Ex nihilo - Podcast English

Undoubtedly, the question of oikophobia is a most puzzling social phenomenon. If the 19th-century psychiatrists understood it as the fear of being inside one’s home, the English philosopher Roger Scruton understood it to mean becoming a stranger, no, even more than that: an idiosyncrasy towards one's own culture that can take on ‘a chronic form…in the guise of political correctness.’ Benedict Beckeld – who grew up in Uppsala and Stockholm, and emigrated with his family to New York as a teenager – has taken up this concept as a comparative lens to examine history for recurring patterns. As a classical philologist and philosopher who studied and earned his doctorate in Heidelberg, and who also performed research as a visiting scholar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and in Bologna, he is highly predisposed to do so (he had also spent a year as a student at the Sorbonne and was later a professor of philosophy and classics at the American University of Paris). After all, he has that fundamentally alien view distinguishing the historian, enabling him to identify recurring patterns and structures.

Conversations with Dr. Beckeld are extremely stimulating as you move effortlessly with him through world history. If Beckeld follows the personality ideal of antiquity, he is also a child of postmodernism - just as familiar with its twists and turns as with various languages and philosophical systems of thought. Consequently, he’s by no means unfamiliar with the world of social media – in addition to his philosophical work, he also runs a video blog where he regularly comments on the issues of the day. He currently lives in New York and is working on a book about aesthetics and a narrative about his experiences as a young teacher in Namibia (which is why the young student in the photo below not only declared him her favorite teacher but one whose vast knowledge has changed her life).

Link to Benedict Beckelds website

Benedict Beckeld has recently published

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Looking at many contemporary institutions, we can't help thinking Modernity's secret goal lies in its organizational irresponsibility. In the shadows, however, a revolution has occurred where the individual doesn’t have to function as a cog in the Wheelwork of a Machine. Instead, they’re given the freedom to work in small, highly agile groups responsible for the efficiency and quality of their product. Inspired by the novel Toyota Production System of Teamwork (TPS) that Japanese engineer Taiichi Ohno developed on the car manufacturer's factory floors, this movement found its spirtitus rector in Jeff Sutherland - a thinker whose Agile Manifesto (co-authored with Ken Schwaber in 2001) has promulgated this project management’s style in all areas of life. And if you consider Sutherland is advocating a method without methodology that’s essentially a staged form of chaos, you immediately sense a highly unconventional spirit at work here.

As a West Point graduate, Jeff Sutherland was deployed flying reconnaissance over enemy territory in the Vietnam War – missions that often cost his fellow pilots their lives. Then, as a young statistician in Radiology, he was asked to apply his knowledge in cancer cell research, where his expertise unexpectedly catapulted the Stanford assistant professor into the financial industry. Here he experienced the problems of a strictly top-down, hierarchical management style and developed his idea of Scrum. That is small groups of people who, like a deeply attuned Rugby team, work out their interactions with each another - and in the form of blind agreement – develop a step-by-step efficiency that puts to shame everything designed to date. In this respect, it’s no coincidence this idea has found its way into the modern working world after becoming the startup world's undisputed paradigm. And that’s precisely what an energetic 82-year-old Jeff Sutherland tells us in his interview with Ex nihilo - the story of a revolution set on a permanent course.

Life is What Happens To You While You’re Busy Making Other Plans (John Lennon)

In German:

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If we remember that the machina mundi, like the Deus ex Machina, flies in from above, it's unsurprising that the scene of the Machine Discourse shifts to where the Politics of Heaven are fought over. It's the emerging Christianity that takes up the Machine question - albeit in a way that seems like a palimpsest, a parchment that has been scraped over and over again: constantly rewritten.

This chapter deals with the paradox of the Christian world (which is trying to free itself from ancient materialism) becoming the catalyst of the Machine World - through the detour of Universal Scriptural Writing and the Assumption of the Immaculate Conception. It's a movement that inevitably led to the building of Cathedrals, the founding of Universities, and the book society of the Renaissance.

Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

To listen to previous chapters:

Philosophy of the Machine 10

Philosophy of the Machine 9

Philosophy of the Machine 8

Philosophy of the Machine 7

Philosophy of the Machine 6

Philosophy of the Machine 5

Philosophy of the Machine 4

Philosophy of the Machine 3

Philosophy of the Machine 2

Philosophy of the Machine 1

Here is the Link for the German Publication at Matthes & Seitz

Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

You might call Roger Pielke Jr., the son of the highly respected Climatologist Roger Pielke Sr., an Environmental Political scientist who analyzes the atmospheric disruptions between Science and Politics. And because, with the looming apocalypse, this represents mined terrain, Dr. Pielke, who's been awarded international prizes and honorary doctorates for his work and served as director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has found himself at the center of a campaign that made him, as he puts it, the Voldemort of climate science. Paradoxically, this label has nothing to do with Pielke's measured observations, delivered with the beautiful clarity of a true scientist, but solely with the veritable religious furor that activists and world-savers have brought to the debate. This position of Pielke's is based on a timeless scientific ethos, which never allows itself to become aligned with any cause - knowing that the cost of such activism is sacrificing science's integrity. On the other hand, the liminal position between Science and Politics has made him highly sensitive - so when Mary Douglas' name comes up in the conversation, he's immediately familiar with her institutional theory and mentions Steve Rayner's work, appropriately titled The Social Construction of Ignorance, explaining that institutions are not necessarily formed to produce new knowledge, but often to keep uncomfortable or inconvenient learning out of sight. But because Pielke is stubborn enough to endure even the disruptive and inappropriate, he doesn't shy away from the adversity - he only points out at the end of the conversation; however, that contradiction is more manageable at an advanced age and that Academia might not be the ideal place for an up-and-coming Roger Pielke III’s career choices.

Roger Pielke has published.

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The chapter deals with the birth of metaphysics and eternal damnation, the emergence of that peculiar attitude of mind called Gnosis in the science of religion. That the Earth becomes transformed into a vale of tears is, in this sense, a dialectical necessity. That culture becomes the angel maker.

If the pure sign represents the appearance of eternity, the question arises why we still concern ourselves with the decrepitude of the earthly. Why not live eternally right away?

Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

To listen to previous chapters:

Philosophy of the Machine 9

Philosophy of the Machine 8

Philosophy of the Machine 7

Philosophy of the Machine 6

Philosophy of the Machine 5

Philosophy of the Machine 4

Philosophy of the Machine 3

Philosophy of the Machine 2

Philosophy of the Machine 1

hier der Link zur Publikation bei Matthes & Seitz

Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The idea of another world arises with the pure, animate signs: Pure spirit, eternity, Platonic bodies. In contrast, the real world is a cave, an underworld realm of shadows, in which illusory existences see only reflections of their destiny: the reflection of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The chapter tells of philosophy's birth - and of how thinking thus begins to run in circles:

That which philosophy considers as being or essence is the art of running in the circle of the universal machine. En kyklos paidein. But as we know, still every encyclopedia is alphabetical.

Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

To listen to previous chapters:

Philosophy of the Machine 8

Philosophy of the Machine 7

Philosophy of the Machine 6

Philosophy of the Machine 5

Philosophy of the Machine 4

Philosophy of the Machine 3

Philosophy of the Machine 2

Philosophy of the Machine 1

hier der Link zur Publikation bei Matthes & Seitz

Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

Occasionally, we must admit we belong to an older generation with worldviews shaped by our specific generational experiences. This, at least, was what crossed my mind while reading the text of a young Swedish writer considering the question of whether our present-day culture wars could be the result of an elite overproduction in the form of an educational glut from a flawed educational system; often leading its actors into the fiercest battles, not infrequently unfairly waged, for the remaining high-status jobs. The most interesting thing about this reflection is its tribute to the forgotten American political scientist James Burnham, who’d analyzed an emerging new ruling class in the forties with the publication of his Managerial Revolution – incidentally, which significantly influenced George Orwell’s writing of 1984. In his referencing of this thinker, who was a Trotskyist that metamorphosed into a staunch conservative, Malcom Kyeyune finds a diagnosis for the present as something quite comparable: an emerging new Woke elite class that distinguishes themselves morally rather than economically while teaching the world of its possibility. He notices that they are engaging in a moral economy that can be used for career advancement, social status, and economic advantage, often at the economic and career expense of the disadvantage they supposedly represent. And because Malcolm still considers himself a Marxist, our conversation (even if it lightly crosses different eras, cultures, and continents) revolves around questioning what drives this strange moral economy.

Malcolm Kyeyune is a fearlessly provocative blogger and writer living in Uppsala, Sweden. He shouts for Aftonbladet but primarily for English-language venues like UnHerd, American Affair, and Compact Magazine.

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The chapter deals with the birth of Pythagorean mathematics - or, more precisely, the way with which mathematicians fall into the delirium of Infinity.

Carnival. In that old-fashioned sense, every mathematical calculus has a strange carnivalesque side because you extract the flesh from life. Just as the tones of the music are abstracted from the body of sound, the formula dissolves an experience from reality, imposing on it a system of rules in which the highest is at the bottom, the lowest is at the top.

Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

To listen to previous chapters:

Philosophy of the Machine 7

Philosophy of the Machine 6

Philosophy of the Machine 5

Philosophy of the Machine 4

Philosophy of the Machine 3

Philosophy of the Machine 2

Philosophy of the Machine 1

Here’s the link to the original German edition.

Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The chapter tells of how the Machine, as socioplasty, inscribes itself on antiquity - how it becomes an ideal of personality and, as imprinted freedom, ultimately determines social relations.

From then on, sacrifices were no longer made to the gods but to the Polis. It is no coincidence that taxation is the only area in which we still talk about having to make sacrifices today.

Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

To listen to previous chapters:

Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe

The sixth chapter tells how the phallic sign of the bull deity turns into an alphabetic type. But where does this story begin? There, where the god in bull form abducts Europa to Crete? Or in the labyrinth of Daedalus, where the Alpha-beast and mythical figure awaits its extinction?

With the Alphabet, the twilight of the gods begins…we do not meet the riddle of creation here, but rather a nature that is spun into the type wheel of an already given understanding of the world.

Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

To listen to previous chapters:

Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe