Who are we? How do we find out? What is it to find our authentic selves? What can we learn from the history and philosophy of authenticity?Today, supposedly, we’re free. Free, to do what makes us happy, to be anything we strive to be, to choose our own paths. We even feel free from parts of ourselves – that our emotions are something separate from us, that there’s a real us beneath them, a supra-inner rational core that transcends everything outside of it, that is somehow higher than fleeting emotions that make us do things that aren’t really us.The history of the search for authenticity has sought to understand this true core of human experience. It has been approached in many ways. Sometimes as a revolt against the outer layer, against standards given to us by society. Other times as taking off a mask. Or rejecting reading a script someone else has written for us, whether god or the bible or society and its rulesPhilosopher Jacob Golomb writes that ‘the concept of authenticity is a protest against the blind, mechanical acceptance of an externally imposed code of values.’ The history of authenticity tells us much about the modern world. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, discovering our authentic self meant removing the masks society encourages us to wear, about confessing why we really say or do certain things. Kierkegaard encouraged us to take passionate leaps of faith, to find subjective truths that were meaningful for us, to take action, to make difficult either/or choices.Nietzsche knew that the death of god meant that humans were free to create their own values, to pursue the will to power creatively, to break free from the chains others imposed on us. We should love our fates - amor fati - but give style to our characters.Heidegger thought authenticity meant facing our own deaths, as beings-towards-death, overcoming our own anxiety, and stepping away from the 'They' to create something unique and lasting in the worldAnd finally, Jean-Paul Sartre argued that we are, above all us, free to choose who we are, what we do, and what meaning we attach to the world and its objects. We have a piercing, lucid, and powerful consciousness that can explore the world and our own characters, and not using that reflective power, not interogating our own traits, beliefs, and actions meant we'd be living in 'bad faith', inauthentically ignoring our true human potential.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is best known for giving us the concept of a leap of faith. He was a deeply religious thinker, but his ideas have as much relevance for secular lives as Christian ones. He was the grandfather of existentialism, a purveyor of authenticity, and of discovering, amid conflicting beliefs and the demand to conform to the rules of society, who you really are. Although he was born in 1813, his works were not widely read in English until the middle of the twentieth century.He published Either/Or, his most famous work in 1843, and in it, through an array of pseudonyms and fictional characters, he discusses competing and contradictory ways one might live life. Should you live for the moment? Seeking pleasure? Or should you live for the interesting? Should you live dutifully? Ethically? Should you conform to the rules? He suggests there are three stages of life, three spheres of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Some of the key concepts are reflective aestheticism, the rotation of crops, subjective truth, passion, and, of course, Christianity.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that human violence has declined across history. One part of this argument is that life in a state of nature – before civilization – was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Amongst other things, Pinker argues that hunter-gatherers, tribal societies, were – and are - much more violent than later more civilized societies. Both Pinker and Thomas Hobbes argue that the state and its monopolisation on force and authority have pacified our darker human nature.This is a common trope:In the 1996 book War Before Civilization, for example, archaeologist Lawrence Keeley argues that prehistoric violent deaths probably ranged from around 7-40% of all deaths. He says: ‘there is nothing inherently peaceful about hunting-gathering or band society’.In 2003, Steve LeBlanc and Katherine Register claimed in their book Constant Battles that ‘everyone had warfare in all time periods’Biologist Edward Wilson ‘Are human beings innately aggressive?’ Yes. Coalitional warfare is ‘pervasive across cultures worldwide’John Tooby and Leda Cosmides declare that ‘Wherever in the archaeological record there is sufficient evidence to make a judgment, there traces of war are to be found. It is found across all forms of social organization—in bands, chiefdoms, and states.’The book Demonic Males argues that ‘"neither in history nor around the globe today is there evidence of a truly peaceful society’.Pinker has written that ‘Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.’Are – and were – hunter-gatherers really that violent? Brian Ferguson and Douglas Fry argue no. Looking at chimpanzees, bonobos, Otzi – the iceman – and a range of much more insightful ethnographical and archaeological evidence is the best way to find out.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An introduction to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Hobbes looms over all of us as the preeminent defender of the modern state and sovereign authority. Nuanced and original, he is probably the most influential figure in modern political philosophy who, and could be described as the father of both modern liberalism and modern conservatism.Hobbes’ originality was his belief that political theory could be deduced from scientific principles about psychology, the senses, language, morality, knowledge, and power. To understand politics, he argued, you had to understand people. Hobbes grounds Leviathan in a state of nature – a theoretical situation in which humans have no institutions, no government, no coercive power – a pre-societal condition.Human existence in a state of nature is, according to Hobbes, pretty undesirable. In the most famous passage of Leviathan he says that in a state of nature there are ‘no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’In a state of nature, we have a right to all things, but because we seek our own self-preservation, there are ‘laws of nature.’ Hobbes says that the first law of nature is ‘that every man seek peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.’Because some ignore or misunderstand the laws of nature we require a sovereign power to keep us in awe; a leviathan.Hobbes has been reinterpreted in the 20th century in game theory terms as a prisoner’s dilemma.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What can the Holocaust teach us about morality and ethics? Does the Holocaust pose a challenge for moral relativism? Zygmunt Bauman argues yes. In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman argues that the Holocaust proves that societal rules, norms and standards cannot be the only source of morality. Perpetrators often argued in court that they were only following the law of their country. How can we judge them if morals are the product of a relative social context? Instead, Bauman argues, the source of morality is in a fundamental responsibility to another in proximity. And there’s plenty of evidence for this. A biological repulsion to killing, for example. Or the distancing and division of labor that was required to scale the genocide. If proximity and responsibility are at the heart of a kind of moral objectivity, what might the consequences of this be?Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What drives ordinary everyday people to become mass killers? What are the psychological mechanisms and cultural factors that lead to genocide? What were the causes of the Holocaust? Can we theorize a psychology of genocide? A theory of genocide?The Holocaust was not perpetrated solely by a few sadistic psychopaths but by tens of thousands of everyday Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Austrians, Slovakians, in fact, much of Europe took part. If any of us could be motivated under the right conditions to become mass serial killers, how can we protect ourselves against the threat? How might we innoculate our societies and cutlures from decending into genocide?There are a number of factors that lead to the Holocaust. Compartmentalization, euphemism, conformity, authority, rationalization, propaganda, anti-Semitism, victimhood, and association, in particular. Gustav Le Bon, for example, argued that individuals are more likely to conform in a crowd because of anonymity and mimesis. Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments looked at conformity to authority. This combined with rationalisations like ‘its either us or them’ or ‘they won’t survive through the winter anyway.’There was still a system of belief – an ideology – and almost a decade of propaganda disseminated by the Nazi Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP). Years of anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe led to conspiracy theories about Jewish world domination. While Britain, the USSR, and America were all consistently associated with ‘Jewish aggressors’.When a person perceives themselves as a victim and a prisoner as an aggressor in a war of survival and we combine this with the pressure to conform and submit to authority the probability for murder increases. In Nazi Germany, everything was made to fit this formula.Ervin Staub proposes a model of genocide that has three initial stages:First, there’s the frustration of basic needs.Second, An out-group is identified that’s the cause.Next, The in-group is motivated by a ‘utopian vision’ that excludes a certain group.And Herbert Kelman has also argued that the requirements are threefold: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization.How does all of this fit together?Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Winston Churchill once said that ‘Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.’ In the wake of what happened in Washington last week, I think this metaphor illustrates something deeper about the relationship between demagogues and their followers. Who are the tigers and why are they hungry? Riots - the voice of the unheard - clearly signify some issues within a society that if not resolved inevitably lead to the baring of teeth. Tigers only emerge from tears in the social fabric. The more the economic, social, or cultural chasm rips open, the more untamed emotions spill out of the void, and the more likely it becomes that a demagogue can saddle-up and offer a solution. Steve Bannon said that ‘we got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall….This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”Many ancient philosophers were skeptical of democracy because it was vulnerable to the threat of demagogues. Plato argued in the Republic that because democracy must allow freedom of speech it was defenseless against strongmen who could make to the demos based on their fears and emotions. Joseph Goebbels said that ‘This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.’ So why is it that democracy is vulnerable to demagogues? What do demagogues offer and how might we protect against it? Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How can we untangle Madness & Civilization and think clearly about what Foucault is saying, both in the book, and by extension in later works?Looking at some criticisms of him are a good way to try to pin down exactly what’s going on with his method and view of the world, so let’s start there.In 1987 Lawrence Stone, for example, criticized Foucault as being ‘unconcerned with historical detail of time or place or with rigorous documentation.’ He said that Foucault ignored ‘enormous differences in the degree and organization of incarceration from country to country’ in Europe.How might Foucault respond to some of his critics? To understand it's important to look closely at his method, too.In short, his method is ‘to write the history of madness will therefore mean making a structural study of the historical ensemble – notions, institutions, judicial and police measures, scientific concepts.’A Foucauldian method searches for the consistent and compatible conceptual frameworks that set the criteria for what a normal human nature is at any given time, and broadly suggest the attitudes, perceptions, and sensibilities any given society holds. These phenomena form epistemes that historically have changed over time.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The podcast delves into Michel Foucault's groundbreaking work on madness and civilization, exploring how societies have viewed and treated madness over time. It questions the blurred boundaries between reason and madness, the historical segregation of lepers and the mentally ill, and the paradox of madness as a form of wisdom in the Renaissance period. Foucault's work challenges traditional notions of reason, raising difficult questions about the nature of madness and society's attitudes towards it.

What did Descartes know for certain? That he is a thinking thing, a cogito. But what does it mean to think? Descartes lists a few modes of thinking: Doubting, affirming, denying, understanding.Heidegger embarks upon a similar project to Descartes. What, he asks, is the fundamental nature of our experience? Of our existence? Heidegger agrees with Descartes. If we want to live life well we need to be clear about its most fundamental components. Descartes answer is summarised by his phrase cogito ergo sum, which translates as thinking, therefore, being. For Heidegger, Descartes has it the wrong way around. He thinks that Descartes has neglected the sum, the being. What is it to be something? Heidegger’s answer comes in a number of forms: he says as well as being thinking things we have care for things, we have an anxiety about the world, we are existential, but most importantly, we are beings-in-the-world.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.