Mind & Desire

In a previous episode where I was talking about my work completing a video series on what we possess of Aristotle's Poetics, I had brought up the fact that there were rather rigid interpretations and applications of Aristotle's text to dramas, particularly in the 17th century, where Aristotle was interpreted as providing us with definitive rules for how a tragedy has to be written in order to be a good tragedy, in order to be a proper representative of that genre.

And I promised that I would come back to the topic, so that is what I'm going to do here, but I want to broaden it a little bit. So it's interesting, if you go and you look at what people have to say about it, the most common way that people talk about it in the present seems to be telling us about Aristotle's theory of tragedy.

And it's kind of a funny term to use, given that Aristotle does in fact use the Greek verb that we end up getting theory from, theorein, which means essentially to contemplate. And it's particularly used for the spectators at a tragedy, or we would call them today, the audience, the people literally looking at or watching the drama being depicted, the mimesis that Aristotle is particularly interested in.

And a lot of people will write about this in ways that reflect a kind of rigidification of Aristotle's text. You might even, if we want to use another term, say ossification. And this comes from the word os, from bone. It's making Aristotle very bony. It's giving you something like a skeleton that doesn't have the mobility of Aristotle's thought as we actually see it right there in the text.

So when you see somebody telling you about the theory of a particular philosopher, I'm not saying that every time that happens, alarm bells should go off or a red flag should go up in your head, but you might want to be a bit suspicious, particularly if the philosopher, him or herself, didn't say, “this is my theory”, right?

If they didn't present it in that way, because what you're always getting there is a sort of reconstruction, and it could be a reconstruction that is also, we could say, a not only rigidification, but a reduction, making it less than it actually is.

And when you think about these great authors and classic texts, why do we read them? Not because we're looking for a cookie cutter or recipe or schema that we can cram everything into. We're looking for thought that remains alive, that can provoke our own reflection and meditation and widening our own range of thinking and and even perception when it comes to these matters.

So when you read through Aristotle's poetics, you can't apply it very easily to every single genre of drama that we have in the present, whether it's literary, whether it's presented on a stage, whether it is in a streaming television show or movie, but it should help you at least see some things in a different and deeper light.mThat's the power of Aristotle's text.

And sometimes it's going to help you see it, not so much by saying, aha, I know exactly what's going on, but by helping you to better be puzzled, better be astounded, better be challenged, and better ask questions or muse upon things. That's the function of classic texts like Aristotle's Poetics.

And so I want to say another thing as well to widen the scope here and take us to some of Aristotle's other works. So you'll often see people saying things like Aristotle's doctrine of this or that. So for example, Aristotle's doctrine of the unity of the virtues, this would be in book six of the Nicomachean Ethics. Or sometimes you'll even see argument being used as well, like Aristotle's function argument.

And I'm not going to say that all of that should be automatically rejected. I mean, if it helps you to wrap your head around what is going on in Aristotle's admittedly ambiguous at times argument, difficult at times, tricky, and sometimes confusing text, that's great. Just don't mistake, as we often say, the map for the territory, where the territory is Aristotle's actual text and the thought lying behind it, and the map, or tiny little portion of the map, maybe just a route, is what it is that the commentator or even just website has to say about what Aristotle's really doing.

Because you're not getting the fullness of what Aristotle's doing when somebody talks about the function argument or Aristotle's theory of tragedy or anything along those lines. His thought is more complex, more richly interconnected, more ambiguous in its language, and more, you could say, questing. Aristotle is often showing us his process of thinking about things, and that's part of why it is so messy when we try to reconstruct it.

And maybe we need to get out of the habit of thinking that everything should be made nice and easy and quick to apply, set in bullet point form. Maybe that's a habit of mind that we actually need to break, to identify within ourselves, and then to slowly disentangle from our approach to things.

So coming back to Aristotle, coming back especially to the Poetics, I will say that Aristotle does provide us with an effective definition of tragedy as a particular artistic memetic medium, a kind of poesis, a kind of poetry and production. But there's much more to the picture. And I'm just going to give you one example to drive this home.

So everybody who knows anything about tragedy knows that it involves, according to Aristotle, purification of two emotions in particular, fear and pain. Well, that's true. Aristotle does actually say that in his definition, and he does talk about that. But are those really the only emotions that we would possibly want to focus on?

He also mentions anger in the Poetics and I think that we could quite easily, using our brains and applying them somewhat to this, say perhaps sometimes if there is catharsis (purification is often how we translate that), if there is catharsis of emotion why couldn't it also be that of anger. He also talks about another interesting emotional state within there that often doesn't get remarked upon that we could translate as human feeling, philanthropia, a term that gets used a lot in later authors, but which Aristotle is using there.

We might think about other emotions as well, like that of sadness, which he doesn't actually mention in this work, but does talk about in other places, certainly under the aspect of grief, which he mentions in the Nicomachean Ethics. So when we look at it that way, when we don't simply say, well, as we all know, Aristotle only thinks, because Aristotle only talks about two emotions there, that catharsis in good tragedy involves purification of the audience's feeling of fear and pity, or we might say sympathy or compassion, as a translation of Greek, by the way in which we read it and the assumptions that we bring to it.

Sometimes, unfortunately, and this has often been the case for me as a younger person, the book that we're reading is not as great a book as other people are encountering. And maybe we have to mature a bit. Maybe we have to learn to not simply rely upon secondhand interpretations and go into the text ourselves and linger with, really spend time with it if we want to get entirely what is available to us as readers, as thinkers, as collaborators in the thought, if we want that to become available to us.

So those are a few musings that hopefully discharge the obligation I incurred by promising to talk more about Aristotle's poetics. I'll probably return to it later on down the line because there's plenty of other interesting aspects of this text to talk about, but that's enough for right now.

One of the kind of projects, or rather sets of projects that I've been working on probably a good portion of this last year, and I'll be continuing to do it this coming year, is you might say finishing up things that I started. And by that, I mean video series, which then will turn into podcast series down the line, core concept videos primarily.

And I'm thinking about this in particular right now because I am finishing up a series that I'll be releasing pretty soon about Aristotle's poetics, which is a really great, I would say, underrated text, well worth reading if you're interested in Aristotle's philosophy, not just for literary criticism or his remarks on tragedy, but also for thinking about ethics and a bunch of other topics.

Now, coming back to what I was saying originally, so why am I shooting videos, actually a set of seven, on Aristotle's Poetics? Well, because earlier on, I want to say last year, I shot a whole series on Aristotle's Poetics, but only covered the portions of the text that my students enrolled in an Introduction to Humanities class actually wrote. at the time.

One of the required texts for that class, which I teach every so often, is Sophocles' play Antigone, which is really a great, great play. And Aristotle is one of the classic theorists who talks about the nature of tragedy. We talk about him in class. I have them read the Poetics, or at least selections of it that are relevant to Sophocles' tragedy. And so I thought it might be a nice resource for my students to have me going over and delving into all of the discussions that bear directly on tragedy.

But what we find, if you look at Aristotle's Poetics, that is, I think, what most people go to it to read about. But he's also going to talk about the nature of mimesis and that is imitation, which is going to lead into all the different art forms that we engage in, including the dramatic arts, but other types of poetry as well. He's going to talk a good bit about epic poetry, particularly that of Homer. He'll tell you a little bit about comedy. Unfortunately, as many of you know, we have lost the second book of it in which he is reputed to have talked about comedy at great length.

But he also tells us about a number of other interesting things,some of which connect up with matters that are discussed elsewhere, like the nature of diction or lexis or style in the rhetoric. Also, the importance of emotions, another topic discussed in both the rhetoric and the two Ethics, and I would say even in the Politics, the nature of character and choices and motivations, very much a matter of the Ethics but also found in the Rhetoric, and then metaphor.

So I wanted to go back and finish up the series so I could say, here you go. If you want to study this text, you can check out all of these videos. Later on, I'll convert them into podcast episodes. And now you've got these resources. And then I could actually take them and turn them into an online course that people could use for their own edification and self-directed education as well.

And as it turns out, there are a lot of texts where I've done precisely this over the years. I would start creating content to cover what I thought was the most productive pressing needs.

So let's talk about this stuff and then we'll come back to it later on sometime in the future. Things I would almost like triage, figuring out what the most immediate needs of my students were and dealing with those by producing content on that. And then down the line, I think to myself, well, wouldn't it be nice to have the completed set?

So I've done this with a number of other works. You know, I've shot videos on the entirety of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. At one point, there were videos on various Platonic dialogues where I shot some of them first and then shot the rest of them first. Later, there's a number of Stoic texts where I've produced content on some of the text, but not the entirety of it and need to go back and produce more. And, you know, this goes on and on and on.

So I've got plans down the line to shoot some content on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which I've got quite a few videos on, but not covering all of the text. Or St. Augustine's Confessions. Again, similar thing. I produced a number of videos on it, but not all of them that I should have or would like to have. Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals is another example. And so I'll probably be doing that.

You know, I said for the next year, but I'll probably be doing that if we're honest about it for at least a couple of years to come, because I think it's important to complete these matters. Now, why is that the case? Well, is it just that we have a tendency to like things brought to their fruition, to be finished, we could say?

And, you know, this goes back to Aristotle and ancient Greek. They have this term telos that you've probably heard of, which we translate as end or goal, and that gets turned into a all sorts of other constructions a verb that is used for completing but also translated as perfecting bringing to fruition adjectives that are derived from that verb all of which trace back to this original conception of like reaching the end reaching the goal bringing things to the point where you can say “ah, that's it, I have actually done enough.”

And I will point out this, when you see that term translated as perfection, I think that in our modern mindset and language, we often interpret that in too maximal of a way. We think that something is perfect if every single thing has been totally fixed, there are no mistakes, nothing possibly wrong or unfinished with it.

And that's not exactly what they meant at the time in using this term. They were not perfectionists, so to speak. But they thought that it was important to work things through, to get them to a point where you can stand back and say, “yeah, that's good. That is good enough.”

And you might think about it in terms of like writing a book. So I've got some experience with that. And I can tell you that whether it's writing a short thing like a blog post or a newspaper article or writing something longer and more involved and rigorous like an academic article or actually writing an entire book, there are always going to be flaws.

There are always going to be some mistakes. There are always going to be errors that you hope somebody would have caught but somehow sneak through. And it doesn't mean that the work isn't finished. or that it hasn't been brought to its fruition, or that in an older sense of it, it hasn't been perfected. It's just not perfect in its entirety.

And now shifting back to Aristotle's Poetics as I wrap this up, one of the things that I'll probably talk about a bit more later on that I think is really interesting about this work, particularly as I'm rereading it and thinking about it more, is that it has been interpreted by people in the past, particularly in the 17th century, when Aristotle's Poetics was, you might say, interpreted in a very rigid way by playwrights and critics and philosophers, particularly in France, as if he was providing us with not a set of guidelines, but a set of strict rules for how tragedies have to be written.

And now, if you know anything about that time period, you know that it was a time of great, fruitful, French playwriting, the 17th and 18th centuries, I think you can say. And you can take Aristotle's remarks about what makes for a good tragedy and what makes tragedy particularly effective as a kind of canon, a kind of set of guidelines for how you ought to carry out this art form that we call tragedy.

That's certainly an option you can do it that way but you don't have to and it kind of goes against Aristotle's own way of looking at things he clearly thinks that tragedy has developed and improved and figured things out kind of by experimentation or trial and error in which the audience is involved and critics are involved.

And critics and audience are not something radically distinct …

A friend of mine recently asked me to provide him with some information about myself. And the reason is because he's doing something quite nice and it might say even a little overdue for me. So nice on his part, overdue on my part, not on his. And that is to create a Wikipedia entry page about me as a person, as I suppose a public-facing philosopher, somebody whose work gets used and referenced by a number of different people.

So today I have been compiling something that could be used as raw material for a Wikipedia entry. And he asked me for just a blurb and a few things, but I thought, well, why not take the sorts of things that I typically see with authors or musicians or other people that I am interested in on Wikipedia, and provide that sort of information and categories?

And it's been an interesting exercise to do for a number of reasons. And one of them is that it winds up being a lot of work to go back and think about all of these different matters that people might want to know about and to put them into a document. I think that that to most people who know anything about me - and it's the reason why on occasion I'll have people come up to me and start talking to me because they recognize me - it's because of my YouTube channel. That is I would expect about 85 percent (and I'm just pulling this number out of the air) of the people who know me and then come up and interact with me, that's where they're getting it from originally.

I mean, I do also have a couple podcasts, including this podcast. I have been writing public-facing philosophy in blogs and podcasts. Participating in interviews on podcasts and shows. And I have a radio show that I co-host with a friend of mine for quite some time. So it's not as if it's only the YouTube channel. But I think that is probably where most people know me from. That's my claim to fame if I have any such thing.

And it's interesting, so this is a little bit of a digression, but I've had much more massive of an impact with the public-facing philosophy, particularly the YouTube videos than I am likely to ever have with the one academic book and dozens of articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries that I've written through the years,really going back more than 20 years now at this point, more than 25 if I'm actually thinking all the way back to my first article that ever came out. I've had much more impact with those sorts of media than I have with traditional academic publishing.

And that's most likely, unless I really shift gears and spend a lot more time on academic publishing, that's what I'm going to be known for, I suppose, through the rest of my lifetime. And if I'm remembered beyond that, other than on personal notes, it'll be for those sorts of reasons.

So today I've been engaging in a process of trying to remember, of arranging and organizing, thinking about what I would want to see if somebody were to actually produce a Wikipedia entry about me. What sorts of categories belong in there? What parts of my history or personal life do I want narrated, put out there for people to know about?

And because it's Wikipedia, there's one other key thing in mind.Anything that goes in there, as far as I understand it, needs to be able to be documented in one way or another. And fortunately, when it comes to video work or blogging or stuff like that, the evidence is already out there for people to find.

And it's kind of a good practice to engage in every once in a while to think back and consider your own biography, whether it's personal or professional, academic or public facing, whatever it's going to be. It doesn't hurt every once in a while to think about how you could explain what it is that you do, and what you've done, to somebody who doesn't know anything about you.

What would you put out there first? What would you prioritize? What would you leave in? And what would you leave out?What would you describe in detail? And what would you just talk about in outline or perhaps even gloss over? And so this is where I think that it might be useful, not just for me, to engage in this sort of thing.

But you, the listener, you could think about if you were put on the spot, if somebody said, hey, I want to write a Wikipedia entry about you, or I want to write a blog post about this aspect of your life or that aspect of your life. Or if you had a biographer that said, I would like to write an article or a book about your life, because I think that you're interesting, what would you actually tell them?

Is it only the stuff that you're currently focused on interested in? Well our lives reach back decades and decades, and we've often forgotten a number of the things that used to be quite important for us and may have shaped us and created the opportunities that we are currently exploring, perhaps even enjoying in the present, but we left the other stuff behind.

So, for example, in my case, I had to think about, well, when did I actually get started giving lectures to the non-academic general public? And the answer to that was way back in the early 2000s, 2000s when I started getting invited by various places to come in and give talks. And I don't think I was particularly good at it at that point in time.

Or where did you get your interests from? Where did those arise from? I had to think about the fact that, and I think many of you know this, I never intended to become a college professor. That was just not on the horizon for me when I was in high school or even in college. It was only later on when I decided to go to graduate school that that became a viable option for me to even envision. When I was in high school I didn't even plan to go to college. I just thought i was going to go into the military and perhaps be a lifer, or even - and this shows you just how much our mindsets can change over time - perhaps a mercenary. A bit of a pipe dream that, of course, didn't come to pass.

So I think it can be a useful exercise, and it may be one that a person person would actually want to do through writing or perhaps other alternative forms of putting something down. It could be talking to yourself with a recording, or it could be video recording yourself, but something that's more than just going off and thinking by yourself, delving into yourmemories and reflecting in your solitude.

I think it would be useful for all of us every once in a while to do this, maybe not with the entirety of our life, but to ask this question, how did I get here? What was I doing today? Earlier on? Five years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? That got me to this place where I currently am, that got me to the person that I currently exist as.

And so this could be an interesting kind of exercise to carry out, you know. I'm telling you about this as the year is coming to a close, and we'll soon be talking about new years and what lies ahead of us. But perhaps we want to also from time to time take that time to look behind us and find the self who no longer exists as such, except in our own memories or the apparatus by which we have preserved those.

And in some respects I may be better off than most other people because as an academic I have a curriculum vitae which I've had to keep current over the years. And I can go back to earlier ones and see the things that I thought were important back then, and perhaps have left off of more recent versions. I also have a lot of writings that I've done, and podcast episodes and videos, and things like that.

But we could think about all sorts of other ways and in which we preserve stuff that we used to have, opening up a book and seeing what you underlined or what notes you took. Going into the garage or the attic or the basement and seeing what you've put in boxes from the last time that you moved, or when you needed to store things, and thinking about what those things are and why you held on to them and why they could be important to you.

So I don't have any really grand philosophical reflections, but I was struck …

I expect that many of you are familiar with the series that I have been writing on Stoicism and grief, which is a topic that I've been thinking about for quite some time, and I had the opportunity to present some of my thoughts, largely drawn from the classic Stoic authors, about how we can look at the emotion of grief and and the activities of grieving back when I went to stoic camp and was an invited speaker there. And subsequently, I've given a few talks, and I've been writing a series of posts, trying to expand on that.

It gives me the opportunity to go back to the texts and dig in a bit deeper. I have the freedom to write as much as I'd like since I'm not writing for a press. There's no editor looking over my shoulder who has a certain word count in mind. And I get to go back to these great thinkers, particularly Cicero, who has a lot to say about it, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, among others.

At the stage that I am currently at in the series, I am looking in particular at one work by Cicero, which is called The Tusculan Disputations. It's a really excellent, long, dense work that is not only engages Stoic philosophy, but a number of other philosophical schools of antiquity as well, including the Platonists, the Aristotelians, the Epicureans, also some of the schools that we consider to be kind of minor, like the Cynics and the Cyrenaics. He also talks about the Skeptics, and he brings up examples from a number of other, we could call them one-off or standalone philosophers who are not part of a major school or tradition.

And he also will bring up quite a few poets, including playwrights and people that we would nowadays actually call poets who had a philosophical experience. And he's interested in examining their points of view and sifting out what he thinks would be most valuable.

I've talked elsewhere about Ciceronian eclecticism, which is the stance of teaching, taking in what is valuable from a variety of philosophical perspectives, methods, traditions, schools, and trying to assimilate or integrate what they have to provide into a coherent position of one's own. And I think that arguably is what Cicero is doing in that work among others. And I'm particularly drawn to that as well, so I like going along for the ride with Cicero. And that's exactly what he's doing in Book 3, particularly when it comes to the issue of consolation.

So consolation or comforting is what you do when somebody has experienced a loss. And it can be as simple as going to the funeral and going up to them while they're in the receiving line and you've dressed in some somber clothing. You go up and say, I'm so sorry for your loss. If there's anything that I can do, let me know. And you know, that probably doesn't have a huge effect on their mood, but it shows that you care, and that by itself can be something quite important.

I'll mention, as somebody who has been in those receiving lines at funerals quite a lot, including for my mother and my grandparents and a that sometimes the things that people have to say are not particularly helpful. It's much more about them getting to say something that they think is helpful for you but isn't, or is really there to help them out in one way or another. And so not every attempt at consolation, however well-intentioned, it may be, or at least is imagined to be, is going to be on point.

But Cicero thinks that philosophers can actually give us some helpful advice about how we ought to console other people. And he's going to look at a number of different positions, including those of the Epicureans and the Cyrenaics, several different Stoic positions, the Peripatetics or Aristotelians, among others. And he's going to give you a critical assessment of what's right about those and what is probably off base about those.

Human nature and even human interactions in society have not changed so radically since Cicero's time that these have become useless, although we can certainly say that we've learned some additional lessons. And there are other philosophical and perhaps religious perspectives or even literary perspectives that could be useful that, of course, Cicero didn't have the opportunity to bring in. But I think that the Tusculan Disputations is really quite helpful when it comes to this.

And there's two things that I want to say to sort of bring this to a close. And the first is that when you look at a work like the Tusculan Disputations, You could say that it is existentialist in a very, very broad sense. Obviously, Cicero is writing a long, long time before existentialism as a philosophical movement is arising in the 19th and 20th centuries. But we often talk about proto-existentialists, and people will often include figures such as Augustine of Hippo, or Blaise Pascal, or Marcus Aurelius, or even Socrates among them.

I think you could make a good argument that Cicero is very, very interested in and concerned with existential matters, the things that are characteristic of existential philosophy. He's interested in how philosophy interpenetrates our lives that we're actually living. He thinks that we don't have to go to Athens in order to philosophize. We can engage in it and we should engage in it wherever we happen to be within the world and he thinks that it can in fact apply to the day-to-day matters of our lives. As a matter of fact Cicero is somebody who it's not as if he disrespects theoretical philosophy or speculative philosophy he thinks that that's important. But he always wants to bring it back to the practical and to real life, we could say, and show how philosophy can helpfully inform that.

The other point that I want to linger on a bit is that Cicero is not just sitting back and saying: ‘hey, when you run into grief, I'm going to tell you how to get out of it. I'm the sage on the stage. I'm the super smart guy who has all the answers.” He is writing from a position of common experience, and we could even say common suffering.

Cicero himself wrote a book that we no longer possess called the Consolatio, or Consolation. And why did he write it? Well, somebody very important, very close to him, very beloved by him, died. His daughter, Tulia, who appears to have been a really incredible person and somebody who he could see as sort of a peer intellectually and practically. And she dies before him. As a matter of fact, the wife, who's not her mother, who he's married to at the time, in Cicero's view, doesn't sufficiently grieve for Tullia. She might have been a little bit jealous of the affection that Cicero had for his daughter, and he will divorce her afterwards as a result.

But coming back to Cicero himself, he feels the loss very deeply, and he goes looking for helpful philosophical works, which unfortunately no longer exist, but we know about through references, for example, Crantor the Platonist's work on grief. And Cicero finds them lacking so he decides to write a work himself now why is this in a way existentialist because he's not just telling other people how they ought to deal with this emotion this experience that he himself has gone through but now is above it all.

Instead, he is seeking for words of advice that he can give himself in a kind of inner dialogue, an interior exhortation that can help him navigate these difficult waters of grief and grieving. And in the process like so many other people who do similar projects he writes something that could be useful for others, indeed likely was quite useful for others

Again we've lost the work, the Consolatio, but we do possess the Tusculan Disputations. And I would say, as somebody who deals with grief himself, that reading through the Tusculan Disputations, and thinking about some of the things that Cicero tells us that other philosophers or other schools have had to say and have suggested as practices or insights bearing upon grief, that we can take that and apply it to our own lives very productively and perhaps lessen our own emotion of grief or restrain it, r…

I plan for this to be the last post (at least for a while) discussing my reflections about various matter stemming from our big move earlier this Fall, during which we left behind our two-story loft apartment in the Westown neighborhood of Milwaukee, and moved into a smaller living space in the Third Ward, and took up an office space in the Walkers Point neighborhood. That had the interesting and unintended effect of producing a new kind of work/life balance that I haven’t had in my life for quite a while.

In this episode, I reflect on why work/life balance is important for a good life, and I go into the particulars of how I ended up with it. It is working out well for me, though it certainly still needs some fine-tuning. In some ways, I’m finding myself less productive, but in others more productive, and I explain why and how that is.

Following up on my previous episode discussing the big move that we recently made to a new living space and a new office space, splitting functions we previously did in our loft apartment in the downtown of Milwaukee, I gave some thought to a problem related to and revealed by the move that my wife and I have given a good bit of thought to.

We have moved several times now. When you move, you pack stuff up. For us, that generally means putting stuff either into plastic storage tubs or (what I prefer) into bankers boxes. That’s not a problem at all. It’s nice to have the things one is moving organized like that.

The problem that was driven home to me by our recent move was that after the move 9 years ago, quite a few of those boxes and storage tubs that came from our previous home in Kingston, NY went into our walk-in storage closet, and then, in that entire 9 years, they never got unpacked. In fact, we recently moved each of those without unpacking them, nearly all of them going into a third destination for our move, a sizable storage locker. And there they sit right now, where they will sit, until we decide to do something different and finally unpack and go through all of that stuff.

I realized that I’ve been doing that in a more specific way going back not just to the last two moves, but for decades, all the way back to graduate school. In may case, it is notebooks and photocopied articles that I have saved, stored, and brought from place to place, reluctant to let them go, just in case down the line they might prove useful, important, insightful, even necessary for my work down the line.

It’s worth thinking about the motivation(s) that leads otherwise reasonable people to hold onto things they’ve packed, never getting around to unpacking them, sorting through them, and that’s what I reflect upon a bit in this podcast episode. There’s a good bit more to think through and say, but this is where I’ll leave off in these reflections for the moment.

There’s a good reason why I’ve been a bit radio-silent on the podcast front as of late. Earlier this month, we finished a big move from our old apartment to a new living space and a new office. Previously, we had been both living and working in the same place, and now they are separated by about 4/10 of a mile (and funny enough, in two different zip codes). Since I recorded and edited this new Mind & Desire podcast episode from the new office, that got me ruminating a bit about offices I’ve worked from before and thinking about how much I’m enjoying this new office we’ve moved into.

What’s so great about this new office, you might ask? It’s been a long time since I’ve had my own office space, one I could really settle into, bring our shelves and books in, work in without interruption, at whatever hours I’d like to. The last time I had anything like that was 13 years ago, when I was an assistant professor of philosophy at Fayetteville State University. In the meantime, I’ve shared adjunct offices at Marist College, Marquette University, and Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Not quite the same as having your own place to work in.

This new space has a lot of advantages. It’s in a commercial building where a lot of the firms are innovators in the Milwaukee area, and it’s quite a aesthetically pleasuing building set just a little distance from both of the major rivers (Menominee and Milwaukee) that feed into the city, eventually merging and emptying into Lake Michigan. Not only do we have our office there on the fifth floor, but as tenants, we also have access to an auditorium and conference room, so we will likely be able to start holding events there down the line.

It’s quite interesting to notice just how good it feels to have this new space to work in. I suppose I’d been going without, or making do, for so long that I’d forgotten what it was like. I expect that now that I’m settled in, I’ll be able to get a lot more done, and get it done more consistently, than I was able to do before.

There is a passage in the first section of David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that, every time I read the work, makes me pause and reflect. It has to do with assessments of which past thinkers or writers are read in the present and will be read in the future. Some of Hume’s choices and predictions strike us in the present as rather quaint. But perhaps there’s a lesson for us there.

Here’s what he says:

The fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decayed. La Bruyere passes the seas, and still maintains his reputation: But the glory of Malebranche is confined to his own nation, and to his own age. And Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten

As I point out, not even 100 years later, at least in the field of philosophy, the positions of Cicero and Aristotle will be reversed. I’ve never read Bruyere or Addison, but I’ve read Malebranche, and you really can’t avoid Locke if you aim to have a decent philosophical education, at least one cognizant of the discipline’s history!

So there’s a lot to think about that we can apply to our own present situation. Who will be the authors considered interesting and worth reading 100 years from now? You can guarantee that most of the people considered absolutely important right now won’t stand the test of time.

A little bonus in this episode: I tell the story of one of my professors advising me against selecting Derrida as the thinker I would write my dissertation upon, and the reasoning he set out for his advice.

How much time do you need to give to a philosophical text in order to adequately understand it? That is a question I get asked, both in general and with respect to specific texts and authors, very often. There isn’t any good precise answer to a question like that. It depends on so many different factors. How complex and difficult is the text or the thought of that author? How well-equipped is the reader for grappling with philosophical texts? Are they already familiar with the author, or are they coming to the text “cold” as it were? How deep or extensive of an understanding are you hoping to develop?

What I can say, as a rough and ready rule of thumb, though is that texts require what they require. And often our initial ideas about that amount can be way off base. We have to find this out through experience. Or rather, experiences, since no one single experience of reading will be enough to conclusively tell us that we’ve understood matters well enough (except with authors who have little to offer us).

How long should it take you to read and thoroughly understand a massively important and influential work like Rene Descartes’ Meditations On First Philosophy? Is giving each of the meditations one quick read enough? Some of my students mistakenly assume that is the case, and then find out they were in error when it comes time to explaining what is going on in the text, even at a beginner level.

Descartes himself suggests by the format of the Meditations that each of them should be read and thought about for a day, so that working through the six meditations would then take a little less than a week. But interestingly, in one of this responses to objections, he tells his interlocutor that each of the short meditations really ought to require a month, or at a minimum a week.

That’s the author himself writing to people who have a solid education in philosophy, so presumably he would have a good idea about what his own work requires! That might be a useful caution to us, not to try to cut corners or “optimize'“ our reading, speeding through philosophical texts quicker than we ought to.

I’m currently teaching an online class on Rene Descartes’ Meditations, as well as on the Objections other philosophers and theologians provided about his work, and Descartes’ own replies to those objections. One of the points I emphasize to my students is that this willingness to see our feedback from other thinkers is something important not just for Descartes himself but for doing philosophy well in general.

Descartes himself tells us a good bit about this in his Preface to the Reader of the Meditations. This doesn’t mean that he wants to considers every single objection coming from anyone whosoever. It is critical that would-be critics have actually read, understood, and thought about a work before they are in any way equipped to say anything intelligent about it. But there are intellectually well-developed critics out there, and Descartes thinks it essential to engage with them.

As I note, there is an interesting similarity between what Descartes does in publishing his Meditations with the much longer Objections and Replies added to it, and what Anselm of Canterbury did centuries earlier with one of his major works, the Proslogion. Another monk, Gaunillo wrote a set of objections on behalf of the Biblical fool mentioned in chapters 2-4 of the Proslogion, and Anselm himself wrote a response. Like Descartes, he required that the work, in its official publication, have Gaunillo’s criticisms and his own response included.

Thinking about these works, and these editorial decision by their authors provides us with a valuable opportunity to think about what it takes to do philosophy well as a practice.