One of the texts that I've taught in my classes in the past, but never produced any lecture videos about until nowis Michel Foucault's piece, Technologies of the Self. It fits in particularly well with one class I'm teaching this semester for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. It's titled "Philosophy, Mindfulness, and Life, but the class mainly focuses on Philosophy As A Way Of Life.
That's a term popularized by 20th century French philosopher Pierre Hadot, but as as approach towards philosophy it goes far beyond the ambit of his works. Foucault's study of technologies of the self covers much of the same ground (as does, I would argue, what Alasdair MacIntyre calls "tradition-constituted inquiry"). The focus is on how intentional ways of living develop, employ, borrow, and transform practices.
Foucault's own emphasis on technologies allows him to explain his own overarching projects, framing them particularly in terms of his earlier focus on technologies of power, and his later shift to examining what he calls "technologies of the self."
I hope you find them useful and interesting. As always, if you'd like to make a contribution to helping me continue my work making classic philosophical texts, thinkers, and topics accessible for people worldwide, consider becoming a monthly supporter on Patreon. If you'd like to make a one-time donation, you can do so directly on Paypal, or on Buy Me A Coffee.
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.
For nearly a year, I've been engaged in a rather long-term and massive project which I don't think I've mentioned previously here on this blog -- the Half Hour Hegel video series. By the end of December, I'd managed to make it to a minor milestone -- small in comparison, that is, to the amount of work that is still waiting to be done! -- I'd shot, edited, and released all of the videos for the Preface and the Introduction to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's early masterwork, the Phenomenology of Spirit.
The general idea behind the series (the motivations for which I'll discuss in more detail below) was that I would go through the entire text, paragraph by paragraph, first reading and then commenting on each paragraph (there's a from over 800 total) in turn. The 70-odd-paragraph Preface -- famous for, among other things, asserting the impossibility of actually providing a preface to any genuinely philosophical work -- ended up taking me 31 total lectures -- around 15.5 hours. The much shorter and more straightforward Introduction required just 7 lectures -- 3.5 hours.
Last month, I appeared as a guest on Patrick McCarty's internet radio show, Insight Radio, along with a bright young high school student, Rohan Macherla, who has already developed a strong interest in an understanding of the daunting, difficult thought of G.W.F. Hegel. The segment was to start out discussing the section "Self-Consciousness" from the Phenomenology of Spirit
(famous for the portion called the Master-Slave Dialectic), and then go off in whatever directions seemed fit to us.
As it turned out, our conversation (the full recording of which is available here) ended up focusing more and more on the conditions of contemporary education, and in particular with the effects -- good or bad, aimed at or unintended -- of recent, and in some ways ubiquitous, technological innovations have had on education and culture. Since our recording session, I've been mulling over certain unfinished lines of thought we outlined during the conversation.
One reason I've been unmistakably lax over the last month in meeting my self-imposed obligations to timely and consistent posting on this blog stems from what might be regarded as a species of inconstancy. It's fortunate that blogs cannot exhibit or feel jealousy, or else I might have problems on my hands in addition to those involved in skillful time-management -- or juggling the consequences of its lack thereof. For, I must admit that another blog has been absorbing much of the energies and attentiveness I had earlier been devoting to Orexis Dianoētikē, which, to judge by readership counts, has not remained entirely unattended in my all-too-often absences.
I started a new blog, Virtue Ethics Digest, intended to function as a complement to Orexis Dianoētikē, much more tightly focused on one area of my lasting interests -- Virtue Ethics as a means for understanding moral issues in contemporary culture -- as well as sparer in design, shorter in post-length, with somewhat less of my own voice compensated by more block quotes from the sites whose articles and entries I would mine for relevant and provocative material. The original impetus and idea emerged from a combination of two factors: teaching Ethics to interested, well-motivated students and some degree of experience with another tumblr blog. [note: I've since switched V.E.D. over to a Blogger platform]
Nearly a week and a half of busily packed days have passed since I officially started the tour for my book Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in Franceat our own Charles Chesnutt Library at Fayetteville State University. I didn't realize until I started putting my presentation together precisely how appropriate an occasion and location that was. The story that I'm going to tell, reflect upon, draw some implications from, and conclude with an argument about resources and policies - - the story of my research and the book that eventually emerged from is also the story of a library, the University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library, a library of a certain type that unfortunately seems to be at risk for gradually dwindling away, faced with the twin pressures of a digital age and the costs of maintaining library stacks.
I'm not going to talk much about my book in this entry, other than to say that I'll be adding a video (to My New Book) discussing how it is intended to make contributions to scholarship in several respects somewhat different than and complementary the volumes of secondary literature -- or even original groundbreaking work in Philosophy, Religion, History, Political Theory, or Rhetoric -- the disciplinary circles in which I move and appreciate the works of my peers. What I will note first about Reason Fulfilled By Revelation is that were it not for the existence nearby of a certain kind of library, a certain form of repository of human knowledge, of intellectual striving and dialogue, the research that I carried out would have been. . . . well, not entirely inconceivable, but practically speaking rendered impossible
A few days ago, I came across a story from the Atlantic, From Social Media Startup VYou: Endless Questions, about yet another new social media site in my twitter feed. As it turns out, going back into a twitter search on "VYou" -- after weeding out all of the posts of"so-and-so's video response to. . . . " -- there's several other interesting stories out there about this type of social interaction, from apparently more cutting-edgy sites, like TNW and Black Web, explaining what kind hybrid or cross this new site by reference to yet other sites, and worrying about whether VYou will succumb to pornification as did Chatroulette.
Busy with classes, meetings, preparing for the last of the six or seven presentations I've made this semester (after a while, you lose count, but thankfully they don't blur together so badly that I think I'm supposed to talk about Aristotle and internet flaming but actually am expected to talk about Plato's dialogues and close readings, or vice versa), I put off exploring the site until I had finished my presentation at the Saturday Academy earlier today on CLA grading rubrics. I'm still the office now, having created a VYou profile, recorded the requisite "waiting" and "no response yet" videos, then responded to three questions, the first two asked by a colleague (our debate coach, here today to meet with his team), the other anonymously.
You have to record your answers with a web-cam. Multiple takes are allowed -- in theory as many as it requires to get it right -- but you can't stage your videos by recording them elsewhere and then uploading them. A certain degree of spontaneity is not only required but even seems appropriate, or better yet befitting to this type of interaction. It's strange but enjoyable to think a bit and then work out answers to the questions that get asked.
That's a key aspect to this medium -- questions and answers. One only gets to video answers to questions that get asked so without incisive, well-worded questions -- the questions act as tags for the answers -- the medium is not likely to be of much use to potential viewers and contributor, and will fail to gain the critical mass and momentum needed in cyberspace.
I am just starting to envision uses to which we philosophers might put this medium. I'll just mention two:
If the philosopher answering is personable enough, works out (or just by knack quips) witty answers, and is diligent in getting to questions, this could provide an excellent forum both for popularizing philosophy and for stamping interactions with enough of a personal touch to bring people young and old to philosophy, or at least to some topics (you'd have to be extremely charismatic or inventive to make some topics in contemporary analytic philosophy anything other than deadly dull).
This could also be an excellent medium for fostering interdisciplinary discussion, debate, collaboration. . . That aspect I admittedly have to devote a lot more thought to, and I'll defer that for the time being so that I can eventually get to the CLA website work I'm supposed to be working on.
One last point, not so much a complaint as an expression of the hope that the designers of VYou will expand and modify it: You get to list your interests and specialties, but philosophy is not among them. You have to stretch a bit to find categories that fit you. In my case, Religion, Literature and . . . . Motivational Speaking.
Back now for several days from a grueling month of attending conferences, preparing and providing workshops, seemingly interminable committee meetings, web-design, a few job applications, and . . . oh, yeah, how could I forget, regular web-enhanced Critical Thinking classes for my students -- back and almost fully up to speed, it's time to get the blogging back into gear. I've got a few started and then parked posts which I hope to finish, polish, and bring to light in the next several days. But today, instead, a short, technogeeky (as opposed to philosogeeky) post.
One of our webmaster-IT gurus at FSU, Bill Gibson sent out an interesting email, which linked to his blog, which linked then to Odiogo, a site which takes blog posts and "reads" them as near-human quality speech to anyone who clicks on the newly-enabled buttons on one's blog, in this case my own little site of ramblings and ruminations.
