June 19, 2025 • 50 mins
On this episode of The Middle we explore the philosophical middle, and how philosophy can help veer us away from extremes in our daily lives. Jeremy is joined by Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and Stephen Asma, a professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. #philosophy #middleway #goldenmean #socrates #aristotle #plato #confucius #locke #hume #ethics #logic
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to a special edition of the Middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson.
It is great to have you with us. And if
you are a regular listener, you've heard me say that
this show is about bringing the voices of Americans in
the geographic, political, and philosophical middle into the national conversation. Well,
this hour, finally, we are going to focus on that
last one, the philosophical middle.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
What is that? What does it mean?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Well, there is the middle Way in Buddhism, there is
Aristotle's Golden Mean, and there are other components of philosophical
thought that urge people to avoid the.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Extremes and find compromise.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
We're going to talk about that and more with two
philosophers this hour. But first, last week on the show,
we asked you for your thoughts on the so called
Big Beautiful Bill and what it could mean for you
if it becomes law.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Here are some of the voicemails that came in hither.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
My name's Louis. I'm calling from Wyoming. I think this
bill is going to be a big failure for Republicans.
I'm curious how many everyday voters people like that will
actually see the negative impact. And I think it would
be great if it packed or it didn't add so
much to the deficit. However, since it is, it's going
(01:13):
to be really bad if it passes for our country.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
Hi, my name's Anita and I'm from Say Georgie Talk,
and I am concerned about the bill leaving my grandchildren
and my great.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Grandchildren in bigger debt.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
And who's to say what's really really going to be
in the bill in the first place.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I mean, Bardriie Taylor Green said that she signed it
and she didn't even.
Speaker 5 (01:33):
Know what was in it.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
Hi, my name is Tobias, sir, which I'm calling you
from Baltimore and Maryland. It's a big, horrible bill that
will take democracy backwards and the last thing I want
is to see this bill react into law.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Well, thanks to everyone who called in, and you can
hear that entire episode on our podcast in partnership with
iHeart Podcasts on the iHeart app or wherever you listen
to podcasts. So now to our topic this hour, the
philosophical middle, what it is and how we can weave
philosophy into our politics and our daily lives. Joining me
this hour Agnes Callard, Professor of philosophy at the University
(02:07):
of Chicago. Her new book is called Open Socrates, The
Case for a Philosophical Life.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Agnes Collard welcome, thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
And Stephen Asthma is also with us, professor of Philosophy
at Columbia College Chicago. You can also hear him on
the Chin Wag podcast, which he co hosts with the
actor Paul Giamati.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Stephen, welcome to you.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Well, let me first ask each of you how you
would describe the philosophical middle.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Agnes, I'll start with you, So.
Speaker 6 (02:35):
In terms of ethical theories, I think what I would
say is remarkable about philosophy is that it is a
domain that's just very hospitable to extremism. So we have
philosophers who deny the existence of the external world, deny
that there are other minds, philosophers who are skeptics about
(02:58):
basically anything you can possible be a skeptic about, who
have radically different conceptions of what a good life is
and how you should live one and all of those
philosophers can kind of miraculously interact harmoniously and have productive
conversations with one another, despite the fact that they occupy
(03:20):
many different kinds of extremes.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Well, how do they do that? Where do they find
the middle?
Speaker 6 (03:24):
I think it's in the norms of interaction, that is,
they all agree on a set of norms about how
to talk to one another.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Stephen, what do you think?
Speaker 7 (03:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (03:35):
I like what Agnes is saying is because especially modern
philosophy has this tendency to do these thought experiments that
are quite extreme. But I think the ancients, whether it's
Aristotle or Confucius or the Buddha and Plato two, they
had a kind of suspicion and a kind of worry
about extreme emotions and extreme beliefs. They felt that if
(03:59):
you didn't sort of can your appetites and your emotions
like anger and find some kind of moderation path, then
you would be easily sort of manipulated by your own
inner drives and sort of forces. So the idea you
see in Plato's Republic is how do you get it
so that your reason will rule over your sort of
(04:20):
emotions or your spirited part, which then they team up
together against your appetites. And so there's this worry in
the ancient world that your cravings, whether it's like for
sex or chocolate cake, or the latest TikTok video that's
going to basically send you into a kind of spiral.
So a lot of them saw the moderation in the
(04:41):
Middle Way as the kind of life preserver, the raft
that you could hold on to.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
They recognize that their positions were extreme, even though they
had them.
Speaker 5 (04:51):
Well, they saw extreme positions all around them in religion,
for example, mostly in religion, and they thought of reason
as a kind of I mean, maybe we'd agree on
this Agnes that they were naive about how powerful reason
was and that it could save us. But the Enlightenment
project was that if you let your conspiracy theories fly,
(05:14):
then you end up with a kind of chaotic you know,
you end up with a thirty years war, and you
end up with religious fighting, and you end up with
our contemporary, you know, polarizing politics. So they thought reason
was this middle territory that everyone shared, and if you
could cultivate your rationality, you would stop these kind of
(05:35):
overly dramatic passions.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
So taming the passion is important. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (05:40):
The Buddha, the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama is living in
like the sixth century BC, and he he lived like
his early part of his life, he was a rich kid,
so he was a wealthy son of like you know,
landed gentry. And then he thought he realized that everybody
suffers from age and disease and disappointments, and so he
(06:03):
leaves this wealthy sort of life of privilege and he
goes in totally the opposite direction. So then he starts
living like a wandering mendicant. He's an ascetic. He doesn't
eat much. He just practices yoga all day long. He
starves himself meditating. But eventually he almost drowns, like in
the Ganges River, and he's fished out of there. And
(06:23):
then he resolves, Okay, I've tried both extremes. I've lived
like a rich, opulent lifestyle and I've lived this life
of self denial, and these don't get you anywhere. So
he says, I'm now going to live the middle way,
which is a technical term for Buddhism. It means like
avoid the extremes, not just in terms of wealth, but
(06:46):
also in terms of knowledge and metaphysics and all this
other stuff. So it's a nice I think the Buddhism
really clings to the middle. Yeah, should be your patrons
sayd here the Buddha.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Maybe we should change the logo of the show, Agnes,
what about what about the golden mean from Aristotle?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
What can you just tell us briefly about that?
Speaker 1 (07:07):
What is that?
Speaker 6 (07:08):
It's not a principle that's meant to regulate ethical theories.
It's a principle about the kind of character that you
should have. And the idea is that to be virtuous
is to inhabit a middle condition between two vices, so
that a courageous person is not falling into the excess
(07:28):
of cowardice, but is also not falling into the excess
of rashness, of being like too bold. But even there,
when when Aristol describes the mean, he says, it's the
middle condition in accordance with orthos logos, the correct account,
correct reason. And there's a sense in which for Aristotle,
as for pretty much all of his sort of contemporaries
(07:52):
and his descendants, and certainly for Plato and Socrates, his
kind of ancestors, there is a kind of primacy of
reason as having the role of determining what this middle
course is. He didn't think it was obvious. He didn't
think you just somehow average together the worst kind of
cowardice with the worst kind of rashness, and you'll get
this perfect golden mean in the middle. He thinks that
(08:14):
you have to use the power of reason to bring
the middle state to light. And so I do think
that thinkers like Aristotle and Plato, maybe Plato more so
than Aristotle, had a huge amount of faith in the
power of reason, and they were in that way extremists
about that claim. That is, they didn't think you'd be
(08:36):
able to find the middle way except in except by
understanding it.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Now, when you talk about these different philosophies and trying
to get to the middle, trying to find reason, trying
to find the more rational approach, agnes, when you look
at the country today, it does seem like in many
cases in our media and our politics, we're moving in
the opposite direction. We're getting more toward the extremes with
(09:00):
a common set of facts. Do you agree with that
or what do you think is going on in our
society right now?
Speaker 6 (09:05):
I think that's a really hard question to answer. And
one of the striking things about the world we live
in is how ready people are to pronounce confidently on
where things are going, which is like it's just like
an It's like an incredibly complicated math problem. How are
things going? You have to choose what to pay attention to.
It does feel to me like right now everything is
(09:26):
very loud. There are a lot of loud voices, and
they're kind of all yelling at the same time. I
would separate the question about polarization from a second question
about whether we can have rational dialogue. To me, those
are really different questions for the reason that I gave earlier,
which is that philosophy can be very polarized. People can
(09:46):
adopt very extreme positions, and that doesn't mean that everyone
is shouting and nobody can talk to each other. In fact,
it facilitates people. It facilitates interesting conversations in the same
way as you might in many context we like polarization.
If you know that you can see two movies and
one of those movies everyone kind of says it's okay,
and the other movies like you either love it, it's
(10:07):
your favorite movie ever, or you hate it. Which one
do you want to see? Maybe you want to see
the second one where you love it or you hate it. Right,
it's not terrible if something is polarizing. Polarization by itself
is not necessarily a problem. What's a problem is when
those polarized positions become structured as a kind of war
where one side is trying to defeat the other, instead
(10:29):
of a situation where people use the fact that they have.
Speaker 8 (10:33):
Very different vantage points.
Speaker 6 (10:34):
To their advantage in an inquiry, which is what we're
trying to do in philosophy. So I think what we're
seeing today with just the very many loud voices is
there's a bunch of conversations that we're sort of trying
to have, but we're failing to have them. It's hard
to know, That's what I was getting at the beginning.
It's hard to know which aspect of that to emphasize.
Is it really bad because we're failing to have them,
(10:56):
or is it kind of good because we're sort of
trying to have them. We've just, you know, been the
beneficiaries of a bunch of communication technology that makes it,
at least in principle, kind of feasible to think in
terms of having this big national conversation, and then all
we hear is a bunch of loud voices. But I
find it hard to assess that situation.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
You say, we've been the beneficiaries. I guess in broad strokes,
we have benefited from technology, but in some ways you
could say we are the victims.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Of this value.
Speaker 8 (11:26):
We're the recipients.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
We're the recipients, were the.
Speaker 6 (11:28):
Recipients of a bunch of technology. The jury is still
out as to how we choose.
Speaker 8 (11:32):
To use it.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yeah, well, stand by because at a moment we're going
to talk about how philosophy applies to our politics these days.
But as we go to break, listen here to the
British philosopher Bertrand Russell talking in nineteen fifty nine about
the lessons he would want to impart on future generations.
Speaker 9 (11:48):
Love is wise, Hatred is foolish. In this world which
is getting more and more closely interconnected, to learn to
tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up
with the fact that some people say things that we
(12:08):
don't like. We can only live together in that way,
and if we are to live together and not die together,
we must learn the kind of charity and kind of
tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human
(12:29):
life on this planet.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Bertrand Russell, whose English is so proper he makes King
Charles sound like a commoner, stay with us more about
the philosophical middle. Coming up, This is the Middle. I'm
Jeremy Hobson. This hour, we're focusing on the philosophical middle
and talking about what we can learn from philosophy and
apply to our lives politically and socially. I'm joined by
Agnes Collard, Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago,
(12:52):
and Steven Asthma, Professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. Stephen,
you've written about Donald Trump and Trump is in a
philosophical way, not really making judgments about it, but just
looking at it as objectively as possible. What do you
make of Trump's dominance of our politics?
Speaker 9 (13:10):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (13:10):
God, okay, we may need several more shows. But I
was sort of making a general comment about My own
background is in philosophy of biology, and I sort of
look at things through an evolutionary perspective. I think in
many ways politics for me has to be understood in
(13:31):
terms of the larger question of human evolution and cooperation.
So I look at somebody like Trump and I see
that he appeals to certain parts of the human being
all of us, which is somebody who has a sense
of certainty, direction mission. Even if you don't believe that
he can deliver on any of those things. He represents
(13:54):
a classic straw man I'm sorry strong man, which might
be a strong man as well. That's sort of it's
oftentimes the case that when there's chaos, people will give
over their freedoms to somebody that has a kind of
authoritarian approach. I lived in Cambodia for a while after
the Cambodian kim Erusian after the civil war, people were
(14:15):
willing to hand over a lot of their freedoms to
the Prime Minister Hunsen, and he has held power there
for over thirty years. And it's possible that somebody like
trump fulfills that need when people are feeling unstable. But
I think what's happening is that the media, for example,
(14:36):
also hijacks human nature. So we have an outrage media
that hijacks the human attention towards threats, so we key
in on things that cause fear and are threatening. So
it's no accident that the media basically gives us two stories,
like you're either with us or you're against us. Because
(14:57):
it's not just that the media is out to get
is they're just simply hijacking a human system of attention,
and human beings evolved to survive, so they attend to
things that are fearful, and if you keep feeding them fear,
they will keep tuning in. And so that's sort of
the approach that I have about politics and media.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Well, and Agnes.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
It kind of gets to what you were saying a
moment ago about sort of having such certainty about your position.
Speaker 6 (15:22):
Trump feels not so foreign to me as a kind
of scholar of the ancient world. There were just a
lot of tyrannical personalities and figures who achieved what they achieved.
I think because they were good at appealing to people.
(15:45):
They were good at getting the people to set them
up as a tyrant. That's how Plato would put it.
That was a common figure, and in fact it was.
There's a dialogue in which Socrates is asked, but look,
isn't that what everyone secretly wants wants? Don't we all
secretly want to be Trump? Don't we all secretly want
to rule the world in a way where we are
(16:07):
not subject to the usual constraints of the law or morality.
And the person that he's talking to just thinks it's obvious,
that's what everyone wants.
Speaker 8 (16:17):
We just most of us can't get it.
Speaker 6 (16:19):
And you know, maybe we admire Trump because he's getting
the thing we want, or maybe we hate him because
he's getting a thing we secretly want, but we all
agree that that's secretly, deeply what we would want. And
Socrates says, no, if you're asking me whether I admire
this tyrant, he's not asked but Trump, obviously, but he's
being asked about a certain tyrant in his world. He's like, well,
(16:41):
what I want to know about him is how does
he stand with respect to justice and injustice? That is,
is he a good or bad person? I need to
know that before I can admire him or not. And
I think Socrates thought we really could get our bearings
in that way, that is, we could educate ourselves into
a position where we would we would learn not to
(17:02):
admire people who were unjust, but that that took philosophy.
It took philosophical work to educate ourselves out of that.
And so like, that's the thought I often have. If
Socrates were alive today, he would I think. The thing
I could say about him is he wouldn't be jealous
of Trump, which is like not a thing.
Speaker 8 (17:20):
I'm sure I could.
Speaker 6 (17:20):
I'm sure I can say about anybody else, but I
feel sure that I could say that about Socrates. And
is related to a certainty. It has to do with
like you can be very certain of things and you
can be wrong. And if you're certain of things where
there are moral claims and you're wrong about them, then
you might be in a very bad way and be
(17:42):
unaware of it. That's what Socrates was worried about.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Stephen, is there a philosophical basis for democratic politics right now?
Do you see anything in a similar way to how
the democrats act philosophically?
Speaker 5 (17:56):
I thought you were asking about a sort of democracy
small d but you're asking about the party of parties
right well, God, there is a kind of just sort
of going off of what Agnes was pointing out, there
is a kind of obvious tyrant, which is in the
case of one person who's achieved a kind of outsize power,
(18:18):
and as Plato and many of the ancients would agree,
that person might look like they're happy because they have
so much power, but inside psychologically they're very distressed. They're constant.
It's like a gangster movie like you watch, you know,
Goodfellows or something. It looks great until you look at
how paranoid and freaked out they are in their minds.
(18:40):
And so that's sort of against the sort of centralized
authoritarian tyrant. But there's also a tyranny of ideas. And
what I think the left is good at, and I
don't mean this as a compliment, but they're good at
making an ideology that you must conform to, and if
you don't conform to that ideology, you're considered either a
(19:01):
racist or a bigot, or otherwise some degenerate, deplorable. They're
very good at formalizing this nest of litmus test ideas,
and it becomes its own kind of tyranny. You can't
identify it so clearly, like oh, that's the guy, but
you feel very distinctly like I better not share this
idea at work because all these lefties are going to
(19:23):
crucify me. And that's a common problem in the academy
where it's dominated by the left.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Was the world of philosophy Agnes touched by the kind
of cancel culture that occurred a few years ago.
Speaker 8 (19:37):
I think touched as an understatement.
Speaker 6 (19:39):
It's like deeplichaped by it in the ways that Stephen
was just saying that is it's not coming from the outside,
the message is coming from inside the house. We I
think it's a really nice point about tyrannical ideology, and
I had never thought of it that way.
Speaker 8 (19:56):
That in so far as.
Speaker 6 (19:58):
You get a discipline where there is a fair amount
of political agreement among people in the discipline, and that's
true for philosophy, as it is for all of that kademia,
then at least it's not going to be true for
all of the philosophy, but the parts of philosophy that
kind of touch on politics, So political philosophy or ethics
or whatever there is, there is going to be this
(20:21):
kind of deep sensitivity to.
Speaker 8 (20:24):
Having your examples come out on the right side.
Speaker 6 (20:28):
And so it's not it's not at the level of
here's a thing I'm afraid to say. It's slightly worse
than that. It's like you don't even think of saying
the thing. You're afraid, you're not even afraid of saying
it because you're so fully indoctrinated into the way that people.
Speaker 8 (20:43):
Like you talk.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
I was just talking to a political science professor the
other day who said he used to ask his students
at the beginning of the class to kind of talk
about what's going on in the news, and they're so
afraid to say anything right now that he doesn't even
do that anymore.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
That's sad, Really, it is sad. It is sad.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
We heard bertrand Russell talking a moment ago about tolerance, Steven,
tolerating other people even when they disagree because we're so interconnected. Now,
how do we get more of that, especially in our
politics these days, to tolerate people whose ideas are dissimilar.
Speaker 5 (21:21):
Yeah, I think there is a because things are so
polarized now, there's a sense that if you're in the middle,
that you must be some kind of coward and you
just don't feel strongly about your views, and that you know,
it's a position of weakness. I think this is a
huge mistake. There's a wonderful tradition that bertrand Russell's drawing
on there. It goes back to people like Erasmus and
(21:45):
in Praise of Folly, where it's okay to not know,
it's all right to say I need more information, I
haven't made up my mind about this. That teaches you
a kind of what philosophers would call sort of an
epistemic human like an intellectual humility. You know, if you
look at Erasmus, or you look at a lot of
stuff that Bertrand Russell writes, it shows you that you
(22:08):
should not be very confident about your views because knowledge
is such a it's just fraught with doubt and skepticism.
And exactly when you think you have the truth, then
you learn, oh, you were totally wrong about that, even
in the sciences and physics. So people should just learn
to hold their ideas a little more lightly. And when
(22:29):
you do that, it tends to give you a little
more charity towards other people's views instead of just damning them.
And so that's the threat of dogmatism. And I feel
like philosophy can provide some helpful there's too much skepticism
when you don't know what to do or say or think.
But healthy skepticism is just sort of, I don't know,
(22:52):
levening your views with a little humility.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
I was lucky enough during college to take a class
with Elie Wesel, a Nobel Peace Laurate Holocaust survivor, and
he would quote, I believe a philosopher who said trust
those who seek the truth, distrust those who found it
at which I thought was just a great, a great.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Line of agnes.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
You know, if you listen to politicians these days and
they talk about the willingness to compromise, the thing that
they'll say in the next breath is, but I you know,
I'm gonna stand firm in my beliefs when I need to.
Is it possible to do both of those things at
the same time.
Speaker 6 (23:31):
To both compromise and stand firm with respect to the
very same things.
Speaker 8 (23:36):
No, I don't think so.
Speaker 6 (23:39):
I actually think there's a real problem here, like that
Wezel quote trust those who seek the truth, but don't
trust those who found it. Like, on the face of it,
that's just kind of nonsense, Like if it matters for
them to seek it, it'd be even better if they
found it. Now, the way I think we're supposed to
read that is, don't trust those who claim they found it.
Speaker 8 (23:57):
Right if they actually found it, yes, you should trust them.
Speaker 6 (24:02):
And so I think that this reveals like kind of
I kind of disagree with Russell and with Wiseel in
that way that I don't think tolerance is the highest value.
Speaker 8 (24:13):
I don't think compromise is the end point is the goal.
Speaker 6 (24:16):
Compromise is the means, and tolerance is like how we
get through a rough patch. But the word I would
prefer to use is patience. And that's because I think
these questions where we're trying to figure out the answer,
they're they're really important and it's not okay that we
disagree about them, and there's a there's a way in
(24:37):
which tolerant, the attitude of tolerance, can trivialize the disagreement.
So I have a colleague who reports that with her students,
when they talk about really charged topics, the students all
say to one another, your opinion is really valid. That
was that was a valid opinion. And she says to them,
wait a minute, you disagree with this other person, Like,
I want to hear it. I want All they want
(24:58):
to say is your opinion is valid. So they're scared
to disagree. They want to just tolerate. And I think
that that can lead us we can kind of stall
out on the seeking that Weisel was pointing us towards.
We can stall out on the inquiry. So I guess
the way that I see the value of compromise is
(25:19):
that it has to serve a higher end of like Ultimately,
I'm going to get where I want by compromising. The
compromise itself is not a perfect instantiation of what I want.
It's a compromise. And similarly, instead of tolerance, I would say, look,
I'm gonna have patience with people who disagree with me,
(25:39):
because it could be that I'm the one who's wrong
and they're gonna show me that I'm wrong. I'm not
just tolerating their views because again, I might be the
one who's wrong, So tolerance will be the wrong attitude.
But it's that we're in the middle of a journey,
not at the end of it.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Well, and Stephen, let me throw one other thing at
you that probably a lot of our listeners have experienced,
which is people who on social media, where a lot
of the conversation takes place these days, they just start
unfriending or getting rid of the people who say things
that they don't want to hear. So then they end
up even in more of a bubble where they only
(26:15):
reinforce the beliefs that they already had.
Speaker 5 (26:18):
Yeah, that's a common problem, and I think it's we
have to change that view about beliefs really and about
I suppose even about the ideas about the truth. It's
very common for family members to even like break apart
just because they disagree about politics. And when I was
a kid, nobody did that. You would disagree about politics,
(26:39):
but there was a sense there was a shared world
as well, and you could exit your political bubble and
enter this shared world together, which I think is harder
to find because we're increasingly living in this simularckrum all
the time, this online world of extremes, and even just
you know, you have to understand who the stakeholders are.
You might have a very very hardcore Republican and a
(27:01):
very hardcore Democrat. But then maybe they meet at their kids,
you know, fencing or Little League game, and they share
like a conversation. They realize the other person's not a monster.
There's a sense in which these like I think they're
sometimes called third spaces by social science, right space, so
they're decreased maybe, and that they act as a wonderful
(27:26):
curative to some of the partisan sort of living in
a bubble problem. I also think there's a kind of
maybe a utopian sense about the truth, which is, when
you have it, all of the truths are going to
live together with each other and I'm sort of more
of a conservative and think that actually what happens is
(27:48):
it's not like you're right and they're wrong. They're right
and they're wrong. Oftentimes it's a battle between two good things.
They just are mutually exclusive. And that's a difficult thing
for us to accept because we're all kind of utopian,
liberal minded. We think everyone's going to be able to
share and get along and it's going to be a
kind of kumbaya thing ultimately when we get there. But ultimately,
(28:11):
some of the good things for my family are not
going to be good things for your family. That's just
the way it is. From my point of view. It's
I'm sort of influenced by a philosopher named Isaiah Berlin
who thinks about the good as not absolutely opposed to
the evil or bad, but rather politics is about trying
to balance and find coexistence between goods. But ultimately there's
(28:34):
friction and contest and conflict ages.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
What do you think about that.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
People who sort of go into their information bubbles or
they just you know, they'll take any fact or news
item and just use it to bolster their preconceived notions
about something.
Speaker 6 (28:51):
I'm inclined to think that when we frame a person
that way, we're just not understanding them very well. That is,
that's a caricature of a person, and if they were here,
we'd have any conversation about that.
Speaker 8 (29:01):
So we're repeating the problem by thinking about it that way.
Speaker 6 (29:04):
But I think I think it's interesting this, this Berlin thought,
this thought that conflicts of interest are final or something
that's really very deeply different from the way people thought
in the ancient world, where they believed in the unity
of the virtues.
Speaker 8 (29:17):
So this is Plano, this is Aristotle.
Speaker 6 (29:19):
They all believed that, like you know, it's not going
to end up that the courageous.
Speaker 8 (29:24):
Thing to do is an unjust thing to do.
Speaker 6 (29:27):
And so if a courageous thing for me to do
would be unjust to you, it would be bad for
your family or something. I'm not gonna it won't be courageous,
that won't be the good thing for me to do.
I guess in that way, I'm a naive ancient thinker
in that I believe in the unity of the virtues.
I think it's sort of incoherent that the good could
be divided from itself in that way. However, I think
(29:47):
conflicts of interests are very much endemic to ignorant creatures.
Speaker 8 (29:52):
So that's what we are.
Speaker 6 (29:53):
It's not that we understand the good, but it's conflicting
with itself. It's that our understanding, we're messed up in.
Our understand is poor, and so it looks as though
the good contradicts itself. So that's the situation we're in,
and that's why we're bad at talking to each other,
is that we're ignorant.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Well, on that note, let's take another Listen to the
British philosopher Brian McGhee talking about the Enlightenment thinker John Locke.
Here he is talking about that.
Speaker 7 (30:20):
One thing that I admire. In fact, I think the
thing I admire most in Locke's political philosophy is the
clarion call for tolerance, and at least one of his
arguments for that is based on his insistence that, after all,
we don't really know all that much in this life.
We are wrong about a lot of things. A great
deal is mysterious to us, and therefore we are not
(30:43):
justified in imposing our opinions on others by force.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Stephen, as we go to break What do you make
of that?
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (30:50):
I think that's right. I mean, I can't figure out
how to grow good tomatoes in my garden. I can't
even get along with my neighbor. But I'm supposed to
like have the right ideas about international policies. People think
they know a lot more than they do. I think
we should accept this sort of general skepticism and tolerance.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Yeah, that is philosopher Steven Asmad also speaking with philosopher
Agnes Callard. We will be right back with more of
the middle. This is the middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson. This
hour we're focusing on the philosophical middle and how that
can improve our politics and our daily lives. I'm joined
by Steven Asthma, professor philosophy at Columbia College, Chicago, and
Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
So, Agnes, your book is called.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Open Socrates, The Case for a Philosophical Life. What does
it mean to live a philosophical life in the modern
context and how do we do that?
Speaker 6 (31:48):
It's living your life as though you don't know how
to live it, as though the project of your life
we're trying to find we're to find out. So your
life has lived in pursuit of knowledge. The way you
pursue knowledge is by talking to people, because since you
don't already know how to do it, you can't guide yourself.
And it's a specific kind of conversation. It's the kind
(32:10):
of conversation where when you say something wrong, the other
person corrects you.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
But I think of like, as you get older in life,
you want to know how to live your life. You
want to say, Okay, I've got this down, I've figured
this out, I'm doing this properly.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
This works for me. You're saying that we should continue
to question.
Speaker 6 (32:28):
I think it's going to be this is going to
be a really hard sell to old people, and they're
probably not going to embrace it. But if I get
the young people, they might stick with it.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Stephen, what do you think?
Speaker 1 (32:40):
How do you How much do you incorporate philosophy into
your daily life?
Speaker 5 (32:45):
A lot? I hope I try to do what Agnes
is describing, although I also think philosophers from the time
of Socrates down to the present oftentimes are very much
in their head, and they're very much about the language
and the conversation. So for them, the meaning of life
is in this conversation and the tradition really embraces this.
(33:06):
It's a very you know, it's a very conversational tradition.
But I myself want to remember the body, and I
think the body is extremely important in living the good life.
And there's been a sort of movement in the last
i don't know, ten twenty years called embodied cognition, and
a lot of the way we understand the world is
through the body, through making art, through things like dance,
(33:29):
through investigation with the body, and a lot of these
things can't be expressed directly into conversation. They don't submit
to language very well. Language is sort of like just
the top part of how the mind works. But there's
all this mammalian problem solving ability that we have. And
I think somebody like Aristotle understood this, so he said,
(33:50):
you can't just talk your way to the good or
the right. You have to develop habits. So there's kind
of behaviors that you have to sculpt and model and
always be changed. Your habits informed by conversation and discourse.
But I think also just creativity and doing something creative
is also a kind of meditation, and it's a kind
(34:12):
of philosophy. But a lot of philosophers haven't really noticed that.
They'll sort of dismiss that as a kind of esthetic exercise,
not a way of gaining knowledge or investigating the world.
But anybody who does art knows that they are also
investigating the world.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Ages have you lived by what you write about in
your book Living a Philosophical Life?
Speaker 8 (34:32):
I try to.
Speaker 6 (34:33):
I think it's very demanding, and you can't do it
all the time. And I agree that sometimes the body
calls you to pay attention to it. And maybe I
just view those moments slightly differently from Steven. I don't
embrace them like I wish my body would shut up
so I could do philosophy.
Speaker 8 (34:49):
But I can't make it shut up all the time.
Speaker 6 (34:53):
And so there's just the way that I see it
is we live lives of leisure relative to almost everyone
in human history that is quite wealthy. Everyone who's listening
to this show has the leisure to listen to it,
and we have the leisure to be here and to
sit and talk. And philosophy is an answer to the
question what do you do with leisure? That is, what
do you do when you're not constantly worrying about how
(35:16):
you're going to survive? When you freed up some time
and Socrates. Socrates's answer, I agree with Steve, it's different
from Aristotles. But Socrates's answer to that question was, well,
maybe you use that time to figure out what.
Speaker 8 (35:27):
You actually should be doing, how you actually should be living.
Speaker 6 (35:30):
And that means that I guess in a concrete way
and everyday interactions. What you do is when someone is
talking to you, you listen for the criticism.
Speaker 8 (35:40):
In what they're saying.
Speaker 6 (35:41):
People often present a criticism in a way where you
could hear it as like just an observation or just
a right, but you intentionally hear it as a criticism
and you welcome it. You respond joyfully to that. And
when you do that, you're kind of giving a signal
that you're to the other person that you're open to inquiry.
And I think so you thought that's the most fundamental
(36:01):
way in which human beings can help each other is
we can help each other.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Think Stevid, do you think we do that enough that
we are open to that kind of criticism, or even
that we think philosophical that we use our free time
to think about things as opposed to just doom scrolling
on Instagram or something.
Speaker 5 (36:20):
Like Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, as
Agnes was describing it, I was just realizing how hard
it is to do what she is suggesting. But it's there.
It's the core idea in Socratic method, which is you
can't have a deep conversation unless the participants are willing
to engage in something that might damage the egos lightly
in the conversation. I would say our Western tradition. I've
(36:42):
lived on and off in China and taught in China,
and the Confucian tradition, which I have a great respect for,
does not like questioning authority. It's not the model. They say,
like the authority is contained in the elder son and
the father, and it's this sort of top down authoritarian
so you don't challenge authority and you master wisdom by
(37:06):
understanding the tradition you're in. But in the West, from Socrates,
it's we're taught to challenge authority and that authority has
to justify itself through some kind of rational explanation. And
even though I think today we don't do that very much,
it's very much part of the Western tradition. We could
get back to it, but at the moment, the media
is not Foster. I mean, this show is a good
(37:26):
example of how it could be done, but it's a
rarity in the media to find a conversation like.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
This, Agnes.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
When you think about the strands of philosophy, the big
ones existentialism, nihilism, hedonism, stoicism, et cetera, which one do
you think is most prevalent in the United States. We
just heard about China and Confucianism, but what about in
the US.
Speaker 6 (37:48):
I think what's most prevalent is confusion and inconsistency. I
think people will be hedonist in one moment when that
serves them, and they'll pull up stoicism when that makes
them feel good about them. They will vacillate between all
of these positions. And they mean Socrates thought the basic
problem with.
Speaker 8 (38:05):
People was not that they were stubborn. It's not that
they're dogmatic.
Speaker 6 (38:08):
It's that they're unable to stick to any claim for
more than like thirty seconds, and that what they will
do is they will cover their vacillation over with language.
So you know, if I don't like the fact that
you are changing yourself and amending what you do to
please other people, I'll call you a conformist. If I
(38:31):
like it, I'll call you cooperative. I'll just choose the
word based on whether I like it or I don't
like it. You know, I'll call it freedom of speech
when I like it, and I might and I'll call
it by a variety of bad names when I don't
like that kind of speech. And it's not there is
no position that I'm consistently adopting. I am at the
mercy of my whims and I'm at the mercy of
(38:54):
what I can say to please the people around me.
Speaker 9 (38:57):
Uh.
Speaker 6 (38:57):
And that's just totally inconsistent. It's there's no theory that
underwrites it all all along, from beginning to end.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Stephen, Agnes loves when you criticize and disagree with her.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
So do you agree with what she just said?
Speaker 5 (39:12):
Well, here, I have to say. This is what's funny
about what Agnes just said is that it sort of
describes how Plato talks about the about democracy that in
this you know, in the order of states, like the
one that's just next to being the worst, tyranny is
the worst, but the second to that he thinks is democracy.
(39:35):
Because of the problem Agne has talked about. Since everybody
they this is basically what you know, the Federalists were
sort of arguing this too. They think everybody is Homer Simpson.
So like you see something shiny and you run in
that direction, and then you should see something over here
and you run in that direction. So it is a problem.
I think it depends on how you know pessimistic you
(39:58):
are as to how big the problem is. But I
think it's true that human beings are easily manipulated and
easily distracted. And now we have these phones and these
social networking sites that are really keeping us completely distracted,
and it keeps us from having a kind of pro
like a program or a purpose what Aristotle will call
a teleological orientation in life. And the existentialists talked about
(40:22):
this too. We are just buffeting back and forth from
one stimulus to another too, and that's sort of how
modern life is. So you almost have to do things
like have a media diet, stop for like a week,
get offline. As the kids say, go touch grass. You know,
you have to have these like measures by which you
(40:44):
can can reconnect to real life instead of just being
bounced around because of this these appetites that we have.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Do the kids say, go touch grass?
Speaker 5 (40:54):
Yeah, that's what my Son says. He says, go touch
grass means you've been online too long. You need to
go out.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Something that you write about, Agnes is the importance of
symbols in our understanding and judgment of people, like a
red Maga hat, for example, or a Pride flag. How
does that fit into what we're talking about here.
Speaker 6 (41:16):
I think symbols are like automated thinking. I think that
we become a little symbol mad sometimes. That is, we
want to automate more and more, and especially as we
get involved in larger and larger conversations with more and
more voices, and there's just so many things going on,
we kind of want these like anchor points. And so
(41:39):
what happens is that a person can become a symbol
like Trump right, or a Maga hat, a hat which
normally you could respond all different ways to a hat, right,
But if it's a Maga hat, there's kind of only
two responses you're allowed to have. That's automated responses. Even
a concept like abortion right, you might have thought, well,
there are many different responses you could have to the
(42:00):
concept of abortion. No, we've automated it so that there's
two that you're allowed to have. So I think that
this kind of symbolic thinking, the heavy use of symbols
and using people and ideas and sentences, freedom of speech,
all those things as symbols, that's a kind of way
to create some stability in a discourse, but it heavily
(42:22):
inhibits our ability to think because we don't want to
automate all those responses.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Is it new, I don't know.
Speaker 6 (42:30):
I do seem to see more of it over time,
so I suspect that it is increasing, And you would
sort of predict that it would increase as we get
this kind of communicative mayhem that we don't know how
to sort out.
Speaker 5 (42:45):
I would argue that it's actually quite old too. I
think it is like ramped up now more than ever.
But I think the way that an image gets right
at your emotional you know, lexicon almost faster than language does,
I think it's quite old. Like there's always been this
hostility towards icon iconography in the you know, Jewish and
(43:08):
Muslim tradition and even in the Christian tradition. Even in science,
people were afraid of images because they tilted you one
way because of your emotions, and it could be the
wrong way. But it is it's sort of stronger than
ever at the moment with memess meme culture.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
And you think that that's just because we want to
simplify an otherwise very complicated world. We're trying to make
it easier for us to digest and understand.
Speaker 6 (43:36):
Basically, yes, and the tools that we might otherwise use
if that world weren't coming at us in such a
weird medium, namely like conversation is not available, so we've
got to use something else.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
So, Stephen, if our listeners are hearing this and they
say I want to take a more philosophical approach to
my life, what would you suggest that they do.
Speaker 5 (44:02):
Sort Of some obvious stuff would be think more critically
about what you're consuming. Everybody sort of knows that, but
it would be really valuable for people to really study
a little logic. You can learn a lot of informal
logic anywhere, like YouTube anywhere, but you can start to
see what at least fallacies are. And if you know
what some of the classic fallacies are, slippery slope fallacy,
(44:24):
a false dichotomy fallacy, you can start to spot them
in all the media that you're consuming, and that gives
you just a little bit of distance on what you're consuming,
and that's always a good thing from the philosophical point
of view, but it's also this kind of evaluation of
your own thinking. And again I'm very influenced by people
like David Hume and the skeptics of that tradition, which
(44:46):
said that you can't get rid of the emotions. They're
oftentimes going to be leading you, but you can educate
them so that they don't give into your worst tendencies.
It's very easy, for example, to wind somebody up with fear,
but there's many other emotions that the media could be
working with and that we could be working with, like
the feeling of wonder or the sublime. That's something you
(45:09):
can inculcate in your own life by just trying to
focus on it rather than doom scrolling fear all the time.
But you have to make a conscious decision to do that.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Agus what do you think what can people do to
take a more philosophical approach to their lives.
Speaker 6 (45:21):
I'm much more skeptical about our ability to cure ourselves.
My inclination is to say that, yes, it may be
good to do less doom scrolling or learn some logic,
but the thing that's really going to get inside your
head and reshape the way you think about something is
probably going to.
Speaker 8 (45:41):
Be another person if you let them in.
Speaker 6 (45:44):
I guess an alternative thought is just a kind of
reorientation towards the people around you, that they're a kind
of incredible resource that you're under using.
Speaker 8 (45:53):
The people around you have.
Speaker 6 (45:54):
All sorts of thoughts about the ways you go wrong,
and they're scared to tell you them because they're scared
you'll hate them if they do that. If you can
somehow create a new motive interaction where you make it
clear that you're going to be grateful, there's a lot
you could learn.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
And Stephen, let me ask you from the other side here.
There may be people that listen to this and say,
why are you talking about this? Why aren't you talking
about what's happening right now? This is so overly intellectual.
What do you say to people who feel that philosophy
is not connected to our modern lives.
Speaker 5 (46:25):
Well, that's kind of an American tradition, isn't it, the
dismissal of the intellectual. The only philosophy that America produced
as a sort of identifiable movement is called pragmatism, which
tells you something about the American psyche. I guess I
feel like this is wrong headed, and that you can't
(46:47):
solve even practical problems without a little bit of philosophy,
and philosophy is extremely valuable in all fields, whether it
be public policy, policing, policy, legal questions. Those are places
where philosophers actually shine. If you look at people who
study philosophy, kids who come out with a BA or
(47:08):
they go on to a master's, they do well in
any areas that require sort of conceptual analysis. So some
people will talk about philosophy as being a kind of
conceptual engineering, and that works really well in many disciplines,
including our most pressing social problems. So I just think
there's a kind of anti intellectualism about philosophy, which I
(47:29):
just think comes from a kind of naivete and I'm
not a fan of it. What can I say?
Speaker 1 (47:36):
I'm sure, I'm sure, Agnes. Let me just finally come
back to Socrates. Your book is about Socrates. How you've
studied Socrates extensively. He was sentenced to death because of
his beliefs. Are you worried at all as people worry
about sort of the freedom of speech right now in
this country about not maybe people philosophers being sentenced to death,
(47:56):
but just pulling back of the freedom people have to
speak out, think what they think, say what they think.
Speaker 6 (48:04):
I guess we're a lot more free than Socrates was
and then the people in Socrates's world were, because we
have protections that didn't exist, and yet we still.
Speaker 8 (48:17):
Don't do it.
Speaker 6 (48:18):
So I feel like I don't take intellectualism as an insult.
I'm an intellectualist. I believe that the highest thing we
can do with our lives is to engage intellectual pursuits,
and it's, you know, a great privilege to be able
to spend any of your time doing that, but that
we recoil from it and we're terrified of it, and
(48:39):
we make it clear to the people around us. Don't
go there or I might react poorly. So yes, I'm
very worried about the fact that we don't make use
of the freedom that Socrates didn't even really have, and
he still made use of it. But I'm not sure
that our current political situation is that we can blame
(49:00):
are cowardice on that.
Speaker 8 (49:02):
I think it runs deeper.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
That is.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Her new book is called Open Socrates, The Case for
a Philosophical Life, and Steven Asthma is professor of philosophy
at Columbia College Chicago and co host of the Chin
Wag podcast. So interesting to talk to both of you.
Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, and
don't forget. The Middle is available as a podcast in
(49:25):
partnership with iHeart Podcasts on the iHeart Apple, where you
listen to podcasts including our weekly podcast Extra One Thing
Trump Did and next week we'll be back here live
talking about the challenges that Generation Z faces. So gen
Z listeners, get your comments ready. As always, you can
call in at eight four four four Middle that's eight
four four four six four three three five three, or
write to us at Listen to the Middle dot com.
(49:47):
The Middle is brought to you by long Nook Media,
distributed by Illinois Public Media in Urbana, Illinois, and produced
by Harrison Patino, Danny, Alexander Samburmustas, John barth, Ana Kadeshler,
and Brandon Condritz.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
Our technical director is Steve Mork.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
Thanks to our satellite radio listeners, our podcast audience, and
the hundreds of public radio stations making it possible for
people across the country to listen to the middle I'm
Jeremy Hobson, and i'll talk to you next week.
Welcome to a special edition of the Middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson.
It is great to have you with us. And if
you are a regular listener, you've heard me say that
this show is about bringing the voices of Americans in
the geographic, political, and philosophical middle into the national conversation. Well,
this hour, finally, we are going to focus on that
last one, the philosophical middle.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
What is that? What does it mean?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Well, there is the middle Way in Buddhism, there is
Aristotle's Golden Mean, and there are other components of philosophical
thought that urge people to avoid the.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Extremes and find compromise.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
We're going to talk about that and more with two
philosophers this hour. But first, last week on the show,
we asked you for your thoughts on the so called
Big Beautiful Bill and what it could mean for you
if it becomes law.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Here are some of the voicemails that came in hither.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
My name's Louis. I'm calling from Wyoming. I think this
bill is going to be a big failure for Republicans.
I'm curious how many everyday voters people like that will
actually see the negative impact. And I think it would
be great if it packed or it didn't add so
much to the deficit. However, since it is, it's going
(01:13):
to be really bad if it passes for our country.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
Hi, my name's Anita and I'm from Say Georgie Talk,
and I am concerned about the bill leaving my grandchildren
and my great.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Grandchildren in bigger debt.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
And who's to say what's really really going to be
in the bill in the first place.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I mean, Bardriie Taylor Green said that she signed it
and she didn't even.
Speaker 5 (01:33):
Know what was in it.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
Hi, my name is Tobias, sir, which I'm calling you
from Baltimore and Maryland. It's a big, horrible bill that
will take democracy backwards and the last thing I want
is to see this bill react into law.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Well, thanks to everyone who called in, and you can
hear that entire episode on our podcast in partnership with
iHeart Podcasts on the iHeart app or wherever you listen
to podcasts. So now to our topic this hour, the
philosophical middle, what it is and how we can weave
philosophy into our politics and our daily lives. Joining me
this hour Agnes Callard, Professor of philosophy at the University
(02:07):
of Chicago. Her new book is called Open Socrates, The
Case for a Philosophical Life.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Agnes Collard welcome, thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
And Stephen Asthma is also with us, professor of Philosophy
at Columbia College Chicago. You can also hear him on
the Chin Wag podcast, which he co hosts with the
actor Paul Giamati.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Stephen, welcome to you.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Well, let me first ask each of you how you
would describe the philosophical middle.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Agnes, I'll start with you, So.
Speaker 6 (02:35):
In terms of ethical theories, I think what I would
say is remarkable about philosophy is that it is a
domain that's just very hospitable to extremism. So we have
philosophers who deny the existence of the external world, deny
that there are other minds, philosophers who are skeptics about
(02:58):
basically anything you can possible be a skeptic about, who
have radically different conceptions of what a good life is
and how you should live one and all of those
philosophers can kind of miraculously interact harmoniously and have productive
conversations with one another, despite the fact that they occupy
(03:20):
many different kinds of extremes.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Well, how do they do that? Where do they find
the middle?
Speaker 6 (03:24):
I think it's in the norms of interaction, that is,
they all agree on a set of norms about how
to talk to one another.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Stephen, what do you think?
Speaker 7 (03:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (03:35):
I like what Agnes is saying is because especially modern
philosophy has this tendency to do these thought experiments that
are quite extreme. But I think the ancients, whether it's
Aristotle or Confucius or the Buddha and Plato two, they
had a kind of suspicion and a kind of worry
about extreme emotions and extreme beliefs. They felt that if
(03:59):
you didn't sort of can your appetites and your emotions
like anger and find some kind of moderation path, then
you would be easily sort of manipulated by your own
inner drives and sort of forces. So the idea you
see in Plato's Republic is how do you get it
so that your reason will rule over your sort of
(04:20):
emotions or your spirited part, which then they team up
together against your appetites. And so there's this worry in
the ancient world that your cravings, whether it's like for
sex or chocolate cake, or the latest TikTok video that's
going to basically send you into a kind of spiral.
So a lot of them saw the moderation in the
(04:41):
Middle Way as the kind of life preserver, the raft
that you could hold on to.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
They recognize that their positions were extreme, even though they
had them.
Speaker 5 (04:51):
Well, they saw extreme positions all around them in religion,
for example, mostly in religion, and they thought of reason
as a kind of I mean, maybe we'd agree on
this Agnes that they were naive about how powerful reason
was and that it could save us. But the Enlightenment
project was that if you let your conspiracy theories fly,
(05:14):
then you end up with a kind of chaotic you know,
you end up with a thirty years war, and you
end up with religious fighting, and you end up with
our contemporary, you know, polarizing politics. So they thought reason
was this middle territory that everyone shared, and if you
could cultivate your rationality, you would stop these kind of
(05:35):
overly dramatic passions.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
So taming the passion is important. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (05:40):
The Buddha, the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama is living in
like the sixth century BC, and he he lived like
his early part of his life, he was a rich kid,
so he was a wealthy son of like you know,
landed gentry. And then he thought he realized that everybody
suffers from age and disease and disappointments, and so he
(06:03):
leaves this wealthy sort of life of privilege and he
goes in totally the opposite direction. So then he starts
living like a wandering mendicant. He's an ascetic. He doesn't
eat much. He just practices yoga all day long. He
starves himself meditating. But eventually he almost drowns, like in
the Ganges River, and he's fished out of there. And
(06:23):
then he resolves, Okay, I've tried both extremes. I've lived
like a rich, opulent lifestyle and I've lived this life
of self denial, and these don't get you anywhere. So
he says, I'm now going to live the middle way,
which is a technical term for Buddhism. It means like
avoid the extremes, not just in terms of wealth, but
(06:46):
also in terms of knowledge and metaphysics and all this
other stuff. So it's a nice I think the Buddhism
really clings to the middle. Yeah, should be your patrons
sayd here the Buddha.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Maybe we should change the logo of the show, Agnes,
what about what about the golden mean from Aristotle?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
What can you just tell us briefly about that?
Speaker 1 (07:07):
What is that?
Speaker 6 (07:08):
It's not a principle that's meant to regulate ethical theories.
It's a principle about the kind of character that you
should have. And the idea is that to be virtuous
is to inhabit a middle condition between two vices, so
that a courageous person is not falling into the excess
(07:28):
of cowardice, but is also not falling into the excess
of rashness, of being like too bold. But even there,
when when Aristol describes the mean, he says, it's the
middle condition in accordance with orthos logos, the correct account,
correct reason. And there's a sense in which for Aristotle,
as for pretty much all of his sort of contemporaries
(07:52):
and his descendants, and certainly for Plato and Socrates, his
kind of ancestors, there is a kind of primacy of
reason as having the role of determining what this middle
course is. He didn't think it was obvious. He didn't
think you just somehow average together the worst kind of
cowardice with the worst kind of rashness, and you'll get
this perfect golden mean in the middle. He thinks that
(08:14):
you have to use the power of reason to bring
the middle state to light. And so I do think
that thinkers like Aristotle and Plato, maybe Plato more so
than Aristotle, had a huge amount of faith in the
power of reason, and they were in that way extremists
about that claim. That is, they didn't think you'd be
(08:36):
able to find the middle way except in except by
understanding it.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Now, when you talk about these different philosophies and trying
to get to the middle, trying to find reason, trying
to find the more rational approach, agnes, when you look
at the country today, it does seem like in many
cases in our media and our politics, we're moving in
the opposite direction. We're getting more toward the extremes with
(09:00):
a common set of facts. Do you agree with that
or what do you think is going on in our
society right now?
Speaker 6 (09:05):
I think that's a really hard question to answer. And
one of the striking things about the world we live
in is how ready people are to pronounce confidently on
where things are going, which is like it's just like
an It's like an incredibly complicated math problem. How are
things going? You have to choose what to pay attention to.
It does feel to me like right now everything is
(09:26):
very loud. There are a lot of loud voices, and
they're kind of all yelling at the same time. I
would separate the question about polarization from a second question
about whether we can have rational dialogue. To me, those
are really different questions for the reason that I gave earlier,
which is that philosophy can be very polarized. People can
(09:46):
adopt very extreme positions, and that doesn't mean that everyone
is shouting and nobody can talk to each other. In fact,
it facilitates people. It facilitates interesting conversations in the same
way as you might in many context we like polarization.
If you know that you can see two movies and
one of those movies everyone kind of says it's okay,
and the other movies like you either love it, it's
(10:07):
your favorite movie ever, or you hate it. Which one
do you want to see? Maybe you want to see
the second one where you love it or you hate it. Right,
it's not terrible if something is polarizing. Polarization by itself
is not necessarily a problem. What's a problem is when
those polarized positions become structured as a kind of war
where one side is trying to defeat the other, instead
(10:29):
of a situation where people use the fact that they have.
Speaker 8 (10:33):
Very different vantage points.
Speaker 6 (10:34):
To their advantage in an inquiry, which is what we're
trying to do in philosophy. So I think what we're
seeing today with just the very many loud voices is
there's a bunch of conversations that we're sort of trying
to have, but we're failing to have them. It's hard
to know, That's what I was getting at the beginning.
It's hard to know which aspect of that to emphasize.
Is it really bad because we're failing to have them,
(10:56):
or is it kind of good because we're sort of
trying to have them. We've just, you know, been the
beneficiaries of a bunch of communication technology that makes it,
at least in principle, kind of feasible to think in
terms of having this big national conversation, and then all
we hear is a bunch of loud voices. But I
find it hard to assess that situation.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
You say, we've been the beneficiaries. I guess in broad strokes,
we have benefited from technology, but in some ways you
could say we are the victims.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Of this value.
Speaker 8 (11:26):
We're the recipients.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
We're the recipients, were the.
Speaker 6 (11:28):
Recipients of a bunch of technology. The jury is still
out as to how we choose.
Speaker 8 (11:32):
To use it.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yeah, well, stand by because at a moment we're going
to talk about how philosophy applies to our politics these days.
But as we go to break, listen here to the
British philosopher Bertrand Russell talking in nineteen fifty nine about
the lessons he would want to impart on future generations.
Speaker 9 (11:48):
Love is wise, Hatred is foolish. In this world which
is getting more and more closely interconnected, to learn to
tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up
with the fact that some people say things that we
(12:08):
don't like. We can only live together in that way,
and if we are to live together and not die together,
we must learn the kind of charity and kind of
tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human
(12:29):
life on this planet.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Bertrand Russell, whose English is so proper he makes King
Charles sound like a commoner, stay with us more about
the philosophical middle. Coming up, This is the Middle. I'm
Jeremy Hobson. This hour, we're focusing on the philosophical middle
and talking about what we can learn from philosophy and
apply to our lives politically and socially. I'm joined by
Agnes Collard, Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago,
(12:52):
and Steven Asthma, Professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. Stephen,
you've written about Donald Trump and Trump is in a
philosophical way, not really making judgments about it, but just
looking at it as objectively as possible. What do you
make of Trump's dominance of our politics?
Speaker 9 (13:10):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (13:10):
God, okay, we may need several more shows. But I
was sort of making a general comment about My own
background is in philosophy of biology, and I sort of
look at things through an evolutionary perspective. I think in
many ways politics for me has to be understood in
(13:31):
terms of the larger question of human evolution and cooperation.
So I look at somebody like Trump and I see
that he appeals to certain parts of the human being
all of us, which is somebody who has a sense
of certainty, direction mission. Even if you don't believe that
he can deliver on any of those things. He represents
(13:54):
a classic straw man I'm sorry strong man, which might
be a strong man as well. That's sort of it's
oftentimes the case that when there's chaos, people will give
over their freedoms to somebody that has a kind of
authoritarian approach. I lived in Cambodia for a while after
the Cambodian kim Erusian after the civil war, people were
(14:15):
willing to hand over a lot of their freedoms to
the Prime Minister Hunsen, and he has held power there
for over thirty years. And it's possible that somebody like
trump fulfills that need when people are feeling unstable. But
I think what's happening is that the media, for example,
(14:36):
also hijacks human nature. So we have an outrage media
that hijacks the human attention towards threats, so we key
in on things that cause fear and are threatening. So
it's no accident that the media basically gives us two stories,
like you're either with us or you're against us. Because
(14:57):
it's not just that the media is out to get
is they're just simply hijacking a human system of attention,
and human beings evolved to survive, so they attend to
things that are fearful, and if you keep feeding them fear,
they will keep tuning in. And so that's sort of
the approach that I have about politics and media.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Well, and Agnes.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
It kind of gets to what you were saying a
moment ago about sort of having such certainty about your position.
Speaker 6 (15:22):
Trump feels not so foreign to me as a kind
of scholar of the ancient world. There were just a
lot of tyrannical personalities and figures who achieved what they achieved.
I think because they were good at appealing to people.
(15:45):
They were good at getting the people to set them
up as a tyrant. That's how Plato would put it.
That was a common figure, and in fact it was.
There's a dialogue in which Socrates is asked, but look,
isn't that what everyone secretly wants wants? Don't we all
secretly want to be Trump? Don't we all secretly want
to rule the world in a way where we are
(16:07):
not subject to the usual constraints of the law or morality.
And the person that he's talking to just thinks it's obvious,
that's what everyone wants.
Speaker 8 (16:17):
We just most of us can't get it.
Speaker 6 (16:19):
And you know, maybe we admire Trump because he's getting
the thing we want, or maybe we hate him because
he's getting a thing we secretly want, but we all
agree that that's secretly, deeply what we would want. And
Socrates says, no, if you're asking me whether I admire
this tyrant, he's not asked but Trump, obviously, but he's
being asked about a certain tyrant in his world. He's like, well,
(16:41):
what I want to know about him is how does
he stand with respect to justice and injustice? That is,
is he a good or bad person? I need to
know that before I can admire him or not. And
I think Socrates thought we really could get our bearings
in that way, that is, we could educate ourselves into
a position where we would we would learn not to
(17:02):
admire people who were unjust, but that that took philosophy.
It took philosophical work to educate ourselves out of that.
And so like, that's the thought I often have. If
Socrates were alive today, he would I think. The thing
I could say about him is he wouldn't be jealous
of Trump, which is like not a thing.
Speaker 8 (17:20):
I'm sure I could.
Speaker 6 (17:20):
I'm sure I can say about anybody else, but I
feel sure that I could say that about Socrates. And
is related to a certainty. It has to do with
like you can be very certain of things and you
can be wrong. And if you're certain of things where
there are moral claims and you're wrong about them, then
you might be in a very bad way and be
(17:42):
unaware of it. That's what Socrates was worried about.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Stephen, is there a philosophical basis for democratic politics right now?
Do you see anything in a similar way to how
the democrats act philosophically?
Speaker 5 (17:56):
I thought you were asking about a sort of democracy
small d but you're asking about the party of parties
right well, God, there is a kind of just sort
of going off of what Agnes was pointing out, there
is a kind of obvious tyrant, which is in the
case of one person who's achieved a kind of outsize power,
(18:18):
and as Plato and many of the ancients would agree,
that person might look like they're happy because they have
so much power, but inside psychologically they're very distressed. They're constant.
It's like a gangster movie like you watch, you know,
Goodfellows or something. It looks great until you look at
how paranoid and freaked out they are in their minds.
(18:40):
And so that's sort of against the sort of centralized
authoritarian tyrant. But there's also a tyranny of ideas. And
what I think the left is good at, and I
don't mean this as a compliment, but they're good at
making an ideology that you must conform to, and if
you don't conform to that ideology, you're considered either a
(19:01):
racist or a bigot, or otherwise some degenerate, deplorable. They're
very good at formalizing this nest of litmus test ideas,
and it becomes its own kind of tyranny. You can't
identify it so clearly, like oh, that's the guy, but
you feel very distinctly like I better not share this
idea at work because all these lefties are going to
(19:23):
crucify me. And that's a common problem in the academy
where it's dominated by the left.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Was the world of philosophy Agnes touched by the kind
of cancel culture that occurred a few years ago.
Speaker 8 (19:37):
I think touched as an understatement.
Speaker 6 (19:39):
It's like deeplichaped by it in the ways that Stephen
was just saying that is it's not coming from the outside,
the message is coming from inside the house. We I
think it's a really nice point about tyrannical ideology, and
I had never thought of it that way.
Speaker 8 (19:56):
That in so far as.
Speaker 6 (19:58):
You get a discipline where there is a fair amount
of political agreement among people in the discipline, and that's
true for philosophy, as it is for all of that kademia,
then at least it's not going to be true for
all of the philosophy, but the parts of philosophy that
kind of touch on politics, So political philosophy or ethics
or whatever there is, there is going to be this
(20:21):
kind of deep sensitivity to.
Speaker 8 (20:24):
Having your examples come out on the right side.
Speaker 6 (20:28):
And so it's not it's not at the level of
here's a thing I'm afraid to say. It's slightly worse
than that. It's like you don't even think of saying
the thing. You're afraid, you're not even afraid of saying
it because you're so fully indoctrinated into the way that people.
Speaker 8 (20:43):
Like you talk.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
I was just talking to a political science professor the
other day who said he used to ask his students
at the beginning of the class to kind of talk
about what's going on in the news, and they're so
afraid to say anything right now that he doesn't even
do that anymore.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
That's sad, Really, it is sad. It is sad.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
We heard bertrand Russell talking a moment ago about tolerance, Steven,
tolerating other people even when they disagree because we're so interconnected. Now,
how do we get more of that, especially in our
politics these days, to tolerate people whose ideas are dissimilar.
Speaker 5 (21:21):
Yeah, I think there is a because things are so
polarized now, there's a sense that if you're in the middle,
that you must be some kind of coward and you
just don't feel strongly about your views, and that you know,
it's a position of weakness. I think this is a
huge mistake. There's a wonderful tradition that bertrand Russell's drawing
on there. It goes back to people like Erasmus and
(21:45):
in Praise of Folly, where it's okay to not know,
it's all right to say I need more information, I
haven't made up my mind about this. That teaches you
a kind of what philosophers would call sort of an
epistemic human like an intellectual humility. You know, if you
look at Erasmus, or you look at a lot of
stuff that Bertrand Russell writes, it shows you that you
(22:08):
should not be very confident about your views because knowledge
is such a it's just fraught with doubt and skepticism.
And exactly when you think you have the truth, then
you learn, oh, you were totally wrong about that, even
in the sciences and physics. So people should just learn
to hold their ideas a little more lightly. And when
(22:29):
you do that, it tends to give you a little
more charity towards other people's views instead of just damning them.
And so that's the threat of dogmatism. And I feel
like philosophy can provide some helpful there's too much skepticism
when you don't know what to do or say or think.
But healthy skepticism is just sort of, I don't know,
(22:52):
levening your views with a little humility.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
I was lucky enough during college to take a class
with Elie Wesel, a Nobel Peace Laurate Holocaust survivor, and
he would quote, I believe a philosopher who said trust
those who seek the truth, distrust those who found it
at which I thought was just a great, a great.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Line of agnes.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
You know, if you listen to politicians these days and
they talk about the willingness to compromise, the thing that
they'll say in the next breath is, but I you know,
I'm gonna stand firm in my beliefs when I need to.
Is it possible to do both of those things at
the same time.
Speaker 6 (23:31):
To both compromise and stand firm with respect to the
very same things.
Speaker 8 (23:36):
No, I don't think so.
Speaker 6 (23:39):
I actually think there's a real problem here, like that
Wezel quote trust those who seek the truth, but don't
trust those who found it. Like, on the face of it,
that's just kind of nonsense, Like if it matters for
them to seek it, it'd be even better if they
found it. Now, the way I think we're supposed to
read that is, don't trust those who claim they found it.
Speaker 8 (23:57):
Right if they actually found it, yes, you should trust them.
Speaker 6 (24:02):
And so I think that this reveals like kind of
I kind of disagree with Russell and with Wiseel in
that way that I don't think tolerance is the highest value.
Speaker 8 (24:13):
I don't think compromise is the end point is the goal.
Speaker 6 (24:16):
Compromise is the means, and tolerance is like how we
get through a rough patch. But the word I would
prefer to use is patience. And that's because I think
these questions where we're trying to figure out the answer,
they're they're really important and it's not okay that we
disagree about them, and there's a there's a way in
(24:37):
which tolerant, the attitude of tolerance, can trivialize the disagreement.
So I have a colleague who reports that with her students,
when they talk about really charged topics, the students all
say to one another, your opinion is really valid. That
was that was a valid opinion. And she says to them,
wait a minute, you disagree with this other person, Like,
I want to hear it. I want All they want
(24:58):
to say is your opinion is valid. So they're scared
to disagree. They want to just tolerate. And I think
that that can lead us we can kind of stall
out on the seeking that Weisel was pointing us towards.
We can stall out on the inquiry. So I guess
the way that I see the value of compromise is
(25:19):
that it has to serve a higher end of like Ultimately,
I'm going to get where I want by compromising. The
compromise itself is not a perfect instantiation of what I want.
It's a compromise. And similarly, instead of tolerance, I would say, look,
I'm gonna have patience with people who disagree with me,
(25:39):
because it could be that I'm the one who's wrong
and they're gonna show me that I'm wrong. I'm not
just tolerating their views because again, I might be the
one who's wrong, So tolerance will be the wrong attitude.
But it's that we're in the middle of a journey,
not at the end of it.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Well, and Stephen, let me throw one other thing at
you that probably a lot of our listeners have experienced,
which is people who on social media, where a lot
of the conversation takes place these days, they just start
unfriending or getting rid of the people who say things
that they don't want to hear. So then they end
up even in more of a bubble where they only
(26:15):
reinforce the beliefs that they already had.
Speaker 5 (26:18):
Yeah, that's a common problem, and I think it's we
have to change that view about beliefs really and about
I suppose even about the ideas about the truth. It's
very common for family members to even like break apart
just because they disagree about politics. And when I was
a kid, nobody did that. You would disagree about politics,
(26:39):
but there was a sense there was a shared world
as well, and you could exit your political bubble and
enter this shared world together, which I think is harder
to find because we're increasingly living in this simularckrum all
the time, this online world of extremes, and even just
you know, you have to understand who the stakeholders are.
You might have a very very hardcore Republican and a
(27:01):
very hardcore Democrat. But then maybe they meet at their kids,
you know, fencing or Little League game, and they share
like a conversation. They realize the other person's not a monster.
There's a sense in which these like I think they're
sometimes called third spaces by social science, right space, so
they're decreased maybe, and that they act as a wonderful
(27:26):
curative to some of the partisan sort of living in
a bubble problem. I also think there's a kind of
maybe a utopian sense about the truth, which is, when
you have it, all of the truths are going to
live together with each other and I'm sort of more
of a conservative and think that actually what happens is
(27:48):
it's not like you're right and they're wrong. They're right
and they're wrong. Oftentimes it's a battle between two good things.
They just are mutually exclusive. And that's a difficult thing
for us to accept because we're all kind of utopian,
liberal minded. We think everyone's going to be able to
share and get along and it's going to be a
kind of kumbaya thing ultimately when we get there. But ultimately,
(28:11):
some of the good things for my family are not
going to be good things for your family. That's just
the way it is. From my point of view. It's
I'm sort of influenced by a philosopher named Isaiah Berlin
who thinks about the good as not absolutely opposed to
the evil or bad, but rather politics is about trying
to balance and find coexistence between goods. But ultimately there's
(28:34):
friction and contest and conflict ages.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
What do you think about that.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
People who sort of go into their information bubbles or
they just you know, they'll take any fact or news
item and just use it to bolster their preconceived notions
about something.
Speaker 6 (28:51):
I'm inclined to think that when we frame a person
that way, we're just not understanding them very well. That is,
that's a caricature of a person, and if they were here,
we'd have any conversation about that.
Speaker 8 (29:01):
So we're repeating the problem by thinking about it that way.
Speaker 6 (29:04):
But I think I think it's interesting this, this Berlin thought,
this thought that conflicts of interest are final or something
that's really very deeply different from the way people thought
in the ancient world, where they believed in the unity
of the virtues.
Speaker 8 (29:17):
So this is Plano, this is Aristotle.
Speaker 6 (29:19):
They all believed that, like you know, it's not going
to end up that the courageous.
Speaker 8 (29:24):
Thing to do is an unjust thing to do.
Speaker 6 (29:27):
And so if a courageous thing for me to do
would be unjust to you, it would be bad for
your family or something. I'm not gonna it won't be courageous,
that won't be the good thing for me to do.
I guess in that way, I'm a naive ancient thinker
in that I believe in the unity of the virtues.
I think it's sort of incoherent that the good could
be divided from itself in that way. However, I think
(29:47):
conflicts of interests are very much endemic to ignorant creatures.
Speaker 8 (29:52):
So that's what we are.
Speaker 6 (29:53):
It's not that we understand the good, but it's conflicting
with itself. It's that our understanding, we're messed up in.
Our understand is poor, and so it looks as though
the good contradicts itself. So that's the situation we're in,
and that's why we're bad at talking to each other,
is that we're ignorant.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Well, on that note, let's take another Listen to the
British philosopher Brian McGhee talking about the Enlightenment thinker John Locke.
Here he is talking about that.
Speaker 7 (30:20):
One thing that I admire. In fact, I think the
thing I admire most in Locke's political philosophy is the
clarion call for tolerance, and at least one of his
arguments for that is based on his insistence that, after all,
we don't really know all that much in this life.
We are wrong about a lot of things. A great
deal is mysterious to us, and therefore we are not
(30:43):
justified in imposing our opinions on others by force.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Stephen, as we go to break What do you make
of that?
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (30:50):
I think that's right. I mean, I can't figure out
how to grow good tomatoes in my garden. I can't
even get along with my neighbor. But I'm supposed to
like have the right ideas about international policies. People think
they know a lot more than they do. I think
we should accept this sort of general skepticism and tolerance.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Yeah, that is philosopher Steven Asmad also speaking with philosopher
Agnes Callard. We will be right back with more of
the middle. This is the middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson. This
hour we're focusing on the philosophical middle and how that
can improve our politics and our daily lives. I'm joined
by Steven Asthma, professor philosophy at Columbia College, Chicago, and
Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
So, Agnes, your book is called.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Open Socrates, The Case for a Philosophical Life. What does
it mean to live a philosophical life in the modern
context and how do we do that?
Speaker 6 (31:48):
It's living your life as though you don't know how
to live it, as though the project of your life
we're trying to find we're to find out. So your
life has lived in pursuit of knowledge. The way you
pursue knowledge is by talking to people, because since you
don't already know how to do it, you can't guide yourself.
And it's a specific kind of conversation. It's the kind
(32:10):
of conversation where when you say something wrong, the other
person corrects you.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
But I think of like, as you get older in life,
you want to know how to live your life. You
want to say, Okay, I've got this down, I've figured
this out, I'm doing this properly.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
This works for me. You're saying that we should continue
to question.
Speaker 6 (32:28):
I think it's going to be this is going to
be a really hard sell to old people, and they're
probably not going to embrace it. But if I get
the young people, they might stick with it.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Stephen, what do you think?
Speaker 1 (32:40):
How do you How much do you incorporate philosophy into
your daily life?
Speaker 5 (32:45):
A lot? I hope I try to do what Agnes
is describing, although I also think philosophers from the time
of Socrates down to the present oftentimes are very much
in their head, and they're very much about the language
and the conversation. So for them, the meaning of life
is in this conversation and the tradition really embraces this.
(33:06):
It's a very you know, it's a very conversational tradition.
But I myself want to remember the body, and I
think the body is extremely important in living the good life.
And there's been a sort of movement in the last
i don't know, ten twenty years called embodied cognition, and
a lot of the way we understand the world is
through the body, through making art, through things like dance,
(33:29):
through investigation with the body, and a lot of these
things can't be expressed directly into conversation. They don't submit
to language very well. Language is sort of like just
the top part of how the mind works. But there's
all this mammalian problem solving ability that we have. And
I think somebody like Aristotle understood this, so he said,
(33:50):
you can't just talk your way to the good or
the right. You have to develop habits. So there's kind
of behaviors that you have to sculpt and model and
always be changed. Your habits informed by conversation and discourse.
But I think also just creativity and doing something creative
is also a kind of meditation, and it's a kind
(34:12):
of philosophy. But a lot of philosophers haven't really noticed that.
They'll sort of dismiss that as a kind of esthetic exercise,
not a way of gaining knowledge or investigating the world.
But anybody who does art knows that they are also
investigating the world.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Ages have you lived by what you write about in
your book Living a Philosophical Life?
Speaker 8 (34:32):
I try to.
Speaker 6 (34:33):
I think it's very demanding, and you can't do it
all the time. And I agree that sometimes the body
calls you to pay attention to it. And maybe I
just view those moments slightly differently from Steven. I don't
embrace them like I wish my body would shut up
so I could do philosophy.
Speaker 8 (34:49):
But I can't make it shut up all the time.
Speaker 6 (34:53):
And so there's just the way that I see it
is we live lives of leisure relative to almost everyone
in human history that is quite wealthy. Everyone who's listening
to this show has the leisure to listen to it,
and we have the leisure to be here and to
sit and talk. And philosophy is an answer to the
question what do you do with leisure? That is, what
do you do when you're not constantly worrying about how
(35:16):
you're going to survive? When you freed up some time
and Socrates. Socrates's answer, I agree with Steve, it's different
from Aristotles. But Socrates's answer to that question was, well,
maybe you use that time to figure out what.
Speaker 8 (35:27):
You actually should be doing, how you actually should be living.
Speaker 6 (35:30):
And that means that I guess in a concrete way
and everyday interactions. What you do is when someone is
talking to you, you listen for the criticism.
Speaker 8 (35:40):
In what they're saying.
Speaker 6 (35:41):
People often present a criticism in a way where you
could hear it as like just an observation or just
a right, but you intentionally hear it as a criticism
and you welcome it. You respond joyfully to that. And
when you do that, you're kind of giving a signal
that you're to the other person that you're open to inquiry.
And I think so you thought that's the most fundamental
(36:01):
way in which human beings can help each other is
we can help each other.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Think Stevid, do you think we do that enough that
we are open to that kind of criticism, or even
that we think philosophical that we use our free time
to think about things as opposed to just doom scrolling
on Instagram or something.
Speaker 5 (36:20):
Like Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, as
Agnes was describing it, I was just realizing how hard
it is to do what she is suggesting. But it's there.
It's the core idea in Socratic method, which is you
can't have a deep conversation unless the participants are willing
to engage in something that might damage the egos lightly
in the conversation. I would say our Western tradition. I've
(36:42):
lived on and off in China and taught in China,
and the Confucian tradition, which I have a great respect for,
does not like questioning authority. It's not the model. They say,
like the authority is contained in the elder son and
the father, and it's this sort of top down authoritarian
so you don't challenge authority and you master wisdom by
(37:06):
understanding the tradition you're in. But in the West, from Socrates,
it's we're taught to challenge authority and that authority has
to justify itself through some kind of rational explanation. And
even though I think today we don't do that very much,
it's very much part of the Western tradition. We could
get back to it, but at the moment, the media
is not Foster. I mean, this show is a good
(37:26):
example of how it could be done, but it's a
rarity in the media to find a conversation like.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
This, Agnes.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
When you think about the strands of philosophy, the big
ones existentialism, nihilism, hedonism, stoicism, et cetera, which one do
you think is most prevalent in the United States. We
just heard about China and Confucianism, but what about in
the US.
Speaker 6 (37:48):
I think what's most prevalent is confusion and inconsistency. I
think people will be hedonist in one moment when that
serves them, and they'll pull up stoicism when that makes
them feel good about them. They will vacillate between all
of these positions. And they mean Socrates thought the basic
problem with.
Speaker 8 (38:05):
People was not that they were stubborn. It's not that
they're dogmatic.
Speaker 6 (38:08):
It's that they're unable to stick to any claim for
more than like thirty seconds, and that what they will
do is they will cover their vacillation over with language.
So you know, if I don't like the fact that
you are changing yourself and amending what you do to
please other people, I'll call you a conformist. If I
(38:31):
like it, I'll call you cooperative. I'll just choose the
word based on whether I like it or I don't
like it. You know, I'll call it freedom of speech
when I like it, and I might and I'll call
it by a variety of bad names when I don't
like that kind of speech. And it's not there is
no position that I'm consistently adopting. I am at the
mercy of my whims and I'm at the mercy of
(38:54):
what I can say to please the people around me.
Speaker 9 (38:57):
Uh.
Speaker 6 (38:57):
And that's just totally inconsistent. It's there's no theory that
underwrites it all all along, from beginning to end.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Stephen, Agnes loves when you criticize and disagree with her.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
So do you agree with what she just said?
Speaker 5 (39:12):
Well, here, I have to say. This is what's funny
about what Agnes just said is that it sort of
describes how Plato talks about the about democracy that in
this you know, in the order of states, like the
one that's just next to being the worst, tyranny is
the worst, but the second to that he thinks is democracy.
(39:35):
Because of the problem Agne has talked about. Since everybody
they this is basically what you know, the Federalists were
sort of arguing this too. They think everybody is Homer Simpson.
So like you see something shiny and you run in
that direction, and then you should see something over here
and you run in that direction. So it is a problem.
I think it depends on how you know pessimistic you
(39:58):
are as to how big the problem is. But I
think it's true that human beings are easily manipulated and
easily distracted. And now we have these phones and these
social networking sites that are really keeping us completely distracted,
and it keeps us from having a kind of pro
like a program or a purpose what Aristotle will call
a teleological orientation in life. And the existentialists talked about
(40:22):
this too. We are just buffeting back and forth from
one stimulus to another too, and that's sort of how
modern life is. So you almost have to do things
like have a media diet, stop for like a week,
get offline. As the kids say, go touch grass. You know,
you have to have these like measures by which you
(40:44):
can can reconnect to real life instead of just being
bounced around because of this these appetites that we have.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Do the kids say, go touch grass?
Speaker 5 (40:54):
Yeah, that's what my Son says. He says, go touch
grass means you've been online too long. You need to
go out.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Something that you write about, Agnes is the importance of
symbols in our understanding and judgment of people, like a
red Maga hat, for example, or a Pride flag. How
does that fit into what we're talking about here.
Speaker 6 (41:16):
I think symbols are like automated thinking. I think that
we become a little symbol mad sometimes. That is, we
want to automate more and more, and especially as we
get involved in larger and larger conversations with more and
more voices, and there's just so many things going on,
we kind of want these like anchor points. And so
(41:39):
what happens is that a person can become a symbol
like Trump right, or a Maga hat, a hat which
normally you could respond all different ways to a hat, right,
But if it's a Maga hat, there's kind of only
two responses you're allowed to have. That's automated responses. Even
a concept like abortion right, you might have thought, well,
there are many different responses you could have to the
(42:00):
concept of abortion. No, we've automated it so that there's
two that you're allowed to have. So I think that
this kind of symbolic thinking, the heavy use of symbols
and using people and ideas and sentences, freedom of speech,
all those things as symbols, that's a kind of way
to create some stability in a discourse, but it heavily
(42:22):
inhibits our ability to think because we don't want to
automate all those responses.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Is it new, I don't know.
Speaker 6 (42:30):
I do seem to see more of it over time,
so I suspect that it is increasing, And you would
sort of predict that it would increase as we get
this kind of communicative mayhem that we don't know how
to sort out.
Speaker 5 (42:45):
I would argue that it's actually quite old too. I
think it is like ramped up now more than ever.
But I think the way that an image gets right
at your emotional you know, lexicon almost faster than language does,
I think it's quite old. Like there's always been this
hostility towards icon iconography in the you know, Jewish and
(43:08):
Muslim tradition and even in the Christian tradition. Even in science,
people were afraid of images because they tilted you one
way because of your emotions, and it could be the
wrong way. But it is it's sort of stronger than
ever at the moment with memess meme culture.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
And you think that that's just because we want to
simplify an otherwise very complicated world. We're trying to make
it easier for us to digest and understand.
Speaker 6 (43:36):
Basically, yes, and the tools that we might otherwise use
if that world weren't coming at us in such a
weird medium, namely like conversation is not available, so we've
got to use something else.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
So, Stephen, if our listeners are hearing this and they
say I want to take a more philosophical approach to
my life, what would you suggest that they do.
Speaker 5 (44:02):
Sort Of some obvious stuff would be think more critically
about what you're consuming. Everybody sort of knows that, but
it would be really valuable for people to really study
a little logic. You can learn a lot of informal
logic anywhere, like YouTube anywhere, but you can start to
see what at least fallacies are. And if you know
what some of the classic fallacies are, slippery slope fallacy,
(44:24):
a false dichotomy fallacy, you can start to spot them
in all the media that you're consuming, and that gives
you just a little bit of distance on what you're consuming,
and that's always a good thing from the philosophical point
of view, but it's also this kind of evaluation of
your own thinking. And again I'm very influenced by people
like David Hume and the skeptics of that tradition, which
(44:46):
said that you can't get rid of the emotions. They're
oftentimes going to be leading you, but you can educate
them so that they don't give into your worst tendencies.
It's very easy, for example, to wind somebody up with fear,
but there's many other emotions that the media could be
working with and that we could be working with, like
the feeling of wonder or the sublime. That's something you
(45:09):
can inculcate in your own life by just trying to
focus on it rather than doom scrolling fear all the time.
But you have to make a conscious decision to do that.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Agus what do you think what can people do to
take a more philosophical approach to their lives.
Speaker 6 (45:21):
I'm much more skeptical about our ability to cure ourselves.
My inclination is to say that, yes, it may be
good to do less doom scrolling or learn some logic,
but the thing that's really going to get inside your
head and reshape the way you think about something is
probably going to.
Speaker 8 (45:41):
Be another person if you let them in.
Speaker 6 (45:44):
I guess an alternative thought is just a kind of
reorientation towards the people around you, that they're a kind
of incredible resource that you're under using.
Speaker 8 (45:53):
The people around you have.
Speaker 6 (45:54):
All sorts of thoughts about the ways you go wrong,
and they're scared to tell you them because they're scared
you'll hate them if they do that. If you can
somehow create a new motive interaction where you make it
clear that you're going to be grateful, there's a lot
you could learn.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
And Stephen, let me ask you from the other side here.
There may be people that listen to this and say,
why are you talking about this? Why aren't you talking
about what's happening right now? This is so overly intellectual.
What do you say to people who feel that philosophy
is not connected to our modern lives.
Speaker 5 (46:25):
Well, that's kind of an American tradition, isn't it, the
dismissal of the intellectual. The only philosophy that America produced
as a sort of identifiable movement is called pragmatism, which
tells you something about the American psyche. I guess I
feel like this is wrong headed, and that you can't
(46:47):
solve even practical problems without a little bit of philosophy,
and philosophy is extremely valuable in all fields, whether it
be public policy, policing, policy, legal questions. Those are places
where philosophers actually shine. If you look at people who
study philosophy, kids who come out with a BA or
(47:08):
they go on to a master's, they do well in
any areas that require sort of conceptual analysis. So some
people will talk about philosophy as being a kind of
conceptual engineering, and that works really well in many disciplines,
including our most pressing social problems. So I just think
there's a kind of anti intellectualism about philosophy, which I
(47:29):
just think comes from a kind of naivete and I'm
not a fan of it. What can I say?
Speaker 1 (47:36):
I'm sure, I'm sure, Agnes. Let me just finally come
back to Socrates. Your book is about Socrates. How you've
studied Socrates extensively. He was sentenced to death because of
his beliefs. Are you worried at all as people worry
about sort of the freedom of speech right now in
this country about not maybe people philosophers being sentenced to death,
(47:56):
but just pulling back of the freedom people have to
speak out, think what they think, say what they think.
Speaker 6 (48:04):
I guess we're a lot more free than Socrates was
and then the people in Socrates's world were, because we
have protections that didn't exist, and yet we still.
Speaker 8 (48:17):
Don't do it.
Speaker 6 (48:18):
So I feel like I don't take intellectualism as an insult.
I'm an intellectualist. I believe that the highest thing we
can do with our lives is to engage intellectual pursuits,
and it's, you know, a great privilege to be able
to spend any of your time doing that, but that
we recoil from it and we're terrified of it, and
(48:39):
we make it clear to the people around us. Don't
go there or I might react poorly. So yes, I'm
very worried about the fact that we don't make use
of the freedom that Socrates didn't even really have, and
he still made use of it. But I'm not sure
that our current political situation is that we can blame
(49:00):
are cowardice on that.
Speaker 8 (49:02):
I think it runs deeper.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
That is.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Her new book is called Open Socrates, The Case for
a Philosophical Life, and Steven Asthma is professor of philosophy
at Columbia College Chicago and co host of the Chin
Wag podcast. So interesting to talk to both of you.
Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, and
don't forget. The Middle is available as a podcast in
(49:25):
partnership with iHeart Podcasts on the iHeart Apple, where you
listen to podcasts including our weekly podcast Extra One Thing
Trump Did and next week we'll be back here live
talking about the challenges that Generation Z faces. So gen
Z listeners, get your comments ready. As always, you can
call in at eight four four four Middle that's eight
four four four six four three three five three, or
write to us at Listen to the Middle dot com.
(49:47):
The Middle is brought to you by long Nook Media,
distributed by Illinois Public Media in Urbana, Illinois, and produced
by Harrison Patino, Danny, Alexander Samburmustas, John barth, Ana Kadeshler,
and Brandon Condritz.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
Our technical director is Steve Mork.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
Thanks to our satellite radio listeners, our podcast audience, and
the hundreds of public radio stations making it possible for
people across the country to listen to the middle I'm
Jeremy Hobson, and i'll talk to you next week.
Host
Jeremy Hobson
Popular Podcasts
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com