Episode 182: Reflections on PEL 2017 (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for living, but then thought better of it. Episode 182 is a freeform look back on 2017, a state of the podcast. Check in where we can discuss things we didn't get to, topics we'd like to delve into further and other items of miscellaney. This is Mark Linsenmayer sitting Twix drum set. An undated child's drawing of Zen man in my basement in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:26 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, half submerged in the split level basement office in Austin, Texas.

0:32 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:35 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey before Three Apples in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:39 Wes: Three Apples.

0:40 Dylan: I have a little painting that I've always liked that I bought when I lived in Easton, Maryland, of three apples, two Granny Smiths and a red one, and a still life. I learned then that somehow I really liked still lifes. I never knew that.

0:55 Seth: Two Granny Smiths and a red one.

0:57 Dylan: And a red one.

0:58 Seth: Is it a Red Delicious? Is it a.

1:00 Dylan: It is definitely not a Red Delicious, but it's hard for me to tell because Granny Smiths are so iconic.

1:04 Wes: Right?

1:04 Dylan: They're all green, but, you know, the red ones are tougher to tell. It looks like it might be a gala or Jonagold on the side, but I wouldn't swear by it.

1:14 Mark: So, Wes, you're not going to share anything about your environment? Tell us where you are right now.

1:19 Wes: In my room, there's nothing.

1:22 Mark: You have no landmark. I'm beginning to think you're actually an AI, that you're not in a room at all.

1:27 Wes: That's right.

1:28 Mark: I haven't seen you in quite a while.

1:30 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in the Cloud in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:35 Mark: So let's start this on a highly informative note. That's my suggestion. I don't have a piece of information I especially want to start with.

1:50 Wes: This is the kind of witty banter that has made us famous.

1:56 Seth: Perhaps we should begin with a review of the topics we covered this past year.

2:02 Wes: So what was your favorite podcast we did this year, Seth?

2:05 Seth: My favorite podcast was Spinoza on Biblical Criticism. I enjoyed the Society of the Spectacle, the Baldwin Readings, and the Rorty. But I guess Spinoza is probably dearest to my heart. It actually is. One of the things that came up when I was looking at the year in review was how our agenda this year was shaped in many respects by external factors. I mean, I think we're becoming more and more driven by political and social events, but with a healthy dose of traditional good old philosophy. And this year, when I looked back at our list of what we had actually covered, Spinoza, I think, is probably the most solidly situated in the Western tradition. It definitely seems like the trajectory this year was dictated by what was happening externally, which is maybe a commentary itself on the nature of philosophy being somehow abstracted from the moment and ahistorical.

3:06 Wes: What do you mean by Spinoza being the most situated in the tradition? And then what do you mean by determined by external factors?

3:15 Seth: Determined by external factors was that we started the year off after the election of Trump in the United States. And that dictated, in many respects, we had a freeform political discussion. We had Rorty, we had Orwell, we had Baldwin, we had white privilege, we had Society of the spectacle. So there was a sense in which the beginning of the year, especially the topics that we chose and what we chose to read, was dictated by external factors, or at least influenced. How's that sound? And then Spinoza being situated in the traditional Western philosophical tradition, we read Confucius, Boethius, Orwell, an episode on Dr.

Drew, Native American philosophy, we read Adam Smith, we did an episode on Blade Runner. And so thinking about a charter of the traditional philosophical subjects, you know, the usual suspects. Spinoza is very solidly in the middle of what is traditionally considered the canon, as opposed to the things that we covered this year as a philosophy podcast.

4:20 Wes: Well, we definitely moved into different areas, more politics and more film. But I think some of that was just driven by our interest. I'm not so sure. So, for me, it wasn't about Trump getting elected or the political climate in the country that I wanted to do that stuff. I just wanted to branch out into those areas. The Spinoza part I have to think about. We've done some other seminal stuff, Nietzsche and Smith and all that.

4:44 Mark: There are three things that happen. One is just because we've gradually gotten through a lot of the seminal, essential philosophical works, I feel like we're a little more open to things that are philosophy adjacent but historically vital. So even just starting with the Tocqueville on election time, that was specifically time to.

5:05 Wes: Yes, that's true.

5:06 Mark: To meet up with that. And then doing the Darwin, even doing the Spinoza itself, because so much of it was about biblical criticism, which is something that three or four years ago, I probably would have pooh poohed, and probably did. The Ethics is so much more straightforwardly philosophical. So a book like wealth of nations or Darwin's the Origin of Species, or even the one that we just did on Arendt. These are fat books that are not laid out. It's not like reading a tight philosophical argument. It's a matter of approaching these idea filled texts and trying to figure out what philosophically can we take from those. Now that we're open to that, there are many, many other possibilities as well.

5:45 Dylan: I've always thought that that was what we always were supposed to be doing, and I guess maybe I just misunderstood. I always felt like as a philosophy podcast, it was philosophically reading things or keeping in mind philosophy, or a certain kind of disposition with respect to reading texts that were worth reading or processing things that were worth processing, as opposed to reading treatises that were self consciously about philosophy. I mean, of course we do a lot of that stuff and I think there's all the right reasons to do it. But I always felt like calling ourselves a philosophy podcast and that we just always had a strong streak of doing that, of examining things as opposed to worrying too much about whether it was philosophically thick enough.

6:38 Wes: Yeah, I share that. I think that's kind of a St. John's influence.

6:42 Dylan: Well, maybe that's true.

6:44 Wes: You know. Yeah, there's seminar and you read everything and there's almost a sort of prejudice against making these distinctions and just reading what's worthy and talking about it. If you're doing it reflectively, then in some sense there's a philosophical element to that. But that's one of the reasons why I like pushing out into other areas, including film. I think it's just as good a basis for what we do as a traditional philosophical text.

7:10 Dylan: Well, and often even better. Right. Because those kinds of texts don't always, but can often have lines of thinking and tendrils that if incomplete, lead to a lot of good thinking. And that's one of the things that I think that we also do on the podcast that maybe was fanned a little bit by having such a diversity of topics is doing thinking on the podcast as opposed to being self consciously pedagogical or trying to spread the word about philosophy or something like that. That's something I've thought that we've always done, and maybe I've just gravitated to filtering the compliments that we get on those terms.

Right. The ones that talk about how they were prompted to think about something or had engaged with either a text or an idea in a way that they hadn't before. From our fans. I take that to be a compliment. Less about our pedagogical explanation of something and More about the way in which we openly think and talk about the books that we're reading or the films that we've watched.

8:15 Mark: I guess I don't agree that the not straightforwardly philosophy episodes are better in terms of thinking. In fact, I see them as pretty self consciously supplementary. So like one of our best loved episodes, our no country for Old Men episode, where we first got into this, to me, that is almost entirely parasitic on the fact that we had already covered some existentialism and we covered Nietzsche and it was a way of making these ideas that we've already talked about in some other way more concrete. So it's the same, you know, we did Dostoevsky's the Idiot this year. And yes, Dostoevsky's flavor of existentialism is not quite the same as Jasper's or Heidegger's or Nietzsche's or Sartre's or de Beauvoir's or Levinas' if you want to count him, or Bubers. So it's adding something new, but I wouldn't use that as the introduction.

9:06 Wes: Mark, did you take any lit crit, just straightforward litcrit classes in college? No, I'm just curious because you could read the text without ever self consciously appealing to some philosophical theory, right? You could read and have a conversation

9:19 Dylan: about the text and you could talk about existentialism.

9:23 Wes: Yeah, I mean, there'd be a ton to talk about in Dostoevsky without ever appealing to existentialism directly.

9:29 Dylan: And I would double down on that and say that you could spend a lot of time talking about existentialism without using the word existentialism and not even know you're talking about it having read the Idiot.

9:39 Mark: So I guess I had an experience in high school and early college taking not philosophy courses like my Great Books of the Far east course and my classic Civilizations course, where I felt like it was almost too easy that you could get an A on any essay by just kind of saying anything the least bit insightful. Whereas for philosophy there was actually more or less a right answer. Not a specific thing that you had to put down, but a more specific method, a more specific kind of analysis that would filter out just, you know, intellectual bullshitting.

No, something. Here's something I've been using from really determined thinking. And so that's one of the things that attracted me to philosophy and making me feel like rather than trying to figure out from a book like Brave New World, which is one that we'll probably do coming up here, but that's one of the first ones you Know, back in the day when I read that in high school, where I felt like, yeah, I would rather have the essay that boils down the philosophical point than this roundabout way of talking about it. Just. Just because the philosophical issue is what I was most interested in.

If I was really interested in, you know, I don't do that on my music podcast because I'm interested in the craft of music. I'm a little less interested in how exactly does the author use symbolism to convey, blah, blah, blah. The kind of things that I would talk about in high school English class that just had less immediate appeal to me. I had less feeling when I was writing in that vein that I was actually discovering something, that I was onto something really elating.

11:15 Wes: Yeah, I think that's the difference. So someone like me, I like the bullshitting, I like the intellectual. I like essays and more freeform. Not just the end result, but reading literature as literature, even though we sort of. I remember people at St. John's who I think they had transferred from other colleges and probably had taken real lit crit classes, and they thought what we did was kind of at St. John's was not what they were used to. Our literature seminars were more. Ended up being philosophy of literature classes without appealing directly, necessarily to philosophical texts, but appealing to any of the texts that we. The different texts we had read at St. John's in any different subject. We were always trying to relate all of them.

11:59 Dylan: They were all in the shadow of Socrates.

12:01 Wes: Yeah. I remember another student saying, this is ridiculous. You guys here never read literature as literature. So maybe that's not exactly what I'm talking about. I'm just thinking of close readings of texts, and it might be a very different. At least now, especially different experience in the English department reading, say, Dostoevsky, where you'd spend a lot of time on historical background, or. I mean, it depends on the leaning of the department, but also on maybe hardcore literary theory. And a lot of that is very socially conscious stuff. So anyway, what's important is that we still don't even agree on the format of the podcast. I think that's the important lesson. If we come to that agreement by the very end of the journey, then maybe that'll be something.

12:46 Dylan: There's a live tension, maybe part of it, you see, in the variety of texts we pick. You know, everybody is making suggestions, right. And we come to a kind of group agreement on what to do, but we're pretty flexible on that. We're pretty open to doing stuff, especially if it's interesting.

13:04 Wes: Yeah. Someone actually asked me how we pick what text is going to be next. And I said, well, we just sort of, you know, we have a list, you know, we have a little bit of a discussion. It depends on who's, you know, someone might be very passionate about doing something at a given point and that it's kind of very organic and relaxed and it doesn't. There's not this very formal process and that surprised them. It's not like we make a list of, okay, these are all the great works of philosophy and we must hit these ones. And, you know, we prioritize them and this and that. That's just not how it works. It's more about the same sort of process you'd go through when you were deciding which book to pick up off your shelf to read and enjoy.

13:43 Dylan: That's one of my most favorite things about the way we pick topics is we let the things that we've been working on most recently educate what we're going to do next. And we do have these little streaks of topics. And I really like the fact that we're open to extending a topic or sometimes cutting it short based upon how we're liking it. I mean, the next one is a perfect example. We were going to do one episode on free speech and liberty in general, and then we said, well, why don't we do On Liberty on its own? And then followed up with another podcast doing some other stuff, mainly because we were finding it interesting.

14:21 Seth: Well, that was my point, was not to say, you know, that I want to only study strictly technically philosophical things and recreate, you know, several hundred years of traditional university education on this podcast. My point was that just like Dylan said, we're. We were influenced by the zeitgeist to take our topics and our discussion a certain direction this year. And that's all that struck me was that part of the thing that we have to recognize is that we experience this podcast linearly in time and that there's a small subset of people that do as well.

But we're creating a kind of green field of content around philosophical topics that people can dip into constantly. And that they do. Right. I mean, we still get in a tremendous amount of traffic on older episodes, 6 years old, 5 years old, 7 years old. And so the more in which we're influenced by topical things to cover, let's just say zeitgeist driven subjects, the more we have to make sure that we balance the fact that we're motivated to cover these topics now or these subjects now with the kind of approach that we take what it is, as Dylan said earlier, that makes us attractive to people, which is the open approach to it, the discussion, so on and so forth.

Does that even make sense to you?

15:47 Mark: Yeah, I mean, for me, so many of our topics are ones that have been hanging out for years that I feel like we just haven't gotten to this yet. And that's why, you know, like I was saying, like James, psychology is another one. It's not straight ahead philosophy, and it's a really long book. And so I think that's not something that when we started out the podcast, we would have wanted to do that. It was much. It made much more sense to read Pragmatism, the small book, to read essays by people. And so I think a couple years ago we decided we could do something like Augustine's Confessions and do two straight episodes on it and not just do a chunk of it.

Whereas, like when we tried to do Being in Time Long ago, well, we just picked, hey, we're going to do the very beginning and people still want us to go back and do more Being in Time. Maybe we'll do that just like we did for Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. So I think our appetites have enlarged. We figured out a way that we can cover longer books and these longer books that are not primarily philosophy, because of our format, we really can have a single session or two sessions and do okay with them. There are other things, even in what we pick to read about the wealth of nations that we were talking about, like that we could have had a further session on.

And doing that second session with Russ Roberts fulfilled some of that. But that didn't get us to look at the sections that we didn't talk about so much the first time that More was just an independent, interesting follow up to probe his thoughts and bounce things off him and chase down a few tangents. Not a way of getting more of the straight economics stuff out of it. That's one of the things. And then one of the other things is just, I think because of the success of the strictly political episode that started off last year, really was a very spontaneous thing, and then that was successful enough.

Like, I think a lot more people listened to that than had listened to the surrounding episodes that we determined that we should try to do something in the politics or popular culture area every few episodes. And I know Wes kind of wanted to make it more formal than some of the rest of us.

17:53 Wes: Every fourth episode, film, literature, politics, culture, something. One of those areas.

18:00 Dylan: I sincerely take Wes at his word that he was, if anything, he was being an opportunist, preying on the willingness of everyone else because he's been wanting to do that for a long time.

18:11 Wes: True.

18:12 Mark: I don't know if I'd heard that much discussion about doing more fiction earlier. I don't know. I don't feel like we. We turned down a lot of ideas in that vein. Am I wrong?

18:23 Wes: Well, yeah, I was never pushing ideas exactly. And I mean, I think I've been a lot more active this year in trying to push an agenda.

18:31 Mark: So there have been past years when I tried to open things up like let's do so I thought out. I posted a thing on Facebook about this. Somebody accused me of trolling them with this idea of getting them excited over nothing. And the idea never happened. But when I was of doing Pink Floyd, Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon in particular. And so I kind of did an episode's worth of research and even got a guest.

18:53 Wes: I agree to that.

18:55 Mark: Yeah. I'm not sure. It just other things preempted it at the time and then it kind of fell off the radar. It's not that people slammed these ideas down, it's just other things somehow become more urgent and interesting. But, you know, the idea of doing a classic album like that, that has a lot of philosophical intent behind it, I think still makes sense. I'd also propose doing the Sandman comic book series, which is quite long. And so I started reading it from the beginning, but I kind of didn't get far enough into it. And again, other things kind of intervened.

I think that we've had other discussions of wanting to do something with Neil Gaiman's work, whether it be that or now he has a TV show, or just because he's become a much more pervasive cultural force even since I proposed that episode. What are some other things that like those ideas that either ideas you have now or that you recall bringing up in the past or just other things we can tempt the audience with? Wes, do you want to get into Joan Didion or something or what?

19:51 Wes: How did that come about?

19:53 Mark: I thought somebody wrote something about Joan Didion. Maybe it was a brain pickings thing.

19:59 Wes: Yeah.

19:59 Mark: As soon as you mentioned it, I began to see her name in the news, like all over the place. It's just one of those synchronicity kind of things.

20:07 Seth: I watched the Joan Didion documentary that was on Netflix. Wes. Oh, I haven't seen Griffin Dunne. Oh, you haven't?

20:15 Wes: No.

20:17 Seth: Here's something I thought of last night. My wife and I watched a movie called the Killing of a Sacred Deer, which is apparently another in a series of absurdist films starring Colin Farrell. This one had Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman.

20:33 Dylan: The same director did the Lobster.

20:35 Seth: The lobster, yes.

20:37 Dylan: Yeah. Which was nothing like what I expected it to be.

20:39 Wes: I hated that movie. I went on a date to see that movie, actually. Oh, that was not a date movie.

20:46 Dylan: The trailer made you think it was a date movie, though. I went thinking that, oh, it's gonna be charming and quirky and not have a vile murder of a dog in it.

20:56 Wes: Yeah, some kind of weird, pessimistic take on human relationships as well. Like the. The whole idea of people having things in common. So it was about dating?

21:06 Mark: In a way.

21:06 Wes: It was a. It wasn't just not a date movie. It was an anti date movie.

21:10 Dylan: It was.

21:11 Wes: Anyway, sorry, Seth.

21:12 Seth: No, no, no. It's the same director and the same concept. I guess I don't even care about spoiling things for people because this is not a movie podcast. In essence, this is a modern spin on Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, except it's just not well done. But in watching it, I was like, what is this Killing of a Sacred Deer? What is it? I was like, okay, so he's going to have to sacrifice one of his children. And I was like, I bet I know which one's going to be. So I look up online and, you know, I see it's a reference to Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides, which was supposedly the ending of which was written by somebody else.

21:52 Wes: I've seen that play live.

21:54 Seth: That must be amazing, because, I mean, you guys know how I feel about the Oresteia and the whole arc. Anyway, it came through all this, and I thought, oh, I remember when pl. We used to do these dramatic readings with famous people of ancient Greek plays that nobody gives a shit about. And I was like, we need to

22:11 Mark: do more of that.

22:13 Seth: So if you want to talk about what I would like, I want to bring Lucy and Paul and whoever else we can get our hands on, and we need to read some of these dramatic Greek plays, and we need to dig into some of these deep seated. Okay, can I just tell you how pissed off I was? I can't.

22:32 Wes: Before you say that, I totally second that. I. With the Greek plays I love.

22:36 Seth: Yeah, okay, More of that. Because there's gold and then there are hills and.

22:41 Mark: Well, I'll give an update on that after you're done. With telling your story. Go ahead.

22:44 Seth: All right. No, no, I was just going to say one of my favorite, favorite things when I was young and I was imbued with the spirit of learning and all that, was the character of Clytemnestra in the first of the three series of the Oresteia, Agamemnon. Agamemnon. And the way in which she is just violently strong and angry at her husband for the choice he has made. And, you know, it was worth delving into the different translations to see the tone of the interpreter, you know, the translators about how they interpreted it. She's one of my favorite characters ever.

And one of the things when I was watching this film and simultaneously, you know, googling this about the idea that there's this deus ex machina where Artemis comes down and actually saves Iphigenia and substitutes a deer to be sacrificed, you know, totally absolving Agamemnon of his guilt and completely taking all of the tragedy out of the play and all of the pathos and all this pissed me off. I mean, I was just furious. Furious. A movie that forced me to read a synopsis of a play that was written 2000 plus years ago made me angry, you know, while I was half drunk sitting on my couch.

That's the kind of experience that I would like to get out of.

24:05 Wes: So you want to be made angry?

24:09 Seth: I want to be moved to emotion, yes. I guess in some respect, I'm just

24:14 Wes: associating to being in high school and finishing Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. She gets spoiler alert. She gets hanged at the end of the book. I remember throwing that book across the room. In anger. So, yes, if something moves you to damaged property, then the author has kept done a good job.

24:40 Mark: Not necessarily, because I had the same reaction with the Fountainhead.

24:46 Seth: I had the same reaction with the blue and brown books.

24:49 Wes: Really?

24:49 Seth: Yeah.

24:50 Mark: Wittgenstein, what are you talking about?

24:52 Wes: Yeah, why?

24:53 Dylan: Well, in all three cases, you guys threw the books across the room, But I feel like in all three cases, you threw them across the room for different reasons.

25:03 Seth: Actually, mine is not across the room. It's at the bottom of the. A little lake in the back of the Reed College campus.

25:09 Wes: Wow.

25:11 Mark: And mine was an audiobook, so I couldn't actually throw it. Didn't want to dance.

25:15 Wes: Marc just listened at three times the normal speed and that was his

25:20 Mark: Keep pushing it faster, make it end quicker. It was fine. I already vented about that. Just the update on the drama thing. So the Oresteia I did read all of and think about proposing as an episode and when we had the Martha Nussbaum interview, that the first chapter of her book was referenced to the civilizing of revenge into justice, which is the theme of the third play in that series. So this is pretty close. After we did Antigone and the Birth of Tragedy, I actually did a not school discussion with it, but only one person showed up and we had technical problems.

It was such a lame discussion that I did not post it. And as a play, because I was kind of evaluating things in terms of what we want, like Lucy Lawless or somebody to read with us, it's not anywhere near as appropriate a format just because the chorus sections are so freaking long by comparison to the ones in Antigone. So that was my reason for getting away from that. When we last talked to Paul and Lucy, we kind of all agreed, oh, we should do some Shakespeare. And that's what was kind of in my mind of Wes had brought up the Tempest or they had brought up Macbeth at the time, I think, or Hamlet.

I forget what. As I was thinking about that, I started thinking more about like, well, those are not one act plays. Those are freaking five act plays. Those are way longer than anything we've done in the past. And I don't know that I want to be on tape reading Shakespeare. Like, I think there's just so much precedence. It's not like people have heard a million versions of Antigone that I'm going to be embarrassed to have that exist. But when a type of actor is called a Shakespearean actor, then having a bunch of freaking amateurs reading that out loud, like, what is the point of that?

I don't see the point at all. So given that that was the idea, that was the top of mind, and I didn't want to do that then I didn't pursue that for a long time. I know coming up here, we've talked about reading Pygmalion, but I don't think we had convinced ourselves yet that we wanted to do a performance of it.

27:20 Seth: Right.

27:20 Mark: We're just going to perhaps read and talk about the play, Wes. Or was that tbd? I forget.

27:25 Wes: Well, the reason why I argued against doing a performance is because, as you know, if you've seen My Fair lady, the whole play is premised on the idea of transforming someone from one class into another class, but specifically by changing their accent. And so people would have to do different sorts of British accent. I suppose you could do it with different sorts of American accent, but in Order to even make it make sense, you'd have to be doing a Cockney accent versus an upper class British accent. And that's not where we want to go. She could do it. We can't.

27:59 Mark: You don't think Lucy could do her New Zealand accent for the low class? All the low class people talk with New Zealand accents. But then when they get civilized, then they're more straightforwardly Australia. No, then they have American accents.

28:16 Dylan: Because everyone who's civilized has an American accent. Right, Mark?

28:20 Mark: Probably English. She could do an awesome Brit accent too. Yes. Although having her trainer have an American accent but then she gets a British accent. That would make less sense. Although after we finish the no Exit, Jamie Murray suggested that I probably should have done it with a British accent because that's what she did. I guess maybe I should go redo it or something. But I did not feel confident enough about that. Nor did I want to put in the additional effort to read the whole thing in a different way.

28:48 Seth: See, this is the thing. I think the performance of the play is kind of like the precog, sort of like the summary. Like I don't worry so much. I can get caught up about that. It's just the experience of reading it and then talking about it that makes me excited.

29:05 Dylan: I do think that Mark's point about some plays are so famous, have been done so many times. One of the nice things about doing the ones that we have done is that they just don't get read very often. I mean, it's not like they don't exist, but reading it aloud is a way of bringing it to the people. That's not true for Hamlet.

29:26 Seth: No, no, of course not. I mean we should definitely do the Frogs rather than Macbeth.

29:32 Mark: Maybe we should just read through Rent. You know, we should do it. We'll just kind of hum the songs. That's the kind of thing the culture does not need us doing.

29:42 Seth: Maybe that's our next side podcast. It's a two to force reading by not particularly talented voice actors of the entirety of the ancient Greek canon now.

29:55 Mark: Well, we know enough professional actors now. Like I did actually think about having as a spin off podcast, just kind of producing more of these read throughs. But just the legal issues surrounding it. It's already kind of. We're not getting permission from anybody to read these particular translations and I'm surprised nobody has objected at all. But I guess it's not a big enough deal if it was a standalone product. And month after month we're either having to deal with rights issues or just flagrantly going in the face of that, I did not want to deal with that.

But there's so many actors we've run in over, into over the years, and then the friends of the actors that we get friends bringing on friends and stuff. I think we could get a pretty consistent, varied cast of people who are more talented than we are to prop up such a thing. But I'm not going to do that. Somebody else wants to volunteer to run that kind of thing, I'd be happy to contribute.

30:49 Wes: So I remembered why I was thinking about Joan Didion. So on Brain Pickings, Maria Popova wrote an article called Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self righteousness for morality, which of course is kind of related to the ax I'm always grinding. So the quotation at the top is when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen. Yeah, it's an interesting little essay on Joan Didion and her essay called On Morality, which is in the collection of her essays called Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

And of course, that's the name of another of her essays. It's about our tendency to mistake for morality what is what Didion calls monstrous perversion. And this whole question of. And it's interesting because we're reading Mill right now and he has similar things to say about this. And some of this came up in the Spinoza episode. But it's the moment when we're most sort of morally certain or impassioned about something which I think in a way is the most dangerous, the place in which we're most prone to error. So I thought, just because I had seen that post by Popova and I had always wanted to read Didion, but I really haven't.

And I thought that theme was sort of up our alley, especially given the kinds of stuff we've read this year. That's why I suggested it.

32:08 Mark: And that's another one that we all agreed on and I think even maybe tentatively slotted in the schedule. But something else intervened that particular week and now, I don't know, it's not even at the top of the list right now, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of what we discussed recently, it's just typical. I'm sure we'll do it, but who

32:24 Wes: knows exactly when that'll be in 2031. If you guys are listeners are interested,

32:31 Mark: I do have in looking at the episode list here Malebranche is number 16. That doesn't mean 16 episodes from now that'll happen.

32:39 Seth: I'm just saying what would we learn from Malebranche at this point?

32:43 Wes: Something about occasionalism.

32:44 Mark: Right. There's a very well known text. He's come up as kind of a side issue. Yeah. When we were doing Spinoza again, I think I even proposed, like, let's do Malebranche right after that. Because it's basically the same time period, the same neo Cartesian stuff. When you're in the thick of a particular area, then you're like, oh, we gotta read the five other things directly related to this. But as soon as two more episodes go by and you haven't done that, then it seems less pressing. That's at least the story for me. So it goes on the list and some of them then hang around on the list for a long time until there's some other reason to do it or, you know, that I. Just by fiat. I think we only actually did Adam Smith because I just said, okay, we're doing Adam Smith next. Like that was on the list for years. And it seemed. Yeah, dreadful. Just like Das Kapital.

33:32 Wes: I was never excited about doing that.

33:34 Dylan: Yeah.

33:34 Mark: So Das Kapital is now the next in that slot that we're not that eager to do.

33:39 Wes: We're going to wait a little while.

33:42 Dylan: You're describing a kind of curing that happens on the list.

33:46 Seth: Curating.

33:47 Mark: I think he's talking about some alcoholic process of maturation. Is that what you mean?

33:53 Dylan: Well, or the beautiful slow rotting of fine meat, The further fermenting of delicious vegetables.

34:04 Wes: So this is curation. It's not curing or curation. It's cureration.

34:10 Mark: Let me tell you one that is an idea that I've thrown out fairly recently and I've been embroiled in and still kind of going back and forth whether you'd have an actual episode on it is. My daughter tried out for you're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, the Musical. And she asked, hey, can we get some Peanuts comics so I can kind of read up on this? And I had not thought of that for a long time. You know, Peanuts was my favorite thing when I was really, really little. And so I took the opportunity to start reading the complete editions from the beginning, from 1950 on.

So I'm up to about 1966 or seven. I'm not sure if I'll. It might be like my attempt to watch all the Doctor who's, where I got through, like, the first two Doctors and then stopped. I Couldn't spend more time on that at that particular time. So I might crash and burn here once it becomes clear that, like, no more innovation happens ever. If there's a point where that reaches. But, you know, from the start, when I was then putting this effort into this, and there is a Peanuts and philosophy book that I bought and there's several books about Peanuts and religion and have been struggling with.

Could this be a legitimate episode? Certainly. People have written lots of essays about it. It contains existentialist them. That's like pushing the boulder up the hill is like trying to kick the football every year and just, you know, feelings of dread. There's so many things you can read into it. But at the same time, like reading an interview with him, he clearly did not know much about philosophy. He had some religion background. He, as a young person, actually preached on the street very briefly. But by the time that he was doing the comic after he'd been in the war, and he was not that serious, and he certainly wasn't trying to shove ideas down anybody's throat and really was surprised when people would find all this hidden philosophical meaning and the way that he would throw around.

What philosophical content in there is not all that different than what you'd seen in Monty Python, where you get the philosopher's football. Like the kind of drawing on a certain common culture, which is of course, not the same set of cultural references for Schultz as for Monty Python, but that a character has to appear smart every once in a while, and so they'll say something. But I was talking about that to Wes, and Wes didn't seem to care about that. Right. Because we had kind of this. It doesn't matter what the author thinks. Do you want to elaborate on that, Wes?

Do you want to get into that?

36:21 Wes: So this is something we should actually do an episode on. On the interpretation more. You know, it would fall into line with our other interpretation episodes. But, yeah, for me, I don't think authorial intent is as important. So, for instance, when we did our episode on Vertigo, and if I want to say something about what the bra in the movie is a metaphor for, it doesn't matter to me whether anyone, whether a writer or the director or anyone else, whether they actually thought the bra was a metaphor for anything. I think some people comfort themselves with the notion, well, unconsciously.

You know, if an author didn't do that symbolic thing consciously, then they probably did it unconsciously. But I don't even think that matters. And for me, it doesn't matter in the same sense as I don't think the meaning of dog depends upon the intention of any particular language user. In the same way, I don't think the subtext of a text, its broader thematic meaning, depends upon the intention of the author. The same way that the language community determines the meaning of a word. You know, even if someone misuses it, doesn't know what the word dog means and misuses it, that doesn't change the meaning of the word dog.

I think in the same way, interpretative community determines whether or not bra is actually a metaphor for something in a film. And there's a kind of structuralism here. So if it fits in a way, part of it is just sort of maybe a coherentist theory as well. So if a movie is in some way about being able to be supported or stand tall, and if there's this talk of some sort of supportive garment that is typically associated with females but happens to be worn by the male in the movie, and even if that never occurred to anyone, I mean, thematically, it's all right there, and it just is what it is, regardless of the intent of the author.

38:06 Dylan: I want to agree with you almost completely, but with a couple qualifications. One being is that it sounds a little bit too far to say that what the author intends doesn't matter at all, especially if the author explicitly intended something. Right. I mean, you can easily have a case where part of that community of interpretation is the author themselves. So it doesn't seem quite right to say that that doesn't matter.

38:33 Wes: Well, some authors are better interpreters of their own work than others, but I think as part of the creative process, they try to tend to put aside any conscious. And that's why I think, Mark, you'll find in interviews with not just Schulz, but any author, they might pooh, pooh some of the interpretive stuff people do. Because I think as an author, you can't sit there and think, and now I'm going to insert a piece of symbolism into the text and this is what it's going to mean, that would be ruinous to the actual quality of what you're doing. It has to happen organically and from the standpoint of the creative process. I think it has to happen largely or at least in part unconsciously. I think at some stage of editing or something, you might become an interpreter of your own text and then enhance certain themes or something like that.

39:17 Dylan: It also doesn't seem quite right to say that there isn't something that the author would have intended.

39:25 Wes: But they might be wrong.

39:26 Dylan: Though I don't disagree with that. But I don't disagree with the idea that the author either on sort of explicitly interpreting their work or even the idea of talking about what it seems like the author meant when they wrote the work. Those all seem like valid questions. It just doesn't seem like it's the only set of questions that you would ask on it. And that in particular, I mean, to me, the salient point of what you're saying is that you can't legitimately negate an interpretation of a work by saying that, well, the author never intended that.

40:00 Wes: Yes, I think that's the main point I'm making. But I'm also saying that the right interpretation trumps the author's interpretation. The author could be completely wrong. There could be a truth to the matter about an interpretation of the text which completely contradicts the author's intention. So, for instance, you know the who song Squeeze Box? It's like taking Double Entendre to the limits. Mama's got a squeeze box when daddy comes home he never gets no rest. Daddy never sleeps at night. And so Squeeze Box, accordion, squeeze box, something else. So I thought some completely naive person, this would be a great skit or something. Somebody who writes a song full of double entendre doesn't know that they're doing it, does it all unconsciously.

40:46 Dylan: Will Ferrell acts in it.

40:48 Wes: Exactly. They have a completely different interpretation of the text than the audience who's just laughing their asses off hearing this. But the audience, of course, is right. And even if you reject all Freudian theories or any psychology of the unconscious. So the person on stage who's doing their song who naively doesn't understand the double entendre of it, you don't have to appeal to, oh, well, they did this. They meant this unconsciously and blah, blah, blah. You don't have to save it in that way. You can just say the double entendre is actually there in the text and they don't get it.

41:20 Mark: So I recall us kind of disagreeing on this way back in our episode 16, our first aesthetics thing, where Seth was saying that he does not watch the behind the scenes featurettes and the DVDs and things. So that was a prompt Seth to say something.

41:34 Seth: No, no, I get it, I get it. I had something I was trying to interject earlier. I've lost the pithiness of what I was gonna say. But the point is that of course it matters what the author intended, but it's not a question of the author's intent. Doesn't matter. And the right interpretation is right regardless of whether or not somebody intended it. The point is that authorial intent doesn't carry the weight of authority or authenticity in such a way that it can dictate. Like, you can't say, I made this to be this, I meant this to be this. And if it means something else in the culture, then so be it.

It doesn't mean we discount the fact that that's what you intended as the author. And so my experience of art and this goes back actually a long way. We had this conversation a while back where we talked about how with modern art, when we did the Danto episode, I think, you know, we were talking about needing to be educated about what was happening at the time in the art world and the trends. And can you have a. An aesthetic experience that is divorced from the historical context of the work as well as the authorial intent, and how authorial intent was so much more important now, at least in 20th century non representational art.

And responding to these different trends and themes, you know, what we were trying to accomplish, you know, Warhol and so forth. So I just think that when I say that authorial intent, I don't say it quite the same way where I say it doesn't matter. What I mean to say is it's not the thing that determines whether an interpretation is right or wrong.

43:07 Wes: Yeah. So I think we should maybe ask listeners at this point, maybe, what would we read for an episode on authorial intent? What would you like to see us read and discuss?

43:19 Dylan: What I would love to be able to read is both some essays talking about it, but ideally would be to read some work of fiction where the question of authorial intent looms large as an interpretive question for the text itself. I don't know of such a text. Maybe our audience, someone does. But it seems like there must be some text or group of texts that this weighs. I mean, the place where it comes up in philosophy most often has to do with the relative process, political or ethical positions of the authors that we read and how much it comes forth in their text, either in the way they live their lives or maybe their side comments or some streak of various kinds of prejudice or bigotry that come in and whether that.

How that should be weighed on other parts of their text. It's a slightly different issue, I admit, but to me it's a similar kind of thing about whether the ethical and moral character of the author affects or infects the final product of their work

44:31 Wes: and whether we can be contaminated by it. Yeah, we read a book by who's a good example. I'm thinking of literature. But if we wanted to do philosophy, it would be Heidegger. Of course. But, you know, we read Being in Time, and then the question is whether Heidegger's Nazi predispositions are going to corrupt us or sort of determine part of the gist of the text. And so if we in some sense are persuaded by something in the text, maybe there's something to Dasein which is fascist, let's say, or something like that. I mean, certainly that is something that people worry about a lot right now, with, for instance, Louis CK Being one of the people accused of sexual harassment. The immediate reaction was to eliminate all his stuff from. From streaming platforms to make sure that we are not contaminated by the work of a.

45:23 Mark: A sexual monster, according to.

45:25 Wes: Sexual monster.

45:26 Dylan: That's right.

45:27 Wes: Is that what they said about Louis C.K.

45:29 Mark: yes.

45:29 Wes: Who said that?

45:30 Mark: Saturday Live news.

45:32 Wes: Okay, I remember that. You guys, by the way, have to see the new Chappelle specials. He's fantastic. If we ever did an episode on Stand Up Comedy Specials, it would be Chappelle's four Netflix, which are profound in some ways.

45:45 Mark: So the question for me has been, as we've been opening ourselves up to these other formats, specifically film, with the two episodes that we did so far this year, is what are we doing? What exactly are we talking about? And that's why when we got to do Blade Runner, are we just going to talk about the new movie? And so it seems like you St. John's people don't have any problem with this. You could read anything or view anything, whatever, whatever the medium is, and still have the same kind of St. John's Y discussion. But because that was not the way I was approaching our past voyages into literature, that we did no country for Old Men with an essay by a philosopher next to it.

We did Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, looking specifically for the philosophy as presented in it. That was my agenda before, and I've opened to changing my expectations that I don't want to necessarily take the piece of literature and just jot down the outline of the actual philosophical claims involved. But the question is, what is it then we are doing?

46:42 Dylan: What did you think we were doing when we did Blade Runner? It was at your suggestion. Well, we all agreed to it, that we would read the book as well. And so we all had seen both movies and we all had read the book, and we ended up talking a lot about the book. So I'm interested about Your own experience on that and what you thought of that conversation and how that went.

47:05 Mark: I mean, that went fine partially because, again, I've pulled myself away from having to say, what exactly is Philip K. Dick's philosophy? And try to chart that in terms of is he closer to an existential, you know, trying to put him in the canon or something like that. I'm not trying to do that anymore. And as long as there was text, then I didn't have a problem. But because, you know, I like movies. I watch a lot of movies. I've seen a lot of movies over the years, and I think I appreciate the filmic aspects of them. Not in the same degree to which I appreciate all different aspects of music.

I know that doing a nakedly examined music type discussion of a work would not be appropriate, and I don't know enough about film to have that kind of discussion. I feel like I'm bringing this up as a contrast because the way Wes was putting it, it's just talking about what is the meaning of the work. And maybe that is kind of how we came down when the Blade Runner kind of. When I'm talking to a musician about their oeuvre and about three songs in particular, the meaning of the work is often not brought up at all. It really depends on what the particular artist's view of what the work is trying to do.

Is it trying to present some ideas, and we can talk about the ideas that it's trying to present? And I definitely do agree that authorial intent is not the end of the story. And in fact, I have trouble with some of my interviewees because they think that I'm just asking them, you know, tell me exactly what you were thinking when you wrote this lyric 20 years ago. And they're like, I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know what this means. Often this doesn't mean anything. And so I have to even sometimes state baldly, which can be a little contentious.

Like, basically, other people's opinions of what you meant matter, too. Which is a strange thing when you're in this position of interviewing somebody who is a famous person often, and they're nice enough to do this, and I want to somehow convince them that I should get to talk because I have something to say. And I guess I haven't gotten enough listeners to that podcast for them to say, mark, why don't you shut up more and let them talk like I do? But I try to make it interactive in the same way that our discussions here are. And that usually Goes over very well.

They usually appreciate that a lot of it is. If I'm talking about. Even the sort of theories that I'm putting forward might be comparisons to other styles or just what that gesture makes me think of. And getting them to think about, like, oh, why did you throw that little Latin riff in there? Were you into Latin music? What's going on? You know, trying to, you know, illustrate that there really is more going on to a work than what they were actually thinking when they did it. And they often enjoy that too, because they can be then post hoc listeners of their own stuff.

But that's very different than what I would want to do on Pel with

49:51 Wes: anything I can tell you. In the case of Blade Runner 2049, I can point to the specific thing that made me want to talk about that film, which is that the protagonist in that film wants to learn that his memories are real and he's an Android. And he's a. There's no question of whether he's conscious and has some sort of subjectivity, but there is a question of. There's a question of affect and how much feeling he has, how connected he is to the world and the people in the world. And it's something that fills him with doubt. So to find out that he has memories which are in fact, his own, which are in fact related to a real past and real people in his past, and real relationships that he's had.

Because I think that's the import of that. That to him is the measure of whether or not he is real in some sense. This idea of whether or not I am real, I think is a very common feature of fairy tales. For instance, Pinocchio. Pinocchio's the wooden little boy who wants to become real. So Spielberg took that theme in AI and very effectively used that with androids. And in the same way, the same sort of thing is going on with this particular Blade Runner movie. So I just think that's a very interesting question before you even start to think about it, before you develop some sort of thesis.

I just think it's fascinating that someone would think that's the measure of whether or not they are real. And that, of course, does get us into all sorts of philosophical questions. We talked about the. The experience machine, right? And whether we would choose to live in a perfectly pleasurable universe if we knew that there were really. Because this is really what it boils down to. If there weren't really any other people in that universe, if they were just simulations, if we were actually deprived of Genuine human contact, even if we could have a perfect simulation of that contact that was perfectly frictionless and pleasurable and devoid of all the sorts of terrible things that go on in real life and the horrible conflicts within relationships and things like that.

So there's an obvious sort of philosophical issue at play there. But it doesn't matter to me whether we say, hey, there's a sort of existentialist theme in this movie, or, hey, we have to relate it to this specific philosopher or something like that.

52:12 Dylan: I think that you're pointing out that there are movies and books and works of art that are philosophically rich, that in a relatively plain way, you can access questions that are typically addressed or commonly addressed in philosophical works, be them ethical or moral or existential or any of those kinds of things, but in a way, through a piece of artwork or a piece of literature that, on the one hand provides you access to it, on the other hand provides you a kind of explicit example that provides a way to think about it and to go back and forth on it and ask questions of scenarios, and sometimes, I think, even provides a complicated answer to that philosophical question, or at least a complicated context to it that enables thinking about it in a way that is, to me, not as rich as going through in sort of straightforward philosophical treatise.

It's certainly not as interesting, and it's

53:27 Wes: not as emotionally impacting in some sense. And it's one thing to talk in general, abstract, analytic terms about the relationship between memory and one's personhood or reality or something like that. Reality is a person. And it's another to be drawn into these very poignant scenes, including the one at the very end in which K, the protagonist, that movie, learns that the memories he was hoping were his own are in fact, not his own. Just those very profound moments. That gives you a different kind of access to this sort of question than simply reading philosophical analysis.

54:04 Dylan: Yeah, it makes it personal.

54:06 Mark: Well, so, Wes, you've definitely gotten in a mode where, whether because of your familiarity with psychoanalytical writings on film or for whatever reason that you've given multiple talks and had multiple long articles about what were the films you did one Back to the Future, you did a talk on Ex Machina, another talk on Planet of the Apes, Close Encounters. Yeah. And of course, we've all encouraged you start a second podcast. And for various reasons that has not happened yet and might not happen, but at least, you know, hopefully you'll keep doing these talks and articles.

So I think it's been instructive to see what your approach has been. But at the same time, you went into the Vertigo episode with much, much more to say than any of us did. And we weren't necessarily playing your game, even though some of us at least read a lot of these supplementary articles that you're interested in. So I guess we have somewhat different purposes just because we're in different places in our way of talking about these things, in getting into these areas.

55:12 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think I had too much of an agenda in that. In that one. And that's not going to work if you guys aren't. Yeah, I mean, that one I really did want to talk about, not just about the film, but about the psychoanalytic literature. And that's at tension with the idea of just talking about the film, which is another. I respect that. Which was more of our approach with Blade Runner, and it's just better if the four of us can have a conversation like that. So I just happen to be into film and I get moved by something and I want to talk about it.

So in the case of the Planet of the Apes, it's something that it's long been a favorite of mine, and I. I felt like I take this movie more seriously than other people, and I always wanted to write about it. And I had written a lot about it, as you typically, I write a lot, and it just never sees the light of day. And then I got an offer from someone who helps run the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, which is pretty well known institution here, Art House Theater. They are a fan of the podcast, and they asked me to do a talk, and they ask all kinds of people in the community to do talks.

Professors and people from the film industry. And they have this series called the Elements of Cinema. So that's the series, and that's what these talks are. And I just was, wow, wow, this is great. And they said, pick a few films that you might want to do and we'll see which ones we can find and which one fits best. And so Vertigo was one of them, just because we had talked about it, and I was prepared to talk a lot about that. And then another was Annie hall and a few other favorites like that. And I put Planet of the Apes on that list as well.

And even though I didn't put Planet of the Apes at the top in terms of priority, I secretly hoped that that was the one that they picked. And that's the one they picked. And for me, it was just. It's a fascinating film because it. So even before I had thought about its relation to Rousseau and to Nietzsche and sort of the philosophers who are in some sense anti civilization and thinks that civilization is not only not the solution, but it's a big part of the problem. I had never necessarily made that explicit connection between Planet of the Apes as a sort of critique, but I always knew just.

There's something really fascinating going on with the. I'm talking about the original 1968, by the way.

57:32 Dylan: Charlton Heston.

57:33 Wes: Yeah, there's just so much that's fascinating going on because you have this sort of American icon, Heston, who's playing a kind of parody of the typical male protagonist of the time. You know, the tough American hero, the pioneer, the cowboy. And in this case he has that, but he's also this incredible misanthrope. And then he finds himself in this transformative predicament suitable to the extremeness of his misanthropy. Anyway, not to keep going on about all of that, but that's the kind of thing that'll grab me and make me want to talk about a film and I would love to do a podcast. It's just I have to know that I can commit and I have hang ups.

58:18 Dylan: You have commitment issues?

58:19 Wes: Yeah, about what I want to do and how I want to spend my time. And I have, you know, I have a lot going on right now.

58:28 Seth: It's this notion of thinking of the film as a text versus a thought experiment. So the way that Dylan articulated it, which is the way I think I see it more frequently, is the film gives you a rich way of posing a question or proposing a conundrum or, you know, it's a rich and nuanced version of the trolley problem. And the way west talks about films and experiences them is more as a text, which has an interesting argument and position and so on. And what I constantly seem to be experiencing lately with films and I. Maybe it's just there's a dearth of.

Or maybe I don't have Wes's aesthetic sense and good taste. But they're just. They're bad. I mean, they're just not. They're bad. They pose the questions badly, they beg off and they shy away from the tough moral questions. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe I've just had a long run of experience here recently where I've just been disappointed by films either as posing the questions or as trying to be the text. And this notion of authorial intent and interpretive prowess, it's like I can't be who Wes is. That's one of the things that Makes the podcast great, is that we all are different in our own ways.

But I want to engage the way that he does around Vertigo or, you know, one of these things. And maybe Planet of the Apes might be the place, Wes, where we come together. Although I think if we do try to figure out a way to do a Planet of the Apes episode, we have to get Dana Gould on, because I can tell you from having listened to his podcast and his comedy, but also when I went to see him here in Austin and I encouraged him to participate, he would bring a new light to the Planet of the Apes. In fact, I'm even going to step out. I think, Wes, we need to connect you and Dana Gould to have a Planet of the Apes discussion.

But you have to be prepared not to just talk about the original one. You got to be able to go through the whole series. I'm not so sure about the reboots, which just strike me as they're fetishistic in their treatment of violence. But again, that's my perspective from the outside.

1:00:42 Mark: So maybe we should turn our attention, as a perhaps final topic, to the political bent that we've taken. Right. We talked about the popular culture and the difficulties we've had in trying to figure out how to talk about basically different media than we've been talking about before. But this move to more overtly political material, you know, political philosophy is something that we've done for a long time, and whenever we do talk about political philosophy, we often have our own agendas, and people that are more conservative maybe don't appreciate that.

But then over time, we've tried to deal with more of the fundamental texts that drive political thought all across the spectrum. Not all. I'm. As soon as I say that, somebody's going like, no, you didn't talk about the thing that I want. No. Well, there are lots of spots we have not pretended to be comprehensive in this respect, but there definitely been in particular, the foundations of conservatism in the US are, since it's something that's a little foreign and puzzling to us, have been something that, through episodes like Burke and, you know, just these founding American documents, one.

I think this On Liberty thing that we're about to do is going to be another one in that series. But also Nozick on libertarianism, and then on the other side, reading some more overt Marxists and stuff. This has all been part of our mission from the beginning, is to be open to that kind of stuff. And the overtly political discussion that we had was a Spur of the moment idea. And we haven't done another one of those. And we've kind of tried to avoid that. And yes, we might have picked Orwell when we did because of what was going on at the time, but I don't.

I don't think. I think we've been whimsical in the same way. It's not been a complete right turn in an attempt to broaden our audience so much is just like that's just been where our attention has been a little more in some of these areas than it has in the past. But that's, you know, some people have. We've gotten feedback like, oh, I'm so glad in that last episode you didn't just talk about politics the whole time, just like you have done the past bunch. People were relieved when we did the Nietzsche.

1:02:48 Dylan: Well, I sort of put some of it in the category of following our noses the way we were talking about earlier in picking episodes that, yeah, we had contemporary political issues in mind and maybe not so different than the. Maybe more vigorous discussion of politics and the influence of politics in our lives that's common right now, I think more so than. Feels like, more so than was in past years and thinking about what our political culture is like and then following our noses on some of those topics. White privilege and other contemporary topics.

1:03:28 Mark: And just to trace the. Again, that initial political discussion was more or less spur of the moment. Also, we had in mind that we were going to do this modern Rorty book and that we could only do that because we had then done the sort of classical, more straightforward philosophical book. So that was just a bonus, like being able to throw in his political thought at that time. But I think that was planned beforehand. That certainly wasn't a reaction to the election. It just kind of happened that we put the freeform political episode in between those things and it just was a happy accident.

And then the white privilege thing we just did because so many people reacted to things that Wes in particular said on our freeform political episode. Like, hey, you're kind of just dismissing this whole identity politics thing of the left. And this is something that Wes writes a lot about. And so I felt like, well, why don't we just actually try to do an episode on that? And then as soon as that was out there, then, well, we might as well do this Baldwin thing. Like, he's.

1:04:25 Seth: He.

1:04:25 Mark: A new documentary got released on him. He's somebody that we should know more about. I think that was really as far as it went, though. Then we kind of let it drop. So this is really. By March or April, we were kind of done with it. And we had stuff like Boethius in there as well, that as that had no. So it's not like we became a political podcast.

1:04:41 Dylan: You sound apologetic, Mark.

1:04:43 Mark: And

1:04:46 Dylan: I don't know, it all seemed to work for me. I do feel like at the end of last year with the election, we did the Tocqueville episode thinking about. I mean, at least I was self consciously thinking about American politics and how American politics works or doesn't work. And that was imbued in the discussion, you know, even the politics discussion that we had on Rorty's work.

1:05:17 Wes: So I think we had 24 episodes last year. Right. And it's just five of them that are sort of political in the off the beaten path sense. The freeform, Rorty on the left, Orwell, White Privilege and Baldwin as far as political ones.

1:05:32 Dylan: And then we had the Idiot and Darwin and Vertigo as far as ones that are not straight up canonical philosophical texts. But I think you're right, Wes, in terms of explicitly political ones, that sounds right.

1:05:47 Wes: I mean, there's obviously there's the Arendt and Society, the Spectacle and Spinoza on politics and religion. Those are political in some sense as well, but they're more straightforwardly stuff we would do.

1:06:00 Mark: Yeah, Society, the Spectacle, we might have gotten around to it at that time because it was requested in light of what was going on politically, but there's so much kind of neo Marxist stuff that has been requested almost more than any other category of thing. So the fact that we're doing occasionally something from that line, there are so many more of those figures that we have not covered and that I don't know if we'll get to Althusser and Marcuse and Zizek and many others.

1:06:30 Dylan: My experience of doing these and choosing them, like I said, has felt more or less organic. And I can reflect back on the process and where I was at the time and also thinking about the effect of what we're doing and interested in thinking about at any given time as having an effect on our selections. But I sense a certain kind of defensiveness or apologetics going on. And I'm wondering about that from you.

1:07:03 Seth: Right.

1:07:03 Mark: I'm reacting to comments that we get and to a recognition of what I see as our core mission of getting back to the core philosophy texts. And when we do that, when we're doing the Nietzsche or the Spinoza or something that feels good in a certain way, I don't mind the as these other forays as well. But we definitely, I don't know if it's a majority or just a few comments here and there like we're why don't you guys shut up about your political, you know, we know your political views, get over it, move on or something. But this might just be the occasional oversensitive Trump voter who just I can't believe that you would cover something having to do with totalitarianism that's so overreactive to thinking that Trump wants to be a totalitarian.

Like, and we could have that argument about whether he does or not. We haven't, we actually haven't had that argument too much on the Orwell or the Arendt or anything like that. Right. All conversations don't necessarily lead to lead to Trump as they seem to do at cocktail parties these days. It's not something we've felt that we had, I think, so much to say about independently of what's already out there. It's just more, yeah, this kind of makes what's going on does make me think that we should read Brave new world or 1984 or whatever. But these are all things we kind of had intended to get to anyway.

I don't know what other people. Am I entirely baseless in my defensiveness about our. This has not been a crazy redefinition of our mission in the last year, as we have been accused on occasion.

1:08:35 Seth: It doesn't feel like that from the inside, but I refuse to back down on this one. We have made content choices based on those things. But it all comes down to how do we treat the subject matter? I mean, I think if we say, like, it's not just that, oh, it was time for us to do Society of the Spectacle and Orwell's totalitarianism in the same year or something like that, it's that that was the content that seemed appropriate to do at the time. The question is, did we do the appropriate amount of partially examined life justice to the text when we did it?

And look, we have our biases built in, but we try to approach, at least that's in some sense my role, I guess. But we try to approach the text from a certain perspective and with a certain kind of openness and generosity. And I think the criticism, if you want to criticize us for the choice, it's the, it's criticism for the choice of what we read versus how we treat it. I do like to think that whatever our political and social biases are, we don't read into texts. We don't read those things into texts in a way that's ex. Just egregious. Right.

That we try to give short shrift. Now, the question is, are we doing our best in selecting content texts that don't necessarily obviously or explicitly align with our implicit biases? What would it be like for us to read something? And we tried this with Ayn Rand, but she's just so horrible. As a thinker, it's. Is there such a thing as a. A really great conservative thinker that we could try to approach and see what the pel. Aesthetic, as it were?

1:10:29 Dylan: We read Edmund Burke.

1:10:31 Seth: Well, Edmund Burke.

1:10:32 Mark: We read Hayek. We didn't read Von Mises or something like that.

1:10:35 Seth: Well, we read. Yes. One essay by Hayek, and we read Edmund Burke, who's so removed historically from context that, you know, he's got his arguments in favor of tradition, but he's not. It's not something that's a live issue right now that would be scary and painful for us to address. I'm not saying that I know the answers to these questions. I'm just saying what would it be like if we picked something.

1:10:58 Dylan: Bring it.

1:10:59 Mark: Somebody did recommend. I forget, you know, there was a. You know, this guy has one of the thinkers underlying the alt right or something, and I don't even remember what the name was. It was not attractive enough for me. Mostly how these recommendations go is if more people keep recommending, like, I'm not going to necessarily. Every time somebody recommends something, I'm going to write it down. It's just if I keep hearing that name from other people, then eventually I'll get around to it. So it's fine for you to recommend stuff that I've never heard of, but unless it becomes a trend, then it probably won't come top of mind.

1:11:33 Seth: Yeah. So early. Early on I mentioned how when I was growing up, I remember, like Dick Cavett. Right. And I guess back at the time, it wasn't Charlie Rose, who was the other. The other guy who had the late. Tom Snyder. Late Night with Tom Snyder or whatever. I don't remember the name of the show, but you could have, like, William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. So we're. Who's the William F. Buckley of today?

1:12:01 Wes: There are people of the National Review. Try to be, but there's really. There isn't one.

1:12:06 Mark: It's Milo. We'll have Milo on the show.

1:12:08 Seth: Milo.

1:12:09 Mark: It's not Milo.

1:12:10 Wes: We'll say Charles Cooke of the National Review.

1:12:14 Seth: And is this a guy who writes thoughtfully or is he a talking head? Because that's the other problem that we have.

1:12:20 Wes: I mean, he's a kind of. He's a talking head, but he's at Buckley's magazine and he tries to. He's British, and he thinks of himself as an intellectual and tries to do that now. I mean, it is what it is. It doesn't rise to a certain level necessarily, but he's doing that thing.

1:12:40 Seth: That's fair. You're going to have to work hard to convince me to have somebody on just because they're British. I can't take the rhetorical, oh, we're

1:12:49 Wes: thinking about in terms of guests. I mean. Yeah, I mean, it might work. He would be a more thoughtful person to bring on.

1:12:57 Mark: Yeah, I think we're always open to suggestions about guests like that. But. And I didn't mean to get in a whole what is our. I guess we might as well get a little into our. What is our criterion for guests. But I think, as we've made clear on other podcasts where we've had guests and we talked to the guests about this issue, that we like guests that understand our format.

1:13:18 Seth: We like guests who are willing to have a conversation and aren't there to be interviewed. Yes.

1:13:23 Mark: Which is one and the same thing. Right. So I guess somebody could have a St. John's background and never have listened to us and still be able to do it because they understand the St. John's format, which is not exactly what we do, but it's close enough. But if they're used to being on panel shows, if they're used to being on one on one, you know, you think that Robert Wright has so much experience talking to people, but yet our interview with him, despite us being very upfront about communicating this, was very much like he's defending his thesis against us.

And like, one of us asks a question, and then he answers this, another asks a question, he answers it. And I think the end result was very entertaining and people liked it. But it's not ultimately what we do, but I think it's a thing that guests who know how to talk and are used to talking, that's kind of the default that they go into. So if we have Sam Harris or we had Zizek or any number of other people, that's what it would be. It would be just like when we had John Searle on. It would be an interview.

1:14:17 Dylan: Well, one of the challenges, though, is having people come on to talk about their own work. And I think that there's a way in which it's hard for it not to fall into that question answer thing on top of the relative uncommonness. But when we had Dr. Drew on, I think one of the advantages of that was that we weren't talking about one of his books. We were talking about something he was really interested in. Right. So that sort of makes it all of us have a third thing to talk about. Whereas with Wright reread his book. Right. And so there's a natural way in which we would be asking him questions and of course he's going to answer them from the standpoint of the fact that he wrote the book.

And so it might be just a thing to keep in mind. We wanted to have Searle on to talk about his book, but at some level it'd be better to have write on to talk about Buddhist texts. In fact, we read some and we had some talk about those independently. But that would have been a better way to generate good conversation.

1:15:22 Mark: Well, that's what we did with Russ Roberts and it was the same thing. Like it was totally fine that it ended up being Russ talking for a long time and then us asking a question and Russ talking for a long time. I really enjoyed that conversation. I think it's a great thing to supplement our regular episodes. But again, it was still monologuing by the guest. And I think Dr. Drew didn't do that. Not only because we weren't talking about his work, but because he is just a fabulous conversationalist and because he's actually a listener of our show.

Robert and Russ, I'm sure they listened a little bit to our show for a couple episodes, but like not enough so that they would really internalize the format. So it's a lot to ask from somebody as a famous author or something. Like, yeah, why don't you really like us and spend a lot of time listening to our show before you come on? Like, that's kind of obnoxious. So that helps guide what guests we choose.

1:16:15 Seth: I mean, I don't feel any sense of obligation or somebody needs to listen to the podcast. But I think like Dylan's guidance is right. It's just like maybe the problem is if somebody wants to promote their book, we say, you know what, we'd love to, but we'd rather have you talk about Hume or Kant or something like that. You know, we kind of try to force them into a conversation about topics and about thinkers that are third party relative to them versus their work. And maybe you can ease your way into the conversation about their work. I mean, how many frickin solicitations have we Gotten. It just seems recently, the emails, every day somebody's like, I'm calling on behalf of this author. It was a mindfulness thing or all about mindfulness.