Phi Fic

On Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel, recorded at Manhattan's Caveat on 4/6/19, with audience participation.

If we harness the power of society to employ available technologies to really focus on making people happy, what would the result be? This is Huxley's thought experiment, but is it in all respects a dystopia, and is it a fair test of the ideal of social improvement or merely of a flawed view of human nature? You can watch this episode instead.

End song: "Brave New World" by Mark Lint. Read about it.

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Concluding Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885).

What's the wise way to live? We start in earnest into part three, treating the "spirit of gravity" where socially-imposed values cover over your uniqueness, omni-satisfaction vs. being choosy, "Old and New Tablets" where Nietzsche explores various ethical and meta-ethical issues (e.g. is self-overcoming a matter of one-time self-actualization or is it continual?), and more on the Overman and eternal recurrence.

Listen to part one first, or get the ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!

End song: "Upright Man" by Rachel Taylor Brown, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #91.

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On the remainder of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885).

How can we keep our spirits up and avoid nihilism? We consider Nietzsche's "solution" of eternal recurrence, why he uses a poetic, allegoric style, and more.

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Is technology making us complacent? Are we in danger of becoming Nietzsche's famed "last men" who are no longer capable of creativity and independent thought?

Mark Linsenmayer from the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast lays out Nietzsche's idea and argues that on the contrary, having our basic needs met by technology can free us up to pursue the creative endeavors that Nietzsche saw as the pinnacle of human achievement

This is but a Glimpse. To hear the full Partial Examination of this book, visit partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Continuing on Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, books 1 and 2 (1883).

We talk through Nietzsche's symbolism (tightrope walkers and gravediggers and snakes, oh my!), the path toward the overman, his screed against the state, the Will to Power as the will to overcome oneself by reconciling oneself with the past, and more.

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On Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, books 1 and 2 (1883).

What is wisdom? In this text whose style parodies the Bible, we get pithy advice and allegorical imagery to guide us away from self-defeating, life-denying attitudes and orient us towards creative self-overcoming (i.e. exertion of the Will to Power). The Last Man who no longer knows how to give birth to a dancing star is a rotten egg!

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Sponsors: St. John's College Graduate Institute: partiallyexaminedlife.com/sjcgi. Listen to the Hi-Phi Nation podcast at hiphination.org.

 

Should literature be political? Jean-Paul Sartre thought that all literature is political, because of what literature is.

That's a very weird-sounding view. Mark Linsenmayer from the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast tries to make it sound like something you should at least consider.

This is but a Glimpse. To hear the full Partial Examination of this book, visit partiallyexaminedlife.com.

The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

--Swann’s Way

 

Beyond the renowned “Madeleine” scene in Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, we swim within his enchanting prose to learn and expand the most unpredictable senses and worlds within ourselves, and which only Proust is able to bring to life.

Swann’s Way is the first volume of Proust’s mammoth novel, Remembrance of Things Past, which at its core is a study into the experience of involuntary memory.

Told in stream of consciousness manner, Swann’s Way, follows the youth of the narrator in aristocratic France of the late 19th century, taking place largely in the fictional village of Combray, France (based on the real town of Illiers, which changed its name to Illiers-Combray in 1971, in honor of Proust), and is largely focused on what is love, memory, and, lost time.

Through the description and exploration of an older neighbor named Charles Swann, the narrator examines Swann’s tortured romance with a purported “lady of the evening”, Odette.

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.”

-Swann’s Way

Through vivid, comprehensive, sweeping colors and endless stream of consciousness prose which knows no margin, Proust carries us through Freudian, Marxist, philosophical struggles as he scrutinizes Swann, his family, his mother, every object in his room, himself---and the moment when he dips a madeleine cake into his tea, sparking an experience with memory which charges the novel through the constant links between perception and memory.

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

-Swann’s Way

Join Cezary Baranieckli, Laura Davis, Nathaniel Hanks, Daniel Johnson, and Jennifer Tejada, as we spend a very long episode deconstructing and being reshaped by our reading of this unspeakably remarkable novel.

If you have thoughts, recommendations, or questions that you want to send our way, please do via [email protected].

Hear more Phi Fic.

Thanks to Allan Bowley for audio assistance.

Thanks to Christopher Nolen for the music.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continuing on What is Literature? (1948).

Sartre gives a phenomenology of reading and writing that makes reading into a creative act of completing the writer's work, and calls this cooperation ethical: the work is an appeal to the reader's freedom, and also the reader's responsibility to then know what the work reveals. Are you shirking, all you skimmers?

Start with part one, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!

End song: "Things I Shouldn't Have Told You" by Sam Phillips, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #90.

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