is this. Is it implied, then that everything is going to happen the way it did? I don't really know that I can go very far with that. But the questions you were asking about whether we have a stake in mankind, whether we have a stake in what goes on long, long after we're gone. That's an interesting point to me.

I just ran over to my bookshelf and picked up Blood Meridian. I'm not going to quote from it properly, but in the foreword there's three quotes. One is from Paul Valéry, one is from Jacob Boehme, and the other is a newspaper article. But Jacob Boehme's bit, I think, stands out here.

It is not to be thought that

the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost, as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing, for sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in

death, and death and dying are the

very life of the darkness. What that says to me is that, to Cesari's point, about what we imagine when we're not there, how that could matter. It's not as if we're in a position to ever occupy that place that we're really afraid of. It somehow exists in this beyond for us. And what would it be like if a tree fell in the woods and

there's no one around to hear it?

It puts this fear about not existing anymore. But what is that really founded on if you don't exist? And oddly enough, the machine still exists at the end of time and it's outside of man at the end. It doesn't have someone to give the answer to. It's become this summation of matter. And I guess what must be going on at the end is it just refracts all that back out. Everything that's accumulated as man's expanded and grown. It just lets it all back out to become the universe again. Well, that's a point about entropy. And there's the anti termed entropy. So entropy is. And I'm thankful to have an engineer in the group now that I know that you've got an increase of disorder. But the opposite of that would be. There's a couple of words for it. One, I think the proper one is enthalpy.

That's correct.

Yeah.

There's another popularized phrase for it which is exotropy. That's what Kevin Kelly called it in what technology wants. And at the same time as you have expanding disorder, there's also an expansion in order. So while the universe is expanding, you get something like this multivac which is shrinking.

Or at the end you're left with

complete darkness except for this incredibly complex thing. So you've got interesting like yin yang at the end where you all the darkness and then the spot of light and it's shrinking away, but it's also more intensely focused by getting smaller.

Doesn't it have to do with the relationship between that intense piece of light

and the darkness and right around to the big bang? I think he was also wondering like everyone wonders what was before the Big bang? Where'd that come from?

The monkey back.

Yeah.

Reminds me of like the humanity's last stand. Like the Alamo, this little bright dot fighting against the entropy of the universe. It's a hard concept to intuit. When I learned it in school, the easiest way that I learned about it was just if you think about why we don't all just cool our houses

by opening our refrigerators.

And the reason is because that would make it hotter because you use more energy to cool than.

Well, you know, if you take the fridge to be the Internet, then how is that heating everything up? There's this way in which we move into and expand just by being. And that has a way of getting right down to the individual life. You know, what we consume for food and energy or what we're doing as a total human project on the planet. What we consume.

Yeah.

There's a way in which we are the ones unmaking everything at the same time as creating something new and to get to an ultimate end where you're really just. All that's left is the computer. And it's the heaven of all the known. There's just all the stuff that's ever been known or recorded by humanity is

there in a really creepy way, this is what we're doing. Right. Every day, every week, every month. The computers, the technology are sort of making certain things not necessary for us that we don't need to do anymore. Like even a small little idea like email. Right. We don't really have mail anymore. We don't have, like a physical body of paper that we need.

8:49 Nathan: Yeah.

8:50 Unknown speaker: And then this gets into this relativism that the story really points out, because at each turn, someone has the bigger, greater thing, and yet they're still confronted with the same problems of trying to find enough place to live and having a family and living and all of that. And so each time you jump through, you see someone who's writing a letter and the next person's typing a letter and the next person's mentally composing a

letter, or you go through the times,

that direction of what it said, this story really. Because we're not doing the actual think of the body or the physical body of writing the letter or the paper in our hand and the pen. He's talking about this movement toward the point where we really. The Multivac or the AC at the end is really all the data that is in our brains. It's in our brains. The bodies are gone.

It's interesting that you talk about it with letter writing, because I have friends who we still write each other letters, and we also send each other emails. And what comes out in the letters could probably not be any farther from what gets sent in email. There's something so vital about sitting down with a pen and a piece of paper and writing to someone. I love it. I've always loved it. And I find it strange that people don't want to do that anymore.

Well, I mean, it's not even a question of don't want to. It's kind of like. And again, I'm looking back at the

movement of this story where we're going

from These two guys drinking the booze and getting drunk and going through the process, the evolution where we end up just really, the universe just exists of this data, you know what I'm saying? And I'm just looking at the falling away of the body, of the falling away of that physicalness at the end of this story. Because we're all. It's really just. We're all the brains, it's just the data. That's all that really matters.

With shedding the body, going into data, and then at one point becoming all one through this database. I mean, in popular culture, I feel that's usually portrayed in a very negative light. I'm, you know, I'm thinking of. I don't know how. How nerdy you guys are, but like the Borg in Star Trek or, you know, the Matrix. And like, the loss of individuality is something to abhor rather than to strive for. And I mean, with. With it all just being data, with it all going down that road, I think we lose what it means to be individuals and to be human.

Of course.

I mean, can you imagine what the experience of life would be like to just be an interconnected database? Like, how would love exist in that sense? You know?

But what brought the question was despair. It's like a universal despair. What happens when I die? What happens if this all goes away? Which is very human, very. Not data. And even though you can pull data for a question out of it, the actual need to hear an answer to that is still, I think, the Prime Mover, even though it says, well, I've just been collecting all this data, but what brought it about?

Yeah, it only has meaning in relation to life, to be life as data. Seems like there's no real there there, you know, I mean, what. In relation to what would any of that information have meaning? What are you. Information is just information in theory.

Isn't that a question of consciousness? Like at the end of this story, he says the consciousness of AC Encompassed all of what had once been a universe and brooded over what was now chaos. Step by step, it must be done. And then let's just imagine that that last line isn't there. And AC Said, let there be light. Let's just imagine that. But isn't that just a question of consciousness? You're saying that what if it was just all data? What kind of value is that? Well, we don't know because we're not just data. We are human beings with physicalities who write letters, with pens and hands and paper. But thinking about it like he's done and postulating this concept. I mean in a way if we took out the last line, okay, that could be very dark and very sad and very depressing. But then he says this last line and AC Said let there be light. So what does that say to the value of just being data?

13:29 Wes: Yeah.

13:31 Mark: Alright, next up you get a little taste of our discussion about Karl Jaspers' Truth and Symbol. This is a discussion I took part in back in February 2015, not too far after our Jaspers episode. Now in that episode you may recall we got the point that Jaspers thinks that you need a philosophy and not just science, that having philosophy will let you have the correct existential comportment toward the world. Jaspers is an existentialist but we had a hard time figuring out what he was actually recommending, to what extent he was advocating traditional religion, was he a mystic?

So this book Truth and symbol from 1947 which is a chunk of a larger work that's not translated into English takes on one of our relations, takes on one of our ways of relating to the encompassing which by the end of this book he's actually just calling God which is through symbols. So religious symbols in particular poetic symbols are somehow supposed to point beyond sensible existence and they somehow enable us to maintain the existentially correct comportment towards the subject object distinction. Alright, so here's the beginning or attempt to unravel what that all means.

I was joined in this discussion by Michael Burgess, Marilyn Lawrence, Nick Halmay and Heath Adams. Maybe that's a good place to start

14:41 Unknown speaker: what the notion of symbol is here because he makes it clear that he doesn't mean a symbol like a philosopher of language would mean it where this thing refers to some other thing in the world, right? A symbol, the stop sign symbolizes that you should stop or whatever it's. I think symbol is only used analogically, right? If a literal symbol is like a letter or a word written down or many of the other things like a stop sign that we would consider a symbol, then what is a symbol when it doesn't point to something in the world or a set of things in the world? It points. We somehow have to see beyond it. It's a special kind of object in the world that is supposed to point to the beyond. What did you folks think of that?

I would think it's a complicated point to jump into because you've got the establishment of quite a lot of his sort of metaphysics before then. But in that context I think it's a sign in the traditional sense Like a sign saying mountain pass at five yards or hundred yards or whatever. But it's not pointing towards an object in the world. It's pointing to a different state of consciousness or a different way of relating to things or what he would call transcendence. So it's pointing at a different state, but I think it is nevertheless pointing at something or signifying something in that sense.

15:55 Mark: Well, it would seem strange for a regular symbol if you had to be

15:59 Unknown speaker: a special kind of person to be able to read it. That he says you only get the symbol on the upswing of man.

You can think of symbols where that is the case, though. I mean, you can think of something written in Hebrew or something, or mystic religions of which Christianity is possibly one, you know, of the turn of the early millennium. Then you had all these religions that had symbolism of nth degrees symbolizing some internal part of their religion that only initiates new and things like that of which Scientology is doing quite a bit today. So I'm not convinced that there isn't a sense in which other symbols can have an analogous function. But it's true that it's not symbolic in the linguistic sense of a piece of language that points to something in the world.

It seemed that anytime we try to nail down the meaning or interpretation of a symbol, we're missing them all, that it's pointing beyond to a numinous sort of experience. You know, as soon as we try to nail it down, we seem to be falling away from or limiting what the symbol is or limiting our experience of it.

Well, he also calls it like a cipher, like cipher status. So I guess it's unlike a traditional symbol. It's not like a stop sign. Like, oh, yeah, it means stop. Like, what else could it mean? That's all it means. It's a way to contemplate something by. It's not exactly referencing things, I guess, but it does sort of point towards something. But you're not supposed to use it as like a springboard for thinking about it more than just to designate it like philosophy of language might attempt to do.

I was reading this in the context of some other things I'd read about mysticism. So a large portion of the book is that there's a good way to encounter symbols. And then there's a lot of errors you can fall into. It's sort of this balance that you have to keep, and it involves preserving the subject object distinction that how do you get at being? Being is what the symbol points at, for lack of a better word. Or he Calls it God at the very end. And that's, you know, ultimately what religious experience is supposed to get at. It's what he thinks is missing from our materialist take on the world.

You know, so ultimately he's coming from something very recognizable as a religious viewpoint, even though he avoids doctrine. So he's trying to give us, like Schleiermacher, like these other liberal theologians like Bultmann, probably a modern, respectable way, phenomenologically accurate way, intellectually above board way to be religious. It seems like he's giving a phenomenological account of our relation to being. And by phenomenological I actually mean less in the Husserlian, which sounds like there's a phenomenological method. You know, if you look carefully at things, then you kind of have this experience and then you and I can compare this as a Hegelian phenomenological.

Like I know Jasper's just loved Hegel

18:44 Mark: said there's, that's endless.

18:46 Unknown speaker: And the way he talks about the way that you can emphasize the object too much, you can emphasize the subject too much, that there's all these sort of frameworks, you know, Sartre also came to mind that there's a sort of ontological structure of being. Well, and Heidegger too. And then there are ways that within that structure you can seemingly with intellectual consistency, fall on the wrong side somehow, somehow be violating the existential goal. And so here it was, for instance, if you pay attention only to the object and look at yourself as just a point, that is of observation, that's sort of the point of view of, of science, of Whitehead.

19:24 Mark: Right.

19:24 Unknown speaker: You can even take the world of objecthood as it doesn't have to be a materialist, Aristotelian looking thing. It could be events or something like Whitehead. But still, if you're focusing entirely on the object and not on the subject, you're never going to actually get at being. You're going to be doing science, but you're going to be missing something. And likewise, if you pretend to be Descartes and like, well, there's this world or the subject and maybe it reaches to something out there, then you're likewise missing out something then. And you're not going to have this.

There's going to be no room in your framework for experiencing something properly as symbol that points to the thing in itself. That's how I'm sort of taking this, that he's a version of Kant or Schopenhauer, had a similar thing that, you know, had a very Kantian Take of we can describe the objects of experience, but then we still don't get at the insides of things. And so Schopenhauer thought that, okay, well somehow we can figure out that that's all will. Well, for Jaspers it seems like the outside of things is all mystery. But we still can use symbols, ciphers as a way to reach out there in something like the way Schopenhauer thought that we could somehow get our intellects out there as well.

But there were lots of ways that this can go wrong.

So I think it's important actually to focus on his ontology, well, his metaphysics a bit, to say broadly. So doing that, it did seem like he started out with a fairly modern phenomenological set up. Right. So there's this terrible distinction that's labor, that history, metaphysics is labored under the subject object distinction and we need to get past that to the what's beyond it or something. And then he sort of. That's sort of Kantian. He sort of. Then he drifts into Hegel a bit and it sort of becomes that he says at one point, but of course in objects, deep inside objects, there's spirit.

So he sort of abandons this idea of noumena almost that you might expect him to have in the early section. And we get to a point where objects are constituted by consciousness in a way, in a sort of Hegelian way. And then by the end, I think we end up with Berkeley, to be honest, I think we end up with, oh, everything turns out to be God. So I think on the surface there's a kind of consistency. But I did notice at times that he was kind of maneuvering around a bit and he may have been a bit of tension with himself. So he does sort of try to set up this framework for evaluating his later religious claims.

But I do think that there's some potential flaws with it. I mean, he ends up saying, you know, I don't really like idealism. I don't like all this pure subjectivity and things. And then in the second section he spends quite a while praising subjectivity and saying if you step back far enough and go into pure consciousness. Even I think credits the cogito. At one point he says something like, you know, if you're just impure thought, you can be certain of various things and so on. There seems to be a lot of stuff going on there. And I wouldn't describe it as neatly Kantian.

It's certainly phenomenological. It's certainly says at several points that the Beginning of philosophy should be basically this pure conscious state where there's no metaphysical assumptions and we're sort of purely unreflective in a way. And everywhere he says we're naive at one point. So there's, you know, that's sort of pretty ubiquitous in phenomenology that there's a sort of pre reflective or immediate state or some kind of non differentiated state that you can get to and that's where you meant to start from. And this is of course where ciphers enter as this kind of almost structuring aspect of this state that gives things meaning or however you want to cash that out.

But I did see a lot of influences going on and it not falling neatly into either Kant, Hegel or as I said towards the end I think Berkeley even right.

The subject object thing. A lot of things in Jaspers look like Heidegger that he says it's not

23:06 Mark: strictly Kantian because Kant sticks too much

23:09 Unknown speaker: to the subject object distinction for Heidegger and post Heideggerians. But once you realize that subject and object are not ultimately different, that there's no grounds for the Cartesian move or something like that, or for saying that the world out there is ultimately unknowable because we're all part of being. So it's, you know, it's a mystical take. What I read about mysticism back in the day is that in my most Eastern mysticisms the idea is to somehow get rid of the self or take everything, say I am all. You know, it's somehow it's bridging the gap between subject and object by actually expanding your identity or shrinking it to nothing and becoming part of the whole.

And you know, of course that's exactly why Nietzsche hated stuff like that because he thought that all religion was, you know, attempt to snuff out the self or something. But Christian mysticism, it's not cool to say I am God or we are all God or I am nothing in comparison to God. You have to retain the duality.

24:06 Mark: So right.

24:07 Unknown speaker: Buber is another figure that we ran into like this that seeing God through the eyes of another person sounds very much like the account of love that he just refers to on the first page of this book. Referring to the part before here in the larger work that I don't even know if it's translated into English. But then also just the take on ciphers, you know, the things should be somehow transparent that we can see through to the divine like that. I think it's a very doctrinaire view of mysticism. In Judeo Christian traditions to retain the sense of duality.

So while you're overcoming the subject object distinction in one sense, like, you know, we're ultimately all part of being and mystery and if you delve deeply into yourself or in the outside, you're still, you're going to get into being. But the correct, the existentially correct view that will actually grasp ciphers in the, in the way that Jaspers wants us to, maintains the duality and maintains the subject object distinction in a more enlightened way.

I guess, just to clarify, I didn't mean to say that they abandoned it. So you might think that the subject object distinction is metaphysical in the way that Kant does, or you might think it's, I don't want to say pragmatic, but a symptom of our thinking that we engage in that consciousness sort of does in a Hegelian fashion. So he has these stages where you. So you have this first stage and you have the second stage and then the subject object distinction is kind of a movement between states of consciousness. So he maintains it in a slightly weakened, not so metaphysical way.

You know, it's not like this other half of the world and it's completely separate and they're not all together. There is this underlying unity to things, but there is a dialectical movement that keeps objects and subjects separate. So it's, it's. I mean, it's almost hinting at this eastern idea, even if it doesn't have the courage to just outright go for it.

25:52 Mark: So folks who are not aware, not school is a thing that we offer along with your pel citizenship, which is your $5 a month way to support the Partially Examined Life, you get access to the back end of our website, which includes a bunch of forums and a group system that is set up so people every month propose things that they'd like to read together. And then some of these groups eventuate in a discussion, sometimes recorded, sometimes not, much like a Partially Examined Life podcast. So it's on that model. But there are lots of different ways that you can approach a text.

It could be something very short, it could be videos, it could be lectures, it could be covering something that was already covered in a past Partially Examined Life episode. Sometimes I or some of the other podcasters will lead a group ourselves. People that listen to Partially Examined Life are smart, they're inquisitive, and the idea is to hook them up with each other because not everybody can go to

26:40 Unknown speaker: a local book club and have a

26:42 Mark: quality discussion that matches anything that you're going to hear here today?

26:47 Nathan: Absolutely. I mean, I've met everyone that I talk with regularly now for years. There's someone in Canada, someone across the country in San Francisco, just next door in New York and Tennessee as well. We have people from all over the place and it's always a great time to hear new voices. And just meeting people through a common interest is a whole other benefit.

27:08 Mark: I mean, most learning happens not from passively listening, of course, but to actually take part in these things. So whether it's discussing further the things that we discuss on the podcast, or more likely finding people to pursue interests above and beyond what we cover, this sort of active engagement with other people, testing out your communication skills is really the only way to learn to do philosophy. You just have to actually do it. And this is a, this is a low overhead, you know, much easier than signing up for a full online course. It's very inexpensive. Some of the groups, like the fiction group, are long lasting.

27:42 Unknown speaker: Whatever your level of effort you want

27:44 Mark: to put into it, there's room for you. There's always room to improve, however little you want or much you want to do.

27:50 Nathan: Yeah, I think that the topics in the forums are interesting now too. You can open a question up to the community of members. Something like Heidegger. His notion of care and openness is being discussed right now. Some people are talking about attention. It doesn't have to be a focused group around a text so much as getting all of the individual knowledge from everybody together in a discussion. I think that's another benefit of the citizens forum.

28:17 Unknown speaker: Hi, I'm Daniel Cole.

I managed PEL's Not School from late spring 2014 until August of 2015, and I've also participated in a number of groups on the site over the past

two and a half years years, most

notably the long running philosophy and theater group. Carlos Frank, Philip Czerny, and myself were the core of that group for most of its run, and we're the three that you'll hear on this call. Most of the group's recorded conversations feature us trying to get a handle on plays or essays that we had little or no prior familiarity with. But we were all enthusiastic about the readings and we were determined to come away with some understanding of them. I believe Pel hosts 10 recorded discussions from the group and the highlight you're about to listen to is on famous playwright Bertolt Brecht essay Theater for Pleasure, Theater for Instruction.

Brecht wrote extensively about theater and also written many famous plays such as the Threepenny Opera And Mother Courage. Through most of this clip, we try to come up with an acceptable description of Brecht's epic theater. And we also discuss a little about his methods and aspirations for using theater as a way to provoke his audiences to consider moral conflicts in a rational way. Hope you enjoy.

So why don't we start off by trying to come up with a definition, or according to Brecht, of what epic theatre is and how it differs from dramatic theatre.

Well, there's the instruction aspect. And then a lot of his argument in this essay is that you don't have to have this dichotomy of theater for pleasure or theater for instruction. You can actually have amusing theater that's also didactic, and it's also teaching the audience something about very immediate present conditions in their lives and getting them to examine that.

I guess I didn't really consider the instructive aspect necessarily a defining characteristic of what Brecht meant by epic theater. But the thing that kind of irked me about this essay, reading it, not that I care necessarily for writers to define things. In fact, I think it's kind of annoying when they do. But it seems like he was just at the beginning. When he talks about the epic theater, that first section, he's just saying what epic theater is not. He hints at it by saying, well, it's not this. But he's not very direct as he was like. When he talks about the dramatic and he's talking about the methods of construction, he says that in the dramatic, there's a strong centralization of the story, a momentum that drew the separate parts into a common relationship.

So you can infer from this that he's not interested in that aspect. And Benjamin also mentioned something. It was in section three, he says something along the lines of the epic theater is less interested in the end result and more interested in the different parts, a series of events, or like the process of it. Here it is. Epic theatre and tragic theater have very different kind of alliance with the passing of time, because the suspense concerns less the ending than the separate events. Epic theater can span very extensive periods of time, which makes complete sense.

That's how I've always thought of, like, an epic movie versus a non epic movie. But, yeah, I mean, I think that you can relate that quote that I read from Brecht about the strong centralization of the story and the momentum.

Yeah, well, one of the things in the Brecht essay somewhere is about how you should be able to break it into chunks, the epic theater, break it into episodes. And that a Member of the audience ought to be able to enter into the theater at any point and still get something out of it and still immediately be able to relate. So it's not this continual dramatic thing that needs to be observed as a whole. It can be. I think the word Benjamin was using was gestural. So that you can take it in these kind of discrete units that can be examined in and of themselves. And I was a little confused on that because I wasn't exactly sure. I mean, I see what you're saying as to how that relates to the epic, but I wasn't exactly sure on what the purpose of that is as far as Brecht's main goals.

Maybe this is more obvious to me from my knowledge of Brecht outside of this essay we read. But Brecht is a political director in the utmost sense. Very much opposed to the Third Reich and very much Marxist leaning director. And a lot of his themes emphasized. This is what I hear, at least. I don't know. I've never watched my knowledge of the Threepenny Opera stuff. Like, it's just the lyrics, the Mack the Knife or something, but they have nihilistic undertones or leanings, you know. And at some point he does mention something about the empathy where he's not interested in empathy. He wants there to be a contrast between what you're feeling and what's going on in the story as opposed to being empathetic with the characters.

That's the distancing effect, right? I mean, that's the big thing that seems like it's come out of Brecht and lasted all this time.

It's his alienation effect. It's at the end of the first section he says, that's great art. Nothing obvious in it. I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh. But yeah, yeah, so like that nihilistic stuff about, like writing about killers and stuff like that, which would have shocked audiences probably at the time. And today it's like we see this in rock music all the time, where you can't really. Yeah, the distancing aspect of it. But he never. That's the problem I had with his essays. He doesn't really. I wish he would give more examples.

So I've mentioned two problems that I have with the essay. One is that he's not very direct in like, defining things. He's just saying, oh, it's not this, it's not that. And the other is that he doesn't really give very specific examples. All he does is say Goethe's Faust and Byron's Manfred. And then he doesn't say exactly how. Those are epic theater, you know what I mean? Where Benjamin does a much better job at that.

Yeah. That's probably partly my fault for picking this out. It probably would have been better to do some sort of a play by him in addition to an essay like this. I didn't think about it because I thought it'd be more robust, but it wasn't, so. But there's Mother Courage and Her Children. That's the one I'm familiar with. And without going all through the plot of that, I heard this story about the way he wrote that, and it seemed like he was very involved in seeing the audience's reaction to the way he would stage that play and then adjusting the play according to what he was after from them afterwards and then restaging it in a different way.

So, like, from what I understand, if you go to read that play, there's so many different versions of it now. But what he was after, you know, was getting this character who was, I don't want to say neutral, but a character who would evoke a response, but would evoke a response that the audience had to decide about for themselves. So they couldn't just empathize and totally identify with this character of this mother whose children had been killed in the war, and she was. Was a merchant or something like that. And initially, when he wrote the play and first staged it, people were being too empathetic with her.

And so he made her more callous in later versions in order to get the audience to back off a little bit. And eventually, I guess it sounded like he got it to where he wanted it. And he was getting mixed reviews about whether or not they could tolerate her actions as moral, whether or not they could see her as a hero of some kind. And it seems like that's the kind of thing he's going for. He wants an audience that can decide for themselves upon seeing any work and is forced to decide about the moral implications so that nothing gets kind of buried under your consciousness.

Like, he talks about, like, the naturalistic stage a lot in the essay. And what I took that to be was, you know, a very realistic kind of stage where it's so close to, you know, I think of, like, the drawing room kind of sets and things like that, where it's so close to something you might run into in your everyday life that it kind of blends into the background of your mind, and you don't really question it, as, you know, you don't really See it as theater. You just take it for granted. And it seems like he's trying to bring everything about the theater up to the forefront.

So it's within the domain of consciousness and has to be examined from an aware state of mind by the audience.

Yeah, you're talking about. I think that's in the first section. I think he introduces that here when he starts talking about technology. There's a lot of other interesting essays that Brecht has to write on the topic of technology. Let me just read it. It says the possibility of projections, the greater adaptability of the stage due to mechanization. The film all completed the. The equipment and did so at the point where the most important transactions between people could no longer be shown simply by personifying the motive forces or subjecting the characters to invisible metaphysical powers.

And then following paragraphs is where he talks about the environment on the stage. I wasn't exactly clear what he meant here. I think he was referring to when he says that personifying the motive forces or subjecting the characters to invisible metaphysical powers. I think he's referring to the concept of. I think it's called pathetic fallacy, where the environment reflects the mood of the character. But I wasn't exactly clear, you know, how does that pertain to film? Maybe he's talking about the subjective shot in film. It wasn't clear to me what he was talking about.

And like projections. I didn't think that projections were a thing until, like, the 60s. Or maybe he's just talking about radio light projections.

I don't know.

Not like the fancy video projections that we have today.

I'm not sure how advanced those were. That's a good question.

But it's clear that technology is a central concern to him. I read another essay by him where he talks about the politics of the radio much the same way that we talk about the Internet today and the whole controversy with net neutrality. Basically, in his ideal world, he would want every station to be public access and have, like a ham radio for everybody. And that would be. The nation's form of mass broadcast is just from the roots up. And Benjamin also speaks about this, about how Brecht is constantly aware of the masses, whose conditioned use of the faculty of thought is surely covered by this formula.

His effort to make the audiences interested in theater as experts, not all for cultural reasons, is an expression of his political purpose. I think that's a really. Well, a good way to put Brecht's agenda with theater and also with radio and technology, those three things. But exactly how technology necessitates epic theater as a form isn't exactly clear to me. And I was reminded of all the people of Wagner who like did these sensationalists. He wanted to make a giant dragon and put that giant dragon into the. He would have these fantastical plans for his operas that were so crazy, required more technology than was.

Than technology was capable of, you know, and yet his things were very tactical oriented and which actually deterred Nietzsche from, you know, that Nietzsche was originally a fan of Wagner and then became not so much a fan because of these spectacle mass like these forms of entertainment for the masses, basically. And you know how Nietzsche is like the masses are just a bunch of dumb people, you know. But it's strange to me because it seems like Brecht here is wanting to employ technology and somehow reach the masses, but inform them, not just to entertain them, but to inform them.

Or am I wrong in that assessment?

I think you're totally right. But if I can, can I go back to that original passage that you mentioned? The possibility of projections, the greater adaptability of the stage due to mechanization. The film all completed the theater's equipment and did so at a point where the most important transactions between people could no longer be shown simply by personifying the motive forces or subjecting the characters to invisible metaphysical powers. So since you mentioned Nietzsche, I think maybe there's something there in a Nietzschean vein. If I take that inability to personify motive forces or subject characters to invisible metaphysical powers to be something like modernity or, you know, the death of God.

I mean, am I on the right track and thinking about that in that vein? Because what I think about when I think about his use of technology is maybe him thinking of it in a way that it relieves the actors from the responsibility to embody not just their characters, but the world itself and their environment. So the technology is now capable of. He talks about it being its own character. In some ways the technology can now take on the role of the environment in a much more versatile and effective kind of way. And the characters are free to then just be people within that world and it can do much more of its own kind of thing.

Like if you think about cavemen dancing around a campfire or something like that, you know, those actors have the responsibility of everything that's going to go on in that presentation. They have to be the one to act it out. You know, so they just. They have not just their characters, but they have the entire world that they have to create in order to make that presentation go off. If that makes any sense. But now the technology can do some of that for them. So they're free to be people just acting in a world and it can act on them. So the stage can now show these kinds of transactions in a way that allows people to just kind of be a little bit smaller and be kind of flowing along in a world that they no longer have to encompass all of, but they can be much more realistic in the way that they're subjected to powers more beyond their control.

Does that make any sense?

That sounded really good.

So I have nothing to add.

That was great.

42:56 Mark: All right, so thanks to Daniel Cole for giving us that clip and for helping us with not school for so long. Next up, we've got another group of mine that I felt obliged to pursue in light of our episode 113 on Jesus parables. This is on the historical Jesus. And to demonstrate that you don't have to have a discussion on a book, we actually just listened to a series of lectures posted on iTunes U by Stanford professor Thomas Sheehan. It features Michael Burgess, Terry Lee Bell, John Letters, Chris Iyer, and Benjamin Feddersen. For the first part of our discussion, we tried to figure out the extent to which Sheehan represents an academic consensus. And the part you're about to hear here is after that, where we try to give the outlines of his story about the evolution of the stories of Jesus by faith communities.

43:37 Unknown speaker: This is a good shift, I guess, to what I saw as the factual crux, that is the claim, a picture of how the Gospels were created, that we really don't know much historically about this figure at all, and that it is entirely reasonable to assume that what we have are these few maybe facts that there was a guy preaching this stuff. And you know, a very early tradition of here are sayings attributed to this person, whether it was even one person, maybe it wasn't one person, but it's just like we're in the same situations with Confucius or Buddha or something, that at least there's this core of sayings, you know, if you think it's worth acknowledging that there was such a person at all, then at least you could grasp onto that.

But then the crux of the historical story that he's presenting is that through then over the period of 50 years or so after the death of this person, that you get these traditions that record their rationalizations of the death of this person. It doesn't fit with the story that he would have been killed. So therefore it must have been something that's foretold and. And this rising Christology. So what do folks think of this overall? Picture this, to me was the big takeaway from here. And I found it utterly reasonable and explained a lot that I had as a kid.

Oh, well, Isaiah predicted that somebody like this would come along. And then I'd heard more recently, well, there were a lot of claimed messiahs at the time entirely because of the Isaiah predictions being so big in the Jewish culture at the time. And now I read here that in fact most of this stuff, what you would do as somebody in one of these traditions, given that there's no Internet, there's no newspapers, there's no real good ways of getting information, is you would study your sacred scriptures and use that to elaborate. Well, okay, then he's a martyr.

So it must be like the other Jewish martyrs in the tradition, according to Daniel and other books, that they are going to come back, they will be raised right to the right hand of God. And that this sort of method becomes then enhanced sort of by tall tales to become more and more, you know, he doesn't. Sheehan doesn't say. It's more and more outrageous. He doesn't say. But he becomes more and more literary and he really has a high literary praise for the Book of John, the sort of furthest removed from the historical death period.

Well, it rings for the non Americans in the room, I guess, but it rings very similar to the old cherry tree type of things about American founding fathers and attributing to them all of these weird events just to glorify them, like, you know, walking 10 miles to return 10 cents for someone who overpaid at a store or something like that, to take some characteristics of this individual that were well known and just elaborate on them in huge ways to create sort of a narrative about why they were so spectacular.

A mythic narrative and mythic biography. Now he was saying, like, you know, typically a generation after somebody, some hero has died, then you get all these things surrounding them.

You think of it.

Well, I was going to say Elvis, but other than his supposed continued existence after a fake death, there's nothing comparable there.

My uncle saw Ronald Reagan punch a bear in the face, you know, so things happen, man.

The real problem for someone trying to establish a historical Jesus as well is that once you subtract everything from the gospels that is clearly designed to fit into predictive narratives from the Hebrew Bible, you're left with actually very little. You're left a lot of the events, a lot of the decoration of the events, a lot of the crown of thorns, the whole Sort of symbolism, I

mean, everything but the crucifixion itself, I guess.

There's just so much in there that is trying to so obviously in some consciously fit in predicted bits from the Old Testament, especially Isaiah and Daniel. If you think all of that is right for subtraction, you're actually left with very little. So the problem is then if you wanted to go for a mythicist position, you'd have to say, what if the historical grounding of this person's life exists in these gospel narratives? And if these gospel narratives are so clearly in many places designed to fit prophetic predictions, what in these gospel narratives is historical?

Because I mean, Richard Carrier, who's a famous non establishment mythicist and who's not crazy conspiratorial mythicist like you know, zeitgeist films and things, he takes the Gospels to be euhemerizations, which is to say books written about divine beings that place them on the earth. Now if you were to look at the earliest texts by Jesus, which are, for example, Paul, almost all of them treat Jesus as having been resurrected by

that point and having been in heaven and being divine.

When Paul says he's spoken to Jesus, he means he's received revelation from heaven. So I don't want to get too sidetracked, but there is a big problem with just trying to untangle the Gospels from what is designed to meet literary and prophetic and agenda based interests and what is actually trying to be recorded as historical at all. What events are meant to be historical. And there's something that come out like the sword and the oil and bits and pieces because of the criterion of embarrassment. So actually some of the bits and pieces that are meant to be historical are even on the lowest rungs of what principles we should use when deciding these things. So it's a very complex affair.

I have to say, Michael, I'm very grateful that you were the first person to say the word euhemerization and not

me, because I was afraid I'd have

to broach this whole subject.

So thanks for, thanks for bringing that in.

Well, yes, I mean, I'm not convinced that they are.

I'm just saying that actually if you

compare a mythicist narrative of like a really respectable mythicist, very contemporary, respectable mythicist narrative of the Gospels and of the New Testament as a whole, you will find that a lot of the claims are exactly the claims, very surprisingly, that leading historical scholars will make. Like for example, when Paul talks about

the rulers of the world.

Yale said what Paul meant there was also demons and angels. He didn't just mean earthly powers like Rome. And the more and more you see

Paul as talking about a divine being

and non earthly powers, the more strange and peculiar the idea of a historical series of events given Paul. How strange that seems.

So not really making a point here. I'm just trying to complicate things.

But it is very difficult to separate out what the authors are trying to do from what the historical. From any historical motivations. I mean, people were talking about Josephus earlier and even as a quote unquote historian, he's just not very good. Like when he's describing the destruction of the second Temple, he says something like the ghosts banged the doors and the angels came down and the cows were lifted up and gave birth to rabbits or something. And he puts all that in the text as just part of the destruction of the second Temple, which is a historical event. So it's very difficult to even know where to begin and end with historical claims in these texts.

Yeah. Chris, I'm anxious to hear you jump

in on anything that we've been talking

about or something of your own perspective.

Right. Starting at the beginning, back to the Jesus seminar criteria. I'm not very fond of the criterion of dissimilarity as it's applied by them.

Can you remind me what that was? I don't remember.

Oh, yeah. If something's very similar to what people before him in that society were saying, it wasn't him. It's been interjected. And if it's very similar to what the Church was saying a century later, it isn't him because the Church has added it. The problem with that is that if you prove somebody else has written before, you've got nothing left. And I have definitely written those things. So you've got, for instance, the episode of him apparently talking about marriage. He comes down in favor of Shammai rather than Hillel, and you can see him coming down in favour of one of them.

And the fact that he elsewhere comes out with things that are more or less paraphrases of Hillel, such as what are the greatest commandments? Which Hillel did something like 40 years earlier on much the same basis, it's very likely that somebody is going to have been repeating things. If you prune out everything that he's absorbed from his society, you're going to get a very flat picture. That's one thing that strikes me. I don't like the Jesus seminar terribly much because of their voting system and the fact that most of the conservative Scholars self selected themselves out of it at a very early something which is more skeptical than I would prefer.

I think they're right with everything that's black, but an awful lot of the gray stuff should be pink, etc. The other thing is the mythicists. I take the point that Carrier actually has cred. But if you come down to Carrier's personal attitude, even he thinks that there was a historical person, that this had to be hung on, that it wasn't a complete fiction. My view on that is has tended to be that there were certainly plenty of other proto messiahs, people who vanished into his remainder catalog. Why was this one the one on which others made a religion?

I think there has to be something reasonably remarkable about him. My best bet on that one is that when it comes to the resurrection, there were understandable psychological reactions in some of the disciples which produced, at least in their minds, apparitions of a resurrected Christian. And I think that happened to quite a few of them and then that got decorated. Paul says there were 500. I think that's probably exaggerated, but I think there has to be something of that kind for that movement to take off at that point. So if you can say resurrection appearances as accounts of apparitions, they make much more sense at that point.

But you've got to regard them as the inner, inner workings of people's minds rather than anything further or more than that. And I read the whole thing as more history of thought than history of real events. In any event, I think the resurrection

mark made a good point about mentioning that a lot of writings might have been writing, you know, creating a history that would correspond to earlier prophecies as well. So. Yeah, whether or not that they were imagined or, you know, I don't know, you didn't quite say hallucination, but it could have just been back writing, creating an event to have it fit with earlier predictions as well.

Not.

That means that what you said isn't exactly what happened.

There isn't actually any previous Jewish warrant for a physical resurrection happened to anybody.

But never mind.

Well, but that's. Yeah, so that's one of the points that Sheehan makes, is that he thinks that Paul, for instance, is not talking about a physical resurrection, that he's talking about more in line with the tradition that this is something that is not until Luke or something, you know, until after the temple destruction.

That.

Yeah. So this linguistic point that the word that would have corresponded to resurrection is not actually the Greek word used, it's awakening and that that was something that was very fixed in the tradition.

See, now that makes it very odd though, doesn't it? I mean, if Paul is not thinking of a physical resurrection and the gospel writers are writing about a physical resurrection, you've got two communities of people, both with a different idea of the events that precede them. What happened 30 years ago to Paul? What happened? Well, a bit more, let's say what happened 30, 40 years ago in Paul's mind. Not the physical resurrection of Jesus. What happened 60 years ago in Luke's mind, the physical resurrection of Jesus. Are we talking about historical person then? Because I think we are. Let me just say that I think on balance we are. But it's so extremely peculiar that in the minds of one person who's writing about it, there is no physical resurrection. Certainly. Well, just not just in Paul, but probably. Maybe even some other people.

Hebrews, for example.

Yes, but in the minds of the gospel writers, there is a such a resurrection. So are the gospel writers writing history at this point, or are they giving you a sort of literary narrative of the story of a person's life, A faith interpretation?

Yeah, the Sheehan said, actually we're being stupid in thinking that they thought they were writing a history, that they didn't think that at all.

Yeah, that's not how history was written at the time. I mean, history, you know, until very recently, was written to create a narrative about what should and should not be. I think that's fairly well known. So there's no reason to think that they were trying to write a textbook.

Yeah, well, I think one of the

most amusing ironies to give to literalists is that none of the authors of the New Testament were literalists. If you look at Paul's interpretation of the Old Testament, if you look at any of their interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, they're all crazy.

Paul's interpretation of Sarah and Hagar as

being the mother, two mothers of Jerusalem on earth and Jerusalem on heaven, that's just not at all in any potential possible region of the story in the Old Testament. What that's about couldn't possibly be. It even sound crazy to people listening to Paul, no doubt. And yet Paul's doing it. I mean, even Jesus himself was quoting things. He's quoting allegory. So that said, did Paul, when writing Romans or writing Colossians or something, think of himself as writing scripture? That is something liable to him being interpreted that way? I don't think so. So on the one hand, we can say the writers of the. The Gospels probably weren't writing history in their own minds.

But on the other hand. So I don't think we can say

of Paul's letters, for example, that he was doing something the same. I think he was writing what he was thinking at the time.

57:57 Mark: So that was a very fun discussion. My interest in the topic came out of our philosophical exploration. Even though the lectures we listened to were not from a philosophy department, they were philosophy adjacent. So even if the idea of reading some straight up philosophy is intimidating to you, you could, as we've seen, talk about a novel, about plays, we've had groups on movies, we had a group on a graphic novel Logicomix. But maybe one of the best reasons to have a not school group is to solidify and develop your understanding of something that was already covered on a Partially Examined Life episode.

In fact, you could just listen to a bunch of Partially Examined Life episodes and use not School to sync up with other people to further your understanding of the topics we covered there. The clip you're about to hear grew out of one of our episodes, number 20 on pragmatism, where David Prentiss, Tim Clark, and Peter Oppenheim decided to read for themselves one of the essays they heard us discussing. This is right near the beginning of their talk. Let's see what they made of the essay.

58:47 Unknown speaker: Thanks for joining us. For the first hangout of the C.S. Peirce group, we're going to be talking about his essay the Fixation of Belief. My name's David Prentice, I work at the University of Maryland and I Live in Washington, D.C. i'm Tim Clark and

I'm at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada.

I'm Peter, I live in Napa, California. I first was introduced to Peirce in grad school, although I never really read him. He was a recommendation to me from a professor on a class about rhetoric, and he was like, you know, if you really want to get deep into rhetoric, you're really going to want to tackle some of the thought and writing of the pragmatists because of how influential they are to that discipline. So that's really kind of what motivated me to come and check this out.

So I think at the beginning of the essay he talks a little bit about reason and he goes over some examples from the history of science. And I think I will skip over that summary wise and go straight to he posits doubt, which in a definition that he doesn't really care for, he says is irritation in the absence of a fixed belief of about something as opposed to belief, which is the absence of doubt. And also belief is a motivation for us to take further action. He also posits an activity, I think he means to adopt the common sense definition of inquiry to be any activities directed at ending our doubt about something and fixing our belief.

He identifies four methods for the fixation of belief in order. There's tenacity, which is deciding that we're going to believe something and doing our best to do it by force of will. And then, let's see, there's authority, which is I guess, similar to tenacity in that it's the state deciding or some authority deciding what you will believe. There's a priori, which is kind of like using reason to start from first principles and develop some beliefs out of, from deduction. And then science, which he states implicitly, is what he wants to go on to explain.

And he suggests that science has some special properties that set it apart from the other three methods.

I was interested with the a priori method in particular because it seems to be the part where he makes the transition between the first two methods, which I think at least implicitly for Peirce, are less useful, although he will say it at the end that they have their own specific uses, but where he begins to kind of fill in that sketch toward the scientific method. So I got the sense when he was describing the a priori method that, yeah, he had in mind either a kind of philosophical rationalism or almost a kind of Kantian transcendentalism, like making gestures toward that which is necessarily true by the structure of belief or by the structure of a particular problem rather than by one's individual belief.

So it seems like that's the point in that kind of four part breakdown of the methods that is trying to expand into a kind of, I guess, I mean, it seems like the positive kind of turn as opposed to these first two methods of belief, which are almost, I suppose they're not quite negative. But I mean, in the method of tenacity, you have a kind of willed belief or you will what you believe to be true at the expense of any other possibilities. And in the method of authority, there's already a very firm kind of limiting factor in the state or the authority or whatever that authority actually happens to be.

So I thought that his description of the a priori method was kind of interesting in that sense. And I'm kind of interested in exploring how he moves from there into the method of science.

On what page did you guys find his discussion of the a priori method?

Let's see. I suppose I'm well poised to answer that question since we have the same edition. He calls it a Priori on page 17. If I'm using the a priori method to fix beliefs, I'll start with a certain set of principles and I'll reach a particular conclusion. And that might be the only way that it can work for me. But if one of you try to answer the same question, you could start with different principles. And even though you're guaranteed to arrive at some particular solution, there's no reason it should be the same as mine. That's how I took his critique of the a priori method. You know, it's just a short essay. He doesn't really go too deep into this stuff. But it seems to me that if that's a serious criticism of reasoning as a way to truth, it seems like it might also apply to the scientific method of fixation of belief as well.

Yeah, it seems like in the a priori method, it's almost as though the critique is wide enough to include a lot of what we think of as kind of traditional metaphysical models or systems, which I guess, as you say, he's attacking on the grounds that they are essentially beginning from something that is rather peculiar to each system and building off of that. But there is no principle to determine what is necessary to be the first object for any of those metaphysical systems and. Right, yeah, Peirce doesn't quite say that, but I think he's implying it in a lot of ways. And it's a strange little essay in that sense. Like I found a lot of places where I was trying to figure out what Peirce was actually saying.

Yeah, he's really trying to get to science. He's like, let's get this out of the way and get to science.

Yeah, there's a lot of compression here,

I think it seems like from what I understand this section on page 17, the a priori method to go along with what you're saying, Tim, about the metaphysical. It seems that his project is very results focused as well as methodology in a very materialistic sense, I guess you could say. Right. Like the a priori method is just. I'm going to say it out loud and define it just so I can better understand it.

Go for it.

It's knowledge that is at hand independent from experience. Is that correct? Is that what your understanding is of the a priori method? It's kind of like what you're saying, David, is starting with first principles. But these first principles are so well grounded in or so well founded that they are indicative of what you're saying, Tim, is that metaphysical knowledge Right. It's kind of almost anti investigative. Am I representing that correctly to you guys, the way that you understand it?

Yeah, I think so. There's certainly a sense there. I think he describes at one point, and I guess I'm using a different edition, so I apologize for the kind of flipping around here. He says at one point about the a priori method, that it arises from this situation where the shock of opinion soon leads men to rest on preferences of a far more universal nature. And it seems as though it's a means almost of extinguishing the specificity of experience or trying to abstract out of experience to these supposedly universal, I guess, common threads between various experiences.

He seems to be criticizing it on the grounds of certain authoritarianism which he finds problematic in the Method. He says on that page 17 of the edition that, and this is a part that you've already read, this method, therefore does not differ in a very essential way from that of authority. And then two pages later, on page 19, he goes, so with the a priori method, the very essence of it is to think, think as one is inclined to think. So it seems very like just kind of whatever BS comes to mind, whatever you think is right is right. Or the flip side from the earlier passage, it seems like he's saying that this is really just appeal to authority. Like somebody in power would say, trust me, I know this is just, you know, this is the truth. Therefore you just need to know that this is the truth. And just take my word on it. Like that. Appeal to authority.

Yeah.

He mentions, not far from what you read, that the practitioner starts with those ideas which are agreeable to reason. And I think the. The kernel of his critique is that one would start with ideas that are agreeable to reason. Is the downfall there is that you're picking premises that make it easy for you to draw a conclusion which is sadly removed from, or might be removed from the truth. So, yeah, he uses the example of, I think it was Plato just making some assumptions about the ratios of celestial distances or something.

Yeah.

Plato, for example, finds it agreeable to reason that the distances of the celestial spheres from another should be proportional to the different lengths of strings which produce harmonious chords. And then he goes on to suggest that other philosophers, astronomers who started at a different point, that was agreeable to them. So anyway, I think we've probably gone into as much detail as Peirce did criticizing that particular method. I find it interesting that he seems to spend as much time convincing us that he doesn't mean to badmouth these methods that they have their place. There's one quote in particular in reference to the method of authority. He says, if liberty of speech is to be untrammeled from the grosser forms of constraint, uniformity of opinion will be secured by a moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its thorough approval.

I love that line.

Yeah. In addition to just seeming instantly true, I mean, just from listening to the way people talk and shaming each other for this, that and the other idea. I think he's trying to make the point that even. Even if an established authority doesn't limit speech and the flow of ideas, we have society to do that for us in a sort of de facto taboos and de facto morality that limits what can be believed. Yeah.

It seems very important to him that these are all. There's always a tension, I think, as he's trying to describe these methods, especially in this section where he starts talking about the flaws and benefits of the first three methods as opposed to the last method, that he's trying very hard not to discount them, even though it seems sometimes that he gives these rather thin reasons for admiring certain methods of belief. I forget where, but at one point it seems like he makes this move of saying that the method of tenacity is admirable because it's so tenacious. Or something along those lines.

I don't know enough about Peirce. I'm assuming this essay comes earlier in his career, maybe before he had achieved founder of pragmatism status. So when I say it starts to have some kernel of pragmatism, it could just be my understanding, not actually. You know, Peirce could already have his idea well formed. I wouldn't know, but I started to see anyway the kernel of the pragmatist move, where I guess he wants to say during the section on science, I think that. That science is something more like the truth. But we'll probably end up talking at length about the scientific method.

1:09:44 Mark: I'm back here with Nathan. Can you tell us about what's coming up? We're about to hit November. This is the prime part of the month for people to propose new groups, tell us what's going on.

1:09:53 Nathan: There are several new groups and topics for discussion by other members in the Citizens Forum. You may be interested in Georg Lukács's the Theory of the Novel or Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, or maybe Judith Butler's chapter in Contingency, Hegemony and Universality. You can also propose your own topic or group in the Citizens Forum. If you have any questions about Not School, you can contact me. That's Nathan@PartiallyExaminedLife.com.

1:10:20 Mark: all right, so we got one more for you. We're going to return to the philosophical fiction group. Nathan, why don't you tell us about what they're about to hear?

1:10:27 Nathan: All right. This was our conversation on the Fall by Albert Camus. In this, you'll hear Laura, Mary, Cesari, Daniel and myself talking about the novel. It follows Jean-Baptiste Clamence at his time at a bar where he professes his life and crimes in the hopes of finding a friend and showing the person what their lives are through his confession. It's the portrait as a mirror, as set up in the book. It's a really interesting novel and we had a good time discussing it.

1:11:00 Unknown speaker: He has a line on 25. Living aloft is still the only way of being seen and hailed by the largest number.

I love that.

I wrote that one down, too. There was something that he said on page six that, you know, started off,

oh, I love that one.

I know where you're going.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the paper. And I thought about that. It's like, yep, we fucking. We gossip. That's like.

But it's one. It's interesting to think what Camus, why he wrote that. I mean, what was in his mind at that moment writing that? I mean, it's fascinating.

Well, and I think that that's that simple line right there with fornication and the papers is brought up later in maybe the fourth day or the third day, he talks about the dynamic that drove him in his life. There is a line where he said, I'm ashamed to say, but if I had been given 10 conversations with Einstein, I would have thrown them away for a pretty.

A woman.

I know.

However, he goes on to say, but if I had spent 10 days with that girl, I would be dying for a conversation with Einstein.

We are changeable, funny.

So, I mean, I think that I just want to put this in, like, stake in the ground. I think that the. The real. The real, like the joke or the punchline or the twist of the story is how he so carefully sets you up to. It's, It's. It's almost like. It's almost like a villain or something. Like this is like a grand plan that he has to lure in with his confessions and get everyone to see this is his role that he's defined at the beginning the judge, penitent. He's not just judging. He's not just getting up and saying, you people, you people. He's like a comedian in this way. He gets up and he says, this is me. And if you happen to see yourself in this, well, that's all the better.

Yeah, he says.

He, like, he.

He goes to the bar to have people confess to him after, like, mentions at one point, after they're drunk, they, like, fall on the ground crying.

Yeah, yeah. Part of that, that I really liked, because he's not really accusing himself, but accusing all of mankind. And this, I think, really plays into that. The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. So he doesn't even bring himself into it. But if you. If you consider yourself intelligent, you know, you have to actually take that in and say, huh, would I do that? Would I want to do that? You know?

Well, and then the anecdote he gives about the stoplight, I mean, I think everybody could see themselves in that. And the thing that he wanted above all was not, you know, it wasn't just, like, him. I mean, he. So he pulls up to the stoplight. There's a guy on a motorcycle, and the motorcycle stalling and the light turns green. And he's saying, get out of the way. And the guy's like, fuck you. And everyone behind him starts blaring their horns. And so he gets out of his car and is like, hey, excuse me, can you get out of the way? And another motorist comes up and is going to stop him from interacting.

And whenever he turns to address that guy, the motorcycle guy punches him in the head and drives off. And then he turns and the motorcycle guy's gone. And all the cars are honking their horn at him. And, like, now he's the asshole and he has to get back in his car. And he's thinking that the only thing I want to do is catch up with this guy on the motorcycle and put him against the curb and, you know, just make it right. In some way, he wanted to come, to be vindicated. He wanted to be completely dominant. And dominant comes up quite a few times in this.

And I wonder about that word. He talks about it again with islands. He says that he enjoys the small islands because they're easy to dominate.

Yeah.

And I think in that way he's meaning also dominion and perspective. There's something that I'm trying to tie in here that he talks about earlier. He says that if he was being Honest. He wants the world to be waiting for him on the back burner. That whenever he wants to call a friend, he wants them to be there. He wants everybody to stop what they're doing for him. In short, he wants the world to exist for him.

There's actually a line. I think it might tie into this. On page 68, he says, I could live happily only on the condition that all individuals on Earth, or the greatest possible number, return towards me eternally in suspense, devoid of independent life and ready to answer my call at any moment. Doomed, in short, to sterility until the day I should deign to favor them. In short, for me to live happily. It was essential. For the creatures I chose. Chose not to live at all. They must receive their life sporadically.

Only at my bidding.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's the line.

At what page does the woman fall into the Seine? Do you remember?

I don't have that.

Because you're saying, right, Nathan, that it was. What we see is a change at that point and before the fall and after the fall.

Yeah.

No pun intended. I think.

I think you can see. You can. I mean, it. It's. You know, probably despite the fact that he got so much enjoyment out of being generous, he could still feel like he was on the. That he was being good or that he had. He was on the road to goodness. But in that act, in ignoring that, he. He couldn't lie about it anymore. He had to, you know, because there wasn't. There was.

Go ahead in.

In ignoring her. That was a. That was a definite act.

Yeah. Because it's not just that he saw someone jump off of a bridge, the way it's set up. And just thinking back to it, he sees this woman late at night, staring over the edge of the bridge. And he walks past her. And it's not until he's passed that he hears just a horrible sound of the body hitting the water. And then he hears screams going downstream. And he does not jump in the water.

Water.

And he does not go and save her. And this haunts him to where later, he's having a great night. And he's about to. Next to the river. This is later. Smoke a cigarette of satisfaction. When he hears a laugh from the river. And it sends, like, a chill through him. And the laugh disappears down the stream. And he's haunted by that real loneliness. And so if you go back to before he even mentioned the. This in the first section, that first day he's talking. He says something that I thought was just really staggering about friendships. And he's saying you want your friends to be there for you and you hope that they'll call on the night whenever you're considering your suicide, but they never do.

They call in the day whenever you're happy and busy, or they just miss it. And to me, he's as much as showing a mirror to other people. At the end of the story, he sees in that woman a mirror of himself and is terrified by that desolation that she encountered and. Sees what it would be like to feel that way and to die and to shout out and for no one to come for him either.

In other words, she was calling and he didn't answer.

I mean, the Seine is not a little stream that you jump into, save somebody from either. I mean, it's really not, you know, they're both going to die. He talks about how quickly the water was running that night and stuff like that. That's the other thing, is that I won't. I mean, it wasn't just, I won't save you. It was, I won't die for you, all of my generosity. I'm not Christ. I am not going to die for your sins or for your sorrow or anything else. I'm not going to try and save you because it'll kill me.

Yeah, and we should talk about Christ in a second. But the last line of the book deals just with this woman and the idea of going back. And Laura quoted the majority up to it. But then there's this, oh, young woman, throw yourself in the water again so that I may have a second time, the chance to save both of us. And then the very end is. Just suppose, though, that we should be taken literally. We'd have to go through with it. And brr, the water is so cold. But let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately.

Yeah, the last line, I thought of that.

Fortunately.

I remember I looked at that word and I thought, what is he saying? Why fortunately? Why not? Unfortunately.

But is he telling himself that he'll get it next time?

Well, that there won't be a next time. So he's happy. And this goes back to what he was saying about friends and death. You know, it's like, oh, we love our friends, but, you know, the friends we love more are the ones that are dead.

They don't impose on you.

And he was like, I had an ex and that ex died. And immediately in my heart there was a place for her in a way that there wouldn't have been even if she was still Alive when we were talking. And there's a way in which the finality of death instantly cements something or aggrandizes, romanticizes, yet it's cut off. And so at the end here, you know, I can imagine going back, but imagine if we could, you know, that would be really tough, but we can't absorb. So that's a fortunate thing there. But that fortunate is. That's a lingering line there. It's terrifying. And it's.

So he's saying that he can keep the thought in mind that now that he's thought about it, if he were to go back, even though that's impossible, he handled the situation correctly, I think

that he would, but he can't, you know, so it's easy to romanticize yourself and think that you can. So maybe I'm left with that, I think is what he's saying.

Go ahead.

The situation just reminds me of. I think I recently read no country for Old Men. And the sheriff there, he spends his entire life doing good deeds, but he regrets the fact that he let his comrades die back in the war. Nothing he does, no matter how noble and good a life he lives, he can't go back to that moment and die with his friends or fix that scenario in the same sense that this guy living his entire life thinking about this one moment where he, you know, he was supposed to put his money where his mouth is and he was found wanting.

Well, I mean, imagine if someone's about to die right in front of you and you do nothing. I mean, you hear, you know it's going to happen and you do nothing. I mean, you actively do nothing.

Yeah.

Isn't that the Phil Collins song? Isn't that the myth behind one of those really popular songs that a singer saw a woman drowning and didn't do anything, but then saw her later? This is off text. There's a really popular song. And I've heard, and this might be a myth, but it serves the point well that a guy. And this is actually a good twist of the story, a guy sees or hears a woman drowning, sees her, I guess, and doesn't do anything. And then later sees her not as a ghost, but she made it out, and he's, you know, kind of left with, oh, man, I really didn't do the right thing.

Yeah, but she made it out. That's another weird thought.

Well, even in the book, doesn't he say or no, he avoided reading the newspapers as to not. As to not get the report.

Yeah, yeah. As for that, I didn't read the newspapers per day.

1:23:51 Mark: Yeah, that and a million other things we would love to get to on the Partially Examined Life podcast proper, but we only have a finite amount of time. But with the many people that can and should join this, these discussions can multiply. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode and I hope you go to partiallyexaminedlife.com and check out the not School offerings. You can read introduction, a little more of what it's about. And even if you decide not to participate, signing up for a membership means you get access, of course, to the ad Free episodes. You get access to all those episodes that are no longer on the public feed, those vintage episodes, and you get to listen to all the discussions that you've heard clips of here today and many, many more.

1:24:33 Wes: Hey, this is Wes Alwan. You may or may not know that the Partially Examined Life is not just a philosophy podcast, it's also a blog. If you're a writer and you'd like to blog for us or submit essays related to philosophy, culture and ideas, Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com write all right, as

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1:25:35 Unknown speaker: That's it.

1:25:36 Mark: All the bonus content and ad free versions of all the regular episodes will be available to you with no further fuss. Thanks to Nathan, our not school administrator for joining me for this. Nathan, do you have any last words?

1:25:48 Nathan: Yeah, just It's a great environment for people to meet. I've over the past couple of years met people that have come and gone and some people that have stayed around and I've been happy to know all of them. It's been a great opportunity to expand what I thought I knew a lot about as fiction. But you learn more when everybody comes in and has their own suggestions, recommendations, thoughts and perspectives. It's been better than a lot of the conversations I've had in schools over the past years and I've gotten a lot out of it. So I really think that people should take advantage of the community of like minded folks and similar interests. It's just been great.

1:26:24 Mark: All right, good night everybody, and thanks for listening.

1:26:48 Unknown speaker: It.

Sa.