What Is X?

On this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith asks: What is friendship? His guest, S. Abbas Raza, is the founding editor of 3 Quarks Daily and has a graduate degree in philosophy from Columbia, but what qualifies him as an expert on this topic is quite simple: he is one of Justin’s oldest friends. Together, the two settle into a relaxed conversation on the nature of friendship—once a high priority for the ancient philosophers, and yet strangely neglected today—and take their own as something of a case study, probing its start in the mid-Nineties, its roots in the cultural differences between American and Pakistani conceptions of friendship, and how it has changed over time. From there they progress to timeless questions: Can you have too many friends? Is there really a distinction between the “true friend” and the “fair-weather friend”? Does the classic “Friendship ended with Mudasir” meme bear witness to a kind of relationship that simply does not exist in the U.S.? And most pressingly of all: Is friendship overrated?

In this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith comes ready to be persuaded, as he tries to get a handle on one of the most difficult Xes of all: consciousness. What are the inner states we experience? Is figuring it out just a matter of neural activity, or might there be something to consciousness that science can’t fully apprehend? What is the nature of introspection, the stream of thoughts and experiences we have in the privacy of our own intellects? What are the boundaries of consciousness? Is it different from sense perception? What does it mean to “see” a red dot? From the origins of psychoanalysis to philosophy debates of the 1990s, Justin and Eric try to answer the question so poignantly captured by The Pixies: Where is my mind?

The ancient conception of virtue is quite far removed from our own. Nowadays, we tend to think of virtue as a kind of moral righteousness, as opposed to sin. The Greeks, however, had a very different idea about virtue, or arete, as they called it. For Aristotle, virtue was a unique form of excellence, something that each person or animal or thing could aspire to. On this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith invites on philosophy professor Jennifer Frey to try to recover this idea of virtue and to ask whether Aristotle's definition can still work for us today. Along the way, they revisit the works of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, and talk about everything from Madame Bovary to sea cucumbers. They ask: Does virtue ethics fit into the purview of moral philosophy, or should it stand alone? Is living a good life a matter of luck or effort? Is there one particular path to human flourishing? How should philosophy orient itself toward literature? And what is the best Coen Brothers movie?

For Valentine’s Day, there was only one question “What Is X” could ask, one that thinkers through the ages, from Plato to Howard Jones, have not managed to answer: What is love? In this episode, Justin E. H. Smith is joined by New School media studies professor Dominic Pettman, the author of books such as Peak Libido and Creaturely Love, for a wide-ranging discussion of desire, romance and what it means to be completed by someone (or something) else. Starting with Plato’s Symposium, they move on to Agamben and Badiou, Leibniz and Lacan, Proust and Fourier, Spinoza and Berlant. (One lesson from this episode: philosophers might be our best aphorists of love.) With these thinkers, they’re prepared to tackle the big issues: the tension between love of hyper-singularity and love for the generic nature of humanity; whether love is work or grace; how Aristophanes predicted Sex and the City; whether you can marry the Berlin Wall, or a white-naped crane; and just how it is love is a concept we can use to describe both our romantic partners and the crucial cup of coffee we have each morning.

When it comes to gender, there are many big questions that people often get stuck on. On this episode of “What X?," Justin E. H. Smith asks Robin Dembroff, a professor of feminist and LGBTQ philosophy at Yale, to help untangle them. Justin and Robin start off by disambiguating sex and gender, with some help from the philosophical vocabulary of essence and telos. Gender, Robin argues, is the entire process of defining, classifying, and regulating people according not only to their body parts but on the basis of ideas of maleness and masculinity, and femaleness and femininity. The result: a set of norms and expectations that guide the direction of one’s life—and whose enforcement makes us miserable. If this is true, can any of these labels be salient identifications without limiting us? And if not, can we even imagine a life without gender?

And a special note from the host on Season 2: “I realized over the course of Season 1 that I'm not nearly as convincing a Socrates-figure as I had imagined. But this may be another way of saying I'm a better conversationalist than I thought myself to be. I find I generally agree with people, at least during the time I'm speaking with them, while afterwards their spell begins slowly to wear off and I recall all the more enduring commitments I have that are in fact in tension with all the things I was nodding along to just a short time before. This might seem contradictory, hypocritical even, to some who position themselves in the world as polemicists or fighters for some particular cause. But everyone believes what they believe for what at least they take to be good reasons, and it's worth learning what those are. Part of that learning is the effort we undertake in conversation to put ourselves in their position, and to see what things look like when we agree with them. So, while this podcast still strives toward a determination of Agreement (marked by the sound of bells), Disagreement (goat’s bleat), or Aporia (wind), the goat has turned out to be a rare character on this show. I make no apologies for that.”

On this episode of “What Is X,” Justin invites his “old friend and sometimes adversary” Jason Stanley, the Yale philosopher and author of How Fascism Works, to investigate what might seem to be a relatively narrow question: What are slurs? You might think a slur is just a word that hurts. But to study slurs is, Jason contests, to attempt to understand why words have the communicative force they do—and why the very logic of philosophy of language falls short. In the traditional account, slurs seem to have special linguistic properties, to be uniquely expressive. But what if language is not at its core a neutral mechanism for conveying information, and the philosophy of language ignores the very aspects of language that make it so powerful and worthy of investigation? Slurs seem to be unique because they carry a history and an ideology. But so do all words—boss, professor, mother. Can slurs in fact teach us more about how language actually works than philosophy’s standard examples? To answer such questions, Justin and Jason also discuss the difference between slurs and taboos, what analytic philosophy can learn from Charles Mills, critical race theory and Judith Butler, and why the sentence “the cat is on the mat” expresses an ideological commitment.

What is the relation between criticism and crisis—is criticism in crisis?  On this episode of "What is X?," taped in July 2021, Justin invites the critic and poet Ryan Ruby on to attest to the state of criticism today. Is it even possible to play a social role as a critic today, Justin asks, given the economic structures that disadvantage serious long-form criticism? There’s more good criticism than one might expect, Ryan offers—an embarrassment of riches amid the top-ten listicles. Criticism, Ryan says, following Oscar Wilde, has become a form of art in its own right.  What can account for the paradoxical abundance of good criticism precisely at the time when there are so few incentives to writing it? Ryan and Justin discuss criticism in an age of abundance and information overload: Is everything a worthy critical object? How central is negativity—or, conversely, praise and rapture—to the critic’s arsenal? Along the way they talk about the medium of poetry, hierarchies of taste, individual subjective judgment vs. the canon, and the Filet-o-Fish.

This week’s episode of “What Is X?” begins with a provocation: Does this conversation really need to be an hour long? Can’t Justin and this week’s interlocutor, D. Graham Burnett, just agree that history is what happens in the past, and let the bells of agreement ring? Naturally, they can’t, as Graham, a historian of science at Princeton and a longtime friend of Justin’s, well knows. Instead, Justin and Graham plunge into the history of defining history: if it’s not just all the events that happened in the past, what is it? Perhaps, then, it’s the process of recovering, documenting, describing and understanding those events. But is the asteroid that hit the earth 65 million years ago really in the scope of historical inquiry in the same way as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes? And if history is a kind of knowledge, as these colloquial definitions of history imply, don’t we first need to have a shared sense of what knowledge itself is before we can come to a consensus on the nature of history?

How is the aesthetic experience of art different from how we appreciate wonders of nature—a pretty flower, or a mountain vista, or a peacock's beautiful feather? In this brisk and bracing 40-minute discussion, Justin E.H. Smith is joined by critic and self-declared lover-of-art Becca Rothfeld to spar over what makes art art. They ask: Does it have to be something made by humans and for humans, or could one consider an animal or a machine an artist? Is there a stable, transhistorical definition of the term, or would what is considered “art” in one era be unrecognizable as such to those from another time? (That is: can we say that Paleolithic cave paintings are art in the same way a Basquiat painting is art?) And together they settle the matter once and for all: Are Marvel movies art?

Say you’re researching your ancestry, and you hit a dead end: the genealogical trail goes cold. Is it really a dead end? Or might this open up new ways of understanding who we are and how we came to be? In other words: What do we mean when we say something exists in our historical memory? Can we actually remember historical events that you were not alive to see? 

On this week’s episode of “What Is X?,” Justin E. H. Smith talks to writer and critic Julian Lucas about memory, and historical memory in particular. Justin asks, what is the relationship between memory and the historical record? Julian defines "memory" as a presentist, personal relationship to the past, one that is mediated by places, objects, and ritual practices—it is an approach to history that brings it into conversation with the lives we lead today. Over the course of an hour, Julian and Justin discuss the uses and misuses of history (cf. corporate appropriations of MLK), occasional bad vibes of historical reenactments, the poetry of Derek Walcott, and what African diaspora memory practices can teach us about the contingencies of history. Most pressingly, they try to uncover the root of Justin’s childhood conviction that his grandfather was George Washington.