The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

On Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (2016). What role should we allow anger to play in our public life? Should systems of punishment be strictly impartial, or should they be retributive, i.e., expressive of public anger? Nussbaum thinks that anger necessarily involves the desire for payback, and that this is nearly always unhelpful. We should instead use anger (or rather, change it into "transition anger") to look toward the future and prevent future harm. Whether in personal relationships, dealings with acquaintances, or in setting policy, anger as desire for payback tends only to further exacerbate bad situations. And "transactional forgiveness," i.e., debasing someone and making them jump through hoops before you accept an apology, is a historical relic that also just expresses hostility. But what about social justice—can anger help us focus on achieving that? Doesn't punishment need to express our collective anger against undesirable behaviors and those who perform them? Nussbaum is an engaging and provocative speaker, and Mark, Wes, and Dylan were happy to get to talk with her. Here's the Huffington Post article she wrote on sexual assault that she mentions. Get parts 2 (more interview) and 3 (discussion) of this episode in a single, unbroken, ad-free file (which can be beamed straight to your mobile device via our Citizen feed) by becoming a PEL Citizen. Please support PEL! Nussbaum picture by Solomon Grundy.

PEL welcomes a new podcast to our fledgling network: Phi Fic, which grew out of our Not School Philosophical Fiction group, featuring Nathan Hanks (who you'll likely recognize from our Not School anouncments, Mary Claire (who helps edit the PEL blog), Daniel St. Pierre, Laura Davis, and Cezary Baraniecki. This time they discuss Mary Shelley's classic novel, and are joined by special guest, PEL host Wes Alwan. If you've never actually read it, don't think you know Frankenstein, because the structure, the themes, the tone, the insights into human nature and our relationship to technology: none of it is what you'd expect given the portrayal of the characters in popular culture. Check out more episodes and be sure to subscribe at phificpodcast.com. Don't expect philosophy per se, but do expect insightful, entertaining explication of idea-packed stories. Learn from me... how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. –Victor Frankenstein Theft of Fire by Christian Griepenkerl Go buy the book or read along online. Get your free month of The Great Courses Plus at thegreatcoursesplus.com/PEL, including Neil deGrasse Tyson's The Inexplicable Universe.

Continuing to discuss the views of Plato's Eleatic Stranger on sophistry, with a right turn into hardcore metaphysics with an exploration of falsity and its metaphysical correlate, non-being. The "Eleatic" in "Eleatic Stranger" is supposed to connote Parmenides, a Presocratic philosopher who famously claimed that all existence is really One, with no real change. This means that all the variation among the things we see is really illusion: all is Being, and there can be no real thing as a lack of Being. Among the many paradoxes for language coming out of this view is that we can't even rationally say that "non-being does not exist," because in doing so we're using "non-being" as the subject of the sentence—i.e., as an object, i.e., as something that in some sense exists and has this property of not existing. And this property of "not existing" of course means "partakes of non-being." So, saying that unicorns don't exist is a matter of attributing this paradoxical property to these non-things. If Plato/the Stranger wants to claim that the sophist is a liar, then he has to make sense contra Parmenides of the idea that a sentence can be false, i.e., can refer to a state of affairs that IS NOT, that lacks being. Non-being has to in some sense be a real thing. The eventual solution in this difficult dialogue is that the concept of "other" makes talking about non-being make sense. A unicorn is not really a non-thing; it's just a thing that's different than any of the things that are in the world, or a better way of putting it is that the situation of there existing a unicorn is other than any of the situations that hold. Falsity just means "other than truth." Listen to part 1 first or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition with your PEL Citizenship. Please support PEL! End song: "Dumb," by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).

On the later Platonic dialogue (ca. 360 BC). What is a sophist? Historically, these were foreign teachers in Ancient Greece who taught young people the tools of philosophy and rhetoric, among other things, and espeically they claimed to teach virtue. In this dialogue, "the Eleatic Stranger" (i.e., not Socrates, who is present but wholly silent after the first couple of pages) is trying to figure out what a sophist really is, and in the process is showing us a new procedure for defining a word, which he calls the method of division. This is sort of like 20 questions, where you start with "animal, vegetable, or mineral?" The difference, of course, being that in 20 questions, one player already knows the answer, and you might ask whether it makes any sense at all to use such a method when you really don't know what the thing is that you're looking for. If you don't know what a gastopod is, then you can't start to answer that by asking yourself what general type of thing it is. But with "sophist," or any other term (e.g., justice, knowledge) that Plato concerns himself with, of course you know enough to start the inquiry, and the point is to get more philosophically precise. So a better example might be "what is a whale," where you start with the animal you can see and end up classifying it as mammal as opposed to fish. The Stranger ends up classifying the sophist in several ways corresponding to various properties ascribed to sophists (Is he someone who hunts for the souls and money of young people? Is he someone who divides people from their confused beliefs? Is he someone who creates false beliefs in people's heads?). This whole interest in sophistry is certainly still relevant to discourse today! Continued on part 2, or get the Citizen Edition as one of the many benefits of a PEL Citizenship. And as Wes explains at the beginning of the episode, there are many other ways to support the podcast, some of which don't actually cost you anything. Buy the book or follow along in this online version. Dylan's fancy new Eva Brann translation is Plato : Sophist: The Professor of Wisdom (Focus Philosophical Library). Plato picture by Genevieve Arnold.

Continuing on Plato's dialogue (from around 370 BC), diving into Socrates's myth-laden speech on the nature of love: The soul is like a charioteer with a good horse and a bad horse, and the bad horse is the crazy, love-struck, lust-filled one, and pulls us toward the beloved until the good horse and charioteer restrain it. Love essentially gives the soul a chance to exercise self-control, to become more mature. Oh, and also, we are attracted to beauty because it reminds us of the time before our birth where our chariot chased after gods over the horizon of the world, beyond which at least some of us got a glimpse of that world of the heavenly Forms. Are we supposed to take this myth literally? Is this really what Plato thought? The context in the dialogue tells us that this is probably not the case, although translating the myth into simple declarative statements describing Plato's beliefs is not going to be possible. Socrates speaks in myth (maybe) because the truly profound truths transcend words, and so this ecstatic musing is really the closest we can come to communicating the fundamentally incommunicable. This is a pretty surprising result given the reputation of Plato/Socrates as the champion of Reason and explicitly evaluating your beliefs based on Reason. Listen to part 1 first, or get the ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition with your PPEL Citizenship, which also gets you into the Not School groups that Brian Wilson talks here. And it's not too late to sign up with Great Discourses; get 15% off with code PELIFE or 20% off as a PEL Citizen. Please support PEL! End song: "Summertime" by New People, from Might Get It Right (2013). Buy the album. Sponsors: Blue Apron, a better way to cook: blueapron.com/PEL. Also, the St. John's College Graduate Institute: partiallyexaminedlife.com/sjcgi.

Socrates hangs out in the country flirting with his buddy Phaedrus. And what is this "Platonic" love you've all heard about? Well, you use the enticement of desire not to rush toward fulfillment, but to get all excited about talking philosophy. Phaedrus starts off reading a speech by renowned orator Lysias (actually Plato's invention parodying the style of this real guy) about love: Love is a form of madness, where people do things they then regret after love fades. Therefore, it's better to hang out with someone who does NOT love you, i.e., some friend who's concerned with your interests instead of fulfilling his addled desires. Socrates critiques both this position and the speech itself. We get to learn about what makes for a good persuasive speech (one point: don't put the sentences in random order!) and see both how Socrates would make the same point Lysias does but better, and then what Socrates's true view and preferred presentation is: This takes the form of a long myth that involves a chariot, and the structure of the soul, and how beauty causes us to remember a heavenly world. And after all this, we get to hear more about rhetoric and how back-and-forth, in-person philosophical exchange is way better than reading books. Mark, Wes, and Dylan are joined by Great Discourses founder Adam Rose, who provides us with a lot of nice literary context, as you should know if you listened to our spiel for signing up for the greatdiscourses.com July or September seminars with a 15% discount using the code PELIFE. (PEL Citizens get 20% off.) Continued on part 2, or get the full, unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL! Buy the text or follow along in this online version. Related Episodes: Folks may want to listen to our past Plato episodes on The Symposium (on love), Gorgias (on rhetoric), and The Republic (on what's wrong with poetry and the structure of the soul). Plato picture by Solomon Grundy. Sponsors: Get your free month of The Great Courses Plus at thegreatcoursesplus.com/PEL. Also, visit harrys.com/PEL for $5 off your first order of shaving supplies.

PEL is partnering with Great Discourses to offer something like the PEL experience to YOU, led by professional educators in discussion with no tests, no grades, just a great environment to get a grasp on great literature. Just go to greatdiscourses.com and use the code PELIFE when checking out. Use the code as many times as you want! Mark and GD honcho Adam Rose explain further, and then you can hear a chunk of one of Adam's seminars to know what it's like. And even if you don't care, this is an interesting seminar: It concerns Plato's "Apology" and "Crito" and really serves as an excellent preface to our ep. 142 on "Phaedrus." Adam raises the point that on the one hand, Socrates famously dislikes poetry and rhetoric as empty calories as compared with nutritious philosophy. But Plato, who's writing about Socrates, is himself a great poet, and his characters give great speeches. So what are we to make of this apparent conflict? If you become a PEL Citizen, you can join a Not School group for Great Discourses and get 20% off all courses instead of 15% with a Citizen-only discount code (which effectively makes your Citizenship free for a bit). Also, we've posted a whole, hour-long seminar for PEL Citizens to listen to, also from this course (on "Apology" and "Phaedo"). And no, Great Discourses is not affiliated with PEL sponsor The Great Courses.

Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). We continue discussing Part III of the book, turning explicitly to political dilemmas: Embracing our freedom means willing the freedom of others, but what if the other person is (according to Beauvoir's formula) failing at freedom by oppressing you or someone else? Stopping the oppression typically at some level requires violence, which means ceasing to will the oppressor's freedom, and (if military action is involved) most likely sacrificing the lives both of your own soldiers, of the oppressor's less guilty cohorts, and innocent bystanders. Beauvoir does not in the end tell us what to do (that's not what ethics is about), but stresses the need to understand the stakes involved: A sacrifice of a human life is the loss of a world, and that fact doesn't change even if it was "justified" by its prevention of a greater loss. You don't get to sit back with the self-satisfaction of "having done the right thing" when you make such terrible (though often necessary) choices. The fact that there's no objectively "right" answer in such situations, no expiation if only you always follow the utilitarian calculus, the categorical imperative, or God-given laws, exemplifies her (Nietzschean) claim that morality is a creative act, requiring independent, authentic thought, not rule following. Seth had dropped out of the conversation due to illness by this point, so Mark, Wes, and Dylan remain to hash things out. Do you think that Beauvoir's solution allows for morality within atheist, anti-obedience existentialism? Come join us on the Sun. 6/26 Aftershow at 5pm ET (covering our discussion back to ep. 140) to tell us what you think. This requires signing up to be PEL Citizen, which in turn gives you access to the unbroken, ad-free the Citizen Edition of this episode, and the entire back catalog. Everyone can Watch the Aftershow live or after the fact. Please support PEL! End song: "Indiscretion (Mess Things Up)" from the 1993 Mark Lint album Spanish Armada: Songs of Love and Related Neuroses. Simone de Beauvoir picture by Solomon Grundy. Sponsors: Visit ClubW.com/PEL for a $20 credit and free shipping on your first order of four bottles of wine. Also, visit harrys.com/PEL for $5 off your first order of shaving supplies.

More on Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), this time on part III. In ep. 140, we described de B's picture of our "ambiguous" existential situation and how proper recognition of our freedom means willing the freedom of others, but what does that actually mean for how we're supposed to act? De Beauvoir is well known as a feminist and political leftist, and is concerned here with oppression. To fight an oppressor is necessarily to not will the oppressor's freedom, and de B. doesn't rule out violence, though she at the same time points out how inexcusable it is. That is, literally inexcusable, because there is no external moral standard ("I killed one to save many, which utilitarianism says is OK!") one can turn to for exculpation. And if you're part of a corrupt system, you share in its responsibility, even if you are not personally guilty of exploiting someone. So, what do you do? There's no rulebook to tell you, but in general terms, you need to respect the individual, whose value can never be simply written off as insignificant next to the group. And of course, people are exploited who claim to be satisfied with their lot, so paying attention to the individual is not simply getting their consent or doing what they say. You have to (when practically feasible) raise their consciousness and put them within grasp of their freedom, which only they can grasp. Mark, Wes, Dylan, and a Seth who was sick enough to drop off before the end of the discussion try to sort through De B's practical paradoxes. The discussion continues on part 2, or get the ad-free, unbrokenthe Citizen Edition; being a Citizen will also let you listen to the Beauvoir Aftershow discussion featuring Jennifer Hansen. Simone De Beauvoir picture by Solomon Grundy.

Continuing on Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), parts I and II. We discuss all the various ways to fail to wholly will your own freedom, i.e., will it all the way to where you will the freedom of others. The first step is admitting that human consciousness is an ontological negative, i.e., it doesn't have static being in the way a rock or tree or even an instinct-driven squirrel is, and some people just stop there, really willing nothing at all. These are the "sub-men." Or maybe you sign on to some cause, some goal with all your being: you fill your negativity up with something external (like God, or wanting with all your heart to become an Olympic gymnast, or devotion to doing your job well) and thereby pretend to be determined just like a squirrel is. This is the "serious man," and it's a serious abrogation of your freedom! Or maybe you react against this seriousness and just deny that any such external thing has a hold on you, and actively will to have no values at all. This is nihilism, and it fails the existential test too. …And there are several more iterations before you're really a fully freedom-embracing, authentic human being; in the process she ends up distinguishing herself from other existentialist atheists like Nietzsche (whom she thinks to be too solipsistic) and Camus (p. 129: "To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won."). Listen to part 1 before this, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen edition with your PEL Citizenship. Please support PEL! End song: "Reasonably Lonely," by Mark Lint & the Simulacra from The Sinking and the Aftermath, recorded in 2000 and 2003, newly mixed.

On Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), parts I and II. We return to existentialism! Instead of describing our predicament as "absurd," de Beauvoir prefers "ambiguous": We are a biological organism in the world, yet we're also free consciousness transcending the given situation. Truly coming to terms with this freedom means not only understanding that you transcend any label of character ("villain") or role ("doctor") that you or anyone else has put on you, but also recognizing that your freedom requires the freedom of others. And this is the challenge of her book: In an existentialist world view that denies pre-existing moral laws, whether given by God or Reason or anything else, how can ethics be possible? Wouldn't it just be all subjective, or relative, if, as Nietzsche says, we are the ones who create values? What prevents an existentialist from being a self-consistent monster à la the antagonist of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men? The key is recognizing and preserving this human ambiguity. We are things in the world, yet qua consciousness, we're really a hole in the world, a little pit of desire, an unpredictable action behind a pair of eyes, and to embrace our negativity means recognizing not only that no external, alien moral law causes or commands our behavior, but also willing that being exist, i.e., the being of the things we desire, the projects we want to enact in the world, and the happiness of other people and improvement of the world. Self-consistently embracing our free nature therefore means willing the good, and this willing is an act of creation much like creation of an artwork. Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan are all on board this time to fill out this picture and try to figure out whether de Beauvoir is right that not only does this existentialist picture support ethics, but in fact it's the only way to support ethics: a pre-existent, objective standard would not allow us the freedom to actually choose the good. Think about how, for Plato, we never knowingly choose evil; we always want what we think is good but sometimes are just mistaken. De Beauvoir, like Augustine, thinks that we really can perversely choose to deny our nature, deny our freedom (though that denial remains a free choice), where pretending like Aristotle and (in a different way) most theologians that we have a built-in teleological "good" that by our nature we were meant to pursue is just another way of actually denying our total freedom. Continued on part 2, or get the full, ad-free Citizen edition. Please support PEL! Recommended prerequisites: De Beauvoir's book is a great introduction to existentialism, if you haven't read any, and our discussion should be mostly clear, but it may help you especially to listen to our ep. 10 on Kant's ethics, which also argues for the "self-legislation" of ethics. Other touchstones are Nietzsche (most centrally ep. 84), Camus (ep. 4), and especially Sartre (ep. 87).

Brian Wilson's Not School Intro Readings in Philosophy Group discussed Plato on why you should obey the state and other musings from a condemned Socrates; you can be part of the group's next discussion on Sun. 6/4 5pm EDT. Just become a PEL Citizen, join the Intro group, and RSVP here. Citizens can also hear the entire "Crito" recording, featuring Steve Kurtz, Stacey Morris, Roger Crandy, Nick Eddy, Justin Modra, James Lee, and Cathy Reisenwitz. Purdue's Chris Yeomans was our guest Hegel scholar as we reflected back on eps 134/135, joining Mark and Danny Lobell with PEL listeners to discuss Hegel's theology, metaphysics, and more. PEL Citizens can listen to the whole discussion here. Check out PEL's second spin-off podcast: Phi Fic: A Fiction Podcast at phificpodcast.com or subscribe on iTunes. The new 'cast grew out of our very own Not School Philosophical Fiction group! What is Not School? Watch the Hegel Aftershow on YouTube: Watch the Crito session on YouTube:

Hey, PEL Listeners, go subscribe to Nakedly Examined Music at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com or on iTunes! Craig is into Buddhism and surrealism, and led Shudder to Think from 1986 to 1998, and has since had a solo career and done soundtrack work, often for members of the comedy team The State like childhood friend David Wain. Shudder to Think was a band that started as part of Washington DC's "hardcore" scene, but challenged musical conventions to try to achieve U2-level success with Captain-Beefheart-level weirdness (they failed). We discuss their song "Pebbles" from Get Your Goat (1992), then go post-Shudder to "Show Down" by Craig's short-lived attempt at a pop-dance band, since released as Craig Wedren & Baby. Then we talk about working on assignment and his experience with "I Am the Wolf, You Are the Moon" (co-written by Isaac Carpenter), which appeared on 2015's Netflix (David Wain/Michael Showalter) series Wet, Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp. We conclude by listening to "Heaven Sent" from the Craig Wedren album Wand (2011). The opening music is Shudder to Think's "X-French Tee Shirt" from Pony Express Record (1994) and the closing music is the theme from the MTV show The State featuring samples of The Nation of Ulysses. Learn more about Craig at craigwedren.com. And here's a progress update on this here spin-off podcast about songs and songwriting: I've interviewed a bunch of smart people, exploring their philosophies of creativity and life: Do you work meticulously like Gareth Mitchell or seize the moment like Narada Michael Walden? Do you retreat from the world like Jonathan Donahue or get out everywhere like Gary Lucas? Do you (reflectively) play the fame game like Nick Eede or eschew it like Steve Petrinko? Do you focus on inspiring others like Beth Kille or working with those that inspire you like John Philip Shenale? Do you take sole ownership of your career like Jeff Heiskell or become director of a creative commune like Roderick Romero? Do you redirect when things get boring like Kevin Godley or keep your needs simple and consistent like Fritz Beer? Do you allow yourself to get suckered into meeting the rest of the PEL gu...

Continuing on Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) and Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992, Intro, Ch. 3, 11), with guest Myisha Cherry. We talk about black feminist "essentialism" (i.e., a single narrative of oppression) and how that relates to bell hooks's project of media critique. Every person's journey is individual, yet she thinks there are right ways and wrong ways to self-actualize: You may think you're all independent and free, but really you're just parroting the narratives of the oppressor, e.g., by embracing loose sexuality or enjoying films where black gang members shoot each other up. How can we tell if this self-deception is really happening in particular cases? The video Mark refers to is this conversation she engaged in at The New School; some of the references might also be to her Speaking Freely appearance. You can also watch her in dialogue with Cornel West, whom we briefly covered in ep. 52. Listen to part 1 first or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition with your PEL Citizenship. Please support PEL! End song: "Stories" by Mark Lint and Steve Petrinko (2011). bell hooks picture by Solomon Grundy.

On Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) and Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992, Intro, Ch. 3, 11). How do these pernicious forces interact? bell hooks (aka Gloria Watkins) describes black women as having been excluded both from mainstream historical feminism (which was led by white women who didn't want to alienate Southern whites) and black civil rights struggles (which were permeated with patriarchy), and this "silencing," this removal of them from narratives of liberation, puts them in a challenging position when it comes to achieving self-actualization and social justice. Black Looks is one of many books in which hooks engages in the cultural critique that she thinks is part of the solution: Marginalized groups need to reclaim the narrative about themselves so that they aren't cast as "Other" in their own minds, and this in part involves criticizing media representations that reinforce stereotypes. These limiting images need to be replaced in people's psyches by a story rooted in the historical struggle for liberation. Mark, Seth, and Dylan are joined by Myisha Cherry, host of the UnMute Podcast to reflect on how hooks's prescriptions address today's social problems and how they relate to philosophical views of human nature and freedom. Related episodes: We first covered race back in ep. 52 and feminism in ep. 42. hooks praises Erich Fromm (ep. 133), and Mark makes some attempt to attach this to Hegel's master-slave dynamic (ep. 36). Ideology in media is discussed in ep. 136 on Adorno. Here's part two, or you can get the full, ad-free Citizen Edition by becoming a PEL Citizen, which will allow you to participate in the Not School groups like the ones Brian Wilson talks about. Support PEL! bell hooks picture by Solomon Grundy.