Stephen R. C. Hicks is a Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society. He is also the author of six books. His writings have been translated into seventeen languages. Aleksandar Todorovski, the Editor in Chief of the Miskatonian, …
Stephen R. C. Hicks is a Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society. He is also the author of six books. His writings have been translated into seventeen languages.
Aleksandar Todorovski, the Editor in Chief of the Miskatonian, had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Hicks and covered topics such as the recent development of disruptive technologies and their impact on education, the business world, and the future of the Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Aleksandar – Good morning, Professor Hicks. Or should it be just ‘Stephen’?
Stephen –’ Stephen’ is fine.
Aleksandar – Thank you very much for making the time for our conversation today, it is much appreciated.
Stephen – You too. It looks like you guys have ambitions with your website. I looked at your website, a wide range of articles, and it looks lively.
Aleksandar – Thank you for that.
So, let’s start by sharing more about your current projects. I know you were supposed to, or you might have published a book for 2023. So, I guess if you could tell me more about what you’re doing and what keeps you busy and awake at night.
Stephen – Well, nothing keeps me awake at night. I do sleep well, and I have a lot of enjoyable projects going on right now.
One is that we’re working on a reissue of Eight Philosophies of Education. The education space right now, both lower education and higher education, is in turmoil, partly for ideological, political, and low-performance reasons. But at the same time, there’s a lot of exciting entrepreneurial stuff going on and rethinking the purpose of education.
So, we had a limited-issue publication of Eight Philosophies of Education. The idea is that education is a philosophical project, taking young people and preparing them for adult life in the real world.
Well, what is the real world?
What is adult life?
What are the critical values?
What strategically do I need to do?
Everything controversial in philosophy comes to be controversial when we think strategically about education: the curriculum, the methodology, how we will assess, what kind of people we will hire to be the teachers, and so forth.
We’ve also been doing a new video series called Philosophers, Explained, and it’s me guiding people through some of the classic and essential philosophical texts. The format is me speaking on the screen with the actual text alongside with key passages highlighted. It’s for serious students who want an in-depth but guided introduction through the significant texts. We’re working on that series and up to 40 episodes now.
And there are several shorter article projects, but we’ll set those aside for now.
Aleksandar – So, making something that can be an entry point for people who would not necessarily have a liberal education under their belts is a noble endeavor. That brings me to something else I wanted to discuss with you.
So, you have been working closely with Dr. [Jordan] Peterson for some time, and he’s building the Peterson Academy. So, can you tell me more about your part of the project now?
Stephen – A great question. Peterson Academy is one of the interesting new entrepreneurial ventures. In this case, I would not say that I’ve been working closely with Jordan Peterson in the higher education space. We have done interviews about postmodernism and related topics on his YouTube channel and have had a couple of other points of contact.
About the Academy: much of what’s been going on in higher education is a scandal, particularly in humanities and areas that have been infected by kind of skeptical, nihilistic, and anti-education trends. Yet on the positive side, many are working to provide solutions for the new generation, taking seriously the new technological tools that are available.
Aleksandar – Okay, sounds good. Can you tell me a little more?
Stephen – What the Peterson Academy is doing is going into the studio – and this is a bit self-congratulatory – still, they select professors and others people they think are the best worldwide in various subjects, and then bring them into their studio to do a course in their expertise. The Academy wants a wide range of courses that would make up the standard liberal arts education.
Courses in history, religion, philosophy, mathematics, physics, and some applied issues like environmental science and economics. At any college or good university, you will have professors who can teach all those things, but you won’t have the best people in the world at any one university or college.
They have studio space and skilled editors and use CGI and imported graphics. It is an awe-inspiring, ambitious project. The result is a stand-alone series of lectures or a course that students anywhere in the world can take on their own time, out of interest, or they can take them for university credit that can be transferred to their institution.
Aleksandar – What was your part if I may dig deeper?
Stephen –I don’t know anything about the business side of things at PA. I was invited to be a professor teaching two courses in my area of expertise. So, I did an eight-lecture course on Modern Philosophy using the philosopher’s label for ‘modern.’ It begins with Francis Bacon and René Descartes, and the lectures go through early modern philosophy and twelve major philosophers up to John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche, ending in the 19th century.
Aleksandar– That sounds interesting.
Stephen – The second course is called Postmodern Philosophy. Not that all the philosophers covered are postmodern, but the trend of 20th-century philosophy has been skeptical and relativistic. It covers all the themes and major philosophers who fed into postmodernism, although also some philosophers who are critical of postmodernism are covered in the course.
Aleksandar – It sounds great, and this is in addition to your already ongoing projects regarding liberal education. It’s difficult for me not to probe further with you on liberal education because we are already in the interview.
You have shared that you are trying to balance disruptive technologies and the neck-breaking speed at which AI is progressing. What will happen with the most highly specialized and complex technical operations regarding different AI systems happening daily across the corporate world? – And do you believe that liberal education will regain its sovereignty as the most complete approach towards cultivating better citizens, knowing that most of the monotonous and repetitive tasks have been outsourced? Our readers and I would probably like to hear your thoughts on this.
Stephen – Those are big questions. You mentioned the corporate world. You also mentioned the concept of citizen, a more political concept about one role concerning the political structures and one’s role in the corporate world.
In that case, the question is the relationship of liberal education to both of those in connection with technological developments.
So that’s just huge. Some things are perennial and will never go away. We are human beings, and the task for us as individuals is always to figure out what we will do with our lives. A massive subset of that is how we will make a living for ourselves. Another huge subset is our relationship with the government and the political sphere. That will always be the same.
Technology is a set of tools, and how the tools are going to be used will always be a secondary question to me. I am figuring out who I am, my goals, and what character, habits, and skills I will acquire to achieve my goals. That’s perennial. What will change is that technologies can enable us to outsource many things that we do. Before we didn’t have a choice about doing those. Many, as you say, monotonous tasks can be outsourced, and we won’t need to do those anymore.
Aleksandar – Okay.
Stephen – So I have more free time, and then with that free time I’m right back to the human questions. What do I want to do with that time? How do I want to fill it up to make my life more significant, more meaningful? People won’t think fundamentally differently, but they can take all of our humans dreams and make it more realistic for those dreams to happen. Also more resources. The trend of the technologies has been to make us more affluent. It gives you more tools, and given that wealthy people live longer it gives you more time.
I think you’re correct to say that we will be more aware of liberal education’s importance as time passes. Liberal education prepares you to be a free person, not just politically free, but also an economically free agent and in the rest of your social life.
One of the liberal education’s philosophical assumptions is that you have agency. You are a free agent, not just pushed around by deterministic forces beyond your control. Also in your artistic life and your scientific life, being a free agent and a free thinker is its common theme of freedom all the way through.
The proper education for a fully human life will become a more pressing issue.
Aleksandar – Speaking of agency, Martin Heidegger spoke about the revealing or gradual process of attaining knowledge. If we have a rapid, high concentration of unimaginable expertise at our fingertips, do you think we’re missing out on what it means to be a human in the higher sense of the word?
Because I belong to a generation of taking notes and having 20 different color markers while studying, attaining knowledge also helped bring one to an inevitable conclusion.
Would you say that that disruption is detrimental if we can use platforms like ChatGPT to write research papers and then read the same research papers in the same way as if as if we actively participated? Without AI, you would need two or three days to produce a fragment of knowledge specialized in a very narrow branch of a particular science or art. We have reinforced the process by obtaining results immediately, so can we tweak or adapt this process? We can certainly learn more about engineering and different operations. Still, it seems to me, and please correct me if I’m wrong, that there is an externalization of specific intellectual processes that makes us truly human.
Stephen – Another vibrant question, and to unpack some elements: one thing you’re pointing to is the speed with which we can acquire new knowledge and the impact of that. Another is the amount of knowledge that will be available and the challenge of absorbing the more significant amount of expertise. The next issue is what you do with large amounts of more readily available knowledge and how you add value significance to it, find value significance in it, or put it together so that value significance emerges.
I think a fourth thing you were saying is: what about people who want to make things easier, but tech can make it too easy for them so that they can copy whatever ChatGPT does and submit that without learning anything?
We can the questions sequentially and start with the speed issue.
I’m older than you are. I can recall my early days of learning. I liked to read books a lot. If I wanted to get new books, I would go to the library in town. My parents bought a lot of books for me, but I still had to go to the library and bring books home, and then I’d read the books and return them. So, all kinds of time costs are involved. But when we go to the Internet stage, much of that has been digitized and put online. So it saved me a lot of time, and then, say, ChatGPT comes along, and I can get and digest various books much more quickly.
Am I better or worse off because of the speeding up the process? Or would we say that engaging in the longer process by going to the library invests me in the process in a way that enriches the experience?
Another analogy I would give here is if you think just about the history of the encyclopedia as one form of the book where we go back to the very first encyclopedia, which I believe was the French encyclopedia project at the height of the Enlightenment, and all the collaborators involved.
Aleksandar – Okay.
Stephen – This massive project took them 20-something years to write all of the articles and then get everything published. It was conceived in the 1750s and, I think, finished in the 1770s. By then, some things are already out of date and incomplete.
So, we compare that very ambitious 18th-century encyclopedia – which was a magnificent project – then we fast-forward a century to another project, the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is also multi-volume, but the process of putting that together is much quicker because of the technology they can use. It’s also not just located in France, but is now an international team of scholars. So, it’s all the knowledge in the world and it’s put together much faster, and that’s an improvement. We don’t want to say that the slowness in the 18th century is more of an advantage compared to the late 19th century.
Then I’d like to jump to another century to Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and the Wikipedia project that started to come online in the 1990s.
Aleksandar – Right
Stephen – Another century goes by, and we have the entire Wikipedia at our fingertips. I sense that ChatGPT and its descendants will be the next evolution of that. So, you, in effect, have even more access to accurate information and have high-level summaries of whatever you want more quickly, right? So, just on that timeline, I think it is an improvement all the way through.
Aleksandar – This makes sense.
Stephen – I think the most significant thing is the second point you raised, which is the quantity of information available, and on this one, I think there’s more to the argument.
If you have less information or less knowledge available, that puts less cognitive strains on individuals because they know that there are only so many books, so to speak, that they can read, and less information they have to absorb to be a universal thinker or to know a little bit about any everything.
Aleksandar – Yes, exactly.
Stephen – So how do we confront that more significant cognitive challenge?
One way is having a genuine concept of a liberal education where we make education fun enough that people want to take on that challenge from a young age — to explore everything.
Also, I think this is what has also happened over the last couple of centuries: the editorial function or the curating function has become more critical. We turn more to teachers and professors in each generation to make decisions since they’ve devoted their lives to a particular area of knowledge — to sorting the good from the bad, telling us what’s important and why it’s important, and guiding us away from the 99 books that are just so-so and towards the exceptional ones.
Aleksandar – I agree.
Stephen – The same editing and curating function applies to newspapers, magazines, and other forms of periodicals.
While it does put greater cognitive loads on us as individuals, it should be seen as an enjoyable cognitive load and all the while we’re developing tools like ChatGPT and hopefully better professors and better editors who can help us, when we are younger, sort through the bewildering array of stuff that is out there.
That is a long set of answers to probably only half of what you had in your initial question. So let me put it back to you to ask where you would like to go next.
Aleksandar – I want to note here that I completely agree that once we have gone through cultivating a canon and knowing which books should be read vis-à-vis books that have usefulness, we also avoid epistemological traps of not distinguishing philosophy from ideology. But we will not go into this because we do not have time for that topic.
I had a very similar process. I went through a similar process of education and philosophical improvement to a certain degree in my study of law. I grew up among books. I come from a former socialist country, and education was pretty much put on a pedestal. Again, I do not want to go into ideology right now because we will lightly touch on the ideology regarding philosophy later in our conversation.
But what about the younger generation who seem to have issues with, let’s say, attention span? Reading 30 pages of Hegel can be challenging for people who are advanced in self-study of philosophy or even professional philosophy scholars.
Stephen – Yes.
Aleksandar– But what about the typical Z-generation young person who doesn’t have those points of orientation and those anchors in terms of having a canon that can be used as a point of departure into an intellectual exploration? So, I mean, there is a generational difference when it comes to the reception of those disturbing –
Stephen – Is it?
Aleksandar – and disruptive technologies, because the level of integration of those technologies will be quite different between people who did not have them at their complete disposal, like children of the 21st century, right?
Stephen – Okay, I’m hearing two issue in your question. One is cognitive-psychological side of each new generation. As technology gets faster and faster, it creates different kinds of opportunities but also stresses and limits them.
Aleksandar – Yes.
Stephen – And I heard the word ‘canon’ in there. Or, on the supply side, if there is no longer a set of canonical works among the elders in each generation—I don’t want to put words in your mouth—works already sorted wheat-from-the-chaff to present to that generation.
If so, the new generation has more significant problems. If the older generation, say, has decided everything is equal, that there is no truth, and so on. They throw the younger generation into a sea of information, just a bunch of stuff. Then: Will they be doing that younger generation a disservice, combined with the greater rate of cognitive load that the new technologies are going to acquire?
So, let’s separate those, and then we can put them together again.
The first issue is the rate of change, and I think there is something to this. Every time there is disruptive technology, it puts better tools for information absorption in the hands of the people who learn and can then learn using the disruptive technologies. At the same time it puts more significant cognitive stresses on them.
That’s an ongoing learning curve, and the human mind is extraordinarily adaptable. If we make a historical point and go back to, say, the 1400s. The first generation of the Gutenberg printing press its widespread adoption—you find the same kind of worries there, people saying: Well, you know, for centuries, we’ve been hand-copying manuscripts and books.
Aleksandar – Sure.
Stephen – And now there’s this massive flood of books and periodicals available to people! Will people be able to handle this new flood of information to them? Won’t they be lost at sea and not have any cognitive bearings and so forth?
So it’s interesting that 500 years ago, that kind of argument was already raised.
It was raised again in the 1700s when the steam engine came along, and suddenly printing presses attached to steam engines could print out vast numbers of newspapers, magazines, and books again—and the same point was made.
Then the same worry was raised when the radio came along and television and there’s a flood of sounds and images and so many new print publications people can’t keep up. And the same with the Internet and with ChatGPT.
I think that every time disruptive technology has come along, we have this worry—but at the same time, we adapt pretty quickly and develop. People get smarter and cleverer in each generation. Parents and teachers determine better educational methods to get young people up to speed. The young people themselves, after a certain amount of experimenting, figure it out for themselves, making the new technologies work for them.
So, I’m not too worried about that one at all. I’m more concerned about the second part of the question. Though I’m not sure if I put those words into your mouth about the idea of there being a canon.
Aleksandar – Please do.
Stephen – I don’t think a fixed and firm canon of texts should be set in stone.
Aleksandar – Okay.
Stephen – There’s no dogma. Some works are better than others, and I believe some works are classics. I’m always ready to jump into the debate about making recommendations to young people about the top 20 or 40 books that you really ought to read, whether you’re going to be a ballet dancer or a quantum physicist, whatever you’re going to be, and make them part of your cultural furniture.
But there is a danger that our generation is facing—the postmodern generation when we have a significant number of people who are among the elite—the elite educational institutions, the elite professors, the elite cultural institutions—who are not only unfriendly to liberal education but unfriendly to education. They have abandoned the ideals of knowledge, truth, and objectivity.
Sometimes they are politically and ideologically motivated, and sometimes they are philosophically deep skeptics. Yet they have assigned themselves to the task of explicitly subverting the idea that there are more and less true works. Or better or worse works. In many cases, they are intentionally advocating works they know are bad with the idea of undermining works they know are good.
That is a more significant danger for young people, when they are more intellectually vulnerable. If these anti-education leaders mis-educate them, they will give up on their quest to become knowledgeable, free citizens. I mean free thinkers who can put together a meaningful life. Their capacity to do so will be destroyed early. That’s the more serious thing to worry about in our generation.
Aleksandar – Since we are talking about the younger people, without saying that you’re old, some thinkers are like a fine wine, and based on what I have heard and read coming from you, I most certainly would put you in that club of philosophers.
Stephen – Well, thank you for that.
Aleksandar – Absolutely. I think wisdom is very archetypal in that regard, and genuinely, wisdom does come with age, but I want to take you back to your intellectual development. Now, you have been a prolific writer on different topics, right?
Stephen – Okay.
Aleksandar – But if you ask anyone out there about Stephen Hicks, at least when it comes to your audience Nietzsche and the Nazis is considered your “magnum opus” by many.
I’m not saying that the rest of your work has less validity or less relevance, but somehow the name of Stephen Hicks is immediately associated with that guy who wrote Nietzsche and the Nazis, right? So why did you choose this topic? That’s the first part of the question, and I think at this point you’re used to me asking two or three questions as one question, but I think they’re all relevant.
Stephen – Hmmm …
Aleksandar – And the second one is your thoughts regarding the use and abuse of philosophical systems or such ideas to justify ideological goals. If this question doesn’t get me in trouble, I don’t know which one will, but it must be asked.
Stephen – Well, of course, if you’re going to be philosophical, you must ask questions that will get you in trouble. That’s part of the job description.
Aleksandar – Absolutely. So, I’m more than happy to put it out there boldly.
Stephen – Okay, good. Again that’s an excellent, rich question, and I appreciate the compliments that are built into it.
Nietzsche and the Nazis was part of a twofold project that I was working on when I was a younger scholar back in the 90s in the early 2000s.
National socialism must be understood in the classical sense of the “right.” In Nietzsche and the Nazis, I was thinking about developments on the political “right.” If we put the right in quotation marks, to recognize that it’s a fraught term.
Aleksandar – So, national socialism needs to be understood as it relates to what it would be in the classical sense of the right.
Stephen – Yes.
Aleksandar – I fully agree with you, but keep it on the right for the sake of arguments, right?
Stephen – Yes.
It was paired with my other book of the same era—Explaining Postmodernism—which is focused more on the developments on the political “left,” again puts that in quotation marks.
The problem is that both the political right—if we accept that in the form of Nazism—ends up in horrific totalitarianism. And the political left also manifests as a horrific totalitarianism. So, Explaining Postmodernism was about the intellectual history of the left ,and Nietzsche and the Nazis about an essential part of the political history of the of the right.
One of my career themes as a philosopher has been that philosophy makes a difference between life and death. Philosophy is a high theory, and when the high theory is put into practice in one’s personal life and then more broadly in societies and political communities, it makes a life or a death difference, getting it right or wrong.
To put it negatively, I’m very much against what are sometimes called dualist “spiritual” or “Platonic” approaches to philosophy–again, putting “Platonic” in quotation marks—that somehow there’s a big divorce between a theoretical or abstract world versus the real and practical world because I see the two as closely integrated.
The question about Nietzsche and the Nazis came about in part because I had a long-standing interest in Nietzsche as a philosopher. He is a great philosopher. Not that I agree with him very much, but he is excellent in that his influence on 20th-century philosophy and 20th-century cultural life has been enormous.
Aleksandar – Sure.
Stephen – And I don’t think there’s another philosopher whose influence has been more significant than Nietzsche. He is a thinker every serious intellectual needs to grapple with. So, I spent some time reading through Nietzsche’s major works, and I found him stimulating and taught him in my courses.
At the same time, I was doing a parallel reading in political history, and especially as someone born in the 20th century, there’s is a question with which everyone grapples: the question of the Nazis. How could the National Socialists come to power in a country like Germany, which was so cultured, so educated, so literate?
How could they plunge the world into World War Two and then, even more horrifically, how could something like the Holocaust come out of a country like Germany? Understanding and grappling with this astounding fact of what the National Socialists did is a part of any thinking person’s history.
SoI was doing a lot of reading about the National Socialists and reading Hitler’s works and Goebbels’s works, and I started to read the intellectuals behind them. I had questions like, who were Nazi supporters? It turns out deep-thinking people like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.
Aleksandar – Yeah, Schmitt.
Stephen – And Moeller Van den Bruck, to a lesser extent, Oswald Spengler, and others. These are all high-powered German intellectuals in the 1920s, before the Nazis came to power.
Aleksandar – And some of them were victimized, I believe, during the night of the long knives because I think they were, well, too right-wing for the National Socialists.
Stephen – Some of them, yes. Lots of internal schisms, and things became quite violent. But the intellectual exciting thing is that you have that list of people, all of them—whatever your short list of critical German intellectuals who supported the National Socialists in the 1920s—all of them thought of themselves as Nietzscheans or as close-followers of much of Nietzsche’s works.
And when you read Hitler and listen to many of his speeches and those of Goebbels and the other more thoughtful politicians and activists in the National Socialist movement—they are aware of Nietzsche or citing Nietzsche, and in many respects see themselves as followers of Nietzsche.
So, in my thinking, there’s has been this big question: What is the connection between the most important late 19th-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, and perhaps the most significant political movement of the 20th century, National Socialism?
The Nietzsche and the Nazis book came out of that exploration. To spoil the story, my analysis ended up in a split decision. I think, in many respects, obviously Nietzsche would have been disgusted by the Nazis and would have disagreed with them in many political and cultural respects.
But at the same time, I do think that the Nazis, both intellectuals and activists, were right on target in seeing Nietzsche philosophically as one of their near ancestors. So, it was a scholarly working out of how the Nazis both properly used Nietzsche and diverged from Nietzsche.
Aleksandar – I think it’s a genuinely unique tractate. It can be read as a tractate. I believe that a documentary was produced on the book.
Stephen – Yes, the project …
Aleksandar – I can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure to see it. I don’t know if it’s possible to find it electronically.
Stephen – Yes, it did start as a documentary. We produced it in 2005, and it came out (if you remember that ancient technology) on DVD and it was available on Netflix for a few years when Netflix was a mail-order business and then the early streaming. It’s good quality technically for the early 2000s though not up to Netflix’s current standards.
There are bootleg versions on YouTube and other channels, if one goes hunting for it.
Then the book came out after I wrote the script and we produced the documentary, a few years later. I want to say it was 2010 that the book version came out.
Aleksandar – And on the second part of the question, what are your thoughts on using and abusing philosophical systems? This means to justify theological and ideological goals. Have we seen that before Nietzsche, and are we seeing that today?
Stephen – I think there’s been much more use of philosophy than abuse of philosophy. The most significant philosophers—going back to Plato, say—and even though quite a bit of Platonic philosophy was otherworldly, he wanted philosophers to influence kings and kings to become philosophers. That connection of philosophy to political practice runs though Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Rousseau, etc.
That idea of philosophy has been to say that the most general truths and values should guide us, not only in our personal thinking but more broadly in our social and political lives. Philosophy is meant to be applied.
At the same time, all of the more empirical philosophers say that philosophers should be engaging with politicians and economists and studying history and seeing history as a laboratory of human living so that we can properly learn and use that data.
Do our philosophical generalizations about true knowledge and actual values come out of our study of history? If philosophy is meant to be used—and I think that’s the proper conception of philosophy—the abuse issue will come up but mostly when so many philosophies that are applied go wrong. One get the philosophy wrong—you have some terrible untruths and value frameworks that people try to live by.
Aleksandar – Okay.
Stephen – But if they are wrong in the first place, then one reaches disaster or, to a lesser extent, negative consequences, when one tries to put them into practice. Then it is a common excuse that people will say when their theory doesn’t work out in practice: “Oh, you didn’t apply my theory correctly, or you abused my theory.”
Aleksandar – Right.
Stephen – There’s a long history of clear examples. If we take the early modern John Locke, the most famous of the classically liberal philosophers. His ideas were explicitly to be put into practice in the American Revolution by the Founding Fathers, who were very well-read and often who saw themselves as Lockeans. Not just reading but putting Lockean ideas into practice. When that revolution was by and large successful, they did not go on to say, “Oh no, we’re abusing Locke.” That’s a success case, so they’re happy to give the credit to Locke.
Another example, though, is the French Revolution and its third phase, when the Jacobins take over—Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the others—and the whole thing descends into chaos and blood and the guillotine and civil war and just all-round nastiness. Then we say: “Gosh, what went wrong? How could this happen?” Then we not that all these guys were explicitly disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They read his Social Contract. They carried it around. They considered it to be their Bible. They loved Rousseau, and they were trying to put Rousseau’s philosophy into practice. But then you start to hear. “Oh, no, no, no. Rousseau can’t possibly be held to blame for the Reign of Terror. They must have been abusing his philosophy!” It’s the negative results that people don’t want to take ownership of.
You find the same thing occurring in the next century and a half.
Think about Karl Marx, as a philosopher with a revolutionary program that inspires actual activists: Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and others. Then your judgment-call about the Soviet Union, which becomes a disaster with widespread torture, famine, mass murder, and so forth. Many people want to say: “That shows that Marxist theory is wrong, that we have done the experiments, and it doesn’t work. We need to reject it.” However, others want to say, “Oh, they just abused Marxism.”
Again it’s a philosophy that led to negative results, but some do not want to accept the negative results as indicting the philosophy in any way.
The same thing occurs in the case of Nietzsche and the Nazis, or even Heidegger and the Nazis. The same dynamic is at work, and my sympathies are with those who say that by and large the activists got the philosophy right when they were putting it into practice. We should take this seriously as a negative lesson: There is something deeply wrong in a philosophy when educated, articulate, well-resourced activists put it into practice—and disaster results.
The bad faith move is to self-seal the philosophy away from those negative results. The proper attitude is to be hyper-critical about said philosophy and reexamine every one of its assumptions under the microscope.
Aleksandar – I understand, and I do agree, especially the point that I believe it’s a well-established truism that any deep and authentic thinker, regardless of the authenticity and the paradigm-shifting force behind their thoughts. They can control everything except interpreting and implementing their intellectual legacy.
Stephen – That’s correct, partly because philosophers are operating at a level of generality, at a level of abstraction, and that always means there will be room for interpretation and different implementations.
For example, to take a more positive path, it’s one thing to say I am, as a philosopher, an advocate of “small r” republicanism. What I mean by that is that the power should reside with the public, broadly speaking, that there should be separations of powers and checks and balances, and so on.
Now, if I leave it there, that’s not going to predict exactly what voting mechanisms I’m going to have in place, whether I set the franchise at age 18 or age 21. At that level of generality, I haven’t even said anything about women or men yet, or anything about the level of education. Should there be two houses of Parliament or not? Should we have three branches of government or four? On all of those more applied issues, the philosophers are not going to decide, and there can be many experiments.
At the same time, I think it holds on the other side of the equation. If I say: Okay, I’m not in favor of republicanism. Instead, I favor some authoritarianism and want concentrated, centralized power in the hands of one or a few figures.” I can be a political philosopher at that level of abstraction, and it would be exactly right to say many different sub-versions of authoritarianism can follow. So, yes, that part is correct.
Aleksandar – And since we are approaching the time limits that we have agreed upon. In the spirit of the show, this is a question specifically about the choice that you would make personally, Stephen. Generally, do you follow instinct or intelligence when in doubt?
Stephen – Intelligence. Well-trained intelligence. I don’t think instinct is much of a guide.
I think you might make an argument depending on how you define instinct. You know, whether we have an instinct for eating or an instinct for sex, or an instinct that is for flight or fight, but those are all arguable.
Aleksandar – Or instinct to pick the right book?
Stephen – Well, no, there’s no such thing as that instinct. That’s too high level. But instinct, as it’s often used, really is a process of prior intelligence. What have you thought? What you have decided and automated in your thinking and behavior comes at us (in quotation marks) as “instinct.” Even there, when having a strong reaction-impulse, one should think about it and reassess, especially when the stakes are high.
Yes, you’re right. We are approaching the end of the time, and you had a longer list of questions. Maybe we should plan to do Part 2 at some point in the future.
Aleksandar – We’ll be starting a professional level of production podcast(s), so we are working on the infrastructure, and we are setting up the operations so we can have a high level of production because, as you know, with the proliferation of podcasts, it seems to me that every third person has a podcast. No offense. We need to find a niche that will genuinely make us exceptional. So, we have that ongoing project.
If you would do us the honor of coming on as a guest on a podcast, that would be amazing. I think we can cover more. It’s just the nature of our questions and the areas you cover, which are highly complex. Covering this much ground in an hour has been challenging, but it has been a pleasure.
Stephen – Okay, good. Thank you for the great questions and the invitation. Let’s plan to do a second round at some point in the future.
Aleksandar – Thank you very much for your time.
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