Moral Minority

In Part 2, we wrap up our consideration of Jean-Paul Sartre's midcentury magnum opus by exploring how we move from the inaccessible interiority of consciousness to our concrete relations with others. The latter half of Being & Nothingness takes up the question of what aspects of our being are revealed to us in confrontation with the Other. Sartre famously argues here that it is the Other's look, the omnipresent possibility of being seen, judged, and evaluated by another consciousness that discloses the objectivity of our being through and for the Other. As soon as the Other enters the scene, a fundamental aspect of our being is alienated from us; captured in the Other's appropriating gaze. The various attempts by the for-itself to retrieve this alienated being and penetrate the Other's essential freedom play a determinate role in shaping the contours of our fundamental projects, that is the immanently revisable set of possibilities, meaning, and value we pro-ject into the world.  In the final sections of the book, Sartre sketches an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis, asks us to reframe our conception of the autonomous will and the role of giving and asking for reasons, and gestures towards an ethics grounded in criterionless choice.

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Note Bene is a series of off the cuff episodes that delve more into our personal experiences with broader topics with relevance to normativity and the ethical life. In this episode, Charles is joined by the writer and critic, Jon Repetti, to reflect on the art and philosophy of the late American avant-garde filmmaker, David Lynch. While touching upon his entire filmography, the discussion focuses on the LA triptych of films, Lost Highway(1997), Mulholland Drive(1999), and Inland Empire(2006) as the centerpiece of Lynch's mature moral vision of the political unconscious and metaphysical groundwork of American life.

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Jon's Substack: https://fivegoodhours.substack.com/

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Matt McManus joins us to help excavate the common origins of liberalism and socialism within the revolutionary republican tradition and illuminate shared political and normative principles rooted in a commitment to egalitarianism and expressive individualism. His new work, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. functions as an survey of key figures within the tradition of political liberalism and how their ideas of freedom, equality, and solidarity run parallel to the development of socialism. McManus lays the groundwork for a reconciliation between a moribund liberalism and a revitalized form of social democracy that reunites the utopian vision of socialism with the moral foundations of liberalism.

Buy The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism: https://www.routledge.com/The-Political-Theory-of-Liberal-Socialism/McManus/p/book/9781032647234?srsltid=AfmBOoqLejqwPodlJArQhLUWtNwlFd-dSNixTon8cxGXlFhxJ4brH1GV

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Devin: @DevinGoure
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In a far-reaching conversation with the critic Ryan Ruby, we unpack the legacy and impact of Fredric Jameson's landmark work of Marxist literary criticism, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Jameson's text argues for the explanatory richness and coherency of a Marxist hermeutical approach to interpreting the social function of the literary text. The guiding principle of Jameson's methodology is that any commentary that fails to historicize the narrative strategies at work as symbolic expressions of terrains of social conflict will be incomplete. Instead, he argues that we should view the interplay between the manifest content and historical subtext of the literary work as enacting imaginative "solutions" to social contradictions immanent to the dominant mode of production. In addition, we connect Jameson's historical materialist methodology to Ryan's new book of poetry, Context Collapse. Context Collapse is a playfully experimental work of philosophical verse that tells the story of the evolution of poetry in the Western tradition through the lense of information technology.

Buy Context Collapse: https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4657-context-collapse?srsltid=AfmBOopFByZKYoPP5UObNCZ32p6oIVIkXeNBH5TAW7KUUED-v7bgLPvM

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Devin: @DevinGoure
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In Part 1, we explicate Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to build a total existential system hinges on an unusual account of the evanescent character of consciousness at the heart of the meaning of existence. In this episode, we cover the first half of Sartre's monumental work, Being and Nothingness, explaining core concepts derived from his philosophical progenitors found in Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian Existenz philosophy. After discussing Sartre's creative appropriations of these thinkers, we discuss the role of ontological nothingness, consciousness as a transcendence-within-immanence, bad faith, and ethical anguish. These concepts form the backbone of Sartre's unique system of phenomenological ontology that purports to avoid the pitfalls of subjective idealism and naive realism and instead deliver both the reality of consciousness and the world upon which it stamps its meaning and values.


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Repetititon(1843) is a difficult and, for many, a baffling work by Søren Kierkegaard. It is equal parts psychological study, literary riddle, and philosophical problematic. In this discussion, we attempt to shed light on its central concept of repetition, how its interior dialectic differs from the Hegelian concept of mediation, and what the possibility of repetition means for the peculiarly modern problems of personal identity, historicity, and contingency. We interrogate the unusual literary form of the work, explain Kierkegaard's method of indirect communication, and ask how the task of freedom, or existential authenticity, reconciles itself (or fails to) with ethical and social obligations. 

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In this lively interview with philosopher Vanessa Wills, we discuss her recently published book, Marx's Ethical Vision, which argues that Marx's historical materialism contains a coherent and consistent moral picture of social transformation grounded in a view of human nature and the conditions of human flourishing. Contra the amoralist reading of Marx, Wills critically reconstructs, drawing from the entire range of Marx's corpus, an unflinching concern for normative ends that emerge as the dialectical product of human interaction with the natural world. For Marx, the necessity for morality is grounded in the existence of class domination and antagonism and will only disappear with the final dissolution of class society. Until then, we will still need to take seriously the gap between the existing state of things and the way things out to be, while remaining vigilant against forms of ideology that mystify or naturalise conditions of life that thwart the unleashing of human potentiality, freedom, and individuality.

Find out more about Professor Wills's book here:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/marxs-ethical-vision-9780197688144?cc=us&lang=en&

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This episode inaugurates a series of episodes exploring the existentialist approach to modern philosophy by considering the most well-known work of the melancholic, Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric is a genre-bending blend of aesthetic criticism, biblical exegesis, and critical ethics. It is perhaps the most profound deliberation on the concept of faith in the history of philosophy. Firmly rooted in post-Kantian ethical universalism, Fear and Trembling attempts a first approximation at defining the relation between faith, deliberative choice, passion, and the limits of rational morality. It is a work that challenges our received notions of faith as immediate certainty or intuition and takes us to the limits of human understanding. Faith, for Kierkegaard, as exemplified in Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is a matter of passionate interiority that defies intelligibility. In faith, we are gripped with an anxiety whose object is the paradox that tempts us to trespass the bounds of our understanding and our conventional ethical worldview. True faith is a rare human achievement that places the singular individual in an absolute relation to the absolute. Can the conviction of a passionate interiority which unifies a life around a singular decision be justified? Can passion or a purely personal virtue be reconciled with the public demands of ordinary social morality? Are there instances in our ethical life where our commitments force us to become an exception?

To complete our series on Dialectic of Enlightenment, we take an extended look at the famous chapter on the culture industry. The function of the culture industry, or the sphere of production concerned with creating entertainment and art is to inure and train consumers to acquiesce to the dominant ideology expressed through its culture products. The tendency of this process, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is to reproduce sameness, conformity, and eliminate the thought of rebellion against the status quo. The culture industry is a totalizing system that continuously creates desires by the management of consumer preference, while foreclosing the means of actually fulfilling these desires. Some have argued that this analysis is no longer applicable to a digital age characterized by a fragmentation of mass media and infinite streams of information. In this episode, we ask to what extent does the internet age continue to stifle authentic creativity and individuality and reproduce formulaic entertainment? Finally, we pose the question of whether rebellion is still possible within a system that anticipates and absorbs the gesture of rebellion. 

In this multi-part series, we examine the legacy of critical theory and the prospects of a recuperation of Marxist theory in the face of rising fascism by delving into the dense and fragmentary landmark text of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Part 2, we focus on the final completed fragment, "Elements of Anti-Semitism: The Limits of Enlightenment,' which analyzes the concept and instrumentalization of antisemitism in fascist political currents. Adorno and Horkheimer, over the course of seven theses, interweave insights from Freudan psychoanalysis, Marxist theories of reification and class struggle, and Nietzchean analyses of power to argue that antisemitism is a recurrent symbolic structure for the mobilisation of repressed violent urges.  This structure casts whomever is unassimilable to the dominant order in the role of scapegoat for the ills of the wrong society.  It is this shared feeling of impotence of a purportedly rational order to resolve the inherent contradictions of "the wrong society" that leads to the unleashing of irrational forces of destruction. The enlightenment is premised upon the promise of universal humanity and general emancipation, but the capitalist order keeps this nascent potential on the other side of the dialectic as a promise deferred. Is it possible to break the spell?