This is KZSU, Stanford.
I'm Robert Harrison, host of the radio program
entitled "Pinions," which aired its first episode
12 years ago.
Today, we're going back to that very first season
and re-broadcasting a memorable conversation
with American philosopher Richard Roydie.
It aired live on KZSU on November 22, 2005.
Roydie was a beloved Stanford colleague and a good friend
of mine.
I did not know at the time of this interview,
and I don't think he did either,
that he would die a year and a half later.
I haven't been able to determine whether this was his last live
interview or not, but it certainly is one of the last.
Richard Roydie was an avid bird watcher,
and the original broadcast began with some reflections
on my part about birds.
The version we're posting today picks up
where my conversation with Dick Roydie begins.
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 coming on to talk with us.
So, Dick, I gather that you've spotted over 1,000 birds
in the wild.
What is it about birds that appeals to you?
Does something like "stand it just" the collectors instinct,
finding something rare and special?
It works for butterflies, it works for wild flowers,
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 referred.
When I was young, it was mods and butterflies,
actually, I switched to birds.
Is 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 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 buns, birds of America.
I'll never see another snowy owl probably.
Were you actually bird-watching when you saw it?
Or is it a matter of contingency to use one of your
fur contentions?
Your contingency, yeah.
Great.
Do you have a favorite bird yourself?
Not really.
No.
Well, birds have something to do with philosophy.
It's not why I brought it up.
But there is, of course, the famous owl of Minerva
that Hegel says of philosophy like the owl that comes at the end of history.
And the famous winged soul of the platonic myth of returning back
to its original homeland.
But that's not the kind of philosophy we're going to talk about.
Dick, 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, PhD 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 Birkin 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 Klein and Wilfred Sellers and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
But I wrote about the men away 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?
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 in 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.
So I got familiar with a lot of the issues within analytic philosophy.
And then in my book, I published at the end of the '70s, I raised questions
about some of the presuppositions of the work that was being done.
And what are the presuppositions exactly which you find we can dispense with now?
Is it analytic philosophy's ambition to find a language which corresponds to this so-called true nature of reality
and to kind of tack on propositions to the world?
Was it persistent and still persistent assumption that philosophy somehow is in the business of getting right?
Are 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 and impossible enterprise.
The idea was that we, by doing something called analyzing language or explaining confusion
created by misuse of language, we would put an end to metaphysics and indeed put an end to all philosophy
by dissolving all of philosophical problems.
This never happened, but that was what gave the movement its glimmer.
Well, here, I've been reading this little statement that's more recent on your part of the 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 historic 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 believe 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 free 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.
It is made up of elementary physical particles. These are the people whom mine 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 it 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 and an ordinary 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.
Sometimes, although I'm deep sympathy with that, decide that you're on, 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?
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 German absolute idealists said in the 19th century, and 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 of real cream or 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.
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?
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?
Or what flatters are our self-image the most of a way? 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, 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 poetry. Rules you can always construct if you want them. The philosophers' ideas in Plato has been that there's a sort of set of super rules that enables us to tell.
That rules from good rules. That is to tell bad human social practices from good social human practices. Good human social practices. 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.
These are our rules. I think the trouble with that response would be that they have the so-called problems of analytic philosophy keep changing with each generation.
It's given rise to a literature that goes out of date every ten or twenty years. Everybody throws themselves into solving the great new problem that Professor Sowan saw at Princeton, or Calaburglior 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 the quietest on this side of the equation, you you're comfortable identifying yourself with that group.
The 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 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 where as far as we know there's no way that we can humanize the cosmos as a whole or that are of specific kind of manner of being in the world seems to be rather exceptional in the order of nature.
And 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 you know, primate relatives that does the sort of unease of being in the world in our human mode is 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 probably will have no interest to neither religion or philosophy.
If you do you probably will have some interest in it when you go in for be 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 I can understand that but as 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 are there I think it substituted hope for the human future for hope of getting in contact with another world.
That is I think we we secularists leave 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 so.
Yeah, we're going to want to I want to talk about that more maybe in the second half of the show but here just to get the the map straight we talked about analytic philosophy.
Naturalists and quietest and then this is juxtaposed to the historicist philosophies which you also divide into two broadly speaking two different camps which you called 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 on Stuart Mill, John Dewey, Isaiah Berlin, 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?
Jesus Agamem, but you, who co.
The people who say it's all a sham, we haven't really been making any great progress.
Well 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 had any hopes other than the usual bourgeois liberals or democratic 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 and which Nietzsche's last man wouldn't dominate the earth and so on.
What did Nietzsche have against the last, who were the last man and what did what disgusted Nietzsche about the concept of the last man?
The last man, 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 on the Englishman, do.
I think he can give John Stuart Mill I guess.
So it's a fair to say that you, insofar as you're a follower of Dewey you say, pragmatists,
that you are therefore both a quietest and a reformer.
And I think that 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, the globalization of the kind of society we've managed to create in the modern world.
That makes me a reformer.
I'm a quietest 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 way of getting, I don't know, 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?
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 have asked, 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 nature on the one hand and do it 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 decision that one makes to embrace that thing, but here you say I'm going to read you.
All we need, if you say that this really jumped out at me, so you're saying that you're a quietest for the reasons you escaped,
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 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 tell an alternative story.
What is it about Norway that's make it so desirable that America become more like Norway?
The welfare state, 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 over the pragmatic to play out the pragmatic consequences of a philosophy that you could say that that's an issue that we debate day and day out among economists, sociologists and citizens and so forth.
That's to dissolve the problems at 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 you think that 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 pig.
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.
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 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 make it work elsewhere, but people coming to our country and finding out how things are done in the democratic West 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'd 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.
Why can't we go to China and see a beautiful statue of the Buddha or something and understand equally a moment of enlightenment and bring that statue back and say that we have something to learn.
This other culture from out there.
And why is the Statue of Liberty the final transcend that you say yourself as a philosopher?
You don't know that there are no absolute and that part of the misunderstanding in the history of philosophy is the search for absolute.
It sounds like the Statue of Liberty is for you in absolute.
It's about it's the best thing anybody has come up with so far.
It's done more for human happiness than the Buddha ever did.
And it gives us something.
How can we know that?
How do we know that?
I mean, what some history felt, for example.
What do we know about the happiness of Buddhist cultures from 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 in moving around from culture to culture.
They're not closed off entities invisible, you know, we'll pick 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 Bhutua 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.
You say that Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and 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, 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 our future looks bleak.
In fact, you wrote in your book Philosophy and the Future of Hope, I believe it's 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 the S.P.
In this hypothetical narrative you give, it sounds like things are very wrong.
Why could someone not come and tell you, well, Dick Royter thinks 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 as well, the whole democracy has always been a very fragile creation.
The whole of Russia novel, the plot against America is described one way in which fushers and could have come to America.
And Claire 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, that it's surrounded by dangers, is nothing against it.
But do you think we're on the wrong track?
I until someone suggests a better moral ideal to work for than, in our way, 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 as a hypothetical narrative from the end of the 21st century,
where you give it a positive ending.
And you don't believe anymore 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 terrorists 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,
there were eventually going to be used on American cities now.
I think it's overwhelming, likely.
This is not the fault of which role of rule democracy is 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, Hungary, Romania, and so on.
If the Russians had been good guys, if the Americans had always been good guys,
if the Americans would always been good guys, if they weren't in 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 imagine we'll accept for all the others that have been tried.
You know, nationalization of the means of production, state capitalism.
It was a complete law.
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,
for a 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 there the task was to reconcile Greek philosophy
or the legacies of Greek philosophy with Christian revelation.
And 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 the atoms and the void and so forth.
Their philosophy had to take on the question of, you know, 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.
I kind of mowed, 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 that now, 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.
is possible, and 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
into life, that isn't enough to give them any 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 turned 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, I mean 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 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 finitude of its resources, about the way in which a few degrees in climate change can
create devastation unthinkable by us at the present moment where, you know, in one fell
swoop, all our Norway's and America's revert back to some very pre-modern condition.
Suppose we find out that we're all going to be wiped out by an asteroid, would you want
philosophers to suddenly start thinking about asteroid?
We may well collapse due to the exhaustion of natural resources.
Yeah, but there's a different ado from philosophers to start thinking about natural
resources.
There's a difference between thing of asteroids, which is something which is 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 a 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, roton, philosopher.
So there's nothing philosophical interesting at least compelling in trying to rethink the
human place on Earth.
I again, it seems to me too large a topic for anybody to think about.
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 know.
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.
No, 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 foundation still in your thinking that human beings
should be the masters and possessors of nature 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, the science becomes very clear that it's leading to an unsanct
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 as the social democratic humanists, Evan, why?
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 tradition and legacies.
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 that is 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 for a row to the half of the world's population that lives on to
the world's own.
I'm not the problem.
The problem is not the people who are living on $2 a day.
It's the people in the first world.
As our colleague Paul Arlic 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.
He's referring above all to America, which consumes typically two to three times that
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 $2.
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 takes a philosopher, it doesn't take a philosopher, but a philosopher could certainly add
some authority saying that you cannot universalize something like that because we just know
what the limits are, but, seriously, speak.
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 with the philosopher.
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 that's
founded 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, Reverend.
I know.
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.
♪♪
Summer's almost gone
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Summer's almost gone
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Almost gone
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Yeah, it's almost gone
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Where will we be
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When the summer's gone
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Morning fellas, come live all the way
♪♪
Where will we be
♪♪
Where will we be
♪♪
Morning fellas, come live all the way
♪♪
Where will we be
♪♪
Summer's almost gone
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Summer's almost gone
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We had some good time
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What were gone?
The winter coming on
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Summer's almost gone
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KZSU Stanford
♪♪
Stroke arrays were born to race,
he had a mean street to be glad.
It was kind of a gun for the taste of the moon
and bore the sheer pride.
Take a dirt glue for the devil's nerve,
make a car dance across the moon,
call the chimes, his regular lads
and the dragon god in his blood.
It was a real hot shot, and he bragged a lot of men
and they pulled the grass,
'cause he looked at the field, and the steering wheel,
the girls in the bedroom eyes.
And in a race and a hat or a bar room,
the battle's focused on the show.
A back --
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