Ep. 200: Kant/Mendelssohn/Foucault on Enlightenment (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So let's do a little status check on how far we've got in the conversation. I feel like there's probably a few small textual things that maybe we could finish up in Kant and then make sure we've hit what we want in Mendelssohn. And then we should spend most of the rest of our time talking about the Foucault, which was pretty darn interesting. Was there anything else specifically in the quotes that we want to read, points that we hadn't really discussed enough?

0:21 Dylan: Sapere Aude.

0:22 Wes: Yeah, Sapere Aude.

0:25 Dylan: I don't know how to pronounce my Latin.

0:26 Mark: That's a good one. So it's that the problem with our lack of enlightenment is that we're not brave enough. It's be brave, have courage to make use of your own understanding.

0:34 Dylan: Isn't it specifically having to do with knowledge?

0:36 Wes: Dare to know is the translation.

0:38 Dylan: Dare to know. That's what it is. Yeah. And so the courage comes with the daring. But it's not just have courage in general, but have courage with respect to your knowing.

0:48 Mark: Have courage to make use of your own understanding. Which seems a little different than actually achieving the knowledge. But he does elsewhere say, yes, courage to actually know.

0:57 Wes: Yeah, it takes courage. Or he says, extrication is difficult. He talks about precepts and formulas being the ball and chain, or what he calls the mechanical instruments of rational misuse. Again, we get one of these ironies where the non Enlightenment doesn't mean just specifically not being reasonable, because we can be clever. We can use precepts and formulas and make little moves and reasoning. But he's talking about what he calls the cultivation of the spirit, something higher, where we are. I would think this kind of ties to our episode on liberal education, but sort of getting to the bottom of the precepts and the formulas, questioning them, reflecting on them.

1:38 Mark: Well, the irony it seemed like you were pointing at is, isn't Kant known for precepts and formulas, like the categorical imperative, which actually to me said, maybe I've been interpreting the categorical imperative when we Considered that in our old episode on that, we were kind of evaluating it as. Does this actually make sense as a formula? Can I program a computer to determine what action it should perform at any given time? And it came down to, no, it's way too ambiguous for that. But if it really is supposed to be, despite it's being the soul of rationality itself, if it's supposed to be more a rule of thumb, in the way that we got from Hume and Smith, the other ethicist that I like a lot better, then maybe that makes a lot more sense.

Like, yeah, this is kind of a blueprint for what the right action is. But it's not an algorithm. You're not going to be able to actually figure it out without exerting your independent human judgment. You know, you can have as many heuristics as you want and how to apply the categorical imperative, but ultimately some independent judgment is going to be necessary.

2:35 Wes: We legislate those maxims for ourselves. They don't just come from outside of us. And then we obey them. That's what he means by the precepts and formulas, I think. So we can apply. There's lots of rationality to the application of precepts and formulas, but that's not enough.

2:49 Mark: Did you have any other thoughts about courage, Seth, or anything? You know, what you actually got out of Kant?

2:56 Seth: I guess the takeaway for me is this notion of emancipation that's related to enlightenment and the idea that there's a strong correlation between enlightenment in the form of knowledge and, I guess, informed opinion and so forth, and freedom or autonomy. That was the clearest link for me to connect to the Foucault essay that we are going to read or talk about shortly.

3:18 Mark: All right, so before we do this, the Mendelssohn. So we laid out his vocabulary of civilization being divided into cultivation and enlightenment. And he's arguing that we have problems when those things don't advance at the same rate.

3:35 Wes: That's sort of the conclusion, though. Okay, do you mind if we back up?

3:38 Dylan: Yeah, go.

3:38 Wes: Because he made this distinction between cultivation and that we already got into an enlightenment where he says the former, which is cultivation, seems to be chiefly practical and to consist of refinement, beauty and perfection in mechanics and the arts and. And in the matters of society, of talents and industry and the arts and of moral inclinations and propensities. And then enlightenment is more the theoretical. And what he says is that for men, as men, we require enlightenment, we require freedom of thought and conscience, but no cultivation.

But for men as citizens, we require cultivation. And then the extent to which we're enlightened is going to be graded according to our rank or profession. There are going to be some limits according to those division within a society on how enlightened we ought to be. So he's coming down on this question of how much enlightenment is good for society, and he's going to make it complex. But the main thing to note here is this lines up with Kant's distinction between obeying but also being enlightened in the sense that cultivation becomes the tool of obedience.

Right and obedience is what's required of a citizen. Our cultivated part is the extent to which we are reacting, including to the products of rationality and the Enlightenment. We are simply going with the flow and adhering to customs. Even though they refine us, we're still passive in that sense. And then enlightenment goes beyond that.

5:08 Mark: Just to read a quote from the rank and profession of men in civil life arise certain duties and rights, and therefore in proportion to these require various talents and abilities, habits and inclinations, manners and customs, degrees of cultivation and refinement. And the more these accord with the various ranks and profession of men, that is with their respective conditions as member of society, the more cultivation that nation may said to have attained. So I thought that was interesting, that it's not just that there are talented people, that you have a rich culture, it's the more that those things accord with the various ranks and professions of men.

So you could imagine a very dysfunctional society. You have a Confucian society that falls into massive internal wars and things. So there are people that are trained in various talents, but the economy is a shambles. They can't actually use those talents functionally. So even though there might be a lot of individual refined people, the civilization is not cultivated. The cultivation of the nation. And I would think that it would be possible. Well, would it be possible to have the opposite? That you have a nation that has various ranks and professions, but yet the people are in decline.

What is Nietzsche's favorite word to use? The people are depraved, they're in decline.

6:26 Wes: They're no longer decadent.

6:27 Mark: Decadent, that's the word, okay? The people are. Have become too decadent. And so this is the way that a nice developed Confucian society might become corrupted is because you've got these good social institutions, but you no longer have the people of grit to fill them.

6:44 Seth: Well, it's funny you mentioned Confucianism, because I was actually taking this in a different direction. Mark, what you Were saying the relationship between enlightenment of an individual versus enlightenment of a society, and what's the mechanism for societal enlightenment if not each individual undertaking some form of enlightenment themselves? And there seems to be a tension there. The idea that Kant talks about. Well, first of all, we know that the outcome of the Enlightenment was social terror in the form of revolution and violence. But also he talks about, and Mendelssohn talks about it as well, these communities, that there's a sense of some kind of communal enlightenment, sort of a societal enlightenment.

But when we talked about the notion of enlightenment and Buddhism, as in contrasting to Confucianism in the past, we talked about how. And the same thing with Stoicism, it works well as an individual action, the idea that an individual can become enlightened, whether, you know, attain enlightenment or use Stoicism to manage their emotions and their reactions to things. But we struggle to find meaningful social and political content in those theories in the same way that we do in a traditional political philosophy. And I'm wondering here if that same tension exists, tension between the notion of an individual enlightenment versus societal or community enlightenment.

8:03 Mark: Is there a paragraph here? Because I was just reading the paragraph contrasting within cultivation, the individual cultivation versus the society cultivation. Is there an equivalent paragraph about enlightenment in here?

8:13 Wes: No, there isn't. Actually.

8:15 Dylan: There's this weird paragraph about ratios. According to these rules, the enlightening the public mind of any nation will be regulated first, by the degree of knowledge they possess, second, by the importance of that knowledge that is relatively to the actual state and condition of men as men and as citizens. Third, by its extension through the various ranks and classes. Fourth, by the nature of their professions and vocations. And where the degree of this enlightening of a nation to be measured by a fourfold compound ratio. The component parts therefore separately taken, would be found to be themselves composed of other more simple ratios.

8:49 Wes: Yeah, it is weird. But you know, basically what he's saying, right, is certain ranks are going to be allowed to be free thinkers. But the hoi polloi, for instance, or maybe even women are not going to have the same access to free thinking and the ability to do scholarship and things like that. And nor should they. And sort of in the background here are other thinkers in this conversation who will say, for instance, that well, anyone can be a scholar and that's fine because the soldiers in the trenches are not going to be influenced by it because they're not of the right level of education to be able to deal with that free thinking stuff that might corrupt their morals.

And so Destabilize society. So it's sort of naturally built in. But the idea here with Mendelssohn is that we have to ensure that right. We have to ensure that people who don't have the minds for it are not exposed to this potentially morals corrupting, free thinking stuff.

9:45 Dylan: This is a thread all throughout these aristocrats thinking about it. There's a lot of concern that freedom leads to debauchery and debasedness. So that sort of anti democratic thread which has been since the beginning of thinking about democracy, is it good for these people? You know, is it good for society to have everybody part of the decision making? Are people capable of using properly the freedom that they have? All those questions are at play here.

10:12 Mark: So we get a little more clue about Mendelssohn's real views here from that secondary source that I can point folks to. James Schmidt. The article is called Continental Sin and the Question of enlightenment in 1989. So apparently again, this was a question that has been discussed for over a year prior to the publication of Mendelssohn's paper here in a forum, a secret forum, these people getting together. Kant was not in on these discussions, however, Mendelssohn was. And in fact he published something internal to that group December 1783. So almost a year earlier, where he was responding to another guy, this Möhsen, who was saying there are things, I guess the initial question was, per Machiavelli, should the government be lying to people?

Should they keep lying to keep them in line or let them know truth? In other words, should enlightenment filter through the entire society? And here it says in this article. Mendelssohn's initial response to Möhsen's lecture took a rather skeptical stance toward the fear of too rapid enlightenment of the public. He requested that those troubled by such a prospect provide examples from history where either Enlightenment in general or unrestricted freedom of expression in particular have done actual harm to public happiness. Even if one concluded that there might be certain prejudices held by the nation that must, on account of circumstances, be spared by all judicious men.

Mendelssohn asked whether this deference to prejudices should be set through laws and censors, or whether, like the limits of prosperity, gratitude and sincerity, it should be left to the discretion of every individual. So it was really just because of further discussion with his peers that we get the actual view that we see in his published essay, where he seems to be saying, yeah, actually there really do need to be limits based on kind of what the ranks of society are in. The way that Wes was Just describing

11:53 Dylan: him exercising his freedom led him to conclude that he should constrain other people's

11:57 Mark: freedom, his freedom of intellectual.

11:59 Dylan: Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, that's what is the same thing you get with Kant, right? Is that the people who are in the know are able to exercise their freedom and they come up with conclusions that say no better than everybody else. That's my inner Democrat coming out.

12:13 Seth: Isn't that the history of philosophy?

12:15 Wes: Again, this does reflect this whole tension between obedience and conscience that is there in Kant. It's just that Kant is not so worried about the conflict between them. And Mendelssohn at this point is now all about the conflict. So he says there are some truths, I'm paraphrasing, but some truths which can be useful to us as human beings. That's enlightenment stuff. But then injurious to us as citizens in the sense that they will make us question our roles, they will lead us not to perform our duties, to obey.

12:47 Dylan: Those women might walk out on their responsibilities.

12:50 Wes: Yeah, the breakdown of the family that's directly mentioned. And one of these other things that Schmidt talks about, all the same trends that you would see today in conservatism in the United States. And it's not completely irrational, of course, that society will in some sense break down. And we saw this in Burke as well. The eradication of hierarchy means the eradication of, of strong social connections between human beings. And then once those links are eradicated, what links are left? So there's the concern of isolation between individuals, all that stuff. It's not completely irrational to think that free thinking in some sense is not entirely good for us.

13:31 Dylan: Freedom comes with a price. And this is why when you start talking about freedom, especially freedom from, you end up with these negative consequences, right? Because the power of those connections comes with constraint. So a tension exists that in fact in some ways being as free as you can be requires a certain amount of constraint.

13:55 Mark: I guess I'll just point to Allan Bloom, the episode that we just had on that to make this. Because when you say Wes, like, oh, this is reflected in current American conservatism, like picturing an actual conservative politician saying people shouldn't think so much because then they'll be morally unmoored or something like, nobody says that perhaps the anti intellectualism is too strong in the culture. They don't have to say that, but I don't think so. I think they might think that doing philosophy is useless or something like that. But nobody's going to be actively thinking too much.

14:26 Wes: No they wouldn't say that. They might prioritize, for instance, the wisdom of tradition over what we can get at simply through our own analysis. Right. So we might not place as much confidence and our ability to simply pull truths out of the air by being super, super scientific or super, super rational. We might think, well, and this goes back to Confucianism, that there's just a sort of wisdom that's passed down over thousands of years through tradition that can't be reconstructed through rationality, and that we ought not simply discard it.

14:58 Mark: I can see, you know, that comes into the anti trans, anti gay marriage sort of that conservatism. I think we got a view that our listeners might be a little more sympathetic to in what we saw in Allan Bloom, that too much freedom, which might just not be thinking for yourself, but like the way Bloom put it, the ultimate freedom is freedom from judgment, freedom from the judgment of others. That you are not only free to think and say whatever you want, but that you have earned yourself through your autonomy, a sphere in which it needs to be an intellectual safe space, that you cannot be criticized.

If you're even criticizing, responding to somebody else, you're somehow violating their freedom of speech. That sort of interpretation of what freedom is and intellectual autonomy is runs counter to what Mill had in mind in allowing unrestricted speech. And I think that's very much the same as we were just saying that these folks wanted to make sure. In fact, the quote was from Lessing, as included in the Schmidt article. Religious tolerance can come to the freedom to make as many idiotic remarks against religion as one wants is specifically what Lessing said.

This is the kind of thing Bloom was concerned with.

16:07 Wes: And Lessing was also concerned, though, with the fact that it was just religion that all this stuff was applied to. Like you didn't have the same freedom with other stuff. When talking about legislation or political arrangements, ironically, you're actually more restricted. And so that's what he was saying. Like, this just makes religion a target, but everything else is off the table. That's not fair.

16:28 Mark: Right? Lessing also called the rule under Frederick the most enslaved land in Europe.

16:32 Wes: Yeah, enslaved, because there is more ability to think about all that political stuff in other countries. More freedom to do that.

16:39 Mark: So have we finally gotten to the point in Mendelssohn where we can say how cultivated individuals are versus their society are and the relationship between those things? We're also talking about the relationship between the individual being enlightened and the society being enlightened. You could measure with ratios in the pseudo mathematical way, how enlightened the whole society is. And I think Mendelssohn would like enlightenment to be spread through all the ranks. It's just that, like cultivation, there has to be some sort of correspondence for the enlightenment to be successful between the material that people are thinking about when they're being enlightened and the actual conditions of man, as he says.

So that if you do have people that just because of the social setup, have to be in a slave state, then loading those people with master level enlightenment, intellectual level enlightenment, the state is going to fall apart. So if the state relies on oppression. So I still think Mendelssohn would like this is me reading into Mendelssohn for oppression not to be necessary for the foundation of the state, for all the groups to rise. He's not necessarily committed to. To there being these distinctions in social classes forever. So the ultimate conclusion here then is enlightenment and cultivation have to proceed at the same rate, right?

If you have too much enlightenment, the enlightenment is spreading, but the cultivation is messed up because you do have oppression, because you do have things out of whack between people's actual talents and the roles that are available to them, then you need more cultivation to catch up with the enlightenment, or vice versa.

18:12 Wes: I would only amend that to say I think the cultivation is, in a sense, the oppression. And you guys might disagree, but the cultivation is what serves the obedience of the citizen. So I don't think it's clear in the essay, but when you go back to. He's talking about refinement, beauty, perfection and mechanics and the arts and all that stuff. So that sounds a lot like enlightenment, even though he's talking there about cultivation. And it is, in a way, a product of the age of Enlightenment. We mentioned this irony before, so. Right. The more free thinkers you have, the more technology and perfection and mechanics, all that stuff.

But then that stuff gets, I think Heidegger would say, sedimented, right? It becomes a part of the routine of a society and part of our cultivation, it gets passed down to us. Once the free thinkers have done their work, it becomes part of the social fabric, and then it becomes the thing to which we are essentially obedient as citizens. And it affects our social arrangements, affects our customs and mores, and then that gets built into society. So the contrast between cultivation and enlightenment is just directly parallel to what he calls our conditions qua human beings and our conditions qua citizens.

And ultimately we need those two things, he says, to harmonize our essential condition as human beings must harmonize with our essential conditions. As citizens. And you can see where those things, again, might be in conflict. As human beings, we need enlightenment. We need freedom of conscience. We need total freedom to believe and say what we want. But as citizens, again, that might lead us to, say, disobey laws or other stuff. And that kind of conversation, we're having it today. Right. And we talked about it in our freedom of speech episode.

The idea that some speech might just be bad for society, like racist speech. So being free to say what we want, you know, we need that as human beings. But it could lead to violation of our obligations as citizens, let's say, wasn't

20:12 Mark: one of the concerns. I think this was expressed in the Schmidt article somewhere behind Mendelssohn and the people he was arguing with, that some of the problem with enlightenment could be that you can't harmonize certain truths that you might discover with the rest of life. The way that Kant might think of it is a little bit of philosophy is dangerous. Like, if you go all the way, if you really get a grasp of reason from Kant, you end up acting according to the way society would like you to anyway. And you praise the ruler and you are a perfectly ethical person.

But if you just get some of that information, so you just get part of the first critique where you say you can't prove the existence of God, and then you don't follow through and get all the practical reason stuff that makes you religious anyway, according to Kant, then you end up being a free thinker, an atheist, that this is part of the problem with the danger of being enlightened. It's actually not the danger of being enlightened, it's the danger of being partially enlightened.

21:06 Wes: Yeah. So we need the right balance of. When he's talking about the balance of cultivation and enlightenment, he's really talking about the balance of tradition and religion and that Confucianism stuff, ritual. With our living at the cutting edge and challenging all those things, we have to proceed carefully. And we can't just quickly jettison tradition or it could be a disaster. So there's a sort of prescience to this. Right. With the French Revolution on its way.

21:32 Mark: Yeah. I don't know exactly what I think of the idea of Mendelssohn describing the cultivation as the oppression. Because, again, I'm kind of projecting onto this the Confucian sort of model of Judaism as a religion of. You know. And Mendelssohn was explicitly a Jewish writer. Like he was writing in religious topics. I'm not just saying, oh, he's Jewish, he wants to have thought this. No, that was his professed philosophical point of view.

21:57 Wes: I was using the term oppression broadly. And.

21:59 Mark: And okay, but I just would think that civilization cultivation would be part of what having the correct. You know, just as in Confucianism. The correct rituals. The correct practices, exactly. So, you know, wearing the yarmulke, these things that we do, we light the candles in remembrance. Just these rituals, that would actually be a good thing. Those are not in themselves oppressive. What is a problem is if somehow it has overshot the enlightenment part. So maybe you're again going through the motions, you remember the rituals, and in fact you are so stuck on pursuing the rituals that your neighbor doesn't pursue the ritual and you stone him. That's when we have a problem.

22:37 Wes: Superstition, barbarism, fanaticism, they talk directly about that.

22:41 Dylan: It comes down to, for all your activities, that you participate in them freely. Just because you have a ritual doesn't make it oppressive. It's that the ritual is imposed upon you. And for example, you get stoned if you don't do it.

22:56 Wes: Well, I meant oppressive just in this broad sense of being part of what Kant calls the guardianship. It's just something we do by rote, like any more, any custom. We just do it because other people do it. And that's what you do. We don't think about it, we don't do it because we freely chose this through reason.

23:13 Dylan: But that doesn't make it oppressive. I mean, just because you do something habitually doesn't make it oppressive.

23:17 Wes: I apologize for using the term oppressive.

23:19 Dylan: No, I'm not disagreeing with the point.

23:22 Mark: I'm thinking in terms of the stages as described in the Confucius episode between. You know, you start by just obeying, but then if you get to the point of a sage, then your every impulse is in line with what you're supposed to do so that you've so transformed yourself, you've so connected to reason, you're in harmony with the universe, and so your freest action ends up being exactly the one that is ritually required of you by your society.

23:50 Wes: Yeah, perfect harmonization.

23:51 Mark: Yeah. So I guess there's a parallel to me there. I was just describing, like, well, a little bit of enlightenment can get you screwed up. You got to be all the way enlightened. Well, a little bit of cultivation has you just obeying the rituals. You need all the cultivation, and that actually ends up hooking up with enlightenment sort of at the end of the tunnel. Anyway, that's just a hypothesis that seems to go well with Mendelssohn saying that these things should proceed at the same rate in a society.

24:16 Dylan: You made me start wanting to talk about the Foucault because. Well, because it's time to talk about it, but also because of the question of it being a way as opposed to a place.

24:25 Mark: Yeah, Dylan, kick us off. Give us the upshot of the Foucault or the initial point that you wanted to start on there.

24:30 Dylan: Well, I guess it's worth pointing out that Foucault is directly responding to Kant. He mentions Mendelssohn and interestingly, Baudelaire, which made me think a lot about Nietzsche. He does this nice archaeology on the Kant essay and in the end, maybe not surprisingly, he ends up conceiving of enlightenment and modernity in terms of an activity of self critique, an activity of contextual analysis that is sort of ongoing. There isn't a distinct stage of you transform from being unenlightened to enlightened. So I think he even wants to attribute it also to Kant's implicit, if not explicit meaning that this activity of enlightenment is non transcendental, but we should just go through it. That was my take on it.

25:18 Mark: I certainly saw a parallel, you know, he's saying, even though Kant is wrongly saying that, yeah, if you are a hold of reason, then you're enlightened.

25:26 Seth: Hey.

25:26 Mark: In fact, Foucault's conclusion is we're not yet enlightened.

25:30 Wes: Kant says that as well, by the way, we are not an enlightened age, but we are an age of enlightenment.

25:34 Mark: Yeah, well, he, Kant was saying we are not as a group, as a society, enlightened. But you don't think he thought that he himself and his fellow intellectuals were actually enlightened?

25:43 Wes: That's a good question.

25:45 Mark: Whereas I think Foucault is denying even that. So I saw a parallel here between the two trends in, in Socrates. Right. In Plato, that on the one hand we have what enlightenment is for Socrates is to be questioning yourself. But then when we get to later Plato, then it seems like enlightenment is to be outside the cave. It's not just questioning yourself, it's actually getting to the end point. The brilliant thing that you're supposed to discover when you start questioning yourself and getting rid of all the crap that society's pushed on you. So becoming enlightened is being independent of that.

Well, so Foucault is pointing at Kant and saying, actually, Kant has given us a whole new way we can talk about what the difference between Kant's way and the Socratic way. But a whole new way of interrogating ourselves, that we're still engaged in the Socratic project of know thyself of the examined life. But there was something new here in the way that he was going about it. And in the same way, there was that dichotomy within Platonism, there's the dichotomy within Kant, that Kant himself, I think, seemed to say that if, basically, if you agree with the Kantian philosophy, then you've got a hold of what reason tells you.

At the very least, you're going to be doing things like treating everybody as an autonomous person. And again, I think that it points you toward a spinozik, like at least basic belief in God, if not toward a particular creed. It's not just creating a space for religion to be available. It's actually saying if you're really reasonable, you will buy into the kind of religion, the kind of politics that Kant was into. Well, predictably, Foucault is saying Kant was right about the methodological thing, wrong about the results. Even if we go through his process, if we go through the process of the scientific revolution, of the sort of questioning that Descartes was involved in the whole project of the Enlightenment, that's a good thing.

That's a new method that Kant is being the capstone of with his Copernican revolution that he's distilling down for us in this essay a little bit. But still, we have not reached the end point of that and we should never expect to do so. It's really an attitude of self criticism. And in fact, then Foucault says, I like my way of doing criticism better. I like my genealogical, archaeological way better than this. Searching for the transcendental limits of things.

28:00 Wes: Yeah. So Mark, he wants to talk about the Enlightenment ethos and in particular its effect on modernity. So on page six, I had read

28:10 Dylan: this when I was an undergrad, and so I had it in my Foucault reader. So I was just going to say

28:14 Wes: page 39, my PDF, page 6. Yeah. First of all, he's talking about modernity, Right? And as I said before, you can think of the Enlightenment as early modernity and then post French Revolution as sort of modernity up until the early 20th century as modernity proper. And that involves a lot of. He'll think about Baudelaire here as well, but he's thinking about an ethos. And the ethos he identifies is what he calls the heroization of the present. So he begins by saying modernity is often characterized in terms of a consciousness of the discontinuity of time, a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment.

And we can see how this is sort of a direct result of what we've been talking about with this sort of rupture of the cultivation and the tradition element that we get right. So with Kant and Mendelssohn, we've seen them worry about the effects of enlightenment on tradition and cultivation. And here Foucault is saying, and I think this is what happens after the French Revolution, as a direct effect of the Enlightenment, we do get this radical break with tradition. And when we get that, we're also saying something about a change in the way we as human beings are related to the present and related to our consciousness of time.

You know, the more cultivated we are, the more steeped in tradition, the more a sense of continuity and permanence we have when it comes to time. And now we are getting this what he calls vertigo, the sense of the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent becoming dominant.

29:56 Dylan: Just before what you read, Wes, there's a quote there, and there's a quote at the end that I wanted to point to. He says, thinking back on, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. By attitude, I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality, a voluntary choice made by certain people, in the end, a way of thinking and feeling, a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation to belonging and presents itself as a task. He points to the Greek notion of ethos.

And then at the end of his comment about discontinuity of time, he says, modernity is distinct from fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time. Modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the heroic aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present. It is the will to heroize the present.

30:48 Wes: Yeah. And before that, he's saying, basically, what do we do with that sense of fleetingness and discontinuity? Well, he's going to say we're going to try to capture the something eternal behind that, and that's what we're doing. When we heroize the present, we are actually going to retrieve out of this presentation, you know, fracture of tradition and time. We are going to try to retrieve something permanent out of the pieces. And that is the distinctive attitude of modernity.

31:14 Mark: Yeah. Bringing in Baudelaire is weird here. I mean, not that we've read any Baudelaire. I have never read any Baudelaire. I didn't know that he wrote about painters of his time. But he gives as an example Foucault, you know, what is it to heroize the present? Well, according to Baudelaire, the modern painter is the one who can show the dark frock coat as the necessary costume of our time, who knows how to make manifest in the fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains with death. The dress code and frock coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality.

This is a quote from Baudelaire. But also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public soul, an immense cortège of undertakers, mutes, mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes. We're each of us celebrating some funeral, which sounds like a modernist, is somebody who's really pretentious.

31:58 Dylan: You have to read the second thing, though, about how this heroization is ironical, needless to say.

32:02 Seth: Yeah.

32:03 Wes: And what he's saying there, Right. Is if you take these seemingly contingent, unnecessary things. Right. So fashion and the wearing of a dark frock coat is just arbitrary custom, arbitrary tradition, arbitrary. It's something defined by our times that, again, we do out of mere obedience rather than free thinking. But we can aestheticize that. The modern painter can take that and show that that actually is something necessary, that is something meaningful. It makes manifests a certain kind of relation to death that we might have as a society. So, again, that's the way of retrieving something permanent out of something that's seemingly contingent and arbitrary. We look for its meaning.

32:42 Mark: We interpret what everybody's doing and saying, oh, it's not just that Trump got in office because of a stupid historical accident, that we happen to have a particular candidate up against him. The society happened to be laid out in a certain way. There happened to be certain. Certain things. That just was very unlikely, but it happened. No, it's. It's the age of Trump. There's a. There's an inevitability, a cultural inevitability. People are writing articles of. Like, you could see this, right, in conservatism's Republican Party's DNA for decades.

It was all going to come down to this. It was all, you know, this essentialism, which, when Foucault is saying this heroization is ironical. He clarifies the attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as sacred to try to maintain or perpetuate it. It's not that he's joking. Like these people who say it's the age of Trump, they're not joking, but by saying it's ironically saying he's not actually trying to heroize it, like, say that it's great, that he's just trying to say that it really is meaningful.

33:32 Wes: Yeah, very well put. Make America meaningful again. The spectator's posture is what Baudelaire calls it. We see a lot of links here to Nietzsche, I think, the aesthetic significance of things as a way out of everything being fractured and a way out of nihilism.

33:48 Dylan: Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth. He is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not liberate man in his own being. It compels him to face the task of producing himself. That whole activity of producing himself, that's straight up in line with Nietzsche, which

34:04 Mark: I guess I'm still trying to get exactly the leap. Does Nietzsche, in his hermeneutics, heroize the present? I guess he does. In saying, like, this thing that happened at the spirit of our decadent society, or describing these things as the movements of the spirit of races, he doesn't use the word ideology, but that's essentially what he's talking about. The ideology of Christianity, the ideology of slave morality, whatever. The thing he's talking about. That does seem like a way of. I don't know that he would like the word heroize, but it's. It's hermeneutics. It's making meaning out of it.

34:34 Wes: Yeah, I mean, he. Nietzsche celebrates the present in the sense that he celebrates the appearance. Right. As opposed to the metaphysics behind the

34:41 Mark: appearance, and the genealogy is part of the appearance.

34:44 Wes: Well, I don't know what you're onto there, exactly. I'm saying the. The appearance is part of the, you know, what we would call becoming. It's the temporally fleeting, as opposed to, you know, the substantial permanence behind all that.

34:56 Mark: Right. I guess I was equating the heroization in the case of Nietzsche, at least, with something genealogical. I guess the difference is how far back you're going.

35:02 Wes: Well, that's his method, though.

35:04 Seth: All right.

35:04 Mark: Well, it's the relationship between pointing at a society right now, as we did in our most recent episode, and saying this is decadent, and doing that actual historical, I think, very related method that Foucault is going to basically talk about later right here, where he goes back and, you know, kind of explains why the present is decadent because it is coming out of this past of slave morality. And the way that Foucault puts it here is he says the method is archaeological archaeology and genealogy together as like the two things. I'm thinking that this is the way he's characterizing what's ultimately come out of modernity, this heroization of the present that he characterizes as modernity, and is relating this to Kant's method.

Although there's certainly a jump between Kant's method and Nietzsche's method. But I think according to Foucault, the DNA is there. So Foucault is like sketching a genealogy himself right there. And so filling in the blanks here. If you're Baudelaire, you're taking the spectator's posture that you're modern man, you're imposing meaning on things, whether it's archeologically, genealogically, whatever. And then, Wes, you were saying that maybe Dylan was saying that out of that comes the Nietzschean self creation. Right, because you're observing, you're aestheticizing history

36:12 Wes: and as Dylan noted, producing oneself. Right. Aestheticizing oneself but having a style.

36:18 Mark: Yeah, it's a weird jump, at least the way I've described it, from, you know, an analysis of history and heroizing the present to creating yourself as a certain style.

36:27 Dylan: Well, but this goes directly with the notion of immaturity or being self incurred minority that you have something to grow out of. That's the link that I think that Foucault's making and why he's linking it up with Nietzsche.

36:39 Wes: This goes towards item three too. Mark on. So he says modernity for Baudelaire, is not simply a form of relationship to the present. It is also a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself. The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments. It is to take oneself as an object of a complex and difficult elaboration.

37:05 Dylan: That's straight up Nietzsche too. I mean, it's just.

37:08 Wes: Yeah, although I think, you know, the asceticism. Nietzsche famously is an anti ascetic, but I don't think we should read. What Foucault is talking about here is asceticism in the Nietzsche, the pejorative Nietzsche sense.

37:18 Dylan: That's right, because there's an interesting conversation to have another time about. Despite Nietzsche being anti ascetic, there's a certain kind of deep asceticism about him.

37:28 Mark: It would almost work better according to the interpretation I was just giving. If you read asceticism as aestheticism, right, the deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to aesthetically interpreting. This is what the heroization of the present was, is focusing on the appearance and somehow building yourself out of that stylistic. But this asceticism seems to fly in the face of that interpretation.

37:49 Wes: Dylan already read this, but the end of three is modern man, for Baudelaire is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth. He is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not liberate man in his own being. It compels him to face the task of producing himself. This is a new take on autonomy and freedom, right? We haven't left that behind. A new take on Enlightenment, not simply as being a reasoner and hyper rational, but as being in some sense creative, producing something.

38:19 Dylan: And that's why Foucault starts with this part of Kant that's talking about our immaturity. I mean, he, I think, wants to draw a direct line from Kant's essay, straight through Nietzsche, Baudelaire, modernity, all the way right up to himself and say that that current attitude of modernity that he refers to is really the properly understood flowering of a proper understanding of enlightenment. Was there in Kant already.

38:47 Seth: Sometimes I read Foucault and it's very clear and compelling. And sometimes I struggle and I definitely struggled with this essay, but I was under the impression he was contrasting Baudelaire and Kant and not seeing like a single line that connects them. And maybe not even contrasting is the right word, but that they're both threads which constitute our view of modernity now. And he's trying to say, reflecting back on what was conceived of as the modern in the Kantian Enlightenment, actually just describes, while it's no doubt been influential, it describes a certain way of viewing the world and which is not wholly reconcilable with where he sees us at today.

39:28 Wes: The last paragraph before section A is actually really helpful in this regard because it makes the explicit connection. So I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation, one that simultaneously problematizes man's relation to the present, man's historical mode of being and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject, is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent Reactivation of an attitude that is of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.

40:05 Dylan: Exactly.

40:06 Wes: I should like to characterize this ethos very briefly. And then he goes into the characterization of that. I think this is what Dylan was saying before. There is this enlightenment element to the modern attitude, the modern ethos that he's talking about. What's the element, the permanent critique of our historical era. Also the element of freedom. Right. The Enlightenment stuff, as we saw in the previous readings, was all about rational freedom, being able to reason for oneself, think for oneself. We're getting a twist on that here, but it's not entirely a break because it still seems to have something to do with autonomy in this self production and in this aestheticization and interpretation of fractured pieces of tradition or cultivation, as I would like to call it, to relate it to Mendelssohn that we're left with once the self critique of a historical moment rips tradition apart.

Right. And leaves it groundless.

40:59 Mark: And incidentally, I'm okay with the word asceticism now because I read again the rest of point 3 on the previous page, which I'm not going to read all of here, but just a quote. The asceticism of the dandy who makes his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence a work of art. In other words, this Nietzschean living as an art is not a matter of being a free wheeling hippie, it's a matter of that. You know, Nietzsche also stresses self discipline, not self tyranny. He doesn't like stoicism. We'll talk about that next episode.

But yeah, that it takes a determination of will to kind of interpret history this way. You know, it's not a matter of just, oh, there's an interpretation over here. An interpretation over here. This heroization of the actually seems like it's. Well, I don't want to say dogmatic, but it's very insistent. Let's say that you own it. So that requires a certain. Yes, if you define yourself in a certain way, that's actually fully defining yourself. It's not a matter of this way. I'm going to be a farmer in the morning and a businessman in the afternoon.

You know, whatever the Marxist characterization of that of virtue. No, making of yourself something determinant requires ascetic dedication. So he's reading that into modernism as well.

42:08 Wes: And then he's going to go on right now, he's going to characterize the ethos. He starts out with the refusal of blackmail of the Enlightenment is what he calls it of having to choose to be for or against the Enlightenment.

42:20 Mark: Why is that a blackmail of the Enlightenment?

42:22 Wes: I don't know. It's a weird way of putting it. Right.

42:24 Mark: I also think that as an enterprise for linking the progress of truth in the history of liberty in a bond of direct relation, it formulated a philosophical question that remains for us to consider. I think, finally, as I've tried to show with reference to Kant's text, that it defined a certain manner of philosophizing. Oh, but that does not mean that one has to be for or against the Enlightenment.

42:40 Wes: Yeah.

42:41 Mark: It even means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative. Either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism, or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality.

42:54 Dylan: The last paragraph. We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined to a certain extent by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible. And these inquirers will not be oriented retrospectively towards the essential kernel of rationality that can be found in the Enlightenment and that would have to be preserved. In any event, they will be oriented toward the contemporary limits of the necessary, that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects. So it's refusing to make that all or nothing decision about the characteristic of what the light means in its rationality, and. And whether we should embrace rationality in exactly that way. But this contextualization of it, us being born out of it.

43:41 Wes: To what extent is rationality necessary to the constitutions of ourselves as autonomous subjects? And he sees that as in line with Kant's critique of the limits of reason.

43:51 Dylan: This is exactly another point about how Foucault understands what he's doing as being a fruition of Kant. In some ways, I think he's making the argument that he's doing criticism right through genealogy and archaeology, that that is decidedly Kantian and owes its context to that, but that it's a appropriate development of it. Not just a twist, but a development of it.

44:18 Wes: I always forget how great Foucault is, by the way, because it is a little wordy and a little too French for my tastes. But the insights are great. Great.

44:29 Dylan: It's really good.

44:30 Seth: Dylan, on your reading, Foucault is saying it's the application of reason in the way that he does it via genealogy, as Opposed to whatever the scholarly Kantian methodology is. That represents his indebtedness to the Kantian Enlightenment, skepticism or questioning. But his inquiry is not ahistorical in some respect, which is the way that the Kantian, And I'm struggling to articulate it.

45:00 Wes: I think you're right, Seth. It's still critique, right? They're both forms of critique, but for Kant it was reflection, right? And so you could do transcendental deduction in a way to get where you wanted to go. And for Foucault, we're no longer doing that. We have to do Nietzsche style genealogy, right? And look back at Nietzsche's genealogy of Morals. That is a prime example of critique. It's just that it's done through the genealogical method. It looks at historical origins, but it also looks at psychological origins. If a system of value is the result of ressentiment, what does that imply about it? About its limits, about its validity? Whatever.

45:39 Dylan: The goal is not transcendental, that is to get to some place other than where you're at now. And the other way in which I think that Foucault is tying himself to Kant. In particular, this article is emphasizing Kant's point about us without enlightenment being in a state of immaturity, and that therefore there's a process of development that needs to be there. And in this way he might be asking Kant to do more than he's actually doing. But to the extent that then that article, he's pointing towards things like development and becoming and growth, both in his words, his choice of vocabulary, and also some of the explicit parts of it, Foucault is tying him directly right to Nietzsche. Kant might not like that, but that's what Foucault is doing, I think.

46:35 Seth: Okay, that's interesting. And that was the piece that I found that I thought was interesting. I don't know if he just hints at it, but in section A, it's stakes. So that's page 13 in the PDF that I'm looking at now. The relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of autonomy are not as simple as the 18th century may have believed. And we have been able to see what forms of power relation were conveyed by various technologies. Whether we are speaking of productions with economic aims or institutions whose goal is social regulation or techniques of communication, disciplines, both collective and individual procedures of normalization exercised in the name of the power, power of the state, demands of society or population zones are examples.

What is at stake then is this. How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations. That was the thread that I picked up, and it harkens back to the last part of the previous episode when we were talking about the power relations or the political. That's inherent in the exercise of criticism. And I think Foucault's bringing two pieces additional to the dialogue here, which is it is the Nietzschean genealogy, but he's also got a sense of acknowledgement that we're starting from the place where we're at.

We're not doing criticism, not even with a goal of transcendence, but also not from any kind of privileged position. We start our dialogue from the historical moment that we're in. And that includes all of the social, institutional, economic things that dictate the power relations which limit our autonomy and limit our ability. Maybe we have to overcome them. Maybe we can, maybe we can't. But that was the thing that I picked up on there that I thought was interesting.

48:20 Wes: This is directly tied to the cultivation Enlightenment conflict that we were just talking about. Right. The growth of capabilities. Again, it's an effect of the Enlightenment, but it creates new constraints, all these new technologies. The effect of those technologies on social relations, they in turn have negative effects on the growth of autonomy.

48:42 Mark: Yeah. This makes a lot more sense of why you were saying the cultivation in Mendelssohn actually is the oppression, because that's specifically the way Foucault considers it.

48:50 Wes: Exactly.

48:51 Mark: You might want to still ask, does Mendelssohn's formulation offer some advantage over Foucault's formulation here? There seemed to be something in Mendelssohn's idea of cultivation as correspondence between the talents and inclinations of individuals and the roles that they can fill, and that it's actually a good thing for your society, even if it's not enlightened, even if it doesn't have the Enlightenment hit it yet. But it's still a good thing for those things to correspond, I guess, because it's more peaceful. Whereas Foucault is not putting a high priority on peace here like it would be.

You know, we have a very highly developed system of prisons, and we have prisoners that are just right for those prisons. Like that seems compatible with the way that Mendelssohn puts it. And of course, that's exactly the kind of thing in Discipline and Punish that he's going to point out as being presumably horrific, even if he's just giving a genealogical, scientific analysis of it. Like, it's obvious that socially we're supposed to fight against that. So doesn't that kind of get at the essence of what. What Foucault is saying is wrong with both Kant and Mendelssohn talking about the Enlightenment is that they thought that you just get reason and you're enlightened.

But no, actually we have all these superstructures built onto our thinking by historical society that prohibit us from truly thinking independently, even when we think we are. The power of ideology corrupts reason.

50:25 Dylan: Maybe. I think that there's that kind of criticism of power and ideology in Foucault. I just think that he's really just trying to say what philosophy is and tying himself back. I mean, at the very end, he says, I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us mature adults, and we have not yet reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a meaning can be attributed to the critical interrogation of the present and on the present and on ourselves, which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment.

It seems to me that Kant's reflection is even a way of philosophizing that has not been without its importance or effectiveness during the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not certainly as a theory, a doctrine, but or even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating. It has to be conceived of as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time, the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.

So, I mean, again, I think that he's tying himself directly to the path of philosophy that Kant set out centuries ago. And I think that he's refining it to. In the implicit criticism of the Enlightenment would be understanding it as a doctrine or as a theory that you'll get to a final transcendental end, or it's

52:02 Wes: a result of transcendental analysis, I would also think. So this is still the project of freedom, right? Becoming free. But for Foucault, it's so he says back on page 11 on mine, criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying so we have to look at all the forces that are at work on us and that constitute us even in our rationality, right?

We have to go under simply our rationality and the product of our rational thinking to look at what's constituting us as human beings? And later on he'll say to separate out from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking what we are, do or think. So in other words, freedom. Right. The possibility of doing, being and thinking things which are no longer. And there's an existentialist theme here, right. Which are no longer simply products of our essence, no longer simply products of deterministic forces that make us who we are.

53:17 Dylan: Yep.

53:19 Mark: So I guess I see some of this is pointing to that ambiguity, right, in Kant's notion of the Enlightenment that we pointed out earlier, which is, are we free to think or are we free to know? And so Foucault is. He connects the dots in a way that I found interesting, wasn't obvious to me from just reading the Kant by itself. It's like, when do Kant's critique come in? Well, he says it's when we are enlightened, we are free to think. That's when we need Kant's critique. Because before you're, when you're just thinking about your job and stuff, then you're not going to have the problem of speculative reason running wild.

Like that's not a good description of what's happening in superstition. Superstition is not really count as thought at all. It's just kind of more parroting junk that's been flying around in the culture. But it's perfectly reasonable for a enlightened person like Leibniz to then make all sorts of unjustified, according to Kant claims using reason about the world, about metaphysics. So you might ask again, for Kant, is the point of enlightenment when you just get free so you can start doing philosophy? Or is the point enlightenment actually when reason kicks in its results and is used properly, that Foucault sees Kant's critiques as.

This is the way I was thinking of it as sort of like just the normative rules of logic. Hey, we're going to do some argumenting. Let's learn about modus ponens and let's learn about modus tollens. Let's learn about symbolic logic. It kind of just sets up a framework. So this is very different than the idea, you know, like we saw in Ayn Rand's critique of Kant. How can reason criticize itself? That that's self contradictory reason undermining itself? Like. No, no, what Kant is doing in sketching out his critiques is just saying, looking. We're using reason kind of to figure out logic, to Figure out actually in a broad sense, higher than modus ponens and modus tollens and deductive stuff, what realms are legitimate for reason to talk about.

Again, I like the analogy between that and logical rules. So again, you might think that really enlightenment for Kant doesn't come until you have internalized Kant's philosophy.

55:27 Seth: Right.

55:27 Mark: Until you've learned all this stuff. Kant's going to say, once we get rid of political impediments, people are going to start reasoning, they're going to start thinking for themselves. Ultimately, they're going to come up with Kant's philosophy because that's just what pure reason ends up telling you. But Foucault, I think, is going to deny both of those things. First, as an existentialist, no, you don't come up with transcendental rules. We've said that. But also, how do you know when you're truly politically free? You thought that as long as there weren't laws specifically saying if you publish this, we're going to throw you in prison. But Foucault is. His whole books are stories about how even without laws like that, we are still constrained by society in more subtle ways.

56:08 Wes: Yeah, psychosocial stuff that goes on that amounts to power relations and to things that constrain us.

56:15 Mark: So I'd say that was my closing. Unless there are other parts of the text that people want to get into, other people want to give closings.

56:22 Dylan: I think these are great examples of things just to go read. They're not very long. I found them. I think they're very accessible. I think they make a good triple in general.

56:34 Wes: Yeah. Getting Foucault in juxtaposition to the Kant and Mendelssohn and all those connections that I think we really drew out in the podcast. I don't know. It's really enlightening, let's put it that way. It's enlightening to make those connections between enlightenment and then post enlightened modernity and between critique in the Kantian sense and then critique in the Nietzsche and then Foucaultian sense. So I really enjoyed reading these and enjoyed this conversation as well.

57:03 Seth: I'll third that. I guess I struggled with the Foucault, as I mentioned the other two, there's no excuse for anybody listening not to read them. The Kant and the Mendelssohn for sure. There's one theme in Foucault that we didn't touch on that I think would be interesting for a follow up at some point, which is the difference between enlightenment and humanism. And then there's a whole other podcast at some point in the future about critiques of enlightenment and the sense in which the Enlightenment, or the rationalist project can be viewed as leading to the types of power structures that Foucault discusses in, for example, discipline and Punish and the violence, wars, genocide, and stuff in the 20th century that I think also would be really interesting. But this was a lot of fun and a great topic for this 200th episode, for sure. So thank you, Wes and Mark, for recommending it.

57:52 Wes: And Dylan. Oh, you mean for a recommended topic. Okay.

57:58 Mark: No, thanks to you, Dylan. Yeah, just to give a little more history, a little more background on how we chose these. And so, of course, Foucault is critical of this, and there are lots of other people who are critical of this as well. Foucault, in fact, is coming after the Horkheimer Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment, which has a whole section on enlightenment or people recommending Habermas to us talking about enlightenment. It seemed like that would just be introducing too much complexity in this episode. Perhaps we could have an episode later on those two things.

We did have a Habermas article identified, and some of us read it. I had started it. It really raised an interesting issue of, like, what is modernity versus postmodernity? More than Foucault's particular method, but, you know, larger. I'm not even sure if Foucault counts as a postmodernist, but he's at least in the same universe. That is a topic for a future episode, I think. I also like this idea of doing some more with humanism, I think Foucault's point in here about humanism, that basically that people use humanism to argue for all sorts of different contradictory stuff.

So that's pretty interesting. And the fact that a continuous critique of the type that Foucault is recommending, that he thinks that this enlightenment project got us on, is ultimately a critique of those humanisms that when you argue for a humanism, you're kind of saying you have a determinate idea of what human nature is, and you probably pull that from religion or some other dogmatic source. So that as a tool to knock down all dogmatisms going forward in a very stern, ascetic way, that that would be actually be contra to humanism. Anyway, interesting topic.

We could definitely read a bunch of essays just on that, I'm sure. But we're going to be turning in our next episode to Stoicism, back to Stoicism for a third time around I think this is going to be. We're going to finally hit the jackpot on it because we're bringing on Ryan Holiday, one of the most prominent, most famous Stoics. He wrote the Daily Stoic, for instance. The Obstacle Is the Way is another one of his books. We're going to be reading Marcus Aurelius with him. So that is his favorite Stoic. And I think also looking at his Daily Stoic for places where he brings out and interprets Marcus Aurelius.

So this will allow us. Since the Daily Stoic also includes Epictetus and Seneca and a few other folks, I think we might be able to think more concretely about the relationship between historical texts and modern Stoicism.

1:00:32 Seth: Right.

1:00:32 Mark: Daily practice, because that's actually what Marcus Aurelius was doing. He was not an original philosopher. He was in his meditations, just writing notes to himself. He was basically doing the same thing that Ryan is doing in the Daily Stoic, except that Ryan knew that he would be able to publish it and sell a jillion books. And Marcus had no ambition of that sort at all. But he's not trying to be original. He's often quoting Epictetus. He's quoting these other folks, but giving his own interpretations and really trying to make it apply to his life.

So that some of the discussion that we engaged with on the Epictetus episode of like, you know, is some of this anachronistic. The modern Stoic does not care about that. Like, if it's anachronistic, just throw it away. It's a pick and choose philosophy to what is going to most empower you, most improve your life. And I think that sort of attitude starts with Marcus Aurelius. And we'll get to hear it firsthand from Ryan.

1:01:20 Dylan: I would point out that Marcus Aurelius, being a Roman emperor, might not have had to worry that much about publishing.

1:01:27 Mark: That's true. Thanks, everybody. We want to hear what you thought of these things, these articles, our discussion of these articles, what else, what other threads you want us to pull for future episodes? Please do that by commenting on this episode at partiallyexaminedlife.com or chiming in via our Facebook group, our Facebook page on Twitter, emailing us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com today's closing song is called Holy fool is from the final 1998 album by Love and Rockets called Lift. And I interviewed the singer, guitarist here for Nakedly Examined Music, episode 35. That's Daniel Ash. I also interviewed another one of the writers here, David J. Who plays bass on this for Nakedly Examined Music, episode 72. So check out both those interviews@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com thanks for 200 episodes, guys.

1:02:20 Seth: Thank you.

1:02:21 Dylan: Awesome.

1:02:22 Mark: And thanks to you, the audience, for supporting us for 200 episodes. Good night, everybody.

1:02:27 Seth: Good night.

1:02:28 Dylan: Good night.

1:02:28 Wes: Good night.

1:02:45 Mark: I could kiss the sheep fire Just like a holy, holy fool

1:02:52 Wes: I could

1:02:53 Mark: never think too much Just like that Whole head, whole head fool

1:03:00 Wes: I could

1:03:00 Mark: never see a bright, bright future in the bottom of this puppet girl I

1:03:07 Dylan: could scream up and down up and

1:03:10 Mark: down Just like a jet boy out of school.

1:03:25 Seth: How.

1:03:37 Mark: I could pick up the pieces and try to play by the rules I could dig down deeper and deeper Like a hole in a hole in the

1:03:50 Wes: fool

1:03:52 Mark: I could think there's no judgment no control no control I could think the best times ahead Now I can hold it, hold it for hold it for.

1:04:17 Wes: How.

1:04:42 Mark: There. By you.

1:05:34 Dylan: She fights.