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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
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Here it is again.
To die like the thirst-trickened lark close upon the mirage.
Or like the quail, having crossed the sea in the first bushes.
Because it has no more wish to fly.
But not to live on lament.
Like a blinded finch.
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The finch gets a raw deal here. I like finches actually.
In fact, I love every kind of bird known to me.
Even the vial and abrasive blue jay.
Birds are what you get to become if you've lived a virtuous human life
and are reincarnated after death.
Did anyone see that astounding documentary?
No, not March of the Penguins.
That was all right.
It was called Wings of Migration.
Breath-taking.
Especially if you're one of the birds flying halfway across the world twice a year.
And to think that all the birds in our skies across the earth may well be
the descendants of dinosaurs. Think of that.
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My nephew Alex, eight years old, is fascinated by avian life.
And he keeps asking me what my favorite bird is.
And I keep telling him that I don't have a favorite bird
that it depends on the kind of mood I'm in.
On some days, crows fill me with anguish and a sense of helplessness.
As if something that has no business seeing the light of day
had escaped from the depths of the collective unconscious.
On other days, crows seem the noblest and wisest of birds
and I get the feeling that they know something that we don't
and that we would be better off if we did.
Yes, I like the falcons, hawks, and eagles that captivate Alex's imagination.
And I'm especially fond of owls.
But it's hard to explain to him why my ultimate allegiance is to see gulls.
There's nothing particularly beautiful about see gulls, nothing rare or wondrous about them.
And in fact, it's not so much the bird itself that does it for me,
but it's piercing cry.
It's a cry full of desolation, distance, and mystery.
I hear in the gulls, strident call, all the transcendence and craggy harshness of the sea.
And there's something reassuring to me about its quacky marine accents,
which have nothing to do with history.
If I could take one sound on earth with me into the grave,
it would be the cry of the seagull.
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During the month of December, the city of Rome becomes host to hundreds of thousands of starlings
on their late autumn migration to the coasts of Africa.
They swarm across the evening sky and vast roving configurations that take on a boggling life of their own,
gathering around an invisible center and then dispersing,
only to gather again in huge spheres of moving blackness,
an avalanche of wings darkening the sky.
One day I saw a gigantic flock of them, a light on the bare branches of an immense tree near Pazzadilare Publika.
The tree turned into a dense mass of starling foliage and seemed about to become airborne at any moment.
On a very hot afternoon this summer, I saw a swan in the Vila Borgesle bathing itself.
Swans are astounding creatures under any circumstances,
but to see this unreal bird dunk its roco-co-neck in the pond
and then lifted up high in the air to get the water to flow down on its body,
and then straighten itself up and beat its wings several times like it was about to take off into the heavens,
yet all the while staying put.
How can you not believe in God when you see something like that?
I don't mean a providential God who has plans for our salvation or damnation.
I mean a God of the earth, of the elements, a God of form that gives us the miracles of the visible world.
You may be wondering why I'm going on about birds when I have with me in the studio one of America's greatest living philosophers.
That's right, I have with me Richard Rohrte, who joined the Stanford faculty a few years ago,
but besides being one of the greats of contemporary philosophy, he is also an avid bird watcher.
We're going to talk with him about philosophy, politics, and various other things,
but first I would like to ask him about birds.
Dick, welcome to the program. It's an honor to have you on the show.
Thank you, Remmer.
And I know that you're a little bit under the weather today, so I doubly appreciate you're coming on to talk with us.
So, Dick, I gather that you've spotted over a thousand birds in the wild.
What is it about birds that appeals to you?
To some extent, it's just the collectors instinct finding something rare and special.
It works for butterflies, it works for wildflowers, it works for lots of things.
When you see a bird that you've never seen before, that very few people have seen,
there's a special thrill in the way in which we're a collector of rare books.
There's a special thrill in coming across a rare volume in the back of a bookstore.
So, it could have been butterflies equally well as we heard.
When I was young, it was moths and butterflies, actually, I switched to birds.
What is the particular thrill you get when you're in the wild and you do make a spotting like that?
Just how glorious it is to see something of that perfection of form.
It's something you've seen often enough in books, but when you see it in real life, you're impressed all over again with what an extraordinary creature it is.
Do you have any particular highlight point in your bird watching activity?
It's mostly the one and only time that I saw a certain species that I'll probably never see again that sticks in my mind.
When I was about 10, I saw a snowy owl, which I recognized because I had a lot of birds of America.
I'll never see another snowy owl probably.
Were you actually bird watching when you saw it?
Was it a matter of contingency to use one of your pure contingent cure continuous?
Do you have a favorite bird yourself?
Not really.
Well, birds have something to do with philosophy.
It's not why I brought it up. There is, of course, the famous owl of Minerva that Hegel says of philosophy like the owl that comes at the end of history.
The famous winged soul of the platonic myth of returning back to its original homeland.
That's not the kind of philosophy we're going to talk about.
I think you've had an amazing sort of career in philosophy and you have, in some sense, burned a lot of bridges behind you in your development as a philosopher.
And since time is limited, we can't go through the whole career from its beginnings when you went to the University of Chicago and then went on to get a graduate degree at Yale, Ph.D. at Yale.
Your first book, as I understand, is of philosophy in the mirror of nature that came out in 1979.
That book had a huge impact, very controversial.
For our listeners out there who might not know this, what exactly was the big stir all about when it came to philosophy in the mirror of nature?
I think it was a problematic book for a lot of people because it seemed to cast out on the whole idea of analytic philosophy on the value of the movement that had taken place in the Anglophone philosophical world since the days of Bertrand Russell at the beginning of the 20th century.
I hadn't really intended it that way. I had intended it as a celebration of the work of my favorite analytic philosophers, Willard Ben-Arman-Quine and Wilfred Sellers and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
But I wrote about the men a way that suggested that the whole phenomenon of philosophy as analysis of language or philosophy as the study of language was now something we could put behind us.
And people found this shocking because it seemed to cast out on the profession as such. I kept being asked after the book came out, so what is it?
What is left of philosophy? What do you want us philosophers to do now and so on? And I didn't have any good answers to those questions.
Had you spent a long time in analytic philosophy before you turned against it? If that's not too strong a term?
Well, I'd prefer to say before I began having doubts about it. I don't think I ever exactly turned against it. When I went to Princeton as an assistant professor in '61, I didn't know much about analytic philosophy and I had to bring myself up to speed very fast and the course of the '60s learning stuff from my colleagues who had all studied at Harvard or Oxford and knew about stuff that I didn't know about.
I got familiar with a lot of the issues within analytic philosophy and then in my book published at the end of the '70s I raised questions about some of the presuppositions of the work that was being done.
What are the presuppositions exactly which we can dispense with now?
Is it analytic philosophy's ambition to find a language which corresponds to the so-called true nature of reality and to kind of tack on propositions to the world?
Was it this persistent and still persistent assumption that philosophy somehow is in the business of getting right or facts or statements about the world?
No, analytic philosophy began as a reaction against the attempt to say what the true nature of reality was. That was condemned as metaphysics and as undesirable, an impossible enterprise.
The idea was that we, by doing something called analyzing language or explaining confusions created by misuse of language, we would put an end to metaphysics and indeed put an end to all philosophy by dissolving all the philosophical problems.
This never happened, but that was what gave the movement its glimmer.
Well, here, you know, I've been reading this little statement that's more recent on your part of this symposium on living philosophers.
And I find it astounding in 12 pages, a kind of map of what has been taking place in philosophy and what the state of philosophy is nowadays.
And you do begin by distinguishing between analytic philosophy and what you call historicist philosophy. Some others might call it continental philosophy.
And you say that analytic philosophy is still in the business of solving, of problem solving.
And that there are two branches, according to you, one, you call the naturalists and the other, you call the quietest.
If I understand you correctly, the naturalist of the analytic wing believed that there are a core set of problems in the history of philosophy, which have really not changed over time very much.
They go back to Plato, Aristotle in the tradition, problems of pre-will and so forth.
And for them, the task of philosophy is to solve these problems, whereas you distinguish them from the quietest,
whom you say are out to dissolve the problems.
Now you use the word that dissolved before when you were talking about analytic philosophy, but is there this distinction between those who are still out to solve and those who are actually trying to dissolve problems?
Yes, metaphysics was sort of reborn within the bosom of analytic philosophy.
When people had been dissolving problems and exposing what they called conceptual confusions for decades, eventually they got sick of that and they began saying, "No, actually, we want to say what the nature of reality is."
But fortunately, science tells us that it is roughly atoms in the void, that is everything is made up of elementary physical particles.
These are the people whom, in that piece, you referred to, I call naturalists.
The people like me, the quietest are the ones who say there is no such thing as the nature of the world.
Science doesn't tell it to us, nothing tells us to us.
The whole question of what's real and what's apparent is a bad question.
You can ask about a real Rolex and a fake Rolex or a real cream, a non-dairy creamer, but you can't ask about reality in general.
Real only has a sense when it's applied to something specific.
Well, we can get into this issue.
I'm deep sympathy with that.
I also, that's a host of the program, maybe I'll try to ask some of the questions that others would want me to ask of you.
For example, why do you assume that there is no such thing as a reality out there for philosophy as such, which you can get at?
But I think the main problem with metaphysics is that it's a game without rules.
If somebody says the nature of reality is spiritual as the heirs of the German absolute idealists said in the 19th century,
somebody else says no, the nature of reality is to be made up of atoms and void.
How are you supposed to decide a question like that?
When it's a question, a real creamer, non-dairy creamer, we have some criteria to apply.
The trouble with metaphysics is that anybody can say anything and get away with it.
What do you do with the scientific description of the world?
Because I heard you say that even science doesn't give us any more accurate view of so-called reality than anything else.
And here I'm referring to what you're talking here about these analytic problem solvers who are trying to ask questions such as,
is there room in a universe of elementary, physical particles for such things as consciousness, intentionality, moral responsibility, moral value, etc.
And you say that these are location problems.
So what is the location, for example, of value in a world of particles?
And location is just a metaphor, meaning given that really it's all particles, why is it we're talking about non-particles?
And this seems to me a bad question.
And why is that?
Because the only question is how did we come to talk about particles?
How did we come to talk about values?
How did we come to talk about minds?
There are stories, historical narratives, to be told about the emergence of various discourses.
My view is that when you've told the story about how the discourse emerged, you've told everything you've found out everything there is no about the nature of mind, the nature of matter, the nature of God and stuff like that.
There isn't a further question about, yeah, but what are they really?
All that there is to know is the story of how the words are used?
Does that mean that we're trapped within the stories that we tell ourselves?
And that therefore becomes a question of choosing which story appeals to us most in our imagination?
What flatters are our self-image the most?
At what point does storytelling also assume a set of rigorous rules where it doesn't just become mere contrivance, a narrative contrivance?
You can set up rules.
The scientists and the physicists have rules for what counts as an acceptable physical theory.
The mathematicians have rules about what counts as a mathematical demonstration.
Academic art has rules about what counts as a legitimate example of painting or a poetry.
You know, rules you can always construct if you want them.
The philosophers' ideas since Plato has been that there's a sort of set of super rules that enables us to tell bad rules from good rules.
I don't think there's anything like that.
Couldn't the analytic philosopher, the problem solving the naturalist analytic philosopher say, well, we also have our own rules in analytic philosophy about how you go about solving problems?
And these are our rules.
I think the trouble with that response would be that they probably so-called problems of analytic philosophy keep changing with each other.
That is, it's given rise to a literature that goes out of date every ten or twenty years.
So everybody throws themselves into solving the great new problem that professors own, so that Prince Bernard Coe, Berkeley or somewhere, has come up with.
Then they discuss it for ten years, and then nobody can ever remember what the problem was supposed to be, and they go on to the next great new problem that's been discovered by a professor somewhere else.
They're also supposed to be the true problems that philosophers have really had they, but known it, been working on all the time.
But there's never any real justification for the claim that's what people have always worried about.
So when we look at the quietest on this side of the equation, you're comfortable identifying yourself with that group.
So the quietest who want to dissolve certain problems in history of philosophy rather than solve them, is that correct?
Yeah, but it's not an animus against problems generally.
It's an animus against a certain set of problems that have become to my mind, cliche and textbook, and obsolete free will versus determinism, mind and matter, the place of value in a world effect, that kind of thing.
Does the problem of human existence in a world which, as far as we know, there's no way that we can humanize the cosmos as a whole, or that are a specific kind of manner of being in the world seems to be rather exceptional in the order of nature?
Do you find that maybe something like a kind of loneliness that human beings might feel in their very humanity and the alien, the sense of estrangement by virtue of the fact that there are no really, we don't have any immediate cousins in the animal kingdom, there are no intermediate species between the human and our next closest primate relatives that
does the unease of being in the world in our human mode, is that a false problem or is it...
I don't think it's a false problem, but it's a problem for some people and not for other people.
If you don't have some sense of loneliness, you'll probably have no interest in either religion or philosophy.
If you do, you'll probably have some interest in it.
When you go in for either religion or philosophy, that interest may survive, or it may be eclipsed by other things, but it's not a problem that all human beings necessarily have, and the people who never experienced it are not subhuman or clubs, they're just people with different tastes.
Yeah, no, I can understand that, but as Wittgenstein says in the philosophical investigations, the world of the happy is not the world of the unhappy.
And the world of the happy is alive and well, and when one looks at human cultures historically globally speaking, it seems that there's hardly one on earth that has not had a religion of sorts.
There's the secular modern west of the last 200 years, which has created a secularist culture which seems to me better than a previous culture known to humanity.
And do you think that secularist culture has evacuated the role of the religious or the spiritual altogether?
No, I think it's gotten beyond it, or are there...
I think it substituted hope for the human future for hope of getting in contact with another world.
I think we secularists lead, if you like, as spiritual lives as anybody has ever led, but our focus is on what might come to pass here below in the human future rather than in our relation to reality as.
We're going to want to talk about that more, maybe in the second half of the show, but here just to get the maps straight, we talked about analytic philosophy, naturalists and quietists, and then this is juxtaposed to the historicist philosophies, which you also divide into two broadly speaking two different camps, which you call the reformers and the revolutionaries.
And now in your last comment, I think you were articulating a little bit why you're on the reform side.
Can you just summarize a little bit what the distinction is between the reformers and the revolutionaries?
I think of reformers as people like Consort, Mel, John Dewey, Mazai Oberlin, Jurgen Habermas, who think that in the last 200 years since the French Revolution,
human beings in the West pretty much discovered how human life ought to be lived.
It ought to be lived as with as much individual freedom as possible under as democratic a system of government as possible.
The last word on human society, at this point of view, was given by John Stuart Mill and on liberty.
The revolutionaries are the people who say this attempt to create heaven on earth has been a disaster, a failure.
We should see now that something has gone terribly wrong. There is something radically wrong with modernity, radically wrong with Bushwell liberalism, radically wrong with the secular society and so on.
What does that have to do with philosophy specifically? I mean everyone can have an opinion on whether the world is a good place or modernity has been a disaster, whether we're on the right track or whether we need radical revolution.
Why should this be a problem that's specific to philosophy?
I don't think it's specific to philosophy, but a lot of the people who have written best about it are shelved on the philosophy shelves.
People like to name I mentioned a minute ago.
Well, who are the revolutionaries?
Gee-zik, Agam-min, Bud-Yoo, Foucault.
The people who say it's all a sham, we haven't really been making any great progress.
It's all some kind of domination or oppression or something like that.
Bushwell liberalism is somehow a fraud.
Well, let me mention a few more of a guest names in that Nietzsche Heidegger.
Freud?
I don't think Freud counts.
Freud, Freud, I don't think he had any hopes other than the usual bourgeois liberals or frittemocratic hopes.
Foucault, I'm sorry, Nietzsche hoped for the coming of the overman.
Heidegger hoped for something another age of the world in which thought would once again be possible in which Nietzsche's last man wouldn't dominate the earth and so on.
What did Nietzsche have against the last, who were the last men and what did what disgusted Nietzsche about the concept of the last man?
The last men were, he said, people who have their little pleasures for the day and their little pleasures for the night.
People who don't aim for greatness who have no conception of greatness.
The reformers of the people who think it's okay not to have a conception of greatness.
It's okay just to think about maximizing human happiness.
Nietzsche and Heidegger after him thought that was an ignoble idea.
Nietzsche said, not all men live for happiness, only Englishmen do.
Thinking of John Stuart Mill, I guess.
It's a period of say that insofar as you're a follower of Dewey, you say, pragmatists that you are there for both a quietest and a reformer.
The development of Bush was society in the last two hundred years has put humanity on the right track and the best we can ever hope for is the universal globalization of the kind of society we've managed to create in the modern world.
That makes me a reformer.
The first thing I've noticed and that I don't think that there are permanent problems of philosophy that need to be solved in the course of making that kind of life for humanity possible.
Okay, Dick, I'm going to now get in the adversarial role for a little bit.
How can you say that we're on the right track when what you were claiming earlier in the philosophical realm is that there is no such thing as a right.
I don't know the natural reality.
That you need some sort of criterion to say that bourgeois liberal democracy is the right track.
Why can there not be a plurality of opinions about what the right track is?
Why can there not be a sustained conversation with a diversity of the contesting views about what the right track is?
On what basis does bourgeois liberal democracy become the enshrined sort of right answer for what philosophy should be occupying itself with?
It's not that philosophy should be occupying itself with bourgeois liberal democracy.
It's that philosophy should ask, what can I do for bourgeois liberal democracy?
Why?
I don't think there's any criteria you can appeal to to settle the quarrel between Nietzsche on the one hand and Dewey on the other.
I think you've just decide what kind of future you want for humanity and work on from there.
Yeah, but that's okay.
That's a, again, it's a decision that one makes to embrace that thing, but here you say I'm going to read you.
All we need, you say that this really jumped out at me.
So you're saying that you're a quietest for the reasons you escape.
We are also reformers in the sense that we think that liberal philosophy is as good as it is ever going to get.
All we need is for the United States to get a lot more like Norway and for the rest of the world to become a lot more like the United States.
Now there are a lot of people out there who might think that this is grotesque.
As a, the final arrival point is to make America more like Norway and the rest of the world more like America.
I might agree with you, but I'm trying to, I'm hearing a number of voices in my head saying, well, there has to be more to the story than that.
Well, then let them kill an alternative story.
What is it about Norway that's make it so desirable that America become more like Norway?
The welfare state, social, social economic equality, they tell me that Norwegians have a law that if a firm wants to pay the chief executive more than five times what it pays the law is played in play.
The company has to pay a fund to the state. That seems a great way to organize things.
Sure, we can agree on that, but whether this is what the law is for is when they are taking the turn to the pragmatic to play out the pragmatic consequences of a philosophy that you could say that that's an issue that we debate day in and day out among economists, sociologists and citizens and so forth.
That's to dissolve the problems, certain problems of philosophy to lead it on this sort of mission to Norwegianize America.
And by the way, what do you mean that the rest of the world should become more like the United States?
Would it be desirable to have all the various cultures across the globe, Americanize?
Would that not entail some sort of loss at least at the level of diversity or certain wisdom that go back through their own particular traditions?
What would be loss in the Americanization or Norwegianization of the world?
A great deal would be loss. A great deal was lost when the Roman Empire suppressed lots of native cultures, when the Han Empire and China suppressed a lot of native cultures.
Whenever there is a rise of a great power, a lot of cultures get suppressed, that's the price we pay for history.
I take it that price is not too high to pay.
I think if you could get the kind of democratic society that we have in the United States, universal laws around the globe, you could have a very little variety in culture would be a small price to a pith.
Well, here I'm going to speak in my own proper voice and to really disagree in this sense that I think governments and forms of governments are the result of a whole host of contingent geographical
historical factors whereby Western, bourgeois liberalism or democracy arose through a whole set of circumstances that played themselves out over time.
And I think that a certain presumption among a certain segment of Americans or of the American nation, that our form of democracy is infinitely exportable to other parts of the world whose histories are profoundly different than the ones that had led us to this state.
And that regardless of whether you're in the deserts of the Middle East or in the jungles of Africa or in the islands of Polynesia, that we can just take this model of American democracy and make it work elsewhere.
I think experience has shown us that it's not that easy.
We can't take, we can't make it work elsewhere, but people coming to our country and finding out how things are done in the democratic was can go back and try to imitate that in their own countries.
They often have done so with considerable success.
I was very impressed on a visit to Guangzhou to see a replica of the Statue of Liberty in one of the city parks that was built by the first generation of Chinese students to visit America when they got back.
They built a replica of the Statue of Liberty in order to help try to explain to the other Chinese what was so great about the country that they come back from.
And remember the replica of the Statue of Liberty was carried by the students in Tiananmen Square.
Well, okay, but that's one way.
What if you, why can't we go to China and see a beautiful statue of the Buddha or something and understand equally, have a moment of enlightenment and bring that statue back and say that we have something to learn from the
You know this this other culture from out there and why why is the Statue of Liberty you know the final transcend you say yourself as a philosopher you don't that there are no absolutes.
And that part of the misunderstanding in the history of philosophy is the search for absolutes.
It sounds like the Statue of Liberty is for you an absolute.
It's how about it's the best thing anybody has come up with so for.
It's done more for human happiness than the Buddha ever did.
And it's something gives us something how can we know that how do we know that I mean what some history felt for example I mean.
What do we know about the happiness of.
What do we know about the culture of those cultures?
Can the inside can we really know from the outside that we're happier than they are I suspect so we've all you know all of us have had experiences and moving around from culture to culture.
They're not closed off entities invisible you know we'll take to outsiders.
You can talk to people raised in lots of different places about how happy they are and what they'd like.
You go on saying that there is nothing rotten about which one liberal democracy capitalism is okay as long as it is combined with liberal institutions like the welfare state this is not a technological wasteland and so forth.
But Marx and each a high degree in Foucault are geniuses we can be grateful to them for spotting things that are indeed distressing but their overall attitude in their sense that there is something radically wrong is misguided.
Now even let's say that one accepts that.
I've read writings of yours which seem to suggest that there are things that are profoundly wrong with the American Republic at present and that it's in a crisis that it's lost its way.
That we are that our future looks bleak in fact you wrote in your book Philosophy and the future of hope I believe is called or social hope that you have this essay where you're looking at the 21st century from the point of view of the end of the 21st century.
And there has been a kind of calamity that's taking place in the Western world in America.
There's been a collapse of all the institutions of this bourgeois liberal democracy.
And although you give it a happy ending at that essay at the end in this hypothetical narrative you give it sounds like things are very wrong.
Why could someone not come and tell you well Dick Roy, do you think things are profoundly wrong but his opinion is misguided?
What do you think is wrong in the present state of the political sphere in America?
And how can you justify it as being wrong as opposed to right?
But liberal democracy has always been a very fragile creation.
The liberalists novel the plot against America is described one way in which forces and could have come to America.
Sinclair Lewis had a similar story in 1935.
It's easy to imagine after a nuclear terrorist attack that will lose all our civil liberties overnight and the whole dream of liberal democracy will fade out in the worst.
The fact that it's fragile, it's surrounded by dangers is nothing against it.
But do you think we're on the wrong track?
Until someone suggests a better, moral ideal to work for than Norway, roughly.
I'll work for that.
Do I understand?
But the question is, is there something rotten in the state of Denmark?
In other words, is there something rotten in the state of the American Republic at the present moment?
Well, too many people vote for the wrong candidates, but is that exactly rotten or just bad luck?
Well, the question, before coming on air, we were talking about that essay, that hypothetical narrative from the end of the 21st century,
where you give it a positive ending and you don't believe any more than that positive ending.
So it sounded like there was a deep pessimism in your mood at that present when it comes to America.
Well, my pessimism is largely that I suspect a successful attack by terrorist using nuclear weapons is probably inevitable.
I don't think there's much that the government can do to prevent it if that happens all bets are off.
And before 9/11, I didn't quite realize how likely it was that with all the nuclear warheads floating around the world,
they were eventually going to be used on American cities now. I think it's overwhelming, likely.
This is not the fault of the rule of rule of democracy. It's just the fault of the nations of the world for not getting rid of nuclear weapons back in 1946.
Does it have anything to do with American capitalism and the kinds of ravages that it might have created around the world and the kind of backlash?
It might have bred in certain areas of the globe.
Well, some people hate America for good reason people in El Salvador and Chile, for example, at the moment in Iraq,
best of the way some people hated Russian communism and Poland and Hungary and Romania and so on.
If the Russians had been good gues, if the Russians had always been good gues and if the Americans had always been good gues, the money of the country would have gone very differently.
And we wouldn't have nuclear weapons to worry about it anymore.
Is capitalism for you a neutral phenomenon morally speaking or is it a...
Do you take it to be the most efficient way of maximizing economic wealth, even though it's badly distributed in capitalism?
Do I take it that for you capitalism is not a problem in and of itself?
Again, I think that it's the worst economic system.
I think that it looks at all the others that have been tried.
The nationalization of the means of production, state capitalism, that was a complete slop, private property and private entrepreneurship seemed the only alternative left until somebody thinks it was still a third order.
When you talk about... you give a very compelling history of philosophy about how philosophy has meant different things in different eras.
So you say, for example, in Plato's time, no one ever thought about changing the world.
Therefore, what philosophy promised was developing an attitude towards one's life or living one's life in such a way that you could rise above the immediate contingent realities of your situation and contemplate eternal truths, find some kind of spiritual tranquility in contemplation.
But if you look at the Middle Ages, the purpose of philosophy is very different because the task was to reconcile Greek philosophy of the legacies of Greek philosophy with Christian revelation.
So the philosophy we're setting about themselves, the task of coming up with the synthesis between Christianity and Platonism, for example.
And that in the 17th and 18th century, with the rise of science and Galileo and so forth, and this discovery that the world of nature was not at all, this fixed place that we thought it was or this finite cosmos that there was infinite space and that the atoms and the void and so forth, their philosophy had to take on the question of,
"How do we reconcile ourselves to this mechanistic view of nature?"
And that led to this heavy emphasis on epistemology that you get in Descartes through Kant and what can we really know for sure this whole anxiety about whether we can know anything for sure.
And you feel that that was superseded with the Industrial Revolution and that philosophy now should no longer,
Although the analytic philosophers are still in your view, many of them are still trapped in that epistemological, 17th, 18th century kind of mode.
But that we, others have moved on to different things and in your, in this story that you tell, we're trying to situate yourself and how you see philosophy.
And again, as we mentioned several times now, the point is how can we further the cause of bringing about this kind of utopia of a social democracy in the world and including as many people within it as possible?
And this is where, this is where philosophy ends up for you.
The question I have is, "Could we be at a turning point or can you envision something happening even sooner rather than later whereby philosophy now has a completely new vocation?"
Which is to rethink the human in terms of everything we know about the kinship of humans with the world of nature, with other animals.
With the fact that we are part of a larger web of interdependence and to think the phenomenon of life which is by no means restricted to the human and that this might be the next new serious challenge that philosophers face, which is reflection on the biotic as such.
I think it's too large a topic for anybody to reflect on. I mean, I think it's like reality or experience or language.
You know, if you say philosophers ought to turn their attention to life, that isn't enough to give them a sense of direction.
Any more than, any more than telling them to turn their attention to language gave them a sense of direction.
We've had our attention to turn to life on occasion, Leidenitz did it, Bergson did it.
It didn't revitalize philosophy, proposing a new subject to talk about never does.
What revitalizes philosophy is some genius suggesting a new way of thinking.
But I guess the spirit of my question was, are we in an era where we, because we've had a few centuries of that last stage in your narrative of the industrial revolution and working towards a social utopia and so forth.
But there is a sense now that no matter how much, no matter how efficient and good we get at bringing about this utopia, the whole thing depends upon the resources of the earth, the balance in the biosphere as a whole.
And that all of history and all our utopias are hanging on a very fragile thread that connects us to the earth and to the biosphere as such.
And that if we screw that up, then our social utopias go down the drain with it.
Sure.
Unless we develop fusion energy or something like that, we've had it just as much as we've had it if the terrorists get their hands on nuclear bombs.
That's one of the dangers, but I don't see it gives any reason for philosophers to start talking about life.
Well, I think that if the human story has revealed itself as being embedded within the world of nature, then I don't think it's just proposing a new time.
We're proposing a new topic of conversation or a new topic for philosophy.
I think that it's putting us in a state of crisis where we have to rethink whether the old humanism of which dreams of a social utopia are part of, whether those are viable given what we know about the care and capacity of the earth, about the
the magnitude of its resources, about the way in which a few degrees in climate change can create devastation's unthinkable by us at the present moment, where, you know, in one fell swoop, all our
ways and America's revert back to some very pre-modern condition.
Suppose we find out that it's all going to be wiped out by an asteroid.
Would you want philosophers to suddenly start thinking about asteroids?
We may well collapse due to the exhaustion of natural resources.
But there's a different ado for philosophers to start thinking about natural resources.
There's a difference between thing of asteroids, which is something outside of human control, and which is not submitted to human decision, and doesn't enter into the political sphere, and talking about something which is completely under the governance of human action.
I don't say it's under the governance of human will, but it is human action which is bringing about the asteroid, if you like.
And therefore, it's not just a question of waiting around for some kind of natural disaster to happen, because we are the disaster, or one could say that we are the disaster.
And at the maximization of wealth for the maximum amount of people is exactly what is putting us on this track towards disaster.
Well, we've accommodated environmental change before, maybe we can accommodate it again, maybe we can't.
But, surely, this is a matter for the engineers, rather than the philosopher.
So, there's nothing philosophical or interesting at least compelling in trying to rethink the human place on Earth.
Again, it seems to me too large a topic for anybody to think about.
And if social utopia is not too large a topic to think about?
No, because then it's associated with a program of action.
And environmentalism is not associated with a program of action.
Sure, but it's the program of action to conserve natural resources, to find fusion energy, to do all the kinds of things we hope can happen.
It's just part of the same construction of a social democratic, you'd hope.
Yeah, well, I guess I'm suggesting is that it's not just a technical challenge of finding new resources, or conserving resources better, or conserving energy.
So, it's about rethinking our very relationship to nature, and the ways in which we go about being in the world as part of nature, rather than what they call the masters and possessors of nature.
I take it that there is certainly this humanist foundation still in your thinking that human beings should be the masters and possessors of nature.
Right.
And that there's no problems with that.
But if the data assumption, which has been the foundation for the last few hundred years of modernity, leads a certain sense, becomes very clear that it's leading to an unsustainable situation, environmentally speaking, then perhaps it's that assumption that needs questioning.
Suppose you questioned that what political program would you mount?
What political direction would it give you, except the same one in the social democratic humanists, heaven, mind?
Well, one would have to, the radical rethinking would be such that one would have to go and find new heroes, even in the past traditional legacies.
Well, maybe one would have to reread the row and give more heed to his call for what he called a voluntary poverty among his citizens.
And to rethink whether human happiness is that dependent upon accumulation of material goods and consumption and so forth.
And as this kind of voluntary impoverishment, alongside spiritual enrichment, that might be one thing that one could talk about.
I'm not proposing that as the answer.
I'm saying that it's full of possibilities for philosophy, if philosophy wants to turn its attention to that.
I don't see that it is.
I'm recommending thorough to the half of the world's population that lives on two doors a day isn't going to do anything for them.
But the problem I dear Dick is not the people who are living on two dollars a day.
It's the people in the first world, as our colleague Paul Erlich puts it, there are not too many people in the world.
There are too many rich people in the world.
And what he's referring to there is the first world.
And he's referring above all to America, which consumes typically two to three times.
An American baby consumes two to three times as much as the next biggest consumers.
I don't know if there's Sweden or something, it's something I have.
80 times as much as a Brazilian baby will consume.
In other words, there is an equation between consumption and population.
And so, no, I'm not telling the person who's earning two to a dollar a day.
I'm trying to tell my fellow Americans that the so-called American way of life, which we think that we have this entitlement to.
That is a kind of natural God-given right that everyone enjoy a standard of life as we enjoyed.
We know that if one were to materialize cons categorical imperative and say what would happen to the world, if everyone in the world had the same standard of living as the average American, we know that the carrying capacity of the earth would be completely overwhelmed and it's unsustainable.
And yet we're promoting all around the world this idea that our average standard of life in America is universalizable.
Well, I'm sorry. It doesn't take a philosopher, but a philosopher could certainly add some authority to saying that you cannot universalize something like that because we just know what the limits are, materially speaking.
I don't disagree with what you say. I just don't see the relevance to philosophy.
What kind of authority can a philosopher add to this prediction?
And so, perfectly, you'll determine prediction is probably true.
Well, I could ask the same question. What kind of authority does a philosopher bring to questions that belong to the sphere of the social and the political?
None, whatever. I mean, on my view, you start from the political and move from there into the philosophical.
You don't try to back up the politics.
Well, Dick has been very interesting. The hour passes quickly.
And finally, I love talking with philosophers because one who can really get down and argue about things.
And as part of that's one thing I like about the whole tradition of philosophy is found it on debate.
And that one can very respectfully and disagree on certain issues and yet friendship is still what it's all about.
So, thanks a lot for coming on the program. I appreciate it. Thanks for asking me, Robert.
All right. And I remind our viewers we have a web page.
For this program, you want to just log on to the home page of the French and Italian department and then click on entitled opinions.
And there you can listen to past programs. You can download them. You can get them on iTunes and podcast them.
So, please do that. I want to remind you that we have Decca at the Cafe Bohemian coming up.
So, stay tuned and I will see you next week.
[Music]
Summer's almost gone. Summer's almost gone.
Almost gone.
It's almost gone. Where will we be?
When the summer's gone.
Morning, fall as cold as I fall away.
Summer's almost gone. Where will we be?
When the summer's gone. Where will we be? Where will we be?
Where will we be?
[Music]
Morning, fall as cold as I fall away.
[Music]
Where will we be?
[Music]
When the summer's gone. Where will we be?
When the summer's almost gone. Where will we be?
[Music]
Summer's almost gone.
[Music]
Stroke arrays were born to race.
He had a mean street to be glad.
But some of them were going to taste more than more.
And the summer's gone.