Transcript
Himself in one of his, I think the seventh letter, he says that I can't describe what philosophy is. It is something like a spark, a flame that is kindled in one person, in a conversation, living a life together with somebody and talking with them that kindles a flame and a spark comes from one mind to the other. And that is what philosophy is. And that is a very good image of what authentic philosophy would be inauthentic philosophy is constant point scoring on almost purely linguistic questions. I'm rather opposed to the idea that philosophy boils down to language because that again makes it seem like a representational business, unless you're very careful to point out that language is actually embodied and language comes out of our, which the later victims and I did point out that it comes seamlessly out of our mode of being. So I think the authentic is to do with something that emanates from a whole and fulfilled life in which you draw together your experience with the things that you learn through many, many partners, through science, through reason, through intuition, through imagination. (01:18): All of these things take part in good philosophy and they can be lost sight of, especially in the academy, by which of course I just mean the word of university.
If you believe that all philosophy can be done by sitting in a room and analyzing language, then that would be an inauthentic kind of philosophy because it's not lived. And it's also devoid of time, which some people find hugely attractive because it gives it this, in theory, universal nature. But my vague understanding of Heidi would be that we don't exist without time and that everything we learn is learned through and with time, through and with experience. And that's a more authentic approach to philosophy where there's the living right now and then there's reflecting on the living. And through that, there's the flame that is fostered. And when you spoke of the Plato image of the flame that is between two persons, my understanding is that it can also be between a person and nature, with nature playing the role of the- Certainly. ... of the other person. (02:31): Certainly.
And that of course was worthless (02:34): Situation. But yes, in other words, it's a between us again. It's something going on between two beings. It's not something in an abstraction. And I found my thinking got more and more involved with the mind body problem in Oxford, and that I did go to the seminars and listen to the wise philosophers talking about it. But however good what they were saying about it was, and a lot of it was actually terribly disembodied because it was Anglo American philosophy and nobody seemed to have heard of, never mind, being able to talk about Merlot Ponty, who is probably the most important philosopher on the topic of the mind body, quote a problem, but isn't really a problem at all, except something created by philosophers. But in any case, what I felt was that this was all far too abstract, sitting in a seminar room in Oxford discussing the mind body problem. (03:38): I needed to go out there and find out in an authentic way about this question. And the only way I could do that was by going and talking to people who've had something go wrong with their body or their mind and how it affected their way of being. That was how I discovered about it. That meant studying medicine. So medicine was what I studied.
And the mind body problem is complex and deep and books and books and books and books and books have been written on it. But there's a quote that brings to mind, which is that it is sometimes as if I have a body and sometimes as if I am a body.
I think quite a few people have said that.
Yes.
And I think it's a very important distinction to make. It's there in a way in such things to be answerable and pushua sort of for oneself or in one. So it's a distinction he makes. It's not there in the language, but the difference is in one case, a body is a thing that you have and you inhabit and in the other, as you say, the body is who you are.
I think it's really, really important. And my understanding of how it relates to the hemispheres is that the left hemisphere would see that the body is something that it has, whereas the right hemisphere would see the body as something that it is. Keep it completely.
It applies more broadly. For example, having a belief is a very left hemisphere way of thinking about what belief is. In other words, it's a proposition that you hold. Whereas belief, as I suggested, the right hemisphere's understanding of it and the one that I prefer is a way of being. It is a disposition, which is what in root belief it comes from the word love actually. And it's about a relationship that you have for something in which you honor and respect it and are attracted to it. That is your belief. Coming back to the idea of things that are attractive exemplars or ideals or images of things ahead of you that you wish to go towards. Not that you already have, but that you want to be. So I think that we could apply that across the board to the differences between the
Hemisphere. I like this idea of growing towards. Some people say, "Oh, I'm going to go and traveling so I can find myself." As if the self is something that can be found and is fixed and dead, which is not to say that going traveling doesn't help you to understand and become wiser, but I much prefer the idea of self as becoming. And perhaps it's Gandhi, be the change you want to see. But if you can really see your life as a story and look at what kind of story you perhaps want to live and see if you can grow towards that, and it's going to change.
Well, if it didn't change, there was something wrong with
It. Well, yes, but it wouldn't be- You wouldn't
Be living and growing and responding to experience.
It would be something made by a computer. It was only made
Up rather than lived. Yeah. I agree.
And I think this brings us onto the soul.
Yeah.
God, do you want to talk about
Something else? Only to say that people who go traveling to find themselves, I mean, I wouldn't be too hard on that because I think what they're saying is it's very hard for me to have the space, physical, mental, space and time to reflect deeply and to attend to my experience and that's what I want to do.
Yeah. And perhaps I'm being too particular on the choice of words.
What about discover in the sense of uncovering? Uncover
Myself. I see. Maybe I'm not being fair. Or
To allow whatever it is that's rather in the dark to come to the light.
I couldn't be more of an advocate for going and changing one's context. I mean, I went and lived in Istanbul for a year and a half, and that was a place where I did find myself, but I would say I found a aspect of myself, an aspect of myself was allowed to become ... I think this ties to this idea of relationship with respect to identity and the way that who we are in any one context is a relationship between how we're seen by others and how we see ourselves.
But I'd rather like ... Well, Whitman's famous thing, do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself. I'm large. I contain multitudes and we all contain multitudes actually. It's not recognizing that. That is the root of many problems, particularly the wish to deny the dark side. I think a very important problem for many people nowadays, because the way our culture suggests we make progress, another fascinating, entirely modern idea, which probably doesn't stand up too much scrutiny, but the way we do this is by becoming this perfect person in which all the bad things have been transcended and so on. But in fact, as Shakespeare wonderfully said, the web of our life is a mingle deon, good and ill together. That applies to everything. It applies to courses of action. It applies to societies. It applies to people, individuals.
I'm fascinated by this idea to tell a small anecdote about Chap, who more than most considers who he wishes to become and I much admire what he's brought to my life. But during one conversation, he was telling me how he had given up alcohol, given up eating meat, was exercising every single day. He was broadly speaking, becoming the perfect man. And I said to him, "You're putting up the dam. The dam's going to burst, and it could be destructive." In a state of denial, he came up with all these reasons for why I was absolutely wrong. This is what I met him in Istanbul. As Chance would have it, he moved back to London around the same time as I did, and we had another encounter, and he said, "The dam is about to burst." But that's an individual case of something which I feel could be revealed in a broader sense by society as a whole.
Yes. I think what happens is the things you deny don't go away, but rather like your image of the dam, they build up pressure and they come out in ways that may be very damaging, whereas if they're accepted, which doesn't mean to say you do nothing about them, you're always free to work on them. It doesn't mean you have to like everything about yourself, but you need to have a long, cool look at yourself and see what the problems are and accept them. Not accepting them makes you not a better person, but makes you a more anxious, sometimes embittered person. And I just have to say as a reflection that people who have ... I'm very much in favor of people doing what they want and I've hardly criticized people for wanting to exercise and drink no alcohol and eat vegetarian food or whatever it may be. (11:26): All of these things are potentially healthy, but it's just a reflection that the people I know who are really big on this are not necessarily either the nicest or the most likable people.
Well, precisely, yes. But there's also a judgment on it, I often find.
It's quite a judgmental
Thing. And I think this relates to the idea of shame, because I remember a friend of mine who's a vegetarian, and he was chatting about another vegetarian, but he goes, "Oh, but they're not a proper vegetarian," by which he meant that person doesn't like meat, whereas I have chosen not to eat meat for moral reasons. Trouble is if you take that standpoint, which is what many, the position that many, many people hold about all beliefs, and as you say, it's a left hemisphere way of seeing the feeling that you sort of have arrived at a belief that's yours in your own, rather than something that you embody and as a result of where you are in the river of life, is that you then set up a position whereby in conversation, people feel as if they can't reveal their instincts because they make the assumption that it's going to be met by shame.
Oh, absolutely.
And-
So we get a culture of virtue signaling in which nobody says what they mean.
And I just think it then manifests itself in, and this is a point in fact that Eric Dodson made. So the trouble with shame, which is, and it's very common in America, you then have a position where people don't say things and then one strong man stands up and says, "Oh, well, I'm not sure about immigration." And a lot of people who aren't so strong go, "Oh, that's what I'd been thinking, but I wasn't brave enough to sit around the table."
I blame both the existence of a President Trump and the, in my view mistaken Brexit movement, they are owed to the liberal majority having so made almost any point of view other than their own over the last 40 years, so shameful that nobody will discuss important issues. I mean, it's just a matter of basic mathematics that it's lovely to have immigration. It enriches the culture, but you can't have absolutely uncontrolled immigration. And I'd be in favor of a liberal point of view on it, but on the other hand, not to discuss it means that we have two alternatives, chaos or some sort of person who goes, "No, we shouldn't have it. " And you get polarization, oddly, the attempt to be all things to all people and to be terribly liberal eventuates in a polarization of opinion in which we get extreme views, you get an idiot, sorry, you get an extraordinary person like Donald Trump, who tweets like a 10 year old to Putin, "I have shinier toys than you have, " risking a possible world war.
It's astonishing
Really. It completely bizarre.
It is astonishing.
But this is because people, perfectly intelligent people who have been ignored, stigmatized, made feel stupid or even bad have for a long time who said the liberal consensus position needs a bloody good shakeup and it did and it got something it didn't bargain for.
I'm just glad we got onto this part of the conversation and it also reminded me of another topic that I wanted to raise, which is on the art of conversation itself (15:22): Because it's not something that was ever a feature during my schooling, but it seems to me to be absolutely central to a flourishing society. My take is that when you're in conversation, there are those who agree with everything you say. We don't want to be there. There are those who disagree. Well, everything is there. You don't want to be there either. And then there's a really lovely balance where there's a reflection and a respectful critique, but we seem to be in a situation where if someone makes a point, and I've found this myself, they'll make a point and I'll go, "Ooh, I'm not sure about that. " Suddenly, me and the said person are hundreds of meters from each other because it's become a war zone, whereas I've never wanted it to be like that. And I'm interested to hear your thoughts on conversation. I
Think it's a neglected art, and I think that it's based on a minimum of mutual respect for positions that you don't hold. Otherwise, conversation becomes boring. Either it's just a fight and nothing good comes out of it, or as you say, it's just a lot of yes saying. So in order to debate things of interest or even to entertain other people's points of view, you need to have a degree of respect, and that's what's gone out of the tweety conversations that we now have. There are things that apparently can't be said, and I think I've said this before, but I think it's so important, I'm going to say it again, which is that everything should be sayable, as long as it's said in such a way that it is not offensive. Now, some people say just to say certain things is offensive, but that's a mistake. (17:19): That leads to tyranny. That leads to closing down of conversations. If something is obviously wrong, which is more important than whether it's offensive, it might be important that some things are right, even though at the moment people take offense at them, but if they are wrong, then the answer to that is not to scream and shout and call names, but to say, "Okay, let us discuss that rationally." And to be able to do that without getting overheated, and it's very difficult for people nowadays to do this, it seems.
Sometimes things do matter so much that you can't avoid things being heated, and that shows a level of care. But yeah, a generosity of spirit. I
Think that's right, but if you ever hear people who really been through the most appalling situations, they were in the Nazi war camps, or they were in the Gulag. What's notable about their discourse is not that it's screaming and shouting and calling names, it is notably mature. It is incredibly powerful because it is not based on immature posturing and you can't say that and I'm right. It is based on experience. So I don't think that there's anything that cannot be said, but it must be said calmly and it must be said reasonably, and you mustn't shout down people who don't agree with you.