November 27, 2025 • 50 mins
On this encore 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
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to a special edition of the Middle. I'm Jeremy
Hobson and it is great to have you with us.
Happy Thanksgiving. And if you're a regular listener to this show,
you've heard me say that we're about bringing the voices
of Americans in the geographic, political, and philosophical middle into
the national conversation. Well, this hour, as we dip into
(00:22):
our archives, we're going to focus on that last one,
the philosophical middle.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
What is it? What does it mean?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Well, there's the Middle Way in Buddhism, there's Aristotle's Golden Mean,
and there are other components of philosophical thought that urge
people to avoid the extremes and find compromise. We're going
to talk about that and more with two philosophers this hour.
But first, last week on the show, we talked to
the host of the Last Invention podcast to talk about
excitement and fears when it comes to artificial intelligence. Here's
(00:51):
some of what we got on our voicemail after the show.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
My name is Pamela Taylor. I'm callin from Houston, Texas.
I'm concerned about AI mainly because workers, you know, if
people are going to be put out of work and
not able to find another job. What's going to happen
down the line when you don't have people able to
find jobs because they're being replaced by AI. Yeah, I
(01:14):
think it's going to be mass unemployment.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
Hey, this is Josh from Columbia, South Carolina. Humanity whenever
it has to face an existential threat, like say World
War two, that sort of devastation unites people. And I
think with an existential threat, if we see it through AI,
it's going to unite humanity in order to face that.
I think we do better with that sort of adversity
(01:37):
as a human race.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
My name is Carol. I'm calling from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I think, hey,
I is already pretty much leveraged itself. I think it's
letting us think that we're still in control.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
App or wherever you look to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
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 of Chicago.
Her new book is called Open Socrates, The Case for
a Philosophical Life.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Agnes Collard welcome, thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
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 (02:30):
Stephen, welcome to you, Thanks.
Speaker 6 (02:32):
For having me.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Well, let me first ask each of you how you
would describe the philosophical middle.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Agnes, I'll start with you.
Speaker 7 (02:40):
So 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, philosophy fers who are
(03:01):
skeptics about basically anything you can possibly 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
(03:24):
occupy many different kinds of extremes.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Well, how do they do that? Where do they find
the middle?
Speaker 7 (03:30):
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 (03:39):
Stephen, what do you think? Yeah?
Speaker 8 (03:41):
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 or and a kind of
worry about extreme emotions and extreme beliefs. They felt that
(04:04):
if you didn't sort of control 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
(04:26):
of 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.
Speaker 6 (04:45):
So a lot of them saw.
Speaker 8 (04:46):
The moderation in the middle Way as the kind of
life preserver, the raft that you could hold on to.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
They recognize that their positions were extreme, even though they
had them well.
Speaker 8 (04:57):
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, then you
(05:21):
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 overly dramatic passions.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
So taming the passion is important. Yeah.
Speaker 8 (05:46):
The Buddha, the historical Buddha, Sidhartha 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,
into gentry. And then he thought he realized that everybody
suffers from age and disease and disappointments, and so he
(06:09):
leaves this wealthy 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 then he resolves, Okay,
(06:32):
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 also in terms of
(06:54):
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 say, here the Buddha.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Maybe we should change the logo of the show, Agnes,
what about what about the golden mean from Aristotle?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
What can you just tell us briefly about that? What
is that?
Speaker 7 (07:14):
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
(07:34):
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
(07:58):
and his descendants, and certainly for on 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 you have
(08:20):
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 huge amount of faith in the power of reason,
and they were in that way extremists about that claim.
(08:40):
That is, they didn't think you'd be able to find
the middle way except in except by understanding it.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
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, less
(09:06):
with a common set of facts. Do you agree with
that or what do you think is going on in
our society right now?
Speaker 7 (09:11):
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
(09:32):
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
(09:52):
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, 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 your
(10:14):
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
(10:35):
of a situation where people use the fact that they
have very different vantage points 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
(10:56):
getting at the beginning. It's hard to know which aspect
of that TOMA size. Is it really bad because we're
failing to have them, 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,
(11:17):
and then all we hear is a bunch of loud voices.
But I find it hard to assess that situation.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
You say we've been the beneficiaries. I guess in broad strokes.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
We have benefited from technology, but in some ways you
could say we are the victims.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Of this value. We're the recipients, right, We're the recipients.
Speaker 7 (11:33):
We're the recipients of a bunch of technology. The jury
is still out as to how we choose.
Speaker 5 (11:38):
To use it.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
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 (11:53):
Love is ways a treat is foolish in this world
which is getting more and more closely interconnected.
Speaker 10 (12:05):
We have to learn to tolerate each other. We have
to learn to put up with the fact that some
people say things that we 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
(12:26):
kind of charity and kind of tolerance which is absolutely
vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Bertian Russell, whose English is so proper he makes King
Charles sound like a commoner, stay with us. More about
the philosophical midle coming up, This is the Middle. I'm
Jeremy Hobbson 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,
(12:58):
and Steven Asthma, Professor philosop be at Columbia College Chicago. Stephen,
you've written about Donald Trump and trump Ism 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 6 (13:15):
Oh?
Speaker 8 (13:16):
God, okay, may need several more shows for visit. 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
(13:37):
in 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
(13:59):
a class straw man, I'm sorry, strong man, which might
be a straw man as well, but 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 kimer Rousian after the civil war, people
(14:21):
were willing to hand over a lot of their freedoms
to the Prime Minister Hunsen, and he has held power.
Speaker 6 (14:26):
There for over thirty years.
Speaker 8 (14:28):
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, also hijacks human nature.
So we have an outrage media that hijacks the human
(14:49):
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. You're either with
us or you're against us. Because it's not just that
the media is out to get us, they're just simply
hijacking a human system of attention, and human beings evolved
(15:11):
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 (15:21):
Well, and Agnes.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
It kind of gets to what you were saying a
moment ago about sort of having such certainty about your position.
Speaker 7 (15:27):
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.
(15:51):
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
the There's a dialogue in which Socrates has 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
(16:13):
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. We just most of us
can't get it. 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
(16:35):
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, 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.
(16:56):
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 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
(17:18):
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 I'm sure
I could. 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
(17:40):
where there are moral claims and you're wrong about them,
then you might be in a very bad way and
be unaware of it. That's what Socrates was worried about.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
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 8 (18:02):
I thought you were asking about 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 outsized power, and as
(18:24):
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 like a
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.
(18:45):
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
(19:06):
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.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Are going to crucify me.
Speaker 8 (19:29):
And that's a common problem in the academy where it's
dominated by the left.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Was the world of philosophy Agnes touched by the kind
of cancel culture that occurred a few years ago.
Speaker 7 (19:43):
I think touched as an understatement. 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. That in so far as you
(20:04):
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 academia, then
at least it's not gonna be true for all of philosophy,
but the parts of philosophy that kind of touch on politics,
so political philosophy or ethics or whatever there is, there
(20:25):
is going to be this kind of deep sensitivity to
having your examples come out on the right side. 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 like
(20:49):
you talk.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
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 6 (21:05):
That's sad, Really.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
It is sad. It is sad.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
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 8 (21:27):
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
(21:51):
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. Taches you a
kind of what philosophers would call sort of an epistemic humility,
or 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 should
(22:14):
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 you do that,
(22:35):
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.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
Say or think.
Speaker 8 (22:54):
But healthy skepticism is just sort of.
Speaker 6 (22:57):
I don't know, leavening your views with a little humility.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
I was lucky enough during college to take a class
with Ellie Weisel, the 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 (23:18):
Line of agnes.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
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 going to stand firm in my beliefs when I
need to. Is it possible to do both of those
things at the same time.
Speaker 7 (23:37):
To both compromise and stand firm with respect to the
very same things. No, I don't think so, Huh. I
actually think there's a real problem here, like that Wesel
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 and be even better if they
found it. Now, the way I think we're supposed to
(23:59):
read that is, don't trust those who claim they found it.
Right if they actually found it, yes, you should trust them.
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.
I don't think compromise is the end point is the goal.
(24:22):
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
(24:42):
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
(25:04):
to say is your opinion is valid. Right, So they're
they're scared to disagree. They want to just tolerate. And
I think that that can lead us. It can 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 that it has to serve a higher
(25:26):
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 because it could
be that I'm the one who's wrong and they're gonna
(25:48):
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 would be the wrong attitude. But it's that
we're in the middle of a journey, not at the
end of it.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
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
(26:20):
reinforce the beliefs that they already had.
Speaker 8 (26:23):
Yeah, that's a common problem, and I think it's we
have to change that view about.
Speaker 6 (26:31):
Beliefs.
Speaker 8 (26:32):
Really and about I suppose even about the ideas about
the truth. It's very common for family members to even
break apart just because they disagree about politics.
Speaker 6 (26:41):
And when I was a kid, nobody did that.
Speaker 8 (26:43):
You would disagree about politics, 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
(27:05):
hardcore Republican and a 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 on 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
(27:29):
that they act as a wonderful 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.
(27:49):
And I'm sort of more of a conservative and think
that actually what happens is 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
(28:11):
it's going to be a kind of kumbaya thing ultimately
when we get there. But ultimately, 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. 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
(28:34):
rather politics is about trying to balance and find coexistence
between goods. But ultimately there's friction and contest and conflict ages.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
What do you think about that.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
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 7 (28:56):
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 an interesting conversation about that. So we're repeating
the problem by thinking about it that way. But I
think I think it's interesting this this Berlin thought, This
thought that conflicts of interest are final or something that's
(29:17):
really very deeply different from the way people thought in
the ancient world, where they believed in the unity of
the virtues. So this is Plaano, this is Aristotle. They
all believed that, like you know, it's not going to
end up that the courageous thing to do is an
unjust thing to do. 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
(29:38):
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 conflicts of interests are very
much endemic to ignorant creatures. So that's what we are.
(29:59):
It's not that understand the good, but it's conflicting with itself.
It's that our understanding we're messed up, and our understanding
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 (30:15):
Well, on that note, let's take another listen to the
British philosopher Brian McGee talking about the Enlightenment thinker John Locke.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Here he is talking about that one.
Speaker 6 (30:26):
Thing that I admire.
Speaker 11 (30:27):
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 justified in imposing our opinions
(30:50):
on others by force.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Stephen, as we go to break what do you make
of that?
Speaker 6 (30:55):
Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 8 (30:57):
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 (31:15):
Yeah, that is philosopher Steven Asmad also speaking with philosopher
Agnes Callard.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
We will be right back with more of the middle.
This is the middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
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. So, Agnes, your book is called Open Socrates,
The Case for a Philosophical Life. What does it mean
(31:47):
to live a philosophical life in the modern context? And
how do we do that?
Speaker 7 (31:53):
It's living your life as though you don't know how
to live it, as though the project of your life
trying to find where 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
(32:15):
of conversation where when you say something wrong, the other
person corrects you.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
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 (32:29):
This works for me. You're saying that we should continue
to question.
Speaker 7 (32:33):
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 (32:44):
Stephen, what do you think?
Speaker 1 (32:45):
How do you How much do you incorporate philosophy into
your daily life?
Speaker 6 (32:50):
A lot?
Speaker 8 (32:51):
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. It's a very conversational tradition.
(33:13):
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,
through investigation with the body, and a lot of these
(33:36):
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,
you can't just talk your way to the good or
(33:56):
the right. You have to develop habits. So there's kind
of behaviors that you have to sculpt and model and
always be changing 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
of philosophy. But a lot of philosophers haven't really noticed
(34:18):
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 (34:30):
Ages have you lived by what you write about in
your book Living a Philosophical Life?
Speaker 7 (34:35):
I try to. 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. But I can't
make it shut up all the time. And so there's
(34:56):
just the way that I see it is we live
lives of leisure relative to almost everyone in human history.
That is, we're 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 you're gonna survive?
(35:19):
When you freed up some time and Socrates. Socrates's answer
I agree with, see if it's different from Aristotles. But
Socrates's answer to that question was, well, maybe you use
that time to figure out what you actually should be doing.
And that means that, I guess, in a concrete way,
in everyday interactions, what you do is when someone is
talking to you, you listen for the criticism in what
(35:40):
they're saying. 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 Socrates thought that's the most
(36:00):
fundamental way in which human beings can help each other,
is we can help each other.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Think, Steven, do you think we do that enough that
we are open to that kind of criticism, or even
that we think philosophically that we use our free time
to think about things as opposed to just doom scrolling
on Instagram or something.
Speaker 8 (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
the 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
slightly in the conversation. I would say our Western tradition,
(36:42):
I've 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.
Speaker 6 (36:51):
It's not the model.
Speaker 8 (36:52):
They say, like the authority is contained in the elder
son and the father, and it's this sort of down
authoritarian so you don't challenge authority and you master wisdom
by 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.
(37:16):
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 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 7 (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 themselves. They will vacillate between all
of these positions, and they you know, Socrates thought the
basic problem with people was not that they were stubborn.
It's not that they're dogmatic. It's that they're unable to
(38:10):
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 like it, I'll call you cooperative.
(38:32):
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
(38:53):
mercy of what I can say to please the people
around me. Uh 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 6 (39:12):
Well, here, I have to say.
Speaker 8 (39:14):
This is what's funny about what ads 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 because of the problem Agne
(39:36):
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.
Speaker 6 (39:52):
So it is a problem.
Speaker 8 (39:54):
I think it depends on how you know pessimistic you
are as to how big the problem is.
Speaker 6 (40:00):
But I think it's true that human beings.
Speaker 8 (40:01):
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 this too. We are just buffeting
(40:24):
back and forth from one stimulus to another, 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 can can reconnect to real life
(40:47):
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 8 (40:54):
Yeah, that's what my son says. He says, go touch
grass means you've been online too long.
Speaker 6 (40:58):
You need to go out.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Sure, 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 7 (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 7 (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 8 (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 memes 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 7 (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, Steven, 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 8 (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.
Speaker 6 (44:38):
Your own thinking.
Speaker 8 (44:39):
And again I'm very influenced by people like David Hume
and the skeptics of that tradition, which 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
(45:01):
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 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 7 (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 be another person if you let them in.
(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. The people around
you have 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
(46:06):
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 8 (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.
Speaker 6 (46:39):
The American psyche.
Speaker 8 (46:41):
I guess I feel like this is wrong headed and
that you can't 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
(47:05):
people who study philosophy, kids who come out with a
BA or 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.
Speaker 6 (47:24):
So I just think there's a.
Speaker 8 (47:26):
Kind of anti intellectualism about philosophy, which I just think
comes from a.
Speaker 6 (47:31):
Kind of naivete and I'm not a fan of it.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
What can I say, I'm sure, I'm sure, Agnes.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
Let me just finally come back to Socrates, and your
book is about Socrates. 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, but just pulling back
(47:58):
of the freedom people have to.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
Speak out, think what they think, say what they think.
Speaker 7 (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 don't
do it. So I feel like I don't take intellectualism
as an insult. I'm an intellectualist. I believe that the
(48:25):
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 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
(48:49):
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 are cowardice on that. I think it runs deeper.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
That is.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Agnus Callard, a professor a 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 to
(49:25):
subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and a bonus you'll
get our weekly podcast extra One Thing Trump did only
on the Middle podcast feed, and next week we'll be
back here live talking about the state of your economy.
That's tariffs and prices and everything else that's going on.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
We want to know what it looks like where you are.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
As always, you can call in at eight four four
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Speaker 2 (49:52):
Up for our free weekly newsletter.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
The Middle is brought to you by Long Nook Media,
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for people across the country to listen to the Middle
(50:16):
Happy Thanksgiving. I'm Jeremy Hobson. I will talk to you
next week.
Welcome to a special edition of the Middle. I'm Jeremy
Hobson and it is great to have you with us.
Happy Thanksgiving. And if you're a regular listener to this show,
you've heard me say that we're about bringing the voices
of Americans in the geographic, political, and philosophical middle into
the national conversation. Well, this hour, as we dip into
(00:22):
our archives, we're going to focus on that last one,
the philosophical middle.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
What is it? What does it mean?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Well, there's the Middle Way in Buddhism, there's Aristotle's Golden Mean,
and there are other components of philosophical thought that urge
people to avoid the extremes and find compromise. We're going
to talk about that and more with two philosophers this hour.
But first, last week on the show, we talked to
the host of the Last Invention podcast to talk about
excitement and fears when it comes to artificial intelligence. Here's
(00:51):
some of what we got on our voicemail after the show.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
My name is Pamela Taylor. I'm callin from Houston, Texas.
I'm concerned about AI mainly because workers, you know, if
people are going to be put out of work and
not able to find another job. What's going to happen
down the line when you don't have people able to
find jobs because they're being replaced by AI. Yeah, I
(01:14):
think it's going to be mass unemployment.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
Hey, this is Josh from Columbia, South Carolina. Humanity whenever
it has to face an existential threat, like say World
War two, that sort of devastation unites people. And I
think with an existential threat, if we see it through AI,
it's going to unite humanity in order to face that.
I think we do better with that sort of adversity
(01:37):
as a human race.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
My name is Carol. I'm calling from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I think, hey,
I is already pretty much leveraged itself. I think it's
letting us think that we're still in control.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
App or wherever you look to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
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 of Chicago.
Her new book is called Open Socrates, The Case for
a Philosophical Life.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Agnes Collard welcome, thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
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 (02:30):
Stephen, welcome to you, Thanks.
Speaker 6 (02:32):
For having me.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Well, let me first ask each of you how you
would describe the philosophical middle.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Agnes, I'll start with you.
Speaker 7 (02:40):
So 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, philosophy fers who are
(03:01):
skeptics about basically anything you can possibly 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
(03:24):
occupy many different kinds of extremes.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Well, how do they do that? Where do they find
the middle?
Speaker 7 (03:30):
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 (03:39):
Stephen, what do you think? Yeah?
Speaker 8 (03:41):
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 or and a kind of
worry about extreme emotions and extreme beliefs. They felt that
(04:04):
if you didn't sort of control 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
(04:26):
of 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.
Speaker 6 (04:45):
So a lot of them saw.
Speaker 8 (04:46):
The moderation in the middle Way as the kind of
life preserver, the raft that you could hold on to.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
They recognize that their positions were extreme, even though they
had them well.
Speaker 8 (04:57):
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, then you
(05:21):
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 overly dramatic passions.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
So taming the passion is important. Yeah.
Speaker 8 (05:46):
The Buddha, the historical Buddha, Sidhartha 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,
into gentry. And then he thought he realized that everybody
suffers from age and disease and disappointments, and so he
(06:09):
leaves this wealthy 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 then he resolves, Okay,
(06:32):
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 also in terms of
(06:54):
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 say, here the Buddha.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Maybe we should change the logo of the show, Agnes,
what about what about the golden mean from Aristotle?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
What can you just tell us briefly about that? What
is that?
Speaker 7 (07:14):
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
(07:34):
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
(07:58):
and his descendants, and certainly for on 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 you have
(08:20):
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 huge amount of faith in the power of reason,
and they were in that way extremists about that claim.
(08:40):
That is, they didn't think you'd be able to find
the middle way except in except by understanding it.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
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, less
(09:06):
with a common set of facts. Do you agree with
that or what do you think is going on in
our society right now?
Speaker 7 (09:11):
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
(09:32):
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
(09:52):
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, 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 your
(10:14):
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
(10:35):
of a situation where people use the fact that they
have very different vantage points 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
(10:56):
getting at the beginning. It's hard to know which aspect
of that TOMA size. Is it really bad because we're
failing to have them, 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,
(11:17):
and then all we hear is a bunch of loud voices.
But I find it hard to assess that situation.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
You say we've been the beneficiaries. I guess in broad strokes.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
We have benefited from technology, but in some ways you
could say we are the victims.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Of this value. We're the recipients, right, We're the recipients.
Speaker 7 (11:33):
We're the recipients of a bunch of technology. The jury
is still out as to how we choose.
Speaker 5 (11:38):
To use it.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
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 (11:53):
Love is ways a treat is foolish in this world
which is getting more and more closely interconnected.
Speaker 10 (12:05):
We have to learn to tolerate each other. We have
to learn to put up with the fact that some
people say things that we 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
(12:26):
kind of charity and kind of tolerance which is absolutely
vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Bertian Russell, whose English is so proper he makes King
Charles sound like a commoner, stay with us. More about
the philosophical midle coming up, This is the Middle. I'm
Jeremy Hobbson 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,
(12:58):
and Steven Asthma, Professor philosop be at Columbia College Chicago. Stephen,
you've written about Donald Trump and trump Ism 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 6 (13:15):
Oh?
Speaker 8 (13:16):
God, okay, may need several more shows for visit. 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
(13:37):
in 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
(13:59):
a class straw man, I'm sorry, strong man, which might
be a straw man as well, but 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 kimer Rousian after the civil war, people
(14:21):
were willing to hand over a lot of their freedoms
to the Prime Minister Hunsen, and he has held power.
Speaker 6 (14:26):
There for over thirty years.
Speaker 8 (14:28):
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, also hijacks human nature.
So we have an outrage media that hijacks the human
(14:49):
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. You're either with
us or you're against us. Because it's not just that
the media is out to get us, they're just simply
hijacking a human system of attention, and human beings evolved
(15:11):
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 (15:21):
Well, and Agnes.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
It kind of gets to what you were saying a
moment ago about sort of having such certainty about your position.
Speaker 7 (15:27):
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.
(15:51):
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
the There's a dialogue in which Socrates has 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
(16:13):
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. We just most of us
can't get it. 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
(16:35):
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, 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.
(16:56):
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 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
(17:18):
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 I'm sure
I could. 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
(17:40):
where there are moral claims and you're wrong about them,
then you might be in a very bad way and
be unaware of it. That's what Socrates was worried about.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
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 8 (18:02):
I thought you were asking about 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 outsized power, and as
(18:24):
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 like a
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.
(18:45):
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
(19:06):
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.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Are going to crucify me.
Speaker 8 (19:29):
And that's a common problem in the academy where it's
dominated by the left.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Was the world of philosophy Agnes touched by the kind
of cancel culture that occurred a few years ago.
Speaker 7 (19:43):
I think touched as an understatement. 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. That in so far as you
(20:04):
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 academia, then
at least it's not gonna be true for all of philosophy,
but the parts of philosophy that kind of touch on politics,
so political philosophy or ethics or whatever there is, there
(20:25):
is going to be this kind of deep sensitivity to
having your examples come out on the right side. 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 like
(20:49):
you talk.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
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 6 (21:05):
That's sad, Really.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
It is sad. It is sad.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
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 8 (21:27):
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
(21:51):
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. Taches you a
kind of what philosophers would call sort of an epistemic humility,
or 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 should
(22:14):
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 you do that,
(22:35):
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.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
Say or think.
Speaker 8 (22:54):
But healthy skepticism is just sort of.
Speaker 6 (22:57):
I don't know, leavening your views with a little humility.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
I was lucky enough during college to take a class
with Ellie Weisel, the 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 (23:18):
Line of agnes.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
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 going to stand firm in my beliefs when I
need to. Is it possible to do both of those
things at the same time.
Speaker 7 (23:37):
To both compromise and stand firm with respect to the
very same things. No, I don't think so, Huh. I
actually think there's a real problem here, like that Wesel
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 and be even better if they
found it. Now, the way I think we're supposed to
(23:59):
read that is, don't trust those who claim they found it.
Right if they actually found it, yes, you should trust them.
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.
I don't think compromise is the end point is the goal.
(24:22):
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
(24:42):
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
(25:04):
to say is your opinion is valid. Right, So they're
they're scared to disagree. They want to just tolerate. And
I think that that can lead us. It can 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 that it has to serve a higher
(25:26):
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 because it could
be that I'm the one who's wrong and they're gonna
(25:48):
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 would be the wrong attitude. But it's that
we're in the middle of a journey, not at the
end of it.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
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
(26:20):
reinforce the beliefs that they already had.
Speaker 8 (26:23):
Yeah, that's a common problem, and I think it's we
have to change that view about.
Speaker 6 (26:31):
Beliefs.
Speaker 8 (26:32):
Really and about I suppose even about the ideas about
the truth. It's very common for family members to even
break apart just because they disagree about politics.
Speaker 6 (26:41):
And when I was a kid, nobody did that.
Speaker 8 (26:43):
You would disagree about politics, 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
(27:05):
hardcore Republican and a 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 on 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
(27:29):
that they act as a wonderful 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.
(27:49):
And I'm sort of more of a conservative and think
that actually what happens is 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
(28:11):
it's going to be a kind of kumbaya thing ultimately
when we get there. But ultimately, 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. 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
(28:34):
rather politics is about trying to balance and find coexistence
between goods. But ultimately there's friction and contest and conflict ages.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
What do you think about that.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
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 7 (28:56):
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 an interesting conversation about that. So we're repeating
the problem by thinking about it that way. But I
think I think it's interesting this this Berlin thought, This
thought that conflicts of interest are final or something that's
(29:17):
really very deeply different from the way people thought in
the ancient world, where they believed in the unity of
the virtues. So this is Plaano, this is Aristotle. They
all believed that, like you know, it's not going to
end up that the courageous thing to do is an
unjust thing to do. 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
(29:38):
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 conflicts of interests are very
much endemic to ignorant creatures. So that's what we are.
(29:59):
It's not that understand the good, but it's conflicting with itself.
It's that our understanding we're messed up, and our understanding
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 (30:15):
Well, on that note, let's take another listen to the
British philosopher Brian McGee talking about the Enlightenment thinker John Locke.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Here he is talking about that one.
Speaker 6 (30:26):
Thing that I admire.
Speaker 11 (30:27):
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 justified in imposing our opinions
(30:50):
on others by force.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Stephen, as we go to break what do you make
of that?
Speaker 6 (30:55):
Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 8 (30:57):
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 (31:15):
Yeah, that is philosopher Steven Asmad also speaking with philosopher
Agnes Callard.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
We will be right back with more of the middle.
This is the middle. I'm Jeremy Hobson.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
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. So, Agnes, your book is called Open Socrates,
The Case for a Philosophical Life. What does it mean
(31:47):
to live a philosophical life in the modern context? And
how do we do that?
Speaker 7 (31:53):
It's living your life as though you don't know how
to live it, as though the project of your life
trying to find where 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
(32:15):
of conversation where when you say something wrong, the other
person corrects you.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
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 (32:29):
This works for me. You're saying that we should continue
to question.
Speaker 7 (32:33):
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 (32:44):
Stephen, what do you think?
Speaker 1 (32:45):
How do you How much do you incorporate philosophy into
your daily life?
Speaker 6 (32:50):
A lot?
Speaker 8 (32:51):
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. It's a very conversational tradition.
(33:13):
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,
through investigation with the body, and a lot of these
(33:36):
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,
you can't just talk your way to the good or
(33:56):
the right. You have to develop habits. So there's kind
of behaviors that you have to sculpt and model and
always be changing 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
of philosophy. But a lot of philosophers haven't really noticed
(34:18):
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 (34:30):
Ages have you lived by what you write about in
your book Living a Philosophical Life?
Speaker 7 (34:35):
I try to. 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. But I can't
make it shut up all the time. And so there's
(34:56):
just the way that I see it is we live
lives of leisure relative to almost everyone in human history.
That is, we're 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 you're gonna survive?
(35:19):
When you freed up some time and Socrates. Socrates's answer
I agree with, see if it's different from Aristotles. But
Socrates's answer to that question was, well, maybe you use
that time to figure out what you actually should be doing.
And that means that, I guess, in a concrete way,
in everyday interactions, what you do is when someone is
talking to you, you listen for the criticism in what
(35:40):
they're saying. 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 Socrates thought that's the most
(36:00):
fundamental way in which human beings can help each other,
is we can help each other.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Think, Steven, do you think we do that enough that
we are open to that kind of criticism, or even
that we think philosophically that we use our free time
to think about things as opposed to just doom scrolling
on Instagram or something.
Speaker 8 (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
the 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
slightly in the conversation. I would say our Western tradition,
(36:42):
I've 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.
Speaker 6 (36:51):
It's not the model.
Speaker 8 (36:52):
They say, like the authority is contained in the elder
son and the father, and it's this sort of down
authoritarian so you don't challenge authority and you master wisdom
by 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.
(37:16):
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 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 7 (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 themselves. They will vacillate between all
of these positions, and they you know, Socrates thought the
basic problem with people was not that they were stubborn.
It's not that they're dogmatic. It's that they're unable to
(38:10):
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 like it, I'll call you cooperative.
(38:32):
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
(38:53):
mercy of what I can say to please the people
around me. Uh 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 6 (39:12):
Well, here, I have to say.
Speaker 8 (39:14):
This is what's funny about what ads 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 because of the problem Agne
(39:36):
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.
Speaker 6 (39:52):
So it is a problem.
Speaker 8 (39:54):
I think it depends on how you know pessimistic you
are as to how big the problem is.
Speaker 6 (40:00):
But I think it's true that human beings.
Speaker 8 (40:01):
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 this too. We are just buffeting
(40:24):
back and forth from one stimulus to another, 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 can can reconnect to real life
(40:47):
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 8 (40:54):
Yeah, that's what my son says. He says, go touch
grass means you've been online too long.
Speaker 6 (40:58):
You need to go out.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Sure, 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 7 (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 7 (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 8 (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 memes 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 7 (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, Steven, 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 8 (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.
Speaker 6 (44:38):
Your own thinking.
Speaker 8 (44:39):
And again I'm very influenced by people like David Hume
and the skeptics of that tradition, which 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
(45:01):
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 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 7 (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 be another person if you let them in.
(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. The people around
you have 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
(46:06):
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 8 (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.
Speaker 6 (46:39):
The American psyche.
Speaker 8 (46:41):
I guess I feel like this is wrong headed and
that you can't 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
(47:05):
people who study philosophy, kids who come out with a
BA or 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.
Speaker 6 (47:24):
So I just think there's a.
Speaker 8 (47:26):
Kind of anti intellectualism about philosophy, which I just think
comes from a.
Speaker 6 (47:31):
Kind of naivete and I'm not a fan of it.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
What can I say, I'm sure, I'm sure, Agnes.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
Let me just finally come back to Socrates, and your
book is about Socrates. 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, but just pulling back
(47:58):
of the freedom people have to.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
Speak out, think what they think, say what they think.
Speaker 7 (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 don't
do it. So I feel like I don't take intellectualism
as an insult. I'm an intellectualist. I believe that the
(48:25):
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 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
(48:49):
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 are cowardice on that. I think it runs deeper.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
That is.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Agnus Callard, a professor a 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 to
(49:25):
subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and a bonus you'll
get our weekly podcast extra One Thing Trump did only
on the Middle podcast feed, and next week we'll be
back here live talking about the state of your economy.
That's tariffs and prices and everything else that's going on.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
We want to know what it looks like where you are.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
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 you can reach out at Listen
to the Middle dot com, where you can also sign.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
Up for our free weekly newsletter.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
The Middle is brought to you by Long Nook Media,
distributed by Illinois Public Media in Turbana, Illinois, and produced
by Harrison Patino, Danny Alexander, Sam Burmas, Dawes, John barth On, Akdessler,
and Brandon Condritz. Our technical director is Steve Mork. Thanks
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for people across the country to listen to the Middle
(50:16):
Happy Thanksgiving. I'm Jeremy Hobson. I will talk to you
next week.
Host
Jeremy Hobson
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