PEL ’24-’25 Transition Nightcap

0:00 Mark: Happy holidays, Happy end of 2024, beginning of 2025, it's your partially examined life nightcap broadcast to the whole world. Supporters, listeners, people who stumbled across this. Everybody will get to hear this yearly reflection, this philosophical social expression of where we're all at. I'm Mark Linsenmayer. Just chilling.

0:25 Seth: Just chilling.

0:26 Mark: You didn't think we had to have intros for these for a nightcap, did you? But introduce yourself. I'm just saying.

0:31 Wes: Well, no, when you said just chilling, it made us afraid we had to have intros.

0:35 Seth: Yes.

0:36 Wes: And you set the bar really high with just chilling.

0:38 Mark: Just say what your names are.

0:40 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:44 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:47 Mark: Ooha. So we like to do these. Of course, we do these regularly for the supporters. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for being supporters. But thank everybody for sticking with us for another year as we get older and older. Yeah, I was more thinking just that our appeal is more select the quote Spinal Tap. Not that I'm not talking about metrics. I'm just talking about that we're doing these long series of things, that this is what scratches our itch at this time, even to the point of what Wes and I are doing on close reads, which is maybe crazy, I don't know, in terms of the. If people are just coming, like, I want to have Cocktail Party level familiarity with these philosophical figures. I mean, hopefully you got that from our first hundred episodes or something. But we're so far past that I don't even. We're unrecognizable to our earlier selves.

1:41 Seth: Yeah. I think it would be great if I could remember well enough to have more than Cocktail Level. I mean, I guess it's appropriate you mention that, because we did cover Rorty again this year. And wasn't. Isn't that the famous quote, that Rorty thinks the history philosophy is like a cocktail party or something that brings all the relevant people together for a conversation? Or at least that's how he is. But sure, yeah. I just went back over the list, and I was completely forgotten where we had started this year and the breadth that we covered. I. It was pretty. Do you remember where we started? What the first episode of the year was?

2:14 Dylan: Kierkegaard.

2:14 Seth: Yeah. Okay. Dylan did his homework or has a

2:17 Wes: great memory, or Mark told us that before we started recording and you forgot it. Speaking of memory.

2:26 Seth: No, no, no, no. I didn't forget. I just wasn't Paying attention when Mark talks. That sometimes happens.

2:31 Dylan: Oh, geez.

2:33 Mark: Hey, back at you, buddy.

2:36 Seth: No, no, I usually. I saved that line for my wife.

2:40 Mark: Yes, we are in the middle of our Kierkegaard run. We're at sort of the tail end of it, I should say. So.

2:45 Dylan: Thank God.

2:46 Mark: One of the backgrounds of this is this fall, I taught this for the first time, this Continental philosophy. Big books in Continental philosophy, which for Kierkegaard, I should have done either or, but that seemed a little too hard to have a single session and just make people go straight to the or. So I did Fear and Trembling, so that was sort of cheating. But I did a lot of the big books. Also, on close reads, Wes and I have picked up Phenomenology of Perception, Being and Nothingness, some of being. Did we do some of being in time? Maybe we didn't. Anyway, it's making me want to read, you know, so, like, the unscientific postscript, the fattest book of Kierkegaard's, I believe I still have yet to even look at a page of. So I want more Kierkegaard in my life, even though we had all this.

3:27 Dylan: Why?

3:28 Mark: Out of a masochistic sense of completeness. I don't know. He's an interesting fellow.

3:33 Dylan: Okay. Okay. Well, I would be interested in why. Because I don't ever want to read Kierkegaard again.

3:39 Wes: All right.

3:40 Mark: I mean, that's a good indication that it will be at least 10 years before, on this podcast, Kierkegaard makes an appearance.

3:48 Dylan: There's a difference between wanting and willing. But I was interested in. You just said, I want to read Kierkegaard's thickest, fattest book, and I want to have more Kierkegaard in my life, as I was interested in why. Maybe it is your sense of completeness. But. But I didn't come away from reading Kierkegaard feeling like, oh, you know what? I need to go pull that book out of my basement. But it's still, you know, I have, like, three or four of his books.

4:12 Mark: But don't you feel like having read either or, like, was or had you? I forget now if you had read some of that before, but I feel like that was a big gap, and I liked it. You know, in retrospect at least, I

4:23 Wes: think he's a great writer.

4:24 Seth: Sure.

4:24 Wes: Thinker. And I mean, from me, it's a weird contradiction because he's a great writer, but he's hard to read. And maybe we just were doing too much reading as part of it. I think we were doing like 100 page readings or something of stuff that's very. Well, it's not dense in the way some other things are dense, but it. But not easy on my view. Not easy.

4:43 Seth: No. And. Well, yeah. And in Kierkegaard's case too, we're doing a lot of reading, the reading stance. But at the same time, oftentimes these writers are pretty repetitive or they're in a paradigm. We get the point. Right. Like we. And then it just keeps getting hammered home over and over and over again. That gets a little tedious.

5:03 Wes: Well, especially when the project is more literary and it's more like a. More like an essay in a sense than a. Yeah, he's not trying to get straight to the point.

5:12 Dylan: Creative non fiction.

5:14 Wes: Yeah.

5:14 Mark: Well. And so I think the battle scar that you are most recently reacting to. If this gets edited in the timely way that I want and goes up right at the end of the year, then folks will have not yet heard the Max Stirner episode, which. I had too many things going on and then I got sick. So I was not on that. And having now listened to most of your recording without me. It was. You told the story wonderfully. I'm so glad that I was. Did not actually have to read this guy. At least with Dylan's negative appraisal. It seems like a really good guy to have heard about rather than to have experienced. So was that the same. It seemed like it was the same as what you're saying about Kierkegaard, that he was very repetitive and sort of literary and not too beefy. But yet take a lot of your time.

6:00 Dylan: Yeah, I have to be a little careful because I feel like this year I had more bad attitude about more readings, even though I did the readings and worked on it. And I found things that I appreciated. I don't know what that is for me. I have to do some reflecting on that. But I found myself having less patience with the particular kind of hand wringing that someone like Kierkegaard has. And also I suppose he's a great writer. I mean, I just came away feeling like he was just self important and not to the point and not illuminating. That's what I felt, but that's not the consensus. Obviously.

6:40 Mark: I'd also want to look through this. I think actually the strategy, which we've never done before, of kind of going a little through the calendar and seeing what it brings to mind about the things about our lives, about the things about our overall reading habits and whatever. I think that's. And you Right now, for the last year are maybe facing a different existential challenge than the rest of us. That maybe so. I know, Wes, you're doing more and more therapy sessions, so it is hard to like administering therapy sessions. So maybe it's hard to fit stuff in.

But Seth has moved on from his day job. Am I allowed to. I think we've said this on. Whereas Dylan is like. They just keep promoting him and promoting him and he's doing very important work in a very stressful company. That's taking. So I feel like your time is objectively more valuable than the rest of ours. Such that when one of these philosophers tries your patience, it's maybe. What is the opportunity cost of reading Kierkegaard? Is it a little different?

7:33 Dylan: I suppose. I mean, that's an interesting thing about capitalism. Well, it makes you think about. Well, yeah, I guess. Suppose that's part of it. Thinking about what's worth. I had more experience reading things that I this year that I would not have read except for being a pel? Which is a great thing about Pel? And I say this often. There's never ever recording that I ever regret doing, even with doing the work on the reading and. But I had more. I found myself less patient. I think Mark might be right a little bit about that. My mind space for a certain kind of philosophizing. Just my practical life might be like, well, I don't know, just get to the point. But that might be just a symptom of what's that said? Capitalism, I guess.

8:23 Mark: So we had at the tail end of Kierkegaard, we did Marcel, which I really enjoyed. I thought that was a nice little gap filler. And in fact, I was ready to move forward and do, I don't know, Miguel de Unamuno and Emil Cioran, these other existentialist or existentialist adjacent figures. And I believe Wes said, no, no more of this for now. I seem to feel like you're one of the people who helps jog when we're like, right, we're doing all this Marxism and you already have advanced like, we're not going to do a bunch of neo Marxists right after doing this. I know you know that, like, enough is enough. Let's move on to something else.

8:59 Wes: I said that too.

9:00 Mark: And enough. And yes, after we did Williamson, you're like, enough analytic that even though you're the guy who. Who has been like, oh, I want to. Has been in favor of doing these series of things so that you can like, read some secondary literature kind of really immerse yourself in a milieu, but still there needs to be a stopping point. And I think the audience is grateful for that.

9:20 Wes: Well, why do you think the audience is grateful for the that? How do you know the audience is grateful for that?

9:24 Mark: I just intuit I represent the soul of the audience.

9:28 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I would prefer to do series and try to feel like I have a good grasp on a subject before we leave it in general, which takes a while and probably would require us to do a more like an introductory secondary reading episode, which we've talked about a little bit.

9:45 Mark: Well, you've talked about that, but I think that's a great. Let's dwell on this a little bit because I feel like, especially recently, you've had kind of a. Whereas Dylan is like, I'm just going to read the stuff and I'm going to be done. And frankly, I'm about like that as well. Like, in fact, if I could do some of it on audiobook, I'm going a little overboard on Das Kapital because I got the audiobook and I'm just like, trying to get through as much of it as I can to really get a flavor of, like, what this project is beyond. But that's much different than what you do with the secondary literature. And I feel like you've. You've sort of led us through some of the last ones that maybe your notes are a little better, you've had more time to review them.

10:19 Wes: Well, you know, I always take. Yeah, I always take extents. I mean, I do a summary, I summarize. You know, it's too much. It's too much prep, obviously, but I resummarize the whole work in my own words because it's the way I feel. I understand it. And I guess I need to be more efficient, but find some other way that makes me feel like I get the same level of comprehension. But, yeah, I want to feel I spend too much time on prep, and it's my own obsessional nature, but I feel like I. I want to understand it at a certain level before we record. And.

Yeah, so it would be helpful if we took more time on each figure and that I'm not cramming in secondary literature on the side, but to the extent that I can. Yeah. So if I'm going to read Stirner or. Or Marx, I mean, at the very least I want to read the Stanford Encyclopedia article and then ideally and a book or two on them, especially to understand the historical context. And like, I'm glad we did Forbach, these intervening figures. I feel like I understand a lot more about Marx after reading Forbach and even Stirner. And I'm very interested in that intellectual history, which often.

Yeah, if you're not reading secondary literature, you don't get, you know, if it's Hegel and then it's Marx. If you don't read in any secondary literature, any intervening figures, then I think quite a bit is lost.

11:43 Dylan: I'm very sympathetic with the idea of balancing reading and diving into the primary literature and then having some way of engaging the secondary literature. And we often have something in the background that read the SCP article, get some context, which informs and helps with just reading the primary text. And I would be interested in occasionally putting in some kind of an episode that was primarily the text, was some key secondary literature for whatever we were reading. Mainly because I think that it's a way to tie things up and get a synoptic view of some reading or author that you just get a wider cut on, as well as being able to engage with some criticism and some, you know, other thoughtful engagement. I think it's a good idea. I like it.

12:44 Mark: It certainly has worked in the past. Like, the Fink on Lacan episode I thought was good because Lacan raised special problems and I feel like Das Kapital. I would have rather. No, I mean, it's fine that I'm experiencing the audiobook this way, but there's about one key, like, formula per chapter. And I just. I do want to look at something that just sums those up to remind me, because I am getting a little lost, especially not having, like, the math in front of me. And I know that's not, you know, we're not reading that much of it for our official assignment and we're reading some other stuff.

I don't want to prefigure any of that, but, yeah, to have sort of. What is the philosophical gist? Because he's very slowly building this big picture that is philosophical, but it's basically economics textbook. It's from his own idiosyncratic point of view. So, like, trying to figure out, like, he hasn't gotten. I'm eight chapters in now, and he hasn't gotten to any of the political stuff. He's mentioned, you know, workers being exploited once or twice. But, yeah, so having some guiding hand. But at the same time, we did, like, on our Gettier episode, the Stanford was, like, one of our official readings, and I think there was another one this year, and it was kind of boring as, like, going through.

And it was not a satisfying experience because it was just like mentioning this study and this, you know, this paper and this paper and this paper. And like, we hadn't read any of these papers and so we weren't getting the flavor and the fun of actually engaging them. It was just sort of a bare outline of ideas.

14:03 Seth: Yeah, well, what you're pointing out is that each of these things is a special case. You can't just say generically primary text and secondary text. Think about the Indian. Like we read Steven's book, Stephen West, Stephen Phillips. Phillips. I mean, we read his book about the Nyaya Sutra. Now, if we tried to pick up the Nyaya Sutra by ourselves, there would have been. I'm not saying we wouldn't have gotten something out of it, but it would have been a very different experience than reading his book. And that's not to say his book was like the ideal text for a discussion either, you know, because it was kind of idiosyncratic in itself.

But my point is, you know, we wouldn't think twice about picking up a secondary text for something so called in the Eastern tradition. And in the case of Gettier, there was just 70 years or 50 years or whatever. It was a back and forth that we'd be missing out on because we couldn't plow through all that, that kind of stuff. So, you know, maybe we think we can just attack people like Hegel and Marx by themselves, but maybe that's not the case. Of course, there's fewer canonical secondary texts either. Unless you're just going to pick up like a, you know, Introduction to German Idealism, you know, or German Idealism and

15:17 Mark: Marxist German Idealism for Dummies.

15:19 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I'm of two minds about this because I went to St. John's where the culture is that you don't read secondary literature. And there's a virtue to that because you wrestle with the text and you sit down with Hegel or Kant, let's just say Kant, and you don't know where the hell he's coming from because you know nothing about the context, the historical philosophical context, or, you know, as much as the last philosopher that you read and working through it is very, very useful. It's. I think you can gain a degree of understanding doing that that you might not otherwise gain if you read nice, shiny, easy secondary work and felt like you'd had it all explained to you, but you had never really thought through it and gone through the labor, so to speak.

On the other hand, I think after a certain point, it's Very helpful to. And it's very, just very interesting to look at the history of ideas in detail and to. I mean, I think there are two aspects to it. Knowing a bit about the detailed scholarly academic debate about certain things, not necessarily too much detail, but then knowing the historical context and some of the intervening figures. Zena Hitz, who's a St. John's professor, has quite a bit of a Twitter following, kind of has a debate occasionally about this online. And she seems to be very anti secondary literature.

And so she engages of course with people who come along and from mainstream universities and say that's crazy. How could you say that? I think I stand somewhere in the middle. I think you should. People should go through that exercise and I think it's fine. And even with the Nyaya Sutra you can get a great deal out of doing that. It's just. But at this stage in my life I want to do more than that. Which is not to say it's not a danger.

17:07 Mark: Right?

17:07 Wes: You read SCP on Marx or some book on Marx and then it's. And then you naturally, you mentally rely on those as a kind of crutch and it makes you. The danger is that it makes you less curious and puzzled as you're reading the text. You're not as puzzled by things that you might otherwise be puzzled about and have to work out for yourself. Then again, life is short. I don't have time to work everything out for myself. So again, I'm kind of conflicted about it. But in general, at this point in my life, I like reading secondary stuff. I'm reading something on Hegel now.

I was actually listening to Robert C. Solomon's in the Spirit of Hegel. And he mentioned this guy Stacey, I think from like the 1950s, who wrote a book about Hegel which is subtitled A Systematic Exposition of His Philosophy. And I thought, wow, that's really a systematic exposition. And then you get into it and it's a very high level abstract, but maybe leaning in the analytic, like towards an analytic philosophy style exposition. It's quite, I mean it's very, very interesting. Very, very interesting and very helpful. So, so that, yeah, I want, I want to do that type of thing.

18:20 Mark: Well, it's just interesting that you say it's because life is short. I want to do secondary literature, whereas I feel like life is short. So I don't really have time for secondary literature. I've always been in favor of on your own. You know, let's read in the spirit of Solomon's. In the spirit of Hegel, when we're doing phenomenology, let's read Dreyfus's Being in the World or whatever that book is called when we're doing Being in Time. But those have never been like the explicit and in fact I've thrown interpretive quotes from those guys around when relevant.

Like here's how I understand this. Just because I remember what Dreyfus said about this. But I have not had as much time to do that and. Right. We have not made it like the reading, one of the essential readings. I think that was still under debate. Maybe it is still under debate right now. As to Peter Singer's book on Marx which I have, have not cracked open, or the Terry Eagleton book on Marx, what we were thinking, like, would it be appropriate for us to have an episode that's just on those books, you know, either before or after or during our treatment of actual Marx?

I think we won't know until we do the next discussion whether that's appropriate.

19:27 Wes: Yeah, well, my argument is that it would be helpful to listeners. So it's like a two step thing. We do the St. John's thing on the, on the text as usual. But in preparation to that we do a higher level. Okay, this is some of the historical context for Marx and a high level description of some of the general ideas. So for instance, like labor theory of value from Marx or some of the other things which I don't know that we're necessarily going to get a very clear definition of in this reading that we have for Marx, but it's something he relies on and various other concepts.

So yeah, we're going to read the first chapter of Capital and some of the Grundrisse and all that and not have a background on his economic. Which we certainly you do not want to read his economic theory, most of which is bogus anyway. Right. I don't want to read his economic theory. Most people don't. And I'm more interested in the philosophical stuff. But I need to know on background what the economic theory is. So there's some people that I would rather read about at least for certain parts of their work. And then for some people like Lacan, I would just like to read nothing but secondary literature and never read the primary sources because it's like my Dylan moment where I just.

It makes me too angry to read the primary source. So

20:46 Mark: speaking of, the next big stretch we had starting in February was on Aristotle's Metaphysics. And I really regard this as one of our crowning achievements that we actually got through With, I think, the correct level of thoroughness. It's a book that one could take a whole semester on, but we focused on some important parts. And, yeah, that was a good one. And I think we had the appropriate amount of secondary literature intervention, even if it was just through the mouth of Wes. I don't know.

21:14 Wes: Yeah, I learned a lot. I mean, I felt like I learned a lot from that series. And it changed the way I think about a lot of things. And it renewed my. Here's a weird thing to say. It renewed my respect for Aristotle.

21:27 Seth: Is that weird?

21:28 Wes: Because I wouldn't automatically respect. But I'm like, oh, shit, Aristotle's the guy. Like, I didn't know that. Aristotle is the man. I got that at a visceral level, maybe that I hadn't gotten before because. Right. Because the stereotype is just. I mean, through the lens of maybe the Neo Aristotelian medieval philosophers or through secondary literature, even. He. I don't know. Yeah, right. If you're hearing about him secondhand, some of it doesn't sound all that profound and it sounds weird.

21:55 Dylan: Yeah. Aristotle is a perfect example of why you should read primary literature and wrestle with it because there are thousands of years of opinion making about it. And he's a perfect example of why you should do it because he ends up being more interesting and more complicated and more insightful than you ever thought. And you still see, I think, all. All of the interpretive, all of the baggage of interpretation that people have about it. You can see why they come to those conclusions, but the validity of that becomes a lot less clear. And so, yeah, to Wes's point,

22:36 Wes: you

22:36 Dylan: see more than you did before. I don't think that's true of everyone

22:40 Mark: that we read now without going in through. Yeah. So I see, like, Seth, you missed the end of that, the unmoved mover. And I feel like that's been. If we're missing an episode, I don't know. When I have an absence, I try to plan it in advance if possible and, like, getting, you know, hey, you guys here. I'll even tell you a topic that I don't care about. Like, that's at least my ideal, so that I don't mind that I miss. But, Seth, it seems like, well, we're doing these series and you just aren't. Aren't there for one of them, you know, things come up.

Have you felt like this is. Well, you already got enough because you got part of the series, or like, you know, we're about to get to this new Next was Brian Ellis and that was one where Dylan missed the first half of it. And then you guys had a second episode without me with Dylan and we just did a similar thing with our last Feuerbach. So. Yeah, what, what is. How do you guys feel? Seth, you first about sort of coming in and out on these things and playing catch up?

23:30 Seth: It works perfectly fine for me most of the time. I don't plan to miss any episodes. It's just I'm flaky.

23:39 Mark: Well, I think that was only one that you simply didn't show up too because you didn't remember it was happening. But most of the time it's like, you know, you have an active family and a kid. Yeah, it's sick and blah, blah, blah.

23:48 Seth: Yeah, I mean that kind of stuff happens. But you know, I'm trying to think if there's been an example of. There was one was that this year that I prepped for and then we ended up rescheduling so I was able to make it. I can't remember. It was one that we read and I didn't think I was going to like it and then I did. I can't remember. Anyway, the point being that I don't seem to have any issues dropping in and out and I actually, I mean, here's to be candid, this is kind of like me slamming us or whatever. But it goes back to the we read too much for what we get around to.

Like Dylan coming in on the second half of a conversation, you think like, oh well, you missed that first hour. How are you possibly going to catch up with the conversation? It's like, like, well, we're only on fucking page seven. We haven't actually made that much progress. So it's not that big of a deal. You know, there's useful conversation to be had and if you've prepped like if I prepped and then I have to like listen to a recording of what you guys recorded to do a part two. When you combine the conversation and the text, it's no different than missing a class at school and coming in for the next one.

And you can kind of pick up the thread. But it's also, I don't think about how. The truth is I don't really come to these things and think about how can I contribute to our conversation, how can I further the thing I'm here to work on the stuff that's interesting to me about the text and to get your guys opinions and to help figure out things that I don't understand or if it's something I find tedious and unhelpful. Like usually it's Wes who's like elevating it out of the cliched, you know, my cliched or hackneyed opinion of it. But now because of my extreme and spiraling and accelerating nihilism, I kind of see everything through the same lens anyway.

And so it's like everything I read is just either confirmation of my ultimate thesis about the self abnegation of the human species or. Or it's irrelevant talking about something that doesn't matter. That's kind of where I'm at right now.

26:01 Mark: Should we change the description of the podcast to match what you just said to hit the quote? We read everything through a singular lens.

26:09 Seth: That shows a podcast by some guys who see the entire human species is on a death spiral too.

26:17 Wes: Did it for 20 years and then became nihilists.

26:20 Seth: I have been struggling to come up with a clear and concise and communicable definition of my nihilism because everybody just thinks it's pessimism. And I'm trying to find a good way to distinguish the two that the layperson can understand.

26:37 Wes: You think it's nihilism, not pessimism?

26:40 Seth: Oh, it's definitely nihilism.

26:41 Mark: So maybe Stirner is the gateway is the.

26:44 Wes: Well, nihilism. It imply you don't have any. You think morality is an illusion, for instance. I think. But I think you have strong moral sentiments which kind of leads you to. They kind of pain you. And yeah, I do have no hope. Hope for the world because. And I can join you on that. I have no hope for the world either. ChatGPT is going to be taking over soon. So.

27:09 Seth: Yeah, no, that's kind of my point is like the border path pessimism is just having a negative. Oh, it's going to go badly. Right. As opposed to optimism. But nihilism is more like. There is no. I guess what happens is the nihilism kind of either blends into or ties up or somehow parries off of existentialism. So I'm a nihilist. It doesn't mean that I don't act a certain way or that I don't believe certain things. It's just I know that I believe those things because I believe them, not because they're objective facts in the world or. And I have no recourse to believe that other people should believe them.

I just, I honestly believe that the human species is like a parasite on this earth and on other species. And ultimately every time somebody does something Outrageous. Oh, my God. Can you believe Elon Musk said a tweet? And now a bunch of elected, quote, unquote officials are running around like, doing what he said. Can you believe how shocking that is? Yeah, yeah, I can. I can absolutely believe it. Why is everybody shocked? Why? When terrible things happen and terrible people do terrible things and they say, I'm going to do a terrible thing, and then they do it, does everybody like, oh, my God, I can't believe it.

It's never happened before in the history of the human species. We've never had this happen. Speaking of Aristotle, right? Democracy, oligarchy, despotism, tyranny. That's the cycle, right? Those are the three. I mean, Aristotle had it pinned down. Sorry, this was not intended to go that direction. This. Those are just symptoms or examples of what I'm talking about.

28:42 Wes: But you can see this. These subjects, still, they animate you. Even if your disdain is shifted. Musk. Musk. To the people who are surprised by musk, you're, in a way generalizing it to humanity. It's not just musk who's the bad guy, but it's humanity.

29:01 Seth: Yeah, yeah. No, no, you're right. I'm animated by it. I'm not completely like, I'm not Eeyore. I'm not just completely dead or in or indifferent, but I have to try to numb myself constantly so that I don't become so agitated by things.

29:15 Dylan: But that doesn't sound like a nihilist.

29:18 Seth: No, no. What does it sound like?

29:20 Wes: More like a pessimist

29:23 Seth: motherfucker. All right, let me go work on this and see.

29:29 Dylan: Cultivate your inner nihilism.

29:30 Seth: Well, maybe I'm trying to get to nihilism from pessimism. Like, this is my mindful journey.

29:36 Wes: Yeah, that sounds like it. Okay, so just to check aspiration route. I mean, why not just suffer and say, forget about the path to nihilism. Just accept the suffering of the world? Sucking.

29:51 Mark: While we're checking on why each of us is a unique pain in the ass, I've just been stuck on calling it nihilism as opposed to nihilism. And I've been paging through pronunciation. I think both are fine, but I think nihilism, I just like. I like it better because it's like annihilate. And nihilism sounds like it's. You're following somebody named Neil. I don't like that. Neil Degrasse Tyson or what? Whatever. Your favorite Neil.

30:16 Wes: I'm a nihilist concerning pronunciation, but we have a special. I Have absolutely no. No comprehension of why you care about pronunciation. Yeah, except to avoid embarrassment. Like, sometimes it's embarrassing. Like getting a. As opposed to get. What's the real.

30:32 Mark: Well, I'm. I mean, I'm on record saying Nietzsche for three years, so I really should be past shame.

30:37 Wes: Well, what's wrong with that? Nietzsche. Nietzsche. I mean, who cares? Like, yeah, we're not German, so we're not saying it the correct way anyway.

30:44 Mark: Right. Well, and I'm sure we. So when we did our Carl Jaspers episode, the guest even. In fact, we were calling him Jaspers throughout, but it was a conscious choice. And our guest even said Jaspers. Yes, Jaspers. Like, as if he was acknowledging. And I edited out the correct one because I wanted us to be consistent in our. But then I reversed that. Even with the after show, we went with Jaspers, and it was just a. It was just a. But we did Walter Benjamin. We didn't do Benyamin. Right. I don't think we did. We didn't feel. All right, I'll shut up about this, but.

31:14 Seth: No, no, no. Well, just for the record, I prefer nihilism to nihilism too. But Wes said nihilism, and since I. I prefer it.

31:21 Wes: I prefer nihilism as well. But I was just saying that to emphasize my point about grammar.

31:29 Seth: What would be hilarious would be to go back through, like, the old episodes where there's a mispronunciation or something and then record, like an obvious. What do they call it? A dub when you come back. Like a voice, you know, so it'd be like, well, yeah, so, you know, on that page 17. And Benjamin where he says that, you

31:48 Mark: know, like, dude, AI replacement when Camus died in a car crash.

32:01 Seth: Do you still get mileage out of that? Wes, have you had anybody recently?

32:05 Mark: It's something that he corrects five minutes

32:07 Wes: later in the discussion in the episode.

32:09 Mark: Yeah, there's no fucking excuse for people being so incensed by something they hear in the Internet. They have to stop the playing and write an email right then.

32:19 Wes: Well, that's the thing. They're so upset that they don't listen to the rest of the episode.

32:24 Mark: I did. In my. In the Continental Philosophy class that I taught, we revisited Camus, those exact readings from episode three. And I was a little embarrassed by how cavalier and how all these James Dean sort of comparisons with Camus. It just, you know, we were going through a thing. I was going through a thing when starting this podcast. And I feel like we should do some more Camus. We should do the Rebel, for instance,

32:48 Wes: were we not fair.

32:49 Mark: We were just a little more flippant about it than I was when teaching it. Much more flipping about it.

32:55 Wes: In fact, I was flipping as well.

32:57 Mark: I don't know. I only pay attention to myself.

33:00 Wes: Okay. Yeah, that's same here.

33:03 Mark: So Brian Ellis was the next one we did. This was a Wes request, sort of as a tail end of Aristotle. It was the good modern thing I think we did. Definitely didn't need two episodes on it. And I wasn't on the second one. But again, it was good to hear Dylan's perspective because he wasn't able to be on the first one. So he got to chime in. And really we are. I think there was something magical about when we started and we were reading one thing every three weeks. Whereas now we try to read one thing every two weeks. So anytime we feel like, you know, we could just do two full episodes, you know, what we just did on Feuerbach, I think we're going to do that because it's just a little less work for us. Especially since we're assigning ourselves 100 pages rather than 50 pages, which was always the goal.

33:46 Wes: Yeah, I think we got to start assigning ourselves 50. I'd rather around 50 pages of recording and.

33:54 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

33:54 Wes: Yes. Because that's all we're going to get to anyway. And we probably won't even get to that in the discussion.

33:59 Dylan: We also have to stop Mark every time we have a little bit more time in between episodes. Mark says, well, let's. Why don't we add in these six things?

34:09 Mark: Do I do that?

34:12 Wes: And I'm guilty of it as. I'm guilty of it as well. Although I really mean it more as optional. But then it can feel like pressure. But.

34:20 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, agreed.

34:22 Wes: But I mean, Mar. You know, I differ from you, Mark, and I would rather go slower. I don't have the same sentiment about you about two episodes on a guy being on Ellis, for instance, being too much. But you know, on the other hand, I think I'm just slow. So I. I want to feel like I comprehend it at a certain level. And it just takes me time. So that's the problem. And I. Yeah, well.

34:47 Seth: And certainly anything worth writing a book about, we could. I mean, we have to also be cognizant of the fact we could easily fill two episodes on anything we read if it's not sufficiently. If it's just sufficiently serious, you know, whether or not we would want to. If somebody finds something important enough to write a book about, then there's probably two hours worth of conversation in there. You know, the Ellis was surprisingly fun, I thought. I mean, I thought it was actually quite good. And I'll say this, it really made me think. And part of what we kind of didn't talk about, but could have danced around was he makes allusions in the book to social and political things that may or may not be impacted by accepting the idea of essentialism.

And we could have blown off and explored that, but I think we could have easily done one episode or two episodes on that. It would have worked both ways. But that was surprisingly interesting and fun.

35:49 Mark: So right after that we did Zhuangzi, which was another two episode thing, because we had this guest that had sort of been lingering, Karyn Lai, the co-writer of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast. So Peter Adamson reads the thing, but she was the. So I wanted to get her involved. And this is one that Wes planned to not be on. And then I forget whether you then rejoined us. No, you didn't rejoin us. You did some close reading with us. But yeah, we essentially had an episode and a half on that book, which again, we could have kind of gotten the point.

In fact, we had done this figure, Chuang Tzu, as we called him, many, many years ago. But besides the fact of, like, it's good for us to. We forget completely. So we might as well, you know, if we're going to actually want to add this to our lexicon. But we were so much, you know, after doing what, four or five episodes of Chinese philosophy last year. The. The previous 2023, which were in much better shape to take this on. And it was fun to spend time with. I don't know any. It seems like it's been less of a deal for us to just add a token. That's not the right word, a random non Western episode.

You know, the Nyaya fit in really well. I thought this fit in just fine without having feeling like we have to do a whole other run to establish a whole historical background. Since now at least we did some of that with both Indian and Chinese philosophy.

37:15 Dylan: So I enjoy doing them. I do find that I think this is inevitable that you end up. You end up reading things through a lens that you have or what you've read before. And so there's this challenge to try to take anything on its own terms. I think that's something, you know, the more I've done read, the more I have to cultivate that. And maybe that's part of, again, part of my challenge this past year Is the challenge of cult, of continuing, keeping, cultivating that of taking things on their own terms with the Eastern stuff. The more we do it, the more I feel like there's stuff going on that is very distinct historically from the main threads that are in the Western stuff.

I mean, it's sort of an obvious statement, I guess, but I feel. Well, just less. I have less road feel for it and how those interests are and idiosyncrasies are on their own terms, not just variations on a theme in the Western side. Now, at some level, I think all of it is at some level, a variation on a theme because we're all human beings. And I guess I do believe in something about the. The commonality of the experience. And so the kinds of questions that we've asked ourselves as human beings over history. There are lots and lots of overlaps, but the distinctions in the themes, I think, are real.

And the conversation that is happening through ancient Chinese texts up through Japan, and it is distinct. And I find myself wanting to just spend more time in it to get a better road feel for it.

39:01 Seth: I have very similar sentiments. Dylan, you're sort of held hostage on these things by the translators. And then in Phillips's case, like, it's obvious he was trained analytically, because if you look at the way he describes what's going on in the text and the translation, it's very like. I can imagine a very different translation of that. But that's also one of 26 sutras, and this is just the one on epistemology. Right? Right. So God only knows what else is out there that we could be exploring. And then the question becomes like, okay, are we talking metaphysics and ontology in the same way?

Is it a variation on a theme like we're used to, or is it something novel? I think we find that at least not necessarily in the Indian tradition, but in the Chinese stuff that we've read. We've got the four Sages of the Ages, or whatever they are. Like, we've definitely found a thread that stands counter to our, you know, Western tradition to some extent. This. We see it as not mystical, but kind of like validating and prioritizing a kind of experiential knowledge, you know, a know how as opposed to know that, that kind of thing. And then we question, you know, how do we translate that into social and political structure, ethical norms, that kind of thing?

We don't have that yet with the Indian folks.

40:21 Mark: Sure. I feel like I got at least a picture of what the landscape is, and I even Looked to do either on here, on close reads the Vaisheshika. It was like a corresponding. You know, we did the epistemology, the Nyaya, but that would. They were sort of coupled with this other school that had ontology that I thought would be interesting to compare with Aristotle's. Right. We did the categories and we'd done Aristotle's metaphysics. I just found the text that I was looking at at least like, this is not going to be interesting. This is not going to be interesting to read line by line in close reads.

This is not going to be interesting to summarize. It might be one of those things like, well, let's find a secondary source like Wes was talking about that, you know, really sums up the history of this in. And makes those comparisons for us to Aristotle and the other. So that we can really. That would be the most efficient way because we're just not going to read. We're not going to do 30 episodes or even three episodes on ancient Indian metaphysics. It's just not going to happen. But I wouldn't mind doing that. And I definitely with the Chinese, like, I know there was like Han Fei the legalist, we didn't quite get to.

And. But actually getting to Chan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, that seems like what we were inching toward all this time. And that Zen is the more popular thing among our listeners, I bet, or among a segment of our listeners. So I would like to do that, you know, hopefully in the next year have two episodes, say on Chan, which is just the Chinese version and then the Japanese version just to. To complete what I saw as that cycle.

41:54 Dylan: Yeah, I'd be up for it.

41:56 Mark: Plotinus we finally got to in June that was built. Filled a nice hole. That was one that there was various logistical things. But also I think Wes was kind of resisting it for a while, thought it would be redundant of other things we've done. It ended up being a very nice one.

42:11 Wes: I didn't remember being resistant to it, but. Yeah, no, I mean, I might have been resistant. Yeah. Are you a fan of the one mysticism and. Yeah, but yeah, no, it was interesting.

42:22 Mark: Yeah. Especially just given, right. That we had done Aristotle's metaphysics and we'd done all the hardcore Plato metaphysics ones. It's like we had earned it, whereas if we just did it 13 years ago, we would not have earned it. So I will feel when we get back to phenomenology, having done all this Hegel, all this German idealism, all this German romanticism, all these Marxists, we will have earned you know, more Sartre and Merleau-Ponty sort of finishing up here a little bit. We're only to July in the rundown, but we've sort of already talked about our analytic strain.

There were some more recommendations in light of that of more epistemology and analytic metaphysics. There was, of course, the Williamson's actual philosophy of philosophy book that out there that would be. I don't know, it seemed like there maybe wasn't that much enthusiasm in the group for doing more analytic philosophy anytime soon.

43:16 Dylan: No, I think it really. I mean, the ones that I enjoy are the ones that seem the least paradigmatically analytical.

43:25 Wes: I think occasionally it's like a palette cleanser. It's a palate cleanser that leaves a bad aftertaste in your mouth, but it's still a palate cleanser. No, I think a little bit of analytic. Huh?

43:37 Seth: FERNET BRANCA yeah, A little bit of

43:40 Wes: analytic philosophy to keep us honest, maybe, but not a huge percentage of what we do. I would prefer as well. And we should do more political stuff, for sure.

43:49 Mark: Yes. Well, that was the idea of we're going to do Marx because, hey, it's election time. We should do something political instead. We ended on this. We did not do anything political by the time of the election.

44:01 Wes: I just mean political philosophy. I don't mean. Yeah, right, right. Commenting on contemporary politics is not what I mean. But.

44:07 Mark: Yeah, no, but, you know, we often we're trying to pick something and we, we were throwing around some ideas of things that would have been relevant to the moment. And I still want to do that looking forward. So I have. Yeah. Both just war theory and immigration. I would really like to do those in the near term as practical things.

44:29 Seth: Just war, I think, would be a great one.

44:31 Wes: And I want to do self defense as well, which I've. I've read the Stanford article on it a few times and thought about it a great deal. I think the concept of self defense, which is, I think, important to judge. Just war theory. Sure. And at least to the Geneva Conventions. Definitely. But it has really, really, I think, broad significance to ethical theory in general.

44:54 Mark: Yeah. If you want to understand what's going on in what to make of Israel, Palestine, Israel, Gaza, Israel versus the world.

45:03 Wes: Yeah. I was thinking about it in that context.

45:06 Mark: It would be really good to just instead of just jumping in and advocating a position or having a guest on who feels strongly about, let's just read the primary sources and try to educate ourselves about what the defenses are. Yeah. So just war theory and self defense. I Think go really well together on that.

45:24 Wes: So for instance, some people think that when you figure out who the bad guy is and who the good guy is, and then the bad guy doesn't have a right to self defense, if there is such a thing as a right to self defense, which is actually not the way it works, it turns out. Or do we have the right to. If someone is sleepwalking and they're trying to kill me and the only way to get out of that is to kill them, is that ethical? And then what does that imply? Because from an abstract ethical point of view, it's a life. Maybe it's two sleepwalkers, right? And I have to kill both of them to save myself.

45:57 Mark: What a metaphor for modern times.

46:00 Wes: From an abstract point of view, two lives are more valuable than one. And they're innocence, they're innocent people. And yet we have the strong intuition that I can, I should, it should be permissible for me to defend my own life, even if it takes innocent lives. So it's a very complicated and interesting subject and it has huge implications for how we think about war.

46:22 Mark: We then did William James on religious experience. I remember somebody posted at the time, like, I like hearing about sort of history and issues in religion as much the next person, but I don't need to see anything else like this in my PEL feed ever again, I think.

46:38 Wes: So wait, what was the. The objection was religious.

46:41 Mark: That it was too much about religion and the psychology of religion and why people are religious. And you know, I don't think we've given how prevalent it has been in the history of philosophy. I don't think we spend a lot of time on that, but it's sort of unavoidable. And one of the big figures I want to hit in 2025 finally is Thomas Aquinas. We never had a real Thomas Thomas Aquinas episode. He's like one of the most famous, most important philosophers ever. He deserves probably a two or three episode run to get through important stuff. in the Summa Theologica.

47:14 Seth: We've never read any Thomas Aquinas.

47:16 Mark: We have little bits like in our Eva Brann Will episode, we read a little of him. In our arguments for the existence of God, we read just like his one page. Here's the list of arguments. I think that's the extent of what we did.

47:27 Seth: Yeah, that seems like a good one.

47:29 Mark: Yeah, Well, I think we had something lined up for a long time after we did, you know, we revisited Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics. We're like, okay, now we're ready for Aquinas's update of this. And I think, Dylan, didn't you have a friend who's, like, way into that?

47:42 Dylan: I have a friend from St. John's who's a Thomas Aquinas scholar, but he's metaphysics guy mostly. He can talk. Well, I don't know that he would want to be on the podcast.

47:52 Mark: Oh, all right, well, we can revisit that. But in any case, it would be nice to have some sort of help. Given that that's such a fat book and given that so much of it is about religious rather than philosophical stuff, it would be good to have some. A secondary source, a person, somebody guiding us to tell us what is really important. Often we just look at online syllabi and go with that.

48:12 Seth: But Borges, we've never done Borges as a.

48:16 Mark: Does he write straight prose or just literature? Like, I don't know.

48:22 Wes: It's just literature.

48:23 Seth: Yeah, that'd be terrible if we had to read literature instead of straight prose.

48:27 Mark: Well, that's why I suggested the Rebel. And I think. Right. I don't think we had the whole last year a piece of fiction. I mean, I know now subtext is giving people, our listeners, plenty of that and pretty much pop and things, but still, it'd be nice to. We've talked about. Probably every year we talk about Moby Dick doing that.

48:47 Seth: At some point I started listening to and watching the Netflix series now about the Three Body Problem, that science fiction book written by the Chinese author, because I thought it was a, like, mind fuck, philosophical, science fictiony thing, but it's more physics, at least from what I'm understanding. So I thought that might be a fun topic that we can't. It's not going to work.

49:11 Mark: All right, well, we're open for suggestions if people want to tell us what novels, what key philosophical things we're missing because we're not doing enough literature. Then we had the analytic stuff we did. Rory. We sort of talked through some of this already. Trans. We probably talked about quite enough in recent nightcaps. There's certainly room. We got some subsequent emails about that of a. That we, you know, of course, by having a trans guest who is very intolerant of the arguments against the arguments that trans people are fundamentally deluded in some way.

Right. Somebody sent us an email comparing, like, well, what about this comparison to people who have lost a child, and so then they carry around a doll and they want everybody socially to consider it to be their child. Like, well, isn't that clearly even Though it's, you know, there might be some therapeutic value to that. Isn't that clearly diluted? So there was that. That kind of thing. And then there was. We weren't pro trans enough that even though we were sort of like, well, respect people, treat them as you want to be treated, as they want to be treated.

But as far as like the underage issue, like, well, people under 18 really can't make the thing that's in the news right now, right? This court case, people under 18 maybe can't make these life altering decisions by themselves. And somebody responded to that by saying, well, look, they're about to be hit by a bunch of hormones, so unless they have the hormone blockers, so there's something catastrophic happening either way. So he sort of gets into a, are you allowed to take affirmative action? Or by even not taking action, are you inviting some irreversible change?

So there's sort of, it's not merely a, well, let's just take a hands off approach and wait until people are 18 and let them make decisions anyway. There's definitely still things to be explored in that area and I think we are open to suggestions on books and guests, but you know, maybe we'll let it sit for several months before venturing in that area area again. But that, yes, we did. That was the political thing, but we didn't like abortion. Here's a pro and here's a con article. Like the abortion, I think was a great model for how we can do modern political stuff.

And I don't know that we did as good a job with that on the trans thing, but it seems like it was good to do something about it on the podcast. It's such a, you know, socially important topic.

51:26 Seth: That episode was not as satisfying as I would have liked it to have been, but. But it was such a weird dynamic while we were in. Just felt very hard to.

51:37 Wes: Well, why was it a weird dynamic?

51:40 Seth: It was for me. I didn't feel like I could speak freely and ask more critical. I mean I felt like here's somebody who's very clearly staked out of position and it's heavily autobiographical and I didn't think Sophie was brittle. It wasn't like she couldn't take it, you know, I mean she's a philosopher. But I just was like, this is not the right forum to go hard on issue X or issue Y or question. Because there are definitely like, especially about the whole whatever gender reassignment surgery for younger. Like there are things that I'm like, it feels like There's a lot more that needs to be talked about with respect to those.

Those types of issues. But I just felt like I should be there to acknowledge and affirm and then clarify and question and not really. So I can imagine there being a debate, a conversation around the subject that was more of a debate where some things were more called into question and discussed with opposing perspectives, but also data and information behind it that would be really. Add some richness and depth. But I'm glad we did it. I just. I didn't feel like myself on that episode.

52:52 Mark: We got a comment. I was looking on Discord this week, and somebody said after that episode, like, I don't think that PEL does interviews very good. That they're invariably genial and conciliatory, but slightly backbiting. That it's not just a, you know, I guess it's what you're saying, that we're not necessarily comfortable.

53:10 Seth: Well, that's not our format. Right. We always say. We never say we're doing an interview. We bring somebody on to talk about the book, and we try to have a conversation.

53:17 Mark: I mean, I've sort of given that up a little bit that I will just tell some people, like, okay, we know this is going to be an interview, and then we're going to have our part two without them, or we're going to have something else that we can sort of talk more freely. And. And we did that with this. I mean, I think our part two that we decided not to make public, or at least I decided because I felt nervous about putting ourselves out there. And then Wes didn't even want to talk about the issue for a long time, but then we got him in a nightcap to, like, completely, like, suddenly got comfortable.

So I think between those three presentations, actually talking to a trans philosopher, our part two, and then this nightcap that Wes got to unload between the three of those, I think we gave a reasonable treatment of the topic, but definitely should not be the last word on it. All right. Thomas Reid, wonderful discovery.

54:06 Seth: Awesome. And spending highlight of the year two.

54:08 Mark: Two episodes on that. I was entirely warranted. That's not one where I feel like, oh, well, we just have more to talk about. I don't know. Ellis probably didn't need two episodes. This one definitely should have had two episodes. Feuerbach somewhere in the middle. Like, we kind of did plenty of Feuerbach. The first time we could have just stopped, but it was fun. I like the rest of what we did in Feuerbach. All right. We're Just about to the end of the year.

54:29 Wes: Yes.

54:29 Mark: And starting on our marks thing. Any other sort of wish lists? I've named a couple things, but what I mean, I also would really like to do Dylan's long promised physics episode that you've been just too busy with your real life to actually get us.

54:47 Dylan: Yeah, I still want to do that. In fact, I spent the weekend with the person that I'd like to have the guest on it for and I think there's a lot of cool opportunities there. So I just have to put together the episode list.

55:00 Mark: Have we earned having done Aristotle's metaphysics and Ellis and a bunch of philosophy of science stuff. Polanyi, that's another guy still on our list. Another philosophy of science one. But we even. Well, Wes and I sort of played around with this in reading some John Stuart Mill that I don't think we want to pursue on Pel as a full episode. But yeah, hopefully we're in a better position than we were as of episode 13 or whatever you were on originally when we talked about Heisenberg. It's been so long since we did any quantum physics related stuff.

55:31 Dylan: Yeah, there's also a lot of interesting stuff that's happened certainly in the past hundred years about interpretation, quantum mechanics.

55:38 Mark: So other wish list things. What have you felt like we've been neglecting or you want to read more about Seth, more Holocaust stuff, more Hannah Arendt, more. Have you been hankering for anything in particular?

55:52 Seth: Well, I mean, we've kind of touched on like I was thinking anarchism, but we did the Kropotkin. I don't know if there's anything current. I mean, I feel like right now we're in the sweet spot because if capitalism is going to break, now's the time it's going to happen. I mean, we're clearly transitioning to an oligarchy here in the United States. You see what's happening around the whole execution of that CEO of UnitedHealthcare versus all the these other things. I mean, you know, people are striking, strikes are being broken by the police. So we're definitely covering the right topic right now.

56:26 Mark: Yeah, I think we thought we maybe were going to talk about the election on this nightcap as the thing that had happened.

56:33 Seth: Yeah, well, so much has happened since. It seems like a distant afterthought.

56:37 Mark: Wes, we just broached the election. Is this something should prompt us to do a bunch of episodes? Do we have any? I know we were before the election, we were sort of making our predictions and things, but or has this just been. The disappointment is such that we not only want to shut off politically a lot of people and not read the news and stuff, but like even philosophically, like, I don't know, let's just.

56:58 Wes: Are you saying do you want to do political philosophy that might help people understand the election or are you just saying do a straight up election episode? Is that.

57:06 Mark: Well, I'm more asking do we have anything to say right now, given that this is the time that we want to say about the stupid election, or are we just all sick of it?

57:15 Wes: Yeah, you know, I mean, I think we all share the same sentiments. Whatever our political differences, we're in roughly the same political camp and none of us like Trump. And what else is there to say? He's a clown and an idiot and a purveyor of chaos. And I don't know, we could obviously alienate some people by saying that he's

57:33 Mark: probably long alienated already, but there was some shift in the Joe Rogan audience that might still like this podcast or something, in the principled conservatives or, I don't know, people who, at least we've voiced on this. Right. We had a. Not last year, but the concerns with the overwhelming wokeism or something and if somebody felt like, all right, well let's put up with this idiot for a little bit to just stem the tide of the insanity of the left. At least I've heard that said, even though I don't agree.

58:05 Wes: Yeah, I mean a lot of the people, prominent anti woke people just went completely off the deep end and became Trumpers. So you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. I think it's like the whole anti woke. I mean, I don't know, it's just extremism on all sides. Do you know what I mean? I have a lot of concerns about wokeness, but it's just like, I don't know, like the anti woke thing is extreme enough that maybe I should just learn to be happy with the woke side. I don't know.

58:32 Mark: Well, maybe the overall social pressure against DEI initiatives in public agencies and blah, blah, blah, maybe that it will have a naturally tamping effect such that we don't have to talk about it.

58:46 Dylan: What I find kind of remarkable about thinking about the way things have changed over the past 40 or 50 years, or maybe it's. Maybe it's since post World War II or whatever. The way in which the things that I feel like I consider virtues in the changing of our society have now become lumped in With a kind of status quo that is being rebelled against. And so I understand rebelling against the status quo, but like, I'm used to being on the side of thinking, you know what? We need the FBI. But the FBI has certain overreaching tendencies. And now I feel like the way in which people want to run the FBI is so crazy that I find it weird to be in that position of the people who are talking about law and order in the sense of how we have good governance of our community.

They're talking about law and order in the sense of punishing people and putting people down. And I just find it a very weird place to be. So the thing that I found myself most recently thinking about was one of the early Chinese philosophy episodes where it's. I forget the Warring States period where there's just like this. Just total chaos and there's a little bit of stoicism and just like, you know, look, we just need people to be able to live their lives and to have just this drumbeat of wackadoodles who are so unintentional. I mean, it's always been true.

You have people who are not really interested in governing, being part of government, but there's just so many of them, and it's just being put into positions of power.

1:00:31 Wes: That.

1:00:32 Dylan: That virtue, that notion that we. That part of governing is wanting to figure out what is the best for the community. We have a proliferation of people where that's not true. It's not that you disagree about what the good for the community is. That's always been there. And I feel like that's fine, that's healthy. Right. Even if I disagree with who's in power, they're actively trying to governed from the point of view of they think that something else is better. We have actively have people in government and more and more and more and more of them who they don't even believe in that point of view.

That truth about what we should be doing is just like our democracy should be cultivating the flourishing of the individuals in the way in which they want to flourish. That the government should be. We should be governing ourselves in such a way that it's trying to balance the good of the community. And they're not even have that point of view. People like Kash Patel and Robert Kennedy and Trump, they simply don't believe in that.

1:01:38 Wes: Yeah, I think there's a rejection of the. Maybe I'm not saying the same thing, but rejection of the concept of a shared public good.

1:01:45 Dylan: Yes.

1:01:46 Wes: Which I've been thinking about in relation to conspiracy theories. Yes, as I continue to think about that, because I think it's very closely related. Because in conspiracy theories it's agencies of the public good, our own government, or some agency within our own government which comes under the thrall of some cabal or group of elites. But primarily it's an agency of the public good which is trying to harm us. Right. Rather than doing what it's supposed to do, which is to be to take care of us or to protect us. And so it's this extreme skepticism towards agencies of the public good.

But it rises to the point where any such agency is automatically recast as something persecutory. Right. Like the nanny state or something like that. You see that on, you know, I think conspiracy theorists come in all political stripes or in many ways they transcend politics. But you see conspiratorial frame of mind infecting politics. Yes. And on the left, I see it as identity politics where it's not about the public good so much as about the power, interests, or status and prestige of particular groups. And then on the right, it's this hyper individualism where.

Right, let's get rid of government. That kind of idea.

1:02:59 Seth: You just keep in mind that these people didn't pop up out of nowhere and take power by force. They were elected.

1:03:05 Dylan: Yes.

1:03:06 Seth: Which means the person living next door to you probably shares that sentiment or somebody very near to you does. And this is not a. They're just simply instruments. The idea you have of what you thought America was and what you thought American citizenship was and what you thought is wrong and be prepared to be Christian or die.

1:03:25 Wes: I'm not as pessimistic as that. I think most people are low information voters and they, they do not. They are not as engaged with politics as us. They have no idea about the battles that you and I are steeped in. And for them it's just the. There's inflation and I'm going to vote for the other guy. And that is the sum and substance of what they're doing. And they'll flip back to the Democrat next time.

1:03:48 Seth: No, no. It's such a patronizing view. It's such a tired, quote, unquote progressive or liberal view of that. It's absolutely not true. I don't think. I'm sure there are some of those, but there are people that know exactly.

1:04:00 Wes: There are core partisan constituencies for each side, but there's a lot of people who don't even vote. And then there's a lot of people who are swing voters. Who are. They're not Trumpers, they're not progressives, they're not anything. But they're gonna vote for Obama one year and Trump the next. And that's. I mean that's demonstrated by the political data, people switching back and forth. These are the people who are determining the elections. The person next door to you voted for Obama one year and voted for Trump the next year. That's the truth of, of what's shifting the political winds.

1:04:32 Dylan: I would be happy to engage some of this kind of thinking by exploring themes like conspiracy theory or other stuff. And also just war theory we talked about earlier, self defense, those kinds of things. I feel spending some time with that would feel insightful. I don't think it's worth time even with the identity politics stuff that we did not long ago. It just feels less. Feels too on the nose at some level. I would rather.

1:05:02 Wes: Yeah, I agree. So it's played out. Yeah. It's just played out like it doesn't matter anymore.

1:05:08 Seth: Well, that's.

1:05:08 Mark: That's why I felt like immigration as a philosophical topic is actually just one that I've never thought about like what are our duties toward fellow citizens versus other people. And it just. That's a fundamentally new thing to think about for me in terms of philosophy. So. And is specific rather than. But I think these things about fascism. It's probably worth our time to read something in Seth I know has been reading in this area for a long time, but we had read the two main Arendt books, Origin of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem about this.

But there's probably something by a similar figure that would be not unhelpful. Anyway, it's not the top. If people have recommendations, please send them. Just a couple. We want to wrap up here very soon. Oh, just another thing that was on my list. I had suggested Edith Stein on the problem of empathy and Max Scheler the Nature of Sympathy. So if we want to do a stretch, there's also J.L. Mackie's considering error theory in Morality. So that. That was on our list from 12 years ago. He's the guy that wrote the Miracle of Theism that we read for our Arguments for the Existence of God episode.

So I. Yeah, we haven't really done straight up ethics in a while that I can recall. So having a couple revisit. Stein and Scheler are both post Husserlian or phenomenologists I believe so and we're just taking up Husserl on at least on close reads to see if that's something we that we dare a name we dare utter whether we have earned or deserve another go round in that area. The other one, Eva Brann, passed away and we never really talked about on here. Dylan, did you want to address that at all?

1:06:48 Dylan: Yeah. Eva died this fall. She had been on the podcast a few times. For me, she had a really personal effect on my life. When I went to St. John's she was my first seminar partner, which meant that she was a person who sort of introduced me to the way in which St. John's worked. And as I learned more about that, I learned how lucky I was to have had that happen. And I've told stories about her and my interactions with her. She was really powerful intellectual force and for me, someone that I'm really glad to have interacted with in my life. And after she died, I found myself calling around to colleagues and friends just to get an opportunity to talk about her and reminisce. Yeah. I don't know what else to say.

1:07:42 Mark: Yeah. No. Honored to have had her on the show. Some of our best interviews, for sure. Not because they weren't interviews, even though it was about her books. Thanks, everybody, for hanging on, for hanging out with us for this nightcap, and we wish you a wonderful new year.

1:07:59 Dylan: Happy New Year.

1:08:00 Wes: Happy New Year.

1:08:01 Seth: Bye.