So what does this view imply for our experience of ourselves as freely acting beings? What about that God as first cause business? Are we ever justified in believing someone’s account of a miracle, which by definition violates all previously experienced patterns of causality?

You can probably guess, but you don’t need to, because we’ll tell you, and Wes will probably pooh pooh Hume’s conception of knowledge, and we will fight, and there will be blood, but from whence will be its cause and hence fault? David Hume’s, of course.

Read with us: http://18th.eserver.org/hume-enquiry.html.

Smarter, more well read, more articulate and generally better people than me have weighed in on the topic for 40+ years.  It mattered to them.  It might have mattered culturally at some point.  It did matter to me 20 years ago, but it doesn’t now. 

First, a distinction.  There’s Heidegger the man, and Heidegger’s ‘thought’, which is to say his texts and other writings.  Not in question are these facts:  he joined the National Socialist party, he did reprehensible things in their name and defended his actions, he was kind of a douche.  This isn’t about the man.  What’s at issue in Faye’s book and all the others is whether Heidegger’s thought is fascistic or national socialistic.  It’s all about interpretation of the texts, but interpretation with intent.

With regard to Nazism, you can make the attempt to ‘read’ it into his texts as an illuminating interpretative strategy, or you can do it to prove his philosophy was an underpinning for Nazi ideology.  The former I find uninteresting, the latter only matters if you are going to do something with the result.  The implication is that an answer in the negative means we are allowed to keep reading him, in the positive and his thought becomes ’tainted’, ‘fascist’, ‘anti-semetic’, whatever and, presumably, his texts are consigned to the flame.   This isn’t about proving a thesis, it’s about establishing a disposition towards his philosophy that implies some kind of action.  Let’s say Faye (and others) prove the point - what are you going to do?

It’s a normative question about the interplay of ideas.  We’ve already granted that Heidegger the man acted consentually and didn’t repent.  If you take the position that morally objectionable actions by the person invalidate their work, the point is already moot.  And you can then throw Niezsche, Schopenhauer, Picasso and Tiger Woods into the hole with him.  If you move from the person to their ideas, the question is more complicated.  In the case of a straight-up apologist hack, where the ideas have no merit other than to justify an objectionable ideaology, it’s easy to say that because X supports Y, I’m not going to read any of X’s work.  What we’re saying in that case is:  X’s stuff is one-note, and that note is tedious and objectionable, so I’m invalidating X’s thought by ignoring it.   In the case of a body of work more prolific, nuanced, thought provoking and less clearly implicated like Heidegger’s, I don’t think that move works. 

I think something like this motivates the Heidegger/Nazism debate now.  People who argue one side or the other want you to do something about his thought and texts.  Keep reading him or don’t.  Censure him or don’t.  Villify him or don’t.  Include him in the canon or don’t.  Blame him for something or don’t.  Take a stand…

So here’s what I’m going to do:  keep reading him (or not) without regard to the outcome of the debate.  As you’ll hear in the Danto episode and as befits someone tied to the tradition of pluralistic hermeneutic reading, I respect authorial intent but it’s only a gateway into interpretation for me.  And I’m quite OK with multiple, contradictory and difficult readings of texts.  In fact, the more you can read into and get out of a text, the better.  And I think there’s a lot to be got from Heidegger - useful, interesting, stimulating, thoughtful, relevant, meaningful things that stand independent of a) less useful or even censurable things you can get out of his work and b) they way the useful stuff might be employed.  Hence, re: Heidegger’s thought and Nazism, mir ist egal.

I’m surprised this debate even has currency anymore.  It does appear to be dying a slow death and perhaps with the last of Faye’s generation of intellectuals it will finally be put to bed.  Immediately after the issue came to light, there was real Angst on the part of intellectuals who were influenced by and had strong personal ties Heidegger as they tried to come to grips with his participation in National Socialism.   Early work on the subject reflected painful moral and philosophical struggles by people for whom the events of the War and Holocaust were recent and personal.  His stature as leading European thinker needed to be questioned and legalities around his ability to participate in German academic life needed to be resolved. 

That’s 60 years in the past now.  If you want to make this something personal for you, go ahead.  If you want to talk about the normative question above, feel free.  But the debate itself lacks currency and relevance and I’m just not interested.  –seth

If you’ve listened to the podcast ep. 16, you’ve heard that Seth thinks that it’s boring when musicians interpret songs for you, so I won’t to that, and leave you merely to wonder what it would mean to be “bold enough to bend” and “cold enough to mend” or whether these are just rhyming devices.

This was written back in early 1994 during a period of pretty substantial emotional turmoil, where I still entertained the suicide fantasies of the very young, and this was a song I would play very late at night with my vision shrunk to a point boring through my wall and a harsh night calm set all over me, when it seemed like THIS WAS IT, whatever IT was. Music is nice at capturing one’s visions of personal Armageddon.

I started this particular recording (the only one of this song) in maybe 1997 and decided in 2000 to add it to the Simulacra album via my friend (and philosophy student!) Mark Doroba’s awesome trippy guitars (and drums… double tracked at the beginning for extra clickery by Armando Reyes, who played in my previous guitarist’s new band). I managed to record bass w/in the next year but didn’t get around to doing the singing and mixing it down until now.

I have known for some time that my voice is at the pitch of ‘background noise’ and that my cadence is, let’s call it, deliberate.  In my professional life I have witnessed on numerous occassions men nodding off during my presentations or while I am talking.  I say “men” on purpose, as oddly, this seems only to apply to men.  In any case, this is what made me very good at delivering bad news to big institutional customers - I know how to bore an angry mob into submission.

So I’m particularly sensitive about how I come off in this podcast and when I edit, I pay particular attention to how I sound and the way I speak.  What I have found is that while ‘on tape’, my voice appears to be substantially less soporific, I am still terribly paced and deliberate in the way I speak.  Worse, I imagined myself as ‘thoughtful’ and coming out with extended but complete and coherent thoughts, which is not the case.  I get lost, go on tangents, restart, “um” and “you know” like everyone else. 

So I’m trying to be more responsive, speak more directly and be more succinct.  Easier said than done, but that’s my commitment to you.  And I highly recommend that you record one of your own conversations or an unrehearsed monologue - it’s an enlightening experience in self-awareness.

If you re-Tweet our episode posts to the millions of Twitter followers you undoubtably have, then you’ll have our eternal gratitude.

While I’m on the subject of spreading the word, why don’t you scroll ALL the way to the bottom of this page and hit the “Stumbleupon” or “Digg” icons at the bottom under “Share with your friends on…” This will nominate our page for wider circulation via those sites and will also make you cool. Note that you can do this with any one of our blog posts here as well; just click on the title of the post, and when a page comes up with just that post on it, then click the sharing icon. You’ll have to sign up for an account with those sites, but they’re kind of cool regardless.

More importantly, if you’ve not already gone onto iTunes and given us a steamin’ hot awesome rating (a review is nice too), go do that! I’m unclear re. what rating resources are available to you Zune users and other non-traditionals, but I encourage you people to do something as well… perhaps just stand in the street holding a sign with our URL on it. …Or better yet, buy a freakin’ T-shirt already!

I understand you may not have heard of Danto, and you may think modern art is goofy, but you’ll definitely enjoy this discussion and the reading anyway. Danto gives a picture of philosophy and art at war throughout history: philosophy says that art can’t get at truth and is otherwise useless, yet philosophers like Plato seem afraid of the power of art to corrupt. What’s the deal?

Also, Danto claims that art is over; the end of art has happened. So suck it, artists. (Actually, artists can keep on doing what they’re doing; they’re fine, yet art is still over.) Plus, can you stare at a urinal and thereby make it art? What if it’s in a museum? Danto loves them crazy ass post-modern artists, and thinks that their work shows that art was not what we thought it was.

Plus, Seth talks about the plane crashing into the IRS building near his house, and we respond some listener postings.

This work is unfortunately not available free on the Internet, but is worth your purchase. Try Amazon or your preferred bookseller. We also refer heavily to Calvin Tomkins’s “The Bride and the Bachelors.” For a summary of “The End of Art,” you can read this excerpt from one of Danto’s later books: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s5911.html. You could also check out the Amazon preview of Danto’s book “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” which we refer to a bit.

End song: “This Night Before the End,” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded mostly in 2000 but finished just now.

One of the first musicians I met in Madison upon arriving in 2000 was Ken Labarre. “Mush” was a song he wrote for his previous band, and it rips on people who bare their feelings on daytime talk shows (not the kind of topic I typically write about, but if it’s good enough for Peter Gabriel, it should be OK with me).

I wasn’t fond of the lyrics (the previous chorus lyrics were: “Have I told you that I think you’re crazy; bag of bones hanging with your daisy; you talk so darn proud of the hurting inside; it’s MUSH.”), so I rewrote them and tweaked the melody to come up with this demo. Ken said he thought I captured the original intent well, but his wife Mel was supposed to actually sing it in the new band we were trying to form, and she didn’t like the faux tough stance (despite my already softening the word “shit” in the choruses to “bit”), so the two of them rewrote the lyrics again, in a way that I thought made it worse, so she quit the band, which led to the whole project getting scrapped. I started Madison Lint, and Ken (who for some reason likes being called “The Jammy Bastard” now) started a great band called Tangy, which apparently recorded part of some version of this, though I don’t know if any of the ideas I contributed were retained.

Despite this acrimony, and the apparent hurriedness of the demo (my guitar is out of tune, and this was recorded on my Tascam 4-track, which is what I HAD to record on prior to 1996 but at this point only used when too lazy to set up the more elaborate digital equipment), this song has been going in my head periodically since November when I digitized the original audio tracks (which had degraded quite a bit), so I used this as a test of my ability to make crappy tracks sound OK through heavy use of digital processing and effects. It’s a nice song, and it would have been nice to hear a full band version.

So, my question: Do lyrics matter? My biggest barrier in this and other cases to working with other songwriters is that I don’t like their lyrics. Most people write in clichés, or to be less harsh about it, they don’t write in a way that would feel natural coming out of my mouth, and this embarrasses me, despite the fact that listeners, especially in a live situation, just don’t care. Ideally, I like bands like Roger Waters’s Pink Floyd where the lyrics have a definite and consistent narrative viewpoint that goes across all the tunes, but at the very least, the different songwriters have to have compatible styles.

My chief means of songwriting collaboration in the past has, then, been my “fixing” other people’s lyrics, sometimes to their satisfaction, sometimes not. Collaborative lyric writing can be great, but should be argumentative, I think, to polish each and every line into something better than each participant could come up with on his own, and the respect and deference that you typically want to offer to someone else’s ideas when you’re working with them usually precludes this.

I think I’m less of an arrogant bastard re. this issue now, but that’s probably just because the other songwriters I currently work with usually don’t set me off, though there was a bit of the second verse to one of the songs we recorded on our last album that I asked Matt again and again and again to fix, and he just couldn’t think of anything better and didn’t like my suggestion… bah!

How should a philosopher approach the study of history? Is history just a bunch of random happenings, or is it a purposive force manipulating us to fulfill its hidden ends? If you have asked yourself this question in this way, then you, like Hegel, are mighty strange.

Here we talk about the unfolding of the world-historical spirit, world-historical individuals (hint: not you), dialectic, his alternative to the social contract, the formation of the self based on what others label you, the geist of America, why a constitutional monarchy is obviously the best form of government, and heaps more.

Read with us: Pages 14-128 of http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hegel/history.pdf or, for a somewhat less intimidating experience (and to read the same translation I have), just pick up a paperback of just the part we’re concerned with: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0872200566/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used.

End Song: “Cold,” by Madison Lint (2004), described in my music blog.

What you see before you, i.e. me, is, admittedly, very awesomely partially examined, but I was not always this way.

No, I say, there is hope. By just mostly giving up and not worrying about it out of sheer disgust with yourself, you can, like me, slowly become a more nearly tolerable person to be around who doesn’t drive himself absolutely batshit for no reason. With just a touch of philosophy (and just a touch, now!) and some good old fashioned elbow grease or some other meaningless cliché that you don’t think about enough to edit out of your inspirational speech, you too can, like me, have the partially examined life.

I’ve been singing this a lot to myself as I walk around this horribly frozen wasteland that is Wisconsin and thinking about when I wrote the words to this while wandering around the building of my crappy office job back in early 2001, when both the job and the city were new to me after leaving Austin.

Some bits of the music were born a few months earlier when I had a “professional” songwriter I’d just met come over and try to write some music with me. Now, I don’t actually work that well with other songwriters as a rule, though I appreciate having someone in the room forcing me to come up with ideas and not run off to watch TV or something. So I came up with most of the melody, and the other dude tried to wedge in some ideas that didn’t fit, and he got disgusted with the tune and said it wasn’t good enough to submit to his publisher in Nashville. I proceeded to expunge his contribution, simplify the chord progression into a Nirvana-esque soft then loud thing, and write all new lyrics. I’m still waiting to be sued regardless, as the dude seemed litigious.

The song became a staple for Madison Lint, the band I formed soon after, and was recorded for our initial demo in the fall of 2001. Several lineups later, we recorded this version in March 2004 for our full album project, which I then proceeded to abandon when the band fell apart a few months later. I don’t think I’d actually listened to this take between recording it and late 2009, when my crime was revealed: I had a pretty damn great recording of a sickly good band that I had not been responsible enough to finish up.

…But I knew that already, and the point of this blog is to address that sin among others.

You may notice that after about minute 3.5 when the singing is all done, the song keeps going and going, wanking about a la the Grateful Dead, repeating the same two chords as first the keyboard, then the lead guitar take solos, then the lead guitar keeps going while the drums get silly, then my acoustic guitar just won’t shut up, bringing the thing to over 8 minutes. This is not a feat I intend to repeat, and the tune may get edited down in the final reckoning, but trying to shove my style into a jam greater than I myself could personally manage as a solo performer was sort of the point of that band, and the groove is all right, so who am I to knock it?

It was my belief in forming my first bands (in the late 80s) that improvisation can never be as good as something thought out beforehand, but many years listening to jazz has convinced me otherwise. I do not believe that one’s soul magically emerges from one’s body to squirt around in a shower of glory during such a procedure, but the thing certainly did seem to gain its own momentum, and I felt excessive but gleeful about it at the time.

After listening, however, I have decided to hyperbolically extoll the virtues of PEL.  Please to enjoy…

• All the participants contribute.  We don’t have some random dude who has no apparent connection to the material introduce the discussion and then disappear.  Nor do we have ‘interviewers’ or ‘hosts’ who offer up nothing but a set up questions to guests, allowing them to solliquize.
• We are having a genuine dialogue.  None of us is the acknowledged leader and we each bring both an open mind and unique perspective to the table.  Our purpose isn’t to lecture, educate or browbeat you from a soapbox.  (OK, well maybe Wes has a soapbox…)
• We have focus.  Beyond framing the discussion around an issue, we have textual grounding for the discussion.  This both lessons the likelihood of random stream-of-consciousness rambling and provides an anchor for the discussion when things are in danger of going off the rails.
• We prepare.  None of thinks ourselves so clever, intelligent or well read to come without reading the recommended texts.  Which correlates with,
• We have respect for each other and the texts/subjects.  Regardless of how much fun we make of someone’s ideas (Hegel), writing style (Aristotle) or life (Nietzsche), we take them seriously as thinkers and try to respect the context and goals of their enterprise.
• Authenticity vs. Authority.  We are genuinely interested in the philosophers and their ideas and struggle understanding them.  We don’t represent ourselves as experts or falsely claim insight or entitlement.
• Enough education, but not too much.  We all have the academic background and general smarts to treat the ideas and readings respectably without insulting your intelligence or wringing the life out of them with process, theory, -isms or technical specialization.
• The Real World.  We aren’t just evaluating ideas based on logic, tradition or intuition.  We allow our real life experiences to inform our reading and responses to the texts.
• We have a sense of humor but we aren’t ‘making fun’.   Our goal is to entertain, inspire, enlighten and amuse with a sense of decorum and integrity.  Jokes and humor are integral but not dominant elements in that quest.
• Minimal jargon and fetishism.  While it is *extremely* difficult not to use technical terminology or inside jargon, particularly when one has been “schooled”, we do our best to keep the discussion ‘right down to earth, in a language everyone here can easily understand.’  We also are not in the business of hagiography (I had to find some way to work that word in here.  I love it.)
• Universal approach.  We are performing for anyone interested in the ideas, philosophers or texts that we are discussing.  Our topics are only limited by that - you don’t have to have a certain background, education, geographical location, academic affiliation, gender, race, hair color or other trait to get engaged.
• Production and audio quality.  Hey, we’re not perfect, but we try to maintain a certain level of quality to our podcast, even though we are in three separate cities using Skype and different audio equipment and software.  At the very least we try to clean and equalize tracks so that one person’s volume isn’t radically different from another.   As someone who listens to podcasts at the gym or in a 9-year old car, this is really important to me.
• We edit.  “Um”, “yeah”, “right”, silences…ugh.  We try and get rid of the chaff, keep the wheat and provide an engaging dialogue (I’m sure with more or less success by episode).  We actually record 2 1/2 to 3 hours of stuff to get around 1 1/2 hrs of material, FYI.
• We have fans, ratings & responses.  Check us out on iTunes, Facebook or the PEL web page.  It isn’t American Idol level mania, but people listen and care enough to communicate, review and rate us.
• Better music and logo.  ‘Nuff said.

To be fair, I should point out areas where we are lacking as compared to the other podcasts.

• We don’t know famous people or prominent philosophers we can get for interviews or guest spots. 
• We haven’t been around for years to build up a body of work.
• We don’t have the luxury of time or resources to attend philosophy conferences or festivals.
• We don’t have the luxury of time or resources to produce episodes more frequently than we do.
• Our file sizes are large and our run time varies from episode to episode. 

For your reference, here are a few links to other philosophy podcasts - again, we’d love to hear what you think!

• Three Philosophers - http://www.threephilosophers.net/   (Primarily religious, last updated in August)
• Elucidations - http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/podcasts/index.html  (’Official’ cast of the dept of Philosophy at U of Chicago)
• Baggini’s Philosophy - http://julianbaggini.blogspot.com/  (out of UK, publishes a monthly magazine as well)
• Bad Philosophy - http://www.badphilosophy.com/blog/  (long running program by students at Texas Tech University)
• Exploring the Mind - http://exploringthemind.com/ (not really Philosophy, the moderator is somehow involved in hypnosis, but the guests are interesting)

This blog post is dedicated to Marvin Levich.  –seth

It’s a pretty old song, from around 1993, back when I was in a psychedlic band called The MayTricks, and though the recording is entirely new (OK, I started the click track and the acoustic guitar back in 2000, i.e. this is another tune destined for the “Cheese Stands Alone” album), the ethic and even the recording technique are MayTricks, with my co-frontman from that period, Steve Petrinko, chiming in on drums and the heavy distortion guitar part. I experimented a bit on this, bringing back my cheesy 80s keyboard that hasn’t been operational in a while and recording my first electric guitar part in a long time, and some of the psychedelic effects plugins–on the vocals at the end and on Steve’s guitar and the keys–are new to me.

What is the song about and why does its title have parentheses in it? Well, this was about finding yourself attracted to multiple people of the same physical type, possibly the same type as your ex. The lyrics exaggerate the situation a lot from there. The verses somewhat embarrassingly play up the verbal similarity of various rhyming names (putting the “Ann” or “Anne” in “Dianne” as if this implied that one woman can stand in for another), and the chorus betrays the fact that I’d been reading too much philosophy:

Dim sentimental monism or an unhealthy grieving for the long gone
Or a mean, shallow way to use people or a fine strategy to move on
Or a general desire to capture the moment or a desperate attempt to feel secure
Or a vicious betrayal of the others and the self
Or religious sublimation, I’m just not sure

So there’s that. I’d put off recording this for so long because I wanted it to be BIG and didn’t really know how to do that, and I’m not sure I entirely succeeded here, but it was pretty fun trying, and certainly great to work (at a distance) with Steve again, who I’ll hopefully drag in for more of these new recordings.

What’s a philosophically astute approach to political matters? What makes a government successful? Should you keep that fortress or sell it for scrap? If you conquer, say, Iraq, do you have to then go and live there for the occupation to work out? Is it OK to display the heads of your enemies on spikes, or should you opt for a respectful diorama?

Besides the famous Prince, Mr. M. wrote, at about the same time, the Discourses on Livy which focus on republics instead of princedoms, so the combined picture is less out of sync with our time than you might think, meaning we talk about G.W. Bush for a bit (sorry).

Plus: An inspirational speech to play at middle school assemblies across the land!

Skim the texts at http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm and maybe at http://www.constitution.org/mac/disclivy_.htm.

The Isaiah Berlin article we talk about a bit is “The Originality of Machiavelli,” which you read most of if you search for the essay title in this book preview: http://books.google.com/books?id=Zjv9fBU-YRoC&dq=berlin+the+proper+study+of+mankind&source=gbs_navlinks_s

End song: “Se Piangi, Se Ridi” (Mogol/Marchetti/Satti), recorded by Mark Lint in 2000.

The linked song is one of two I’ve just put up there from a 1997 gig by The Fake Johnson Trio. This was the very last gig for that band, and one of the few played as an actual trio: I switched to bass for a couple of shows for that incarnation. The song is “Retrogress,” a cheery tune with lots of little arrangement nuances to screw up the band. It’s about not letting yourself get pulled back into moldy old modes of feeling.

Also now on my channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer) are songs by two different line-ups of Madison Lint.

Both of those bands (FJT and Madison Lint) had a good deal of turnover, which brings me to my topic: how much ownership do you have to have for an artistic project for it to feel fulfilling? From a young age, I was always someone who had to either lead the game, or I wouldn’t play. So though I’ve flirted with being “just a sideman” in bands, it would never stick: I like playing my own songs. I do enjoy my current situation as co-frontman, though; I am able to feel good about filling out my fellow New Peoplers’ songs, so long as that isn’t my only role.

So I’ve fundamentally never understood the sidemen I’ve played with. Why are you here? Why would you put up with being in your situation for very long? Well, they don’t. For some (drummers, mostly), playing in a band is like doing a sport, like intramural soccer or something. Few would SUFFER for a commitment like that in the way that is routinely required to play in a band (i.e. driving a lot, hanging around dingy clubs with bad sound, small crowds, long hours in the studio). Clearly, these guys were doing me a favor, and in return, I, the leader, was obliged to set up situations for them to enjoy themselves, which usually involved getting lots of good shows, which I was–through ineptitude or lack of patience or simply facing tough odds–seldom able to do, so of course these awesome musicians would wise up and move on for the hope of something more stable and rewarding.

…And, like a VH-1 Behind the Music special, I’m supposed to say now that that’s all behind me, and I’m in a good place, playing with people who do not see themselves as sidemen and so will not quit. So that’s what I’m saying. All is right with the world… for the moment.

The song in question is “Little Mina,” written mostly in 2003 when my daughter was a mewling shrieking biting baby, so the “Don’t bite me” is not a metaphor, or not merely a metaphor. The song morphed into something about trying to impart wisdom to your kids and how none of the really important stuff can be put into words.

But, I realize that the sound on the video is low quality and you likely can’t understand the words anyway, so let me rant instead about the absurdity of gigging.

A great concert in my experience as a spectator, for a band playing original music, is one where I already know most of the songs in advance, and where I can show up and clearly see and hear the band playing these tunes, with more excitement and spontaneity than what’s on the album, sitting with other people who also love the music.

As a performer, this rarely happens, first because venues usually either have a crummy sound system where you can’t make out the lyrics, or they crank it so loud that it’s unpleasant to be there (and you still can’t make out the lyrics). More importantly, the only people in the audience who know the songs will be friends that I or other band members have personally indoctrinated. Bar owners have long understood this: going to a friend’s show is like going to your kid’s school concert; you MIGHT enjoy it, but mostly you’re there to provide support to someone you know.

So, despite the fact that I’m supposed to be entertaining, i.e. providing a service, audience members are generally doing me a favor by being there, supporting my selfish desire to perform and my empty hopes of “making it.” Club owners recognize this, and typically see letting bands play there as an opportunity to have their dead nights filled with musicians’ beer-buying friends. Some clubs seem to go out of their way to ensure that no one that you didn’t personally bring to the show will possibly see you, and that the only way you can play in a time slot where people you didn’t invite might show up is if you can prove that you can bring in 100+ people in on, say, a Tuesday night at 7pm (or 2am) all on your own. It’s a sucker’s game.

As an adult, I’ve for the most part tried to avoid these situations and accepted the fact that the best I can do is to provide a pleasant place for those friends who come to indulge us a nice place to hang out and a convenient time slot, which means playing out less frequently (very few friends want to come to one of your shows every month) at places with no built-in crowd, but who will give us shows on Saturday nights, have decent enough facilities where we can make sure that the sound quality/volume is tolerable, and who don’t particularly care how many people we bring in. It’s like putting on a piano recital, except louder, usually with booze (though in Austin a couple of coffee houses became our preferred venues after a while).

The venue pictured in the video is a slight step up, in that it has a built-in crowd and (for our last show anyway) the sound quality was not TOTAL mush, and we seem able to play multiple Saturday nights there (this was our second show there in three months), so there is hope that with perseverance and an accessible show, one can incrementally move forward toward the Platonic ideal gig. …Or maybe I’m still just a sucker.

The first song from that batch proved to be something that really stuck in my head, with its bad lyrics intact: “You came ’round; I saw your shoes. You came ’round, and I felt used. You came ’round; I smelled your breath. You came ’round, I felt my death.” Well, at least those are a little cute, but the lyrics I had over the chorus were much worse, rhyming “crossing” with “lossing.”

Fast forward to the present, when the song has become one of the first things I play on my acoustic as a fun finger-picking exercise. How could I turn this cliche fragment with goofy lyrics into a full song? I determined while playing through it a couple of weeks ago that it should have a loud part in the middle starting on a G chord, but that’s as far as I got. Well, in the day before recording this, I wrote the bridge lyrics, wrote another couple of verse lines, decided to have the choruses be just instrumental, and, finally, figured out something to play under the loud part, which I’d originally envisioned as less repetitive chord-wise, but just kind of fell into being what it now is.

…and this brings me to my topic, which is related to last week’s: manufactured inspiration. Since completing this last week, I’ve gotten some comments that this is one of the best things I’ve come up with, that the intense part in the middle is especially rousing, which (quoting one friend of mine) “probably had something to do with the time I wrote it.” But here’s the thing: there’s nothing personal going on with me right now (i.e. when I wrote that part), or in 1999 for that matter, that justifies the level of passion I put in there. The lyrics draw on a couple of sentiments exaggerated from those I’ve either had in the past or have imagined someone else having, and I definitely was looking to recapture some of the magic of my last full acoustic album, “Spanish Armada,” recorded back in 1993 when I was young and angst-filled in the throes of unrequited love and loss and all. …But I’m not really feeling any of that now; instead, this was just fun and cathartic.

This is perhaps not such a great discovery. When an author puts drama in a book, or even more telling, when a filmmaker goes through the painstaking process of getting some emotional moment up on the screen, it’s not as if he or she is, through the many grueling hours required to do that, all choked with emotion about some personal tragedy. It’s imagined, and then manufactured and dressed up to get the imagined emotion out there, but with songwriting, we expect people to be writing passionately about their personal experiences, which in turn leads to the feeling that as an older person in a settled relationship and a generally happy situation, I should have nothing much interesting to write about, and for sure, my output and slowed tremendously now that I don’t need so much songwriting as therapy. So, unless I just want to be writing music as humor or social commentary or expression of the inevitable vague dissatisfaction that comes with living, then I have to make stuff up, but based on this song, at least, that seems to be a viable strategy, the “truth” of the matter be damned.

So my New Year’s resolution is to be more ‘unreasonable’.  By that I mean not only cut down on the rational, analytical approach to things, the measured intake of data and attempt to view things from multiple perspectives, but also to stop being so accomodating to everyone else’s requests - to be a bit ‘unreasonable’.  Open myself to interpersonal energy and the immediate Zeitgeist.  And guess what world, that might mean I take more risks and am a bit more selfish.  I’m 41 and I deserve it, so deal.

A corollary to this is that I am going to start setting unrealistic expectations and goals.  Got this from The 4 Hour Work Week, but it seems to fit.

Unlike Mark, I’m not going to commit to either doing or sharing weekly with y’all.

Cheers, seth

The song is one of several I’ve written about inspiration and its masochistic character. What I want from moment to moment is a feeling of warmth, of involvement. When I finish a great movie or book or come back from a great concert, “real life” feels naked and cold by comparison, and you want to fill it. When you’re at peace, there’s no reason to write a song.

I’m overgeneralizing, of course. You can be inspired by another work, like I’ve on occasion written some songs (lyrics, at least, and maybe the rhythm of the melody) basically while listening to another existing song over and over, so that what I come up with is essentially a child of whatever it is I’m listening to, even if no one else would notice that listening to the two back to back.

But I don’t want to talk about inspiration and its many varieties here, but only the kind where you’re amped up with emptiness, probably late at night when all around is quiet, maybe walking the dog, which is in fact how I’m pretty sure I came up with this tune, walking around my neighborhood in Austin on a warm evening in 1999. While the emptiness is vertiginous, it’s also exhilarating, and is probably the kind of productive sort of suffering that Nietzsche was always on about.

Like the previous tune, drums and electric guitars were recorded back in 2000, and I put down the bass that summer, I think, shortly after moving to Austin. I was surprised that Mark Doroba the guitarist, who recorded all of his parts on his own at his house onto my recording equipment, had not really recorded a lead guitar part on this one, and I pictured getting some really good classical player to do it. Instead, of course, I, just now, ended up doing it myself, which involved a lot of punching in and overdubbing, as it inevitably does when I play lead. I also recorded all the vocals just now, mostly very quickly, though I was somewhat lost for a bit as to how the whole key change near the beginning was supposed to work (I’m not sure what made me do that originally and likely wouldn’t have included that now.) I’m pretty sure that there was supposed to be more of an instrumental break instead of quite so many repeats of the choruses, but I’m pretty satisfied with how it sits now.

This is part of the “Sinking and the Aftermath” project; the story of my utter irresponsibility in not finishing these songs (from 1999-2000) earlier is told here.

This is one of my favorite songs of those I’ve written, and it’s gone around my head quite regularly in the 10 years since I wrote and partially recorded it. Why did I not finish it? Why is this blog even necessary? Well, perfectionism, for one. It’s easy to find excuses not to finish things when, in this case, you envision a full choir singing the goofy “ba-ba-ba-bah” backing vocals. I also only recently got a steel-stringed acoustic guitar in my house this year (and still don’t have a really adequate electric setup, though I’ll try to overcome that for one of the next weeks), and my classical just wouldn’t cut it on this one.

The other reason is also the main theme of the song, i.e. frustration with the absolute (or, OK, relative) indifference of any substantial number of people to whether any of my music gets made or not. Like most of my songs, the lyrics to this express some momentary, extreme sentiment that I captured and wrote down in all its snarly, pathetic glory. And yet, one of the reasons it’s been so resonant with me is the number of times when something like that sentiment recurs. Just like there’s a canon of philosophers and I feel like people look for any excuse with a newly heard-of figure to disregard that person so that they don’t have to expend the energy learning about him, the same thing goes on in popular music, and even I am no exception to this celebrity culture mindset.

What remains when you try to get past insecurity about the quality of your creative output is first, pleasing yourself, which is great and necessary, but doesn’t necessarily consistently motivate the great effort required to have a constant creative stream running over the majority of your life, and second, sharing with others: The immediate impetus for this song was discovering that a CD (that I’d worked my ass off to create) that I’d given to someone who I know was into music and whose approval I apparently sought had been sitting in his drawer unlistened to for like a year after I gave it to him.

Ultimately, the song is about whether you care what other people think of you or not, and as independent and self-assured as you’d like to see yourself as, it’s still pretty galling to be written off in the face of your best efforts. So there you go.

What weird stuff about reality does quantum physics imply? Is Heisenberg (of the Uncertainty Principle fame) right that we need to reject “metaphysical realism” based on this very well established scientific framework? The discussion ranges over the uncertainty principle, relativity, wave/particle duality, Pre-Socratic metaphysics, why Kant is wrong about space, and lots of very weird things.

You can read along with us here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13499208/PHYSICS-AND-PHILOSOPHY-by-WERNER-HEISENBERG.

Plus, we spend far too much time talking about an article by Thomas Nagel about Intelligent Design; you can read that here: http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1172/papa_132.pdf. And the blog post by Brian Leiter that got us talking about it is here: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/thomas-nagel-jumps-the-shark.html.

End song: “Neutrino of Love,” written and sung by Dylan Casey, with backing and production by Mark back in 1997 or so (remixed and cleaned up just now). A different version appears on his Neutrino Sessions album.

This song was written in 1997 or 1998 smack in the heart of my Texas grad school tenure. That’s what the reference to “Every day I get up about three hours late” is about; I tended to sleep until 11am in those days.

This is a song that seemed too sappy, simple, and uncool to do with any of my subsequent bands, and it in fact was the proximate cause to one of my band mates not wanting to work with me any more (he’d already quit the band earlier but was considering jumping back in to help us finish recording the album), with the sentiment “all Mark writes any more are goofy songs for Kim” (i.e. my girlfriend, now wife of over a decade).

Still, it stuck in my head, and was on the list of songs to record for an aborted solo album “The Cheese Stands Alone,” and I had the first drummer I played with upon moving to Madison in 2000 play this part against a guide guitar. The tape then sat and sat and sat along with the many other tapes that are the reason I needed to start writing this blog, but is something I have commonly played when screwing around on my acoustic guitar and whose lyrics I had almost entirely memorized without intending to, so it’s good to hear it now “done,” though I suppose it could still use a plunky lead guitar part to round it out if I end up sprucing this up for the revival of the “Cheese” album.

What is it about? Well, it’s a love song to someone who isn’t there, whether at the moment, or at all is left unclear. Maybe she’s dead. Maybe she left him (i.e. the narrator, who is not exactly me though has stolen my sentiments, as per my normal technique). Maybe she’s just at work while he lies around the house not working on his dissertation? What’s clear is that the environment is imbued with her, and that’s a good thing.

So, here’s my New Year’s resolution: I have a lot of recordings that need finishing, a lot of songs that I’ve never bothered to record decently, or at all, lots of recordings (video and audio) of old live shows and/or significant life events that I should digitize and put in an order such that if I die, then my relatives will be able to find things easily. I hereby resolve to fix, finish, or at least make progress on something 50 times (i.e. approximately once a week) over the course of 2010, and to prove it, I aim to post and possibly analyze to death at least some if this for the amusement of you, the kind readers of the world.

And I’m starting right now.

It is not my intention to give a full fledged review of this book.  I’d like, rather, to partially examine something in the book that surprised me and is relevant to our PEL universe - Steve Martin studied philosophy in college during his ‘formative’ years and attributes a certain amount of influence to the discipline on his development.  Although this is not a typical ‘reading’ and the topic might be somewhat unorthodox, I consider discussing Philosophy & Comedy perfectly legitimate and this a suitable text for the endeavor. 

It starts, of course, with a woman.   A young love named Stormie suggests that Steve read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.  Martin sees the book as a quest for “[u]niversal, final, unquestionable knowledge.”  That combined with the book’s glorification of learning inspires Martin to enroll in Long Beach State College (aka California State University at Long Beach) and major in Philosophy.  While studying metaphysics, ethics and logic, Martin was building the core of his act at the Bird Cage in Knott’s Berry Farm and branches out to the aptly named venue, The Prison of Socrates, where he needs to expand his act.  He gets exposed to Lenny Bruce, Nichols & May and Tom Lehrer through a friend.

The combination of these elements convinces Martin that he needs to be ‘original’ and all his existing material needs to be expunged.  One approach to achieve this is observational humor with a twist - relate things that he’s seen that make him laugh as though they happened to him.  Another is absurdist - do a dramatic reading of the periodic table of the elements.  A third, and for this discussion the most important, is word play inspired by his study of logic. 

Martin discovers during a logic class that Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, was a logician.  Playing with the syllogistic form, he creates nonsensical demonstrations of the form which strike Martin as funny.  The example he provides:

1)  Babies are illogical

2)  Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile

3)  Illogical persons are despised.

——————————————

Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles.

Finding the humor in word play and logic - precisely the opposition of logic and humor - opens up Martin’s conception of what comedy can be.  He introduces logic and language inspired bits into his act (he even makes a reference to Wittgenstein later in the book - the ultimate gamer of logic and language) and launches what he sees as a new avant garde form of comedy.

Maintaining the elements of word play and logical form are what kept Martin’s style from being strictly observational or, at the other extreme, absurdist.  Consider his bit about getting “small”.  Martin would use the (at the time) counter-culture language of getting ‘high’, but substitute the word and concept of “small” for “high”.  Martin would immediately create a sense of displacement for the audience by inviting them into the bit with a familiar grammar and dialogue, but then removing and replacing the central conceptual element.  E.g. ‘the other day I got soooo small, I wasn’t sure I could drive.’  The audience couldn’t be sure if he was trying to introduce a new euphemism for being stoned, or if he really meant ’small’.  He might then talk about having trouble reaching the steering wheel and pantomime standing on the seat reaching way above his head with both arms to drive.  

The audience would realize he was ‘literally’ talking about being small and not stoned, but by maintaining the grammar of the stoner language and being faithful to the logic of the discussion and the conceptual substitution, he never fell into simple absurdism.  The audience either didn’t get what he was doing (there’s no ‘joke’) or they were forced to make the conceptual leap with him.  At that point it was either a funny ride, or perhaps an amusing curiosity.  He even admits that he didn’t exactly know what he was developing or whether people would get on board - they did, although it took him years to establish himself and his comedic identity in mainstream media and venues.

There are other examples of how Martin used language and logical form to disrupt audience expectations such as his ‘Grandmother’s Song’, which starts out like a ditty about good behavior, etc. and moves to bizarre and nonsensical advice (’be tasteless, rude and offensive…Put a live chicken in your underwear’) or when entering a stage say ‘It’s great to be here!’ and then run to another spot on the stage, ‘No, here!’ or ‘It’s great to be here!’   Martin understood - at least in part by virtue of his philosophical studies - how to disrupt conceptual norms using language and grammar to comedic effect.

The key for Martin was to be clever while maintaining intellectual and performance discipline, which he did, helping to usher in a new wave of comedic entertainment (think Saturday Night Live) and the era of comedy as a legitimate, stand-alone art form.  Born Standing Up is enjoyable and an easy read, with perhaps less detail about his later material and emotional entanglements than I would have liked to have seen but as a case study in Philosophy & Comedy it delivers enough for our purposes here.  There is much more obviously about his musical influences and background in magic that I do not mention, but I strongly encourage you to check it out for yourself. 

I would welcome other suggestions for readings/people to discuss along this line of thought.

Cheers,

–seth

In my view, Dante was grossly in error when, with an ingenuity meant to inspire terror, he set that inscription over the gateway into his hell: “Eternal love also created me.” Over the gateway into the Christian paradise and its “eternal blessedness” it would, in any event, be more fitting to set the inscription “Eternal hate also created me” — provided it’s all right to set a truth over the gateway to a lie!

For what is the bliss of this paradise? . . . We might well have guessed that already, but it is better for it to be expressly described for us by an authority we cannot underestimate, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint: . “Beati in regno coelesti”, he says, as gently as a lamb, “videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat” ["In the kingdom of heaven the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss."]

For David Brooks, such reversals fit his standard recipe for praising the opposition: it’s not enough merely to agree with a policy or like a speech; one must incorporate it into one’s sanctimony. In this case, Brooks likes the pro-war speech Obama gave while accepting a Nobel Peace Prize. Therefore, it is an example of Obama’s profound decency. Profound decency, in turn, means engaging in precisely the policies that liberals would thing of as inhumane by cloaking them in the garb of tough love, democracy-spreading war, etc. Further decompose such conservativism into its religious rationale: there is evil in the world, and it must be opposed. We must take Christian love to mean war, not peace!

Add to this the pleasure of one particular bit of aggression towards those Godless Europeans — that of using a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to justify war. But again, turn this hubris on its head and remind us that combating evil requires super-Obaman humility. And just as Obama imposed it on the Swedes, this humility can be imposed on entire countries — in its institutional form, as Democracy — at the point of a sword: Democracy is ”the only system that fits humanity’s noble yet sinful nature.”

So you see, when we wage these wars we may not be forceably converting Muslims to Christianity, as Michelle Malkin would have us do; but it all comes to the same thing. Democracy just is an institutional expression of Christianity. Freedom-wars just are “Christian Realism” … just are holy war.

• Audio-Technica AT2020 USB Condenser USB Microphone
• Samson SP01 Shockmount Spider Mount for Condenser Mics
• On Stage Tripod Microphone Stand (7701B)
• OMNITRONICS EPF-15A Cad Mic Pop Filter

From a poll of 438 “professional” philosophers. (The idea of philosophy as a profession still amuses me).

Of course, that leaves the question of whether one can “lean towards” freely.

It’s the second-most-famous Taoist text and the most humorous, with anecdotes about people singing at funerals and jumping out of moving coaches while drunk. What could it possibly mean to “make all things equal?” and how is the Taoist sage different from our other favorite paragons of virtue (hint: magical powers)?

Featuring special guest panelist Erik Douglas, another U. Texas philosophy grad school dropout now living in England, who knows more about Eastern philosophy than we do.

Read along at http://www.terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu.html.

The end song requires explanation: I had a “New Age” period where I investigated Eastern philosophy, tried to be cheerful all the time, and was generally insufferable. This song, “Pass Time Incorporeal,” is an artifact of that time, with lyrics from early fall 1989; the recording is from 1993. It finally slipped out on a 1996 album of similar goofiness rejected from my “real” albums called “Black Jelly Beans & Smokes.”

Why I’m bothering to review this is its picture of gods and how they work, and what this exemplifies about the treatment of the metaphysical in popular, fun fiction, and really, what good religion is to us in these modern times. Plus, there’s a whose section of the book that takes place in a fictional version of Athens with a lot of fine jokes about ancient philosophy, a brand of humor that I’ve not seen in a whole lot of other places.

It’s been posited before in fiction that gods get their power from the attention and belief of their believers. This is a flippant response to the obvious goofiness of why gods (modern or ancient) would have any interest in our belief, let alone worshiping and groveling and sacrificing lambs and such. Were I a god, all this fawning would make me pretty uncomfortable, but of course gods were invented in an age of crushing despots, where the god is super-king and often serves to reinforce the rule of the king.

Well, “Small Gods” explores that line of thought, with the premise that there’s an entire nation (Omnia) devoted to one big god (Om), but the church has become so institutionalized (with a violent “Quisition” torturing and killing anyone even smelling of heresy, or anyone else that its leaders feel like), that in fact almost no one actually believes in Om any more, with the consequence that when Om decides to become an animal and visit the earth for a bit, instead of a big fiery bull or something, he becomes a tortoise, with the mentality and approximate abilities of a tortoise, and it’s only when the SOLE believer left in the country, a low-level monk and gardener, happens to pop by, that Om is able to communicate with him, have some rational self-reflection, and do some minor god-like acts (e.g. lightning bolts on par with a bad static electric shock), and so he wants to use said believer as a vehicle to get his powers back, and so hilarity ensues.

So, what’s the philosophical import? Well, first, religious history is filled with good stuff to make fun of, and however much or little you may think it applies to your modern belief system, that whole “I’m a jealous god and will kick your ass” thing from the old Testament and Greek mythology and such is pretty amusing. So, it sure is fun to play with such ideas, and my reading tendencies have favored this direction (e.g. Mike Carey’s comic book series “Lucifer” is another example, as well as its parent series, Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman,” as well as most of the rest of what Neil Gaiman’s ever written).

…And it’s not just the internal content of old belief systems that’s strange and fun, but the relationship of belief to ordinary life, to technology, to politics, that makes for many a fine plot. I won’t pretend that “Small Gods” has anything profound to say about morality (e.g. that you should not kill in the name of belief) or philosophy (that most of it is useless, except that one idea out of 100 that creates some new massive technological boom), but like any good philosophical fiction, it gets ya thinkin’, which is, really, the best we can hope for, even from a source that claims to be serious, and moreover, the thinking is brought about in a way that is actually enjoyable, unlike most philosophical texts or more ham-handed and less reflective attempts at philosophical fiction (like, say “Brave New World”). Pratchett is working in the tradition of Voltaire (”Candide”), with the added benefit of the advance in years/thinking/distance from the time when religion dominated the earth. So, yes, I recommend the book.

We go through Nietzsche’s convoluted and historically improbable stories about about the transition from master to slave morality and the origin of bad conscience. Why does he diss Christianity? Is he an anti-semite? Was he a lazy, arrogant bastard? What does he actually recommend that we do?

Online copies of the readings can be obtained at: http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm and http://www.allphilosophers.com/nietzsche/nindex.html.

End song: “The Greatest F’in Song in the World,” from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio

A quick recap that will get you through the first 10 minutes of the movie without giving anything away:  20 years ago, a giant spaceship comes to earth and settles over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa.  And that’s it.  Nothing happens.  After a couple of months, people decide to go up and take a look.  Commandos board the ship and cut into it and find thousands of aliens inside, starving and aimless.  The aliens kind of look like 7 ft tall praying mantises (in any case bug-like).  The humans ‘rescue’ the aliens and put them in a restricted zone on the outskirts of the city called District 9. 

The suggestion is that the aliens have a ‘worker bee’ like mentality and they are missing their ‘brain bugs’ - so they can’t fix their ship or take care of themselves.  This also means that even though they have limited cognitive and language abilities, they can’t really integrate with human society.  There are tensions and violence between humans and aliens and the District becomes in effect a militarized refugee camp.  That’s the lead-in to the story and the beginning of the movie sees a documentary crew following a qausi-government organization that has been tasked with relocating the aliens from District 9 to a camp much further away from any human settlement.

One of the first questions that presents itself is whether and what ethical position the humans should take vis-a-vis the aliens.  Given that they have space travel, they are clearly an advanced race of sentient beings.  From a common sense perspective, I would think we would consider them as ‘ethical equals’ or at least acknowledge some kind of responsibility to treat them as we would other human beings (as opposed to insects or animals).  And I suppose this means that we would expect the same of them.

But do we treat them as ‘equals’ with ‘human rights’?  Bracketing out the issue of political rights for a second (they are, after all, not citizens of the Earth, much less South Africa) we have to ask ourselves whether we have the same moral obligation to them as we do to a fellow human being.  If so, why?  They are, after all, not human.  Do we assume that ‘human’ has really been a placeholder for ’sentient being’ and that what we consider to be ‘human’ rights are really for anything that fits some criteria for sentience and perhaps other cognitive functions?

If you can even resolve this issue satisfactorily, the film further complicates the discussion by having humans only interacting with the ‘worker’ types from the alien race, who are more insect/animalistic and do not demonstrate  the necessary cognitive function and awareness to be considered ‘equals’.  Beyond meeting criteria for ethical status, the aliens also really aren’t able to enter into a ’social contract’ with us.  So we have a sense that we might have an ethical obligation to the aliens really only by inference to the parts of their race that must have been capable of building the space ship, but the actual aliens we are dealing don’t have that capability and don’t appear to be able to breed or develop into it. 

Needless to say, the conscious or unconscious decision that the humans make regarding these questions dictate how they treat the aliens both at a ‘policy’ and a ‘personal’ level.  And, if you are like me, you will find yourself reacting to the events as they unfold in visceral, emotional ways that are clues to how you answer the questions above.

District 9 forces reflection on the nature of ‘natural’ or ‘human’ or ‘inalienable’ rights.  And while there is a clear social message (I read the film at least in part as making a commentary on the treatment of ethnic minorities or aboriginal cultures in Africa and elsewhere),  I think the movie elegantly challenges our assumed anthropocentric concepts of ethical agency and philosophical justifications for moral positions based on rationality or sentience.

OK, I lied.  This is as long as Mark’s post.  I guess we are equally prolix.

We try very hard to make sense of Kant’s major ethical principle, the Categorical Imperative, wherein you should only do what you’d will that EVERYONE do, so, for instance, you should not will to eat pie, because then everyone would eat it and there would be none left for you, so too bad.

Also, Kant on free will, “things in themselves,” our duties to animals, and prostitution! Plus: Should you go to grad school?

The Kant reading can be found at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5682. The Allen Wood article “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature” is here: http://www.stanford.edu/~allenw/papers/Nonrational.doc.

End song: “Stop” by Madison Lint (2003).

create & buy custom products at Zazzle

You see, I’ve wanted to go beyond the bounds of the podcast and tell folks about the philosophy books I’ve stumbled over of late, largely in trying to figure out things for us to talk about on the podcast, but in most cases I only finish part of the book, and it seems unfair to “review” a book given that. However, let me be frank: I’ve got a big bookshelf of philosophy books, and how many have I read ALL of? Not many, not many at all. Most courses only assign select chapters, select papers; there’s never time to discuss it all. That there Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason? Took a semester course just on it, and still didn’t finish it. Being and Nothingness? Didn’t come close to finishing. Dewey’s Experience and Nature? Searle’s Intentionality? Bernard Williams’s Descartes? No no no. Yet I deign to have opinions on most of this stuff anyway (or at least I did when the bits I had read were fresh in mind). So, you likely deserve my only partially informed ramblings on the books I’ve lately gotten out of the library, read the first couple chapters of, let sit for 3 months while I renewed them, and then returned. You’re welcome!

Now, if that doesn’t sound amateurish enough, right now I’m going to give you a review of the first 3/5 of a movie, because after 41 minutes, I’ve got opinions I can no longer keep in check.

The movie is “Stupidity,” a documentary from 2003 that I stumbled over sitting at my computer looking at Netflix’s streaming options. I just spent about 10 minutes writing about the format of the documentary just to give you some background but erased it. It’s a documentary! …and not the kind that has to actually follow someone interesting around or go shoot difficult footage, but just lots of talking heads and overlaid graphics.

The film points out that most people have ill-defined notions of stupidity, and hence intelligence, and talks to some people who have written books about the subject and who otherwise seem to have opinions, and of course the point is that America is dumb, rejoices in dumbness, and it’s largely the media’s fault. I find it ironic that a film that complains about people’s short attention spans feels the need to, just like a music video, cut away to a different image every three seconds maximum to avoid audience boredom. And yet, for me, it’s not enough. This is basically an informational piece, and there’s some real information in it, such as the historical, clinical definitions of “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron,” but I find myself wanting to just be reading the damn thing on Wikipedia, such that I could get all this publicly available information in three minutes rather than an 41.

After this sort-of interesting historical stuff is out of the way, then the movie just shows a bunch of people complaining about idiocy without doing anything to really add to my understanding of it. Yes, I understand that media editorial departments enforce an “audience target age” that means that not too many big words can fit in there. Yes, I understand that some TV shows are created simply as escapism, and, if poorly made, do so via a very limited number of tricks, i.e. murders, big guns, jiggling asses, people getting lit on fire, etc., but this all sounds to me like complaints about the 80s, where media were limited.

I have of late myself become addicted to big stories, whether in print or on film or whatever, which means, for instance, that I’ll get ahold of a season (or five) of a TV show with a continuous plot (like The Wire, Babylon 5, or Dexter) and watch it compulsively until it’s done. This kind of TV is very different from the Diff’rent Strokes and Three’s Company of my youth that was created purely to kill time and sell advertising, and yet, for me, it’s still passive, vegetating time on the couch, i.e. the putting oneself into a stupor that the film Stupidity objects to.

Likewise, after philosophy grad school, as an adult with some nice pretentious literature behind me, I went through a Stephen King phase… a writer read by many a dumbass who uses violence as titillation and consciously avoids any language (big words and such) that would trip anyone up and so interfere with the storytelling, and I’ll tell ya what: it generally works. I get sucked in, and I think I’m deadened enough to described violence that it just seems like some of the flavor of it to me… something that creates the mood but which could just as well be switched to something else to create a different, equally compelling mood.

So I’m not going to defend my country and my era against stupidity, and the film reminded me of the topic and provided me with some nuggets of information, but my view on the topic is about the same as when I started, which I’ll just tell you: Intelligence is a cultural myth, a reduction of a lot of very different capacities and behaviors to a one-dimensional scale that doesn’t make much sense. It’s not just “book smarts” vs. “street smarts” or “common sense” vs. “intellectualism;” there are just certain sets of things that make a given individual’s brain hurt when he or she tries to think about them, and so he or she generally DOESN’T, and philosophy is often one of those things, though not generally for me. I, however, have plenty of experiences of terminal inattentiveness, feeling “too tired to think” about some topic whenever it comes up, just not being able to get my mind around things, poor memory, etc. I’m convinced that these experiences are not fundamentally different than those had by someone pretty unambiguously dumb, and there are a lot of factors that go into how we each individually deal with those feelings. Do we have faith that even though this math stuff or Kant or investment crap or sports statistics or whatever seems so hard that we COULD figure it out with effort? It often depends on how we’ve dealt with such things in the past; my little nephew who doesn’t know his own limitations will ALWAYS volunteer to take a crack at anything you’re having trouble with, no matter how obviously inappropriate for a seven-year-old. Self-confidence is a lot of it, and practice is most of the rest. Yes, some people do a lot better on standardized tests, some people think better on their feet, some people can read Nietzsche while driving, but they’re all basically the same breed of dumbasses as the rest of us.

I’ve still got plenty of questions about stupidity: some positive puzzles brought up by some of the Nietzsche I’m reading for Episode #11, like what basic, necessary errors are necessary for us to live, or what crap we’ve inherited from our culture that we just can’t see past, or what can we possibly do to turn this era around and make it less stupid, but “Stupidity” doesn’t give me any insight on those questions. (Well, maybe it does at the end, but my prediction says no.)

So, there you go, a half-assed film review that’s now made me too tired to bother to see the rest of the film, told you not that much about the movie, and ended with a painfully inadequate account of one of my own half-formed views that you didn’t actually ask for. Again, you’re welcome!

Going full tilt on the Greatest Happiness principle, with talk of gladiators, consensual cannibalism, and illegal downloads. How many Pleetons were in your last orgasm? Should animals count in the utilitarian calculus? What is Bentham’s skull up to nowadays? This extra long episode (patched together from two recording sessions, as Seth’s audio track got toasted for most of the first one) is disgustingly thorough and only occasionally internally redundant.

Read along at http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/bentham01.htm, http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill1.htm, and http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972—-.htm (Also, for some more information on Singer’s view of animal liberation, see http://www.utilitarian.org/texts/alm.html.)

End song: “So Whaddaya Think?” by Mark Lint and the Fake (2000).

Carnap interprets W as simply ruling out as unscientific most of the talk we’d consider philosophical, i.e. metaphysics, ethics, the self… Or is W really a mystic who just wants to distinguish these from science? Why doesn’t he just write more and explain himself? This tricky text inspires Seth to start a cult.

To follow along, read the Tractatus from the beginning through around 4.12, then skip to 6.3 and read to the end, skimming the more technical material in the middle. The text can be found at http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~luke_manning/tractatus/tractatus-jsnav.html, with the Carnap at http://www.philosophy.ru/edu/ref/sci/carnap.html.

Also, if you’re confused by the description of truth tables (which are hard to picture without seeing some), check out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_table.

End song: “The Last Time,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the 2000 album So Whaddaya Think?

One online place to find the reading is http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~luke_manning/tractatus/tractatus-jsnav.html.

For a clearer explanation of fact-based ontology, see this short introduction by Bertrand Russell to his lectures on logical atomism: http://www.hist-analytic.org/RussellLAfacts.pdf.

End song: “Facts for a Moment (What You Are to Me),” recorded in 1992 and released on the Mark Linsenmayer album Spanish Armada, Songs of Love and Related Neuroses.

Leibniz thinks that the world is ultimately made up of monads, which are like atoms except nothing at all like atoms, because they’re alive, and mindful, and eternal, and windowless, placed in the best kind of harmony at the beginning of time by God. Is there a concept album in all of this?

Plus, does reading philosophy make you a better conversationalist, or just get you ostracized?

Get the reading at http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/GMR/hmp/texts/modern/leibniz/monadology/monadology.html

End song: The soothing “Healthy Song” by The MayTricks, from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down.

Why should you bother to go through the trouble of downloading and listening to one of the full length episodes? Who are we anyway? Why shouldn’t you just go listen to some philosophy lectures posted by university professors instead of this thing? Do you need to listen to the episodes in order? Do you need to already know a lot about philosophy to get anything out of this podcast? Should you listen to it while pleasuring yourself? Most of these questions will be answered here!

End song: “New People” by New People.

What is virtue, and how can I eat it? Do not enjoy this episode too much, or too little, but just the right amount. Apparently, if you haven’t already have been brought up with the right habits, you may as well give up. Plus, is Michael Jackson the Aristotelian ideal?

You can read the text discussed at http://www.constitution.org/ari/ethic_00.htm.

End song: A newly recorded cover of Billie Jean by Mark Lint and the TransAmerikanishers. (Hear it by itself here.)

We’re mentioned at the end of the first section, then have a couple of paragraphs under “Talk Talk” near the end, plus the “Gallery” includes the excellent caricature that Ken Gerber did for us. (Incidentally, you should check out Ken’s blog at http://cartoonstand.wordpress.com/ if you haven’t already.)

Discussing Camus’s “An Absurd Reasoning” and ”The Myth of Sisyphus.”

Does our eventual death mean that life has no meaning and we might as well end it all?  Camus starts to address this question, then gets distracted and talks about a bunch of phenomenologists until he dies unreconciled.  Also, let’s all push a rock up a hill and like it, okay?  Plus, the fellas dwell on genius and throw down re. the Beatles, the beloved Robert C. Solomon and Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers.

An abridged version of the reading covered with most of the good stuff in it is here: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2/sisyphus.htm.  An unabridged version of “An Absurd Reasoning” is here:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/3223928/Albert-Camus-The-Myth-Of-Sisyphus.

End song: “My Friends” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra (2000). ]]> http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2009/06/22/episode-4-camus-and-the-absurd/feed/ Beatles,Camus,genius,Gladwell,Greek myth,Nietzsche,phenomenology,philosophy,Robert Solomon,Sisyphus,suicide,the Absurd - Discussing Camus's "An Absurd Reasoning" and "The Myth of Sisyphus." - Does our eventual death mean that life has no meaning and we might as well end it all?  Camus starts to address this question, then gets distracted and talks about a bunch ... Discussing Camus's "An Absurd Reasoning" and "The Myth of Sisyphus." Does our eventual death mean that life has no meaning and we might as well end it all?  Camus starts to address this question, then gets distracted and talks about a bunch of phenomenologists until he dies unreconciled.  Also, let's all push a rock up a hill and like it, okay?  Plus, the fellas dwell on genius and throw down re. the Beatles, the beloved Robert C. Solomon and Malcom Gladwell's Outliers. An abridged version of the reading covered with most of the good stuff in it is here: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2/sisyphus.htm (http://www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2/sisyphus.htm).  An unabridged version of "An Absurd Reasoning" is here:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/3223928/Albert-Camus-The-Myth-Of-Sisyphus (http://www.scribd.com/doc/3223928/Albert-Camus-The-Myth-Of-Sisyphus). End song: "My Friends" by Mark Lint and the Simulacra (http://marklint.com) (2000). Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin yes 1:37:18 http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2009/06/22/episode-4-camus-and-the-absurd/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePartiallyExaminedLife/~3/8mgpYVIURuk/ http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2009/06/07/episode-3-hobbess-leviathan-the-social-contract/#comments Sun, 07 Jun 2009 06:51:39 +0000 mark@marklint.com (Mark Linsenmayer) http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/?p=56 Discussing Hobbes’s Leviathan, Chapters 13-15.

Have we implicitly signed a social contract whereby our native right to punch other people in the face is given to the President? Hobbes does things that eventually result in the U.S. Constitution and makes Wes nauseous. Plus: Star Trek and the Bible!

You can get the reading from http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html

End song: “The Villa” by Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998).

Descartes engages in the most influential navel gazing ever, and you are there! In this second and superior-to-the-first installment of our lil’ philosophy discussion, we discuss what Descartes thinks he knows with certainty (hint: it is not you), the Matrix, and burning-at-the-stake.com. Mark and Wes agree to disagree about agreeing that they disagree. Seth had a long day and is very tired. Plus: Some listener feedback; whom is this here podcast aimed at? Why, you, of course!

To increase your enjoyment, download and read Descartes Meditations 1 and 2.

Here, also, is the Descartes chunk of Philosophy and the Matrix that Seth refers to.

End song: “Axiomatic” by New People (2009)

Incidentally, the “celibacy society” that Seth refers to at one point in here has a T-shirt.

This reading is all about how Socrates is on trial for acting like an ass and proceeds to act like an ass and so is convicted. Big surprise. On this our inaugural discussion, Mark, Seth, and Wes talk about how philosophers are arrogant bastards who neglect their children, how people of all political stripes don’t usually examine their fundamental beliefs (but probably should), why it might be better to know you know nothing than to only think that you know nothing, and how Plato was a super genius all of whose texts you should worship uncritically. Plus : podcaster philosophical origin stories, like when Wes was bitten by a radioactive Anaxagoras.

To increase your enjoyment, download and read Plato’s Apology.