Seven Videos on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground

My summer 6-week Existentialist Philosophy and Literature class, designed and taught for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, is now nearing the end of its first week.  We are spending about five of those weeks going through selections from 10 key authors in the existentialist movement.  One of the thinkers we are hitting early on - next week in fact - is Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I've assigned the students Part 1 of Notes From Underground, with a chapter from The Brothers Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor) as a supplemental text.  I like to provide students with a lot of resources in all of my classes, and in online classes, this is particularly crucial.  So, I produced a series of core concept videos going through the key ideas set out in Notes from Underground.

Here are those seven videos:

• The Intellectual, Inertia, and Negativity
• Pleasure, Perversity, and Suffering
• Revenge, Anger, and Justice
• Enlightenment, Laws of Nature, and The Will
• Self-Interest and the Advantageous
• Desire and Reason
• The Most Advantageous Advantage

If you find the philosophy resources I develop interesting, enjoyable, or useful, by all means share them with others. And if you'd like to support the work that I do, making philosophy publicly accessible, you can become a monthly supporter on my Patreon page, or if you prefer a one-time donation, you can Buy Me A Coffee!

Musings About Life On YouTube

This weekend, my main YouTube channel - a largely academic channel devoted primarily to lectures about philosophical texts and thinkers  - passed a significant milestone.  Over 30,000 viewers are presently subscribers to the channel, and we're rapidly approaching 3 million total views.

Those numbers are particularly gratifying given that the videos I produce are on the low-tech, low-production - but high-content - end of the spectrum.  It shows that there's a real desire for substantive engagement with ideas out there, and that, if you produce content that helps people grapple with those ideas, what you out out there will indeed be watched.  And not just watched, but shared, commented on, and used by students, lifelong learners, working professionals - and even other academics.

Once I passed the 30,000 subscribers mark, I took a look through the figures - the "analytics" - YouTube provides me about the channel and the videos in it.  There's several other figures that are in many respects even more telling.  One of those is the total number of minutes that have been viewed - and that's a staggering number.  As I recheck those numbers tonight, it's 29,104,280 minutes.  29 million!  That has me once again mulling over something I've thought about from time to time over these last five years.  Quite simply - my YouTube avatar has existed for more total time than I have.

Happy Birthday, Georg W. F. Hegel

Today marks what would be the 242nd birthday of one of my absolutely favorite philosophers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, best known in our era for his early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, but also an extraordinarily productive thinker, lecturer, and writer. He worked out two massively dense, complex, and rich Logics -- the Science of Logic and the Encylopedia Logic -- which on first read, to those used to the rather restricted, formal, sterile understanding of Logic mediated in our current classes and curricula,  seem almost like something from another world -- though they're efforts to meticulously chart out the world in which we live, permeated by dynamic intelligence, worked out through dialectical processes.  He contributed to political theory with his Philosophy of Right, and lectured brilliantly on a number of subjects, particularly religion, art and aesthetics, and historical development.

The particular image of Hegel selected above is by far my favorite representation of him, a portrait that captures certain qualities of his thought, character, and life -- not least his marked melancholy paired with an intensity, one of the mind but almost palpably material, his own hungering desire for knowledge, for understanding, for wisdom, turned not only inward, in reflection and introspection, but all the more outward, towards the world, other human beings, history, society, art, law, religion.  I think you can say metaphorically of Hegel's eyes, that as opposed to the optics that came to prevail in modernity -- in which eyes passively take in and filter the world -- they work according to the older optics conjectured by the ancients -- actively extending light and penetrating intelligibity into the phenomena appearing before them.

Is Kierkegaard's Present Age Our Own?

I've been rereading a lot of Soren Kierkegaard's works over the last several weeks, in preparation for a new video venture -- a series of course lectures on Existentialist philosophy and literature -- and I was grateful and gladdened to get to return to one of his short works which I have enjoyed since I was an undergraduate nearly two decades ago, though admittedly I had much less of an appreciation for what he was doing in that text then:  The Present Age.  I shot roughly an hour of discussion of the key themes (available soon in YouTube), and as I find so often is the case, the mere act of explaining and unfolding the text, even before an essentially imaginary audience, not only highlighted certain themes for me, but also filled me with a greater sense of passion about the author, the ideas, their applicability.

We often talk as if the "life of the mind" was a matter of isolation, ivory towers, individual contemplation -- when the reality is that the more deeply we think, the more we also feel, and the more we find ourselves within fascinating conversations antedating ourselves, entangled with the lives and thoughts of others.  Perhaps more ought be said about that in a later post -- but for the time being, back to Kierkegaard and his diagnosis of the dangers, character, and opportunities for what he called the Present Age.  He wrote those words over a century-and-a-half in the past, though, so are they -- could they be -- as relevant today as when he wrote them?  I'd argue that some portions, certain ideas, several concerns are even more applicable to our own present situation than they were in Kierkegaard's own day

Plato, Persons, and the Ascent to the Highest Good

My colleague Eric Silverman hosted me in his Plato class at Christopher Newport University this last Wednesday, where I delivered a guest lecture (video available here)-- with much contribution from his student's questions, objections, puzzles, and discussion -- ostensibly focused on Diotima's speech (in Socrates' speech) nested in the very heart of Plato's dialogue, the Symposium -- but actually taking the opportunity to work out and talk about a few parts of one of my own projects concerned with Plato.

That dialogue is, and will ever remain, a central work in the history and discipline of philosophy.  It has inspired commentators, appropriators, perhaps even what might be called imitators down throughout the ages.  Its depiction of philosophy, indeed of many types of activity and inquiry, as fundamentally erotic will ever seduce new students to read it through and then return to explore its fascinating passages, and will draw back old friends and lovers, professors whose copies of it bear wear as signs of diligent study -- or even as the guide with whom I first traversed the dialogue in Greek with called it, an inability to put the book away because every time one opens it, in turn it opens in the reader's mind new, gnawing, aching questions.

Anselm on Persons In God's Mind (part 2)

Two weeks ago, in one of my Sunday musings, I posted some reflections bearing on some of the implications of a tripartite distinction the  great Medieval thinker St. Anselm made.  This was what we'd call an "ontological" or "metaphysical" distinction, meaning that it has to do with the being or reality of things.  The distinction bore on the modes of being or reality of a thing, the way a thing is or exists.

There is the thing as it actually is, in itself, real, existing.  And then there is how it is in our mind, in our knowledge, or imagination, or memory of the thing, even in our language, perhaps even in a painting of it.  The thing does exist this way, but with a lesser degree of reality or being than the thing as it is in itself.  Then there is the thing as it is in God's mind, in God's knowledge of it, which like every other genuine divine attribute for Anselm (e.g. God's goodness, His eternity, His justice) is in fact what God is, entirely so (so God is His justice, eternity, knowledge).

Three things to say about this.  First, it might be helpful to think of an example.  Second, this whole perspective, which may seem very strange and counter-intuitive, is a perfectly respectable philosophical stance which we call Platonism or neo-Platonism, and Anselm does definitely fit that label. Third, from that perspective, there is a hierarchy of degrees of being, and for a Christian (or for that matter Jewish or Islamic) neo-Platonist, from low to high it goes like this:  how a thing is in our minds, an image; how a thing is in itself, as it exists; and how a thing (most truly, most genuinely) is in God's mind.

Let's take an example:  there's a vase.  It is made of marble.  It came into being, say, 500 years ago, formed by the hand of a craftsman.  It is real.  You touch it, hold it in your hands, feel the coolness and smoothness, run your eyes over it.  Now, imagine it.  What's in your mind?  That same vase, or rather an image of it.  An image which has less reality, less truth than the actual thing itself of which it is a more or less faithful copy.  That has a lower degree of being.  And, then there is the vase as it is in God's mind, existing in there with all of the rest of the world, eternally.

Anselm on Persons in God's Mind (part 1)

Saint Anselm makes a very interesting distinction at several points in his writings.  He contrasts how things are in our thought, language, or knowledge about them with how things actually are in themselves.

Such a contrast between reality and appearance, or reality and representations of reality, is a commonplace found in nearly all philosophical approaches, even in those which accord priority to perspectives rather than to realities.  Anselm goes further, however, introducing a higher, or better put deeper, level: there is how things are in our knowledge of them, how things are in themselves (in se), and how they exist, as he puts it, in the divine Word, i.e. how they exist in the mind of God.  Here is one of several key passages (in Hopkin's and Richardson's translation:

Now, it is evident that the more truly the Creating Being exists than does the created being, the more truly every created substance exists in the Word (i.e., in the Understanding) of the Creator than in itself. Therefore, how would the human mind comprehend what that kind of speaking and knowledge is which is so vastly superior to and truer than created substances, if our knowledge is as vastly surpassed by these [created] things as their likenesses are different from their being?