It’s great to have back with me Johannes Neiderhauser, PhD. In yet another engaging and eclectic discussion, Johannes and I ranged over a wide but interconnected landscape of ideas including Dasein and the tragic death of the very young, the necessity of Amor Fati in the face of a world by turns joyous and painful, the pitfalls of happy-go-lucky nihilism, before finally turning to an examination of whether the subject has been eliminated or amplified in drone warfare.

Johannes is a philosopher, currently teaching at Birkbeck College, he will soon publish his first book on Heidegger’s phenomenology of death. Johannes has also made recent forays into online education through his collaborative course with Justin Murphy on the subject of Deleuze Vs Heidegger; a thought-provoking course which very much felt like Johnny Cash jamming with the Sex Pistols. In the last few weeks, Johannes has also launched his own solo course on Idleness with Dignity, surely to be followed by many more to come. As well as being the impresario of the Dead Philosophers Club, Johannes is also the founder of the Halkyon Thinkers Guild, ‘a gathering of thinkers, artists, writers, forecasters, and sense-makers.’ Johannes has been on fire recently with a plethora of fascinating YouTube videos on the challenges of our age. Please check out his fascinating lectures and interviews at Classical Philosophy on Youtube, Instagram and Patreon. Links can be found below.

Classical Philosophy on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDsQqlrzoc-K32DE-Wh-roA

Classical Philosophy on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/classical.philosophy/

Classical Philosophy Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/classicalphilosophy/posts

Halkyon, The Thinkers Guild Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halkyonthinkersguild/posts

This time around, it was great to have with me Robin Amos to discuss the idea of Utopia. I’d met Robin through the indiethinkers.org forum and was intrigued to learn more about his conceptualisation of the future as an idea in itself.

To begin, I asked Robin what I hope going forward will become “the Primitive Accumulation question”, which is: which two thoughts do you hold that contradict themselves the most? This kicked off an interesting discussion of the tension between liberty and security.

We then moved on to the topic of utopia proper, including a contemplation of Oscar Wilde’s classic dictum that, “A map of the world without utopia is not worth looking at”; to past hopes and horrors brought about by the utopian ideologies of the 20th century; the immanent emancipatory potential of the US Constitution; Brexit as a Conservative utopian vision, and the failure of the Left to articulate a similarly compelling vision of the future.

I’ve been reading Donald D. Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality: How  evolution hid the truth from our eyes. At one point Hoffman uses a  Wittgenstein quote to raise a point about how our senses can deceive us,  and this got me thinking about distortions in our moral perceptions,  too. Hoffman makes the point that from the basis of our everyday  perceptions of the world it is very natural to experience the earth as  the unmoving centre of the universe; to believe that the sun goes around  the earth. This quandary was once put to Wittgenstein, whom replied,  ‘what would it have looked liked if it had looked as if the earth turned  on its axis?’. This gap between perception and reality then made me  think that something like this can occur with our moral sense. How best  to treat addiction, for example, is just such a case in point.

For my debut podcast I’m delighted to have with me Johannes Niederhauser PhD. Johannes is a Heidegger scholar, currently teaches philosophy at Birkbeck College and will soon publish his first book on Heidegger’s phenomenology of death. Johannes is also the impresario of the Dead Philsophers Club, which he hosts at the Library Members club in London. Please check out his fascinating lectures and interviews at Classical Philosophy on youtube, Instagram and Patreon.

In today’s discussion, Johannes and I explore Heidegger’s statement in The Thing that in the modern age, ‘the frantic abolition of distance brings no nearness’. We explore Heidegger’s notion from the personal realm of online interactions before expanding it out to encompass the global nature of drone warfare, ballistic missile defence and nuclear war. How do these Techniks, as Heidegger would put it, stem from a pathological spatial abstraction and what can be done to counter this?

Podcasts coming soon. Let's Get Primitive!