Unleashed to the Public: Nightcap Late September 2020

0:06 Mark: Yo, yo, yo, lifers. Do you like, be called lifers? I don't know. As you're absorbing the shock of Habermas Part 2 not being publicly available, I have a bone. Would you like this bone? I'm gonna unlock the Pel Night Cap episode that is being released to supporters right now, and you people get it for free, in full so you can see what kind of fun you're missing. So, yes, this is actually not generous. It's an advertisement, so you have double the reason to go sign up@PartiallyExaminedLife.com support for a PEL Citizenship or Patreon subscription.

We have been recording these nightcaps in the off weeks between episodes. What you're about to hear is the sixth one we have done, and it's pretty typical. We read some listener emails, we discuss a little philosophy without having read any text for this in particular. Really, anything could happen. It is an evolving form. The point is, it is us four hosts, Wes, Seth, Dillon, and me, Mark, being your Covid companions in this relatively safe space of supporterdom. So see what you think. Hey, this is the Pel nightcap we are recording on August 28, on the eve of our Habermas recording, which has gotten delayed how many times?

At least three. But I think actually more than that because we kind of had it earlier in the schedule and then put this Weil in there. So probably five times.

1:32 Seth: Yeah, it's a marathon.

1:34 Mark: And is this the most fun reading that we've ever done?

1:37 Seth: It's amazing. Loving it.

1:40 Wes: I commented that it is the most interesting thing I've read that I've enjoyed the least in my life.

1:47 Mark: Part of that was we switched what reading we were doing that. We had one thing assigned, and Seth read most of it, and it was really difficult. Like, I just stopped after page one, and then we shifted to something easier that the second one was more of a commentary on. And I think the second reading was better. Like, it's really not any more vicious than the average analytic philosophy thing, as far as I'm concerned.

2:07 Dylan: No, it's not.

2:09 Seth: No. And I think, well, we can talk about this more in the episode, but I think it's unnecessarily difficult. A lot of analytic philosophies, at least, can be clear. This, I think, is just unnecessarily unclear.

2:20 Dylan: I would describe it. It's the Germanic spin. He writes from tradition of the great German systematic philosophers. But he's writing in a very analytic philosophy kind of way. So if you imagine German rhetorical techniques applied to the Cat on the mat. You can imagine it's the worst of both worlds. It is, it is. I mean, I think the project's very interesting myself. And the first reading, you know, is very much him giving a very detailed rebuttal to people who have criticized him, which really unveils a lot of nuances in his thinking. It's just, you're right, it could be clearer. But we're also reading him in translation, so who knows what that means?

2:59 Seth: I think for secondary sources, the Stanford Encyclopedia article is very good, very clear, and shows how quickly some of this can be explained.

3:06 Mark: And because we keep pushing this off, I'll have time to actually look at that. So that's great.

3:09 Seth: Yeah, yeah. And I also. I'm enjoying. I'm reading a very short introduction book to Habermas. That's good. And then the Internet Encyclopedia article is more in the weeds and more difficult. You can tell it's written by a continental person and that Stanford, as usual, is written by an analytic person. But you get more detail on the Internet Encyclopedia article.

3:30 Mark: Well, let's justify that being in this nightcap by punting the question to the listeners, to the supporters. Do you use the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? Do you find those to be easy to read things? I actually find Wikipedia often is perfectly serviceable for somebody that is just very unfamiliar with the thing. Not necessarily for these episodes, but like, as far as what I'd recommend for

3:51 Dylan: the listener, if I need to verify spelling, pronunciation or like publication names or something like that, then Wikipedia is where I start. And maybe for some ad reads I might go try to pull some nuggets. But I try not to rely on Wikipedia as a secondary source for any particular philosophical concept.

4:12 Seth: Yeah, it's very hit or miss because it's crowdsourced. And some articles are really quite bad, I think, but sometimes it's not so bad, but for a very high level, it's not a bad place to start, I think.

4:24 Mark: Yeah, and those other things are, I won't say crowdsourced, but some of the Stanford articles are really clear and some of them are really thickety, are really just like you were saying with the IEP on Habermas in particular, just a matter of who is choosing to write it.

4:36 Seth: Yeah, but at least they're all professionals, you know, that's the thing. So.

4:40 Dylan: Yeah, and it's a single voice for the most part, so there's some coherence. The thing that's. Maybe I have an account with Wikipedia that makes it look this way, but like there's so much. What's the word I'm looking for? Like hypertext and commentary and stuff. Warning, this hasn't been cited enough. Or this is insufficient. Or as you're reading it, there's so many links and so it can be really distracting.

5:03 Mark: You're only using wiki to look up QAnon topics and of course those are going to.

5:06 Wes: Yeah, you're just reading crappy Wikipedia articles.

5:09 Dylan: Oh, okay.

5:11 Seth: You know, and Wikipedia editors aren't. You're not allowed to write in your own voice. You're not allowed to present any original takes. Right. So any explanation of Habermas sort of has to be cited as coming from somewhere else. And then there's repetition and it's writing by committee.

5:28 Mark: I actually did use it recently in response to looking at somebody who was writing QAnon stuff of like what was actually going on with Hunter Biden. And Wikipedia was very well sourced. Like it distilled the news about what was actually found about his being on the board of Burisma and stuff, like in a perfectly concise and well sourced way. So it served a purpose.

5:48 Seth: Yeah, I've used Wikipedia and political arguments before, it seems.

5:53 Mark: Yeah. The crowdsourcing is a. Wikipedia says it's true. Well, yeah. And the fact that it is so like internally checked that you know, it's not a news editor coming in and checking it. Although maybe there are actual news editors involved in those kind of stories. I have no idea.

6:06 Seth: There are people with. Of differing points of view. So you get. And if you can look at the discussion threads for any given article so you can see people disagreeing and wrangling over those disagreements. So that I think is actually a valuable thing, especially when it comes to current events and politics.

6:23 Mark: Speaking of, I wanted to read a listener. So this is a Facebook post. But I've communicated with him subsequently. We were already Facebook friends. I don't know how I'll say his full name because he puts himself forward as a commentary Sque. Berta. And he goes by Squee. I know he has another name. I found it at some point, but reacting to our Weil episode, he says, can you please do an episode on at least one classical anarchist thinker? Listening to your Weil episode, you consistently get the notion of anarchism very wrong. And this was the beginning of a kind of back and forth.

But this is something we, you know, we had it on our list. I think Wes, you were the one that rejected it at the moment. At least it made it deprioritized. It can we say if we're going to read stuff like Benjamin and Weil that are engaging with anarchism, should we not actually read one of those classical sources?

7:07 Seth: We can. I'm not all that excited about it, but we can. Once we start reading it, I'm sure I'll get into it.

7:13 Dylan: The reading you shared actually looked kind of interesting. I just don't know that I want to read the whole thing. Kropotkin.

7:18 Mark: Yes. The Conquest of Bread, I believe.

7:21 Wes: Yep, the Conquest of Bread.

7:23 Seth: Okay.

7:24 Wes: It's a sourdough recipe.

7:26 Mark: It's all these people that were about the same time as Marx or I think shortly post Marx, sort of before Marxism got really codified. I don't know that much about it. And I think, you know, Stirner is a guy who's definitely from that era who's often also requested, which I was. Was that another one?

7:42 Seth: I think it's ultimately for me, I have prejudices, so I. Maybe I need those. I need to be disabused of those, but I. My associations to anarchism are immediately negative and I associate it with a juvenile point of view.

7:54 Wes: I'm exactly the same way. I'm willing to read it. But I'll say right out of the gate that I'm expecting it either to conform to my expectations, that it's just utterly juvenile, or that it is qualifications that where it is interesting but ends up not being anarchism.

8:13 Mark: So

8:16 Wes: that's what I'm gonna walk into the door with.

8:17 Seth: Yeah, that's not what we really mean by anarchism. We mean something else.

8:21 Wes: We mean something that's not anarchism.

8:23 Mark: We mean the strawman that we put up ourselves. That's what the everyday person means by anarch.

8:29 Seth: It's like defunding the police. We don't really mean defunding the police, you idiots. That's just what we said. We mean something else. Sorry, that might be a little too political demilitarizing.

8:39 Mark: I like that that was put. Somebody put that recently that way.

8:41 Seth: That's a good shorthand. That's a better shorthand.

8:44 Mark: Well, so likewise, should we treat anarchism like we did the Ayn Rand episode, understanding that there are a lot of adherents out there, many of whom are into philosophy. I guess that's the way I'm leaning, rather than let's get like this guy in particular or, you know, somebody else that runs one of the many leftist podcasts that we know to join us?

9:04 Wes: No, let's just read something that is supposed to be worthwhile in anarchism. Let's just read something that an anarchist would say, you got to read this. That sounds fine to me.

9:13 Seth: And I think the third alternative, Dylan, for me or for us could be that we just disabused of our prejudices. So for any listeners, you know, thinking, okay, you guys are just being uncharitable, maybe it could be an educational experience. It could.

9:26 Wes: I am willing, you know, having stated my prejudices at the beginning, I am willing to walk in and read with an open mind and check my prejudices. I mean, that's one of the things that we always try to do even though we have opinions. And I think we're generally pretty good at it.

9:41 Mark: So there are certainly advantages to having someone on with us that like has just read everything else in this tradition so that if we have a question that he can be like, oh well, this other thinker, this other text, Proudhon, that you haven't read yet does actually address exactly what you're saying. We have had some guests like that that have been been able to answer questions without hijacking it and making it all kind of not talking about what we actually read. But I don't necessarily think we need that. It does open us up to. Well, maybe on your second attack you can bring on an adherent.

I don't know. We haven't like for instance, with Buddhism, yeah, we had guests, but we haven't like had a Buddhist monk on with us. Even though I've had Buddhist monks reach out to me and I kind of feel like, okay, by the fifth or sixth episode on Buddhism we should have somebody like that with us. It's just as long as we don't need that. I kind of would rather not.

10:26 Seth: Yeah, I think it's a double edged sword, you know, to have an adherent on being an adherent. That doesn't mean you're necessarily the best explainer or the best person to give an analysis or a critique of the thing you adhere to. Which is not to say that people sometimes aren't, but just by in and of itself knowing that someone is into something is not enough.

10:46 Mark: Well, and certainly among adherents we can find people like, you know, stoicism, we did it the first time without an adherent, got a lot of shit for it, did it two more times with adherents, but those were like top flight, best selling author and world renowned podcaster, slash intellectual. So those worked out pretty well. And I think satisfied didn't really satisfy the hardcore stoics that still can't think that any disagreement with stoicism means that you don't understand stoicism. But we took that seriously enough, because I guess there are enough people that I really respect into philosophy that are into that, as opposed to objectivism, that there's no need for two or three attacks on that.

11:27 Dylan: It was also hot. I think there were a bunch of books that come out, and there was a Slate thing in the New York Times. It was all, you know, the School of Life and all that kind of stuff. There was a lot of hot, stoic. It was hot when we did it.

11:39 Mark: Hot stoic action.

11:41 Dylan: Hot stoic action.

11:42 Seth: Yep. I went to some of those conferences, met Massimo in person.

11:46 Mark: What would stoic porn look like? I'm just throwing it out.

11:51 Dylan: Masturbation. It would just be masturbation.

11:54 Mark: I will not rely.

11:56 Wes: Expressionless, though.

11:58 Seth: That's right. Robotic.

11:59 Mark: You just don't get stoicism, Dylan. They wouldn't be expressionless. They'd be feeling it another way into the topic. Perhaps if somebody. If Zizek writes a paper on that, if Massimo writes a paper on that. I would love to have Massimo to talk about his stoic masturbation essay.

12:16 Seth: Speaking of prejudices. Just to change itself, please.

12:19 Wes: Thank you.

12:20 Seth: Wesley, what is the episode that you came into with the most prejudices or a lot of prejudices, but then you were turned around and you were pleasantly surprised? What's the episode that most pleasantly surprised you? I'll give you a few seconds to go through all 300 episodes. Yeah.

12:38 Mark: Without scrolling through the list.

12:40 Dylan: Go ahead, Seth. So a couple that come immediately to mind. One was the Sartre episode on consciousness, where I thought I was going to get sort of wrapped up in this transcendental ego conversation that I don't buy. But his discussion of consciousness as a horizon and his writing style in that essay, I really enjoyed. That would be one for me. And then another one was Lacan. I fully anticipated that I would despise it, actually. I thought the conversation, particularly in conjunction with the Poe, was really entertaining. It was fun to do. And there was actually some very interesting ideas there. Those are two that come to mind immediately.

13:17 Seth: I think for me, it was a Judith Butler. The first one, not her Force of Nonviolence book, which I thought was terrible, but the Gender Trouble book, despite all of the jargon and all its many faults, I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting it was.

13:32 Mark: I think I said at the time that my preconceptions about the second sex were not good, that I thought this was like the shitty political thing that Beauvoir did, as opposed to ethics of ambiguity. But it really was much higher level of that. Dylan, do you have any thoughts offhand?

13:47 Wes: There hasn't been much that we've read that I went into having a really bad opinion that then I got turned around from it. But we've read a lot of stuff that I've never read before. The one that I was the most surprised about was the Sellars, how much I liked it and how interested I was in it. So just in terms of something that I read that I was like, wow, that's not what I expected.

14:12 Mark: That is a crapshoot with analytic philosophy that you feel like, oh, it's going to be dry and mathy and some of them end up being just super interesting.

14:21 Seth: That's true. Oh yeah. So maybe like naming and necessity, I think was another one for me, thought, okay, this is going to be dry language stuff.

14:30 Mark: And then it's actually let me shift topics then. We've been having some slack back and forth, but I wanted to get this out in the open in front of people about the idea of kind of front loading our episodes a little more. And I'm not talking about like Everybody giving a 20 minute intro spiel. I'm just saying, like recognizing the fact that way more people listen to, I don't know, way more people, but more people listen to our part one of an episode than part two, as far as the public version goes. And we've even talked about maybe we should put part two behind a paywall separate from that, that very practical thing.

It still seems like a good thing that we should try. Even with this Habermas. Can we do on purpose what we often do by accident, which is give a good enough treatment in part one that somebody could just stop there and not feel like they stopped in the middle of a sentence. So there's always more to talk about in part two. We can go into more quotes, we can hit parts of the text that we didn't hit in part one, but give a good enough walk through the text in terms of what is this actually about? What did you guys think of it? What are the really pressing issues to argue and try to save more of the total wrangling over a sentence to part two.

It just might be more interesting to people. What do you guys think of that idea? Dylan, you're the. We talked about this a little before you jumped on and I was really wondering about you in particular.

15:46 Wes: So I'm down with the idea of talking about some sort of bigger synoptic ideas at the beginning, which we've gotten better about doing. As a way of orienting listeners to the discussion, Even though I'm the kind of person that would generally just start from the beginning and work our way through, I've basically been persuaded by Mark that for the sake of the listeners, we should go through and say something a little bit more about what's going on. In general, I do think that it's very rare that we have a break that's in the middle of, effectively in the middle of a sentence between part one and part two, and that we generally have something pretty close to a complete thought that has gone into part one, even if it isn't the whole thing that we're covering.

So I guess a qualified. Sure, but I guess it's common enough for us to have things that break effectively into two pieces that I don't think that we should degrade the kind of discussion we have about the first part into and cram in a degraded version of the discussion on the second part into a new part one. So it would be sort of on a case by case basis. And in that respect, I don't think it's a problem. I don't even know if it's a change to say, well, let's make sure that part one has a complete thought that even if it gets extended. And I myself would disagree with the idea that we have to cover everything that we're covering in a given reading.

In part one, if we had two articles that we're reading, I guess that's

17:22 Mark: a question whether we should even have two articles with this new approach.

17:25 Wes: Well, of course we should, because, I mean, I guess I think we've had good discussions where we've leveraged them both, one against the other. I guess I'm saying, I think that the first part is typically a complete thought, even though there's more to go on. Maybe in the end that means I'm disagreeing with you. I don't know.

17:41 Mark: Let's think about just so like the Sontag. So that's a good one. Where we had two articles, they were totally complementary of each other and we clearly just dealt with one in part one and one in part two, for the most part. We maybe had a few comments about. Actually it was three articles. Actually, now that I'm thinking of it, I think, you know, at least I said some stuff, a sentence or two at the beginning of the whole thing to try to bring the three articles together. But for the most part we just took one at a time. And I think having two separate articles does mean like, yes, part one is A coherent whole.

Because it's only about the first one. And that's a fine treatment. If you only knew about this one Sontag article against interpretation, that'd be okay. But you'll get more if you go on to the second one. You know, it showed clearly with the Weil. I should not have tried to cram three articles in what we were doing. I'm hoping that this approach would make it so that. What you guys are always begging of me anyway, choose shorter readings, that this would be another pressure to do that.

18:35 Dylan: Well, I mean, look, if this whole thing is a long, roundabout way of saying we want to pick shorter readings, then I think I'm all for it. I'm concerned about dictating the course of the conversation. I mean, you know, the issue is, right, we pick readings. And I think, Mark, you do a great job of trying to vet and say this is worthwhile. This maps to this. This doesn't. Because you're a good scan reader and, you know, the rest of us don't quite read the same way. But it's still the case that, like Dylan said, a lot of this stuff is new to all of us and we don't really know.

So when we get into it, we don't know really what's going to be interesting and how the conversation's going to go. And so that's the part I'm most concerned about, is just like I said, if we get into a conversation and we're spending 30 minutes on one sentence or one paragraph because it's really provocative and interesting and whatever, I'd hate to say, like, okay, well, we got to stop here because we still need to now summarize the rest of the book so we can get out of here in 15. That's the part I'm concerned about.

19:34 Wes: Yeah, I completely agree. I would absolutely not want it to happen that at the sort of our typical halfway point around, we typically go about an hour and 15 minutes or so for the first part, and we get to an hour, and all of a sudden we say, hey, we got to go. Make sure we cover all the rest of this and at least get some stuff out on the table so that we can have a complete part. One that I think would be just fundamentally objectionable. Because I still think that we, in the end, most typically have something like a complete thought in part one, even if there is real substance that comes in part two.

20:09 Mark: Yeah, I think it's objectionable in the same way that checklists were objectionable in that initial Sartre consciousness episode. Famously, I had a. Here's an outline of. These are all the topics that come up. And I was like, no, we got to move on to part G now. No, we got. That was a. Obviously at the time, that was an exploration. And it's not bad for us to have notes like that, but, like, certainly can't insist that we get through a list, you know, in a reasonable timeframe.

20:37 Seth: But we would have to be more disciplined about not getting bogged down and staying at a more summary type level. I think if we really wanted to do this, we would have to be conscious of that.

20:48 Mark: And I guess the theory of that, as I think you were saying, Wes, is that we maybe could make this more accessible to more people. You know, if somebody's listening to our podcast for the first time and we get bored, completely bogged down in a sentence, like, you know, maybe for some readings, that's what you do. Like, it's just if they're aphorisms, probably. But if we're really neglecting the bigger picture and immediately getting sucked up into something, like, I could see how that could be a turn off for a new listener.

21:14 Seth: Yeah, we do something that is not the easiest thing to listen to, like a podcast like Philosophy without Any Gaps or philosophize. This is really. It's a written lecture that someone is reading. It's like someone teaching a class for beginners. And we are definitely not like someone teaching a class for beginners. And I don't think, even with this new approach, that we could be that. Partly because we're trying to have a real conversation. Right. It's not just one person speaking, partly because none of us is going to prepare a lecture, and that's not really what we want to go for. But we'd have to move a little bit more in that direction if we are going to do a more synoptic first part.

21:55 Mark: I mean, I like to pretend it's just me talking, and then I wait a while. Well, until you guys are done. And then I say more.

22:01 Seth: You get moved to the next part of your checklist.

22:04 Mark: All right, well, that's probably good for us. I want to throw this open to the listeners. That is always the point of this, to ask you what you think about the way we structure things. Do you sometimes feel like an episode has started and we're already off and running in some direction and you don't know what this reading is actually about or why we read it, or have we been pretty good about that as far as you're concerned? And as well as if. If you have tried to if longtime fans have tried to play this for your loved ones, for your friends, and they get stuck in some way, would what we're talking about here address some of that? So thank you for being a supporter. You're awesome.

22:42 Wes: Thanks.

22:43 Dylan: Thank you.

22:44 Seth: Thank you.

22:46 Mark: We hope you enjoyed that special release and would like to join us for this audience interactive, less academic, super fun endeavor that is made possible by Partially Examined Life supporters. So just head on over to partiallyexaminedlife.com support. Look at the options. If you're destitute and want to join the party, we do offer scholarship memberships. Just reach out to us@pelartialexaminedlife.com Thanks.